Crowley's model of the three schools of Magick, represented by the three Magi, seems accurate. It is a model that I add to my own, although reality is undoubtedly even more muddled and miraculous than even old Uncle Al lets on. These ideas are fun to play with.
It is customary to describe these three Schools as Yellow, Black, and
White. The first thing necessary is to warn the reader that they
must by no means be confounded with racial distinctions of colour;
and they correspond still less with conventional symbols such as
yellow caps, yellow robes, black magick, white witchcraft, and the
like. The danger is only the greater that these analogies are often
as alluring as the prove on examination to be misleading.
My own take on this may or may not follow from Crowley. Certainly it is useful to differentiate on the basis of geography and history. He is right not to generalize in terms of race. It's helpful, though, to attempt to look back on possible origins.
The dark shamans, seeking power for themselves, used the siddhis to establish a priesthood, an elite cabal of magical kingmakers, above and apart from the rest of the tribe. The first states formed and history ensued. Naturally the more traditional were opposed to this move and were either forced to conform or they went into hiding. From this point on the states of history were sworn against the free tribes of the dreaming.
All of the magic of the priests came directly from the countless millennia of nature shamanism. Only the forms changed. As empires expanded, however, the philosophy of the priests became varied. Eventually, as Crowley taught, three distinct schools emerged.
The Black and Yellow schools were (and are) primarily non-dualistic. Differences arise in their sense of non-duality. The Yellow School, typified by the Taoists and Confucianists of China, views the world, here and now, as the living embodiment of the Tao. A polarity of yin and yang, female and male, exists within the the world, but these two are basically complementary.
The Black School, on the other hand, adheres to a more transcendental non-dualism. For this school the world is an illusion. It is maya. Only ignorance of this fact prevents our full participation in the higher non-duality of the Real. This is the Brahamanic tradition of India and its offshoots, including Buddhism.
In the West, another tradition took hold which was, and is, dominated by the White School. This tradition is unreservedly dualist. Both the realm of matter and the realm of spirit are real, and separated by the spheres of the soul, but the realm of the spirit alone is true and beautiful while matter is a pale, deathly and essentially evil reflection. The world is not the one but neither is it an illusion. It is fallen.
The White School of priests, being dualist, naturally invites and encourages its own opposite. Its bright light makes its shadow that much darker. This shadow is called by the White School "black magic," but it has little in common with the Black School of India. It is simply the mirror tradition of the White School. God becomes the Devil, light becomes darkness, spirit itself becomes matter. It is a system of overturning the law. It may be called sorcery, but it is entirely intertwined with the history and development of the White School.
The White Schools can be traced through the Egyptian priesthood, official Platonism, the Roman imperial Sol Invictus cult, the Roman Catholic Church, the Jesuits, etc. Its shadow is found in the Dionysian mystery cults, in the Gnostics, in the Brethren of the Free Spirit, in alchemy, in the Cathars, the Rosicrucians, Freemasonry, the Illuminati, etc.
Historically it is very difficult to distinguish the light from the shadow, the sun from the black sun. Each has infiltrated and penetrated the other. They are very much like Spy vs. Spy. It is impossible to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Both have committed acts of terror and acts of salvation. Perhaps it is this eternal struggle which accounts for the dynamic quality of the West. At times they cooperate, often they conspire and back-stab, and occasionally they are in open warfare.
All of this is complex enough, and it belies the "Illuminati controls everything" myth that we constantly hear, but it is even more complicated. As the world, through communication and transportation technology, became more unified, more globalized, the three schools began to mix and meld, divide and conquer, and at an accelerating rate. A big example is Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism, a combination of the Black and Yellow schools.
During the period of "colonization" the White schools began to dominate all societies, most notably from the Sixties and onward. Islam is another example of a White school which broke off and made certain, but very incomplete, ties with the Black. Shadow sects within the West have also forged relations with the Eastern schools as a means to subvert those in power. With increasing globalization this confused muddle inevitably becomes even more bewildering.
Next is the fact that the schools, although being kingmakers, are essentially esoteric in nature. They are represented by exoteric religions, but they operate largely behind the scenes. At times in history, though, the exoteric and secular faces of their respective traditions act to interfere with their plans.
Nor can we overlook the genuine grassroots, spontaneous, autonomous movements of the common people. While these inevitably become manipulated by power of all types, and at times they are started by the schools but break free, the upwelling of human energy, the true mass desire for liberation, should not be disregarded. It is the most powerful magic out there.
Even this great power, however, as Jean-Paul Sartre pointed out, is not free of confusion, is not unambiguous:
It is hardly surprising that popular opinion in the bourgeois era is haunted by the myth of occult powers, Jesuits and Free masons, the Jewish Conspiracy, the Elders of Zion, the wall of money, the conspiracy of munitions-makers. These legends naively betray the deepest misgivings of the ordinary citizen. He supposedly enjoys all of the rights; yet no sooner does he exercise them than a subtle modification occurs which renders them totally ineffective. He can never recognize his original intentions as what is presented to him as the product of his actions. The reason is that in bourgeois regimes, whether parliamentary, monarchic, or dictatorial, it is the bourgeoisie itself which is the Occult Power.
Another Occult Power, and related to the above, is something that Crowley also omits from his writing. This is the "school" of traditional tribal shamans, those who have always disregarded the lure of state power and privilege. There are dark shamans within these societies who are easily corrupted by the various schools, and yet there are also those sages who are able to smuggle liberating impulses into the priestly orders, most notably the Yellow but also the Black and the White to a lesser extent.
The most power hungry of the priests hate the shamans for they represent the most potent threat to their control. The masses, the multitude, also have a natural affinity for the shamanic. This Red School is the most significant hope for real freedom and balance. There is evidence that this Red School, while isolated by geography and marginalized by economics, may be networked by an archaic yet fully functioning system of "songlines" or "bush telegraphs" -- in constant telepathic communication, and in continual interception by priestly forces.
Connected to this may also be a Silver or Blue School, dating from the time of mesolithic matriarchy, pockets of the priestesses who still dance beneath the moon. We have no knowledge, though, how many of these groups persist from the old lineages and how many are resurgent phenomena.
In general, though, the Blue School is either in union with the Red, or existing in countercultural elements within the societies dominated by the patriarchal schools. In any case, the Red and Blue schools form a loose alliance against the White School-centred patriarchal schools. The "counterculture" is manipulated by both sides of this historical conflict.
Compounding all of this complexity, and taking it all up a few orders of magnitude, are the "Secret Chiefs" that operate behind and through all of these schools. These are the the Gods, the spirits, the angels and the demons, that are the focus of worship in all traditions. They are the spirits of planets, stars, forces and the Earth herself that act both in cooperation and in competition with each other. In modern times they have taken on the technological garb of the space alien and UFO.
Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince provide a good overview of this bunch in The Sion Revelation:
They might be spirits of the dead, "ascended masters" (humans so spiritually developed that they have been elevated to a new plane of existence), angelic or supernatural beings, or, more recently, extraterrestrials, but the basic idea remains the same. Only the heads of the Order [or Schools] can make contact with them, which gives them their authority -- a tough concept for a subordinate to argue with!
The doctrine of the Secret Chiefs may seem a little too convenient -- a great device to justify authority -- but it is clear that they are held to be real, in some fashion, within all of the above Schools. The Theosophical writer, A. P. Sinnett, characterized them as "Mahatmas" in his Esoteric Buddhism (1883).
In reality, the Arhats and the Mahatmas are the same men. At that level of spiritual exaltation, supreme knowledge of the esoteric doctrine blends all original sectarian distinctions. By whatever name such illuminati may be called, they are the adepts of occult knowledge, sometimes spoken of in India now as the Brothers, and the custodians of the spiritual science which has been handed down to them by their predecessors.
They, however they are called and summoned, along with the various schools themselves, are the secret architects of the events of history. Schools, masters and the active fantasies of the bourgeoisie.
I need to change the format of this blog. The last few posts have been monsters of thousands of words each. What I thought I could finish in a few days has taken several months. I just don't have the time to continue on at this pace. My computer is slowly seizing up, and in any case I don't know how many people are reading these beasts to the end. I am surprised and delighted to find that a few are taking the time to slog it through.
So I've got to try a new model for writing. At least for now. There are a few more huge rants I need to get out, but they can wait for a while. The new model comes from Ezra Pound. Pound has a lot to say about writing in general that is extremely helpful. Writing, he repeatedly stresses, should present images in the clearest, most concise way possible. Sentences should be packed with meaning and all superfluous words should be eliminated. Writing should shine.
becoming Leaf becoming Coal becoming Light
Pound also applies this clarity and precision to the subjects of poetry. Unlike usual prose, and especially writing on history, which presents general theories and a flurry of facts and impersonal trivia, poetry and good prose should explore specific details that are both meaningful to the author and throw light on the core of the subject at hand. These are what Pound calls "luminous details." He defined the term very precisely in 1912:
Any fact is, in a sense, 'significant.' Any fact may be 'symptomatic,' but
certain facts give one a sudden insight into circumjacent conditions into their
causes, their effects, into sequence, and law.
The Cantos are constructed of inter-reflecting luminous details. Pound's epic concerns itself with only those potent snippets of history that allow a slight glimpse behind the curtain. These "facts" provide "sudden insight" on the deeper tissues and processes of political, economic, social and transcendent reality. Pound scholar, Hugh Kenner, describes luminous details as "patterned integrities," comparing them with the self-emergent patternings of matter and energy.
Luminous Details, then, are "patterned integrities" which transferred out of their context of origin retain their power to enlighten us. They have this power because, as men came to understand early in the 20th Century, all realities whatever are patterned energies. If mass is energy (Einstein), then all matter exemplifies knottings, the self-interference inhibiting radiant expansion at the speed of light. Like a slip-knot, a radioactive substance expends itself. Elsewhere patterns weave, unweave, reweave: light becomes leaf becomes coal becomes light. [The Pound Era,my italics]
This taken alone is mind-blowing. The "knottings" of our own perception resound with the self-weaving pulses and patterns of nature. This resonance is also luminous. The tapestry is woven with threads of light. The medium of these patterns is secondary. They occur in thoughts, in written and spoken words, within organisms, in technology, in water, wind and rock. Pound, though, continually digs deeper. He also calls the luminous details, "barbs of time." This phrase, as Carroll F. Terrell suggests inTheCompanion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound, may have originated with Giordano Bruno:
barb of time: Perhaps an allusion to Giordano Bruno's motto vincit instans ("the instant triumphs"), of which Bruno says that the creative instant or inspiration is a barb of light which pierces the mind to give one a totally new perception beyond all mere logic chopping. This links up with Pound's notions regarding the "luminous detail."
The luminous detail, then, is both the instant of creative inspiration and the radiant recording of this instant. The two become indistinguishable. This is not at all logical, but it provides a "totally new perception." William Blake immediately comes to mind here and it is really no wonder that he arrived at an almost identical concept. Blake calls it the "Minute Particular." He writes of this often in Jerusalem.
Every Minute Particular is Holy
Blake means "holy" in the profoundly religious sense. The particular moment, a particular detail, is the one doorway to the eternal. The eternal is only revealed through particulars. It cannot be approached with generalities, or abstractions, or averages. Science fails to locate it in this regard. It shines through in the unique and the singular.
so he who wishes to see a Vision; a perfect Whole Must see it in its Minute Particulars...
But General Forms have their vitality in Particulars: & every Particular is a Man; a Divine Member of the Divine Jesus.
The religious terminology of "Divine Jesus" should not scare us off. Blake is explaining that the universe is personal and intimate, not abstract and indifferent. It is equivalent to the clearest expressions of our imagination and our highest apprehensions of beauty. Bruno may have been an influence on Blake here but it is obvious that the two, along with Pound, are writing about almost identical things.
Holes In The Tent
But how does the moment of perceiving a luminous detail happen? When exactly does the instant triumph? James Joyce lucidly lays out this process in his theory of aesthetics provided in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Stephen Hero. I've written about Joyce's theory elsewhere, but one quote from A Portrait offers new insights to this discussion:
The radiance of which he [Aquinas] speaks is the scholastic
quidditas, the whatness of a thing. The supreme quality is felt by the
artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination.
The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a
fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the
clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the
mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its
harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure...
As in Pound, Bruno and Blake, Joycedescribes the instant apprehension of luminosity radiating out from the heart of each thing and uniting with the effulgent imagination of the artist. Art needs to be judged by how closely it portrays and even reenacts this instant. This moment is further called by Joyce, an "epiphany." Dubliners presents a series of epiphanies, Ulysses is a epiphany stretched out to a single day, and Finnegans Wake is all of history epiphanized.
Percy Bysshe Shelley's image of the "fading coal" also deserves some looking into. Joyce finds this image in Shelley's essay "A Defence of Poetry." In this essay Shelley, like Bruno, emphasizes that these moments cannot be brought on by reason or logic. The fading coal sparks once again to life with a sudden and unexpected gust of wind or inspiration, an "invisible influence."
Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted
according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, “I will
compose poetry.” The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in
creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an
inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises
from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is
developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic
either of its approach or its departure.
Shelley's vision is clearly shared. All of these poets are being struck with the same beams of light. The luminous details are constellated. As in Turko-Tartar mythology the firmament is the skin of a vast tent. The stars are the holes in the tent where the light of heaven penetrates to earth. Each poet views a particular star but the light pouring through is identical. These poets form a "tradition," therefore, but not in the usual sense of a body of customs and knowledge that is passed down through the generations. The tradition is eternally present.
If we talk of tradition today, we no longer mean
what the eighteenth century meant, a way of working handed down from one
generation to the next; we mean a consciousness of the whole of the
past in the present. Originality no longer means a slight personal
modification of one’s immediate predecessors... it means the capacity to
find in any other work of any date or locality clues for the treatment
of one’s own personal subject matter.
This is from yet another poet, W.H. Auden, writing in 1941. Certainly, Finnegans Wake and The Cantos both contain "a consciousness of the whole of the
past in the present." Epiphanies, luminous details, minute particulars, barbs of light each interpenetrate one another like gems in a net or blossoms on a dark bough. Past, present and future are merely turnings of the dazzling "collideorscape." All exists at once in chaotic coherence.
Cosmos-making
There is a network of these moments, a network that a handful of sensitive souls occasionally become aware of. Sacred spots are cordoned off. Points of hierophany are recognized (cults may later be built around these and the light occluded, but that's another story) and these points echo off similar points within both history and geography. In modern secular societies such points are becoming difficult to locate, but in ancient times they were clearly delineated and revered.
Whenever the dullness of the profane was left behind, whenever life grew
more intense in whatever way, through honor or death, victory or
sacrifice, marriage or prayer, initiation or possession, purification or
mourning, anything and everything that stirred a person and demanded a
meaning, the Greeks would celebrate with fluttering strips of wool,
white or red for the most part, which they tied around heads, or arms,
or to a branch, the prow of a ship, a stature, an ax, a cooking pot.
This is from Robert Calasso's masterwork, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. In Ancient Greece these colourful woolen strips could often be found. People realized the porosity of the tent. The meaning of these strips was meaning.
What was it those woolen strips, those tassels represented? An
excess, a flowing wake that attached itself to a being or thing. And at
the same time a tether that bound that being or thing.
Meaning itself binds. To live without significance is to live without responsibility. In modern existence all features are levelled, made smooth. No moment is greater or lesser than any other. There is no excess and there is no scarcity. All is explained. Sudden metamorphosis is impossible. No one is subjected to the arbitrary whims and fancies of the gods. We are rational and free. This could be anywhere. This could be everywhere. But this was not always so. What was gained and what was lost?
It was a momentary surfacing of a link in that invisible net which enfolds the world, which descends from heaven to earth, binding the two together and swaying in the breeze. Men wouldn't be able to bear seeing that net in its entirety all the time...
All these woolen strips, these vain, winged tassels, were the nerves of the nexus rerum, the connection of everything with everything else, which alone gives meaning to life.
Meaning may have been lost. But only temporarily. The old web of hierophanic ruptures is intact. Nodes are even now occasionally added to it, instants of "busting thru," that are remembered by the network even if they are hastily dismissed from the minds of their modern experiencers. But in many places around the world these points are still marked and recalled.
In Japan, sacred areas or trees or rocks are enclosed and sanctified with shimenawa ropes. Small Jizo statues are found along quiet forest trails. A single mountain in Shizuoka has 88 stations which mirror in miniature the grand pilgrimage of the 88 temples of the southern island of Shikoku. All these represent still visible "nerves of the nexus rerum," that are really much older than Shintoism or Buddhism. They are the eastern-most nodes of an unbroken web of significance that also contains the "winged tassels" of Ancient Greece.
Flickering Flakes
And of course this web is also marked by synchronicities -- meaningful coincidences. That things coincide is really not all that special. Right now my fingers are coinciding with this keyboard. Synchronicity, though, only exists because of the meaning that particular individuals assign it. Like a luminous detail, like a hierophany, a synchronicity is singular and subjective. What one person views as being highly profound another will call sheer nonsense. The outline of the "Divine Jesus" constantly shifts and shimmies. It's hard to get a bead on it.
That's why not everything syncs. Nor is everything sacred. How could it be? A world where everything is sacred is a world where everything is profane. Meaning is marked by differences -- luminous differences. P.K. Dick could find revelation in trash and sync savants can hear alchemy in pop, but the stars really shine in the imaginations of these poets.
Art is primarily where the woolen strips are now tied. And it is the artist who apprehends that the strips have already been tied. The object, whatever it is, only becomes art at that moment. The artist attempts to capture this vision -- in words and music and picture and form -- and if he or she successfully does this the moment is recreated. The fading coal flares anew.
Already this has gone on too long. Already I've failed in this "method." Ezra Pound also called the assembling of luminous details the gathering of "the limbs of Osiris." Osiris is equivalent to Blake's Divine Jesus or Joyce's Finn. Maybe I'll be lucky enough stumble across a bit of dandruff.
i.e. it coheres all right even if my notes do not cohere.
The vices of man, as full of horror as one might suppose them to be, contain the proof (if in nothing else but their infinitely expandable nature) of his taste for the infinite; only, it is a taste that often takes a wrong turn.
-- Charles Baudelaire, Artificial Paradise
In Ezra Pound's famous (or infamous) "Canto XLV," the poet explains the many ways that usura distorts and stultifies a healthy and vibrant human culture. Towards the end of the Canto the analysis deepens -- it is human fertility itself that is threatened by an economy centred around the practice of charging exorbitant interest. People simply cannot afford to have children. Human sexuality grows further and further away from the procreative and fertile.
Usura slayeth the child in the womb It stayeth the young man’s courting It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth between the young bride and her bridegroom CONTRA NATURAM They have brought whores for Eleusis Corpses are set to banquet at behest of usura.
The life instinct becomes a death instinct. Our very desires become twisted. Whores have been brought to Eleusis. What does this mean? It is the inner core of a great mystery. The Eleusinian Mysteries were essentially fertility rites. Sacred sexuality, the hieros gamos, was involved but the focus was on furthering life not avoiding death, on harvest and not on monetary transactions. In short, the mysteries involved free love in every sense of the term.
The Lust For Secret History
In The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult (1993), critic Leon Surette writes that The Cantos trace in epic fashion the historical interplay of two opposing forces -- one which frees and flows and the other which attempts to block, divert and capture this flow:
The Cantos explain historical event through its exposure of a malignancy blocking the creative forces that are also identified and celebrated in the poem. Pound calls the malignancy "Usura." The creative forces are called "amor" and "Eleusis."
Pound did not view these two as being merely abstract forces. Instead, he saw each as being conscious traditions involving real individuals, groups and institutions throughout history. They were, in fact, in his system of thought, conspiracies.
I've discussed usura at great length in my last post. Unlike present-day conspiracy theorists, however, Pound did not think that the international banking conspiracy, and whatever malign forces lay behind it, was absolute and omnipotent. It is obviously extremely powerful, with the ability to shape history like a sculptor shapes clay, but it is more than matched by what Pound at various times calls "the conspiracy of intelligence," "amor," "the mysterium," "the celestial tradition," and most often, "Eleusis."
In a collection of essays from 1952, A Visiting Card , Pound lays out this dichotomy very clearly and explains exactly the role of the two conspiracies:
We find two forces in history: one that divides, shatters, and kills, and one that contemplates the unity of the mystery... There is the force that falsifies, the force that destroys every clearly delineated symbol, dragging man into a maze of abstract arguments, destroying not one but every religion. But the images of the gods, or Byzantine mosaics, move the soul to contemplation and preserve the tradition of the undivided light.
One tradition divides, falsifies and enters one into useless and confusing abstractions. The other, which Pound identifies with, is dedicated to the contemplation of the "undivided light." In an earlier prose work,Guide To Kulchur, Pound characterizes both as "mystic states" which, while having entirely opposite aims and means, are equally concerned with the spiritual.
Two mystic states can be dissociated: the ecstatic-beneficent-and-benevolent, contemplation of the divine love, the divine splendour with goodwill toward others.
And the bestial, namely the fanatical, the man on fire with God and anxious to stick his snotty nose into other men's business or reprove his neighbour for having a set of tropisms different from that of the fanatic's, or for having the courage to live more greatly and openly. The second set of mystic states is manifest in scarcity economists, in repressors etc. The first state is a dynamism. It has, time and again, driven men to great living, it has given them courage to go on for decades in the face of public stupidity. It is paradisical and a reward in itself seeking naught further... perhaps because a feeling of certitude inheres in the state of feeling itself. The glory of life exists without further proof for this mystic.
Thus, while usura is obsessed with moralistic legalism, strict adherence to the scriptures, asceticism and imposed scarcity in worldly affairs, suppression of sexuality and the physical, priestly mediation between men and God, and redemption to come, Eleusis represents a radically different mystical ideal.
It proclaims that Paradise is here, right now, and the purpose of life is to creatively celebrate this fact. It is dynamic, open, passionate, compassionate and ecstatic. It takes joy in natural processes and natural beauty. It rejects sin, debt and enslavement of any kind. Life is abundance and the goal is to behold and worship the overflowing abundance of life in this world, in this body.
Plus
Pound explicitly and literally connected this latter movement with the original Mysteries at Eleusis. He believed that there was an unbroken tradition from the ancient mysteries through neo-Platonism, the Gnostics, certain Christian mystics, and in full blossom during the troubadour movement in Provence and Northern Italy during the 12th Century. Pound wrote in 1930:
I believe that a light from Eleusis persisted throughout the middle ages and set beauty in the song of Provence and of Italy.
Pound's favourable association with Eleusis is all the more surprising when we read Joe Atwill and Jan Irvin. According to these authors, Eleusis is the ancient prototype of the rot that led to the ultimate psy-op of the 1960s counterculture. Wasn't, after all, The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries (1978) a book co-authored by arch-conspirators R. Gordon Wasson and Albert Hofmann, among others? The Eleusinian Mysteries were the original mind control operation. Atwill and Irvin know this and they are revealing it to us now:
How the elite of ancient Athens controlled the masses was through drug mystery initiations at Eleusis that they managed to keep secret for 2000 years during their reign, and the secret agenda of how the mysteries were actually used for control hasn't been revealed for all to see until now – nearly 4000 years since the mysteries at Eleusis began.
Pound would beg to differ. He would agree, of course, that the Mysteries were at one point corrupted. This is the meaning of his "they have brought whores for Eleusis" line, but he would adamantly disagree that the purpose of the Mysteries was for social control, and he would argue that the pure light from Eleusis can be traced throughout history.
How, Atwill and Irvin and others might protest, could Pound have gotten this so wrong? Pound, the mentor of Eustace Mullins and the exposer of usura, how could he also be a celebrant of the Eleusinian Mysteries?
Pound would reverse these questions. Obviously these people, who are genuinely concerned with tracking the machinations of usury throughout history, are missing the big picture. There is much beauty in the creations of humanity, and this beauty arrives to us through a "conspiracy of intelligence" that has its roots in the ancient and archaic fertility rites. To see only one absolute and malign conspiracy is to give up the battle from the outset. We also are the heirs of great vision and wisdom.
Pound discusses these sorts of "shallow minds" and their desire for all-encompassing conspiracy theories:
Shallow minds have been in a measure right in their lust for "secret history". I mean they have been dead right to want it, but shallow in their conception of what it was. Secret history is at least twofold. One part consists in the secret corruptions, the personal lusts, avarices etc. that scoundrels keep hidden, another part is the "plus", the constructive urges, a secretum because it passes unnoticed or because no human effort can force it on public attention.
Without the realization that "secret history is at least twofold," without equal acknowledgement of the "plus," of Eleusis, our analysis lacks all profundity. However much we expose the Agenda we will be lost if we cannot also connect with those forces and agencies that tirelessly work for our liberation.
But beyond this, those who seek to convince us that there is no other conspiracy apart from that desiring total control, those who natter on that all liberation movements of the past, all inspiring works of art and literature, all personal visionary experiences are entirely facets of the nefarious design for our complete enslavement, who are these people anyway? Which of the conspiracies that Pound identifies do they actually, wittingly or not, serve?
Barruel's purpose in writing the Memoirs was to discredit the French Revolution. His thesis was that the Revolution was planned and fomented by the Bavarian Illuminati, which was itself the most recent manifestation of an ancient Manichean conspiracy that was sworn to destroy Christendom and overthrow the monarchies of Europe. Barruel believed that the ultimate origin of the conspiracy, openly revealing itself in the Cathar movement of Provence, was in the teaching of the Manichean prophet himself, Manes:
Attending only to the most striking similarities, we have seen the Occult founded on the Bema of the Manichæans. It was Manes whom they were to avenge on all Kings, on Kings who had condemned him to be flayed alive and who, according to his doctrines, had only been instituted by the evil spirit; and the word to be recovered was that doctrine itself, to be established on the ruins of Christianity.
The Templars, taught by the adepts dispersed throughout Egypt and Palestine, substituted, at their dissolution, their Grand Master Molay for Manes, as the object of their vengeance; and the spirit of the mysteries and the allegories remained the same. It is always Kings and Christianity that are to be destroyed, Empires and the Altar, to be overturned, in order to re-establish the Liberty and Equality of human nature.
It is fascinating not only that Barruel viewed the Knights Templar as being a key link in the conspiracy, with de Molay as a new Manes, but that the conspiracy that Barruel was against was essentially democratic in nature. Barruel was an enemy of the conspiracy to liberate humanity. Surette remarks:
Barruel's attribution of the revolution and all earlier upheavals in Europe to a single heretical doctrine is entirely implausible, but its status as the grandfather of modern conspiracy theories is unchallengeable.
They supposed a God supreme, but they attributed the government of the world to another principle, the empire of which does not extend further than this world, and will finish with the world. It was in the earth's centre that those formidable powers, the gods of evil, resided...
The abode of this evil principle was filled with spirits, who were essentially in a state of movement, because it is only happiness which is calm, and the movements of these troubled spirits, like the restlessness of unhappy mortals, had neither design nor order — discord reigned throughout their empire. The evil principle is the cause of all the misfortunes of the universe; it ruined mankind, and gained possession of the empire of this world.
According to Barruel, because the Manicheans were convinced that all governments and authorities of this world were in league with the "evil principle," to advocate the overthrow of these authorities was fully justified. Baruel thought the Manicheans were entirely wrong in this conviction. Instead, following Catholic doctrine, Barruel argued that however corrupt a king might be he sits on his throne by the will of God. The first rebel was Lucifer and to seek revolution is to attempt to dismantle the order of God.
Despite the obvious extremism of his ideas Barruel's influence is immense. All of the Illuminati conspiracy theories that exist today, including that of Robert Welch and the John Birch Society, ultimately derive from Barruel. Understandably, though, some that read Barruel's information did not agree with his conclusions.
One such thinker, which Surette highlights among a handful of others, is Gabriele Rossetti. Rossetti was a Italian Freemason and a member of the revolutionary Carbonari. Following the Revolution of 1820 Rossetti, blacklisted for writing poems in support of the failed revolt, fled to England.
It was after he left Italy that Rossetti published the two volumes of Disquisitions on the Antipapal Spirit (1834), which presented a version of "secret history" that both expanded and completely inverted Barruel's own theories. Rossetti's ideas, both directly and indirectly, would have an enormous impact on Pound.
Rossetti agreed with Barruel that there existed a centuries-old conspiracy against the Roman hierarchy and its allied monarchs, but unlike Barruel he was very much in favour of this conspiracy. Rossetti, following Barruel, believed that the roots of this conspiracy were Manichean but, and this is where his originality lies, he also thought that the members of this revolutionary conspiracy communicated to each other in code within, among other writings, the greatest works of European art and literature. It is worth quoting Rossetti at length:
If we explore the secret recesses of ancient literature, what else shall we find there but one vast conspiracy of the learned against the Roman hierarchy? What else shall we see but cunning struggling against cruelty, hatred dressed in the garb of friendship, and hypocrisy turning the weapons of force against itself? Works of every size, in every language, written in verse and in prose, on literary and philosophical subjects of all kinds, with every variety of outward meaning, and with but one inward design, were published by this secret school; and often those which appear the most simple, are the most mysterious. The greatest number of those literary productions, which we have hitherto been in the habit of considering in the light of amusing trifles, or amatory rhymes, or as wild visions of the romantic, or heavy treatises by the dull scholar, are in reality works which enclose recondite doctrines, and secret rites, an inheritance bequeathed by remote ages; and what may to many appear mere fantastic fables, are a series of historical facts expressed in ciphers, which preserve the remembrance of the secret actions of our fathers.
Rossetti was particularly obsessed by the evidence of this "secret school" in the poetry of Dante, although he was also able to find the same "inward design" being "expressed in ciphers" in the poetry of Calvacanti, Petrarch and the troubadours. All of these and more, the most gifted minds of history, were enlisted by the shadowy conspiracy for its goal of total revolution.
The most learned men, and authors of various ages and countries, were pupils of this mysterious school, and never losing sight of their one grand object, they were constantly on the alert to bring persons of talent and genius to their way of thinking, and to render them co-operators in their bold projects....
The ungovernable thirst for freedom, and the effervescence of political opinions, which have for so long agitated the hearts and minds of men throughout Europe, are but the tardy effects of the slow, but unceasing labours of this ancient school, which worked to free mankind from the tyranny of priesthood, as well as from monarchical despotism.
Valli, in particular, was close in his ideas to Rossetti. And while Pound openly criticizes Valli's "unconvincing" theories this is not to be taken as a general critique of "secret history."
Pound scholar, Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos explains this point in The Celestial Tradition: A Study of Ezra Pound's Cantos:
Pound objects not to the presence of a message [in Dante's poetry] but to its nature: For Valli the message is secret and political; for Pound it is esoteric.
Another key way that Pound's own version of the "secret history" differed from Barruel or Rossetti or Valli was that he did not think its origins were Manichean. Pound disagreed with the Manichean doctrine that the body, sexuality and matter in general were essentially evil. He also uniquely denied that the Albigensians of Provence and earlier Gnostic sects were either Manichean or dualist. Instead, Pound, based in part on the scholarship of the Theosophist, G.R.S. Mead, viewed the "conspiracy of intelligence" as originating with the Mysteries of Eleusis.
As the poet writes in Guide To Kulchur:
Prose is not education but the outer courts of the same. Beyond its doors are the mysteries. Eleusis. Things not be spoken of save in secret.
The mysteries self-defended, the mysteries that cannot be revealed. Fools can only profane them. The dull can neither penetrate the secretum nor divulge it to others.
Becoming the Great Accursed
Eleusis as a conspiracy, then, is at once revolutionary and esoteric. It is a conspiracy of art and life itself. The "light from Eleusis" which "set beauty in the song of Provence and of Italy," both in the troubadour movement and in the Cathars or Albigensians, later shone on the entire history of true poetry and art from the twelfth century onwards. Pound, in an essay of the same name, call this "The Tradition":
The tradition is a beauty which we preserve and not a set of fetters to bind us. This tradition did not begin in A.D. 1870, nor in 1776, nor in 1632, nor in 1564. It did not begin even with Chaucer. The two great lyric traditions which most concern us are that of the Melic Poets and that of Provence. From the first arose practically all the poetry of the “ancient world,” from the second practically all that of the modern.
The nine Melic Poets would have all been very familiar, if not initiates themselves, with the Eleusinian Mysteries. The troubadours and Cathars of Provence, by a traceable lineage, are their direct spiritual descendents according to Pound. But, as the poet explains, the tradition did not end in Provence. Tryphonopoulos notes that the names of those who Pound includes within the "celestial tradition" have nearly all been influenced by Hemeticism or Gnosticism. The three really make up one single tradition:
Pound's list of philosophical heroes and villains in the Guide to Kulchur reveals his own commitment to this gnostic or hermetic tradition.... Pound includes Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Porphyry, Psellus, Plethon, the Corpus Hermeticum, Scotus Erigena, Grosseteste, the Masons, Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Heydon, Blavatsky, Mead, and Yeats. To these names others can be added from the pages of Guide to Kulchur: Manes, Albertus Magnus, Dante, Swedenborg, Orage, Upward, H.D., Balzac, Brancusi, Cocteau, and Gurdjieff. The tradition that Pound is tracing is the Hermetic or Gnostic one. He calls it "Eleusis."
Eleusis, then, is a much bigger movement than the ancient mysteries. It is a living poetic and visionary tradition that still exists, even if its "members" are unaware of being a part of it, at the present time. In the most part it does not consist of secret teachings or techniques that are passed down from initiated masters to their disciples. There is a sort of transmission, a code is sent and received, but nothing is formalized.
Of all those listed above only "the Masons" are an organization and not an individual. And Pound certainly would not want to include all of Freemasonry within the tradition. Freemasonry as an institution has very evidently been compromised by usura for quite a long time. Pound would have been interested in its original manifestation yet only with the truly creative individuals within it.
The list above, however, would set alarms ringing in the heads of Illuminati conspiracy theorists. Aren't these just the names of those who are the key historic players in the grand conspiracy to establish an occult New World Order? Isn't Pound, by exposing usura, also against this same conspiracy? Obviously not.
Pound went deep enough in his research to figure out, again, that "secret history is at least twofold." Usura is fully concerned with material gain and political and social control. Eleusis is essentially driven by the desire to create and contemplate the beautiful. The two, despite how muddled, intertwined and spaghetti-ized they've become, are at heart irreconcilable.
No matter how many times usura uses creative individuals of Eleusis unwittingly, perhaps like Pound himself, to advance its agenda, no matter how many false prophets and sham artists dishonestly present themselves in the guise of Eleusis, and no matter how many times the utopian projects of the Eleusians are co-opted and misdirected horribly by the agents of usura, the pure spirit of Eleusis remains.
There is no organization of Eleusis, no central office, no bureaucracy or member cards. Various "members" of this conspiracy have spawned all of these things, but usually without planning to do so and often to their great regret. It is these organizations that are swallowed up by usura. Individuals of Eleusis do not rise in the ranks of a cult, a sect or a corporation to achieve their visions. They are somehow "called" to seek these vision by themselves. So wrote the poet Arthur Rimbaud in 1871:
I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed - the great learned one! - among men.
For he arrives at the unknown! Because he has cultivated his own soul - which was rich to begin with - more than any other man! He reaches the unknown, and even if, crazed, he ends up by losing the understanding of his visions, at least he has seen them! Let him die charging through those unutterable, unnameable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where he has succumbed!
The "other horrible workers," the future crazed poets and lovers who come to the very horizon of the unknown where the prior poet either achieved transcendence or succumbed to stark-raving madness, will continue on. Their work will inspire new work. Visions will build upon visions. This is how the tradition is transmitted within Eleusis.
Rimbaud was a French symbolist poet who wrote everything that he is famous for before the age of 20. He was definitely an unofficial member of the "celestial tradition." Rimbaud's letter clearly shows that, almost a century before the nineteen-sixties, psychedelic exploration by artists and "seers" was already very much underway. Rimbaud used absinthe, opium and hashish, among other substances and methods, to rationally disorder his senses. He wasn't the first.
Armies of Romance
Back in 1821, Thomas de Quincey published The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Along with describing the pains of his addiction, de Quincey also related how the visions of opium could be used for creative inspiration. De Quincey wrote of how his friend, the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was able to use the drug in this way. It has been long suspected that Coleridge, who started taking opium in the 1790s, used his drug-induced reveries as the basis for his most famous poem, "Kubla Khan."
However the drug affected his creativity, it was Coleridge who gave us the best definition of the imagination and it is the imagination which is at the root of Eleusis:
The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.
Drugs were and are certainly employed to tap into the imagination. De Quincey's book became hugely influential to the Romantic movement and in France it helped to inspire the poet Charles Baudelaire's Artificial Paradises (1860). The book describes, as in de Quincey, the poet's experiences with opium and hashish as means to experience a "taste for the infinite." Rimbaud, who considered Baudelaire the "king of poets,"obviously gained much from this book.
Baudelaire, himself heavily influenced by the U.S. Romantic author Edgar Allen Poe, was a member in the 1840s of the Club des Hashishins (the Club of the Hashish Eaters). The Hashishins would gather every month for "seances" induced by eating the strong hashish, which had made its way into France in the early 1800s with soldiers returning home from Napoleon's campaign in Egypt.
In the preface to his 1827 historical drama, Cromwell, Hugo characterizes what would become French Romanticism:
Down with theories and systems! Let us tear away the old lath-and-plaster hiding the face of art! There are neither rules nor models; or, rather, no rules but the general laws of Nature!
Hugo and his friends were prepared to fight for these new principles. When French government censors prevented one of his plays from being performed Hugo made sure that this would not happen again with his 1829 play, Hernani. He gathered together a rag-tag "Romantic Army" to defend it from being shut down.
They [the Romantic Army] ensured that there was enough of a crowd upon opening night that the play could not be shut down. They arrived in the most absurd styles, and fashions, most of them exceedingly young, though already accomplished. Upon the premiere night, these proto-bohemians were locked within the auditorium for three hours, and in that time managed to make quite a mess of it, mostly due to the lack of facilities provided for them.
Thus long before Bernays brought Vaslav Nijinsky and the Russian ballet to the U.S. to, according to Atwill and Irvin, "debase" its culture, and even before Nijinsky's notorious production of Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" set off riots in Paris in 1913, artistic performances were inspiring passionate and violent reactions. Bernays did not invent this.
The "proto-bohemians" of the Romantic Army were some of the first in a long line of social misfits that includes the beats, the hippies and punk, post-punk and syncnik sub/countercultures.
From the 1820s, at least, the telltale signs of the counterculture have existed -- voluntary poverty, alternative lifestyles, experimentation with mind-altering substances, political radicalism, the fostering of creativity, interest in the occult and other taboo subjects, sexual liberation, and a desire to shock and subvert bourgeois culture.
None of these things started in the 1960s, or with Bernays in the 1900s, or even in Germany in the late 19th century. They are perennial. Even the fashion of the 1960s was anticipated by the 19th century bohemians of France and elsewhere.
By the 1830's, the French Bohemian art crowd and the Romantics embraced medieval and oriental clothing styles. With their colorful fabrics, long flowing hair, and wide brimmed hats, the artistic culture did come to resemble Gypsies...
Bohemian style evolved into a cult of the individual, a person whose very appearance became a work of art with carefully planned outfits and accessories. The word bohemian suggested a sense of arcane enlightenment, sexual freedom, and poor personal hygiene. Bohemian life rejects materialism, private property, and centers on creativity and communal living. Often associated with the use of drugs and alcohol, bohemians ignore social convention, centering their lives on art.
Throughout the 19th century, then, bohemianism could be found in low-rent neighbourhoods of urban centres across Europe, North America and even far-flung places like Japan. It was in these vortices of radical and creative tumult that, here and there, it would be possible to encounter a true initiate of Eleusis.
In France, the bohemian current flowed through Romanticism, the Symbolist movement and the Decadents. The popularity George du Maurier's novel about bohemian life in Paris, Trilby (which directly involved mind-control in its plot!), proved that interest in this counterculture was very much alive in 1894.
A Carpet of Tiny Flowers
It is important to note, however, how international and interconnected this broad movement has always been. The Romantic movement in France led directly to the Symbolists and Decadents, with several overlapping members. These artistic movements also had their counterparts in Britain, the U.S., Germany, Russia and elsewhere. The artists were genuinely international, moving from bohemia to bohemia across many borders, and prolific correspondence maintained intimate connections at a distance.
Surette notes a fascinating coincidence of interconnection regarding Gabriele Rossetti:
It is a curious coincidence that, in April 1826, Rossetti married Frances Polidori, sister of Dr John Polidori. John Polidori was the physician who accompanied Byron on his travels; he was a member of the famous Swiss evenings of 1814 that produced Frankenstein and the Byron/Polidori story, Vampyre, the prototype for Bram Stoker's Dracula. One can hardly fail to recall that Frankenstein and Dracula are important sources for the popular literature of the occult. However, I do not attach any particular significance to the coincidence.
These "famous Swiss evenings" also involved drinking copious amounts of laudanum, seances, and other assaults on the limits of usual perception. They were best depicted in the 1986 movie, Gothic, directed by Ken Russell. The nights were hosted by Lord Byron and were attended by Dr. Polidori, the poet Percy Shelley and his wife Mary.
Mary Shelley was the daughter of the anarchist writer, William Godwin, and his wife, the early feminist Mary Wolstonecraft. The couple were also friends with William Blake. Aside from showing how culturally incestuous this all is, it also reveals again that visionary experience involving drugs, feminism, the occult, radical politics and creative boundary dissolution were all in full swing more than a century before the 1960s.
Rossetti was himself the father of four children who were also involved in the arts. His sons, Dante Gabriele and William Michael, were central members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This movement in painting went on to directly affect the French Symbolists and was a major influence on W.B. Yeats's father, John Butler Yeats.
Stephan George, a German Symbolist poet who had his own "circle" in Germany and was also a member of the Munich Cosmic Circle, was one Mardiste who helped to forge connections between the French movements and the various alternative scenes in Germany, later centred around Ascona in Switzerland. W.B. Yeats was also a frequent attendee of the Tuesday night salons.
Stein's influence was enormous. It was Stein, for example, that suggested that the U.S. writer Paul Bowles go to Tangiers. Bowles went and settled there and his place in Tangiers later became a Mecca for Beat writers like William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Tangiers is the "Interzone" of Burroughs' Naked Lunch.
Gertrude Stein's personal history before she moved to Paris from the U.S. is also fascinating. Allen Ginsberg, in his December 1968 article "Remarks on Leary's Politics of Ecstasy" in the Village Voice, lays out a very interesting source for the '60s counterculture involving Gertrude Stein, her time at Harvard University, and her teacher while she was there, William James.
One scholar who transmitted Blake's kabbalah, S. Foster Damon, can remember his sudden vision of tiny flowers carpeting Harvard Yard violet before World War One, an image that lingers over 60 years in mind since his fellow student Virgil Thomson gave him the cactus Peyote to eat. Damon concludes that rare beings like Blake are born with physiologic gift of such vision, continuous or intermittent.
William James, whose pragmatic magic probably called the Peyote God to Harvard in the first place, had included shamanistic chemical visions among the many authentic "Varieties of Religious Experience." His student Gertrude Stein experimented in alteration of consciousness through mindfulness of language, an extremely effective Yoga since mechanical reproduction of language by XX Century had made language the dominant vehicle of civilized consciousness; her companion Alice B. Toklas contributed a cookbook recipe for Hashish Brownies to enlighten those persons over-talkative in drawing rooms unaware that "the medium is the message."
Ginsberg's article provides as good an account on the origins of the sixties as anywhere. He also introduces a new element into the mix. "Bohemians" were not only experimenting with opium, hashish and absinthe. By the end of the 19th century, peyote and mescaline had entered the scene. Long before LSD, there was experimentation with psychedelics proper in the Western counterculture.
Gertrude Stein's Harvard teacher, mentor and friend, William James -- the brother of one of Pound's literary heroes, Henry James -- was an early peyote experimenter. James, as detailed in his famous Varieties of Religious Experience, used many techniques and substances, like ether, to explore different states of consciousness. He tried peyote in 1896:
Concerning the "mescal episode", there are a number of things to say. First, James received the peyote buttons from the Philadelphia neurologist, Silas Weir Mitchell, a close friend. Mitchell had gotten them from the US Government, who had ordered cavalry physicians at outposts in the Southwest to collect them from the Indian tribes who used them in religious ceremonies. Mitchell's task was to find out more about what these substances were. Whatever chemical assay was performed, Mitchell and other physicians also ingested the peyote themselves and reported extraordinary states of consciousness.
The composer, Virgil Thomson, appears to have "turned on" many people to peyote during this time. In addition to introducing it to the Blake scholar, S. Foster Damon, Thomson was a source of peyote for members of the Harvard Poetry Society:
John Joseph Sherry Mangan was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, on June 27, 1904. He entered Harvard in 1921, where he studied classics and became introduced to Wheelwright at meetings of the Harvard Poetry Society. Virgil Thomson introduced peyote to Mangan, who subsequently obtained "mescal caps by mail from New Mexico for the peyote parties in his room in Weld Hall." (Virgil Thomson, An Autobiography, 1966).
Harvard was not the only place having peyote parties at this time. At the salon of Mabel Dodge in New York -- which like the Stein salon in Paris attracted writers, artists and even anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman -- there is a report in 1914 of an incident involving peyote.
Gertrude Stein did not write directly about peyote, but as the favourite student of William James, the good friend of both Virgil Thomson and Mabel Dodge, and the author of the weird modernist classic, Tender Buttons -- speculated to be about peyote, a woman's nipples or both -- it is likely that she had been experienced.
In addition, as Ginsberg points out, one of the recipes in Stein's lover's The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book (1954), actually provided by Brion Gysin the artist, was for hash brownies. Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein's best friend, was a notorious imbiber of hashish.
It is very likely that there was a lot more going on at Gertrude Stein's salon before and after World War One than lively conversation about art and literature. If the writing of James Joyce, Ezra Pound and even Hemingway at times appears to be at least partially inspired by psychedelics that is probably because it was. The whole scene at the time was as dedicated as Rimbaud to a "long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses."
W.B. Yeats, a mentor of both Pound and Joyce and the man who first introduced the two younger writers, used both hashish and peyote/mescaline, trying the latter while under the supervision of the controversial doctor, Havelock Ellis, in 1897. Yeats spent three winters with Ezra Pound in rural England during WW1 and it is very likely that the two poets, in addition to pursuing occult studies, also shared a taste for induced visionary experiences.
No Shit, Mind Control
The occult aspect of all this, of Eleusis, is also highly fascinating. Marshall McLuhan, who later became friends with Ezra Pound, was distressed to discover how deep the occult current ran through the work of his favourite modernist writers. In a letter he wrote to Pound in Feb. 1953, McLuhan expressed his shock and dismay:
Last year has been spent in going through rituals of secret societies with fine comb. As I said before I'm in a bloody rage at the discovery that the arts and sciences are in the pockets of these societies. It doesn't make me any happier to know that Joyce, Lewis, Eliot, yourself have used these rituals as a basis for art activity.
This is very revealing. Here is Marshall McLuhan, a man people like Jan Irvin claim to be one of the chief architects of the sixties psy-op, expressing his hatred of the occult conspiracy, which he suggests goes to the root of modernism, to Ezra Pound, a man which most conspiracy theorists argue exposed just such a conspiracy. In contrast, it seems, it was McLuhan who was against such a conspiracy and Pound who was in the thick of it!
The following is what Jan Irvin thinks of McLuhan and Joyce. This was his reaction in a Facebook comment from July 14-15, 2013 to a statement by our compadre, Bill Klaus, on a Red Ice interview:
"What Joyce is trying to do is make people aware of the constructs of language that they are in all the time. I connected a straight line on the edges of this Jig saw puzzle blah blah: James Joyce, Marshall McLuhan, and Stanly Kubrick and the internet are the corner pieces to seeing what the 20th century was really about" ... yeah, no shit, mind control and manipulation from all of the above mentioned... incredible.
But here these clowns are quoting McLuhan, etc... the guy who created the Tune IN Turn On Drop out meme to destroy the masses... this is just sick shit.
The secret societies, McLuhan claimed, were characterized by a use of ritual and liturgy designed to put adherents directly in touch with occult spiritual forces existing in the timeless patterns. For the societies, those forces and patterns were alone real, not the world of appearances. McLuhan characterized the philosophy behind these societies with varying labels: "gnostic," "hermetic," Buddhist," "Neo-Platonic," and so on. They posed a deadly threat to the Catholic Church, which, along with Aristotle, insisted that the senses did not deceive the mind and that the material world was dependably real.
So here's an uncanny conundrum. Joyce was in the Conspiracy, Pound was in the Conspiracy, but McLuhan was not? What about "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out"? Was Leary actually working for the Church?
It should be obvious at this point that no movement, no event, no person, can ever be reduced to black and white terms. Complexity, nuance, variation, contradiction, surprise -- these are always in play. How much of the bohemian counterculture, which stretches back to more than a century before the 1960s, was manufactured by TPTB? Will we ever be able to definitively answer this question?
It seems pretty clear, though, that sexual images, wild dancing, music idols, feminism, integration and psychedelics -- all of the bullet points that Atwill and Irvin isolate -- were all happening well before the influence of Bernays and Wasson. It is doubtless that those in power attempted to influence, infiltrate and direct these movements, but this was not in any manner all that was going on. Throughout each was also a stream of potency from Eleusis.
In The Zome
And according to Pound this stream can be traced back to the troubadours and Cathars of Provence. Before the bohemians were the alchemists, the mages of the Renaissance, medieval heresies like the Free Spirit, the Fedeli d'Amore group of poets centred around Dante and Calvacanti, and finally back to the troubadours themselves. In each of these Eleusis is occasionally revealed, but we know that for Pound the tradition is much older. It extends back to the original fertility Mysteries and their even more archaic ancestry.
Provence in the 12th century, though, is a turning point. It begins the modern wave of resistance. Here Eleusis almost fully unveiled herself. It was AMOR directly against ROMA, love against the Empire. And neither it nor the Empire ever died. It manifested in the south of France, but that was not the only place to witness the expression of AMOR at this point in history. Joseph Campbell, in his Creative Mythology, explains that this time was a pivotal one for the entire globe:
...Simultaneously with the rise, at the opening of the twelfth century, of this elite tradition of Arabized European poetry, the "cult of the dame," likewise "following the Arab precedent," also suddenly appears. Thus we now have evidence of an unbroken, though variously modified, aristocratic tradition of mystically toned erotic lore, extending from India not only eastward as far as to Lady Murasaki's sentimental Fujiwara court in Kyoto, but also westward into Europe, and even rising to almost simultaneous culmination all the way from Ireland to the Yellow Sea...
The "cult of the dame", the resurgence of the archaic fertility/goddess tradition, swept the whole length of the Eurasian super-continent. Eleusis was on the rise but it emerged in that time with roots, as Pound pointed out, in the Gnostic and Hermetic traditions. And yet even this genealogy is incomplete. It is too tidy and organized. Too "aristocratic." As we saw with the 19th century, the tradition is also Bohemian. And by this I mean Bohemian in the larger and deeper sense. It is Gypsy.
The artists and eccentrics of the early 1800s in France or elsewhere came to be called bohemians because they dwelt in low-rent neighbourhoods near or once occupied by the Gypsies. And in those days people thought the Gypsies came from Bohemia. The excellent documentary on Gypsy music, Latcho Drom, shows us however that the Gypsies, or (ironically) Roma, have their origins not in Egypt as their given name suggests, but in Rajasthan.
The colorful and musical tribes of Rajasthan, though, are not the only people who took to nomadism and marginalized living. In the Himalayas to the north of Rajasthan and extending all the way to the lower mountains and hills of South East Asia are pockets of hearty "hilltribes" who have very intentionally rejected the governments, organized religions, and settled and ordered modes of being that have always been established in the valleys. Certain anthropologists now call this vast area, one of the largest stateless zones left on Earth, "Zomia."
Pound's mentor, W.B. Yeats, pushes this into an even bigger dimension. Yeats, like Pound, was fascinated by the religious and cultural movements of Provence. In addition to seeing an Arabic and Sufi connection to the troubadours, Yeats thought that these minstrels were directly influenced by the ancient Bardic tradition of the Celts. Many scholars have since agreed with Yeats on this point. But, continues Yeats, even the Bards of Ireland were not so special in this regard.
Every culture is built around a corresponding mythology. The great epic poetry of all lands stems entirely from the myths and folklore of the people.
Folk-lore is at once the Bible, the Thirty-nine Articles, and the Book of Common Prayer, and well-nigh all the great poets have lived by its light. Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and even Dante, Goethe, and Keats, were little more than folk-lorists with musical tongues. The root-stories of the Greek poets are told to-day at the cabin fires of Donegal; the Slavonian peasants tell their children now, as they did a thousand years before Shakespeare was born, of the spirit prisoned in the cloven pine.
This is a profound thought. All of the world's great literature, argues Yeats, owes its greatness to its proximity to, and origin from, folklore and myth. And myth itself is the expression of the living soul of nature -- "the spirit prisoned in the cloven pine." Pound entirely agreed with Yeats on this point. Eleusis, more than anything else, is this expression. Pound by no means considered all of the many individuals mentioned above to be members of the "conspiracy of intelligence." And even those that were and are do not necessarily have permanent "membership".
Root and Sap
Pound wrote that true works of art, or music, or poetry possessed virtu -- an intrinsic potency, a flash of the original Light. By no means do individuals possess this virtu at all times, and even works of consistent genius are very rare. Sometimes the flashes are only found in a few pages or a few sentences. Eleusis is at once extremely rare and yet it is all pervasive. Thus, Pound wrote in Guide To Kulchur:
The truth having been Eleusis? and a modern Eleusis being possible in the wilds of a man's mind only?
The modern Eleusis may be only possible in sparks of the imagination. Moments, as Coleridge revealed, that repeat "the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM." And yet these scintillas of light run through it all -- through myth, through language, through the tribes, through stars, through wood, stone and water. Eleusis is also synonymous with the power of another god who was celebrated in the Mysteries -- Dionysus.
In his introduction to Euripides' Bacchae, E.R. Dodds writes eloquently of the domain of Dionysus:
His domain is, in Plutarch's words, the whole of [liquid nature], not only the liquid fire in the grape, but the sap thrusting in a young tree, the blood pounding in the veins of a young animal, all the mysterious and uncontrollable tides that ebb and flow in the life of nature.
In these "mysterious and uncontrollable tides,"of blood and sap and jism and tale and song, flow the god and the goddess endlessly coupling through imagination and nature. This is really what Pound means by Eleusis. In "Canto II," Pound writes a version of the old myth of how when the young Dionysus was in a ship in passage to Naxos, the sailors attempted to kidnap and sell him into slavery. This myth encapsulates the timeless battle between avarice or usura and Eleusis. The boy-god saves himself by turning the greedy crew into dolphins.
In reference to this Canto, William Cookson writes in A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound:
This conflict between the splendour of the universe ... and those who exploit it for the sake of money-lust is at the core of The Cantos.
And this really typifies the difference between the two "conspiracies" that Pound identifies. One flows and one attempts to divert this flow for its own gain. This perhaps explains why the two are so scrambled. It is sometimes hard to distinguish a flow from a block to the flow.
Pound thought that this difference was essentially economic. The first is productive, procreative and creative and the second was usurious -- attempting to generate wealth without production. We only need to look at how much of the current global economy that is based on speculation to realize that the situation has only become more imbalanced since Pound's era.
Yeats summarized the basic division differently. In a December 1920 letter to Lady Gregory, he wrote:
...it is nationalism against internationalism, the rooted against the rootless people.
This is also interesting. Banking, the Empire, the engines of war, the 0.01% are certainly international. Usura really does not care what land it lays waste to, what people it starves or enslaves, as long as it increases itself. The centre of financial and political power continually shifts throughout history. No roots hold it in place.
But, at the same time, Eleusis also flows and grows. It is nomadic, metamorphic, bohemian. It also appears to be without roots. Yeats himself was international in this way. So was Pound and Joyce and most of the figures mentioned in this piece. Definitely their imaginations were not confined by provincial or national borders.
Both the international elite and the international bohemians have a disdain for the settled mundanity of bourgeois morality and existence. Both "conspiracies" are elitist, not democratic, in this regard. They are bitter enemies and yet they share certain convictions.
A bohemian may be a democratic revolutionary (like Blake) or an elitist reactionary (like Pound). They may ally themselves with the elites against the mindless conformity of the middle classes (the "sheep") or they may rise up with the downtrodden and perennial misfits against the Masters of the World.
They are often used by Power -- for ideas, artistic creations, movements, etc. -- but they are notoriously unreliable. Pound at once praises Cosimo de Medici for being a patron of the arts and Hermetic learning, and condemns the Medici family for being the first modern bankers.
Conspiracy theory itself, both terrifying and obsessing the middle classes, is often generated by bohemian crackpots and ne'er-do-wells, but much of it may also be traced back to the elite. The minds of the "rooted" are under constant attack by at least two "rootless" tribes. The "Jews" are opposed to the "Gypsies" and both aim to subvert and violate the "good Germans" or "good Americans." And meanwhile all of these categories are fictions created by the fetid imagination of some self-marginalized crank.
Pound seems to be suggesting something that is quite different than Yeats's distinction, and yet these two may at heart be quite similar. Eleusis, which is not at all synonymous with the bohemian counterculture, is rooted in a profound sense. It is the expression of the divine Light, which is permanent or eternal in both the Neo-Platonism and Chinese philosophy that Pound followed. Usura, on the other hand, obsesses itself only with the discarded forms and husks that this Light flowed through.
The proponents of usura, therefore, are rootless most essentially in their attachment to what is impermanent and transitory. Their power rests in their ability to convince others that material wealth contains intrinsic value. This is the core of the con of usura. It can only attempt to defile, obscure or counterfeit the Light. Eleusis, in contrast, does not seekimmortality or other simulacra of permanence. The only thing eternal is the flow and its beauty is only appreciated in its transitory nature. Death is not feared because life, though never staying the same, also never ends.
Letting the Wind Speak
The 1960s, then, were a very mixed bag. Of course the movements that manifested at that time were subjected to the machinations of usura. But, as anyone knows who has listened to the music or has somehow touched the spirit of this decade, something else was happening as well. The general countercultural drift was away from avarice, war and control -- away from usura. Different values, at least nominally, became widespread.
These values -- anti-materialism, creativity, free love, communalism, autonomy, vision -- are antithetical to the desire for material accumulation. They can all be twisted to sell products, but eventually the scam wears thin. It fails to convince and the spell of usura is directly threatened. Psychedelics, while certainly agents of confusion and disorder, undoubtedly can also help to temporarily break the spell. Eleusis, when it is truly seen, is nothing like mind control.
The two are like opposite poles of a sphere, two extremes of a spectrum. Usura, being the more solidified and objectified of the two, is more like a conspiracy in the conventional sense (with conspiracy theory providing its myth of omnipotence). Eleusis is revealed in a more or less conscious resonance within art and poetry, and on rare occasions with the artists and poets themselves.
Both are ages old. I've suggested before that both "conspiracies" emerged within the shamanism of hunter-gatherer tribes. The complex of "dark shamanism" (which I was turned on to by Jan Irvin's podcast) may be where the chains of debt can ultimately be traced. And yet both continue today. Both have been active behind the scenes in the formative 108-year period from 1904 to 2012. The inhalation to the present exhalation. Conspiracy and inspiracy. Both usura and Eleusis craft the visible rhythms of history.
These are Ezra Pound's terms, but they really have little to do with his own errors and obsessions. Pound's actual vision is no more "fascist" or "totalitarian" than the great visions of Dante or William Blake. These poets were seers. And as Blake taught, one should not mistake a poet's "Spectre" for the true self which sees. It also has nothing to do with Pound's anti-Semitism. Those that are attracted to this element in his work while ignoring or discarding Eleusis are missing the only thing in it of real value, as Pound himself finally and fully acknowledged.
That I lost my center fighting the world
This he confessed in "Canto CXVII." And in the next and final Canto:
I have tried to write Paradise Do not move Let the wind speak that is paradise Let the Gods forgive what I have made Let those I love try to forgive what I have made.
Fighting the world is dangerous. This epic struggle reminds me of the quote by the Dionysian anti-anti-Semite, Friedrich Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil:
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
It is easy to take many wrong turns in the search for the infinite. Losing one's centre is almost a part of the plan. Let us take care to not become monsters again.
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