Just ran across this book today -- Pagan Resurrection: A Force for Evil or the Future of Western Spirituality? -- so I thought I'd drop it in here. Random House has a thing that (apparently) allows you to read the whole book online, which is pretty amazing (more how-to info here). To see it in action, first click here, then look for the size controls in the bottom right corner (I found that zooming to 250% was comfortable; deduct 50% for each 10 years younger than me you are).

Following are several grafs from the sole (at present) Amazon review. Note especially the last line about Jung and Serrano, since we've been discussing them here of late. Though I am calling out this one bit, it's worth reading the entire review, which is much longer.

Rudgley portrays C.G. Jung as the figure of central importance in the modern pagan revival. For Rudgley, Jung was essentially a prophet of Wotan/Odin. Jung saw Hitler as a manifestation of the stormy, restless side of Odin. But there is another side - Wotan's "ecstatic and mantic qualities", which will also be revealed in time. Jung himself said, "things must be concealed in the back ground which we cannot imagine at present..." But Rudgley fails to note that, for mortals, moments of divine ecstasy are not without their price...and the price often involves those same stormy, restless moments he greatly fears.

Rudgley describes Jungian archetypes as "blueprints for certain workings of the human psyche." Some of these, he acknowledges, are "specific to certain cultures." (e.g. Odin is the most important archetype of the Germanic mind). Hyperborea, the land of Indo-European origins, is not a physical plane... it is to be found "not on the map of the earth but the map of the soul." As a symbol it has many layers of meaning, one of the primary ones being a vertical ascent, or attainment of enlightenment.

But are the gods, then, merely 'blueprints', and not objectively real? Rudgley seems to think so, and states that "we do not have to believe in Odin's actual existence as a god to track his return to the forefront of the Western psyche." In the same way, Stephen Flowers, noting Jung's influence, claims that "divinities in Asatru/Odinism are not seen as independent/transcendental beings, but rather as exemplary models of consciousness, or archetypes, which serve as patterns for human development." But this doesn't take into account Jung's own later view expressed in his Foreword to Miguel Serrano's book The Visits of the Queen of Sheba, where he stated openly for the first time that his mission was religious rather than scientific - implying that the 'archetypes' are, in fact, independently real.

Among the set of concerns (let's call them) that led me to start Mystic Bourgeoisie, was the question of why certain New Age types -- especially those who most vehemently deny that's what they are -- seem to believe that the answers to all life's most profound questions are to be found, you know...

{{{ WITHIN }}}

Even if your literary masochism amounts to but a fraction of my own, you can't avoid running into this bizarre concept if you read anything in this genre. Look within, my child, and your questions shall be answered!

I strongly suspect that heading the FAQ Hit Parade in this regard would be:

"Who's the fairest of them all?"

And the #1 most popular corresponding answer:

"Why, you are, Queenie!"

I got thinking about this again today because a reader kindly sent me a link to an interesting post titled Folk Theories Of Guru-Based Spirituality, which included such items as...

• The folk theory of everything being connected
• The folk theory of ancient wisdom
• The folk theory that only the heart knows what is true
• The folk theory that the mind is an enemy of the spirit

In the comments, someone added one of my all-time favorites...

• The folk theory that the Universe has a plan for Your Life

To me, that last is perhaps best expressed by this collection of psycho-spiritual hillbillies doing "That's The Way God Planned It." If you too have a rusted busted old brokendown Ford pickup parked in the weeds of your frontal lobe, feel free to sing along.

Meanwhile, I added...

• The folk theory of the Inner Magic 8-Ball

But then, thinking that might well beg for further explication, I finally started my own post on the subject. And as Madge would say: "You're soaking in it."

OK then, let's go to the source...

Of course, that's not really the source of this meme. Nor, despite the highly self-assured (if terse) rhetoric of the reply, is the answer definitive. But even after years of searching and frustrated head-scratching, I have yet to discover where the idea originated that "the answer lies within" -- or words to that general effect. I did, however, just today -- and totally by accident, opening a random book in my downstairs bathroom as if it were the I Ching (it was not) -- find the following passage from Tupak Okra's The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success: A Practical Guide to the Fulfillment of Your Dreams (pp. 43-44).

Consciously put your attention in the heart and ask your heart what to do. Then wait for the response -- a physical response in the form of a sensation. It may be the faintest level of feeling -- but it's there, in your body. Only the heart knows the correct answer. Most people think the heart is mushy and sentimental. But it's not. The heart is intuitive; it's holistic, it's contextual, it's relational. It doesn't have a win-lose orientation. It taps into the cosmic computer -- the field of pure potentiality, pure knowledge, and infinite organizing power -- and takes everything into account. At times it may not even seem rational, but the heart has a computing ability that is far more accurate and far more precise than anything within the limits of rational thought.

The cosmic computer, aha! So I guess there's my answer. But now I'm wondering if something like this is what Nietzsche was maybe on about with his whole "Gott ist tot" shtick...

I am barely awake. I know I risk the titters of the enlightened for saying such a thing. "Ah, he is slumbering in the otter darkness." Or perhaps I mean outer darkness. But the typo is felicitous, even fateful, for when I go haring off to Google Images to find an appropriate Otter, where do I find this one but on a site called The Interpretation of Dreams. This was not intentional, I assure you, but does serve to underscore the ubiquity of what I set out - after such a long hiatus - to discuss today. The page where I found this furry water sprite says:

If in a dream you see, how otters peacefully dive and lap in transparent water, in reality to you the happiness and good luck are prepared. For bachelors such dream promises successful marriage. 

The page is festooned with astrological sun signs and other assorted paraphernalia of the psychic prediction business. To me, the happiness and good luck are prepared indeed, because what I was meaning to discuss was precisely this sort of magical thinking. However, the Otter was merely a gift from Source, as Marianne Williamson might say. I wasn't really shooting for such low-hanging fruit as broken-English dreambooks.

What does this do? bear with me: just messing with the HTML. this post is a work in progress, as I'm having to relearn my own Blogger template! But let's see what happens if I drop this graphic in...

These people are thanking Kat Herding for following them on Twitter. Little do they know that I am "Kat Herding" and that I've added them, along with about 100 others, to my new Twitter list: Crackpotz.

Naturally, this requires further explication -- as does my absence here since May 22, but we'll get to that.

Twitter just recently implemented these lists, and it took me a day or two to figure out what they were for and how they worked. Then the penny dropped. Oh! I immediately flashed on the Mystic B Rogues Gallery I put together back in January. With a Twitter list, I could update that, expand on it, plus make it more interactive and, you know, modern. For instance, let's listen in on what some of these jokers are saying right this very minute!

Deepak Chopra: You were born with wings. Why prefer to crawl through life?

Marianne Williamson: Expect less from other people; expect more from universal supply.

Wayne Dyer: An infinity of forests lie dormant within the dreams of one acorn.

Jean Houston: Are the UFO's full of ET's at a galactic sporting event, on the edge of their seats betting on whether we will make it or not?

James Arthur Ray: I am spending the weekend in prayer and meditation for all involved in this difficult time...

As you can see, metaphor is big with these folks. That is, unless they actually think people fly and acorns dream. Or that "this difficult time" is an appropriate euphemism to use in reference to three people you just killed. However, given their many other strange beliefs -- such as, oh let's see... "universal supply" and "UFO's full of ET's" -- I suppose dreaming acorns are entirely possible. In fact, all these people are all about "the possible."

At this point I should probably recap why I started writing Mystic Bourgeoisie. Stop me if you've heard this before. My inspiration, if you could call it that, was the painful death of an important relationship. She always protested that she was not New Age. You've heard that one before, for sure. "Who me? Oh, I'm not New Age!" We've all heard it. Only terminal cases ever admit to the proclivity. Maybe the last gasp of those people who recently died in James Arthur Ray's Sedona sweat lodge was "Oh fuck, I guess I am New Age!" But of course, we'll never know if, even then, the denial was finally overcome. When you get right down to it, nobody wants to be seen as New Age because nobody wants to be seen as irreparably stupid.

Long story short, I took her at her word. Until after it was over, anyway, and I started asking myself what had happened, what had gone so terribly, irreparably wrong. "I'm spiritual but not religious," she once told me, and I was actually impressed. It sounded so smart. At the time. In the context. It's embarrassing to admit what a chump I was. But I was. A tool. A fool. An unwitting enabler of this grandiose self-absorbed bullshit. It wasn't until I encountered the book, Spiritual, but not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America, that I -- suddenly, thunderstruck -- understood it was a context-free cultural meme, a buzzword, a badge of membership in some amorphous faux-community held together only by the vague belief of its members that they are "not New Age."

So I started Mystic Bourgeoisie to explore what else might be hidden under the hood of nicey-nice sentiments and trendy affirmations of the type that are common as dirt here in Boulder, Colorado. Of course, I quickly came to realize that Boulder and Sedona and Big Sur had long ago lost whatever lock they once may have had on the market for mystically rationalized narcissistic personality disorders. Such spiritual-but-not-religious not-really-New-Age notions and nostrums had been packaged, marketed and widely exported, such that -- thanks to middleware mediums such as Hay House, The Secret, and The Oprah Winfrey Show --- they now constitute many of the unexamined "core values" of middle-class, middle-of-the-road America: a.k.a. the Mystic Bourgeoisie.

But of course, it didn't stop there. The phenomenon has gone gibberingly, grandiosely global -- and "established religions" have hardly been immune. Take Hinduism. Please.

Some of you will recognize many of my Crackpotz. Others will recognize only a handful. But I'm betting damn few will be familiar with these denizens of the Hindu Right. That's right: as in what some would call spiritually fascist. In no particular order...

Hindutva on Twitter on Wikipedia site Sangh Parivar on Twitter on Wikipedia site BJP on Twitter on Wikipedia site Narendra Modi on Twitter on Wikipedia site Sri Sri Ravi Shankar on Twitter on Wikipedia site

And this brings us back to why Mystic B has been virtually moribund since last Spring. The history of Hindutva and related right-wing racialism goes back two centuries, connecting German Romanticism, American Transcendentalism, Indian Nationalist terrorism, Esalen Institute, Transpersonal Psychology, and Ken Wilber's Integral-Everything-on-a-Stick. When I began to explore these connections and cross-pollinations, I had no idea what I was wading into. The links are deep, real, and ultimately mind-blowing. However, trying to unpack how this whole morass evolved -- not to mention how it has shaped the contemporary self-delusions of the Spiritual-But-Not-Religious set -- proved more of a challenge than I was prepared to deal with. It was daunting. I am daunted still.

But I have gritted my teeth, girded my loins, and decided to press on: ever deeper into the heart of darkness.

For "personal reasons." Sure, why not?
Deepak Chopra

Marianne Williamson

Wayne Dyer

Jean Houston

James A. Ray

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Sangh Parivar

Hindutva

Narendra Modi

(an example of Gurjarat "defamation")

Somewhere (in my garage, I think), I have a copy of Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. I need to look at it again. Maybe this time I could understand what she was on about, my previous efforts in that direction having always ended with me going, "Why did I buy this damn book, anyway?" Today I know: because God wanted me to read it.

I also know I shouldn't judge a book by it's cover, but if I could afford it, I'd buy this other Mary Douglas volume strictly on the strength of the following graphic. From what little I can glean, I guess the idea is that one big class of things people find risky, what they really fear, are various kinds of pollution and environmental toxins. Which is to say impurities. But that the purity that's being guarded (if not truly protected) by such fears might be something deeper. Hidden. Masked, you could say.

For instance, in the Wikipedia entry for Purification Rundown, we read...

[L. Ron] Hubbard put forward his ideas about Niacin in a book called All About Radiation. He claimed to have discovered that large doses of vitamins could both alleviate and prevent radiation sickness. He marketed this anti-radiation mixture in the form of a tablet, calling it "Dianazene." 21,000 such tablets were seized and destroyed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1958.

There's also Moral Purity and Persecution in History by Barrington Moore Jr., and it looks as if he has some insightful (inciteful? I always forget) things to say about purity. However, the reviews seem to indicate that he blames monotheistic religions for too much. Me, I think it's a crime to leave out The Mystic East in a work of this type. I mean, can you spell P-U-J-A? Not to mention, more generally, purification rites.

Ritual purification is a feature of many religions. The aim of these rituals is to remove specifically defined uncleanliness prior to a particular type of activity, and especially prior to the worship of a deity. This ritual uncleanliness is not however identical with ordinary physical impurity, such as dirt stains; nevertheless, all body fluids are generally considered ritually unclean, and some religions have special treatment of semen and menses, which are viewed as particularly unclean.

America has a deep Puritan heritage, but few have Clue One what that means. I don't. Despite any number of books by Perry Miller and Sacvan Berkovitch lying about the place. I'm not sure, but I think it might have something to do with the odd fraction in this...

It might also have something to do with The White American: Racial Purity is America's Security, an "official publication" of the National White Americans Party in Birmingham, Alabama (where the skies are so blue).

However, by far the greatest invocation of purity involves the spiritual risks and dangers of sex (Lord, I'm coming home to you). For one example among thousands, see And the Bride Wore White: Seven Secrets to Sexual Purity.

OK, now we're getting somewhere. Hmmm, let's see. What else have we got in this vein? How about...

Oh wait... How did that last one get in there? Sorry, I don't know what I was thinking. But while we're at it, let's dip in and see what's up with this unwelcome intruder. Here the author is discussing Lester F. Ward (1841 - 1913), who, as Wikipedia helpfully informs us, was no less than the first president of the American Sociological Association. Just imagine! The author notes Ward's view that...

White racial purity was an impossibility; miscegenation a social inevitability. Yet Ward wrote in support of whites' double standard with regard to miscegenation, condoning sexual intercourse between white men and black women as advantageous to blacks, while castigating and forbidding sexual intercourse between black men and white women. For the purposes of evolutionary progress, according to Ward, sexual intercourse need only occur between men of the conquering race (white men) and women of the conquered race (black women).

Ain't science wonderful?

And of course there are all sorts of books like Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity.

Yeah well, I suppose this must all seem totally arbitrary, huh? But here's how I got to those books and links (up to but not including Angelfood McSpade). Pay close attention here, OK? First, here's an equally white cover, wherein we return from simple and possibly ideology-free interior decorating to something more spiritualized. Note, for instance, the carefully chosen title term "sanctuary."

Your Home As a Sanctuary

Then note that Josephine Collins, who wrote the above, also wrote

And lest you still doubt the deep spiritual purity dimension of detoxification, try The Tao of Detox: The Natural Way to Purify Your Body for Health and Longevity

Get rid of the the dirt, the pollution, the poisons, the toxins, the horrid and unforgivable blackness of racial and sexual sin! Another popular term for this sort of detox is "cleansing," as in...

Of course, it would be utterly wrongheaded to associate this sort of cleansing -- ridding the pristine Godly self of invisible sub-molecular dangers and unspeakably spiritual quantum risks -- with the completely unrelated idea of ethnic cleansing.

Yes, it would be wholly irresponsible to suggest such a relationship. Even despite books like Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide (Columbia University Press, 2009)...

...from which, boys being boys and all, let's crib a couple quotes anyway. Just for the hell of it.

p. 33:

This search for 'oneness' also very often goes along with a headlong quest for 'purity'. This is another theme of the imaginaire that 'toughens' the identitarian process and impels it more inexorably toward an episode of mass violence. To define oneself as 'pure' in fact implies categorizing some 'other' as impure. The accusation of impurity constitutes a universal accusation against the population one is going to massacre. Purity already implies a requirement of cleanliness as opposed to another catalogued as 'dirty', perceived as rubbish. Purity also contains an appeal to the sacred: the need for purification falls within the province of religion, and constitutes a powerful springboard for unleashing a purgative violence. These clichés -- pure-impure, cleanliness-dirtiness, whiteness-blackness -- seem terribly crude to us. Their binary structures mirror however the elementary functioning of the human psyche in times of crisis.

p. 56:

In the 1920s [Alfred] Rosenberg became a kind of guardian of the general doctrine (Weltanschauung) of National-Socialism, propagating through his writings profound personal convictions about the reality of a Judeo-Masonic world conspiracy. His masterwork, The Myth of the Twentieth Century [: An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual Confrontations of Our Age], published in 1930 (thus three years before Hitler came to power), was to become the second Nazi 'bible' after Mein Kampf. This book, which had taken him years to prepare, is deeply inspired by the racist theories of the Count of Gobineau and Houston Chamberlain. The myths of Rosenberg are based above all else on the mystique of the purity of Aryan blood which, under the sign of the Swastika, sparked off a worldwide spiritual revolution: that of 'the awakening of the Aryan soul'.

And so in closing let me say: Axe not for whom de tocsin toll. It Tolle for thee, Eckhart.

Yo G, now we Donne.

there must be some way out of here
said the joker to the thief.
there's too much confusion
I cant get no relief.

dylan ~ all along the watchtower

From the Pseudologia fantastica entry on Wikipedia:

Pseudologia fantastica, mythomania, or pathological lying, is one of several terms applied by psychiatrists to the behaviour of habitual or compulsive lying. It was first described in the medical literature in 1891.

I ended the last one (Liar Liar 3: The Myth of Myth) by saying: "Lying turns out to be a central theme and major mode for the Mystic Bourgeoisie, even if they call it their 'Mythic Journey,' which is where we'll pick it up next time." Those of you who actually click on the links, know that that one went to Your Mythic Journey: Finding Meaning in Your Life Through Writing and Storytelling by Sam Keen. Ring a fire in your belly? No? Well, there's Sam on the right, looking for all the world like Quasimodo, the old bell-ringer himself. Say hello to the folks, Sam, you old fraud. Are you ready for your close-up?

OK, let's start with this clip from the intro to your interview at EnlightenNext (formerly What Is Enlightenment? magazine) Issue #16, Fall-Winter 1999; issue theme: "How Free Do We Really Want to Be?"

...[Keen] has authored over a dozen books and has for years been a prominent figure in the American human potential movement. It was through his experiences leading workshops at Esalen Institute, as a contributing editor for Psychology Today, and as cofounder of a men's group called SPERM (Society for the Protection and Encouragement of Righteous Manhood) that he began to formulate many of the ideas that would fill the pages of his books.

Which explains why those pages tend to stick together.

In the middle of an interview that is so cranky and boring at the same time that your ears might start to bleed, Keen says something that sounds as if it might actually be true.

So much of my approach is the effort to go beyond mythology to autobiography, to take my own story and the uniqueness of my own situation, my own gifts and my own wounds, with a kind of ultimate seriousness.

Interesting that he distances himself from both gender issues ("get over it") and Jung ("I don't like Jungianism -- just like I detest the idea of archetypes."). He made a bundle on the former, and invokes Jung -- as does his mentor Campbell -- whenever he finds it convenient, which is often. For instance, on Keen's current website, in a directory inexplicably titled...

fontsize13bseminarsandlecturesbfontp

...in the section on "Your Life, Your Story: Composing an Autobiography," right after where he says that human beings are "biomythic animals," there's this...

Carl Jung once said that the most important question anyone can ask is: What myth am I living? In the degree that we remember and retell our stories and create new ones we become the authors, the author/ities, of our own lives.

Too right. You probably didn't know this about me, but I have totally reinvented myself as the Sugar Plum Fairy.

The photo of Keen, above, comes from Yoga Journal November-December issue, 1994, pp. 114-116. (btw, monster kudos to Google for putting magazine archives online!) The article is titled "What My Book Is Not About," the book in question being Hymns to an Unknown God: Awakening The Spirit In Everyday Life. This appears opposite a cheesy ad for two Deepak Chopra books: Restful Sleep and Perfect Weight. Evidently, things the book is not about include angels, UFOs, miracles, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, self-esteem, and "prophesy" [sic].

It is not even about what my dear friend Joseph Campbell talks about in Hero's Journey, where he writes that we go into the forest where it is the darkest, and each goes alone, since It would be a shame to go in a group.

A shame, yes how true. But note that Keen has cleverly touched on all the magic hot buttons that readers of Yoga Journal in 1994 -- and perhaps even more so today -- are most likely to care about.

After devoting at least half the article to such disclaimers, Keen then says, well OK, he can tell us a little about what the book is about. "The book is in some ways about forming a spiritual bullshit detector," he writes. But only in some ways, right, Sam? Because if your intended audience had working bullshit detectors, they'd never read your crap in the first place. So: moderation in all things. A little detecting, a little bullshit. A little detecting, a little more bullshit. Rinse and repeat.

Publishers Weekly says of Hymns to an Unknown God...

Defining the quest to unlock spirituality as "the reverse of the religious pilgrimage," bestselling author Sam Keen (Fire in the Belly) nonetheless sets out immediately to blend Eastern and Western religious traditions with philosophy, psychology and autobiography. The result is a New Age-ish "now-and-then spiritual journey" whose indirect path may result in confusion for questers seeking less amorphous guidance.

But Publishers Weekly clearly doesn't get it. On your mythic journey, indirection is the path; amorphous confusion the shining goal.

In the opening bars of Your Mythic Journey, we learn two salient facts. First (p. iii), the book was published by Jeremy P. Tarcher, who was responsible for more New Age books than Jesus Christ, Buddha and Lao Tzu, combined. (btw, Tarcher was married to Shari Lewis, so it's possible that the ontological devolution we've been exploring here, lo these many years now, was a plot hatched by Lambchop. After all, ask yourself: is this the real life or is this just fantasy?)

Second (p. iv), it is dedicated to Joseph Campbell, whose name will appear again and again in such books. Such books being those about how to make the lesser argument appear the greater. The lesser being the random-ass concatenation of cruel jokes and unconscionable misjudgments that constitute your personal history. The greater being the same set of raw materials magically reformulated into the shining saga of a hero or goddess able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, patch up the crack in the Liberty Bell, or fearlessly lead a locust-horde of God-fearing White People Westward. You go, girl!

John Gast's 1872 painting, American Progress, is but one reminder that America is no stranger to heroes and heroines, gods and goddesses got up to serve the interests of the prevailing ideological drift. A bit further back, we have the glee of Henry David Thoreau that his family took its name from that of a Norse god.

But back to Sam & Joe. Note that Keen's Your Mythic Journey (1973) came out barely a year after Campbell's Myths We Live By (1972). Much later, Jean Houston -- another Campbell protege -- wrote A Mythic Life: Learning to Live Our Greater Story, with a foreword by Mary Catherine Bateson, author of Composing a Life. Houston also wrote an introduction to The Mythic Path: Discovering the Guiding Stories of Your Past, Creating a Vision for Your Future by David Feinstein and Stanley Krippner (Tarcher/Putnam, 1997). That book begins with "An Invitation: Renew the Dream That Quickens Your Spirit" (p. 3)...

Your personal mythology is the loom on which you weave the raw materials of daily experience into a coherent story. You live your life from within this mythology, drawing to yourself the characters and creating the scenes that correspond with its guiding theme.

---

There is no end of references to the power of mythic hogwash. But as this is the fourth installment of the "Liar Liar" series, perhaps at this point I should back up and talk about why all this is important. Why I think it's important.

In my previous post (Liar Liar 3: The Myth of Myth), I suggested that the powerful attraction of Jung -- Eliade depended on him, as did Campbell and so many others since -- is based not just on his notions about archetypes and the collective unconscious, but on something much more seductive that those two constructs enable: "individuation."

By individuation, Jung meant the creation of a real Self (he usually capitalized it) balanced between individual subjectivity -- the waking personal conscious -- and the Collective Unconscious (he capitalized that too) -- a transpersonal layer of racially acquired experience. (Yes, the reference to race is problematic -- as has been Jung's entire theory, for the same reason.)

Henry David Thoreau, who was wrong about so many things, was right when he said most people lead lives of quiet desperation. At least some of the time. I have felt that way. You have felt that way. Let us not talk falsely now. And the desperation is to get out of the terrible suffocation of being imprisoned within a miniscule inarticulate repetitive and hugely boring subjectivity. There must be some way out of here.

By the way, dropping allusions to Dylan here is more germane than you might guess. His song, "All Along the Watchtower," is based on one of the most obscure prophets of the Old Testament...

• I will stand upon my watch, and set me upon the tower, and will watch to see what he will say unto me, and what I shall answer when I am reproved.

• And the LORD answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it.

Habakkuk, 2:1-2, King James Version

In brief, word on the street was that some ill-intentioned horde of barbarians was bearing down on some minor king's minor kingdom in some long forgotten desert where more recent barbarities are now making headlines. So this king asked God what to do. Should I stay or should I go sorta thing. And God, in His ineffable effing way, said hang loose, King, I'll get back to you. Put sentries on your watchtowers and I'll send you a sign.

Except He never did.

For this reason, Sunday sermons based on the book of Habakkuk tend to get rather convoluted rather quickly. Two riders were approaching. Or they weren't. Or... well, let's kick around what God might have been thinking.

A favorite human pastime.

Which brings us back to Jung. And to the larger context within which Jung, by his own occasional admission, was embedded: gnosticism. Let's leave aside for the moment the fact that some scholars in the field of Religious Studies have suggested that gnosticism is such a vague and historically slippery concept that it has no real meaning at all. See for instance, Rethinking "Gnosticism": An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton University Press, 1996). As a class, the Mystic Bourgeoisie has constructed itself of just such nebulous and ultimately meaningless categories. So what else is new?

The gnostic category Jung gave us was the capital-S Self, and a method by which it could "shop" itself together, i.e., individuation. Think a sort of spiritual Photoshopping. Think rag and bone shop of the heart.

The shop window is the collective unconscious, another questionable category, but let's let that one slide too. Think Macy's windows at Christmastime in New York, the lights, the snow, the tinkling sublunary music of the spheres. Everyone in love, everything sorta magical. Sorta mythic.

Kinda like a drug. Like ecstasy maybe. Like whatever drives away quiet desperation. Take only as directed.

And here are the directions. Stroll up and down looking at the pretty archetypes in the shop windows. The Empress, the Goddess, the Good Witch of the East, the oracle@delphi. But of course, not all are so pretty. There's the Warrior, the King, the Sorcerer, the Magician. Those are for the boys. And don't worry, if you're lesbian, there's Sappho, if you're gay, there's Pan. And so on. Point being: something for everyone and not half boring! Not in the least desperate. In fact, when you get right down to it, really rather Sacred.

And who wouldn't want to trade in their ho-hum subjectivity for a gung-ho archetypicality or two?

Actually, Jung himself warned about this. He warned of psychic inflation, infection, of "invasion" from the unconscious. Sounds dire, doesn't it? Like "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers," like "The Day the Earth Stood Still." Aba Gort. Klaatu barada nikto!

Jung wasn't kidding, though. He had first-hand experience of such invasions and possessions. Serious business. No laughing matter.

But note also how close such warnings sound to those of the side-show barker. Ladies and Gentlemen, don't get too close! This Beast from the Dark Jungles of Africa will shock you. It will challenge your most cherished beliefs! Don't come inside unless you are sound of body and pure of heart! Only for the brave, courageous and bold!

Such "warnings" sell a lot of tickets.

So you step right up and buy yours for the Gnostic Individuation ride. Show your girl you're no chicken, dammit. Show that guy you're no dum-dum!

I weep for you.

Because yes, life is boring a lot of the time. Not as exciting as you thought it'd be. The wife, the kids. The husband, the job. Is that all there is? Midway on life's journey, your desperation boils over, and no Virgil in sight. Because Stoneman's cavalry came and tore up the tracks again. Yeah, that's it, that's probably why.

Virgil Kane is the name
and I served on the Danville train...

The Band ~ The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

Or wait. Corn in the fields... Maybe Virgil reincarnated as Carlos Castaneda or Don Miguel Ruiz or Sri Aurobindo or Ram Dass or Deepak Chopra. Listen to the rice as the wind blows 'cross the water... One-a those foreigners with the funny names. One-a them vaguely Oriental types. King Harvest will surely come!

You're individuating now, baby! See? All you needed was a little help, a little expert direction. A Guide, a Guru, a Master.

Step right up.

Stroll by the window displays. Pick yourself a cool archetype, a knowing goddess, a fearless champion. And rework the story of your life so it works out that that's really you. The real you. The realer than real you. Your True Self.

Ta-da!

You're on your mythic journey now, just like Sam Keen promised. You got your mythic image, just like Joe Campbell said. You're a Hero, a Heroine.

Or maybe you're on a particularly addictive form of heroin. Maybe you're shitting yourself blind.

Mystic Bourgeoisie is a history of professional liars, side-show barkers who, for hundreds of years, have promised to help you find a more mythical, mystical story for your life. A deeper meaning. A higher purpose. A better soundtrack.

Scarecrow and a yellow moon
and pretty soon a carnival on the edge of town.
King Harvest has surely come.

The Band ~ King Harvest

Although I'm starting this one with Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future, my aim here is not (overtly) political. To paraphrase Elvis Costello, my aim is truth. But nota bene: I do not mean any sort of philosophical or metaphysical capital-T Truth, but rather the plain vanilla garden variety opposite of myth.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, and their now innumerable wannabe emulators, the general half-educated public tends to have quite an inflated view of capital-M Myth these days. However, it is worth recalling that the word can also refer to something that just flat-out ain't so.

The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary includes these bits in its definition of myth:

• an unfounded or false notion
• a person or thing having only an imaginary or unverifiable existence

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, includes these alternative semantics:

• a fiction or half-truth, especially one that forms part of an ideology
• a fictitious story, person, or thing

Author Will Bunch shows how the "Reagan Myth" -- created posthumously by GOP spin doctors -- fits these negative senses of the word. But long before he went all POTUS on us, Ronnie was already a built-from-a-kit product of "modern" -- really, then only barely nascent -- public relations and advertising. Clearly, such myth makers have a long and hoary (so to speak) history in both political and commercial arenas.

When an individual plays a part he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them. They are asked to believe that the character they see actually possesses the attributes he appears to possess, that the task he performs will have the consequences that are implicitly claimed for it, and that, in general, matters are what they appear to be.

~ Erving Goffman, p. 17
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Goffman published The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life in 1959. Fifty years later, this brilliant piece of sociological R&D has it's own Wikipedia entry. But no one really reads it. Too old fashioned.

No worries, though: there's a brand new book on self presentation, published just last year. In this updated case, the presentations are in PowerPoint. And of course, the whole discussion has been "spiritualized." For instance, on page 145 of Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery, we are told that...

It also doesn't hurt to have the Helvetica Neue UltraLight font in your bag of tricks. Plus a copy of the DSM-IV-TR, which includes this diagnostic criterion for Narcissistic Personality Disorder...

As only hinted in Liar Liar 2, we are back in the world of self as brand manipulation, of identity as infinitely moveable advertising feast. That is to say, back in the special, high-status, high-quality, sophisticated, important and above all spiritual realm of capital-M Myth. And we should therefore not be in the least surprised at this juncture to re-encounter kindly old Father Jung, replete with his archetypes and the collective unconscious, ready to assist with contemporary branding initiatives.

For exhibit A in this regard, try The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes by Margaret Mark and Carol S. Pearson. The latter also wrote The Hero Within: Six Archetypes We Live By and Awakening the Heroes Within: Twelve Archetypes to Help Us Find Ourselves and Transform Our World.

But let's break out of our branding focus for a moment and go back to the Ur-Spring of all these notions. The following is from Abstract #000226 of Jung's paper on "Archetypes of the collective unconscious." The paper itself appears in The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious - Collected Works of C.G. Jung Volume 9, Part 1 (p. 3-41). The abstract begins...

The concept of archetypes as the mode of expression of the collective unconscious is discussed. In addition to the purely personal unconscious hypothesized by Freud, a deeper unconscious level is felt to exist. This deeper level manifests itself in universal archaic images expressed in dreams, religious beliefs, myths, and fairytales. The archetypes, as unfiltered psychic experience, appear sometimes in their most primitive and naive forms (in dreams), sometimes in a considerably more complex form due to the operation of conscious elaboration (in myths).

Note a couple of things here. First, "hypothesized by Freud." Hold that thought. Second, re Jung, "a deeper unconscious level is felt to exist." Note the passive voice. Note especially that this is felt as a feeling, an inkling, perhaps a belief -- or a hunch, a conjecture, a shot in the dark. Perhaps Jung simply took a wild ass guess. Finally, note well, highlight, underline, and set off in neon spots the bit about...

conscious elaboration (in myths)

Up until around the time of Jung's death in 1961, Freud had won the depth psychology sweeps hands-down. Psychoanalysis had beat out Analytical Psychology by any and every measure that could be applied to determine things like cultural popularity, number of clients and gross take.

However, with the advent of psychedelic drugs in the 1960s -- thanks largely to their importation and wide distribution by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (but that's another story) -- the inherent spookiness of Jung's crypto-occultism was a better fit with the return of a hallucinatory Zeitgeist. That the '60s were in fact a return to the cultural milieu of fin-de-siecle northern Europe is a major premise of this blog (soon to be a Major Motion Picture) -- and thus a return to Jung's roots, as partially unpacked in Spiritualism and the Foundations of C.G. Jung's Psychology (Amazon). Later, the women's movement (with substantial help from Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson) debunked Freud's "seduction theory," thus tilting the scales still further, if by default, in favor the Jungian persuasion.

We're getting a bit far afield with this detour, but it's worth noting that in the often dramatic cultural competition between Freud and Jung, the latter -- amazingly, hare-and-tortoise-wise -- won! While neither man's theory of the mind has ever been scientifically proven, Jung's ideas are certainly more "far out," trending toward the arcane, the inexplicably mysterious, even the occult.

It is one of the supreme ironies of the century just past -- which kicked off in 1900 with the publication of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams -- that psychoanalysis is today almost universally considered passe, while nearly anything invoking Jung is taken by many as absolute gospel. Try telling a woman she is suffering from penis envy, and she'll slap your face and walk away. Rightly so. But mention archetypes, alchemy, Gnosticism, or "synchronicity," and chances are good she'll hang on your every word for the entire evening. What's wrong with this picture?

That's the question Mystic Bourgeoisie returns to again and again. In the present case, what's wrong is what's right. For many, the powerful attraction of Jung is that his numinous musings enable a mythic reconfiguration of the Self -- the favorite subject, bar none, of the Mystically Beatified. This is what Jung called "individuation." The Wikipedia discussion of this topic points to a hopelessly confused ("Individuation is the process of integrating the conscious with the unconscious, for the purpose of self-actualization." BZZZZT! WRONG!), but entirely typical source on a site called soultherapynow.com...

Individuation is a philosophical, spiritual and mystical experience (Jung, 1989b, p. 294). It is the goal of our psychological development and in metaphysical terms amounts to God's incarnation (Jung, p. 157). Individuation is the central concept and purpose of Jung's Analytical Psychology (Jung, 1989a, p. 209)...

References
• Jung, C. G. (1962). Symbols of Transformation: An analysis of the prelude to a case of schizophrenia (Vol. 2, R.F.C. Hull, Trans.). New York: Harper & Brothers.
• Jung, C. G. (1989a). Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Rev. ed., C. Winston & R. Winston, Trans.) (A. Jaffe, Ed.). New York: Random House, Inc.
• Jung, C. G. (1989b). Psychology and Religion: West and East (2nd ed., R.F.C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

I have no serious doubts as to whether Jung said those things, in a general sort of way, or even verbatim -- though it's impossible to know from the clip and the references. For instance, Google finds "Individuation is a philosophical, spiritual and mystical experience" only on that soultherapynow.com site. And what "(Jung, p. 157)" might conceivably refer to is left as an exercise for the reader. But this sort of thing gets uncritically passed around the net, and does reflect the popular grasp of all things Jungian, i.e., "our psychological development" = "God's incarnation." w00t!

I shall restrain myself from even mentioning Individuation and Narcissism: The Psychology of Self in Jung and Kohut, an excursus into deeply ignorant ideas about "healthy narcissism," of which we know there is no such fucking thing. When I hear the names Jung and Kohut together, I reach for both my revolvers.

At one extreme, one finds that the performer can be fully taken in by his own act; he can be sincerely convinced that the impression of reality which he stages is the real reality. When his audience is also convinced in this way about the show he puts on -- and this seems to be the typical case -- then for the moment at least, only the sociologist or the socially disgruntled will have any doubts about the 'realness' of what is presented.

~ Erving Goffman, p. 17
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Emphasis mine, of course, as I count myself firmly ensconced among "the socially disgruntled," and with -- as I keep trying to demonstrate here -- damn good reason!

With that in mind, let's turn back to brands. Specifically, to brands and archetypes. More specifically still to Building Brands and Believers: How to Connect with Consumers Using Archetypes (Wiley, 2003), the cover of which is graced with the Signs of the Zodiac -- which I suppose are being offered as brand serving suggestions. Rather than rant at you further at this point, let's just look at a bit of the Table of Contents, shall we?

SECTION II  The Mythic Connection
Chapter  5. Archetypes: The Source Code
Chapter  6. Making Modern Mythology

SECTION III Mythic Profiles
Chapter  7. Mythic Profile: The Ultimate Strength
Chapter  8. Mythic Profile: The Siren
Chapter  9. Mythic Profile: The Hero
Chapter 10. Mythic Profile: The Anti-Hero
Chapter 11. Mythic Profile: The Creator
Chapter 12. Mythic Profile: The Change Master
Chapter 13. Mythic Profile: The Powerbroker
Chapter 14. Mythic Profile: The Wise Old Man
Chapter 15. Mythic Profile: The Loyalist
Chapter 16. Mythic Profile: The Mother of Goodness
Chapter 17. Mythic Profile: The Little Trickster
Chapter 18. Mythic Profile: The Enigma
Chapter 19. Mythic Figures in Combination and in
            Local Cultures

SECTION IV  Harnessing Archetypes
Chapter 20. Managing the Intangible
Chapter 21. Improving Consumer Connections

Now, from the sound of that, combined with the cluelessly lurid cover art, you might be forgiven for thinking the author to be yet another New Age no-brainer on bad drugs. However, while I frame no hypothesis as to his actual IQ, get a load of this official "About the Author" clip...

Kent Wertime is a veteran of the international advertising and communications industry. His career to date has included executive positions in New York, Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Singapore. Kent has worked with dozens of blue-chip multinational clients, covering a wide range of product categories. He is also an experienced writer and lecturer whose articles and professional commentary appear frequently in the Asian press, including the Asian Wall Street Journal, Media, CNN, and CNBC. Currently, Kent is the CEO of OgilvyInteractive Asia, the Interactive division of the Ogilvy & Mather Group.

If you don't find that at least vaguely horrifying, try this blurb from no less a light than Philip Kotler, S.C. Johnson Distinguished Professor of International Marketing, Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University...

Kent Wertime successfully argues that while products are becoming more alike, brands can avoid "commoditization" by drawing on the rich language of archetypes to tap into more unconscious and emotional levels that influence consumer perception and preference.

We are now fully through the looking glass. That wasn't very painful, now was it? Unless you object to Global Economy by Ouija Board. Unless you thought rationality was still intact among the much vaunted spoils of some fondly imagined Age of Enlightenment 1.0. Unless you thought "New Age" was merely something involving tinfoil hats and crystal gazing in Sedona, AZ.

But oh, it gets so much richer! In How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding (Harvard Business School Press, 2004), author Douglas B. Holt -- the L'Oreal Chair of Marketing at Oxford University, so he should know! -- "shows how iconic brands create 'identity myths' that, through powerful symbolism, soothe collective anxieties resulting from acute social change."

Don't you feel soothed already, just reading that? Can you handle a little more? This is from p. 39...

Targeting myth markets can be a complicated task, for they don't stand still. In fact, myth markets are routinely destabilized by cultural disruptions: Symbolic earthquakes pulse through society, shattering the value of existing myth markets and spurring the creation of new ones. Iconic brands not only target the most appropriate myth market; they are also sensitive to cultural disruptions, shifting their target when opportunity strikes. Successful iconic brands leap nimbly across cultural disruptions by deciphering the new myth markets created by the disruption and homing in on a new target.

Sounds pretty freakin impressive, no? Until you read the next sentence: "One especially agile iconic brand has been Mountain Dew."

In the preface, Holt tells a story about an ad for Diet Coke that used the Cheap Trick song, I Want You To Want Me. He describes the voiceover by Renée Zellweger about some loser flossing his teeth in the apartment across the alleyway or some such bullshit. The details are supremely unimportant, trust me. Then the author tells us...

this ad touched me because Diet Coke had grabbed familiar cultural source material and used it to tell a story about manhood, a story I wanted to believe in. The story tells us that guys caught up in frivolous pop music, guys so immersed in their music that they find spiritual moments in the most mundane of tasks, are endearing, even cool in a way.

That was when the projectile vomiting set in.

When the individual has no belief in his own act and no ultimate concern with the beliefs of his audience, we may call him cynical, reserving the term 'sincere' for individuals who believe in the impression fostered by their own performance. It should be understood that the cynic, with all his professional disinvolvement, may obtain unprofessional pleasures from his masquerade, experiencing a kind of gleeful spiritual aggression from the fact that he can toy at will with something his audience must take seriously.

~ Erving Goffman, p. 18
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

This was going to be a lot longer, but it's too long already. So I guess there'll be a Liar Liar 4, and maybe even a Liar Liar 5. Lying turns out to be a central theme and major mode for the Mystic Bourgeoisie, even if they call it their "Mythic Journey," which is where we'll pick it up next time.

For now, let me leave you with this from the Conclusion (p. 201) of The Culting of Brands: Turn Your Customers into True Believers...

We live in a spiritual economy. There is a
marketplace for worldviews and communities as
well as goods and services. There are both
consumers and producers of belief systems and
community. And the laws of supply and demand
apply as much in the spiritual exchange as
they do in the economic. Where the economic
and spiritual marketplaces differ, however,
is that in the former, demand can rise and
fall. In the spiritual marketplace demand is
pretty constant. There is always a need to
belong and make meaning. They are the
essentials of the human condition after all.

Yeah, after all.

Lifting from Enchanté, my post of 29 August 2005, wherein I quoted from Philip Cushman's Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy...

In a later chapter called "Self-Liberation Through Consumerism" -- the section is titled "Heinz Kohut and the Valorization of Narcissism: The Self Takes Center Stage" -- Cushman talks about Kohut's "self psychology" and theory of narcissism, writing (p. 270) that Kohut confused appearance for essence, that is, taking culturally conditioned psychological dynamics for universal human truths. He says that Kohut

...saw the whole mid- to late twentieth-century clearing -- the appearance of emptiness, confusion, isolation, the commodification of human life -- and called it essence. By doing so he reified the given, gave it a scientific justification, and encouraged its continuation. Ultimately, this is the source of his limitation, and ours as well.

And there's this a page later...

......self structure is both built (through psychologically taking in and metabolizing the parent's qualities) and liberated (through the unfolding plan of the nuclear self). The consumer language in [Kohut's] formulation should be obvious. The two characteristic elements of twentieth-century American consumerism -- individual salvation through the consuming of commodities and the liberation of the enchanted interior -- are clearly evident.

Relationships Are Tools

Other people are viewed as objects or tools in the quest for distinction, and the narcissistic patient expends a great deal of mental energy comparing him- or herself and judging the worth of others. If others have the potential to advance the narcissist in some way, they will be idealized and pursued. If others are perceived as ordinary or inferior, they will he dismissed, or perhaps exploited for some gain, then discarded.

Cognitive Therapy of Personality Disorders
Aaron Beck et al, 2nd edition, p. 250

The Brand YU Life - Chapter 6: Be Authentic

“I love the babes, don't get me wrong.
Hey, that's why I wrote this song!”

dire straits ~ heavy fuel You know what I'm thinking? No, of course not. That's why I write this stuff. To tell you. And what I'm thinking right now, as I track down references to C. Wright Mills and Ralph Waldo Emerson (more about them later on), only to find myself, via Google, thinking about the same stuff six years ago... what I'm thinking now is that maybe it's time for certain parts of Entropy Gradient Reversals to come together with certain parts of Mystic Bourgeoisie. Since we've lately been getting so personal and all. I mean, it's all coming from the same source, my attempts at diversionary prestidigitation notwithstanding.

So here. This is cryptic as hell, hell being perhaps merely a form of cryptomnesia. And more on that later, too. In the meantime...

   Sunday, April 13, 2003
   Border Patrol
   
   coyote moon, half high, half full,
   girl on the radio singing no one
   could ever compare to you. middle
   of the night, I'm out of cigarettes.
   all day reading Alice Miller. not
   reading really. what I do. tracking
   something down.
   
   two days ago I bought this first 
   edition. not that I collect the 
   things. not for their dates of 
   publication anyway. I got a coffee
   and walked back to where I'd read
   those first few pages a year and 
   change ago.
   
   and funny thing, it was a different
   book. Prisoners of Childhood it was
   called in 1981 when this all started,
   just now noticing. that fits. nothing
   else does. not really. not well. the
   receipt I found in the other one says
   01-27-02. sitting in this same spot
   that day outside of starbucks on the
   mall I said oh my god, this is me.
   well of course it was. and everyone
   else. what marketing genius. 
   
   back then I'd been thinking about
   C. Wright Mills. about voice. about
   anything but the moon. thinking that
   he'd said the sociological imagination
   flowered where biography intersected 
   history. 
   
   but in the Drama of the Gifted Child,
   Alice Miller says in those first few
   pages, first paragraph in fact, that
   biography is all that counts, and not
   all that abstract intellectual stuff.
   it's all we have, she says, to protect
   us from mental illness. I'm quoting.
   for the personal history of our
   childhood defines, for each of us,
   she says, our own truth. your truth
   my truth his truth her truth.
   
   and this truth, though different for
   each, so different that it takes a
   boatload of empathy to get it, is that
   each of us was abused raped sodomized
   beaten. left for dead. but nobody wants
   to hear about your truth because of
   this secret conspiracy of nasty old-boy
   psychoanalysts to hush it all up, like
   Freud with his drives and instincts.
   Eros was bad enough, but how about
   Thanatos, she says. and now how do you 
   like your blue eyed boy, Mr. Death?
   
   but here's the weird thing. in the 
   first edition, she says I'm not going
   to talk a lot about narcissism. then
   does. at length. by that name. on and
   on. however, by the new improved second
   edition, the word doesn't appear at 
   all except in a brief retelling of
   the story of Narcissus and Echo, which
   just sort of sits there, disconnected.
   split off and out of place. 
   
   she doesn't like Melanie Klein or
   Kernberg she says, with their over harsh
   views about darkness and pathology. she
   does like Kohut, though, who deep sixed
   all that nonsense about drives and said
   no, instead it was all the self, evolving
   naturally, coming to its own realization.
   it's own truth, you could say.
   
   but tell me something Alice, honey, where
   does all that abusive aggression come from
   then? when the true self blooms in the 
   gentle listening of someone as enlightened
   as yourself (no other authors are cited),
   is it all just perfect niceness after that?
   and nobody anymore wants a piece of your
   action? 
   
   and tell me another thing before you go.
   what happened to all those references to
   narcissism, leaving us with our little
   personal stories but no common history,
   no imagination, except for an undriven
   darkness that, in truth, does not exist?
   and why no mention of solipsism, leaving
   me with your truth, the revised expanded
   second edition, and me with this coyote
   moon, half high, half empty. girl on the 
   radio, interrupted.
   
   10:22 AM | link |  

well no one told me about her
the way she lied...

zombies ~ she's not there

"Paradoxically, the reluctance to come to grips with
deception can stem from an exalted and
all-absorbing preoccupation with truth."

Sissela Bok ~ Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life

I once knew a woman, or thought I did, who told me the following story. We were in bed together at the time, which is to say, it was an intimate moment, not an oh-by-the-way sort of thing. The story was meant to convey something deeply meaningful, and she told it that way.

Once, she said, she was walking home at night, and a car pulled up alongside her. The driver offered her a ride, and naively, she got in. As soon as she did, all the locks clicked shut and she instantly knew he was planning to rape and quite possibly kill her. Panic washed over her. But then, just as suddenly, she was enveloped by a feeling of deep calm. Not knowing why she did it, she reached over and touched the man's arm. "Don't worry," she said. "I won't hurt you."

As soon as she said this the doors unlocked and the man roughly shoved her out. Then, without a single word, he drove away.

I was stunned by this story, deeply moved. What incredible insight, intuition. What courage. My amazing lover, what a woman! In a couple of my books, I wrote: "I'm a motherfucker, baby, your mind my sky, your eyes my fire." Click the link. Read between the lines. It wasn't a casual relationship.

But as George Harrison warned us, while his guitar gently wept, all things must pass. Yes, yes, how true. Yet, not being George Harrison, nor of his Hindoo-cum-faux-Boodist persuasion about The Impermanence and such as, things didn't pass all that smoothly.

Sometimes you look back on your life and wish you'd made different choices. For me, the road not taken entailed a sawed-off and a life stretch in Florence. Ah well, maybe George was right. What good is it now to cry over might-have-beens?

OK, so I passed on my one real opportunity for interpersonal mayhem. But that didn't mean I, you know, moved on. I am morally and philosophically opposed to moving on. This blog is living proof. This blog is all about asking what happened? What went wrong? This blog is about answering the sort of questions most people never think to pose, opting instead for a wistful and comforting sense of remorse and personal guilt. To quote from the final movement of Repo Man...

• Girlfriend: "Don't just go! What about our relationship?"
• Otto: "Huh?"
• Girlfriend: "What about our relationship?"
• Otto: "Fuck that!"
• Girlfriend: "You shit!"

That movie helped me a great deal at a difficult time.

Then time moved on of course, even if I did not, and one day in a local used bookstore I found an old paperback copy of Magical Child by Joseph Chilton Pearce. The first edition was published in 1977, three or four years before I first met the woman who told me the story recounted above. Keep in mind that she told me that story during our second go-round circa 2000-2002, and that I knew this was a book she'd read before our first tour, you might say, in 1981. Not only read, but studied carefully. And talked about. I have a good memory for lovers and books.

So I bought Magical Child and brought it back to my lair. During the worst months of the worst depression I've ever lived through (and there was some non-trivial question pending at the time as to whether I would), it sat unread in a stack on my coffee table, which was already spilling over with books like Severe Personality Disorders and the complete series of Essential Papers in Psychoanalysis. They say that, when you break up, you learn so much about yourself. Well fuckin-A, they got that right! Here's a picture of me during those dark days, doing my best to look sane and harmless...

One day, maybe six months later, I picked up that battered copy of Magical Child. Hmmm, I thought idly, I wonder. Now, I don't read in the usual linear way, and there was no way in hell I was going to slog through all of Joseph Chilton Pearce's honeyed prose, so soon, I was nearly done with the damn thing.

Then I hit the passage that begins on page 225. What with The Healing and all, it has taken me something like six years to get around to copying it out as Exhibit A in a case that was never tried. I hope you enjoy it even a fraction as much as I did at the time. Picture me sitting there for an hour afterwards with my mouth hanging open and a dumbstruck look on my face.

A remarkable woman in her early thirties, formerly an actress, now working for a doctorate in psychology, related the following incident at a seminar.

As she was approaching her apartment in New York City late one evening, a car suddenly pulled up, and she was yanked into the front seat between two young men, a knife point immediately jabbing at her throat, all in the wink of an eye. The two young men immediately began babbling at her, their speech sporadic and half incoherent, that they were taking her out to New Jersey and were going to rape and kill her. They demanded that she tell them how it felt to be getting ready to die. It dawned on her that they meant it, that they were in a state of high agitation and had all the earmarks of intense fear and anger. They shook physically, the knife point at her throat jogging little stabs.

After an initial panic, realization of the futility of her position and a calm acceptance of her death swept over her. She replied to their frenzied questions calmly and earnestly. Now that she had accepted her death, her focus clarified and shifted. She became increasingly intrigued over the young men's fear and almost total lack of physical control. An odd maternal concern over them began to dominate her thoughts. She asked them about themselves, although they only insisted, like broken records, that she tell them what it felt like to be getting ready to die. She told them that she was sorry she had to die because she was young but that she understood perfectly well what the rape-kidnap laws were and realized why they would have to kill her. But what, she asked them, were they so afraid of? Why were they shaking so?

It was a strange conversation as they drove the thirty-odd miles out into a desolate, deserted part of the Jersey tidewater region. The men grew exasperated, confused. and more belligerent, all but pleading that she tell them how it felt to be getting ready to die. She prodded them with gentle, spontaneous, and utterly sincere questions about themselves and about why, knowing they had to do as they must do, they were so afraid. She assured them that all was well, that they did not have to be concerned on her account.

They arrived at a place that seemed familiar to them and in the dim light pointed out to her several mounds they claimed to be previous victims. Demanding that she tell them how it felt to be the next, they stripped her and threw her to the ground, both now whimpering and making strange noises. Looking up at the boy mounted over her, she dimly sensed a contorted and broken face. Compassion filled her anew, and she put her hands up, cradled his cheeks in her palms, and said quietly, "It's all right. You don't have to be afraid."

At this, the young man collapsed into a heap, overcome with great, wracking sobs, shaking uncontrollably in the spasm of wild grief. The other man sat pounding the ground and shouting, "What is it? What is it? What's gone wrong?" Then he, too, burst into the same strange, grief-stricken sobs.

It was some time before they quieted enough that she could speak to them and say quietly, "Boys, we may as well go home." Without a word, only their continued sobbing, they drove her back to the city. At the first subway, she suggested they let her out, which they did. She told us she had $300 in her purse, but they had given no thought to money. On impulse, she asked them would they lend her the money for the subway, which they did. She turned her back to them, started down the steps, heard them drive away, put her money in the turnstile, walked through, and fainted dead away. When she was questioned by the policeman who revived her, she replied, "If I told you, you'd never believe me."

well let me tell you about the way she looked
the way she acted and the color of her hair
her voice was soft and cool
her eyes were clear and bright
but she's not there

she tricks me into thinking
I can't believe my eyes
I wait for her forever
but she never does arrive

cars ~ all mixed up

In May of last year, in a post called I Can Get It For You Wholesale, I begged you (yes you, The Valued Readers) to buy me what I was then calling The Library of World Bullshit. This is a series of books including...

• 50 Self-Help Classics (2003)
• 50 Success Classics (2004)
• 50 Spiritual Classics (2005)
• 50 Psychology Classics (2007)
• 50 Prosperity Classics (2008)

No sooner had I posted that than I got my wish! This is all fully documented in a post unaccountably titled 300: Prepare for Glory. These days, given the state of The Economy, I am begging for food, not books, but I did want to share the wealth by alerting you to a site I found while slumming the nether reaches of the web yesterday. Click the graphic below and be amazed!

One assumes that's a photo of author/editor Tom Butler-Bowdon, and not a male model, but no matter. Point is, if you click on it, you will be treated to many substantial excerpts from these valuable and informative books. In an interview with some unspecified interrogator, Butler-Bowdon says:

While Christians may view Goddess worship as the work of the devil, its adherents find in it a beautiful and complete expression of the sacred feminine power.

Not being a Christian myself, I don't view Goddesses worship as the "work of the devil" -- unless it is that infamous devil in the details. Let's explore some of those, shall we?

In aid of said exploration, I'm going to share a very cool pop-culture research trick with you here. And make no mistake, it's in popular culture that these ideas really take root and play out, not in the realm of academic scholarship. So here's the trick. If you go to Zinio.com, you'll see a search box at the top of the page. As Zinio sells electronically delivered magazine subscriptions, most people would reasonably think to enter the name of a magazine. But as Zinio apparently indexes the full text of all its 900+ magazines, you can search for anything. For instance, searching on "goddess" I found the following...

Prediction Magazine - Page 67 | Sep-05

...A home that is happy, welcoming and healthy is the goal of this goddess. Annette Gardner and Anne Nash of 21st Century Goddess work with goddess energy, offering themed parties and trips to sacred sites...

And you can even embed riffy graphical links to the full article in your blog, like so.

Prediction Magazine-Sep-05 So how cool is that? But the ultracool thing is, your query will even turn up stuff in the advertising -- the sine qua non of pop culture. My "goddess" query found, among many other hits, this...

Yoga Journal-Mar-09 Expanding on the ad at the top of the right page, we get...

And going to the Fertile Goddess site, we learn even more!

“Here at Fertile Goddess we believe in the
inspirational connection between real women and the
bountiful power and wisdom of ancient fertility
goddesses....

From her days studying archaeology, [founder] Stacia
[Wells] knew that in many ancient cultures, abundance
was synonymous with fertility.”

I have emphasized "archeology" above because it plays into the rest of our story, which will serve to explain the particular brand of archeology Ms. Wells most likely studied.

To get deeper into that story, let's start on the landing page for (my favorite) 50 Spiritual Classics. There you will find one book listed for which, sadly, no excerpt is provided. I refer to the The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess - Rituals, Invocations, Exercises, Magic by Starhawk (pictured right). The book was published in 1979, at what some vainly hoped was the height of the madness, and was hugely influential in certain quarters of the U.S. where witch burning is deprecated. If you've never heard of her, you have clearly not kept abreast of the zeitgeist, as Starhawk now has a blog, "On Faith," on a joint Newsweek / Washington Post site.

I sometimes tire of people asking if my beat here on Mystic Bourgeoisie is not trivially marginal to mainstream American culture, and thus the world's. If you should entertain such misgivings, click that Newsweek / Washington Post link where you can read in Starhawk's mini-bio about how she "travels internationally teaching magic, the tools of ritual, and the skills of activism," and posts stuff like this bit from Compassion Begins With Mother Earth...

Earth based spirituality covers such a wide spectrum of diverse religions and spiritual traditions, from indigenous traditions to modern NeoPagansim. We share no unified dogma, and no one person carries the authority to speak for all, certainly not me.

Yeah, but hey, Newsweek, The Washington Post... you've sure got a bully pulpit! Though, granted, it's not as if there aren't plenty of other speakers for "earth based spirituality." For instance, also published in 1979, there's Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America by Margot Adler.

That would be the same Margot Adler who once told me, personally -- in front of a sizable audience -- that I was her kinda guy. No lie. At the time, which was April of 2000, we were both speaking on a panel at the University of Colorado's 52nd annual Conference on World Affairs. So you see, I've come a long way too, baby.

However, witches, druids, goddess-worshippers, and other pagans -- whether in America or elsewhere -- are no longer saying nice things about me. Not if they've ever read this blog. But let's get back to Starhawk and her latest documentary, which is about the archeologist Marija Gimbutas -- about whom I wrote back in June, 2006, in Yogis, Shapersons and Goddesses (if you didn't catch it the first time around, don't miss The Da Vinci Code movie review).

In The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (p. 357), Ronald Hutton writes of Gimbutas...

In 1974 she published a celebrated analysis of the figurines which had long been recognized as one of the most remarkable features of neolithic and Copper Age sites in south-eastern Europe. Following the collapse of general scholarly belief in a Great Goddess, she treated these as representations of individual deities and interpreted their symbolism -- elaborately and boldly -- according to a system which had been developed in its essentials by the Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann, whom she acknowledged and praised.

Jung, of course, as we might have suspected. But continuing...

It was only in the late 1970s that feminist theory replaced Jungian psychology as her major conceptual tool, and this may not be unrelated to the fact that she taught in the University of California, Los Angeles.

Your...

...at this juncture would not be inappropriate.

A much fuller description of the Gimbutas debate is provided by an article in Lingua Franca (April/May 1997) by Lawrence Osborne. It's called...

And not all the naysayers are men, by a long shot. Quoting from the above...

• Lotte Motz, an expert on Germanic mythology, argues that images of men and animals are just as prolific as goddess imagery in early European cultures.
• Lauren Talalay at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology in Ann Arbor, Michigan, claims that Gimbutas's work was as marred by gender bias as that of her Russian peers in the 1950s.
• For many scholars, the Pokrovka warrior women serve as the final nail in Gimbutas's coffin, putting her male-marauder theory permanently to rest. "We have this macho myth about the so-called Kurgan nomads, that they were hierarchical warmongers and so forth," says Claudia Chang, an archaeologist at Sweet Briar College, who works on Kurgan graves in central Asia. "But in fact, as these recent excavations are showing, their kinship system often favored women and enabled them to enter the military and social elite."

What you see in the video on the Belili Productions website is the first minute and a half of this more complete YouTube video, which is the first part of Starhawk's documentary about Marija Gimbutas, "Signs Out of Time."

Olympia Dukakis (narrator): "What does the dance mean to the dancers? How do we measure the beliefs that set those feet in motion?"

Good questions, to which we will eventually loop around again.

Meanwhile, the following are sequential statements from Part 7 of the Signs Out of Time - Marija Gimbutas video on YouTube.

• Lord Colin Renfrew: "She felt she had a direct line to these things. So she felt to some extent that she could understand it in an intuitive way. I'd almost say a feminine way, but that might be... I might be criticized by some of your more critical viewers. But she had a very holistic approach to things."
• James Harrod: "And that's why it was so creative. It was that cross-fertilization of ideas which enabled her to see things which other people hadn't seen."
• Olympia Dukakis: "But artists, ecologists, feminists, contemporary goddess worshippers, and social thinkers were deeply inspired by her work."
• Joan Marler: "When Marija began to publish her work on the symbolism of Old Europe it just happened to coincide with the second wave of feminism and the development of eco-feminism and sense of rediscovering the fact that we are connected with this Earth."
• Ernestine Elster: "There were feminists who found in Marija's ideas the scientist who they had hoped would support their ideas that once God was a woman. And so she was borne aloft by, really, a lively group of women -- and pr... men too. And she never looked back." [note: the "pr..." elision was probably "probably" -- doncha think?]
• Patricia Reis: "So the backlash against her I think was part of the backlash against feminism, because she got identified with feminism."

By the way, if you click on the names above, you'll find some... interesting background on these people.

The voiceover then refers to Gimbutas' home country: "Lithuania, where goddesses have never been forgotten." We'll come back to that shortly -- and with a vengeance.

But first note the interesting logic on display above: What many (including myself) believe to be a crackpot theory just happened to intersect with "second wave feminism" (there have been more waves than two, but we'll let that ride) and was accepted, adopted and championed by a whole herd of crackpots who were eagerly awaiting a crackpot with a Ph.D. in Archeology and a bunch of cracked pottery, who, and which, supported their own crackpot theories.

Continuing in an oddly (but intimately, you could say) related direction, Hugh Urban's Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism has an interesting table of contents. Here's a sample.

My emphasis. In case you wondered.

Urban also wrote Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion. Both books are published by the University of California Press, and Urban is Associate Professor of Religion and Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. Whether because of or in spite of these credentials, he seems to know what he's talking about, and his books are a needed counterbalance to the plethora of absolute malarkey about "Tantric Sex" that is being spewed around these days by the ignorant loonies of the Mystic Bourgeoisie. He writes in Tantra (p. 2)...

As we can see on the shelves of any bookstore, Tantra pervades Western pop culture, appearing in an endless array of books, videos, and slick web sites. Indeed the phrase "American Tantra" is now even a registered trademark, representing a whole line of books, videos, and "ceremonial sensual" merchandise.

There is much more in this vein at Urban's The Omnipotent Oom: Tantra and Its Impact on Modern Western Esotericism.

But wait! That's not all you'll get!

I searched Zinio again, this time for "Gimbutas," and found her mentioned in the 28 September 2007 issue of Science, which has been the official journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 1900. In other words, this is not Science Lite. The article, titled "Myths and Consequences" is a review of Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science by Stefan Arvidsson (on my Amazon wishlist, yo). The University of Chicago Press site provides a useful synopsis, including this bit...

Stefan Arvidsson traces the evolution of the Aryan idea through the nineteenth century -- from its roots in Bible-based classifications and William Jones's discovery of commonalities among Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek to its use by scholars in fields such as archaeology, anthropology, folklore, comparative religion, and history. Along the way, Arvidsson maps out the changing ways in which Aryans were imagined and relates such shifts to social, historical, and political processes. Considering the developments of the twentieth century, Arvidsson focuses on the adoption of Indo-European scholarship (or pseudoscholarship) by the Nazis and by Fascist Catholics.

While "Fascist Catholics" is certainly a show-stopper phrase, don't let it overshadow that reference to pseudoscholarship. Meanwhile, you can read the full review right here...

Science-Sep-28-07 The reviewer, Michael Witzel (Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard), notes that 19th-century linguists Max Müller and Hermann Hirt had argued against drawing connections between language and race. He then continues...

I found this interesting note on p. 293 of Aryan Idols...

Marler (1997) stresses Gimbutas's strong Lithuanian identity and the traumatic consequences that the Polish and later the Russian Bolshevik occupation of Lithuania had for her and her educated family, who seem to have held liberal and romantic-nationalist values. As for many Lithuanians during the interwar period, the German army instead seemed like defenders of the Lithuanian culture.

the cited reference is to
"The Circle Is Unbroken: A Brief Biography" by Joan Marler
in From the Realm of the Ancestors:
An Anthology in Honor of Marija Gimbutas

So what have we got here so far? Archeology, Feminism, Indo-European languages, Hindu Tantra, The Goddess, The Four Noble Truths, Hour-Long Orgasms, Perfect Great Enlightenment, Total Utter Bullshit... As The Cars once said: it's all mixed up.

But maybe, just maybe, we can still extract some shred of sense out of this bubbling cauldron of newts' eyes and fenny snakes.

Something about the opening bars of that Starhawk/Gimbutas video made me uncomfortable. Dancing peasants happily cavorting around bonfires always give me a creepy feeling. They conjure up images of the carefree Wandervogel circa 1900, about whom I've written elsewhere. (Click graphic for more.)

Point is, many of those kids, several decades after their youthful revels, were signing up with the Nazi Party.

So, on a hunch, I broke out of Starhawk's "Signs Out of Time" vid and googled "Lithuania Holocaust" -- without the quotes. And the first thing I found was a Wikipedia page called (predictably, but still I was floored) Holocaust in Lithuania. It says...

The Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Lithuania resulted in the near total destruction of Lithuanian Jews living in the Nazi-controlled Lithuanian territories... Out of approximately 208,000 to 210,000 Jews, an estimated 195,000 - 196,000 perished before the end of World War II (wider estimates are sometimes published)...

It has taken me several days to put this into the context that the balance of this post will attempt to present. This has already been long, I know, but I hope you'll bear with me to the bitter end. And it is bitter indeed.

In 1992, Christopher Browning published a book titled Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. The Publishers Weekly review said...

On June 13, 1942, the commanding officer of Reserve Police Battalion 101 received orders to round up the Jews in the Polish town of Josefow and shoot all but the able-bodied males. Major Wilhelm Trapp, who wept over the order, gave his troops the extraordinary option of "excusing themselves" from the task. Of the 500 in the unit only a dozen did so, and the rest slaughtered 1500 women, children and old people. ...these ordinary men, mostly middle-aged working-class people from Hamburg, shot to death some 38,000 Polish Jews and sent 45,000 others to the Treblinka gas chambers. ...this short work... reveals how average Germans became mass murderers.

Four years later, in 1996, Daniel Goldhagen ignited a firestorm with Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Here's Publishers Weekly again...

Refuting the widespread notion that those who carried out the genocide of Jews were primarily SS men or Nazi party members, he demonstrates that the perpetrators -- those who staffed and oversaw the concentration camps, slave labor camps, genocidal army units, police battalions, ghettos, death marches -- were, for the most part, ordinary German men and women: merchants, civil servants, academics, farmers, students, managers, skilled and unskilled workers. Rejecting the conventional view that the killers were slavishly carrying out orders under coercion, Goldhagen, assistant professor of government at Harvard, uses hitherto untapped primary sources, including the testimonies of the perpetrators themselves, to show that they killed Jews willingly, approvingly, even zealously.

But it wasn't just the Germans who did this. That Wikipedia article on the Holocaust in Lithuania cites an article by Dina Porat -- The Holocaust in Lithuania: Some Unique Aspects -- which appears in The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation. Porat writes (p. 163)...

A declaration issued after the war by the Lithuanian Jews in the American zone in Germany regarding "the guilt of the Lithuanian people in the extermination of Lithuanian Jewry" concludes: "The small places in the Lithuanian provinces, without any exception, were erased by the Lithuanians." This declaration actually sums up the events detailed in Lithuanian Jewry, the volume on the Holocaust: the handful of survivors of 220 Shtetles and small towns describe how the Jews in those places were killed. Their descriptions, in which the Germans are hardly mentioned, make it quite clear that Lithuanians perpetrated most of the torture and killing, generally without any German officials on the spot. Recent research confirms Jewish sources to a large extent. The German historian Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, in his research on the Einsatzgruppen, assumes that "possibly half or two-thirds" of Lithuanian Jews were killed by local units. It seems, then, that the part played by the Lithuanians was greater than the Germans could afford to admit in their reports to their headquarters.

And this is from the Neustadt-Saki chapter of Lithuanian Jewry, referred to by Porat in the previous quote...

...a group of Lithuanian "Activists," under the command of Germans who came from Shirvint, attacked the city. They ordered all Jewish males above the age of fourteen out to the streets. There armed Lithuanians were waiting and they took them under heavy guard to the District Council building. Council officials collected their papers, money and anything of value found on them.

In groups of fifty the Jews were taken to the Jewish cemetery. There, pits which were excavated by Soviet prisoners of war were ready. One hundred ninety-two of the prisoners were murdered by the Germans and the Lithuanian "Activists." They were shot at the edge of the pits.... The district governor and the council head were present at this mass execution. ...all those who participated were invited by the district governor and council head to a large banquet. The two thanked the Germans and the Lithuanians who participated in the mass slaughter for their efforts.

To make this even more real, try watching these YouTube videos:

• Holocaust Testimony: Murder of the Jews of Lithuania
  Dina Baitler, age seven, was brought to the forest of Ponary outside of the city of Vilna, Lithuania together with thousands of other Jews. From morning till night the Jews were lined up and shot into pits located in the forest.
• Holocaust Survivor Describes Escape from Cattle Car
  Born in 1930 in Kaunas, Lithuania, Kalman Perk was deported with his family to the Kovno ghetto in 1941. Hiding in a cellar in July 1944 to escape the impending liquidation of the ghetto, the family was forced to abandon their hiding place due to German-ignited fires in the ghetto. They were then loaded onto a cattle car and deported to the concentration camps.

Remember this? "Lithuania, where goddesses have never been forgotten."

So it wasn't just the Germans. And it wasn't just the men.

A book published just last Fall, Ordinary People as Mass Murderers: Perpetrators in Comparative Perspective, contains a chapter titled "Perpetrators of the Holocaust: A Historiography." Here's a clip...

The representation of female perpetrators and their defence strategy in various Nazi trials is a largely neglected topic but played an important part in the collective strategy of denying any guilt. Accused women exploited their gender status by arguing that they had been exploited and had acted in subordinate positions as helpless assistants in a regime that was led by men. Furthermore, analyses of "courtroom culture" and "media representation" of trials show that female perpetrators were stereotyped and demonised as complete deviations from femininity and exceptional "female brutes", e.g., Ilse Koch, "the witch from Buchenwald", Carmen Maria Mory, "the devil" of Ravensbrück, or Herta Oberheuser, "the sadist of Ravensbrück". This discourse disguised the participation of a large number of women in Nazi crimes, and served to avoid a critical self-reflection on the past. In short, the picture of "unnatural femininity" and dehumanised creatures with unbridled sexuality allowed society to construct a counter-model of itself as normal and innocent.

The following names (and links) are taken, fairly randomly, from the Wikipedia pages for Ravensbrück concentration camp and Female guards in Nazi concentration camps...

Hermine Braunsteiner, Emma Zimmer, Johanna Langefeld, Maria Mandel, Dorothea Binz, Greta Boesel, Elisabeth Marschall, Christel Jankowsky, Ilse Goeritz, Margot Dreschel, Kaethe Hoern, Irma Grese, Elisabeth Volkenrath, Herta Ehlert, Alice Orlowski, Jane Bernigau, Gerda Steinhoff, Hildegard Neumann, Ruth Closius, Juana Bormann, Ruth Hildner, Elfriede Lina Rinkel, Herta Bothe.

If you visit all those pages, as I did, you'll recognize some of the faces on the cover of this book...

So how did that Starhawk/Gimbutas intro go again?

What does the dance mean to the dancers? How do we measure the beliefs that set those feet in motion?

You tell me, babycakes.

we have all been here before...

• Positively Fourth Street*
• You've Come a Long Way, Baby
• Diachronicity: A Causal Disconnecting Principle
• A Rogues Gallery

* "Note that the book Seligman references - Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 - is an extended paean to Blind Boy Apollo and the All-White Astronauts of Western Civilization."

I'm just saying...

We begin today's little homily with a large, slightly modified graphic (a "derivative work" on several fronts, you could say) from the homepage of Joie de Vivre Hotels. That by way of introduction to its CEO, Chip Conley (pictured), and this extremely interesting thing he said...

The customer sees the product as an extension of themselves. Then you've created an identity refreshment. You've refreshed the identity of the customer because they feel that by using your product they're becoming more of that aspirational self.

He says this in a video recap of some of the exciting marketing events at LOHAS 12, a conference that took place last year right here in Boulder, Colorado. And hearing the guy say that, how could I not think once again of that seminal work of pop psychology, Narrative Therapy: The Social Construction of Preferred Realities? In fact, allow me to recycle a bit from a 2005 Mystic B post on that very subject...

So let me see if I've got the gist of this... If I'd prefer to be a fairy princess, say, instead of someone whose life has been derailed by a personality disorder arising from childhood trauma -- some combination of physical, emotional, sexual and/or psychological abuse -- then I could rework my "narrative" to where I was really born with a magic wand and a tiara? Or let's say I was spooked by all this postmodern confusion of optional selves and shifting histories. I could what? Morph myself into some arcane magus from the 15th century?

Cool!

I wrote about the market research outfit LOHAS in November 2005 in The Discreet Charm of the Mystic Bourgeoisie. The group says of itself...

LOHAS is an acronym for Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability, a market segment focused on health and fitness, the environment, personal development, sustainable living, and social justice.

But who are they really? On the LOHAS Means Business page, we learn a bit more...

Anthropologist and sociologist Paul Ray, Ph.D., executive vice president of American LIVES, a research firm in Oakland, Calif., in 1994 began a lengthy and complicated national study of American values. Ray's research reshaped theories about American culture and revealed an emerging cultural phenomenon called the "Cultural Creatives" -- a slice of the American population comprising 50 million persons or 26 percent of American adults.

Ah, so we're back to that again. One of these days I'll learn that I can save a lot of time by going to Wikipedia first. Had I done that a couple years ago, I might have gotten the connection between LOHAS and the "Cultural Creatives" meme a whole lot sooner (though who knows if it was even there then). The following is from the Wikipedia page for LOHAS...

Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability (LOHAS) is a demographic defining a particular market segment related to sustainable living, "green" ecological initiatives, and generally composed of a relatively upscale and well-educated population segment.... Author Paul H. Ray, who coined the term Cultural Creatives in his book by the same name, explains that "What you're seeing is a demand for products of equal quality that are also virtuous."[4][5] Included in the cultural creative demographic are consumers of "new age" goods and services.[6][1]

Those inline references go to...

• 1. Judith Rosen (May 27, 2002). Crossing the Boundaries: Regardless of its label, this increasingly mainstream category continues to broaden its subject base - Publishers Weekly
• 4. Amy Cortese (July 20, 2003). They Care About the World (and They Shop, Too) - New York Times
• 5. Laura Everage (October 1, 2002). Understanding the LOHAS Lifestyle - Gourmet Retailer Magazine
• 6. David Moore (June 17, 2002). Body & Soul, yoga w/o the yoyos - Media Life

A kid named Max Simon appears in the video Next-Gen LOHAS Leaders - Part 3. I kick myself for missing this pow-wow last June, as it took place not three miles from where I live. You really must catch Max's act, as it's impossible to do it justice with mere words. The logo from his site might give you a clue though...

Max, as it transpires, is the son of Deepak Chopra's sidekick, David Simon -- a man I have always thought the phrase "pencil-necked geek" might have been invented for.

like father like son

On the page where that exuberant picture came from, Max includes some laudatory blurbs, starting with...

"I believe Max is the perfect example of a leader for the next generation." Deepak Chopra M.D., the pioneer of mind-body medicine

But all was not entirely well in paradise it seems, reading between the lines of Max's somewhat embarrassing Un-edited thoughts post, which begins...

It's 6 am and I am in my hotel room at the Westin in Colorado after finishing my last Chopra Center course (in the foreseeable future). We (my father and I) decided that it would be better to have me stop teaching at their courses so that I could focus my full time and attention on selfcentered and so that it wouldn't distract from The Chopra Center's programs.

It would appear that the exuberance got a bit much even for the far-famed equanimity of Deepak Chopra. Ayurvedic healing is apparently no match for the terminal irritation that can be caused by self-centered enfants terribles.

Steve Case of AOL fame (pictured right) spoke at the LOHAS 10 conference in 2006. From his remarks there I learned about Lime ("healthy living with a twist™"), which I'd never run across until today. Don't miss their...

...where you can choose amongst:

• the spaceroom™
• the winterroom™
• the floralroom™
• the forestroom™
• the waterroom™
• the zenroom™

But if you go to any of them, turn down your speakers first. The zenroom almost blew me off my zafu! Actually, the various rooms are not trademarked. Yet. I added the ™ symbols in a spirit of preemptive branding. There is clearly big money behind Lime, and it seems to be nailing down everything in sight. Lime itself, for example, is not just plain vanilla Lime, but rather...

And Gaiam -- "Gaia" + "I am" -- is not simply Gaiam, but...

Unsurprisingly at this juncture, Gaiam's 2000 annual report informs us...

"Cultural Creatives," a term coined by sociologist Paul Ray in a demographic study on American values, refers to a distinct segment of the population who value personal development and wellness and who support the health of the planet. This group comprises 26% of the population or 50 million adult Americans according to Ray. Gaiam caters to these consumers by supporting "conscious commerce," a term we use to describe our customer's evolving practice of making purchasing decisions based on lifestyle and values.

Giam's Personal Growth section facilitates, for instance...

...in other words: selling shit. But hey, it's...

Continuing a trend we saw above with LOHAS, the following is from Gaiam's current Corporate Officers page.

Paul H. Ray - Director since October 1999. Mr. Ray is the Chief Executive Officer of Integral Partnerships LLC, a consulting firm specializing in Cultural Creative topics. From November 1986 until December 2000, he was Executive Vice President of American LIVES, Inc., a market research and opinion-polling firm. From 1981 to 1983, prior to joining American LIVES, Mr. Ray was Chief of Policy Research on Energy Conservation at the Department of Energy, Mines and Resources of the Government of Canada. From 1973 to 1981, Mr. Ray was Associate Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Michigan. He is the author of "The Integral Culture Survey," which first identified the Cultural Creatives subculture.

And the Integral Partnerships What's New page contains the following...

In association with Wisdom University and the Institute on Emerging Wisdom Culture, Dr. Paul H. Ray is conducting a major new study on America's Cultural Creatives. The findings of the study will be released in the Summer of 2008.

In addition to Paul "Cultural Creatives" Ray, the Wisdom University Faculty page includes the following luminaries and their associated "fields." This is a veritable Who's Who of the Mystic Bourgeoisie. I encourage you to explore their respective pages -- if you can stomach them.

• Oberto Airaudi: Damanhurian Studies (website)  
• Lauren Artress: Labyrinthian Mysteries (website)
• Alex Grey: Sacred Art (website #1; website #2)
• Stanislav Grof: Transpersonal Psychotherapy (website)
• Jean Houston: Social Artistry (website)
• Barbara Marx Hubbard: Conscious Evolution (website)
• Caroline Myss: Energy Medicine (website #1, website #2)
• Rupert Sheldrake: Holistic Science (website)
• Marion Woodman: Feminine Spirituality (website)

Let me end this on the same note I came in on, by quoting the words of wisdom delivered to that LOHAS confab last year by Joie de Vivre Hotels' CEO Chip Conley...

The customer sees the product as an extension of themselves. Then you've created an identity refreshment. You've refreshed the identity of the customer because they feel that by using your product they're becoming more of that aspirational self.

Yes, this is how Pod People procreate.

Well, refresh your identity with this: If you are buying any of the products or services hawked by these fucking LOHAS vampires, you are supporting some of the most twisted, irrational psychos currently inhabiting planet Earth. Or if you prefer, Gaia.

an important message from the Gaiam > Eco Home & Outdoor > Bedroom page

I used to think that every little thing I did was crazy
but now I think the karma cops are comin' after you.
aerosmith ~ full circle

I've given all I can but were still on the payroll.
radiohead ~ karma police

For a minute there, I lost myself. Several posts ago, in You've Come a Long Way, Baby, I wrote, "Hints in the sidebar: compare and contrast." The big hint was the second item -- here it's the first. The big hint was actually not so big. The big hint was actually pretty hidden, as it's next to impossible to read the title. So I'll tell you the title. It's The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World by Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson.

But why is The Feminine Face of God also back again this time? Easy: because it too was co-authored by Sherry Ruth Anderson. I had to wait till Amazon sent me a cheap-ass copy before I could continue this thread. And I had to first post about Jean Shinoda Bolen, as I did last night, because she comes into the story too. In fact, she wrote the foreword to Sherry Ruth Anderson's book. There, for instance, Shinola Bolen says...

The feminine face of God is an aspect of divinity and an approach to the sacred that is not exclusively of women, but women will naturally lead the way because women's receptivity, commitment to relationships, and biological experience provide greater opportunities for this kind of revelation.

Right. But let me ask my women readers -- of whom there are many more than some might suspect, given that my subject matter often edges on territory that could invite speculation re possible misogyny; but that's only because so many chicks go in for this kind of bullshit. Let's try that again. Let me ask, just because you have an innie and I have an outtie, does that really make me less:

• receptive?
• committed to relationships?
• biologically experienced?

...whatever those things might actually mean, which isn't exactly crystal clear. But that's just something to think about. Just a MacGuffin on the way to looking at the kind of bullshit the boys go in for every bit as much as the girls. No Goddess necessary. Batteries not included.

So there I was seven or eight years ago, sitting on the floor in the back of Boulder Book Store -- where I hardly ever go anymore because of a) the parking, and b) the clientele -- looking at this book called The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World. Yes, the very one by Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson. Keep these names in mind, as they will be important to our story as it unfolds. And oh baby, is it ever gonna unfold!

Also keep in mind that when lots of things come together unexpectedly, it's not necessarily synchronicity. It is just as possible -- in this case, far more possible -- that you have stepped into the magic circle jerk of mutual self-admiration.

It wasn't that the premise of the book didn't interest me. It did. But 50 million people? C'mon! I didn't think there were 50 million people in America who could read, much less create anything that might be called "culture." Of course, this was before blogging took off. Now there are 50 million bloggers, easy. They still can't read, but they can type.

This was in the days when I had tons of money -- from Cluetrain and (mostly) Gonzo Marketing -- and I would buy books on the merest whim. Nonetheless, I left The Cultural Creatives sitting on the shelf. There was something deeply bogus about the book, but I couldn't say what it was, couldn't put my finger on it.

Last week I ran into the book again in a local used bookstore. I picked it up and started casually flipping through it. And I was thunderstruck! All my obsessive research in the intervening years had finally prepared me to grasp the awful truth:

cultural creatives = mystic bourgeoisie

OMG! OMG! I didn't have the... (what can I call it? Receptivity? Biological experience?) to see what I was looking at back in 2001. But now it jumped out at me from nearly every page. Strap in and prepare for examples. Amazon's own review offers a decent precis for starters...

Cultural Creative is a term coined by Ray and Anderson to describe people whose values embrace a curiosity and concern for the world, its ecosystem, and its peoples; an awareness of and activism for peace and social justice; and an openness to self-actualization through spirituality, psychotherapy, and holistic practices.

That last bit is the kicker, of course. You can care all you want to about the ruination of the physical world and the slow starvation of billions of poor bastards under fascist regimes propped up by vampiric global capital and the CIA. But if you don't filter that concern through a finely cultivated miasma of ayhuasca tourism, Maslovian needs-meeting, esoteric shiatsu Reiki Qi Gong biodynamic bodywork, and archetypically Jungian evolutionary dream trance shaman goddess consciousness, then all bets are off: you suck.

Let's look at a couple blurbs.

There is no way to overestimate the contribution that Ray and Anderson have made to our understanding of the times in which we live. They have put their finger on the pulse of an entire generation. Just knowing who we are, having a name as it were, gives Cultural Creatives more power to affect the world.  

~ Marianne Williamson

That would be the same Marianne Williamson who introduced the world to A Course in Miracles in her book, A Return to Love. And those would be the Miracles described by Jesus-channeler Helen Schucman, who, at the end of her life "cursed, in the coarsest barroom language you could imagine, 'that book, that goddamn book'," and whose life-partner sidekick, William Thetford, was oh-btw concurrently doing research on "Personality Theory" funded via the CIA's then-secret MK-ULTRA mind control program. Weird, I know. But hey, I'm just saying.

Here's another one in run-on-sentence mode...

"Hallelujah! The Cultural Creatives brings us spectacular, inspiring good news: our long-desired sea change has occurred, each of us 'cultural creatives' is not alone, together we now amount to a critical mass sufficient to transform America!"        

~ John Vasconcellos

And that would be the same John Vasconcellos who as a California state senator was responsible for pushing through one of the biggest boondoggles in that state's much-boondoggled history, to wit, the disastrously failed (though worthless from the get-go) project to promote "Self-Esteem" in the classroom (hey teacher, leave those kids alone!), based in part, as he so embarrassingly divulges, on "my own painful personal struggle - despite repeated successes and achievements in my life - to develop my own self-esteem." In aid of which, he wrote: "It is time to plumb the reaches and mysteries of inner space." Excuse me, John, but what an asshole!

Am I suggesting guilt-by-association here? You bet I am. And let's lay on a little more! The Cultural Creatives was based on a multi-year marketing study by American Lives, Inc. Does the following chart look vaguely familiar? Like say, the same sort of slice-em-and-dice-em routine applied by every huckster target-marketing outfit that ever centered its cross-hairs on your Third Eye?

click graphic for full-size image on American LIVES site

If you go to that LIVES Analysis page, right under the graphic, you'll find this...

Paul H. Ray, Ph.D., Executive Vice-President of American LIVES, has extensively researched how the subcultures of values permeate all aspects of American life. In this research, he discovered the emergence of a new values subculture of Americans that he named the Cultural Creatives, which includes 1 out of every 4 American adults. This led to more research about the Cultural Creatives, a group that Dr. Ray identifies as being on the cutting edge of social change. They have a different set of values than the subcultures that have dominated America's past. They are interested in new kinds of products and services, and often respond to marketing and advertising in unexpected ways. They represent valuable new market opportunities if their needs can be met and addressed.

But this was not just any old market research study. Oh no. I here reproduce the end of the LIVES Analysis page verbatim, including the links and graphic...

The Institute of Noetic Sciences and the Fetzer Institute have both been key sponsors of research on the Cultural Creatives. The Integral Culture Survey: A Study of the Emergence of Transformational Values in America, a longer description of the American LIVES Typology and its historic context, is for sale by contacting the Institute of Noetic Sciences at 415.331.5650.

For a more exhaustive analysis, look for Dr. Ray's new book, The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World, by Harmony Books. He and his co-author, Sherry Anderson Ph.D, offer an evocative portrayal of the Cultural Creatives: who they are, how they are affecting society and culture, and why we should care. You can also visit Cultural Creatives for more information.

First off, The Fetzer Institute -- maaan, you learn something new every day -- was founded by one John Earl Fetzer, who, according to his official bio...

had an intense intellectual curiosity about the "unseen elements" of life. He studied various forms of meditation, prayer, philosophy, and positive thinking, and explored other ways of healing.... The interests that shaped John Fetzer's life can be seen as the seedbed for the questions that define the work of the Fetzer Institute: How can the secular and sacred elements of life be better integrated? How can the insights of science and the powers of technological innovation be utilized to explore the capacities of the mind and spirit? How can the wisdom and insight gained through inner exploration be used to better our individual and collective health? And how can the entrepreneurial spirit and financial resources gained from the American business sector be used in the service of creating a better world?

Well, isn't that special? Wikipedia adds: "Approximate endowment = $400,000,000 in 2006," and the Dalai Lama is featured on the site's front page -- so you know you're in good hands here. But wait, that's not all! In June, you can attend the "Nature and Mystical Experience" event.

In this workshop, we will deepen our mystical rapport with Earth through ceremony and mystical practice. We will immerse ourselves in the wind, rain, sun, and fields at GilChrist, making time for solitude and community.

In case you're getting confused, we're still talking about backers of the Cultural Creatives market research study. Right? Still with me? And the other backer is the biggie: the aforementioned Institute of Noetic Sciences. One of my favorites! IONS, as it is affectionately known to not-really-New-Agers everywhere, was founded by ex-astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who, while orbiting in his Apollo 14 capsule, "conducted private ESP experiments with his friends on Earth." Wikipedia, which is where that quote comes from, adds a footnote to Private Lunar ESP: An Interview with Edgar Mitchell. Well, OK!

Interviewer: Were you already interested in ESP?

Mitchell: Oh yes. I had a religious upbringing, and was always interested in science; the two seemed to have different answers, which bothered me. When the chance to go to the moon came up, it re-raised the questions about what kind of world we live in, because nobody had been outside the atmosphere. I had been reading the literature for several years and had become convinced. Science says it can't work but laboratory experiments show that it does.

No, Edgar, they don't. Not scientific laboratory experiments. And people even weirder than you have been trying for well over a century.

You can read more about all this in Mitchell's book, The Way of the Explorer: An Apollo Astronaut's Journey Through the Material and Mystical Worlds. But let's push on to some of the other focal interests of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. These include, as the site puts it, Three Principal Program Areas:

1. Extended Human Capacities
• Creativity
• Meditation
• Psi Studies
• Wisdom Capacities
• Subtle Energies
• States of Consciousness
• Death, Dying, and Beyond
2. Integral Health and Healing
• Biofields
• Distant Healing
• Global Medicine
• Integral Medicine
• Mind Body Medicine
• Extended Survival
• Placebo Expectancy Effects
3. Emerging Worldviews
• Integral Intelligence
• Science of Wisdom
• Gaia Theory
• Transformative Practices
• Cultivating Spiritual Awareness
• East/West/Indigenous Practices

Are we getting the drift, class? I hope you're starting to share my road-to-Damascus flash (so to speak) that

cultural creatives = mystic bourgeoisie

btw, Patricia Hopkins, Sherry Ruth Anderson's co-author in The Feminine Face of God (and remember: Sherry Ruth Anderson was Paul Hays' co-author [not to mention wife] on The Cultural Creatives; head ache yet?), also thanks The Institute of Noetic Sciences. It's a tight little group. But actually not so little. If you believe Hay and Anderson, the number is 50,000,000.

And that should be that, as this has already gone on far too long. But remember that mention of synchronicity back at the start of all this? Well, the reason for that was an Amazon recommendation I got this morning (hell, you know the kind of weird stuff I read) for a new book by Daniel Pinchbeck et al called Toward 2012: Perspectives on the Next Age. Being a big fan of 2012 (do not miss the trailer!), I poked around inside the book -- and found an article I simply had to read RIGHT NOW NO WAITING: "Transforming Repression of The Divine Feminine" by Wahkeena Sitka Tidepool Ripple. No lie. So I googled about and, mirabile dictu, found it on Reality Sandwich! I also found another article by Ms. Sitka Tidepool Ripple on Alternatives magazine. It's called Can Sex Work Be Shamanic? And since we've been chatting lately about Tantric Sex and whatnot here on Mystic B, I took a closer look. But what really caught my eye there was the site banner...

And you just know I did my best Keanu Reeves "Whoa, dude!" Because, are you kidding? "Cultural Creativity"? This just has to be related to the post I was, even then, thinking I had to post today (this is it). And naturally, but of course, I dig a little deeper and find The Cultural Creatives: We Are Everywhere - The "InnerView" with Paul Ray. They sure as shit are everywhere! But seeing as this was from the Summer 2001 issue, where have I been all my life? Surrounded by fucking Cultural Creatives -- a demographic to be proud of! -- and here I didn't even know it.

The Cultural Creatives was published in 2000. And oh look, it was also blurbed by the ubiquitous Jean Shinola Bolen...

When people identify themselves as cultural creatives through reading this book, the transformation of society will be accelerated. The book itself will be a force for change.

Well gosh, I guess so. Because whatever rough beast this is, it's not slouching. It's galloping, kids. It's got a nine-year lead. And something tells me it's not headed for Bethlehem.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them.
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
~ tolkien

Confused by my title slug? Ever eager to help, Wikipedia comes to the rescue in its admirably complete entry on a particular brand of shoe polish -- specifically in the subsection titled You don't know shit from Shinola.

Shinola was immortalized in colloquial English by the phrase You don't (or he/she doesn't) know shit from Shinola which first became widely popular during World War II. Aside from being an amusing bit of alliteration, the phrase implies that the person being referred to is stupid or woefully ignorant. Shit and Shinola, while superficially similar in appearance, are entirely distinct in their function; only one is good for polishing shoes, and anyone who fails to distinguish one from the other must be ignorant or of low acuity.

Such ignorant low-acuity types should, for instance, never polish their footwear in the bathroom, lest they be overcome with confusion and wind up in the plight described in this tune by the Rolling Stones...

Come on, come on down Sweet Virginia,
Come on, honey child, I beg of you.
Come on, come on down, you got it in ya.
Got to scrape the shit right off your shoes.

(emphasis added)

Granted, this is perhaps an overlong introduction to the work, such as it is, of Jean SHINODA Bolen, but I thought it would get us more quickly into the spirit, the marrow and substance, the archetypal essence of her oeuvre. For make no mistake, Ms. Shinoda Bolen is, and I quote, "an internationally known Jungian analyst." Which means, as we have come to understand by this self-labeling, that she can make up any sort of fatuous nonsense and, by attributing it to some hypothetical and impossible to substantiate "collective unconscious" make it seem not only reasonable, but indeed, profound.

While she is best known for Goddesses in Everywoman: Powerful Archetypes in Women's Lives, I am more interested here in her longwindedly titled Ring of Power: Symbols and Themes, Love vs. Power in Wagner's Ring Cycle and in Us: A Jungian-Feminist Perspective. Actually, I ran across an older edition of this in a used bookstore last week and was amused to see that it was no less prolixly titled Ring of Power: The Abandoned Child, the Authoritarian Father, and the Disempowered Feminine: A Jungian Understanding of Wagner's Ring Cycle. Clearly, the publisher -- which puts out all manner of similar crap -- decided that love and power trump abandoned children and sexual politics in these latter days. So hard to keep up with what's hip.

That's the Arthur Rackham illustration that graces the cover of my edition. The publisher's synopsis says...

Bolen shows how Wagner's ever-popular Ring Cycle articulates universal experiences and deep-seated longings by offering a mythology of the dysfunctional family and the patriarchal society in which the quest for power distorts personalities and relationships. We respond to the Ring because we recognize ourselves and our relationships in the Cycle's stern father, disempowered mother, abandoned children, and brave truth-tellers. Bolen vividly relates the events of the four operas and spotlights characters in ways that evoke the reader's identifications, memories, and healing emotions.

Brave truth tellers: hold that thought.

What most of us know about Wagner (if I'm any example) comes from the Ride of the Valkyries being blasted from helicopter gunships in Apocalypse Now. Yet even I, in my woeful state of ignorant endarkenment, had heard there was something fishy about Wagner. Something about the Jews, wasn't it? Google google. Oh that's right! For the painless short form, you can read the Wikipedia entry about the maestro's racist rantery in Das Judenthum in der Musik.

And OK, I admit it, I know more about Wagner's antisemitism than I'm letting on, but only because I happened onto an insanely cheap copy of Twilight of the Wagners: The Unveiling of a Family's Legacy in a Barnes & Noble cutout bin several years ago, and for about a year it was sitting on the bookshelf in my downstairs bathroom, which is where a lot of my knowledge acquisition activities take place, and yes, I did idly page through it on occasion. While it appears that many Amazon reader/reviewers were put off by the book, the Publishers Weekly review does contain some highly pertinent information that goes beyond issues of writing style and ideological bias.

According to Greek myth, the sins of a father are visited upon his sons for three generations. Born in 1947, Gottfried Wagner is the third generation of operatic genius Richard Wagner's offspring, and it is clear in this prickly memoir that he does continue to carry the burden of his great-grandfather's infamous anti-Semitism. Though Wagner (1813-1883) died six years before Hitler was born, Gottfried demonstrates that the composer's virulent essays, which call for Jews to "redeem" themselves through "destruction," exercised a powerful influence on Hitler. More importantly, Gottfried shows that Wagner's descendants -- especially his daughter-in-law Winifred -- were ardent supporters and close friends of Hitler. Furthermore, Gottfried contends that his father, Wolfgang, now the director of the annual Wagner festival in Bayreuth, continues to obfuscate the family's and the festival's Nazi connections.

And it's not exactly as if the Wagner/Nazi connection is arcane, hidden, difficult to find information. A desultory search of Amazon brings up in a flash...

• Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination
• The Darker Side of Genius: Richard Wagner's Anti-Semitism
• The History of Anti-Semitism, Volume III: From Voltaire to Wagner

...the last of which is sitting on a bookshelf across the room from me, along with its three sister volumes (sisterhood is powerful).

Of all this, Jean Shinoda Bolen seems not only ignorant, not just "of low acuity," but positively deaf, dumb and blind. The only significant (being generous) mention she makes of the Hitler connection in her book on Wagner is this embarrassing bit of exculpatory twaddle.

As I became familiar with The Ring of the Niebelung, the psychiatrist in me became intrigued by my knowledge that Hitler was fascinated by the Ring cycle and identified with it in some way. I knew that he was a major patron, that he had insisted that SS officers attend, and required that schoolchildren be exposed to these operas; all of which had caused me to be biased against Wagner and the Ring. I had assumed that it extolled Nazi goals and reflected Hitler's dreams of triumph and was surprised that to the contrary, Valhalla and Wotan go up in flames in the last act of Twilight of the Gods, reflecting the fate of the Third Reich and Hitler's own end; his charred remains were found in a burnt-out bunker.

That last bit in case you hadn't read the comic book. The book's index includes entries for alchemy, anima, archetypes, codependency, courage, darkness, dragon, empathy, father god, feminine aspect, funeral pyre, grief, Hades, humiliation, integrity, intuition, Odin, magic horses, ravens... well, you get the idea. And of course lots about Joseph Campbell and C.G. Jung.

Not included are any references to Jews, antisemitism, fascism, or Nazis. The one substantive reference to Hitler I have quoted in full above. For someone writing an entire book about Wagner, this passing over in silence is not just a -- whoops! -- "oversight." It is clear and simple intellectual dishonesty.

And this sort of willful blindness is endemic in the Jungian community (with one significant exception that I know of), perhaps in part because too close an examination of Jung's own ideas along such lines would reveal his theories to be inherently racialist, if not, in places, outright racist. His stated views on "Negroes" and Jews in Civilization in Transition (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 10) are hair-raising. Here's a relatively tame example...

Just as every Jew has a Christ complex, so every Negro has a white complex and every [white] American a Negro complex. As a rule the colored man would give anything to change his skin, and the white man hates to admit that he has been touched by the black. 

CW 10, par. 963

And why? Because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the earth. That's why. Doesn't it sorta have that certain Ring of Power?

got to scrape the shit right off your shoes

---

Postscript: As I mentioned above, I bought my copy of Ring of Power in a used bookstore here in Boulder, and the previous owner's name was written on the flyleaf. I won't tell you who it was, but I found her easily on Google, in a very lovely PDF for a Colorado arts center. She (or perhaps it was someone else) left a note in the book, on a 3x5 card. Here, verbatim, is what it says:

YOU GOT WHAT
IT TAKES.

YOUR IDENTITY
COME FROM
THE SILENCE
& EXPERIENCE
ITS WHEN YOU
FEEL GOOD
& YOU FEEL GOOD
WHEN IN ALIGNMENT
WITH YOUR
INNER BEING.

Right. So say we all. God bless America.

Despite strong leanings toward multiculturalism, not all the Not-Really-New-Age crowd (most of whom, of course, are women, and totally New Age) are comfortable with non-Western alternative New Religions -- new to them anyway, such as Santeria, Voodoo, Hoodoo, Macumba, Abacua, Candomble, Palo Mayombe, Umbanda, shit like that. They tend to be uncomfortable with these other paths lest some pow'ful black man come be messin wit dey gris-gris bits.

Paulist Press to the rescue! "Celebrating 142 years of excellence in Catholic publishing," as the website informs us, Paulist offers solace to confused white Americans in search of safe inner weirdness with its Classics of Western Spirituality series.

Chosen with care from that series, what follows is my Top-Ten gallery of solid-platinum First-World Spiritualityism® -- you just can't go wrong with these perennial favorites.

But first, a few brief notes before you start clicking through and buying all these wonderful books for your own personal library, thus assuring me a continued source of intellectual stimulation and much needed protein.

1. In the first couple items below, note that "Anglo-Saxon" and "Celtic" are code words for White. In fact, "Western" in this context is a code word for White. Don't worry, you're in good hands here. I understand Your Needs.
2. Angels are always good. How could 74% of Americans be wrong?
3. Hildegard of Bingen is included because her name always cracks me up. Right up there with Princess Marie von Thurn and Taxis. Call it a personal thing.
4. Julian of Norwich was a chick. Who knew?
5. Mostly sunny with clouds of unknowing in the later afternoon.
6. Meister Eckhart appears twice in deference to his name having been highjacked by Holy Rollah Eckhart Tolle -- though that boy not be preachin in da hood any more than they be rollin Enya loops.
7. I wanted to add Emmanuelle II, but I guess Paulist Press was out of stock.
8. The last one is in honor of Madonna's deep spiritual yearnings.
9. Yes, I had a really fucked-up childhood thanks to the Roman Catholic Church. How did you guess?
10. One two three four five six seven... all good children go to Heaven.

Anglo-Saxon Spirituality

Celtic Spirituality

Angelic Spirituality

Hildegard of Bingen

Julian of Norwich

The Cloud 9 of Unknowing

Meister Eckhart 1

Meister Eckhart 2

Emanuel Swedenborg

Kabbalah

for a larger, suitable-for-framing version, click here.

If you think my title slug for this one is a tad weird (I hope you get Mastercard flashbacks), you can easily see where I got it by looking for those phrases, which stochastically emerge from the lower left-of-center portion of the above graphic like delicious found art. That would be, obviously, Aldous Huxley and -- not so obviously -- Richard Price.

The graphic itself was generated using Wordle, a cool little web app I've been having lots of fun with. I seeded it with a bunch of random grafs grabbed from this University of Chicago Press excerpt of Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion by Jeffrey J. Kripal. I was going to call this post "Mystical Queers on Dope," but thought it might give offense to Tupak Okra, who, incidentally, blurbs the book as "stunning." (We've had our differences over the years, but I've always thought him a snappy dresser.)

More seriously, my inclination to use such a scurrilous title slug was influenced to large degree by passages like the following (which you can go read in greater detail).

...[Gerald] Heard, like his fellow British expatriate and brother Vedantist, Christopher Isherwood, was quite clear about his homosexuality. In other words, two of the three British expatriates (Huxley, Heard, and Isherwood) were self-described homosexuals, even if they chose to express this sexual-spiritual orientation in very different ways. Isherwood wrote openly about his own active homosexuality, his (failed) attempts at celibacy, and his sexuality's defining effect on his devotional relationship to the tradition's founding saint, Sri Ramakrishna, who he suspected (correctly) was also homoerotic in both his spiritual and sexual orientations.

So Ramakrishna was gay, big deal. Perhaps a good deal bigger deal, however, was his apparent predilection for prepubescent boys, the correct term for which is pedophilia. The same author writes elsewhere (Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna, p. 163):

In other words, the visions and acts speak once again of Kali astride Siva, arousing his penis into an erect acknowledgment of her erotic dominance.

Well, OK. So far so good. For who amongst us, of whatever gender preference, has never wanted to give Kali a good sound fucking? But then...

Ramakrishna laughs as he plays with a paramahamsa boy's penis, worships the penises of young boys in a Tantric state, teases a pearl out of the erect phallus of Siva, and plays naked in a dream vision with a fourteen-year-old boy, whom he wants to kiss and embrace in his waking life. He has become the goddess. He is a scandal.

Bottom line, Kripal writes, "Ramakrishna's worship of the boys' penises was something he could not stop."

Evidently, some debate and hard feelings were engendered by all this. Oh dear. Jeffrey Kripal here defends himself at length against various charges.

Ah... well, I seem to have gotten rather off-track with this post somehow. Personally, I couldn't care less about any of the foregoing except inasmuch as it serves to further ground my fundamental premise, to wit: that all these people were total FREAKS and should be approached as one would a mad dog, which is to say, with all due caution and a working sense of humor as to life's not-so-little ironies.

---

For Extra Credit: The following pull-quote (so to speak) is from EnlightenNext magazine's recent Sex issue, specifically from the article titled Their Stroke of Insight. Are we seeing a trend developing here? If so, it's quite clever. While many people react negatively to spiritual cultists, who, in these thoroughly enlightened times would dare to diss a coven of numinous lovelies stroking each other off? As House says in a recent episode: "Another life saved by girl-on-girl action." Look for more such "Tantric" marketing coming soon to a future near you!

Gives a whole new meaning to this one. OM, Jeeves!

And there's a lot more to come on this score. The present post is just a placeholder so I won't forget to fill in the blanks. (I have to do these in small bites. Otherwise, I throw up in my mouth a little.) Hints in the sidebar: compare and contrast.

Not since the days of Plato and Buddha and Confucius some twenty-five hundred years ago, has there been such an uprising of spiritual yearning... The spiritual technologies at our disposal can be harvested from the whole world: Christian centering prayer, Buddhist mindfulness and visualization practices, African trance dancing, Tantra and sacred sexuality, Native American powwows and sweat lodges, shamanic spirit journeys, Asian martial arts, Jungian dreamwork, as well as, for some, the neomystical study of quantum realities. All of these rework the landscapes of the subliminal mind so that there are channels and riverbed in which a deeper spiritual consciousness can flow.

-Jean Houston, Jump Time

PLUS: This just in from my all-time favorite magazine subscription...

For our second issue under the name EnlightenNext, we take an in-depth look at the always provocative relationship between sex and spirituality. Surveying the latest trends in the field -- including the neo-tantric dharma of David Deida, the One Taste community's practice of "orgasmic meditation," and psychologist Jenny Wade's research into transcendent sexual experiences -- we deliver a thought-provoking exploration that you won't want to miss...

Note: This issue contains explicit language and content.

Oh really? Well, here's some more for ya... America, Fuck Yeah!

When I was working in Japan's so-called Fifth Generation Project in Tokyo in 1984, I read George Steiner's book, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. It made a great impression on me, an ex-carpenter/cabinetmaker suddenly thrown into the midst of one of the world's most prominent research efforts in artificial intelligence and natural language processing.

Now, in his 80th year, Steiner has just published My Unwritten Books (Jan 2009). The New Directions publisher's page says:

By one of the world's foremost intellectuals, George Steiner's My Unwritten Books meditates upon seven books he had long had in mind to write, but never did. Massively erudite, the essays are also brave, unflinching, and wholly personal.

Among the themes listed there is "a theology of emptiness," and one gets the impression from the following quote that he isn't talking about Buddhism. Perhaps some kind reader will buy the book for me (shameless hint-hint). Then we'll all know.

The quote is from an interview with Steiner on Australia's ABC Radio National. The interviewer reads a passage from the book: "I'm haunted to the point of panic by the fragility of reason." Asked what he means by that, Steiner replies...

As I come to the end of my life, there are four times as many registered astrologers in the United States as there are physicists and chemists. Four times as many. The wife of our sometime Prime Minister wears an amulet against "space rays." There is not a corner of our lives now that is not invented, invited, invaded by idiocy of irrational superstition, [such as] people who pay vast sums to have some fake Oriental arrange their furniture. Vast sums! The whole New Age -- this is a charlatan's age like never before. It makes the Middle Ages seem scientific in many ways. And all around me, in people I deeply respect, you scratch the surface and there is a frightened, profoundly superstitious person doing hidden gymnastics of the non-mind, in a way, trying to plan their fate, trying to escape from reality. And it frightens me a great deal, because reason is very fragile.

So you won't miss the reverb with Mystic B's extended subtitle, let me quote it again here...

The unlikely story of how America slipped the surly bonds of earth & came to believe in signs & portents that would make the Middle Ages blush.

Nuff said.

it took me so long
to find out.
I found out.

day tripper ~ beatles

"The Sphinx Without a Secret" is the title of a nasty little story by Oscar Wilde. I thought it nasty, anyway, when I discovered it five or six years ago. It's about a mysterious woman. A woman about whom there turns out to be no mystery at all. It seemed to me the story was... uncharitable, to say the least. It seemed to be saying something I was unprepared to accept: that this woman had built herself, as from a kit, and cloaked herself with an obscurity suggestive of great depth, but that there was nothing behind the screen.

Interesting metaphor. Let's say you go to see a film and are greatly moved by it. If afterwards you go backstage and explore behind the projection screen, are you a fool to feel cheated to find nothing there? More than a fool: a moron. What were you thinking to even look? Mon Dieu! The movie moved you because it was a cleverly constructed illusion. If it moved you greatly, we might even say its construction was artful.

I have no desire to wade into the morass of dissecting, you know, Art: what it is and isn't, what it does and doesn't do, what it strives for, when it falls short. Leave that for the longhairs and poseurs in the sparkling salons of the idle rich. From this far dumpier salon of the idle poor, my interest does nonetheless bear upon intent. Is the artist's purpose to somehow touch the heart and mind, or merely to appear to be doing that? As art exists and works within the very domain of appearances, it is the best place, bar none, to practice deception as divulgence. Assemble a collection of abstruse icons, symbols, semaphores. Arrange them on a carefully prepared palimpsest of partially excavated previous attempts. Annotate the lot with animal familiars, arcane alphabets, phases of the moon. Is it real or is it Memorex? Pay close attention: my fingers never leave my hand!

I would argue that this kind of artistic sophistry -- making The Bogus appear The Profound -- has a special allure for the Mystic Bourgeoisie. I would say it almost constitutes a definition. And they construct themselves this way as well. There are even manuals.

Don't prefer your current reality? Surely you can cobble together something better. Or at least something that appears better, plays better. Something deeper, denser, darker, more intelligent, more spiritual. Yeah, that's it: full fathom five! For after all, is all not Maya, the veil of dream, the play of illusion? As the Dalai Lama said to the hot dog vendor: make me one with everything.

You can be what you want to be.

On Cloud 9.

When Marx said religion was the opium of the masses, he hadn't even scratched the surface. Communism is to skin-popping as Spirituality is to shooting mainline.

You might want to check your seat belt at this point, as we're coming into a sharp curve. Hang on.

So there I was a couple nights ago, listening to the audiobook version of Indigo Slam, "An Elvis Cole Novel" by Robert Crais. It was first published in 1997, which is important for my purposes here. My purposes are archeological, you could say, with my personal history as the dig site.

Elvis Cole is a P.I. -- that would be Private Investigator to you. He's a helluva guy, emphasis on the guy part. He's 100% American Male. He was in Nam, baby, and he learned a lot of heavy shit in country. Firearms and munitions and martial arts. You don't want to fuck with this LA gumshoe whose business card says "World's Biggest Dick." He's a firecracker. He's a whip-sharp wisecracker. Yet Elvis is also a sensitive guy. He cleans, he cooks, he philosophizes, he does yoga. And he doesn't screw around; he has relationships. Elvis, as Robert Crais tells us in three-foot-high letters of glowing neon, is an...

This woman I once knew (and about whom I've been writing here in pseudo-stealth mode all along) turned me on to Robert Crais in 2000. At first, I was surprised that she'd read that sort of pop pulp fiction. Then slowly (duh!), I got it that Elvis turned her on. Not to mention his sidekick, Joe Pike, who is much darker and, it is hinted about 3000 times, far more dangerous -- but who is also a vegetarian.

Despite my snide tone here, I've enjoyed these books, and I've read them all. Crais is a decent writer in a genre littered with people who can't write for shit -- and that includes many of the biggest bestsellers. I loved Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, and over the years have looked for more contemporary authors who come even close. Crais comes close.

But I've never read this kind of stuff what you might call "critically." I read mysteries the way people who have televisions (I don't) watch Lost or Battlestar Galactica -- or the way the truly discerning (I am) watch Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Summer Glau, if you're reading this, please get in touch!

Sadly, we can't all be ADULTs.

Which rather nicely brings us back to our emerging theme. It's pretty clear that some group of high-powered market researchers got ahold of a sample of my non-adult DNA, and engineered Summer Glau's friendly robot terminator character to slot into it perfectly. I mean, I like the series. A lot. I think it's well written, well acted, well done all around. But there are times when Cameron (the aforesaid anti-Terminator) does something, says something, makes some move that leaves me not only willing to suspend my disbelief, but positively poleaxed with desire. It's uncritical in the extreme. I can't help it.

However, my point here is not to convince you I'm a dirty old man. You knew that. No, my point involves market research. My erstwhile lady friend's sexual attraction to Elvis Cole was engineered by highly skilled semioticians who were reconstructing her unconsciously preferred reality by remote control.

While it does get hormonally translated into sex appeal, Elvis Cole's main attraction is, for lack of better language, his political correctness. But maybe there is better language. Perhaps cultural correctness is closer. Elvis always conducts himself correctly. Sure he kills the living shit out of the bad guys. Sure he has lots of guns and knows 29 ways to permanently maim you. But he's always a gentleman in his relationships. That's the key thing. And he has one in this book. Bigtime. With Louisiana lawyer Lucy Chenier. In fact, it's a relationship that carries across quite a few of Crais's other novels, e.g., The Forgotten Man, The Last Detective, L.A. Requiem, Sunset Express, and Hostage.

So there I am a couple-three nights ago, listening to Indigo Slam. It's a book I've read before, but all of a sudden I'm hearing it differently. I'm hearing this unmistakable thread of cultural correctness running through it. It's not only unmistakable, it's consistent. There's a template, a framework, an ethic, a set of, you know, values. So when that one's done, I queue up The Last Detective, and listen for that thread more closely. Was it just the one book? Nope. At the end of this one, Lucy breaks up with Elvis. It seems that violent mayhem is not among the needs Lucy seeks to get met. Bummer. But Elvis is brave. Just as he can handle his booze -- a crucial element in the skill set of the All-American Male -- so can he handle his feelings. His heart is broken but he understands.

The Last Detective didn't come out till 2003. That was after the woman who turned me on to Robert Crais had broken up with me. She discovered that my own unique brand of nonviolent mayhem was not among the needs she needed to get met. Unlike Elvis, I did not understand. I was like, "So? Who gives a flying fuck?" I did not handle my feelings well. At the very end of The Last Detective, there's an existential dream sequence in which Elvis discovers his Inner Child. Unlike Elvis, I discovered my Inner Borderline. It wasn't like I Hate You, Don't Leave Me, the classic work on the subject for the intellect-impaired. It was more like I Love You, Eat Shit and Die You Fucking Crack Whore!

No, I did not understand. In fact, when she was breaking up with me she said, "You don't know anything about communication and relationship!" Except it came out sounding more like...

Like it was a total girl thing. Like the frosted lettering on top of the sheet cake they maybe had when she first made the cheerleading team. Go - Fight - Win! Mom, God and Apple-Pie America. All T&A and pom-poms flying. Truth is: I never stood a chance.

As I listened to Indigo Slam, I started thinking -- the one activity I usually read such books to avoid. I stopped the player. I went to Amazon to see when it was published. Aha: 1997. Three years before we got (back; it's a long story) together. So it was at least possible that this culturally correct framework, this set of values, had served to um... inform our experience of each other. Or at least hers of me. Then I fell asleep.

On waking, I realized that I must have been thinking more about all this in my sleep. For the first time in six or seven years, it occurred to me to google "communication and relationship." Was it possible that this had been some sort of code-phrase not included in the boys' version of The Junior Woodchucks Guidebook?

I searched and searched, but nothing really jumped out at me. Then I tried it on Amazon and found this...

While, true, this does capture the general flavor of the concept -- a bunch of fruits out of their tree -- who the fuck ever heard of Joseph A. DeVito? No, I was looking for something with a far greater degree of cultural magnetism. So I pressed on. I may not know anything about communication and relationship, but I'm hell on wheels with a search engine. And finally, my efforts were rewarded.

• Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: A Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting What You Want in Your Relationships (1993).

• Mars and Venus Together Forever: Practical Guide to Improving Communication and Relationship Skills (1996).

Oh ho! In retrospect, I guess I should have guessed. But I never paid any attention to that kind of horseshit. Obviously. Thus my abject failure in the Communication and Relationship Departments.

But back to Robert Crais. (Bear with me, as I'm trying to stitch this all together somehow.) Say you're him, and you notice that the Romance genre is getting way hotter, so to speak, than the straight private eye shtick. Maybe you could... hmmm... combine them! Yeah, but wouldn't it be cool if there were some sorta prefab market research just lying around for the taking to model the characters on? Well, dude, there's Mars and Venus practically jumping off the goddam shelf at ya. Hey, it's almost like paint-by-number fiction!

Lest you wonder if the Mars/Venus books really had all that much cultural impact, the first book remained in hardback for 12 years, and purportedly sold something on the order of 14 million copies in that time. Add in the new paperback version, a dozen other books mining the same rich seam, plus innumerable CDs, VHS tapes, DVDs, conferences, workshops, websites, and spin-off "therapies" ... and it becomes suddenly and painfully clear that I must be the only person left in the known universe who has not been deeply touched by this man's uh... work.

More to the point, I now discover that I was deeply touched by the Mars/Venus craze. Only I didn't know it.

Elvis Cole, you turncoat little cocksucker!

I hope the foregoing serves to explain my sudden interest in Dr. John -- Dr. John Gray, that is; not to be confused with Dr. John, The Night Tripper. I mean, to look at the guy, he seems a total dweeb. But hey, he holds a Doctor of Philosophy degree, and he still advertises it proudly to this day. For example, this clip is from the cover of his most recent book, Why Mars and Venus Collide: Improving Relationships by Understanding How Men and Women Cope Differently with Stress.

But why do I say "to this day"? Well, it's because the institution that granted that vaunted "Ph.D," Columbia Pacific University, was shut down in 1999 by order of the Marin County Superior Court of the State of California. See, e.g., Court Orders Columbia Pacific University to Cease Operating Illegally in California (via Quackwatch). And his undergraduate "degrees" were granted by... well, here, let's let Wikipedia tell it...

In 1995, Newsweek reported that Gray had spent nine years as a celibate monk and secretary to New Age cult leader Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. In 1997, Time magazine revealed that Gray earned B.A. and M.A. in the "Science of Creative Intelligence" from the Maharishi European Research University in Switzerland, a field of study created by the Yogi himself, purported to be the "scientific theory for the development of higher states of consciousness, which naturally develop through the practice of Transcendental Meditation." Neither the school nor the degree field is accredited.

The guy who got lei'd in the above photo, is the same guy who invented "Yogic Flying," which, if you've never seen it, is beyond ludicrous. Beyond, in fact, any previous definition of belief.

In response to my belated discovery of this connection between John Gray's libido-planetary delusions and the hallucinatory wig-droppings of the Maharishi Freakpuke, just allow me to say: Vishnu H. Krishna on a pogo stick! Is there any corner of our fast-shrinking world that has not already been psychically terraformed by these stealth religious zombies? Is there no quarter they have not colonized with their total and utter bullshit?

Describing Gray as a "a man who must have left his humility on Mars when he fell to Earth," Time magazine said of him in June, 1997 (Tower of Psychobabble)...

He announces proudly that the new book [Mars and Venus on a Date] took him a grand total of seven weeks to do and that it is "without a doubt in my mind the greatest book I've ever written." Relaxing in the living room of one of two houses he owns in Mill Valley, Calif., Gray sounds awestruck by his own wizardry: "I'm sitting there writing, and these beautiful ideas come out."

Yeah, beautiful, baby. Don't ever change!

But here's an idea. Fuck communication and relationship. Do something useful for a change...

S T O P   S K Y N E T

I have to admit it: spiritual calligraphy is far fucking out. Take, for instance, this quotation from Rumi...

But "spiritual calligraphy" is something of a reverse oxymoron. That is to say, it's not that it's not calligraphy, or that it's not spiritual; it's that all calligraphy is spiritual. So why bother to say so? Except of course, to make a point that might otherwise slip by us -- as so much that is spiritual and beautiful and meaningful and deep so often does. For as that font of wisdom and fluted prose, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reminds us, Beauty is God's Handwriting.

In fact, Emerson is a favorite of calligraphers. Why, without him and Rumi, many would have no idea where to start and stop their textish arabesques. Without the immortal words of others who have scried further than themselves into the vasty deeps, they wouldn't have the grit, the guts, the nerve, the pluck to write a goddam thing. Sure, your Inner Magic 8-Ball may have all the answers, yet it seldom has the poetry, the fire, to frame the perfectly aesthetic apothegm.

But even if you do go where there is no path, and even if you leave quite a considerable trail, it is very fucking unlikely that you'll ever see your words immortalized in calligraphy. Take this clip from my July 2006 Mystic B post, Ken Wilber Would Like You To Suck His Dick, as a counter-example...

It does not lack, you must admit, a certain poesy.
Nor does it represent a shallow thought.
But it's likely not something some chick
is going to frame and stick over the couch.

when you say she's looking good
she acts as if it's understood
she's cool.

girl ~ beatles

See also...

• race and degeneration
• fear of devolution
• evolutionary slippage
• hidden worlds
• fascist foxism
• more fascist foxism
• colonialism 1
• colonialism 2
• colonialism 3

Ontology for Dummies - or - The Fucktard's Guide to the Universe

Amazon today alerted me to a new feature: what they're calling Author Stores. That link goes to the main index, but I couldn't resist creating specific links to some of the miscreants Mystic B loves to hate. Moreover, once I'd already blown half the day doing that, I couldn't help adding certain... individuals who don't yet have their own pages. If you trip around through the following, you'll see what I mean. Have fun, and remember: Tous les jours á tous points de vue je vais de mieux en mieux!

(btw, the photos at the right are taken directly from the Amazon Author Stores. Who knew that Napoleon Hill, author of perhaps the best-selling self-help book in the history of the world, looked so much like Geraldo Rivera?)

The Founders

• Ralph Waldo Emerson

• H.P. Blavatsky

• Rudolf Steiner

• Edgar Cayce

• C.G. Jung

• Mircea Eliade

• Joseph Campbell

• Carlos Castaneda

The Perennialists

• Aldous Huxley

• Huston Smith

The Traditionalists

• Rene Guenon

• Frithjof Schuon

• Julius Evola

The Positive Thinkers

• Napoleon Hill

• Dale Carnegie

• Norman Vincent Peale

• Anthony Robbins

• Martin Seligman

The Hardcore New Agers

• Ken Wilber

• Deepak Chopra

• Wayne Dyer

• Marianne Williamson

• Eckhart Tolle

• Miguel Ruiz

• Thomas Moore

• Andrew Cohen

The Base

• Oprah Winfree

• Esther and Jerry Hicks

• Rhonda Byrne

• Louise L. Hay

• Neale Donald Walsch

• Michael Bernard Beckwith

• Richard Bach

• James Redfield

• Gregg Braden

• Sylvia Browne

Bad Science

• Fritjof Capra

• Gary Zukav

• M. Scott Peck

Bad Juju

• Ayn Rand

Just Plain Crazy

• David Icke

• Zecharia Sitchin

• Jose Arguelles

• Daniel Pinchbeck

Personal "Favorites"

• John O'Donohue

• Joseph Chilton Pearce

• Dan Millman

• Terry Tempest Williams

• Mary Oliver

Napoleon Hill

Dan Millman

Eckhart Tolle

Wayne Dyer

Rhonda Byrne
(gosh, what's her secret?)