I wake up this morning and groggily call up this page. No coffee in me yet, but hey, it's my job. Oh no! There are bugs all over it. How appetizing is that? Some people have a serious aversion reaction to the sight of cockroaches. My hit count will plummet. I'll be ruined! I decide to make coffee, try to calm myself.

Better. But the bugs are still there. Ah, so I wasn't imagining them. Whew. You know? Progress, as they say in The Program, not perfection. I could divert into a whole rap on that last allusion, but let me resist the impulse. For my sake, if not for yours, though this is one of those times, I suppose, when compassion is a mutual self-other kinda deal. So: not going there. Not going to talk about The Program and M. Scott Peck's Road Less Travelled or his new book about the devil, recycling his old book about the devil. You think I'm kidding, don't you? Well here's a clip from the cover of the new one, came out just Jan '05...

You see the background behind where it says he's a "psychiatrist"? Yeah, well that's the fire down below is what that is. So think twice, eh? What a long way we've come since Freud and Jung.

Which... ah, brings me back from my reveries to something approximating the present moment. I don't know if devil dogs are any better than bugs, but that will have to suffice. And it's not entirely divorced from what I want to write about here today, which is occultism. So first, let's get some sort of definitional thing going.

OCCULTISM, belief in supernatural sciences or powers, such as magic, astrology, alchemy, theosophy, and spiritism, either for the purpose of enlarging man's powers, of protecting him from evil forces, or of predicting the future. All the so-called natural sciences were in a sense occult in their beginnings; most early scientists were considered magicians or sorcerers because of the mystery attending their investigations. In the modern world occultism has centered in small groups that seek to perpetuate secret knowledge and rites alleged to be derived from the ancients.

from: occultism
source: The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2005
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 2005 Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition

Well, OK, that's good. That's helpful. But I was thinking more of a dictionary definition. Get a bit more specific and etymological.

oc-cult
adj.

1. Of, relating to, or dealing with supernatural influences, agencies, or phenomena.
   
2. Beyond the realm of human comprehension; inscrutable.
   
3. Available only to the initiate; secret: occult lore. See Synonyms at mysterious.
   
4. Hidden from view; concealed.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright© 2004, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

It's that last one I was looking for. In an eclipse of the moon, the moon is sometimes said to be occulted -- meaning: in the shadow of the Earth. This is gratuitous detail, yes, but I did want to work in that Stones quote somehow.

Closer to home -- or is it further from home? -- and since I just mentioned them (sneaked them in, really, when you weren't looking) I've long been meaning to look up what it was, precisely, that Sigmund Freud said to Carl Jung on the eve of their breakup. No time like the approximate present, so just a sec. Let me go search about...

Well, it's not exactly what I was looking for, and I found it in the last place I'd expect. But the final line below does refer, however tangentially, to the quote I'm hunting for.

In Tim Burton's 1989 film Batman, there is a scene in which the Joker and his goons break into a museum and spray-paint works of art. In so doing, they become the co-creators of these paintings, or, as Brener's attorney put it at the trial, they "raise the price of the artwork." This implies a symbolic injection in the form of, or in the disguise of, defilement. What happens is a rupture that raises the "plank" higher. The archaic rises the bottom of discourse, and its surface is clouded over with an ecstatic foam. Freud, arguing with Jung, called this "black mud."

from: Batman and the joker: the thermidor of the bodily
by Victor Tupitsyn
source: Parachute: Contemporary Art Magazine, 1 October 1997
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 1997 Parachute Contemporary Art

But here's the horse's mouth source -- a passage from Jung's autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections...

I can still recall vividly how Freud said to me, "My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark." He said that to me with great emotion, in the tone of a father saying, "And promise me this one thing, my dear son: that you will go to church every Sunday." In some astonishment I asked him, "A bulwark -- against what?" To which he replied, "Against the black tide of mud" -- and here he hesitated for a moment, then added -- "of occultism." [Vintage, 1965 (reissue edition, 1989), p. 150]

Jung makes Freud out to be a fool in this story. But Freud was a Jew and Jung wasn't. Freud had something to fear from occultism, as a thousand years of history -- and the following review -- suggest. The book the author is discussing is Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke.

The "Black Sun" of Goodrick-Clarke's latest title is a pervasive symbol of current international neo-Nazism derived from a design, based upon a ninth-century Germanic ornament, in Himmler's SS order-castle at Wewelsburg, and popularised in the postwar occult sci-fi trilogy of Thule novels by Wilhelm Landig. In his introduction to Black Sun, Goodrick-Clarke again emphasises National Socialism's central millenarianism and indicates how such beliefs are currently being recycled:

National Socialist ideology was ... deeply imbued with ideas drawn from the radical religious imagination. The belief in a Jewish world conspiracy, ostensibly backed by the notorious invention The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, provided the image of a demonic enemy. Nazi anti-Semitism was rooted in this apocalyptic demonology, which blamed the Jews for all ills, including liberalism, communism, the corruption of morals, and the downfall of a traditional world. The notion of national regeneration was also presented in an apocalyptic spirit: only the destruction of the Jews could guarantee the salvation of Germany in a racially pure millennium.

As in the case of the Ariosophists in the early twentieth century, political isolation in a hostile world committed to liberalism has led many neo-Nazi and neo-fascist groups to embrace occult notions of ancient Aryan wisdom. From the 1970s onward, right-wing extremists began to repackage the old ideology of Aryan racism, elitism and force in new cultic guises involving esotericism and Eastern religions.

from: Shadows from a Black Sun by Tom Gibbons
source: Quadrant, 1 April 2004
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 2004 Quadrant Magazine Company, Inc.

By the way, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke is not some nut-case conspiracy theorist, as are so many who write about this sort of thing. As his homepage attests -- not to mention searching Amazon -- he's published many scholarly works on matters related to the occult and its bearing on extreme-right political movements. Continuing from the Quadrant review cited above...

...Goodrick-Clarke writes with exceptional clarity, adroitly steering his reader through the maze of changes and overlappings in the multifarious groups which he describes. He also provides a useful selection of illustrations: sixteen pages of photographs of such neo-Nazi intellectuals as Julius Evola, Savitri Devi and Miguel Serrano, reproductions of neo-Nazi magazine covers and posters, and two diagrams of "Hindu-Nazi esoteric anatomy" from Serrano's Adolf Hitler: The Ultimate Avatar (1984).

I can't find any copy of the Hitler book online, though I did find an interesting quote attributed to Serrano at Stormfront.org [fair warning: this is a neo-Nazi site]:

02-24-2004, 05:55 PM
The Returning Fuehrer
"At the end of time, our Volk Leader will return for the Wild Hunt [Wildes Heer], with his Final Battalion, astride a White Horse, Sleipnir, his eight-legged steed. He will be the Last Avatar, also known as Wotan and Vishnu-Kalki. This time he will come to conquer and to judge." [Miguel Serrano]

In my investigations into this general theme over the last six months or so, I was surprised to continually come across the name Miguel Serrano. In my twenties, I remember reading a few of his novels -- he was a sort of precursor to New Ager Extraordinaire, Carlos Castaneda -- and a slim volume titled C.G. Jung and Hermann Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships.

The plot thickens, does it not? But I have to run, so for now I'll leave you with a repeat of the koan that began this one...