I went through an entire box of Kleenex® last night. Finally got up and went out at 3am to buy the most expensive, most potent form of Echinacea I could find. I found some. I took six. So I was sitting here at four in the morning eating hardboiled eggs, cold spicy chicken wings and a Hershey bar (with almonds) washed down with copious draughts of orange juice. This has always worked in the past, but I think this time I was too late in catching it. That is to say: I caught it.

I've been working on something to post here, something attempting to explain how dangerous computers are, and the Internet, and especially Highbeam Research. This is a warning. A public service. If you start using Highbeam, at first it seems harmless enough, oh yeah, no big deal. You begin by looking around for information on your favorite subject, like, say, pig faming. And do you get immediate, useful, on-target results? Yes, absolutely. No doubt about it...

"His diplomacy, passion and infectious enthusiasm made him a very effective ambassador, which has benefited the whole of British pig production," said British Pig Executive chief executive Mick Sloyan.

BUT... if you sign up on Highbeam you should plan on -- sooner or later -- beginning to have fever dreams like this one I'm having right now. Here, I took a picture...

Soon, you won't give a tinker's dam about pig farming or baseball or RSS or whatever cockamamie thing you started out thinking you were interested in. No. All you'll care about will be outlandish things like neo-fascist gnostics and Russian Theosophists and weirdball New Age theories about how the earth is really hollow and there are UFO bases inside from which Hitler and the Waffen SS will soon return to conquer the world and establish a million-year Fourth Reich. I swear to god such matters never even crossed my mind before I started using Highbeam. I think it's some kind of plot, personally. I think they've taken control of my mind and are sending me these sorts of query results on purpose!

for the love of all that's good and holy, do yourself a favor and don't get too deep into this thing. I'm serious. I don't know how long I can hold out against the mind-control rays -- I'm feeling the pressure build even as I attempt to write this warning -- but if you're seeing this post via some newsreader, unsubscribe now. Don't think, just do it. If you've bookmaked this blog, delete that bookmark immediately. Resist the voice in the back of your mind threatening dire results. Pay no attention to the intimations of dread that will surely beset you. It is The Influenz speaking, not your own will and natural intelligence.

For me, alas, it is too late. Just as with the Echinacea. So as soon as I work my way through another half dozen boxes of Kleenex® (Lotion Tissue with Aloe and Vitamin E), I'll be back with many more strange tales from the crypt. I can't help it. Look for a true story of my personal (if somewhat tangential) connection to poet Ezra Pound when he was in St. Elizabeth's (mental) Hospital in Washington, DC so that they didn't have to execute his ass for treason during WWII. And how he was pals with Madame Blavatsky and -- are you ready for this one? -- Gurdieff. All true. All too too true.

So kiss pig farming goodbye, Dorothea, bella. We have passed irrevocably beyond the bounds of Kansas, and that man behind the curtain doesn't know any more than you do. Any more than I. All we can do now is press on deeper into the chthonic uncanniness of Millennium #3...

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...

Back when it was night, I started reading the book you see pictured below, The Politics of Myth. When I got to the part I'm going to quote here -- from a section titled "Modern Gnosticism" -- I decided it was time to blog. Now it's morning.

This gnostic "monomyth," to borrow Joseph Campbell's term, was then populated with numerous colorful if not bizarre names and details. Gnosticism speaks the language of myth even as it helps one understand the modern fascination with myth. But the fundamental point is always the same: salvation is essentially inward or intrapsychic, and entails the possession of secret, saving knowledge. It's assumptions then are:

1. We are inwardly of a different nature from the surrounding evil world, in which we are entrapped through no fault of our own.
2. Salvation must come from a source outside the present evil environment, which cannot overcome its contradictions on its own terms.
3. Salvation is in the form of secret knowledge or gnosis.

The "secret" aspect meant that gnosticism was often taken to be, in the words of a modern authority, "a knowledge of divine secrets which is reserved for an elite."

---

Now you know why I put the cockroaches in there. Besides, I had a few left over from yesterday. Unlike those in yesterday's post, however, these cockroaches do not represent Frank Paynter (who really is quite a good fellow), but are rather a comment on the ideas described above. Gnosticism, with it's twisted notions of "the evil world" and its divine secrets reserved for a privileged elect, can, in short, kiss my serene Illinois ass.

It must seem, from some of these posts, that my real concerns are far from the web, the internet, even from the books I've written about these wonders in the past. I struggle with how I can connect my current research (I know that sounds a bit lofty, but it is that) with the sorts of things I was writing about four or five years ago. An easy answer, if not a very satisfying one, is that if one continues to write about the sorts of things one was writing about four or five years ago, one may find -- usually rather painfully -- that one has long since run out of useful things to say. And though the familiar is easier to categorize, and thus take in, and thus be recognized as... well, the familiar -- because that's what familiar means -- one finds oneself not wanting to be quite that predictable. Not least because of what we all know familiarity breeds.

A better answer, if not quite as curiously circular, is that those things I was writing about four or five years ago -- voice, communities of discourse, stories, power via command-and-control vs. attraction via bottom-up engagement... all the sorts of things that populated the original-flavor cluetrain manifesto (the website) and Gonzo Marketing (the book that only 14 people ever read; "79 used & new from $0.47") -- well pardners, none of those things are quite unequivocal "things." I mean, all are constructed of other bits and pieces, other concepts, and all depend on myriad assumptions and points of view for their interpretation. What, for instance, is a "conversation"? As it turns out, the more you think you know the answer to that one, the less you can actually have one.

What stands in the way is a little item called ideology. Call them belief systems if it makes you more comfortable. Americans, especially, seem to be made easily uncomfortable by talk of ideology. Like class, ideology is what other  people -- people somewhere "over there" -- have. Not us. What we have is the plain vanilla truth. This charming naivete quickly shades into the kind of unconscious arrogance that makes those other people over there want to blow up our buildings and give us all anthrax. Nasty, yes. Despicable, yes. Understandable? Unfortunately, yes. Because if you say you have no ideology, only the truth of the "way things are," then there is no possibility of having a conversation. Because if you say you have no "system of belief" but rather perceive reality as it truly is, then there's no use talking.

So I'm interested in breaking things down a bit more (pick any semantics you like). We do have ideologies and belief systems, and they're built up historically. None of em jus' grew like Topsy. But because we don't tend to see them this way -- i.e., as ideologies or belief systems -- they tend to be invisible. Or totally opaque. One extremely large and potent ideological complex is cobbled together from various vaguely defined ideas that constitute "New Age thinking." What some perceive as its positives -- no boundaries, no dogma, no requirements nor stringent prohibitions -- are what make New Age thinking so hard to pin down. Conveniently so. Very few people, in my experience, want to cop to being New Age. It's got a tacky rep. For good reason. But this sort of thinking has so permeated American life and thought, it's all but invisible -- which, strangely or not, equals opaque. It's right there in front of you but you can't see it. It's masking your ability to recognize what it is, but you can't see through it. Convenient too, because it's whatever anyone who wears it wants it to be, communicated in coy insider code phrases like "body, mind, and spirit" and "spiritual but not religious."

But hell, live and let live, right? Hero with a thousand faces. A thousand points of Light.

Yeah well, maybe not.

So that -- roughly stated, with a lot of handwaving thrown in -- is part of what I've been working on lately. The thrust and substance of conversations on the web today didn't spring to life concurrent with the invention of TCP/IP or the HyperText Transport Protocol. We are living too much in the moment, or we'd see more clearly the historical roots of the various ways we envision the world, and the hallucinatory quality of much of that vision.

One thread in the fabric of New Age thought seems to be gnosticism. The following indented bits are all from the same review of Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams and Resurrection by Harold Bloom, who is a big fan. Of gnosticism, that is, not of yours truly. Nor yours truly of him.

Gnosis means true knowledge... It is recognizing that as my true self is already divine, I should put aside the fear, guilt, resentment, and frustration belonging to the lower, material existence, which only enshrouds and obscures my true reality.

from: Gnosticism and American Religion by Andrew Wilson
source: The World & I, January 1, 1997
via: HighBeam Research

In Gnosis, the search for a God "out there" gives way to finding God within. I need not seek the blessings of God above, because my true self is already a spark of God: eternal, uncreated, and one with the universe.

Gnosticism is pervasive in late twentieth-century American spirituality. Bloom finds its traces in such New Age pastimes as fascination with angels and yearning for the millennium. Nevertheless, he denigrates modern American religion as Gnosticism of a debased sort. Gnosticism historically has been an elitist's faith.

Oh, that's so groovy, baby!

More to come on this score. Which score, in my thinking of late, is the spiritualization of pathological narcissism. ("But Bloom's's at Yale!" you may protest. Uh huh.) Perhaps it will all start to come together soon. I don't want it to be too clear, though, and risk getting the whole freaking world yelling at me.

"Here we have Locke at his finest, his mind flowing free..." writes Frank Paynter of my previous post -- after making fun of my ass for about three screens. "...the dude's getting into the carpenter rap again... let's hope we're not going into the christian martyrdom darkness." Yeah, very funny Frankie. Just you wait. Look at him there, all pleased with himself. He has no idea what he's in for.

But at least he interspersed his parody with gratuitous Highbeam pointers. As CBO's main purpose is to showcase the value of Highbeam Research, this is goodness. Especially as I've developed so many... well, let's call them side-purposes. For the kind of setup you're seeing here on CBO to work, corporate underwriter and blog underwrtitee must be at least somewhat symbiotic.

SYMBIOSIS, the habitual living together of organisms of different species. The term is usually restricted to a dependent relationship that is beneficial to both participants (also called mutualism) but may be extended to include parasitism, in which the parasite depends upon and is injurious to its host; commensalism, an independent and mutually beneficial relationship; and helotism, a master-slave relationship found among social animals (e.g., the ant and the aphid). True symbiosis is illustrated by the relationship of herbivorous animals (e.g., cockroaches, termites, cows, and rabbits) to the cellulose-digesting protozoans or bacteria that live in their intestines; neither organism could survive without the other.

from: symbiosis
source: The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2005
via: HighBeam Research

"One morning Gregor Samsa awoke to discover he had been transformed into a gigantic cockroach." So wrote Franz Kafka in The Metamorphosis. Think of Chief Blogging Officer as a lowly cellulose-digesting protozoan. Which metaphor, I hasten to add, should in no way be taken to suggest that Highbeam Research is a giant cockroach. But I guess it does, doesn't it? Well, it's not what I meant, OK? Click on the cockroach if my meaning seems ambiguous here. Can we just leave it at that? Otherwise I'll have to erase this whole post and start over. Let me see if I can find one more suitable for Frankie. Yeah, here we go...

The emblems of banality speak volumes about the longings and desires of the postmodern subject. Disputing the politically inert critical strategies of parody and irony that characterized postmodern photographic practice, Goldstein argues for the need to confront our desires rather than ignoring them, sneering at them, or disengaging from them.

from: Boredom, repetition, inertia: contemporary photography and the aesthetics of the banal
by Eugenie Shinkle
source: Mosaic (Winnipeg), 1 December 2004
via: HighBeam Research

Let Dr. Frankenfurter chew on that  for a while. Meanwhile, on a ...cough... more sober note, I came across this brief post by A.K.M. Adam...

March, 04, 3005 Props For Our Man It's a treat to see e-learning pundit Stephen Downes commend our hero Chris Locke's recent column on serendipity and research at his Chief Blogging Officer gig. "Someone who finally understands search' -- indeed!

For readers who have arrived here from other dimensions (according to our stats, CBO is especially popular with the Fourth and Tenth), your first question may be: who the hell is A.K.M. Adam -- though given the collar, you might not have said "hell." Silly you. Simply AKMA to his many friends is a) Professor of New Testament studies at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary (formerly of Princeton), and b) a prodigious blogger. If you click on the Seabury-Western link, you'll see he's written a number of books, among them one titled What Is Postmodern Biblical Criticism?. I figured I'd show you that one, so I went to Amazon to get the cover clip you see at the top of this graf. Then, poking around in the reviews, I found this introductory disclaimer by David E. Rogers:

Let me say up front that I'm a big fan of the author's Weblog. He's first on my blogroll by the accident of alphabetism, but he's also at the top of my list of must-read bloggers. So don't expect this book review to be impartial or anything.

If you click on David E. Rogers in this Amazon review (as I did, naturally), you find this:

About me: I'm a Los Angeles-based information architect, instructional designer and writer -- and a true believer in the Internet. Learn more at my weblog: http://dave_blog.blogspot.com

I go there too (naturally) -- the site is called Connect & Empower -- and find many familiar "faces" on the blogroll, two of them my own. Like looking into a more than usually populated mirror. Here are AKMA, Chief Blogging Officer, Dan Gillmor, David Weinberger, Doc Searls, that old dog Frank Paynter, Halley Suitt, Jeneane Sessum, RageBoy (!!!), and Tom Matrullo, among others. It's been said that blogging is incestuous. Yeah? Well hell, how could it not  be? Many birds of a feather are worth two in the bush. Although... no, nevermind.

The other question you may have had about AKMA's post about my post, is who, precisely, is Stephen Downes? Not hard to find out if you follow AKMA's link. Sure, you already knew what it said there, basically, as AKMA quoted it. But note the link to Nietzsche! (Hey, your guess is as good as mine.) So I back up to the bio page, and encounter this:

Born in Montreal, Quebec, Stephen Downes lived and worked across Canada before joining the National Research Council as a senior researcher in November, 2001. Currently based in Moncton, New Brunswick, at the Institute for Information Technology's e-Learning Research Group, Stephen has become a leading voice in the areas of learning objects and metadata as well as the emerging fields of weblogs in education and content syndication.

I look him up on Highbeam and come across the following. Downes was obviously very early in to the whole syndication infrastructure that's now become a standard feature of the blogging world.

Finding a clear explanation on the Web of RSS and how to create and use this XML format for content distribution or syndication can pose quite a challenge. A less technical online introduction is Stephen Downes' An Introduction to RSS for Educational Designers [Microsoft Word document], published on November 2, 2002.

from: So you want to start a syndicated revolution: RSS news blogging for searchers by David Mattison
source: Searcher, 1 February 2003
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 2003 Information Today, Inc.

Then, on an entirely different note, I find that AKMA's post has been picked up by wood s. lot and dropped into his blog right above this picture of Alan Ginsberg, Anne Waldman and Gregory Corso.

I met two of the three of them the next year, in Boulder, Colorado, where this was taken, and where I still live -- though I've moved away and moved back twice since then. I never did meet Gregory, though I carried a copy of his City Lights book of poems, Gasoline, in my back pocket when I was my daughter's age now. She turned 15 yesterday. Anne Waldman might recognize me on sight, as I would her, from passing in various shrine rooms and meditation halls. We never spoke about poetry, if we spoke at all. I sang this bit of the Diamond Sutra to Ginsberg in a very crowded kitchen at a very drunken party. Quoting here from memory...

He said: "You didn't write that!"

"No," I said, "I made up the melody."

Last time I saw Allen was in a Chinese restaurant that was later my office, and later still the scene of the end of what turned out to have been merely a relationship. He was asking this elderly couple what they were eating. Was it good? Could he try a bite? Totally outrageous though very polite. They had no idea who he was. Nor did I, except for those negro streets at dawn and that eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry.

He's dead now. I stay away from Naropa, though I just drove past it today. Madame Levy knew them all, Burroughs, Ginsberg, the lot. She tells me Corso was the real poet. How would I know? I was just 15. Just starting out.

And that's how hypertext works, pretty much.