Is There Intelligent Life on Earth? (part 15)

by Revilo P. Oliver

The Fly in the Ointment

IT IS HIGH TIME we returned from our excursus to Mr. Catran and took notice of one nugget of wisdom he offers us, an injunction that we must never study history. History, you see, would tell us what human beings are by nature, and prophets of a New World must eschew that, just as an engineer, such as Mr. Catran, I suppose, would avoid learning anything about the properties of steel before he designed a dream bridge. It would be awfully inhibiting to know the limitations of the material with which one proposes to work!

I have often been impressed, however, by the unwillingness of some scientists to learn what they are talking about, once they have strayed outside their own narrow fields of specialization. One thinks of the “atomic scientists” who had their egos so vastly inflated, in a manner that reminded one of the Aesopic fable about the frog who wanted to be as big as a cow,⁶⁴ when Oppenheimer decided that it would be advantageous for his race to prevent the Americans from developing a hydrogen bomb before the Soviets had one. Nor was that a new aberration. I remember how startled I was around 1947 when I read in an official publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (of which I was then a member) that some highly esteemed association of chemists had published a resolution that all atomic weapons be delivered to the Soviet Union, “which will use them to ensure world peace.” Had the chemists wanted the atomic weapons delivered to the pixies, that would not have been overtly unreasonable: no one has ever seen a pixie, so we may imagine them as benevolent as we wish. But by 1947, even ignorant individuals, who read nothing but newspapers, had enough information about the consequences of the Jewish capture of the Russian Empire thirty years before to know precisely what the consequences would be, if the Americans, who still had an opportunity to remain a first-rate military power and even to regain their independence, were made helpless as the aliens and traitors in Washington were then in the process of making them. I wondered why the chemists did not stay within their own field and recommend cyanide of potassium as an infallible means of ensuring perpetual peace for all who really want it. It was not until later that I saw why those chemists chose to ignore facts of which they must have known. They, no doubt, thought of themselves as hard-headed men of science, but they had Christian sediment in their minds.

Without knowing it, those chemists, like Mr. Catran and so many others, had got religion, probably the religion of Marx, which is sometimes called “the religion of humanity” by “Liberals” when a mention of Marx would not be tactful. And when one has got religion, common sense and facts no longer count. One reverts to the mentality of young children, who cannot distinguish between fact and fancy, and are often punished for insisting that they actually saw what they only imagined. And persons who can make the distinction often become so puffed up with righteousness that they lie to prove that what they have imagined is real. That is why it is so often difficult, and sometimes impossible, to be sure of the motives of witnesses of supernatural events.

We mentioned much earlier the pair of adolescent girls who made poor old Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believe in fairies. They are very old women now and admit, of course, that they faked the photographs of themselves consorting with fairies and gnomes, but they insist that they actually did see fairies in the garden and forged the pictures to make others believe what they just knew to be true. We cannot now tell whether they, through some quirk of female adolescence, really did have hallucinations in which they thought they played with fairies, or they are now pathetically trying to justify the adolescent espièglerie with which they light-heartedly perpetrated a hoax that made them famous and set so many theosophical minds aquiver with transcendental thoughts.

We now feel certain that when Joseph Smith forged the Book of Mormon and its pendant gospels (Book of Moses, Book of Abraham), he did so as a clever rogue who had perfected a technique for gaining power over simpletons and their purses, but we do so only because we have records of his earlier career as a confidence man. Without those records, we should have to consider the possibility that he might have imagined he was promoting a theology that would be beneficial.

We now think it likely that when the Reverend Mr. William Dennis Mahon in the 1880s became convinced that there was no historical evidence to support belief in Christianity,⁶⁵ he produced his celebrated series of forgeries to prove the truth of a faith that was dear to his glands and in the belief that he was righteously lying for the Lord. But we grant him sincerity largely because he was such an awkward old duffer that he seems not to have had the cunning of a practiced rogue.

When we patiently read through the vast masses of early Christian gospels, all of them anonymous or pseudonymous or under meaningless names, we know nothing about authors whom we cannot identify and of whom there is no historical record, we can rely only on conjectures and our own imaginations as we try to sort out the hallucinés, the gullible believers of tall tales, the conscious forgers for sweet Jesus’s sake, and the professional shamans, who exploited the credulity of the masses. When we come to Fathers of the Church and other theologians whom we can more or less positively identify, we can usually believe that they were indulging in the common practice of Lying for the Lord to propagate a belief to which they were emotionally attached. When Jerome composed short stories about martyrs, he thought the fact that they were fiction was irrelevant, since they would help spread piety. Chrysostom praises the efficacy of deceit in implanting Faith and frankly says that lies are not “untruthful” when they edify suckers and strengthen the faith of True Believers. Augustine was one of the few early Fathers who said that it was wrong to lie for a pious purpose, and it was he who proudly assured his congregation that he had preached the gospel to a tribe in Africa that had only one eye, which was in the middle of their foreheads, and had told the glad tidings about Christ to another tribe that had no heads at all, having eyes in place of nipples in their chests. He must either have changed his mind about Lying for the Lord or have lied when he claimed to disapprove of holy lying. Such is the normal effect of religion on veracity. And this fact has a highly important corollary which we can only mention here. The votaries of the Marxist religion are no exception to the rule. They can and do lie cheerfully to spread their gospel. They are estopped from sporting with fairies and from interviewing ghosts, but they can forge pseudo-historical records and they can forge pseudoscientific data and do it proudly, probably telling themselves that they are resorting to fraud to promote “world peace” and “human rights” and “brotherhood,” which a conscientious god would have ordained, had he existed. In earlier pages we have commented on the absurdities that are invented or endorsed by professed scientists and in a footnote (53) we barely alluded to the horrifying prevalence of conscious fraud in what purports to be scientific research. Now we have to ask the terrible question, How much of what now passes for accepted and generally endorsed scientific theory is actually based on hoaxes contrived to propagate the Christian-Marxist doctrines that are driving our race to insanity and suicide? The possibilities are so frightening that we dare not estimate them. Before that abyss, the affrighted spirit recoils aghast.

Bye-bye, Jack

You can guess what revelations Catran received in his bout of messianic fever, but we may as well glance at the high points. Although slightly disguised by talk about “unlimited sources of energy,” “unlimited credit for everyone,” and “extrapolatory computers,” the essence of his gospel is, as one would expect, merely the old and hackneyed “Liberal’’-Marxist myths. Mr. Catran, without a hint of a grin, tells us that “sexual discrimination” is “caused by the money system.” I feel certain that Mr. Catran himself conducted experiments that gave empirical proof of differences between men and women, differences both anatomical and psychic.⁶⁶ And I am equally sure that Mr. Catran discriminates between the sexes — although he may do so with a bad conscience, if true to his principles. The “money system” is also the cause of “racial discrimination,” because all human beings are absolutely the same, except for “slight differences in pigmentation, etc.” And, as proudly as a dog that has retrieved a thrown stick, our Jack brings us the old “Liberal” chestnut about Beethoven. I know you have heard it a hundred times, but I must ask you to endure it just once more. If someone had taken the infant Ludwig, fresh from his mother’s breast, and deposited him in an African jungle, and he had been raised in the hut of niggers who, for some reason, did not eat him, would he have composed the Third Symphony? You will not argue about that, but you will want to ask another question. If someone had put a pickaninny in young Ludwig’s cradle, and if Beethoven’s parents had been so feeble-minded as to adopt it and give it Beethoven’s nurture and education, would it have written the Third Symphony? Of course, you never get a chance to finish that question. All the “intellectuals” will be screeching that it ain’t fair and besides, you’se a “Nazi,” and although everybody is equal, you are a Hell of a lot less equal than others.

What the hypothetical experiment with infant Ludwig proved, I need not say, is that we have got to have what our Jack calls an “homogenized humanity,” with all human beings of all races dumped into a vast garbage-shredder and reduced to a uniform and stinking mass of coffee-colored mongrels reeking with sub-human equality. Now if Mr. Catran imagines that God’s Master Race, which has decreed mongrelization as the best means of exterminating Aryans, will not maintain its own racial purity and rule the “homogenized” mongrels for its own profit or fun, he really is delirious. And, come to think of it, the Aryans, their minds rotted with fifteen centuries of obeying the Big Jew up in the stratosphere, are the only race that has become so witless and craven that it wants to disappear in a mass of mongrels. The niggers, who justly contemn the Aryan curs who cringe before them, have no intention of repudiating their own race. And the subtle minds of the Mongolians, who have an old and elaborate civilization of their own, are learning again to despise the barbarous White Devils, whose power they respected until they saw that our race was suffering from a progressive softening of the brain and becoming imbecile. Their power waxes as ours wanes, and they have no slightest intention of liquidating their race to please the Jews. They never believed in Yahweh.

But Mr. Catran dreams of an “homogenized humanity,” perhaps because the prospect is so dear to sick Aryans. And there, my friends, we have reached the zenith of his wisdom. It’s a shame he stopped believing in “flying saucers.”

Before we bid Mr. Catran a long good-bye, however, we should just notice the underpinnings of his Faith. What his behavioral scientists will give us, presumably before we are shoved into the homogenizing garbage-shredder, is a “fellowship with all peoples” and they will ram into children’s defenceless minds a “kinship with all humanity.” Why not a kinship with all mammals? The mongrelized Hindus, for that matter, carry this genealogical theorem to its logical conclusion, a kinship with all organic life, including, of course, their own body lice. But patriotic Marx did not go to India for his religion.

I shall only tell you that Jack Catran promises us that his behavioral scientists will inculcate (his word!) into a child “the highest form of love,” which is “love for his fellow man.” And — I shall quote verbatim — “through applied love we can become holy.” Yes, holy. Jesus Christ!

I have devoted some pages to this book, but not merely because its title asks the crucial question. It is also portentous. It contains, as I have said, much sound common sense about the present status and trends in the real sciences. But when we step on what appears to be a massive and solid rock, we suddenly find ourselves sitting in the middle of the “New Testament” with a dazed expression on our faces.

I need not have taken this book as an example. I could have written about a thousand books that have rolled from the presses this year, if I had the time to look at them. I fear, I gravely fear, that the chances of intelligent life on earth are becoming increasingly remote.

Notes

¹ Corruption always breeds corruption. Margaret Mead used her prestige to install in the American Association for the Advancement of Science the new “science” of “parapsychology,” which studies such miraculous phenomena as “psychokinesis” (i.e., the art of bending spoons when no one is looking) and “extra-sensory perception” (i.e., the art of guessing cards by the techniques long used by professional gamblers or by the operation of chance that makes it possible for some men to win in a game of faro). And it was almost ten years before the honor of the Association was championed by a distinguished physicist, Professor John Wheeler of the University of Texas, who asked the Association to end its patronage of the hokum. The parlous state of scientific thought in the United States is shown by the resulting civil war within the Association – and that even Professor Wheeler felt obliged to refer to “our late and beloved Margaret Mead.” See Martin Gardner, Science, Good, Bad, and Bogus (Buffalo, New York, 1982; paperback, Avon, 1983), Chapter 17.

² This book is the first comprehensive inquiry into the motivation of presumably honest “psychic researchers,” as disclosed by a study of their biographies. Many readers of J. W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time (London, 1927; third edition, 1934; reprinted 1937, 1958, 1960, 1964, and doubtless subsequently) have been impressed by the author’s seeming candor and objectivity; Ruth Brandon leaves us only with the question whether Dunne perpetrated a hoax or was a victim of his own delusions. Incidentally, I trust that I need not remark that the word ‘prestige’ is appropriately derived from praestigia (‘a trick, deceit, illusion’) and, like ‘glamor,’ denotes an influence based on appearances that are deceptive, not necessarily entirely fallacious, but at least great exaggerations of the underlying reality.

³ For a good description of the technical aspects of “psychic phenomena,” see Joseph F. Rinn, Sixty Years of Psychical Research (1950, and still available from the publisher, The Truth Seeker, P.O. Box 2832, San Diego, California). Many of the hoaxes were exposed by the famous magician, Harry Houdini (Weiss), whose memory every rational man should honor. From the biography by Raymund FitzSimons, Death and the Magician (New York, 1980), you will learn that the death of Houdini was really caused by a Bible-believing nitwit who went berserk and attacked him, You will also learn that professional hokum-peddlers are such knaves that after his death they tried to impose on the credulity of his widow by forgery and jugglery, and that there are numerous crackpots who, to this day, whine that Houdini must have had “psychic powers” to, perform his magic. You will also learn that Mr. FitzSimons or his publishers had an eye so fixed on the market that instead of ridiculing the dolts, his book pretends that there is a “mystery” about Houdini’s feats: could they have been accomplished by physical means? Who can tell? The answer to that question is, Any man whose common sense hasn’t been amputated.

⁴ It is possible, so far as I know, that the enterprising Dr. Henry Rogers may have invented the mechanism whereby an untended typewriter may be operated electro-magnetically from a remote typewriter. Such devices are commonplace now, but they seem to have been unheard of when Dr. Rogers, a pious holy man eager to rescue mankind from the slough of materialism, exhibited in broad daylight a typewriter on which the unseen spirits of the dead, having acquired stenographic skills in the next world and having been summoned by the strains of “Nearer, My God, to Thee” or “One More River to Cross,” typed out loving messages for their dear kinfolk in this world, telling them how jolly it was to be dead and immortal. By a neat irony of life, Rogers’ stunt quickened the religious hankerings of the inventor of one of the first successful typewriters, George Yost, whom Rogers fleeced of two million dollars and whose brains Rogers so addled that when the poor old man died in penury, he still believed that Rogers had shown him the way to Heaven.

⁵ Physiologists assure me that the differences between the sexes are genetic and cannot be abolished by a Constitutional amendment – or even by the surgery it would logically require. For a neat illustration of a fundamental psychic difference, see note 66 below.

⁶ Uri Geller’s race is by no means irrelevant, although it would be hard to measure its precise influence. Christians have always stood in awe of the great race to which Yahweh, by a special contract, gave a perpetual lease on the whole world, and although they claimed that Yahweh had rescinded the contract, they never doubted but that Jews were on terms of special intimacy with either their god or their anti-god. The three Judaic religions filled the whole horizon of the Middle Ages, as is evident from the story of the “three rings,” which Boccaccio inserted in his Decameron, and from the famous and now lost work De tribus impostoribus, in which the three impostors were Moses, Jesus, and Mahomet. The whole of Mediaeval magic and sorcery was derived from the Kabbalah and its congeners, and even today you would have to use its hocus-pocus, if you wanted favors from the Princes of the Air (cf. note 20 infra). His race lent prestige to Michel de Nostre-Dame (Nostradamus), who peddled astrological and mantic quackery that still excites credulous persons, while his brother, Jean, was forging a history of Provençal poetry and spurious genealogies he could sell to French aristocrats who felt a need for more distinguished ancestors. The mystic mish-mash of the Rosicrucian hoax (cf. note 22 infra), Masonry, and the various sects of Illuminati were all based on Jewish superstitions and myths, as were less obvious derivatives, e.g., Godfrey Higgins’ Anacalypsis, that monument of disordered learning. Even deists and atheists commonly granted to Jews a spiritual superiority because they had discovered the “lofty morality” they had taken from the Babylonians and Egyptians. All our prevalent superstitions were Judaic until the orthodox religions of India became known in the Nineteenth Century and provided theosophical cults for persons who were in the market for more transcendental mysteries. All this gave to the Jews a quasi-religious prestige, which still persists, and they are often credited with access to supernatural powers by the very persons who hate them most vehemently.

It is, furthermore, a pusillanimous hypocrisy not to note the race of Jews in matters in which they participate. Einstein justly observed that “There will be anti-Semitism [what he meant by that nonsense word, of course, was antipathy toward Jews] in the sense of a psychological phenomenon as long as Jews come into contact with non-Jews.” (See Ronald Clark, The Life and Times of Albert Einstein, New York, 1971). That was in 1930, before our race was taught by the Suicide of Europe to cringe before Yahweh’s Master Race, and the tension that Einstein noted has been multiplied a thousand times by the amazing racial solidarity that Jews now ostentatiously display and the arrogance with which they demand that the lower animals profess to believe even such preposterous tales as the physically impossible Holohoax. No goy can now behave toward a Jew as he would toward a member of his own race; whether his attitude is defensive or he cringes in slavish eagerness to please or salaams and stores up in his own mind a secret but implacable resentment, the tension is there and necessarily affects all relations between the two. And it may take many forms. A foreign correspondent assures me that a competent scientist who was a sucker for “psychokinesis” was really incited by a wish to prove that even lowly Aryans could bend spoons, too.

⁷ This, to be sure, is an effect that has been sought by religions since the dawn of history. Five thousand years ago, a procession of soldiers and men-at-arms, chariot-drivers with their chariots, high-born ladies of the court, household servants, girl musicians with their heavy harps, and a chorus of maidens marched down a ramp into a deep pit, where they lay down and each drank from his own small cup a lethal narcotic. The harpists played and the maidens sang until they died – doubtless hymns about immortal souls and the beautiful world into which they were going gladly to rejoin Queen Shub-ab, whose body lay on the bier but whose soul had flown to the life everlasting. There is a deep pathos in that scene, which we know from the excavations of Sir Leonard Wolley at Ur. But that was in the dawn of civilization, and the self-sacrifice, however mistaken, had a dignity, even a nobility, that makes us esteem the Sumerians. They were White men and we hope they were Aryans. There was nothing of the squalor and stench of the human cesspool at Jonestown.

⁸ This is a facet of the subject irrelevant here. Mr. Randi alludes to incidents that must excite commiseration, and most of us, no doubt, could adduce observations of our own. A physician of my acquaintance had a sixteen-year-old son who, having had his mind addled in a public school, went off on a quest for transcendence and was eventually located by the police in a nest of drug-addicts in the basement of a Christian church on the west coast. The father was distressed, but, a rational man, he simply cut his losses, and did not cry over spilled milk or try to salvage it. Our pity must go to the mother, who was biologically incapable of such objectivity, and if we feel for her, we should ask questions about a society which sends its children to be demoralized by expert “educators” to promote “equality.” – A cultivated lady whom I met years ago lost both of her children, in their early twenties, to a cult similar to the ones James Randi describes. She was not allowed to enter the grounds of the cult, but her son, who was laboring on some building for the community, came to the fence, gaunt and stem with righteousness, and he treated her with the cruelty the Jesus of the “New Testament” is said to have shown his own mother: “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” With the mother, I saw the daughter, a trained nurse who remained employed in the hospital so that she could contribute to the salvation of the world; she could listen to us without hearing what was said. I noticed the dilation of the pupils in the hard eyes and drew the obvious inference, but did not have the heart to tell the mother. What weakness in us makes us suggest hope where there is none?

⁹ These terms, come from the low jargon of the creatures that infest Haiti. Some of the words are corruptions of the French that was spoken before that part of Hispaniola reverted to savagery under the guidance of French Jacobins and English Missionaries. The euphemistic term for ‘zombi’ is obviously a corruption of the French guidé. The voodoo-cults are relevant to our subject. The effect of Pavlovian techniques on members of our race is to paralyze a large part of the neocortex of the brain and make the individual regress to the animal consciousness of the limbic system, with the retention of only the parts of the neocortex that are needed for speech and similar activities. The great virtue of these techniques in the eyes of “Liberals” is that they eliminate “racism” by making the victims regress to the lowest forms of human life and the animal consciousness that is needed for “one world” of mindless mongrels.

¹⁰ Torrance, California, Noontide Press, 1981. This edition was far from satisfactory to the author, and I understand that a corrected edition will be published in the near future by Liberty Bell Publications.

¹¹ The zeal of unthinking do-gooders in promoting a social poison of which they know only the innocuous name is almost unbelievable. On 21 March 1983 the Associated Press reported a significant manifestation of contemporary American culture in New Bedford, Massachusetts. A young White woman entered a tavern to purchase a package of cigarettes. A pack of mongrels, imported from Portugal, seized her, held her down on a table, and gang raped her for two hours, while the patrons of the establishment applauded the floor show as enthusiastically as though they were in the television business. Now there were people in New Bedford, probably wicked “racists,” who disapproved of such egalitarian jollification in our great “Melting Pot,” and at least some of the mongrels were arrested. There is in New Bedford a Coalition Against Sexist Violence, and its crusading women were made indignant by the event. If you logically infer that they demanded the immediate application of pesticide to the anthropoid vermin, you are mistaken, They demanded “sensitivity training for police officers”! I know you can’t believe that, but see the Associated Press despatch by Fred Bayles in many daily newspapers for 21 March.

¹² If you are interested in becoming an aërobat, you may be able to do better, if you shop around. In the 1940s there was a great organization to promote world peace and the rest of that nonsense, Mankind United, which had a membership of 176,000,000, not counting its allies, the little men with metal heads down below, who cause earthquakes, whenever they feel like shaking things up. Its president thought his name was Arthur Lowber Bell (he swore he had so many names and was simultaneously present in so many parts of the globe in which his society had business that he couldn’t be sure). Being impatient one day, he took off from a liner in mid-Atlantic and made it to his office in San Francisco in just seven minutes flat, taking his luggage with him. Note that Transcendental Meditation does not promise such high velocity aloft and makes no provision for baggage. For further wonders wrought by Mr. Bell, see the Report of the Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities in California for 1943, pp. 353-382 and the references there given to earlier testimony by Mr. Bell. The Committee was able to locate only a few of the 176,000,000 members, but they did include college professors, and that will show you the advantages of higher education.

Levitation is, of course, an old art. Apollonius of Tyana, according to the romance by Philostratus which suggested several details of some of the Jesus-stories, travelled to India and there saw the gymnosophistae (probably Jainas) floating in the air over the mountain peaks on which they resided. They, however, must have practiced transcendental meditation more assiduously than their modern successors, for they also used their minds to provide a cloud that would float above them to shed the rain, when necessary, and prevent sunburn, which would have been painful on their naked bodies. Perhaps Robert Rabinoff, Ph. D., will extend his researches to provide these additional comforts for his pupils when they become graduates (if their money holds out).

¹³ Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1977. Despite the publisher’s blurb, this is not a popularization. A general knowledge of the several sciences is taken for granted, and you need a fair competence in mathematics to get through some of the articles.

¹⁴ Bastin’s article is not the only cause for alarm in this book. E. W. F. Tomlin, C.B.E., endeavors to put Teleology back into circulation in an article on “Fallacies in Evolutionary Theory.” Before “creation scientists” start rushing for this book with their tongues hanging out, they should be warned that atoms and molecules are every bit as alive and full of purpose as they – and they may not like that. Hylozoism appears in Western thought in the seventh century B.C.; a very crude kind of it, found among the lower forms of human life, is called animism.

¹⁵ According to Ruth Brandon, whose new book I cited above, Dr. Rhine was also inspired by a desire to crush the Communist conspiracy with “spiritual armament” and put God back in business on a scientific basis by proving the existence of telepathy and other forms of clairvoyance. He presumably had the Christians’ god in mind, and it is hard to see logic in his thinking. Belief in all sorts of wonderful supernatural powers need not involve belief in any god, as is obvious from the atheistic school of Hindu Yoga (Nirīśvara-Sāmkhya). And supernatural psychic powers have been vouched for as proof of the existence of all of the innumerable gods that men have created since the dawn of history. Moreover, as early as 1929 Dr. Rhine exultantly reported the discovery and scientific verification of the telepathic powers of a remarkable horse. Now the horse is an animal for which Aryans have a distinctive fondness, but which was hated by the Jewish authors of Christianity, who have always preferred asses (both quadruped and biped). It would therefore have been more reasonable for Dr. Rhine to turn his piety toward Poseidon, the Celtic Epona, or some other Aryan deity who has shown our racial appreciation of the equine species. I do not mean, of course, that Christianity is necessarily inimical to horses. I often wished that I could introduce Dr. Rhine’s mind-reading horse to an amiable grey mare of my acquaintance, who was a Doctor of Divinity and a Minister of the Gospel, licensed to perform marriages in several mid-Western states; she had, framed above her stall, a diploma from an authentic Bible College and state certificates to prove her sacred learning and powers. The two spiritual equines would have had much in common, although the sex of Dr. Rhine’s psychic horse would have precluded hope of a race of transcendental Ьberpferde on which indolent pietists could gallop to the next world.

¹⁶ I report this from Rawcliffe, op. cit., p. 391. He relies on reports of the physiological phenomenon called hyperaphia that he considers reliable. In the present state of scientific morality, we can only hope that he was not taken in by a scientifically accredited faker. I do not doubt the report, but I take this occasion of pointing out how complete is our dependence on the integrity of the men to whom we entrust scientific determinations. Our lives really depend on them, and deliberate treason on their part deserves, not a rebuke, but a firing squad. If that seems drastic to you, think it over.

¹⁷ Eugène Marais, in his popular work, published before his death, My Friends, the Baboons (London, 1939), reports an instance in which a band of baboons, who had acquired confidence in him as a friendly being of vastly superior powers, evidently hoped that he would resurrect their children, who had just died from a sudden epidemic of a highly contagious disease. So far as I know, no other observer has reported so striking an instance of religiosity in baboons, so we may doubt the accuracy of Marais’ observations in that instance, but it is not by any means implausible. One remembers Anatole France’s description of dogs as religious animals of exemplary piety.

¹⁸ The devastating exposure of the whole hocus-pocus called parapsychology has naturally caused consternation in some richly endowed circles. I am amused by an article in the New Scientist (London), 30 June 1983, that anxiously inquires under what conditions magicians should be permitted in laboratories. The author refrains from raising the more urgent question whether we should permit expensively equipped laboratories in which earnest scientists labor hard for months and years to ascertain how frogs are turned into princesses.

¹⁹ I shall return to this exciting topic later. Here it will suffice to note that so long as it seemed that our solar system contained two planets, Venus and Mars, that seemed similar to the earth, one could not exclude a priori the possibility that they were inhabited by intelligent beings whose accumulated scientific knowledge exceeded our own. Now that we have photographs taken on the surface of both planets, we know, beyond peradventure of doubt, that the earth is the only planet in our solar system on which organic life is possible, If you, dream of “advanced civilizations” on the planets which may or may not revolve about other stars in our galaxy, take pencil and paper and compute the velocity of the rocket that will reach Uranus next year and then the time that it would take a machine travelling at that velocity to cover the more than four light-years that separate us from the nearest star. Then put all the shelves of trash about space-craft from outer space in the trash basket. O, I know, you can imagine those super-beings with space-craft that will travel at the speed of light and with such praetematural patience they will sit in one for four years or more to play hide-and-seek with earthlings, but if you think of doing that, just believe in angels: they are easier to understand. Professor J. Allen Hynek and his cohorts have just one escape hatch left open to them. It is still barely possible that there have been a few authentic sightings of a secret weapon on test flights or in experiments to test its utility for psychological warfare. As everyone knows, the rocketry that has enabled us to send men to the moon and unmanned space craft to other planets was developed by German scientists before the catastrophe of 1945; there are claims, supported by purportedly authentic drawings of projected machines that strikingly resemble most of the U.F.Q.’s described in the reports of sightings, that the Germans were developing such craft. The drawings are reproduced in a speculative book by Mattem, UFO’s unbekanntes Flugobjekt? Letzte Geheimwaffe des Dritten Reiches? There is a considerably revised English version, UFO’s, Nazi Secret Weapon? Both books are published without dates by Samisdat, Toronto, Canada. The drawings are impressive, but there is no explanation of the source of the power needed for such craft, if their range was to be greater than that of the well known “hover craft” now in use over bodies of relatively quiet water. Some means of counteracting gravity would have been needed – and there’s the rub! But Professor J. Allen Hynek could find some comforting suggestions and perhaps inspiration in Mattern’s books.

²⁰ If you want to try your hand at obtaining supernatural assistance and are tired of praying, you will find a compendious list of the more active demons, together with the proper rites and incantations for invoking them, in Arthur Edward Waite’s, Book of Ceremonial Magic (London, 1911; reprinted, New Hyde Park, New York, 1961 and perhaps subsequently). This is really the Jewish Kabbalah, simplified and systematized for the use of goyim. Although the theologians of the Protestant sects were greatly influenced by the divine secrets that God’s People disclosed in their Kabbalah, those holy men never communicated to their followers the learning that might have fostered a do-it-yourself religion.

²¹ I have repeatedly pointed out that, so long as the science of genetics was unavailable, thinking men were confronted by the indubitable fact that human beings seem not to “breed true,” since the offspring of a given man and woman, in circumstances which preclude a supposition of adultery, differ widely in their physical and psychic characteristics, and in no family are the children really alike, unless they are identical twins. In almost all instances, nurture, education, and environment can be excluded as causes, since all children have been equally exposed to them. The differences are therefore innate, and differences in stature, complexion, physical vigor and the like, though often striking, are less remarkable than the differences in temperament, talents, and general intelligence. When the laws of genetics were unknown and even unsuspected, the inborn psychic differences had to be explained by the operation of some external variable at the time of conception and/or birth. Observation soon excluded such simple factors as the weather, time of day, season of the year, and even the phase of the moon that governed the fertility cycles of females. There remained only four possible explanations :

(1) Creation. Some god with an artistic temperament manufactured souls in enormous quantities, but, like an artist fashioning figurines, made no two of his products exactly alike. Having accumulated a supply of his creations, he was Johnny-on-the-Spot whenever a woman conceived or whenever she gave birth, and he stuck into her womb a soul that he either took from a grabbag or perhaps selected from the stock in his, warehouse,

(2) Metempsychosis. All living bodies are animated by immaterial but imperishable entities called souls, which, when one body dies, pass in some way into another that is being born. Thus each new-born child is an incarnation of an individual soul that has a character formed by its own peculiar experiences in many former lives, which it has conveniently forgotten.

(3) Astrology. Although judicial astrology and catarchic astrology as practised by professionals – in other words, the astrology that is still peddled to suckers and dispensed by most newspapers – was seen to be fallacious long before it was thoroughly demolished by the New Academy, even the Academics had to admit that astral influences might mould or determine the innate character of an individual; see especially Cicero, De divinatione, II.43.90, for a precise definition of this limited validity of astrology. In the absence pf other explanations of innate qualities, it was the most reasonable and scientific, involving no recourse to the ingerence of supernatural beings.

(4) Some unknown cause. This, of course, was correct, for the cause was eventually ascertained by the science of genetics, but until that happened, astrology, as defined above, was precisely in the same position as the “Big Bang” theory: it was accepted because no better explanation of observed phenomena seemed available. That is a point no one should forget.

²² There were many combinations that seem bizarre to us now. The court of Frederick V, Elector Palatine (1610-1623) and “Winter King” of Bohemia (1619), was the foremost center of both mechanical ingenuity and the Rosicrucian hoax until the destruction of Heidelberg in 1623. See Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London, 1972).

²³ It is not generally known that the great scandal excited by the first edition of Ambrosio, or The Monk was triggered, not by the horror of the story or the supernatural episodes, but by Lewis’s remarks obiter on the folly of exposing children to such immoral and corrupting reading as the Bible, filled with tales of revolting crimes, fiendish massacres, and morbid sexuality, all presumably approved and abetted by the Christians’ god. If children were to read such stuff, they should at least be given an expurgated version. Those injudicious remarks naturally sent the pious into a tizzy, and the publishers hurriedly replaced the first edition with a censored version of the book, for which there was an enormous demand from readers eager to have their blood curdled.

²⁴ For a very superficial survey with excerpts and summaries of a few stories, see Hilary and Dik Evans, Beyond the Gaslight, Science in Popular Fiction, 1895-1905 (London, 1976).

²⁵ The promoters of “science fiction” for a long time harped on the theme that such tales were oniy anticipations of what Science would shortly make possible: Jules Verne “predicted” the submarine, etc. I am amused by a recollection that one piece of trash in the Electrical Experimenter was an “anticipation” of the cable television now being vended in many localities. In the story, an inventor established a “cable phonograph” system: the subscriber could dial a number and thus have his phonograph play any phonographic recording ever made, all of which were in the central office and any of which could be made to play by an adaptation of the mechanism of dial telephones.

²⁶ What is far from being the worst of the chapbooks, Varney the Vampire, or The Feast of Blood (1847), was recently reprinted in two volumes by Dover (1972), with an introduction by E. F. Bleiler that gives some details of the way in which the chapbooks were produced. Chapbooks were issued weekly, each containing an installment of a story that could be prolonged as long as the market was brisk. When I was a child, I was told that this species of writing for the masses had survived the competition of the cinema; housewives purchased each week another installment of a romance that was protracted to tedious length, and when it was finally concluded, they received a set of tableware for which, of course, they had paid many times over.

²⁷ Of course, the idea, of life on other spheres is a very old one. Democritus deduced from his atomic theory that the universe must be full of worlds like ours, similarly inhabited. I do not know when the Hindu doctrine of metempsychosis was expanded to include the detail that rishis who have become too holy for earth are reincarnated on the moon and dwell in splendid cities on the lunar plains. The idea that there may be other inhabited worlds appears now and then, often in satirical writings, in the old literatures, but was first popularized by Fontenelle in his famous Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686), in which he assured the scientifically minded Marquise that all planets probably supported intelligent life, and that all the stars in the sky were suns which, like ours, were surrounded by such planets. Improvements in telescopic observations soon moderated such fancies, but they were enormously stimulated by the supposed discovery of canals on Mars.

²⁸ Cf. note 19, supra.

²⁹ The saucer shape, most commonly attributed to the space-machines and obligingly shown in the many photographs of automobile hub-caps and similar objects thrown into the air, was one of the best arguments for the validity of the phenomena, since it obviously connected them with the sightings of clipei ardentes reported by the elder Pliny, Seneca, and other Romans as behaving in a similar manner. The clipeus/clupeus is a round shield uniformly curved toward the boss and therefore having the shape of a saucer.

³⁰ Dr. Brian Brady of the U. S. Bureau of Mines believes that some authentic sightings of supposed U.F.O.’s were reports of light balls created by the Assuring of quartz-bearing rocks under seismic stresses, and noted their frequency over major faults in the earth’s crust. The electromagnetic charge thus induced on ionized air would be confined in what he calls “magnetic bottles,” which, I gather, are similar to the ball lightning that is not infrequently observed. The explanation is plausible, so far as I know, since small, erratically moving points of luminescence are produced by the fracturing of quartz in laboratory experiments. When Dr. Brady announced his theoretical explanation, he brought on himself furious telephone calls from indignant individuals, according to the Sunday Times (London), 29 March 1981, which quotes him as remarking, “It seems that people just don’t want you to take away the chance that there’s some Big Daddy out there in the sky.” Believers in “democracy” should take note of what everyone has known for a long, long time.

³¹ I wish I could hope that such research will be undertaken, for I cannot stress too strongly the almost unique opportunity for psychologists to obtain data crucial for an understanding of human society. Tales about joy rides on “flying saucers” differ significantly from comparable reports: when one considers reports of what individuals claim to have experienced in haunted houses or with Poltergeister, one has first to determine whether or not they actually saw what they claim to have seen, i.e., whether they were the victims of hoaxes by pranksters or by believers in spiritual things; and that is frequently very difficult. With the tellers of tales about joy rides on “flying saucers,” the only alternatives are hallucination and calculated mendacity, since it should be easy to identify and exclude possible instances of illusions implanted by competent hypnotists.

³² I have already suggested perusal of the files of the Skeptical Inquirer. Nothing of which I have heard surpasses the brainstorm of Dr. Mikhail Vasin and Dr. Alexander Shcherbakov, both, according to the press, “senior scientists” in the Soviet Academy of Sciences. They believe that the moon is a “spaceship,” a hollow shell covered with armor-plate twenty miles thick; the hollow interior contains the machinery of an “advanced technology,” including “special devices” that controlled the spaceship automatically and kept it in orbit about the earth after it was abandoned by the astronauts who brought it near the earth, and who both came and departed in a mysterious way, their wonders to perform. This, of course, is sheer lunacy. See the official Russian publication in English, Sputnik, July 1970. Then call for a double Scotch in a hurry.

³³ “Psychokinesis” has, of course, the added lure of the occult, but the itch to believe can be very strong, even when the supernatural is specifically excluded. The history of the “automaton” manufactured by Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1770 is traced by Charles Michael Carroll in The Great Chess Automaton (New York, Dover, 1975), who shows the strength of the lust to believe that a machine could play chess: “half-a-dozen times in its career the Turk’s secret [i.e., that there was a chess-player concealed in the machine] was decisively revealed to all who could see and reason; but they refused to look or think, and went on with their desire to believe . . . De nobis fabula narrabitur.” – The adulteration of “science fiction” with transcendental vaporings is common enough; a good example is the novel by Frederick Oliver, A Dweller on Two Planets (1894; reprinted, Health Research, Mokelumne Hill, California), from which we learn that there was, on the lost continent of Atlantis, an “advanced civilization,” complete with wireless telegraphy, atomic power plants, and yachts which contained machinery to neutralize gravity and zipped through the welkin at high speeds; the Venusians are even better equipped, having television, transmuting matter by thought-controlled electricity, and enjoying a machine which will read printed books aloud, giving the proper elocutionary emphasis, for example, to each of the speeches by the various characters in Shakespeare. But all these wonders float in a gooey syrup of talk about The Way, Tibetan sages roosting on snow-capped mountains, reincarnation, karma, what Jesus said, spiritual truths and the rest of the chocolate sauce for female palates, and the novel was reprinted several times and vended as transcendental pablum. (It is said to have been a boy’s story, polished up and first published pseudonymously as a leg-pull by his father, then a practicing physician of some prominence in California.) I especially commend this book to addicts of U.F.O’s who refuse to surrender: the Venusians, being formed of a higher order of matter, are invisible to the purblind eyes of earthlings, so that explains why our photographs of the surface of Venus show nothing – and also why you cannot see the visitor from Venus who may be watching you right now. That’s your loss, because, she is (as you should guess from her nationality) a beauteous damsel, far more luscious than anything you ever saw in the pages of Penthouse and similar publications.

³⁴ One of those fantasies struck a note of ultimate horror: the prototype that the innocent extra-terrestrials had selected for their cloning was Senator Joseph McCarthy, who, as all “Liberal intellectuals” know, was an incarnation of Satan, so evil that he thought the United States worth preserving.

³⁵ Myths about prominent figures are elaborated and revised by so many that they become a welter of confusion, as, of course, students of Christianity well know. The creation of the wonderful automaton was more commonly ascribed to a god, Hephaestus, and the connection with Daedalus explained by supposing that Talus was not only the name of the automaton but also the name of a son whom Daedalus had in addition to Icarus. Other tales, however, attribute to Haphaestus a copying of an invention made by the mortal, Daedalus. Others credit Daedalus with such simple and primitive inventions as the saw and sails for a ship. I assume that the legend of Daedalus as a cunning mechanic was an old one, but I cannot here enter into the question of whether it was known to Homer. Cf. the following note.

³⁶ I infer the use of the statues in religion, but that seems obvious. Our only clue to the artifice by which Daedalus was said to have given the appearance of life to the statues, so far as I know, is the passing allusion in Aristotle, De anima, 406b.18 (=1.3.9.), whence it appears that mercury was placed inside a hollow statue of wood; the weight of the fluid mercury would, of course, have made it possible to simulate movement, especially of the eyes. The original story was elaborated until Daedalus was credited with making the statues simulate life so completely that they had to be chained to prevent them from walking away! Robert S. Brumbaugh, Ancient Greek Gadgets and Machines (New York, 1966) thinks that automata as elaborate as those that were actually constructed by competent mechanics in the fourth century B.C. were meant. One could not imagine an automaton more elaborate than Talus, of course, and with all our electronics and computers, we couldn’t duplicate Talus today!

³⁷ Such aëronautical devices are frequently mentioned in the literature, and when they are thought of as simply magical, they are commonly said to have been the work of Kuvera, the Regent of the North and dispenser of wealth. In the Rāmāyana, it is Kuvera’s half-brother, Rāvana, who abducts Sītā and carries her off in a puspaka. Now Kuvera is a god, and, odd as the genealogy may seem, Rāvana is King of the Rāksasas, an extremely powerful and malevolent race of demons. The Vidyādharas are human beings who owe their power to the knowledge they have acquired (their name is derived from the verb vid, ‘to learn (especially by experience), to know’), and that is a very important difference. – An amusing vulgarization of the whole concept of knowledge is represented by the word vidyālābha, which designates the wealth that one acquires by expert knowledge, and reminds one of the squalor of our contemporary universities, in which both the salesmen and their customers rate knowledge according to the income which it will supposedly produce.

³⁸ For a good account of the hoax, see J. S. Weiner, The Piltdown Forgery, Oxford, 1955; reprinted, Dover, 1980. This is an emphatic lesson in the need for absolute integrity in scientific work, but the forgery, although it misled some distinguished anthropologists who trusted the learned perpetrator, did much to smooth the way for the genuine skulls that were discovered later.

³⁹ Our Ancestors Came from Outer Space, translated by Orest Berlings; New York, Doubleday, 1977; paperback, Dell, 1979 and later.

⁴⁰ The statements allegedly made over the radio by the crews of manned capsules are disputed; they are said to have been suppressed by the executive of the Space Agency, but there was no apparent motive. When the Jews failed to kill all the Americans on the Liberty, they naturally ordered the U.S. Navy to suppress news of their attack, which they thought might disturb the insouciance of their goyim, and the Navy, of course, obeyed its master’s masters. (See Jim Taylor, Pearl Harbor II, Washington, D.C., Mideast, 1980). It is hard to see why the Jews would wish to suppress news of high jinks around the moon, and it appears improbable that a lesser authority would have been obeyed. As for the psychic sensations experienced by some men on the capsules and the religiosity some are said to have developed on their return, a psychological study of the mental effects of the great loss of weight they experienced (and perhaps their close confinement most of the time) is certainly in order.

⁴¹ This is the common vocalization of the Hebrew word, NFYLYM, which appears in Genesis, 6.4. For the names of the eleven chief Egregori who conspired to seduce mortal women and commit miscegenation, see the Book of Enoch, which, although dear to many Fathers of the Church and quoted in the “New Testament,” was overlooked or excluded when that collection was made. Only fragments of the Greek and Latin versions are now extant, but a complete translation into Ethiopie was found in 1775, and an English translation of it appears in the second volume of R. H. Charles’s Old Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. You should remember that apocrypha are, strictly speaking, esoteric writings, and the word does not mean ‘spurious,’ except by a secondary sense given it by theologians who were embarrassed by some of the works. The Book of Enoch should not be confused with the Secrets of Enoch, a shorter work preserved in old Slavonic.

⁴² The Lost Tribes from Outer Space, translated by Lowell Bair; New York, Bantam, 1977 and later. If you decide to read the book, keep a fifth of Chivas Regal at hand; it will help preserve your sanity.

⁴³ One could think of these as merely modern versions of the old tales about journeys to an earthly paradise, with the future replacing the geographically remote. One could cite, as really comparable, the Christian rifacimento of the wonder tale of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, the Alexandri Magni iter ad Paradisum (first edited in 1858), and even the common legend, dating from the end of the Seventh Century, of the three sainted monks, Theophilus, Sergius, and Hyginus, who travelled far into the mysterious East, seeking a land in which men are happy – a tale which, for all its crudity and absurdities, has a deeply human pathos, the perennial and unrealizable aspirations of our unhappy species. A simple form of the tale is to be found in the standard collections of lives of the saints; a more elaborate form may be found in the first volume of Zambrini’s Miscellanea di opuscoli inediti o rari (Torino, 1861).

⁴⁴ It is no great over-simplification to say that electrons revolved about their proton as planets circle their sun. Inevitably, of course, the agile imaginations of early writers of “science fiction” immediately peopled electrons with advanced civilizations or, conversely, thought of our solar system as an atom in a super-cosmos.

⁴⁵ For one ingenious theory to explain away inconvenient observations, see the Scientific American, June 1982. The grapevine reports that we shall soon be given an Einstinian explanation of the recent demonstration by Alain Aspect and his associates in Paris that photons are subject to some force that moves faster than the sacrosanct velocity of light. We can only wait and see.

⁴⁶ Dr. Hill was confirming earlier work. As long ago as 1961, C. Bruns and R. H. Dicke pointed out that the structure of the sun, so far as it could be determined, might well account for the perturbation of Mercury, and, as a matter of fact, subsequent measurements of the oblateness of the solar sphere gave both the exact amount required to cause the precession of the orbit and indicated that the core of the sun rotates more rapidly than the photosphere, for which Hill presented additional evidence. But the work of Bruns and Dicke was swept under the rug, and the textbooks went on proclaiming that the precession of Mercury’s orbit had proved that Mercury contracted in size as its velocity increased as it approached perihelion and therefore proved Relativity. That kind of thinking is theological, not scientific.

⁴⁷ What makes the term “anti-Semitic,” which began as a joke in France, so disgusting is its sheer absurdity, since the Semitic race seems always to have been the object of the Jews’ most intense racial hatred. According to the tales in their Holy Book, they began by exterminating (with the help, of course, of their Big Pirate in the clouds) the Semitic population of a large part of Palestine, and when they appear in history, they have obtained, by whatever means, possession of that territory, enslaved its native population, and even appropriated their language, since Hebrew seems to be a dialect of Canaanite (Old Phoenician), much as Yiddish is essentially a corruption of German. And today, financed by the cringing peasants of their American colony, they are subjugating and, when convenient, exterminating the largely Semitic peoples of Asia Minor and direct their most intense hatred at Saudi Arabia, the nation which contains the largest percentage of pure Semitic stock, and which the Americans are scheduled to deliver into their hands after enough killing and destruction to appease the Jews’ hatred momentarily. The American serfs have just despatched 11,000 troops to help Begin, and will soon send many more, although Israel is the mightiest military power in the world, if one believes the American Congressman who recently assured his supporters that they must pay Israel a tribute of seven million dollars a day because “Israel is our only protection against the Soviet.” The Jews are, in fact, the most anti-Semitic people in the world, and opposition to them can be called “anti-Semitic” only in the world of 1984, where “war is peace” and “all are equal except that some are more equal than others.” Humpty Dumpty was a piker in linguistics!

⁴⁸ This is obviously true, even if one explains much of the scientists’ piety by invoking the “principle of inverse irreversibility” sardonically formulated by Ralph Estling in the New Scientist (30 September 1982), according to which a little evidence against an accepted scientific theory “will cause agonies of doubt,” but irrefutable proof of its untenability “will cause the scientist to cling to it with the tenacity and singlemindedness of a barnacle.”

⁴⁹ As one would expect, a Russian fakir, P. D. Ouspensky, produced a book, Tertium Organum, modestly designed to supplant the famous work by Lord Bacon; when translated into English in the 1920s, it sold like popcorn at a circus, since it proved that you must have a soul (sizzling with Love, of course) in the very place into which you insert a tennis ball when you turn it inside out without breaking its surface. Such profundity leaves intellectuals agape. When I reviewed Ouspensky’s last book, The Fourth Way (New York, 1957), I remarked that while it was permissible to doubt that “everything that dies feeds the moon” and that “the air we breathe is hydrogen 192,” the book contained one irrefragable statement: “people are becoming less and less sane.” Ouspensky proved that to the hilt.

⁵⁰ Some delightful verses on this problem by J. A. Lindon are printed in a footnote by Gardner, op. cit., p. 186.

⁵¹ They are convinced, however, when one of the animalcules on this tiny planet is able to measure by triangulation the height of the Saturnian, whose stature is, of course, proportional to the size of his planet. The Saturnian was more than twice as tall as Jesus, who was measured in the same way by the Reverend Mr. Oral Roberts.

⁵² Lidiraven Books, P. O. Box 5567, Sherman Oaks, California; $12.95 postpaid.

⁵³ The author could have gone on to consider what is even more alarming, the ever increasing incidence of downright fraud in “research” that is accepted as eternal truth by honest but gullible scientists throughout the world. One naturally expects corruption and crime in anything that emerges from the Dismal Swamp that is commonly called Washington, D.C. One thinks, for example, of the two great scientists who, as part of the Food and Drug Administration’s assault on the most eminent member of the College of Medicine at the University of Illinois, forged a spectroscopic analysis that was advertised to the public in Life (4 Oct. 1963), then one of the most widely circulated magazines in the nation. When an independent laboratory made its own spectroscopic analysis and exposed the hoax, the Administration’s natural response was to send out agents to threaten with reprisals corporations that used the services of the independent laboratoty. All of that is not really a contrast to the same Food and Drug Administration’s savage reprisals in July 1976 against the director of one of its own branches, who, although employed by the Federal government, doubtless through some blunder, was an honest man. Dr. Anthony Morris was given three days to get out of the building and all his records and even his laboratory were as thoroughly destroyed as could have been done by a horde of Huns. His great offense was to disclose to the public data that ruined the great scheme to inoculate everyone against the largely fictitious “swine flu,” which could have had – and may well have been planned to have – a result that would have duplicated the famous epidemic of a deadly influenza in 1918, with large numbers of Americans dying everywhere and bureaucrats and “experts” in all their glory rushing all over the landscape, making big noises, and sucking ever more blood from an affrighted populace.

The most heinous of all forms of crime is becoming increasingly common in the guise of “scientific research.” In a recent book, Betrayers of the Truth (New York, 1983), William J. Broad and Nicholas Wade list a few examples of forged data in very important areas of scientific investigation that happened to be detected, and they estimate that for every exposed fraud a hundred thousand more may “lie concealed in the marshy wastes of scientific literature.” That, no doubt, is gross hyperbole, but if the total is only 1% of that figure, a thousand sets of forged data now generally accepted as valid in matters of any importance should be enough to send cold shivers down your spine. The authors give fairly numerous examples, but they almost constantly keep their eyes pudically averted from Margaret Mead’s “anthropology,” the prevalent “sociology,” and their adjuncts, fields in which the fabrication of spurious evidence has long been a way of life, An anonymous writer in Instauration offered an explanation of the authors’ conspicuous discretion: “both work for the New York Times, which happens to be the granddaddy hoaxer of them all in the nature/nurture pseudo-debate.” It would be easy to compile a more inclusive and damning book, which could properly be entitled, “Treason to Western Civilization,’’ But that is another subject, far beyond the scope of the present article.

⁵⁴ I have discussed the law of cultural residues briefly in America’s Decline, pp. 360 f., and elsewhere. The perdurance of what Bacon, with a somewhat unfortunate choice of terms, called the idola theatri among a peasantry is notorious and often mentioned by “intellectuals,” who have overlooked the larger beam in their own eyes. The cheat is often concealed by the coining of nonce words and the perversion of the old, of which we see flagrant examples in the press every day. The word ‘Christian’ is a notoriously lubricious word. Theologians like to twist it to include only themselves as real ‘Christians,’ stigmatizing others as ‘Gnostics,’ ‘Arians,’ ‘Manichees,’ ‘Shakers,’ ‘Mormons,’ etc. because they differ on some point of doctrine that is regarded as crucial. Many clergymen today peddle Marx’s hokum, which they call the “social gospel,” and claim to be Christians although they admit they cannot believe the mythology; the Communists peddle the same garbage under other names and profess to be anti-Christian. Both are clearly derived from the proletarian agitation carried on by the earliest Christian sects, and so the term ‘Christian’ should be impartially applied to both or to neither.

⁵⁵ What makes the evolution so ironic and even paradoxial is the fact that, according to the tales in the “Old Testament,” which Christians claim to believe, their god (Yahweh, Jesus & Co., Inc.), for the greater part of time, decreed “human rights” only for his pet bandits and regarded all other races as having no more rights than swine; he notoriously afflicted the Egyptians with every torment he could think of to entertain his ferocious pets before they ran away with the gullible Egyptians’ portable property, and he helped his chosen marauders slaughter the Semites and other cattle in Palestine and steal a country for themselves. It is true that Christians believe their god reformed and became less savage after the Jews crucified a third of his divine corporation, and he then ordained “human rights” for the former biped cattle, except pagans and heretics. He did not really extend “human rights” to all loquacious species of anthropoids until he had to compete with the revived Stoicism of the deists, whose Nature’s God had decreed it for reasons best known to himself. The Jews, who have refused to take stock in christs who went bankrupt and were killed, have held fast to their “Old Testament’s” conception of Yahweh as a Celestial Jew who naturally regards all races but his own as cattle, to be domesticated or butchered. They are more logical as well as historically correct. What Aryans need, if they are unwilling to be cattle, is a god of their own, and it is a great pity that since belief in supernatural beings has become impossible for educated men, that recourse is closed to our race.

⁵⁶ The Christian ideal is most clearly stated by Jesus in the gospel that I cited in a review, reprinted in America’s Decline, pp. 360 f., q.v.

⁵⁷ I paid my respects to Mr. Seidenberg in 1963; see America’s Decline, pp. 236-246. An American who claims to have investigated in Doylestown, where Seidenberg was said to reside, tells me that ’’Seidenberg” is the pseudonym of a Jew who is one of the most prominent of our present rulers and is believed to have the job of manipulating the presidents in the Punch-and-Judy shows in the White House, but my informant claims to rely on sources he may not disclose.

⁵⁸ I am reminded of a blob of “science fiction” that I read years ago but thought not worth recording in my notes. In our blissfully workless future, the world will swarm with millions of Socrateses (yes, I know the correct plural is ‘Socratae,’ but forgive my pun). And all of them, clad in snow-white and freshly laundered himatia (just like Socrates), will walk in fair meadows, day after day, incessantly gabbling about the “good life” – which, presumably, is what they already have. I predict that before lunch time on the second or third day some of them will start punching others on the nose, just to have something interesting to do.

⁵⁹ Review in your mind, if you please, all the great poetry you have enjoyed – even all the poetry you have ever read. Can you call to mind a single example that does not depend on one or another of the supposed imperfections of human life that will have been eliminated and be unknown to the hapless “energy-consuming machines” of Jack’s dire future? They will be like blind men in the Sistine Chapel and not even know they are blind. Dr. Samuel Johnson justly observed that men in a state of equality could know only animal pleasures. Even Catran cannot entirely suppress an awareness that his “energy-consuming machines” will not be able to perceive any of the things that make life worth while for us, and in an epoptic frenzy he predicts at one point that human beings will be replaced by “cyborgs,” which he defines as “cybernated organisms.” They will be no more capable of happiness, and probably no more capable of thought, than the adding machine on your desk. Well, if the future the great Technocrat predicts is inevitable, we can at least hope that the sun will soon become a nova.

⁶⁰ This is an important factor in American life today. A judicious friend of mine attended a day-long meeting of several dozen young men and women who were being recruited for another scheme of “get-rich-quick” salesmanship. There was nothing of the almost incredible physical and psychic degradation imposed on Patrick’s victims, but a team of expert con men harangued the victims for hours with preposterous promises of quick profits and further contributed to their mental exhaustion by behavior suited to a madhouse, yelling like wild Indians, jumping up on chairs, and exhibiting such gross vulgarity that any normal man, not detained by curiosity about the techniques, would have walked out in ten minutes. The prospective purchasers of “franchises,” having been thus thoroughly bewildered and confused, tired and hungry after six hours, were finally served an abundant and excellent dinner, after which the boss financial evangelist told them again of the wonderful profits they were going to make and advised them about the best models of the Cadillacs they might as well order in the morning. My friend reports that the whole roomful of prospects went insane, writing out cheques on paper napkins and jumping on their chairs to yell in chorus, “Get the cheque! Get the cheque!” Needless to say, they were all petitioners in bankruptcy a few weeks or months later. The explosion of madness was so impressive that my friend wondered whether some drug had been placed in the food or, possibly, some gas introduced through the ventilating system. I wish I could think so, but I fear that the explanation is that all of the young persons had been made permanently feeble-minded in high schools.

⁶¹ No encouraging casualties, I mean. There are rare exceptions to the submissiveness, of course. I know of a young policeman who was ordered to undergo the usual course in “sensitivity training,” which sounded innocuous to him. When he found out what it was, he gave the behavioral scientist a right to the jaw and stepped over him to walk out and resign from the police force. Unfortunately, a prompt administration of cold water prevented that light of Behavioral Science from being opportunely extinguished.

⁶² Described, with the omission of certain sexual details, by D. Bacu in The Anti-Humans (1971, available from Liberty Bell Publications).

⁶³ In The Encyclopaedia of the Horse (London, Octopus Books, 1977; frequently reprinted).

⁶⁴ The well-known form of the fable first occurs in Phaedrus (h24), who, incidentally, has another (IV. 15-16) that is the most reasonable of all creation stories. Prometheus fashioned men and women out of clay, as sculptors make their models, but he did much of his work by night, after returning from a drinking party, on Olympus, and his unsteady eyes and wavering hands made all the blunders that are reproduced in human anatomy.

⁶⁵ He admits as much in the introduction to his sheaf of forgeries in the edition of 1887 and doubtless other editions of that oft-reprinted hoax: “I have as much reason for believing the genuineness of the contents of this book [i.e., his crude forgeries] as I have to believe the genuineness of the Scriptures, looking at the question from a human standpoint.”

⁶⁶ There is one fundamental difference, relevant to our subject here, which will, I think, be obvious to anyone who has observed the society about him, although no psychologist, so far as I know, has ventured on a study that would be so unfashionable at present. There is a great difference in the incidence of religiosity in men and women and a correspondingly great difference in the sexes’ attitudes toward their deity, when both recognize the same one. In The Uses of Religion, pp. 34 f., I mentioned the opinion of a venerable bishop whose observations had convinced him that “in every congregation there are always two religions, since the two sexes have in their inner consciousness conceptions of their deity so different as to be reciprocally unintelligible or, at least, unacceptable.” Furthermore, I am sure everyone has observed that almost invariably in our society males who show a strong emotional attachment to a god have grown up under predominantly feminine influence, whereas women who have emancipated themselves from superstition have been strongly influenced by a man to whom they were emotionally attached, usually a father, but often a lover or husband. And when a husband and wife are both strongly religious, there is a very marked difference in their credulity. Of this a perfect illustration is provided by Elizabeth (Barrett) and Robert Browning. Both attended a séance with a rather clever confidence man named Home, who exhibited to them his ‘spiritualistic’ tricks accompanied by his best patter about immortal souls, divine purposes, and the rest of the then fashionable hokum. The lady, although a poetess of some distinction and a highly intelligent woman, was completely taken in, revered the ghost-raising wizard, and looked forward to the glorious time when she could start hovering invisibly and impalpably in drawingrooms, rap tables on her own, and send silly messages to her survivors. Robert Browning, although himself given to sprees on metaphysics and warmly religious speculations, saw that the charlatan was merely performing parlor tricks in the dark with rather crude apparatus. Browning registered his opinion of Home in his well-known poem, “Mr. Sludge, the Medium.” This difference of opinion lasted throughout the rest of the Brownings’ life together, tempered by a forbearance enforced by their devotion to each other, and since both were essentially religious persons, they provide a neat example of the innate difference between the feminine and the masculine mind.

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Source: Liberty Bell publications; transcribed by Racial Idealism