Mad Scientists, Propaganda & Covert
War part 1
The Western notion of “democracy” currently offered
in the West is a sham, where every three of four years we demean ourselves by
choosing the lesser of two evils. True democracy is enshrined in the Golden
Rule, which not only ennobles the right, but the ability, of the average person
to have a say in the political process. Not to say that every citizen must
directly participate in that process, but rather that his opinion, if properly
informed, can offer a legitimate critique of the rightness or wrongness of any particular
course. The occult, which secretly
defines the outlook of many of our
nations’ leaders, proffers the diametrical opposite . It is ultimately fascistic,
by denying such a right or ability,
claiming instead that only those able to face unshaken the dark nihilism of the
absence of truth are entitled to rule without mercy over those who “can’t handle
the truth,” who must instead be manipulated through false propaganda, an
extension of what Plato called the “Noble Lie.”
Despite celebrating Stalin as a hero during World
War II, a chill came over US/Soviet relations near the end of the war. Because
of the perceived need to maintain “perpetual war,” communism immediately became
the new enemy of the West after the war’s end. While the US represents a system
of state control as thorough and complete as that of the Soviet Union, it’s
success is attributable to its strategy of avoiding being recognized with that
impression, by producing a system of propaganda that operated through what
appeared to be an independent “free” system of media. Rather than overt
slogans, the CIA insinuated its propaganda through the arts and entertainment,
giving the illusion that the patriotic output was spontaneously produced by
fellow citizens who had become amorous of their society by their own volition.
Assisting the Americans in fabricating the
supposed threat of a “Red Menace” was Reinhard Gehlen who, along with Otto
Skorzeny, was the primary agent of American covert action against the Soviets.
However, the Americans’ recruitment of former Nazis also suggests a deeper more
sinister association. After being condemned to death for war crimes in 1946,
the chief philosopher of Nazi Ariosophy Alfred Rosenberg declared: “Within fifteen years we will begin to be talked about again, and within
twenty years Nazism will again be a
force.”1 As Carl Oglesby explained, while it is popularly assumed that the Nazis suffered defeat, “on the
contrary, the evidence as of 1990 is that…
Nazism did not surrender unconditionally and disappear, that indeed it
finessed a limited but crucial victory over the Allies, a victory no less significant for having been kept a
secret from all but the few Americans who were directly involved.” 2 The
Americans were integral to this reorganization. Collaboration with the Nazis prior to World War II suggests that a number of
America’s leaders evidently harbored hidden sympathies for the cause of fascism. In fact, according to SS Major-General Prince Maximilian von
Hohenlohe, who had been in contact with Dulles on Himmler’s orders as of mid-1943, “Dulles does
not reject the basic idea and deeds of National Socialism” but he supposedly deplored
its excesses. Hohenlohe was later appointed to a top job in the Gehlen organization and made an adviser to
the US State Department. 3
Not only did the top Nazis escape to safety with American
assistance, but they would be absorbed into the heart of the American
intelligence establishment, and become indispensible in their sham fight with
communism. As explained in The Nazi
Hydra in Americaby Glen Yeadon and John Hawkins:
Gehlen is perhaps the man most responsible
for starting the Cold War. At first, the military was skeptical of Gehlen and his reports. However, because of the meddling of Allen Dulles and postwar rivalries between the OSS and the Pentagon’s Military Intelligence
Service, Gehlen soon became the leading
expert on the Soviets. 4
In 1945, the Joint Intelligence Objectives
Agency was established and given direct responsibility for Operation Paperclip, which was a precursor of
the CIA’s notorious MK-Ultra program of human research into
behavioral modification. Several secret US government projects grew out of Operation Paperclip.
These projects included Project CHATTER (established 1947), and Project BLUEBIRD (established 1950), which
was renamed Project ARTICHOKE in 1951. Their purpose was to study mind control,
interrogation, behavior
modification and related
topics. While the
CIA was particularly interested in scientists specializing in
aerodynamics and rocketry, chemical weapons, chemical reaction technology and medicine
as Christopher Simpson has shown, the
CIA also hired former Nazis “for
their expertise in propaganda and psychological warfare.” 5
One such scientist was purportedly the
notorious Nazi concentration camp
“Doctor” Joseph Mengele, the “Angel of
Death,” whose innumerable torturous “medical experiments” on detainees at Auschwitz had been directly financed by IG
Farben. 6 Mengele’s superior, Otmar
von Verschuer, as wartime director
of the Rockefeller Foundation created Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology,
Eugenics, and Human Heredity in Berlin, and secured funds for experiments
at Auschwitz from the German Research
council. The foundation’s German centers combined the search for organic signs
of mental illness with eugenic projects. The
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute had also been endowed by the Krupp family and James Loeb, Paul Warburg’s brother-in-law of the Kuhn-Loeb
banking family. Through the barbarous experimentation that took place in the
concentration camps, thousands were murdered, and their organs and other body
parts were sent to Verschuer and the
Rockefeller group at the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute.7
In 1946,
Verschuer wrote to the Bureau of Human Heredity in London asking for
help in continuing his research. In 1947, the Bureau moved from London to
Copenhagen where Verschuer joined the
group in a new Danish building
funded by Rockefeller money.
The first International Congress
in Human Genetics following WWII
was held there in 1956. Verschuer’s
former assistant, Dr. Kallmann, who had
been forced to leave his job by the
Nazis for being “half-Jewish,” helped save Verschuer by
testifying at his denazification proceedings. Kallmann, a director of the American
Eugenics Society, became an icon at the New York State Psychiatric Institute,
which remains to this day a hub of the Eugenics Society. With Verschuer and other Nazi notables, Dr. Kallmann also created the
American Society of Human Genetics, which organized the “Human Genome Project.”
4
Verschuer’s assistant Joseph Mengele, however, was wanted for war crimes. But,
as part of Operation Paperclip,
Otto Skorzeny used the resources of Die Spinneto
help Mengele escape to Argentina in 1949. This kind of
collaboration with the CIA purportedly stemmed from the perpetuation
of the relationship between the Muslim
Brotherhood and the Nazis. Its purpose
was apparently to employ the age-old indoctrination methods of the Ismaili
Assassins through the use of drugs, in their case marijuana. According
to Dean Henderson, author of Geopolitics: The Global Economy of Big Oil,
Weapons and Drugs:
Part of this Faustian bargain may have
involved the House of Saud chieftains providing information to US intelligence
on how to create mind-controlled assassins. The
Muslim Brotherhood claims to have first perfected this technique during
the 11th century Crusades when it
launched a brutal parallel secret society known as the Assassins , who employed mind-controlled
“lone gunmen” to carry out political assassinations of Muslim Saracen nationalists.
The Assassins worked in concert with
Knights Templar Christian invaders in
their attacks on progressive Arabs, but were repelled. 9
MK-Ultra was an extension of the behavior
control research conducted by the Tavistock Institute. Formed at Oxford University,
London, in 1920 by the RIIA, the
Tavistock Clinic became the Psychiatric Division of the British Army
during World War II.10 The clinic took
its name from its benefactor Herbrand Russell, Marquees of Tavistock, 11th Duke of Bedford. The Dukes of
Bedford was the title inherited by the influential Russell family, one of the most
prominent aristocratic families in Britain who came to power and the peerage
with the rise of the Tudor dynasty. Herbrand Russell and arch-conspirator Bertrand Russell shared the same great
grandfather, John Russell, 6th Duke of Bedford. Bertrand Russell was descended from John
Russell’s third son, Bertrand’s grandfather, John Russell, 1st Earl Russell,
who served twice as Prime Minister of the England in the 1840s and 1860s.
Herbrand Russell’s son, Hastings Russell, Lord Tavistock, the 12th Duke of
Bedford, went on to become patron of the British Peoples Party, a far-right
political party founded in 1939 and led by ex-members of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. It was he whom Rudolf Hess flew to England to contact about
ending World War II.
The basis of the project of the Tavistock Institute
was explained by Lord Bertrand Russell, who is considered one of the founders
of analytic philosophy along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege and his protégé
Ludwig Wittgenstein, and is widely held
to be one of the twentieth century’s premier logicians. Russell offered a
revealing glimpse into Frankfurt School’s
mass social engineering efforts, in his 1951 book, The Impact of Science on
Society:
I think the subject which will be of most
importance politically is mass psychology… Its importance has been enormously
increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most
influential is what is called “education.”
Religion plays a part, though a diminishing
one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part… It may be
hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he
can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and
equipment. …Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be
rigidly confi ned to the governing
class. The populaci will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When
the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of
education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely
without the need of armies or policemen. 11
A successor organization, the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, was then founded in 1946 under a grant from
the Rockefeller Foundation when it separated from the Tavistock Clinic. According to John
Coleman, a former British Intelligence
agent, it was Tavistock-designed methods
that got the US into World War II and which, under the guidance of
Dr. Kurt Lewin, established the
OSS. Tavistock became known as
the focal point in Britain for psychoanalysis and the psychodynamic theories of
Sigmund Freud and his followers. Tavistock is ostensibly a British charity
concerned with group behavior and organizational behavior. Tavistock engages in educational, research
and consultancy work in the social sciences and applied psychology. Its clients
are chiefly public sector organizations, including the
European Union, several British government departments, and some private
clients. Its network now extends from the University of Sussex to the US
through the Stanford Research Institute ( SRI),
Esalen Institute, MIT, Hudson Institute, Brookings Institution, Aspen Institute, Heritage Foundation, the Center of Strategic
and International Studies at Georgetown, US Air Force Intelligence, and
the RAND Corporation.12
The
Tavistock Institute’s projects were a follow-up on the work of the Frankfurt School, a predominantly Jewish group
of philosophers and Marxist
theorists who fled Germany when Hitler shut down their Institut für Sozialforschung,
“Institute for Social Research,” at the University of Frankfurt. The school’s
main figures sought to learn from and
synthesize the works of such varied thinkers as Kant,
Hegel, Marx, Freud,
Weber and Lukacs, and focusing on the study and criticism of culture
developed from the thought of Freud. The
Frankfurt School’s most well-known proponents included Max Horkheimer, media theorist Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse,
Walter Benjamin and Jurgen Habermas. Dr. Kurt Lewin, the founder of the study of “group
dynamics,” was a member of the Frankfurt school in America, and an important influence on the work of
the Tavistock.
In producing their critical theory, the Frankfurt School brought together the dialectical versions of history of Hegel and
Marx. They were deeply influenced
by Hegel’s idealism and dialectical interpretation of history, and derived
a sense of the power of Spirit(Geist) or of cultural forms in human cultural
life. From Marx they derived a sense of
the importance of material forces in history and the role of economics in human
and social life. They were also heavily
influenced by Nietzsche, particularly his critiques of mass culture,
society, morality and the state, which in Thus Spake Zarathustra, he had denounced
the new idol and object of worship. Nietzsche
also criticized “mass man” and
conformity, and was one of the first critics of the role of journalism in
creating mass opinion. The Frankfurt
School agreed with Nietzsche that a lot
of the common cultural forms repressed natural instincts, and therefore tried
to develop a philosophy that would lead to the supposed emancipation of the
human being in society.
The
Frankfurt School recognized that modern consumer society was the new
form of capitalism, creating novel
forms of social institutions that integrated the working class into advanced
capitalist systems. Important, therefore, was their attempt to update
traditional Marxist interpretation by
analyzing the role of what they recognized as state and monopoly capitalism. While, beginning in the late
nineteenth century, a new era of monopoly
capitalism had arrived, additionally, with the Great Depression the state
began to play a much more important role in managing the economy, resulting in
the new model of state capitalism
exemplified by the New Deal. There were two forms of
state monopoly capitalism: there was the
fascist and authoritarian state
capitalism of Nazi Germany and the democratic state capitalism of the United States. In both of
these forms of state capitalism, new
types of administration, bureaucracy and
methods of social domination emerged that contributed, they believed, to a
curtailing of individual freedom and
democracy, giving rise to conformity and massification. In particularly,
the Frankfurt School explored
the role of the mass media. Where control of mass media was overt in Nazi Germany, and similarly in the Soviet Union, the Frankfurt School saw that the instruments of
mass culture and communication were playing an equally important role in marketing capitalism,
democracy and the American way of life.
The members of the Frankfurt School were, for the most part,
from assimilated Jewish families. And it would seem, due to their secularism,
despite retaining a Jewish identity, as well as their cohesiveness and theories
promoting a reinterpretation of traditional morality, particularly sexual
morality, that they must have been of
Sabbatean origin. When they treated religious topics, as in the case
of Walter Benjamin, it was of a
decidedly mystical orientation. Benjamin was highly influenced by his close friend Gershom Scholem, the
renowned twentieth- century expert on the
Kabbalah, regarded as having founded the academic study of the
subject. Scholem, by tracing to the
origins of Jewish mysticism from its beginnings in Merkabah and all the way forward to its
final culmination in the messianic movement of Sabbatai Zevi, rehabilitated perceptions of
the Kabbalah as not a negative example
of irrationality or heresy but as supposedly vital to the development of Judaism as a religious and national
tradition. 13 According to Scholem’s “dialectical” theory of history, Judaism passed through three stages. The
first is a primitive or “naïve” stage that lasted to the destruction
of the second Temple. The second is
Talmudic, while the final is a mystical stage which recaptures the lost essence
of the first naïve stage, but
reinvigorated through a highly
abstract and even esoteric set of categories.
Frankfurt School historian Martin Jay concedes
that a certain degree of Jewish identity nurtured the Frankfurt School’s perspectives. Having
attempted to live assimilated lives in Weimar Germany with dubious success, he
says, must have had an impact. “The sense of role-playing that the Jew eager to
forget is origins must have experienced,” says Jay, “could only have left a
residue of bitterness, which might easily feed a radical critique of the
society as a whole.” 14Jay additionally concedes that the Kabbalah would have had some influence as well, as noted by one of its own members, Jurgen Habermas. Jay summarizes:
Jurgen
Habermas has recently argued that a striking resemblance exists between certain strains in the Jewish
cultural tradition and in that of German Idealism, whose roots have often been
seen in Protestant Pietism. One important similarity, which is especially crucial
for an understanding of Critical Theory, is the old cabalistic idea that speech
rather than pictures was the only way to approach God. The distance between
Hebrew, the sacred language, and the profane speech of the Diaspora made its
impact on the Jews who were distrustful
of the current universe of discourse. This, so
Habermas has argued, parallels the idealist critique of empirical
reality, which reached its height in Hegelian dialectics… The same might be argued
for its [the Frankfurt School’s] ready
acceptance of [Freudian] psychoanalysis, which proved especially congenial to
assimilated Jewish intellectuals. 15
Habermas cites the example of the Minima
Moraliaof Theodor Adorno who, despite
his apparent secularism, explains that all truth must be measured with
reference to the Redemption,
meaning the fulfillment of
Zionist prophecy and the advent of
the Messiah.
Philosophy, in the only way it is to be
responsive in the face of despair, would be the attempt to treat all things as
they would be displayed from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no
light but what shines on the world from the redemption; everything else is
exhausted in reconstruction and remains a piece of technique. Perspectives
would have to be produced in which the world is similarly displaced, estranged,
reveals its tears and blemishes the way they once lay bare as needy and distorted
in the messianic light. 16
David Bakan in Sigmund Freud and The Jewish Mystical Tradition, has
shown that Freud too was a “crypto-
Sabbatean,” which would explain his extensive interest in the occult and the
Kabbalah. As shown in “The Consolation
of Theosophy II,” an article by Frederick C. Crews for The New York Review of
Books, several scholars have established that
Freud was among the key figures
who developed
therapy through the retrieval of
forgotten trauma, by way of debt to Franz
Anton Mesmer. 17 Adam Crabtree’s From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the
Roots of Psychological Healing traces Mesmer’s use of artificially induced trance-states to uncover the influence of unconscious mental activity as the source of hidden
thoughts or impulses. Jonathan Miller traced the steps by which psychologists
gradually stripped Mesmerism of its occult associations, reducing it to mere
hypnosis, thus paving the way for recognition of unconscious mental
functioning. 18
Hypnotism is nothing new. It is merely what had
been known as putting someone under a spell, and practiced for thousands of
years by witch doctors, spirit mediums, shamans, Buddhists, and yogis. Freud himself was renowned in Vienna as a
suggestive healer, and his practice relied heavily on the use of hypnosis, a
method he characterized as essentially “mystical.” 19 Freud also engaged in magical propitiatory
acts and tested the power of soothsayers. He confided to his biographer Ernest Jones his belief in “clairvoyant
visions of episodes at a distance” and “visitations from departed spirits.” 20
He even arranged a séance with his family
members and three other analysts. He also practiced numerology and believed in
telepathy. In Dreams and Occultism, he declared, “It would seem to me that
psycho-analysis, by inserting the unconscious between what is physical and what
was previously called ‘psychical,’ has paved the way for the assumption of such
processes as telepathy.” 21
Freud, when he was made aware of the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria apparently exclaimed, “This is gold!”
and asked why these ideas had never previously been brought to his attention.
22 Carl Jung, who had worked with Freud, commented approvingly of the Jewish
mystical origins of Freudian psychoanalysis, stating that in order to
comprehend the origin of Freud’s
theories:
…one would have to take a deep plunge into
the history of the Jewish mind. This would carry us beyond Jewish Orthodoxy
into the subterranean workings of Hasidism… and then into the intricacies of the Kabbalah, which still remains unexplored
psychologically.23
Freud’s theories were excessively concerned
with sex and even incest, which is
reflected in Sabbatean antinomianism. As Gershom Scholem noted, the Sabbateans were particularly obsessed with upturning
prohibitions against sexuality,
particularly those against incest, as the Torahlists thirty-six prohibitions that
are punishable by “extirpation of the soul,” half of them against incest. Baruchya
Russo(Osman Baba), who in about the year 1700 was the leader of the most
radical wing of the Sabbateans in Salonika and who directly influenced Jacob Frank, not only declared these
prohibitions abrogated but went so far as to transform their contents into
commandments of the new “ Messianic Torah.” Orgiastic rituals were preserved
for a long time among Sabbatean groups and
among the Dönmeh until about 1900. As late
as the seventeenth century a festival was introduced called Purim, celebrated
at the beginning of spring, which reached its climax in the “extinguishing of the
lights” and in an orgiastic exchange of wives. 24
As Bakan indicated, in his book Moses and Monotheism, Freud makes clear that, as in the case of the
Pharaohs of Egypt, incest confers god-like status on its perpetrators. In the
same book, Freud argued that Moses had
been a priest of Aten instituted by Akhenaten, the Pharaoh revered by Rosicrucian
tradition, after whose death Moses was forced to leave Egypt with his followers. Freud also claims that Moses was an Egyptian,
in an attempt to discredit the origin of the Law conferred by him. Commenting
on these passages, Bakan claims that his attack on Moses was an attempt to
abolish the law in the same way that Sabbatai Zevi did.
Thus,
Freud disguised a Frankist creed
with psychological jargon, proposing that conventional morality is an unnatural
repression of the sexual urges imposed during childhood. Freud instead posited that we are driven by subconscious impulses, primarily the sex
drive. In Totem and Taboo published in 1913, which caused quite a scandal, Freud theorized about incest through the Greek
myth of Oedipus, in which Oedipus unknowingly killed his father and married his
mother, and incest and reincarnation rituals practiced in ancient Egypt. He used the Oedipus conflict to point out how much
he believed that humans desire incest and must repress that desire.
Freud also read Nietzsche as a student and analogies between
their work were pointed out almost as soon as he developed a following. Freud and Nietzsche had a common acquaintance
in Lou Andreas- Salomé, a Russian-born psychoanalyst and author. Her diverse
intellectual interests led to friendships and affairs with a broad array of
well-known western intellectuals, giving her a reputation of somewhat of a
femme fatale. These included
Richard Wagner and Rainer Maria Rilke, considered one of the most significant poets in the German
language, and who was a friend to Gurdjieff’s
collaborator, Thomas de Hartmann. Salomé claimed that Nietzsche was desperately in love with her and
that she refused his proposal of marriage to her. During her lifetime she achieved
some fame with her controversial biography of
Nietzsche, the first major
study of his life.
Salomé was a pupil of Freud and became his associate in the
creation of psychoanalysis. She was one
of the first female psychoanalysts and one of the first women
to write psychoanalytically on
female sexuality. She
developed Freud’s ideas from his 1914 essay On Narcissism, and argued that love
and sex are a reunion of the self with its lost half. She was eventually
attacked by the Nazis as a “Finnish
Jewess,” though her parents were supposedly of French Huguenot and Northern
German descent. A few days before her death the
Gestapo confiscated her library,
because she was a colleague of Freud, practiced “Jewish science” and had many books by Jewish authors. The
fact that Salomé would have secretly
been Jewish despite professing a Christian heritage would suggest that her
family were Sabbateans. We may suppose
that their deviant sexual practices might have contributed to a trauma that
gave rise to her inability to develop normal relationships with other men, and
in turn to her unconventional theories. We may speculate that, sadly, the
origin of Salomé’s dysfunctions were possibly incestuous relationships with her
father and five older brothers. In fact,
Lou would claim to see a brother hidden in
every man she met. She married linguistics scholar Friedrich Carl Andreas, though
they never consummated the marriage, and yet remained together from 1887 until
his death in 1930. Nevertheless, Salomé
maintained sexual relationships outside marriage and visited regularly a
gathering place for gay men and lesbians.
Freud considered Salomé’s article
on anal eroticism from 1916 one of the best things she wrote. This led him to
his own theories about anal retentiveness, where prohibition against pleasure
from anal activity “and its products” is the first occasion during which a child
experiences hostility to his supposedly
instinctual impulses. 25
Essentially, by rejecting that man could be
driven by a higher moral inclination,
Freud believed all that was left was man’s animal nature, particularly
what he called the libido, a belief that was reflective of his association with the traditions of occult
thought and its veneration of the act of sex as the only true vital
impulse. Freud believed that the libido
developed in individuals by changing its object of desire, a process codified by the concept of “sublimation.” He
argued that humans are born “polymorphously perverse,” meaning that any number
of objects could be a source of pleasure. He further argued that as humans
develop they become fixated on different and specific objects through their stages of development. The first is the oral stage,
exemplified by an infant’s pleasure
in nursing, then in the anal stage marked by a child’s “pleasure” in evacuating his or her bowels, and finally in the phallic stage. In the phallic stage,
Freud contended, male infants
become fixated on the mother as a sexual object, referred to as the Oedipus
Complex, a phase brought to an end by threats of castration, resulting in the
castration complex, the severest trauma in man’s young life.
Through
Freud’s influence, the “ incest
taboo” would become an issue of
fundamental concern to the Frankfurt
School. For example, Claude LeviStrauss (1908 –2009),
a French anthropologist and one of the central figures in the structuralist
school of thought, considered the universal taboo against incest as the
cornerstone of human society. Incest, he believed, was not naturally repugnant,
but became prohibited through culture.
Lévi- Strauss’ theory was based on an analysis of the work of Marcel Mauss who believed that the basis of
society is the need for the exchange of gifts. Because fathers and brothers
would be unwilling to share their wives and daughters, a shortage of women
would arise that would threaten the proliferation of a society. Thus was
developed the “Alliance theory,” creating the universal prohibition of incest
to enforce exogamy. The alliance theory, in which one’s daughter or sister is
offered to someone outside a family circle starts a circle of exchange of
women: in return, the giver is entitled to a woman from the other’s intimate
kinship group. This supposedly global phenomenon takes the form of a
“circulation of women” which links together the various social groups in single
whole to form society.
Carl
Jung, Freud’s associate, who was
also affiliated with Tavistock, founded analytical psychology, and proposed
and developed the concepts of the extraverted and the introverted personality, archetypes,
and the collective unconscious. Jung became
the central figure
at Eranos, is an intellectual discussion group
dedicated to the study of psychology, religion, philosophy and spirituality
which has met annually. The group was founded by Olga Froebe-Kapteyn in 1933,
and these conferences have been held annually on the grounds of her estate near
Ascona in Switzerland. Originally a resort area for members of the Children of the Sun and Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy cult, Ascona became a
sort of early New Age haven of bohemianism and the occult, featuring
experimentation in surrealism, modern dance, Dada, paganism, feminism, pacifism,
nudism, psychoanalysis and natural
healing. Crowley’s OTO
had its only female lodge at Ascona.
The dominant influence in the area came
from Dr. Otto Gross, a student of Freud
and friend of Carl Jung, who had been part of Max Weber’s circle when Frankfurt
School founder Georg Lukacs was also a member. Based on his interpretation of
Nietzsche and Freud, Gross’ aim was to revive the cult of Astarte to bring
about a “sexual utopia” through “sexual revolution and orgy.”
26 Among the
members of his cult were Frieda and D.
H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, philosopher Martin Buber, and Alma Mahler, the wife
of composer and Theosophical Society
member, Gustav Mahler.27
Froebe-Kapteyn established Eranos at the
suggestion of the eminent German religious historian, Rudolf Otto (1869-1937),
an early theorist of the psychology of religion. Over the years, interests at
Eranos included, Yoga and Meditation in East and West, Ancient Sun Cults and
the Symbolism of Light in the Gnosis and in Early Christianity, Man and Peace, Creation and Organization
and The Truth of Dreams. Participants over the years have included the scholar of Hinduism, Heinrich Zimmer, Karl Kerényi the
scholar of Greek mythology, the Traditionalist
Mircea Eliade, Gilles Quispel the scholar of Gnosticism, Gershom Scholem, and Henry Corbin a scholar
of Islamic mysticism.
Jung’s appointment to the WFMH was despite
the fact that in 1934 he published an
attack on Freud as a proponent of
“insidious Jewish psychology,” and his 1938 essay Wo ta n he praised Hitler as a “visionary, an inspired shaman
with magical power, a spiritual vessel.” Carl
Jung, who is considered the founder of analytical psychology, was also
heavily interested in various occult subjects, like astrology, alchemy,
Gnosticism and Eastern mysticism. In Memories, Dreams,
Reflections, Jung recounted that
his turn to psychiatry while in medical school was accompanied by an avid
interest in the literature on psychic phenomena. In particular, he was drawn to
Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit Seerand the writing of Swedenborg.
Jung was convinced that he had been chosen by
God for a prophetic mission to herald the dawning Age of Aquarius and it is through him that
the idea became a mainstay of the counterculture
of the 60s and 70s. 28 Richard Noll in The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of
Carl Jung, has argued that the
early Jung was influenced
by Theosophy, sun worship and
völkisch nationalism in developing the
ideas on the collective unconscious and archetypes. 29 Among the formative influences on Jung were writings of Blavatsky’s secretary, G.R.S.
Mead, on
Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and Mithraism. As
Jung himself admitted, “the main
body of the collective unconscious cannot be strictly said to be psychological,
but psychical.” 30
Jung developed these theories during the sixteen
years he worked on the Red Book. In 1913, at the age of thirty-eight, Jung
repeatedly induced trance states using methods he had learned from his
experience with spiritualism. This technique, which he would later call “active
imagination,” cause him to experience a horrible “confrontation with the
unconscious,” when he saw visions and heard voices. These altered state of
conscious Jung understood as a visionary
“descent” into the unconscious, which he refers to as the Land of the Dead,
corresponding to the traditional pagan underworld.
Though at first
he worried he might be schizophrenic, Jung
decided that it was a valuable experience.
Jung began to transcribe his notes into what came to be called the Red
Book. After years of Jung’s heirs
refusing access to it, Jung’s grandson Ulrich Hoerni decided to publish it. In
it, Jung described that he was visited
by two figures, an old man and a young woman, who
identified themselves as Elijah and Salome, accompanied by a large black snake.
The Elijah figure became his
guiding spirit, that Jung called
Philemon, “a mythological creature recalling centaurs, mermaids and the
Minotaur.” 31 In Memories, Dreams and
Reflections, he reveals
that this figure, was a
“pagan” having “an EgyptoHellenistic atmosphere with a gnostic
coloration.”32 It is from his discussions with Philemon, as recounted in
Memories, Dreams and Refl ections, that
Jung received his most profound insights about the nature of the human
psyche.
Salome, who was identified by Jung as an anima figure,began worshipping Jung, saying to him, “You are Christ.” Then
the snake coiled itself around Jung, and he realized as he struggled that he had
assumed the attitude of the crucifixion. While the snake was squeezing him, Jung felt his head change into that of a lion, and
described, “The animal face which I felt mine transformed into was the famous Leontocephalus of the Mithraic Mysteries.’’
33 Jung became a god, known as the Aion. Near the end of his life Jung published a book in 1951 on “the
phenomenology of the self” named after this god, with a cover photograph
featuring Deus Leontocephalus.
The Mysteries of Mithras, according to Jung, are nature worship “in the best sense
of the word; while the primitive Christians exhibited throughout an antagonistic
attitude to the beauties of the world.” 34 Jung regarded Christianity as a Jewish religion that was
cruelly imposed on the pagan peoples of Europe, who were therefore cut off from
the primordial heritage of Aryan peoples.
Jung was influenced by
Franz Cumont, at the time the leading
scholar of Mithraism, who saw Mithras as
“the old Aryan deity” worshipped by different names in the religions of
ancient India and Iran. It is not surprising,
therefore, as Noll indicates, that between 1909 and 1914, Jung and his assistants believed the mythological
elements in psychotic symptoms in patients were survivals from ancient Aryan
cultures. According to Noll, “When Jung
became one with Aion in his visionary initiation experience, in his imagination
he was not only becoming a full participant in the mysteries of Mithras; he was experiencing a direct
initiation into the most ancient of the mysteries of his Aryan ancestors.” 35
The accusation that Jung was a
Nazi sympathizer stems from a magazine article he wrote in 1918, in
which he drew distinctions between Jewish and German psyches to illustrate the
variety of heritable elements of the collective unconscious. Jung is also accused of complying with
the Nazi authorities, in particular with
the cousin of Hermann Göring,
Matthias Göring, who became the leader
of organized psychotherapy in Germany. He remained affiliated with German
psychoanalysis from the rise of the Nazi
regime in the 1936s, through the first years of the war, though he insisted that his main motivation was to aid disenfranchised Jews. As his Jewish friend James Kirsch
noted, Jung was “a man with his contradictions.” Another
commentator later argued that Jung was
“—to put the best face on it—confused by the politics of his day.”36
In
Black Sun: Aryan Cults,
Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of
Identity, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke reports how
Jung described “ Hitler as possessed by the archetype of the
collective Aryan unconscious and could
not help obeying the commands of an inner voice.” In a series of interviews
between 1936 and 1939, Jung
characterized Hitler as an archetype,
often taking the place of his own personality. “Hitler is a spiritual vessel, a
demi-divinity; even better, a myth. Benito
Mussolini is a man.” Jung, explained
Goodrick-Clarke, likened Hitler to Mohammed, the messiah of Germany who teaches
the virtue of the sword. “His voice is that of at least 78 million Germans. He
must shout, even in private conversation… The voice he hears is that of the
collective unconscious of his race.” 37
US military intelligence apparently found
that claims of Jung’s Nazi sympathies
were unsubstantiated, and cleared him for employment in the OSS, where he was known
as “Agent 488” by Allen Dulles. Jung had
a devoted student in Mary Bancroft, who
became Allen Dulles’ mistress while he
was stationed in Berne during World War
II. Bancroft affectionately referred to Jung as a “sex symbol,” despite his
age, and acted as an intermediary through which he was able to conduct a case
study of Dulles, who he considered a “quite a tough nut.” 38 Nearing the end of
the war, Dulles exchanged letters with
Jung on the best use of psychological techniques for turning the German
“collective mind” from Nazism
towards democracy. Jung was also briefly involved in a plot to overthrow
Hitler, and his essay “ Wotan,” in his which he presents Nazism as evidence
that Germany, which he called a “land of spiritual catastrophes,” had been
overcome by the archetype of the ancient Teutonic god, became required reading throughout the
British Foreign Office.
Eisenhower himself turned to Jung’s
analyses for insight into how best to convince German civilians that defeat was
inevitable. 39 Dulles later remarked: “Nobody will probably ever know how much
Prof Jung contributed to the allied
cause during the war.” 40
After the war, Jung tried to excuse his over-zealous
characterizations of the Nazi era.
“However,” notes Sanford Drob, in an article titled “ Jung’s Kabbalistic Vision,” for the Journal of
Jungian Theory and Practice, “he exhibited a clear tendency to reinvent rather
than repent of his earlier views.” 41 By the 1950s, Jung began to
include numerous references to
Kabbalistic ideas and sources in his works. Jung claimed
to have read the “whole of Kabbalah Denudata,”
of Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, and
quoted the works of Gershom Scholem. 42 He acknowledged his debt to the
Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, in the writing of his Answer to Job, for the
idea that man must help God in
completing creation. 43 Jung’s last great work, Mysterium Coniunctionis, a treatise on alchemy completed in 1954, is filled with discussions of such Kabbalistic symbols as Adam Kadmon, the
divine archetypes or Sefiroth, and
the union of the Holy One and his Shekhinah. As Drob explains:
These Jewish symbols (which in some but not
all instances were mediated for Jung
through the Christian Kabbalah) became
important pivots around which Jung constructed
his final interpretations of such notions
as the archetypes and the collective unconscious, and his theory of the
ultimate psychological purpose of man.44
In an interview conducted in 1955, Jung remarked that “the Hasidic Rabbi Baer
from Mesiritz, whom they called the Great Maggid…anticipated [my] entire psychology
in the eighteenth century,” calling the Maggid “a most impressive man.”45 The
Maggid had posited that the Godhead has a hidden life within the mind of man,
and that while the Godhead himself is the foundation and source of thought,
actual thinking can only occur within the framework of the human mind, a
notion, as Drob points out, that clearly anticipated Jung’s own “psychologization” of the objects
of religious discourse. 46
In his autobiographical Memories,
Dreams, Reflections, Jung described experiencing visions,
following his heart attack in 1944, that were “the most tremendous things I
have ever experienced.” The visions, which involve overtly Kabbalistic themes,
occurred, he relates,
“as though I were floating in space,
as though I were safe in the womb of the universe.” 47 The visions involved the
divine wedding between
Tifereth and Malchut,
the Sefiroths which
represent the masculine and feminine aspects of both God and the world.
Finally, in his Kabbalistic vision, Jung identifies himself with Rabbi Simon ben Yochai, who, according to Jewish tradition, is the author of the Zohar.
The
Tavistock Institute began behavior control research in the 1950s
coordinated with the Scottish Rite Freemasons, the CIA and other British, American, Canadian,
and UN agencies.In 1934, the Scottish
Rite of Freemasonry joined the
Rockefellers in sponsoring psychiatric research into dementia praecox (
schizophrenia). 48 In 1936, the Scottish
Rite’s Field Representative of Research on
dementia praecox, Dr. Nolan D. C. Lewis, director of the New York State Psychiatric
Institute, reported to the Scottish Rite
Northern Supreme Council “on the
progress of the fourteen research projects being
financed by the Supreme Council.” 49 The head of the Scottish Rite Research Committee was Dr.
Winfred Overholser Sr., president of the American Psychiatric Association who
provided overall leadership for the Rite’s psychiatric research. Overholser was for twenty five years the super
intendent of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., the first
large-scale, federally run psychiatric hospital in the US, where he pioneered the
use of “group therapy, tranquillizing drugs and psychodrama.” 50
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