World War One Part 2
The
Young Turks regarded themselves the heirs of the secret organization known
as the Young Ottomans, formed in 1865, which drew their inspiration from
the Carbonari societies founded by Mazzini, like Young Europe, Italy,
Spain andPoland.Influenced by Montesquieu, Rousseau and the French Revolution, they advocated a
constitutional, parliamentary government. The organization was forbidden and
its members exiled in 1867. In 1876, the Young Ottomans briefly seized power, temporarily installing Sultan
Murad V, who had also been a Freemason.
They ended a debt moratorium, paid off the British, declared free trade, and
brought in European bankers. But they were soon overthrown. 47 Murad V was
dethroned three months later, and replaced by Abdul Hamid II.
The failure of the Young Ottoman policies in reversing the decline of the Ottoman Empire led groups of intellectuals to
search for other means. One of these groups was the Young Turks. The Young Turks were created in the 1890s by a
prominent Sephardic Jewish family in
Ottoman Salonika (modern
Thessaloniki, Greece) and an official of the Italian B’nai B’rith, named Emmanuel Carasso.
Carasso was also the grand master of an Italian masonic lodge there
called “Macedonia Resurrected.” The lodge was the headquarters of the Young Turks, and all the top Young Turk leadership were members. The Italian
masonic lodges in the Ottoman Empire had
been set up by a follower of Mazzini named Emmanuel Veneziano, who was also a
leader of the European Affiliate of the B’nai B’rith’s, as well as the Alliance Israëlite Universelle. 48
Abdul Hamid II, the Ottoman Sultan, was overthrown in 1908 in a
military coup carried out by the Young
Turks against his crumbling regime, who seized power over the
Ottoman Empire . While in power, the
Young Turks ran several newspapers
including The Young Turk, of which Zeev Jabotinsky was the editor. Jabotinsky was the
founder of Revisionist Zionism, on which the policy of the Zionist
terrorist faction the Irgun was based,
and helped form the Jewish Legion of the British army in World War I. He was educated as a young man
in Italy, and later described Mazzini’s ideas as the basis for the Zionist movement. Jabotinsky arrived in Turkey shortly after
the Young Turks seized power, to take
over the paper. The paper was owned by a member of the Turkish cabinet, but it
was funded by the Russian Zionist
federation, and managed by the B’nai
B’rith. 49
Israel has typically been reluctant to describe
the Turkish massacre of the Armenians in 1915 as “genocide.” As investigative
journalist Wayne Madsen pointed out, it has usually been assumed that the reason
for Israel’s reticence was not to
upset Israel’s close military and
diplomatic ties with Turkey. However, more evidence is being uncovered that the
Armenian genocide was largely the work of the Dönmeh leadership of the Young Turks. 50 The official who carried out
the genocide of the Armenians and Assyrians was a Young Turk from Salonika, Mehmet Talaat. Talaat was the interior
minister and dictator of the regime during
World War I. He had been a member of
Carasso’s Italian Masonic lodge in
Salonika. One year prior to the 1908 coup, Talaat became the grand
master of the Scottish Rite Masons in
the Ottoman Empire . 51
From without, the final dissolution of the Ottoman Caliphate was accomplished by exploiting the
treachery of the Arab Muslims of the Hijaz, who rose up in a large-scale
insurrection, known as the Arab Revolt. Instigating the revolt was the ruler of
the Hijaz at the time, Sharif Hussein of
Mecca, who belonged to the Hashemite clan that claimed descent from the Prophet
Mohammed, and who had ruled on behalf of the
Ottoman Empire in the region. On a visit to Damascus in 1914, Hussein’s
son Faisal had been given the Damascus Protocolby
the Arab secret societies al Fatatand al Ahd. The Damascus Protocoldeclared
that they would support Hussein’s Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, if the demands in it were
submitted to the British.
The Arab Revolt represented a renewed attempt
on the part of the British to Pit Arabs
against Turks after their first
unsuccessful attempt with the Wahhabis in the eighteenth and nineteenth
century. The ostensible aim of the Arab Revolt was autonomy for the Arab
peoples of the Ottoman Empire , creating
a single unified Arab state from Syria to
Yemen, under a puppet Caliphate, where
Hussein would be proclaimed “King of all the Arabs.” It was a plan devised by
London’s Middle East team which included
foreign secretary Lord Curzon, Robert Cecil, and his cousin Arthur Balfour, and also Mark Sykes and David George Hogarth, the chief of
the Arab Bureau. They were joined by
Winston Churchill and Arnold Toynbee, who was head of the RIIA of the Round Tablers. Outlining the
policy was T. E. Lawrence “of Arabia”:
If the Sultan of Turkey were to disappear,
then the Caliphate by common consent
of Islam would fall to the family of the
prophet, the present representative of which is Hussein, the Sharif of
Mecca. Hussein’s activities seem beneficial to us, because it marches with
our immediate aims, the breakup of the Islamic bloc and the disruption of the Ottoman Empire , and because the states they
would set up would be as harmless to ourselves as Turkey was. If properly
handled the Arab States would remain in a state of political mosaic, a tissue
of jealous principalities incapable of cohesion, and yet always ready to
combine against an outside force. 52
Assisted by
T. E. Lawrence in 1916, in the midst of the War, Faisal and the British
army coordinated the Arab Revolt, which finally succeeded in
wresting Middle Eastern territories from the
Ottoman Empire , and helping to end the Caliphate. Faisal seized Damascus in 1918. Five days
later, an armistice with the Ottoman
Empire came into effect. The Ottoman
government effectively collapsed, and the empire was divided amongst the
victorious powers. The Turkish people refused to accept this arrangement,
however, and under
Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk, the remnants of the Young Turk movement formed a government in
Ankara, and created an army that forced the Greeks and Italians out of
Anatolia, while the British and French refused to intervene.
In
Salonika, Greece, the heartland
of the Dönmeh community, Turkish Freemasonry
and the Young Turk movement, many Jews claimed that Ataturk was a Dönmeh.53 The 1973 book, The Secret Jews, by Rabbi Joachim Prinz, maintains that Ataturk and his finance minister, Djavid Bey, were both committed
Dönmeh and that “too many of the
Young Turks in the newly formed
revolutionary Cabinet prayed to Allah, but had their real prophet [ Sabbatai
Zevi].” 54 When Greece achieved sovereignty
over Salonika, many Dönmeh, unsuccessful
at being re-classified Jewish, moved to Istanbul. Others moved to Izmir, Bursa,
and Ataturk’s newly-proclaimed capital,
Ankara. Some texts suggest that the
Dönmeh numbered only 150,000, and were mainly found in the army, government, and business.
However, other experts suggest that the Dönmeh numbered as many as 1.5
million, and thattheir influence extended
To every facet of Turkish life. One influential
Dönmeh, Tevfik Rustu Arak, was a
close friend and adviser to Ataturk and
served as Turkey’s Foreign Minister from
1925 to 1938. 55 However, contrary to their promises to Faisal, in
characteristic duplicity, the British
had secretly ratified the contradictory Sykes-Picot agreement. It instead allotted the
former holdings of the Ottoman Empire in
the Middle East to themselves and their
allies, and most importantly, Palestine
was offered as Jewish homeland, stated in a promise known as the “ Balfour
Declaration.” Late in 1920, Churchill told Lloyd George that he wanted to move to
another cabinet post. On February 14,
1921, when Churchill took over the
Colonial Office, the Balfour declaration was part of his legacy.
Formulated in 1917, the text was
prepared under the supervision of
Rothschild front-man and Round Tabler, Lord Milner, who was a member of the inner War
Cabinet. The declaration was addressed to Nathan Mayer Rothschild’s son, Walter. In the declaration
Balfour proclaimed:
I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on
behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the
following declaration of sympathy with Jewish
Zionist aspirations which has
been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet. His Majesty’s Government views with favour
the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and
will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it
being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the
civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political
status enjoyed by Jews in any other
country.
With the end of Turkish rule in Syria in October 1918, supporters of the Arab
Revolt in Damascus declared a government loyal to the Sharif of Mecca in
Arab-controlled Greater Syria. Faisal
had been declared “King of the Arabs” by a handful of religious leaders and
other notables in Mecca. In 1919,
Faisal led the Arab delegation to the Paris Peace Conference and, with
the support of the knowledgeable and influential Gertrude Bell, of the British Military Intelligence Department,
argued for the establishment of independent Arab emirates for the area
previously covered by the Ottoman Empire
. In January 1919, Faisal and Dr. Chaim
Weizmann, President of the World Zionist Organization signed the Faisal-Weizmann
Agreement for Arab-Jewish cooperation in which Faisal conditionally accepted
the Balfour Declaration, dependent on the fulfillment of the British’s
promises:
We Arabs… look with the deepest sympathy on
the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Paris is fully
acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organisation to the Peace Conference,
and we regard them as moderate and proper. We will do our best, in so far as we
are concerned, to help them through; we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home… I look
forward, and my people with me look forward, to a future in which we will help
you and you will help us, so that the countries in which we are mutually interested
may once again take their places in the community of the civilized peoples of the world.
The British
promises were not immediately fulfilled however, or in some cases not until after the establishment of the Jewish
state. In 1920, Faisal had proclaimed himself “King of Syria.” His claim was resisted by the French who
defeated him militarily and expelled him from
Syria. Though the British held a mandate in Iraq, given the unrest in
the colony, in 1921, at the Cairo Conference, they decided to step back from
direct administration and created a monarchy, installing Faisal as King of
Iraq. Though he was not popular there, a lack of organized opposition allowed
him to remain ruler and establish power.
In Jordan, the British created a protectorate for his brother Abdullah,
while their father Hussein declared
himself “King of the Hijaz,” and also “King of all Arabs.” In 1923, when the
Republic of Turkey was founded, it was
Kemal Ataturk who was elected the republic’s first president. In
1924, Ataturk shocked Muslims of the world by abolishing the Caliphate, with
the Turkey now following a secular and nationalist ideology of “Kemalism”
instead of Islam. Two days later, Hussein declared himself Caliph, but the
claim to the title had a mixed reception among Muslims.
Then, in an additional act of treachery, the
British also intended to remove Hussein and have the Hijaz ruled instead by
their long-time Wahhabi ally King
Abdulaziz Ibn Saud (1876–1956), who had no interest in
the Caliphate. While the
Hashemites—Hussein, Faisal, and Abdullah—were
backed by the Arab Bureau, their
enemy Ibn Saud was also receiving
British support. The first formal treaty between Ibn Saud and the British had been signed in
1915. Assigned to assist him was Harry St. John “Jack” Philby, a protégé of E.G. Browne. Philby, who made a feigned conversion
to Islam, taking on the name “Abdullah,”
was responsible for conveying to Ibn
Saud his monthly retainer of £5,000.
Philby also escorted Ibn Saud’s
teenage son, the future King Faisal, on
a tour of London, including a visit to E. G. Bowne and Scawen Blunt. 56
Then, assisted with British support, Ibn Saud defeated Hussein in 1924. The
conquest of Arabia by the Wahhabis, however, came at the cost of 400,000 killed and wounded. Cities such as Taif,
Burayda, and al Hufa suffered all-out
massacres
carried out by the Ikhwan, Ibn Saud’s
notorious Wahhabi henchmen. The
governors of the various provinces appointed by
Ibn Saud are said to have carried out 40,000 public executions and 350,000
amputations. Ibn Saud’s cousin,
Abdullah ibn Musallim ibn Jilawi, the most brutal among the family, set about subjugating the Shia population by executing thousands.
Afghani and
Abduh had long supported the plan of the British to create an Arab Caliphate
to replace the Ottoman one. Rashid
Rida, another Freemason who after the death of Afghani in 1897, and Abduh in 1905, assumed the leadership of the
movement, had also supported the plot. Therefore, after a visit to the newly
conquered Arabian Peninsula, Rida did his part to legitimize Ibn Saud’s criminal
usurpation of power in the eyes of the world’s Muslims, by publishing a work
praising Ibn Saud as the “savior” of
the Holy sites, a practitioner of “authentic” Islamic rule and two years later
produced an anthology of Wahhabitreatises.
This, it was through Rida that the Salafis and the Wahhabis became aligned
from that point forward. Rida also became
seriously involved in the editing and publication of the works of Ibn Taymiyyah
, and achieved farreaching influence in the
Muslim world through
his monthly periodical, al Manar (“The Lighthouse”),
which was first published in 1898 and continued until his death in 1935.
In 1932, through British support, the Kingdom
of Saudi Arabia was founded. Then, the
following year, in 1933, Standard Oil of
California (SOCAL) negotiated with Jack
Philby on behalf of Ibn Saud for
a sixty-year contract that allowed California Arabian Standard Oil company (CASOC),an affiliate of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil of California (Socal), to have
exclusive rights to explore and extract oil. 57 Despite the initial breakup of
the parent company, former Standard Oil
companies would go on to dominate what came to be known as the Seven Sisters,
the seven oil companies that controlled the global petroleum industry from the
mid-1940s to the 1970s. They consisted of British Petroleum (BP), Gulf Oil,
Texaco, Royal Dutch Shell, and three “baby Standards”: Standard Oil of California (Socal), later
known as Chevron; Standard Oil of New
Jersey, which eventually became Exxon;
and Standard Oil Company of New York, or
Socony, which eventually became Mobil. The last two companies in particular grew significantly over the next few decades.
In 1936, Socal and Texaco created a partnership
which would later be named the Arabian-American Oil Company, or Aramco. To Socal and Texaco were later
added Exxon and Mobil. Together, with
the remaining partners of the Seven Sisters, this cartel controlled the price
of oil, along with the Saudi royal
family, who managed the world’s largest source of petroleum. Being a country
that is said to “belong” to the royal family and is named for them, the lines
between state assets and the personal wealth of senior princes are often
blurred.
The extent of
the influence of the
American petroleum industry and
their relationship with Saudi
Arabia was enshrined in 1943 when President Roosevelt proclaimed,
“I hereby find that the defense of
Saudi Arabia is vital to the defense of the United States.” 58 In
1945, Roosevelt met with Ibn Saud aboard
the USS Quincy in Egypt , to forge an important US- Saudi economic alliance.
Roosevelt had acted on the advice of Harold Ickes, then Petroleum Coordinator
for National Defense, and a State Department which in December 1942 had noted,
“It is our strong belief that the development of Saudi Arabian petroleum
resources should be viewed in the light of the broad national interest.” FDR’s proclamation
would be reaffirmed by every American president, most prominently, in the
1957 Eisenhower Doctrineand the
1980 Carter Doctrine. As Richard
Labeviere noted sarcastically, the American president and the king of Saudi Arabia not only concluded an “excellent
deal,” but “they also secured an unfailing alliance that would lead them, one
and the other, and their successors as well, to becoming the godfathers of
Islamism.” 59
Modernism & the Avant-Garde Part
1
Through her membership in the Fabian socialists,
Annie Besant had become close friends with its leading members, which included
George Bernard Shaw, Julian and Aldous Huxley, a founder of the Rhodes Round
Table group and author of Brave New World, and fellow Round Tablers H. G. Wells
and Bertrand Russell. Prominent Fabian and writer, George Bernard Shaw,
revealed that their goal was to be achieved by “stealth, intrigue, subversion,
and the deception of never calling socialism by its right name.” 1 Shaw’s
mistress, Florence Farr, had been a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn. A
lifelong collaborator of Arnold Toynbee, Aldous Huxley was also one of the
initiates in the “Children of the Sun,” a Dionysian cult comprised of the children
of Britain’s Round Table elite. Among the other initiates were T. S. Eliot, W.
H. Auden, Louis and Edwina Mountbatten, Winston Churchill’s son Randolph
Churchill, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, John Strachey, Harry St.
John “Abdullah” Philby’s son “Kim” Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean, Sir
Oswald Mosley, the Mitford Sisters and D. H. Lawrence, Huxley’s homosexual
lover.2
Aldous Huxley, who eventually became widely
acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time,was the twentieth-century
equivalent to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, as the person at the center of an
international network Of figures associated with the occult and its plotting,
which included almost the entire gamut of
the twentieth century’s leading intellectuals and artists. Unlike the leading
occultists of the nineteenth century, however, we do not know to which secret
societies Huxley and his extensive entourage belonged to. Nevertheless, their
actions were intricately related, and pertained to a tradition that was an
extension of the “Oriental Kabbalah,” seeing in Hindu and Buddhist Tantra the
source of a primordial religion tradition.
Aldous Huxley and his brother Julian were the
grandsons of Thomas H. Huxley, who coined the term “agnosticism” to describe
his religious belief. Thomas H. Huxley was also a founder of the Round Table,
and a lifelong collaborator of Arnold Toynbee. He and his grandson Julian were
both presidents of the Royal Society. Thomas H. Huxley was also known as “Dar
win’s Bulldog,” for his defense of evolutionary theory, which according to
Rabbi Kook (1865 –1935), most
important exponent of Religious
Zionism, “is increasingly conquering the
world at this time, and, more so than all other philosophical theories,
conforms to the kabbalistic secrets of the world.” 3 According to Julian
Huxley: “evolution is nothing but matter become conscious of itself.”4
Interest in
Darwinism was related to the Theosophical
notion of spiritual evolution. Based on
the Kabbalah, it asserted that nature as well as human consciousness evolves,
forming the basis of the belief in an expected cultural transformation that
would come to characterize much twentieth-century occult and eventually New Age
thought. It is also known as “higher evolution,” a term used to differentiate
human psychological or spiritual
evolution from the “lower” biological or physical evolution. In addition
to Blavatsky, early proponents included
Max Theon, Henri Bergson, Rudolf Steiner, Sri Aurobindo, and Alfred North Whitehead.
Bergson (1859 –1941), whose sister married Golden Dawn leader McGreggor Mathers, put forward an
alternate explanation for Darwin’s
mechanism of evolution, suggesting that evolution is motivated by a “vital
impetus” that can also be understood as humanity’s natural creative
impulse. Bergson influenced
Bertrand Russell’s collaborator,
(1861 – 1947), who developed what is
called process philosophy, which identifies
metaphysical reality with change and
development. Another influential
exponent of spiritual evolution was the
Indian yogi, Sri Aurobindo (1872 –1950), who
was regarded by Rene Guenon as an authentic representative of the Indian
spiritual tradition. Aurobindo’s close spiritual collaborator, Mirra Richard,
who came to be known as The Mother, in her 20s, had studied occultism with Max
Theon.
This network
of individuals also exemplified the “religious
nihilism” of the Sabbateans, by
constituting the core of the new
avant-garde movement, which later came to be known as modernist movements
such as cubism in the arts, atonality in music, and symbolism in poetry, and
encompassing the works of artists who rebelled against nineteenth-century
academic and historicist traditions, believing that earlier aesthetic conventions
were outdated. It was early associated with
Bohemianism, which espoused unorthodox or antiestablishment political or
social viewpoints, often expressed through free love, frugality, and even
voluntary poverty.
Included was the Bloomsbury set, whose membership included the
well-known economist John Maynard Keynes
and his homosexual lover, philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein, and writers Leonard and
Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence E. M. Forster and Roger Fry.5 The Bloomsbury Set, which reacted against the
social norms, “the bourgeois habits … the conventions of Victorian life,” deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as modern
attitudes towards feminism,
pacifism, and sexuality. 6 The group “believed in pleasure …They tried to get the
maximum of pleasure out of their
personal relations. If this meant triangles or more complicated geometric
figures, well then, one accepted
that too.” 7 These personalities were often also members of, or further
intersected with, the Theosophical
Society, which included D. H. Lawrence,
as well as William Butler Yeats, Lewis Carroll, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London,
E. M. Forster, James Joyce, T. S.
Elliot, Henry Miller, Kurt Vonnegut, Dame Jane Goodall, Thomas Edison, Piet Mondrian,
Paul Gauguin, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul
Klee, and Gustav Mahler.
The
Bloomsbury Set was
also closely affiliated with the
Apostles, an intellectual secret society at Cambridge, founded in 1820 by
George Tomlinson, a Cambridge student who went on to become the first
Bishop of Gibraltar. The Apostles
included a long list of the most eminent Victorians. To name a few: Charles Darwin’s brother Erasmus, poets Arthur Hallam
and Alfred Tennyson, the philosopher Henry Sidgwick, Lord Balfour, later Prime Minister, known for
the Balfour Declaration. The Apostles
were also predominantly homosexuals, inspired by their interest in Platonic
love, with Hallam and Tennyson being the most well-known couple. Of the
Bloomsbury Set, John Maynard Keynes,
Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey and his brother James, E. M. Forster and Rupert Brooke were all
Apostles. Through the Apostles they also encountered the analytic philosophers
G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell who were revolutionizing British philosophy at
the start of the 20th century. The English philosopher Henry Sidgwick wrote of
the Apostles in his memoirs that “the tie of attachment to this society is much
the strongest corporate bond which I have known in my life.”
Sidgwick was a member of the Metaphysical Society
and one of the founders and first president of
the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), whose members included Arthur Conan Doyle, Lord Balfour, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey and William James. SPR is
a non-profit organization whose state purpose is
to understand “events and abilities commonly described as psychic or paranormal
by promoting and supporting important research in this area” and to “examine
allegedly paranormal phenomena in a scientific and unbiased way.” But, it was the SPR which later
investigated Blavatsky’s mysterious Mahatma
letters which were said to appear out of thin air and in 1885 declared her to
be a fraud.
Arthur Balfour also served as president of
the SPR, and was succeeded by American psychologist and psychological warfare
expert, William James. James also served
as president of the American Psychological Association, and wrote one of the
first psychology textbooks. He was the
brother of novelist Henry James,
and the son of Henry James Sr., a noted and independently wealthy Swedenborgian
theologian well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his
day. William James interacted with a
wide array of writers and
scholars
throughout his life, including his godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, his godson
William James Sidis, as well as Charles Sanders Peirce, Bertrand Russell, Josiah Royce, Ernst Mach,
John Dewey, Macedonio Fernández, Walter Lippmann, Mark Twain, Horatio Alger,
Jr., Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud.
Having been a member of the Theosophical Society, and an admirer of Vivekananda,
James was also interested in mystical subjects as well as a champion of alternative
approaches to healing. James is regarded by most psychologists of
religion as the founder
of the field.
James’ research was
focused on the belief inspired by
mysticism, that philosophical answers to human existence could be found by giving
humans the opportunity to explore the irrational. His development of terms of a
“stream of consciousness,” had a direct and significant impact on avant-garde
and modernist literature
and art. Found in the books of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, “stream of consciousness” was
coined by James in his book The Principles of Psychology (1890) “to denote the
flow of inner experiences.” 8 James’s
book also relied upon Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga, a treatise on the discipline of
meditation practice from which he quoted extensively: “All the different steps
in yoga are intended to bring us scientifically to the superconscious state, or
samadhi.” 9
As explained by Hugh Urban in Tantra Sex, Secrecy,
Politics, And Power In The Study Of
Religion, “If Hinduism and the Indian
nation were to be defended as strong, autonomous, and independent of Western
control, then the profound stench of
Tantra would have to be ‘deodorized,’ as it were—either By
rationalization and purification, or by concealment and denial.” 10 The two
most important figures in this process,
according to Urban, were Vivekananda and Sir John Woodroffe.
Woodroffe (1865 – 1936), Supreme Court
Judge at Calcutta, wrote under
the pen-name of Arthur Avalon, and as noted by Kathleen Taylor, “Anyone who
named himself after King Arthur or the mystic isle of Avalon would be thought
to be identifying himself with occultism, in Theosophists’ eyes.” 11 Woodroffe’s
The Serpent Power – The Secrets of Tantric and Shaktic Yoga, is a source for
many modern Western adaptations of
Kundalini yoga practice. According to Urban, “ Woodroffe was also an
apologist, seeming to bend over backward to defend the Tantras against their
many critics and to prove that they represent a noble, pure, and ethical philosophical
system in basic accord with the Ved a sand
Vedanta.” 12 William James is frequently mentioned in
Woodroffe’s The World as Power. According
to William James, “The paragon of all
Unity systems is the Vedanta philosophy of India, and the paragon of Vedanta missionaries was the late Swami
Vivekananda. The man is simply a wonder for oratorical power. …The swami is an
honor to humanity.” Like Woodroffe,
James was also an admirer of
Vivekananda, and wrote, “The paragon of all Unity systems is the Vedanta philosophy of India, and the paragon
of Vedanta missionaries was the late
Swami Vivekananda. The man is simply a wonder for oratorical power. …The
swami is an honor to humanity.” When
the Parliament of the World’s Religions
of 1893 spurred the creation of a dozen privately funded lectures, with the
intent of informing people of the diversity of religious experience, among
these was William James, who travelled to England beginning in 1889, to deliver
the Gifford Lectures, from which his The Varieties of Religious Experience
(1902) were based. 13 Along with the James and
his brother, a number of prominent figures arranged for speaking tours by Vivekananda. Sara Bull in Cambridge,
Josephine MacLeod in New York, and Margaret Noble in London would set up salons
and even followed him to India. Through their networking, his talks became popular
among people from Gertrude Stein, one of James’s students, to John D. Rockefeller.
From these lecture tours developed the
Vedanta movement in the United States, with its ten centers in Boston, New
York, Los Angeles and other cities. Affiliated with the Ramakrishna Order,
which has a hundred centers in India and others in Asia and one each in England,
France and Argentina, the American centers are led by swamis trained in India
by the Order.
William James also helped inspire the mystique
around the mind-expanding possibilities of drugs that characterized widespread
experimentation found among the bohemians. James’ interest in drug-induced
religious experiences stemmed from the “laughing gas craze” of the nineteenth
century, when an unknown poet and philosopher, Benjamin Paul Blood, underwent
an experience under the substance which he later described as “the Initiation
of Man into the Immemorial Mystery of the Open Secret of Being.” Blood later
wrote of his experiences in a booklet titled, “The Anasthetic Revelation and the
Gist of Philosophy,” which was picked up and reviewed by James in the Atlantic
Monthly. Similarly, James came to believe that drugs provided mind-expanding
possibilities. With the publication of The Varieties of Religious Experience,
James introduced the study of “religious experience,” which most often confuses
mysticism with rational religious impulse. James suggested that the intense
varieties of experience should be sought by psychologists, because they represent
the closest thing to a microscope of the mind. James went so far as to try to
induce the equivalent of a “religious” experience by experimenting with chloral
hydrate, amyl nitrite, nitrous oxide (laughing gas), and even peyote. James
claimed that it was only when he was under the
influence of nitrous oxide that he was able to
understand Hegel. 14
More than any other person, it was Gertrude Stein who coordinated the avant-garde
art movement in painting, literature, and music in Paris in the early decades of this century and
whose influence extended into the
grooming of the black jazz musicians from the 1930s to the 1950s. Stein was a
close friend of Bertrand Russell, and
started her career under the tutelage at Harvard University of William James. In 1905, Stein set up a
cultural salon along the lines of the parlor room hangouts for artists and
intellectuals that had been the meeting places for Europe’s avant-garde since the eighteenth century. Similar circles were later established in New
York City’s Greenwich Village by Stein’s lesbian colleague Mabel Dodge, the
lifelong friend of D. H. Lawrence. In London,
Bertrand Russell’s lover Ottoline Morrell ran an informal meeting place
for the Bloomsbury set. 15 In her Paris
salon, Stein entertained nightly a circle frequented by the painters Picasso, Matisse,
Georges Braque, Diego Rivera, the American writers Ernest Hemingway and F.
Scott Fitzgerald, the composers Maurice Ravel,
Stravinsky, and Erik Satie and many, many others.
At their Paris residence, Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo had
essentially inaugurated, the first museum of
modern art. Their private collection, assembled from 1904 to 1913, soon had a
worldwide reputation. Their acquisitions started with buying Gauguin’s Sunfl
owersand Three Tahitians, Cézanne’s Bathersand two Renoirs. In the first half
of 1905 the Steins acquired Cézanne’s
Portrait of Mme Cézanneand Delacroix’s
Perseus and Andromeda. Shortly after the opening of the Salon d’Automneof 1905,
the Steins acquired Matisse’s Woman with a Hatand Picasso’s Young Girl with
Basket of Flowers. By early 1906, Leo and
Gertrude Stein’s studio had many paintings by Henri Manguin, Pierre
Bonnard, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Honoré Daumier,
Henri Matisse, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
It was from these circles that the “primitivist”
movement was born, that became the hallmark of the new avant-garde movement in painting, music, and
literature during the first two
decades of this century. Representative of this movement were the cubist
portraits of Picasso, the pagan-themed ballet
Rite of Spring by Igor
Stravinsky, a close friend to Aldous
Huxley and W. H. Auden, and the
automatic writing of Gertrude Stein’s
novella Melanctha.
Essentially,
avant-garde and modernist art was propaganda for nihilism, coordinated
by the leading exponents of the occult underground. Modernism represents the sense of
dissociation—or schizophrenia—that
results from the nihilist proposition of the absence of meaning. Because it
denies man’s inherent ability to recognize not only morality, but beauty itself,
it deliberately opposes traditional esthetics. By producing the ugly and the
disturbing, it derives prestige only through pretention, an elitism that
suggests it can only be understood by the educated. It garners legitimacy by
purporting to explore the human condition, and ennobles itself with a highly
ambiguous term, calling itself “art.”
However, as Larry Shiner has demonstrated in
The Invention of Art: A Cultural History,
the concept of
“art” is a specifically Western
invention. As Shiner shows, Western
culture is the only civilization with a word for “art,” with all its
connotations, where in other societies it is just craft. “The modern system of
art,” explains Shiner, “is not an essence or a fate but something we have made.
Art as we have generally understood it is a European invention barely two hundred
years old.” 16 The conception of the word “Art” with a capital A, or Fine Art, has its origin in the Enlightenment, which attempted to redefine aristocratic pretensions
for the new bourgeois classes. The
notion of fine art was developed to distinguish “so-called polite and vulgar
arts.” Shiner provides the example of music, which was played at home or for
“religious and civic occasions” until it started to be played in concerts with
no other goal than artistic enjoyment in and of itself: “On this high cultural
ground, noble and bourgeois could meet as a fine art public, rejecting both the frivolous diversions of the
rich and high born as well as the vulgar
amusements of the populace.” 17
Effectively, “Art” has become a new secular
religion, or “a kind of metaphysical essence,” as
Shiner refers to it, where it would fill the spiritual void left from the
abandonment of Christianity. Artists
are the new monks and mystics, who explore the limits of human consciousness
and the meaning of existence, and give it tangible form. So art has become
abstracted from its original purpose. Paradoxically, modern art has its origins
in the anti-art movement of the European avant-garde known as Dada. The movement, which had political
affinities with the radical left, was
a protest against the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests, and
against the cultural and intellectual conformity in art as well as society,
which Dadaists believed were the root cause of the war. Dada therefore concentrated its anti-war
politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art
cultural works. Probably the most famous work of the period was Marcel Duchamp’s
Fountain, a porcelain urinal, signed “R.Mutt,” which caused a scandal when it
was submitted for the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New
York in 1917, but was rejected by the committee, after much discussion about
whether the piece was art or was not. Duchamp’s Fountainis now regarded by some
art historians and theorists of the avant-garde as a major landmark in
twentieth century art.
Duchamp therefore later complained, “The fact
that they are regarded with the same reverence as objects of art probably means
that I have failed to solve the problem of trying to do away entirely with
art.” 18
The concept for the controversial ballet
the Rite of Springwas developed by Nicholas Roerich, another important member of the Theosophical Society and also a friend
of H. G. Wells. Nicholas Roerich was a Russian mystic who, along with his wifeHelena, was the first to translate Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine into
Russian. A prolific artist, Roerich’s paintings are exhibited in well-known museums
of the world. Roerich was an author of an international pact for the protection
of artistic and academic institutions and historical sites, known as Roerich’s
Pact, for which he was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Roerich developed the concept for the Rite of Springfrom Stravinsky’s outline idea, and is suggested
by its subtitle, “Pictures of Pagan
Russia.” The theme is the pagan worship of the dying-god, whose resurrection was traditionally
celebrated on Easter, and which Stravinsky
dared to associate with human sacrifice.
In the scenario, after various primitive
rituals celebrating the advent of spring, a young girl is chosen as a sacrificial victim and dances herself to death. When the
ballet was first performed, at the Theatre
des ChampsElysees in 1913, the controversial nature of the music and
choreography caused a riot in the audience. Nevertheless, Stravinsky’s music achieved rapid
success and signaled the birth of modernism in music. According to some
researchers, Roerich became a member
of Papus’ Martinist Order while in St.
Petersburg prior to World War I.19 In
St. Petersburg, Roerich was involved in
the construction of the Buddhist temple under the guidance of Lama Agvan
Dorjieff, chief tutor of the Dalai Lama XIII, who has been identified with
Gurdjieff.20 Peter Washington, in Madame
Blavatsky’s Baboon, presents
Gurdjieff as Blavatsky’s most
important successor in a process he called “the emergence of the Western Guru”:
“if Theosophy represents the idealistic
tendencies in early-twentieth-century Europe—the currents of feeling which gave
birth to the League of Nations,
social democracy and youth movements—
Gurdjieff is part of the complementary fascination with barbarism and
primitivism which colors the politics of
fascism and works of art of Lawrence’s novels to Stravinsky’s early ballets.” 21 Although at
times Gurdjieff has been viewed as an egotistical charlatan, but he exercised a
strong influence on many
modern mystics, artists, writers,
and thinkers, including Idries Shah, George Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley. Aldous
Huxley attended group meetings given by
Gurdjieff’s pupil Ouspensky in London in the 1930s. Gurdjieff’s
collaborator was Russian composer Thomas de Hartmann, who was also friends
with Rainer Maria Rilke and Wassily Kandinsky. T.S. Eliot’s “late poems and
plays” are permeated by Gurdjieff’s
teaching theory. Aleister Crowley visited his Institute at least once and privately
praised Gurdjieff ’s work, though with
some reservations. 22
Roerich’s
affinities to Martinism and synarchy were also found in his link
with Harvey Spencer Lewis’ order
Antiquus Mysticusque Ordo Rosae Crucis ( AMORC), founded in 1915 in New York,
and which was developed from the OTO and borrowed heavily from Theosohy and
the Golden Dawn. AMORC’s teachings draw upon
ideas of the major philosophers, particularly Pythagoras, Thales, Solon,
Heraclitus, Democritus, as well traditional healing and psychic techniques,
material and spiritual alchemy, sacred architecture, meditation, karma and
reincarnation. It claims to have been created to make public a supposed Rose-Croix Order that originated in Ancient
Mystery schools supposedly established in Egypt about 1500 BCE. AMORC claims that
among their most esteemed pupils were Pharaoh
Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV) and his wife Nefertiti, the parents of Tutankhamun, who established a kind of
monotheistic worship of Aten, the disk of the Sun. Over the centuries these
Mystery Schools were succeeded by the
Essenes, who created the original Christian Mysteries, assisted by the
adepts of the Great White Brotherhood, and later to be inherited by the
Templars. AMORC claims that
Rosicrucianism was brought to Philadelphia in 1694 under the leadership of
Grand Master Johannes Kelpius, the follower of Johann Jacob Zimmerman, who was
part of the Sabbatean-connected circle of
Benjamin Furly, known as the Lantern, which included alchemists van
Helmont, Henry More, John Dury and
William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania.23
AMORC was affiliated with both the Ordre Martiniste et Synarchiqueand the Ordre
Martiniste Traditionnel. After World War One, and the death of Papus in 1916, the
Martinist Order became almost extinct and the surviving members split
into competing factions. Many French
Martinists joined the synarchist movement and formed the Ordre
Martiniste et Synarchie (OMS). In 1931 Augustin Chaboseau resuscitated the Martinists Order he had founded with Papus, naming it the Ordre Martiniste
Traditionnel (OMT). Although he had received his Martinist initiations in the OMS, Lewis was
asked by the OMT in 1939 to bring Martinism to the United States, and was
granted the necessary charters and other documents.24
There were two distinct Rosicrucian traditions in the United States.
Reuben Swinburne Clymer headed the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis, founded by Paschal Beverly Randolph, whom he
claimed had been given his authority by the European Rosicrucians, who had authorized him to take
the Order to America in 1852. Randolph
believed that throughout history a series of initiatory orders were controlled
by higher spiritual beings, which he referred to like Blavatsky as the Great White Brotherhood, and Clymer claimed that the Grand Master of his
order, the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis, was
directly accountable to them. This was many years before AMORC (Ancient and Mystical Order Rosæ
Crucis) was founded by Spencer Lewis. The resulting dispute was settled in
court, in Clymer’s favor, accepting his
registration of the title “ Rosicrucian” in 1935.
Lewis was associated with Theodor Reuss, and
Clymer claimed AMORC stemmed
from Crowley’s OTO. Lewis was therefore forced to distance
himself from Crowley, who was derided as
a “black magician,” and who Reuss had supposedly
expelled from the OTO in 1921. Reuss elevated Lewis through the honorary
degrees of the Scottish Rite, the Rite
of Memphis, the Rite of Misraïm, and
the OTO respectively in order to
side-step Crowley. After Reuss’ death in 1923, Lewis as Crowley’s rival sought an alliance with a
branch of the OTO which differed from
Crowley’s. Since Hans Rudolf
Hilfikerwas joining forces with Clymer, Lewis turned his back on the
Swiss OTO which had been named in his
Warrant, but allied himself with Heinrich Traenker in Germany, who had signed
himself as “National Grand Master of the O\T\O\” in a letter to him. In August 1930, the two men planned a
“Pansophia International Rosicrucian
Council,” which under the twin banners of the
OTO and AMORC would send out a “Second Fama.”
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