1: The Secret Protagonist
The modern world has passed into the postmodern, and the old millennium into a new one, and still the lament is heard in many quarters: how can it be that such a world of technological wonders and material comfort is so lacking in the things of the spirit? How is it that science can tell us so exactly how the universe began and how we got here, but hasn’t a word to say about why, or what our purpose is? We can live longer and better in our bodies than ever before ~ so how has it come about that we seem to know less than ever about our soul?
In fact there has been no accident, nor is there a shred of irony about it. The grim reality is that things have settled into their present shape precisely because the human race collectively sold its soul for a chicken in every pot and a mess of wattage ~ that is, for material abundance and technology.
It was a literally real transaction, and goes back to an alchemist named Faust, a legendary character who may or may not have had an actual historical existence on the cusp of the medieval and modern aeons, and whose act of magic sparked the transition from the one into the other. The basic story is that Faust made a deal with the Devil, called Mephistopheles, whereby he would gain all knowledge of the physical world, and power over it, at the cost of his soul. In the original myth Faust is hauled off to Hell at the end, as we might expect; in a later version, the playwright Goethe granted him redemption.
The word is not yet in on which version will prove to be the truer, because we are all still living out the myth. Whether or not there ever was an individual man named Faust, his figure grew to become the symbolic embodiment of European humanity as a whole, and now of the entire world.
Those who came before us made a fearsome choice, to which we have all consented by living in the world created by that diabolic covenant. Every article of the contract promised by Mephistopheles has come resoundingly true, as mere mortal humans make sport with the tools of God, transform the world at a touch of their hand, transmute the elements, and fly with their physical bodies into the very heavens. But the time-limit set by the deadly codicil is almost up ~ the Devil will arise from the Abyss and demand his due. Will angels descend from above and save us, as they did for Goethe’s Faust? Or will we be cast down and destroyed by our own God-forsaken handiwork, as the archetypal pattern demands? It may well depend on your response to these words.
2: The World Turned Inside Out
The actual process by which European humanity (and later the rest of the world) lost its soul was a collective schizoid rupture in which the soul split into two parts. The basic entity was still called “soul”, or ANIMA in Latin, but it was cast into a dark pit of unconsciousness. Meanwhile, the new center of self-awareness became a smaller, smarter, and more alienated creature which was soon to be named the EGO.
What does it mean to say that up until 500 years ago human beings had a soul, and that as a result of the Faustian bargain they now have an ego instead? It happened in increments over the centuries, step by remorseless step. You have been taught all the phases of it in school and college, as the glorious history of the rise of science and enlightenment over ignorance and superstition. In fact this is merely the ego telling its own inflated side of the story. What really happened? Who did it, and why? And what does it mean for the fate of the human species? I’ll now tell you the REAL story ~ the first time it’s ever been told, at least publicly.
Whatever the limitations of the Middle Ages, people were still truly human then, meaning that they were ensouled, and knew it. The simplicities and distortions of Christian dogma were the outer raiment of a subtler inner substance, a true collective tranmission of the Spirit as first manifested by the Christian Avatar Jesus. Thus anyone who could find his way to this inner Spirit might realize the Truth and attain union with God. But even those in the outer ranks of the medieval Christian culture lived their lives in full certainty of the basic issues of existence: they knew who they were, why they were here, and what they had to do to assure continuity of their consciousness after death in a positive manner. And most importantly of all, no matter what hardships and deprivations the people suffered, they were consoled and redeemed by dwelling in the constant presence of the divine love of Christ.
The soul was part of the conscious awareness of pre-modern people, instead of being suppressed and unconscious as it is today, or in some cases literally non-existent. This meant that the medieval person could see another whole dimension of reality which is invisible to moderns and postmoderns. They perceived the world as being alive, which it is, instead of being comprised of dead, “inanimate” matter, which is a delusion of the ego. This was the first thing that the early protagonists of Faust felt called upon to change: they claimed that the living, humanlike qualities which people in all times and places have perceived in nature were merely an “anthropomorphic” projection, a false overlay. These individuals took it upon themselves to literally DRIVE THE SPIRITS OUT OF THE WORLD, until nothing was left but a pallid, dead pile of lumps which would submit passively to the new regime of measurement and mathematics. Of course the spirits remained, though the Faustian avant-garde could no longer see them; but once the Lie had attained the status of consensus in the leading circles, it did no good for the common folk to object that they could still see the spirits plainly in the places where they had always been.
The basic mystery of existence can be penetrated only by experience of the Spirit, and the Soul which is its subsidiary. Obviously the starting-point for such ultimate knowledge is within. And this was the second verity attacked by the minions of Faust: they said that the starting-point of knowledge is OUTSIDE THE MIND, that ultimate reality can only be found in the OBJECTS which they had already divested of spirit in the first go-round. So it was that the highest truth was now held to be “objective”, in opposition to the internal center of awareness, described as the “subject”, and now derided as secondary and derivative. This monumental inversion of reality made it forever impossible for anyone duped by it to realize the God Within ~ for the world would now laugh at this sublime experience as “merely subjective”.
In every culture ever known except the one that currently dominates the world, it has been accepted as axiomatic that there are certain universal essences which determine the basic nature of every separate thing and category of being. Of these natures, the most important one in relation to ourselves is the human. Did you know that modern science began by denying that there is such a thing as human nature, and still denies it to this day? Specifically, the denial is of some special thing INSIDE every human being, a “something” that all other creatures lack, from an eggplant to an ostrich to an angel. You’ll recall that the self-styled science of the Faustians holds that the EXTERNAL is primary, and not anything within. Now perhaps you know why this “science”, which so values numbers, can find only 2% of difference between a human and a chimpanzee, and even then would not label them as separate species except for the strictly external criterion that the two (ahem) varieties cannot interbreed.
In the same way, removing the spirit, the purpose, and the meaning from the physical universe was precisely the act required to get it to submit to a science that was merely physical. It was Faust’s world-scale experiment in alchemy, and it’s still going on to this day.
3: Alchemy
The most basic aspect of the scientific method is the process called “analysis and synthesis” ~ that is, breaking something down into its parts and then mentally or physically reassembling it in order to learn how it’s made and how it works. This is identical with the process that is called in alchemy “solve et coagula”: dissolve and coagulate. The difference is that the new scientists of matter left out a crucial step in the process.
The authentic alchemists of the Middle Ages (a small minority of the total) were scientists of the
spirit; they knew that the physical aspect of anything, including metals and other inorganic substances, was merely the outer part of it. They knew that every element, like every type of living being, has its own subtle essence which determines its form and its NATURE. The process of transmuting base metals into gold was long and slow, consisting of many steps, especially many repetitions of solve et coagula. But the crucial part of the operation was what the alchemist did to the substances IN BETWEEN the dissolution and recoagulation: he REFINED and PURIFIED them by subjecting their subtle essences to the direct “magical” influence of HIS OWN SPIRIT. In this way, the alchemist gradually CHANGED THE NATURE of the physical substances, so that lead could be literally turned into silver, and then into gold. The precious metals thus produced were different from the common varieties found in nature ~ they could be taken internally as medicines, and used in other ways to produce effects which modern material science would consider miraculous ~ and thereby, of course, impossible.
There are plenty of plausible documents from the medieval period attesting the success of certain alchemists in creating the “Philosophers’ Stone” or “elixir” that was the goal of the work. These are dismissed out of hand (or suppressed when necessary) by the pundits of the present social order for the obvious reason that it contravenes the current worldview. If it were necessary to burn people at the stake to suppress the threatening evidence effectively, the supposedly enlightened and humane guardians of the postmodern paradigm would not hesitate for an instant to do so. Times have changed only in which worldview gets suppressed and what means are used to do it.
The reason such a small proportion of alchemists successfully accomplished the MAGNUM OPUS (Great Work) was because that is the inherent nature of the science of the spirit. Only an individual who had elevated his inner nature to the loftiest degrees possible could bring this Supernal power to bear on the physical substances in the alchemical operations. The maxim was (and is): “You need gold to make gold.” This meant that the alchemist needed to have inside himself the highest fruit of spiritual enlightenment: inner gold. Only then could he use this non-material substance to create gold in its physical form. So it was that all the legions of foolish men who took up alchemy out of greed for material gold were doomed to failure right from the start ~ because GREED was the very first vice from which the alchemist had to purify himself in order to be worthy to participate in the Great Work.
Alchemy was only one of many spiritual sciences that have been practiced by adepts from time
immemorial. This same principle always held, and prevented the great power of these processes from falling into the hands of unworthy knaves: a lofty and exalted spirit was necessary to make the operations work, because this was an inherent part of the process. But at the dawn of the modern aeon, the followers of Faust overturned this principle completely, and the most dangerous secrets of the ages have been in the hands of knaves and scoundrels ever since.
The earliest of the prominent Faustians was Sir Francis Bacon, whom some regard as the founder of modern science. He was among the first to turn the universe inside-out with his assertion that “man is NOT the measure of all things”. Then he took it another giant step further in asserting that the use of tools and technical devices could eliminate the need for advanced levels of attainment, or even intelligence; this method “places all wits and understanding nearly on a level... so it is exactly with my plan.” These words, written at the end of the 16th century, established the principle of modern science that its results must be reproduceable by ANYONE, provided they follow the prescribed steps and use the physical apparatus correctly. So taken for granted is this notion today that it just seems like common sense, and no one realizes that it was a monumental inversion of the principles of a higher, nobler, and better science, one that was immune from misuse of its results and discoveries. So it is that when modern people lament the apparent irony that there is so much knowledge in the world and so little wisdom, leading to the imperilment of the world itself, they don’t grasp that this is part of the inherent equation upon which the modern age is founded. In fulfillment of his covenant with Faust, the Devil has embezzeled the tools of God and given them into the hands of spiritual morons.
Every “scientific experiment” ever performed in the 500-year history of the modern age is in direct violation of the precept of the truly sacred science of alchemy, viz. that in between the “analysis” and the “synthesis”, the matter of the experiment must be SUBLIMATED. This is a word that has been used and abused by the modern pseudo-science of psychology, hardly any of the practitioners of which remember that its original and literal meaning is: “to make sublime” ~ to subject the matter at hand to the purifying effects of a lofty and noble spirit. This means that, lacking this vital, redemptive part of the operation, ALL the results of modern science, and ALL the technology produced therefrom, are direct byproducts of the CORRUPTION of the spirit ~ it’s all a monumental MISUSE of power and knowledge. Is it any wonder that it has brought us to the brink of the extinction of the spirit?
4: The Secret Identity of Science
Was the world created by God, or did it happen by the chance interactions of inanimate objects?
This is not an abstract question about the remote past, but a matter of how we see and understand the world around us right now. You, the perceiving self, are the SUBJECT, and God is the Absolute
Subject. If the bottom line of reality is subjective, it means that ultimately it all comes from US ~ from you and I and all sentient beings. It means that if we connect with the God Within, we can remember ourself as the Creator, and change the world around us directly and immediately, by acting from the inside out. But if existence is basically objective, it means that the source of all power lies outside of us, and can only be approached and grappled with by artificial means.
And this is precisely what the growing phalanx of Faustians set out to do in the ensuing centuries, as they began to measure, weigh, and examine the world with a whole new battery of mechanical contrivances. Nevertheless, the most potent device of all was not physical but abstract. Mathematics was a tool that had always been at the disposal of the scientists of the spirit; some chose to use it, like Pythagorus and Plato, while others did not. The great secret of math was that it was an instrument that could access all but the highest realms of reality from the objective side. In the hands of a wise man, it would be complemented and controlled by his access to ALL the realms from the subjective end; thus his inner and outer knowledge could meet in the middle, and such an individual could work wonders in service of the Spirit, and bring its light to Earth for the uplifting of his fellow humans. But Faust’s deal with the Devil now put this mighty instrument into the hands of men who had no inner access to the higher realms at all, and in fact denied their very existence. The secret was out, and there has been hell to pay ever since.
It would not have been possible without the collusion of men who did have higher knowledge, and who consciously created the conditions by which the sacred forces could be invoked by profane men. The great transitional figure was Sir Isaac Newton, a practicing alchemist and initiate of the mysteries. Unlike his contemporaries, and even his Faustian predecessors, Newton knew perfectly well that nature is alive and that natural forces are indeed the work of spirits, and he said so in his public writings. But he never publically revealed the true nature of what he did in his Magnum Opus, and all those who revere him as a pioneer of Faustian science would be shocked to find out ~ for in fact it was an act of magic. Newton took the spirits ~ the angels, genii, and demons that have been known to magi since the world began ~ and magically BOUND THEM INTO THE LAWS OF PHYSICS which he duly formulated and proclaimed to the world in his Principia Mathematica. He adjured them to forevermore obey anyone who acted in accordance with these laws, and who used the laws as formulae to manipulate
the physical world, even if such operators knew nothing of spirits or the Spirit. This is the REAL foundation of “modern science”, and the reason why its methods seem to work so infallibly. Why does “a body at rest remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside force”? Why is it that “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”? Is it because these are eternal and immutable laws of nature? After all, they’re built into the very structure of the universe, and Newton merely discovered them by objective experimentation and insight, right? Wrong. These basic Faustian verities are so because Newton MADE them so, by declaring them and endowing them with magical power, and ultimately getting everyone in the world to BELIEVE in them.
Well, ALMOST everyone ~ for there are still some hold-outs, as you are now discovering by reading this. Even if everyone in the world should say me nay and think me mad, I declare that the laws of nature are made from the inside out ~ that the Subject, not the Object, is the ultimate determining power. The laws of physics hold true only in our local universe, and only because the leading lights and vast majority of the human species believe them to be so. If a counterweight appears, and a new paradigm arises which wins the allegiance of a decisive margin of informed belief, then the very laws of nature will change in accordance with this tectonic shift in the human spirit. For they are not laws at all ~ that is merely a conceit of the legalistic Faustian mind. The truth is that the parameters of nature are extremely elastic ~ they live and they breathe and they flow, they morph and change and transubstantiate. They are malleable clay in the hands of God, who is no more nor less than the Absolute Subject.
Would you like to win back your soul and resurrect the human spirit? The first step is to say NAY to the insidious spell that holds your mind in thrall and makes you forget that the world begins and ends within you.
Power over the material world without the wisdom to use it well ~ there has always been a precise technical term which exactly describes this condition. And now you know that the vaunted Faustian science which has produced the corrupt wonders and spiritual wilderness of the postmodern world is literally nothing other than BLACK MAGIC.
Chapter 5: Leviathan, Frankenstein, Macrobot
Having banished the soul, the Faustians found it a giddy concept that the human body was merely an empty shell activated by nothing but pure inertia and mechanical cause and effect. Why should they have found such a grotesque notion so exhilarating? Because if it were true, it meant that now they could play God.
When did the idea of “artificial intelligence” or thinking machines first arise? In the second half of the 20th century, after the invention of computers? Wrong again; it was 300 years earlier, in a monumental book called LEVIATHAN by Thomas Hobbes. In it he said: “For seeing life is but a motion of limbs. . . why may we not say that all automata have an artificial life?” And since man
imitates God by making artificial things like watches and other machines, then why not “an artificial man”? This was the great “Leviathan” of the title, meaning the state.
This book was the origin of the idea that the state and society are an arbitrary and artificial construct of the human beings who comprise it, inaugurated by what later came to be called the “social contract”. Again this was a total inversion of the medieval concept and that of all sane cultures, which have always held that society is an organic entity, initially formed by God, gods, or nature herself, with a soul and a unique nature of its own, just like an individual human; society indeed is a collective organism.
The original cover illustration of Leviathan seems to show exactly such a thing: it features the giant figure of a king towering over the buildings and hills, with sword and sceptre in his hands.
His body is made up of a mass of tiny human figures, who are his subjects, the population of the state. Any uncorrupted reader who sees this picture and opens the book is then shocked to discover that the reality presented by Hobbes is exactly the opposite of the natural, organic conception ~ that the collective “Leviathan” on the cover is really a sort of giant robot, an “artificial man” without a soul, patched together from the inflated schemes fermenting out of the Faustian ego.
When the Romantic movement came along somewhat later, it saw through the conceits of
“Leviathan” and gave the creature a more accurate name: Frankenstein’s monster. For myself, I think of it as the MACROBOT. Today it girdles the entire globe, and the steady march of mechanism has invested it with all the marvels of postmodern high tech. Most present-day people pride themselves on no longer being the subjects of any king; but how proud can they be instead to find themselves welded like silicon chips into the vast metallic body of the Macrobot?
Chapter 6: Out with Their Souls, Off with Their Heads
The whole Faustian worldview was like a bad science fiction novel, and it got even worse when this poorly-plotted potboiler became the script for social change on a grand scale. As we have seen, the first wave of Faustians extirpated divine meaning and purpose from the universe in order to make it safe for mathematics, mechanics, and the rapidly-inflating ego of the new intelligentsia. By the 17th century the effects of this exorcism had so taken hold that the newly-concocted “laws of science” now seemed self-evident to educated people; and thus they felt secure enough to dream up their own schema for the meaning of life and the purpose of human existence, and to impose it on the masses.
It was now believed that the material world comprised the whole of reality, and that the ego constituted the whole of the person’s self. Obviously, then, there were no higher worlds, and no human soul to ascend to them; so how could there possibly be any meaning or purpose in such a hellacious situation? Like Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Faust decided to make a heaven out of hell itself. Speaking through Hobbes, the Faustian Zeitgeist (Spirit of the Age) said: “The final cause, end, or design of men is their own preservation and a more contented life”.
With nothing more noble or exalted to look forward to than mere survival and sensual gratification, it was natural that Faustian Man should soon succumb to the Great Fear. Unlike the soul, the ego does not survive the death of the body; so humans who imagine themselves to be nothing more than the ego of course have a terrible and incurable fear of death. This unnatural collective delusion gave the Faustians a horror of natural primal life, which Hobbes summed up with the famous notion of “the war of all against all”. Because they had severed themselves from the spirit and its natural, organic interconnections in the human world, Hobbes and his ilk had no inkling of the spiritual bonds which unite people; therefore they thought that the only thing standing between humanity and total anarchic chaos was the artificial form of government which Hobbes lays out in great detail in Leviathan. Today we know it by the inaccurate euphemism it acquired in later centuries: “democracy”. A more accurate term would be CRYPTOCRACY: rule by a hidden clique of unmitigated manipulators.
John Locke parlayed Hobbes’ fantasies to the next logical extreme of absurdity in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. He took the concept of the empty, soulless individual and concretized it into the doctrine of the TABULA RASA, meaning that the newborn baby is a “blank slate” at birth, with no given nature, no inherent tendencies, nothing innate whatsoever. This meant that the parents ~ or the conniving Faustian social reformers ~ could imprint absolutely anything they desired onto the child, and shape it according to their whim.
Another implication of this theory was that all significant differences between individuals, all inequality, and all the problems of the human condition were due solely to “the imperfections of the social art”. By the time of the so-called “Enlightenment” of the 18th century, the Faustians, who claimed to be opposed to war, were hypocritically fomenting revolution in order to sieze power and gain the opportunity to put their bizarre prescriptions into practice unimpeded by more sensible men. It finally happened in France, and the result was the grizzliest bacchanale of blood and butchery that the world had ever seen up to that point. The only redeeming feature may have been that some of the leading proponents of the Faustian fantasies were hoist by their own petard and duly guillotined.
Chapter 7: The Iron Age Proclaimed
In order to speed up the destruction of the souls of the common people, the new Faustian rulers herded them into sterile preserves and set them to doing subhuman work in the hellish temples that arose in the 19th century, devoted totally to worship of the machine. These “factories”, as they were called, were like nothing that had ever existed on Earth before, even in the so-called “Dark Ages”, which were really times of light and spiritual well-being compared with the manner of life that now arose in modern times. Cities began to expand like virulent infections on the skin of the planet, sucking people out of the more natural habitats in the rural areas, uprooting them from the soil, hypnotizing them with dazzling visions of luxury, only to entrap them into the degraded slavery of the mechanized labor cesspool.
If Faust was the collective personification of the new aristocracy of bourgeois industrialists, scientists, statesmen, and intellectuals, then Mephistopheles himself was the lurid symbol of the burgeoning priesthood of high finance. If machinery was the body of the triumphant Leviathan, then money was the blood that flowed in its mechanoid veins. This unholy alliance of Ego and Economics made war against its enemies, the Spirit and Soul. The claim of the Christian Church to be an upholder of the Spirit was indelibly wed to the medieval worldview and Biblical cosmology; and now the very foundation of the Judeo-Christian mythos ~ its story of the origin of the world ~ was torn asunder by the theory of evolution propounded by an Englishman, Charles Darwin. Surely it’s no coincidence that at the same time the Bank of England, in concert with the Jewish House of Rothschild, was founding a secular empire upon which the Sun never set.
There was a legend which appeared at opposite ends of the ancient world, in both Greece and India. History was believed to pass through four grand epochs, in which the nature of the human race gradually deteriorated, and society degenerated step at a time. The four Ages (called "Yugas" in Sanskrit) were emblemized by metals of descending value: gold, silver, bronze, and iron. At the end of the cycle there would come an apocalyptic collapse and disaster, but the remnant of humanity would survive and regenerate itself, and enter upon a new Golden Age.
This myth has a relevant twist for the Age of Faust, as revealed during its apotheosis in the nineteenth century. At that time the premier symbol of the technological power of this New World Empire was the railroad. There was a campaign for most of the century to drive the steel bands of transport deep into the wilderness, and link them up in an interlocking mesh to secure the control of the new regime over peoples who had once been relatively free to pursue their own lives and cultivate their unique heritage. The media of the time, crude as they were by high-tech standards, proclaimed very effectively (if unwittingly) that now the world had fully entered into the fourth, last, and most degenerate epoch in the vast cycle of the aeons. Innumerable newspaper and magazine covers featured the trademark icon of the era, a steaming locomotive, below a headline or title heralding THE IRON AGE.
The final Yuga, or Iron Age, is said to be ruled by the Goddess Kali, usually portrayed as a large, dark, demonic entity with fangs and claws, wearing garlands of human skulls around various parts of her anatomy, indicating that she has snacked heartily on these hapless legions of people. Yet this voracious consuming of flesh is just the symbol of a deeper spiritual reality ~ for in fact Kali is the Eater of Souls.
Chapter 8: A Geist Divided
At the dawn of the 20th century, the Zeitgeist of the nascent world civilization (though it was still centered in the West) was cleft with collective symptoms of dual personality disorder. On one side were the idealists of a peaceful utopia, who believed that the overthrow of religion and banishment of the soul had likewise exorcised Original Sin from the human species. This notion had originated with Jean Jacques Rousseau, the culminating figure of the materialist “Enlightenment”, who had taken the “tabula rasa” proclaimed by his predecessors and engraved upon it a fantasy depicting human beings as inherently kind, benevolent, and gentle. This meant that the sole cause of ill will, injustice, and war was the misguided efforts of all past “unenlightened” cultures to inflict morality, discipline, and traditional beliefs upon their children. To attain heaven on Earth, all that was necessary was to allow children to be themselves and do as they pleased, to cultivate and discover their True Will as individuals. If any of the little rascals were caught inflicting harm on a sibling or playmate, it was a sure sign that some ignorant adult had laid a negative imprint on them in some way.
This doctrine was taken to its logical extreme by the anarchist movement which arose and flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and which still carries its black banner aloft in the land today. The anarchists declared war against law, religion, and authority per se, believing that if all restraints were removed people would spontaneously organize themselves into a utopia of peace, freedom, brotherhood, and universal equality. Another variation of this doctrine was Marxist communism, which preached the same pipedream but added the proviso that a brief transitional period would be necessary under the “dictatorship of the proletariat” to expunge the negative imprints left over from the belief-system of the old regime, and, incidently, to slaughter without mercy all those who still adhered to it. These marvelous theories concocted by dreamers and academics were later put to the test and bore their bloody fruit in places like the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia.
But at the turn of the century, when these reality-tests still lay in the future, a very different sort of movement was already making its mark in the world. One of its most prominent aspects was called Social Darwinism, in which certain features of evolutionary theory were used to justify the predations of the wealthy and powerful upon the common folk in general and the workers in particular. In a world that no longer believed that people had souls, or that anything at all was truly sacred, “survival of the fittest” was taken as a “divine” fiat for capitalists to work their wage-slaves to death and to ruthlessly claw their way to the top of the heap in the industrial jungle. It was in fact this attitude of infinite egotism and inflated contempt that the anarchists and communists were taking aim at in their diatribes, and which allowed the latter to win enough followers to lead successful revolutions.
There were, however, deeper cultural strata beneath such visible tendencies as Social Darwinism. The best-known philosopher of this current of thought was Friedrich Nietzsche. From a bedrock foundation of belief that was just as materialist as the utopian-socialist countercurrent, Nietzsche rattled the rooftops of the intelligentsia with polemics heaping scorn upon all gentle feelings like compassion for the masses and love of one’s neighbor, preaching instead a hard-nosed creed that exalted the superior individual and exhorted him to work his will no matter what the cost to his fellow men, if they should prove too weak or dimwitted to prevail against him. This would prepare the way for the coming of the Superman (Übermensch).
Again it was a case of armchair heroics, for Nietzsche himself was a high-strung academic who literally fainted at the sight of blood; evidently he found great compensation for his failings in his literary flights of fancy. And once again it was left to more pragmatic men to take his words to heart and turn them into deeds. In fact, Nietzsche had provided the ultimate rationalization for anyone with a wicked heart and brittle ego, by proclaiming that unabashed acts of Will by unashamed would-be Übermenschen were BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
Another significant figure in this “current” was Aleister Crowley. He, too, was an admirer of Will, giving it a mystic twist and calling it by its Greek name of Thelema; but he was more honest than Nietzsche in that he freely admitted that his practice of black magic was thoroughly EVIL. In The Book of the Law, “channeled” by Crowley in 1903, a demonic being named Aiwass seems to pick up the advice to the Übermensch where Nietzsche’s fictional “Zarathustra” left off. The entity says that his “chosen” will be found not in humble hermitages but in pleasure-palaces among the lords of the Earth. The attitude prescribed for these regal ones toward the rest of humanity formalized the callous contempt of the Social Darwinists into an actual diabolic creed: the “Thelemites” are told to banish mercy and pity from their hearts, to kill, torture, and spit upon those who oppose them; “on the low men trample in the fierce lust of your pride. . . I will give you of their flesh to eat.”
The watchword and keystone of Crowley’s entire doctrine was: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” referring specifically to the concept of True Will, or “Thelema”. This was remarkably similar to the basic premise of the other camp, that of the utopians who believed that if only people could realize their True Will, it would usher in a Pollyanna paradise of sweetness and light, love and peace, equality and brotherhood.
Chapter 9: God Shall Win
These two conflicting tendencies within the not-yet-coagulated World Order, which we may call the Utopian and the Darwinian, inevitably came to blows. World War I ~ or the Great War, as it was called at the time, since it was inconceivable that there could ever be another one ~ was not yet the decisive conflict between the two sides of the archetypal divide. Rather, it was a vital preliminary skirmish which consolidatd the hegemony of the dominant mundane faction.
Up until the final decades of the 19th century, the British-Rothschild consortium was the undisputed heavyweight in the world power structure, with the Royal Navy enforcing its fiat around the globe. Military technology at the time was such that this supreme power of the seas was enough to maintain the integrity of the British Empire and its financial underpinning. But the unification of Germany under Bismarck created a new land power in Europe which was a definite threat to this dominion. When Germany began establishing its own overseas empire, the House of Windsor felt it necessary to throw down the gauntlet, and there ensued the Great War.
The result exceeded expectations: not only was Germany laid low, but so also were the dynasties which had still been based on medieval power-formations, namely the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires; these ceased to exist, and their ruling houses were effectively crushed and dispersed.
Nevertheless, it wasn’t enough. The Rothschilds and other large banking houses had profited enormously from the sale of munitions to both sides during the war, and had swallowed up many smaller concerns which could not compete. But the goal was total global unification under a single centralized power, and the concommitant reaping of unlimited fortunes by the elite of this power structure; and it was clear that in order to accomplish this another war would be necessary. So it was that the groundwork for World War II was deliberately laid immediately, at the “peace” conference at Versailles which ended World War I.
In the first decade between the wars, the visible political structure polarized dramatically along the true lines of the overshadowing archetypes: Utopianism scored its first great victory with the Bolshevik Revolution, and claimed the Russian Empire as its own. Darwinism reacted with the rise of Fascism, taking over Italy, Spain, and ultimately Germany. Hitler can be seen as a veritable Avatar of Faust, filled with such hubris that he tried to break the deal with Mephistopheles: he publicly identified and openly defied the power of Jewish-dominated international finance. The Rothschilds and their cohorts could afford to remain aloof from the “anti-Semitic” propaganda and political measures, but the deadly blow struck by Hitler was economic: he unshackled the Reich from the central banking system and established debt-free currency. This was an act of war, and the physical clash of armies was not long in coming.
The conflict between the two opposing currents in the Western Zeitgeist was fought to a conclusion in World War II. The Devil got his due, and the unmitigated defeat of fascism in the war made the world safe for the whole spectrum of Utopian belief for many decades to come.
However, just as communism ultimately proved unviable and collapsed from its own contradictions, so also would the less extreme forms of Utopianism, since it is an inherently unbalanced and inaccurate view of reality. What has actually happened, then, is that the Utopian paradigm has become the official PUBLIC belief-system of the New World Empire, a veritable secular religion. Presidents, potentates, and media stars all pay obeisance to the basic doctrines of this creed, namely liberal (or conservative) humanism, the inherent goodness of people, equality, democracy, individualism ~ and of course the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of unlimited lucre.
Meanwhile, the Darwinian side didn’t die with Hitler, but only went underground. Very few of the world’s most powerful people actually believe the doctrines they or their frontmen preach in the public media. If you somehow gained entry to their private councils and pleasure-palaces, you would be more likely to encounter a worldview very similar to that of Nietzsche or Crowley. For the fact is that the Cryptocrats of the Kali Yuga all share the egotistic belief that their superior power or intelligence or wealth gives them the right as of a god to inflict their whim upon the masses. Their faces smile from the television screen proclaiming their love for all people equally, and the preciousness of every life; while in their hearts they hearken to a different creed: “On the low men trample in the fierce lust of your pride; I will give you of their flesh to eat.”
The end of the Cold War eliminated the last vestige of any serious division within the Cryptocracy, and any effective opposition to its rule over what is now truly a New World Empire. The last stage in the career of Faust is that he becomes King of the World; in the next scene his lifetime contract expires and Mephistopheles appears on cue to carry him off to Hell ~ exactly at midnight, according to an early version of the story by Christopher Marlowe. A later poet, W.B. Yeats, was keenly aware of what was happening to civilization, and charted the cycle of its rise and fall. He said prophetically of Faust at this stage of the epochal drama:
Now his wars on God begin;
At stroke of midnight God shall win.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
More on Faust:
