Once I noticed I was on fire, I decided to relax and enjoy the fall

Eugenics, like Utopia, has a double meaning

Recently I found myself musing about eugenics. It came out of the typical display so many make when confronted with ideas they dislike...you and everyone who thinks like you should be removed from the gene pool. This is funny on multiple levels. First off, my opinion was not transmitted to me in my father's semen or my mother's ovum, I synthesized it out of hundreds of sources over the course of my life. If you want to kill a person's ideas, prevent them from reoccurring, then killing that person is often spectacularly unsuccessful. Look at Christianity, for just one such example of personal assassination leading to the dissemination, not eradication, of a viewpoint or ideal. Also this is funny because the people agitating for such a culling usually do so while invoking the name of Charles Darwin, which is amusing because Darwin was actually relatively uninvolved in this application of his ideas of selection as a mechanism for biological development over time. It's interesting to recall that Darwin himself didn't even coin the phrase survival of the fittest, but rather Herbert Spencer did.

Another such view is "Social Darwinism", which holds that social policy should allow the weak and unfit to fail and die, and that this is not only good policy but morally right. The only real connection between Darwinism and Social Darwinism is the name. The real source of Social Darwinism is Herbert Spencer and the tradition going back to Hobbes via Malthus, not Darwin's own writings, though Darwin gained some inspiration on the effects of population growth from Malthus. The claims made by Social Darwinists and their heirs suffer from the ethical fallacy known as "the naturalistic fallacy" (no connection to naturalism in explanations and the study of knowledge mentioned above). This is the inference from what may be the case to the conclusion that it is therefore right. However, while it is certainly true that, for example, some families are prone to suffer diabetes, as mine is, there is no licence to conclude that they should not be treated, any more than the fact that a child has a broken arm from a bicycle accident implies that the child should have a broken arm. David Hume long ago showed that "is" does not imply "ought".
John Wilkins, Evolution and Philosophy

Why, I said, the principle has already been laid down that the best of either sex should be united with the best as often, and the inferior with the inferior, as seldom as possible; and they should rear the offspring of the one sort of union, but not of the other, if the flock is going to be maintained in first-rate condition. Now these goings on must be a secret with the rulers only know, or there will be a further danger of our herd, as the guardians may be termed, breaking out into rebellion.
Plato, The Republic

Herbert Spencer's vision for mankind predated to some extent Darwin's theories, and contained much more of a moral bent (moral as in the study of morality, not moral in the sense that one would use to define something as moral as opposed to immoral) and a desire to see human intellect replace random selection. To men like Spencer, as an example, those who failed to acquire wealth and power were the unfit of the human herd, and should suffer the fate Plato outlined for the inferior. He stated this quite openly. "The whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them, and make room for better." Men like William Graham Summer preached the Social Darwinist mandate to millionaires who lapped it up, considering that it told them they were the fit for whom society would be selecting. Social Darwinism thus gained adherents among the powerful who saw in it a sanction from the laws of the universe themselves for their struggle to maintain and expand their wealth and influence. "We cannot evade it; no substitutes for it have been found; and while the law may sometimes be hard for the individual, it is the best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department." wrote Carnegie in 1889. The fittest, of course, being Carnegie himself and those like him. Truly an unbiased creed.

Still, however, it isn't Spencer or Darwin who did the most work to take Plato's idea of selectively breeding the best and make a scientific theory of it. The man who did that was Sir Francis Galton. It may or may not surprise you to find out he was Darwin's cousin, and it was in part his belief that they both inherited their genius from a shared grandfather that helped inspire his eugenic fervor. "It is easy to let the imagination run wild on the supposition of a whole-hearted acceptance of Eugenics as a national religion; that is of the thorough conviction by a nation that no worthier object exists for man than the improvement of his own race; and when efforts as great as those by which nunneries and monasteries were endowed and maintained should be directed to fulfil an opposite purpose. I will not enter further into this." Of course, he didn't have to. Inspired by another devotee of Darwin (Ernest Haeckel, who upon reading Darwin's Origin of Species decided he's found the Holy Grail) who founded the Monist League to help promote the purity of the German volk over lesser races, a nation would indeed embrace Eugenics as fervently as a faith, complete with creating breeding farms where young German girls could rut with the SS for the improvement of his own race, as Galton so eloquently put it. Haeckel himself put it even more bluntly, showing how his idea of the human race and Galton's differed: "Politics is applied biology." Clearly to Haeckel, the best weren't those with the most wealth as William Graham Summer might have argued or those with the greatest intellect and sensitivity as Galton himself seemed to believe, but rather those with the bluest eyes and the blondest skin.

This, to me, points out the greatest danger of Social Darwinism and Eugenics; they are often applied not in any real sense of actually improving society, but rather to eradicate those less sympathized with by the ones seeking to implement these principles. Social Darwinism, at least, assumes that the unfit will be destroyed without taking an active hand in their destruction, and so while it is on the whole an onerous attempt to extend moral purity to hate and racism and bigotry it is at least harmless in comparison with Eugenics, which often ends up agitating for implementation and which ignores the actual nature of human beings in its quest to perfect the race.

At its best, Eugenics quickly became the mechanism behind which the mandatory sterilization of people in asylums, prisons and hospitals was justified for the good of the race. Benedict-Augustin Morel's 1857 paper on the hereditary degeneration of those who suffer from alcoholism, criminal insanity, epilepsy and so on is just one example, as was Dugdale's 1875 study of the Juke family, or H.H. Goddard's hammer-fisted application of IQ testing to indicate human intelligence, and thus suitability or degeneracy. All of this hysteria led to the passing of state laws applying sterilization to institutionalized mental patients, forbidding insane or feebleminded individuals from marrying, (even epileptics in some cases) and by the 1950's tens of thousands had been sterilized in America. At worst...well, we all know what the results of the worst possible application of eugenic theory are. Germany showed the world what racial hygiene would become, taking these ideas to their furthest possible execution.

In his thought-provoking book Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (1998) Robert N. Proctor traces the history of this movement, from its nineteenth century Social Darwinist beginnings to Third Reich orthodoxy. Proctor's history is less a tale of evil Nazi doctors than of the smooth transition made by ordinary people from eugenics and euthanasia to state sanctioned murder in the name of public health.
Donna Kossy, Strange Creations

The Nazi attempt to create a pure aryan race (never minding that aryan doesn't really have a fucking thing to do with race at all...because fanatics are rarely logical, and even less rarely care what reality might have to say about their ideals, since doubt never enters their minds) is well documented. Their genocidal engine which sought to scour 'Greater Germany' of the taint of Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals, Mental Defectives, Political Prisoners and others who had committed the grave sin of not fitting into what the state defined as fit, the Lebensborn programs to breed children of increased 'racial purity' (down to suggestions that good German women should conceive if at all possible in SS graveyards in order to bear the reincarnations of the deceased) combine a demented fervor for mysticism with a rigidly applied eugenic theory. Obviously the application of the theory is at fault here much more so than the theory itself...if eugenics hadn't existed, the Nazis would have had to have found some other reason for what they did. They did not have to, however. Racial hygiene provided the perfect erosive force over the course of its existence, scouring away the objections others might have had to so cruel and draconian a series of edicts under the guise of the health of the people. Whether it be that your ancestry was unsuitable or that your ideas were dangerous, there was now a mechanism in place to remove you for the good of the race...always, always, for the good of the race.

And it didn't stop with the assembly line approach to death imported by the Germans from Henry Ford (another of Carnegie's economically selected, come to think of it, and also a rigorous anti-semite who helped bring the electric chair to America) or the breeding of blond children in cemetaries. Minds like Ploetz and Lenz created whole mythologies of racial superiority while laws like the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offsping provided the framework for sterilization if the Genetic Health Court found them to be feebleminded, epileptic, schizophrenic, alcoholic, manic-depressive or so on, and also mandated sending such to concentration camps if they refused to be so made sterile. Obviously, the definition of feebleminded was stretch quite a bit during this time, since more than 400,000 suffered this law's effect...but it is impossible to say, while certainly possible to suggest, how many were 'removed from the gene pool' for having an unpopular opinion at this time.

Eugenics is therefore very much like an alchemy in reverse. While alchemy began as an attempt to create the perfection of the self through an understanding of the laws of nature and ended up descended by chemistry, an actual scientific discipline that divorced the mystical implications of enlightenment from the quest for knowledge about the laws that govern matter, eugenics began as a simple desire to apply the seeming laws of evolution via design rather than random selection and ended up a neo-mystical attempt to create a perfect specimen of humanity via Darwinist theory welded to a mystical notion of the purity of specific racial groups. It shouldn't surprise us to find a few examples of alchemical thought welded to this doctrine of racial hygiene, therefore...and yet when we come upon these nexus points of complicated doctrine, they can often surpass into a lunacy as frightening as it is elaborate.

We've mentioned before how Harry Crosby may have discovered the existence of an entity lurking in the background of existence, a being he called the Black Sun and which seemed to be some sort of proto-god of fascism. The interesting thing to consider here is how Crosby...a clear product of Carnegie and Graham's Law of Competition inasmuch as he was descended from the same wealthy fit they so idolized, even if he did display many of the same mental qualities that would lead to state-ordered sterilization in many American states during his own life, like alcoholism and that ever-so-vague 'feeblemindedness' which always seems to mean whatever it needs to...and Crosby's Black Sun, also defined as sol niger, the primordial matter of the alchemists, also helped to inspire Himmler's SS and their immediate descendants. (Crosby really does seem like a perfect Lovecraftian hero, his mind ravaged by insanity he brought back with him from his stint in the first World War, his penchant for romanticism and art welded to a deep strain of pessimism and despair...I must admit to a sincere fascination with the man.)

Halik related the flying saucers to the Black Sun myth. He identified the saucers as manifestations of the Grail, "a cultic vessel used by the supreme hierarchy of Christian Gnostics." He analyzed the etheric constitution of flying saucers on the basis of their glowing concentric rings. At the same time, Halik seemed to believe that the Germans had indeed established "polar empires" in both the Arctic and Antarctic, under the signs of the "Golden Sun" and "Black Sun." While the former represented a Luciferic, solar quest (linked with Otto Rahn and the SS Cathars), the latter was driven by Saturnine, satanic lodges of the SS. Halik understood the UFO not so much as a technical invention as the application of a metaphysical and alchemical principle. The alchemical metaphor of sol niger (Black Sun) was said to represent occultation, blackening, a sinking into the mystery of self-discovery.
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity

Now, if you're like me, you read that passage and felt a slowly dawning realization as this 'metaphysical UFO' idea hit you full force like a bucket of ice water. You began thinking of the Book of Ezekiel and then you actually shouted the Merkabah! Those fucking Nazis actually stole the fucking Merkabah! It's the goddamn Merkabah! The chariot of the throne, the conveyance of the glory (Kavod) of God himself as is manifested by the measure of the body, the Shi'ur Komah which presages the perfect and holy image of creation in the Adam Kadmon of later Qabbalism. When you're done with that lightning flash let us supply another one. Eugenics is often considered the attempt to create the ideal society by creating perfect men and women through selective breeding. Mystically speaking, it's an attempt to bring Adam Kadmon into existence by fixing the Shi'ur Komah into one form rather than allowing it to be all forms at once. Like the demiurge of gnosticism, who cannot truly create but can only defile and starts with Wisdom itself, Sophia, we find an attempt to divine the Tree of Life itself, the Sephirothic tree which so resembles the helix of our DNA, our own private Shi'ur Komah and to weed out any and all possible branches of that tree that don't fit an arbitrary definition of perfection. Metaphysically speaking, this is some heavy shit, the magical equivalent of full-on Qlippothic Warfare. (And why is it that the Nazis seem wholly unable of coming up with mysticism of their own? They steal Gnosticism, Theosophy, the Qabbala...for guys who hate the Jews so much, one has to wonder why so much that is quintessentially Jewish in origins ended up in their grubby mitts. Metaphysic Envy, perhaps?) The idea of 'Black Sun' summoning forth UFO's as an attempt by Qemetiel, that crown of the Qlippoth, to mock the Merkabah itself comes to mind, as does the SS attempt to steal the lightning flash and have it identified with them just as the party as a whole did the sun-wheel of the Swastika...like Corpse-Tearer chewing away at Yggdrasil, this all seems so deliberately intended at corrupting and deforming a powerful source of energy. And that's before we consider one of the main goals of the Sefer Yetzirah.

What we therefore have in Sefer Yetzirah appears to be an instructional manual, describing certain meditative exercises. There is some evidence that these exercises were meant to strengthen the initiate's concentration, and were particularly helpful in the development of telekinetic and telepathic powers. It was with these powers that one would then be able to perform feats that outwardly appeared to be magical. This is supported by the Talmudical references, which appear to compare the use of Sefer Yetzirah to a kind of white magic.
Aryeh Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation

There is an obvious connection between this linguistic-mystical cosmogony, which has close parallels in astrological speculation, and magic which might be based on the creative, magical power of the letters and words. In fact it might well be said that Sefer Yetzirah speaks of "the letters in which heaven and earth were created," as according to the Talmud, Bezalel, the architect of the tabernacle, possessed the knowledge of their combinations. From this point stem the ideas connected with the creation of the golem by an ordered recitation of all the possible creative letter combinations.
Gersholm Scholem, Kabbalah

And suddenly we burst forth into horror and understanding. The Black Sun, Qemetiel the absolute negation, the dark mirror of Ain itself, working to usurp the very means of creation of everything. Look at it from the perspective of the eugenicist who seeks to silence his opposition by killing him, by sterilizing those of a different opinion or outlook or perspective, by wiping out those that could possibly know the truth through the transmission of culture as well as that culture itself. The eugenic superman will be one created wholly in line with a limited, ideologically selected Shi'ur Komah, arbitrary ideas of what is 'good' or 'fit' used as the template for the breeding of the new humanity. The very concepts of the enemy, his art, his religion, his mysticism will be stolen and corrupted and debased, pruned away to fit the new pattern. If one is brought to mind of Belial, the master of the Sons of Darkness, the Kittim of Ashur from the Dead Sea Scrolls, it fits. Can the Sons of Light be allowed to develop the white magic of the Sefer Yetzirah, said to be used by Abraham himself in the creation of new souls? This is the alphabet and the grammar of majesty and existence, the means by which mind and soul can be called into being. In many editions of Sefer Yetzirah, scriptural evidence is provided by the verse, "Abraham went as God had told him, and Abraham took...the souls that they had made in Haran" (Genesis 12:5). According to some commentaries, this indicates that Abraham actually used the powers of Sefer Yetzirah to create a Golem. Compare this to the rumors printed by the Hearst syndicate about Alexis Carrel, physiologist and eugenicist (and Nobel prize winner) in 1936: Dr. Carrel is now working in his closely guarded laboratory at Rockefeller Institute on the problem of the relation of cells to those of vegetables and plants, with the hope that some time in the future he can build in his laboratory an artificial human being. This robot-with blood coursing through his veins, heart beating, brain vibrating, lungs breathing-would be an assembled man; he would have the heart of one dead man, the brain of another corpse, the lungs of a third. Then contemplate as you digest this plagiarism of Mary Shelly the fact that Carrel wrote the following passage himself in his Man, the Unknown the next year.

There remains the unsolved problem of the immense number of defectives and criminals....Why do we preserve these useless and harmful beings?...Why should society not dispose of the criminals and the insane in a more economical manner?...Perhaps prisons should be abolished. They could be replaced by smaller and less expensive institutions. The conditioning of petty criminals with the whip, or some more scientific procedure, followed by a short stay in hospital, would probably suffice to insure order. Those who have murdered, robbed while armed with automatic pistol or machine gun, kidnapped children, despoiled the poor of their savings, misled the public in important matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanistic institutions supplied with proper gases. A similar treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane
Alexis Carrel, Man, The Unknown

It should be pointed out that Alexis Carrel was not a Nazi. One is reminded, however, of Plato's idea that these goings on must be a secret with the rulers only know, or there will be a further danger of our herd, as the guardians may be termed, breaking out into rebellion which reminds one of the Marquis de Sade's old argument that Once upon the throne of kings, there shall never have been a tyranny to equal ours, no despot shall ever have put a thicker blindfold over the eyes of the people; plunged into essential ignorance, it shall be at our mercy, blood will flow in rivers, our Masonic bretheren themselves shall become the mere valets of our cruelties, and in us alone shall the supreme power be concentrated; all freedom shall go by the board, that of the press, that of worship, that simply of thought shall be severely forbidden and ruthlessly repressed; one must beware of enlightening the people or or lifting away its irons when your aim is to rule it. If, as Plato argued, those in charge of winnowing the human herd must hide themselves away, how can we determine if they exist or how long they've been at it? Carrel's own slippery slope (from murderers to liars to the insane...objectivity to subjectivity, for as the Reich proved, insanity becomes fluid when we're talking about these kinds of ideas) illustrates the essential difficulty even good people can have when these notions pop up. If there is a shadow war between adherents of the Black Sun and the Sons of Light, the enlightenment bearers, the illuminators...who is to say that both sides didn't start in the same place? One comes to think of Ormazd and Ahriman, or Yahweh and his faithful servant the Adversary, or Balder and Loki, dark reflections locked in a contest for the hearts and minds of the human race so profound that it extends from the ether created by our thoughts to the baseline of our genes. And so long a war will create strains of thought all its own, which if useful will be alloyed back into the conflict...the Nazis may not have directly copied Carrel's suggestions, but they put them into practice all the same.

This of course brings one to mind of what these SS Cathars and Saturnists would have done had they succeeded in despoiling the keys to creation inherent in the Sefer Yetzirah. Armies of golem soldiers, created soulless and obedient, stomping their black bootprint onto the face of all humanity to come, stripped of creativity, of hope, of any sense of the divine and mystical...the gifts of the spirit Abraham sought to develop used to monitor us down to our very thoughts, our opinions edited or deleted at the whim of hidden ones lurking behind the mask of the Nazis themselves (like the valets of their cruelties postulated by de Sade) twisting the world itself out of the paths of the spheres and into the orbit of the cracked shell of life, the demiurge god, the Black Sun. Whether one sees Qemetiel as Black Sun or Black Sun as a corruption of the purpose of the original sol niger, a mockery of the internal void one must master to come to know Ain is a matter of perspective. Qemetiel, and indeed all the Qlippoth, are necessary counterbalances when kept to their proper places, perhaps, but devoting oneself to them leads to the stagnation inherent in their lack of creativity. I would suggest the difference is that one who seeks to know Ain would never seek to define it for anyone but him or herself, and certainly would not try to reduce the Shi'ur Komah to one form. It must be fractal, ever branching, expansive, all inclusive, not limited, not the Bonsai Tree of Life

In the end, after all this musing, I find myself forced to come to one conclusion: no one has a monopoly on what is a desirable quality to pass down either through inheritance or dialogue. Those that consider themselves the guardians of purity are often the ones who take the most hideous steps to preserve it. It's better to seek perfection of the self first before attempting any such Bonsai development on the whole of the species. With the future unknown and unknowable, it's better to hold on to traits that may prove beneficial in a place and a time we cannot foresee than to excise them and suffer for it later.

Eugenics, like Utopia, has a double meaning

Recently I found myself musing about eugenics. It came out of the typical display so many make when confronted with ideas they dislike...you and everyone who thinks like you should be removed from the gene pool. This is funny on multiple levels. First off, my opinion was not transmitted to me in my father's semen or my mother's ovum, I synthesized it out of hundreds of sources over the course of my life. If you want to kill a person's ideas, prevent them from reoccurring, then killing that person is often spectacularly unsuccessful. Look at Christianity, for just one such example of personal assassination leading to the dissemination, not eradication, of a viewpoint or ideal. Also this is funny because the people agitating for such a culling usually do so while invoking the name of Charles Darwin, which is amusing because Darwin was actually relatively uninvolved in this application of his ideas of selection as a mechanism for biological development over time. It's interesting to recall that Darwin himself didn't even coin the phrase survival of the fittest, but rather Herbert Spencer did.

Another such view is "Social Darwinism", which holds that social policy should allow the weak and unfit to fail and die, and that this is not only good policy but morally right. The only real connection between Darwinism and Social Darwinism is the name. The real source of Social Darwinism is Herbert Spencer and the tradition going back to Hobbes via Malthus, not Darwin's own writings, though Darwin gained some inspiration on the effects of population growth from Malthus. The claims made by Social Darwinists and their heirs suffer from the ethical fallacy known as "the naturalistic fallacy" (no connection to naturalism in explanations and the study of knowledge mentioned above). This is the inference from what may be the case to the conclusion that it is therefore right. However, while it is certainly true that, for example, some families are prone to suffer diabetes, as mine is, there is no licence to conclude that they should not be treated, any more than the fact that a child has a broken arm from a bicycle accident implies that the child should have a broken arm. David Hume long ago showed that "is" does not imply "ought".
John Wilkins, Evolution and Philosophy

Why, I said, the principle has already been laid down that the best of either sex should be united with the best as often, and the inferior with the inferior, as seldom as possible; and they should rear the offspring of the one sort of union, but not of the other, if the flock is going to be maintained in first-rate condition. Now these goings on must be a secret with the rulers only know, or there will be a further danger of our herd, as the guardians may be termed, breaking out into rebellion.
Plato, The Republic

Herbert Spencer's vision for mankind predated to some extent Darwin's theories, and contained much more of a moral bent (moral as in the study of morality, not moral in the sense that one would use to define something as moral as opposed to immoral) and a desire to see human intellect replace random selection. To men like Spencer, as an example, those who failed to acquire wealth and power were the unfit of the human herd, and should suffer the fate Plato outlined for the inferior. He stated this quite openly. "The whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them, and make room for better." Men like William Graham Summer preached the Social Darwinist mandate to millionaires who lapped it up, considering that it told them they were the fit for whom society would be selecting. Social Darwinism thus gained adherents among the powerful who saw in it a sanction from the laws of the universe themselves for their struggle to maintain and expand their wealth and influence. "We cannot evade it; no substitutes for it have been found; and while the law may sometimes be hard for the individual, it is the best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department." wrote Carnegie in 1889. The fittest, of course, being Carnegie himself and those like him. Truly an unbiased creed.

Still, however, it isn't Spencer or Darwin who did the most work to take Plato's idea of selectively breeding the best and make a scientific theory of it. The man who did that was Sir Francis Galton. It may or may not surprise you to find out he was Darwin's cousin, and it was in part his belief that they both inherited their genius from a shared grandfather that helped inspire his eugenic fervor. "It is easy to let the imagination run wild on the supposition of a whole-hearted acceptance of Eugenics as a national religion; that is of the thorough conviction by a nation that no worthier object exists for man than the improvement of his own race; and when efforts as great as those by which nunneries and monasteries were endowed and maintained should be directed to fulfil an opposite purpose. I will not enter further into this." Of course, he didn't have to. Inspired by another devotee of Darwin (Ernest Haeckel, who upon reading Darwin's Origin of Species decided he's found the Holy Grail) who founded the Monist League to help promote the purity of the German volk over lesser races, a nation would indeed embrace Eugenics as fervently as a faith, complete with creating breeding farms where young German girls could rut with the SS for the improvement of his own race, as Galton so eloquently put it. Haeckel himself put it even more bluntly, showing how his idea of the human race and Galton's differed: "Politics is applied biology." Clearly to Haeckel, the best weren't those with the most wealth as William Graham Summer might have argued or those with the greatest intellect and sensitivity as Galton himself seemed to believe, but rather those with the bluest eyes and the blondest skin.

This, to me, points out the greatest danger of Social Darwinism and Eugenics; they are often applied not in any real sense of actually improving society, but rather to eradicate those less sympathized with by the ones seeking to implement these principles. Social Darwinism, at least, assumes that the unfit will be destroyed without taking an active hand in their destruction, and so while it is on the whole an onerous attempt to extend moral purity to hate and racism and bigotry it is at least harmless in comparison with Eugenics, which often ends up agitating for implementation and which ignores the actual nature of human beings in its quest to perfect the race.

At its best, Eugenics quickly became the mechanism behind which the mandatory sterilization of people in asylums, prisons and hospitals was justified for the good of the race. Benedict-Augustin Morel's 1857 paper on the hereditary degeneration of those who suffer from alcoholism, criminal insanity, epilepsy and so on is just one example, as was Dugdale's 1875 study of the Juke family, or H.H. Goddard's hammer-fisted application of IQ testing to indicate human intelligence, and thus suitability or degeneracy. All of this hysteria led to the passing of state laws applying sterilization to institutionalized mental patients, forbidding insane or feebleminded individuals from marrying, (even epileptics in some cases) and by the 1950's tens of thousands had been sterilized in America. At worst...well, we all know what the results of the worst possible application of eugenic theory are. Germany showed the world what racial hygiene would become, taking these ideas to their furthest possible execution.

In his thought-provoking book Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (1998) Robert N. Proctor traces the history of this movement, from its nineteenth century Social Darwinist beginnings to Third Reich orthodoxy. Proctor's history is less a tale of evil Nazi doctors than of the smooth transition made by ordinary people from eugenics and euthanasia to state sanctioned murder in the name of public health.
Donna Kossy, Strange Creations

The Nazi attempt to create a pure aryan race (never minding that aryan doesn't really have a fucking thing to do with race at all...because fanatics are rarely logical, and even less rarely care what reality might have to say about their ideals, since doubt never enters their minds) is well documented. Their genocidal engine which sought to scour 'Greater Germany' of the taint of Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals, Mental Defectives, Political Prisoners and others who had committed the grave sin of not fitting into what the state defined as fit, the Lebensborn programs to breed children of increased 'racial purity' (down to suggestions that good German women should conceive if at all possible in SS graveyards in order to bear the reincarnations of the deceased) combine a demented fervor for mysticism with a rigidly applied eugenic theory. Obviously the application of the theory is at fault here much more so than the theory itself...if eugenics hadn't existed, the Nazis would have had to have found some other reason for what they did. They did not have to, however. Racial hygiene provided the perfect erosive force over the course of its existence, scouring away the objections others might have had to so cruel and draconian a series of edicts under the guise of the health of the people. Whether it be that your ancestry was unsuitable or that your ideas were dangerous, there was now a mechanism in place to remove you for the good of the race...always, always, for the good of the race.

And it didn't stop with the assembly line approach to death imported by the Germans from Henry Ford (another of Carnegie's economically selected, come to think of it, and also a rigorous anti-semite who helped bring the electric chair to America) or the breeding of blond children in cemetaries. Minds like Ploetz and Lenz created whole mythologies of racial superiority while laws like the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offsping provided the framework for sterilization if the Genetic Health Court found them to be feebleminded, epileptic, schizophrenic, alcoholic, manic-depressive or so on, and also mandated sending such to concentration camps if they refused to be so made sterile. Obviously, the definition of feebleminded was stretch quite a bit during this time, since more than 400,000 suffered this law's effect...but it is impossible to say, while certainly possible to suggest, how many were 'removed from the gene pool' for having an unpopular opinion at this time.

Eugenics is therefore very much like an alchemy in reverse. While alchemy began as an attempt to create the perfection of the self through an understanding of the laws of nature and ended up descended by chemistry, an actual scientific discipline that divorced the mystical implications of enlightenment from the quest for knowledge about the laws that govern matter, eugenics began as a simple desire to apply the seeming laws of evolution via design rather than random selection and ended up a neo-mystical attempt to create a perfect specimen of humanity via Darwinist theory welded to a mystical notion of the purity of specific racial groups. It shouldn't surprise us to find a few examples of alchemical thought welded to this doctrine of racial hygiene, therefore...and yet when we come upon these nexus points of complicated doctrine, they can often surpass into a lunacy as frightening as it is elaborate.

We've mentioned before how Harry Crosby may have discovered the existence of an entity lurking in the background of existence, a being he called the Black Sun and which seemed to be some sort of proto-god of fascism. The interesting thing to consider here is how Crosby...a clear product of Carnegie and Graham's Law of Competition inasmuch as he was descended from the same wealthy fit they so idolized, even if he did display many of the same mental qualities that would lead to state-ordered sterilization in many American states during his own life, like alcoholism and that ever-so-vague 'feeblemindedness' which always seems to mean whatever it needs to...and Crosby's Black Sun, also defined as sol niger, the primordial matter of the alchemists, also helped to inspire Himmler's SS and their immediate descendants. (Crosby really does seem like a perfect Lovecraftian hero, his mind ravaged by insanity he brought back with him from his stint in the first World War, his penchant for romanticism and art welded to a deep strain of pessimism and despair...I must admit to a sincere fascination with the man.)

Halik related the flying saucers to the Black Sun myth. He identified the saucers as manifestations of the Grail, "a cultic vessel used by the supreme hierarchy of Christian Gnostics." He analyzed the etheric constitution of flying saucers on the basis of their glowing concentric rings. At the same time, Halik seemed to believe that the Germans had indeed established "polar empires" in both the Arctic and Antarctic, under the signs of the "Golden Sun" and "Black Sun." While the former represented a Luciferic, solar quest (linked with Otto Rahn and the SS Cathars), the latter was driven by Saturnine, satanic lodges of the SS. Halik understood the UFO not so much as a technical invention as the application of a metaphysical and alchemical principle. The alchemical metaphor of sol niger (Black Sun) was said to represent occultation, blackening, a sinking into the mystery of self-discovery.
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity

Now, if you're like me, you read that passage and felt a slowly dawning realization as this 'metaphysical UFO' idea hit you full force like a bucket of ice water. You began thinking of the Book of Ezekiel and then you actually shouted the Merkabah! Those fucking Nazis actually stole the fucking Merkabah! It's the goddamn Merkabah! The chariot of the throne, the conveyance of the glory (Kavod) of God himself as is manifested by the measure of the body, the Shi'ur Komah which presages the perfect and holy image of creation in the Adam Kadmon of later Qabbalism. When you're done with that lightning flash let us supply another one. Eugenics is often considered the attempt to create the ideal society by creating perfect men and women through selective breeding. Mystically speaking, it's an attempt to bring Adam Kadmon into existence by fixing the Shi'ur Komah into one form rather than allowing it to be all forms at once. Like the demiurge of gnosticism, who cannot truly create but can only defile and starts with Wisdom itself, Sophia, we find an attempt to divine the Tree of Life itself, the Sephirothic tree which so resembles the helix of our DNA, our own private Shi'ur Komah and to weed out any and all possible branches of that tree that don't fit an arbitrary definition of perfection. Metaphysically speaking, this is some heavy shit, the magical equivalent of full-on Qlippothic Warfare. (And why is it that the Nazis seem wholly unable of coming up with mysticism of their own? They steal Gnosticism, Theosophy, the Qabbala...for guys who hate the Jews so much, one has to wonder why so much that is quintessentially Jewish in origins ended up in their grubby mitts. Metaphysic Envy, perhaps?) The idea of 'Black Sun' summoning forth UFO's as an attempt by Qemetiel, that crown of the Qlippoth, to mock the Merkabah itself comes to mind, as does the SS attempt to steal the lightning flash and have it identified with them just as the party as a whole did the sun-wheel of the Swastika...like Corpse-Tearer chewing away at Yggdrasil, this all seems so deliberately intended at corrupting and deforming a powerful source of energy. And that's before we consider one of the main goals of the Sefer Yetzirah.

What we therefore have in Sefer Yetzirah appears to be an instructional manual, describing certain meditative exercises. There is some evidence that these exercises were meant to strengthen the initiate's concentration, and were particularly helpful in the development of telekinetic and telepathic powers. It was with these powers that one would then be able to perform feats that outwardly appeared to be magical. This is supported by the Talmudical references, which appear to compare the use of Sefer Yetzirah to a kind of white magic.
Aryeh Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation

There is an obvious connection between this linguistic-mystical cosmogony, which has close parallels in astrological speculation, and magic which might be based on the creative, magical power of the letters and words. In fact it might well be said that Sefer Yetzirah speaks of "the letters in which heaven and earth were created," as according to the Talmud, Bezalel, the architect of the tabernacle, possessed the knowledge of their combinations. From this point stem the ideas connected with the creation of the golem by an ordered recitation of all the possible creative letter combinations.
Gersholm Scholem, Kabbalah

And suddenly we burst forth into horror and understanding. The Black Sun, Qemetiel the absolute negation, the dark mirror of Ain itself, working to usurp the very means of creation of everything. Look at it from the perspective of the eugenicist who seeks to silence his opposition by killing him, by sterilizing those of a different opinion or outlook or perspective, by wiping out those that could possibly know the truth through the transmission of culture as well as that culture itself. The eugenic superman will be one created wholly in line with a limited, ideologically selected Shi'ur Komah, arbitrary ideas of what is 'good' or 'fit' used as the template for the breeding of the new humanity. The very concepts of the enemy, his art, his religion, his mysticism will be stolen and corrupted and debased, pruned away to fit the new pattern. If one is brought to mind of Belial, the master of the Sons of Darkness, the Kittim of Ashur from the Dead Sea Scrolls, it fits. Can the Sons of Light be allowed to develop the white magic of the Sefer Yetzirah, said to be used by Abraham himself in the creation of new souls? This is the alphabet and the grammar of majesty and existence, the means by which mind and soul can be called into being. In many editions of Sefer Yetzirah, scriptural evidence is provided by the verse, "Abraham went as God had told him, and Abraham took...the souls that they had made in Haran" (Genesis 12:5). According to some commentaries, this indicates that Abraham actually used the powers of Sefer Yetzirah to create a Golem. Compare this to the rumors printed by the Hearst syndicate about Alexis Carrel, physiologist and eugenicist (and Nobel prize winner) in 1936: Dr. Carrel is now working in his closely guarded laboratory at Rockefeller Institute on the problem of the relation of cells to those of vegetables and plants, with the hope that some time in the future he can build in his laboratory an artificial human being. This robot-with blood coursing through his veins, heart beating, brain vibrating, lungs breathing-would be an assembled man; he would have the heart of one dead man, the brain of another corpse, the lungs of a third. Then contemplate as you digest this plagiarism of Mary Shelly the fact that Carrel wrote the following passage himself in his Man, the Unknown the next year.

There remains the unsolved problem of the immense number of defectives and criminals....Why do we preserve these useless and harmful beings?...Why should society not dispose of the criminals and the insane in a more economical manner?...Perhaps prisons should be abolished. They could be replaced by smaller and less expensive institutions. The conditioning of petty criminals with the whip, or some more scientific procedure, followed by a short stay in hospital, would probably suffice to insure order. Those who have murdered, robbed while armed with automatic pistol or machine gun, kidnapped children, despoiled the poor of their savings, misled the public in important matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanistic institutions supplied with proper gases. A similar treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane
Alexis Carrel, Man, The Unknown

It should be pointed out that Alexis Carrel was not a Nazi. One is reminded, however, of Plato's idea that these goings on must be a secret with the rulers only know, or there will be a further danger of our herd, as the guardians may be termed, breaking out into rebellion which reminds one of the Marquis de Sade's old argument that Once upon the throne of kings, there shall never have been a tyranny to equal ours, no despot shall ever have put a thicker blindfold over the eyes of the people; plunged into essential ignorance, it shall be at our mercy, blood will flow in rivers, our Masonic bretheren themselves shall become the mere valets of our cruelties, and in us alone shall the supreme power be concentrated; all freedom shall go by the board, that of the press, that of worship, that simply of thought shall be severely forbidden and ruthlessly repressed; one must beware of enlightening the people or or lifting away its irons when your aim is to rule it. If, as Plato argued, those in charge of winnowing the human herd must hide themselves away, how can we determine if they exist or how long they've been at it? Carrel's own slippery slope (from murderers to liars to the insane...objectivity to subjectivity, for as the Reich proved, insanity becomes fluid when we're talking about these kinds of ideas) illustrates the essential difficulty even good people can have when these notions pop up. If there is a shadow war between adherents of the Black Sun and the Sons of Light, the enlightenment bearers, the illuminators...who is to say that both sides didn't start in the same place? One comes to think of Ormazd and Ahriman, or Yahweh and his faithful servant the Adversary, or Balder and Loki, dark reflections locked in a contest for the hearts and minds of the human race so profound that it extends from the ether created by our thoughts to the baseline of our genes. And so long a war will create strains of thought all its own, which if useful will be alloyed back into the conflict...the Nazis may not have directly copied Carrel's suggestions, but they put them into practice all the same.

This of course brings one to mind of what these SS Cathars and Saturnists would have done had they succeeded in despoiling the keys to creation inherent in the Sefer Yetzirah. Armies of golem soldiers, created soulless and obedient, stomping their black bootprint onto the face of all humanity to come, stripped of creativity, of hope, of any sense of the divine and mystical...the gifts of the spirit Abraham sought to develop used to monitor us down to our very thoughts, our opinions edited or deleted at the whim of hidden ones lurking behind the mask of the Nazis themselves (like the valets of their cruelties postulated by de Sade) twisting the world itself out of the paths of the spheres and into the orbit of the cracked shell of life, the demiurge god, the Black Sun. Whether one sees Qemetiel as Black Sun or Black Sun as a corruption of the purpose of the original sol niger, a mockery of the internal void one must master to come to know Ain is a matter of perspective. Qemetiel, and indeed all the Qlippoth, are necessary counterbalances when kept to their proper places, perhaps, but devoting oneself to them leads to the stagnation inherent in their lack of creativity. I would suggest the difference is that one who seeks to know Ain would never seek to define it for anyone but him or herself, and certainly would not try to reduce the Shi'ur Komah to one form. It must be fractal, ever branching, expansive, all inclusive, not limited, not the Bonsai Tree of Life

In the end, after all this musing, I find myself forced to come to one conclusion: no one has a monopoly on what is a desirable quality to pass down either through inheritance or dialogue. Those that consider themselves the guardians of purity are often the ones who take the most hideous steps to preserve it. It's better to seek perfection of the self first before attempting any such Bonsai development on the whole of the species. With the future unknown and unknowable, it's better to hold on to traits that may prove beneficial in a place and a time we cannot foresee than to excise them and suffer for it later.

While I'm thinking about Nebuchadrezzar...

I was musing about the Babylonian Captivity and how it might fit into a planned attempt by Nebuchadrezzar to attempt to undo the destruction of the Tower of Babel (which, as we all know, has been defined by Umberto Eco as a menhir, an attempt to tap the telluric energies of the Earth itself, an enormous standing stone, basically)...just looking at how Nebuchadrezzar deported artisans and nobles of various cities (hardly just Jerusalem) it was as though he was attempting to recreate the infamous devastation of said temple and the creation of the varying languages of mankind from the myth in reverse...in essence, reconstructing the primal ur-language of mankind from the many tributaries it had broken into, like a man piecing together a shattered urn. You can't look at the effort he put into rebuilding the city...cleaning the canals, repairing the walls, rebuilding the ziggaraut itself. It reminds one of how an earlier king, Sargon II (Sharru-Kin the Assyrian) also attempted to reconstruct an earler dynasty (that of Sargon of Agade, founder of the Akkadian kingdom of 2300 BC) by personifying himself as Sargon returned and constructing a vast new city called Dur-Sharrukin. A city Sargon constructed in a ten year span, with lavish threats of death for those who worked on it if they failed to construct it in time...and Sargon barely lived a year past finishing it. Another attempt at a menhir?

Sargon II took the throne of Assyria in 722 BC or thereabouts. Within a hundred years he would rise to conquer the Hittites, the Chaldeans (and when one considers the astological prowess of that people...the word Chaldean came to mean astologer in Greek) and marched his way to Samaria...and then he would die, and the Assyrian Empire would fall apart. Likewise, Nebuchadrezzar's Babylon would rise from the ashes of that Assyrian defeat...a Babylonian state founded by Nabu-apla-usur's rebellion in 626 BC, which saw its greatest expansion under Nebuchadrezzar, first as a general fighting the Egyptians and then as King conquering as many of the Syrian and other western cities as he could manage, including Jerusalem. Then he died in 562 BC...and in a few years, his empire crumbled, and his rebuilt Babylon was conquered by the Persians. Waves of conquest, empires rising and falling in the span of a hundred years. Monumental building on scales that would challenge any civilization on Earth at that time, and even for thousands of years after.

It makes one wonder about the area often called the cradle of Western Civilization, the fertile crescent that hugs the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Why these massive attempts to build vast complexes...and why they failed so spectacularly? The Middle East (as we call it now) has always been a land of complex admixtures of faith and politics. One recalls Solomon's own construction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Usually a temple is considered a home for a god or gods, a place to come and worship them...but considering the tenor of Solomon's reputation as a summoner of spirits and angels (malakh yahweh, the messengers of God) I begin to consider other possibilities. Instead of paying homage to these spiritual beings, is it possible these massive building projects were intended as mandala-like channeling complexes, the magical equivalent of the enormous cannon Saddam Hussein attempted to build with British help in the 1980's?

If we accept the idea of the Tower of Babel as a menhir intended to channel telluric power, we must realize that the Tower was also the Ziggaraut dedicated to Marduk, slayer of Tiamat and chief God of Babylon. Similarly, Dun-Sharrukin was dedicated to Ashur himself, master God of Assyria. And we know that Jerusalem and especially the Temple itself was considered the home on Earth of YHWH...chief and only (especially after the Babylonian captivity...was Nebuchadrezzar attempting to crib the menhiric engineering of the artistan class of Jerusalem, descendants of the men and women who built the Temple for Solomon, acknowledged master mage of the ancient world?) God of the Hebrews. Do these telluric energy taps serve merely as a kind of geomancy, finding the right locations and then sculpting them to provide proper amplification of divine energy...and to what purpose? One recalls the Ark of the Covenant, carried into battle to destroy enemy armies...and what one god can do, might not another? Perhaps Sargon II marched on Samaria as part of his own attempt to gain the secrets of Solomon a century and a half before Nebuchadrezzar did...and when considering that the ascendant Mede/Persian Empire freed those same artisans and upper-class citizens to rebuild their Temple after the fall of Babylon, it makes one wonder if the Persians were intending that the telluric energy of YHWH (so similar to their own Ahura Mazda) would be used to defend their own empire, a spiritual H-Bomb of sorts. Was the ur-language a means by which the telluric currents could more easily be directed? The Qabbala teaches us that by permutation, language can be made into the cipher for reality itself...was the language of the original builders of the Tower a more permutable one, or somehow more suitable for speaking to gods? Shades of the division in Hesiod's Theogony, where at one time man and god interacted as equals.

Perhaps they should have remembered the myth of the Tower. Telluric energy seems to be both dangerous and exceedingly complex to tap...look at the precision of the engineering of these ancient cities, the scale of their construction, and how quickly they fell away. Perhaps the gods don't like being used as reactor cores, perhaps we simply don't know how to tap their power effectively without risking the total devastation of our civilizations...or maybe we just haven't worked the geomantic geometery out yet. Maybe the stars have to be right, too...after all, there were plenty of Chaldeans involved in these menhric god cannons disguised as cities. Maybe one needs to know the primal alphabet, or be on good terms with the entities one hopes to draw into the power source...Solomon was chosen by God, after all, he didn't attempt to control his diety. Or perhaps it's all nuts and so am I, which is the outcome I would bank on.

Still, when one considers the Middle East...hotly contested for all of its existence or at least for all of the existence of tribes of men to live there, birthplace of countless religions, and Holy Land to three of the major faiths on Earth today...isn't it possible some of that telluric energy leaked, a kind of spiritual Chernobyl, creating Jerusalem's Syndrome and allowing for all sorts of divine chaos? Perhaps the will of God seethes in the sands of the fertile crescent...and one wonders if the Tower was ever test fired before its collapse, perhaps even causing it. Sodom and Gomorrah make a good target for the menhir, don't they?

Enough for now. At least it wasn't more political ranting, right?

While I'm thinking about Nebuchadrezzar...

I was musing about the Babylonian Captivity and how it might fit into a planned attempt by Nebuchadrezzar to attempt to undo the destruction of the Tower of Babel (which, as we all know, has been defined by Umberto Eco as a menhir, an attempt to tap the telluric energies of the Earth itself, an enormous standing stone, basically)...just looking at how Nebuchadrezzar deported artisans and nobles of various cities (hardly just Jerusalem) it was as though he was attempting to recreate the infamous devastation of said temple and the creation of the varying languages of mankind from the myth in reverse...in essence, reconstructing the primal ur-language of mankind from the many tributaries it had broken into, like a man piecing together a shattered urn. You can't look at the effort he put into rebuilding the city...cleaning the canals, repairing the walls, rebuilding the ziggaraut itself. It reminds one of how an earlier king, Sargon II (Sharru-Kin the Assyrian) also attempted to reconstruct an earler dynasty (that of Sargon of Agade, founder of the Akkadian kingdom of 2300 BC) by personifying himself as Sargon returned and constructing a vast new city called Dur-Sharrukin. A city Sargon constructed in a ten year span, with lavish threats of death for those who worked on it if they failed to construct it in time...and Sargon barely lived a year past finishing it. Another attempt at a menhir?

Sargon II took the throne of Assyria in 722 BC or thereabouts. Within a hundred years he would rise to conquer the Hittites, the Chaldeans (and when one considers the astological prowess of that people...the word Chaldean came to mean astologer in Greek) and marched his way to Samaria...and then he would die, and the Assyrian Empire would fall apart. Likewise, Nebuchadrezzar's Babylon would rise from the ashes of that Assyrian defeat...a Babylonian state founded by Nabu-apla-usur's rebellion in 626 BC, which saw its greatest expansion under Nebuchadrezzar, first as a general fighting the Egyptians and then as King conquering as many of the Syrian and other western cities as he could manage, including Jerusalem. Then he died in 562 BC...and in a few years, his empire crumbled, and his rebuilt Babylon was conquered by the Persians. Waves of conquest, empires rising and falling in the span of a hundred years. Monumental building on scales that would challenge any civilization on Earth at that time, and even for thousands of years after.

It makes one wonder about the area often called the cradle of Western Civilization, the fertile crescent that hugs the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Why these massive attempts to build vast complexes...and why they failed so spectacularly? The Middle East (as we call it now) has always been a land of complex admixtures of faith and politics. One recalls Solomon's own construction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Usually a temple is considered a home for a god or gods, a place to come and worship them...but considering the tenor of Solomon's reputation as a summoner of spirits and angels (malakh yahweh, the messengers of God) I begin to consider other possibilities. Instead of paying homage to these spiritual beings, is it possible these massive building projects were intended as mandala-like channeling complexes, the magical equivalent of the enormous cannon Saddam Hussein attempted to build with British help in the 1980's?

If we accept the idea of the Tower of Babel as a menhir intended to channel telluric power, we must realize that the Tower was also the Ziggaraut dedicated to Marduk, slayer of Tiamat and chief God of Babylon. Similarly, Dun-Sharrukin was dedicated to Ashur himself, master God of Assyria. And we know that Jerusalem and especially the Temple itself was considered the home on Earth of YHWH...chief and only (especially after the Babylonian captivity...was Nebuchadrezzar attempting to crib the menhiric engineering of the artistan class of Jerusalem, descendants of the men and women who built the Temple for Solomon, acknowledged master mage of the ancient world?) God of the Hebrews. Do these telluric energy taps serve merely as a kind of geomancy, finding the right locations and then sculpting them to provide proper amplification of divine energy...and to what purpose? One recalls the Ark of the Covenant, carried into battle to destroy enemy armies...and what one god can do, might not another? Perhaps Sargon II marched on Samaria as part of his own attempt to gain the secrets of Solomon a century and a half before Nebuchadrezzar did...and when considering that the ascendant Mede/Persian Empire freed those same artisans and upper-class citizens to rebuild their Temple after the fall of Babylon, it makes one wonder if the Persians were intending that the telluric energy of YHWH (so similar to their own Ahura Mazda) would be used to defend their own empire, a spiritual H-Bomb of sorts. Was the ur-language a means by which the telluric currents could more easily be directed? The Qabbala teaches us that by permutation, language can be made into the cipher for reality itself...was the language of the original builders of the Tower a more permutable one, or somehow more suitable for speaking to gods? Shades of the division in Hesiod's Theogony, where at one time man and god interacted as equals.

Perhaps they should have remembered the myth of the Tower. Telluric energy seems to be both dangerous and exceedingly complex to tap...look at the precision of the engineering of these ancient cities, the scale of their construction, and how quickly they fell away. Perhaps the gods don't like being used as reactor cores, perhaps we simply don't know how to tap their power effectively without risking the total devastation of our civilizations...or maybe we just haven't worked the geomantic geometery out yet. Maybe the stars have to be right, too...after all, there were plenty of Chaldeans involved in these menhric god cannons disguised as cities. Maybe one needs to know the primal alphabet, or be on good terms with the entities one hopes to draw into the power source...Solomon was chosen by God, after all, he didn't attempt to control his diety. Or perhaps it's all nuts and so am I, which is the outcome I would bank on.

Still, when one considers the Middle East...hotly contested for all of its existence or at least for all of the existence of tribes of men to live there, birthplace of countless religions, and Holy Land to three of the major faiths on Earth today...isn't it possible some of that telluric energy leaked, a kind of spiritual Chernobyl, creating Jerusalem's Syndrome and allowing for all sorts of divine chaos? Perhaps the will of God seethes in the sands of the fertile crescent...and one wonders if the Tower was ever test fired before its collapse, perhaps even causing it. Sodom and Gomorrah make a good target for the menhir, don't they?

Enough for now. At least it wasn't more political ranting, right?

Be water, or be fire?

All life is a part of life.
The tall Xyanbiari stopped, her emerald and saffron fronds waving as they tasted the air around her. Her enormous black eyes glittered from the center of a luminescent blue face. At the center of the platform she walked upon stood an azure crystal, many times harder and stronger than diamond.
You must understand this to proceed further. All beings, be they a carbon-based entity like myself, a crystalline being like the 66 MegaHertz signal for ten seconds, or even the plasma hive-mind of the Taklarsaza swarms, all and more are one. All is created through the evolution of the universe: even the supposedly immutable laws of physics are as sand in a whirlwind. Everything we experience distance, force, separation of form these are illusions created by the inability of any being to perceive the totality of all. Everything is one.
Stopping again, her glittering indigo robes gestured to the darkness that surrounded them, the stars that shone through the enormous dome that hung above and around them, sealing off the vacuum. The swarm of student-candidates, from races and cultures all over creationa chaos of form and identity, of a vast spectrum of potential forms and existences, even from worlds that had no inkling yet that this universe existed in the form and variety it dideach in their fashion studied those stars.
Everything is, and everything is one. One vibration. One essence. An electron in my palm and an electron in your body and an electron in a star half-way across the galaxy from this spotall are in fact part of something far vaster, an endless electron which crosses and crosses and is unbroken, even though we sense it as separated by vast distances. There are no such distances. Everything is, and everything is alive, and all life is a part of life.
Stopping, she held her palm out in front of her for a moment, as if studying it with her huge, dark eyes. The glittering bracer on her arm refracted blue light, catching the senses. Then she turned gracefully on her heel, as if merely preparing to make another point, and her hand slid easily into the azure crystal, passing through it as though nothing were there at all and leaving no trace of its passing.
You will be like water. Blue, serene, at one with all life. Adapting to outside forces rather than wasting energy opposing them, yet capable of vast force and unstoppable in the scale of time. Flowing from place to place, a drip one moment and a flood the next. When you have understood this, nothing will be able to stop you from bringing the truth of life to all life.
Her cilia waved in the artificial air.
You will be Azuriath.

Like I said two days ago, I have been inspired lately to think about the similarities between the classic (if overwrought, sometimes tedious, often paternalistic and sexist etc, etc...they're still written with a frenetic energy that leaps off of the page like lightning towards heaven) Lensmen stories of E.E. Doc Smith, the Jedi of George Lucas' Star Wars stories, and the classic 1960's reboot of the Green Lantern character into a much more SF/Space Opera concept of a universe-spanning corps of superheroes, each assigned a nebulous sector of space by their mentors (Yes, I deliberately liken them to Mentor of Arisia) the Guardians of the Universe, who had taken it upon themselves to divide all of creation into 3600 wedges. The Lensmen had the Cosmic All and the Lens, a device that heightens natural abilities and bestows specific facilities on each race that uses it...the Jedi have the Force and their Lightsabers, weapons and badges of office...the Green Lanterns have the Power Ring that can tap the emerald energies of Oa and the Guardians and basically do just about anything.

The rest of this entry is freaking long: if you want to see it, click the extended entry.

Be water, or be fire?

All life is a part of life.
The tall Xyanbiari stopped, her emerald and saffron fronds waving as they tasted the air around her. Her enormous black eyes glittered from the center of a luminescent blue face. At the center of the platform she walked upon stood an azure crystal, many times harder and stronger than diamond.
You must understand this to proceed further. All beings, be they a carbon-based entity like myself, a crystalline being like the 66 MegaHertz signal for ten seconds, or even the plasma hive-mind of the Taklarsaza swarms, all and more are one. All is created through the evolution of the universe: even the supposedly immutable laws of physics are as sand in a whirlwind. Everything we experience distance, force, separation of form these are illusions created by the inability of any being to perceive the totality of all. Everything is one.
Stopping again, her glittering indigo robes gestured to the darkness that surrounded them, the stars that shone through the enormous dome that hung above and around them, sealing off the vacuum. The swarm of student-candidates, from races and cultures all over creationa chaos of form and identity, of a vast spectrum of potential forms and existences, even from worlds that had no inkling yet that this universe existed in the form and variety it dideach in their fashion studied those stars.
Everything is, and everything is one. One vibration. One essence. An electron in my palm and an electron in your body and an electron in a star half-way across the galaxy from this spotall are in fact part of something far vaster, an endless electron which crosses and crosses and is unbroken, even though we sense it as separated by vast distances. There are no such distances. Everything is, and everything is alive, and all life is a part of life.
Stopping, she held her palm out in front of her for a moment, as if studying it with her huge, dark eyes. The glittering bracer on her arm refracted blue light, catching the senses. Then she turned gracefully on her heel, as if merely preparing to make another point, and her hand slid easily into the azure crystal, passing through it as though nothing were there at all and leaving no trace of its passing.
You will be like water. Blue, serene, at one with all life. Adapting to outside forces rather than wasting energy opposing them, yet capable of vast force and unstoppable in the scale of time. Flowing from place to place, a drip one moment and a flood the next. When you have understood this, nothing will be able to stop you from bringing the truth of life to all life.
Her cilia waved in the artificial air.
You will be Azuriath.

Like I said two days ago, I have been inspired lately to think about the similarities between the classic (if overwrought, sometimes tedious, often paternalistic and sexist etc, etc...they're still written with a frenetic energy that leaps off of the page like lightning towards heaven) Lensmen stories of E.E. Doc Smith, the Jedi of George Lucas' Star Wars stories, and the classic 1960's reboot of the Green Lantern character into a much more SF/Space Opera concept of a universe-spanning corps of superheroes, each assigned a nebulous sector of space by their mentors (Yes, I deliberately liken them to Mentor of Arisia) the Guardians of the Universe, who had taken it upon themselves to divide all of creation into 3600 wedges. The Lensmen had the Cosmic All and the Lens, a device that heightens natural abilities and bestows specific facilities on each race that uses it...the Jedi have the Force and their Lightsabers, weapons and badges of office...the Green Lanterns have the Power Ring that can tap the emerald energies of Oa and the Guardians and basically do just about anything.

The rest of this entry is freaking long: if you want to see it, click the extended entry.

Why I should not be allowed near any instant messenger service

Ezrael: Interesting thought: Al Capone was never convicted of murder.
Ezrael: What if it's because he never killed or had anyone killed?
Alucard: Heh.
Ezrael: Eliot Ness might have done it
Ezrael: Almost everyone Capone is alleged to have killed was a rival bootlegger
Ezrael: And later in his career, Ness failed to stop the Cleveland Torso Murderer
Alucard: "I'll get him if I have to kill you to do it!"?
Ezrael: Maybe. Maybe Ness was trying to create trouble for Capone by framing him for the murder of his rivals...
Ezrael: And eventually found himself addicted to killing
Ezrael: Maybe he failed to stop the Torso Killer because it was him.
Alucard: Maybe.
Ezrael: Or...ooh
Ezrael: Maybe it was Bugsy Moran
Ezrael: Who figured out Ness was the one who tried to kill him (Moran was the target of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre) and decided to ruin him as payback
Alucard: Ah, sweet conspiracy.
Ezrael: Oh my God, it was 1930!
Ezrael: How did I miss that!?
Alucard: Umm, dunno?
Ezrael: LOVECRAFT! Gotta work Lovecraft into it.
Ezrael: What could the occult significance of the Untouchables be...
Ezrael: Hmm. The name suggests a hermetic seal.
Ezrael: And Ness' desire for publicity implies an understanding of the magical power of public opinion...as did the attacks on Capone and the idea that Ness was trying to frame Capone against his rivals...
Ezrael: Manipulation of the image controls the man, like a modern media voodoo doll
Alucard: Heh. Cameras become very deadly weapons.
Ezrael: Which explains why ness made sure to bring reporters on the raids
Ezrael: The idea that he and his men were 'Untouchable' is powered by each new article
Ezrael: It's a conjuration of Achilles-like invulnerability
Alucard: Neat!
Ezrael: I think Ness was acquainted with Hastur
Ezrael: Passion play as magical working is right up Hastur's alley
Ezrael: And so, Moran couldn't attack Ness directly
Ezrael: He had to weaken the man's reputation first, and thus weaken public belief in him

Why I should not be allowed near any instant messenger service

Ezrael: Interesting thought: Al Capone was never convicted of murder.
Ezrael: What if it's because he never killed or had anyone killed?
Alucard: Heh.
Ezrael: Eliot Ness might have done it
Ezrael: Almost everyone Capone is alleged to have killed was a rival bootlegger
Ezrael: And later in his career, Ness failed to stop the Cleveland Torso Murderer
Alucard: "I'll get him if I have to kill you to do it!"?
Ezrael: Maybe. Maybe Ness was trying to create trouble for Capone by framing him for the murder of his rivals...
Ezrael: And eventually found himself addicted to killing
Ezrael: Maybe he failed to stop the Torso Killer because it was him.
Alucard: Maybe.
Ezrael: Or...ooh
Ezrael: Maybe it was Bugsy Moran
Ezrael: Who figured out Ness was the one who tried to kill him (Moran was the target of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre) and decided to ruin him as payback
Alucard: Ah, sweet conspiracy.
Ezrael: Oh my God, it was 1930!
Ezrael: How did I miss that!?
Alucard: Umm, dunno?
Ezrael: LOVECRAFT! Gotta work Lovecraft into it.
Ezrael: What could the occult significance of the Untouchables be...
Ezrael: Hmm. The name suggests a hermetic seal.
Ezrael: And Ness' desire for publicity implies an understanding of the magical power of public opinion...as did the attacks on Capone and the idea that Ness was trying to frame Capone against his rivals...
Ezrael: Manipulation of the image controls the man, like a modern media voodoo doll
Alucard: Heh. Cameras become very deadly weapons.
Ezrael: Which explains why ness made sure to bring reporters on the raids
Ezrael: The idea that he and his men were 'Untouchable' is powered by each new article
Ezrael: It's a conjuration of Achilles-like invulnerability
Alucard: Neat!
Ezrael: I think Ness was acquainted with Hastur
Ezrael: Passion play as magical working is right up Hastur's alley
Ezrael: And so, Moran couldn't attack Ness directly
Ezrael: He had to weaken the man's reputation first, and thus weaken public belief in him

Objective Correlative

There's a reason I never post much in December, I think. Because it is paradoxically my favorite month and my least favorite month...because I experience the warmth of victory over a hostile universe and continued existence, and then the stark contrast between my feelings and those of others that makes me doubt my essential humanity. I always feel like a freak in December.

Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto. Terence said it. From the time I was seven years old, I have sought to make it real for me. I have wanted for the whole of my conscious life, from the time I was old enough to read words printed on a page, to make myself know everything. To feel everything. To understand the entire experience of what it is to be human, to share with the world the essence of emotion. I have wanted to be emotion. Divorced from thought, pure and unalloyed. Nothing else would, could satisfy me. I have lived the past twenty years with a desperation that makes the fingers of my hands claws that stab at keys, that scrapes at the very center of all I clutch to myself like the packrat of experience I have always been.

I know it will never be. I can't do it.

I can't even get people to understand one emotion I have. I can't even convey the depths of my loathing for one event. If I could, they would have read my words, respected them, and not felt the need to offer me exactly what I least wanted in all the world. If I can't even convey how I shudder, scream, seethe and stalk my tiny world like a wounded creature held at bay every year as the wretched date draws closer, then I'm utterly and completely incapable of understanding humanity. Does it ultimately matter why I feel the way I do? Must I explain what lurks at the heart of it, must I bleed out my reasoning in starkest terms? I refuse to do that. Maybe that's my ultimate fault, my desire to earn understanding rather than compel it.

I am human. But humanity is alien to me.

Because I simply cannot understand why I should pretend I am happy when I am not. I do not grasp why I should join in. All these examples aimed like pins, trying to deal my emotion the death of a thousand cuts...trying to invalidate how I feel. Why would anyone do that? I went out of my way to cede that many people have perfectly good, valid reasons for feeling the opposite of the way I do. I repeatedly stated that I didn't want to try and remove those feelings from them. Why, then, do people attempt to do so to me? Years and years of hatred are not going to go away. The fact is, I have a lifetime of being trained and taught to hate, and hating a holiday is a hell of a lot more innocuous than hating a race or a creed. My hate has to go somewhere. You won't convince me otherwise. I can feel it inside me right now, making my limbs quiver with it, my teeth grind, my head pound as my heartrate climbs steadily upward...it isn't even that I will not give it up, it is that I cannot give it up. And I would be willing to bet that there's something out there that each and every human being in the whole world hates, that they hate because they must hate something. Some of those hates are hideous creeds of death and annihilation. Mine is a hate for a day. I should be allowed it. And whether or not I will be, I will still have it, for it is my hate and I cherish it like a baby I bore for thirty years. It's mine.

At times like this, I feel utterly divorced from humanity. I'm literally sitting here, preparing to go walk about in the world and try and understand if I'm really human at all, because it seems that my priorities and my way of thinking are just entirely skewed. I know my parents were human. I've had a lot of human friends. There's nothing about me superior in any way to a human...I bleed, I weep, I long for lost ones, I smile at the thought of seeing those I love, I take each day and am glad to get it, I can admire the luminescent orange of a sunset or the almost-violet grey of an approaching thunderhead, I delight in the sensation of a good meal as it paints with texture and flavor and is accompanied by the music of contradictory smells...so I don't understand where the disconnect is.

One of the reasons I maintain this page in the face of my lessening ability to play around with ideas is out of a hope that with it I can at least practice making myself known. To come up with a way to encode my emotions and thoughts so that others can experience them. But I don't think it works. Obviously, my emotions come through in some sort of bland attenuation of their full complexity...perhaps I can convey pain, but not pain and anger at the same time, and certainly not pain, anger and joy. And while conveying the emotions, the intellectual process with which I convert emotion into reason seems wholly lost. I can come so tantalizingly close, it seems...and like Tantalus, the water receeds just when I think I can drink it, and the grapes retract just when it seems I shall bite into one and feel the shock of sweetness and acridity at once.

I do not want to be made to feel better. I feel exceptionally well. Whether the emotion is rage or sorrow or joy or love, I am quite capable of feeling it and even wallowing in it, evoking it for myself to dance in the radiant fountain of the hues that light the mind. I don't know that I even care what the emotion is so long as it's potent, so long as it's intoxicating (and I am aware of the relationship between toxicity and intoxication), so long as it launches my thoughts out of the mire of their usual hobgoblin-clad consistency and up into somewhere I have not been before. I want to feel. I want to feel enough that I can finally understand humanity, that I will have a pallet of analogies when someone else tells me of their existence, an ability to empathize with their pains and their joys.

I do not want anything human to be alien to me.

It seems so entirely unlikely, though, so impossible. I can't even grasp or convey this one series of emotions. It's so shockingly complex, so fractal...I narrow my view and see more detail, ever more detail as I try and reach down into myself for the sum total of my emotional state, desperation making me rend at the matter of it, hurling away plumes of ideas and impressions about it. Were those vital? If I go back over them, will I find new ground that will allow me to try and capture the essence of what I'm saying or of what's being said by others? So I hunt, but the endless branching takes place in all dimensions at once and there's never an end to it. I usually enjoy such boundlessness. It makes me happy to have room to play in endlessly. Now, it seems again to serve to keep understanding that hair's breadth out of my reach.

Either humanity is just too large for me to ever grasp it, or I am just too determined to achieve what was never intended for anyone. Perhaps I should be content with those that I find small patches of comprehension with...the selection of humanity I can find to resonate with, the ones that share at least some of the same harmonics of thought. But I'm greedy. I want more. I have always wanted more. I want to know, and feel, and be one with the great music...I want to understand how people come up with their thoughts, what they are feeling, how they construct their worlds and what they use to do it.

I do not think I will ever even manage to make one human in all the world understand me, however, much less understand all of them. The water receedes no matter how many times I try and drink from it. Yet I keep trying anyway. I must be human. I cannot bear the idea of being otherwise.

Objective Correlative

There's a reason I never post much in December, I think. Because it is paradoxically my favorite month and my least favorite month...because I experience the warmth of victory over a hostile universe and continued existence, and then the stark contrast between my feelings and those of others that makes me doubt my essential humanity. I always feel like a freak in December.

Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto. Terence said it. From the time I was seven years old, I have sought to make it real for me. I have wanted for the whole of my conscious life, from the time I was old enough to read words printed on a page, to make myself know everything. To feel everything. To understand the entire experience of what it is to be human, to share with the world the essence of emotion. I have wanted to be emotion. Divorced from thought, pure and unalloyed. Nothing else would, could satisfy me. I have lived the past twenty years with a desperation that makes the fingers of my hands claws that stab at keys, that scrapes at the very center of all I clutch to myself like the packrat of experience I have always been.

I know it will never be. I can't do it.

I can't even get people to understand one emotion I have. I can't even convey the depths of my loathing for one event. If I could, they would have read my words, respected them, and not felt the need to offer me exactly what I least wanted in all the world. If I can't even convey how I shudder, scream, seethe and stalk my tiny world like a wounded creature held at bay every year as the wretched date draws closer, then I'm utterly and completely incapable of understanding humanity. Does it ultimately matter why I feel the way I do? Must I explain what lurks at the heart of it, must I bleed out my reasoning in starkest terms? I refuse to do that. Maybe that's my ultimate fault, my desire to earn understanding rather than compel it.

I am human. But humanity is alien to me.

Because I simply cannot understand why I should pretend I am happy when I am not. I do not grasp why I should join in. All these examples aimed like pins, trying to deal my emotion the death of a thousand cuts...trying to invalidate how I feel. Why would anyone do that? I went out of my way to cede that many people have perfectly good, valid reasons for feeling the opposite of the way I do. I repeatedly stated that I didn't want to try and remove those feelings from them. Why, then, do people attempt to do so to me? Years and years of hatred are not going to go away. The fact is, I have a lifetime of being trained and taught to hate, and hating a holiday is a hell of a lot more innocuous than hating a race or a creed. My hate has to go somewhere. You won't convince me otherwise. I can feel it inside me right now, making my limbs quiver with it, my teeth grind, my head pound as my heartrate climbs steadily upward...it isn't even that I will not give it up, it is that I cannot give it up. And I would be willing to bet that there's something out there that each and every human being in the whole world hates, that they hate because they must hate something. Some of those hates are hideous creeds of death and annihilation. Mine is a hate for a day. I should be allowed it. And whether or not I will be, I will still have it, for it is my hate and I cherish it like a baby I bore for thirty years. It's mine.

At times like this, I feel utterly divorced from humanity. I'm literally sitting here, preparing to go walk about in the world and try and understand if I'm really human at all, because it seems that my priorities and my way of thinking are just entirely skewed. I know my parents were human. I've had a lot of human friends. There's nothing about me superior in any way to a human...I bleed, I weep, I long for lost ones, I smile at the thought of seeing those I love, I take each day and am glad to get it, I can admire the luminescent orange of a sunset or the almost-violet grey of an approaching thunderhead, I delight in the sensation of a good meal as it paints with texture and flavor and is accompanied by the music of contradictory smells...so I don't understand where the disconnect is.

One of the reasons I maintain this page in the face of my lessening ability to play around with ideas is out of a hope that with it I can at least practice making myself known. To come up with a way to encode my emotions and thoughts so that others can experience them. But I don't think it works. Obviously, my emotions come through in some sort of bland attenuation of their full complexity...perhaps I can convey pain, but not pain and anger at the same time, and certainly not pain, anger and joy. And while conveying the emotions, the intellectual process with which I convert emotion into reason seems wholly lost. I can come so tantalizingly close, it seems...and like Tantalus, the water receeds just when I think I can drink it, and the grapes retract just when it seems I shall bite into one and feel the shock of sweetness and acridity at once.

I do not want to be made to feel better. I feel exceptionally well. Whether the emotion is rage or sorrow or joy or love, I am quite capable of feeling it and even wallowing in it, evoking it for myself to dance in the radiant fountain of the hues that light the mind. I don't know that I even care what the emotion is so long as it's potent, so long as it's intoxicating (and I am aware of the relationship between toxicity and intoxication), so long as it launches my thoughts out of the mire of their usual hobgoblin-clad consistency and up into somewhere I have not been before. I want to feel. I want to feel enough that I can finally understand humanity, that I will have a pallet of analogies when someone else tells me of their existence, an ability to empathize with their pains and their joys.

I do not want anything human to be alien to me.

It seems so entirely unlikely, though, so impossible. I can't even grasp or convey this one series of emotions. It's so shockingly complex, so fractal...I narrow my view and see more detail, ever more detail as I try and reach down into myself for the sum total of my emotional state, desperation making me rend at the matter of it, hurling away plumes of ideas and impressions about it. Were those vital? If I go back over them, will I find new ground that will allow me to try and capture the essence of what I'm saying or of what's being said by others? So I hunt, but the endless branching takes place in all dimensions at once and there's never an end to it. I usually enjoy such boundlessness. It makes me happy to have room to play in endlessly. Now, it seems again to serve to keep understanding that hair's breadth out of my reach.

Either humanity is just too large for me to ever grasp it, or I am just too determined to achieve what was never intended for anyone. Perhaps I should be content with those that I find small patches of comprehension with...the selection of humanity I can find to resonate with, the ones that share at least some of the same harmonics of thought. But I'm greedy. I want more. I have always wanted more. I want to know, and feel, and be one with the great music...I want to understand how people come up with their thoughts, what they are feeling, how they construct their worlds and what they use to do it.

I do not think I will ever even manage to make one human in all the world understand me, however, much less understand all of them. The water receedes no matter how many times I try and drink from it. Yet I keep trying anyway. I must be human. I cannot bear the idea of being otherwise.