
Daring, funny, and filled with strange facts about the medico-military-occult complex, Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg is a paranoid comedy that’s seriously concerned with the fate of humanity.
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
Daring, funny, and filled with strange facts about the medico-military-occult complex, Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg is a paranoid comedy that’s seriously concerned with the fate of humanity.
The Washington Post, November 24, 1991, Sunday, Final Edition
Godfather of the New Age
A FIRE IN THE MIND The Life of Joseph Campbell
By Stephen and Robin Larsen Doubleday. 618 pp. $ 30
By Martin Gardner
ALTHOUGH NEW AGERS embraced Joseph John Campbell decades ago, it was not
until after his death in 1987 that Bill Moyers's six television interviews
turned him into a public superstar. His books on comparative mythology
weigh down the New Age shelves at Walden and B. Dalton. Critical studies of
his work are burgeoning, and now two ardent acolytes have produced a
massive hagiography. The authors, Stephen and Robin Larsen, operate a
growth potential institute on their farm near New Paltz, N.Y. Stephen, who
teaches psychology at nearby Ulster County Community College, has written
two previous books about myths, and Robin has edited a biography and
anthology of the Swedish spiritualist and trance channeler Emmanuel
Swedenborg. Stephen is also a student of Zen, Yoga and karate, and has a
private practice as a psychotherapist. Drawing heavily on Campbell's
voluminous diaries and journals, and interviews with his wife and friends,
the Larsens have written a comprehensive life of their mentor that will
tell you almost everything you want to know.
Six feet tall, handsome, blue-eyed, Campbell played guard on the Dartmouth
football team and captained the track team at Columbia, where he obtained
his master's degree. A jazz buff, he played the piano and ukelele, and blew
saxophone in dance bands. After several passionate romances, failed efforts
to sell fiction (his early stories and one novel have not survived), and
much wandering about the globe, Campbell settled down at Sarah Lawrence
College, in Bronxville, N.Y., where he taught literature for 38 years. Most
of his students idolized him. When he married one -- Jean Erdman, who
became a professional dancer -- the girls lowered the campus flag to half
mast.
(clip)
Campbell's often repeated advice, "follow your bliss," is equivalent to the
New Age "do your own thing, or "create your own reality." (How about a
person, critics asked, whose bliss is to rape little children?) Yet in
spite of his close associations with theosophists and New Agers, Campbell's
basic metaphysical convictions remain hidden. When Bill Moyers asked if he
believed in reincarnation, Campbell side-stepped by saying he believed in
the metaphor of reincarnation. It is this mushiness that turns so many
people off. We don't need myths to remind us that life is a quest or that
we battle dragons. There is nothing "spiritual" about mythology unless it
points toward transcendence. As far as we can learn from A Fire in the
Mind, Campbell's mythic fires point to nothing beyond experience. It is
surprising that he seems not to have admired George Santayana, the
ex-Catholic myth-admiring atheist of whom it was said that he didn't
believe in God, but did believe that Mary was God's mother.
Campbell's darkest side was his antisemitism, forcefully detailed by
Brendan Gill in the New York Review of Books (Sept. 28, 1989). The Larsens
dismiss it with a brief reference to "so-called bigotry." Campbell once
said he moved to Bronxville to escape from Jews, and that the moon would be
a good place to send them. He objected to blacks entering Sarah Lawrence.
He threatened to flunk, and once did, any student who engaged in leftist
political action.
Similarly, Campbell's hatred of President Roosevelt prompted him to say
there were three living Caesars: Hitler, Mussolini and FDR. A great admirer
of Thomas Mann, Campbell foolishly sent him a copy of a speech in which he
urged artists and writers not to take sides in the unfortunate conflict
between Hitler and Churchill. It drew a barbed response from Mann.
Campbell's political opinions, wrote Gill, were to the right of William
Buckley. "His glibness and his charisma," one of his students said in a
letter to the New York Review of Books, "were a mask that concealed a
narrow mind."
The Larsens have done a commendable job of assembling a thousand facts
about the life of their hero with many faces. A balanced portrait of
Campbell, covering his prejudices and inner beliefs is still to come.
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/ ... g00056.htm
Yes, Joe said "Yes" to life, the good and the evil, the paradox, the suffering. One person told me that she believed the series was successful because Joe expressed the difficulty of everyone's life so well and yet he was so affirming. "Is this a private fight," Joe would paraphrase an old Irish saying, "or can anyone get in?" And: "It's a wonderful opera, only it hurts." That's an accurate reflection of the experience of being alive and accepting it as it is. It says we all share the suffering, and the sharing without pretense is comforting.
Yes, Joe loved the German culture. And the Japanese culture, and the war years were painful and puzzling for him.
And yes, Joe viewed the Jewish God, Yahweh, and the Old Testament, as a mythology (like all religions) that was the expression of a war-like, punitive culture, as he says in the series, and many would agree. None of that means that Joe was anti-Semitic, which, in fact, as an alumna of Sarah Lawrence and, possibly, because I am Jewish, I have been told many times. I will not dispute it. I can only say that none of it emerged during the twenty-four hours of interview.
...
But, interestingly, Gill doesn't stop there. He follows this Freud/Jung "example" with the fact that Campbell opposed generally the involvement of artists in urging American entry into the developing war in Europe and that he sought Thomas Mann's approval of his ideas, an approval which was not forthcoming. What are we to make of the placement of this anecdote? Is Gill insinuating that these actions were also rooted in Joe's unproven "bigotry"? Are we to gather that that "bigotry" led him to a tolerance of "the menace of Hitler and the Nazis" and to the evils resulting in the holocaust? These are terribly serious charges; they cry out for evidence, and Gill provides none. Knowing Joe as we did, we know why that evidence is not presented. It does not exist.
...
Gill Replies
The Markmans state "unequivocally" that my charging Campbell with anti-Semitism is false. They complain that I provide no evidence of his tolerating "'the menace of Hitler and the Nazis' and ...the evils resulting in the holocaust," and that the reason I do not do so is because the evidence does not exist. But the evidence does indeed exist; there are scores of witnesses (for example, Ms. Orr, in the letter printed above) to the anti-Semitic dicta that Campbell was given to uttering. When the astronauts landed on the moon, Joe made the repellent jest to a member of my family, who was a student of his at the time, that the moon would be a good place to put the Jews. The latest addition to this evidence is at hand. A correspondent, Carol Luther of San Anselmo, California, writes to say that she once attended a lecture in which Campbell recounted what he called a popular Indian fable (a favorite of Campbell's in old age), the gist of which was that we are not all mere mild grass-eating goats but, instead, are blood-thirsty, carnivorous tigers, who do well to prey upon whatever lower species of animal makes up our natural diet. When she heard Campbell tell this story, my correspondent was so upset my its ethical implications that, she writes, "I rose shaking from my chair and shouted, 'What about the six million who were gassed during World War II?' In response, Mr. Campbell simply shrugged and said 'That's your problem.'"
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/3846
Hammer of Los wrote:
"When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars.."
slimmouse wrote:Hammer of Los wrote:
"When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars.."
There is absolutely nothing the global elite would hate more than for peace to break out on earth.
Once you understand that , the whole picture becomes as clear as day.
vigilant wrote:slimmouse wrote:Hammer of Los wrote:
"When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars.."
There is absolutely nothing the global elite would hate more than for peace to break out on earth.
Once you understand that , the whole picture becomes as clear as day.
For thousands of years all ethnicities of mankind have been the pawn of chess masters. "We", all of us, of all nations and ethnicities are no more than chess pieces in the big game. The paradigm builders have have kept the wool over our eyes and our noses to the grindstone so that we don't have time nor resources to catch a breath and take a good look around.
The worst thing that could possibly happen in the chess masters eyes, is that the Jews and the Gentiles, et al... will befriend one another on a large scale. They are terrified that we will learn that we are just alike. They are terrified that we will notice.
They are terrified that I will notice, that the average Muslim does not wake up in the morning, and wish he had himself an American to kill right quick before before breakfast. They are terrified that the Muslim might learn that the average American doesn't wish he could run over at least a couple of Muslims right quick on the way to work.
The greatest fear of the chess master is that the pawns might refuse to play the game. The chess master is terrified that the different colored pieces might get mixed one with another, and destroy the strategy in the game. Typically when the pieces get mixed together and become familiar with one another, it means the board has flipped upside down, the game is over, its "checkmate"........for the master.
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