Prophecy No. 1

History only exists in individual minds. There is a need for stewardship of the public domain. There is a need to preserve the works of history, but for them to be truly preserved, they have to be read. They can’t exist only in closed books in libraries, in books that no one reads. There will be an improved society where the lives we lead will be ordered very differently than in today's society. Instead of going to college and then directly into the professions, we all will be working-class until our kids are raised. Only after our own kids graduate from high school can we enter the professions. If a person desires to enter a profession, his training will begin at age 36 or 37 and by age forty he or she will be a professional.

Not all professions exist in the future. All exploitative professions no longer exist. They implode. Their evil unsustainable. Their appetites unnatural. The banks implode and the stock market implodes. The insurance industry and investments fall like dominoes. Doctors, Lawyers, Judges, and Priests find a lack of incentives in the marketplace. Those who practice wise-craft basically serve the social function that the African witchdoctor fills in his society. The practitioners of wise-craft,—the witches— will no longer exist. But there is a need for the stewardship of the public domain. It takes individual minds to sustain history. We need people who will dedicate themselves to the stewardship of history, even the history of science before science was politicized toward human exploitation. The history of literature in a thousand languages. The history of art and music. A culinary history.

The most basic thing that is occult in our society is the understanding of the medical uses of herbs. By teaching this, we can let our children out from under the thumb of the medical industry. The medical industry is destroying itself, along with all exploitative practices. Science and medicine have become monstrous scams that are unsustainable. Industrial farming in the United States will collapse and the people who survive will adopt Mexican food practices. Only by keeping people ignorant are they able to exploit us. Doctors are thirsty and exploitative. Many of them borrowed a quarter of a million dollars to enter their marketplace. The bank owns them.  They are the automatons of evil. They don’t have choices. They already made their choice—they chose to enslave themselves to the banks and to the ethic of human exploitation that dominates our world. There is no freedom in money ethics. Either your behavior optimizes your finances or it doesn’t. If it does then you are a perfect Philistine.

A society of educated and ethical people is not exploitable by professionals and their professionalism.  The witches that rule us must depress our mentality to protect their marketplace. What would lawyers do in a society free from personal disputes? The reward for living a Christian life is that the practitioner of Christianity gets to live a Christian life. Once the good news is completely disseminated, we will also get to live in a Christian society (whereas we now live in a Philistine society). This society is the kingdom of God that Jesus taught us about. And we can read from the good parts of the bible, where Jesus teaches us what the kingdom of God is going to be like. The lawyer and the doctor both find little to do in a healthy society in which we all value each other. The judge will find himself adjudicating in an empty court. His druidical robes will no longer strike fear into the hearts of the accused. The crack of his gavel will be as silent as if it were pounded in an empty forest. When the ethical system of Christianity is fully disseminated the new age will begin.

The problem is that many of us have been duped into thinking that Christianity is a religion. It wasn’t supposed to be one. Christianity is a system of ethics that tells us to serve the needs of other humans. To forgive them, as Jesus forgave us. Christianity is a system of ethics that antagonizes Philistinism, which is the ethic of human exploitation that currently dominates our society. 

Priestcraft is and has always been witchcraft. It is an exploitative act of intentional deception to practice Priestcraft. The spell of religion is truly how the witch Circe turns all men into swine. Christianity is not a personal holiness quest the way these priests make it seem. Holiness becomes a status game in any church. For a thousand years we’ve had this problem of holiness and social status. If you appear to be more holy than other people that is status. And so, it’s natural for those people in elevated positions to act “holier than thou.” It’s in the way they speak and in the way they walk. In all their mannerisms. And which of us would not fall into this mode of superiority if we were giving the smallest amount of status? Are we not like kindergartners who wish that it was us that was given the privilege of erasing the chalkboard or assisting the teacher in handing out crayons? But all this is not Christianity. It is religion. Once a person falls into this pretense of holiness the only cure is to slap the log out of his eye and to see if he turns the other cheek. Christianity will always frustrate notions of personal status. The only status in a Christian society is the giving of gifts.

If a priest can make you ashamed of your natural self or your bodily functions, then he can own you. If he can make you fear what happens to you after you die, he can control you. Priestcraft cultivates mental weakness in the church members by playing on the superstition of the believers and encouraging it. Yes, demanding it.  Reject the priests and their stupid mumbo-jumbo! Wake up from your religion! You are no longer swine. Recognize the pearls that you’ve been trampling. The spell of the witch is broken. Hallelujah!

Wolfbane: Chapter 2

        “If you don’t want to see or hear evil, you’d better keep your eyes closed tightly and your fingers in your ears. The truth is that the Satanic Church has grown too large to be concealed. The witches are too thirsty for the blood of our children. Even with the whole abortion industry producing adrenochrome and the entire child protection network providing orphans for Satanic sacrifices, they cannot quench their evil thirst.  Even with the importation of children purchased from the third world, there is not enough nutrition to sustain them. Those of us with our blinders firmly in place will not be able to deny much longer. Are they witches or are they vampires? It matters not what appellation, what parallels to popular culture are most correct. The blood machine is the bank machine. The Swissy flagged Red Cross drains us of our blood and cash.”
    “God Damnit, Wolfbane!” I said. “Why are you so poetic? Can we not enjoy our Christmas dinner without this talk? I don’t see you for fifteen months and we fall into this dramatic mode in the first ten minutes? It took me all day to prepare this fucking figgy pudding.”
    “Fuck your figgy pudding!” Wolfbane roared with laughter. “Although we could use a dram of your botanical spirits, as an aperitif, of course.” A great suggestion! “A little gin never hurt anybody. Tell me again your recipe?”
    “Wormwood and Fennel. Then Eucalyptus and Elderberry. One pot.” I said removing the stopper from the bottle and lowering my nose. My senses heightened by the effervescent aroma of Eucalyptus.”
    “A hint of lavender, as well,” he said. “Delicious.”
    “Pointless to keep a secret from you, sir,” I said. I poured the spirit into two chilled snifters and added a little soda.  A whole meadow of fragrance in one breath.
    Wolfbane tapped his cane on the floor as he gathered his thoughts. “It’s wonderful how our senses respond to a new ingredient that we had been without. Like the truth that is forbidden; once tasted it will never be forgotten. And also how one can become desensitized to the bullshit stinking under our very noses! Little by little, we’ve gotten used to the taste.” Wolfbane never jabbed unless he followed with a straight right. “We’ve spoken many times about the CIA infiltration of the press and the total collapse of the free press in 2008. Newspapers went under in their dozens after the emergence of online media. It’s funny how easily we forget.”
    “Yes, I also remember the housing bubble of 2007 and how the banks wiped out American homeowners in their millions and then hung For Sale signs on the houses. This caused a large recession that affected business, and the most affected business was the American newspaper business. The free press was wiped out by the same bankster bubble that ruined the housing market. And by 2012, what remained of the popular American press was propped up by Federal Bank entities disseminating pure corporate propaganda.”
    “Mind control!” cried Wolfbane. “Witchcraft! Like religion itself, poisoning the mind against the real ethical Christianity that we’ve inherited. When did Christians forget that usury is a sin against mankind and a tool of Satan, who is the slaver of mankind? Who are these fucking priests who replace Christian ethics with doddering religious superstition? Their priestcraft reduces us to bowing our heads and mumbling their Satanic words. Remember this my friend, the Pope is not the Vicar of Christ on Earth and Satan is not God.”
    “I’ll drink to that,” I said. “And communion is not a religious ritual involving the Babylonian cannibalism of the Christ. Communion is when Christians get together and enjoy the freedom, the love, and the blessing of being together. The cup of Christ is not filled with blood, but with wine.”
    “Ye Gads! You’re a fucking heretic,” said Wolfbane.
    With that Wolfbane reached into his jacket pocket and produced two pairs of white cloth gloves. “Put them on,” he instructed. Next, he reached down into his leather briefcase and pulled a gift-wrapped package from it. “Here’s your gift, but you can’t keep it. I borrowed it from the library.” I hesitated. “Well, go ahead, open it,” he said.
    “I know it’s a book,” I said ripping away the wrapping paper.
    “Tell me what you see,” said Wolfbane
    “I see a very old book. A full vellum binding over boards with clasps. The boards are beveled and the covers blind-tooled.  Gold tooling on the spine with handsewn end bands and the edges are sprinkled; all typical of 17th-century bindings. What library did you get this from?” I asked incredulously, already fearing the worst.
    “Why, the Newberry,” replied Wolfbane wryly.
    “Wolfbane, you’re a madman!” I yelled. “The Newberry Library has no circulating items for checkout.”
    “I didn’t say I checked it out, I said I borrowed it!” He bellowed. “I have certain privileges among librarians. Special access, you might call it. Now open it.”
    I opened the book to the title page. It read Demonology by His Majesty King James 1 of England. “Antique laid paper printed with Gothic script. Every page of this massive volume is worth more than $20,000 in the collectors market,” I said, my hands shaking.
    “That’s why it’s so hard to keep old books together. They are worth much more ripped apart page by page,” he replied.
    “What do you want me to do with it?” I asked.
    “Read it carefully. Then take it back to the library. Got to a kiosk, order some materials, then leave it with the materials. You’ll be the first one to have read it in fifty years.”
    “And if I’m caught?” I asked coldly.
    “There is as little chance of that as of you ripping out pages of this book for your own profit,” said Wolfbane.

Wolfbane

    When I was an undergrad, Twenty-five and more years ago, I met a man of a singular character, who I now call Wolfbane. A professor of English at a small college in a quiet mid-western town, I assumed he was at least seventy years old when I first met him, but to a twenty-year-old, everyone looks more advanced than they perhaps are. He had a shock of white hair that once must have been red. He was the opposite of good looking, but he had a very strong bearing and was remarkably healthy. In fact, his appearance changed not at all from the time I met him until late last year, the last time I ever saw him.
    What his initial interest was in me I can not say. I was his student. He had many who were more serious and more talented than myself.  I think now, that we shared a love of poetry into which most people cannot enter. Even those bright competitive students, my classmates, many of whom have today published their own works, did not apparently receive the joy of poetry in the way that he and I did. In previous centuries, people used to entertain each other with poetry. Poems are not read, they are sung. Many are the times that Wolfbane would beg me to sing from my own poems.  We were to spend many hours reciting verse and singing our favorite poems aloud to each other.  We had much in common. I would sing Poe and Coleridge. He would sing Milton and Blake. We smoked tobacco and cannabis. And sometimes Opium. We would drink port and whiskey.
    It is my particular talent to eat and drink without ceasing. And apparently the last faculty to be encumbered by drink in myself, is the verbal faculty. Even when I am beyond the place of standing or walking, I can still be found jabbering away quite coherently or even brilliantly. Like Socrates himself, I become more wise as I continue to imbibe. Wolfbane too had a moist soul like mine. Although there was never any indication of overindulgence or sloppiness in him. We simply drank and smoked and read poems, or sought other amusements. Always simply for our enjoyment. Our eternal games of poker, chess, and billiards filled those years. I never ceased to be astounded at Wolfbane’s endurance and his zest for competition. When drink gave way to hunger we would eat a huge repast in the wee hours of the morning. And this gave us burst to continue our entertainments until the crack of dawn.  Several times I was late and unprepared for his nine-thirty class. He was never late and he never gave the slightest indication that the previous evening and morning had all been spent in smoke and sport. Perhaps after that morning class he would take a brief respite, but then he was back in the afternoon class on Milton which he taught with fire and zeal.
    One of my great memories of him is when he told me, upon my graduation, that I needn’t become a scholar. I hadn’t the scholarly gifts of patience and discipline. Truly, I felt such relief at that moment. I embraced him. He was the only one who understood me. That was the most freedom I have ever felt. For what I feared most of all was a life of skullduggery or drudgery. The life of a bean counter and the life of a person who reads student writing is to me the same dull round.
    As fate would have it, I came to know him even better after graduation. I lived in Chicago for a few years as a young adult, and he often had business there, at the University of Chicago.  It was at this time that I first noticed his walking with a cane. Not that he depended upon it. It was like jewelry to him. A birch cane stained black, with a silver tip and a carved silver head in the shape of a wolf. He claimed it once was a Hollywood movie prop. It was as much a club as a cane and its heavy silver handle could deal a severe or deadly blow. He showed me once how pulling away the bottom of the cane would reveal a gruesome silver blade some ten inches long, and by tilting the handle on it’s hinge he could expose an old fashioned pistol with a single silver ball.
    This was also when Wolfbane began to expose to me certain Baroque prejudices. Certain attitudes which I thought had gone extinct centuries ago. He was right to keep his true feelings hidden while I was a student, but now that we were both adults living in the real world, he did not hide from me a darker side to his personality. His acrid judgments and incisive tongue were shocking to me. It may also be true that he was actually a heretic. He had an antinomian bent and professed his anticlerical sympathies. He was like an Englishman transported from the seventeenth century.  A ranter. A dissenter and protestor against all orthodoxy. He spoke of the 17th century as if he had been there himself, and he referred to all of his contemporaries in academics as babies or illiterates.
    “Philistines!”  He would shout in reference to the clergy. “A poor show of Christianity indeed,” was his usual retort after sitting through a mandatory mass. “Look at all these illiterates,” he would say in reference to the churchgoers. “They have not read even their Hawthorne.” I knew well enough what he meant by that. He was referencing Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown, where the same priests and ministers who run the Christian church on Sunday can be found of a Saturday engaged in their actual black religion. Of course, atheism has perhaps crept into the church in the last century, but surely priests are not engaged in witchcraft at this late date. Nevertheless, this lunatic idea was the central theme to his speech.
    “How do you know,” he said to me during one visit, “That every single priest is not a Satanic witch who has sworn fealty to Satan? How do you know every single one of them has not bled drops of blood for Satan or not committed atrocities with children?” This was the general train of his thoughts. I would try to temper his fury by injecting some reason in the conversation: “We live in a Philistine society,” I would say. “People do things for social position, personal status, or just money motivation. Ninety-nine percent of people in America are Philistines. It’s not religion, it’s just the way we are.”
    “You don’t understand what a Philistine is,” he replied. “At the ancient city of Ekron, 6000 years ago, Philistines began worshiping Baal-Zeebub, Son of Dagon. The most bloodthirsty of all gods, Baal-Zeebub taught his priests to extract blood from the adrenal gland of their humans victims at the base of the skull, and to embibe.” I could tell he was getting worked up now: “You haven’t read the works of King James I of England! If you had, you would know what Mystery Babylon is. You would understand why King James called the Catholic Church the Whore of Babylon and why every single Catholic priest is a fucking whore! How long will you go on in your stupid indolence! You fucking cow!”
    I am a person who is habitually slow to anger. I am accustomed to taking flack. It is my personal gift to be able to breath such things away. To clear the air leaving room for reason.  In this case, I told my friend he was showing signs of stress and I encouraged him to take a minute to calm himself. I went to my closet and fetched a bottle of good Mexican brandy. Good for anyone’s constitution. I grabbed two glasses and placed a single cube of ice in each and then I poured a liberal drink for myself, and one for Wolfbane.  When I handed him the glass he looked me straight in the eye and said, “The Power and the Glory.”  “The Power and the Glory,” I repeated, and we both drank.
    “And you don’t understand what religion is either,” he started in again. “Religion is all the little things we do without thinking. The unquestioned allegiance. The pop-corn prayer. The mindless ritual observed in thoughtless obedience. The superstitious fetishism of Rosary beads. The sick belief in the purity of the Bible and the respectability of money.”

The Horror of Romance

The American Horror Genre comes directly from English Romanticism (lie #1). There is always an ethical barb to a horror story. Often, horror stories depict what happens when we have distorted ethics that cause degeneration over time. The impact of such distortions are very creepy in Lovecraft when worlds under the ground are opened up, and we can see the centuries of decrepitation and the weird outcome of generations of moral and ethical decay.

Horror is in essence philosophical. Horror creeps up from the cracks in the rationalists' ethical thinking. Rationalism becomes the apologetics of human exploitation and money motivation.  The apologetics of usury. The smutty table conversation of a blighted English aristocrat with his mildewed lady--rotten people that they were. Devotion to the wrong ethic can cause grotesque distortions in a single lifetime. Extrapolate these distortions across several generations and the outcome can be monstrous. The musty inbreeding of monied interests. The weird appetites of the habitual and professional exploiters of the people. The stale cadaver of John Stuart Mill breaking free from its grave and limping perpetually from library to library over the earth.

    The Horror genre sailed like Dracula across the Atlantic transplanting it’s dank soil to a burgeoning American audience (lie #2). Edgar Allen Poe was a big fan of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and they had similar habits concerning opium use. It was common then to smoke opium on one’s tobacco. I imagine the reading experience of those days as by firelight through a blue haze of opium and tobacco smoke.  The smoldering of herbs and the power of the snuff has never been equaled to what it was in London’s late 18th century. The Apothecary’s entire cabinet was open to the paying public. Tinctures of cannabis were common. Laudanum was a popular and heavily addictive tincture of opium and Absinthe was already adding a trippy edge to the first psychedelic generation. The late 18th century was a time of tremendous experimentalism.  A fascination with spontaneous combustion and hypnotism were in vogue. The infusion of Jewish and Indian ideas into the cultural milieux made for a stew richer and older with vampires and witches.  Weird deities in Tantric sex positions. Entities older than the English language itself and older even than our ugly Roman letters.

    What are the works of English Romanticism that form the root of the horror genre? Henri Fuseli’s Nightmare. Fuseli was pal and partner of William Blake, the most violent and horrific of all Romantic poets.  Readers should research what Blake meant by what he called the Vintage of the Nations: The Goddess Enitharmon gulping down her cup of ambrosia. Pure adrenalized human blood. All of humanity pressed like grapes for our juice at the pleasure of the Gods.

Grotesque

Grotesque is a man who embraces one overarching truth and makes it his guide stone. He becomes distorted in holding onto his truth. When it passes below the horizon his truth will be upside-down and so will he be. So will he be.

Note: This is my meditation after reading Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg Ohio, which I thought was interesting enough to reread after twenty years. The idea of the Grotesque as a person who is distorted ethically, or is perhaps demented, is missing psychic components, has mental mal-nutrition, are at once pathetic and creepy. It smacked me as reminiscent of Balzac's Comedy Humane; and certainly, that seems to be where the genesis of the Grotesque lies--in the French tradition.

Then it also struck me that the timing of Anderson's American work somewhat coincides to the modern period in Russia, where Anton Chekhov was producing works of short fiction that are similar in structure and content. Of course, there is an affinity in Russian culture for the French.  Russian was once a vulgar language in St. Petersburg, where French was spoken in the court, the church, and the university as well as in polite society.  This is often depicted in classical Russian literature (Tolstoy). So, I think that the impact of Balzac's short fiction can still be felt generations after he had completed his work, in two divergent literary traditions.

Or perhaps they are a single tradition: international modern lit.--which I think would be an interesting course. Does Balzak give us a prequel into modern lit? Yes.

"Immediately the Lark mounted with a loud trill from Felphams Vale" -- W. Blake

http://ramhornd.blogspot.com/2018/06/harvest-vintage.html