Breakthroughs and Connections

January 21, 2011

Dear Amado,

I decided to address this writing to you to give it an interpersonal brotherly focus and tone that will actually help me to explain myself more directly than if I were either talking to myself or to the anonymous world at large. These are raw unedited notes.

My coalescences started when I visited your grad course on the connections between the rise of both so-called civilization and of patriarchy. Through Ulansey’s explanation of the attention to the precession of the equinoxes, I started seeing the roots of so many different developments in the Near and Middle East that the movie Zeitgeist also points to (although Peter Joseph, the director, does so in a completely dismissive and condescending way that pisses me off). These insights were common among the Gnostics for at least a millenium.

What I started seeing very clearly were the root connections between these patriarchal statist oligarchies and the global suppression of tribal cultures. And this suppression in the name of civilization, literacy, state, official priesthoods, and hierarchies of all kinds, becomes the beginning of the imperialist drive.

My life-long interests and researches are being drawn into this net. I started the Fall quarter with the insight into the ideological continuities between North American Zionism (the Puritan Conquest of New England that transformed into the ideology of Manifest Destiny) and 19th Century European Zionism which led to the establishment of the state of Israel, based on the North American model of extermination and dispossession.

But with your course I started seeing the roots of all of this tied up with the rise of Rome and the transition from Mithraism to Christianity. Then I coincidentally started reading Jung again as part of my Anzaldúa study and realized that he saw himself as being instructed in visions by a Mithraic god (see The Aryan Christ). My interest in European indigenous revival movements suddenly came up in relation to Jung, who participated in revived Pagan solar cults in Germany and Switzerland. In addition, I read Vine Deloria, Jr.'s new book on Jung, C.G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions: Dreams, Visions, Nature and the Primitive, which is fantastic.

Leslie Marmon Silko points to the importance of European indigenism (among other things) in her novel Gardens in the Dunes and Ward Churchill does so in his conversations with German Pagans. Churchill’s point—which I discussed with Silko in December when I visited her in Tucson—is that the European indigenists need to reclaim their ancestral traditions from both the continuing forces of Christian repression and extermination (carried out by Rome through the Catholic Church) and the Fascists, who perverted European indigenous roots into a genocidal racist fantasy of racial ancestral Aryan purity. These Fascists also saw the connections between Christianity and the Near-Eastern mystery cults that Zeitgeist points to, but they used this insight as grounds for arguing that Christ’s teachings and his deification by his followers not only stemmed from such Persian/Aryan roots but also for arguing that Christ was not Jewish. How could good Aryan Christians worship a Jewish Messiah?

This, and the Anzaldúa connection, led me to reread James Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology, a post-Jungian argument for overthrowing the tyranny of monotheistic thought and reinstating polytheistic pagan visions (which I briefly responded to here, but plan to do so more thoroughly soon). Then for the past month I spent each night watching another episode of Joseph Campbell’s Mythos series (I and II), in which he makes several extremely profound statements, the impact of which seems to me muted by his staid academic appearance and mode of delivery. He is offering extremely revolutionary insight in these lectures. I will expand on this later.

So at the moment I am feverishly re-reading Heidegger in an attempt to get at the indigenous sources of his re-reading of the “Greeks,” the Presocratics whose notions of nature as a temporal process of emanation or radiance have much in common with various tribal cosmovisions. I am looking into his pagan vision as a different path out of the Fascist neo-pagan legacy, one that offers a potential radical challenge to the technocratic objectification of all being (Machenschaft) which logically led from Socrates to the Nazi death camps and the atom bomb.

So in brief and sketchy form, these are my breakthroughs and connections of the past three months and my head is expoding. Add to this my concurrent research into the connections between Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, and Kundalini yoga (all of which see the cosmos, including the body, as made up of energy fields and cellular intelligence—prana, chi, kundalini), and you can get a glimpse of my cosmic excitement and potential insanity.

With love and respect and enthusiasm,

George