MANIFESTO OF THE WITCHCRAFT

The breakup of the home and family, the confusion in problems of morals and behavior, the frustration of the individual need for love, self-expression and freedom, and the immanence of the total destruction of western civilization all indicate the need for a basic reexamination and alteration of individual and social values. The attempts of economic, political and social movements, of scientific and intellectual constructions, and of the Christian churches to meet and solve these problems have been most notable failures. It is not enough to point out the problems and criticize the situation. The individual and social solution must be simple and workable. Mature investigation on the part of philosophers and social scientists have indicated the existence of only one force of sufficient power to solve these problems and effect the necessary changes, and that is the force of a new religion. New that is in the sense of releasing man from the bonds of pretense, inhibition, frustration, and false morality into which he has fallen, and in helping him to attain the freedom, self-expression, and ability to love and be loved that are his most basic and vital need. The failure of the Christian religion, and of the pseudo religions and state cults which stem from it by imitation or inversion, have left man without roots and without a soul, without the spiritual and religious force of understanding to face and solve his problems.

We, the Witchcraft, are such a religion. In our sanctuaries we have kept alive the light of true religion, that means joy, happiness, love and freedom for mankind. Through the centuries man has done terrible things to himself, things which we were helpless to prevent. Man has needed these experiences and was not ready for our truths. In the face of such calumny, torture and death we maintained our watch against the time a new eon opened, and a man was ready to receive us.

That time has come, Man has at last proved to himself the futility of his false religion, false morals, and false values. He knows his need for love and freedom, and is ready for the word of power that will make him free. In our sanctuaries, we contain the great secrets of life, love, freedom and power than can redeem mankind. One of these secrets is nearly ripe for revelation to the world, the others we reserve for those whose progress in understanding makes it possible from them to receive and use these truths.

In our name we have been cursed, reviled, and persecuted. But man has only to look within and then to look at the lying masks which conceal only a corruption within. We are the religion of nature, of man as he is in his true self. We are come to aid man in destroying his false gods and false beliefs, and in aiding them to attain the knowledge and the power of this true and glorious self. This is our sole purpose.

And to this end we invite every man and woman to join with us, to study our teachings, to participate in our works and aims, and to aid us by allowing us to aid them.

In the first step of our activity we offer instructions in the laws of the ego and the nature of love, and the relations of man with himself and the universe. We show the origin and function of religions and morals, of magic and witchcraft, we teach the basic aspects of the nature, purpose and techniques f the practices which will aid man to the attainment of freedom, power and love. This course is open to all. In further courses for selected students, we offer instructions leading to the understanding and use of the basic secrets of power, the fundamental nature of reality, change and illusion, and the keys which lead to the consciousness of the great world, that is called eternity.

We contain the secrets of alchemy, magic, metaphysics, yoga and all occult science, and the understanding of the ultimate nature of things, and offer these to those who are able to accept them. This is only possible to courage, freedom and love. It is for the sake of these that we now manifest and invite all mankind to the great adventure.

By the Witchraft

Issued June 15, 1950 4000 Y.B.

In the name of BABALON

THE WITCHCRAFT

Registration for course P-1 and application for probationary membership in the Witchcraft.

I hereby apply for probationary membership in the Witchcraft and registration in the Basic Course, P-1. I understand that this application places me under no obligation other than that to study and practice the basic course with the object of knowing and extending my own powers. I further understand that the Witchcraft is a religious, benevolent and fraternal organization pledged to the ideals of love, of liberty and universal brotherhood, and having no other religious, social, or political associations or commitments. I understand that the Witchcraft is under no obligation to me, other than that of furnishing a basic course of instruction, consisting of fourteen sections. I enclose 10 dollars for these instructions and for probationary membership in The Witchcraft.

Signed….

Age…. Sex…. Occupation…. Religious affiliation…. Organizations….

Reason for application….

Approved….

___________

Course P-1. Basic Magick, Fundamental Theory and Practice. Fourteen sections with assignments. 10 dollars.

Introduction to The Witchcraft, Laws of the ego, the nature of love, the new eon, the origins of religion, basic rituals, magical weapons, equipment and symbols, the nature of man and the gods, angels, demons, and elementals, invocation and evocation, the understanding and expression of the true self.

For registration in class instruction or extension courses write The Witchcraft . P.O. Box

____________

August 13, 2022August 19, 2022

DOING YOUR WILL

DOING YOUR WILL_

I

Tonight I will attempt to present you with the outline of a practical reduction of the philosophy behind The Book of the Law, as it applies to our modern life.
This will be difficult, since there is an enormous background of technical, historical, social, and psychological data which I shall be forced to omit. This is all available. I hope that you will be sufficiently interested to review it yourself, if you have not done so.

If you will remember that I am dealing with the end product of this material, and trying, in a very short period, to condense this into a practical conclusion, I will appreciate your tolerance.

There are certain individuals who aspire to a maximum of independence, in thought and in action, in order to achieve the optimum in the function of their nature and in their creative Will.

From among such have come the dreamers and creators, the leaders and revolutionaries, artists and poets and scientists. All that we know of progress and of culture has come from them; all, out of the Neolithic swamp, by fire and air, by earth and water, and by the creative word, has come from those minds, from those hands.

The anthropoid mind fears and mistrusts such sorts, and rides, an unwilling ape, on the coat-tails of the creative evolute. Unwilling, unwitting, and often something more than that.

In the indomitable Will of the first order genius, there is sufficient ferocity or subtlety to overcome arboreal opposition, although the manifest result is usually post mortem, over a somewhat mutilated corpse.

But there are numberless fine minds – men and women of high talent and culture – who, lacking a little in the internal certainty, or facing and overwhelming social opposition, have descended into futility and failure.
We propose a philosophy and a way of life having a pragmatic appeal to such minds.

A vast number of the human race has the mentality of slaves. Following Barnum, we can also deduce an appropriate number of slave masters.
There is no criticism here. The orders of nature are obvious, and acceptable to the philosophic. But, to the slave mind, there is often something unendurable in the notion of freedom and independence; it would have all men as its brothers in bondage. With this, the slave masters are in full accord.

It would be tedious to examine the techniques by which slavery has been fostered; the superstitious and authoritative devices, religious, political, social and economic, which have forged the chains. Whole philosophies, conceiving the Universe of nature as sorrow, and the nature of man as sin, have been constructed to palliate sacrifice, expiation and obedience.

God and Pope and king, society, humanity, the people, the proletariat, the family, war, the national emergency and all the other bogeys from the armory of fear have been summoned to confront the non-groveler. And those psychological weapons have been terribly enhanced.

This is obvious; and there is room in the world for animal acts and animal trainers – but not more than enough room!
If the individual abdicates his independence in the face of this rabbit hypnosis, this prestidigitation, then he has deserved the bondage into which he is delivered.

It is a matter of balance. The leopard won’t change his spots – not very rapidly – nor is it needful that he should. It is only needful that the lion take his proper place in the jungle, and keep the leopard and the rabbit where they belong.
The creative individual must take his place as a creative leader in society. He must fulfill his destiny and his responsibility; he can achieve both in fearlessly following his creative Will – his own inner truth; and, in inevitable corollary, he must know and assist others who strive to do likewise.

Then, by leading the slaves a little out of slavery, and the masters a little into humanity and culture – maintaining all the while his own inviolable independence – he will achieve that balance which alone gives significance to the human story.

II

This exposition of the Rights of Man is a statement of first principles. You are referred to Crowley’s works, the writings of Nietzche, Mencken and Bertrand Russell, Emerson’s essay on Self-Reliance, and the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights in the American Constitution. Here I am not unduly concerned with theory, but rather with you, who, like myself, have independently reached these conclusions, and who are interested in a practical reduction.

Freedom is twofold: there is the freedom within, and the freedom without; and, like all things, the first freedom starts at the home plate.
The mainspring of the individual is his creative Will. This Will is the sum of his tendencies, his destiny, his inner truth. It is the one with the force that makes the birds since and flowers bloom; as inevitable as gravity, as implicit as a bowel movement, it informs alike atoms and men and suns.
To the man who knows this Will, there is no why or why not, no can or cannot; he IS!

There is no known force that can turn an apple into an alley cat; there is no known force that can turn a man from his will. This is the triumph of genius; that, surviving the centuries, enlightens the world.

This force burns in every man.
There are those who are too cowardly, too weak, to see or express it.
There are those who are too full of pretense, of gullibility, of fear and greed, to give it utterance.

Their lot is bitterness, failure and frustration; dust and ashes are their portion.
There are those who are bewildered, at odds with themselves, overwhelmed by adversity. They seek the light, and if they persevere, they will find it – within Themselves.

LIBER LXXVII

“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” –AL. I. 40

“thou hast no right but to do thy will. Do that, and no other shall say nay.” –AL. I. 42-3

“Every man and every woman is a star.” –AL. I. 3

There is no god but man.

1. Man has the right to live by his own law–

to live in the way that he wills to do:
to work as he will:
to play as he will:
to rest as he will:
to die when and how he will.

2. Man has the right to eat what he will:

to drink what he will:
to dwell where he will:
to move as he will on the face of the earth.

3. Man has the right to think what he will:

to speak what he will:
to write what he will:
to draw, paint, carve, etch, mould, build as he will:
to dress as he will.

4. Man has the right to love as he will:–

“take your fill and will of love as ye will,
when, where, and with whom ye will.” –AL. I. 51

5. Man has the right to kill those who would thwart these rights.

“the slaves shall serve.” –AL. II. 58

“Love is the law, love under will.” –AL. I. 57

III

What are the obstacles to the attainment of the Will? There are many, but they may be grouped into certain primary divisions. And the name of every one of them is FEAR.

1. Fear of Incompetence

“I would like to, but I could never do it.”

This is the flimsiest of excuses; – a narcissistic pap poisoning creation at its source. Confidence, enthusiasm, belief and egotism are the roots of creation.

BELIEVE IN YOURSELF

That is the first rule. Humility can come later. Applaud yourself to yourself. Be proud – you are unique, and marvelously made. There is none other like you.

2. Fear the Opinion of Others

“What would people say?”

What people? What would they say? To hell with them. Every genius that lighted the world has outraged public opinion. Do you fear that pack of cards?

BE YOURSELF

Be true to yourself; be honest; enjoy yourself; go your own way, the way of the stars.

3. Fear of Hurting Others

“Mother wouldn’t want me to — !”

Are you yourself or another? Whose life do you live? To whom are you responsible? Who is your master? Shall we ban cigarettes because they make Mrs. Grundy cough, hand lumber dealers because Christ was crucified, and rend Edison because Johnny was electrocuted?
Does it kill mother when you stay out until one? Is hubby so dreadfully hurt over that flirtation, and wifey in tears about the blonde? This is a subtle device of the slave master. “Do what I say or I’ll feel badly.”

EXPRESS YOURSELF

Live your own life – follow your own star. As the Bible has it: “Forsake your father and mother.” “Let the dead bury the dead.” Let the sick tend the sick. But follow yourself, and no other christ or god. You are sufficient; you justify yourself; you are your own reason:

THERE IS NO MORE NEEDED.

You should be polite about it; you may even be gentle about it. Wanton hurt is needless and gains nothing; but inner, inflexible strength, terribly gentle in its own right of expression, can and must follow its own Will as surely as a star follows it own orbit, undeterred and undisturbed by the wailing of inhabitants of minor satellites.

4. Fear of Insecurity

“I might lose my job”

This is the most paltry, the most despicable of the excuses – this slavish whine for daily bread: “Anything you say, masters. I’ll be good, just feed me!”

HAVE FORTITUDE.

Be courageous, and the adventure of Life is yours. Failure – can there be an ultimate failure where manhood is sustained? Is not any failure in freedom better than any success in the Slave Pen?
“Yes,” you might agree – at least I assume that somebody might agree – “but these things are difficult. Where do we start?”

We start, naturally, with the least of the little things. For on the other end of the fulcrum from that little thing is the Universe, and all your heart’s desire. Dedicate yourself to your best and highest, and begin. What is the person you most desire to be – I mean, freely and honestly, not morally? Imitate that person, and what began as imitation will end as perfection.

It is possible to cultivate habits of mind and of attention. The splendor of nature is all about us, immortal in loveliness, inexhaustible in wonder. The sky calls us to the high places; the wind and the rain greet us; trees and grasses speak to us, mountains and the great plains and green valleys. We have only to open our minds and hearts to the eternal forces, and we and the eternal forces are one.

From such harmonies the creative Will draws force to inform the mind. He who has opened the way to nature will not wait long to know his Way.
In the beginning, and consistent action dedicated to the discovery of the Will, or to its development, suffices. The nature of an act is no wise important, so long as it serves as a lever to set the Will in motion, and so long as it is repeated performed.

Almost any device is permissible if it helps. The use of a talisman, fetish or image symbolizing the Will; the use of a daily formula or ritual; and most especially the dedication of a certain period every day – rain or shine, in sickness and in health, in enthusiasm or loathing – for the exclusive practice of the dedicatory act. There is a danger mind or muscle – building as an end in itself can degenerate into a subtle form of masturbation.

The Will must be freed of its fetters. The ruthless examination and destruction of taboos, complexes, frustrations, dislikes, fears and disgusts hostile to the Will is essential to progress. Even in the case of per preferences and prejudices, it must be realized that those things are only significant to the individual; meaningless and often silly in the larger world. On a hot day, Galahad probably stank under his armor. And the sensibility which is nauseated by the sex odor of its own kind, and titillated by the sex odor of plants, might be profitably studied under the heading of a perversion.
Now suppose that the second step is reached. The Will is beginning to flow. You know who you are, what you are, you have discovered your destiny.
It is a time for rejoicing, but not for relaxation. There is no reason in nature why you cannot write music beyond Beethoven, poetry beyond Shelley, out-invent Edison, or out-theorize Einstein!

They are beacons, lighting a sky which you, in your own time and in your own way, will one day illumine.

The task is just begun. There is work ahead – years of work – but work in the real world. Woe to him who dallies with escapist daydreams, with fancies and visions and trances, with specious words and poses, and the onanistic flattery of his fellow opium eaters.

The will is creative and dynamic, and it must create and move in hard fact. By their fruits shall ye known them. “Success is your proof” – but YOUR success, on your own terms. The way is hard; you will face failure after failure, fall after fall. But each fall and each failure is a success, a new jewel for the diadem of conscious experience.

Life – beautiful , terrible, splendid and pitiless; life is your adversary and your love. She you must accept unreservedly, and she you must overcome. She woos to destroy; she submits to conquer, she conquers to submit. That Tigress is your paramour; the Cosmos is your adventure.

And the goal? The totality of experience – the gesture commensurate with the Universe.

Is that not enough?

August 13, 2022August 20, 2022

FREEDOM IS A LONELY STAR

FREEDOM IS A LONELY STAR_

ONE TIME, IN AMERICA, there was a dream. It was a dream of man. Through the long night, through two thousand years of bondage, the dream was born. Out of agony and terror. Out of poverty and misery. Out of secret thoughts, in the heart of despair. Out of whispered words, in the shadow of death. Out of love, in an empire of hate. Children, chained to work carts. Women whipped through the streets. Men and women, and children too, burned alive in the public square, because they dared to think of freedom.

Lonely, and difficult, and dangerous, through ages and ages of night the star of freedom was born. Nursed with blood. Nurtured on agony. Carried, at length, to a new world, and planted there, in the fresh soil. Nourished, until it shone with an awesome light, a winged thing so high, so pure, so beautiful that it struck all the world with wonder. A dream of free men, working together in dignity and significance of honorable representatives, who cherished freedom and honor beyond their own interest and welfare. Of the inviolability of individual freedom, beyond kings and priests, beyond politicians and judges, beyond money or power or prestige. And all over the world men in tyranny and ignorance and oppression responded to that dream. “At last,” they said, “at last.”

Fragments of the dream come down to us now – “We hold that all men are born free and equal; and endowed…with certain inalienable rights, among which are the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” “I shall guard even my enemy from oppression.” “Give me liberty or give me death.” Fragments and strands, echoing emptily in empty hearts.
For the dream is dead now, or in a sleep that is like unto death. It has been sold out, denied and betrayed.

It has been sold out by cheap and venal politicians, by benevolent authoritarians, by “loyal” party men, by shrewd and greedy capitalists, by wise guys and smart guys that know all the answers. It has been sold out by the great middle class that prefers its false sense of security and false freedom, by the labor leaders that put power first, and the little man who prefers – at last with at least a decent reason – a full belly, or the promise of a full belly, to freedom turned dangerous and hungry.

It has been sold out by America, and for that reason the heart of America is sick, and the soul of America is dead. It is for this reason that we cannot instruct our children with a significant morality, or elect honorable men to office, or conduct our own affairs with a sense of dignity and significance. That dream itself was the soul of America in which there was no cause by man, no religion but man, and no goal but man. The betrayal of his dream is the one thing that man cannot forgive himself. The pompous oratory, the brave show, the frantic search for scapegoats and traitors – all attempts to conceal from himself the thing that cannot be concealed, his cowardice, his failure.
Having failed freedom at home, we engaged in sick and fevered attempts to impose it abroad, with all the panoply of futility. Out of the First World War, national prohibition, the income tax, Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, and the benevolent dictatorship of the New Deal. Out of the Second, Stalin, the enslavement of sciences, and the suppression of freedoms in the Great Red Scare. After the Third, what will be left to suppress? Heroic Crusades for Freedom. Advances to the rear. For what? Survival? To what end? To the end that we must ape the enemy in order to defeat him on the grounds that our ends justify our means? To the very end, where all our freedoms are gone, the betrayers themselves betrayed, and freedom again rediscovered and reconsecrated in agony and blood? To what their end?

Perhaps we could face the world as conquerors, in the name of power and right, if we had the guts, which we do not. We could face the world as heroes if we had the courage of our own dream; which we do not. But as champions of freedom abroad who have sold out freedom at home, willing to sell out the freedom of anyone else where our own ends are served, we make a sorry show. Pretentious hypocrites, lacking even the shrewdness of a sound ego, we make ourselves ridiculous in the eyes of the world. And underneath the pretense: shame – the shame of the booby that has sold his dignity, his individuality for conformity, for money, for the prestige of the pigsty.
The principles of freedom are forever the same, but its issues are constantly shifting. George III is not the tyrant today, nor Madison the arch-reactionary, nor are we asked to surrender our liberties and persecute those who think differently because of the menace of Danton, Maurat and Robespierre. It is now safe to enshrine those persons whom once it would have been very dangerous to know – neither Washington, nor Jefferson, nor Henry nor Paine would have been “safe” or “secure” associations in the days of the revolutions.
Now there is a theory that our fathers fought and died for our freedom, and this bought it for us. So now there is no need for us to concern ourselves with that for which they paid with discomfort, hunger and blood. We can leave this to those who are hired or drafted to protect our liberty.

We are assured on every hand that we are a free people – in fact, we have it in writing. Our fathers were not content with such assurances, but rather, by act and deed, assured these freedoms for themselves. That is the difference.
We are a savage culture. Our emotions and our attitudes, our needs and our drives, are all savage. Our religions and our morals, societies and creeds, cults and taboos; all are those of the savage.

But we are savages who have assumed the pretense of civilization, and this is our greatest disaster. This miserable pretense has closed at once both possibilities of stabilizing our culture. The one, or the non-pretentious savage outlet, would allow us the expression of our savage needs and drives in a set of acceptable mores and expectations. The other, an acceptance of our savagery together with an aspiration to true civilization, might allow us to face and know ourselves, and in the slow, painful laboratory where all natural process are wrought, in time effect some upward change.

But in our blindness to our savagery we are trapped – we refuse to see the facts until it is too late – until in our private lives the impossible attention undoes our fairest hopes and fondest dreams, and in the public scene the idiot and criminal nations play holocaust with all our world. And now, as by a joke of the gods, a power that is sublime has been put in the hands of our most ruthless criminals and our most appalling idiots. It thus becomes clear that we must stoon choose openly the most abysmal savagery without the least vestige of further pretense, or we must renounce savagery to an undreamed of degree. And in this renunciation we must accept two propositions of true civilizations: the individuality of the individual, and the absolute necessity for a world state.

No conceivable conquest, save the conquest of the individual of an by himself, can assure us against destruction in the conflicts to come. And if this conquest cannot be total, it must be sufficient to produce the requisite number of adequate and civilized individuals.

At present, I cannot conceive of a workable world state, and I know that it cannot be conceived and ordered in a world of savages. But I can conceive that individuals, sufficiently evolved, and working towards the understanding, knowledge, and self-control that defines freedom, could achieve this. It can only be done by free men, and these men must be equally free of the pretense and self-deception, and the success and conformity cults that have made our society culture a slough of despond. The inane and illogical restrictions that repress all individuality and creative spirit, the savage cruelty and hostility to ourselves and our fellows, the terror and guilt that ride us like nightmares, must be understood and relieved.

That such an undertaking would be popular is hardly to believed. That it would succeed in one generation, or ten, is perhaps too much to expect. But it is the only way. The wars, revolutions, crimes, the social and economic disorders and inequalities, which the ignorant regard as causes in themselves, are only the manifestations of the savage fact behind the civilized pretense – outbursts made more furious by evasions and repression. I know of no other answer than to cry a last crusade, a crusade for freedom, for the freedom to know and be ourselves before it is forever too late. If there is a hope, that hope is in man, and it is only in free men that the hope can be realized.

It is my aim to offer an examination of pretenses whereby they can no longer be concealed by institutions and names, and a definition of freedom that will, once and for all, place it beyond equivocation and deceit.

The conditioned reflex response of the standard ego is formulated in terms of the cross, the flag, the home, the church, the school God, mothers and American womanhood. These things have a purely reflexive value, without any rationale whatsoever. No standard ego has ever examined them; it would be heretical to do so. He simply responds. Behind these mechanical values, the necessities of life are met with rationalization processes that are often almost sublime. The crooked business and political deals, murder and pillage, seductions, rapes and visits to prostitutes are all conducted by the man who isn’t there, in another world whose doors are guarded by the most marvelous network of hypocrisy, pretense and downright lying ever invented by the mind of man.

Occasionally some venturesome soul, dissatisfied with the standard ego formulations, breaks out and wanders around in reality awhile, until he is frightened back into the dream again or guided back by some psychiatrist.
The first view of truth is terror – the knowledge is as old as time – all the myths show it. From alcoholism to paranoid psychosis, from the mildest neurotic syndrome to schizophrenia, the escape from the terror of the true self and the true world. Dalua and Dermot, Pan and Persephone, Mayan and Mixitli, Janicot and Jehovah, each showed a visage of horror before the true face – the total truth – was revealed. Truth, in short, is not for fools and cowards, but for this the will that acts, the wisdom that knows, and the courage that dares the first terrible impact.

Beyond the fanged serpent are the immortal meadows, behind the skull face lie the stars. Only the free man shall pass that portal, and walk out into the total world that is eternity.

In a world where a precocious romance is set above reality – where He is a God and She is a Goddess in a springtime, where all endings are happy, plain John Smith and Mary Jones have short shrift. Morality cannot endure the comparison – a clumsy overture, a cold in the nose, an unexpected monthly ruins the enchantment, and the movies assure us that our mate, odious comparison, is somehow a miserable exception to the gold rule.
But whether we seek the dream in an escape from reality, or whether we cynically deny it, we are equally damned. True marriage, that rare estate, is as close to paradise as humanity can come. But it cannot be attained only by keeping the vision of beauty constantly before us and by transmitting, by constant effort and courage, by faith and love, the hard matters of reality into the shape of the beloved dream. And that marriage attained is the garden of paradise, whereof happy children are the “fruit.”

It is not easily come to – it is possible only to courage, to maturity, to intelligence and high idealism. But it can be attained, “and if it can it must,” for that marriage is the sure foundation of a free world.

Police, like the military, are a necessary evil that requires constant surveillance and rigid control in order to keep them within the bounds of constitutional law and democratic procedure. In most large American cities, police are little more than agents of a corrupt political machine, acting as collectors and supervisors for organizing prostitution, gambling, dope and protection rackets. For these gangsters, the collection of revenue and the terrorization of opposition is of far greater importance than the suppression of crime. The police mind is usually of a sadistic and homicidal trend, and the office, as it now exists, offers an ideal opportunity for the expressions of the urge, and the ruthless punishment of symbolic scapegoats in the form of prostitutes, derelicts, Negroes, radicals, drunks, and other helpless and insignificant members of the nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

The traditional American distrust and dislike of police stems from a remembrance of police states of Europe. But the modern American has abrogated, along with his other freedoms, his freedom from police interference in his private life, unwarranted search and seizure, wiretapping, suspension of constitutional immunity (the sole guarantee against intimidation and torture), and all the other trappings of a police state. His present resentment is about as mature, as courageous, and as effective as that of a small, broken-spirited boy against a brutal and tyrannical father. This gutless specimen is now engaged in selling out each liberty that someone else gained for him, as fast he can make the deal. He is buying security, protection, prosperity – the fine futile freedoms – and all the other gangsters goods at a bargain price. All that he pays is his right to call himself a man.

The methods by which politicians achieve their ultimate ambitions, that is, to become tyrants, are obvious, and exceedingly stale. But however old the trick, it seems that there is always a fresh crop of suckers. Foremost among the public plans and promises of Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin on their way to power were not the establishment of concentration camps. The murder and torture of free citizens, and the annihilation of all freedom.

As hard as it may seem to believe, by some sort of anachronistic plagiarisms these plans and promises included increased prosperity, fewer slums, social security, more jobs, and defense against enemies without and traitors within.
There were also among the foremost plans and promises of Sulla, Caesar, Robespierre and Napoleon. The bait is so old and obvious one suspects that repetition must have given it prestige. The first step is the discovery of an emergency. Any emergency will do – a depression, a plot, an enemy without, and enemy within, the second coming of Christ, witches – anything whatever which can be used to whip fear, hatred and hysteria for fever pitch.

The nest step is the program to meet the emergency. Whatever the program may be, increase taxation is its inevitable first-born and best beloved. Taxation – that is, for the Great Cause – taxation to create bureaus which create bureaus that require taxation for the support of bureaus. Taxation for the support of more politicians, police, charities, public works, et cetera. Taxation, in short, for anything and everything. Purely, of course, as a temporary measure. Ah, these temporary measures. How permanent they are. The Republican procedures of Rome were suspended, just temporarily, so that the politicians could fight a war and save the country in “this great and terrible emergency.” But somehow the emergency lasted through Sulla and Caesar, and Augustus, and Tiberius, and Caligula, and Claudius and Nero and in fact, clean through the collapse and final dissolution of the Roman state.
The next step is the discovery that the emergency is much worse than anyone thought. Revolution is on the verge, collapse is imminent, the world is going to end tomorrow.

So naturally we will act now and in order to do this it is necessary to have a dictatorship. Harsh word? Shall we say – organizations to meet the emergency temporarily, of course. The sophistries by which this putsch is justified, palliated, honey coated, are among the most ludicrous in the politician’s bag of tricks.

The church, for example, burnt heretics from motives of most terrible mercy. Since this was the only way to save their souls from hell, of course the church didn’t really kill, she only tried, convicted and sentenced to execution. The state did the dirty work, just to keep the church’s hands clean. Execution was by fire, because the church could not of course condone the shedding of blood.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is merely temporary – the state will gradually wither away like a snark hunter, leaving us all free as birds. Meanwhile it may be necessary to kill, torture and imprison a few million people, but whose fault is it if they get in the way of progress? Socialism – the greatest good of the greatest number – how can you argue against it? That only proves you are in the minority, in the wrong.

When the rights of labor interfere with the public good, the national need, the emergency – then to hell with their rights. What does the freedom of a few radical university professors, scientists, teachers, government workers matter when our country is in danger? Sign or be fired. And whose freedom tomorrow, fatheads, fools? Whose rights when the masks are down and the gloves off, and a spade is the thing you dig your grave with? When a man can be fired, hounded, persecuted, jailed in America for the opinions he holds, for his refusal to have his privacy violated, then it is time to publicly burn the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence, and call this country by its right name – a tyrant state.

How can we cope with these predators, politicians and their moronic dupes? We can examine their emergencies, for what they are worth. Predators are not confined to one party or one nation. There is always the real need to be well armed, well informed and well prepared against all enemies of freedom. Well meaning fools, appalled by the predators within, clamor to throw down their arms and welcome the predators without. This is plain suicide, but the fear of predators without can also drive fools to the same suicide within. Arms and armies are necessary, but it also necessary to watch them, to control them, and to keep them subservient to the private citizens whom they serve.
We can reduce political sophistries to their basic elements, and examine them in the light of reason and necessity. Politicians need some graft – some excitement, some opportunity for hysteria; it is their life blood. A certain degree of criminality and psychosis goes with the breed. But easily, easily, gentlemen. Within limits, and under control.

Taxation, however, is a major root of the politician’s power, and it is here that he can best be regulated. The first new limit on potential power must be the abolition of confiscatory taxation, and of punitive taxation in all forms. Taxation should exist for the sole purpose of raising reasonable revenue, and must in no case exceed a fixed and minimum percentage of income, profit, value, or sales. The moment it does, it becomes a weapon of dictatorship superseding and replacing due process of law.

Taxation must be open, not hidden and secret. The process of withholding taxes from wages is a violation of individual and corporate rights, a dodge to dupe employees into blaming employers for the piratical raids of government on income. The income tax itself was the opening wedge in a conspiracy to build a vast politico-economic empire, wielding an absolute control over the income, business and private life of every citizen. Augmented by social security and old age and a multitude of hidden taxes, its success is now reasonable apparent to all except the chronic paupers and welfare dupes that are its dubious beneficiaries. Its such fun to soak the rich. But not so much fun when a rich man, from a tax standpoint, is anyone with an income over fifty dollars a month. Let the common man pay his taxes in the open and he will soon see that his “security,” at that price, could be sold by any insurance company, engraved on tablets of pure gold, at a handsome profit.

Any successful confidence fame must be played in stages; the sucker is not hooked all at once. The first issue must be one in which we all believe, the first victim someone we all hate. A rich man, a radical, and atheist, a Negro, a Jew – some no good bastard. We are all together, on the other side, until we take the bait. Then we are on the hook, and it is too late. The Nazi party was the government, the government makes the law, and good citizens always obey the law. Q.E.D. concentration camps = good government. That is the lesson of history, fresh, this time from Germany. One day it may be very well said of us also, “it is too bad they could not learn.” On the basis of the present trend, I would give this country fifteen years, at the outside, to turn into something that that is in essence a socialist or a fascist state.

History is curious. A few of the right men might stop it – the old dream still burns in America, if deep down and dimly. But they have not yet appeared.
The advent of psychoanalytical sciences and the publication of the Kinsey Report have indicated a true state of culture morals previously unsuspected in western history. The impact of these events on society is a moment comparable to that of nuclear physics and the advent of the atomic bomb. The significance of these revolutionary findings in the field of morals has not yet reached the point of practical application in terms of large scale individual and social adjustment. Confusion in regard to proper and significant attitudes and behavior appears to have reached an all-time high.

In addition to the tremendous burdens of self control imposed by culture and civilization, man now sees himself restricted by moral concepts which now appear savage, pretentious and archaic. In the face of ever-increasing social complexity, this burden becomes intolerable and he is tempted to throw the whole thing over at the first clean opportunity. This danger is particulary great because of lack of discrimination between what is essential and what is superfluous in the field of morals. The need for cooperation and renunciation exists as never before; as a corollary, the need for freedom and individuality, wherever these are possible, is od the same magnitude. It is in the field of sexual morals that unnecessary restrictions are most severe, and it is in this field that a process of revision and liberation can go furthest, and serve the most immediate purpose.

It would be of little value, and perhaps almost a disservice, to further demonstrate the barbarous nature and the failure of western sex morals, to develop a further philosophy of sexual freedom and stay at that. This would only serve to increase the awareness of frustration and unhappiness, without indicating any way out of the morass. In addition, it is necessary to clearly show a practical, individual solution to the moral problem, and that is the object of our work.

And you, man, put off this longing for your mother, put away these childish things and come into your manhood. She is not won by small devices and petty conceits, nor by crying, nor by beating on the chest, nor by roses or by gold, but by the clean, bright steel of the sword of freedom. Freedom of yourself, in yourself.

If you have manhood she will look to you for guidance, if you have courage she will find security with you, and if you have freedom she will come with you to liberty in all the spheres. On these three points you will win and hold her and not otherwise, the woman whom your manhood desires.

And from this marriage and not otherwise will come the children who will make a new world, the redeemers of prophecy, the conquerors of darkness and fear.

And this and not otherwise, in freedom, in love, in brotherhood and in the marriage of true minds, will we come finally, unobstructed, to the stars.

August 12, 2022August 15, 2022

Chapter Four: The Woman Girt With the Sword

It is to you woman, beautiful redeemer of the race, whom I address this chapter. That which stirs in you now is not madness, not sin, not folly — but Life! This new life is the joy and the fire that will beget a new race; create a new heaven and new earth. When you were a child, did not the wind and the sun speak to you? Did you not hear the mountain’s voice; the voice of the river and of the storm? Have you not heard the whisper of the stars and the ineffable voice in silence? Have you not gone naked in the forest with the wind on your body and felt the caress of Pan? Your heart has swollen with Spring, blossomed with Summer and saddened with Winter. These things are the covenant and in them is the truth that is forever.

You have sought companions as high-hearted as yourself and found them not save in the elusive memories of dream and song. For you found a blight over the world; a blight of silence and sorrow. Your companions walked in guilt and shame, in fear, in hate, in sin and in the sorrow of sin. There was only nervous laughter and furtive pleasure; unsatisfying and shameful — But be no longer sad, my beloved. Be joyous and unafraid for within you is the song that shall shatter the silence, the flame that will burn away the dross.

It is you who are the redeemer from sing and sorrow, from guilt and shame. WOMAN; oh splendour incarnate! How long have you served in chains, a slave to the lust and guilt of pigs? How long have you writhed under the degradation of your Holy Name, “Whore”, or suffered silently under the degradation called, “virtue”? How well you have known the stake, the rack, the whip, the chains of imprisonment and even entombment in the service of your master.

And was the bond fear, was it weakness, was it cowardice and inferiority? Oh shame of man, it was none of these; it was love. A man was once crucified in a redemption that failed, yet if ten times ten million men were crucified, this infamy could not be redeemed. Husband, father, priest, jailer, judge, executioner, exploiter, seducer, destroyer — so has your lover mastered and defiled you. Yet pity him for he sought love… But finally there is an end and then the beginning and all the future will be with you. For you are the mother of a new race, the redeemer and lover of the new men; the men who shall be free.

I shall speak to you of men. Men desire three things of a woman: a mother greater than themselves, a wife less than themselves and a lover equal with themselves. Against the mother they are in revolt, the wife they hold in contempt and the lover ever eludes them. Consider the husband; how he throws his clothes about, eschews dirty dishes and housework and asserts himself in a loud voice. Consider the homosexual; how he hates woman and flees himself, fearing that he will slay her. Consider the great lover; how he grasps for love and his hands close on nothingness. These are bewildered, frightened children playing games against the dark. And those who wear brass and swords, who strut and slay, are they not the most frightened of all? Therefore pity them and forgive them.

In the ancient world there were men for a season, before cities arose and they turned to gilded popinjays, gracefully accepting futility. Then came Christianity, an anodyne for slaves, an enteric for barbarians whose deeds gave them indigestion — and ultimately, a whip for slave masters.
Faust was the prototype of the Middle Ages, but not the Faustus of whom Kit Marlowe tells. It was a darker Faust; Gilles de Rais, who betrays the Maid in his lust for power, then, after his fall and the failure of his prayers, he descends to horror in his cellars. This theme lasted an age until man, appalled by his nightmares, turned finally to a dream of liberty.

It is the voice of Voltaire, jaded, cynical, weary of folly, that sounds the opening bar of a tremendous, mocking prelude. Tom Paine, one real man, broken and at last betrayed by all the wooden champions, Cagliostro, plotting the revenge of the Templars with a woman and a necklace, Will Blake, speaking uncomprehended with the tongue of angels, Shelley and his beautiful gesture; Swinburne, who almost recreated Helas before he too was broken — Byron, Pushkin, Gautier; all instruments in a prelude to a symphony that was never played. And Science — how it was to save us! That “Brave New World” of Huxley, Darwin and H.G. Wells with only the voice of Spengler in dissent. Science remaking the world; an international language, a universal brotherhood beyond nationality, prejudice or creed… A beautiful vision fallen like a house of cards. You creators of the “New Age” who dare not speak, think or move without permission from the military, you unfettered titans who will hang for speaking across one border — where is your ‘New World’? Champions, where is freedom? What treasure have we lost? We must turn to women for that answer.

The key lies back ten thousand years ago in the Age of Isis that is mistakenly called “The Matriarchy”. It was not a Matriarchy as we conceive it; a rule of club-women, of frustrated chickens, in fact it was not a rule at all; it was an equality.

The Woman was and is the Priestess. In Her reposes the Mystery. She is the Mother, brooding yet tender, the lover, at once passionate and aloof, the wife, revered and cherished. She is the witch woman. She stands co-equal with her mate who is the chieftain, the hunter, the thinker and the doer. The woman is the Priestess, guardian of the mystery, syble of the unconscious and prophetess of dreams. Togther they balanced each other until the catastrophe of the Patriarchal Age, arch-typified by the monosexual monster, Jehovah. Then, under the rule of Priests, woman became an inferior animal while
man became isolated in his imagined superiority and found himself at the mercy of his own merciless intelligence. It was total war between the emotions that must and the intellect that will not. Every patriarchal religion is a self-contradictory monstrosity. They are dogmatic creeds that shift like straws in the wind of the intellect. Upon this shifting structure man has failed. He knows the futility of such artificial systems but he fights for them with all the sick fury his frustration can generate. In the process he has lost his mother, his wife has failed him and his lover eludes him. The Mystery has gone out of the Temple, banished by a senile and self-sufficient council of beards.

Woman, Woman — where are you? Come back to us again. Forgive even if you cannot forget and serve once more in our Temples. Take us by the hand. Kiss us on the lips and tell us we are not alone. Witch-Woman, out of the ashes of the stake, rise again! It was in the Dianic Cult that the old way continued. Those splendid and terrible women; Messilina, Toffana, La Voisin and DeBrinvillies raised revenge to a high art. Others sought the forbidden mystery in secret rites and purchased a brief reunion at an awful price.
This was the hope in the Maid of Orleans, the dream of hopeless millions that the woman who was to redeem them had come at last. Her failure and her fate teach us that innocence is no protection. Be cunning, oh woman, be wise, be subtle, be merciless. I have asked you to understand and forgive — but forget not overmuch. Trust nothing but yourself.

Now I have spoken of those great poisoners but there is a worse revenge. Know that all revenge is revenge on self and the most terrible is that taken by the frigid woman. Count her in the tens of millions. The curse lies in the failure of her mate to be a man and her failure to be true to herself but the cause is the dark guilt with which parents poison their children. There is also suppressed incestuous love and the fear of unwanted children — yet those who have known of these things should have no shame there-from. Strength is not born, it is gained by understanding and overcoming. Go free; sing the old, wild song: EVOE IO, EVOE IACCHUS IO PAN, PAN! EVOE BABALON!

Go to the mountains and the forest; go naked in the Summer that you may regain the old joy. Love gladly and freely under the stars. But you say your body is not beautiful? Here is a secret: the body is molded by the mind. If you have embraced fear, repression, hate — then you may find your body repulsive. But go free, love joyously and without restraint. Run naked then watch the cheeks flush, the breasts well and the supple contours develop from the flowing rhythms of life. Disease and deformity are bred in fear and hate, therefore be fearless lovers and ever beautiful.

The woman is the Priestess of the Irrational World! Irrational – but how enormously important, and how dangerous because it is unadmitted or denied, we do not want to be drunken, murderous, frustrated, poverty-stricken and miserable without cause. These conditions are not reasonable or ‘scientific’ and yet they do exist. We say we do not want war but war seems a psychological necessity. Wars will continue until that need is otherwise fulfilled. We do not love or hate a person because it is “reasonable”. We are moved willy-nilly, despite our reason and our will, by forces from the unconscious, irrational world. These forces speak to us in dreams, in symbols and in our own incomprehensible actions. These passions can only be redeemed by intuitive understanding in the feminine province. Only after such understanding can will and intelligence be truly effective for otherwise they are blind and powerless against the tides of emotion.

Woman, put away unworthy weapons. Put away malice and poison, frigidity and childishness. Draw the two-edged sword of freedom and call for a man to meet you in fair combat; a man fit to be your husband and a father to your eagle brood. Call upon him, test him by the sword and he will be worthy of you. Together you will be archetypes of the new race.

Somewhere in the world today there is a woman for whom the Sword is forged. Somewhere there is one who has heard the trumpets of the New Age and who will respond. She will respond, this new woman, to the high clamor of those sar-trumpets; she will come as a perilous flame and a devious song, a voice in the judgement halls, a banner before armies. She will come girt with the Sword of Freedom. Before her, kings and priests will tremble, cities and empires will fall, and she will be called BABALON, The Scarlet Woman. She will be lustful and proud, subtle and deadly forthright and invincible as a naked blade. Women will respond to her war cry, throwing off their chains, men will respond to her challenge, forsaking foolish ways. She will shine as the ruddy Evening Star in the lurid sunset of Gotterdamerung. She will shine again as a Morning Star when the night has passed and a new dawn breaks over the garden of Pan.

To you, oh unknown woman, is The Sword of Freedom pledged.

August 12, 2022August 15, 2022

Chapter Three: The Sword & The Spirit

There is no evidence to show that man was created and accoutered to serve as God’s vice-regent upon the earth. There is no reason to believe that he is naturally good and kind, brave and wise — or that he ever was. On the contrary, there is much to show that he was a beast who took a strange turning in the jungle and blundered rather aimlessly into a mental world in which he was certainly not at home.

There is much evidence that man is by nature cruel, cowardly, lustful, avaricious and treacherous. He holds dominion over these terrible internal enemies and defends against the other predators (his fellow men) by virtue of his ferocity, his cunning and his indomitable will. This is his beauty and his significance: that out of the blind primordial forces of sex and the survival urge, he has forged reason and science and spun the splendorous web of art and love. If there is no other reason and no other significance, man himself has on occasion created reason and significance, standing as the maker of his gods in a garden made fruitful by his own creative power.

We think in terms of ourselves relative to the external universe. It cannot be shown, however, that this external universe is other than an extension of our own perception. But if we differentiate the internal from the external, we are still part of and not separate from the entire process of nature. We are made from the nova by way of the sun and built from the air, the rock and the sea, animated by the primordial fire of life. There are filaments in our consciousness that reach back to the first ancestor and extend to all other men and all other life with which we share a common creation and a common destiny.

Here is the totality that the Greeks called “Pan”; all-devourer, all-begetter — life and death, good and evil, pain and pleasure, unity, duality and multiplicity; all things and beyond all things. The Soul of Night and the Stars.

If in our folly and fear we will ascribe moral qualities to the lightning that strikes, to the star that shines, to the tiger that kills, then we will not hesitate to assign them also to the woman who gives and the man who takes. Thus we will define god and found a religion. And thus we degrade the living universe into a bewhiskered and irascible character endowed with immortal omnipotence and a hatred for our enemies, or with those nature lovers who catch cold communing with “The All” in the park at night, we sink into the platitudinous sitz baths of various ‘religious science’ systems on our way to the catalepsy of middle age.

All nature partakes of the eternal sacraments of life and death, of ebb and flow, of creation and destruction and regeneration. These are the harmonies of eternity that change forever and never change. The cry of the baby is echoed in the tumult of the nova. Men suns and seasons pass and return again. The spate of semen is one with the jet of stars men call The Milky Way.

The mind that comprehends these immortal processes in love and in worship is an immortal mind that soars beyond time and death. We are of one age with Aeschylus and Sophocles and Shakespeare, of one blood with Moses, Lao Tse and Newton. The body changes and decays while time cuckolds all shapes of desire and all transient things. But the shapes of desire, although transient, are the very vehicles of man’s adventure. He cannot attain by denying these steeds but by strengthening them — by training and bridling them with love and creative will until their wings are revealed. Sex and hunger are the raw stuff of art. Out of his passion, fury and despair the artist transmutes the shapes of terror and wonder into an eternal beauty.

All ways are the right way when will and love are the guides. The grace and bounty of life are free to all, saint and sinner alike, who desire them. The voice of the wind, the poignancy of music, the shout of thunder all cry out to man, daring him to know himself. Sunlight, sea and stars and the splendour of a naked woman are the signs and witnesses of a covenant that is forever. We know these things; we know them with the only certainty that is ever given us. This is the beautiful-pitiable knowledge of childhood and first youth — that the world denies and necessity circumvents. This is the knowledge of the poets, artists and singes who are beloved and outcast by men and of the mystics whom the world calls mad.

And man, self-castrated and self-frustrated, flees down the corridors of nightmare, pursued by monstrous machines, overwhelmed by satanic powers, haunted by vague guilts and terrors — all created out of his own imagination. He escapes into absurdity, drowns his spirit in pretense, worships brass gods of power and tin gods of success. Then, shamed by his pretenses and frustrated by his self-denial, he projects his horror on imagined enemies, seeks release in scapegoats and false issues, thereby propitiating those bestial gods who have arisen from the shattered eidolons of his spirit with sacrifices of blood.

Nothing is of its nature, evil — and nothing is of its nature, good. Evil is only excess; good is simply balance. All things are subject to abuse and likewise susceptible to beneficial use. Balance does not consist in denial or excess in indulgence. Balance can only be obtained by exceeding. The elemental forces in man’s nature are so tremendous that they can only be balanced by an ultimate self-expression. To place limitations and restrictions on this nature is to build a wall of plaster around a sun. If we clip an eagles’ wings or feed carrots to a lion we will not uplift or improve either species.

The fundamental purpose of religion is to attain an identity with a power which we believe to be greater than ourselves, whose omnipotence and immortality we can share. Having achieved some sense of this identity, we then feel that we can cope with problems and attain ends with more confidence. The reliance on religion as well as the reliance on property can indicate a lack of self-reliance.

We ourselves create this ‘God of Power’. It is from our own individual ‘self’ that his power is drawn and this self is greater than any god which it creates. Therefore to know ourselves is the highest form of wisdom and to believe in ourselves is the highest form of faith. Science which seeks to know and art which seeks to interpret are two forms of love which constitute the only availing way of worship. That these two greatest expressions of the human spirit should be subservient to religion, politics, nationalism and war is the ultimate blasphemy.

We are now in the midst of a tremendous battle of forces contending for domination over the mind and spirit of man. It is not, unfortunately, a battle between good and evil, between freedom and tyranny but rather a struggle of dogma against dogma and authority vs. authority. The contenders are fascism and communism. Each is a doctrine alien and hostile to the ideal of freedom. Each says that we must choose between one or the other and each is, in reality, identical. Each demands the absolute enslavement of the individual, the abnegation of the intellect and the subjugation of the will. The authoritarian is right, absolutely right, so right that every extreme of falsehood, suppression and tyranny is justified in the accomplishment of his ‘divine’ ends. Behind his benevolent paternalism lurks the star chamber and the concentration camp; behind his morality looms the stake and the inquisition of the “Old Time Religion” so many profess to long for. All these systems are old; older than human history. Freedom and democracy are the only new things under the sun and they offend alike the slaves and the slave masters.

“Come unto me,” goes the old harlot’s song. “Come unto me you weary and heavily laden. Surrender your intolerable burden of freedom and I will fill your mouths with miracles and your bellies will be full of food. Come with me and I will confound your enemies and show you paradise. Look, you do not even have to change a name, only keep the letter and deny the spirit, for the letter giveth life.”

She is harvesting the nations now, that old whore, for an appointment in the place called Armageddon. There will be a hunting of free men in the name of freedom and there will be prisons and pogroms in the name of democracy, murder and slavery in the name of brotherhood, and all for the sake of dominion over the minds and bodies of men.

There is a choice: the choice of freedom which has no other name and no other cause. Man, freed of his demons, without the need of a dogma or the use of a creed, can, of and by himself, avail, triumph and achieve significance. This is the faith of a liberal; belief in himself and belief in man. There is no other way to the full status of manhood. It is the long way, the hard way; through trial, error, failure and heartbreak — but it is the way guided by science and inspired by art; leading at long last to the stars. This is our choice: we may believe in ourselves, believe in our fellow men and in freedom and in brotherhood. We may start to achieve here and now that paradise which has so long been relegated to the hereafter. Or, with the dogmatists, the positivists, the authoritarians we can return again to the ape-hood from which we have so late arisen.

If we wish identity with a greater power, let us seek union with ourselves — our total self, raised to its highest potential of wisdom, knowledge and experience. If we wish to unite with the universe, let us court the whole of nature, all experience, all truth and the splendour of the awesome cosmos itself. For ‘out there’ lies the great campaign that comes first and last; the ultimate adventure of the individual into himself. He must go down like Moses into his unknown self, out into the new dimension, out with Orpheus and the barque of Arthur, with Tammuz and Adonis, with Mithra and Jesus, into the labyrinths of the Dark Land. There he will meet The Mother and hear Her final question: “What is man?”. Thereafter, close by the heart of the cryptic Mother, he may find the Graal; ultimate consciousness, total remembrance, instinct made certain, reason made real. For it is he, wonderful monster, embryo god who has swum in the fish, shed the skin of the crocodile, peered from the eyes of serpents, swung with the apes and shaken the earth with tramp of the tyrannosaur’s hoof. It is he who has cried out on all crosses, ruled on all thrones, grubbed in all gutters. It is he whose face is reflected and distorted in all heavens and hells — he, the Child of the Stars, the son of the ocean; this creature of dust, this wonder and terror called MAN.

August 12, 2022August 15, 2022

Chapter One: A Sword is Drawn

For numberless centuries society accepted the proposition that certain men were created to be slaves. Their natural function was to serve priests, kings and nobles, men of substance and property who were appointed slave-masters by almighty God. This system was reinforced by the established doctrine that all men and women were owned ‘in mind’ by the church and ‘in body’ by the state. This convenient situation was supported by the authority of social morality, religion and even philosophy.

Against this doctrine, some two hundred years ago, rose the most astonishing heresy the world has yet seen; the principle of liberalism. In essence this principle stated that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights which belong to every man as his birthright. This idea appealed to certain intractable spirits — heretics, atheists and revolutionaries — and has since made some headway in spite of the opposition of the majority of organized society. As a slogan, however, it has become so popular that it is rendered unwilling lip-service by all the major states and yet it is still so distasteful to persons in authority that it is nowhere embodied as a fundamental law and is continually violated in letter and in spirit by every trick of bigotry and reaction. Further, absolutist and totalitarian groups of the most vicious nature use liberalism as a cloak under which they move to re-establish tyrannies and to extinguish the liberty of all who oppose them.

Thus religious groups seek to abrogate freedom of art, speech and the press; reactionaries move to suppress labor, communists to establish dictatorships — and all in the name of ‘freedom’. Because of the peculiar definitions of freedom used by some of these camouflaged tyrants, it seems necessary to redefine Freedom in the terms understood by Voltaire, Paine, Washington, Jefferson and Emerson.

Freedom is a two-edged sword of which one edge is liberty and the other, responsibility. Both edges are exceedingly sharp and the weapon is not suited to casual, cowardly or treacherous hands.

Since all tyrannies are based on dogma and since all dogmas are based on lies, it behooves us to look beyond them for truth and freedom will both be far away. And yet the Truth is that we know nothing…

…Objectively, we know nothing at all. Any system of intellectual thought, whether it be science, logic, religion or philosophy, is based on certain fundamental ideas or axioms which are assumed but which cannot be proven. This is the grave of all positivism. We assume but we do not know that there is a real and objective world outside our own mind. Ultimately we do not know what we are or what the world is. Further, if there is a real world apart from ourselves we cannot know what it really is; all we know is what we perceive it to be. All that we perceive is conveyed by our senses and interpreted by our brain. However fine, exact or delicate our scientific instruments may be, their data is still filtered through our senses and interpreted by our brain. However useful, spectacular or necessary our ideas and experiments may be, they still have little to do with absolute truth. Such a thing can only exist for the individual according to his whim or his inner perception of his own truth-in-being.

The witches and devils of the middle ages were real by our own standards; reputable and responsible persons believed in them. They were seen, their effects observed and they accounted for a large body of otherwise inexplicable phenomenon. Their existence was accepted without question by the majority of men, great and humble. From this majority there was not and still is not any appeal. Yet we do not believe in these things today. We believe in other things similarly explaining the same phenomenon. Tomorrow we will believe in still other things We believe but we do not know.

All of our deductions, for example the theory of gravitation, are based on observed statistics, on tendencies observed to occur in a certain way. Even if our observations are correct, we still do not know why these things happen. Our theories are only assumptions, however reasonable they may seem.

There is a type of truth that is based on experience: we know that we feel hot or hungry or in love. These feelings cannot be conveyed to anyone who has not experienced them. We can describe them in terms of similar feelings experienced by someone else, analyzing their cause-and-effect according to mutually acceptable theories but that someone else will never really know what your feeling is like.

The above may be negative considerations but within their limits we can deduce positive principles:

1) Whatever the universe is, we are either all or part of it by virtue of our consciousness but we do not know which.

2) No philosophy, scientific theory, religion or system of thought can be absolute and infallible. They are relative only. One man’s opinion is just as good as another’s.

3) There is no absolute justification for emphasizing one individual theory or way of life over another.

4) Every man has the right to his own opinion and his own way of life. There is no system of human thought which can successfully refute this thesis.

So much for positivism but other problems still remain. There is necessity, expediency and convenience. If these are illusions they are very popular and it is usual to consider them. We might say that politics is concerned with necessity and expediency whereas science is concerned with convenience. This is not intended to discredit science and reason in their proper spheres. Reason is one of our greatest gifts, the power that differentiates us from the animals, and science is our greatest tool, our best hope for building a genuine civilization. (It is curious that this modern truism appears, in this system of reasoning, as a concession.)

In spite of its inestimable value, science is a tool and has nothing to do with ultimate truth. Herein is the danger of science. As a tool it is so valuable, so useful and so irresistible that we incline to regard it as the arbiter of the absolute, giving final and irrefutable pronouncement on all things. This is exactly the position that the pedant, the dogmatist and the dialectical materialist would have us take. Then, posing as a “scientist” or propounding “Scientific” doctrines, he can persuade us to accept his values and obey his orders. Today’s science must forever be free to overthrow its yesterdays, otherwise it will degenerate into ancestor worship.

It is necessary that we defend freedom unless we all wish to be slaves. It is expedient that we achieve brotherhood unless we desire destruction and it is convenient that we grant others the right to their own opinions and life-styles in order to maintain our own.

The intelligent individual will not base his conduct on an arbitrary or absolute concept of right and wrong. It may be argued that all motives and all actions are selfish since they are intended to satisfy some requirement of the ego. Perhaps this is true of self-sacrifice, abnegation and the highest altruism. We engage in them in order to satisfy ourselves by attaining some object however intangible it may be.

The ego can be very broad. A man may include the whole world as a part of his ego and thus set out to redeem or save it for no other reason than the pleasure of personal accomplishment. Such a man, far from being unselfish, is extremely egotistical. The artist devoted to the production of pure beauty is so dedicated because of his need and his nature; at least such egotism is not petty. Motives of family-love and patriotism are rooted in bigotry. This does not necessarily detract from such actions and motives.

Everything in nature is beautiful and it is no less beautiful because it is understood. However, the unenlightened man will assign arbitrary values to all things in order to protect and justify his own position. His morals are based on things he wishes were true or which someone else wishes were true. His philosophy pays no attention to relative facts or realities and yet in his life he must deal with them. He is consequently involved in a constant round of pretenses and evasions.

The enlightened liberal needs no such justification. He will realize and accept his inherent selfishness and the inherent selfishness of all men. He will understand living as a technique, the technique of getting what he wants on the terms he wants.

Such is the case with freedom. If we abrogate another’s freedom to gain our own ends, our own freedom is thereby jeopardized. That is the cost. If we wish to assure our own freedom, we must assure all mens’ freedom. That is the technique.

If a liberal were to develop two personalities and one of these personalities were to establish a benevolent dictatorship while the other continued his liberal activities it would only be a matter of time before he killed himself. The restriction of others freedom is ultimately self-enslavement and suicide. The dictator is the most abject of all slaves.

These simple considerations are the logical basis of the philosophy of liberalism. From such considerations and from many more the fundamental principles of liberalism arose as a code of rights, basic in nature and clear beyond misconception. This code must be the Law beyond the law, an ultimate expression of the dignity and inviolability of the individual. It must be above compromise by courts and lawyers, beyond the whim of the populace and the treachery of demagogues. It must be the epitome of man’s aspertion toward liberty and self-determination, a canon so sacred that its violation by a state, a group or an individual is treason and sacrilege. The Bill of Rights in the American Constitution was a step in the right direction and its study will indicate further development. In a world so threatened by positivism and paternalism this doctrine is limited in both scope and application. It permits such violations of liberty as the late National Prohibition Act, the Draft Law, the closed shop, the Mann Act, censorship laws, anti-firearms laws and racial discrimination.

It has been said, with justification, that the Constitution means what the Supreme Court says it means. A document so fundamental as a Bill of Rights cannot be jeopardized by arbitrary interpretations. It should need no interpretations. It must apply equally to the national state, the federated states, counties, municipalities, official agencies and the private citizen within their province. It must apply in such a way that the individual or minority needs no recourse to elaborate, lengthy and costly proceedings in order to protect these rights. It is the duty of the state to provide this recourse to all alike.

Freedom cannot be subject to arbitrary interpretation and misinterpretation. It must plainly include freedom from persecution on moral, political, economic, racial, social or religious grounds. No man, no group and no nation has the right to any man’s individual freedom. No matter how pure the motive, how great the emergency, how high the principle, such action is tyranny and is never justified.

The question is, are we able to face the consequences of democracy? It is not sufficient that freedom be assured by purely negative means. Freedom is meaningless where its expression is controlled by powerful groups such as the press, the radio, the motion picture industry, churches, politicians and capitalists. Freedom must be insured.
It can only be insured by the allegiance to the principle that man has certain inalienable rights; among which are the rights:
• To live his private life, insofar as it concerns only himself, as he sees fit.
• To eat and drink, to dress, live and travel as, where and he will.
• To express himself; to speak, write, print, experiment and otherwise create as he desires.
• To work as he chooses, when he chooses and where he chooses at a reasonable and commensurate wage.
• To purchase his food, shelter, medical and social needs and all other services and commodities necessary to his existence and self expression at a reasonable and commensurate price.
• To have a decent environment and upbringing during his childhood until he reaches a responsible majority.
• To love as he desires, where, how and with whom he chooses, in accordance only with the desires of himself and of his partner.
• To the positive opportunity to enjoy these rights as he sees fit, without obstruction on the one hand or compulsion on the other.
• Finally, in order to protect his person, his property and his rights, he should have the right to kill an aggressor if necessary. This is the purpose of the right to keep and bear arms.

These rights must be counterbalanced by certain responsibilities. The liberal accepting them must guarantee these rights to all others at all times, regardless of his personal feelings or interests. He must work to establish and protect them, live in a manner commensurate with them and be prepared to defend them with his life. He must refuse allegiance to any state or organization which denies these rights and he should aid and encourage all who, without qualification or equivocation, endorse them. He must refuse to compromise these principles on any issue or for any reason. Nothing short of such a commitment will assure the survival of liberty, or democracy of society itself. Liberalism is not only a code for individuals and their state, it is the only possible basis for a future international civilization. However, these principles will be only rhetoric unless they are revered and protected by those to whom they apply. They must be interpreted and applied with understanding and sympathy, with humor and tolerance. Pretentiousness, sentimentality or hysterics are not needed in their application or their defense.

Insufferable demagogues of “high principle” are sufficiently numerous as it is.
It must also be understood that we cannot force man’s rights upon him. Man has a right to be a slave if he so desires. If he does not assert and defend his rights he deserves slavery. The person who is tyrannized by his family, his peers, by public opinion or slave morality, providing he is free to leave their influence or to challenge it, is worthy of his condition. His protestations are those of the hypocrite.

Freedom, like charity, begins at home. No man is worthy to fight in the cause of freedom unless he has conquered his internal drives. He must learn to control and discipline the disastrous passions that would lead him to folly and ruin. He must conquer inordinate vanity and anger, self deception, fear and inhibition. These are the crude ores of his being.

He must smelt these ores in the fire of life; forge his own sword, temper it and sharpen it against the hard abrasive of experience. Only then is he fit to bear arms in the larger battle. There is no substitute for courage and the victory is to the high hearted. He will have nothing to do with asceticism or the excesses of weakness. Self expression will be his watchword, a self expression tempered keen and strong. First he must know how to rule himself. Only then can he cope with the economic pressures which are employed by institutions and corporations or the political pressures employed by demagogues.

He may then find himself in a difficult predicament. If he calls himself a liberal, he discovers that he is supposedly committed to a policy of accommodation with the Russian Government. If he opposes a pro-Soviet policy he is welcome to the camp of the Catholic Church and the Manufacturer’s Association. If he eschews both camps, he is condemned for lack of principle. If he should support the rights of the workingman or minority and racial groups, he is a Red. If at the same time he believes in Constitutional Government and individual rights, he is also a Fascist.

Many liberals are familiar with this situation but few seem to have deduced the conclusion. The difficulty lies in the confusion of the rights of the individual in relation to the responsibilities of the state. It is a sad comment on our mentality that the social reformer subscribes to total regimentation while the alleged individualist propagandizes for total irresponsibility. The rights of the individual can be clearly defined. His responsibilities vis-a-vis the responsibilities of the state can be clearly defined. The individual’s rights end where the next man’s begin. It is the function of the state to ensure equal rights to all. But, in the absence of a social devotion to the true principles of liberalism, positivists have usurped its name and even its phrases in order to propagandize for their various totalitarianisms. This process has been aided by that faction of pseudo-liberalism which believes that all opinion contrary to its own must be suppressed.

As I write, allegedly liberal groups are agitating for the denial of public forums to those they call fascist. Americanism societies are striving for the suppression of communist or “red” literature and speech. Religious groups, backed by a publicity conscious press, are constantly campaigning for the prohibition of art and literature which, as if by divine prerogative, they term “indecent”, immoral or dangerous.

It would seem that all these organizations are devoted to one common purpose, the suppression of freedom. Their sincerity is no excuse. History is a bloody testament that sincerity can achieve atrocities which cynicism could hardly conceive of. Each of these groups is engaged in a frantic struggle to sell out, betray or destroy the freedom which was their birthright and which alone assured their present existence.

Freedom is a two-edged sword. He who believes that the absolute rightness of his belief is an authority to suppress the rights and opinions of his fellows cannot be a liberal.
Liberalism cannot exist where it violates its own principles. It cannot exist where the emergency monger or the utopia salesman can obtain a suspension of rights, whether temporary or permanent. Liberty cannot be suppressed in order to defend liberalism.

If we are to achieve a democracy, the rights of individuals and the responsibilities of states must be openly defined and ardently defended. It is inconceivable that men who fought and died in a war against totalitarianism did not know what they fought for. It seems a fantastic joke that the institutions they believed in and defended have turned, like a nightmare, into home-grown tyrannies. A generation went down in blood and agony to make the world “safe” but the evil that makes the world “unsafe” still goes undefeated, plotting new sacrifices of misery and blood. The guilt lies not entirely with the warmongers, plutocrats and demagogues. If a people permit exploitation and regimentation in any name, they deserve their slavery. A tyrant does not make his tyranny. It is made possible by his people and not otherwise.

Much of our modern thought is characterized by pretenses and evasions, by appeals to ultimate authorities which are non- liberal, superstitious and reactionary. Often we are not aware of these thought processes. We accept ideas, authorities, catch- phrases and conditions without troubling to think or investigate and yet these things may conceal terrible traps. We accept them as right because they have a surface-level agreement with the things in which we believe. We welcome the man who is for liberalism, against communism, without troubling to inquire what else he is for or against. In our blindness we leave ourselves open to exploitation, regimentation and war.
Tumultuous developments in science and society demand a new clarity of thought, a reexamination and a restatement of principles. It is not sufficient that a principle is sacred because it is time-worn. It must be examined, tried and tested in the crucible of our present needs.

In our law, in our social and international relations, we are guilty of a myriad of barbarisms and superstitions. These injustices continue and proliferate because we have become used to them. We have lost our freedom through tolerance and inertia.

The principle we have developed herein is simple: the liberty of the individual is the foundation of civilization. No true civilization is possible without this liberty and no state, national or international, is stable in its absence. The proper relation between individual liberty on the one hand and social responsibility on the other is the balance which will assure a stable society. The only other road to social equilibrium demands the total annihilation of individuality. There is not further evasion of nature’s immemorial ultimatum: change or perish but the choice of change is ours.

August 12, 2022August 15, 2022

FREEDOM IS A TWO-EDGED SWORD

Freedom is a Two Edged Sword

Since I first wrote this essay in 1946, some of the more ominous predictions have been fulfilled. Public employees have been subjected to the indignity of “loyalty” oaths and the ignominy of loyalty purges. Members of the United States Senate, moving under the cloak of immunity and the excuse of emergency, have made a joke of justice and a mockery of privacy. Constitutional immunity and legal procedure have been consistently violated and that which once would have been an outrage in America is today refused even a review by the Supreme Court.

The golden voice of social security, of socialized “this” and socialized “that”, with its attendant confiscatory taxation and intrusion on individual liberty, is everywhere raised and everywhere heeded. England has crept under the aegis of a regime synonymous with total regimentation. Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia have fallen victims to communism while the United States makes deals with the corrupt dictatorships of Argentina and Spain.

As I write, the United States Senate is pursuing a burlesque investigation into the sphere of private sexual morals, which will accomplish nothing except to bring pain and sorrow to many innocent persons.

The inertia and acquiescence which allows the suspension of our liberties would once have been unthinkable. The present ignorance and indifference is appalling. The little that is worthwhile in our civilization and culture is made possible by the few who are capable of creative thinking and independent action, grudgingly assisted by the rest. When the majority of men surrender their freedom, barbarism is near but when the creative minority surrender it, the Dark Age has arrived. Even the word liberalism has now become a front for a new social form of Christian morality. Science, that was going to save the world back in H.G. Wells’ time, is regimented, strait-jacketed and scared; its universal language is diminished to one word, security.

In this 1950 view some of my more hopeful utterances may appear almost naïve. However, I was never so naïve as to believe that freedom in any full sense of the word is possible for more than a few. But I have believed and do still hold that these few, by self- sacrifice, wisdom, courage and continuous effort, can achieve and maintain a free world. The labor is heroic but it can be done by example and by education. Such was the faith that built America, a faith that America has surrendered. I call upon America to renew this faith before she perishes.

We are one nation but we are also one world. The soul of the slums looks out of the eyes of Wall Street and the fate of a Chinese coolie determines the destiny of America. We cannot suppress our brother’s liberty without suppressing our own and we cannot murder our brothers without murdering ourselves. We stand together as men for human freedom and human dignity or we will fall together, as animals, back into the jungle.

In this very late hour it is with solutions that we must be primarily concerned. We seem to be living in a nation that simply does not know what we are told we have and that we tell each other we have. Indeed, it is far more than that. It is to the definition of freedom, to its understanding, in order that it may be attained and defended, that this essay is devoted. I need not add that freedom is dangerous — but it is hardly possible that we are all cowards.

Chapter One: A Sword is Drawn

Chapter Two: The Sword & The Serpent

Chapter Three: The Sword & The Spirit

Chapter Four: The Woman Girt With the Sword