Kevin I. Slaughter | Unwanted Advocate

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Web Name: Kevin I. Slaughter | Unwanted Advocate

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Source: Ernest Hello, Life, Science, and Art, trans. by E. M. Walker (London: R. T. Washbourne, 1912), 112–115. Is the mediocre man silly, stupid, idiotic? Not in the least. The idiot is at one extreme of the world, the man of genius is at the other. The mediocre man is in the middle. I do not say that he occupies the center of the intellectual world, that would be quite another matter; he occupies a middle position.The characteristic trait of the mediocre man is his deference for public opinion. He never really talks; he only repeats what others have said. He judges a man by his age, his position, his success, his income. He has the profoundest respect for those who have attained notoriety, no matter how, and for authors with a large circulation.The mediocre man may have certain special aptitudes; he may even have talent. But he is utterly wanting in intuition. He has no insight; he never will have any. He can learn; he cannot divine. Occasionally he allows an idea to penetrate into his mind, but he does not follow its various applications, and if it is stated in different terms, he denies its truth.The mediocre man may, and often does, respect good people and men of talent. He fears and detests Saints and men of genius he considers them exaggerated.Of what use, he inquires, are the religious Orders, especially the contemplative Orders? He approves of the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul because their work relates, partially at least, to the visible world. But the Carmelites, he says, what can be the good of them?The mediocre man admires everything a little; he admires nothing warmly. If you confront him with his own thoughts, his own sentiments, expressed with enthusiasm, he will be displeased. He will declare that you are exaggerating. He prefers enemies, so long as they are cold, to friends who are warm. What he detests above all is enthusiasm.To escape the reproach of intolerance aimed by him at all who think with consistency and decision, you would have to take refuge in absolute doubt; but even then you must be careful not to call doubt by its name. He considers every affirmation insolent, because every affirmation excludes the contradictory proposition. You must represent it as a modest opinion, which respects the rights of the contrary opinion, and appears to affirm something while affirming nothing whatever. But if you are slightly friendly and slightly hostile to all things, he will consider you wise and reserved. The mediocre man says there is good and evil in all things, and that we must not be absolute in our judgments. If you strongly affirm the truth, the mediocre man will say that you have too much confidence in yourself.The mediocre man regrets that the Christian religion has dogmas. He would like it to teach only ethics, and if you tell him that its code of morals comes from its dogmas as the consequences comes from the principle, he will answer that you exaggerate. If the word exaggeration did not exist, the mediocre man would invent it.The mediocre man, in his distrust of all that is great, maintains that he values good sense before everything. But he has not the remotest idea whatgood senseis. He merely understands by that expression the negation of all that is lofty.The man of intelligence looks up to admire and to adore; the mediocre man looks up to mock. All that is above him seems to him ridiculous; the Infinite appears to him a void.The mediocre man appears habitually modest. He cannot be humble, or he would cease to be mediocre. The humble man scorns all lies, even were they glorified by the whole earth, and he bows the knee before every truth.The mediocre man is much more wicked than either he himself or anyone else imagines, because his coldness masks his wickedness. He never gets in a rage. He perpetrates innumerable little infamies, so petty that they do not appear to be infamous. And he is never afraid, for he relies on the vast multitude of those who resemble him.When, however, a man mediocre by nature becomes a true and sincere Christian, he ceases absolutely to be mediocre. He may not, indeed, become a man of striking superiority, but he is rescued from mediocrity by the Hand that rules the world. THE MAN WHO LOVES IS NEVER MEDIOCRE.The list below was compiled by Blanche Barton and Anton LaVey and published in The Cloven Hoof, Issue 129 (1997). I m not posting the introductory and explanatory text, as I feel that would be a breech of copyright (I m not sure the list below does that, and it is not my intention). I do think it s a marvelous display of (almost all) Americanisms, though, many FOR THE LOVE OF MIKE! ZOUNDS! FOR PETE S SAKE! GADZOOKS! FOR CRYING OUT LOUD! CRIMINETLES! LEAPING LIZARDS!” PISH! TOSH! HELL S BELLS!” SUFFERING SUCCOTASH! CHEESE AND CRACKERS (GOT ALL MUDDY!) LAND S SAKES! ME OH MY! WELL, BLOW ME DOWN! WHAT THE HEY! SON OF A GUN! HAIL COLUMBIA! WELL, I SWAN! SON OF A BEE HIVE! SWEAR TO GOD! HOT DOG! GOL DANG IT! I LL BE BUTTERED! GOSH DARN IT! WHAT IN BLUE BLAZES! DAG NAB IT! WHAT THE SAM HILL! DOGGONE IT! WHAT THE DEUCE! I LL BE DOGGONED! DOG MY CATS! JIMINY CRICKETS! GOOD GRIEF! SHOOT! HOLY cow! FIDDLESTICKS! BY GOLLY! I LL BE A MONKEY S UNCLE! GRIPES! EGADS! JEEZ! YOU RE FULL OF PRUNES! BY GOLLY! NONE OF YOUR BEESWAX! BY GUM! FOR CRIMINY SAKES! BY JUPITER! SHUCKS! OMIGOSH! WHAT THE (HECK!) EXCUSE MY DUST! DON T STOP NOW! BY HECK! THIS LL KILL YA! YOU DON T SAY! OH, FUDGE! GOOD GRIEF! H-E-DOUBLE TOOTHPICKS! GOOD HEAVENS! LAND SAKES! GO TO BLAZES! SAKES ALIVE! HEAVENS TO BETSY! WELL, I LL BE! JUMPING JEHOSEPHAT! GREAT SCOTT! LORD LOVE A DUCK! GREAT BALLS OF FIRE! HOLY MOLEY! GLORIOSKI! SAINTS PRESERVE US! LAND O GOSHEN! GOOD GRAVY! TARNATION! CONSARN SHIVER ME TIMBERS! YUMPING YIMMINY! OY, VEH IZ MIR! IF DAT DON T TAKE DE CAKE! SHUT MY MOUTH! YIKES! MAMA MIA! THE CAT S PAJAMAS! THE MONKEY S INSTEP! S.O.B! SON OF A SEA COOK! SON OF A BISCUIT! PSHAW! BUSHWA! ZUT ALORS! AW, NERTZ! OH, NUTS! GOLLY! GOLLY GEE! HOLY MOSES! BY JOVE! GOSH ALMIGHTY! GOODNESS GRACIOUS! GOOD GRAVY! BY GEORGE! GREAT GUNS! HOLY CATS! CONFOUND IT! GEE WHILLIKERS! GEE WHIZ! GODFREY DANIEL! CUT IT OUT YOU REKILLIN ME! GOOD HEAVENS! HOLY SMOKE! BY CRACKY! MY STARS! JUDAS PRIEST! BLESS MY SOUL! UPON MY WORD! THE CAT S MEOW! JIMINY CHRISTMAS! BLIMEY! HONEST INJUN! CARAMBA! I LL BE A DIRTYSO AND SO! I LL BE DARNED! HOW D YE LIKE THAT! WHADDA YA KNOW ABOUT THAT! GIMME A BREAK! HANG IT ALL! AIN T IT THE TRUTH! SHADRACK, MESACH, AND A BILLY GOAT! THREE CHEERS A TIGER! AW, FIGS! FAN MY BROW! TAN MY HIDE! GREAT DAY IN THE MORNING! GLORY BE! HOLY MACKEREL! HEAVENLY DAYS! STUFF AND NONSENSE! MY ACHING BACK! FOR PITY S SAKES! WHADDA YA GONNA DO! THAT S TELLING EM WELL, STRIKE ME PINK! YOU DON T SAY! SEZ YOU! SO S YOUR OLD MAN! YOUR MUDDER WEARS ARMY SHOES! GO CHASE YOURSELF! What follows is found on the first page of the first issue of Vance Thompson and James Huneker s M lle New York magazine, in 1895. It is a glorious tirade of elitism against the public . I stumbled across V.T. while researching Max Stirner, who would certainly be an influence on Thompson (and Huneker!) a few years after the following was written.My own Egoism tends to a type of elitism, rather than communitarian ideals, though some people tie their individualistic horse to the proverbial trough of humanity. I think it s rather fetid water.Wikipedia informs us:From 1895 to 1899, (Vance Thompson) co-edited the periodical M lle New York with Huneker. Described as a highly idiosyncratic blend of serious analyses and presentations of European Symbolist literature and thought with buffoonery and incessant anti-philistinism , it quickly became a manifesto for their cultural ideals.In the following, Vance does not attack the poor, he slanders the UNDIFFERENTIATED mass. He set his journal to celebrate stratification, by scorning egalitarianismFOREWORDThe mob—that glorious clientage of Shakespeare—is dead; it has become the public.  It is not merely a juggle of words. This change goes to the root of things. Once the poet and the mob wrought together. Oh. this divine mob of the early centuries! It had a fine force of instinct; it was ignorant and it avowed it; and by this very avowal it attained a high state of intellectual receptivity and appreciation. The mob and Peter the Hermit made the crusades; the mob and Luther the Reformation; the mob and Shakespeare made the drama, as the mob and Villon made the French language—but the mob has become the public and the poet is its lickspittle. Poets? They are the helots—many of them the drunken helots—of the magazines. The public—The public is made up of individuals who have opinions—they even pronounce opinions; they read the newspapers; they have a sullen and irreconcilable hate for the extraordinary; they believe in philanthropy (the most selfish of vices) and in education (the monstrous fetich of this thoughtless century): there are millions of them; they walk beneath the eternal stars and fondle each other; they are given in marriage and taken in adultery they beget children; they read the newspapers; they have opinions; they are the public. The public—It corrupts the language it has inherited from the mob and the poets; it has debauched the stage to the level of Mr. Richard Watson Gilder s poetry and looks upon the drama merely as a help to digestion, a peptic or aperiative; not content with having vulgarized literature and arts, it has begun to popularize science—your boot-maker has theories of the creation and your tailor argues the existence of God; counter jumpers play at atheism; lawyers and pedagogues are Mattered at reading in the Astor Library that Moses was only a medicine man and Christ a politician. The public—This grotesque aggregation of foolish individuals pretends to literary taste; it has its painters, its playwrights, its authors; that part of it which reads the male blue-stocking, William Dean Howells, looks down upon that part of it which reads the female blue-stocking, Richard Harding Davis; that part which reads Richard Harding Davis looks down upon the part which reads Laura Jean Libby (why, in Heaven s name?), and the readers of Miss Libby look down in turn upon the readers of the Police Gazette.M lle New York is not concerned with the public. Her only ambition is to disintegrate some small portion of the public into its original component parts—the aristocracies of birth, wit, learning and art and the joyously vulgar mob.Long slept Zarathustra; and not only the rosy dawn passed over his head, but also the morning. At last, however, his eyes opened, and amazedly he gazed into the forest and the stillness, amazedly he gazed into himself. Then he arose quickly, like a seafarer who all at once seeth the land; and he shouted for joy: for he saw a new truth. And he spake thus to his heart:A light hath dawned upon me: I need companions living ones; not dead companions and corpses, which I carry with me where I will.But I need living companions, who will follow me because they want to follow themselves and to the place where I will. A light hath dawned upon me. Not to the people is Zarathustra to speak, but to companions! Zarathustra shall not be the herd s herdsman and hound!To allure many from the herd for that purpose have I come. The people and the herd must be angry with me: a robber shall Zarathustra be called by the herdsmen.Herdsmen, I say, but they call themselves the good and just. Herdsmen, I say, but they call themselves the believers in the orthodox belief.Behold the good and just! Whom do they hate most? Him who breaketh up their tables of values, the breaker, the lawbreaker: he, however, is the creator.Behold the believers of all beliefs! Whom do they hate most? Him who breaketh up their tables of values, the breaker, the law-breaker he, however, is the creator.Companions, the creator seeketh, not corpses and not herds or believers either. Fellow-creators the creator seeketh those who grave new values on new tables.Companions, the creator seeketh, and fellow-reapers: for everything is ripe for the harvest with him. But he lacketh the hundred sickles: so he plucketh the ears of corn and is vexed.Companions, the creator seeketh, and such as know how to whet their sickles. Destroyers, will they be called, and despisers of good and evil. But they are the reapers and rejoicers.Fellow-creators, Zarathustra seeketh; fellow-reapers and fellow-rejoicers, Zarathustra seeketh: what hath he to do with herds and herdsmen and corpses!And thou, my first companion, rest in peace! Well have I buried thee in thy hollow tree; well have I hid thee from the wolves.But I part from thee; the time hath arrived. Twixt rosy dawn and rosy dawn there came unto me a new truth.I am not to be a herdsman, I am not to be a grave-digger. Not any more will I discourse unto the people; for the last time have I spoken unto the dead.With the creators, the reapers, and the rejoicers will I associate: the rainbow will I show them, and all the stairs to the Superman.To the lone-dwellers will I sing my song, and to the twain-dwellers; and unto him who hath still ears for the unheard, will I make the heart heavy with my happiness.I make for my goal, I follow my course; over the loitering and tardy will I leap. Thus let my on-going be their down-going!I haven t updated this website since 2012, will probably not update again for a while. I have been hard at work on UnderworldAmusements.com, UnionOfEgoists.com, BenjaminDeCasseres.com, SidParker.com. When any person harms you, or speaks ill of you, remember that he acts and speaks believing it is his duty to do so. Now, it is not possible that he should follow what appears right to you, but what appears so to himself. Therefore, if he judges from a false appearance, he is the person hurt, since he is the person deceived. For if anyone should suppose a true proposition to be false, the proposition is not hurt, only he who is deceived about it. Setting out, then, from these principles, you will meekly bear a person who reviles you. For you will say upon every occasion, It seemed so to him.' The Enchiridion by EpictetusBY BENJAMIN DE CASSERESLIKE all children, I was born without a belief in or a knowledge of God.A four-year-old may astound the world by suddenly improvising a melody on the piano, reciting Pindar in the orig­inal, doing lightning calculations, or writ­ing a passable poem, but that same child will look at you in a perfectly idiotic manner when you ask it, Do you believe in God? —unless it has been coached. Child evangelists—the most revolting of human abortions—are all made, not born. They are the machine products of evangelistic parents. There is no such thing as a spontaneous religious prodigy. It is always a hideous mutilation of child­hood. No such being ever made its appear­ance in a family that was non-religious. Of any real knowledge of God, of course, it has none.Thus the child is born, and generally continues until puberty, an atheist, or, at least, an indifferentist. It plays, it makes believe. It plays at being papa and mamma, but it never plays at being God, or the devil, or Jesus, or Mary. It may have a tremendous imagination. It may be in­ventive. It may listen by the hour to fairy tales and tales of adventure; but it never imagines God or gods. It looks on Sunday-school or church as a bore, or as a rendez­vous for meeting other girls and boys, or as a place to dress up. It looks on its prayers at night as a branch of play, or, again, as a bore.It is only at puberty that the idea, the feeling of God takes form—with sex, death, good and evil. And even then, with the vast majority of boys and girls, God is the last and least important of concepts.The parental notion of the Creator, along with the bag and baggage of the standard creed, is accepted, and then dismissed as something to be used, like the wall fire-extinguisher, only in case of emergency. The interest that a few children, before puberty, show in God is only part and parcel of their intense curiosity. They are merely curious, not religious—and often unconsciously satiric. Now I lay me down to sleep. . . . If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen. This was my earliest contact with God. I said it every night for years, following the words as my mother pronounced them. They hadn t the slightest meaning to me. There was even a trace of aversion in me when I hopped into bed and awaited the mean­ingless formula. My head was full of the game of prisoner s base, or pussy, that I had played in the afternoon, or of Captain Mayne Reid or my real God, Oliver Optic. The prayer finished, I resumed my thoughts about the street boys or the characters in Optic s book, more real at that time then ever God was to Plotinus. I had no curi­osity at any time, as I remember, about the meaning or the words of the prayer. It was a duty, like the weekly dose of rhubarb and magnesia.I remember only one other contact with God until I was fourteen years old. Re­member, said my mother one day, apro­pos of what I do not now recall, that God can see you everywhere—no matter where you are. Do you mean to say, mother, I asked, that God can see me if I stand under Schimmel s awning on the corner? I now recall the peal of laughter that I heard from her with far more pleasure than I got from my first lesson in the om­nipresence of God.I went to a Jewish Sunday-school (Sat­urday morning), where we were read to out of the Old Testament with explana­tions, based on the stories, of the good­ness (!) of Jehovah. These readings and lectures left no more impression on me than the Einstein theory on a flea. The class, when it got loose, never spoke of the matter, but went straight to marbles and pussy.The boys and girls that I played with up until my twelfth year were, as I an­alyze them now, either vapid or cruel. They were all obscene, either actively or passively, including myself. All of us coming of middle-class, ultra-respectable, church-going people, we inherited our instinct for the obscene. We had in us the germs of sexual perversion, pyromania, greediness, theft, cowardice, all forms of cruelty and exhibitionism. Those that were passive in regard to these matters we regarded as milksops—they were not part of our gang. The most popular girl among us was almost hermaphroditic. She spat, fought like a boy, took a chew of tobacco with us, and was always in our stone-fights. I, with the rest of the boys, had my sling-shot with which to kill sparrows. I tortured mice, and used to help pull the rope on the cattle at the slaughter-house, and watch the men cut the throats of the cows and bulls, delight­ing in seeing the blood gush forth and the dying struggles of the animals. This was the divine innocence of our childhood —and maybe it was just that that Jesus meant when He said we must be as little children to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. I do not know.But the point is this: As a boy, I, along with the others, took my inherited wick­ednesses naturally and with glee. But there was one name never mentioned in all those years either by myself or my pals, male or female, and that was the name ofGod. Those golden days were deliciously atheistic. Nor did we ever hear of the Devil, or if we did, the word had no meaning. So it remains, to me, the most curious and significant of my backward.. looking experiences that the belief in God, the consciousness of God, is not inherited, is not instinctive, although every other psychic attribute—including kindness and good-fellowship—is in the blood and nerves of every child.IISo there was no inkling, no herald, of the great adventure that was to befall me—the adventure of my soul with the idea of God—until puberty, which came in my fifteenth year. My interest in the uni­verse awoke when I began to blush and stammer before girls. From my twelfth year to my fifteenth I accepted God and the inspiration of the Old Testament with­out any thought about the matter. I had been told that they were facts, like the Boston Tea Party, the assassination of Lincoln, and the belief that a strip of bacon around the throat would cure a sore throat.But tumescence begot in me revery, a sense of mystery, a vague uneasiness, soli­tude, apprehensions, glamour, question­ings. I fell in love. I began to pity street beggars. I read the newspapers and pon­dered. What made me walk? Look! I could stop walking whenever I willed! I peeped through a street telescope at the moon, and nearly fainted at the over­whelming power of my first cosmic emo­tion. I did not know what I was doing for an hour afterwards. Space! the Infinite! a world hanging in space unsupported!—what was anything? What were we all? What was this thing I was living on? Something expanded tremendously in me. I reeled like a drunken boy through the streets. The hush of a mighty awe fell upon my soul. Human beings whirled before me like ghosts. My girl-love be­came an ethereal being. I walked on air.An immense tear—a stupendous tear, an unburst tear—seemed to keep my heart from beating.God! That word dropped into my brain like a bomb. That word now became the Word. Sex-ache and God-ache took pos­session of me simultaneously with a de­moniacal fury. All this took place within a period of an hour after looking through a street telescope for a nickel. That night was the first broken night s rest in my life, a healthy, regular life until then. The next day I went through my work in a cigar-store in a trance. The Moon, the Universe, Space, Time, Women, Life, Will —it was a witches dance, an initiation, a dreadfully beautiful Awakening. It was the Footprint on the sand. I had discovered the presence of the Being Who was des­tined to become my Friday, Whom I was to hate, deny, curse, love, cajole, thump, dismiss, call back, slay, resurrect.That was my first adventure with the World Spirit, with the Presence; the be­ginning of a prolonged and eternal parley, of a perpetual love-hate duel between my­self and God.Thenceforward nothing was of any ulti­mate importance, nothing was worth while, compared to the existence or non­existence of God. All turned on that question. Until that was established, all that was, is or could be was meaningless. I was embarked on the Sublime Adven­ture. I was looked on askance—above all, by my parents. You can never know .. . Do not think about such things . . . You will go crazy. But the mystical bud had opened in my brain, and no power, pa­rental, economic or religious, could pre­vent the unfolding of that marvelous flower with its changing perfumes—that monstrous poppy which breeds ecstatic poisons, kills with rapturous swoons, emaciates and dilates simultaneously: God.I now no longer believed in the Old Testament. The New Testament I had not yet opened. I bought a booklet at the Friendship Liberal League s clubrooms which pointed out one hundred and forty-four contradictions in the Old Testament. I marked them out carefully in an old second-hand Bible that I picked up on the stalls of Leary s Old Book Store. I showed them to my father. We should not inquire into such things. He feared what I now knew—that God had not actually written the Old Testament. I had the pleasant thrill of fear in this adventure. Had any one adventured there before? I asked myself timidly, knowing nothing of the Higher Criticism. While I do not believe in the inspiration of the Bible, I do believe in a God, I murmured to my­self over and over in my lonely meditative walks in Fairmount Park. I was afraid to let go of God—a good God, a merciful God.But how reconcile this belief with that singing, blind boy that an elderly man led down Eighth street every day? His sweet face, twisted in pain, nearly made me faint with pity. He was the symbol of earthly injustice, an enormous question-mark, a challenge to my belief. I hurried by him as though I were guilty of some­thing I could not define. The problem of Evil thundered with iron knuckles on the door of my belief in a good and merciful Father. Maybe the Devil ruled the world! —I swept that aside as monstrous. l feared the personal consequences of such a belief. I might be paralyzed or blinded if I accepted it.Then came the great event which seemed to be manufactured for me. On May 31, 1889, the dam above Johnstown, Pa., broke and the waters carried away the town of Johnstown and drowned five thou­sand whirling, plunging, struggling men, women and children. As everything that has ever happened to me, mentally or physically, since puberty is related pri­marily and fundamentally to the two questions, Is there or is there not a God? and if there is, How does anything I am experiencing modify my conception of Him?, the Johnstown flood and its heart-wrenching details acted with the same power on my imagination and nerves as Voltaire said the destruction of Lisbon by an earthquake in 1754 had acted on him— from that moment I disbelieved in the goodness of God. I read all the pathetic details of the brutal act of God in the Philadelphia papers. I saw each day the wagons going up and down the streets collecting bed­ding, clothing and money. I saw at night in my dreams the children wrenched from the arms of their mothers, families ob­literated in an hour, and the horrors of death as the waters receded. In my in­flamed imagination I could hear the prayers and curses of thousands.The thundering waters of the Cone­maugh washed away forever my belief in a good, merciful, humanized God. My rage knew no bounds. I hurled oath after oath at Him. I consigned Him and His universe to Hell. I declared everlasting war on the Author of the universe. Luci­fer, Cain and the Devil looked like saints to me now. I did not turn atheist (I have never been an atheist). I turned God-hater. I was anti-God. The Creative Power was evil! God was more real than He had ever been. But He must be destroyed! Atheists were cowards, just as cowardly as those who affirmed a smiling, benefi­cent, all-merciful God. I would destroy the belief in a good God and take up the war against Him where Lucifer and the revolting angels had dropped it—for dropped it they had; one could see that, I thought, by the way prayers still went up from the churches and synagogues.Prayers instead of anathemas! I in­stinctively felt that if I turned atheist my evolution would cease. I might as well turn Catholic. There was too much fight in me to let God go. I had never believed in free will; therefore I had no bone to pick with man. He was a victim. I wept over his ills, his fate. To the degree that I pitied man I cursed God. I shouted my challenges and questions into the spaces. I came to understand the legends of Prometheus and Christ. I felt the need of world-sacrifice. I felt like stopping people in the street and telling them the Truth —they muss know who I was and what I was here for!The blind boy was individual evil. He was Man. Johnstown was History, natural and racial. My adventure by 1890 had come to attain cosmic proportions. I was a black pessimist, furiously anti-God. Death was a fact. Immortality, like free will, was the ruse of priests to let God out of a bad theological hole. I nearly fainted more than once at the sight of thousands on the street who lived in mortal error. They walked and talked and acted as if they were going to live for eternity! How to tell them that the grave was the end, that the universe itself would come to an end, that all was futile?IIIThe stars began to obsess me as the moon had. I studied astronomy. I knew the names of all the stars. My own nothingness in endless space fed my instinct for suicide. Why exist if I was nothing? I wrote mourn­fully pessimistic poems on the transitori­ness of life. And always came back to God, incessantly, like a cat returning to watch a mouse-hole.I began to read. I literally ate up books —the Baron d Holbach s System of Na­ture, which satisfied my prejudices but did not satisfy my intellect or my meta­physical mysticism; Huxley, Spencer, Dar­win, Ecclesiastes, the Greek tragedies, Byron, Locke, Omar Khayyam, Tom Paine, Bradlaugh, Saltus The Philos­ophy of Disenchantment, which had a powerful effect on me; von Hartmann, Schopenhauer, Büchner, Buckle, Gibbon, Berkeley, Tyndall, Lyall, all the theolog­ical writers I could find in the old Mer­cantile Library at Tenth and Chestnut streets, George Henry Lewes, Shelley, Humboldt, Wallace, Haeckel, Voltaire—History, physics, philosophy, meta­physics, poetry, astronomy, fiction—I was looking for a point to assault God, to argue Him out of His universes, to find a weapon to drive through His heart and liberate Man in an eternal sleep. Men at that time were talking about the mystery of the Northwest Passage, the mystery of the Poles. Baby talk! Here was a boy walking among them—in Fairmount Park —meditating the dethronement of God!I went into the gallery of the Park Theatre at Broad street and Fairmount avenue one night to hear Robert G. In­gersoll lecture on Voltaire. Pleasing, elo­quent, true, and worth the quarter I paid. But an agnostic! Pah! Agnosticism was a liberalized form of atheism. I do not know! Why, God was the one thing I did know! His works, his methods, his existence were staring you in the face, Mr. Ingersoll! God exists-écrasez l infame , I hurled back at Ingersoll.The core of the matter was that I had not yet outgrown the God of the Old Testament. My rage was the rage of Jeho­vah Himself, the rage of King David, the rage of Isaiah and Jeremiah. It was pity and mental torture sublimated to a de­vastating anger.At war with God, looking on man as something that had better be annihilated, the frustrated religious forces in me then transferred their need of worship and love to Nature. At sixteen I became panaleptic. It came at about the time of my moon intoxication and increased in madness as my rage against God increased. It actually took the place of sex-rapture. I regarded girls as nuisances, toys, snares of God, a way of damnation. (This attitude to­ward the female has never quite worn off.)I made every foot of Fairmount Park my own. I watched the waning and the coming of seasons as one watches the sleep­ing and waking of his mistress. I rolled in the grass in ecstatic frenzy. I kissed the trees, I almost swooned in the breezes, I lay on the ground staring for hours into the blue of heaven until I was near to bursting with mad pleasure, all of which had strange sex-implications which trou­bled my then chaste soul, but which now cause me an ironic grin. The great event of my life then was Springtime, a hal­lowed miracle. I did not at that time confound God and Nature. But I think it was this early Nature-worship that was the germ in me of that supreme conscious­ness of Beauty and Power, unstained by ethical conceptions, that finally swallowed the old God in me and incorporated him in a transcendent apotheosis of xsthetic amorality.From 1890 until the turn of the century my life was occupied with four things—God, books, alcohol and suicide. The three latter were all roads to the first, modes of noosing Him, underground pas­sages to His throne, where I intended to confront Him and demand in the name of all things that had lived and died since the beginning of Space and Time the Why?I now discovered Pascal and Descartes, and through them returned to Ptolemy s egocentric universe. The stars may not revolve around the earth, but they did revolve around me, for if, as Pascal or Descartes said, the universe is a circle with its circumference nowhere and its centre everywhere, then each one of us is the centre of the universe. Each being is then the measure of all things. I did not revolve around the sun and the stars; they revolved around me!Following Pascal and Descartes came Emerson and Whitman to confirm my egocentricity in trumpet tones. They lifted me to the pinnacle of extreme in­dividualism. They dared me to dare all things. They dared me to confront God. They gave me back my dignity as a unique being. But while accepting their doctrine of the almighty ego, I rejected—my bitter, militant, ethical sensibility rejected—their smug acceptance of things and the essential goodness of the Oversoul. Egoity, dilated to cosmic proportions, superposed itself on a raging hatred of the temporal order, its futility and imbecility.It was about 1903 or 1904 that there was a fissure in my brain, a sinister slit in my consciousness. A face, humorous, satanic, ferocious, floated up from the depths of that fissure. It was the Spirit of Tragic Humor. I lost Thee, my Enemy, my Friend, my Torturer and my Consoler, in the bil­lows of my laughter. As my consciousness and my brain halved, I saw myself for the first time as a ridiculous little witling, and God, if I thought of Him at all at that time, as a Scaramouch, a roguish blue­behinded ape. Lucifer died that Narcissus might be born. I guffawed with God, with the gods, for I felt also at this time my monotheism dissolving into polytheism. I forgot Heaven and discovered Olympus. I was a gay Narcissus. I looked into the lake of my mind and saw a clown-face. I found the exquisite uses of my flesh. God incarnated as a bawdy Eros. He winked at me out of the ale-pot. I still thundered at times against Him, but I felt I was cursing a phantom. The sense of evil, the sense of sin, vanished.Spinoza until then had been but a name. I knew his philosophy only by hearsay, in second-hand expositions. I began to read him. I began to meditate on panthe­ism, on a God who was the spirit of evil as well as the spirit of good, a God who was Power and Beauty unallied to man­made ethical attributes. I heard the first notes of a transcendental symphony, or, rather, the beginning of a titanic struggle between two opposing and equally power­ful forces such as Wagner put into the Overture to Tannhäuser Now the Great Adventure was in full march again! Spinoza and King David were face to face at Armageddon—and Arma­geddon was in my soul. The Psalmist of Hate and Humility faced the serene etern­ist of Amsterdam. I passed from bitter curses to ecstatic swoonings. I rocked Heaven with my shrapnel, and recouped my strength by rendering up my soul to the Impersonal Spirit. I celebrated both of my brain armies in a passionate prose-poem to Spinoza and his God.Then came 1914. Dead was the God of Spinoza in me, dead the God of the ale-pot and the bawdy Eros, during those four years of planetary cannibalism. The spirit of King David and his immortal barbaric God possessed the world, pos­sessed me, and I hurled anathema upon anathema at Him, reversing the smug at­titude of David, but preserving his passion and his rant.This bearded old Jehovah of the Jews, this marvellous creation of the Old Testa­ment poets, would not walk out of my soul. In my Great Adventure He remains my sword of Excalibur. He is the greatest and truest of man s anthropomorphic crea­tions. He is the very garment and texture of Reality. He is Mars, the Serpent, the Instinct of Self-Preservation, Big Brother with a club and sling-shot. He was not born of closet speculations and theological subtleties, but of direct contact with reality.He mirrors the Earth we live upon and its sublime victim—Man. He was built of blood, thunder, lightnings, fear, flood, famine, pest, hate, murder, life, death, war and covetousness: an epitome of the adventures of the human race on the planet Earth. He was (and is) the perfect mirror of life in all its cruelty, irony, humility, hypocrisy, implacability and amoralism. No Spinoza, no Nietzsche, no Christ can dynamite Him out of His heavens, be­cause those heavens that lock in Jehovah —the old storm-god of the Midianites­are locked forever in our hearts and brains. He is practical, pragmatic, the literal I Am of every-day life. He is mud-and­blood humanity. He is the Errinye of personal vengeance. Christ may have a Second Advent; Jehovah s Second Advents are perpetual. Flatten Him out to a philo­sophical abstraction in times of peace and prosperity, He will round to form, gather up His lightnings and His siege-guns when Death stalks the world. Jehovah, in a word, is not a God but the Superman.So during the World War I hated Him and I loved Him. I used to fling anathemas at Him. He became confusedly identified with the God of Spinoza, and both lapsed into Satan.IVIn 1918 admiration was born like sweet lullaby music out of the fantasia of hate, despair and disillusion. I again heard the Pan-phallic pipes of Greek polytheism. God was laughing at me—impotent sun-midge of a day! I took the God of Spinoza and the God of King David and Hellenized Them. I renounced homogeneous unity for heterogeneous diversity. I carved gods out of God. I paraphrased the saying of Goethe, that the meaning of Life is life itself, into The meaning of God is earth-spirits, air-spirits, water-spirits, flower-spirits, star-spirits, individual daemons, familiars. The bright, etheric face of Shel­ley rose out of the wreck of Spinoza and King David. I was in the clutch of mate­rial ecstasy. A mystical atheist!But polytheism was, after all, only a Merlin garden that I had stumbled on and loitered in with half-closed eyes and wide-open nostrils on my way to the Bright Tower. I am primarily a creature of intellect, and not of sentiment. The heart is the cloudy crucible of all prob­lems. The brain is the clarifier. Too long had I been imprisoned in the crucible.Near my fiftieth year the ascension to the eyries of the brain began in earnest. Liberty dwells on mountain-tops. There one has unobstructed vision, preternatural sight, a sudden revaluation of values. My brain is the mountain-top of my soul. I myself had the Bright Tower within me all these years, obscured and weed-hidden until now by my emotional judgments, by my common humanity, by my un­conscious craving for salvation —sal­vation of my own blowsy ego. All great, enduring revelations come from Intellect, the cold, clarified visions of Artists and Ironists. And I saluted Goethe, Nietzsche and Jules de Gaultier.So at last! Artist and Ironist!—that is God! Supreme, innominable, immanent bainter, poet, musician, satirist, roman-:et, mathematician—that is God! He is an ethereal Beethoven and Shakespeare, a Rodin and Cervantes, a Euclid and Ein­stein, an Aristophanes and Aeschylus, a Wagner and Dostoievsky, an Aphrodite and Zeus. God is all of these—and myself!God has nothing to do with human beings except as characters in an eternal serial, an eternal dream-tale, an eternal fabulous drama. Good and evil are art-motives. God is superhuman, unhuman, inhuman. He dreams scenarios, of which we are the puppets. Our agonies and prayers are situations. He is Spinoza s God, the Eternal Return of Nietzsche, the Oversoul of Emerson, the Unknowable of Spencer, the Mephistopheles of Goethe. He is All—omniscient, omnipotent, omni­present, eternal creator, eternal playboy, eternal incarnation; the great dramaturge.Arriving at this truth, I was released. I, with the rest of the species, am part of the music, drama, farce and mathe­matics of the Supreme Artist. And when I utter sadly Such is life! because of my disillusions, defeats and strangled de­sires I say, But such is God, too! For God is Life.But Why? my brain still asks at times; and then again I am Lucifer organizing the revolting angels against Heaven, Prometheus launching curses at Zeus, and a King David raining death and destruction on Life. Why? Is the tragic farce, the music, the artistry worth while?And a veiled sigh comes to me from the depths of myself; a veiled sigh, or is it a veiled laugh?—and I hear a voice: I have assigned to man the sublime role of Why? for an Eternity. Why? is the master-key to my art. That word Why? is the name of all My dreams, tragedies and farces on all the stars. It is the real name of every being I have ever made. It is the name of every sun I have ever created. It is the name of every picture I have ever painted. In the Legend of Life Why? is my eternal Hamlet. So I am thus, like all living things, identified with God in all His manifesta­tions, in all forms and on all planes—a Tantalus of Eternity.The following short story was written by Madison Grant as “The Major.” It was published in Hank: His Lies and His Yarns , privately printed (probably by the Boone and Crockett Club) in 1937. I AM A DUNKARD MAJOR, said Hank at their camp up Lost Horse Cañon, I have been thinking all day bout them sheep down in the Bitterroot Valley. They do smell something dreadful, don t they? They ought to be vermin but they ain t, because they do say in the East there are people that eat sheep, which they call mutton. What has that to do with sheep being vermin? asked the Major. Why you sure know, Major, what a vermin is? No, says the Major, I don t. Vermin, says Hank, is anything you can t eat, so sheep ain t vermin, though they ought to be. Hank, why are you so down on sheep? I know that all cattle-men and hunters detest the brutes, but why are you so especially bitter? Yesterday I was afraid you were going to shoot the shepherd of the flock we rode through. Then Hank said, That Greaser shepherd, he sure ought to be shut. He s verminall right. Well, Major, I tell you why I hate sheep; because they robbed me of my religion. What, robbed you of your religion, Hank?” They sure have, I ain t no Christian no more. I can t belong to no religion what uses a blatting imbecile of a lamb for a symbol. And they say Christ was a shepherd. I ve seen pictures of him carrying a lamb. Just look at them half-breed shepherds we saw yesterday. No, I ain t no Christian, I ain t. Well, Hank, the sheep and shepherd question has nothing to do with Christianity. They are symbolical. But if you are not a Christian, what are you? You have got to be something, are you an Atheist or a Deist or an Agnostic or a Moslem? You must be something. Well, said Hank after an embarrassed pause, I suppose I am a Dunkard. Via Hellorosa.Scenes on the Way to Hades by Our Special Artists.The Engines of Hell running full blast, day and night.Watchman what of the night? And the Watchman said, I see a great light—in fact, I see the flames of Hell. One can-not bring the masses to shout hosanna until one rides into the city on an ass.—Nietzsche.Between the government which does evil and the people who accept it—there is a certain shameful solidarity.— Victor Hugo.Within the memory of man the trade of governing has always been monopolised by the most ignorant and most rascally individuals of mankind.—Thos. Paine.We shall have an Emperor in Washington within 25 years unless we can create a public sentiment which, regardless of legislation, will regulate the trusts.—A. T. Hadley, Pres. of Yale College.We have among us people who would like to abolish radically everything that exists and carry us back, by violence if need be, to a régime discarded and condemned more than a century ago. They are called conservatives.—Paul Masson.With the development of capitalistic production, European public opinion has stripped the last rag off conscience and modesty. Each nation glories cynically in all the infamy that goes to hasten the accumulation of capital. —Flaubert.This old society has long since been judged and condemned. Let justice be done! Let this old world be broken into pieces! . . . where innocence has perished, where villany has prospered, where man is exploited by man ! Let these whited sepulchres, full of lying and iniquity, be utterly destroyed!—Heine.We say that your society is not even a society, that it is not even the shadow of one, but an assemblage of persons that can be given no name : administered, manipulated, exploited at the will of your caprices, a warren, a flock, a herd of human cattle destined by you to glut your greed.—Lamennais.What kind of society is it which, at this period, has, for its base, inequality and injustice? Would it not be well to take the whole by the four corners and send it pell-mell up to the ceiling, the cloth, the feast, and the orgy, the gluttony and the drunkenness and the guests; those who have their two elbows on the table, and those who are on all fours under it, to spew the whole lot in God s face and to fling the whole world at heaven ? The hell of-the poor makes the paradise of the rich. Not only has happiness not come, but honour has fled.— Victor Hugo.Imperialism is a depraved choice of national life, imposed by self-seeking interests which appeal to the lusts of acquisitiveness and of dominion surviving in a nation from centuries of animal struggle for existence. Its adoption as a policy implies a deliberate renunciation of that cultivation of the higher inner qualities which for a nation, as for an individual, constitutes the ascendancy of reason over brute impulse. It is the besetting sin of all successful states, and its penalty is unalterable- in the order of nature.—J. A. Hobson s Imperialism. Aeschylus at Marathon.Are we Saved by Love or by Hate ?Once for all, let us clear our minds of cant. Let us rise to the noble honesty of the Greek attitude which faithfully reflected the sanity and the sanctity of Hate. Can we find a more faithful or more inspiring embodiment of this noble pagan position than in the beautiful, hate-breathing epitaph which Aeschylus wrote for himself? Here it is:Athenian Aeschylus, Euphorion s son,Buried in Geta s fields these lines declare ;His deeds are registered at Marathon,Known to the deep-haired Mede, who met him there.We wish to offer a few observations on one phase of the opinions elicited by our Symposium. We desire to reason in the most patient manner possible with the most misguided beings who have ever obstructed human progress, we mean the well-meaning but deluded Tolstoyans. The Tolstoyans tell us that Love is the only remedy for social misery When the Tolstoyan stands before the victim of oppression and outrage, it is thus that he addresses the suffering man: It is true that the oppressor has robbed you not only of the chance of a decent existence, but has condemned your wife to life-long starvation and your daughters to prostitution; nevertheless you are still more blessed than your murderer and exploiter because you have done no evil; and you must still love the instrument of your afflictions. You are far more prosperous than he is, although you are in this sorry light, because you have the approval of your conscience even while you are starving, and if you continue to love.him till you starve to death, you will be numbered with.the saints: in glory everlasting. When the Tolstoyans, mock our miseries with such precious consolations (for I have but reduced their doctrines to their logical, conclusion) I am compelled to say to them that it is such unutterable imbecilities as these which drive us to despair of humanity. Against such stupidities omnipotence itself must contend in vain. While these, insanities meet us at every turn, progress, is all but impossible—our perpetual damnation is the only thing of which we can be certain. Tolstoyans tell us that social syncope exists because men do not love enough. We believe in the antithesis of this statement—we believe that, so far.as, it is not inherent in human nature, social misery exists because men do not hate enough. Love rarely inspires thought, and indeed its apostles tell us that with love no thought is necessary, that love is a substitute for thought. No apostle of Hate has ever talked such nonsense—it has never been alleged that Hate is- a substitute for thought, but we have abundant proof that profound hatred has inspired some of the most impressive streams-of thought, some of the most powerful intellects of all time. Karl Marx, quoting George Sand, declares On the eve bleach general reconstruction of society, the last word, of social science will ever be Combat or death ; bloody struggle or extinction, It is thus that the question is irresistibly put. H. M. Hyndman wrote: It is precisely the hatred and disgust I feel for the misery, degradation and physical deterioration around me which had more influence in making and keeping me a Social Democrat than anything else. William Morris, writing on How I Became a Socialist, says: To sum up then, the study of history and the love and practice of art forced me into a hatred of [the existing] civilisation. In a world whose characteristics were prevailingly lovely, love would best become a man, but in a world whose leading features are to the last degree unlovely, hypocritical and hateful, hate is the only sentiment an honest man can entertain. Hence it follows that in this predominantly hateful world, men of hate leave their impress on every page of history, while men of love, with their pale and ineffectual negations, have their day and cease to be. Hannibal, Napoleon, Nelson, Danton, Mirabea, Byron, Attilla, Morris, Marx, Proudhon— these names stand as sublime coefficients of vast streams of Hate.What are the greatest events in modern history, its most inspiring episodes? They are: Tell, Hampden, Milton, or Cromwell, hating and resisting the tyrant to the death; Nelson s exploits with his middies, inspired to glorious deeds by their hatred of Napoleon and the French; Napoleon s achievements with his Grenadiers, whose inspiring motive was hatred, first, of their own aristocracy, and then of the enemies of the Eagle Paris razing the Bastille, France liquidating eight centuries of misery, Patrick Henry exclaiming If this be treason make the most of it the embattled farmers firing at the Bridge of Concord (Discord) rather the shot heard round the world, the shot of which Emerson wrote: Their deed of blood all mankind praise, Even the serene reason says, It was well done Victor Hugo pouring the vials of his hate upon Napoleon the Little. These are the inspirations of Hate and they are among the noblest chapters of human history.The great Haters are the great Lovers. Love Which does not hate the hateful as prpfoundly as it loves the lovely is mere hyprocrisy. Let us seriously ask the question, Do the predominant characteristics of the present age attract or repel an honest soul—in- other words, is our present age hateful or the reverse? We ought to base our answer upon the opinions of those whose honesty, capacity and experience entitle them to pronounce judg- ment on this issue. We present a series of such opinions in the sonde VIA HELLOROSA (see below). Those whom we have quoted are not journalists, statesmen, or Doctors of Divinity—but perhaps are not less trustworthy on that account. We believe that a consideration of the unbought opinions of Hugo, Heine, Lemennais, etc., will convince any free mind that-the world has now reached the most murderous, most hypocritical, most hateful stage of social evolution known to history.- Shall we love or shall We hate this horrible epoch which has been cursed by the united execrations of Heine, Hugo, Marx, Proudhon, Nietzsche, Shaw, Tucker, Morris, Redbeard, and Wallace? Surely, not to hate in the profoundest possible manner, such an era, which presents an apotheosis of legitimised assassination and worshipped hypocrisy) is to confess oneself a defender of assassins and a devotee of prostitutes and pirates. When one considers the systematic slaughter of the young and helpless, when one ponders the malign influence of our boasted institutions upon thousands of young men and young women, robbing them, as it does, of their unreturning May time and condemning them to lives of unescapable ignorance, bitterness and vice, institutions which murder thousands to give to a few, luxuries as maleficent as the evils they rest upon, when one has circumnavigated this continent and sub-continent of misery, then one asks oneself the question, How can I sufficiently bate and curse this frightful epoch with which I am fatally contemporaneous?Let us then, like Aeschylus of old, go forth to meet the Mede which threatens the self-realisation of the Free, with a spirit of Hate as unalterable as his own laws, and in a mariner that he will be able to appreciate. If time permit, let us give our enemy a decent burial on the field of our vindication, and if time do not permit we shall leave the dead to bury their dead. But on our field of Marathon we shall erect, with due libations, a trophy of accomplished Hate and Love—of Love for ourselves and our own, of Hate for all that threatens us and ours.JOAN ERWIN MCCALL, Founder of the Religion of Hate.I gathered and stacked up most of the books that I ve purchased in the month and a half leading up to my birthday and took a photo.. well, a few photos, and did a rough stitching together in photoshop.If you re curious what I m curious about these days, this gives you a good idea.Actually, now that I m looking at the photo, I see a number of titles left out oh well.

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