Republicans made it clear that they wanted to defund NPR because they didn’t like the viewpoints they thought it aired—calling it “a progressive propaganda purveyor” (WBMA, 5/8/24).

Every so often, Republicans in Washington engage in the ritual of shouting about public broadcasting’s supposed left-wing bias, usually threatening to cut its federal funding.

It’s been happening nearly from the moment the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was established in 1967 to provide federal funding for public radio and television. Nixon went after the CPB in 1969, leading to Fred Rogers’ famous congressional testimony that helped protect it. Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Donald Trump all launched attacks on public broadcasting. GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich attempted to eliminate the CPB in the mid-’90s, and congressional Republicans sought to do it again in 2005 and 2011. (See Politico, 10/23/10; FAIR.org, 2/18/11; HuffPost 3/16/17.)

It’s hardly surprising, then, to find public radio in the GOP’s crosshairs again this year (WBMA, 5/8/24), since congressional Republicans have been spending most of their time launching McCarthyist hearings into the Biden administration and elite institutions they accuse of “liberal” or “woke” bias (FAIR.org, 4/19/24).

This time, the attack was spurred by former NPR business editor Uri Berliner’s lengthy Substack essay (Free Press, 4/9/24; FAIR.org, 4/24/24) arguing that the outlet’s “progressive worldview” had compromised its journalism. The right gleefully pounced, and the House Energy and Commerce Committee called a hearing to investigate, among other things, “How can Congress develop solutions to address criticism that NPR suffers from intractable bias?”

A voice for the heard

By the time of FAIR’s 2015 study (7/15/15), NPR had almost completely barred political commentary from its major shows, in a futile hope of not angering censorious lawmakers.

As FAIR has documented throughout the years, the primary “intractable bias” public broadcasting suffers from is a bias toward the same corporate and political elites that dominate the rest of establishment media—despite the fact that it was created to “provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard.”

We conducted our first study of the sources on NPR‘s main news programming in 1993 (Extra!, 4–5/93), when Democrats controlled the White House and Congress. Republican guests nonetheless outnumbered Democrats 57% to 42%. Public interest voices made up 7% of sources; women were 21% of all sources.

When we revisited the guest lists in 2004 (5/04), partisan control in Washington had flipped, but little changed at NPR. Republican guests outnumbered Democrats by slightly more (61% to 38%). Public interest voices were slightly lower, and only a few percentage points more than on commercial networks (6% compared to 3% of sources). Women were still 21% of all sources.

When FAIR (7/15/15) looked at NPR‘s commentators in 2015, we found that 71% of its regular commentators (i.e., who gave two or more commentaries in the five-month study period) were white men. Eight percent were men of color, and 21% were white women; no women of color were regular commentators during the period studied.

Led by private elites

The overwhelming domination of public radio’s boards of directors by the corporate elite (FAIR.org, 7/2/15) is a consequence of the strategy of relying on the wealthy for financial support.

FAIR has also looked at the governing boards of the eight most-listened-to NPR affiliate stations (7/2/15). Of the 259 board members, 75% had corporate backgrounds (e.g., executives in banks, investment firms, consulting companies and law firms). They also lacked ethnic diversity and gender parity, with 72% non-Latine white members and 66% men. In other words, legal control over public radio in this country is firmly in the hands of the privileged few.

NPR‘s national board of directors is a mix of member station managers and so-called “public members.” At the time of our study, there were ten station managers and five public members, who in fact represented the corporate elite. Shortly after FAIR’s study, NPR expanded its board to include nine public members; members today include bigwigs from Apple, Yahoo, Hulu, Starbucks, consulting firm BCG and investment bank Allen & Company.

And the percentage of NPR‘s revenues that comes from corporate sponsors continues to increase over time. In 2009, that number stood at 24%; today it is 38%.

Meanwhile, NPR receives less than 1% of its funding from the federal government. But nearly a third of its revenue does come from member stations’ programming and service fees—and the CPB accounts for approximately 8% of those stations’ revenues. (Other federal, state and local government funding contributes another 6%.) That’s why NPR calls continued federal funding “critical for both stations and program producers, including NPR.”

Dampening critical coverage

NPR adopted a definition of “lying” that required telepathy (FAIR.org, 3/1/17).

There is no current threat to public broadcasting funding, with Democrats in control of the Senate and White House. Even when Republicans have controlled Washington, they’ve always backed down in the end. While that’s not inevitable, defunding isn’t necessarily the ultimate goal: The mere threat of defunding is generally sufficient to reinvigorate public media’s efforts to prove their non-liberal bona fides, pushing them to the right.

In one remarkable example, shortly after the 2011 attack on NPR, the outlet stopped distributing an opera program when its host participated in an Occupy protest.

This week’s hearing comes after months of GOP House committee hearings on campus antisemitism, in which leaders of universities (and even city K–12 schools) have been repeatedly hauled before Congress to explain why they aren’t clamping down harder on freedom of speech and assembly. Disturbingly, the committee investigating NPR has demanded that NPR CEO Katherine Maher document and report the partisan affiliations of all news media staff of the past five years, as well as all board members.

As always, these attacks are very useful in dampening critical public media coverage of even extreme right-wing rhetoric and actions. During Trump’s presidency, for instance, NPR refused to call Trump’s lies “lies” (FAIR.org, 1/26/17, 3/1/17) and uncritically used far-right think tanks to defend him (FAIR.org, 2/7/17).

It’s because of public broadcasting’s serious vulnerability to both political and corporate pressure that FAIR has long argued (e.g., Extra!, 9–10/05; FAIR.org, 2/18/11) that we need truly independent public media—public media that don’t take corporate money, or have corporate leadership, and that don’t have to appease political partisans.

In the meantime, it’s critical that NPR stand up to the GOP’s McCarthyism and refuse to accept federal funds when they come with political strings attached.

Featured image: NPR‘s DC headquarters (Creative Commons photo: Todd Huffman).

The post GOP Grilling NPR Is a Tired Ritual That Needs to Be Rejected appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

Orientation  

How I came across Life Force: The Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self                                                                                              

In the middle of the 1980s I had decided to return to college to get a degree in counseling psychology. I was sitting in a café in the North Beach area of San Francisco waiting for my interview to get into Antioch University. It had been ten years since I had recognized that I wanted a more expansive view than what Marx and Engels had to offer. I began studying the work of Teilhard de Chardin, especially The Phenomenon of Man. From there I stumbled on Barbara Marx Hubbard’s  book Conscious Evolution. I also became interested in books that had a sensitivity to the visionary possibilities for the globalization of society through the work of Oliver Reiser and General Systems Theory. I wanted to expand the work on social evolution so that it had a biological dimension on the one hand, and a cosmic dimension on the other. I was jazzed by a book I was reading called Life Force: The Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self. Up until this book, I perceived western history, western psychology and western spirituality as all separate disciplines. This book integrated all three into one movement. This tells the story of the dialectic between social evolution and psychological development through the description of Life Force.

Lack of a psychological and spiritual evolution of Marx and Engels stage theory

Marxists have a stage theory of social evolution. The first stage was primitive communism. The second stage was something Marxists called “Oriental Despotism” which roughly corresponded to the ancient states of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and India. They were all caste societies. From there Marx and Engels argued that the next three social formations were all class societies. Slavery corresponded to Greek and Roman civilization. The second form of class society was feudalism, which in the West lasted from the 10th  to the 14th  centuries. The last form of class society was capitalism, which is roughly coextensive with the modern world, beginning with the fifteenth century into its decline in the 21st century. After a successful revolution against the capitalists, Marx and Engels predicted that first socialism, then communism would replace it. There was no integration of this model with the evolution in the micro psychology in individual development. Further, since spirituality was inseparable from organized religion, Marx and Engels only saw religion as an ideology of the priests to oppress the population for their benefit and that of secular rulers.

Lack of social evolution in psychology and religion studies

Meanwhile, the field of psychology treated the evolution of society as having little or nothing to do with the problems of how people learn, how emotions get produced, the stages of cognitive development or how mental illness evolved. As for spirituality, monotheism seems to have had little to do with psychology or social evolution. They imagined that in the evolution of religion, monotheism was an advance over the polytheism of ancient times but it was not connected to the evolution of human societies.

Integration of social, psychological and spiritual evolution

The first of two people I found who actually combined social, psychological and religious evolution was Jean Houston in her book Life Force. The other was Ken Wilbur in his book Up From Eden. Jean Houston’s book will be the study in this article.

Jean Houston’s Mentor Gerald Heard

As I was reading Life Force, I noticed that she referenced a book called The Five Ages of Man by someone named Gerald Heard. His book was written in 1963. I was very eager to read the book but in the days before the internet and Amazon, the chances were slim to none I would ever find it in a used book store twenty years later. But, thanks to the wonderful resources of Moe’s Books in Berkeley, I found a copy. It was expensive ($50.00 in the early 1990s) but in retrospect, it was well worth it. So, who was this guy Heard anyway?

He has been called “an advanced scout” on the Aquarian Age frontier. He played the role of global midwife to a New Age of human potential movement long before Jung or Joseph Campbell became popular. Heard was born in London in October of 1899 to parents who were landed gentry. At the age of 17, in the midst of a crisis in faith, he turned to and embraced secular humanism. Gerald was involved in progressive education along with social and prison reform. While in Ireland, he came to know George Bernard Shaw and William Butler Yeats. Heard also was involved with an agricultural cooperative in Ireland and he was a champion of an Irish cultural Renaissance.  In 1926, he became a public speaker and made a name for himself as a science journalist for the BBC. He worked on an editorial board that included Julian and Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells and Rebecca West. In the middle third of the 20th century, he was a well-known polymath. He influenced Huxley away from the cynicism of The Brave New World to the perennial philosophy of esoteric religion.

In the early 1930s Heard became influenced by Hindu and Buddhist thought. He transitioned from being a secular humanist to a mystic. He learned exercises for regulating his diet, attitude, inspiration and meditation. In the 1930s and early forties Heard was involved in the research committee for Society for Psychic Research. With World War II looming, he emigrated from England to the US with fellow pacifist Huxley and never returned. He had a long-cherished dream to establish a place where  the study of comparative religion could be combined with research into the techniques of meditations. In Los Angeles they joined the Vedanta Society of Southern California as a place to nurture his dreams.

The 1940s were Heard’s most productive writing years where he turned to novels and science fiction. His early writing included nonfiction work such as Ascent of Humanity, 1929; The Social Substance of Religion, 1931; Source of Civilization, 1935; and Pain, Sex and Time written in 1941. His magnum opus was The Human Venture.

Like Jean Houston, in the 1960s he pioneered the study of LSD and its value while it was still legal to do so.This early hero of the Esalen founders of the Human Potential Movement died in 1971 in Santa Monica at the age of 81.

For my purposes, what is most important about Heard was his attempt to connect social, psychological and spiritual evolution. In terms of psychology and spirituality, Heard published a remarkable fictional story Dromenon (like a Labyrinth). The story is of an archeologist who encounters an ancient therapy which involves the mystical transformation of body, mind and spirit by following the pathways inscribed on the floors and walls of a medieval English cathedral. 

Each of his stages was beset by a specific crisis-ordeal under which the individual was either broken down or transformed and then went on to the next stage. Heard suggested therapies of initiation for each stage along the lines of ancient mystery traditions. The psychotechnology that Heard advised as providing for the initiation of movement included LSD, electrical stimulation and walking on fire.

The Life of Jean Houston

Like Gerald Heard, Jean was an early pioneer in the Human Potential Movement along with her husband Robert Masters. She was born in 1937 in New York City and is still alive and working 87 years later. Her father was a comedy writer who also developed material for theatre, movies and television. This helped Jean to develop her theatrical approach to what she later called “sacred psychology” and group dynamics. She continued to live in NYC after her parents got divorced and she graduated from Barnard College in 1958. Jean was an interdisciplinary from way back. She received a PHD in both psychology and religion. This further supported her later work in sacred psychology. She has taught and lectured at many colleges and has made a name for herself as a social visionary. In the mid 1990s she was given the Keeper of the Lore Award for her studies in myth and culture.

Early Research on Altered States of Consciousness

In the 1950s up until the mid 1960s, psychological research on the effects of LSD was legal and she met her husband working on a government research project on the effects of LSD. This led to their book The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience in 1965. They married the same year and soon became known for their work in the Human Potential Movement. Both Masters and Houston continued their interest in altered states of consciousness without chemical inducement. Their book in 1972 called Mind Games detailed their findings of the power of guided imagery and body movement for altering states of consciousness. Together they conducted research into the interdependence of body, mind, and spirit through their Foundation for Mind Research until 1979.

Group sacred psychology

Jean had been deeply influenced by Heard’s short story Dromenon.  Her rites of passages are powerful new versions of what Heard, following Cambridge anthropologist Jane Harrison, terms the Dromenon. In 1975 she formed the Dromenon Center which was named after the ancient Greek rites of growth and transformation. In Pomona New York, she began to offer workshops on this material. She used the Dromenon book and often implemented it in her seminars by inscribing it on the floor and having her participants walk its pathways. She crafted her own transformational rituals as I will illustrate later in the article. Around 1978, she decided to offer an experimental advanced Dromenon workshop in which she would rethink some of the themes of the Five Ages of Man in light of her own subsequent research and findings.

From her study of Toynbee, Sorokin and others, she attempted to discover a relationship between social evolution and individual development. Child psychologists like Stanley Hall and his student Arnold Gesell have suggested that the individual infant, child and adolescent are recapitulating in their individual growth phases of past epochs of humankind’s psychosocial evolution. Jean’s interest in anthropology brought with it an appreciation of social evolution and its integration into Western history.

The New Dromenon

Jane Harrison in Ancient Art and Ritual points out that for the ancients the enactment of the Dromenon extended the boundaries of the self so that it became part of the larger social order. From the spring of Dromenon there arose two of the main forms of Greek life and civilization:

• Agon or athletic contest
• The agon of the drama

At the heart of the ancient Dromenon is the principle of conflict, the conflict that comes from the anima and animus of the old self and birth of the new year and a new self. She had a yearly 10-week mystery school format of spiritual study and sacred psychology.  An emphasis on myth and story began to be essential to her work since about 1980. The use of the mythic is not as implicit in Life Force as it is in her later works. Works on myth include: The Search for the Beloved: Journeys in Sacred Psychology and The Hero and the Goddess. So how does the structure of her groups work?

The structure of Jean’s groups

Her groups include between 5- 25 people. Ideally, members have sufficient life experience to appreciate the historical and psychological scope of the human drama they will be required to go through. At the initial meeting, the group assigns members to take responsibility for obtaining and preparing the setting for each Dromenon. This includes music and recorder, tape or CD players, art materials, as well as bringing food for a  closing celebration for each Dromenon. The setting should be treated as sacred space with no interruptions. Before the meeting, every member of the group is to read the relevant material from the Life Force book. The group discussion of this material should in most cases be the subject of the first part of the meeting. After discussing the content members are to explore the meaning of its content in their lives. There is also discussion of the changing patterns of viewpoint that members have observed in themselves since the last meeting. They are to keep a journal for their journey.

Jean’s use of Greek mythology

In 1982, Houston began teaching a seminar based on the concept of “the ancient mystery schools” which proposed that human beings have an inherent potentiality which is far deeper and wider than their experience in everyday life. All her later work involved first tapping into that potential in her group settings and then learning how to bring it into everyday life. She used Greek mythology to instill in her students a quest which was not just for individual growth but part of the evolution of the human species.

Jean’s influences in stage theories of history

In Jean’s studio, statues of the gods of Greece and Egypt sit with the most advanced biofeedback equipment. A mummy case overlooks the conference area, while a wildly colored nine-foot carving of a Garuda bird-god of Indonesia shares quarters with a xerox machine. The historical material for stage theories for her workshops were influenced by the stages depicted in St. Augustine, Vico and Hegel. She studied historical cycles of Arnold Toynbee, Walter Schubart, Spengler, Berdyaev and Pitirim Sorokin. Cross-culturally she worked with societies that have scarcely changed form since the time of Christ as well as societies that are still medieval. Every kind of society that has ever existed can be seen today in a hybrid form. Their rituals can be drawn from and incorporated into the Dromenon work.

The Five Stages of Social Evolution

Following her mentor Gerald Heard, Houston divides western history into five stages:

• Tribal societies and agricultural state civilizations
• Greek civilization from 800-300 BCE
• Middle Ages of feudalism (10th – 14th centuries)
• Modern Europe of the capitalist/scientific revolution of the 15th to middle 20th. This includes the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution
• Planetary civilization

These five stages mostly follow Marx and Engels’ writing. The problems with her model include the slurring over the differences between tribal societies and agricultural state civilizations. These civilizations developed cities and states for the first time. They created caste relations which were a radical departure from egalitarian societies that exist mostly on a tribal level. They produced enormous wealth and created the first divisions between mental and manual labor. What agricultural civilizations have in common with tribal societies is that they are both collectivists. However, in my opinion this is hardly enough to justify lumping them together.

The characterization of Greek society as individualistic, aristocratic and warrior-like is good. The otherworldly characteristic of stage three, feudal society also makes sense. Her fourth stage of capitalism and the scientific revolution as the explosion and expansion of goods, infrastructures and population increase follows the work of Toynbee, Vico, Spengler and Sorokin.

Her last stage, planetary civilization, makes sense if you can imagine it as spreading of communism around the world. The problem with Houston-Heard’s stages is that they really ignore the power of capitalism to destroy populations either through world wars, colonialism or the exploitation of labor. Neither do either Heard nor Houston  take into account the emergence and spreading of socialism. The place of either capitalism or socialism is not worked into her global civilization. 

Five Stages of Individual Development

Houston identifies five stages of individual development which compliment her stages of social evolution:

• Infancy
• Childhood
• Adolescence
• First maturity
• Second maturity

One of the more exciting proposals Houston makes is that there is a relationship between social evolution and psychological evolution. In the cross-cultural literature on the evolution of the self, there is a movement from horizontal collectivism of tribal societies to vertical collectivism of agricultural states. Greek civilization can be characterized by first order individualism or what she calls “proto-individualism”. Houston’s 4th stage  of social evolution – science – can be characterized as 2nd order individualism. If she added the cross-cultural research, the model of social evolution to individual evolution would work. But she doesn’t do this. Instead, she argues that social evolution conforms to individual development. This harkens back to the old racist anthropologists who suggested that tribal society corresponds to infancy while modern industrial capitalist societies correspond to maturity. This is exactly the kind of ordering of societies that Franz Boas rightly called racist and which justified imperialism. However, if we take out the implication of social evolution recapitulating individual development there are some interesting connections.

Five Types of Selves

The first stage of individual development is the pre-individual, co-conscious human. At this stage, egotism is repressed, sensuality is important and what goes in here is what she called “polymorphous perversity”. This stage does correspond to tribal societies since their senses are heightened because of the need to survive in a hostile environment.  People are co-conscious because they do everything together.

Houston called the second stage the proto-individual heroic, self-assertive human.

These are the heroes of Greek civilization, the characters in the Iliad and especially the Odyssey. Greek aristocrats are likened to a warrior kind of self, where a code of honor is vital. Doing anything dishonorable leads to shame. Mythology is very important as Greek psychology was inseparable from mythology.

The third stage of the self is called the ascetic self-accusing man. Instead of a hero, this kind of self at its best is a mystic. The Middle Ages was dominated by the Catholic Church so the ideal self was the self-denying, otherworldly individual attempting to escape from the material world. The entire feudal society of the Middle Ages was anti-materialist and anti-secular. Because the Middle Ages was dominated by a Christianity that lost the appreciation of the gods and the psychology of mythology, the stories told were allegories, not myths. Allegories are moral tales as to how to behave.

The fourth stage of the self is called the individual humanistic, self-sufficient adventuring man who is self-confident. This corresponds with the period of the Renaissance, the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. There is an explosion of interest in the external world. If the Middle Age visionary cultivated subjectivity, the new self-sufficient individual became enthralled with objectivity. World trade spans the globe. Science reaches beyond the mesocosm of earth to explore the macrocosm of the stars (telescope) or the miniscule world or organism (microscope). There is a harnessing of energy – coal, steam and oil. Population grows, great wealth is produced by world trade, diseases are controlled and life is lengthened. Leonardo, Goethe and Bruno are the best examples of this type of self.

The final stage of the self is what Houston calls the post-individual, planetary ecological human. This is a stage where society becomes globalized. Books that support this kind of world are books like Teilhard de Chardin’s Phenomenon of Man

Peter Russell’s book The Global Brain; the books of Oliver Reiser such as the Integration of Human Knowledge and Cosmic Humanism and Barbara Marx Hubbard’s book Conscious Evolution. I found nothing in Houston’s work which describes the economic system or political system where globalization will take place.

The kind of self in the last stage is dialectical in the sense that it is a return to the co-conscious, egoless self of tribal societies but on a higher level. The post individualist self is wealthier, less afraid and operates at a grand global scale rather than in local identity. This self is well-rounded like individuals in tribal societies but also well-rounded in the power to use technology on a global scale. One model for this kind of self is Buckminster Fuller.

Crisis, Pathology, Therapy

For me the most interesting part of Jean’s evolutionary landscape is the connection she makes between the stages of the self and three processes.

• The developmental crisis of each stage
• The pathology which arises at each stage
• The mythological therapies that resolve the crisis and the pathology

We will go through each of the developmental stages.

Pre-Individual Tribal societies: crisis, pathology and therapy

To protect themselves from natural disasters, other animals and some other kinds of societies, tribal societies, have ideology that, at least socially, things do not change. It is true that change in these societies is slower than any other social formations, which makes the break-up of tribal societies more difficult. So too, in individual development. When a child leaves home for the first time it can be traumatic. In both cases, Houston calls the crisis a “birth drama”. The pathology in social evolution is to refuse to change. This might mean living on less and less resources born out of a refusal to seek new lands, develop new technologies and politically and economically reorganize themselves. In individual development, the pathology is called “infantilism”. This means acting out, refusing to go to kindergarten or feigning sickness to maintain dependence. Houston’s proposal for a solution is “the mysteries of the earth” which remedies the trauma of birth by becoming “a one among the many”.

In this next section I will describe what the crisis and pathology look like. Space doesn’t permit me to do this with each stage but I wanted to give you a feel for what it is like.

The Dromenon for the pre-individual: The recovery of the beginning

The experiences are divided into four stages:

• First stage recalls the hypnotic symbiosis and comforting securities of the early social group
• 2nd stage one is wrapped in the arms of another, there to undergo a terrible birth of the individual and a hero
• In the 3rd stage birth is inspired to its blessed form, we relive our birth based on the work of Fredrick Leboyer. Here the atrocities of deliveries are refused
• The classical mystery of the earth is reenacted

Stage one: the remembrance of the primal community

One member will sit in a circle, arms linked and facing each other. Members of the second group will sit back-to-back with members of the first group reaching behind them. The entire group is a woven network corresponding symbolically to the interwovenness on all levels of the early community.

After 10-15 minutes of entering into participation mystique and continuous chanting, the guide will tell some to continue chanting but that very shortly some members of the group will be touched on the head. Those touched represent the proto-individual who are trying to break away from the close and interwoven society. Those selected should struggle to break loose while the untouched ones should hold them back and keep them from moving out. (58)

Some members of the hero group will be celebrating their revolt on the outer perimeter and even launch an attack on the inner group trying to drag members off. Some may form into wandering bands of marauders, fighting among themselves and their attacking other bands (59)

This is the beginning of the waking and appreciation of your inner life.

Stage four: the mystery of the earth

This invocation is recorded in Aeschylus The Suppliants and is thought to have been part of the initiatory chants to one of the mysteries…move downward, move inward, return to the earth…of initiates and prepare to receive the ancient mystery of earth rebirth.

Like Persephone in the ancient Eleusinian mystery, ascend out the earth, cave, womb, tomb.

The meal that follows should be a simple, ancient rite, with fruits and cheeses and good bread and perhaps a little red wine, only a little, however. (70-72)

Proto-Individual Heroic societies: crisis, pathology, therapy

The heroic aristocratic society of ancient Greeks are proud individualists, easy to anger and ready to fight. These individuals are not grounded in their individualism and behave like children of 7 or 8.  Their individualism is short-sighted and gets them into trouble. Their crisis is that the drive for separation winds up in fighting, which Houston likens to a Tower of Babel. The pathology of this age is paranoia, always finding enemies even when there are none. The therapeia for this is the “mystery of water” where the egotism is tempered through communing with nature. Another therapeia is that of Odysseys “holding people under the water”

Mid-individual Ascetic societies: crisis, pathology, therapy

Ancient Greek society of the heroic aristocrats was followed by the rise of a merchant, trading society of Greece developed by a democratic polis and a more sophisticated individualism of the classical Greeks of Democritus, Plato, Aristotle and the Sophists. When the Greeks were conquered by the Romans, the Roman civilization lasted 800 years including the very sophisticated Alexandrians. When Roman civilization was conquered by the tribes of Northern and Southern Europe, ancient civilization lay in ruins. The only unification  which followed throughout Europe was the Catholic Church. The Church at that time was extremely otherworldly.

The feudal societies that were built were hierarchical including a weak king, decentralized aristocrats, artisans and peasants . The only individualism really came from self-denying mystics who expressed their individuality through severe control of their bodies. Turning to individual development, this is the stage of adolescence, when the body explodes faster than the individual can keep up. Their self-mortification is a strategy for controlling the body. Aristocrats in the Middle Ages expressed bodily prowess through tournaments and gymnastics. The pathology of this stage is schizophrenia where the individual is torn between the poverty of the material world and the supposed glories of the spiritual world. The therapeia of this stage is the stories of Parsifal and the Holy Grail. Houston has her group enact “the mystery of the air” which is a correction of the drive to self-mortification.

Individual humanistic adventurous self: crisis, pathology and therapeia

The emergence of the Modern world was hammered by seven revolutionary movements: the Renaissance, the Reformation, the scientific revolution, capitalism, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution and the emergence of socialism. This produced in the individual both a feeling of liberation from the closed world of the Middle Ages and at the same time a feeling that just as there were no longer ceilings, so there were no floors.

The development of capitalism produced both more material wealth and more alienation. There was specialization of labor and a loss of a sense of how all the world fit together. There were no longer Renaissance men. There was both an expansion of society as well as informational overload. The struggle of Faust typifies the psychology of the humanist-self-sufficient self. What is meaningful in life is chocked full of new knowledge. Faust solved this problem by putting the knowledge to work in what Marx called “developing the productive forces”. Most other individualists were not so fortunate, swinging between mania and depression. They were haunted by the myth of Midas, where everything touched turns to money.

The therapeia for this Promethean self was the mystery of fire, where the self becomes more disciplined and deeper, rather than wider. There are also exercises for integrating the higher self with using mandalas with both mechanical devices as well as artificial intelligence.

Planetary higher self-crisis, pathology and therapeia

At the time I first read Jean’s book, I thought there was no book more inspiring and hopeful about the next stage of civilization than Teilhard de Chardin’s book Phenomenon of Man. Though I am a materialist, I highly recommend this book by this Jesuit renegade, at least as a place to start. Vernadsky’s great book The Biosphere is strictly Marxist materialist, but a lot more technical. Buckminster Fuller’s Utopia or Oblivion shows us that the scarcity that exists in the world is socially produced, rather than natural. My article The Slavophile Russian Cosmists lays out how social visionary models need to include colonizing other planets. The anarchist Fredy Perlman characterized the history of social evolution in three stages.:

• Tribal societies – having little and being much
• Capitalist societies – having much and being little
• Communist societies – having much and being much

In this individual second maturity, if Marx had his way, we would become as well-rounded as we were in tribal societies, except on a higher level—fishing in the morning, cattle rearing in the afternoon, criticizing in the evening. A major obstacle to catapulting into this planetary world is what Jean calls “involutional melancholy”. My way of interpreting this is the zero growth, people-are-pollution, Malthusian renunciation of human societies as a higher form of nature. Instead we imagine humanity as outside of nature, as a degenerate form of nature. But we must take the Promethean self, developed first with Greeks and along with the adventurous self of the modern world sore higher, not clip our wings and beg an otherworldly god for mercy. We must continue to be proud of our individualism, while recognizing the individuality of others on a global scale in a converging confluence of agape love. This is Jean’s Mystery of the Fields exercise.

Missed Opportunities

I was very surprised that Jean Houston did not attempt to integrate Heard’s five ages with the work of Jean Gebser and Ken Wilber. In the second edition of Life Force, she mentions both but she doesn’t take things any further. This is especially a shame because in the case of Gebser, his states of consciousness could have fit in beautifully with Heard’s stages. For example, Gebser’ magical state of consciousness goes with Heard’s tribal societies. Greek civilization would go with Gebser’s mythical consciousness. Gebser has an in-between 3rd stage which he called mystical, which is perfect for the Middle Ages. Gebser’s 4th stage, mental consciousness, goes with Heard’s humanistic self-sufficient self. Gebser even has a degeneration of mental consciousness which he calls rationality. In Heard’s stages this would begin with the scientific revolution. Gebser’s last stage, which he calls integrative, has a wealth of examples showing how it would go with Heard’s post-individual planetary human stage. Gebser’s stage could have been a whole other category called states of consciousness. Further, Gebser’s work is very rich and could have easily lent itself to therapeutic group exercises.

Integrating Heard’s work with Wilbur would have been a taller order. Both Heard and Gebser are really focused on Western civilization and neither has much to say about the civilizational processes of India and China. Wilbur, with his training in Buddhism, has a lot to say about these civilizations, their individuality and especially their states of consciousness. Integrating his work Up From Eden is probably too much. However, a couple of pages of footnotes suggesting the overlaps and divergencies between The Five Ages of Man and Up From Eden could have been enlightening and inspiring while provoking new research. Please see my table below for a summary.

• First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

‘Screen Mix’, an entertainment and media portal from the Middle East,  made the same claim while sharing this video. This tweet has been viewed more than 60 lakh times. (Archived link)

Quoting Screen Mix’s tweet, Pakistani lawyer Mian Omar wrote that such traditions should be discouraged. Urging the United Nations to take cognizance of it, he added that such rituals were against humanity. (Archived link)

Jordan-based news agency ‘خبرني Khaberni’ also made the same claim while amplifying the footage. (Archived link)

A user named Abu Mohammad (ابومحمد) also tweeted the video with the same claim. (Archived link)

The clip is widespread on social media platforms.

Fact Check

Since this video is in Arabic, Alt News performed a search on Twitter using Arabic keywords related to the viral video with the help of Google Translate. We found a tweet by a user named ‘(إياد الحمود) @Eyaaaad‘, contradicting the viral claim and claiming that the clip was of a wedding being held following the traditions and customs of some tribes in the Baihang district of Nepal. The tweet also featured screenshots of some clips containing the TikTok username @laxu.sapkota.

Since TikTok is banned in India, we accessed the content of the (@laxu.sapkota) account with the help of a VPN. We found that the viral video was uploaded by this account recently.

Laxu Sapkota had included a link to a YouTube channel in his bio on TikTok. When we explored this YouTube channel, we found that the viral video had also been uploaded here on June 6, 2023. The title mentions that this is a video of a traditional wedding ceremony in Nepal.

[Video unavailable]

Laxu Sapkota has also uploaded this video on his Instagram account and added that this was a video of a traditional wedding ceremony in Nepal in which the girl is crying while leaving her home after the wedding.

Upon searching keywords related to the farewell on a palanquin in a Nepali wedding on YouTube, we found one such video in which a ritual similar to the viral video is being performed. In this video, the bride is being sent off in a palanquin.

To sum it up, several social media users shared the video of a traditional wedding ceremony in Nepal with the misleading claim that it is from a tribe in India where the wife is buried alive along with her husband when he passes away.

The post Indian tribe practises ritual similar to ‘sati’? Nepal wedding video shared with false claim appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Abhishek Kumar.

I had a newfound sense of freedom after a lot of trying periods. Being on unemployment through COVID finally gave me the chance to be an artist. I really gained a sense of hope. And I was reading a lot about the Madonna Whore Complex and the history of the veil and how veils were used with the Romans to ward off evil spirits. I just really honed in on what the record meant to me. I essentially found myself through a series of transitions. And so that’s why all the hands are pointed up on the album cover. They symbolize reaching up through different phases, seeking a higher self, freedom.

When you say that you finally had a chance to be an artist during COVID and unemployment, do you mean that you finally had the funding necessary to be an artist? That you didn’t have to work?

Yeah, definitely. It was the most money I’ve ever made, and I got to just play music every day and do what I wanted to do. The money also funded my record.

What was your process for writing these songs?

It varies, certainly, but a big rush of them were written through March to July of 2020. A few of them I’d written in 2019, and “Crooked” was one of the first songs I ever wrote—when I was 20—and that was in one sitting. So it varies. Some of them really came out of nowhere. I was trying to play music every day, and then there would be this huge rush and something would just pour out of me. For songs like “444,” I had the chorus written for a year and a half before I finished the verses. And not even the chorus melody, just the chorus structure. And I was like, “This is something, this grooves.” And I kept at it and kept at it. And when it was right, it came to me.

What fosters your creativity and what hinders it?

What fosters it is love and staying connected with my sense of self. I try to be really intentional about what I listen to and who I surround myself with.

Do you mean musically or who you listen to in conversation?

I guess both because it’s who I surround myself with, what people. It matters what they say and how they behave, and music as well. I try to be really intentional about that, so that I always know what my influences are. I know what I like. And what hinders my creativity is my insecurities and fear. I think that’s what hinders anyone in their craft—and those are demons that are always going to be there.

When you mentioned feeling connected to yourself, I thought of how you’ve toured so much within the past year. How do you make space to connect with yourself when you’re so busy?

Well, being on the road is strange and a huge time warp because you’re going somewhere every day, but there’s a lot of time sitting around. I spend a lot of time just staring out the window and thinking, and I have rituals for the shows. After we do load-in and sound check, I always go on a walk by myself and try to digest the city however I can. And I always listen to my recording from the previous night’s set the very next morning. I take notes while I listen, and that prompts me to journal even more. I think that’s pretty much how I stay connected to myself. I really am bad about getting back to people. It’s pretty much just me and my band and mostly me just staring out a window, thinking about everything. So I do feel like I find myself and change a lot when I’m on the road.

I know that you’ve done some solo tours and you’ve also toured with your band. What are some of the major differences between the two?

Sound check and load in are way easier when it’s just me. I pull in, set up, do the guitar, do the mic, and that’s it. There’s no one else to worry about. And there’s also a deeper sense of freedom in this way, because if I go off the rail or try something new, it’s not going to mess anyone up. So that’s really exciting. And I like that my vocals can really be upfront and highlighted during solo shows. With the band, you spend hundreds of hours with these people. I tour with a band of all boys, and that can be different… and a lot. And boys have cooties, so I don’t know. It can also be a really fun being on stage with the band, feeling really tight together. It’s an incredible feeling to play every night together and then really lock in.

What crowds do you prefer to play for and why?

I like playing to bigger, younger crowds because kids are the future, but I also have a deep appreciation for playing smaller towns because you can see and tell from their response how much it means to them that you came through. I think of cities like Fargo or Tallahassee where they’re maybe not as well attended, but I still played a great show. And those are the fans that will stick around for a lifetime, because a band from New York or from a different city came through and played their town.

I know that you’re also from a small town outside of Kansas City. Were there any bands that came through or any musicians who made a big impact on you in that way?

Certainly. I grew up in Independence, Missouri, outside of Kansas City, and I started going to live shows when I was 10. I was really obsessed with UnderOath, which is this scream-hardcore-adjacently-Christian band. My dad took me to see them with some of my church friends. And then one of my first best friends, Jude Cash, was the youngest of six and his siblings were all really involved in the music scene. They would have bands stay over at their house, Showbread and all of these hardcore Christian bands. And then when I was 15 or so, more of my friends started playing music in Kansas City. None particularly from Independence, but there are some bands in Kansas City that started to do cool things. And still it’s been cool to watch their journey, like Dream Girl and Shy Boys and Kevin Morby, who’s from Kansas City, but on the Kansas side.

It seems that no matter your tour schedule, you always make room for a stop in KC. What continues to call you back home?

I moved away from home six years ago, and during the first few years I felt really disconnected. One big reason being that my parents split up and my childhood home was sold. And I really feel like this record was in some ways a search for home and trying to find that for myself. Over the years, and I think since the pandemic, I spent more time going back to KC. I’ve found a deep appreciation and understanding about how my roots shaped me. And it’s been really exciting to go back and notice how the people and the city helps define me and my music. I’m in that mindset right now and its part of my writing process. And I love seeing my friends. They’re so supportive and were so supportive of my move.

That’s rare. A lot of times when someone decides to leave a smaller town for a big city, there’s a lot of resentment toward them.

There’s a mixed bag. There’s some haters for sure. Hater’s gonna hate.

** I know that when you’re in Kansas City, sometimes you’ll bring in family members or long-term friends on stage. I know you played with your long-term ex, and your brother who’s a magician, performed at your album release. Recently your dad came on stage to sing “No Roof, No Floor” with you. How did these collaboration with people from your past enrich your performances?**

It’s empowering and it also shows a deeper history of myself and my inspirations. Having a magician brother growing up really inspired me, and it’s a big part of me being an artist. And I grew up singing with my dad. He was supposed to do my album release, but I got scared because we had no time to rehearse. But we didn’t rehearse before the show in Kansas City, and he nailed it. But of course he did! I learned what I do from him. I love inviting friends on stage, and I love having my family play a role in it. And my cousin too, we talked about doing a collaboration together where he’ll do a score on the short I’m working on. It’s important for me to lift up the people who were there with me from the beginning.

That’s really sweet. What has being an artist taught you about yourself?

It’s taught me everything I know about myself, because I work through a lot of my own personal turmoil and dreams and frustrations through song. And it’s not even a coherent thing. Usually I get into a really meditative state and it comes through me, but it helps me puzzle together how I work and what I’m hoping for, what I’m lacking. I’ve also learned that I’m a really hard worker. I think in this business it’s 99% hard work and 1% genuine talent. I still get imposter syndrome and down on myself, but I am a lot more confident than I used to be. I’ve realized that, above all else, I am an artist. And beyond even just music, I’m a visual artist, a director, etc. It’s all helped with the overall vision.

You mentioned hard work. I know from being your friend that you don’t have financial support outside of yourself. And I know that you’re an absolute hustler. How do you manage to balance work with your creative side?

I started training at a very young age. I started cooking and doing my own laundry at six, five years old and chores, lots of chores. And then I worked with my grandpa for a while painting houses. And then I got my lifeguard job when I was 14. And then by the time I was 15, I bought my car. And then I got my license at 16, and then I got a second job. And then through high school I had two jobs and was involved in multiple extracurricular activities. Now looking back, I see that that was a form of escaping for me.

As I’ve gotten older, I realize I can be a bit of a workaholic and I need to identify that in myself when I’m trying to escape my reality. And because I love the feeling of hustling out and booking a tour and then being like, “Woo!” But I think my ability to balance has come more naturally with age. I don’t party, which gives me a lot of time. My days are usually spent emailing, booking, planning, and then at night I’ll have time for working on music. So I don’t really see too many people. I try to keep my social life really close and intimate.

Let’s talk about your not partying. How long have you been sober now?

Over a year and a half.

And how has that benefited your creative work? Your life in general?

It’s benefitted my life one hundred percent. I feel a lot more clarity. I’m working better. I have to remind myself that I am making my most genuine work. I think for a while when I was starting to write songs, I would rely on drinking to loosen up and to get the emotions flowing, or whatever excuse I made for myself. And I realized it might not feel like I’m cracking open this thing and forcing it to come out and just word vomiting anymore. Now it’s a slower process, something I have to work at. I’m not just ripping something open and forcing it to come out anymore. Because often I would drink a little bit and then just be like, “Oh, I wrote a song.” But now it’s more of a process.

The gesture you’re making is like a massage.

Right, right. Get to the sweet center without forcing it is how it feels. And I’d say with live performing, it was a bit of adjustment at first, and I was really anxious, especially after the shows when talking to people. But it means the world to me to be able to be present with the songs, be present with the crowd, and to not rely on drinking. I’m sleeping better. It’s a nice life.

I’m proud of you. What’s the most surprising thing you’ve realized along your creative path?

I don’t know how much of a surprise this fully is, but maybe I thought things would be different once I got my foot in the door a bit. I’m surprised by the workload at this point in my career as I’m building a team. And I’m also surprised that people like my music. Strangers and random people. That’s cool. That’s a shock.

Of course they do. It’s good.

Well, it’s just surprising. Random people, that’s been cool.

I know that you post a lot on Instagram and that you have a Patreon. How does self-promotion factor into your career as an artist?

It’s a lot of it, and it does help because people see that I’m staying busy. I sell a lot of tickets through promoting shows on Instagram. Sometimes I wish we were living in the pre-digital age because it is a lot of work, and I hate being on social media constantly, but it gets the job done. People see that I’m busy, and when I run into people, they know I’ve been playing shows every day.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

Image by Xavier Balderas Cejudo.

This has become, sadly, a yearly ritual by now. The world’s governments gather together to discuss what should be done about global warming, and finish their time together by issuing statements of concern while doing little concrete to actually solve the problem. And so it is with COP27.

The 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, to use the formal name for COP27, ended with what has the appearance of a breakthrough: An agreement on the establishment of a “loss and damage” fund for Global South countries severely affected by weather and environmental disasters triggered by global warming, and for which they bear almost no responsibility. This finally fulfills a pledge made at the 2009 Climate Summit in Copenhagen.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Pete Dolack.

My book, Ascend Ascend, was published in 2019 by Third Man Books. When the book came out, I partnered with Atlas Obscura for a series of seven ritualized performances in seven different cities around the country. They were full multimedia performances where I recited the book in its entirety from inside a magic circle that’s drawn with sigils and seals on the floor—ringed with beeswax candles and incense and live marigolds that are planted in this outer rim of soil.

In New York, I performed with Mark Korven, who’s a Canadian composer who did the soundtracks for The Witch and The Lighthouse. In Seattle, I got to do this improvised performance with the cellist, Lori Goldston. Lori is best known for having played with Nirvana on their Unplugged album, which was a huge influence on me as a teenager, and she’s played with Earth, who I often listen to while I’m writing.

When we did this Seattle show, Lori and I had never met. Literally, we just spoke once on the phone before the show. We didn’t even really do much of a sound check together, we just improvised the whole performance in this beautiful old church in Seattle that had incredible acoustics. The show was professionally recorded by the sound engineer, but I just sat on the recordings because as my tour was wrapping up, the pandemic hit.

Honestly, I kind of forgot the recordings existed for a year. And then Steve Von Till, who is one of the members of the band, Neurosis, and who runs Neurot Recordings, ordered a signed copy of Ascend Ascend from my website and we eventually connected over email. That conversation evolved into, “Hey, let’s put out this as a live album with Neurot!”

When it came time to develop a visual identity for the record, illustrator David V. D’Andrea was the obvious choice for me. David has made all these amazing tour posters for the bands like Sleep and Earth and Om and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and I have a print of his that’s hanging on my bedroom wall—that I used to change my son’s diapers under. We’re creating a limited edition, “blood marigold” colored vinyl run, and some screen-printed prints signed and numbered by David as well.

The really exciting thing is that Atlas Obscura wants to do a new round of performances in 2023! So I’m going to be doing an encore set of ritual performances in LA, Seattle, Boston, and New York. Those will probably be the last time I perform this work in this way.

What does it take to just pull something together like that? You have to find a particular kind of event space for this, it sounds like.

For someone who’s operating at my scale, it would be hard to do without having a production partner like Atlas Obscura involved because they have this great network of unusual venues. They helped find crypts, cemeteries, temples, churches, and abandoned warehouses for me to perform in. They also have a network of local producers and AV people who can do the sound and the lights and everything. For instance: I connected with Lori in the first place because a local poet and producer in Seattle, named Shin Yu Pai, brought us together. So it’s really helpful to have them involved.

From a performer’s perspective, I have this whole suitcase of all my ritual materials in it, my candles, my incense, magic items. Then, we locally source live marigolds for each show—and a lot of them!

What is the impetus behind doing rituals as performance as part of your work?

When I’m writing, it’s from this trance state. For me, the poetics of trance isn’t just the practice of entering an altered state of consciousness, but also staying in that kind of transcendent uncertainty while I write. I do this so that the obscure and intimate mystery of my encounter with language takes place in a liminal state of grace. And so the creative act becomes an act of utterance and an act of awe. For me, that’s action without attachment rather than action with agenda. So the poetics of trance is this uninterrupted dialogue with the divine. It’s a deep dialogue of ecstasis, and love and terror with the universe. It’s important to me that the performance of my work reflects the sacred space from which it was produced.

I don’t just mean the physical space. It’s also an interior space. It’s this palace of supernatural longing that exists as a temple in time rather than space. I want the performances of the poems to be an initiatory experience, and I don’t want to just enter that altered state of consciousness myself while I’m performing. I want to invite the audience into it too, so the performance becomes an invocation, a collective trance, flowering into this fourth dimension. Each show is unique because each audience is different, and that palace that we build together takes on new shapes.

For me, magic is so private. I almost never do any rituals with anyone else except for my one friend. And even when I feel like when we do things together, sometimes I feel a sense of vulnerability at showing someone else and doing my magic practice with someone. What is it like then to do something like this so publicly?

It is very vulnerable and very frightening for me to do publicly. As a straightforward reader of my work, taking the ritual performance out, I’m a veteran performer. I’ve been reading in public for over 20 years now. I’m very comfortable and very confident in front of audiences, but when I started doing these ritual performancesI had not felt performance anxiety like that in years or decades even.

It’s a very risky thing to do artistically. You don’t know how people are going to respond to something that, while it’s very sincere, also has a lot of aesthetic artifice to it. Especially poetry audiences. Literary audiences are very suspicious of anything that is theatrical. So you’re dealing with a literary audience who’s skeptical of something that’s theatrical, and then you’re dealing with a performing arts audience who maybe is skeptical of a boring literary reading. So you have to win both people over to the opposite side at the same time.

If you are a practitioner and you really believe in the power of this stuff, it is also a psychically very risky and dangerous thing to do, too. You are opening yourself up to a lot of passengers. There’s a lot of work that I did in crafting those performances. It’s why I perform inside of a magical circle. The sense of risk went into the selection of everything. All my props that I use in that ritual, from the materials to the kind of incense I light, is not just theatrics, but a way of both inviting in the energies I want to involve in the performance, and protecting myself as the performer.

Can you talk about the meditation space that you set for yourself beforehand, before you perform or do other creative things?

Back in 2009, I think it was, I wanted to participate in National Poetry Writing Month where you do a poem a day for 30 days of April.I am not a prolific writer. I usually would write 5 to 10 poems a year or something like that. So for me to do 30 poems in 30 days was really daunting. I reached out to a novelist friend of mine who was prolific and could crank out thousands of words a day. And I was like, “How do you do that? You just sit down and do it?” And his response was, “You need to create a ritual for yourself.”

In hindsight, I realize that what he meant by ritual was get up at seven, make coffee, sit down to your desk at nine, write for an hour, stretch, sit down and go for a walk, come back and write for another hour. But because I grew up in an ashram and I had these really esoteric parents who would take me to mystics and psychic surgeons and everything, when I heard the word ritual, I was like, “Oh yeah, ritual. I know what this is about.” And so I created this occult writing ritual for myself that involved turning off all the lights in the house, and candles, and incense and turning on ambient doom metal, and then just sinking into this Byronian state of torpor in my chair for 15 minutes as I entered this meditative trance state, until I felt like I was empty and I was ready to begin writing. And what happened was really unexpected, that not only was I able to write 30 poems in 30 days, but it changed the voice in my writing, like 180 degrees. Which I was not expecting.

Before that I was writing very confessional narrative poems. Probably I’d be really much more popular if I was still writing those fun Billy Collins-esque poems or something like that. But my poems became very surreal, and fragmented, and ecstatic as I entered these states of utterance. I’ve been writing like that now for whatever that is, 13, 14 years now.

Would you ever go back to the narrative poem?

I won’t talk about it too much because I don’t want to jinx the current writing, but I started writing poetry again. I haven’t really been writing it since the pandemic. I’ve been writing in other genres. Just a couple weeks ago I started writing poems again—switching up my practice a little bit and not being so ritualistic in the writing, but still being meditative in it. Playing with narrative and then launching off into something that is fragmented and surreal and utterance. We’ll see where that goes.

I want to talk about the power of secrecy and even superstition when it comes to creative projects.

The binary between genuine magical practice and superstition is sort of a false binary that gets brought up a lot in debate around it. I think all real magic is part placebo, and just because it derives its power from our belief in it, doesn’t make it invalid. If I have a transcendent experience, it doesn’t really matter how I got there, because the experience is genuine. Let’s take our explicit magical practice out of the equation for a second… If you think about a magician in a darkened room—and whether that magician is someone who is pulling rabbits out of a hat or doing a seance, or is an escape artist like Houdini, or is a rock musician like David Bowie, or someone who really understands the power of ceremony—when it comes to performance (and how, I think as human beings, we are these naturally ceremonial creatures), we’re drawn into that.

You can be drawn into that and have a really genuine other-worldly experience, and the only difference is how we talk about it. Whether you talk about that experience as a divine experience, whether you talk about it as a psychological experience, whether you talk about it as an aesthetic experience, whether you talk about it as a UFO abduction. We’re just talking about it through different cultural lenses, but it’s all the same experience at root, and it is a really transcendent and beautiful one. So I think similarly, those ritual practices or those magical practices that we incorporate into our personal lives or our creative lives, whether it derives its efficacy from superstition, or whether it is actually charged with some extra-dimensional energy of some kind, the result is still the same.

When you are working yourself towards a trance state in ritual, or even for writing, what are some things that you do, what are some methods that you have for that? Is it the music and the meditation until you can drop into that state?

Some of my earliest memories are sitting in my dad’s lap while he was meditating in this big meditation hall full of 200 other people. So I can fall into a meditative state usually in 5 or 10 minutes whenever I make time to do that. But I also like having the somatic triggers. I think that’s also really helpful. And when I teach writing rituals to people, which I do sometimes, I really encourage people to find their own somatic rituals. They don’t have to be super esoteric triggers. It can just be this one type of incense that you always light when you’re being creative, or a special mug you have, or a type of drink you drink, or a certain sweater you wear or whatever it is. But those things, every time you do it, it’s almost like a muscle memory for your creative mind where, “Oh, now it’s time to free associate. Now it’s time to sink into some negative capability and do something interesting and see where that goes.”

In addition to the more formal meditation practice, I like to have those somatic triggers, too. I switch them up, so for five or 10 years, it’ll be a certain set of things, and then I’ll start experimenting with others because I also think input affects output. So what happens if I switch my coffee mug, or I switch my ritual drink, or I switch my incense, or I stop listening to doom metal and I start listening to minimalist contemporary piano compositions or whatever it is. How does that affect my state of consciousness? And then what happens?

I bought some things from Ottessa Moshfegh’s Depop, and I was like, this is going to be my enchanted ritual writing item.

I saw! Didn’t you get her jacket or something like that?

I did, yeah. I also have this little locket she sent that I put on a choker, so it’s on my writing desk and I don’t ever wear it unless I’m going to write because it’s kind of Pavlovian.

There are little things I do for performance that are almost like ritualized ticks or triggers that I do to get myself into that space, but I don’t and won’t say specifically what they are because those are very secret and powerful to me in that way, and part of their power is in their secrecy.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Elle Nash.

Introduction

For the most part socialists and members of organized religion seem to be opposites. After all, didn’t Marx say religion was the opium of the people, the heart of a heartless world? But has it always been this way? Socialists in the 19th century had very different ideas about the importance of mythology, ritual, and art. But could19th century socialist engage in these activities without getting caught up in supernatural ideas and reified images? This article discusses the efforts of William Morris, Walter Crane, and the Knights of Labor to bring heaven down to earth.

Orientation

The need for art, myth, and ritual in socialism

Despite its seemingly secular orientation, literature scholar Terry Eagleton has said that socialism has been a greater reform movement than religion, in fact, it has been the greatest reform movement in human history. But in order to achieve these reforms, economic reorganization of society by itself was not enough to move people. There also needed to be socialist culture, artistry, aesthetics, symbolism, rituals, and mythology. However, you would never know it if you looked at socialist practice for most of the 20th century, especially in Germany and in Yankeedom. Stefan Arvidsson says this about the classical description in historical materialism. The description of how different modes of production have emerged and how socialism of necessity will precede capitalism has something glaringly mythic about which modernist socialists never capitalized on. Karl Kautsky, the socialist Pope of the Second International, went so far as to state that socialism had no ideals to realize, no goals to reach, everything was a secular movement, with no myths and no rituals. Yet all movements, secular or spiritual, need appeal to collective emotions, awaken hope while giving structure to disappointments, sadness and anger. Romantic socialism did this well in the 19th century but why was it so reluctant to claim the same legacy in the 20th century?

Enlightenment and Socialist Criticisms of religion

In his book The Style and Mythology of Socialism: Socialist idealism, 1871-1914, Stefan Arvidsson names three of the most typical left-wing criticisms of religion:

1) Rational – the claim that religion is false. Religion contradicts the factual description of reality offered by the natural sciences. There is no god in heaven; magic is built on faulty premises and faith healing doesn’t work. This was the Enlightenment criticism.

2) Political – priests and the church claim divine authority to control crowds and legitimize the right to their privileges and that of political and economic elites.

This can be seen in Catholicism and Protestant elites in Europe and the United States. It is present in Islamic elites and the Brahminical Hinduism of Modi. It is present among Zionist elites in Israel. This slant also came out of the Enlightenment.

3) Ideological – this is the criticism of Feuerbach and Marx. It affirms that God is the alienated creativity of the masses. What people cannot do on earth, they project onto heaven. It’s the promise of a world to come in order to sugarcoat the lack of a prosperous world in this life.

I believe all these criticisms are right. The problem is:

1. They are undialectical and do not ask the question of why religion has maintained itself for thousands of years in spite of these criticisms. Surely from a Darwinian point of view, if religion was just irrational, a political trick or an ideological mystification keeping people in mental chains, why didn’t natural selection filter it out?
2. Religion is held at arm’s length. All the methods of religion – myths, rituals, holidays, sacraments, pilgrimages, art, altered states – were hot potatoes, too hot to handle. This unfortunate circumstance has kept socialists in the 20th century from learning from and using these spiritual tools in a non-reified, non-superstitious way.

My claim

The purpose of this article is to say:

• Religious art, myth, rituals, symbols and techniques for altering states of consciousness should be taken over by socialists and used to our benefit.
• The Knights of Labor and some socialists the 19^th century knew how to do this and we must learn from them.

Plan for the article

The plan of this article is first to ask if socialism is a religion. My response if that I don’t think it’s a religion. Then I will examine the characteristics of romantic socialism in the first half and second half of the 19^th century. I then turn to the Christian mythology of the Bible, the positivism and the religion of humanity and lastly the pagan claims of Jules Michelet and the work of Ricard Wagner. I then discuss socialist art, including the work of William Morris and William Crane. Next, I examine the political application or romantic socialism to the organization of the Knights of Labor.

In the last part of my article, I will discuss how romantic socialism was gradually replaced by modernist socialism. I close with a discussion of how romantic socialism missed the boat by relying on the slave religion of Christianity for its inspiration rather than a pagan tradition which is much more consistent with the anti-authoritarian nature of romantic socialism.

Is socialism a religion?

There is a beehive of conservatives who were all too happy to claim that, contrary to its atheist claims, socialism is a religion in its own right. In the Psychology of Socialism, Le Bon points out many quasi-religious phenomena of socialism like feasts, saints, martyrs, canonical texts, revolutionary myths, holy symbols and ritualized speech. Georges Sorel argued that the value of socialism does not rest with its material success or failure. Socialism as a kind of myth which gives people hope. It is fair to say that like any religion, socialism has a list of mythological events – Thomas Müntzer leading the German peasants, John Ball leading the English peasants in England, and Robin Hood (myth or not) robbing the rich to give to the poor. In the 19th and 20th centuries we had the Paris Commune, the storming of the Winter Palace in Russia, worker’s self-management during the Spanish Revolution and the life of Che to name a few. Even now, socialism still depends on symbolism – the red rose of the social democrats, the red star of revolutionary socialism and the encircling A of anarchism all show that socialism needs images to inspire.

Modern socialists, especially Marxists, have resisted the idea that it may be appropriate to label socialism as a surrogate religion because they claimed that socialism is scientific. In addition, as a Marxist I would claim that socialism is not a religion because the root meaning of religion is to bind-back, implying that something was lost. What was lost is a community which bound classless, pagan, and tribal societies together. Religion is a social emulsifier designed to paper over class differences. As Marx writes, it is the heart of a heartless world. Socialist attempts to create a classless society are designed to create a real binding, a heaven on earth, a return to primitive communism, but on a higher level. But polarizing socialism to be the opposite of religion was not the way socialists of the 19th century framed things. These socialists understood that religious means could be used to create socialist ends.

Romantic socialism

Romanticism is not an easy term to define and it covers the entire political spectrum.

Arvidsson names five “colors” of romanticism. Blue romanticism is the dreamy, sublime artistic romanticism of Schiller, Shelley and Byron.  There is white romanticism which is a religious and clerical tradition of revolutionary romantic lodges, and Christian socialists and the Knights of Labor. This form of romanticism wanted to take the individualist blue romanticism to the masses. Red and black romanticism is the romanticism of the anarchists, Sorel and artistically the symbolists’ writers. Green romanticism is the romanticism of the radical arts and crafts – Morris, and life reform movement. Yellow romanticism is what I would call the art-for-art’s sake of Oscar Wilde.

1st half of the 19th century

The socialism of early 19th century, what Marx and Engels would have called utopian socialism, began with the experiments in communist living of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. These societies operated on a small scale and combined farming and artisan work, prior to the specialization of labor. Here workers did many more parts of the job than what happened in the specialization of labor in the second half of the 19th century. The emphasis in this community is characterized by Arvidsson as fraternity, intensity, and authenticity. These values were most clearly embedded in the work of Jean Rousseau, John Ruskin and later, William Morris. What made them so different from the socialism of the end of the 19th century was their incorporation of religion with its myth, rituals and art.

2nd half of the 19th century

Surprisingly, the thinker who had the most impact when it came to spreading the expression “religion of socialism” was the person whom Marx characterized as “our philosopher”, Joseph Dietzgen. His was a kind of the Feuerbach-inspired religion of humanity. For Dietzgen, this new religion has two parts:

• scientific knowledge wherein nature is tamed; and,
• science through “magic” – that is, the creative power of labor. It is magic because nature is transformed through work. Work is the name of the new redeemer.

Some advocates of the religion of socialism wished to appropriate socialist hymns, socialist saints, socialist sacraments, socialist rituals and even a socialist Ten Commandments.

Even funeral rites began to be ritualized within the religion of socialism. The great revolutionary socialist Ferdinand Lasalle believed that his political meetings were reminiscent of the very earliest religions. In the early years Wagner, the Viking revivalist, dreamed of creating an opening for revolutionary change with his epic opera. Later on, we will revisit this period and examine the practices of the Knights of Labor. Feeding forward a bit, in the early 20th century Russian authors Maxim Gorky, Anatoly Lunacharsky, and Alexander Bogdanov seized the initiative to create a “god-building” movement. The idea was to merge positivists and left-wing Hegelian religion of humanity, a-la Dietzgen and Wagner.

Mythology

Christian mythology

Socialists in the 19th century were not squeamish about drawing on the Bible to justify their movement. The books of the prophets have been the greatest inspiration for people to fight back. These books tell of rage against the shortcomings of their leaders and condemn social injustices. The man who did the most to link Jesus to the labor movement was George Lippard. For him, Jesus was a worker with class-consciousness. Famously, there is the painting and description of how Jesus cast out all the money-changers from the temple and overthrew the tables. The biblical figure of Mammon become the name of the god of money. Later in classical mythology Pluto is also the god of wealth, involving money and securities.

In Mark (in the Bible), there is the saying it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.  The socialism of Blatchford and Keir Hardie was wrapped up in biblical language. At some point, Debs says “Just as a missionary goes out and preaches to the heathen in foreign countries, so we socialists got on soap boxes and persuaded people that industry could be run for use and not for profit.” (Page 216 of Style and Mythology of Socialism). The president of the union for miners in Illinois preached about the divine origin of labor unions. An English Baptist preacher declared that the capitalist market economy is more in keeping with the gladiatorial than a Christian theory of existence.

Positivism and the religion of humanity

There were a number of famous Christian socialists who were not waiting around for the life hereafter. During the 19th century they included Henri de Saint-Simon, Étienne Cabet, Wilhelm Weitling, Moses Hess, and later in the century, Leo Tolstoy.

In the case of August Comte, it was the human being that were to be worshiped as a deity in the making. Over time, Arvidsson says positivism developed into a full-fledged religion, having even its own calendar composed of writers and inventors like Dante, Gutenberg, Shakespeare, while excluding Christian figures. This religion of humanity included rituals, temples and mythical heroes.

It is easy to dismiss the Christian socialist as not real. But it may surprise you to know that some of the members of the Second International were trying to integrate religion with socialism. For example:

One of those most driven to establish a religion of humanity in Great Britain was Morris’ friend and partner within the Social Democratic Federation and Socialist League, E. Belfort Bax (212). Bax writes:

The religion of the future must point to the immorality of the social man. The religion of socialism can contribute to extending the life of the individual. (224)

What Bax meant was that the immortality of social man would be embedded in the processes and results of building socialism on earth. The individual is immortalized in the collective creations they built in the bridges, buildings, books, paintings, and weavings that became the fabric of the new world long after the individual is dead.

Witches and pagans

Jules Michelet was one of the first historians to consider witchcraft not merely as a religious controversy but as a resistance movement of the peasantry. Arvidsson says he introduced the witch as a proto-socialist whose Chthon-ic gods and goddesses were seen as a viable spiritual alternative to a Christianity which seemed increasingly to have come into conflict with scientific truths.

Just as Michelet brought in pagan witches, William Morris, the revolutionary, was nostalgically fascinated with the Viking Age, especially with anti-royalist Iceland. He studied Old Icelandic, which lead to a translation of the Völsunga Saga. Later when we examine the art of Walter Crane, we will see his work as a longing for a sensuality hedonism and paganism. It belongs to the primitive tradition of Rousseau and Fourier. We can see his paganism when Crane imagined the laborers’ holidays as being a more Dionysian affair.

All primitive magical rituals use all the arts in order to create an altered state of consciousness. This included costume making, music, myth, storytelling, mask-making and dance. For most of western history, with the exception of within the Catholic Church, the arts became separate from the sacred. It was Richard Wagner who reunited them in his epic theatrical productions which included drama, opera, and ritual. It is tempting to dismiss Wagner because of his right-wing turn towards the end of his life, but he was once a leftist:

In Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, beautiful music is wrapped together with anarchist revelations about the corrosive forces of power and wealth, and the innate idealism of natural human beings. (142)

Wagner says:

We should never be careful not to underestimate the yearning by many people to be part of something big and beautiful. Fellowship was all well and good, but men needed something to whet their appetites. (143)

Unfortunately, the modernist socialists never understood this.

Wagner’s use of Norse and Medieval texts for his opera The Ring, which he began working on during the revolutionary days of 1848 when he fought with Bakunin on the streets of Dresden. The Ring is about the curse of greed. Regardless of Wagner’s right-wing turn, Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Soviet minister of culture and education, liked Wagner. In 1933, the 50th anniversary of Wagner’s death, Lunacharsky paid homage to him by describing the composer as a musician who gets the spirits to gather. A famous Swedish example of the anti-capitalist use of Norse mythology is Viktor Rydberg’s interpretation of the Edda poem Grottasöngr. 

Socialist Aesthetics

Idealist aesthetics in the 19th century claimed that the task of art – whether it was poetry, literature, music, or painting – was a way to uplift us and to point the way to the ideal. They wanted to help transform people into more virtuous human beings. 

William Morris

John Ruskin was mercilessly critical of civilization and culture and felt that it oozed of modern decay and decadence. His most driven spokesperson was the great English socialist, William Morris. Morris distinguishes society from civilization and says he hates civilization. For Morris, socialism and anarchism replaced Ruskin’s “blue” romantic elitism. He wanted to align those ideas with Ruskin’s romantic criticism of civilization. Morris’s ideals certainly stemmed from Ruskin and Walter Pater’s Renaissance ideas of beauty. Morris used to say art is man’s expression of his joy in labor. All work should or could be art. Beautiful objects are created by beautiful working environments. For Morris, the reward of labor is life. An ideal society is a society that is not only encouraged by art but is in and of itself a work of art. For Morris, socialism implied a complete philosophy of life that comprised the Good and the True as well as the Beautiful.

At the end of the 1889 into the 1890s, William Morris and the arts and crafts movement stood for the first radical artistic change. Morris and his disciples were not only concerned with graphic design but also with full aesthetic programs for handicraft, architecture, city planning, conservation, art, and literature. The aim was:

• The transformation of life
• The transformation of the conditions of physical labor

The purpose was that life and work cease to be alienated. For Morris, articles become beautiful when they are created from the joyful laboring of a rich personality.

Walter Crane

According to Arvidsson, no one meant more for the socialist culture of visual arts in the late 19th to early 20th century than Walter Crane. Crane joined the Socialist League under the leadership of Morris and Eleanor Marx Aveling. He marched in pro-Irish demonstrations, which would be later known as Bloody Sunday. In his painting, Socialist Valkyrie, the peace of socialism triumphs over the warring knights of liberalism and conservativism. Many of his political posters, Solidarity of Labor; Labour’s May Day 1890; the Worker’s Maypole; The Cause of Labor and the Hope of the World have been copied. For the first time in the history of the world, a socialist iconography had been created. Crane believed that artists learn from the handicraft traditions of folk culture. The artist should look downward towards the lower class and to nature for inspiration, not upwards towards some kind of ingenious spiritual inspiration. The engraving The Triumph of Labor (1891), was Crane’s most famous, commemorating the socialist May Day and the definitive image of English socialism. In Walter Crane’s painting of Freedom, the angel frees humanity from both the animalistic power of the king and the transcendentalism of the priests. In another painting, the famous French icon Marianne leads workers to attack the class enemy.

In a May Day parade, socialists carry Crane’s prints of The Triumph of Labor, which Arvidsson describes in the following way:

In the thick of the procession walks a winged bringer of light…Liberte Marianne…The personifications…bleed into one another. Beside her, a boy leads a mounted farmer and they are closely followed by Monsieur Egalitarian and Fraternity…

The figures of the French Revolution are followed by the two oxen, a woman with a cornucopia – perhaps Demeter and a young man playing a flute (Pan or a satyr) – and a young woman dancing with a tambourine.  (maenad) (192)

Even leading Austrian Marxists consciously tried to infuse May Day with religious solemnity and messianic feelings.

Socialist Romanticism in Politics: The Knights of Labor

Description of the Material Vision of the Knights of Labor

The Knights of Labor was the largest and the most powerful labor organization of late 19th century in North America. Skilled and unskilled laborers were welcomed, as were women and black workers. The order tried to teach the American wage earner that s/he was a wage earner first, a brick layer, carpenter, miner and shoemaker after that. He was a wage earner first, and a Catholic, Protestant and Jew, white, Democrat, Republican after.

Surprisingly for a labor organization, in the spirit of fraternity, politics and religion were forbidden topics of conversation in the congregation’s building.

The Goals were:

• To make industrial and moral growth, not wealth, the true standard of individual and national greatness.
• To secure for the workers the full enjoyment of the wealth they create, and sufficient leisure in which to develop their intellectual moral and social faculties.

Their constitution included the following:

The implementation of safety measures for miners; prohibition of children under 15 from working in factories; a national monetary system independent of banks; nationalization of the telegraph, telephone and railway networks; the creation of cooperative businesses; equal work for equal pay irrespective of gender; a refusal to work more than 8 hours per day. (p. 91)

The Knights felt it was immoral and blasphemous to live off the work of others. Toil was one thing, but to be exploited was another. Under capitalism, they struggled with how to pay tribute to essential and natural creative work without defending alienation of labor. They believed labor was the only thing that generates value.

Knights of Labor as a Secret Society

The Knights of Labor was no ordinary labor organization. They wanted to bring together humanity, hand, head, and heart. The Knights used medievalist mythology as part of the overall trend towards a Gothic revival. Guild socialism was a notion that Middle Ages was valued because it was believed that economics and ethics had not yet been torn from each other. There was a fraternal secret of laborers with rituals, special handshakes, devotional songs, and mythologies. Officials within the order thus acted as a kind of priests and there was a pledge to be loyal to the order and not to reveal any of its secrets. Devotional songs were sung and organ music filled the air. Cooperation is portrayed as divine. The lodges were like seeds that are scattered over the earth and like all seeds, they struggle to germinate and grow. For the Knights of Labor, the philosopher’s stone was no philosophical process of turning dross matter into gold. It was the process of work itself.

Here is a recommendation for a poetic recitation during the opening ceremony:

Notice the combination of matter and spirit throughout the poem: granite and rose, archangel and bee, flames of sun and stars. Notice a pantheistic view of God. This was a theological orientation associated with political radicalism during the 19th century:

God of the Granite and the Rose

Soul of archangel and the bee
The mighty tide of being flows
Through every channel, Lord from Thee
It springs to life in grass and flowers
Through every grade of being runs
Till from Creations radiant towers
Thy glory flames in stars and suns

In 1879 Terrace Powderly was elected grand master workman and he began reworking the images of socialism used for agitation purposes. For example, in the painting of the Great Seal of Knighthood, humanity joins together in the form of a circle around God’s triangle in the Great Seal. Arvidsson points out that Powderly added some new touches. Instead of abstractions like creation, justice, humanity, he added labor. He changes the triangle of God on the inside to the process of laboring: of production, distribution and consumption. The pentagon is changed to the five days of the work-week. Finally, the hexagon on the outside is changed to a symbol of various tools.

For the Knights the handshake was secret, but the manner of the shake was rooted in labor. The emphasis on the importance of the thumb was intended to reinforce how important an opposable thumb is compared with other fingers.  The thumb makes possible humanities such the use of tools at work, in the fine arts and in craftsmanship. Lastly the production of buttons, pins, and portraits of the founders and of Powderly were made. He was first American working-class hero of national stature.

The Fall of Romantic Socialism

According to Arvidsson, after the devastations of the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune, romanticism was on the run in Europe. In the second half of the 19th century romantic socialism had to compete with other cultural styles. For romantic socialism, it was the ideal of the good that was designated in symbols. But alongside it there were now artistic movements of realism and naturalism for which the ideal was not what was good, but what was true – including the dark side of social reality. In the light of the naturalistic outlook with its scientific eye for the less beautiful side of humanity, romanticism seems meaningless, moralizing and out of touch with reality. With Darwinism, the time had become ripe for vitalism, where life was seen as a struggle, where the strong and the sound, not the honest, noble and beautiful triumphed.

Oscar Wilde was the mediator between Morris and Crane’s romanticism on the one hand and modernism on the other. Wilde wanted to link socialism with aestheticism and wanted to revolutionize society so that the life of people will be to become artistic. With Wilde, aestheticism returned to romanticism in emphasizing the importance of beauty, but with a difference. For romantics what was beautiful had to have a particular content, namely, the cause of workers. But for aestheticism it was the principles of beauty independent of its application.

From fraternal order to trade union

For the founders and many of the leaders of the Knights of Labor, the single-minded pursuit of higher salaries seemed narrow and short-sighted. They strove instead to create a higher culture. A sizable chunk of workers’ experience is dismissed if ritual and fraternity is ignored. But attitudes towards fraternalism as a form of struggle began to change at the turn of the century. The mythic and religious aspects of the Knights of Labor were toned down as a consequence of the Catholic Church’s criticism and threats. With the ritualistic dimension missing for the workers, the requirements for direct material success of labor organizations became more pressing. The experience of knighthood was to be replaced by membership in pragmatic oriented and often reformist or relatively apolitical, modern and secular trade unions. Within the political life of unions, socialist modernism suggested that fraternal organizations existed for the benefits of the leaders. They were seen as forms of social careerism for these “high priests”. In the US, it was the modern labor union and socialist-oriented political parties that replaced socialist fraternalism. Socialism came to be understood as economic and less and less to do with culture. Modernist socialists like Marx, Engels, and later Kautsky all took this stand.

From Fraternal order to Fabian Think Tank

In Britain Fabianism became a bridge between life reform and culture-oriented socialist romanticism and the social democratic parties that followed. The Fabian Society was founded in 1884. Members included Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Edward Carpenter, Havelock and Edith Ellis, H.G. Wells, Annie Besant, George Bernard Shaw, and Walter Crane. Early on, they cultivated a kind of life-style socialism, including vegetarianism. But they were not interested in ritual or dramatization. It became important for the Fabians to distance their modern socialism from bohemian lifestyle socialism and primitivist flirtations. The Webbs and Shaw founded the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1895. Political reform, which was foreign to the Knights of Labor, was another tendency that grew with the parliamentarian successes of socialist parties after they became legal. This impressed the Fabians.

From co-producer of culture to consumer of culture

Beginning in the middle of the 19th century, mass advertising and department stores began to spring up, first in Paris and then on the east coast of Yankee cities. By the end of the 19th century, the rising consumer culture pulled the rug out from under both the Knights of Labor and the Fabians. Instead of listening to lectures and singing in the assembly halls, laborers started to visit the emergent theaters, amusement parks, and cabarets more frequently. Leisure was transformed from largely participatory to more passive, consumer activities. In the 19th century, people marched in parades. By the early 20th century, they cheered parades from the sidelines. Successful entrepreneurs were the new heroes in the kingdom of trade. The story lines contained within advertising and their logos replaced myth. Shopping sprees became the new rituals. Buying luxury items became modern talismans. Economists became soothsayers and prophets of economic growth. Old worker flags and banners of real people turned into stylized and geometrical forms.

From Utopia to Dystopia

The 19th century was the great century of Utopias whether in practical communist societies or theoretical novels. Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells were different, with some supporting high technology and others not. However, all were optimistic. Twentieth century modernism was all pessimistic beginning with Jack London’s Iron Heel. In the first half of the 20th century utopian literature became dominated by three disillusioned ex-socialists: Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin’s We in 1921; Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in 1932; and Orwell’s 1984 in 1949.

Romanticism ended with World War I and lost out as a cultural style. However, it was rebirthed with the beats after World War II, the rise of the New Left, the counterculture of the 60s, and the New Age and Neopagan movements that began in the 1970s.

See the table at the end of this article which summarizes the differences between romantic and modern socialism.

Witchcraft and paganism as socialism’s lost opportunity

In the middle of this article, I mentioned the work of some progressives and socialists for whom witchcraft and paganism offered resources for hope. As I mentioned earlier, Jules Michelet claimed that witchcraft in the Middle Ages and in Early Modern Europe was a resistance movement of the peasantry against both the Church and the landlords. Later, William Morris saw the anti-royalist Vikings as inspiration enough for him to study the language of Iceland. Furthermore, the artwork of Walter Crane had many pagan elements in it. Lastly, Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk and The Ring are both about the curse of greed and corruption. But even more importantly Wagner combined his tales in epic proportion by saturating the senses with pageantry, music, dance, drama, and ritual. This was a throwback to the pagan rituals of tribal societies and more elaborately in agricultural states. Why wasn’t this seized on by romantic socialists more often instead of relying on the slave religion of Christianity for its inspiration?

The pagan tradition of tribal societies is much more consistent with the anti-authoritarian nature of romantic socialism. What I want to focus on is the Neopagan movement started by romantics in the middle of the 18th century and blossomed in the 1970s. I’ve written a number of articles agitating for a new pagan-Marxist synthesis. In my article New Agers vs Neopagans: Can Either Be Salvaged for Socialism? I identified many categories where there is full agreement between Neopagans, democratic socialists, anarchists and the various types of Leninists. Here are some of the commonalities from that article. Here is what both romantic and modern socialists are missing out on.

Western magic and matter as creative and self-regulating

Paganism and the western ceremonial magical traditions have deep roots in the West, from ancient Roman times through the Renaissance magicians, alchemists, Rosicrucians and up to the Golden Dawn at the end of the 19th century. All these traditions were committed to in some way redeeming matter. Matter was seen by all magical traditions as creative, self-regulating and immanent in this world. Pagans are either pantheists or polytheists. Like socialist materialists, matter is seen by pagans as real, rather than evil or an illusion. There is clearly a relationship between pagan pantheism and dialectical materialism.

Nature and society are objective forces that impact individuals and only groups change reality

Like socialists, Neopagans would never say individuals “create their own reality”. Neopagan nature is revered and must be taken care of. The forces of nature or the gods and goddesses actively do things to disrupt the plans and schemes of individuals. How would socialists react to this? Very positively. All socialists understand nature and society as evolving. Socialists understand that individuals by themselves can change little. It is organized groups which change the world. Since much of Neopagan rituals are group rituals, there would be compatibility in outlook here as well.

Embracing the aggressive and dark side of nature and society

Neopagans could never be accused of being fluffy or pollyannish. There is a recognition that there is dark side of nature. These dark forces must be worked with and integrated. Socialists would agree with this, but as the darkest force on this planet is capitalism, socialists would disagree that there can be any integration with capitalism.

Importance of the past: primitive communism and pre-Christian paganism

The past is very important to Neopagans mostly because of what Christianity did to pagans throughout Western history. The past is also very important to Marxists because primitive communism was an example of how humanity could live without capitalism.

Most Neopagans, like Marxists, are very pro-science

Chaos theory, complexity theory that would attract Neopagans is very much like Marxian dialectical materialism. While the Gaia hypothesis would be a stretch for materialists, Vernadsky’s Biosphere would be welcomed by Neopagans. Lastly, even primitivist anarchists are very interested in science fiction and how society could be better organized in the future.

Commonality between Wiccan covens and anarchist affinity groups or cells

There have never to my knowledge been pagan cults. Many Neopagans are generally an anti-authoritarian lot and organizing them can be like herding cats.  Many Neopagans, like socialists, are very anti-capitalist anarchists and Neopagan witches.

Politically many wiccan pagans like Starhawk’s Reclaiming have organized themselves anarchistically with consensus decision making. The most predictable anti-capitalists in Neopaganism are wiccans. Economically, the work of anarchist economist David Graeber would fit perfectly for Neopagan witch anarchists.

Commonality between Neopagan goddess reverence and socialist feminism

Wiccans are also very pro-feminist and some are organized where the goddess values of women are predominant. All this is good news for socialists, since Margot Adler has said that about half of the roughly 200,000 Neopagans are wiccans. A program for a socialist feminism could be easily taken in stride by most Neopagans.

Sensory saturation and inspired altered states of consciousness

I have saved these categories for last because this is the area of Neopaganism that might be the most actively contested by socialists, but it is also the area that I think Neopagans have the most to teach socialists. As I’ve stated in other articles, a good definition of magick is the art and science of changing group consciousness at will by saturating the senses through the use of the arts and images in ritual. Socialists are likely to dismiss this as dangerous because it sweeps people away. They are also likely to confuse this with religious rituals which religious authorities control their parishioners for the purposes of mystifying people and asserting control over them. This is a big mistake. Not all rituals are superstitious reifications. and when done well, are a way to empower people and built confidence. People in egalitarian societies, the ones Marxists call primitive communism, understood this. The pagan holiday Beltane May Day corresponds to socialist May Day celebrations around the world and a great place for the meeting of these movements. We need socialists in the arts, especially in dance, music, choreography and play-writing to join with Neopagans who are already good at this.

• First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.