Across the Wounded Centuries -- How an Enlightenment-Era Poet 'beat' Burroughs to the Punch by Nearly 200 Years....

Caleb Whitefoord, 1773 or 74.  Sir Joshua Reynolds

Over the years, I've come across several essays about how some of the earliest novels anticipate literary postmodernism's ideas and concerns.  To whit, Cervantes' conceit in Don Quixote (1605 & 1615) that the story is translated from an obscure manuscript....the totally black page, the Alfred Bester-like typographical oddities, the symbol representing how a character waves his cane in Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759 to 1767). To my regret, two novels I have not yet read.  And to my surprise, the latter book was inspired by....the former!

Today, I came across another example. One Caleb Whitefoord (1734-1810) - wine merchant, diplomat, and poet - discovered a novel way of reading the newspapers, that is to say, across the columns instead of down them.  In addition to finding the results amusing, Whitefoord, among others, pointed out that this method often revealed the unspoken agendas and contradictions of the newspapers.  It also pointed to a concern we don't often associate with the 18th century, but to our own:  media overload.  The populace was becoming more literate, and a welter of daily papers and monthly magazines, journals and reviews were there to supply the ever-growing demand.

Quote:

It was Whitefoord’s genius to notice that when you took a broadsheet newspaper of tightly set columns, and started reading across the paper’s columns - rather than reading down to the column’s next line - you could achieve what he described as “coupled persons and things most heterogeneous, things so opposite in the nature and qualities, that no man alive would ever have thought of joining them together.” Whitefoord called this cross-reading, and he was so amused by it that he would publish sheets of his favorite specimens and hand them out to friends in Fleet Street coffeehouses. (from an interview with Paul Collins)

Coffeehouses, eh? Poets, coffee....and folk singers? Enlightenment Beats?

Some examples:

Dr. Salamander will, by her Majesty’s command, 

undertake a voyage round -

The head-dress of the present month.

Yesterday the new Lord Mayor was sworn in,

and afterwards toss’d and gored several Persons.

Notice is hereby given -

And no notice taken.

A perceptive essay by Giles Goodland about Whitefoord's texts can be found here.  All quotes and information about Whitefoord from this point on come from Goodland's essay, which I urge you to read.

Whitefoord first published what he called "cross-readings" in The Public Advertiser in an article entitled A New Method of Reading Newspapers (1766).  

He used this method again in the New Foundling Hospital for Wit (1770); more cross-readings also occur in various broadsides and ephemeral publications, now hard to trace, usually under his bye-line of 'Papyrius Cursor'.

Writing under this name in 1775 (Fugitive Misc. II. 49-51) he describes his work in a way that seems so modern in its insistence that the consumer of the media is powerless against a flood of contradictory messages from all spheres of an increasingly complicated and contradictory society, it is worth quoting from at length: (Goodland)

18th-Century prose is best read in its entirety, so instead of providing a snippet, please read the quote yourself.  Goodland provides a few more examples:

The comet is now on it's return to the sun—

pursuant to a decree of the high court of chancery.

At the meeting at Newcastle, Sir B. F. D. was in the chair—

and appeared like a dull, faint nebulous star.

Yesterday there were violent disputes in the common-council—

For some time past the volcano has been extremely turbulent.

Now in rehearsal the distrest mother, a tragedy—

Occasioned by the undutiful behavior of the Colonies.

Lucius Papirius Cursor, btw, was a much-vaunted Roman politician and general who Livy compared to Alexander the Great.  As many of Whitefoord's texts were political in nature, perhaps he's mocking the puniness of contemporary politicians by comparison?  Or perhaps it's ironic self-aggrandizement?  Contemporaries would have known the reference, but why he chose this nom de plume, I'm not sure.... 

Apparently, Whitefoord's cross-readings were quite popular and luminaries such as Horace Walpole, Oliver Goldsmith, and Dr. Johnson found them both ingenious and hilarious.  An anonymous broadside from 1782 describes them in terms that, for me anyway, cannot but evoke the basic principles of Surrealism:

One particular species of entertainment resulting from [reading newspapers], is, after reading each column by itself DOWNWARDS, to read two columns together ONWARDS: whereby chance will bring about the most unaccountable connections, and frequently couple persons and things the most heterogeneous; things so opposite in their nature and qualities, that no man would ever have thought of joining them together.

I added the boldface.  It's as if the author had anticipated Lautréamont by 100 years, he who so inspired Surrealist aesthetics with the following line from Canto VI of Maldoror:

He is as handsome as....the chance juxtaposition of a 

sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table!

Goodland concludes:

It was striking to me that I could find no reference to Whitefoord or cross-readings in any studies of the roots of modernism. It seems to me that the work of Whitefoord is an important precursor of styles and poetries that would later be called avant-garde, at least in the fact that he stumbled by chance on Tristan Tzara's famous recipe for a Dada poem ('take a pair of scissors and a newspaper...'). The similarity is not only one of methodology. The humour in these juxtapositions depends on an understanding of class inequalities, the contradictions and aporia of party politics, and not least how easy it was – a mere matter of skipping over a thin white column – to expose the contradictions inherent in the mass media, and the interests they represent.

Burroughs, 1960: hey-day of the cut-up period

What strikes me is that Goodland mentions Tzara, but there is an even more direct example in the work of American author William S. Burroughs.  He did exactly the same thing with newspaper texts, and for pretty much the same reasons, as Whitefoord, almost precisely 200 years later.  Well, not exactly.  Whitefoord produces what read almost like headlines, or single epigrammatic phrases; Burroughs produced sustained texts.  Burroughs' texts are also generally more disjointed.  Perhaps Whitefoord was a bit more selective, or not as beholden to pure chance, meaning that he pruned the excerpts, adding or removing articles, conjunctions, whatever he required for a more coherent read.  Goodland suggests that some of the texts are not entirely found, but constructed.  Perhaps Whitefoord didn't feel as beholden to chance as Burroughs did; he wasn't, after all, striving to predict the future or break through control mechanisms, but produce witty and satirical observations about contemporary politics.

As he himself put it 

Whenever any change on [sic] Ministry happen'd, and the Party Writers on both sides began the work of serious abuse, I have always endeavour'd to make such changes a matter of Laughter rather than of serious concern to the people, by turning them into horse Races, Ship News, &c.

Burroughs experimented with cut-ups and fold-ins, and many variations of the "three column" format; some of the results can be found in The Burroughs File (1984).  This book, my first exposure to Burroughs, incidentally, is a collection of previously-published small books that were themselves often collections of short pieces he'd published in "little magazines," or mimeos, between 1962 and 1969.  A collection, then, of collections.

The book contains two examples from The White Subway (1973):  Who is the Third that Walks Beside You?  and a re-mix of sorts, Who is the | Walks Beside You | Written 3rd?

Another book included is The Old Movies, again providing two examples:  So Who Owns Death TV  and The Moving Times.  If I understand correctly, most of these pieces were originally collected into a German edition called Die Alten Filme (1979) and made available in English for the first time in The Burroughs File.

And all this is just the very tippy-top of the iceberg.  As Alex Wermer-Colan says in his introduction to the collection of Burroughs cut-ups he edited entitled The Travel Agency is on Fire:

[Burroughs] committed over a decade of his life to searching out every multimedia potential to produce works as collage....

He notes that the archive he drew upon 

...contains approximately 11,000 pages of unpublished material.  During my research, it became evident that a significant proportion of these texts went through the cut-up process.  These range from three-by-three textual grids to faux newspapers composed of headlines with three parallel columns of cut-up texts.  In addition archival collections at Arizona State University and Ohio State University suggest that even more cut-up material exists.

Most of these pages date from 1959 to 1965, nearly 200 years after Whitefoord had discovered the cross-reading method.  As far as I know, Burroughs was never aware of his literary ancestor.  Any discussion of the cut-up method invariably brings up Tzara's Dadaist forays into aleatory texts pulled from a hat, but nowhere have I ever seen Whitefoord's name in the plethora of essays about and biographical sketches of Burroughs or the method's actual "discoverer," Brion Gysin.  (Gysin was cutting mounts for some drawings and found that the newspapers he'd laid down had produced new texts that he, like Whitefoord, found hilarious.)  For Burroughs, cut-up literally became a weapon for destroying control mechanisms and predicting the future.  As Wermer-Colan points out, there are three collections of this material, one of which exceeds 11,000 pages.  Burroughs was not dabbling, but deadly serious.  There are thousands of pages of cut-ups, and probably thousands of his own "cross-readings" in those archives

Was Burroughs possessed?  Maybe he was, as Mailer points out, "by genius."  He himself felt he was possessed by an "Ugly Spirit" that led him to shoot his common law wife, Joan Vollmer.  I can't say if he was possessed, but he was certainly obsessed, and for all his brilliance and indeed, prophetic wisdom, he was prone to all sorts of crank ideas:  Reichian orgone boxes, Streiberesque alien abduction fantasies, and using cut-ups to predict, and change, the future.  In a way, he did predict and change the future.  But thousands of pages of cut-ups, years worth of activity....well, I admire the dedication and find it inspiring.  But man.  It's a little bit mad as well!

So, nothing new under the sun.  Burroughs knew about Tzara's aleatory use of found text, but he also advocated lifting whole sections of text; he suggests, for example, using descriptions of the jungle found in say, Joseph Conrad, and recycling them into one's own work.  Alas, even that idea had been used 100 years earlier by Lautréamont, who used descriptions of animals and their behavior from natural history encyclopedias in passages throughout Maldoror.  This does not undermine Burroughs' stature as a literary innovator.  He may have been familiar with Tzara, but was Lautréamont's intertextuality known in the US at that time?  And Burroughs certainly didn't know about Whitefoord.  Burroughs found ideas and twisted and tweaked them until he'd used every possible variation and squeezed out their last vital drops.  It's been said with some mirth that he is probably the only person who profited more from Scientology than they profited from him; indeed, his collaboration with filmmaker Antony Balch, The Cut Ups, even uses some of their proprietary auditing questions as a soundtrack!  

Burroughs' influence on contemporary culture is enormous, far-reaching and widespread.  Interesting, then, that 200 years before this gentleman junky rocked the world and took the novel to its limits with his cut-ups and fold-ins, a largely forgotten London merchant, a friend of Benjamin Franklin no less, invented the technique Burroughs would use for the better part of a decade for many of the same reasons as his literary forebear; to "deconstruct" the media and lay bare its hidden messages and agenda.  

One could argue that "cross-reading" was a technique to "fight back" against a news business that at times could be confusing and overwhelming, and where, absent direct experience, one had to trust what was communicated via the written word from a multitude of often contradictory sources.  After centuries of one authoritative text, the Bible, the written word was still an extraordinarily powerful medium, which in turn made the oft-dissonant chorus of newspapers disorienting.  This was why Burroughs sought to "rub out the word" and diminish the power of those who wielded it as a tool of control.  

England in 1766 was not yet a "Society of the Spectacle," but the era was the beginning of the modern nation state, of urbanization, the Industrial Revolution, and corporate Capitalism.  It was a time when nature was being organized into rigid taxonomies, defined as it were; when dictionaries and grammars were codifying and standardizing language into right...and wrong.  Right of course,  being the language of London's emerging upper middle classes.  Not aristocrats or landed gentry, but the merchant class, like Whitefoord himself.  While not unique to England, the link between one's language and one's social class is more openly, and perhaps more deeply felt in England than say, in France or the US, where égalité and "all men are created equal" are explicit state values.  By 1766, the written word had long been liberated from the Catholic Church, Gutenberg had taken care of that.  But the written word was  no less potent.  Broadsides, tracts, and pamphlets were very powerful indeed.  This was one reason for the Stamp Act of 1765; an attempt to limit the publication of incendiary tracts, to limit the growth of the professional classes, and to squeeze money out of the North American colonies.  The Act was repealed after less than a year due to violent protests, and is generally regarded as one of the leading causes of the American War of Independence. 

While on one hand the Stamp Act in part sought to quell the revolutionary potential of print media, the era was also the beginning of the newspaper business, in which the dissemination of information was inexorably linked with Capitalist interests.  Who knows exactly how the decline of print media will affect us down the line; but at the time Burroughs discovered cut-ups, the mainstream print media was still very authoritative and for him, a potent tool of control; as such, it was a target.  In 1766, Whitefoord might have been using cross-reading to satirize the newspaper business; in 1966, Burroughs wanted not only to destroy the newspaper business, but the written word itself....

Maybe in some ways the "cross-readings" were just a whimsical form of "fake news," a piss-take.  Ye Olde Onion, as it were.  But as with all satire, the humor contained a very real criticism of business as usual.  It's tempting to say Whitefoord was ahead of his time, but I think he came at exactly the right time.  Like the novels of Cervantes and Sterne, his readings say:  "don't trust everything you read."  Just when the news business began to flourish, he was there to signal caution, to say "read between the lines," to be skeptical.  The postmodernists rediscovered what their literary ancestors had already surmised.  Maybe Whitefoord was being whimsical, but he certainly had more of a purpose than humor alone.  Which is not to denigrate humor - au contraire - it reminds us not to underestimate the value of humor as a rhetorical tool.  Humor is another quality Burroughs shared with Whitefoord.  

Now, if someone smarter than I would connect all of this with the Lettrists, the Situationists, and the concept of détournement, we might just have a Ph.D. thesis in the making....come to think of it, they knew the value of a good joke as well....

Well, it is true. Not the human being part.

If this is one of the first things you thought of when you heard the news, please share your experience below.  I'm not trying to be disrespectful, I had nothing against her.  But I'm guessing the news had an extra layer of meaning for generation of pale gloomy dorks, male and female, on both sides of the pond.

And just think, for those a few years older, she weren't no human being....

 

BTW, know how to identify totally worthless website? It calls The Smiths a "new wave band" and says TQID is their second album....

All in the Family: Poets and Writers

 

I published my novella The Ice Mine in 2018, but my great-aunt Alice Adkins beat me to it by 84 years.

 

Alice was a badass. She was blind, yet traveled to Africa, Asia, Australia, the Arctic Circle, and of course, Europe.  She translated from the French and also spoke German, I believe.  Family letters show a woman who was kind, whip-smart, cultivated, and unstoppable.  Her husband was a geographer of some note (part of the delegation which hammered out the Treaty of Versailles, for example), Douglas Johnson, and apparently she was a woman who could go toe-to-toe with him on any day of the week.

 

She published Fog Phantoms and other Poems in 1934.  This slim volume contains original poems and translations from the French.  Here's one of her poems from her school days, 31 years prior: 

from Adytum, 1903:

 

The Secret 

 

The wind is whisp'ring thro' the leafy trees; 

The rippling brooklet answers to the breeze. 

Fleecy clouds across the sky are trailing, 

In the sea of sunshine slowly sailing; 

 

And the ferns and grasses swing and sway; 

While the birds make music all the day. 

Birds and brooklet — tell me what you sing, 

You and yonder bubbling little spring, 

 

Is it on the past you're fondly dwelling, 

O'er and o'er some simple story telling? 

Won't you tell me clearly, all the tale, 

All the secrets of this dreamy vale? 

 

Ah ! But they are secrets, every one, 

Many, many ; but we tell to none; 

 

For the youths and maidens often wander 

To the fatal tree and boulder yonder, 

Tho' we listen long it is in vain! 

We only know they leave thro' lover's lane.

 

-------- 

 

I don't know when he wrote it, but my great-grandfather Alvin Adkins (1853-1926) wrote the following poem, probably close to his death.  Alvin was a farmer, but he was an intellectual man as well.  His wife Emily was descended from Dutch settlers who'd established farms in what is now Brooklyn as early as the the 1650's.  Through her, I am a distant relative of Humphrey Bogart. 

 

Bury Me on the Hill Top High

Under the blue and starlit sky,
Placing my feet towards Sun Rise Street
Placing my head where sun sets meet,
Leaving one hand next to the Northern Light
Placing the right toward the South land bright.

Leave my soul in the care of God
Bury my hopes where Christ had trod,
Think of the Christ who died for me
Think of the Christ who made men free
Give to the world the best of will
Render to man ill for ill.

Forget me not in life's years
When time has dried your loving tears
Enrich the land that gave us birth
Make more happy this home of earth,
Honor the God whose land ye till,
Seeking the best your mission fulfill.

But when you bury my body in the hill top high
Under the blue and starlit sky,
Bury my love in the love of my friends
Letting it live there till Christ descends
Let it grow through eternity's end.

Alvin, along with his dad Isaac and his son Elgin, my grandfather, also have the distinct honor of having been arrested for attempted murder!  How now, Caravaggio?

 

-------- 

 

My most renowned in ancestor, writing-wise, was my great-aunt, from my mom's side, who was a successful romance novelist. Her name was Tilly Armstrong, but she published under other names as well.  Tilly served terms as both Chair and VP of the Romantic Novelists' Association (UK).  Before her writing career, she'd worked for the World Health Organization in Geneva, and later, for 18 months in Canada.  At some point she became the personal secretary to the Chairman of British Steel, Lord Melchett.  Quite a woman. 

 

.As Tilly Armstrong

• Lightly Like a Flower (1978)
• Come Live With Me (1979)
• Joy Runs High (1979)
• Limited Engagement (1980)
• Summer Tangle (1983)
• Small Town Girl (1984)
• Pretty Penny (1985)

As Tania Langley

• Dawn (1980)
• Mademoiselle Madeleine (1981)
• The London Linnet (1985)
• Genevra (1987)

As Kate Alexander

• Fields of Battle (1981)
• Friends and Enemies (1982)
• Paths of Peace (1984)
• Bright Tomorrows (1985)
• Songs of War (1987)
• Great Possessions (1989)
• The Shining Country (1991)
• The House of Hope (1992)
• Voices of Song (1994)
• The Anthology of Love and Romance (edited, 1994) (including stories by Rosamunde Pilcher, Georgette Heyer, Edith Wharton et al)
• Family Trees (1995)
• Love and Duty (1998)
  

So, there you have it. Go Tilly! Some of my literary antecedents. 

 

My great-uncle Homer Burton Adkins was an author of scientific textbooks, and was a leading organic chemist of his time.  The Adkins Catalyst and Adkins-Peterson reaction bear his name.  My second cousin Roger, Homer's son, worked in the Office of Management and Budget, working face to face with Presidents from Eisenhower to Clinton.  Roger was not a "front office" guy, but Google the OMB and his name and he's all over the place.

 

One day, I'll get into all these things, but just wanted to name-check some of the literary ancestors I never knew existed when I started writing as a teenager....

The Avant-Garde, Occultism, and Fascism

Woody Guthrie

Over the years, LoS has made some posts about swastika-shaped buildings people found on Google Earth and then claimed are homages to Nazism.  Finding that preposterous, those posts were rather sarcastic.  But this year we've looked at some monuments seen from the air that were indeed intentionally created to honor not just Nazism, but Lenin and Mussolini as well.

Snark, begone!

This present post began when we looked at fascism in the 20's and 30's and examined the parallels between the backgrounds of fascist leaders.  The political parties involved invariably had uniformed paramilitary arms (almost always identified by the color of their shirts).  The dictators, almost to a man, had a background in the arts and an interest in occultism and/or mysticism.  Leaders of various fascist movements around the globe, prior to their political lives, were poets or novelists, playwrights, or, in the case of Hitler, a painter.   Some of them had been pretty successful at it.  There are a handful of journalists in the mix.

Naturally, there are a lot of fascist flags and emblems in this post in order to compare and contrast their aesthetics.  If you're triggered by that sort of thing, you might as well stop here.  Just to be clear, fascism is not something we find amusing or with which we sympathize.  I think I can speak for The Gid when I say we are not only completely unsympathetic to fascism, but we are decidedly anti-fascist.  Not black-bloc Antifa types hurling bricks at ATM's, but just good-old American anti-fascists, like our grandparents.  Like Woody Guthrie.  You know, like it was before Herr Trump and his GOP and Fox News enablers made "anti-fascist" sound like a sinister thing.

So, with that said, we are unapologetically intrigued at how many of those fascist leaders were artsy types involved with mysticism and the occult.  And colored shirts.

The earliest fascist party we'll talk about is the NSDAP, aka the Nazis.  The movement's influences from Viennese occult lodges are well-documented.  See The Occult Roots of Nazism for details.  The book is a legitimate work of scholarship, not whacky conspiracy nonsense.  It's a long book, too long to summarize, but it shows how much of the more esoteric ideology and imagery Hitler used in his Nazi aesthetics and ideology originated with his involvement in these groups, especially the Thule Society (1918).  

Thule was a mythical place believed by the ancient Greeks to be the northernmost region of the world.  The Thule Society, and the Nazis, believed it to be the homeland of the Aryan race.  This is why both used the swastika as an emblem.

Seal of the Theosophical Society

The Thule Society itself was influenced by The Theosophical Society, founded in 1875 and based primarily on writings of Russian occultist Helena Blavatsky (Theosophy = Theology + Philosophy).  Theosophy quickly became quite influential in European occultism.  The Thule Society embraced a more racialized version of Theosophy called Ariosophy (developed by Lanz von Liebenfels). 

"Ario" refers to the Aryans, an ancient Indo-Iranian people.  They, like many ancient Eurasian peoples, used the swastika as an important religious symbol.  Until Hitler tarnished it, the swastika was a widely-known symbol for good luck in the West, and is today still widely-used in India and East Asia by Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains.  The Theosophy "logo" contains a Hindu-style swastika, facing right and set a at a 90° angle.

"Swastika" is a Sanskrit word (roughly meaning "conducive to well-being") and can be found decorating Hindu and Greek temples, Hopi designs, and has even been found in an ancient synagogue in Capernaum.  Some years ago Microsoft removed the swastika from it's "special characters" Unicode after customer complaints.  It had been included because Japanese maps use the symbol to indicate the location of shrines and temples, much as on Western maps use a cross to indicate a church, a Star of David a synagogue, and a crescent, a mosque.

SA Flag

The Nazi flag is pretty well-known, so I won't include it here.  What I will show is the flag of the SA.  Note the lightning-bolt motif.  The SA (Sturmabteilung, 1921) was the paramilitary wing of the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei,, 1920).  Not to be confused with the SS, the SA were uniformed, paramilitary members of the political party and commonly referred to as the "Brownshirts."  They served as bodyguards and muscle for the fledgling Nazi party.

Hitler had served with some distinction as a corporal in WW1, after which he embarked upon an unsuccessful career as an artist.  Germany's defeat left him deeply embittered, and his artistic failures only deepened that bitterness.  He details how he came to blame both of these experiences on Jews in Mein Kampf.  The theatrics and spectacle of Nazism may be the expression of his frustrated artistic ambitions.  He was a very hands-on dictator, designing everything from the cutlery to the furniture he used in the Chancellery.  Even as the Russians marched on Berlin in his final days, he pored over Albert Speers' plans and models for the Berlin of the "Thousand-Year Reich."

It was during his lean years as a starving artist that Hitler became involved in the occult demimonde in Vienna and was exposed to Ariosophy.  It was here he picked up on the swastika, Aryan lore, and even the idea of a "master race."  

To what degree he believed in the mystical ideas is unclear, and one must be careful not to overstate the degree to which he adopted the beliefs of these occult groups into his worldview, but he knew political theater, and effectively used it to manipulate an entire nation.

Flag of the Regency of Carnaro

Gabriele D'Annunzio had an important if indirect influence on Hitler's theatrics.  He was both rival and influence on Mussolini.  The black shirts of his paramilitary group, the famous balcony speeches....he was even at times called Il Duce.  When Hitler became the dictator of Germany he took the title Der Führer or "leader," a practice he picked up from Mussolini.

D'Annunzio adhered to a mystical philosophy and had became involved in an esoteric form of Italian Freemasonry.  His political ambitions were briefly successful in creating the Italian Regency of Carnaro (1919-1920) where he was sometimes called "Comandante." Basically a city-state, its charter was an odd mix of anarchist, proto-fascist and democratic republican ideas.

He started as a poet, playwright, orator, journalist, (and aristocrat).  He ended up founding his city-state and is credited with creating Italian fascism.  Like Hitler, he served in WW1, but as a lieutenant. 

Benito Mussolini was influenced by portions of the constitution, and by D'Annunzio's style of leadership as a whole. D'Annunzio has been described as the John the Baptist of Italian Fascism, as virtually the entire ritual of Fascism was invented by D'Annunzio during his occupation of Fiume and his leadership of the Italian Regency of Carnaro.  These included the balcony address, the Roman salute, the cries of "Eia, eia, eia! Alala!" taken from the Achilles' cry in the Iliad, the dramatic and rhetorical dialogue with the crowd, and the use of religious symbols in new secular settings.  It also included his method of government in Fiume: the economics of the corporate state; stage tricks; large emotive nationalistic public rituals; and blackshirted followers, the Arditi, with their disciplined, bestial responses and strongarm repression of dissent.

The Roman salute, BTW, is never depicted or even described in Roman art and literature, and is now known as the Fascist salute. Although D'Annunzio created it, it's now most commonly associated with the Nazis.  And D'Annunzio's influences on Mussolini evoke many of Hitler's practices.  No Eia, eia, eia! Alala!" but plenty of Seig Heils!

Flag used by Italian Fascists

MSVN Flag

As we said above, Benito Mussolini also had his Blackshirts, the MVSN (Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale), the paramilitary wing of the National Fascist Party (1921-1943).  Their flag features a skull reminiscent of the Nazi Totenkopf, sans crossbones.

As dictator, Mussolini took the title Il Duce, but he'd actually first been called that after being made editor of the Socialist newspaper Avanti!.  He too had served as in WW1.  Like Hitler, he both rose to the rank of corporal and was wounded in action.

The Great War clearly had an immense impact upon the three future dictators.  Not having read their own words on the subject, I wouldn't want to begin to armchair-psychoanalyze them, but I'm willing to bet there's no dearth of material on the subject.

Filippo Tommaso Marinettii was a poet, art theorist, editor, and fascist.  He co-wrote the Fascist Manifesto (1919).

Marinetti was also the principal architect of Italian Futurism.  Futurism had an enormous impact on Modernist art.  It was roughly contemporaneous with Dada, and each movement influenced the other. Many Dadaists went on to become active participants in the Surrealist movement.  From Surrealism grew Lettrism and Situationism, the latter of which proved very potent; in May, 1968, students inspired by its ideas spearheaded a series of strikes and street protests that almost toppled the French government.

The Dada-Surrealism-Lettrism-Situationism lineage was decidedly Marxist.  Futurism, on the other hand, in Italy, was fascist in nature.

Among other Modernist movements, Italian Futurism influenced the development of concrete poetry and music.  Indeed, the essay The Art of Noises gave birth to an entirely new kind of music, musique concrète, that integrated everyday sounds into compositions:  train whistles, honking horns, engines, etc.  Music critic and cultural theorist Greil Marcus traces the development of late-20th century Punk and Industrial music back to Futurism and Dadaism.  

The term "Industrial" hearkens back to the ideas of Italian Futurism.  The very name "Futurism" derives from the movement's concern with technology, invention, and its effect on art.  Electronic music and sampling led to Industrial, House, Hip-hop, and a whole slew of avant-garde experimentation.

(See Ubuweb for examples of Lettrist, Situationist, Dadaist, and Futurist works, among other Avant-Garde  movements.)

Throbbing Gristle Logo

Noises produced by everyday objects would wind up in the compositions of Edgar Varèse, sometimes called the "Father of Electronic Music," and of course the early Industrial genre, especially Throbbing Gristle (TG), Z'ev, Boyd Rice, and Cabaret Voltaire (named after the cabaret in Zurich which was one of the birthplaces of Dada, ca. 1916).

Rice has called himself an "aesthetic fascist," is an occultist and was once a highly-visible member of The Church of Satan.  TG, friends of Rice, also flirted with fascist imagery and used Oswald Mosley's lightning bolt as a symbol for the band.  

David Bowie also used the lightning bolt symbol in his stage sets.  In the coked-up years around 1976, Bowie famously said in an interview that "Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars."  His mother was in Mosley's BUF - see below - and he did flirt with fascism, although I don't think he was a fascist.  

I think Bowie was making the same connection between the adulation of rock stars at concerts and fascist rallies Pink Floyd made in The Wall.  In the film, rock star Pink has a mental breakdown, and, in a drugged state, imagines himself as a fascist dictator and holds a series of rallies.  The black and red crossed banners of Pink's political party, the black uniforms of Pink and his followers, the violence they stir up, are clearly modeled on real-life English fascist Oswald Mosley and the Nazis. 

 

Marilyn Manson's best songs all seem to be covers.  And he covered the imagery of Rice, Pink Floyd, and Mosley on his Antichrist Superstar tour when he used a similar lightning bolt-in-a-circle logo, black military-stye uniforms, big podiums, and banners in his stage sets.  Manson was also a friend, even a protege, of Rice, and joined the Church of Satan. 

Manson seems to have put on the show Rice wishes he could have staged, but couldn't, because Rice's music is simply far too extreme to make the kind of money Manson has made during his career.  Oh, and don't forget channeling Alice Cooper.  In Cooper's day it was "shock rock," or what the "Decadent" French poets, including Baudelaire and Rimbaud, called "Épater la bourgeoisie," that is to say, shock the middle classes.  

 

But most of it was show.  For a real transgressive rocker, check out G.G. Allin!  That dude ate laxatives before his shows so he could shit on stage, smear it over his usually naked body, fling it about, and punch up audience members.  Not really on point, but he transgressed the norms in ways that make Cooper and Manson look like Girl Scouts.  Need it be said that at times Allin adopted fascist elements in his look?

TG co-founder Genesis P-Orridge went on to found Thee Temple of Psychick Youth, an "anti-cult" with strong influences from The Process Church of the Final Judgement, whose symbol in some ways resembles a swastika.  Both groups toyed with fascist imagery and embraced convoluted occult doctrines.  The Process Church also inspired the name of Adam Parfrey's Process Media.  Parfrey was a pal of Boyd Rice and published Anton LaVey and works about the Process Church.

Flag of the BUF

So, Oswald Mosley, finally.  Like D'Annunzio, Mosley served as a lieutenant in WW1 and was an aristocrat (Sir Oswald Mosley, 6th Baronet).  After serving as an MP for different political parties, he founded the British Union of Fascists (1932).  The BUF had a paramilitary wing called the "Biff Boys".  They wore all black uniforms and their flag was a lightning bolt with a similar color scheme to the Nazis.  Like the NSDAP and the Italian Fascists, his party's uniformed paramilitary put a little fisticuffs into his politics.

A brief aside.  Biff Boys....Can't help but think of the Proud Boys.  The Proud Boys are an alt-right and some say Neo-Fascist group who serve much the same purpose as the Biff Boys or any other x-shirted group.  They like brawling with leftists.

Proud Boys Flag

They favor black and yellow Fred Perry polo shirts, a brand previously associated with skinheads (much to Fred Perry's chagrin).  The Proud Boys aren't the paramilitary arm of a specific party, but they tend to wear MAGA hats and thus, identify as pro-Trump.  They engage in street brawls with Antifa, BLM and other progressive or leftist groups.  They espouse pretty much what you'd expect of any reactionary group:  Western chauvinism, anti-Feminism, anti-Communism, homophobia, racism, antisemitism, and an unabashed belief that a good punch-up is an effective way to keep the left in line.

The Proud Boys was founded by English-born Canadian Gavin McInness.  He was a journalist and a co-founder of Vice magazine.  I wonder if these journalists, frustrated by the lack of direct results with their words, turn to fascism and street-fighting as a way to more effectively propagate their views.  Instead of op-eds, why not pop heads?

Across the pond, The Silver Legion of America (1933), was founded by William Dudley Pelley as a direct result of Hitler becoming Chancellor of Germany, where Hitler, presumably, was busy designing spoons. The "Legionaries" were informally called the Silver Shirts.  Like Mussolini, Pelley had been a journalist, but he was also an award-winning screenwriter, and had become a spiritualist.  He never became a dictator, just a fascist sympathizer, but like Hitler and Mussolini, he took a title anyway.  Followers called him "The Chief."  Another writer/journalist mystic with a thing for shirts.  He first became famous in 1933 when he wrote about an out-of-body experience during which he claimed to have visited other planes of existence and which left him able to levitate, see through walls, and leave his body at will.  His religious system has been described as "a mixture of theosophy, spiritualism, Rosicrucianism, and pyramidism."  

His politics were typical fascist fare: anti-Communism, antisemitism, patriotism, corporatism, and something which persists today among Neo-Fascist Christian Identity movements, British Israelism.  During WW2 he opposed FDR and was eventually charged with sedition and later, securities fraud. 

After being released from prison he developed a religious philosophy involving UFO's and aliens. Which is a whole other canna worms.  There's a whole slew of literature about Nazis, UFO's, the Thule Society, and the Vril Society.  This latter is a weird one.  A genuine religious ideology based on a novel.  You've heard of Marmite for sure.  What about Bovril?  The founder of that goop believed it would boost your "Vril energy."  Alien-given super powers!  

Some posit that there was a Vril Society that served as an inner circle of the Thule Society before WW2, and others claim a Neo-Nazi group in Vienna continued the work, which is where it is alleged the UFO-links were elaborated.  Thing is, the Vril concept comes from a novel.  But many occultists, including Blavatsky, believed it was based on actual occult knowledge.

Flag of the Falange Militia

 

Francisco Franco took the title "El Caudillo," and the fascist paramilitary of the FE de las JONS (1934) was known as the "Falange Militia," unofficially called the "Blueshirts."  Caudillo roughly translates to "Warlord" or "Strongman," but could just as easily be translated as "Chief" or "Head Man," like our next (non-fascist) artistic mystic who went into fringe politics.  

Alone among our fascists, Franco wasn't into any mystic stuff, not a poet, journalist or painter.  He did write a novel, Raza, at some point, but he wasn't really an artist.  He was a career military man, and his fascist ideology was your typical antisemitic, nationalist, anti-Masonic stuff.  Franco never really made use of the grand theatrics, eye-catching symbols, or rallies, etc.  But he was also the only fascist dictator who lasted.  After the Civil War that put him in power, there was pretty much peace.  He was authoritarian and brutally repressive, but Spain experienced economic prosperity, and, after, his death in 1975, his successor King Carlos was able to help transition Spain back into democracy.  And it remains democratic.  

Every few years my wife gets her ballots in the mail, and it seems half of them are for Falangist candidates.  I once bought a clay kid's figurine of a Blueshirt giving the fascist salute from what I suspect was a German Neo-Fascist. He gave me 50% off because it was "for the boy" and "it is cute, no?"

 

I no longer have it because I broke the fucker.  A kid's toy, basically a fascist kewpie doll.  One of my weirder lapses of ethics

Flag of the Social Credit Party

John Hargrave was involved in Scouting and first created the Kibbo Kift Kindred (unfortunately abbreviated as KKK, 1920), which morphed into the Green Shirt Movement for Social Credit (circa 1932), finally becoming  the Social Credit Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (1935).  During his KKK days he was known as the "Head Man" (Caudillo?).  His party's Green Shirts marched, provided security, and brawled with Mosley's Blackshirts and Communist Red Shirts.  Although not a fascist, Hargrave was a charismatic and authoritarian leader, known for his theatrics, ritual, and the use of a uniformed paramilitary.

These paramilitary groups almost remind me of street gangs, and like the Crips (blue) and Bloods (red), signaled their allegiance by the color, not of their bandanas, but their shirts. Hargave was also an occultist:

John Hargrave was many things; a pagan cult leader, a brick hurling radical, a pioneer of universal income, a thriller novelist, a psychic healer, an inventor of note, a control freak, and always, to the very end, a utopian dreamer.

Boyd Rice Wolfsangel

Boyd Rice, mentioned before, is best known as as avant-garde musician of the early Industrial scene, a more pop-based kind of musique concrète that grew out of a melange of the "classical" tradition and Italian Futurism.  Rice is also an artist, essayist, novelist, and occultist.  He has definitely "flirted with fascism," integrating the ouroboros, as in the Theosophy "logo," and the Wolfsangel, an old German rune, into his personal iconography.

Similar runes figure on several German coats of arms.  After its use by the Nazis, including several SS and Wehrmacht units, it has been adopted by several Neo-Nazi groups, including the Aryan Nations.  Rice says it represents the occult principle of the "reconciliation of opposites," but given its association with Neo-Nazis, it's a dubious choice at best.  Note also that the ouroboros figures on D'Annunzio's flag of the Regency of Carnaro.  Rice cites D'Annunzio as a personal hero; perhaps the archetypal "aesthetic fascist...." 

 

Church of Satan Emblem

 

During later years the Church of Satan adopted an inverted pentagram traversed by a lightning bolt, recalling Mosley and its (ironic?) use by Bowie, Manson, and TG.  The Satanic Bible uses quasi-fascist rhetoric cribbed from the Social Darwinist and antisemitic Might is Right.

The Church of Satan, though not explicitly fascist, embraces strength, force, vengeance, and rule by the elite.  Its iconography and doctrines have always leaned right, even though the Church itself denies any political ideology.  Members such as Marilyn Manson and Rice have embraced fascist aesthetics, and though they themselves might not actually be fascists, toying with its imagery, if anything, neatly demonstrates the foundation of this post.  Namely, the intersection of art, fascism, and the occult.

Flag of the the Tatenokai

Emblem of the MSVN

 

 

 

Another author that dabbled in fascistic, ultra-nationalist politics was Japanese author Yukio Mishima, who created a paramilitary group called the Tatenokai (楯の会, 楯の會) or "Shield Society."  They were ardently anti-Communist, nationalist and sought to restore the Emperor to power.  They even attempted a coup in 1970.

Though there's no indication Mishima was directly inspired by D'Annunzio or Mussolini, the speech he gave to try and rouse military cadets to rise up against the government was given from a balcony, a staple of Italian fascist stagecraft.  The flag of the Tatenokai brings to mind the emblem of the MSVN, but I think this is more coincidence than anything else.

The flag includes the symbol of the Japanese emperor, the sun, and a samurai helmet.  It resembles the MSVN flag in form.  Both flags evoke power through armed might, and both pay homage to their nations' imperial pasts; one with the fasces of the Roman emperor, the other with the sun of the Japanese emperor.  Fascist rhetoric evokes the mystical past because the present often sucks, the future's uncertain, and past is always easy to portray as "glorious." Atavism is a staple of right-wing ideology (Make America Great Again).

By the by, Mishima was apparently wont to evoke the ouroboros towards the end of his life.  No other indication, as far as I know, that he was into the occult...

 

Would-be fascist occultists are still walking around.  Have you heard of one Augustus Sol Invictus, born Austin Mitchell Gillespie?  Better call Sol.

"Invictus" is a Florida lawyer who attempted to win office as a Libertarian, yet who has been denounced as a Neo-Nazi.

During his campaign for the US senate he was accused of dismembering a goat and drinking its blood.  Invictus admitted he made this sacrifice as a way of thanking the gods after a pilgrimage he made to the Mojave desert.  He denies being a fascist, and apparently has renounced his past enthusiasm for eugenics, but who knows?  He was a Thelemite, but was expelled from the OTO, ostensibly for the goat sacrifice, but also just as likely for his popularity among white supremacists.

That said, I should point out a certain hypocrisy regarding the sacrificed goat. 

Near Tampa is the community of Tarpon Springs, a community founded by Greek immigrants.  The Greek Orthodox Church remains an important institution there today.  Normally, it it forbidden to keep and slaughter animals in a residential area or without a bevy of permits.  But in keeping with Greek tradition, Tarpon Springs residents are permitted keep and slaughter a sheep at their homes to celebrate Easter.  One hopes it's fast and not cruel, but whatever the case, a whole community sacrifices animals at Easter and it's a-ok.  A Thelemite does it and it's bonkers.  

Of course, the Greeks don't drink the blood, I think.  Not literally, anyway.  If you believe in transubstantiation, Catholics literally drink the blood of Christ and eat his flesh.  Every week.  Sol Invictus may be a weirdo, but hell, millions of other theophagists are just fine.

If I were much more clever, I would try to figure out why the occult, art, and fascism often hold the same allure.  But I won't.  I think it's clear artists want to say something, to bring something from nothing.  To make manifest their will.  Isn't politics something like that as well?

I believe Crowley was the one who defined "magick" as making one's will manifest. "Do what thou wilt."  Makes me think of Triumph of the Will (1935).

 

Without getting overly heady, in many ways art, occultism, and magick boil down to effecting one's will.  It's not done by voting or by committee, but by thinking it and willing it into existence.  Fascist states were essentially big canvases upon which a leader imposed his vision, without scruple.

I don't know how to end this thing, so I suppose I will simply end it here and let you make of all this, erm, what thou wilt....