8-8-88: H8 is Gr8

Edge-lord MacGuffin, publicity shot for MicroPenis: A Journal of Contemporary Art

 

 

 

 

As a student of Satanism and the US Counterculture from WW2 to the Present (History 301, Miskatonic University catalogue), I have of course come across the 8-8-88 rally.  Of course.  Who hasn't?  (Joking)  But I haven't seen the entirety of the footage Geraldo "Capones's Vault" Rivera shot for his Satanism specials back when QAnon was called the "Satanic Panic".  

QAnon =, +/-, Satanic Panic =, +/- anti-Semitic blood libel:   "....the superstitious accusation that Jews ritually sacrifice Christian children at Passover to obtain blood for unleavened bread."   Sound familiar?  Jews, Satanists, and now, "the Global Elite"....Just for irony-value, the Romans accused early Christians of the same things that blood libelers, Satanic panickers, and QAnoners accuse their nemeses...."This is My Body, this is My Blood."  Cannibalism, wot?

Raw footage has been posted by Radio Werewolf: https://archive.org/details/Radio-Werewolf-8-8-88-Rally.  Some great musical turns from Boyd Rice, some "Might makes Right" philosophy, a lot of scowling.  Lots of echoing monologues with kettle drums and people sounding "angwy"....

I can understand the fun of being the bee in a Berkeley Liberal's PC bonnet, but embracing fascist imagery and a social Darwinist doctrine under the guise of "reconciling the opposites," that venerable alchemical chimera, well, it just seems like you're embracing fascism.

This is one of the photos that keeps coming back to bite Boyd Rice on the ass.  Rice has said on Instagram that "there’s a lot more behind that Sassy Magazine photo than meets the eye,” citing a cryptic plan to free Charles Manson from prison.  Do tell?  

The Charles Manson who allegedly had Sharon Tate et.al. murdered  in order to ignite a race war?  The 8.8.88 Rally was partly a sell-a-br8ion of the diminutive would-be guru/rock star; a way to honor Anton LaVey; stroke the leather-clad egos of ye olde Satanist crowd; troll the left back when Spam was a kind of corned beef and not unwanted email.  What strikes me when watching the 8.8.88 video is how unforgivably boring it is.  Lots of stentorian floor toms and haunted mansion pipe organ, a dash of some genuinely nice electronic noise, dollops of echoing misanthropy atop.  Who knows, it may have been a badass trip and a "powerful experience."  What gets me is how so many musical interludes evoke passages from the under-known Miles Davis masterpiece, Get Up with It....

Rice, Adam Parfrey, Coop, Genesis P-Orridge, Jim Goad, the Partridge Family Temple, LaVey, and dare we say, even the Son of Son himself?  (All bright and accomplished people to be sure:  well, almost all).  Make sure you throw in a race war fought by dune-buggy armored cavalry....day-glo and mirror-ball Satanism, furry jackets that look like they were taken from the bastard offspring of Ronald McDonald and a Yeti, lots of martini glasses, 3-piece suits, tats, piercings, the requisite misanthropy....

This article from the SF Gate is biased, ain't they all?  But it's one of the most thorough articles I've read about the rally, "The Church of Satan's last gasp in the mainstream...."  

Since Boyd Rice left after the death of LaVey, there's been a charisma vacuum in CoS leadership.  Current Grand Wazoo Peter Gilmore seems like a smart guy, talented too, and maybe in person he can hypnotize with his magnetic powers, but he just doesn't have the same capacity to spark outrage, interest, mystery....Gilmore also seems to have led the Church into a hermetic phase; whereas Rice and LaVey relished notoriety and publicity,  Gilmore seems more focused inward, with a less prankish sense of humor and zero need to "troll" people.  The CoS has been off the national outrage antenna for decades.  Which seems to be how they want it.  I suppose years of media distortions and half-truths about their actual beliefs have made them wary of that double-edged spotlight....

Another reason for its decline in the public eye may be the right-wing imagery and messages....well, a lot of kids just ain't hip to that.  Hence: The Satanic Temple (official | wiki)....a kinder, gentler, leftist Satanism.  One gets the infantile thrill of drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa without having to explain away the neo-Nazi-like symbols and rhetoric.  BTW, what spurs progress more efficiently:  competition....or cooperation?  A few years back TST seemed to be on the news every other day, so clearly people are still interested in all things Satanist.  Yet whereas TST is (was?) media-savvy and very much self-promoting, the CoS has retreated from all that.

As for Rice, he is a well-known prankster and features heavily in the RE/Search Pranks book, and LaVey was said to be crazy about joy-buzzers, sneezing powders and whoopee-cushions.  Gilmore seems as if juvenile laughter might make his face fall off....Judging from CoS groups on Facebook, intolerance, conformity, and a lack of humor appear par for the course.  And for Beelzebub's sake, don't ever dare to say LaVeyan Satanism. Why? Because it implies there are other kinds!  There's only one, see?  There is only one Satanism, the doctrine LaVey cribbed from Ayn Rand, Ragnar Redbeard, and John Dee....  

Of all Orthodoxies, the orthodoxy of the non-conformist is arguably the worst.  I stopped frequenting those boards after one-too-many verbal thrashings for daring to even mention Rice, The Satanic Temple, and worst of all, asking the wrong questions.  Not a) wearing all black, b) shaving my head, and c) scowling enough didn't help.  CoS Satanists don't seem to want free-thinkers with a sense of history and context, or who point out that LaVey's autobiography is full of demonstrable falsehoods.  Something I don't fault him for at all.  Who wants a nice Jewish kid named Harold Stanton Levey who played lounge music as a guru?

The Satanic Bible finishes with a page with a cryptic phrase:  YANKEE ROSE.  An old tune by one Norvell Slater with which LaVey apparently liked to finish his sets.  Slater, hehe, was best known as a composer of Christian hymns.... 

Update 11/03:  OOPS.  The song was written by Sidney Holden & Abe Frankl.

The embrace of Manson, Nazism, etc; Ironic?  Heartfelt?  Trolling the squares?  Yumpin' Yiminy!  Hail Satan!

Full disclosure:  I am NOT a Satanist.  Just a bemused observer of the 6660's....

A nice letter about the Black Madonna (Vierge Noire) Phenomenon

I got this in my email a few days back.  Not knowing for which it was intended, I just made it a post unto itself.  I don't endorse all the ideas of the author, nor the links, at least not until I've actually explored them.  But so far, it's interesting stuff and I look forward to reading it all more fully....

Hello Steven,  I was trying to post a comment on Laws of Silence about this, but no success. Said I must be a team member  [I've just changed that]. Anyway, the attached is what I wanted to post, plus a Dropbox link and some stuff about the Chapel of Plaincouault.

Chouette. The Black Madonna is something I have looked into considerably over last couple of years. Here are my notes. The serpent is also a good subject particularly in the context of Jung's writings. He was King of Kings on this. What does it all mean for practical purposes? Well what it all drives towards is the probability that Christianity was a cult developed and used by Philip K. Dick's "Empire (that) Never Ended". Further it was probably an Essene cult initially who like many current indigenous populations (see Cosmic Serpent by Jeremy Narby) used Entheogens as a means to achieve higher conscious state(s) in order to move into that other world many are increasingly discovering and finding out that Patriarchy is rapidly (in an eternal sense outside time) moving back towards matriarchy and of extreme necessity. Hekate, Mother Earth, call it what you will. VALIS Vast Active Living Information System. Of a complexity and potential power beyond imagination and then more. In a "fifth dimension". Threaded through 4-D space-time continuum.  "Gallowglaich", Belgique. https://www.dropbox.com/s/897sc45ealryx0a/Black%20Madonna.docx?dl=0

Then there is this: Les Champignons de Plaincourault:

Sam Woolfe (2013), “The Psychedelic Origin of Christianity”, 17th April 2013.
www.samwoolfe.com/2013/04/the-sacred-mushroom-and-cross-by-john.html

History of Yesterday (2021), How Psychedelics Probably Fuelled the Spread of Christianity”, 15th January 2021.
historyofyesterday.com/how-psychedelics-probably-fuelled-the-spread-of-christianity-8d9f22401ac0

"Gallowglaich"

Cute Dog Sneezing (2127 A.D.?): A.K.A. "being outside in the sunlight to smell a magical cure for spring"

Dear Laws of Dickheads:

As you can see, that which:

A) talks the talk,

B) walks the walk, and,

C) squawks the squawk,

Can be properly be called:

A) an unoriginal, 

B) an a-hole-space monkey, 

C) A slob-dobbler (ca. 1990 "knob-gobbler").

Your paltry and simplistic output has lasted for years....years!!  And you have, what?  Resigned yourself to splotchy blurbs with nary a Neanderthal pun in which to find something, anything, that is, shall we say, intelligent, or at the very least, "sharp?"

Get with it, shysters.  Faith is gonna move ya.  Brothers gonna work it out.  God Save the Queen!

You runt-nuts!!  Dare I say:  Russian warship, go fuck yourself!  Get, with it, "blog!!"  Do some ding-a-ling à la a no-bling, flava flav, 'larm clock:  Wake up, bitches!!!  Wake the fuck up!!!"

And so on.  Word to the wise, shit-heels:  Stop phoning it in.   At least have the balls and realpolitik 'nuff to know ya gotta make some bank, yo.

And, oh yeah, at the top of this page there's this weird, looped image of what appears to be a so-called "Border Collie" sneezing, with a demeanor that betrays a feeling somewhere between cute chagrin and total terror.  The striated B+W, 1970's TV-like image could come from 1957, 2047, or today, but it's a transmission, baby, and it was beamed into my head by the pedophile "coronavirus cabal" that has infiltrated the world:  the G-7, NATO, the Bilderbergs, the CIA, FBI, KGB, Star Fleet, the Deep State, the Scottish Rite, the Order of the Arrow, the Rotarians, the UN, etc. et. al. ad nauseum.

Remember, I love you.  But these other chain-yankers do not.  By any means necessary, one way or the other, you must survive this war, and well, so far, you have been getting your asses kicked six ways to Sunday by the brutal boot-heel of everyday living.  Simple shit.

Like I said:  You suck.  Your blog sucks.  Your life sucks.  Close up shop.  STFU.  Give it up, wusses.

Kind Regards,
Théophile Prades
Beaupuy, France

Gerda Meyerhof: émigrée, photographer, friend to the Whole Sick Crew

W.A.S.T.E

One Matthew Cissell made his post a p-post, he posted to the the p-list, a Pynchon mailing list, about our interview with Tod Perry: Cissell was looking for info about Gerda Meyerhof and to what extent she and her husband's home functioned as a kind of informal literary salon during Pynchon's days in NYC just after graduating from Cornell.

Cissell didn't get any responses.

So, I've linked to his message here in the hopes that someone might come across this post and be able to answer his question.  His email can be found at the original post.

If you know something, do be a dear and help Matthew about.  If I can reach Mr. Perry, I'll ask him.  We'll see....

Here's the query in full:

Hello p-listers,

I know folks are gearing up for the BtZ read, which I'll have to sit out,
but I come to you with a query.

   In an interview with the good people at the Laws of Silence blog, Tod
Perry (a former classmate of Pynchon's and part of the Whole Sick Crew)
stated that:

 " On the East side we had other amusements.  And there was the fabulous
table and hospitality of Hans + Gerda Meyerhof.  They entertained a really
amazing group of intellectuals from CCNY and Columbia and elsewhere--art
historians, scholars, artists.  Often we had dinner there, Dick, Kirk, Tom,
Bob, Robin.  Frau Meyerhof sometime shook her head and said it was like
listening to a convention of the poetic plumbers.


  This piqued my interest, so I started looking and found Gerda and Hans
Meyerhof in New York (census record 1940, though the records have her
living in Queens at the time). I also came across reference to a young
jewish gal who was helping some famous photographers before coming over to
the US. This same Gerda Meyerhof was visted by the writer Martin Beradt.
Gerda eventually moved back to Europe (Switzerland) and her photography is
still noted.

  IT sounds like she and her husband had a small literary salon of a sorts,
or at least a place where some german jewish refugees visited.. This
interesting because literary salons were, to some extent, leaving houses
and arising in bars like the White Horse or San Remo.

I am pretty confident that this is the same Gerda Meyerhof. I find it
interesting that she was a photographer; perhaps this is where the young
Pynchon first started to think about light and cameras?

Can any New York Greenwich Village historians help out?

Thanks
MC

There goes the neighborhood

Friday I posted (bit actually wrote on March 5, 2021) about the minor brouhaha over the stage design of the 2021 CPAC.  Seems it was basically the Odal rune (ᛟ), a symbol used by a variety of SS units and subsequently a number of white supremacist groups.  Intentional or not, the appearance of a symbol favored by Nazis is sadly appropriate for an event in which Trump is the star of the show.  We'll get back to the Odal.

This morning I read in WaPo about a bit of a kerfuffle in Linden, NC.  Apparently, the Parkers Grove United Methodist Church, strapped for cash, sold their church building last year.  They are now mortified that the buyer is a Neo-Pagan group called the Asatru Folk Assembly (AFA).

The AFA has been called a "hate group" and a "white supremacist group".  I don't know to what degree they are hateful, but they are certainly all for separation of the races.  They claim to support any ethnic group which strives to develop their people in matters both of the spirit and the world, and for all I know, they do.  But it's hard to read their views and feel a benign vibe.

Their Declaration of Purpose is clear about their agenda (from Pt. II "The preservation of the Ethnic European Folk and their continued evolution"):

If the Ethnic European Folk cease to exist Asatru would likewise no longer exist. Let us be clear: by Ethnic European Folk we mean white people....All native religions spring from the unique collective soul of a particular race. Religions are not arbitrary or accidental; body, mind and spirit are all shaped by the evolutionary history of the group and are thus interrelated. Asatru is not just what we believe, it is what we are. Therefore, the survival and welfare of the Ethnic European Folk as a cultural and biological group is a religious imperative for the AFA. (Boldface added)

So, that's pretty clear; they want to preserve and advance the spiritual and material welfare of white people.  I also emphasized a second sentence to show that they conflate their spiritual identity with their ethnic identity.  They reject Christianity one supposes not so much for its theology and teachings, but because it is alien; it is the spirituality of another race.

Pt. 4 of their Statement of Ethics ("The Family Principle") reiterates this concern for white people:

We in Asatru support strong, healthy white family relationships. We want our children to grow up to be mothers and fathers to white children of their own. We believe that those activities and behaviors supportive of the white family should be encouraged while those activities and behaviors destructive of the white family are to be discouraged.

Miscegenation, it would appear, isn't one of their favorite things.  Clearly for Asatru, white people should marry white people and have white children.  This concern for "keeping the numbers high" is a pretty common anguish among the alt-right, and there's a lot of hand-wringing over declining birth rates among whites in Europe versus the much higher birthrates among immigrants from Africa, the Maghreb, and Asia. Changing demographics terrify these people.

Asatru's ultimate concern for having kids is quite simply a reflection of the alt-right's obsession with maintaining a white majority in Europe and the USA.  Or a least making sure there are enough white people to maintain the machine with white people at the helm.  Having kids is about maintaining the privilege of being in the dominant group.  The US today is one of de facto white supremacy in its political and financial institutions and its assumptions of white cultural and moral superiority.  Why?  How do we know we are superior?

Because Gott Mit Uns - God with us - or so it says on the Wehrmacht belt buckle sitting on the table next to me.  Because In God We Trust, and God Bless America and God is my co-Pilot. Groups in power have always sought to justify their actions by linking themselves with the gods, or to God.  Manifest Destiny.  This hasn't gone particularly well for Africans and Native Americans.

Enter again the Odal rune.  

Continuing my visit to the AFA website, runestone.org, I clicked onto the "Kindreds" page (the Kindreds are local groups affiliated with the AFA). What immediately caught my eye was a picture of Kindreds Coordinator Jason Gallagher.  He sports a prominent Odal rune pendant. Continuing through the page, one can also see that least 5 flags of regional Kindreds also feature the Odal rune:  Wisconsin, British Columbia, Minnesota, Colorado....

Detail from the Vedrfolnir Clan flag; Wisconsin

But so what? The runes themselves aren't inherently evil.  Heck, even the swastika was a universal symbol of all things good until the Nazis turned it on an angle and ruined it perhaps forever.  One can't tar the entire Neo-Pagan world, and one can't even tar the Odinist and Teutonic groups with the racist brush due to others.  True, there have been a lot of overtly racist groups within these spheres, long a source of frustration for those groups who aren't.  Unfortunately one can't say this about the AFA.  Their mission statement is unambiguous, as is their whites only policy

As much as anything is logical regarding white supremacy, rejecting Christianity in favor of Norse mythology makes sense.  Christianity is a Romanized Mystery religion born from a non-white Semitic people.  But through an impressive feat of mental gymnastics, the spiritual racist can turn to a Christian identity-based congregation.  These churches racialize Christianity, and make Europeans the true Israelites and descendants of Abraham, Isaac, et. al., whereas the Jews are the cursed offspring of Cain.  They are openly white supremacist.  Yet despite the symbolism, we'd never mistake such a group as an accurate representation of Christianity as a whole.  The same would go for Neo-Paganism.  The racist spirituality of the AFA shouldn't be taken to represent any kind of other pagan group, whether they venerate Norse, Celtic, or Germanic gods.  Heck, neo-Pagans have it tough enough already; being branded as Satanists is bad enough.  Racists too?

One local reverend said local residents are disturbed by the group’s white supremacist beliefs. “But at the same time, it’s safe to say they may be either as concerned or possibly more concerned about the group’s pagan beliefs,” he said.  At least one African-American resident interviewed seemed nonplussed about the group's white supremacy and in fact, doesn't associate with non-Christians anyway.

I don't think this incident in any way sheds light on the CPAC / Odal "controversy," but it is a nifty example of how a frequency phenomenon begins. Go through life never having heard of an Odal, and it comes up twice in 2 days, an interesting billboard along the trail beginning with the CPAC conference and ending passing the Asatru "whites-only" church. 

It seems that every day I see a headline about the threat posed to American security by white supremacist and other far-right groups.  The risk of terrorism from a white "identitarian" is as likely if not more likely than from a Jihadist, so they say.

I'd say it's worth shedding a bit of light on this area of the American demographic.  The extreme fringes of the right and the alt-right are not some monolithic group, but a spectrum of groups with a varying degrees of radical beliefs.  The Tea Party movement is a part of it, moving through Oath Keepers and Proud Boys and more extreme and overtly racist groups. Charlottesville, the the tiki torches reminiscent of Nazi night parades, the chanting, the fisticuffs:  You will not replace us!  Who's "you?" And who's "us?"  "Make America Great Again!"

25/02  Found I'd never published this one. I suppose it's because I never finished.  I don't think I will, just publish it as is....