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  • Yukio Mishima: The Man and the Mythology

    Yukio Mishima: The Man and the Mythology

    From New Dawn 123 (Nov-Dec 2010)

    Yukio Mishima (pen name of Kimitake Hiraoka) is perhaps the most commanding and tragic figure in 20th century Japan. Born into a samurai-bureaucrat family in 1925, he committed ritual suicide (seppuku) on 25 November 1970. He had just failed, predictably, in a call on the Japanese Self Defence Forces to revolt and re-establish the traditional authority of the Japanese Emperor. Mishima was at the peak of a brilliant literary career and on the day of his death he had completed the fourth and final volume of The Sea of Fertility, summing up his vision of the Japanese experience in the 20th century.

    Mishima’s life and work seems to be a continuous exercise in yin and yang, exploring the mutually nurturing activity of complementary (or contending) qualities like beauty and destruction, pride and shame, strength and weakness, loyalty and betrayal, sacrifice and indulgence. Of even more weighty and lasting importance, his work appeals as an exhaustive and exhausting exploration of mythologies that might revive and reinvigorate the Japanese spirit. Nothing was more important or more taunting after Japan’s humiliation and devastation – the result first of Western socialisation and second of Western conquest.

    No one could better represent and articulate the burden borne by the Japanese elite in the 20th century than Mishima. He won a citation from the Emperor as the highest ranking honour student at graduation from the Peers’ School in 1944, as Japan approached defeat and humiliation. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University School of Jurisprudence in 1947, as Japan accommodated an alien occupation. He then joined the Ministry of Finance at the pinnacle of Japanese government and published his first novel in 1948. His samurai family’s code of complete control over mind and body, loyalty to the Emperor and the austerity and self sacrifice of Zen pervade his life and writing.

    The maturing years of a puny and youthful Mishima make it possible to see him as a mirror for the post-war growth of a weak, bewildered and defeated Japan. Both progressed through much painful soul-searching to build their strength and emerge, at least temporally, as giants in the Asian consciousness.

    Mishima’s life is a little less exotic than his stories. As a young boy he was captive to the needs and whims of a possessive grandmother with aristocratic airs. Nothing could better reflect the strict hierarchical and authoritarian values of his family and society or, perhaps, better nurture a young literary genius. His youth was a struggle towards self-assertion and self-empowerment in a competitive school environment where respect was not won easily and where his unmanly literary interests could invite aggression. Some coughing at his physical examination after being called up for military service gained him a diagnosis of incipient tuberculosis and a reprieve. He emerges as an elite bureaucrat, only to sacrifice that to become a widely celebrated novelist.

    His qualities of self-discipline and self-motivation rarely appear outside their social and political context. His later emergence with a strong and muscular, even beautiful body, all the product of dedicated discipline and purpose, is easily seen as the ultimate expression of a refined and socially conscious human being, albeit in a samurai spirit. The semi-military scenes with his “private army” appear as a statement of a profound determination not to lose touch with the political and historical processes of his time. Even his writing, undertaken to a strict schedule each evening, appears almost as part of a military routine. The odd homosexual dalliance and humiliation was hardly a distraction – seemingly subject to severe, if sensitive, formalities. Indeed, his homosexuality possibly reflected a military culture of encouraging same sex liaisons as a means of strengthening battlefield loyalties.

    Discovering Asian Civilisation

    40 years after Mishima’s death, I encounter a personal set of contradictions and confusions in re-examining and attempting to re-evaluate his life and work. I arrived in Tokyo in 1964 as a diplomatic language student and left in 1969. At a time that was critical in my discovery of Asian civilisation, Mishima loomed large in my imagination as the living embodiment of Japanese cultural and political consciousness. He loomed even larger when I was cross-posted to Laos where his brother was serving as First Secretary in the Japanese Embassy, only to be replaced before my arrival by another officer married to the sister of Mishima’s wife, evidence of the close-knit character of the elite Japanese bureaucracy.

    Mishima’s subsequent samurai seppuku while I was still in Vientiane provided a taunting comment on the Indo-China War, which was the focus of my then professional duties. Unlike the Pacific War where it defeated Japan, America did not succeed in the Indo-China War in defeating Vietnam. This echoed many of the troubling contradictions that haunted Mishima’s life.

    Mishima observed all the correct forms of Japanese surrender yet explored in the most relentless and captivating manner the need to keep the Japanese spirit alive until the time came to express his convictions in actions rather than words – actions that are likely to echo into the future as long as there is art and as long as there is a Japanese spirit. Moreover, perhaps no contradiction was more profound than Mishima’s criticism, common in his writing, of the Japanese capitalists who had usurped the authority of the samurai ethos.

    It is possible to see Mishima, his colleagues in the Ministries of Finance (and Foreign Affairs), and Japan’s capitalists all observing the same disciplined, politically correct forms of surrender, while all discreetly working in their own ways towards a victory (initially commercial) over an America that had humiliated Japan in war. By the end of the 1980s, American authors in books like Japan as Number One were warning of a possible Japanese victory that Mishima was most unlikely to have foreseen.

    These personal recollections and reflections and my own voyage of discovery of an even larger and more dynamic Asia, where China has taken a leadership role once thought reserved for Japan, cannot but colour the way I approach any evaluation of Mishima’s legacy. It places that legacy inescapably in the context of my own exploration of the remarkable character of East Asian civilisation and its economic and cultural renaissance over the past half century. During the four decades since Mishima’s death, I have become acutely aware of fundamental differences between an Anglo-American global order that has largely defined the past two centuries of global history (and all of modern Australian history) and an ascendant East Asian Confucian order likely to define the indefinite future.

    My recent reading of Thinking from the Han: Self, Truth and Transcendence in Chinese and Western Culture by the American authorities on Chinese civilisation, David Hall and Roger Ames, is of particular relevance to my recollection of Mishima. The idea of “self” often looms large for those who examine Mishima’s life and work from a Western perspective. Yet “self” seems to misrepresent totally the essence of Mishima’s life in the Japanese and East Asian environment. Mishima was unquestionably a product of Japan’s intellectual and administrative samurai aristocracy, whose energies and talents are today concentrated in achieving educational and intellectual excellence. The sentiments he evoked are unlikely to die away simply because China and Vietnam have won overt political successes seemingly denied Japan. At the same time, I suspect that Mishima’s elite colleagues and successors, now more than ever defined by relentless academic competition, will find more in common with counterparts in China, Vietnam and elsewhere in Asia than with partners distanced by vast oceans and even vaster cultural divides.

    Mishima and His Work

    Any choice of particular works from Mishima’s voluminous output will be invidious. Nominated three times for the Nobel Prize, Mishima wrote 40 novels, 18 plays, 20 books of short stories, at least 20 books of essays, one libretto and one film. More than 20 of his novels have been translated and published in English. The richness, maturity and insight of his work from an early age often make it difficult to place without careful thought a work in a particular period of his life. All were characterised by the heroic efforts of their protagonists to find a meaningful mythology for their own physical lives in a bewildering kaleidoscope of unrelenting and unpredictable cultural, social, and political change. Almost invariably, this was laced with various physical and spiritual temptations. A quick review of a few of these works offers a glimpse of Mishima’s virtuosity.

    It is surprising, for instance, to realise that a book like Forbidden Colours, which demonstrates Mishima’s uncompromising character in searching out the most difficult and confronting issues in human experience, was written when he was 28. This was the age at which I arrived in Tokyo, green, immature, inexperienced and ill-equipped to envisage such a reality, despite a university education in Russian and English literature.

    A brief outline of the story offers a glimpse of the author’s mastery of the darkest recesses and greatest heights of Japanese society in the immediate post war years.

    This major novel, regarded in Japan as Mishima’s masterpiece, is as much a vivid and shocking panorama of the corrupt life of Tokyo five years after the end of the war and an attack on oppressive Japanese marriage customs as it is the affecting story of Yuichi Minami, a handsome young man with homosexual inclinations.

    Yuichi is caught between his impulses and the demands of his family. Out of his loveless marriage his anguished homosexuality burgeons, and his wife’s dreams depart. The first chapter irresistibly brings to mind “Death in Venice.” An old and famous writer is captivated by Yuichi, and like Mann’s Aschenbach he is never again the man he was. He becomes Yuichi’s mentor, spouting satanic philosophies much like those Oscar Wilde imparted to the young Andre Gide.

    He persuades Yuichi to pursue and disappoint a number of beautiful women who have slighted the writer. Yuichi involves himself with lovers young and old, male and female. We meet ex-aristocrats dabbling in the black market, newly rich couples living promiscuously, blackmailers and male prostitutes. There are remarkable descriptions of parks of assignation, of gay bars and of gay parties, often frequented by Americans. The signs, the argot, the evasions, the frustrations, the humour, the joys and the tragedies of this strange and hidden world are brought out with sympathy and great candour, but also with irony and aversion.

    The richness of Mishima’s adventures can take the reader on a voyage of discovery into a world rarely imagined but full of taunting truths and undeniable realities. Many readers are likely to be left haunted by previously unimagined human interaction.

    The Temple of the Golden Pavilion was written three years later and captures the trials of another young man, Mizoguchi, who is disabled by a crippling stutter but is fascinated by the beauty of the Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Taken by his dying father, a poor rural priest, to become an acolyte at the Temple, he has heard throughout his childhood about its splendid beauty. But the beautiful things in his new life as a monk – the temple, sexual possibility, and personal autonomy – leave Mizoguchi feeling overwhelmed and insignificant, until he seeks to resolve his painful perplexity by burning down the Temple of the Golden Pavilion. It is not hard to see in it a theme that runs through much of Mishima’s work – namely a fascination with beauty leading to destruction, often self destruction.

    Three years later Mishima wrote Kyoko’s House, which was not well received and has not been translated into English. It explores four sides of Mishima through the stories of a boxer, a painter, an actor and a businessman. The American film director Paul Schrader has made the story of the actor available to English speakers in his film “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters.” Interestingly, it was only included after the writer’s wife objected to the use of Forbidden Colours. The actor’s story is, however, just as confronting as any of Mishima’s other stories. It tells of an actor who becomes involved in a sado-masochistic sexual relationship to settle his mother’s debts. This plunges him into a double suicide for himself and his lover, his mother’s creditor. There is less of a sense of rarefied spirituality, fascination with beauty and struggle against carnal debasement than in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, highlighting Mishima’s capacity to move amongst all areas and levels of society. He seems to have an unlimited ability to discover and reveal the grand dramas being played out in mundane life. The actor seems totally absorbed in carnal pursuits and yet to be willing to literally give up his life for both his mother and lover. This heroic dimension does not loom as large as the garish décor of the mother’s bar and the trivia of the dialogue. The pact to commit a dual suicide is entered into almost as a casual convenience. Described as “terrifying” by Mishima’s biographer and translator, John Nathan, the novel’s importance to Mishima was reflected in the unprecedented fifteen months it took to write and the fact that, unusually, it was not published in magazine instalments. It is reported that poor sales and reviews hurt him seriously.

    The following year (1960), Mishima wrote After the Banquet. Uncharacteristically, it is a story about a successful, worldly, head strong, older woman. She runs a business in the “water trade” and throws her heart and her money into a marriage with an aging, idealistic but naive aristocrat. When her support for his political aspirations becomes a source of conflict, highlighting irreconcilable values and life experiences, she has no practical option but to return to her trade – tending commercially the physical and psychological needs of her aristocrat’s political rivals. She again serves the very forces she had hoped to assist her idealist to defeat. The story can be described as a clash of love, politics and money but it also gives Mishima the means to explore characters and political activities that are rare in his work, offering an intriguing insight into the nature and processes of Japanese politics. The accuracy of Mishima’s story was subsequently confirmed by a successful law case mounted for invasion of privacy.

    Mishima followed this fine account of confused ideals and political machinations in Tokyo the next year with a work described by one reviewer as “barbaric lyricism.” The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea (“Afternoon of Glory” reflects the Japanese title more accurately) can be expected to shock almost any reader. A group of adolescent boys resolve to revenge themselves on the sailor who disappoints their romantic sense of masculine life at sea by falling for and committing himself to the mother of one of them. The erstwhile hero is seduced by the boy’s apparent adulation to subject himself to the cruellest of fates, all depicted in Mishima’s finely crafted poetic style.

    This brief sampling of some of Mishima’s stories cannot reproduce his evocative and beautiful imagery or the way in which his genius invariably draws one into new and unfamiliar worlds in the most convincing ways, only to then present a shocking, almost unbelievable, conclusion. Desire and resentment are never far apart and one is often left asking questions that have never previously been encountered.

    It has been suggested that Mishima’s psychological exploration is so profound that it is possible to find in his stories an account of the obsession, the hopelessness, and the desperation inspired by types of spiritual purity that can motivate acts of terrorism. Rather than focusing on terrorism, however, I believe it is more accurate to see Mishima’s writing as an exploration of the obstacles and confusions that confront all human aspiration. He creates a sense of the great difficulty encountered in reconciling ideals nurtured by a lofty human imagination with the mundane, perplexing and corrupting realities of existence.

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    The Sea of Fertility

    “The Sea of Fertility” (a reference to the Mare Fecunditatis, a “sea” on the Moon) is the four volume work that Mishima completed on his final day. It contains Spring Snow (1966), Runaway Horses (1969), The Temple of Dawn (1970) and The Decay of the Angel (1971). It stretches from 1912 to 1975 and in all four books uses the viewpoint of Shigekuni Honda, who matures from a law student to a wealthy retired, but world weary and desiccated, judge. Honda’s life focuses on four reincarnations of his school friend Kiyoaki Matsugae and his attempts to save them from early deaths. This results in Honda’s personal and professional embarrassment and eventual destruction, somehow symbolic of those who cannot rise above the inevitable corruption of respectable social goals. The ill fated Matsugae is successively a young aristocrat, an idealistic nationalist, an indolent Thai princess and a manipulative and sadistic orphan. Significantly, the idealistic nationalist foreshadows Mishima by committing seppuku, but after assassinating a prominent symbol of Japanese leadership. Described by Paul Theroux as “the most complete vision we have of Japan in the twentieth century,” the book reflects Mishima’s endless quest to explore and comprehend the workings of individual lives in the destructive context of contending and conflicting certainties.

    Some Concluding Thoughts

    For a foreigner who studied Japanese language and remains committed to trying to comprehend the powerful sense of civilisation that defines East Asia, Mishima has always represented an irreplaceable source of insight and inspiration. His exotic and defiant character seemed to guarantee an incisive, authentic quality that is usually difficult to find. Today’s problems of globalisation and recurring crises in the West give, perhaps, extra dimensions to Mishima’s thought.

    My memories of the mystique surrounding the living Mishima – the vital symbol of the Japanese spirit in the aftermath of defeat and occupation – manifests itself in almost infinite forms in his work. His task was made all the more problematic for someone with an elite sense of leadership responsibility at a time when the national character was burdened with a sense of defeat, humiliation and dishonour at the hands of an alien conqueror. Mishima’s achievement reflects the disciplined and self-effacing manner in which Japan accepted its defeat, apparently subjecting itself to all that it had fought so fiercely to reject.

    This quality of disciplined, self-sacrificing purpose, in the midst of all the temptations and confusions of modern life, is central to Mishima’s legacy. It is a quality that has distinguished the Vietnamese in Indo-China and the Chinese under Mao and his successors. It is a quality that has been taken from the Confucian tradition throughout history and throughout East, and also South East Asia, although often in a form that is not immediately recognisable. In Mishima’s case his energies were dedicated to recording in a highly literate and informed manner the toils of the Japanese soul in the aftermath of defeat and occupation. In this he reflected a complex sense of community awareness, a quality of literary and educational excellence and a depth of intuitive discipline that characterises Confucian civilisation, even when given a unique form of Japanese relevance.

    One must regret that Mishima is not alive today, wrestling at the age of 85 in his inimical way with the economic resurrection first of Japan, then of many other parts of Asia and finally of China. Most interesting would be his perception of an accompanying cultural renaissance that has been made possible by the victories of a leadership class of which he was critical.

    Would he find contemporary public notions of reform in Japan out of touch not only with his preferred Japanese traditions but also with an emerging mainland rejection of Western fashions and the rediscovery and reinvention of values close to those that he lamented had been swept away forever by the tide of Western modernisation?

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  • Science Was Wrong: An Interview With Stanton Friedman

    Science Was Wrong: An Interview With Stanton Friedman

    Stanton Friedman is one of the world’s most famous ufologists, and a man who understands the workings of mainstream science and academia. Employed for 14 years as a nuclear physicist for companies like General Electric, General Motors, Westinghouse and Aerojet General Nucleonics, he worked on highly classified US programs involving nuclear aircraft, fission and fusion rockets.

    In 1958, UFOs caught his attention, and Friedman has since lectured about this subject at more than 600 colleges and professional groups in all 50 states of the US and around the world.

    His most significant and controversial book Top Secret/Majic revealed much about how the US government dealt with the 1947 crash of a “flying saucer” near Roswell, New Mexico.

    In their new book Science Was Wrong: Startling Truths About Cures, Theories, and Inventions “They” Declared Impossible, Friedman and social scientist Kathleen Marden discuss various examples throughout history when scientists misjudged or ignored scientific evidence or breakthroughs.

    Having worked as an insider for many years, Friedman understands what is wrong with the system and the reasons why otherwise intelligent people refuse to acknowledge hard truths and continue to resist change.

    New Dawn magazine recently spoke to Stanton Friedman…

    What do you think about Global Warming and Cold Fusion?

    There is no question that climate changes – sometimes the world gets warmer and sometimes it gets colder. The much more important question is whether man is responsible for these changes (so called Anthropogenic Global Warming) and whether billions of dollars should be spent to control evil CO2. The data do not support the claims of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore. Mother nature has far more to do with overall weather cycles than man. Contrary to the IPCC’s claim that all scientists agree with them, there are many examples of serious scientists who do not. Politics has become the major issue not science.

    Cold Fusion is still being investigated by such respectable institutions as Toyota, The Electric Power Research Institute and the US Navy. More and more supporting evidence has been found that scientists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann were on the right track, even if not “politically correct.” Their debunkers were guilty of the typical false claims based on bias rather than on the facts. It will be interesting to see how this story plays out.

    Several of the chapters in Science Was Wrong deal with medical issues such as the Hemophilia Holocaust. Why are they important?

    The medical chapters, with most of the work being done by Kathleen Marden, are important because they demonstrate there can be serious consequences (often fatal) when well educated authority figures make totally wrong claims. 10,000 American hemophiliacs were made HIV positive because it was claimed that the chance of HIV being transmitted via transfusions was one in a million. The clotting factor used by hemophiliacs is batch processed from many thousands of individual units of blood. If one was contaminated, the entire batch would be. It was already known that heat treatment could get rid of the viruses. But that was considered too much trouble and expense and not required anyway. Strong claims were made without any supporting evidence.

    Why is that so many smart people make what turns out to be stupid statements?

    I am a physicist not a psychiatrist, but I have certainly encountered many “smart” debunkers. There seem to be major problems of arrogance and ignorance. The “smart person” assumes that if something as obviously significant as alien visitations were taking place, that would be important and therefore he would know about it because he keeps track of what is important. Since he doesn’t know about it, it must not be true and there is no point in wasting his time becoming familiar with the relevant data since there must not be any.

    The basic rules for these arrogant opinion setters are: 1. Don’t bother me with the facts, my mind is made up; 2. What the public doesn’t know, I won’t tell them; 3. If one can’t attack the data, attack the people, it is easier, and 4. Do “research” by proclamation rather than admitting ignorance and doing a serious investigation.

    From a more philosophical viewpoint I would like to quote a serious debunker, Dr. Michael Shermer, founder of the Skeptics Society and author of Why People Believe Weird Things, for why he believes such a weird notion there is no evidence indicating some UFOs are alien space craft.

    First comes this on page 283: “Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.” BINGO. Clearly this applies not only to Michael, but to Dr. Joseph Nickell, the paid “scientific” investigator for the newly named “Committee for Skeptical Inquiry” which used to be CSICOP. His three degrees in English and experience as a magician (master of deception) hardly provide scientific training as demonstrated by his nonsensical explanation of a six foot owl for the Flatwoods, W.V. Monster. He did actually visit Flatwoods but didn’t talk to the witnesses nor visit the site.

    The second quote from Michael’s book that applies to the debunkers is on page 299: “The Confirmation Bias, or the tendency to seek or interpret evidence favourable to already existing beliefs, and to ignore or reinterpret evidence unfavourable to already existing beliefs.”

    It was no wonder that at the end of a three hour debate that Michael and I had about UFOs on Coast to Coast Radio, the audience voted on a winner. I got 80% of the vote. He, of course, had not read any of my books.

    Have there really been serious consequences resulting from the wrong claims made by scientists?

    As documented in Science Was Wrong, thousands died because of the resistance to the use of vaccinations against smallpox. When Dr. Ignatz Semmelweiss was forced out of his hospital in Vienna because he insisted doctors seriously wash their hands between doing autopsies and delivering babies, 20% of the woman came down with child bed fever and died as did their babies. Fewer than 3% delivered by mid wives with clean hands died. Many women were sterilised because of the loud advocacy of the leaders of the Eugenics movement bound on creating a super race by eliminating reproduction by those not deemed suitable. Hitler used their justifications for his ethnic cleansing work.

    Development in space and communication technology and in aviation were often seriously delayed by the arrogance of the leaders claiming man would never fly, space travel was utter bilge, battleships could not be sunk by bombs dropped from an airplane, planes couldn’t go faster than the speed of sound, jet engines had no place in aviation, etc. One expert in the use of explosives insisted to US President Truman that the notion of an atomic bomb was ridiculous.

    Have you personally encountered many closed minds in the academic world?

    I have encountered a number. Professors seem to believe that only PhDs in academia publishing in standard peer reviewed scientific journals can do research. They seem totally oblivious to the huge amounts of money being spent in classified programs in industry and in the various major laboratories operated for the government. They are shocked when I point out that when I worked for the General Electric Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion Department near Cincinnati in 1958, we spent $100,000,000 that year and employed 3,500 people of whom 1,100 were engineers and scientists. We published many classified reports, but were certainly not in the publish or perish mode of academia. The three nuclear weapons labs (Los Alamos, Sandia, Lawrence Livermore) several years ago each employed over 8,000 people and each had an annual budget over $1 billion. Together just those three labs were spending more than the amount spent on all its projects by the National Science Foundation.

    When it comes to flying saucers and the notions of interstellar travel, the academics seem to think the only possibility would be chemical rockets… the Pony Express of the propulsion system business. In contrast, the first nuclear powered submarine was operated in 1956. Hundreds have been built since. There are several nuclear powered aircraft carriers that can operate for 18 years without refuelling. Think how many tankers of diesel fuel would be required. The academic astronomers all know that the stars produce their energy via nuclear fusion. But they are totally unaware of the studies done in industry using appropriate nuclear fusion reactions for deep space propulsion. Using the right isotopes, particles can be ejected having 10 million times as much energy per particle as can be obtained in a chemical rocket. They have all heard of nuclear weapons, but can provide no sensible context. A World War II big bomb was a 10 ton blockbuster. Hiroshima was about 15,000 tons of TNT equivalent. The first H Bomb released 10 million tons of TNT equivalent and had a three mile wide fireball. The biggest Russian bomb was equivalent to 57 million tons of TNT and these guys are thinking of chemical rockets. I worked on a study of fusion rockets back in 1962.

    You spent 14 years working in industry, but have lectured at over 600 colleges and universities. Did you find industry different from academia?

    Industry was much more concerned with results – not the publish or perish business, not outside honours, or tenure – but how can we get our systems to work. We had access to fine equipment, sophisticated facilities, exotic materials. Yes, much work was done under security. The academic guys don’t understand the national security aspects of flying saucer reality. Every country would surely like to duplicate the flight behaviour. Young engineers and scientists had great opportunities as programs expanded and could learn a lot from working closely with more experienced professionals.

    In universities I have found many are afraid to even talk about such unacceptable topics as flying saucers and the cosmic Watergate. Sometimes I have had to wake them up with the fact that Lockheed built the Stealth aircraft at a cost of $10 billion dollars over 10 years in total secrecy. The existence of the Corona spy satellite wasn’t revealed until 35 years after the first one obtained more data about Soviet military installations than all the U-2 flights that preceded it.

    Astronomers seem to be a favourite target in Science Was Wrong. Can you give some examples?

    An astronomer (British Astronomer Royal) in 1956 said space travel was utter bilge and nobody would pay the cost, and what good would it be anyway. Astronomy has benefitted more from the space program than any other science. One claimed in 1903 that man would never fly in a machine. The Wright brothers’ flight happened quietly two months later. The negative attitudes had discouraged many from seeking development funds or doing experiments. One astronomer computed in 1941 that to send a man to the moon and back would require an initial launch weight of a million tons. Turns out he was too high by a factor of 300 million. Turns out, as one might expect, that he was totally unfamiliar with the literature that already had been published, that he made all the wrong assumptions. He like other academics think you can determine feasibility from basic physics. In the real world the initial assumptions are very important. He assumed a single stage rocket launched vertically with much too low an exhaust velocity and much too low an acceleration and using a retrorocket to slow the vehicle down upon return. We use the atmosphere and take advantage of cosmic freeloading at every turn including taking advantage of the moon’s gravitational field.

    The SETI [Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence] cultists assume that interstellar travel is impossible even though they know nothing about it. They assume that aliens would send signals using technology compatible with our techniques roughly 100 years into the age of radio. There are stars less than 40 light years away that are over a billion years older than the sun. Surely their technology is more advanced. Rarely do astronomers point out how terribly wrong they have been in the past. Venus is not a tropical jungle. Mars has had water, and electromagnetic effects are very important in the solar system. Obviously if aliens are visiting, listening for signals using our technology makes no sense. So many cases of arrogance coupled with ignorance. They even would have us believe that they know how aliens would behave. They don’t understand earthlings no less aliens.

    Why are you better equipped to deal with topics such as space travel than the Professors who claim there is nothing to UFOs or to star travel?

    I have studied an enormous amount of evidence, books, documents, and reports about the UFO evidence. When I discuss five large scale scientific UFO studies at my lectures, I ask how many have read each one. Usually fewer than 1%. Dr. Seth Shostak’s SETI specialists had read none of the five, yet claimed as did Dr. Jill Tartar there is no evidence.

    I have worked on far out propulsion systems such as nuclear airplanes, fission nuclear rockets, fusion nuclear rockets. Our most powerful nuclear rocket operated at a power level of 4400 megawatts or twice the power output of Grand Coulee dam. They are totally ignorant about such matters, but hate to admit it. They know nothing about these topics. I worked under security for 14 years, have visited 20 document archives, wrote many classified reports. They know nothing about the work being done in secret.

    Tell us about space travel and other topics you discuss in Science Was Wrong?

    I discuss fission and fusion rockets and the need to take advantage of what has been learned in the programs. I also refer readers to the chapter in my 2008 book Flying Saucers and Science which has pictures of fission nuclear rockets, nuclear airplane propulsion systems etc., and other exotic propulsion systems such as the electromagnetic submarine.

    You seem to be an admirer of the late Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky and yet many scientists have heaped ridicule on him. Why do you support many of his views?

    The first reason is that it turns out he was correct about high temperatures on Venus, radiation from Jupiter and the importance of electromagnetic fields in the solar system. He carefully reviewed many stories from various societies about events in the planet’s past history. Often his opponents attacked him because his background was in medicine and psychiatry not in astronomy. Often they attacked without even reading his books such as Worlds in Collision. He was a true scholar.

    Do you believe that the changes in the energy output of the sun are the real cause of climate change as opposed to the production of CO2?

    The data seems to strongly support these conclusions. New satellites that can carefully observe the sun, solar storms, particulate radiation etc., are backing up these views. Many scientists also have finally been willing to speak out about the phony arguments such as the Himalayan glaciers will soon melt. That notion was nonsense.

    Dr. Robert O. Becker is somebody you obviously admire and consider to have been a pioneer in relating the effects of magnetic fields on people including not only treating certain medical conditions, but influencing people’s behaviour. Can you give some examples of his work?

    He did some great work on using magnetic fields to speed healing in fractures that otherwise seemed unable to heal. He looked at limb regeneration in animals that do indeed regenerate limbs such as salamanders. He did a massive study on admissions to Veterans mental hospitals and behaviour in them as a function of the earth’s electric and magnetic field environment. There was indeed a strong connection. He was a fine scientist with the courage to dig in areas where others were unwilling to follow the evidence. His work was a fine example of my mantra that technological progress comes from doing things differently in an unpredictable way. Think about it. Lasers aren’t just better light bulbs. Nuclear rockets aren’t just better chemical rockets. In both cases there were entirely different physics involved.

    Can you tell us the general rules as you see them for the methods of approach of scientists who try to debunk such topics as UFOs, Cold Fusion, space travel?

    The basic approach is always to assume there is nothing to the crazy notions being put forth. Assume if there had been you would already have known about it. Read only the work of those who think the topics are nonsense. I almost never see an anti-UFO professional refer to the large scale scientific studies or to the more than 10 PhD theses that have been done on UFO related topics, or to the many papers presented by scientists at the 40 annual MUFON Symposia. They never subscribe to the journals. Never admit there has been a great deal of sophisticated research done outside of academia.

    Twice I have had academics claim that Roswell couldn’t have happened because if it had loads of academic scientists would have been pulled from their universities to work on figuring out what was going on. I had to strongly point out this was nonsense.

    During World War II the US established a large number of major laboratories with all the requisite equipment and facilities for examination of alien wreckage, data on flight performance, biology of aliens, and also large budgets etc. What they required was top notch professionals who already had high level security clearances, access to top notch equipment, places for storing and preparing classified reports. There were well over a dozen such large scale labs available to those wanting very high level work, all outside academia. These academics were totally ignorant about this huge resource. And still their thinking is the equivalent of assuming that the most advanced communication system is the pony express instead of the internet!

    Science Was Wrong: Startling Truths About Cures, Theories, and Inventions “They” Declared Impossible (New Page Books, 2010) is a fascinating collection of stories about the pioneers who created or thought up the “impossible” cures, theories, and inventions “they” said couldn’t work. How many have suffered or died because cures weren’t accepted? How many inventions have been quashed? You will end up shaking your head in disbelief and even disgust as you learn the answers. 
    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 123.[/alert]

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  • Rock’s Sympathy for the Devil

    Rock’s Sympathy for the Devil

    From New Dawn 121 (Jul-Aug 2010)

    It was popularly believed in the 1930s that the legendary bluesman Robert Johnson, who inspired Muddy Waters, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton, sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for his musical gifts. It was believed Johnson had the ‘Evil Eye’ and was murdered because of his alleged power over women. He seduced the wife of a beer hall owner who in revenge laced the musician’s whisky with arsenic. Many moralists saw his fate as a punishment for dealing with the powers of darkness.

    Johnson is said to have sold his soul to Old Nick during a midnight ceremony at a crossroads. However, that story did not originate with him. In the 1920s and 1930s there are numerous tales of black musicians and gamblers signing a pact with a mysterious ‘man in black’ at the crossroads. Famous examples are the black singer Clara Smith and Robert Johnson’s namesake Tommy Johnston, a decade before him. The dark stranger has been identified by some writers as either the Christian Devil or the West African trickster god Eshu, worshipped in voodoo and taken to the southern states of America by black slaves.

    While there is little evidence of modern pop and rock musicians actually ‘selling their souls’ to the ‘Devil’, the link between popular music and the occult is a strong one. Christian fundamentalists have predictably seen the widespread use of magical and occult symbols in rock music as evidence it is the work of Satan, but the truth is far stranger than their religious fantasies.

    Sometimes the alleged connections of famous rock musicians with occultism surfaced in apocryphal showbiz gossip or rumour. For example, everyone knows that ill-fated glam rock star Marc Bolan studied as a sorcerer’s apprentice with a magician in a French chateau (in fact he actually admitted it), that the late pop diva Dusty Springfield allegedly belonged to a satanic group called the Temple of the Prince in Manchester, and that Jim Morrison of The Doors married a Wiccan high priestess (which was true).

    Then there was the 1970s British musician Graham Bond, accused by his fellow R & B artist Long John Baldry of sacrificing his pet cat in a magical ritual. Bond told his groupies he was one of the illegitimate sons of the infamous ‘black magician’ Aleister Crowley, and that his musical output was designed to contact “higher forces.” Bond also believed he had been cursed by a fellow occultist. When in 1974 the musician fell in front of a train on the London Underground in mysterious circumstances, many thought the curse had worked.

    The Beatles & the Rolling Stones

    The Beatles are well known for flirting with Eastern mysticism and transcendental meditation during their psychedelic hippy stage in the late 1960s. They may also have had darker interests. For instance, the Great Beast 666, Aleister Crowley, is featured (top left corner above) in the photomontage of “people we most admire” on the cover of the Fab Four’s famous album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

    Antiquarian bookseller and Crowley bibliographer Timothy D’Arch Smith relates how the Beatles attended an exhibition of rare books on witchcraft and the occult he held in Swinging London. Jane Asher, Paul McCartney’s then girlfriend, had suggested the visit to him and, according to D’Arch Smith, encouraged him to buy rare books as an investment.

    If the Beatles were mildly interested in the occult, then their main rivals for the pocket money and affection of teenage girls, the Rolling Stones, were definitely involved in a more dramatic way. Despite their respectable middle-class backgrounds, in the Sixties the Stones were deliberately promoted as the ‘bad boys of pop’. It now seems this was a marketing ploy by their then manager Andrew Oldham, and is summed up in the famous newspaper headline, ‘Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?’ If the parents of Middle England had known about their dabbling in the occult, the answer may have been in the negative.

    Lucifer Rising

    The so-called ‘satanic’ influence on the Stones was through the avant-garde filmmaker, Luciferian and Tinseltown gossip-queen Kenneth Anger. He had become interested in the band’s career and particularly in guitarist Brian Jones and his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, a German film actress and model. Jones had some unusual interests, and both he and the pop singer Robert Palmer were fascinated by the master musicians of Joujouka in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco in North Africa. These musicians claimed to be still practising the ancient rites of the goat-footed god Pan. Jones went so far as to travel to North Africa to record an album of the tribal music performed by this pre-Islamic cult.

    In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine Robert Palmer described how he had witnessed one of these rites to Pan. He said the dancing tribesmen appeared to be in an ecstatic trance with their eyes rolled back in their heads. Palmer said that when “the power came down” the dancer was suddenly “not there.” In fact “something else” was looking out of his eyes, which began to “glow like ruby lasers” (Rolling Stone, 23 March 1989).

    Kenneth Anger believed that Anita Pallenberg and Brian Jones, who was to drown in mysterious circumstances in the swimming pool of his Sussex mansion, were witches. Allegedly, Jones showed the filmmaker an extra nipple he had on his inner thigh and told him: “In another time they would have burned me [as a witch].” Extra nipples were regarded by witch-hunters as a sign of the Devil’s Mark. A friend of Anita Pallenberg, Tony Sanchez, believed she kept her drug stash hidden in an old carved wooden chest in her flat. One day he looked inside. Instead of drugs he found it contained bones and pieces of fur and skin from “strange animals.” Mick Jagger’s one time girlfriend Marianne Faithfull described how she and Pallenberg used to sit for hours reading aloud passages from Robert Graves’ book The White Goddess and studying the ancient Celtic tree alphabet.

    In her autobiography Marianne Faithfull claims the gay Anger had a crush on the bisexual Stones’ singer which was not reciprocated. When the filmmaker’s sexual overtures were rejected he became a bit of a nuisance. One day he turned up at the couple’s house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea and bizarrely threw several books by the 18th century poet and mystic William Blake through the window. Jagger responded in disgust at this stunt by burning all the copies of the occult works that Anger had given him by Crowley and the French occultist Eliphas Levi.

    Despite this, Marianne Faithfull got involved in Anger’s experimental movie Lucifer Rising, allegedly financially sponsored by Anita Pallenberg, and with a score originally to be composed by Mick Jagger. Initially the Stones’ singer was to play the leading role in the film, but he got cold feet and backed out of the project altogether. In the first version, made in 1967, the lead was taken by his brother Chris Jagger. Marianne Faithfull became involved in the second version filmed in 1972 and she agreed to take the part of the demon-goddess Lilith.

    Faithfull described the baby-slaying Lilith as one of the classic female archetypes and compared her with pagan goddesses such as Diana, Astarte, Ishtar, Aphrodite and Demeter. However, she added: “From the view of patriarchy, of course, she was the pure incarnation of evil” (Faithfull by Marianne Faithfull with David Datton, 224). Interestingly, the part of the ancient Egyptian god Osiris in the film was played by Donald Cammell, son of Charles Cammell, a friend and biographer of Crowley. The younger Cammell made his own films including the controversial Performance in co-operation with Nic Roeg. It starred Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg and the archetypal English actor Edward Fox. Donald Cammell committed suicide in the 1990s.

    The shooting of Lucifer Rising took place in Egypt and Faithfull claims that as soon as the crew and cast arrived in the country it was obvious Anger did not know what he was doing as either a film director or a magician. At that stage in her life Faithfull was seriously addicted to heroin and admits she did not know what she was doing on the set either. The whole thing was a recipe for disaster. The last sequence of the film was a winter solstice rite shot at a Neolithic site in Germany. During it, Faithfull managed to fall off a mountain. She somersaulted and landed on her feet without sustaining any injury. This convinced her that her magic was stronger than Anger’s. In her autobiography she dismissed him as a “kitsch occultist” and “a witch out of a Hollywood tabloid.”

    Marianne Faithfull claims that both Mick Jagger and the Stones’ lead guitarist Keith Richards were also sceptical about Anger’s “satanic hocus-pocus” and did not take any of it seriously. However, after an incident involving the magician at the house in London now shared by Richards and Anita Pallenberg, Faithfull became seriously spooked out. As a result, she believed she was under psychic attack. Allegedly, she wore a clove of garlic around her neck and slept in a circle of lit candles for protection. Whether this paranoid behaviour was connected to her heroin addiction is not known.

    One of Marianne Faithfull’s tracks on her comeback album Broken English is called ‘Witches Song’. She dedicates it as “my ode to the wild pagan woman I know and have always around me.” Faithfull says she got the idea for the song after she and Mick Jagger visited an exhibition in Madrid of paintings on the theme of the Witches Sabbath by the Spanish artist Goya. Her autobiography also describes an incident when she and Jagger took LSD before visiting Primrose Hill in North London “where the ancient ley lines are supposed to run” and where modern neo-druids hold their seasonal ceremonies. Under the influence of the acid the couple saw “a great face in the sky” they were convinced was the head of the Celtic giant god Bran. This seems to fit with Faithfull’s professed pagan beliefs. In her autobiography she says she believes not in God the Father, but in the Great Goddess and her consort Pan.

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    Jimmy Page & Aleister Crowley

    In 1969 the satanic aura around the rock mega-group Led Zeppelin reached such a pitch that, in echoes of Robert Johnson, rumours circulated in the Los Angeles music scene that its members had signed a pact in their own blood with the Devil to gain fame.

    James Patrick ‘Jimmy’ Page’s well-known interest in the occult fuelled these rumours of the group’s alleged satanic activities. Described by the magazine AllMusic as “one of the all-time most influential, important and versatile [rock] guitarist and songwriters,” Page had been interested in alternative religions since childhood. While a member of the Yardbirds, he had hung out with Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg at their studio flat in South Kensington. Page has never hidden his interest in Aleister Crowley, and Led Zeppelin’s famous album Rune has a photograph of the Great Beast on its cover. In an interview with Sounds magazine in 1976 Page is quoted as saying that Crowley was “a misunderstood genius of the twentieth-century.”

    Jimmy Page purchased as many artefacts and first edition books belonging to Crowley that he could find. In 1969, Kenneth Anger rented Crowley’s old (seriously haunted) house Boleskine on the shores of Loch Ness where he lived in the 1900s for a few months. When it came on the market for sale, Anger suggested to Page he should buy it. This he did and hired an occult artist called Charles Pace to paint suitable atmospheric magical murals in each room. The Led Zeppelin guitarist could be seen driving around the area like a Scottish laird in a Land Rover with a stack of stag’s antlers on the bonnet. Page also visited Sicily and contemplated buying the old villa where Crowley established his ‘Abbey of Thelema’ in the 1920s.

    In the early 1970s Page opened an occult bookshop in Kensington called The Equinox. It was done out in a futuristic style with glass bookshelves and display cabinets and chrome steel pillars. Under its auspices, Page published a facsimile of Crowley’s 1904 edition of the medieval grimoire Goetia.

    Kenneth Anger approached Jimmy Page and asked him to provide a soundtrack for his ongoing film project Lucifer Rising. Unfortunately, the two men fell out when Page only managed to produce 23 minutes of music and Anger wanted 28 minutes. The filmmaker accused Page of being a mere dabbler in the occult and a drug addict so out of his mind he could not finish the film score. However, in 1976 Page lent Anger the basement of his London house for film editing purposes. Again, the two men did not see eye to eye and Page allegedly cursed the filmmaker. Page later branded the incident as “silly and pathetic” and said he still respected Anger as an occultist.

    There has been a lot of debate about whether Jimmy Page ever belonged to one of the modern versions of Crowley’s magical group the OTO (Ordo Templis Orientis or Order of the Eastern Temple). In fact, the jury seems to be out on whether Page is an actual magical practitioner at all. In this respect New Musical Express journalist Nick Kent dismisses rumours the guitarist spends his time with “his head in a cowl ritually slaughtering various species of livestock.” Kent instead says from his experience Page is “just another seeker after esoteric knowledge, a collector of dusty old books, and committed student of the ‘magical’ information that was supposedly contained in their yellowed pages.”

    Although Jimmy Page’s interest in Crowley and the occult is well known, his Led Zeppelin colleague Robert Plant also has esoteric interests. These manifest in a study of folklore, Norse and Germanic mythology, and reading ‘sword and sorcery’ novels. Plant spent most of his life living on the Welsh Border and in an interview with the rock music magazine Kerrang! he said he often visited the Black Mountains in South Wales. There he rediscovered his roots in the local Celtic culture. Using an ordnance survey map, he wandered the hills visiting Bronze Age sites and places where the Welsh had battled with the Saxons.

    David Bowie

    Another famous rock star who openly admits an interest in the occult, magic and Crowley is David Bowie (born David Robert Jones). In the 1970s he says he studied the Kabbalah and “Crowleyism” and more recently became interested in Gnosticism. On a practical level the singer used Tarot cards and a crystal ball for divination, an ouija board to contact spirits, and performed magical rituals for exorcism and psychic protection. His early album Hunky-Dory features a song called ‘Quicksand’ that references both Crowley and the Victorian magical group Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

    According to David Bowie’s wife Angie in her autobiography, her husband’s interest in the occult was due to his desire to outdo Jimmy Page. Allegedly, he saw the Led Zeppelin guitarist as a magical rival. Bowie eventually decided, possibly because of Page’s interest in him, that Crowley and his works were “small shit.” For that reason he began studying Tibetan magic which he claimed was far more powerful than anything the Great Beast or Page had ever done.

    In an interview with New Musical Express (February 1997) David Bowie admits he had been into “old fashioned magic” in the 1970s, and said he always believed Crowley was a charlatan. He reveals that Arthur Edward Waite, a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, and the Welsh-born occultist Dion Fortune, author of Psychic Self-Defence, have been important to him. In fact, Bowie used Fortune’s book extensively when he believed he was under psychic attack. Talking of a house he rented in Los Angeles in 1975, Bowie said he decorated it with ancient Egyptian artefacts. This was because, “I had this more than passing interest in Egyptian mysticism and the Kabbalah…” (Stage Fascination: David Bowie the Definite Story by David Buckley, 235).

    Angie Bowie says the musician was heavily involved with occult activities in 1975-76. This coincides with a period when he used cocaine and she believed this made him paranoid. Apparently, Bowie stored bottles of his own urine in the fridge and carefully disposed of his nail and hair clippings. This was in case magical practitioners obtained these personal items in order to cast spells on him. He also set up an altar in his sitting room with black candles on it, painted occult symbols on the walls, and performed magical banishing rituals for protection. Angie Bowie once witnessed him exorcise a swimming pool he believed was haunted.

    When the couple were viewing properties to rent or buy in Hollywood they came across an old house with a pentagram of five-pointed star painted on the floor. Bowie freaked out and said he could not live there as the building had been used for black magic rites. One day he phoned his wife and told her witches were trying to steal his semen. Allegedly they wanted to create a test-tube baby and then sacrifice it in a satanic rite. It turned out the ‘witches’ were just some innocent groupies he met in a bar.

    At this difficult point in his life Bowie also flirted with neo-Nazism. He explained in an interview with the British rock music journalist Tony Parsons in 1993 that this was only because he was fascinated by the use of occult symbols like the swastika by the original Nazi Party in Germany. He was interested in their quest for the Holy Grail because he was also searching for its meaning (Stage Fascination: David Bowie the Definite Story by David Buckley, 235-236). Bowie once said that it might be a good idea to have a fascist dictatorship in Britain, although he later denied he was serious and claimed it was a joke.

    Black Sabbath & Heavy Metal

    Partly as a reaction to the hippy ‘flower power’ and ‘peace and love’ movement of the late Sixties, heavy metal bands began to appear using violent satanic imagery and playing loud over-amplified rock music. Groups such as Warlock, Saxon, Venom, Motley Crue, W.A.S.P., Slayer, Iron Maiden, Incubus and Bathory put out albums with covers decorated with human skulls, pentagrams, hooded figures, gravestones, goat-headed demons and vampires. One of the most famous and pioneering heavy metal bands Black Sabbath came out of Birmingham in the industrial Midlands of England in 1969. They combined heavy guitar riffs with satanic inspired lyrics and an obsession with the gothic dark side that soon gave them a dedicated, if rather odd, fan base.

    The band’s distinctive name was taken from an old horror movie starring English actor Boris Karloff, famous for his movie interpretation of Dr. Frankenstien’s monster. Originally, Black Sabbath started out as a jazz-blues band until they became influenced by the ‘black magic’ novels of the thriller writer Dennis Wheatley and books by Aleister Crowley. Their leader ‘Geezer’ Butler was lent a 16th century grimoire or book of magic. Its contents so freaked him out that he locked it in a cupboard before going to bed. During the night he had a spectral visitation from a dark shadowy figure who stood at the end of his bed. In the morning when Butler opened the cupboard the grimoire had vanished and it was never seen again.

    Butler claims the band was invited to play a gig at a Witches Sabbath at Stonehenge, which sounds like something out of a Dennis Wheatley novel. When the boys refused the chief “warlock” of the coven ritually cursed the band. Geezer says he consulted a “white witch” to get the curse lifted and was told the band had to wear crosses to ward off the evil forces directed at them. Apparently, lead singer Ozzy Osbourne’s father, who was a bit of a handyman, made the crosses for each of the band members to wear.

    Ozzy Osbourne always denies he was seriously into the occult, although he did have his Tarot cards read – twice. Famously he said the only evil spirits that interest him are whisky, gin and vodka! He describes the strange people attracted to the band, who habitually wear white face make-up and black hooded robes, as “freaks.” Ozzy says the only good thing about all the satanic stuff is it gave the band free publicity increasing their record sales and bank accounts.

    Some of the heavy metal bands took their interest in witchcraft and magic more seriously. One of these, for a while, was Black Widow who played a mixture of progressive rock and folk music and used demonic imagery in their act based on serious research. In 1968 the group’s manager approached Maxine and Alex Sanders, the so-called ‘King and Queen of the Witches’. He wanted to know if the couple could recommend a nubile young witch with dancing skills to take part in their new stage act. This featured a magician played by one of the band’s members conjuring up a demon who was once an ancient goddess called Ashtaroth.

    Several professional dancers auditioned for the part of the demon-goddess. Each one suffered fainting fits during rehearsals and felt they were being possessed by an evil spirit. In desperation the band wanted to hire a real witch who would not be fazed by the magical goings-on. Black Widow’s manager said the Sanders were happy to help and he described them as “clever business people” only interested in making money in any way they could.

    A member of the Sanders’ coven volunteered for the role and the rehearsals were successful. Unfortunately, on the day of the first performance at the Lyceum Theatre in London, she fell ill. Alex Sanders volunteered his wife and the high priestess of the coven Maxine as a suitable stand-in. When the lead singer of Black Widow playing the sorcerer invoked the demon-goddess and accidentally stepped out of the protective magical circle, she was supposed to attack him. In her autobiography Maxine Sanders says the singer complained afterwards about the bruises he suffered from the physical assault by the ‘Queen of the Witches’.

    Danny Carey

    Another more contemporary band called Tool and its lead singer Danny Carey are well known for their interest in all things magical. Carey collects rare limited edition publications by such modern occult practitioners as Crowley, Kenneth Grant, Austin Osman Spare and Andrew D. Chumbley. During their recordings of albums, Tool use magical banishing rituals to get rid of unwelcome influences left in the studio by previous performers. They have also been known to employ talismans and occult sigils used by the Elizabethan magician and astrologer Dr. John Dee in their gigs. During a South American tour, local Christian workers refused to handle the band’s equipment because it was “satanic.”

    The 1990s saw a sinister link established between rock music and Satanism with the rise of the so-called ‘black metal’ or ‘death metal’ groups. These new bands were committed to an anti-Christian philosophy of anarchism, nihilism, violence and an obsession with death that made Black Sabbath stage appearances look like a vicar’s tea party. Possibly the most dramatic and violent manifestation of this new trend was in Scandinavia. A new cultural trend united satanic beliefs with atavistic forms of neo-paganism and extreme nationalist right-wing politics promoting racism and white supremacy. This deadly combination was to lead to arson and murder.

    In 1992 an ancient wooden stave church was burnt down in a firebomb attack. Rumours began circulating that hard-core black metal fans were responsible for the outrage. It was alleged they were pagan Viking revivalists who expressed neo-Nazi views. Further church burnings and graveyard desecrations took place followed by murders involving rival groups of black metal fans and biker gangs. Media reports said that self-styled teenage satanists saw neo-Nazism and rock music as cultural stepping stones to a revival of Aryan-based paganism. Because the historic Christian churches were built on the site of pagan temples, they had to be destroyed before the heathen ‘old religion’ could be established again.

    Today the number of rock bands using satanic and occult imagery is increasing. The new ‘high priest’ of the Church of Satan in the USA, Boyd Rice, is himself a musician. Critics have dubbed his musical output as “sonic terrorism as an art form.” Strangely enough, his satanic master, Anton LaVey, who found the Church of Satan in the 1960s, preferred Gershwin and Cole Porter with his bedtime cocoa.

    It seems certain that in the future wherever and however rock music is played, there will always be those who claim, quite literally, the Devil has the best tunes.

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 121.[/alert]

    [alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]

    Bibliography

    Heavy Metal Thunder by Neil Aldis and James Sherry, Mitchell Beazley, 2006

    Backstage Passes: Life on the Wild Side with David Bowie by Angie Bowie and Patrick Carr, Orion, 1993

    Stage Fascination: David Bowie the Definite Story by David Buckley, Virgin Books, 1999

    Robert Plant: Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page & the Solo Years by Neil Daniels, Independent Music Press, 2008

    The Lives of John Lennon and the Beatles by Hunter Davies, McGraw Hill Books USA, 1985

    Hammer of the Gods: Led Zeppelin Unauthorised by Stephen Davies, Pan Books, 1995

    The Book of the Beast by Timothy D’Arch-Smith, Mandrake Press 2010

    Faithfull by Marianne Faithfull with David Datton, Michael Joseph, 1994

    No One Gets Out of Here Alive: Jim Morrison and the Doors by Danny Hopkins and Sugarman, Warner Books USA, 1980

    Apathy for the Devil: A 1970’s Memoir by Nick Kent, Faber and Faber Limited, 2010

    I Am Ozzy by Ozzie Osbourne with Chris Agnes, Sphere, 2009

    Firechild: The Life and Magic of Maxine Sanders ‘Witch Queen’ by Maxine Sanders, Mandrake Press, 2008

    Bowie: Loving the Alien by Christopher Sandford, Little, Brown and Company, 1996

    When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin by Mick Wall, Orion Books, 2008

    Led Zeppelin: From Early Days to Page and Plant by Ritchie Yorke, Virgin Books, 1999.

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
    For our reproduction notice, click here.

  • Synarchy: The Hidden Hand Behind the European Union

    Synarchy: The Hidden Hand Behind the European Union

    From New Dawn Special Issue 18 (Dec 2011)

    While questions remain about the existence of a single global elite with an agenda that goes beyond simply keeping itself very, very rich, there are certainly groups that want to run the world for quite other reasons. And with the increasing globalisation of political and economic institutions, it has become easier for a relatively small group to inveigle itself into quite staggeringly influential positions. One cabal in particular reveals – alarmingly – what a small group, driven by a fanatical belief system, can achieve from the shadows. And writing as we are in the United Kingdom, this group is on our doorstep, and has been for over a century. And although perhaps small in number, its reach is big.

    Our research into this subject – detailed in The Stargate Conspiracy (1999) and The Sion Revelation (2006) – demonstrated that every major step in the development of the European Union from a simple trading body to a borderline superstate can be traced back to a very specific ideology, which upholds rule by an elite from behind the scenes. But this isn’t just about politics. Astonishingly, this ideology is also about mysticism and magic.

    This shadowy politico-occult movement is synarchy, which was developed by the Frenchman Joseph Alexandre Saint-Yves, the Marquis d’Alveydre, in opposition to the rise of anarchy in the second half of the nineteenth century. To him the ideal synarchist state would be a rigid social hierarchy topped by an elite that is predestined to rule – absolutely at odds with the then emerging concepts of democracy, individual liberty and social mobility.

    Central to Saint-Yves was the creation of a united Europe, a call for which appears on the first page of his first book on synarchy, Keys to the East (1877). He believed that his perfectly balanced society reflected deep cosmic laws, with which his elite perfectly resonated. They are also directly guided by the powers that rule the universe – as he believed himself to be.

    Saint-Yves claimed that in the ancient past an advanced civilisation – based, of course, on synarchic principles – had governed the whole world. This golden age lasted from 7500 to 4000 BCE, before imploding due to a global catastrophe, remembered in legends such as Atlantis. Since then the occult powers-that-be have periodically reintroduced the revelation of synarchy, sending or inspiring figures such as Moses and Jesus – and, naturally, Saint-Yves himself.

    He adopted the idea, popular in nineteenth-century esoteric and theosophical circles, that spiritually advanced masters – to him preservers of the synarchic revelation – existed in Agartha, a hidden realm in the Himalayas. He confided in his closest associates that he had been visited by its emissaries.

    Another significant aspect of his version of history was that clandestine societies had transmitted the secret of synarchy throughout the ages. It comes as no surprise to discover that his ‘spiritual fathers of synarchy’ were the usual suspects – the Knights Templar.

    For a time in the 1880s and 90s Saint-Yves’ ideas were seriously discussed in political circles in France and elsewhere in Europe. In 1886 he formed the Syndicate of the Professional and Economic Press to promote synarchy to political and business leaders. Several members of the French Parliament joined, including government minister François Césaire Demahy – later a founder of the influential nationalist movement Action Française – and Paul Deschanel, who became President of France in 1920. Saint-Yves was made a chévalier of the Légion d’honneur in 1893.

    In the end, however, Saint-Yves’ followers realised things would have to change radically. After his death in 1909, and particularly in the uncertain aftermath of the First World War, they knew they could never achieve their ambitions through conventional means – and turned to stealth. They decided on inveigling their members into key positions in political and economic institutions intending on creating, in the words of Richard F. Kuisel, a specialist in twentieth-century French political history, “a world government by an initiated elite.”1 Synarchy came to stand for ‘rule by secret society’, which in practice makes it difficult to distinguish between card-carrying synarchists and those merely under their influence.

    Towards Europe’s ‘United States’

    The most high-profile late nineteenth-century devotee of Saint-Yves was the physician Gérard Encausse (‘Papus’), a leading light among French esoteric societies. He blended the teachings of his ‘spiritual master’, the eighteenth century occult philosopher Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, and his ‘intellectual master’ Saint-Yves. Encausse founded the Martinist Order, into which he absorbed synarchist principles – so that, unusually, it had political ambitions, including the formation of ‘a United States of Europe’. Delusions of grandeur, one might have thought…

    Encausse’s death in 1916 resulted in a schism in the Martinist Order over its involvement in politics. The activists, under Victor Blanchard – head of the secretariat of the Chamber of Deputies of the French Parliament – formed the breakaway Martinist and Synarchic Order, which established the Synarchic Central Committee in 1922, designed to pull in promising young civil servants and “younger members of great business families.”2 The Committee soon became the Synarchic Empire Movement, or MSE (Mouvement Synarchique d’Empire) in 1930, under dedicated firebrands Jeanne Canudo and Vivien Postel du Mas.

    Canudo is best remembered today as an energetic campaigner for European unity and founder of several youth organisations in the 1930s, select members of which were inducted into the esoteric synarchist orders that she led together with Postel du Mas.

    An important witness to these events was the celebrated Parisian litterateur Maurice Girodias (publisher of scandalous sensations such as The Story of O, Lolita, Henry Miller’s Sexus and William S. Burrough’s The Naked Lunch). As a teenager in the 1930s he was involved both with Canudo’s European groups and an esoteric society that met at Postel du Mas’ luxurious apartment to hear the ‘secret masters’ speaking through teenage trance medium Laurette. Girodias said of Postel du Mas’ magical salons: “I saw at his feet men of science, company directors, and bankers.”3

    Beyond Top Secret

    The MSE produced an important but beyond Top Secret document – its very existence unknown to outsiders until 1941 – entitled The Synarchist Revolutionary Pact for the French Empire, usually known simply as the Synarchist Pact. The exact authorship is uncertain but the main candidates are Postel du Mas and the businessman Jean Coutrot. It was only as a result of Coutrot’s apparent suicide under the Nazi Occupation, when copies were found among his possessions, that anyone knew the Pact existed.4

    This highly scary document set out a programme for “invisible revolution” or “revolution from above”: that is, taking over a state from within by infiltrating into high office. The first step was to take control of France, before creating the “European Union” – then, tomorrow…

    Saint-Yves did not invent the concept of a federal Europe. For example, Victor Hugo is credited with first using the term ‘United States of Europe’, although – probably not coincidentally – he was a close friend of Saint-Yves in the French ex-pat community in the Channel Islands in the 1860s.

    But it became a serious political force when the Pan-European movement was established in 1923 by the Austrian Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, described by Otto von Habsburg – in rather telling terms – as the “guide and prophet” of a united Europe. He famously won over Winston Churchill, who began espousing European unity from 1930 and wrote a foreword to the Count’s 1953 book An Idea Conquers the World. The Count was a committed believer that cosmic forces shape events, giving him at least the profile of a synarchist. (Sadly we have no information about Churchill’s views on the more occult aspects.) But there is evidence of a closer connection with the French synarchists.

    In their 1968 Synarchy and Power, André Ulmann and Henri Azeau interviewed one of the inter-war members of the MSE, who claimed it had “inspired the action of Coudenhove-Kalergi and his pan-Europeanism.”5 Coudenhove-Kalergi also lent his support to pro-Europe groups formed by the MSE’s Jeanne Canudo.

    Maurice Girodias’ involvement with the synarchists began as a 16-year-old when, at a Theosophical Society lecture in 1935, he was intrigued by a group in flamboyant Templar garb led by Postel du Mas and Canudo. He was told they were “schismatic theosophists with political designs, and they are linked to Count Coudenhove-Kalergi… who is a champion of the United States of Europe… Their aim is to launch a pan-European political party and to institute in the entire world, commencing with Europe, a society obedient to a spiritualist idea.”6 In conversation with Girodias Postel du Mas named Coudenhove-Kalergi as one of the two major promoters of his and Canudo’s plans.

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    The Hood and the Illuminati

    In the tumultuous aftermath of the First World War, like the rest of Europe France became polarised between communism and fascism. The mid-1930s saw the creation of several clandestine far-right groups, both civilian and military, which were integrated into a single network under the control of a three-man Superior Council. Although it gave itself no particular name, the press dubbed it the Cagoule – or the sinister-sounding ‘Hood’.

    Indeed, the Chicago Tribune’s correspondent in Paris, William Shirer, summed up the Cagoule as “deliberately terrorist, resorting to murder and dynamiting, and its aim was to overthrow the Republic and set up an authoritarian régime on the model of the Fascist state of Mussolini.”7 Italy supplied the Cagoule with funds and arms and, in return, the Cagoule assassinated anti-fascist Italian refugees in Paris.

    The Cagoule was led by chévalier of the Légion d’honneur Eugène Deloncle, with the other Council members being Dr Henri Martin and Colonel Georges Groussard, who oversaw cabals within the military. It was funded by wealthy industrialists, including Eugène Schueller, founder of L’Oréal – who obviously thought synarchy was “worth it” – in whose company’s headquarters the group met.

    Although most of the Cagoule were simply anti-communist extremists, who had probably never heard of synarchy, there’s no doubt that there was a strong connection between the MSE and Superior Council, particularly Deloncle. The connection was acknowledged by Shirer8 and by Richard Kuisel, who writes: “Strangely enough, although the Cagoule was an archenemy of Freemasonry, it imitated Masonic ritual, symbolism, and method of recruitment. The head of the Cagoule, Eugène Deloncle, even likened its recruiting procedures to the ‘chain method’ of the Illuminati.”9 

    Basically, through the Cagoule, the synarchists had taken over terrorist groups for their own ends, planning to precipitate a state of emergency that would enable its chosen man to step in as a strong leader to restore order “in the interests of public safety.” And their chosen man was Marshal Philippe Pétain.

    In September 1937 a series of bomb explosions rocked Paris, intended to kick-start a wave of armed attacks to spread chaos and confusion. But a lucky break led the police to caches of arms and ammunition around the city and Deloncle was arrested.

    An official report pointed to the MSE, noting “affiliates of the Synarchic Movement were very numerous and already in place within, and at the head of, the major organs of the state, ready to take charge.”10

    It is hard to overestimate the influence of the synarchists. They were – and no doubt still are – hardly a bunch of nobodies. A major player in this story was none other than François Mitterrand, later France’s longest-serving President. Although he was to reinvent himself as a socialist, before and during the Second World War he was very much of the extreme right.

    Even at the time it was rumoured that Mitterrand was a member of the Cagoule. But more sensationally, Henri Martin’s family claimed he had actually planted the 1937 bombs.11 But while no firm evidence exists to support Mitterrand being a cagoulard, and he strenuously denied it when confronted with his shady past in the 1990s, he certainly had the connections, besides the relevant political – and indeed, esoteric – views.

    Mitterrand believed in rule by an elite – preferably an elite of one: himself. Although from a relatively modest background, he always had an unshakeable belief in his personal superiority, even seeing significance in his family’s origins in the town of Bourges, where a field called the Champs de Mitterrand marks the exact centre of France. ‘Mitterrand’ means ‘middle of the land’.

    When the ultra-ambitious Mitterrand finally achieved power he notoriously governed through his ‘clan’ of friends and relatives, famously remarking that he needed only “fifty well-placed friends to run the country.”12 And he began building the clan during those pre-war days, around leading cagoulards, particularly those close to Deloncle.

    Mitterrand was a close friend of conspirator in the assassination of the Italian anti-fascist Rosselli brothers, Jean Bouyver, and of François Méténier, Deloncle’s assistant who was sentenced to 20 years for his part in the 1937 bombings. But the closest family connection was with Deloncle: Mitterrand’s brother Robert married Deloncle’s sister-in-law just before the outbreak of war. It is inconceivable that Mitterrand never met the Cagoule’s mastermind and top synarchist. Also, as we will see, like Deloncle Mitterrand was deeply fascinated by esoteric and mystical matters.

    Secrets of the Hitler-friendly State

    Although the Cagoule’s plans to create a state of emergency to bring Pétain to power failed, of course this was achieved three years later by an even greater crisis. In June 1940 France fell to Nazi Germany, Pétain emerging as the leader of the new Hitler-friendly French State, based in Vichy.

    Almost immediately after France’s ignominious surrender some claimed elements in the military had connived in the defeat, believing that jumping into bed with the Nazis would enable Pétain to achieve his cherished national reorganisation.

    So it is all the more disturbing that one of Ulmann and Azeau’s ex-MSE informants told them that a senior figure behind the group and “one of the mentors” of the young men being groomed for future greatness in the 1920s and 30s was none other than General Maxime Weygand.13 No doubt not coincidentally married to Saint-Yves’ great-niece, he was Supreme Commander of French and British forces at the outbreak of the Second World War, and in June 1940 it was he who advised the French government to ask Hitler for terms.

    French researcher Roger Mennevée argued that Vichy represented the climax of the first phase of the plan outlined in the Synarchist Pact – taking power in France in preparation to extend it to Europe – using the Germans to do what the Cagoule had failed to three years earlier.14 Ulmann and Azeau note that, coincidence or not, Vichy was organised precisely on synarchist lines.

    Both the Occupation and Vichy were seen as an opportunity by the synarchists. In Paris, Postel du Mas and Canudo positively welcomed the German overlords. One investigator into synarchy notes of one of her pro-Europe organisations, “the majority were found, after 1940, either in the corridors of power in Vichy, or in the collaborationist circles in Paris.”15

    In Vichy, unsurprisingly, former cagoulards rose to the top, particularly in the dreaded Milice, Vichy’s equivalent of the Gestapo. Deloncle was freed from prison – and formed a political party to build a ‘new Europe’, while Henri Martin and Colonel Groussard enjoyed high-level roles in the intelligence and surveillance network. Historian John Hellman states bluntly that former cagoulards were behind the “manipulation, control, and orientation of Pétainist France.”16

    Although a one-to-one connection between the Cagoule and the synarchs may sometimes be something of a leap, the latter were undoubtedly active in Vichy. Shirer declares there is “no doubt” that synarchists “infiltrated the highest posts in business and finance and in the government bureaucracy.”17 Certainly many of the young hopefuls groomed by the MSE rose to Vichy’s upper echelons – including Yves Bouthillier, Minister of Finance from 1940 to 1942.

    What about Mitterrand? Imprisoned in June 1940, he escaped from the Occupied territory in December 1941 to the Vichy zone. He was welcomed by ex-cagoulards who got him various government jobs (his main sponsor was the father-in-law of both his brother and Deloncle) and was even awarded Vichy’s highest honour for services to the state, the Francisque Gallique, in 1943.

    Soon afterwards Mitterrand hastily changed sides, joining the Resistance and making his way to London to ally himself with the Free French – the only episode allowed to be remembered after the war. He wasn’t the only Vichyite to jump ship. Many French synarchists began cosying up to the Allies, as it was increasingly obvious that the tide had turned against Hitler. Henri Martin joined the American covert organisation, the OSS, and Deloncle established contact with the British SOE, although he was killed in a gun battle with the Gestapo in January 1944.

    In November 1943 a group of Free French analysts drew up a report explicitly examining synarchists in Vichy and, lately, in the Resistance, acknowledging the reality of synarchy and its considerable influence.18

    Unbelievably, Mitterrand emerged from the conflict a Resistance hero and a left-wing politician, his connections with Vichy and his far-right background assigned to the collective amnesia that conveniently gripped France after the war.

    But as he clearly had cagoulard sympathies and connections, he must have shared their aims – despite his later bluster to the contrary. And with his interests, associations and chameleon-like changing of political colours in order to achieve his goals he certainly looks like the perfect synarchist. But most suspicious by far are his extraordinary efforts to create the European Union…

    The EU: An Alternative History

    The ‘European project’ began on 9 May 1950 with French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman’s announcement that France and West Germany had agreed to co-ordinate their coal and steel industries. Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg took up his offer to join in, leading seven years later to the Treaty of Rome that established the European Economic Community (EEC).

    Schuman was only the front man. The prime mover was actually Jean Monnet, the most influential businessman and economist in post-war Europe. Period. The massive international power base he had built up before and during the war gave him immense political influence while keeping out of the public eye. It was Monnet who had secured the Allies’ backing for General de Gaulle against Roosevelt’s opposition, and in return, de Gaulle gave him responsibility for rebuilding the French economy and industry – a position he used to achieve his great dream, laying the foundations for the EEC.

    The ‘Schuman Declaration’ was the result of intrigue, trickery and subterfuge by Monnet,19 his most audacious trick being to get French and West German governments to set up a supranational organisation to co-ordinate their industries without realising exactly what they had signed up to. This radical new concept, of an organisation with control over individual nations’ industries but with its own, outside autonomy, laid the foundation for all that came after. Unsurprisingly, Monnet became president of the new body, called – with a chillingly Orwellian tone – the High Authority. Shuman became the first president of the European Parliament in 1958.

    What was really going on? A rather large clue lies in the fact that Monnet was another pre-war protégé of the Synarchist Empire Movement. In 1936, Vivien Postel du Mas told Maurice Girodias that, alongside Coudenhove-Kalergi, Monnet was an influential promoter of the synarchist agenda. He certainly publicly supported Canudo’s pro-Europe groups. And one of Ulmann and Azeau’s ex-MSE informants went so far as to describe Monnet as a “true synarch… whose membership of the movement was never in doubt for the true initiates.”20 (Note the occult-sounding “initiates.”)

    Schuman, too, had pre-war synarchist connections, although not as direct: he had worked closely on political reform in France and European integration with the professor of law Louis Le Fur, a synarchy activist.

    Power for Power’s Sake

    The Single European Act of 1986, which established free trade and movement between EEC states, was the culmination of the process set in motion by the Schuman Declaration. Over the years the EEC had come to include the UK and Ireland, among others, but the original idea had gone as far as it could.

    It was Mitterrand who went beyond the original concept by proposing not just closer economic, but also political, union. The 1992 European Union (‘Maastricht’) Treaty not only turned the EEC into the EU, but for the first time gave the European Parliament powers over member nations (until then it had only an advisory role). Was this the beginning of a European superstate? It also agreed on a single currency, establishing the ‘eurozone’ and the European Central Bank – now terrifyingly beleaguered. All this was Mitterrand’s initiative (aided by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl), including changing the name to the ‘European Union’. Straight out of the Synarchist Pact.

    Mitterrand made his second bid for the presidency in 1981 – but unlike the first sixteen years before, backed by Jean Monnet, this one was successful. He held the office for two seven-year terms, only being prevented from a third term by the onset of the cancer of which he was to die in 1996. His presidency is remembered for its corruption and the blatant nepotism of his ‘clan’ being rewarded with positions of power.

    Political historians accept that Mitterrand was purely interested in power for power’s sake, and for the enrichment of himself and his clan, with no real political agenda or vision – except when it came to the ‘European project’. There, he was driven by the desire to see a fully integrated Europe, which he declared “takes precedence over everything.”

    But was Mitterrand a card-carrying synarchist? He moved in the right circles, through his pre-war associations with the Cagoule’s leadership. His pursuit of closer European integration certainly fits the synarchists’ core objective. And his interest in esoteric matters also fits the profile – which tends to be downplayed by Mitterrand’s biographers, although it is explored in Nicolas Bonnal’s Mitterrand, the Great Initiate (2001). He employed astrologers – even for major foreign policy decisions – believed in reincarnation, and was interested in UFOs.

    Even more intriguing to Dan Brown fans – and indeed, our own – is the fact that he had a special veneration for Mary Magdalene, focused on her cult centre at Vézelay. And much has been made of him visiting the celebrated ‘village of mystery’ of Rennes-le-Château (actually only the most high-profile of several visits) during his 1981 election campaign.

    Nicknamed ‘the Sphinx’, Mitterrand was also fascinated by ancient civilisations: as President he oversaw a great accumulation of Egyptian antiquities by French museums and universities, believing there was some connection between that civilisation and ancient France. Saint-Yves would have agreed.

    As President, Mitterrand also spent some 30 billion francs on a major programme of public building, mostly in Paris. Like all egomaniacs he was driven to leave his solid, tangible mark on history. But apparently, there was more to it than that. His monuments’ esoteric symbolism is acknowledged even by mainstream writers, such as Marie Delarue in her 1999 study, tellingly entitled A Republican Pharaoh. She refers to the Parisian buildings as “a journey for initiates,” noting they “seem to relate more to personal destiny and François Mitterrand’s pronounced taste for hermeticism and the Sacred Science, than to the politics of socialist governments.”21

    The most famous of his monuments is the great glass pyramid outside the Louvre, unveiled in 1993 to mark the bicentenary of the French Revolution, and clearly reflecting a link between ancient Egypt and France. But the most imposing public work is the Grande Arche de la Fraternité in the La Défence area of Paris, completed in 1989 and designed by the Danish architect Otto von Spreckelsen. Bizarrely – and rather ambitiously – it represents a three-dimensional ‘shadow’ of a hyperdimensional cube that he called a “porte cosmique”: ‘cosmic gateway’ or perhaps even ‘stargate’…

    But “the most beautiful, most esoteric and least known of the Mitterrandian Great Works”22 – and his personal favourite – is the 1989 Monument to the Rights of Man and the Citizen in the Parc du Champs-de-Mars, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. Modelled on an Egyptian funerary temple and aligned to the Sun on the summer solstice, it is literally covered in esoteric symbolism, much of it obviously Masonic. After Mitterrand’s death his staff revealed that he often visited it at night, silently meditating.

    In both action and belief Mitterrand certainly fits the profile of the synarchist. But remember that synarchy’s elite believed itself to be in direct contact with powerful non-human intelligences who effectively pulled the strings of those in power. Or perhaps Mitterrand was simply under the synarchist elite.

    So…

    Nobody can pretend the journey from the Schuman Declaration to today’s EU has been untroubled. It has been repeatedly obstructed by those opposed to a federal Europe, and diverted by vested interests – political, economic and even criminal – seeking to turn it to their advantage. The whole thing simply can’t have been planned and directed exclusively by the synarchist elite. But on the other hand, it is undeniable that things have turned out how Saint-Yves and his followers would have wanted. And given that all the major steps along the way were the initiative of individuals with direct synarchist connections, it would equally be wrong to dismiss their influence on the EU’s creation.

    Of course, Saint-Yves’ vision did not end with the creation of the EU and the eurozone. They merely marked the beginning of the ultimate synarchist dream of a true United States of Europe. Building on those foundations, and bringing about even closer integration, depends on overcoming the individual nations’ interests, which has always presented a problem – unless the situation changes drastically.

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    Footnotes

    1. Richard F. Kuisel, ‘The Legend of the Vichy Synarchy’, in French Historical Studies, spring 1970, 378.

    2. André Ulmann and Henri Azeau, Synarchie et pouvoir (Julliard, 1968), 63.

    3. Maurice Girodias, Une journée sur le terre (Éditions de la Différence, 1990), vol. I, 411.

    4. The Pact was finally published in 1946 by Raoul Hussan, writing under the pseudonym Geoffrey de Charnay, in Synarchie: Panorama de 25 années d’activité occulte (Médicis).

    5. Ulmann and Azeau, 64.

    6. Girodias, vol. I, 149.

    7. William L. Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Enquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 (William Heinemann, 1970), 209.

    8. See Shirer, 217-20.

    9. Kuisel, 385.

    10. Quoted in Jean-Raymond Tournoux, L’Histoire secrète (Plon, 1962), 173.

    11. The allegation was made to journalist Pierre Péan, during his research for Une jeunesse française: François Mitterrand 1934-1947 (Fayard, 1994), see page 109.

    12. Quoted in John Laughland, The Death of Politics: France under Mitterrand (Michael Joseph, 1994), 60.

    13. Ulmann and Azeau, 116.

    14. Writing in Action, 2 November 1945.

    15. De Charnay, 69.

    16. John Hellman, The Knight-Monks of Vichy France: Uriage, 1940-1945 (Liverpool University Press, 1997), 331.

    17. Shirer, 218.

    18. The report is reproduced in Ulmann and Azeau, pages 293-310. Ulmann was one of the Free French analysts, who worked alongside Mitterrand after his ‘defection’.

    19. See, for example, Merry and Serge Bromberger, Jean Monnet and the United States of Europe (Coward-McCann, 1969).

    20. Ulmann and Azeau, 63.

    21. Marie Delarue, Un pharaon républicain (Jacques Grancher, 1999), 8.

    22. Delarue, 50.

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
    For our reproduction notice, click here.

  • The First Race: Out-of-Australia, Not Africa!

    The First Race: Out-of-Australia, Not Africa!

    Over the last decade, all manner of unexpected archaeological discoveries have led to many experts questioning much of what was assumed to be fact. Recent findings and field-work relating to little ‘hobbits’ in Flores Island, Siberian hominids with mtDNA connections to people of Papua New Guinea, the exclusivity of our distinct genetic Homo sapiens code being compromised by a 4% Neanderthal input, and a variety of unexpected findings have called into question many elemental assumptions held about the past.

    Professor Clive Gamble (Southampton University) succinctly summarised the current impasse and polarisation this has caused, when declaring we have to construct “a completely new map of the world and how we peopled it.”1 Granted, our response to Gamble’s call may seem radical, however, these discoveries, found not only in America but throughout the entire Indo-Pacific Region, all point to the same ancient southern inspiration.

    After extensive consultation and research, we are of the opinion that at some time in the distant past, no less than 50,000 years ago and possibly much earlier, Aboriginal men and women set sail from Australia and began exploring foreign lands. They were the bearers of new insights and options, and bequeathed humanity the cornerstones of civilisation: religion, culture, gender equality, art, sailing, democracy, astronomy, surgery, and their genes.

    Australian Aboriginal guardians of traditional Lore and Law have made it clear to us that they are indeed the “First Race.”2 They were not, as assumed by some of the general public, ignorant savages stagnating in their primitive inertia. As highly respected Dhungutti Elder Rueben Kelly states, “Centuries ago you white people chose the path of science and technology. That path will destroy the planet. Our role is to protect the planet. We are hoping you will discover that before it’s too late.”3

    Unlike others out in the field or laboratory, we’ve ‘discovered’ nothing: our role is to act as scribes and faithfully present their history. The rest is easy: find white-fella proof to substantiate black-fella truth.

    Questioning Out-of-Africa

    Before setting off on this ancient journey there is one destination and exodus that needs to be repositioned: Africa. According to academics and archaeological texts, Africa is the place from where modern humans evolved then spread their genes throughout the continents. The Out-of-Africa theory has over the years, since first proposed, transformed into fact. One of the original papers laying claim to charting our ancient ancestor’s movements and origin, The Recent African Genesis of Humans, written by Professors Alan Wilson and Rebecca Cann, is acknowledged as the closing chapter in this mystery. However, amongst the absolutes was one qualifier that has been conveniently and repeatedly overlooked. Wisely, with the benefit of hindsight, the authors stated Homo sapiens “probably,”4 never definitely, evolved in Africa.

    Wilson and Cann proposed all modern humans shared the same ancient mother, who they named Eve, and according to their calculations she lived in Africa at sometime between 150-200,000 years ago. Of crucial importance are two of the three assumptions that underpin their mathematics.

    The aboriginal (sic) populations of New Guinea and Australia are estimated to have been founded less than 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. The amount of evolution that has since occurred in each of those places seems about one third of that shown by the whole human species. Accordingly, we can infer that Eve lived three times 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, or roughly 150,000 to 180,000 years ago.5

    This declaration was regarded as the final word, and the resolution of “15 years of disagreement”6 between two branches of science. Wilson and Cann triumphantly proclaimed victory on behalf of the molecular geneticists declaring that “we won the argument, when the palaeontologists admitted we had been right and they had been wrong.”7

    With the case closed and bragging rights secured in perpetuity, science had once again provided certainty and an African ancestry. Or so it seemed. But not long after their paper was published Rebecca Cann realised they were mistaken. In 1982 she examined the mitochondrial DNA of 112 Indigenous people, including twelve full-descent Aboriginals, and the results were in total opposition to what they assumed was fully resolved.

    Nevertheless, Cann was obliged to contradict a central tenet of their paper, stating that “mitochondrial DNA puts the origin of Homo sapiens much further back and indicates that the Australian Aboriginals arose 400,000 years ago from two distinct lineages, far earlier than any other racial type.”8 Not only was the emergence of Aboriginal Homo sapiens “far earlier”9 than any Africans, she provided a sequence and motherland.

    The Australian racial group has a much higher number of mutations than any other racial group, which suggests that the Australians split off from a common ancestor about 400,000 years ago. By the same theory, the Mongoloid originated about 100,000 years ago, and the Negroid and Caucasian groups about 40,000 years ago.10

    The realignment and reversals were of immediate concern to Alan Wilson. If Cann was correct in detecting a “much higher number of mutations”11 they may as well tear up their original paper.

    Desperate to resolve the obvious inconsistencies, Wilson made two visits to Australia. In 1987, Wilson sampled the mtDNA of 21 full-descent Australian Aboriginals and provided 15 different strands. This number was well outside what anyone expected and compelled Wilson to unconvincingly conclude there were more than 15 pregnant females on the first boat. A second visit in 1989 increased the crew size to levels that quite literally sank the boat as it entered the water, and forced Wilson to abandon Africa as the place where Homo sapiens originated. From a second sampling of ten, a similar percentage (70%) of mutation was present. Upon receiving the results of his second mtDNA sampling Wilson immediately conceded the Out-of-Africa theory was wrong.

    The math wasn’t complicated: the agreed rate of mtDNA mutation for every new strand is 3,500 years, therefore 22 x 3,500 = 77,000 years. Wilson realised if he returned and increased the population surveyed, so too would the crew-size increase. He was left with no other option but to dismiss their original paper.

    It seems too far out to admit, but while Homo erectus was muddling along in the rest of the world, a few erectus had got to Australia and did something dramatically different – not even with stone tools – but it is there that Homo sapiens have emerged and evolved… Homo sapiens would have evolved free from competition out of a small band of Homo erectus 400,000 years ago.12

    Sadly, and somewhat puzzlingly, these findings were mostly ignored. In fact, opposition to the Out-of-Africa theory lost momentum. Perhaps this timid climate goes some way towards explaining the reactions to Alan Thorne’s research into the genetics and antiquity of Lake Mungo Man (WLH3). Re-dated to be over 60,000 years old and the oldest Homo sapiens yet found, this in itself raises serious doubts relating to the credentials of any theory claiming the first mariners reached the northern parts of Australia 60,000 years ago. Thousands of kilometres from any potential point of entry, the practicalities involved in reaching this distant in-land lake within days after disembarking are insurmountable. This date, coupled with the discovery that WLH3 had an “extinct DNA”13 which does not resemble any other population, surely calls into question the reality of an African migration.

    Referring back to Wilson and Cann’s original calculations, their proposed timing of somewhere between 50-60,000 years stands on no less shaky ground than their genetic miscalculation. There are at least ten Australian sites claimed to be older than 60,000 years, granted every date is challenged by conservative critics, but even so, all are the products of respected academics.

    What needs to be accepted is that if just one date proves to be correct, irrespective of whatever judgment is passed on the other nine, it can be confidently declared as a fact that Australia was not settled by African Homo sapiens 60,000 years ago. Whether the winning site turns out to be Lake George-fire-stick farming (120,000 years); Lake Eyre-skullcap (135,000 years); Jinmium-tools (176,000 years); Panaramittee-rock-engraving of saltwater crocodile (75,000 years); Rottnest Island-tools (70,000 years); Devonport-rock-engravings (>115,000 years); Jinmium-art (75-116,000 years); Great Barrier Reef-fire-stick farming (185,000 years); Lake Mungo (WLH3)-complete skeleton (61-65,000 years); or (WLH1)-cremated bones (61,000 years); one out of the ten is sufficient to deny African entry.

    The First Americans

    Compounding the inconsistencies of the Out-of-Africa theory is the recent discoveries of “hundreds of skeletal remains”14 in America that “look like Australian Aborigines.”15 

    In the October/November edition of Cosmos, Jacqui Hayes presented a compelling morphological case in support of Australian Aboriginal presence in America. According to Hayes, Aboriginal settlement of the Americas began at an indeterminate time before the second migration of people “with distinctive Mongoloid features”16 and left, within her by-line, a series of unresolved questions.

    When stating that “startling new finds suggest Australia’s first people made it all the way to South America more than 11,000 years ago,”17 the narrative is incomplete. How far back did these Aboriginal settlements span, and were other locations settled? If indeed Hayes is right in that Australian Aboriginal people were in America, any date obtained beyond 11,000 years must be due to the actions of people bearing Australian Aboriginal genes.

    The impossibility of any African migration, genes or antigens entering America, was confirmed through the examination of Aboriginal bones establishing the presence of distinctive antigens.

    Arnaiz-Vilena and his team looked at the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) system, which is a group of proteins on the surface of human immune cells. The HLAs are what the doctors test for to determine whether one person’s tissues are compatible for organ or bone transplants. HLA is a nuclear marker giving an even genealogy and genetic history for both sexes. The best test showing that HLA is a good genetic marker for studying population relatedness is that it usually correlates with geography.18

    As expected, the first nominee was Australian, but just as importantly the comparative results bore witness to one notable omission: it seems the Africans forgot to sign on.

    “So what did they find? Unique signatures only found in Australian Aborigines, Pacific Islanders, and peoples in Asia and even in Europe.”19 Missing in action and mention, the non-appearance of African HLA is yet another inconvenient piece of evidence that bears an Australian imprint.

    When recalibrating this Australian Aboriginal/American time-line, dates just exceeding the maximum Clovis (Mongoloid) entry date are certainly inconvenient, but not demanding of tearing out pages. Corroborating evidence of Aboriginal presence during the 10,000 years before the second migration from Asian began can be found at Tlapacoya, 21,700-25,000 B.P., Los Toldos Cave, Patagonia, 14-15,000 B.P., “Meadowbank Rockshelter 19,000 B.P. (southwest Pennsylvania), Tibito 14,400 B.P. (Columbia), Walker 15,000 B.P. (Minnesota) and Mud Lake 13,450 B.P. (Wisconsin).”20

    But it doesn’t stop there. Professor Silvia Gonzales, who is a leading advocate of the Out-of-Australia theory, was quite staggered21 by the dates obtained when analysing footprints found in a layer of volcanic ash at Lake Vasequillo (Mexico). “A variety of prints (human and animal) captured in this layer of rock were dated using O.S.L.”22 She found, much to her understandable surprise, that 40,000 years marked the “last time that these sediments were lit by the sun’s rays or the last time that the material was heated.”23 Gonzales is adamant these are Australian Aboriginal footprints, and that they reached America by boat through means of “island hopping”24 around the Pacific Basin.

    Such a date, 40,000 years, pushes the boundaries and affirms an extensive Aboriginal tenure, and does not stand alone. The corroborative timing at Albert Goodyear’s site, accentuated by the considerable distance between locations, cannot be a coincidence.

    Goodyear had been working at an archaeological site on the Savannah river, near Topper. It was agreed all the available evidence from the Clovis site had been gathered and their work was complete… He kept digging for another four metres before an assortment of stone tools, along with a hearth, were unearthed. A small piece of charcoal was then analysed by counting the residual Carbon 14 and a date of no less than 37,000 years was deemed appropriate.25

    Uncomfortable as these dates are in relation to when ancient Australian Aboriginals first came to America, it gets worse for any clinging to traditional theories.

    Not far from the Lake Vasequillo footprints Gonzales investigated is another site that was deliberately ignored for close to 30 years after a comprehensive investigation conducted by Cynthia Irwin-Williams. The dates are so sensational and numerous, and so obviously associated with objects made by Homo sapiens artists, the archaeologists downed tools and clipboards and vowed never to return. The dates returned by a variety of sound geological analyses were far too ancient, not only for occupation, but well outside the assumed period when Homo sapiens first appeared. To some extent the issue isn’t just a matter of whether these numbers are feasible, but more a case of open antagonism between two competing branches of science.

    Christopher Hardaker, author of The First American, created a fictional conversation between the two competing parties that graphically highlights how the argument over which group of academics is right has blinded the combatants.

    ARCHAEOLOGIST: You are asking us to believe that the sophisticated art and technology of the Upper Palaeolithic was actually invented over 200,000 years ago in Central Mexico by Homo erectus? Ridiculous. GEOLOGIST: You are asking us to believe that Science is off by a magnitude of 10? Ridiculous.26

    Often the result of cutting-edge technology, the chemicals analysed and computations made came from extremely reputable institutions and individuals. Some of the offending techniques and dates (which came from the layer of volcanic ash and debris deposited above the artefacts/or footprints) include: Uranium Series Dating (200,000 years); Zircon Fission Track (170-640,000 years); mineral solutions (200,000 years); Diatom analysis (80,000 years); U-Th/He (200,000 years); tephrahydration (250,000 years); magnetic shifts in rocks (790,000 years); and argon argon (1,300,000 years).

    The facts, and large figures, demand a response. What if just one date is actually right? Does that mean Homo sapiens were, as Christopher Hardaker claims, responsible for “600,000 year old art?”27 If so, does this alone suggest the often sniggered at talk of Mu, Atlantis and other ancient civilisations has real geological substance?

    As to whether Gonzales’ “island hopping”28 route from Australia, up through Asia, Japan, Siberia then America is plausible, it is often said a picture can act as a worthy substitute for quite a few words. The photograph (see page 27) of the Japanese full-descent Ainu Elder was taken in the late 19th century by German anthropologist Dr. Hermann Klaatsch. The physical characteristics displayed in this photograph, in association with the recent discovery of “a very well-preserved skeleton from Gua Gunung, Malaysia,”29 resonates to one ancient southern inspiration. The Malaysian “specimen is aged 10,200 B.P. and is said to be a late representative of a non-specialised morphology, similar to Australian Aborigines.”30

    The First Boat

    For the appearance of a population “similar to Australian”31 Aboriginals in Malaysia, Japan, America, or any other place, a boat is needed. The oft-proposed settlement of Australia from Africa by ramshackle raft, or through desperately clinging on to driftwood during storms, doesn’t measure up. This vessel must be able to withstand monsoons and weeks at sea, and accommodate a crew of close to 20 adults to negate in-breeding thus successfully repopulate an uninhabited continent. Nowhere today is anyone going to discover the actual ancient wooden remains of such an ancient sophisticated “ocean-going”32 vessel. But if seeking out everything else bar the planks there is only one place to look.

    Graham Walsh was “the widely recognised authority on the intriguing Bradshaw art of the Kimberley area… Within this area, he has discovered the oldest paintings of boats in the world, dated at a minimum age of 17,000 years, but with the strong possibility of being up to 50,000 years old…”33 Walsh insisted that the “high prow of the boat”34 is “unnecessary for boats used in calm, inland waters. The design suggests it was used on the open ocean.”35 Walsh was quite shocked by the function, antiquity, and most importantly dimensions of these vessels: “they are massive boats, totally alien.”36 Moreover not only was the sophistication and technology exhibited difficult for Walsh to assimilate, he still had to account for the reasons why there were “two paintings of ocean-going boats, one with 23 people on board, the other 29.”37

    These are ideal numbers as foundation populations when sailing towards distant lands, however diagrams and specifications do not make a boat. To have a clever idea is a promising first step, but there are some practicalities to be addressed before any idea takes form. There are materials, tools, and navigation skills required which supposedly did not exist for at least another 20,000 years. Irrespective of what is assumed, the first tool needed to build a ship that can comfortably cater for 30 people, is an axe. Wood in its prime, not the rotting logs that fall, is essential in manufacturing a vessel strong enough to sail across oceans.

    It should come as no surprise that the oldest axe in the world, dated at 40,000 years, was found at Huon Terrace PNG (which was part of the Australian mainland until 8,000 years ago), others discovered in Jaowyn land, Northern Territory (35,500 years), at Sandy Creek, Queensland (32,000 years) and Malangangerr Northern Territory (23,000), are all at least 8,000 years older than the first axe found outside Australia (Niah Cave, Sarawak, 15,000 years).

    With axe at hand, plans on the wall, and overseas bookings made, there still remains one vital navigational skill any journey beyond landfall demands. Hugh Cairns’ book Dark Sparklers is the first and only publication dedicated to the sharing of traditional Aboriginal astronomical knowledge. Cairns won the trust of Wardaman Elder Bill Harnley, who spoke of his ancestral knowledge of the stars, “great black shapes,”38 the movements and constellations in between, and of up “on top.”39 According to Cairns, there have been Aboriginal astronomers for “over 30,000 years.”40

    Not only the Pacific, but the Indian Ocean, was a path used to navigate then share so many esoteric gifts, technologies, guidelines, and of course, genes.

    “Dr. Raghavendra Rao and researchers from the Indian-backed Anthropological Survey of India project found unique mutations were shared between modern-day Indians and Aborigines.”41 They “identified seven people from central Dravidian and Austro-Asiatic tribes who shared genetic traits only found in Aborigines.”42 

    Much earlier linguistic studies of the Dravidian language had already identified the same relationship. Dravidian “fishermen of the Madras coast use almost the same words for I, thou, he, we, and you as some Aboriginal tribes. Many other key words in the Dravidian dialects are identical in Tasmanian Aboriginal terms both in pronunciation and meaning.”43 

    It needs to be appreciated that Tasmanian culture and language is a relatively recent event, and the island is the outcome of the final thawing at the end of the last Ice Age when the seas covered the low plains between Victoria and Tasmania. Over the last 8,000 years this isolation has been instrumental in the development of a distinctive Tasmanian culture.44

    With a language that came into existence no earlier than 8,000 years ago forming a substantial part of the basic Dravidian vocabulary, this mtDNA connection strongly suggests the Australian Aboriginals kept in contact with India for some considerable time.

    Especially since “Australian canoes are constructed identically to those of the coastal Dravidian tribes of India, and wild tribes in the Deccan region of India are the only culture known to use the boomerang outside Australia.”45 The oldest boomerang discovered in the world was found at Wyrie Swamp, South Australia, and is dated at 10,200 years.

    The dingo, accepted to have been brought into Australia from somewhere in Asia about 6,000 years ago, only strengthens the possibility of an extended Australo-Indian link. It would appear that the Dravidians adopted the Australian boomerang to hunt with, chose their better designed canoes to assist in fishing, and as is often the case when two cultures first meet, shared technology, friendship and genes.

    There is so much more to this ancient Aboriginal narrative. At best we have provided a brief geographical overview of where ancient Aboriginal people sailed, and hopefully presented evidence validating their belief that they are descendents of the “First Race.”46 

    Whether the African strand of Homo sapiens emerged 40,000 years ago is of no account, our focus is on the much earlier Australian genes, journeys and heritage. We have examined a few of the locations reached, but as for the religious legacy of the Dreaming as evidenced through the nine shared mystical principles, underpinned by equality of gender and species, that is yet another chapter of an ancient story that spans eons and geography. Their intimate awareness of the divine, along with the lesser gifts of sailing, astronomy, brain surgery, penicillin, burial/cremation/embalming, amputations, axe-making, democracy, bows and arrows, and so much more, is part of a forgotten origin that deserves to be heard once more.

    Steve Strong also contributed articles on the ancient Egyptian connection to Australia in New Dawn Special Issue 19 and New Dawn 130.
    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 125.[/alert]

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    Footnotes

    1. “Australia’s ‘First Americans’,” Daily Telegraph, 8 September 2004, 3 (n).

    2. The Nephew of Reuben Kelly, 2010, Recounting Uncle Rueben Kelly From his Nephew, Personal Communication to Steven Strong.

    3. Anne Wilson Schaef, Native Wisdom for White Minds: Daily Reflections Inspired by the Native Peoples of the World (Random House, 1995).

    4. Allan C. Wilson & Rebecca L. Cann, “The Recent African Genesis of Humans: Genetic Studies Reveal That an African Woman of 200,000 Years Ago Was Our Common Ancestor,” Scientific American 266, no. 4. (April 1992), 68.

    5. Ibid. 72.

    6. Ibid. 68.

    7. Ibid. 68.

    8. Robert Lawlor, Voices of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime (Inner Traditions International, 1991), 26.

    9. Ibid. 26

    10. Ibid. 26.

    11. Ibid. 26.

    12. Ibid. 26.

    13. Leigh Dayton, “DNA Clue to Man’s Origin: How Mungo Man Has Shaken the Human Family Tree,” The Australian, 9 January 2001, 1(n).

    14. Jacqui Hayes, “Ancient Odyssey,” Cosmos issue 35, 2010, 42.

    15. Ibid. 39.

    16. Ibid. 40.

    17. Ibid. Front Cover.

    18. Ibid. 45.

    19. Ibid. 45.

    20. Steven Strong & Evan Strong, Constructing a New World Map, 1st ed. (University Press of America Inc., 2008), 42.

    21. Martin Redfern (producer/reporter), Pauline Newman (producer) & Robyn Williams (presenter), “Oldest American Footprints” (transcript), The Science Show, ABC Radio National, 11 Feb. 2006, http://abc.net.au/rn/sciencesshow/stories/2006/1564746.htm

    22. Strong & Strong, Constructing a New World Map, 48.

    23. Redfern, Newman & Williams, The Science Show.

    24. Ibid.

    25. Strong & Strong, Constructing a New World Map, 49.

    26. Christopher Hardaker, The First American: The Suppressed Story of the People Who Discovered the New World (New Page Books, 2007), 187.

    27. Ibid. 45.

    28. Redfern, Newman & Williams, The Science Show.

    29. Walter A. Neves & Mark Hubbe, “Cranial Morphology of Early Americans from Lagoa Santa, Brazil: Implicatons for the Settlement of the New World,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102, no. 51 (2005), www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1317934, 467.

    30. Ibid. 467.

    31. Ibid. 467.

    32. Michael Winkler, “Rock Star of the Kimberley,” The Age, 20 Sept. 2004.

    33. Strong & Strong, Constructing a New World Map, 47.

    34. “First Americans Were Australian,” BBC News, 26 Aug. 1999, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/430944.stm.

    35. Ibid.

    36. Winkler, “Rock Star of the Kimberley.”

    37. Ibid.

    38. Hugh Cairns & Bill Yidumbuma, Dark Sparklers, 2nd ed. (H.C. Cairnes, 2004), 42.

    39. Ibid. 39.

    40. Ibid. 42.

    41. AAP, “First Australians Were Indian: Research,” Sydney Morning Herald, 23 July 2009(n); Within Steven Strong & Evan Strong, Forgotten Origin (University Press of America, Inc., 2010), 16.

    42. AAP, “First Australians Were Indian: Research”; Within Strong & Strong, Forgotten Origin, 16.

    43. Lawlor, Voices of the First Day, 120.

    44. Strong & Strong, Forgotten Origin, 17.

    45. Lawlor, Voices of the First Day, 120-121.

    46. Kelly.

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