Eranos pt 1 w/ The Kingless Generation

Fergal Schmudlach of The Kingless Generation was kind enough to have me on his podcast to talk about the under-discussed Eranos Roundtables that began in the 1930s but have continued to affect our world in many ways both psychically and materially to this day.

Also as a brief update: I have taken some time off due to personal stuff but I am planning on going hard again. I have also totally scripted my next episode in my NXIVM series and that will be dropping very soon. For the near future you guys should be getting a double dose of the podcast as my weekly episodes of the NXIVM series resume and Fergal and I record this series

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey guys, it's Scott. Uh I know it's been a minute. I have just had some personal life stuff that has momentarily gotten in the way of my regular recording schedule, but I am back now and I've got a lot planned going forward. Uh I just wanted to uh create a brief intro for this episode that I did with Fergal from the Kingless Generation recently. Uh it was a great conversation. Him and I have been digging into Eranos, which is this like esoteric round table that existed in from about like the 1930s to the 1980s. And I think you'd be surprised at how much it leads to. And in fact, it even has some ties almost directly to Nexium. So uh it's not totally off-topic for what I'm doing right now either. Uh I will say that I am planning on dropping a new Nexium episode in just a few days as well. But I would definitely encourage you to check out Fergle's awesome podcast, The Kingless Generation. I've been a fan for a long time. He's doing something really unique. He does what he calls paleo-parapolitics, which I think is something that is uh Fieldick is in need of somebody doing the work and looking at it, because so many of us people who are into parapolitics, we stick to, I mean, really Cold War and post-Cold War a lot of the time. And even if we go back further, it's usually only a few decades or maybe centuries. Fergal loves to go back, he'll go back, you know, to the original grain states in an episode. He'll, you know, bounce all around time. So it's it's it's a great show, and you should really check it out. One small correction I wanted to make, and don't worry if this doesn't make any sense to you, because it's just it deals with some fairly minor figures and it's like blinking, you miss it, but I I just I wanted to be on the record about this. At one point, I talk about a man named Roberto Assiagoli, and I claim that Michael Murphy was meeting with him prior to the establishment of, and I say Aranos, but what I really mean is Esseline. Uh, Michael Murphy is one of the two people that is really uh at the head of Esalin when it begins. So yeah, I just wanted to clarify that. But yeah, please enjoy this episode and know that I will be dropping some new stuff on my ongoing next game series very soon.

SPEAKER_02 3:02

Welcome to the Kingless Generation, a podcast on the deep history of class struggle, paleo parapolitics, and the demonology of capital. I'm your host, Fergal Schmudlock, and today I'm honored to have uh rising star in the communoited parapolitical left podcasting scene, Scott Ryan of the Dust Light Archives.

SPEAKER_00 3:26

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Like this is really awesome to me. I've been a huge fan of yours for several years at this point. So it's very cool to get to be here and collab with you on this.

SPEAKER_02 3:38

That's wild to hear. That's that's an honor to hear. Thank you. Well, Scott Ryan, uh, thank you so much for making time here. I'm so glad we got to sit down. It's uh morning in Tokyo. We are discussing a topic that covers all three of the main topics of my show. We're gonna be able to transverse the ancient and the modern and everything. We're gonna get the deep history of class struggle, the paleo-parapolitics, and the demonology of capital in spades because we're talking about the Aranos Foundation or the Aranos gatherings, conferences, which were hosted by a Danish, pan-European kind of uh theosophist connected, uh occult-loving, Gnostic, avowedly uh haute bourgeois uh theorist and uh ideologue named Olga Frubekaptein, uh in Ascona, Switzerland, isn't it? Yes. And it, you know, this lakeside resort area that has maybe a deep history, kind of legendary history in occult European lore and mythology. And she gathered all kinds of global westoid connected for sure, intellectuals, philosophers, people with you know, liberal ruling class to discuss grand strategy. And I I think um and it started in 1933, August 1933. I meant to look up if they actually went whole hog and they got August 88, 1933.

SPEAKER_00 5:36

That would have been you know, I'm not sure about that either. I don't know the exact date offhand. It was definitely something interesting to me when you brought this up. Uh, we were kind of discussing something to collab on, and I had never heard of this institute prior to you throwing this book out here by this Hans Thomas Hockel, who kind of is writing what, like an apology for the institute, I guess you'd say. Like it's uh very, very positive, very uh uh I guess it's a response to criticism of the institute prior that probably was a little bit more spot on. But um I could not believe, like when I started doing research, just how connected this was to so many things that we in the parapolitics community talk about all the time. Like, um, I'd be and you on your show, right?

SPEAKER_02 6:35

So, listener, if you've not yet listened to Scott Ryan's series on the Dust Light Archives on Nexium, which is ongoing at the moment as we record, right? It's amazing. So this connects with things that are happening right now the Silicon Valley cults, the apocalyptic, like Rocco's basilisk or whatever the fuck, these things, it's totally connected to that.

SPEAKER_00 7:01

Yes, and thank you. And uh it's funny, just as like one little micro example that I had caught on to right away when we started going through this, is a man named Gregory Bateson was attending these conferences, and he directly mentored um in my Nexium series, I get on into the history of neurolinguistic programming, and there were two men, uh Richard Bandler and uh uh Don Grinder, I believe, and they uh both were like were the the people who created neurolinguistic programming, and they were directly mentored by this guy. Uh and you jump from there to Nancy Salsman being directly mentored by him, and you're in Nexium territory. Like it's it's wild how little how few degrees you need to get there.

SPEAKER_02 8:01

One step, two steps. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:04

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 8:05

Um really, yeah. Yeah, and so I guess I didn't know too if Hans Thomas Hackel was interesting to me as a that's what we've mainly done to prepare this at this point is read this book, uh, which is called Eranos, uh what, an alternative history, an alternative intellectual history of the 20th century. Uh, it was written in German first, and then this second edition has been translated into English. So it's extra accessible. Yeah, that's what we've done at this point. There's a whole woolly like uh set of connections that I want to get into, but haven't had a chance. So it's time for us to just sit down and get started on this. This is gonna be a many part series. Um, but step one, yeah, we read this book.

SPEAKER_00 8:59

So uh I I definitely like I said, I I think it's definitely way uh too forgiving and positive about uh what Aaronos was exactly and who these people were. Nothing.

SPEAKER_02 9:15

I'm a member, it's pretty clear of like one of the splinter groups that form at the end of it. Isn't he like he's in the milia, right?

SPEAKER_00 9:26

Yes, he was deeply into, I mean, uh he was self-funded and has one of the largest esoteric libraries in the world. Well, he sold it off like a few years before his uh I'm trying to remember. I I want to say it was around 2004 or something like that, but he he did sell it off. But before that, I mean it was a uh it was called the Octagon Library, and it had over 50,000 original documents. So this this guy was very connected. He's the main translator, the main English translator of Julius Evola. And he did it under a pseudonym of HT Hansen.

SPEAKER_02 10:08

Whoa.

SPEAKER_00 10:10

But yeah, but it is it is the same guy.

SPEAKER_02 10:14

So we need to keep that in mind. Okay, wow, yeah. That's awesome. Um you're gonna be able to apply to provide a whole lot more detail on a lot of these things. So definitely keep it like jump in and fill flesh out what I refer refer to in that sort of way. That's great to know because that's gonna be right, like he is always one of the main things he's dealing with in this book, to the point that he has like a wrap-up chapter at the end, in addition to all the points throughout the book, where he is dealing very carefully with the connections to National Soism, to the Nazis. Right. To which Yeah, no, yeah, right, and so he has to, and so we should imagine, you know, this is the guy that translated Evola, right? And and throughout, he's always kind of like, Well, these people weren't as bad as Evola, or like, you know, he'll he'll strike stances like that. So that's wild to know.

SPEAKER_00 11:24

Yeah, and he definitely used the pseudonym because he didn't want his reputation to be directly associated with it. Uh I think that's probably the most interesting thing about him that I kind of dug up. That in uh I mean his giant, you know, I'm very suspicious of anybody who has these giant esoteric libraries, not because like they're necessarily it's it's not necessarily inherently wrong to study, you know, symbolism and how it affects the psyche and the ex, you know, the internal and external world and all that. But right you have these very wealthy people who are hoarding all of this information. I mean, you know, it could be put online, it's not like it's it's definitely restricted access.

SPEAKER_02 12:17

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:17

I mean if I'm to be super.

SPEAKER_02 12:20

I was just reading the beginning of one of the critical books on Jung, who is a major, major figure in Eranos. You know, it's maybe I don't know if it is a central, it's debatable how central Eranos is in Jung's world, and he was always trying to sort of keep it, uh let it not be his whole thing, but uh he was definitely the center of Eranos for the time that he was going there a lot. And um yeah, and it's wild to like get into his whole thing, but reading the introduction to the critical works on him, of which there are the Jung Cult and Arian Christ are the two critical books on him that I know of, uh that I want to get into. That's a whole other series that you know, either the two of us or or we we need to get into this as well. Um definitely, but yeah, there too, like they start out by saying like the Jung archives are so carefully curated, you cannot get into this stuff, right? The class valence, the class character of these things is paramount and the first thing to look at, I think.

SPEAKER_00 13:30

Yeah, and uh one thing I didn't know prior to so I've read a couple of books by Jung, probably, I mean, 15 years ago at this point, quite a while ago. But I was I was interested in him when I kind of went through like a period of you know, uh just testing out different philosophies and kind of you know psychoanalytics and stuff. And he I was never aware of the fact, even with all of my interests, that he's like flat out like oh like OSS. Like, I mean, has like a like a uh number, like an agent. Agent 888.

SPEAKER_02 14:11

He was in touch with Alan Dulles. Hockel cites this as like this exonerating thing, like, oh, he wasn't a Nazi, he was only uh you know, in with Alan Dulles and uh thick as thieves with all the fourth Reich people, not the Third Reich.

SPEAKER_00 14:27

Yeah, totally fine, betrays. I mean Totally fine. Yes, totally no, but I really think that that betrays the you know the underlying philosophy of Aranos and uh the authors as well is the idea that he sees this major distinction that I know we do not between uh you know America and you know Nazi Germany.

SPEAKER_02 14:50

So and like liberal fascism and conservative fascism.

SPEAKER_00 14:55

Yes, yeah, because those are the And the idea of using Alan Dulles as an exonerating figure is so telling because I mean he's just he's perceived as a villain even amongst fairly mainstream like American.

SPEAKER_02 15:12

Now I mean, yeah, things are moving, things is history's moving fast. I think there was a time, and also you know, this was written in German originally when it was probably a bit long just long enough ago that most people didn't maybe know. I don't know. But this so this went from 1933. Um, one thing I want to say real quick at the beginning to frame it is uh I have an English translation of Itsutsu Toshihiko, the Japanese philosopher who spent many years in Iran under the Shah doing uh kind of syncretistic philosophy of, you know, I am his big posture was kind of like I'm combining Zen and Sufism and uh Islamic philosophy, right? And I read Ibn Arabi and I and I know all about Japanese stuff in a in a way that I mean he doesn't do he doesn't have like a Japanese uh uh as much of a specialization on the Japanese side, actually, but it's just like part of his packaging, right? And I have this translation of uh a piece, Reminiscences of Ascona, which he published in 1990, uh looking back on his years at Eranos, and Eranos was wrapped up in its original incarnation right at the end of the Cold War. Very neat and clean, right? So 1933 to 1990 or so, right? I think it was there was uh no Eranos in 1989, they missed a year, and then they had one final year of the original grouping, technically speaking, in 1990, and then it splinters into all these other groups and foundations and this whole milieu that Hockel is apparently quite a part of.

SPEAKER_00 17:17

But yeah, we could definitely at one point get into that because I've I've spent a lot of time looking up uh exactly what went on in those years, so oh but I'm gonna put it.

SPEAKER_02 17:29

Awesome. So, you know, the way that he frames this is so interesting and telling, and like he's letting on like he doesn't you want to look at the Japanese participants because they aren't so up on like what the things are to say and what not to say, maybe I feel, you know, because like I uh he suddenly one the the highlight for me of this is in 1933 when the dark enthusiasm toward the invisible world, which was driven by the fonda sicle conditions, which in the original Japanese, uh I think he's saying Matsujitsu, or like you know, there's a lot of words like the Shu Matsu, the end, the end of the world, uh Matsujitsu, the last days, right? Is what that means. When that that dark enthusiasm toward the invisible world, which was driven by the fondest conditions, was not yet dampened. This purely spiritual movement was born as one of its typical actualizations, centered around two great scholars, uh, whom I have just mentioned, uh Rudolf Auto, whom you mentioned, and Henry Corbyn. Uh right. And that the earlier critical book on this, which um this too I wish I had read right now, gotta read it, listener, please read it, is called Religion After Religion by Steven Vaselstrom. Um, Gershom Sholem, Mirtia Eliadeh, and Henry Corbin at Eranos. Gershom Sholem is the Kabbalah scholar and big-time Zionist. Mircia Eliade is this founding figure of religious studies as we understand it, inventor of the term shamanism, and also major Romanian fascist. So that's something that we have to deal with in this podcast. You know, this strikes out actually the uh core ideas of this podcast, perhaps, you know, ideas of um stages uh of religious history that I have gone to through in connection with the work of Brian Hayden, right? The shamans, sorcerers, and saints typology there. We gotta keep in mind there is uh someone has called it an original occultism of the discipline of religious studies and the history of religions, where maybe there is a way in which, you know, all this research was kind of framed at the start by these modern bourgeois occultists who are framing religious history in their own ways, and they see secret society machinations at the center of as a driving force in history. I think it I still think it's kind of true, but we wanna be careful, right? Is that just a distortion due to their sitting at the center of the discipline as it was founded? And maybe, yeah, like imagining different paths, as we I think are trying to do, um maybe that maybe we can displace that kind of secret society centeredness. That doesn't have to be the center of everything. I don't know. So I think this can this could really advance my thinking. Right?

SPEAKER_00 21:01

Yeah, definitely. Um you were just you were mentioning some of these people, and I was also just thinking about when you were talking about uh, you know, Gersham Sholom, Marche Alade, and like all of these people, like this might be a weird analogy, but it almost reminds me of like I like okay nowadays, like the Joe Rogan podcast sphere and all that, where it's like, oh, we're open to all ideas. We have everybody from like liberal to absolute fascist, but there's no there's no communist, there's no socialist, there's no like you know, even really a democratic socialist appearing anywhere in there. And uh I also think that's very telling because you do have, you know, even with Mircia Elade, uh also huge follower of Julius Evola, like Evola's name is really quite all over. lot of this.

SPEAKER_02 22:01

And despite Hawke's attempt to kind of keep him in the wings, you know.

SPEAKER_00 22:06

Yeah. While also secretly translating him. So that's interesting.

SPEAKER_02 22:12

Yeah. So yeah. That was wild to learn.

SPEAKER_00 22:15

Um yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:17

I and it's a weird well I wanted to just finish I I should finish saying though it's uh frames the whole thing as 1933 to you know 2000. And he and at present, when the 21st century is beginning, people are repeating this experience of the death with the same sense of being with a big B in the obscureness of the same twilight. This is what he talks about the the the being of the the eternally Gnostic, the mysterious, the mystic, and an orientation toward the obscuration of being everything has this dark kind of uh nothingness behind it. And he's he's connecting that to the idea of nothingness in Buddhism which is so different. You know this is the classic thing that I always get into with um you know fucking Mishima as well. So many Japanese thinkers who are promoted in the West are playing to a crusader Satanism that sees everything Eastern as being satanic uh and and good um and they want to do uh Eastern despotism as they imagine it and they find people in the East who are willing to play to those those ideas right even though as uh I hope I'm getting into in the things that I'm dealing with in my podcast these days in regular episodes uh in the actual Silk Road era in the early modernity the East was the center of all the innovation that was leading into the Industrial Revolution. The scientific revolution happened in the East there was all this upheaval and just very dynamic societies happening all over you know maritime Asia people coming in and out of trading cities in the Muslim world and in the Indian Ocean world oh my God like all the dynamism there is no Eastern despotism to be found.

SPEAKER_00 24:23

But here in the 19th century 20th century you have people in the West who imagine an Eastern despotism and they're like Jesus I've seen what you've done for others and I want that for myself you know they're just they want they they're like yeah that's good we want that right uh and all these Japanese figures that get promoted are like yeah yeah we we totally have eastern despotism it's real and I can t I can help you to to realize it right and that he's doing that here yeah and that's this historical framing right where he's like so now there's gonna be another another last days are coming now that the Cold War is over and we can do another final solution is what I read here between the lines you know yeah and I definitely think I've thought a lot about the weird kind of connections between the the Western sort of Buddhist or Gnostic ideas and something like this in some ways I hadn't really thought of before where I'm like you know when you talk about the idea of you know the I this like striving for nothingness or you know some of these people in this group too were very into like specifically chaos in like the Greek sense or whatever.

SPEAKER_02 25:51

And like I really think there is something to the idea of there's a very materialist reason to push these ideas because if you can convince people to your average you know person to want nothing is the you know pinnacle of enlightenment or whatever well then why would you ever you know like try to you'll own nothing uh better your material conditions and meanwhile these people are obviously living extremely lavishly like on their side of things oh totally um there is so on page 99 in Hackel I was just reminded of this little quote from Fruba um Olga Fruba the the the eminence grise herself right the founder of Eranos the hostess of this whole thing yeah she's a real oh should we flesh out her character a bit more she was always wearing flowing Greek style dresses with the the minimal cuts and uh yeah shaping just natural and and she always had all kinds of hippie trinkets all over herself uh this is the milieu basically that really corresponds to the hippie movement as well in the 60s uh this was I think Jimmy Fallen gong back in the day had a a thread on them this kind of thing the the Stefan George the cosmica of um Munich yeah the Munich cosmics they're known uh the yeah so Stefan George is another one um Stefan George there's a a historical book on him called Secret Germany based on his you know his his love his favorite Latin phrase Germania segreta he wants to or segreta in Latin uh where he's imagining all about you know Thulian kind of speculations this kind of thing uh in a hippie mode in a kind of like you know the the the jugendbewegung the the youth movement in pre-war interwar Germany is this hotbed of ambiguously you know um bourgeois libertarian individualist liberal coded what we would call liberal today but uh and and very much the like the inspiration of the hippies mostly esoterically I think I think like a lot of it is under the surface but it's the kind of thing that I think our scene has also been excavating for quite a while finding oh yeah actually the hippies are stimulated by the intelligence agencies quite a bit you know you have your weird scenes inside the canyon kind of realizations about oh all these musicians' parents are high uh intelligence and military industrial complex people all this sort of thing so Olga Fleuba captain hippie lady flowing dresses beads uh she would do rituals in wearing all white and uh to the god of the place and and things like this and she had all kinds of initiations and stuff but in one of her diaries page 99 in Hawkel she writes the golden swastika is a sun symbol equals a symbol of sun energy and power the black swastika or the left hand swastika as it is in Germany equals a symbol of dark power equals destruction with both these symbols I was identified x three exclamation points here lies the root the deepest root of my identification with Germany three exclamation points both these black symbols of highest but destructive power mean possession by the devil big D. Just as Germany is possessed by him the dark aspect of the self with a big S, or by Kali the destroyer so Kali being the uh Indian goddess of destruction and death and and so on right so they're fascinated with that kind of Eastern symbol there as well at the same time uh when is this it is not known when she wrote this text but various things indicate a probable date of around 1945 for that one. And there even is uh text in 1942 where they are using uh I d using words like responsibility and like they know that a big a bunch of death mass death is gonna go down and they're gonna have to dodge responsibility for it later.

SPEAKER_00 30:42

In 1942 Yeah no no uh in there um are so many weird uh connections between her and uh just these German institute like you can take them both ways where she's both got a lot of connections to the Nazis in this time period as far as like um she was going around with this trying to make an archive of archetypal symbolism and she was during I mean world war two traveling to all of these different like the Vatican Library the British Museum the Morgan Library in New York the National Archaeological Museum of Athens compiled over 6,000 images for her archive and this was during the 1930s and 40s so she had like an incredible ability to travel that definitely I to I think a degree belies you know some level of connection like you don't get into the Vatican library you know even as just a rich hippie like you're you know it's especially during that time period. And then at that time I thought it was incredibly odd. I don't know what to make of it but like there was a there was a group called the Warburg Institute forgive me for my dog uh it was a German institute with uh Jewish ownership that was doing the exact same thing like cataloging esoteric symbols and in 1933 Hitler took power and uh the Warburg Institute was rescued by British Capitol uh and over 6000 documents were smuggled on ships from Germany to London. They were transitioned from a private German library to an insulated cell of British institutional soft power in the exact same month that Airno starts which was August 1933 so I I don't even know it could just be a coincidence. I don't know what to make of that but it's just the timing to me is so interesting and odd because there's not a lot of these libraries focused specifically on um esoteric symbolism in particular which basically a pictorial dictionary and so was the Warburg Institute like and I find that to be kind of interesting. At the very least it's this it's the same kind of bourgeois ideologues soft bourgeois ideologues who are shuffling out of the way before they know the the big bomb is going to go off right well and then I'm sorry I I have somebody notes that I was digging through it and I realized I had forgotten the back half of this is that in 1946 she actually donates all of her own research to the Warburg Institute which would speak even more to there being some sort of symbiotic connection between the two um yeah oh there's so many connections as we kind of wander through this you know um did you want to discuss Alice not fucking Alice B. Toklist yeah absolutely Alice um yeah yeah who so actually okay so I I wanted to mention very early on before 1933 before Eranos officially starts she has uh two people that are foundational to the early years because even though it officially starts in 1933 they were holding lectures they did have the place and there was there was movement going on there and one of these people was Alice Bailey and Alice Bailey uh was somebody who was big in the theosophical circuit of the early 1930s and she started a a group called the Lucifer Publishing Company that eventually just because the name was a little bit too spicy changed it to Lucy Trust. Right and I mean it was publishing books I mean calling for a new world order uh in an externalization of the hierarchy where society is run by a secret government of enlightened masters and this slowly revealing itself to take over the management of human affairs she's and this Lucis Trust would go on even past her death to be a spiritual consultant group for the UN and in fact there is a meditation room in the UN that is funded and supported by the Lucis Trust that is just this really odd spare room with a uh several ton iron block in the middle of it and then a single window which is just just very strange and a six and a half ton iron altar actually so I mean it quite quite uh monument uh very aren't kind of gesture there yeah yes and I mean and she's directly like I said like she so she is friends with Olga Frobe very early on and actually what separates it it what what ends up kind of making them divert paths is that uh Carl Jung becomes a serious member in Eranos in 1933. I think that's one of the reasons that that's where the official start is usually marked and he felt that she was too like woo-woo or whatever like he wanted a level of scientific credibility and so uh she was kind of she was pushed to the side like he actually wrote a letter flat out saying I will not come if Alice Bailey is there.

SPEAKER_02 36:42

And then also there was another man named Roberto yes yeah another thing I guess her daughters were like getting involved in the kind of weird sexual scenes around the um Lago Maggiore the same kind of lake right around that lake there were lots of different places like the Oto is there the this is like this weird hotspot where there's all these other things happening and I guess Alice Bailey's daughters got into something that uh Olga Fruba didn't approve of and she actually instructed her to stay away I don't know if that's like just a reason. Although Jung is of course also doing all his uh sexual escapades around there too. He was like a moon I mean he reminds me of Reverend Moon the way that he gathers women around him and manipulates them and leaves a trail of women with like damaged psyches and and just crazy shit.

SPEAKER_00 37:44

No that was one thing I was really shocked about too um and just I wanted to mention this other guy really quickly because I've only got one thing to say about him but yeah the other man that so she had these two people Olga for Bay did who were she was working with very early on one was Alice Bailey the other one is and you'll have to forgive my pronunciation if I don't get it right but it's Roberto Asciagoli I think is how you pronounce it and uh Ashogly I don't know yeah Ashogoli it's totally possible I I um and he also split paths with her in 1933 and would end up hosting several meetings with Michael Murphy the man who would create Aaronos during the time period when he was creating it like Michael Murphy was literally going to him consulting for how to set up Asagioli yeah psychologist yeah he had worked with Freud in and then after 1915 above all with Jung yeah yep and uh and like you were saying yeah that was one thing I was really surprised about too with Jung was uh I hadn't realized he was such a sex pest he had like a sex tower that where he would like hit together with his like main sex mistress and yeah no man he was he was wild yeah okay so there was actually there was a woman uh named uh let me let me find her name real quick uh because I couldn't believe this was Sabina Spielrain I think you're gonna have to forgive my pronunciations on all these I have so many names written down and so many of them are so far outside of my uh uh capacity to know how to pronounce them uh but has a similar thing okay so she ends up having a relationship with Jung where she is institutionalized and yeah there's more than during that time he is doing psychoanalytic work and he's on her and ends up having sex with her so she's like literally in the course of basically a meltdown and i in his institution and he starts a sexual relationship with her and then she gets better ends up splitting from him and kind of ends up becoming a success in her own right and she ends up kind of outing him and in fact talking to her mother who then sends letters on her own saying that he abused her.

SPEAKER_02 40:33

And then Young this blew my like the boldness of this Young writes back to them saying that he is not bound by the Hippocratic oath because they only paid him a partial fee at the time and I mean he he only answers to his his uh tutelary uh daimon philemon or whoever the fuck yeah yeah no exactly and that I wouldn't expect runs and writes to Freud immediately to disparage this woman to say I have this spurned lover who's lying about me I know we don't always agree but we both care about preserving the sanctity of psychoanalytics basically and uh that's wild interesting Freud you remember about Freud like uh discovered that all of his patients were being sexually abused as children by their families yes the girl bourgeois girls um and Jung just kind of was the abuser of the bourgeois girls maybe one and in fact I will give Freud credit for Freud initially believes him but then he receives a letter from this woman's mother and realizes what's going on and writes this very icy letter back to Jung basically saying like you need to preserve boundaries with your patients yeah and and I can't resist mentioning uh just two days ago or something like I've finally you know this isn't high on my list of priorities but I noticed that Rev Left Radio had released an episode on Jung so I was like oh I better listen to this first before we do this and uh I don't know I mean whatever like the main message is just like you gotta work on yourself and you gotta you know handle your psychological demons and things but uh and I to the guest's uh credit she says at the end of the episode like maybe don't trust anybody who presents themselves as a Jungian uh but you should just go and read everything that Jung wrote and you know get into all his ideas and you and use them or whatever.

SPEAKER_00 42:45

Maybe but like yeah I think there's a lot more that we should get into weird yeah I just I I wonder like that's such a weird juxtaposition though that I think of all of the time with us on the left that you know there are two separate things going on where on the one hand it's important to carry like especially you know when you're forming your ideology it's very important to pay attention to materialist forces and to understand how much you are controlled from the top down. But on the other hand obviously on a personal level you can you you need to in your own head take personal responsibility for your life because otherwise they just win. Otherwise you know what I mean otherwise like you're in a position where you feel powerless and there's no way out and that's sort of I don't know if cowardly is the right word to take that path as well. So I get the inclination of somebody on the left to find young appealing I would just say that there that uh he's working Pretty directly for forces that are very opposed to some sort of leftist agenda.

SPEAKER_02 44:05

I think you could learn. I mean, yeah, maybe think about your psyche and try not to be an asshole in movement spaces and right. And think about your strong desire for revolutionary change in relations of production. Make sure it doesn't lead to abuse of behavior in your relationships. Like you need to think about like uh things like uh what do you call it? Prefigurement. Like, does this am I acting out like authoritarian patterns in this org? Uh even though I'm trying to bring about, you know, the opposite of that, this sort of thing. Yeah, you should think about that. But then also just materialist historical class-based his study of Jung himself will show you actually a very strong counterexample of what you don't want to do, I think. Uh, but maybe also forces of like, you know, in the anthropological sense, secret society organizing that maybe maybe we want to imitate. But then on the other hand, you know, as River often points out, uh, on the left, we are essentially trying to do something different, you know. So things like secrecy, things like information asymmetry that a cult leader like Jung is very clearly using, and his ways of using lead directly into modern current things that Scott Ryan, you deal with on the Dust Light Archives, right? Um so we need to watch out and and really think carefully about what we can use in the world.

SPEAKER_00 45:42

That's definitely a thing that I that I question or I think about all the time, too. And I've heard some of Yuri and Rivers conversations on it, and they've been very enlightening. I he seems we have such a dearth of real people with activist experience here in the US that to hear somebody like him talk can be very inspiring because he actually has an on-the-ground understanding of these movements. And like, I don't know what the answer is either, because I feel like we're in a position where a secret society almost always seems to lead to bad things, but they've got us so trapped by the algorithm at this point that anything that pops up can be just strangled in the crib.

SPEAKER_02 46:30

Yeah, Lenin's what is to be done, right? Um the he has this term conspirazia. So like conspiratorial action, like the ability to be can to do a conspiracy, right? In the good old sense. Yeah. Uh that the bourgeoisie used to accuse the working class of of being doing conspiracies, i.e. class organizing. Working class organizing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:56

Yeah. No, and I think maybe I would almost even say, like, you know, would people talk about conspiracies or parapolitics or all of that? I'm like, I almost really even like the idea I was just thinking now of like class organizing as a way, like that's really fundamentally what it is. When we talk about conspiracies, we're talking about the wealthy class organizing.

SPEAKER_02 47:19

In the late Cold War meaning, right? Like post-Kennedy assassination, like cover-up movement, right? And and the branding of that word conspiracy as the conspiracy theorists can say what they will, etc. Uh, yeah, that's that's what it means. And but what it is really, yeah, it's working class, uh not it's it's bourgeois, it's ruling class organization, is what the late Cold War meaning means, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 47:45

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 47:46

Uh and I hope that would lead us into historical study of that should lead us into working class organizing.

SPEAKER_00 47:55

Yes, absolutely. Um and I definitely, I definitely think uh that term has definitely been hijacked. I very much like the Leninist framing of it, and it's almost gone beyond even meaning that in the post in the Cold War and post-Cold War sense, and it really just means like a thing that's stupid to believe, more often.

SPEAKER_02 48:18

Yeah, like it's just a particular thing. You're thinking about class at all, and you shouldn't.

SPEAKER_00 48:23

It's actually like Yeah, no, class forces don't ever organize for their own.

SPEAKER_02 48:27

Don't think about class forces at all. Don't think about don't think of history as a class struggle of of subjects, historical subjects with wills that plan and and act, right? Uh, but don't we see something very, very different? Uh I found the quote from 1942, uh, where she is carefully strategizing who to invite and how close to the Nazis can you have a guest that you invite to your Eranos meeting, right? Before you will be accused later of collaboration. She is using the word collaboration, actually, right? Yeah. And sort of thinking they know in 1942 that terrible things are happening for which justice will be sought. This is on page 76. Um, she is saying, ultimately, we in Switzerland are neutral, and moreover, in such official matters, we cannot afford to pursue a one-sided policy. If two German ladies take part in our meetings, no one can make that into a reason for accusing Eranos of having, so to speak, collaborated with the Germans. We represent no political or social interests, only spiritual ones. It's as if she knows the Nuremberg trials are coming in 1942.

SPEAKER_00 49:51

Yeah. Yeah, no, uh that is that is oddly prophetic of her. Uh, and I definitely think, you know, I I I've probably already said this, you know, once when I was comparing it to something like, you know, the the Joe Rogan idea of free speech or whatever. But like yet again, I can't help but think hearing that quote like, oh sure, two German ladies or you know, two British ladies or whatever, but no Maoist, no Soviets, no Yeah, no, no.

SPEAKER_02 50:26

Um Hockel at the I mean that's the one thing that he's not careful to hide is his contempt for any kind of political uh thing. And I don't do we want to do this today, so we're we're getting close to your hard out. Um what do we want to cover today? Yeah, there it is the the kind of anti-Aranos figure. Maybe this is we'll talk about this now, or this will be something to come. That should be something to come. There's an anti-Aranos kind of child prodigy who is in contact with all these people, and Hockel uses him in this bizarre way to frame his discussion. That's fascinating. I wanted to I want to get uh into what Hockel hides and what Hockel shows this time, and maybe that's enough to get us through to the end and then wrap up. Um he he really cares about Zionist approval, basically, as you would expect. Uh in framing this whole Nazi thing, the only thing that he cares about is just like they weren't anti-Semitic, or they weren't very anti-Semitic, or maybe you know, Jung in particular was like anti-Semitic for a little while and a little bit, but ultimately he had Jewish friends who were all Zionists. And uh he believed in he believed in the the race, you know, the people getting in touch with their volksgeist and having you know Volksgemeinschaft and you know, like race, what what are we saying? Um what's the their racial spirits and their national spirits and getting their national communities kind of spiritually vibrating together, right? And Jews that do that, Jews that did that, Zionists, uh, Jung was fine with, right? And same for all um any number of other figures, right? That's the one thing that he cares about. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 52:33

Yeah, no, no, and you're you're dead right about that. Like, and it is obviously I think that that's always a sign of somebody who probably has a agenda or a thought pattern that's not going to be incredibly useful when when they kind of boil that whole period down to just you know the the suffering of the Jewish people because it's it's a expansive, wide, you know, thing that really final solution has so many different dynamics to it. And you're totally right where it's like, oh yeah, he was a Nazi, but he had Jewish friends, and it's like, okay, so like, but let's take this all together and go, okay, what does it mean that he was a Nazi? What does this mean from a class perspective? What does this mean as far as his relationship to fascism? Not just like how supportive was he directly of the death camps and the Holocaust, you know, like right, right.

SPEAKER_02 53:31

Yeah, and to be clear, he wasn't a member of the Nazi Party, but he has like very close associates are on record in Hockel's book, in things he quotes, describing Jung as a fellow an enthusiastic fellow traveler of the Nazis.

SPEAKER_00 53:46

Oh for a long time. Yeah, there was a uh there was an institute actually uh that he took over from a like a like it was run by a Jewish person. Let me see if I can find this real quick. Uh dang, I don't know where it is. I might I might have to do it.

SPEAKER_02 54:10

Well, maybe we should save Jung for for later. We can we can save Jung for later and for maybe a whole other series, right? Honestly. Um But I think the other side, maybe the other side of the like, what does he care to show you about Eranos and what does he care to hide? Uh he's he cares if they are anti-Semitic in any way. Um, but he doesn't care if they are elitist, he doesn't care that they are bourgeois intellectual operatives. That's of course, you know, and that that's the way he explicitly frames his whole chapter about difficult questions at the end of the book, you know, where he kind of comes back and sums up on the Nazi connections. And he's just like, ultimately, it comes down to whether you are uh what did he what was the framing wording he used? Uh I wish I had that holstered better right now. Um we he uh ultimately it's a question of whether you care about uh social justice and transformations of society and things in this way, uh, or do you care about the rising human spirit? Do you want the human spirit, you know, in the person of a select few, surely, to rise and and dominate and you know uh fulfill the some great possibility? Right. This is what and and so anybody who is asking questions about uh the elitism and the ruling class nature of this is like you know, that's we don't care about you. The hackel doesn't care about you.

SPEAKER_00 55:58

Well, and it and I think his other trick too is to frame uh Eranos as non-ideological, which I just think is such a dishonest reading. Uh because I'm one of those people I don't know. It's religious, it's spiritual. Yes, yeah, exactly. And I would I'm inclined to say there's almost no such thing as a non-political movement or group or something. You have a set of baseline assumptions that you're working with, and those are going to affect your political worldview. And this idea of the non-political in general always just strikes me as meaning their politics were status quo, which Uranos more or less was for the region in the time period, but that certainly uh the status quo in that region and time period was actually like incredibly fucked up.

SPEAKER_02 56:54

Like, well, I mean, yeah, they actually were um part of forces that because they have this vastly transformational vision for all of humanity, you know. I mean, they are part of the gathering forces that would come to talk about uh what do you call like yakshin tiki? Like um making sudden uh radical, radical uh accelerationist is another term that you could use about these people, right? And avowedly so. They want to so in a way that I mean they're not conservative. A lot of them are connected to uh a part of it is the aristocracy dealing with the bourgeoisie, right? The arist the old aristocracy wants to like sort of we should re return to and save and kind of you know aufhaben like uh the the old bourgeois the not bourgeois, the old aristocratic values in this new bourgeois world, and that synthesis of bourgeois and aristocratic ruling uh ethoi is going to is what we're gonna bring about. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 58:13

Yeah, no, and we can definitely uh get into him in probably next episode, because I think it's very fairly early on in the chronology. But uh when you talk about that connection, I go, you have Olga Froby on the one hand, and then you have Baron Edward Vanderheit, who is yeah, old money aristocracy, who owns Monte Verita, which is technically uh it's uh not Arenotes, but it's very much it's walking distance. And he was hosting all of these people who would come to the Airbnb. Libertine conferences and in tents, they were in his hotels.

SPEAKER_02 58:52

Yeah, he had to he wore only these very baggy linen white shirts that he called Lufthemp. Air shirts. So yeah, it was one of this very hippie cult kind of thing that was right on the same lake.

SPEAKER_00 59:07

But even in I'm like, even in the architecture of the real estate, you can see that kind of collaboration you're talking about between the old aristocracy and the bourgeoisie.

SPEAKER_02 59:21

Awesome. Yep. That's that's the world that we're we're peeking in on here with this, I think. So uh yeah, it's it's fascinating the the reframing that Hockel is having to do in the post um it's the 2000s, 2010s or something that he is writing this, yeah. And so 2013 is the trans uh no, 2013 is maybe the original one, and then 2014 is the translation. There's not a big gap. There's not a big gap. So 2010s, yeah, and you know, that's the moment that Ukraine is being cooed, and yeah, they're actually moving toward the yeah, it's it maybe that 2014 is a similar moment to 1933 in world history, perhaps. Maybe now would be a good moment to transition to those bigger questions, yeah, for a moment.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:24

As we wrote, it may be, yeah, it may be a bit of a uh digression, but I will say I was just recently reading Thomas Pinchon's Shadow Ticket. And I well, and I thought it was a really brilliant like move. You know, I saw a lot of these reviewers come out when uh there was one review in particular getting passed around where they're like, he's probably not gonna write another book. This is his last one. Why is he not doing a victory lap? Why is he not like why would he set it in the 1930s? And like reading that book, I was very much like he said it in the 1930s because he's speaking to today, and it's we're in that same cycle. Um, yeah, I definitely would recommend it's an excellent book, but uh yeah, I just I definitely think there's that feeling there, you know, of reapproaching something in the like the 1930s or 40s.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:25

So that's why we gotta strap in, you gotta put on your Luft hempt, uh put on your bead beady necklace of charms, maybe, or maybe keep those off. I don't know. Just you know, maybe purify yourself of that sort of thing, and get your your dialectical materialist goggles on and really be able to look at these things with us here, because this is going to be an ongoing series. There is way more, way more to discuss. Uh, this was just a little introduction, right, to this. Uh indeed, as Hawkel says, you know, talking about Eranos is an alternative intellectual history of the 20th century. What it is is a story of high bourgeois strategizing uh in the 20th century that's happening behind the scenes. I don't know if you're gonna learn that much that's that interesting from reading the Eranos papers themselves, perhaps, right? They're discussing a lot of dry philosophical questions and religious history questions and uh, you know, Gnostic kind of spiritualist questions and stuff. But um, well, but that sort of thing maybe does get into larger world history patterns, right? And that's something we'll we want to get into as well and sort of keep on the table, too, right? Like the larger question of what is Gnosticism, right? Yes. Um, my limited the latest scholarship tends to say that Gnosticism doesn't exist as a self-identified movement exactly. It's a word, a Gnostic, a knower, you know, it's an element in Abrahamist, uh incipient Abrahamist worldview ideology in late antiquity, as it is forming simultaneously within Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All of these are different branches of one tree that forms simultaneously into medieval Judaism, right? And yes, medieval Christianity and medieval Islam. Islam, Islam. And uh pistis, right? Faith and works and knowledge are these three ingredients, right, that are present, I think, in all forms of these. But the extent to which a movement existed, you know, I think much more of this is about the industrial bourgeoisie coming along and using that idea as a hook to hang their hat on, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:02

Yeah, yeah. And you know, one thing you pointed out when we were talking that I thought was uh a little like clear clarified it for me a little bit was when you actually when you were like, well, it's Neoplatonism. I'm like, I almost think that that's probably a better term for because there's a weird, like, you know, you you have like, you know, say like on the Christian side, like the Valentinians and the Scythians and all that that get lumped into Gnosticism, but they were really like the dice who are just yeah, those are scholars coming along and yeah, the Najemadi libraries, like, oh, they're saying this is Valentinian, this is Scethian, like you know, those lines have been drawn by people coming in.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:47

But absolutely Neoplatonism, and then but and then also I think the latest scholarship has shown the ways that Neoplatonism is pretty faithful to Platonism, and there's actually been a modern divorce of the not just religious, not just spiritual, but in the Brian Hayden sense, I think secret society ritual aspect of Plato, what Plato means by philosophy in Plato himself. Yeah, like he was in a lineage with the the old Greek mysteries, the mystery cults of ancient Greece, and whatever Pythagoras was, and whatever, you know, uh he's drawing on that tradition and saying, what I'm doing is one of those. And it's that and the idea of Plato as just a philosopher as well is something that British 19th century, you know, that's a bourgeois era construct too. The the non secret society Plato that existed before Neoplatonism. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:54

In the idea of Neoplatonism, which I totally agree with you, I think that drawing that distinction probably doesn't even really m matter or if it does it does to a limited degree. But like I I feel like and I may be wrong about this, but I my general understanding is that I feel like like uh you know mc uh sl Mathers and uh Alistair Crowley were all kind of people you know the the Golden Dawn and the Oto and all that were kind of the people who mixed it with like Theosophy which was already kind of mixed with Buddhism and through some Kabbalah and each in there and stuff you know but uh yeah we got yeah but the Neoplatonism is the basis the foundation like if like or the Platonism is the foundation yeah which is the rest which is whichever it is real quick what should we say how should we explain the content of that the not the doctrine of spheres ascent through the spheres right and trying to get through all the spheres and out to the world of the forms absolute reality is in this outer space and the adept has to rise to those in some kind of way yeah and I mean it's uh I think there's real if I were trying to explain it simply to somebody I would say you could do worse than to call it basically old timey simulation theory in a lot of ways like it there's a real uh oh you know I like there like simulation theory is so heavily drawing from that connection platonic straight to the modern present day cults that you work on.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:45

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:46

Yeah exactly um but yeah definitely the idea that's a great place to wrap up being yeah um I know I I'm so can so I appreciate you say that I'm we're not looking at the time so I'm glad you said something because let's make the connection to that for work yeah let's make the connection to that real quick we have just enough time oh yeah absolutely yeah um um well you're you're probably a better person to do that than me how does that connect to Nexium simulation theory how does that connect to Nexium yeah simulation so I would say that maybe for somebody who's never listened to your podcast yeah uh Nexium is a little bit I mean simulation theory has existed for a long time but Nexium itself was not really interested in that but what I think and actually this will be something I'll end up getting into in my later episodes as I kind of wrap up my Nexium series is when Nexium got shut down the uh work they were doing and in the psychological tests they were doing uh which I think a lot of people don't even know about they were running schools with young children where they were just doing these wild psychological test tests that you have to like look deep to even find information on. But like they had all of the these these uh documents all of these like tests that ended up floating out into the private sphere after they were shut down and you can look at things like Silicon Valley and their kind of new age movement and a lot of that is literally like I mean personality stuff that Nexium was doing. If you were to draw a line from say something like that's directly government related like MKUltra to something that is uh more privatized like Nexium you you see after that where I think it's moved so heavily into the private sphere where now like you will find a lot of this just in like executive training programs and stuff like that for you know high level people in Silicon Valley or celebrities or things like that. And that's kind of the path it's taken if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:23

Externalization of the hierarchy is this the yes and on a on a theoretical level on an anthropological theoretical level I would call that like a kind of augmented reality technology where you have a screen between your class victim and your class victim's reality right you as the the ruler right and you are preventing the natural human ability to organize and connect with the people around them first of all form a healthy subjectivity by doing that and then become able to understand the world around them and make it better. Instead you are putting screens there and making them think about their animus and anima and their organ I don't know you know whatever substitute whatever you want. Yeah and then you are able I mean anostic would flat out say is demiurgic behavior like I mean demiurgic behavior yeah yeah it there's the wow how does that work that the whole thing is about escaping this um I mean religions maybe in general tend to do that Buddhism does that you know at first it's about escape but then it becomes about like oh now that we understand the whole mechanism of this universe here like you we I can use this to get you a better deal on your next reincarnation buddy this kind of well and it's also dual use technology trying to learn how to elevate yourself out of this plane also means learning how to trap other people in it.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:58

And I think you know you it's a real real short line from these executive training programs in Silicon Valley to uh the algorithms that control our lives in so many ways we don't know you know I was just reading something the other day about like how like these AI programs they don't just log what you say or they log what you type in a race they log how long you know you look at something or how long you wait exactly how do you hold your phone what's the pattern on the accelerometers of the of the phone when you hold it versus someone else oh my god yeah does that mean that revolutionaries could also be born from this I don't know I think it's a rare event when people I think we need more class traders maybe it's not something to sit up waiting holding your breath from these people I I will say I I and this might I don't know I hope this isn't too unpopular of an opinion but I I am of a mind where I'm like this technology is being used for evil it's created by evil people but I'm like is it really in a dialectical materialist sense is it smart to not try to commandeer these tools these are the tools that exist you know like yeah and I see like a very extreme aversion which I understand but I'm also like if you just ignore it that they have these tools like definitely cyber Leninism perhaps is is perhaps part of it although maybe uh in the meantime though I think that needs to be combined in some kind of way with a a Luddite Leninism or a paleolenism perhaps I think reducing the accelerometers on you is probably strategic in a lot of cases now. So with that I hope uh man we have opened up such an interesting uh can of worms here can of dragons can of worms worms in the old English sense yeah in in well thank you so for having me on yeah I just want to thank you so much for having me on giving me this opportunity to talk with you thank you thank you and I'm really happy to introduce you to my listeners uh where can they find you uh they can find me on I have a very small X account that I think is just Scott Ryan88 I've had people ask me it's just my birth year it's not secret Nazi coding I honestly didn't even think about it when I first made it um and then I also the Dust Light Archives which is available anywhere you can get podcasts pretty much the Dust Light Archives check it out with Scott Ryan thanks so much for coming on I'm Fergushmudlock and I have anointed you with the anointing of the kingless generation