COSMIC HERETICS: Part 2 :

by Alfred de Grazia

CHAPTER SEVEN

FROM VENUS WITH LOVE

When Deg was proofreading Chaos and Creation in 1981, he recalled a half-century earlier overhearing Bob, his Scoutmaster, confide to a deacon of St. Chrysostom's Episcopal Church in Chicago, "Sex rears its ugly head everywhere." The recollection was triggered because among innumerable problems foreseen and unforeseen there occurred in remote India the castration of Geb. As illustrated in the book (p. 125) Nut the Egyptian Sky Goddess reaches down to embrace pronouncedly ithyphallic Geb the Earth God. But the printer's proof of the illustration that was sent back by Popular Prakishan Pvt. Ltd. reached Deg sans phallus. I quote now Deg's admirably restrained letter of January 29, 1981, p. 2, point 3:

Back comes the reply of Mr. M. G. Shirali, Production Manager, dated February 2, p. 1:

The new proof returns. The phallus was restored-by half. Persisting, and because he fears that the original has been mutilated beyond use, Deg writes on March 28,1981:

Indeed sex does pop out of all corners in the material of human history and is especially illuminating in regard to catastrophic events. It remarkable how V. managed to suppress sexuality from becoming a major theme of this circles. It would have been easy to follow a path similar to the one of Wilhelm Reich who found in a kind of electromagnetic life force, expressible in sexuality, the beginning of an answer to all things, including a kind of communism for which he was evicted from the communist party in Germany.

Elsewhere, in The Burning of Troy and in related pages of the SISR, a story is told of how V., following Cicero, claimed the root of Venus to be the word venire, meaning 'to come', and therefore the planet must be newly arrived, but Lowery, analyzing the words, finds them unrelated, nor is this the first time Lowery and the tribe of linguists dashed cold water against the heated claims of catastrophists. Christoph Marx and Deg independently found a subtle connection that Lowery missed and I take leave to quote from a paper circulated by Marx dated May 8, 1982:

Electricity has in folklore been connected with sexuality, just as has the coinage and usage of words. Jerry Ziegler, a physicist, in the 1970's circulated his work on ancient knowledge of electrostatics and a copy come to Deg who got in touch with Ziegler and recommended his study to V. who ignored it, but Deg began to develop it in a number of ways. This was not uncommon; V. 's closest associates moved in their own way; Sizemore was aware of a world of marginal sciences that he would not discuss with V.; so Stephanos, as will be seen; so Juergens who moved toward it, because of V., first to be near him, then to be away from him; so Bill Mullen; and the British heretics, so devoted yet so independent of thought.

Ziegler found many associations of ancient religion with electrical practices, and persuasively in his YHWH informs us of what interested so persistently and for so long the ancient sects in their mountaintop ceremonies. To be near to the gods, yes, but to be near the sources of enhanced electrical stimulation, too. The people, led by priests, went up the mountains for ecstatic purposes where religious rites and sexual experience were joined. Electrical discharge was supposed to enhance the sexual libido.

Significantly, when in modern times there began many experiments with electricity, following the invention of the Leyden Jar, the scientist Sigaud tried to pass an electric shock through a company of grounded men, a trick that others had achieved, and when the attempt failed, he suspected that one of the company was "less than a man," a eunuch or castrato, that is; but then, as Heilbron's history tells the story, it developed that these, too, jumped where discharge was passed, and were electrically conductive.

But Zvi Rix, of all the cosmic heretics, went farthest into the exploration of correlations among ancient religious practices, sexuality, and commentary disasters. Marx took over his manuscripts from his widow, but the task of disentangling them and reformulating them into fairly conventional prose proved to be arduous.

When he was a boy, Deg believed that sex was a simple function: a male found a female, like an arrow shot from a bow pierces the bulls-eye of a target. For the several years that he was confined to autoeroticism, his fantasies and exercises, occurring privately, aimed at real female acquaintances and attractive female images in equal proportions. By increments of experience and learning, before he was forty, he could publish the article of a friend in Psychology at the University of Minnesota, arguing that sample surveys might be improved if they solicited information that would place the respondent on scales of masculinity-femininity, allowing sex to be a finer variable, capable of more meaningful correlations with other behavioral variables like "political candidate preferences."

By the time he was sixty, though still an active heterosexual, the image of the arrow and the bulls-eye had resolved into the image of a fragmentation bomb, striking promiscuously and erratically in all directions. Homo Schizo, it seemed, from his beginnings and forever after, had lost, sexually as with all drives, close instinctual guidance and gained an uncontrollable but vast world. The modern theory is that if you don't find indications of homosexuality in a man and lesbianism in a women, you have an unusual person who is rigid and lacking in affect.

Roger Peyrefitte, a French writer, ex-diplomat and professed homosexual, discussed and wrote about what he regarded as the homosexuality of Jesus and his apostles. He was challenged to a duel by a fiery Spanish psychiatrist, but refused the test. The same understandably underground theory was shared by V., but Deg was unimpressed, not needing V.'s innuendoes, meaningful glance and obvious reluctance to say so, but still V. had to let the cat out of the bag, like "you know, there is much to be said in this regard about Jesus." But Deg had no doubt that the tradition went back to the nasty cirumstancs surrounding the trial of Jesus. I'm sure they called him everything, he said, not disagreeing but not caring at the time to plumb V.'s data base on the question. There was little Deg could not find a place for in his mind, ranging from Jean Genet to Don Juan, and all the ambiguous feelings, attitudes and practices in between.

The closest V. comes to offering a theory of sexuality occurs in Mankind in Amnesia. There he asserts that neurosis is based upon narcissism, ultimately, the autistic libido that has to be located and treated first of all (p. 162). This done, the therapist must move to the treatment of homosexual problems and then into alleviation of the Oedipus complex. The theory is rather directly one of Freud's many, and V. generally arrived at these several stages quickly with his psychiatric patients. Fifteen minutes is often enough, he said to Deg, to understand what is going on with a patient. Repeated visits and phonecalls were to be expected, of course. V. was remarkably prudish. Over the years, he gave Deg the impression which actually was obvious at first but scarcely believable in a psychiatrist, that he operated on the idea that "men are men" and "women are women," a simplistic notion. He seemed not to notice that several of his most brilliant and active supporters might have been homosexuals of one kind or another. Fight off the homosexual urge, he seemed to be saying, and stamp out the narcissism that stands beneath it. Laius, father of Oedipus, had introduced, according to legend, the practice of "unnatural love" (V.'s term) in Ancient Greece (which, insists V., is at the origin of the terrible curse upon his house).

Onetime in America and once in England, Deg was asked with a certain wonder about homosexuals in the movement. Their participation was not surprising, he answered; no movement is a rational and random selection from the population, no more than the establishment it stems from; homosexuals are more active in innovative and intellectual movements; all that we know of the sources of creativity and cultural change would be contradicted if they were not. New movements, whether scientific, cultural, political, religious, or social do not come from the average norms and normals of a culture.

Deg ought to have explained fully, right out of his reading of Oedipus and Akhnaton, which so impressed him. There, on pages 48 to 50, is told the story of Amenhotep III, father of Akhnaton, and of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, and of the Greek's and Oriental's indulgence of homosexuality, and the Hebrews' condemnation of it. In a delicate lacework of widesweeping history V. manages the following pejoratives regarding homosexuality: "Greek love," "invert," "iniquity," "spoiled by," "contemptible," "work their will (on Lot's guests)," "horrible retribution" (Laius' descendant at Thebes): throughout the passage, luxury, splendor, power, idleness, extravagance, high culture and civic freedom are dwelt upon as the ambiance of homosexual inversion. No wonder, thinks the innocent reader, that Akhnaton was so queer. But Akhnaton is not the issue here. Three features emerge from the passage: V. absolutely rejects homosexuality; homosexuality is portrayed as an exotic and attractive luxury of high cultures; V. does not, here or elsewhere, appear outwardly punitive to homosexuality.

Deg could name a half-dozen of his acquaintances, all of V. 's circle and on at least three sides of any argument that came up -- not a clique, that is -- who were homosexuals, but he never thought of what might be the seductiveness of V. both at close hand and at a distance. For my part, being more distant from the scene, I would guess that V. subtly presented the image which homosexuals in those years (not the present liberationist gays) could best accommodate to: a stern attitude exuding a luxuriant bath of guilt and a seeming tolerance, delicacy and understanding precluding any but the most "delicious" punition, which was necessary for the enjoyment of their homosexual feelings. (Nor to be fully aware, have we of Western culture quite learned to enjoy heterosexuality without guilt and fear of punition.)

V. liked Nina, Deg's second wife, who was at the Swiss college on and off. Deg recalls an especially vivid image of the two of them silhouetted in the sunshine and snow against the Alps on the road to Haute-Nendez, talking volubly in Russian. Long after, Deg was reporting to him that Nina had gone to Berlin to marry Peter Bockelmann -- a fine musicologist said Deg, and a fine man. Whereupon V. began to speak of Tolstoi's "Kreutzer Sonata," a story in which a husband, according to V., enjoys sexuality homosexually by turning his wife over to another man. Deg was amused at this. He had been happy that she had found so good a friend after their separation. What were V.'s motives for the story -- his liking for Nina, his dislike of Germans, his need to carry a dubious theory into every human relation, a jealousy of Deg's philandering, a homosexual impulse of his own? That is to say, when it came to conjecturing and examing motives, Deg was unwilling to let others escape. Or perhaps V. just had not gotten the story straight; the couple separated, but they were still friends: it was a plot not to be found in V.'s manual.

One of the sillier passages in V.'s Mankind in Amnesia propounds the idea that nations have a masculine or feminine character, Germany and France being among his examples (pp. 140-2). This kind of social psychology is not only unproductive, but also false (like Mussolini once in anger calling the Germans a "nation of barbarians and pederasts") and only made Deg more irritated at V.'s pretentiously published book.

For the infant college in the Alps, Deg had invented a concept which he called, "rapport psychology" that was intended to be a form of group encounter usable for the "Kalotic" world order. He wrote in the Bulletin of the School:

Deg was trying to connect the personal to the universal without the usual intervening madness. Amidst the continual hubbub of hand-to- hand struggle at the new school, he could not operationalize the theory of the Rapport Center. He left it to the attention of his brother Edward and B. J., a group leader whom Ed had recruited from his experience at the famed center for group therapy at Esalen, and to the students, aged 18 to 28. At one moment in a group session, on the way to the brave new world, two men decided that they would make love to each other and went off, after which one, a virgin in such matters, "tossed his cookies" in a rush of shame and disgust.

The word got to Deg and to V. as well, who accosted Deg on an alpine pathway and denounced such conduct nor, said he, will I stay on these mountains with this going on. Deg solemnly and reassuringly listened, and told Ed "What the hell happened there anyhow?" He didn't expect much of an answer, nor got one. The Rapport Center remained popular and undirected to the new world order, whence I remind my readers of two axioms: few truly wish and are psychically prepared to address themselves to the necessary new world, and "bringing life into the classroom" is a beloved pedagogical expression with absurd possibilities.

V. stuck it out on the mountains -- actually he enjoyed his stay -- but he could not help but slip a reminder of the incident, camouflaged, into his notes and ultimately into Mankind in Amnesia, where, in a diatribe against both the old and the new, he says( p. 185):

But V. did not pursue sexual investigations of Jung or Marx, contenting himself with stressing the obvious resentment of Jung at being regarded as a son. Bronson Feldman, a Velikovsky acquaintance and supporter, introduced sexual analysis to back up V.'s claims, but we must remember how chary was V. to let anyone claim to represent his several views, with every excellent reason. Feldman, who became understandably mad and confused when dealing with Central European anti-semitism, added little to historical reconstruction.

He did point out, for instance, that V. had misstated a famous report of Freud's swooning in the presence of Jung and others. V. forgot to mention that not only had Jung been defending the efforts of Akhnaton to erase his father's memory but had just been hotly accused by Freud of the great academic crime of non-citation of authority -- namely himself, Freud -- in his writings. Thus Freud had taken two blows from his disciple and son, Jung, and probably a third unmentioned blow, a Christian effort (at least a suspicion thereof) to bury a Jew's contribution to knowledge; of this suspicion we have ample evidence, and of the fact, too, whether in Jung or in Nazism, that the contributions of Heine, Mendelssohn, Einstein and many another Jew to German high culture were buried. And, incidentally, Deg spoke in Politics for Better or Worse of the recent era in America, "of those highly skilled and creative people who had built the arts and sciences, half of them Jews," for he was irritated that in whatsoever history book or sociological work on America no such statement, even the approximation of such a statement, is to be found. But Jews are divided in their minds and amongst themselves whether to lay claim to their achievements or to play them down to avoid envy and resentment.

The sexual verges upon the political, and the political, I must now make the point, verges upon the sexual. I mentioned that V. was a prude -- or was he canny, realizing that scientists and scholars are sexually repressed and in our civilization will not respect an authority who ties in the sexual link too closely with the processes of the intellect? I would say V. was publicly rather priggish, and privately more so. He did not like at all Stechini's introducing Peter Tompkins to his circle, nor did Peter visit more than once, although a war hero, a man of some fame then ( and more to come), of great personal attractiveness, and a potentially influential supporter: why? Because Tompkins had written on cults and practices of eunuchs and virgins and saw in the history of the planet Venus, which he credited to V., the mad unfolding of the human mind into sexualized institutions.

With perhaps more reason, V was exceedingly wary of a "hippy bookman" in Manhattan, Theodore Lazar, adorative of V.'s books, who wrote a pamphlet about Venusian-derived phallicism, the commentary image as it entered so many ways into the brain and behavior of mankind. V. was wrought up at Robert Stephanos, a Philadelphia school system psychologist, the most faithful, pleasant and helpful of disciples, for pushing favorably the work of the New Yorker. And, later on, he was angry to hear that Stephanos had been flirtatiously corresponding with a Southern devotee and, not long afterwards, in a paranoiac mood, came to suspect that Stephanos might even be purloining papers of his. You must remove him from the Board of Trustees of the Foundation for Studies of Modern Science, he told Deg, the President, and others.

"Politics makes strange bedfellows," but so does science when it strikes out in new directions. Whoever wants to sleep with the partner of his choice or to sleep alone must give up creative dreams. V. sought hard to deny his bedfellows, but they were with him from the moment his book struck a popular chord, attracting many who were looking for bedfellows. Not so strange, he or his fellows, I hasten to stress. Just variegated.