Art as Black Magick and Moral Subversion
by Heinrich von Hankopf
from Critique: A Journal of Conspiracies and Metaphysics #27, 1988
Bob Banner’s long review of David Tame’s The Secret Power of Music (Critique, Vol. VI, No. 1,2, Spring/Summer, 1986; #21/22) certainly goes a long way toward exposing the diabolical, sinister, unhallowed, un-Christian and un-American influences within Jazz and Rock, but I feel that all this merely scratches the surface of the Greatest Conspiracy of All Time – the revolutionary, socialistic, immoral, demonic, hellish, mind-corrupting, occult and Satanic influence of virtually all the so-called “art” of the world.
Mr. Tame points out that Rock derives from Jazz which possibly derives from voodoo, and that voodoo is certainly evil because some people who dislike Blacks have alleged that Voodoo involves animal and (sometimes) human sacrifice. This should, of course, immediately lead us to suspect equally sinister influences at work in the music of Mendelssohn and Mahler, who were both Jews, since some people who dislike Jews have alleged that the Jewish religion involves the sacrifice of humans — Christian infants, according to most of these sources – and certainly the Old Testament makes clear that animal sacrifice was once part of the Jewish religion. If you listen closely, the melodies of Mendelssohn and Mahler reek of eerie, eldritch and nameless influences, strongly suggestive of such blasphemous rituals.
In this unholy context, it is alarming to note the major reputation in the modern world of George Gershwin, who was not only Jewish but admittedly incorporated jazz techniques into his music, thereby invoking Papa Legba, Erzulie and the other terrible voodoo gods and goddesses that Mr. Tame warns us against–and quite possibly summoning Yahweh, the bloodthirsty monster in the Old Testament, as well.
(Incidentally, although Liberal Historians will argue that there is no credible evidence of human sacrifice by Voodooists and Jews, and animal sacrifice may be only part of their distant past – pace, Mr. Tame – there is no doubt at all that the Jews killed Christ. In 2000 years they have not yet produced a convincing alibi for this atrocity, and the obscene, drug-mad and subversive “sick comic” Lenny Bruce offered only the weak, and contradictory, excuses, “I am often asked why we killed Christ. What can I say? Maybe it was one of those wild parties that got out of hand. I don’t remember. Maybe we killed him because he wouldn’t become a doctor.”)
But there are worse depths to explore, as everybody knows by now, Mozart and Haydn were both Freemasons – and Nesta Webster, the Abbe Barruel, the United Methodist Church of Scotland and the majority of Conspiracy researchers of the past two hundred years all agree that Freemasonry is intimately allied to Zionism, atheism, secularism, scientism, humanism, skepticism, socialism and almost everything else conservatives dislike. (I also think I heard the Rev. Gene Scott – or was it the Rev. Pat Robertson? —read a pamphlet one night on TV proving Freemasons are the fiendish cabal who have taken cream out of our restaurants and replaced it with that sinister white powder that “coincidentally” resembles the hellish drug cocaine and always gets spilled when you try to open the microscopic plastic packets in which it is served.) In any event, the melodies of Haydn and Mozart reek of sensuality, and the Ninth Degree of Freemasonry justifies murder and treason, as every Conspiracy book for two centuries will tell you, and as Stephen Knight recently documented again in The Brotherhood.
Beethoven was not only a Freemason, too, like his libertine heroes Haydn and Mozart, but also closely allied with the most infamous of all Masonic orders, the monstrous Illuminati of Bavaria–a fact discussed at length in Maynard Solomon’s scholarly and objective biography, Beethoven. Solomon also shows that Beethoven’s first major work, The Emperor Joseph Cantata, was directly paid for by the Illuminati. This Satanic, subversive, diabolical, socialistic piece of music glorifies the Emperor Joseph von Hapsburg, whom it hails as “the foe of darkness and superstition,” because he closed the Christian schools of Austria and replaced them with modernistic secular humanist education–a sure sign of the most insidious kind of Illuminati conspiracy afoot, as the late Gary Alien will certainly agree. (The von Hapsburgs continue to plot mischief. Johann von Hapsburg financially supported the foul, noisome and probably Gnostic Priory of Sion conspiracy, as you can read in Holy Blood, Holy Grail; and the current scion of the family, Dr. Otto von Hapsburg, is a Bilderberger!!!)
Beethoven continued to associate with Freemasons and Illuminati throughout his Vienna years, and much of his music contains clearly Promethean and revolutionary (i.e. Satanic) impulses. Like the libertine (and foul-mouthed) Mozart, Ludwig patronized whores and probably died of syphilis.
Antonio Vivaldi, the hero of some naive musical conservatives–who recognize and deplore the anarchist tendencies of Romantics like Mozart and Beethoven — appears to present a pleasant surface, but there are erotic, cthonic, pantheistic and lascivious elements in some of his concerti if you listen closely, and it is known that he led a shameful life. Although a Catholic priest (which perhaps gave him access to holy wafers for Black Masses?), he had so many mistresses that the Church removed him from all priestly duties and banished him from Naples to Ireland, which was then so isolated that further news of his amours would not scandalize the Continent. Even now they say in Dun Laoghaire and Baile-atha-Claith that in Father Vivaldi’s day you couldn’t throw a brick over a wall without hitting one of his bastards.
Richard Wagner was not only a Freemason but was probably a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis (according to Aleister Crowley, who should know about that, being Outer Head of the O.T.O. himself.) A close study ofParcifal will clearly demonstrate that, as Crowley claimed, the whole opera is an adaptation of the ninth degree (Sex Magick) rite of the O.T.O. and the insertion of the lance into the cup has Tantric, erotic, prurient and Black Magick symbolism (just as Mozart’s Magic Flute is based on the blasphemous third degree of orthodox Freemasonry, which replaces Jesus by the Widow’s Son, Hiram, as the martyred savior). The cthonic, Cthuhoid Evil of Wagner’s works are indicated by the fact that Hitler said National Socialism was directly inspired by them–as confirmed by Adolfs close friend, August Kubizek, and Wagner’s widow, Cosima. Although some still quarrel over numbers, it seems evident that National Socialism practiced human sacrifice on a scale far beyond that attributed to Voodooists or Jews by even the most avid xenophobes, and the Nazi State even came close to the record genocides committed by the Christian churches.
After Wagner, all is chaos and the formless void, as I am sure Mr. Tame will agree. The atonalities of the Jew Mahler and the ambiguous Schoenberg; the barbarisms of the homosexual Tchiakovsky; the aleatorisms of Bartok or John Cage–the whole tendency of modem music bears the stamp that Mr. Tame has clearly recognized as socialistic, anarchistic, barbaric, Satanic and un-American. It all reminds one of the inhuman antedeluvian frenzies Lovecraft has so terrifyingly portrayed in “The Music of Erich Zann.”
The anthropologist William Irwin Thompson has said that Hard Rock represents “music played on the interface between noise and information.” Such has been the sick, decadent, socialistic tendency in much of our music since those damnably weird late string quartets of the Illuminatisymp Beethoven, but it is also the tendency of modem art in general – and, as I shall show, of art throughout history, although some artists are more clever at concealing their seductive, socialistic, un-American and hellish purposes than others have been.
The warped perspectives and unreal “psychedelic” colors of the Marxist and probably syphilitic Vincent Van Gogh are a clear illustration that decadence is not confined to music. This demoniac Dutchman also poisoned his brain with absinthe, a drink now illegal because it acts like a hallucinogenic drug in the LSD family. Even Hitler, steeped in occultism, found Van Gogh decadent and ordered his paintings banned, saying in warning to those who might imitate such unwholesomeness, “Anybody who paints the sky green shall be sterilized at once.” It is also noteworthy that Van Gogh was expelled from the clergy for his socialist and subversive acts–he once gave his bed away to a poor family who owned none–and, like the fiendish musicians we have been discussing, he often consorted with whores.
Paul Gaugin heartlessly deserted his wife and family, went to live with nonwhite savages (whom he preferred to white civilized men and women) and painted, like his friend Van Gogh, in a suspiciously psychedelic style. Cezanne was wilder still, and some contemporary critics claimed that he must have had an eye disease, just as Beethoven’s deafness may explain the unholy, kakadaemoniac barbarism of his later music. (But all who received their sex education in a good Christian school know what causes blindness and deafness. Ludwig was a lifelong bachelor.)
The Dadaists produced accidental art by combining elements at random; Tristan Tzara even produced “poems” by picking words out of a hat while blindfolded. This is non-Aristotelian, certainly, and therefore, like modernism in general, un-American. Picasso was an openly avowed Communist and, although there is no clear evidence of overt membership in the BILDERBERGERS, the number of his mistresses and concubines undoubtedly surpasses that of King Solomon, Aleister Crowley or even George Washington. Like Van Gogh, Gaugin and the whole “modernist” movement, and like Jazz and Rock, Picasso’s art definitely “plays on the interface between noise and information.” He actually painted a Jazz band once, and he said, in defense of decadence, “One must run faster than beauty, even if it appears one is running away from it.” He even deliberately imitated the primitive art of Africa instead of the art of nice white people, and if Mr. Tame looks closely I am sure he will see Voodoo symbolism in some of Pablo’s Cubist renditions of tortured bulls and sexually frenzied women. Evil is everywhere, for those whose eyes are open and ready to see it.
Jean Cocteau, 23rd Grand Master of the ill-famed Priory of Sion, was homosexual and his paintings, poetry and films are as non-linear, non-Aristotelian and therefore barbaric as the works of his friend Picasso. Cocteau said specifically that “To be an artist is to be a suspicious character” and “The true artist is always a revolutionary.” He helped launch Surrealism, with all its barefaced celebration of erotic, African, primitive, irrational and overtly Communist elements. Andre Breton revealed the anarchistic and sociopathic impulses behind Surrealism blatantly, hanging a lurid sign in the gallery that inflicted the first exhibit of Surrealist art on the unsuspecting and previously sane and decent public; the sign, seemingly humorous, gave a clear warning of what was to come. It said:
DADA IS NOT DEAD!
WATCH YOUR OVERCOAT!
Salvador Dali differed from the other Surrealists only in preferring Hitler to Communism, and once offered the typically Surrealist rationalization, “Hitler has three balls and four foreskins.” Dali also said, “The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad” and insulted us with such degenerate un-American paintings as the Cthulhoid, monstrous, unspeakable Debris of an Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone and the vile, vulgar, lewd and infamous Great Masturbator. (Although not a lifelong bachelor like Beethoven, Dali has lived in so-called “celibacy” since the death of his wife.) Worse yet: he once gave a lecture inside a diving suit, making it impossible for the audience to hear him.
Nor is any of this a peculiarly modern development. Mark Twain once pointed out (in “Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism”) that the very term Old Masters “is a contraction, an abbreviation.” Raphael painted so many voluptuous nude females that Sir Henry Merivale called his paintings “fit furnishings for a brothel” and the Dublin critic, de Selby, has said “The man must have had one hand on the paintbrush and the other on his Willy,” it would be no exaggeration to call him the Playboy Centerfold artist of his day. Why the Feminists and the Moral Majority are not crusading to have his paintings burned is a mystery to me. Renoir was even worse; even the libertine Gaugin said, “This man paints with his penis.”
Michelangelo, another of the endless list of homosexuals and therefore un-American artists, painted and sculpted many raunchy male nudes with the same lubricity Raphael leeringly depicted in his lurid renditions of naked women. The same sodomistic Michelange1o physically assaulted the Pope when His Holiness objected to the obscenities and blasphemies on the celling of the Cistine Chapel, which still embarrass church authorities today. Leonardo was such a raving queen that mothers hid their boy children in the cellars when they heard he was in town; the second Christ in his egregious The Last Supper clearly indicates that he was privy to the secret Gnostic teaching about Jesus’s twin brother and lends weight to the claim that, like Cocteau, he was a Grand Master of the abhorred and loathesome Priory of Sion. The life of the whoremonger Fra Filippo Lippi is memorialized in Browning’s scandalous poem of that name.
In fact, the eminent critic George Jean Nathan, in & celebrated essay, “Art as a Corruptor of Morals,” argued seriously that it was impossible to find a major artist anywhere in history who was not a rascal or scoundrel of some sort. The record of the poets and novelists, is particularly shocking to decent, God-fearing Americans. Sappho was a lesbian. Homer must have led a secret life because nothing is known about him, leaving us to wonder what enornities he took such care to hide – Catullus and Propertius show overt signs of sado-masochism (as do, more recently, Swinburne, almost all English novelists and, of course, de Sade and Masoch.) Ovid wrote bawdy and indecent verse, lived an un-Christian life, and was exiled for gross indecency. Dante imported drugs to Italy for money, had an erotic obsession with a little girl younger than Lolita, and was exiled for political conspiracy. Villon was a whoremaster and thief. Malory of the Morte d’Arthur was jailed for robbery and rape.
Shakespeare’s first child was born only six months after the wedding and his love poems are not written to his legally wedded wife at all–but some to a promiscuous Negress and some to a Gay Boy seemingly named Willy Hughes, perhaps because of the size of his virile member. Swift, although a clergyman, had two or three mistresses, was rumored to be an atheist, wrote treasonable pamphlets under various pen-names, and authored several works so vile that unexpurgated editions are seldom encountered; one of his “poems” has the perverse refrain, “But Celia, Celia, Celia shits.” Defoe was a spy, a thief and a blackmailer. Lewis Carroll shared Dante’s preference for little girls rather than grown women and perverted his mathematical treatise on symbolic logic by including weird, Surrealist, mind-corrupting pseudo-proofs that lead to such conclusions as “some dowagers are thistles.”(A few commentators have wondered, as we all should, about the hookah or hashish pipe in Alice in Wonderland and the magic mushrooms that also appear.)
Baudelaire, Gautier and Flaubert all smoked hashish (as Mark Twain also did, at the instigation of Fitz Hugh Ludlow, who seems to have also seduced Robert Louis Stevenson into this vile habit, while the latter was in San Francisco.) It is no surprise that Baudelaire and Flaubert both had mistresses, and that both were prosecuted for gross indecency. Some of Twain’s drug-warped works were so vile that his wife persuaded him not to publish them, and others were so blasphemous and indecent that they were withheld from print by his family for over 70 years. Melville and Whitman were both bisexual, with a strange passion for sailors, and Poe was a drunkard and drug-abuser. Wilde was another bisexual and in the poem “To Liberty” and the essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” bluntly advocates anarchist and pacifist principles. Yeats, who managed to be an anarchist and a fascist at the same time, belonged to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the same Black Magick society that spawned the infamous Aleister Crowley. Yeats wrote one poem, “Easter 1916,” glorifying socialist revolutionaries and another, “The Second Coming,” prophesying a “rough beast” (Crowley?) who will replace Christ in the New Aeon. In addition to his membership in the diabolical Golden Dawn, Yeats also joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood, direct ancestor of the terroristic Irish Republican Army of today. Joyce admired Wilde, was also an anarchist and lived in sin with a peasant girl for 27 years before he finally grudgingly married her (only to ensure that his bastard children would receive the royalties to his books after his death). Like Yeats, Joyce was once associated with the Theosophical Society, founded by the hashish-fiend Blavatsky, who despised Christian orthodoxy and espoused ecumenicism and World Government. Ezra Pound, a friend of both Yeats and Joyce, was a fascist and lived in a menage a trois with a wife and a mistress; he collected books on magick and shows an unwholesome sympathy for Gnostic immanentalism. The influence of the non-linear, relativistic, non-Aristotelian and therefore un-American experiments in prose and poetry by these two arch-conspirators, Joyce and Pound–who blatantly promoted each other’s works and sneeringly satirized the simple and decent literature of more wholesome minds–has been poisonous and omnipresent ever since. Joyce and Pound can be found as major influences in the poetry of the Jewish homosexual Jazz fan Alien Ginsberg, the New Deal “liberal” Charles Olson, the Black Revolutionary Leroi Jones &c and in the prose of the homosexual Punk Rock fan and drug addict William S. Burroughs, as well as in the brutal Hemingway, the decadent Beckett, the socialistic Steinbeck, the alcoholics Faulkner and Fitzgerald etc.
The record grows increasingly tedious and distressing. Like George Jean Nathan in “Art as a Corruptor of Morals,” I will not examine the shocking careers of the actors and opera singers at all, but merely refer you to the police records, wink knowingly, and pass on. The simple fact is that artists as a group tend to be totally unacceptable in polite society, unruly and un-Christian in behavior, and look at things from weird personal angles that seldom have anything in common with the views of decent, ordinary people. If I may risk a Joyceism, most people are like Mr. Tame, quite tame, but most artists are like Mr. Wilde, quite wild.
This brings us back to Dr. Thompson’s remark about “the interface between noise and information.” I am sure that Thompson was using the terms in their technical sense in mathematical communication theory. Noise, in this theory, is chaotic, erisian, stochastic; information is structured, orderly and “harmonious.” It is immediately clear that the wild will always prefer noise and the tame will always prefer information; but there is a paradox here. Shannon, the creator of mathematical information theory, demonstrated that if a signal is too “rich” in information, it will *appear at first* to be noise. The conventional mind, it appears, requires redundance to identify information, and suspects noise where the amount of new information (creativity) is inordinately high.
But where ordinary domesticated humans fear the noisy and chaotic, the artist is always attracted to them, suspecting that they may contain hidden information which only appears “noisy” because it is “a shocking revaluation of all we ever been” in Eliot’s phrase. This is why Nietzsche defined art as a synergy of Apollonian and Dionysian elements–that is, of rational order and irrational exhuberance, or of the “classical” and the “romantic”–in short, of the interplay of noise and information, the familiar and the unfamiliar, valuation and revaluation. As Pound said somewhere, what the public loves, because it is familiar, is precisely what the creative artist is bored with now. However, popular and seemingly ordinary books or paintings, adored by the public and boring to the creative minority, were or appeared chaotic and noisy when they were first produced. Yesterday’s Dionysian rebel is today’s Apollonian norm, and today’s erisian chaos is tomorrow’s boring cliché.
In this dialectic of noise and information, the artist is always trying to seduce the public away from its habitual perceptions into new and startling states of awareness. Burroughs, the greatest and therefore the most sinister of modern writers, has stated the case with brutal frankness: “Whomever makes a strong impression on you is a vampire and will possess you.”
Mr. Tame’s fear of certain kinds of music is only one example of the public’s general fear of artistic anarchy and creativity. The artist-vampires are always trying to lure straight, square citizens into coming away from their familiar reality-windows to look through new and startling windows that show a strange and bizarre new world. This is why Kenneth Burke declared all art to be “perspective by incongruity,” the symbolic equivalent of an electrical shock or a psychedelic drug. It is for this reason that every State, every Church and every conservative philosopher from Plato onward has feared novelty and originality in art, and has tried to control it with the strictest possible censorship. For those who wish a totally Apollonian world, with all the fecund and “dangerous” Dionysian elements buried in that part of the unconscious which Jung called the Shadow, this is the sound policy and the safe politics. (Only those who share the scientistic Jungian-Freudian view that the Repressed always returns explosively, can challenge this.)
In short, art like science is innately revolutionary and unwholesome. A new breakthrough in art, like a new scientific theory or a new technology, always transforms the world in dangerous and unpredictable new directions. This is sufficient reason for all sane, sound, domesticated people to fear and loathe the artistic personality. Those courageous conservatives who dare to declare their opposition to scientism should now be brave enough to recognize this fact and take a firm, uncompromising stance against artism also.
Ten years ago in Berkeley, California, an old woman died. Her landlord, whom I knew, had to enter the home after the police had removed the body, to check up on how much cleaning and refurbishing would be needed before he could place the house on the market again. He had heard from neighbors that the woman never was seen to go out, but he was not prepared for what he found. There were no electric lights; when bulbs burned out, the woman had not replaced them. The accumulated clutter and trash of at least 15 to 18 years was everywhere. All shades were drawn and all shutters closed. The woman had lived for perhaps two decades in the urban equivalent of a cave.
I think I understand that old woman. She had created her own reality-tunnel and she had hermetically sealed it so that no alien signals could penetrate her shields. She was safe from the “vampires” who might make an impression on her. The great conspiracy in mind-manipulation and consciousness expansion which is art, and the thousand and one other conspiracies old women worry about, could not get through to her. She was alone. She was safe. She was self-enclosed.
I suggest that Mr. Tame and certain other contributors to CRITIQUE should seriously consider this old woman’s example. Nobody knows how many metaphysical conspiracies are afoot in the world, how many mind-manipulators are out to get us, how terrifying the world is when you consider that Satan is not only subtle, insidious and tireless, but also very often quite plausible, according to some of the best-known passages in Holy Writ. Perhaps the safest course is to follow the old woman’s path of isolation, create our own caves, and hide out until we are ready to die.
(this article posted across usenet by Dan Clore)
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Letters to the Editor from Critique: A Journal Questioning Consensus Reality, #28
Dear Editor,
I really enjoyed CRITIQUE #27 like every issue before. I appreciate the new size and the improving layout. I had some good laughs reading Heinrich Von Hanfknopf’s review of your review of David Tame’s SECRET POWER OF MUSIC. By the way, HANFKOPF is a rather unusual German name. HANF is the German expression for the now illegal substance you can use for making paper, cloth or joints. KOPF just means head. Is it much far away to suspect Mr. R.A. Wilson exploring covertly the boredom of Mr. Tame’s Correct Answer Machine? Anyway, I always enjoy Mr. Wilson’s witty pieces. Though I still presume that Timothy Leary was in the beginning a tool of the Russel-Wells-Huxley network, introducing drug use on mass-scale not for liberation but for mind control. Mr. Wilson’s scribbling always gives me a fresh look on things and prevented me even sometimes from falling into the fundamentalist trap. Thanks for that. In the case of drugs I prefer the view presented by Phillip K. Dick in A SCANNER DARKLY. This book was really a breakthrough for me. Having seen so many zombies myself (sometimes by looking into the mirror), having experienced so many drug-induced coercive behavior patterns (I call it the Woodstock/Altamont Syndrome), I came to the conclusion that in certain societies drug use is indeed harmful to the majority of users, plunging them into self-destructive or just stupid reality tunnels instead of freeing them. Reading A SCANNER DARKLY I found out that seeing the dark side of it doesn’t mean you have to lose your humor and forget about the goodness (the divine spark) of the people involved. However, with the coming of the mind machines we will hopefully find a way to deal properly with the two sides of our brain.
A last word: Please Mr. Editor, stay on the edge, don’t read HEIDI.
Thomas Fink
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Dear Editor:
My elation felt over the new shape of “Critique” Journal was shortened by finding in it the deplorable article by “Hanfkopf” “Art as Black Magick.” Well, what can you expect from a “Hanf-” (cannabis, hemp, hashish, marijuana) “-kopf (head), an “acid head” plain and simple. If you want to know about Louisiana Medical Marijuana Doctors and the effects of medical marijuana, you can check it out here!
I am quite certain that this cannabis freak is unable to produce one work of art apart from looking for recreational marijuana near me, be it music or painting or sculpting. Yet he scandalizes great artists in a way that has nothing to do with critique–it is just slander. Why are you dirtying your magazine with such?
Especially outrageous I find on p. 54: “…evident that National Socialism practiced human sacrifice on a scale far beyond that attributed to Voodooists or Jews–and the Nazi State even came close to the record genocides committed by the Christian Churches.”
You as the editor had the power to cut out this incredible piece of insane calumny. You must know better that during the NS time in Germany such crimes as “genocide” (planned extermination of humans) did not occur. And that “human sacrifice” idiotic charge would offend the last aboriginal tribe somewhere in darkest never-neverland. Against Germans anything goes, right? There is no need for probity and accuracy? Just mouth anything that comes to poisonous minds–the calumnies come thick and fast against Germans since 74 years now, beginning with the Belgian children’s hands chopped off by the Kaiser’s soldiers, we have had nearly everything that can possibly be thought up by professional liars and “Hemp Freaks.” Voodooism, human sacrifice, this halfwit “Hanfkopf” even draws composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883) into the slime: You print it.
No, my friend, things in “Nazi” time were absolutely different, and I know because I was there, born 1914. And Germans can walk proud. In the name of all Germans–I am offended, Mr. Banner. Our patience is worn out. We now strike back with the truth, against vilification.
Oscar W. Grussendorf
