Yes, the Illuminati influenced Beethoven, a biography says

In the Illuminatus! trilogy, Ludwig van Beethoven is depicted as an active member of the Illuminati.

This was, perhaps, just a joke by Robert Anton Wilson, the big Beethoven fan. But apparently it may be true that Beethoven was influenced by Illuminati ideas.

The latest big Beethoven biography is Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph by Jan Swafford. The hardcover comes to 1,104 pages, and apparently it took years for Swafford (a composer himself) to research and write it. It came out in 2014, but I have just finished it. (I am on vacation in California).

Swafford says that Beethoven was exposed to Illuminati and Freemason ideas by one of his early teachers, Christian Neefe, and influenced by those ideas all of his life. There are "23 results" when you do an Amazon "search inside the book" for the search term "Illuminati."

Swafford argues, convincingly I thought, that these Illuminati ideas influenced the composition of two of Beethoven's most famous symphonies, the Third (or "Eroica") and the Ninth. For example, Beethoven paid close attention to which keys he used, and the Third was composed in E-flat major, which Swafford says was the key Mozart used for Masonic music, such as The Magic Flute, which Swafford says was Beethoven's favorite Mozart opera. Schiller's "Ode to Joy" poem, used as the text for the last movement of the Ninth, was often sung in various musical settings, in Illuminati and Freemason meetings, Swafford says. Beethoven made several attempts to set it to music in his career, finally succeeding with his last symphony.

Scene from Mozart's "The Magic Flute."  Source.

I don't claim to be a Beethoven expert. Eric Wagner is more of one that I am. When I wrote to Eric (author of An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson), Eric commented, " I started the Swafford bio of Beethoven, but I haven’t finished it. I have reached the Third Symphony. I like it, but I find he lacks much sense of ambiguity. He gives a nice explanation of the role of the Illuminati, but I prefer Bob Wilson’s more tentative approach. Bob writes things like “perhaps the Illuminati does X”. Swafford says instead “the Illuminati does X”. Also, Swafford tends to overemphasize thematic unity between movements in Beethoven’s early works, I think. I find it interesting that Swafford does not include Donald Francis Tovey in his bibliography or in his index. I found one negative comment about Tovey in one of Swafford’s endnotes. I find this common among musicologists born after 1940: an overemphasis on thematic unity between movements in music before the Eroica and a negative attitude towards Tovey. Swafford includes lots of Kerman and Rosen in his bibliography, and his analysis of the Op. 18 string quartets relies heavily on Kerman’s analysis. Kerman sees Tovey’s writing about Beethoven as the finest writing about music period. I tend to lean toward Kerman’s views. Kerman edited a critical score of Mozart’s Piano Concerto K. 503, and the essays there really reveal this split."

Much of the technical discussion in Swafford's book is over my head, although not Eric's. Swafford also does not make a final judgment on who the "Immortal Beloved" was, although he discusses the three main candidates.

Jan Swafford's new Mozart book

Scene from a production of The Magic Flute; note the eye in the pyramid. 

Author and composer Jan Swafford's book, Mozart: The Reign of Love, which came out in December, went on sale on Kindle recently and I grabbed a copy. I looked at it on my Kindle, and it was so interesting I have begun reading it.

I read Swafford's excellent book on Beethoven and also his Language of the Spirit: An Introduction to Classical Music but the Mozart book, at least in the early going, seems even better; Mozart is arguably the most brilliant composer of all time, so perhaps that has inspired Swafford. 

Swafford's Mozart book is relevant to RAW fans, and not just because of RAW's interest in Mozart and classical music. Swafford's book took seriously Beethoven's ties to the Illuminati. (Wilson maintains that Beethoven's role in the Illuminati in Illuminatus! was simply a joke, and that he only learned later it had a basis in truth.)  The Mozart biography appears in the early going to be sensitive to Mozart's relationship to Freemasonry.

In his introduction, Swafford writes, "There is a tendency in writing about Mozart to treat the operas as if he wrote the libretto as well, as if the text represented his own convictions and artistic statements." The content should really be attributed to the various librettists, Swafford writes. But he adds that Die Zauberfloete (i.e., the Magic Flute) is an exception; Mozart was involved in the libretto from the beginning, making it in Swafford's opinion "the most truly and thoroughly Mozartian opera." It is also an opera influenced by Freemasonry, although I haven't gotten to the portion of the book discussing that. 

Listening to Mozart

Scene from The Magic Flute by artist and designer J. Matthew Root. (Source). 

While I tend to think of Beethoven as Robert Anton Wilson's favorite composer, there's no doubt he loved many others, including Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Mozart appears as a character in the "Historical Illuminatus" books. In the piece "Credo," included in Right Where You Are Sitting Now, Wilson writes, "I believe in Bach, the creator of heaven and earth, and in Mozart, his only begotten son, and in Beethoven the mediator and comforter; and inasmuch as their gods have manifested also in Vivaldi and Ravel and Stravinsky and many another, I  believe in the communion of saints, the forgiveness of error and mind everlasting."

In his book Listen to This, music critic Alex Ross writes about how he decided to listen to every note of Mozart music available, transferring a 180-CD collection of complete Mozart issued by the Phillips record label to his iPod. Listening to the whole thing took Ross three months. He concedes that airport public address announcements and the like were a distraction.

I am not as ambitious as Ross, but I have listened to Mozart for decades. The kind of folks who read this blog will likely be interested in his opera, The Magic Flute, but lately I have been concentrating on the solo piano music — I like solo piano.

There are so many ways to listen. I am a big fan of the Hoopla library service, and I've been listening to Alfred Brendel's generally reliable Mozart recordings. (Hoopla does not have everything, but it does have an enormous music library to stream to your phone or tablet or whatever, and it also has movies, TV shows, ebooks, comic books and audiobooks. Check and see if you library has it, or if you can get a library card that provides access to it.)

I've also been listening (via Amazon's digital music service) to a VoxBox complete Mozart solo piano collection by Walter Klien, which I bought for 99 cents in February. It was a great bargain, although the price has now been raised to $9.49. The Wikipedia biography of Klien says, "He was much admired for his crystalline tone and projection of detail in his interpretations. His clarity of playing suited the music of Mozart and Schubert in particular." Although Klien's versions are reliably pretty, he can also bring power when he needs to.

The Big Mozart Box from the Bach Guild, which includes some of the more crucial piano pieces, is available on Amazon digital music for $2.99. There is also a Big Mozart Piano Sonatas for 99 cents, played by Jeffrey Biegel, that's just 99 cents. I can't comment on it because I just discovered it (and bought it).

Mozart's Masonic opera, in a theater near you

Scene from the Metropolitan Opera's production of The Magic Flute

A reminder and a correction: The Metropolitan Opera's broadcast of Die Zauberflöte (e.g., The Magic Flute) will be at 12:55 p.m. Saturday at a movie theater near you, unless you live in the middle of nowhere. See this link to figure out how to find a theater, etc. 

As I wrote earlier, The Magic Flute has Freemasonic elements (note the "eye in the pyramid" motif above.) It was Beethoven's favorite Mozart opera.

In that earlier post, I wrote,  "Isis and Osiris are invoked in the course of the plot, and the main characters have to undergo an initiation. Given Robert Anton Wilson's interest in Mozart, I'm surprised that he never talked about this opera (as far as I know)."

The first sentence is true (as far as I know), but I now know that RAW did talk about the opera, at least once.  RAW stated that the Magic Flute is a Masonic initiation turned into an opera and that the opera has Illuminati ideas.

I can't guarantee a good experience at the theater, but the New York Times seems to like the new production.  And here is a positive review. 

An adult ticket costs about $25. For those who like this sort of thing, it's a good experience. 

The Earth Will Shake online reading group, Week Fourteen

Scene from The Magic Flute. 

This week, please read from page 267 (the start of Part Seven) to Page 293 ("Dimly, all of the pieces fit together, and he understood part of what it meant to be a Freemason.")

This is the chapter in which Sigismundo is initiated into becoming a Freemason, and I appreciated the fact that Wilson took the time, on Page 272, to give a definition of what "Freemason" means, for the benefit of people who don't know much about the subject (such as, for example, myself -- this is going to be a fairly short blog entry.)

The fact that Freemasons stood for freedom, and freedom of conscience, helps explain why figures such as Beethoven and Mozart were interested in the movement. As I've written before, Mozart's opera The Magic Flute has elements of Freemasonry, and it was Beethoven's favorite Mozart opera. Beethoven himself was influenced by members of the Illuminati.

So why is this section interspersed with a passage about Maria Maldonado's dream journal?

A recent Metropolitan Opera production of The Magic Flute. 

Music notes

As we have been talking about Paul McCartney lately, I thought I'd note that the new album, McCartney III, has been released. I listened to it Friday on Hoopla, using my best pair of headphones. Seems solid throughout, although no one song really jumped out at me on first listening, the way that "Maybe I'm Amazed" does on the first McCartney album.

Paul McCartney is 78. I am glad he has been able to stay in good health and remain productive; I have been thinking lately about another great musician who was not so lucky. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was 35 when he died on Dec. 5, 1791. 

35! Imagine how much more music he would have written if he had lived as long as two other genius composers who died relatively young: Beethoven, who was 56, and Prokofiev, who was 61. 

Or at least imagine what Mozart would have done with just a few more years. 

Here are some of the works he completed in 1791, his last year, and he didn't have a full year: Piano Concerto No. 27, String Quintet No. 6, The Magic Flute, The Clemency of Titus (in other words, he completed two operas), Clarinet Concerto in A, the Requiem in D Minor. This list omits many shorter or less famous pieces.

After I wrote the above paragraph, I wondered what Mozart completed in his last full year. So here is a partial list for 1790: Cosi fan tutte, String Quartet No. 22, String Quartet No. 23,  String Quintet No. 5. In 1788, Mozart completed the famous last three symphonies, 39, 40 and 41, and 1788 also included Piano Sonata Number 15, Piano Concerto No. 26, Piano Trio No. 4, Piano Sonata No. 16, Violin Sonata No. 36, Piano Trio No. 5, Divertimento in E-flat and Piano Trio No. 6. My favorite piano concerto, No. 21, was written in 1985, and without belaboring the point, he didn't exactly take the rest of the year off. 

Mozart was one of Robert Anton Wilson's favorite composers; in Right Where You Are Sitting Now, RAW writes "I believe in Bach, the creator of heaven and earth, and in Mozart, his only begotten son, and in Beethoven, the mediator and comforter;" (in "Credo;" he also mentions Vivaldi, Ravel, Stravinsky and "many another.") 

I have just discovered there is a major new Mozart biography out, Mozart: The Reign of Love by Jan Swafford. Tyler Cowen's review.  Eric Wagner and I both read Swafford's Beethoven biography, and the book highlighted the connection between Beethoven and the Illuminati, please see my review. 

My Russian Futurism music blog recently launched; at some point, I'll do a post at this blog explaining my rationale for it. 

'The Classical Style' reading group, week ten

Ludwig van Beethoven, about the time the Hammerklavier was written. (Source). 

Part IV  SERIOUS OPERA 

By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger

On page 180 Rosen writes, “Tovey has remarked that Beethoven was not insufficiently dramatic but rather too dramatic for the stage: his music compresses into ten minutes the complexity of a three-act opera." This reminds of the equation Pound quotes “Dictung = condensare”, which Basil Bunting found in a German/Italian dictionary, poetry = condensation. Pound thought a short poem could compress the action of a novel. One can see this in something like Robert Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi”.  

I find it interesting that The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and The Magic Flute have remained in the repertoire continuously since their premieres, never needed to get revived. Some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries criticized his blending of genres: his comedies contained serious depths and his tragedies contained farcical humor. I found it odd that the 2006 Will Ferrell film Stranger than Fiction insisted on a rather narrow separation of tragedy from comedy. I like how Rosen shows how Mozart took elements of opera seria and incorporated them into the opera buffa traditions to create his masterpieces.  

This chapter serves as a transition from the world of Haydn to the world of Mozart, with a preview of the world of Beethoven. Rosen sees them all working within the world of the classical style, with Beethoven stretching that style into undreamt of territories. In some ways I see this study group as part of our upcoming Schroedinger’s Cat study group. A character in that novel invites a number of concert pianists to a party so she can talk with them about Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata. I like to think of Charles Rosen attending that party and sharing some of the ideas in this book with the host and the other guests, listening the other pianists' notions about the Hammerklavier and having spirited discussions with them.

Prometheus Rising exercise and discussion group, Episode 90, Chapter 17

The Art Ensemble of Chicago in 1978. (By Nomo michael hoefner http://www.zwo5.de - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16491922)

By Eric Wagner
Special guest blogger

Exercise one for this chapter reads, “Make a list of ten areas where your thinking-feeling is conservative. Guess how soon the world will change so totally that those ideas will seem not merely conservative but irrelevant (as the theological debates of 300 AD now seem irrelevant)” (pg. 255).

1. I prefer books made of paper to books on a computer screen.

2. Well, now I started googling “conservative ideas”, and I have started going down the rabbit hole of what “conservative” means. I consider learning languages valuable. Graduate schools seem to have deemphasized languages in the last seventy years, and other levels of U.S. education have as well.

3. As U2 said, I believe in love.

4. Russell Kirk says, “Conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence.” This reminded me of the following passage from Wilson’s The Widow’s Son:

The “fourth soul,” or emerging brain, perceives the invisible web of connections between all things; but it is no more infallible than the rest of the brain, or the gut, or the liver, or the gonads. It merely works without effort, unlike the more primitive parts of the brain, which is why meanings seem to flow into us, when this is activated, and we forget that we are still creating the meanings. We imagine we are “receiving revelations,” and hence we do not take responsibility or exercise any prudence or common sense. This is why there are so many “holy fools” and so few holy wise men. (pg. 339)

This passage surprised me when I first read it. I didn’t think too much of prudence at the time, but prudence and common sense do seem valuable to me today. Crowley calls the Eight of Disks Prudence, and that card tends to make me think of this Wilson passage.

5. Saving money seems like a good idea to me.

6. I love my grandkids.

7. 1939 seems like the greatest year in film history.

8. I think movies have gone downhill since 1974, the year of Celine and Julie Go Boating.

9. I love the music of Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven.

10. I love acoustic jazz.

So, how long until these ideas “seem not merely conservative but irrelevant”?

1. Marshall McLuhan saw a similarity between the invention of movable type by Gutenberg in 1450 with the invention of the computer. Few people today prefer to read handwritten books rather than printed books, although we may prefer them as art objects and look at Medieval texts in glass cases in museums. In one or two hundred years paper books may become rare, especially after a climate change apocalypse. 

2. Perhaps we will learn more about language acquisition in five hundred years, or perhaps we will have telepathy (or extinction).

3. Human sexuality and marriage customs will certainly change. We see love differently in 2022 than Dante did seven hundred years ago or Ovid did two thousand years ago, but their ideas of love still resonate will current beliefs. Perhaps in 2300 years “love” will have lost its meaning, or it may become something very new I can’t begin to understand.

4. Prudence may seem irrelevant in a Bucky Fuller like utopia where no one worries about eviction or getting their next meal or getting their kids’ teeth fixed. Maybe in 1500 hundred years.

5. See number 4.

6. Like number 3, ideas about love will change, and perhaps they will change utterly. As Billy Holliday sang, “You don’t know what love is”.

7. Films like Gone with the Wind have troubling racism. The Wizard of Oz seems unkind to little people. Animals get shot in The Rules of the Game. The women in The Women seem too concerned about men. Gunga Din supports colonialism. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington neglects political realities. Silk Stockings improved Ninotchka. William Goldman wrote movingly about 1939 as the greatest year in film history in Adventures in the Screen Trade, but Mr. Goldman, alas, has died. For decades I have asked my film history students what they consider the greatest era of film history. I don’t think any of them suggested any time before 1970. Of course with new technology movies don’t seem nearly so important to our culture, so these discussions might seem irrelevant in sixty years.

8, See number 7. Most of my students hated Celine and Julie Go Boating the one time I showed it to a class. I didn’t even plan to show it, but I had a copy of it on my laptop and no other technology worked that week.

9. Well, I have Beethoven playing right now. Bach, Mozart and the Big B seem irrelevant to most people today, and perhaps in 250 years they will seem as irrelevant to almost everybody as Thomas Tallis and William Byrd do today.

10. As with number 9, most people don’t listen to jazz in 2022, and even fewer listen to acoustic jazz. In one hundred and fifty years this may seem irrelevant. We will see.

Exercise 2 in Prometheus Rising, chapter 17, asks the reader to “Make a list of ten areas in which your conceptualizing is radical. Guess how soon the world will change so totally that you will seem conservative in those areas” (pg. 255).

1. I have mixed feelings about hard work. I recognize the value of hard work, and I know that it can accomplish a lot, but I also value going with the flow. When I first visited Europe in 1985, I arranged my trip to visit Ingolstadt, Bavaria, the birthplace of the Bavarian Illuminati, on July 23, the anniversary of the beginning of Robert Anton Wilson’s Sirius experience. The train from Munich to Ingolstadt passed Dachau, and on the next day I visited the concentration camp at Dachau. Over the gate of the concentration camp hung a sign reading “Arbeit Macht Frei,” work will set you free. I had a sense that I had a life purpose to unlearn that sentiment.

When I returned that afternoon to Munich I had a deep sense of despair about the human condition after visiting the camp and contemplating the Holocaust. I wandered Munich, listening to oom-pah-pah bands in the park and eating a giant soft pretzel, observing naked frisbee players. I visited Munich’s rich English language bookstores and even looked copies of at Robert Anton Wilson’s books, trying to find some way of dealing with the nightmare of history. I later walked past a theater showing Ingmar Bergman’s film of Mozart’s Magic Flute. I saw I had just enough time to watch the film and run to the train station to catch my midnight train to Vienna. (I just wanted to get out of Germany.) 

With my limited understanding of German, I could barely follow the German subtitles for the Swedish language film, but the film restored my hope in humanity. The story of a secret society of Masonic adepts trying to aid the world set to Mozart’s music gave me hope. Plus I thought the singer playing Sarastro looked like I might look in the future. (Now I don’t think so.)

In the uncut version of The Trick Top Hat, Wilson writes:

Those who had particularly keen memories of the future – those who could see the transformation into Immortality and Higher Intelligence that was before them – imagined that this could only be accomplished through what these primates called Promethean Struggle. They loved to dramatize themselves as heroic contestants “fighting” every step of the way from the primeval ooze to the first upright ape, “battling” mightily toward the steam engine and the Age of Abundance, etc. That all this was programmed into the DNA on every planet, and that all they had to do was cooperate with it, was a concept too humiliating to their primate egos.

“It steam-engines when it comes steam-engine time,” wrote one of their cleverest primate philosophers; but they did not dare to believe him. They were sure that if they stopped struggling, they would slip back into amoebahood again, or something worse. (pg. 247)

Dr. Wilson here refers to Charles Fort as “one of their cleverest primate philosophers.” In Quantum Psychology Wilson renamed the neurogenetic circuit the “morphogenetic system”: “Sheldrake, a biologist, knew that genes cannot carry such information. He therefore posited a non-local field, like those in quantum theory, which he named the morphogenetic field” (pg.191).

Keeping this in mind, I reframe the passage from The Trick Top Hat as that we just need to cooperate with the morphogenetic fields.  

2. I do not consider death inevitable.

3. I think space industrialization can help humanity.

4. I consider the music of the Art Ensemble of Chicago very important.

5. I consider the writing of Rafi Zabor very important.

6. I consider the writing of Robert Anton Wilson very important.

7. I suspect the writing of Ibn ‘Arabi has great value.

8. Paying attention to dreams seems valuable to me.

9. I like E-Prime.

10. The writing of Robert Heinlein seems important to me.

Bob asks the reader to, “Guess how soon the world will change so totally that you will seem conservative in those areas.”

1. Bob Wilson and Bucky Fuller thought we might have a post-work economy by the 1990’s. I suspect it will take at least a few hundred years to move to a world where hard work no longer seems so central. We may never get there.

2. Perhaps we will all die. Perhaps medicine will radically improve in the next century.

3. Perhaps we will reap the benefits of space industrialization in the next sixty years.

4. Most years I look at the voting for the downbeat Hall of Fame. Of the members of the Art Ensemble, only Lester Bowie has gotten voted into the Hall of Fame. I think much of Art Ensemble’s music seems less radical today than it did fifty years ago.

5. Hopefully more people will recognize the value of Rafi’s work during his lifetime.

6. Perhaps Bob Wilson’s work will have a Renaissance in the next few decades.

7. Many people value Ibn ‘Arabi’s work already. Much more of it has gotten translated into English in the last forty years. Perhaps he will become a popular as Rumi in the next fifty years, or least have a significantly greater profile in the West.

8. People have paid attention to dreams throughout history (and probably before it). With Freud people started looking at dreams in some new ways. I suspect we will learn more and more about dreams in the coming century, just as we have learned more and more about the brain in the last thirty years. Perhaps people will learn new things from Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s prophetic vision of the world of the night. 

9. I’ve written, talked, and thought mostly in E-Prime for about thirty years. I no longer have the evangelical zeal for it that I once did, but I still find it a valuable tool. Perhaps it will seem a conservative practice in eighty years, or it may take centuries.

10. Many science fiction fans grew up on Heinlein, especially people my age and older. I have encountered some younger Heinlein fans. His vision of a world impacted by changing technologies and the changes in people’s behavior affected by these technological changes seems relevant in 2022. However, some of his ideas about men and woman seem very outdated to some readers. He gets ignored by academic writers on American literature, but he seems central to writers like Bob Wilson and Phil Dick. Perhaps my ideas about Heinlein’s importance already seem conservative to some.

 

Observations on music

Keith Moon in 1975 (Creative Commons photo.)

Eric Wagner's explanation behind his soundtrack selection in yesterday's blog post by Gregory is worth quoting again: " In 1985 after I graduated from college I went to Europe. I arranged my trip to arrive in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, on July 23. The next day I visited the concentration camp at Dachau which horrified me so much I just wanted to get out of Germany. I had a train ticket to leave for Vienna that night. I wandered the streets of Munich feeling despair about the human condition. I noticed a theater playing Bergman’s Magic Flute which I had heard about but never seen. I figured I had just enough time to see the movie and run to the train station to catch my train. I know some German, so I could barely follow the movie in Swedish with German subtitles, but the film restored my faith in humanity. Bergman’s realization of Mozart’s vision of a masonic society looking out for us seemed just what I needed." Eric linked to Bergman's Magic Flute on YouTube.

Certainly it is good news the movie is freely available and I plan to watch it when I have a nice chunk of time, but I also liked Eric's reminder that music in general, and classical music in particular, can be a positive force in our lives. Compare with RAW's essay on "Beethoven as Information" in The Illuminati Papers, in which he cites Beethoven's alleged statement that anyone who understands his music can never been unhappy.

Speaking of music, did you see Oz Fritz's comment in the Week 21 blog post of the Widow's Son discussion group, about the scene where Sigismundo Celine wakes up to find himself on the "ceiling" of his room? Oz wrote, "I wonder if RAW got some inspiration from The Who's maniacal drummer Keith Moon for the upside down room scene? From Rock Bottom by Pamela Des Barres: 'The road always beckoned and Keith got bored easily, but blessed with an ingenious, devilish imagination, he battled to keep the boredom at bay. ... Sleep never came easily for Mr. Moon: Once he spent hours nailing hotel-room furniture to the ceiling exactly as it had been on the floor'."

Moon, who died in 1978, was arguably rock's greatest drummer. My first thought when I read Oz' comment was "Probably not -- RAW didn't pay much attention to rock music." But RAW had plenty of young fans who did, and it's perhaps not far-fetched to think that one of them had told RAW about what Moon did.

The Widow's Son reading group, Week 13

A romanticized depiction of Charles Stuart ("Bonnie Prince Charlie") addressing Scottish soldiers during the '45.

Week Thirteen (pg. 199-224 Hilaritas edition, Chapter 9&10 Part II all editions)

By Gregory Arnott,

Special guest blogger

Arctic Tern chicks take flight on Dalkey Island: Some recent news. It seems that the arctic tern has a longer migration pattern, from Arctic to Antarctic, than any other creature on Earth. Their migratory behavior also guarantees that they see more daylight than any other creature on Earth. It is appropriate for a species identified by de Selby to avoid toxic black air. 

As Seamus marches from the barracks he ruminates on many of RAW’s favorite demons: double-cross, paranoia, violence and madness. 

Interestingly, my light research indicates that “Croppies Lie Down” wasn’t sang until the Irish Rebellion of 1798. In fact, I was unable to find the verse sang in The Widow’s Son anywhere in the original lyrics and at first only excerpted in a book from 2003 by a historian named William Kelleher: The Troubles in Ballybogoin: Memory and Identity in Northern Ireland.  Eventually I found the same verse in some other books- the oldest one being from 1982. Too Long a Sacrifice is a history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland since 1969; the author, Jack Holland, had a Protestant father and Catholic mother and worked as a news reporter. This leads me to believe that the verse must have been added to the original song sometime during the late twentieth century. The last line before the refrain “And soon the bright Orange put down the Green rag” is particularly aggressive and certainly could have been penned amidst the violence and politics. So it seems that neither the song, or especially this verse, dated back to the Battle of the Boyne. Another trick by Mr. Wilson. 

The Rebellion of 1798 was led by Presbyterians and joined by the Catholics which gives credence to the discussion of how the recension of the Declaration of Independence of Conscience by William of Orange really fucked over anyone who wasn’t an Anglican. The “croppies” of the song were so-called because the revolutionaries cut their hair in the French Jacobin style (not to be confused with the Jacobites).

The Declaration of the Independence of Conscience is more widely known as either the Declaration(s) of Indulgence or the Declaration of the Liberty of Conscience. Of course, James II wasn’t exactly being as beneficent as the text reads and was mostly trying to make his own Catholic faith legal. The founder of Pennsylvania and guy from the Oatmeal tube, William Penn, was a supporter of the Declaration and later quit the party when it was rescinded after the Glorious Revolution. (I’m somewhat certain the guy from the Quaker Oatmeal container isn’t actually William Penn but that’s how I’ve always pictured him.) 

The short reign of James II and the Glorious Revolution is one of the most fascinating parts, in my opinion, of British history. Since studying James II and VII in one of my seminars I have always felt like it was a pity Shakespeare wasn’t around afterwards. The whole debacle could have fit in well with his other Histories as it is replete with scheming nobility and bishops, an ambiguous monarch, and the heavy tread of Fate.This would lead to a series of Jacobite Rebellions and the (perhaps undeserved)  martyrdom of James Stuart, Charles Stuart, and the veterans of the uprising of 1689, the Fifteen, and the Forty-Five from whence “The Skye Boat Song” originated. (Here is a good overview of the Rebellion of ‘45 from the Adam Smith Institute. November 8th was the anniversary of Charles Stuart’s initial invasion.) 

I believe the footnote on pg 204-205 (Hilaritas edition) not only serves to further the de Selby conspiracy sub-narrative but to illustrate the ambiguities of any religious authority. Although we see the Catholic Muadhen mutilated and driven to murderous intent by Protestant oppression, we are reminded that the Catholic machinations in Britain, or elsewhere in the world, were hardly benevolent. 

The conversation between Weishaupt and Cagliostro is supposed to by mysterious but the reader of RAW’s other works is easily able to perceive, read between the lines, or at least think that they can easily perceive the undercurrents and connections in their speech. Phrases such as when the stars are right, Et in Arcadia Ego, and the benediction/response of Ewige Blumenkraft (Eternal Flower Power)/Und Ewige Schlangekraft (and Eternal Serpent Power) should be familiar from Illuminatus! and other writings. The term cowans is still used in Masonic lodges and the footnote provided by RAW links this term to others such as “pashu” (“the unwashed herd”), used by initiates of Tantric cults to refer to the unenlightened. 

That Weishaupt was commonly referred to as “a deep one” is an assertion that RAW repeats elsewhere. Aside from the surface meaning it is easy to see this as another of RAW’s devices tying Weishaupt to Lovecraftian nightmares. (See also the “die wascally wabbit” scene from Illuminatus!.) Weishaupt’s “time-vision” is an example of slipping into the Morgensheutegesternwelf or the yesterday-today-tomorrow-world spoken of in Illuminatus!. RAW, with the benefit of a couple centuries and his expertise is able to make a convincing vision of the future of the Illuminati. On page 213, Hilaritas edition, I see that I made a mistake in my editing and should have inserted a break between Weishaupt’s low opinion of the Knights of Malta and Sir John drinking Guiness and talking about Machiavelli. 

Babcock’s somewhat drunken and perhaps indiscreet joke about Machiavelli, tied with his anxious reflections, makes an interesting triple interpretation of Machiavelli’s political tract as both a religious and sexual allegory. We are also treated to some heavy irony that Babcock is exhausted by a “long hard day in Parliament” when we have read about so many characters in powerless, poverty-stricken situations. The irony is compounded when we find out that Seamus Muadhen, now James Moon, is employed as his servant and waiting outside the tavern. The reader understands how priggish Babcock’s well-intentioned thoughts about the “poor lad” and “the boy” whistling incriminating songs really are as he believes himself to know more about James than he possibly could. 

The thunderstone falls from the sky and interrupts Babcock’s thoughts; is this an inscrutable sign of a Machiavellian God or Author? 

The paragraph from pg 219-220 (Hilaritas) where Moon considers that history is made by the rash those with too much “fooken imagination” are left its passive victims is as good of writing as any in RAW’s work. It is reminiscent of another Hamlet-obsessed, young Irishman’s ruminations on the nature of history. 

The long footnote in the chapter discusses de Selby’s concept of plenumary time which sounds very familiar to the quantum interpretations of Heisenberg and the more recent work of Alan and Steve Moore. I cannot do justice to either Moore’s time/space paradigm here and anyone interested should study Alan’s Jerusalem and then study it some more. 

At the end of the chapter Moon’s moral decision is interrupted by the ancestor of George Dorn, who will also wrestle with the ideas of cowardice versus compassion, with the announcement that Maria, Lady Babcock is in labor. Seamus/James is left behind to uninter the thunderstone. Debate on rocks from the sky and new life awaits.

This week’s selection from Eric Wagner: "This week I have chosen Beethoven’s Cantata on the Death of Emperor Joseph.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjGhUaAp69c .

"The narrator of The Widow’s Son calls this piece “as supreme a work of Masonic ideology set to music as Mozart’s Magic Flute” (pg. 210). (The number 210 plays a central role in Crowley’s notions about sex magick - the two become one become nothing.)" 

'The Classical Style' reading group, Week Two

 

Week 2: Preface to the First Edition, A New Preface, Acknowledgments, Bibliographic Note, Note on the Music Examples. 

By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends. I laughed out loud on pg. xviii when Rosen wrote, “But we know that performers of weak moral principles did not observe all written repeats.”  

Some of you have expressed concerns about not understanding this text. I hope you will enjoy the book anyway. I don’t understand everything that Rosen writes, but I think I understand some of it, and I enjoy it immensely. It seems to me that playing the music provides the greatest tool for understanding it. I don’t play piano much anymore, and I never played that well. I feel lucky that I got to play Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven works while playing bass in student orchestras. However, I disagree with Rosen sometimes, and with other musicians who can actually play this music. We all experience the music in our own way.  

Listening to the music provides the second best way to experience and learn about this music. Hearing it live seems a wonderful tool, but listening to records or watching recordings also help us understand the music. Reading about it also helps. I remember hearing Andre Previn talk about the privilege of conducting music “that is greater than we are”. Now, spiritually, I don’t know if I fully agree with this, but I love the line from the Upanishads Bob Wilson quoted in Masks of the Illuminati, ”Remove infinity from it and infinity still remains.” I keep coming back to late Beethoven, week after week, year after year, decade after decade, and it keeps bringing new delights. 

This brings up the question of opera. Some people go to the opera regularly. James Joyce, Charles Rosen, and Stendhal went to opera regularly, and this experience seems central to understanding their works. I have not attended an opera in person since hearing Die Fledermaus in Vienna in 1985 from the highest, cheapest seats. (Or did I stand? I think I sat. Memory fails me.) Mozart’s great operas play a significant role in this book. I highly recommend Bergman’s film of The Magic Flute. Because of watching that film over and over again over the past 41 years, as well as listening to various recordings and getting to teach that film in various classes, I know that opera pretty well. In the mid-1980s I expressed my yearning to own more opera cd’s to a friend who kindly said they would pay for half of a three cd opera recording for me if I would pay the balance, so I got Solti’s recording of The Marriage of Figaro which I have listened to a ton over the decades. I feel familiar with the music of that opera, but I don’t understand the plot very well. I have started watching a YouTube recording of the opera, but I don’t have much appetite for watching opera on TV, alas. 

Watch a new production of 'The Magic Flute'

 

As I wrote in an earlier blog post, Mozart's opera The Magic Flute has Freemasonic elements and was Beethoven's favorite Mozart opera. 

A new production of the opera is available free on Operavision, if you want to check it out. It is a contemporary production, and I don't know how clearly the Freemason element is depicted, but in the above screenshot from the trailer, one of the characters appears to be holding a golden apple. (I haven't watched the production yet but I'll have some time this weekend.)