Official Edgar Rice Burroughs Tribute and Weekly Webzine Site
Since 1996 ~ Over 15,000 Web Pages in Archive
Presents
Volume 1344c
Something Of Value
Book II: Part 3 of 4 Parts
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Evolution and Religion
by
R.E. Prindle
Illustrations and Links by Bill Hillman - ERBzine
NOTE: The off-site reference links were collated in 2010 -- some of these may now be discontinued.

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(a). The Evolution Of Religion 0-1875

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Iliad parchment in Latin and Greek 1497: Vatican Library
Bust of Homer
Homer's Iliad
......     Prior to, say, -800 the approximate date of Homer's Iliad, religion was comprised of all three facets of learning: Religion, Philosophy and Science.  The reason for the Priesthood was intact.  Then beginning with Homer in the Greek world, who was reverenced with good reason, learning became gradually secularized as the Pre-Socratics developed Philosophy and Science independently of the Priesthood.  In the West this was the real deathblow to religion; in the Semitic East no such development took place.  The Semites are incapable of either Philosophy or Science.

Carl Jung
     About this time also, Astronomy as a science developed, which doomed Astrology to insignificance although its traditions linger on as the world prepares for the Age of Aquarius.  It will  really happen too. Don't ask me how but it will, it is.   If you want to read an excellent analysis of aspects of the Age of Pisces check out C. G. Jung.  The amazing thing is that there is little to indicate a system for perpetuating the design since ancient times, no evidence of a secret society forwarding Astrological designs.  The ancients having set the plan in motion apparently knew it would be self-perpetuating as individuals like myself, and I have no interest in Astrology per se, would penetrate the workings of the design moving it forward whether advertently or inadvertently.  But you have to look at it to see it.  My interest was aroused when I detected a constant presence.  I myself have no prejudices, I don't dismiss phenomena out of hand.  The Tarot has its significance also.  You don't have to believe it, you study its historical development.

     Astrology was still a very active force as the Age of Pisces dawned.  The Semitic Jewish reaction was based on the dawning of the new age.  When this mistaken adventure ended in 135 AD when it became clear that the new age meant little in concrete terms, although defeated militarily and dispersed from Palestine they still had that old ace in the hole. Religion.

Jesus of Nazareth
Model of the centre of ancient Rome
...

    There was still the spiritual world.  While the Rabbis censured Jesus of Nazareth as an imposter a cult of Jewish followers developed after the death of Jesus.  The Jews in those days or just previous to the Jewish Wars had been active proselytizers.  Large Jewish communities existed in all the cities of the Roman Empire including Rome itself.  For various reasons these facts have been downplayed.  Any serious historical studies of the role of the Jews in the Roman Empire is severely discountenanced, at least in American universities.

     As orthodoxy required circumcision and following the ridiculous Jewish dietary laws, I mean, what makes wine kosher or not is whether it has been touched by non-Jewish hands somewhere in the winemaking process, the limits of conversion may have been reached. A lot of folks might think such a condition mere bigotry but I decline to comment.  Paul realized this, thus he wisely discarded circumcision and the dietary laws in his version of Christianity.  This at least made it possible to convert the Gentile although without bigotry Christianity could never have succeeded in being more than a prevalent religion.  Persuasion can only go so far.  A religion can't get anywhere without bigotry.
 

Constantine
Plato
Ruins of Plato's Academy

    After Constantine made Christianity the official religion, empowered, the Catholic Church went to work to suppress all other forms of thought, religious, scientific or philosophical.  The academy of Plato was shut down while the library at Alexandria was burned to the ground.

     Thus the Semito-Roman Catholic Church solidified its position as the official representative of Christ on earth.

Library of Alexandria: A Reconstruction

Interior of the Library of Alexandria

The Holy Grail
     Now, after Jesus was crucified the remaining disciples and adherents were run to earth where possible and killed.  It became expedient to flee into hiding.  From this dispersal has arisen the tradition of the Holy Grail.  This fabulous literary repository has come down to us attached to the exploits of King Arthur.  Known to most through the collation of Mallory, the original documents run to tens of thousands of pages.  The Vulgate-Lancelot alone is close to ten thousand 350-400 word pages.

    The legends which begin with the crucifixion represent a secret history of Europe.  There is much interesting investigation being forwarded on the topic currently by Laurence Gardner and his series of books, he can be accessed at his mediaquest site on the web, and Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln in two interesting books Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Messianic Legacy.

There are others but these two series are most direct. There's a lot more actually but much of it is very speculative.
 
 

Holy Blood, Holy Grail
Messianic Legacy
Charlemagne
......

     According to these writers Mary Magdalen fled Palestine for Marseilles in southern France where she bore a son to Jesus.  This son became the progenitor of the Merovingian line of kings of France.  These in turn presented a challenge to the authority of the Semito-Roman Catholic Church.  Thus the Church encouraged the usurpation of the throne by the line that would be known as the Carolingian which when the Church succeeded in crowning Charlemagne the Holy Roman Emperor it gained the right to invest the royal houses of Europe.  The Merovingians were thus dispossessed.

     With the right to make or break kings in a quasi-theological empire the success of the Church was more or less assured although in a still very difficult political situation.  Still, all Europe West of what became Russia was brought within its sway, hence we currently have a Polish pope.

     Not content with leaving well enough alone the Church in the eleventh and twelfth centuries encouraged the recovery of Palestine from the Moslems.  Contact in the East introduced two heresies which were to have a decisive and devisive impact on subsequent history down to the present day.

Knights Templar by Thomas Kostecki
Hassan i Sabbah
     The Europeans chose to invade Palestine during the heyday of the chief of the assassin cult, Hassan i Sabbah.  Thus while having only limited military success, still a Christian presence was maintained for over two hundred years which is about as long as the United States has been in existence, the crusaders were infected with a heresy.  At the same time the Cathar heresy was introduced into Europe from the East.  The Cathars also known as the Albigensians  and the Knights Templar presented the Semito-Catholic Church with a soul destroying problem.  This is where the Church met its Waterloo although it would be difficult to understand what else they could have done.

     Westerners don't seem to understand that if you're going to interfere in other people's lives you have to go all the way or suffer the consequences.  The assassins of Hassan i Sabbah introduced a very potent brand of heresy into Europe in vengeance for the invasion of Palestine.  Both examples have proven very pernicious and ought to have been suppressed.

     The watchword of the Cathars is given expression in the Rabelaisian phrase 'Do What Thou Wilt.' I haven't read Nietsche but he gave a different formulation in 'Nothing is true, everything is permitted.'

     Thus the Moslems through the Assassins were able to corrupt the morality of the West.  That Cathars prospered across Southern France where the authority of the Semito-Catholic Church was challenged.  If the Cathar heresy, really an error, grew the Church would find itself displaced.

Seal of the Inquisition
...

    The rule of the Church is that the Church cannot shed blood, which is why heretics were burnt, but they could get others to do it for them.  Establishing the Inquistion to smell out heretics the Church called on the French crown to crusade against the Albigensians.  What do you do with people who will believe differently than you do.  As Victor Hugo said, you have to kill them so that a new world may arise.  As Lenin and Stalin believed you have to exterminate the recalcitrants.  As Hitler said, there is the final solution.  Well, that's what they did to the Albigensians.  The soldiers asked how they were to determine whether one was or wasn't a Cathar; they were told to kill them all, God would know his own.

    The devastation if not total was a very serious attempt.

     Here you have one of those insuperable problems, what are you going to do?  If you do nothing you lose, if you let God sort out his own, you lose.  The Cathars would have been enough trouble but then the Church was faced with the Templar heresy.  Same solution, same results.

Painted lead figure by Adrian Bay
     The only consolation the Semito-Catholics had was that at about this same time the troops of Genghis Khan swept over the Middle East rooting the Assassins out their 'impregnable' mountain fastness.

     The result of the Church's action and that of their royal accomplices was a seething hatred of both by the survivors who, after all, believed nothing was true and everything was permitted.   Dangerous people with dangerous ideas.  Several subversive organizations arose, the Free Spirits, Beggars and Beguines who eventually came together as the Libertines in Revolutionary France.

     The Church demonized the survivors, according to Laurence Gardner as witches, hence the witch hunts.  I'm not sure it is true but it does make sense, provides a rational motive for the persecutions.  With the inquisition in place Europe was made a hell on earth.  Nevertheless learning wiggled out from under the suppression of the Church to flower forth as the Enlightenment.  Thus after the Cathars and Templars Science presented a challenge to the Church which has been a knock out blow.  Both the Semito-Catholic Church and the Semitic Jews were presented with a very difficult problem which no amount of persecution could resolve.

     The Church has stubbornly clung to its authority giving up only a minimum to reason.  The Inquisition itself was only discontinued in mid-nineteenth century.  The Jews, on the other hand, were thrown into complete disarray by the Enlightenment, at least in the West.  The great bloc of Judaism in the Pale of Eastern Europe responded much more slowly but then very large numbers of that group emigrated to the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries where the religion faced even more serious challenges.

     The Western Jews ran through a whole series of experimental forms before, under the influence of the Eastern Jews, the compromise of Zionism was evolved.

     Along the way Marx, Einstein and Freud evolved political, physical and psychological pseudo-scientific ideas which had the effect of confusing the West.

     Aiding the emergence of Science and the freeing of speculative religion from the suppression of the Church was the French Revolution of 1789.  The Revolution was as epochal an event in the Piscean Age as the crucifixion of Christ.  The Revolutionists restarted their calendar at year one which was probably symbolically correct.

Jean Baptiste de Monet
St. John Janus cover
Gregor Mendel

  It is probably significant that Jean Baptiste de Monet, the Chevalier de Lamarck was appointed professor of invertebrate zoology at the Paris Museum of Natural History in the critical year of 1793.  As an evolutionist Lamarck preceded Charles Darwin.  In his Tarzan and the Lion Man Burroughs mentions Lamarck along with Gregor Mendel, Darwin as well as  the proposer of the germ theory of evolution,  August Weismann, who Burroughs did not mention by name.  While Burroughs played with evolution in many fantastic ways his playfulness was informed by a thorough grounding in the learning of his day.

         One has to be very alert and attentive to see just how playful he is.

Tarzan The Terrible
H.M. Stanley
...     In Tarzan The Terrible the primitive species, mistakenly called races in most discussions, had tails.  When Tarzan wishes to disguise himself he affixes a severed tail to his posterior.  Now, there was a legend of a tailed people in the Congo Basin.  The legend was based on the fact that this tribe affixed animal tails on their posteriors much as Tarzan The Terrible does.  Thus Burroughs combines evolutionary speculation with historical legend and fact in a humorous episode.  It's possible he may have been waiting a hundred years for anyone to get that joke.  He picked up his information from H.M. Stanley's In Darkest Africa.

     The revolution itself was not spontaneous as it is often depicted nor is the wanton destruction the result of a frustrated peasantry.The Revolution was planned and coordinated by the descendants of those very Albigensians and Templars Church and Crown had crushed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  The Abligensian and Templar heresies and error were thus released on the world in a more concentrated form than previously.  The disorder in society today is caused by the followers of those errors.

     Burroughs was born a short 70 some odd years after the failure of the Revolution.  Sixteen years after Darwin released his Origin Of Species on the world.  In between, incredible advances were made.  Champollion broke the hieroglyphic alphabet of Egypt opening the ancient world to us.  The ancient civilizations of the Middle East were unearthed.  Surely all those ruins Burroughs speaks of were influenced by those discoveries.  Babylonians, Sumerians, Hittites, Cretans and other discoveries such as Schliemann's unearthing of Troy and Mycenae.  The Church was delivered one blow after another as the authority of its Holy Scriptures crumbled into falsehood.

     At the same time a plethora of suppressed religious speculation burst the bonds of repression.  Esotericists stumbled all over themselves to formulate doctrines.  The Spiritualist movement sprang up fully formed like Athene from the forehead of Zeus.  The greatest of the great, Madame Helena P. Blavatsky, ransacked the religious speculative literature of the ages to reassemble it into a spectacular tour de force she called Theosophy.  Just  as Religion, Philosophy and Science had diverged in c.-800 she now tried to reunite them under one head.  She couldn't do it but her work is a magnificent effort none the less.

     Thus Edgar Rice Burroughs was born into this incredible religious, intellectual and scientific ferment.  Learning had become so vast that no one mind could grasp all its details, but like Madame B, it were better to fail gloriously than never make the attempt.  Underneath all the foolery and fantasy of his fiction ERB went at it with a will.

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(b). Relations of the Sub-species 0-1875

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Charles Darwin
     At the risk of being repetitious it might be appropriate here to quote Darwin again to keep the thought fresh in our minds:

    'As the species of the same genus usually have, but by no means invariably, much similarity in habits and constitution, and always in structure, the struggle will generally be more severe between them, if they come into competition with each other, than between species of distant genera.'

     So, when the Semites erupted from the desert the modern phase of competition between Homo Sapiens sub-species began.  The populations had now expanded so that there was not room for all.  One sub-species must drive out all the others.  Thus the outer reality, or world of appearances, will and must triumph over the inner world of wishful thinking.  So the world turns.  Darwin again:
 

     'We see this in the recent extension over parts of the United States of one species of swallow having caused the decrease of another species.  The recent increase of the missal-thrush in Scotland has caused the decrease of the song-thrush.  How frequently we hear of species of rat taking the place of another species under the most different climates.  In Russia the small Asiatic cockroach has everywhere driven before it its great congener.  In Australia the imported hive bee is rapidly exterminating the small, stingless native bee.  One species of charlock has been known to supplant another species, and so in other cases.  We can dimly see why the competition should be most severe between allied forms, which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature, but probably in no one case could we precisely say why one species has been victorious over another in the great battle of life.'

     Let us never forget that there is a great battle for life while with Homo Sapiens we can precisely say why one species will be victorious.  I cannot show the victory but I can show, for my purpose here, how the struggle progressed to 1875.  The next section will take us to 1950, the next after that to 9/11 and then a fictional effort will end with a possible scenario of the end of civilization as we know it.

   The method followed by Homo Sapiens is easily learned, you just have to condition yourself to accept the facts.  The outer world of appearances vs. the inner world of wishful thinking.  In encounters before this period the method was simple.  A band of invaders conquered the indigenous folk, slew all the males, kept the females for themselves.  In an evolutionary sense this is the natural method.

     Amongst lions, for instance, a male is only allowed to enjoy his Pride for a limited time.  Then a couple males gang up on him, driving him away.  One of the new males then acquires the lionesses killing the former lion's offspring at the same time.  The complacent females then go into heat producing a new group of offspring for the new male.  Simple.  Why the simp lion helps his fellow for no reward is beyond me but it works the same way among Homo Sapiens.

     So when the Saxons drove the Britons out of England into Brittany where the Briton conquered the natives, the Britons not only massacred the males but they cut the tongues out of the women so that the language wouldn't be corrupted.  Very offensive to our professed standards but completely within the range of normality.  I mean, you know, get real. This sort of thing can and will happen again.  Nazi Germany wasn't any aberration.

     In this great struggle of life all sub-species of Homo Sapiens are more or less physically equal.  Mental genetics have given HSII and III the edge in scientific intelligence.  Along with the intelligence come the ability to see farther and clearer so that lacking tunnel vision the will is blunted.  Rather than following the ancient methods and disposing of indigenous peoples, which they could easily have done at the time, the HSIIs and IIIs  created a legacy of ill will through their benignity which at the end of this period began to come back to haunt them.

     From the period of Mohammed the sub-species began to be moved around in earnest.

     A legacy of the Arab Moslem triumph was that the West was cut off from all intercourse with the East.  The Moslems blocked all the formerly active trade routes.  The legacy remains today when otherwise well educated historians know nothing of Africa and many points of the Near East.

     Having conquered the Mediterranean littoral of North Africa the Arabs began the penetration of sub-Saharan Africa.  Superior in both intelligence and will to the First Born the Arabs treated them as though they were mere animals, more intelligent apes.  If the African slave trade hadn't existed before it began then. It was brutal.

     Many Africans converted to Moslemism because it gained them immunity from being enslaved.  They in turn captured non-Moslem Africans to sell to the Arabs.  This Moslem African slave trade began c. 700 and continues to the present day although the Arabs will deny it.

     North of Arabia the Moslems captured part of the Byzantine Asian lands while occupying Persia, central Asia and a conquest of parts of India plus a fair penetration into China.  Today if one includes Pakistan, Bangladesh and India as a unit the Indian subcontinent is predominantly Moslem.

     In the West the Moslems were slowly driven from Spain which was accomplished just as the Ottoman Turks who had invaded the Middle East from Central Asia destroyed the last vestiges of the Roman or Byzantine Empire.

    The Ottomans then began the conquest of the Balkans moving into the Ukraine, Romania and Hungary to the very gates of Vienna before the combined forces of Austria, Poland and Russia drove them back to the present borders just as Edgar Rice Burroughs was born.  An incredibly long struggle.  After that defeat the Ottomans were known as 'the sick man of Europe.'

     During this entire period from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the fifteenth century Europe was in turmoil as society reformed from a congeries of Germanic tribes into a semblance of the modern nation states.

Christopher Columbus
...     In 1492 a Genoese sailor named Christopher Columbus changed the direction of European society.  Cut off from the East by the Moslems who took advantage of straddling the trade routes to charge exorbitant prices for Eastern luxuries, Portugal led European exploration of the world circumnavigating Africa finding an ocean route to the orient thereby bypassing the Arabs eclipsing their prosperity sending them into complete stagnation.  Maybe this is what Bernard Lewis means by 'something went wrong.'

Caribs
     Columbus found the islands of the Caribbean Sea occupied by the Caribs.  Here we can see clearly Darwin's dilemma resolved.  Between the introduction of virulent diseases to which the Caribs were unacclimated and brutal treatment the European's like the Asian cockroach drove their predecessors before them.  What had been a Carib lake became a European lake.

     The islands were perfect for the labor intensive sugar industry but the Europeans didn't want the intensive labor for themselves.  They in turn went into the great slave capitol of the world which the Arabs had not yet exhausted to bring large numbers of the First Born out of Africa.  Like all ruling classes the  HSIIs and IIIs were soon swamped by the multitudes of First Born.  Thus the HSIIs and IIIs having displaced the native Caribs, were now displaced by the First Born who at present have possession of the Caribbean islands.

     So now if Darwin were alive he could see how it works.  Caribs>HSIIs and IIIs>First Born.  Simple.
 

     The Spaniard also overran Mexico, Central America and South America.  Here their numbers were few in comparison with the indigenes who were apparently of a hardier stock than the Caribs.  The Spaniards were able to maintain their dominance over the indigenes of the area.  Even today the President of Mexico is of European descent while the peons are Indios.

     Following Columbus' lead the English and French invaded further North in lands which became the United States and Canada.

      Once again here we can plainly see how one species of Homo Sapiens displaces another just as one species of swallow did to its great congener.

     The new invaders from Europe displaced the native Homo Sapiens along the seaboard then as their population steadily increased they rolled the aboriginals back before their advance.  There was no attempt at extermination although there was callous disregard for life in the evolutionary sense.  In the human social sense there was no consideration of aboriginal rights.

  At the same time the First Born were removed from Africa to serve as laborers in the English colonies of North America.  The First Born would never have left Africa had they not been removed by the Semites and HSII and III.  The First Born secured no presence in the Middle East with whatever implications that holds, but from Brazil through the Caribbean to the united States First Born territories were extended greatly.

     The original HSIII population which originally controlled Central Asia was either driven from the area by invading Mongolid tribes or exhausted their numbers migrating West.  As numerous HSIII  populations have existed in the Caucasus and in other pockets the latter is unlikely.  The HSIIIs were undoubtedly driven before the Mongolids in the Darwinian sense.  The Mongolids first made their appearance in the West with the fifth century Huns.  They swept all before them until defeated in what amounts to a last ditch stand by the French.  From the Huns on Central Asia belonged to the Mongolids.

     Then in the thirteenth century on the heels of the Western Crusades Genghis Khan organized the Central Asians to conquer both the Chinese Mongolids in the East as well as sweeping West to overrun Russia and Eastern Europe to the North before retiring back into the Steppes from which they exercised hegemony over Russia for hundreds of years.

     To the South the Mongolids rolled over the Moslems before being defeated in Mesopotamia then again retiring toward the Steppes.

     The Russians eventually threw the Mongolid yoke off, then by running gunboats on the Volga they were able to prevent the Mongolid hordes from crossing.  Thus Central Asia was brought under control.

     The French and English quickly followed the Portuguese into the East.  By then the Spanish had already seized the Philippines.  European religious interference caused the Japanese to close their borders to both ingress and egress.  From the early seventeenth century to nearly the birth of ERB Japan was isolated taking no part in world history.

     With either superior luck or organization the English branch of HSII and III was able to be the most influential branch in the East.  All of India was brought under their control, both Hindus and Moslems.  Southeast Asia acknowledged at least the hegemony of England.  The Dutch seized Indonesia while the French annexed Indo-China.

     England, France and Germany were in the process of annexing China itself when they were interfered with by the United States.  As usual the United States with so-called good intentions produced the opposite result.  John Hay of the United States announced his Open Door policy in regard to China which forced the European branches to back down from their concept of spheres of interest.

     In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, lacking colonists of their own, England began moving Indians and Chinese from their homelands into their colonies.  Thus these peoples who up to that point had been quite content to remain where they were realized the advantages of colonization for themselves.

     Although Chinese and Japanese migrations will fall mainly in the period after ERB's birth, well before mid-nineteenth century the Chinese had begun a substantial migration to the West Coast of the Americas.  In 1849, the time of the California gold rush, they represented a very substantial percentage of the American West coast population.  It was because of the Chinese that Dennis Kearney announced that California was White Man's country.

Chinese immigrants
     Fearful of being overrun by the Chinese, Kearney led the effort for a congressional law excluding the Chinese from immigration.  This law was secured in 1882.  It was repealed or superseded by the 1965 revision of the immigration act which was promoted by the Semitic Jews.

     Americans concentrate only on what happens in this country but in fact once stirred up by the British the Chinese began to emigrate to all parts of the world as circumstances allowed.  Americans refuse to allow volition to any other people assuming the role of world directors in some sort of perversion of Manifest Destiny.

Semite Definition: A member of a group of Semitic-speaking peoples of the Near East and northern Africa, including the Arabs, Arameans, Babylonians, Carthaginians, Ethiopians, Hebrews, and Phoenicians ~ Bartleby American Heritage Dictionary