The Kingless Generation

More ideological and world-historical groundwork, as we introduce, for me, the real hero of this story, the Jewish Italian Communist mythologist Furio Jesi (1941–1980), a rival to many in the Eranos crowd who critiqued their Aryo-heroic, Christian-Kabbalist, and I would say satanic-orientalist project from the outside. He got a professorship at the University of Palermo on sheer merit despite being a high school dropout, but then after moving his family to a country house for their safety after his organizing work got him in some heat during the Years of Lead, he died at age 39 when his water heater suddenly malfunctioned and gave him carbon monoxide poisoning in the night. Join me and Scott Ryan of the Dustlight Archives Podcast as we discover an important Kingless Generation ancestor.

From 1933 to 1988, the liberal spiritualist wing of the trans-Atlantic bourgeoisie had something of a think tank for spiritual and cult technology and grand strategy in the yearly gatherings of philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists like Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Gershom Scholem, known as Eranos and organized by the wealthy socialite and occultist Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn at a lakeside resort in Switzerland. Jung disciple Gustav Heyer memorably called their activities there Aetherhurerei “aether whoredom”. I am joined by Scott Ryan of The Dustlight Archives Podcast for the opening episode of a series on this little-known but very important gathering which has deep links both with earlier modern “gnostic” and bourgeois-occult, satanic-orientalist secret society movements, contemporaneous developments like the Nazis as well as the proto-hippie youth movements of which Nazism was the shadow, and also NXIVM and other present-day developments of the same social and spiritual technologies of the ruling-class vanguard, which Scott is covering so brilliantly on his show.

We continue our study of Elizabethan England, which is often mistakenly treated as an origin point of bourgeois revolutionary culture but which I hope to show is actually an endpoint for the subjectivity of the “Sons of the Silk Road” of Arabic literature, whose literary, religious, cryptographic, and financial antics in the bazaars and marketplaces of West Eurasia, Africa, and the European Ummah, inspired imitators among the crusaders and (re)conquistadors of Spain and Italy and, through them, a strange little island nation called England. This time we savor the acerbic wit of Thomas Nashe, poet of the continental wanderers known as intelligencers and used to great effect by Elizabeth’s spymaster Francis Walsingham. In his iconic depiction of the intelligencer in his picaresque novel The Unfortunate Traveller, we recognise extensive overlap with the fellowship of the Sons of the Silk Road as depicted by the 10th-c travelling Arab poet Abū Dulaf al-Khazrajī in his Qaṣīda sāsāniyya.

Building on our discussion of the Water Margin (the most important surviving versions dating to the 1590s), we go “back”—notice the scare quotes!—to what is usually at least passively assumed to be the source of the culture of capitalist modernity, merry aul England. What we will find, of course, is that we need to re-orient our view of the birth of modern capitalism along the lines long established by world historians like Janet Abu-Lughod, Andre Gunder Frank, Samir Amin, Emmanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi, et al, because Europe was in fact a late-comer to industrial modernity, borrowing all the basic innovations necessary for capitalism from the Afro-Asiatic silk road powers: the Muslim world, India, and China. The same is true for the cultural superstructure of capitalism, as all the core elements of modern, novelistic, secular modernity can also be found first in Afro-Asiatic forms like the Arabic Maqama, the Arabian Nights, the vernacular epics of early modern India, and the Ming Dynasty novel. It was from here that “modern consciousness” spread to the North Mediterranean, and from there to the imaginary homeland of chivalry in the mind of a nascent “Europe”, Britannia. This time we outline the basic activities and characteristics of several lesser-known English writers of the 1590s, all of whom played important roles in the rise of state pageantry, venture capitalism, and intelligence agencies in that storied isle: this time we mainly discuss Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and Anthony Munday.

I swore I wasn’t going to do a chatty one but rather a hard core cultural-historical content for the next premium episode, but I just gave myself podcaster’s block again as I have several irons in the fire none of which feels quite ready. But so much has been happening in the world that I just had to sit down and catch up, so here’s a good old podcast hug, and in fact I feel like it turned out to be a pretty great statement of core Kingless Generation themes packed with updated information and analysis, so I’m just going to get this out there: please enjoy.

Living in Japan, the dominant image of Lafcadio Hearn is something like: he’s that white man who came to Japan and told us he believed in us—he knew we had it in us to become the honorary-white vassal of Anglo-America that we are today! A new TV drama on the national broadcaster NHK lavishes screen time on a klutzy Lafcadio adorably befuddled by Japanese culture, baffled by the Japanese language, and played by a blue-eyed English actor—which is especially interesting because the real Lafcadio was a brown man born of the last Crusade, or maybe the first color revolution: the Greek war of independence from Ottoman Turkey, which was sponsored by a rising British Empire. His mother, a true daughter of the Afro-Asiatic merchant capitalist world with relatives on every shore of the Mediterranean, got in trouble with his father’s English family for piercing little Lafcadio’s ears and putting hoops in them. I run through a collection of his writings in Cinncinnatti and New Orleans, where he lived on the Colored side of town (not entirely by choice) and dedicated himself to recording the lives and speculating on the hopes and possibilities of declassed, liquidated, and colonized peoples that Amerikkka has always burned for fuel. In the end, he was converted to a social-Darwinist libertarianism that left no room for sincere solidarity, and this casts his later embrace of a rising Japan in a different light.