Monday, February 12, 2007

Even Albertans Get It

From todays Angus Reid poll showing the majority of Albertans are concerned about climate change global warming. And though this is a Conservative stronghold in the NDP provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba the numbers are the same.


Views on Climate Change

Q1. We are interested in your views on the debate currently underway in Canada on global warming. Do you think global warming represents a serious threat to the world, or is the issue being overplayed?

All

BC

Alta.

Man. / Sask.

Ont.

Que.

Atl.

A serious threat

73%

72%

63%

61%

74%

77%

81%

Overplayed

20%

26%

33%

31%

19%

13%

10%

Not sure

7%

2%

5%

8%

7%

9%

9%
















Environment





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Liberals BQ Tie

In a poll issued today by Leger Marketing/Angus Reid we find that the Tories have lost significant support in Quebec and the BQ and Liberals are in a virtual dead heat.

But this might help change the fortunes of the Conservatives;
Quebec to get close to $400 million to fight climate change

Provincial Breakdown


BC

Alta.

Man. /
Sask.

Ont.

Que.

Atl.

Conservative

40%

59%

41%

40%

24%

43%

Liberal

29%

20%

25%

35%

32%

39%

New Democratic Party

20%

12%

26%

16%

6%

9%

Bloc Québécois

--

--

--

--

31%

--

Green

11%

7%

8%

8%

5%

6%



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Racist ADQ

The Reform Party of Quebec, aka the ADQ has revealed its racist roots. And with their encouragement the little town of Herouxville has met their challenge.

Mario Dumont is resorting to "demagoguery" when he says old-stock Quebecers are "on their knees" before minority groups, Premier Jean Charest said yesterday.

The premier was referring to an open letter by Dumont, leader of the right-of-centre Action democratique du Quebec. In it, he referred to Quebecers' "European stock" and "our values inspired firstly by our religious tradition."

The ADQ leader noted recent incidents involving minority groups, in which Quebecers "chose to put aside our common values" to satisfy minorities. He also criticized Charest for showing a lack of leadership and blaming "our old minority reflex, which persists despite the Quiet Revolution, Bill 101 and the success of Quebec Inc."

The premier said Dumont's view that Quebecers are always giving in to minorities is "a total, total fabrication."

Once again Quebec Nationalism, regardless of political ideology of its demagogues, reveals itself to be Pure Laine. Quebec does not need national sovereignty it needs working class sovereignty; socialism.

And the ADQ like its federal counterparts now running Ottawa appeals to the lowest common denominator, tax cuts, reduction in government services, privatization of the public sector, and anti-dual citizenship, aka anti-immigrant racism.

Ironically the ADQ's attitude is similar to the old Reform Party base out West which is not only anti-non-European-immigrant but also Anti-Francophone. Expressing the same beliefs that the ADQ does towards minorities, that is the Rest of Canada always gives in to Quebec.

See

Quebec

Not Your Usual Left Wing Rant

Reform Party


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Return of the Soviets



Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay had an interesting slip of the tongue while being interviewed on CTV's Question Period yesterday.

When asked about Putin's charge that American Unilateralism was responsible for increasing world tensions around nuclear weapons, MacKay replied;

"well what do you expect from the Soviets...ah, Russians. "

Maybe the slip of the tongue was because Peter had read this headline;
Icy blast from Putin hints at a new Cold War

Or it could just be good old fashioned right wing nostalgia for the good old days before Russia became capitalist

See:

Putin

Peter MacKay

Foreign Affairs

Soviet Union

Russia





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CN Whines


CN says striking conductors' wage demands too high

Oh really. I think not. Not after record profits and cost cutting that has reduced jobs and has resulted in numerous accidents that endanger their workers, the public and the environment.

UTU asked for wage increases of 4.5 percent in the first two years of a three-year contract and 4 percent in the third, CN said. "The UTU's final offer on lump sum bonus payments - C$1,000 ($840) per year over the three-year period - was three times greater than the other recent agreements," CN said.

Ah. cry me a river.

CN is demanding a flat wage rate. Where it has won those concessions in the U.S. the rail workers are now doing twelve hour shifts. Gone is the eight hour day.

Report on Business Top 1000 listed the productivity of CN workers,

RANKCOMPANY (Year-End) EMPLOYEES HEAD OFFICE REVENUE/
EMPLOYEE
PROFIT/
EMPLOYEE



34. Canadian National Railway (De05) 21,540 Montreal,QC $336,676 $74,420

So each worker at CN produced a gross revenue of over three hundred thousand dollars for the company and made CN a profit of $74,000 each, thats after their wages, benefits, company taxes etc. had been paid out.

After all labour produces all wealth, all wealth belongs to labour.

Here is CN's ten year stock chart.

Not exactly boom and bust, just one long boom.

Paid for by CN workers and CN's disregard for public safety.
















And while CN whines about paying out $1000 signing bonus spread over three years, thats a big $333 a year, to their workers, here is what Hunter Harrison earned in 2005.

He is the second highest paid CEO in Canada.

Canadian National Railway Co. Harrison, Hunter $56,219,496
Salary:$1,665,950 Bonus:$4,664,660 Subtotal:$6,330,610 2% chg
Other:$1,710,324 Share Units:$20,931,213 Option Gains:$27,247,347
TOTAL:$56,219,496 New option grant: 250,000 ($2,136,051)
Industry:Industrials


That means Hunter earns a cool $29,281 a day!!! While begrudging CN workers a measly 4% wage increase and a pitiful signing bonus over three years. Yet each worker produces a profit of $74,000 each, which goes to Hunter and his Shareholders.

Ain't capitalism grand.

See

Time to Nationalize CN

CEO's

CN

Productivity


Wealth


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Sunday, February 11, 2007

Michael Coren's Fatwa

File this under two wrongs don't make a right or birds of a feather flock together.

I found a startling similarity in Michael Coren's latest column defending a protest over the building of a Mosque in Newmarket and this Saudi Fatwa.

Of course Coren claims its not the Mosque that bothers him but the Imam of the Mosque.

Mosque building made simple: Satisfy the local building codes and do not make excessive noise.

Oh, and don't preach anti-Semitic garbage and call for violent world revolution.

Which is where an otherwise anonymous new Muslim temple in Newmarket, Ont., might have got it wrong. A type of culture clash, by the way, that is being replicated throughout Canada and most of the Western world.

Protesters have emphasized that it is not the mosque that bothered them but the fact that its leader, Zafar Bangash, is a notorious extremist.

So we judge for ourselves. Surely just another little mosque in Canada, with fun and laughter and good cheer all round.

Coren being a born again Christian is of course a zealot for his faith, one which he professes allows him to deny the rights of other faiths.

So I would suspect that underneath his denial of free speech from the pulpit, a Minbar in a Mosque, he really agrees with this fatwa.

Just change Islam for Christianity. Better yet change it to Coren's Personal Christianity.

Because what he is saying is that Muslims should NOT be allowed to build Mosques in Canada. Not unlike those nice folks in
Herouxville.

'All Religions Other Than Islam Are Heresy': Saudi Religious Council


The Saudi fatwa reads as follows: "The Permanent Council for Scholarly Research and Religious Legal Judgment has studied the queries some individuals brought before the Chief Mufti… concerning the topic of the construction of houses of worship for unbelievers in the Arabian Peninsula, such as the construction of churches for Christians and houses of worship for Jews and for other unbelievers and [the question of] the owners of companies or organizations allotting a fixed place for their unbelieving workers to perform the rites of unbelief.

"After considering the queries the Council answered as follows:

"All religions other than Islam are heresy and error. Any place designated for worship other than [that of] Islam is a place of heresy and error, for it is forbidden to worship Allah in any way other than the way that Allah has prescribed in Islam. The law of Islam (shari'a) is the final and definitive religious law. It applies to all men and jinns and abrogates all that came before it. This is a matter about which there is consensus.

"Those who claim that there is truth in what the Jews say, or in what the Christians say - whether he is one of them or not - is denying the Koran and the Prophet Muhammad's sunna and the consensus of the Muslim nation… Allah said: 'The only reason I sent you was to bring good tidings and warnings to all [Koran 34:28]'; 'Oh people, I am Allah's Messenger to you all [Koran 7:158]'; 'Allah's religion is Islam [3:19]'; 'Whoever seeks a religion other than Islam, it shall not be accepted from him [3:85]'; 'The unbelievers from among the people of the Book [i.e. Jews and Christians] and the polytheists are in hellfire and will be [there] forever. They are the worst of all creation… [98:6].'

"Therefore, religion necessitates the prohibition of unbelief, and this requires the prohibition of worshiping Allah in any way other than that of the Islamic shari'a. Included in this is the prohibition against building houses of worship according to the abrogated religious laws, Jewish or Christian or anything else, since these houses of worship - whether they be churches or other houses of worship - are considered heretical houses of worship, because the worship that is practiced in them is in violation of the Islamic shari'a, which abrogates all religious law that came before it. Allah says about the unbelievers and their deeds: 'I will turn to every deed they have done and I will make them into dust in the wind [Koran 25:23].'



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Liberation Theology


This is an interesting essay by K. Satchidanandan that is quite long but well worth the read. I have pulled out excerpts that I hope do justice to whole post, it is over four pages long.

I found it informative and in many ways it reflects my belief that certain religious or spiritual movements, such as paganism, Gnosticism, the spiritualist reformers and occult revival of the fin de sicle 19th Century as well as their heirs; the 20th century magickal movements, reflect a true liberation theology. In fact a theology of libertarianism.

As
Satchidanandan says in the Indian context they are movements of the Sramana.

Satchidananda's critique of communalism is similar to that of Habermas though he is clearly critical of western positivism, Hegelianism and Marxism.

He deconstructs in a devastating way the fascist statist elements of Brahmanism and its modern revivalist incarnation in political Hinduism.

He ends with a reflection on the champion of libertarian spirituality, Ghandi, whom his Canadian biographer; George Woodcock called 'the gentle anarchist', and influenced a whole generation of intellectuals to become active anarchist pacifists.

For a critique of Woodcock's view of Ghandi's liberation theology see;Indian Spirituality and the Mythic Gandhi

Which should be contrasted with Woodcocks
Who Killed the British Empire? that observes: "Undoubtedly if one had to choose any individual as more responsible than others for the death of the Empire, it will be Gandhi.''



All in all I found this an enlightening essay , if you pardon the pun, so I thought I would share with you.


Between saints and secularists

K. Satchidanandan is Secretary of the Sahitya Akademi.
A major Indian poet
writing in Malayalam, he lives in New Delhi


We need a secularism that is not merely ‘tolerant’ of our pluralist traditions of religion but is inspired and motivated by them and fully takes into account the creative, positive, contributions of different religions to the moulding of our subjectivity as well as to the evolution of our civilisation. By dismissing religiosity and spiritualism as fundamentally flawed, superstitious and illusory, our communist friends have foreclosed any possibility of a dialogue with the majority of our people who have faith in one religion or another. They have also entirely failed to understand the radical significance of spiritual leaders from Buddha and Mahavira to Vivekananda and Gandhi, and of subaltern religious movements like the Bhakti and the Sufi traditions.

Communalism being the worst form of materialism, divorced from everything that is sacred and oriented towards worldly wealth and power, can truly be combated only by a higher form of the sacred that combines the secular ideal of human equality, democratic awareness, identification with the suffering, alleviation of poverty and resistance to oppression with a deep inner inquiry and belief in the holiness of all forms of life. Those who turn religion into a means to attain state power and worldly status are indeed the most irreligious of all, for they profane the most hallowed and usurp even the last refuge of the spirit from a world where ‘the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity’ by joining the ‘ignorant armies’ that ‘clash by night’.

It is possible, at the risk of some simplification, to characterise the struggle within religions as one between Brahmanas and Sramanas. I am using these words more as oppositional metaphors than as historical categories. Of course, the terms do have historical sanction: there are references to them in Buddhist and Jain literature, Ashoka’s edicts and the travelogues of Megasthenes and Chinese pilgrims. Patanjali records that the two were born rivals "like the cat and the mouse, like the snake and the mongoose". The Arab documents of the second millennium AD also speak of two religious traditions they call Brahmanam (also Brahimam) and Samanyam. The Brahmana stream represents emphasis on ritual, belief in hierarchisation and priesthood and the resulting inequality, the unquestioning faith in the Vedas as repositories of eternal truth, the monopolisation of certain knowledges through a language seldom known to the majority and the linking of those knowledges to power, secrecy, deformation, mystifying representations and divisive practices imposed on people that are later legitimised and rationalised to seem almost natural or divinely created.

In short, it is the religion of hegemony that believes in subjection and domination that splits up community life, forces the individual into himself/herself and ties him/her to his/her own identity in a constraining manner. In this way, it always has had links with state power, even when it does not directly rule, by being more than the rulers, making rules for them, by being advisers in court in the past or as lawyers, managers and bureaucrats in the present, creating and sustaining mechanisms of subjection and determining the forms of subjectivity. Michel Foucault calls this ‘pastoral power’ in the context of the Western State, which has integrated the old power-techniques of the Church in a new political format. Originally, it was a form of power that guaranteed individual salvation in the next world, but it differed from royal power in that it not only commanded but was also prepared to sacrifice itself for the flock. It was a power that looked after not only the whole community but also each individual in particular during his entire life-span, a power that could not be exercised without exploring their ‘souls’, without making them reveal their innermost secrets. The concept of such a form of power applies equally well to the power the Brahmins enjoyed —and to some extent continue to enjoy in Indian society, the growing power of the Papacy and the Church in the Western states and the power of the mullahs in monoreligious Islamic states.

Sramanas by definition are beggars — those who have chosen poverty. They do not approve of the domination of the Brahmanas or accept the authenticity of their texts. Rituals are secondary in their practice: self-realisation and service are primary. They would prefer to speak in popular tongues rather than in Sanskrit or Latin, abhor the idea of hierarchisation through divisive practices like caste, look down upon earthly power and riches and demystify religion by taking it to the people. They interrogate traditional customs, rituals and taboos including, at times, the very idea of temples and idol-worship, not to speak of untouchability and other spatial strategies of distance and differentiation, and believe in basic human equality, or even go beyond it to believe in the equality of all created beings.

While for the Brahmana tradition religion is an instrument of hegemony, for the Sramana tradition, it is an instrument of spiritual enquiry, social justice and revolt against forms of oppressive subjectivisation.

The disappearance of women priests and the conversion of fertility cults dominated by women into celebrations dominated by men, like Ganesh Chaturthi, are all signs of similar patriarchalisation of society. Ancient Indian texts abound with legitimising narratives where the caste system is shown to have divine sanction. The Purusha Sukta of the Rig Veda, probably a later interpolation into the Vedic canon, says that the mouth of the divine became the Brahmin, his arms the Kshatriya, his legs the Vaisya and his feet the Sudra. The Bhagavad Gita, again considered by historians like D.D. Kosambi to be a later Brahminical interpolation in the Mahabharata, brackets Vaisyas, Sudras and women together and calls them the ‘base-born’. The Vishnu Purana, the Padma Purana and Satapatha Brahmana are full of similar narratives and situations that glorify the Brahmin at the cost of other segments of society.

The Sramana tradition, on the other hand, is counter-hegemonic, often to the degree of being subversive. The Buddha and Mahavira, who interrogated the Varna system, questioned the priesthood, spurned rituals, upheld the equality of beings and hence condemned violence, whose victims in those days were mostly the Sudras and the animals useful for the peasants, may be said to belong to this tradition. The Bhakti-Sufi movement was another major pan-Indian articulation of this stream of subaltern dissent.

The spokesmen/women of the movement mostly came from the subaltern or marginalised sections of society and were workers, women or Mulsims. Namdeo the tailor, Kabir the weaver, Tukaram the peddler, Chokamela the bricklayer and Gora the potter were some of them. Bulhe Shah, Baba Farid, Mir Dard, Shah Abdul Latif, Sultan Bahu, Madho Lal Husain, Sheikh Ibrahim Farid Sani, Ali Haidar, Fard Faqir, Hashim Shah, Karam Ali and other Sufi poets were Muslims by birth. And there were women saints from Lal Ded and Meerabai to Andal, Ouvaiar and Akkamahadevi, who transcended their gender and whose stories are also often tales of emancipation from the oppression and subordination they experienced as women. The Sahaja cult of Chandidas and the cult of Chaitanya also did not recognise caste and creed and hence provided moments of liberation for the Sudras.

Tukaram, Kabir, Namdeo, Meera and the South Indian saints like Allamaprabhu and Basaveswara did not accept the authority of the Bhagavad Gita. Even the Sikh credo, that received its elements from various religious sources including bhaktas like Jayadev and Namdeo, has been little influenced by the Gita. Jnaneswar quarrelled with Brahmin beliefs in Alandi and hence had to seek refuge on the southern banks of the Godavari to write his popular version of the Gita. The Manbhavs (or Mahanubhavas), who belonged to the sect established by Chakradhara in Maharashtra in the twelfth century AD, also would have nothing to do with Brahminism; they practised a kind of primitive communism, sharing everything equally and denounced the idea of caste. Even Eknath, who was born a Brahmin, fell victim to the displeasure of his priestly class for opposing the caste system. The Varkari pilgrims of Maharashtra also renounced caste and refused to follow rituals.

The Hindu revivalist ideology practised in contemporary India deliberately ignores this second Sramana tradition of revolt and reform within Indian religion, or blurs the distinctions between the two traditions in order to absorb some of the populist aspects of Bhakti into its strategies of propagation. It is Bhakti vulgarised and emptied of its profound, egalitarian, radical content. The hidden agenda of this neo–Hinduism, what Romila Thapar calls ‘Syndicated Hinduism’, is a reassertion of the hegemony of the Dharmasastras and, through it, the retrieval of Brahmin ideology, now under threat from the awakening Dalit sections of society. The latter have very different traditions and practices of spirituality, a different iconography, and an alternative religion now half-submerged in the ruling rhetoric of the dominant religious discourse and marginalised by the conscious and unconscious processes of history. We know very well that a denomination called ‘Hindu’ did not exist until recently and the word merely denoted the people on the banks of the Indus. The Persians called the Sindhu river Hindu, the Greeks called it Indos and the Arabs, Al Hind. Muslim rulers and Christian missionaries used it as a blanket term to cover all those who did not belong to the Judaic religions, even while recognising the multi-religious nature of that population. The orientalist historians gave it a kind of theoretical legitimation by speaking about a Hindu civilisation and culture.

At the heart of this homogenising Hindutva lies the myth of a continuous and primordial struggle of ‘Hindus’ against Muslims as the structuring principle of Indian history. In this running construction of ‘otherness’, both the communities are to have been homogeneous blocs, though this myth has been entirely demolished by historians. Not the logic of religion but the logic of power had decided the nature of those struggles where Hindus have fought against Hindus (e.g., Saiva-Vaishnava) and Muslims against Muslims (e.g. Shia-Sunni). Both have also very often joined hands to crush someone perceived as a threat to sovereignty or royal power, whether Hindu or Muslim. And if Muslim kings had been invaders, let us remember, so were the Aryans. Only the communicational and economic integration of the last quarter of the nineteenth century provided sharply-defined identities and animosities with a larger expanse of space to spread across, and the forces of neo-Hinduism have managed to develop a wide-based institutional framework and strategic network to make full political use of this facility. Pride in the national past invoked during the anti-colonial struggle, the empowerment of the ‘other backward castes’ in search of new pastures of power and prestige, the growth of an aggressive middle class that seeks to manage society, the desire of the disempowered orthodoxy to retrieve their lost centrality in the power-grid: all these have in different ways strengthened the forces of revivalism and helped them expand their base. They are equipped now with a neo-Brahminical ideology well adapted to modern statecraft and in collusion with the forces of exploitation. This calls for new ways of perceiving ground realities, forging new alliances and reinforcing alternative forms of spirituality.

The Brahmana-Sramana paradigm is not confined to Indian religions alone. Christianity has its own brand of the Brahmana concept: the Vatican has been a major power centre whose growth has been over-determined by the power-systems of civil society from time to time. Hierarchy, priesthood, censorship against free enquiries and radical thought from those of Bruno and Galileo to Leonard Boff and Kazantzakis, alliances with the forces of oppression, with the Whites against the Coloured, with the Spaniards and Portuguese against the Indians in South America to hunt them down like beasts, inquisitions and crusades, the imposition of Western values and thought-systems on vast populations in the so-called ‘Third World’ who were forced to discard their own belief systems and traditions, support to colonialism of every kind and tacit support even to the Nazis, dictators like Somoza and to the CIA, as in destabilising the Arbens government in Guatemala: all these reveal the Brahmana streak of institutionalised Christianity.

I shall conclude this brief monologue with some comments on Gandhi’s attitude to the whole question, which I consider to be in the best of our Sramana traditions and to be valid even today as an alternative to Western touch–me–not secularism, which is completely divorced from the moral and spiritual insights of religion in fighting communalism.

He aspired towards God as an Absolute Truth while admitting that he was able to know only the relative truth. His shift from ‘God is Truth’ to ‘Truth is God’ in 1928-29 was strategic in that he wanted to appeal to the atheists as well. He claimed that sat (that which exists) the Sanskrit word for Truth, came closest to expressing the belief affirmed both in Hindu philosophy and the Kalma of Islam that ‘God alone is and nothing else exists’. He can be called Rama or Allah, Khuda or Ahura Mazda. Naming is a historical act, while God Himself is above Time. ‘There are many religions’, he said, ‘but Religion is only one’. ‘I do not differentiate between the sweeper and the Brahmin. My mind finds no difference between a Hindu, a Muslim and a Christian’. He denounced yajnas like most of the Sramana saints and said that the only true yajna is self-sacrifice for a higher cause. He refused to consider any prophet superior to any other. ‘To say Jesus was 99 per cent divine, and Muhammad 50 per cent and Krishna 10 per cent is to arrogate to oneself a function which does not really ‘belong to man’ — a simple argument, yet strong enough to refute all claims to superiority put forward by the fundamentalists. He considered the Koran, the Bible, the Zend Avesta, the Vedas and other religious texts as equally ‘divinely inspired’. He loathed monolithic categories and believed there were always many interpretations of Truth, many names for God, and many manifestations as scripture.

Truth, non-violence, abstinence, poverty and non-possession were the five vows he advocated; each was well thought-out and reasoned about. He never claimed, as fundamentalists do, that he spoke for truth or as truth, but only that he was ‘in search of truth’. He did not trust the shastras since they often offended his moral sense. ‘If Hinduism sanctioned untouchability,’ he once said, ‘I should denounce it’. Still, he was not prepared to give up his faith altogether; he held on to it even in the worst days of partition. He qualified Truth subjectively. ‘I represent no new truths, I endeavour to follow Truth as I know it.’ This is where he differs from the fundamentalists who always objectify Truth as something external to them and ask everyone to follow it. Gandhi also separated his notions of ‘faith’ and ‘religion’ from caste: "Caste has nothing to do with religion. It is a custom whose origin I do not know and do not need to know for the satisfaction of my spiritual hunger. But I do know that it is harmful both to the spiritual and national good."

Gandhi belongs to that great tradition of critical insiders within religion, and to invoke his image and to liberate it from the disuse into which it has fallen in the hands of the state and his self-proclaimed followers is, I believe, a moral-political act of great significance today, when the country is once again being asked to defend its sovereignty and its traditions of amity in plurality. I will consider my argument wasted if anyone feels that he/she is being persuaded to follow the footsteps of Kabir or Vivekananda, Sree Narayana or Gandhi. My essential plea is for a paradigm shift in our understanding of politics as well as philosophy. I have been looking at some of the positive aspects, the dimension of resistance within the idealist/spiritual traditions in India. In historical and practical terms, the materialist-idealist opposition does not work, at least in India. It has to be urgently replaced by the opposition between the hegemonic and the subaltern or the governing and the subversive. For this, one has to look at the internal critique that religions have developed, if we ever want to relate to the believing majority in the country. Arguments external to religion might appeal to an intellectual minority; but reformers like Sree Narayana, Vivekananda or Gandhi were forced to develop a spiritual idiom to persuade the people to fight the orthodoxy. It is wishful to think that religious revivalism and fundamentalism can be fought with philosophical materialism. One has to look at the history of struggle within and draw one’s energies for the contemporary combat against communalism from the strategies of the critical insiders within religions, especially the majority religion in India.



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Black History Month; P.B. Randolph

Paschal Beverly Randolph (P.B. Randolph) was a 19th Century magickian, a spiritualist and founder of the Rosicrucian movement in the United Sates.

Like Paul Lafargue he was a mulatto but one who initially denied his Negro roots.

( 8 Oct. 1825 - 29 July 1875 ), physician, philosopher, and author, was born in New York City , the son of William Beverly Randolph, a plantation owner, and Flora Beverly, a barmaid. At the age of five or seven Randolph lost his mother to smallpox, and with her the only love he had known. Randolph later stated, "I was born in love, of a loving mother, and what she felt, that I lived." His father's devotion is questionable. In 1873 Randolph hinted at his own illegitimacy, stating that his parents "did not stop to pay fees to the justice or to the priest."

Randolph 's mother possessed a strong temperament, unusual physical beauty, and intense passions, characteristics that Randolph inherited. Later many, especially his enemies, perceived Randolph as being of "Negro descent," which he denied. Sent to live with his half-sister, Randolph was ignored, unloved, and abused and eventually turned to begging on the streets.

Being born in New York to a 'free black' woman, his reluctance to be considered a Negro at the time is understandable. And since his upbringing was in the time and area of the Gangs of New York, plagued by nativism as it was, it is also understandable.

But by the time of the Civil War he was an outspoken advocate of Negro Rights.

Born poor and of mixed race in 1825 and raised (more or less) by prostitutes in the Five Points slum of New York, Randolph was self-educated and prickly proud. Creating himself, he picked and chose just how "black " to be. He could de-emphasize his African heritage in the face of prejudice--after his suicide, a newspaper said he was "part Spaniard, and inherited all the suspicious distrusting qualities of the people of that nationality. " At other times, he emphasized it, as during his Civil War Black Nationalist phase, when he worked briefly as a teacher for the short-lived Freedman 's Bureau, an agency designed to educate freed slaves but only halfheartedly supported by the federal government.

Yet when some Northerners advocated a scheme to ship freed slaves to Africa, Randolph, speaking for the slaves, emphasized "American: " "We men of color were born here; so were our fathers and mothers down a long line of ancestry....Are all our sufferings to be rewarded by our removal to African deserts and barbaric climes and places?...No! Never! Here is our home, and here we mean to stay, and on this soil will die, and in it be buried. "

And like Lafargue he was an internationalist, traveling and training as well as lecturing in Europe. As with many in the occult movement of the 19th Century he was a social reformer. And like his contemporary Virginia Woodhull, Mrs. Satan, he was an advocate of womens rights and Free Love.

Randolph is to be remembered for his philosophical works on love, marriage, and womanhood. He provided new and unique insight into the then taboo world of sexual love. He aided the education, rights, and equality of both women and blacks. He foresaw the evils of tobacco and drug abuse. Finally, Randolph, through his position as the Americas' first Supreme Grand Master of the Fraternitas Rosæ Crucis, directly or indirectly touched the lives of more than 200,000 neophytes (students) comprising the Fraternitas and other Rosicrucian orders.

P.B. Randolph 's life story demonstrates also how reform-minded American Spiritualism turned into "occultism. " Spiritualism was well-intentioned, "scientific " but also passive, linked to social reform (early feminism, the abolition of slavery) but also to faddishness, most notably "free love, " which could, depending on who was talking, mean anything from a partnership of equals to mere spouse-swapping. ( "You and I were meant to be soul mates. ") Occultism, on the other hand, is individualistic, rooted in personal development and self-improvement, and generally not connected to any social or political philosophy.


With the democratic decline in Europe after the revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune secret societies were formed for the purposes of pursuing democratic as well as socialist revolution. In England and the Commonwealth they were formed for the purposes of pursuing trade unionism which had been banned as an illegal combination.

That secret societies should form for finding and revealing secret knowledge, was thus a natural outgrowth of this period and was coincidental with the growth and popularity of fraternal orders after the Civil War in America and across Europe.


His patron both in Spiritualism as well as getting him work with Lincoln was Colonel Ethan A. Hitchcock, a noted military officer as well as practicing alchemist. Like other occultists, John Dee comes to mind, he too was also a spy. The secrecy of the occult overlaps with the secret society of intelligence gathering. They share a similar cosmological outlook that is the search for hidden or secret knowledge.

As happens in the Occult community, as in the political one, sectarian differences are frequent and lead to rivalries and mutual denunciations. Such was the case with P. B. Randolph, who is credited with founding the Rosicrucian movement in the United States.

He faced attack by rivals for hegemony over the occult movement in America denouncing him for his Luciferian ideas from the likes of Madam Blavatsky and her Theosophists and from the white supremacist founder of the American Scottish Right of Freemasonry; Albert Pike. Ironic because both of them are also accused of being Luciferians.

Such is the case of 19th Century occult wars not only in America but in Europe where again competing orders of Rosicrucian's charged and counter charged each other as being in league with Lucifer.

The Luciferian charge comes about from Randolph's advocacy of free love, which was also embraced by American Anarchists at the time. His theories were outlined in his book
Eulis and in his other famous treatise; Magia Sexualis

Today we would call his practices sex therapy, where he discussed sexual dysfunction with his patients, and as a Doctor he practiced mesermism, the passing of hands over the body to affect the magnetic energies. He also advocated the tantra practice of heightened sensuality by controlling the male orgasm and ejaculation.
In 1870 he founded the Order of Eulis, which kept its teachings
secret because of the sex and drugs. Some people must've talked,
though: H. P. Blavatsky denounced Randolph as immoral, a charge also
leveled at the Luciferian Freemason Sir Albert Pike. An occult war
followed. In 1872 his "Rosicrucian Rooms" were raided by police and
he was jailed for distributing "Free Love" literature. Fires,
robberies, and disease followed, and on July 29, 1975, he shot
himself. His friends and followers claimed that Blavatsky's curses
had nailed him. Blavatsky founded the philosophical society the same
year.

By the 1870s many of Randolph's writings dealt with
occult aspects of love and sexuality.

Randolph, as a physician, also counseled many of his patients on matters of
family relations, marital bliss and the art of love. These acts of kindness and
concern were sometimes taken as conduct condoning "free love."

In February 1872, he was arrested and imprisoned for promoting
"free love" or immorality. Although acquitted of all charges, as it was discovered in
court that the indictment was merely a clever attempt by former
business partners (now enemies) to obtain his book copyrights, Randolph
never recovered from the humiliation of the proceeding.

Although dying at age 49, Randolph was a prolific writer, producing many books
and pamphlets on love, health, mysticism and the occult.

And further confusion was sown with his initiation into a mystical Gnostic cult from Syria/Iraq which mistakenly has been associated with the Yezedi.

The Yezedi created a sensation amongst some 19th Century scholars who had finally discovered a genuine devil worshiping cult. And the devil they worshiped was Lucifer.


Despite my best googling efforts the only references I could find to Ansaireh is that referred back to the region in Syria/Iraq which is named after a Mountain.

Gertrude Bell in her diary refers to visiting the region
and the Yezedi who dwelled there. Which may have been the reason the author of the introduction to Magica Sexualis thought Randolph had been initiated into their religious teachings.

During his journeys to Paris, Pascal became aware of several works which were being published in France and Germany dealing with the Ansaireth or Nusairis of Syria. 25 There was much discussion, in the Rosicrucian circles that Randolph traveled in, of the purity and sublimity of the teachings of the Ansaireh. Books by Niebuhr, M. Catafago, Victor Langlois and others told of these mysterious hill dwellers in Northern Syria who were neither Jews, Christians or Muslims. They may well have been the people that modern anthropology has identified as the Yezidi, the devotees of the Peucock god, Melek Ta'aus.

PBR tells how the chief of the Ansaireth, Narek El Gebel, arrived at the Rosicrucian Third Dome in Paris with letters of introduction and then, recognizing Randolph's abilities and character, invited him to come to Syria and to study with the Ansaireth. Randolph went to Syria and was initiated into the Ansairetic Brotherhood. Upon his return to America, he established the Priesthood of Aeth based on the Ansairetic Mysteries

There were a variety of Christian and Islamic sects in the region. Including the Druze and Nusairis and one of the last surviving gnostic sects the Mandaens. As well as Kurds and Yezedi, Sabians all of whom faced persecution from the Turks for being dhimmis.

In another part of this Consular District there seems to have been little change from the old times of rapine and bloodshed in Turkey. I allude to the Ansaireh mountains, stretching from the valley of the Orontes to Mount Lebanon. On a late occasion a member of the Medjlis of Tripoli, passing through a Christian village in pursuit of the revolted Ansaireh, set fire to it, and, when the inhabitants conveyed their moveable property of value into their Church (…), it was broken open and plundered. This case, with many others equally abominable, of simultaneous occurrence, was laid before Her Majesty’s Consul General for Syria, the perpetrators of the outrages being under the jurisdiction of the Pasha of Beyrouth, and will thus have already come under Your Excellency’s notice. (Aleppo, 31st March, 1859; FO 78/1452 (No. 11), Skene to Bulwer, Constantinople)


The author of the introduction to Magica Sexualis is mistaken in associating the Ansairth with the Yezedi. As I said the Yezedi at the time had become somewhat of a sensation amongst certain Christian religious and historical scholars. And the Nusairis refer to an Islamic Shi'a Sunni sect.

Randolphs Rosicrucian Order and his fellow occultists of the time were fascinated with the recent discoveries of Gnosticism and the Gnostic's. Finding a living Gnostic religion which offered initiation would have been more in keeping with their occult traditions.

I suspect Randolph had been initiated into the the mystery religion of the Mandaens. Whose followers were in the same region of Syria at the time.

Within the Middle East, but outside of their community, the Mandaeans are more commonly known as the ubba (singular ubbī). Likewise, their Muslim neighbors will refer to them collectively as the Sabians (Arabic al-Ṣābiʾūn), in reference to the Ṣabians of the Qur'an. Occasionally, the Mandaeans are also called the "Christians of St. John" (a misnomer, since they are not Christians by any standard), based upon preliminary reports made by members of the Barefoot Carmelite mission in Basra during the 16th century.

Other groups which have been identified with the Mandaeans include the "Nasoraeans" described by Epiphanius and the Dositheans mentioned by Theodore Bar Kōnī in his Scholion. Ibn al-Nadim also mentions a group called the Mughtasila, "the self-ablutionists," who may be identified with one or the other of these groups. The members of this sect, like the Mandaeans, wore white and performed baptisms.


The similarity of beliefs about healthy living, not eating meat, avoiding tobacco, reincarnation and sexuality strike me as Mandaean rather than Yezedi.

According to E.S. Drower in the introduction to The Secret Adam, Mandaeans believe in marriage and procreation, and in the importance of leading an ethical and moral lifestyle in this world, placing a high priority upon family life. Consequently, Mandaeans do not practice celibacy or asceticism. Mandaeans will, however, abstain from strong drink and red meat. While they agree with other gnostic sects that the world is a prison governed by the planetary archons, they do not view it as a cruel and inhospitable one.



The Rosicrucian movement he founded still exists today publishing his works;

SEERSHIP; Guide to Soul Sight


The importance of Randolph cannot be underestimated. His works influenced later magickal and occult practitioners including Eliphas Levi as well as the Ordo Templi Orientis in particular Theodore Reuss and Aleister Crowley.




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