Carmen

Went to the Edmonton Opera's presentation of Bizet's Modernist Opera; Carmen last night. It's one of my fav's. it's an opera that has all of my favorite themes; the rise of the proletariat who are cigarette factory girls, who smoked on stage, wanted to light one up in solidarity.

Carmen is a scarlet woman, a gypsy and a witch, she is an independent proto-feminist declaring her belief in free love. She is a threat to the patriarchal male and thus she must be destroyed. It was a social statement that still carries much meaning even today.

And it's an Opera that has more hit singles than the average rock n roll album.

The opera was premiered at the Opéra Comique of Paris on March 3, 1875. For a year after its premiere, it was considered a failure, denounced by critics as "immoral" and "superficial".

The story concerns the eponymous Carmen, a beautiful gypsy with a fiery temper. Free with her love, she woos the corporal Don José, an inexperienced soldier. Their relationship leads to his rejection of his former love, mutiny against his superior, turn to a criminal life, and ultimate jealous murder of Carmen. Although he is briefly happy with Carmen, he falls into madness when she turns from him to the bullfighter Escamillo.

Georges Bizet’s opera, Carmen, is one of the most beloved operas of all-time. It is a French opera with a libretto by Henry Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy that is based on the novel by the same name, written by author Prosper Mérimée. Bizet found great opposition to the work, as many at the time found the plot of the opera to be “immoral.” Carmen, first performed in 1875 at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1875, broke new dramatic ground for French opera as it moved away from opera buffa, or comic opera, towards a more profound and tragic story. Bizet did not live to see that his work, once highly controversial, was to become one of the most often performed operas in the world.

Fans (Malcolm McLaren album) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Most people, if they get the chance, have to settle for one great achievement in the cultural arena. Not for Malcolm McLaren. Besides being an imperialistic cultural plunderer (a non-judgmental designation), he is one of rock's true visionaries. His role in the formation and promotion of the Sex Pistols has been construed as everything from inspired instigator to Machiavellian manipulator, and his solo career has been as influential as it has been criticized: he tends to bring out the moral indignation in people. A brilliant carpetbagger whose precise talents — beyond aestheticism and the canny ability to peg influential trends in a wide panorama (fashion, retail, politics, music, art, film, literature) early enough to exploit them as a pioneer rather than a bandwagon-jumper — are difficult to pin down, McLaren has made himself the star of his own entrepreneurial undertakings. Despite the odds stacked against him mounting a successful recording career (that he's not exactly a musician is high on the problems list), McLaren has crafted a bizarrely significant oeuvre of high-concept adventures. It's hard to say just what McLaren does as an artist. He's more an assembler than a creator, piecing together artifacts from various musical cultures in such a way that, at the end of the day, his own input seems invisible. And yet his perspective as hip outsider has continued to provide a link between his Anglo-American audience and Third World forms. If McLaren's a musical tourist, these records are his home movies.

His next venture was exponentially more improbable. Feeding classic opera into a hip-hop blender, McLaren came up with the surprisingly entertaining Fans. McLaren mainly uses opera for its recitative form and story lines (namely Carmen, Madam Butterfly and Turandot) and, damn it, the thing works more often than not.

Opera and Pop Culture

When Luciano Pavarotti recently passed away, opera lost not only a magnificent voice, but also an ambassador. While the average person (myself included) has a limited knowledge of opera, the world knew Pavarotti. Millions of people watched “The Three Tenors”, whether in thrilling live performances or via video and television. But Pavarotti also stepped out of the opera world to enter the realm of pop culture. Take a jog through the internet and you’ll find performances with James Brown, U2 and the Spice Girls. His various television appearances include Saturday Night Live and he even starred in a movie (the critically lambasted film “Yes, Giorgio”). And that got me thinking about an experiment that tried to weld together opera and pop culture.
In 1984, the single “Madame Butterfly” hit the Top Twenty charts in England and with it, the release called “Fans”. The mastermind behind “Fans” was Malcolm McLaren, an artist who had a bit of notoriety in his career. McLaren was the manager of the Sex Pistols and depending on the point of view, was involved with the formation and promotion of the band. Malcolm also handled Adam Ant, raiding his backing band to put together Bow Wow Wow. But when the 1980s rolled around, McLaren decided to become an artist himself.
“Fans” was an interesting hybrid of opera and hip-hop. This was hip-hop circa 1984 and he relied more on the beat than anything. With the hip-hop backdrop, McLaren would mix it together with the story line and arias of famous operas. Simple programmed drum beats along with a synthesized melody and an operatic soprano or tenor floating on top of it.
“Fans” was a fairly short undertaking as the album consisted of only six tracks clocking in at just over 30 minutes. McLaren stayed with familiar operas with five of the tracks based on Puccini operas (two from “Madame Butterfly”) while the remaining track used Bizet’s “Carmen” as a starting point. To further flesh out the album, McLaren adapted the storylines into English, then personally provided narration (he left the actual singing to the professionals) as he takes the role of several characters.

In hindsight, opera and hip-hop seem to be a good match because of the element of tragedy that exists in both. However, the overall experiment turned out to be a partial success, mostly in England. The single “Madame Butterfly” received some praise from the critics and as earlier mentioned, was also a hit. However, critics weren’t as nice about “Fans”, considering it simply padding for the single. That wouldn’t stop McLaren from continuing his musical career as he had a few more hits in the U.K. although he left opera behind.

The concept of the East Village Opera Company is totally fresh, but not unprecedented in pop. In 1985, for example, former punk-rock impresario Malcolm McLaren released Fans, an album of "hip-hopera" that brought funky beats and electronic programming to the works of Puccini and Bizet. But EVOC is a whole new thing: an integrated, eleven-strong working band dedicated to rocking the opera and electrifying the classics, as the ensemble has been doing to spectacular effect ever since its New York stage debut in the spring of 2004.

SEE:

Labour, Opera and Anarchy

Acoustic Ecology

What's Opera Doc

Tax Time and Walpurgisnacht

Daniel Barenboim's Dream

Classical Rock

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Opera, choral music, Bizet, Carmen, Gypsy, Spain, Malcolm McLaren,Fans, scarlet woman,

Their Satanic Majesties Request

The real psychedelic album of the summer of love.

Their Satanic Majesties Request is a psychedelic rock album by The Rolling Stones recorded and released in 1967. Its title is a play on the "Her Britannic Majesty requests and requires..." text that appears inside a British passport. Although, initially dismissed as a poor attempt to match The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the album is now considered one of psychedelic rock's greatest albums.

Which is overlooked still after forty years of glorification of the Beatles, and the
dissing of the Rolling Stones as the bad boys of Rock N Roll. Because they had Sympathy For The Devil.

Though I doubt Cheap Trick will be doing a Fortieth Anniversary cover of it.

It is a great album. Starting off with the psychedelic sci-fi anthem; 2000 Light Years From Home.



The song "Sing This All Together" was used in the TV show Faerie Tale Theatre. It also contains a hidden track which may have given rise to later paranoia about back masking.

Why don't we sing this song all together?
Open our minds let the pictures come
And if we close all our eyes together
Then we will see where we all come from

Pictures of us spin the circling sun
Pictures of us show that we're all one

Funny things happen when you invoke Lucifer.


SEE:

Every Cop is a Criminal

More Sunday Satanic News

Classic Rock

Sunday In Hell

Marxism and Religion

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
rock, music, progressive, bands, Their Satanic Majesties RequestRolling Stones, Summer of Love,
420 LSD, hallucinogens, psychohallucenogens, Albert Hoffman, Timothy Leary, pot,
Illuminati-Triology, authors, writers, conspiracy, Robert Anton Wilson, RAW, Leary, Cosmic-Trigger,
libertarian, SEKIII, left-libertarian, agora, libertarian, anarchism, anarchist, Playboy, editor, sex, drugs, rocknroll, Crowley, magick,
Eric, Burdon, Animals, RocknRoll, Sixties,

Summer of Love

It is the fortieth anniversary of the Summer of Love, which led to a social revolution around the world. One that we are still experiencing and which the Right Wing loves to blame for all of modern societies ills.

Summer love-in summer -in



Events nationwide mark the 40th anniversary of 'Summer of Love'

Events are being held around the country this summer to mark the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love, when thousands of young people descended on San Francisco to experience the hippie counterculture in 1967. Here are some highlights.

Ongoing: ''Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era'' at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York through Sept. 16. Through light shows, album covers, posters and music, the show explores the era's cultural impact. http://www.whitney.org .

Ongoing: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum exhibit dedicated to the 40th anniversary of the Monterey International Pop Festival. Highlights include telegrams from Jemi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead and The Who regarding their attendance at the festival; Paul Simon's guitar; the dress worn by Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas,and many pohotographs. The museum is in Cleveland, Ohio. http://www.rockhall.com .

Related Links

• Baby boomers nostalgic for wild Summer of '67
• 'Psychedelic Era' exhibit a cheerful romp through shards of the vanished hippie tribe
• Summer Of Love Memorable Moment

Various dates: Jefferson Starship, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company and other bands reunite for a Summer of Love 40th anniversary tour, including the Monterey Pop 40th anniversary festival at Monterey Fairgrounds, Monterey, Calif. http://www.genxentertainment.us .

Concludes today: Monterey Summer of Love Festival, featuring dozens of bands performing from the same exact stage as the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. On stage: Riders on the Storm, Robbie Krieger's & Ray Manzarek's latest version of The Doors; Electric Flag; tributes to The Mamas and the Papas, and The Who. http://www.summer67.com .

American soldiers are fighting an unpopular war halfway around the world; peace groups protest and Congress is embroiled in a bitter, divisive debate.

At home, radios play the Doors, the Beatles, the Who and the Moody Blues. People flock to open-air concerts to see Eric Burdon and the Animals, Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Concern grows for the environment and people feel good when they can buy organic food directly from growers.

It’s cool to get in touch with your feelings. Fashionable women wear flower power minidresses and empire-waisted tops. Jeans, of course, are everywhere. Is it 1967 or 2007? It’s both.

Forty years after the Summer of Love that signaled a seismic shift in our culture, many of the concerns and issues – even the looks – are back again.

And as for the areas where we’re not re-experiencing 1967 – the sexual revolution, the drug culture, the civil rights movement, the civil unrest – that’s because the subculture has now become the culture, says Robert J. Thompson, founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.

“Our entire lifestyle in the early 21st century significantly carries the genetic code of the revolutions and cultural and social changes in the late 1960s. And we don’t consider them at all revolutionary,” says Thompson.

Nineteen sixty-seven was when the journey began, but where, and when, did it end? Or has it? What really happened during those portentous few months of the Summer of Love that caused many of us to mutate physically, emotionally and spiritually? Did it really cause a seismic shift in the values, sensibilities and moralities of our culture, as many suggest? And are we still living in the afterglow of it intense culture-transforming heat?

Critics on the right would also like to deep-six the buzz about a better, happier time. A psychedelic Shangri-La. As the Chicago Tribune recently noted:

"In the nation's culture wars, the 1960s are a rallying cry for conservatives who view the decade as the source of social trends they oppose, such as a high divorce rate, legalized abortion and, more recently, the drive for same-sex marriage." (Strange, you make that sound like it's a bad thing.) For Jason Fine, deputy managing editor of Rolling Stone, "A lot of what happened in the summer of '67 wasn't about politics, or even antiwar, it was much more personal. And those kinds of developments have certainly stuck around. Our attitudes about sex, drugs and spirituality are all rooted in that time. That wasn't a blip."

SEE:

A Little Eros For Valentine's Day

CIA Conspiracies Are Real

Psychedelic Saskatchewan

RAW RIP

420

Marx on Bigamy

Passover Song

Year of the Pig

Black and Redmonton

Celebrating Capitalism

Soul of a City

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
420 LSD, hallucinogens, psychohallucenogens, Albert Hoffman, Timothy Leary, pot,
Illuminati-Triology, authors, writers, conspiracy, Robert Anton Wilson, RAW, Leary, Cosmic-Trigger,
libertarian, SEKIII, left-libertarian, agora, libertarian, anarchism, anarchist, Playboy, editor, sex, drugs, rocknroll, Crowley, magick,
Eric, Burdon, Animals, RocknRoll, Sixties,
Tags
gay
Supreme Court
women
feminism
socialism
Swingers
sex
free love
bigamy
polyamoury
Canada
Robert Rimmer
Heinlein
pagan
libertarian
anarchism
playboy
sexuality
marriage

Valentines Day Challenge

Valentines Day is the most overt expression of heterosexuality in our culture. The assumption made is that your sweetie is a member of the opposite sex. All of the commercial cultural products are aimed with this assumption in mind.

So as I picked up my obligatory card and gifts for my sweetie, from me and the cats and dogs, hmm, I wondered; what about gay and lesbian couples?

I saw no cards for Mary and Alice or Adam and Steve. No his and his flowers or her and her chocolates. And then I came across this posting at Alternet;

We in the gay and lesbian community understand coming out, but I've found that coming out isn't easy for some heterosexual folks to understand. They still think, but WHY do you NEED to come out?

To answer that, I have a challenge for you: This Valentine's Day, don't indicate to anyone all day what the gender of your sweetie is. Evade. When people ask, "What are you doing this evening?" Say, "I'm having dinner with a someone special," or, "My partner and I are seeing a movie." Some people will assume that the person you reference is of the opposite sex. Some people may think you are in a same-sex relationship. How do you feel about that? How do you think gay and lesbian people feel?

Since I regularly use the term 'my partner' rather than wife, I understand the phenomena. Though in the labour movement and in other progressive circles this term is used more often than the term husband or wife so I am used to it being sexual orientation neutral, and being an acceptable practice.

I used partner long before it was socially acceptable, being an anarchist and coming as it does from the anarchist tradition of Free Love referring to ones lover as companiero, companion,comrade, or close friend, showing that we are partners not property of each other.

Mollie Steimer and Senya Fleshine
Anarchist activists who were in their 80’s at the time of these interviews (both are now deceased). Steimer, defendant in the celebrated “Abrams Case” (one of the most important civil liberties cases in US legal history, it was the first important prosecution under the 1918 Espionage Act. The Supreme Court upheld the convictions of Steimer and her comrades, Jacob Abrams, Samuel Lipman, Hyman Lachovsky, and Jacob Schwartz, for giving out leaflets protesting American intervention in Soviet Russia.). She was deported from the United States to the Soviet Union in 1921.

There, she met Senya Fleshine, then secretary to Emma Goldman (also an immigrant to the United States, he had not been deported to the Soviet Union, but had hurried back when the revolution broke out. He participated in the historic attack on the Winter Palace, and was acquainted with the Ukrainian anarchist general, Makhno.) . Steimer and Fleschine became “companieros”, and lived together for the next 60 years, although several times separated by war, revolution, and imprisonment. In 1923, they were both deported from the Soviet Union for their anarchist activities and protests against authoritarian rule. They lived in various places in Europe (mostly in Paris), until Nazism forced them to flee to Mexico in 1940, and where they stayed until the ends of their lives. Senya became a nationally-known photographer, assisted in his photographic studio by Mollie, under the name of “Semo” (orSenya-Mollie).





Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
love, valentines day, valentine, lesbian, gay, heterosexual, free love, anarchism, anarchists, companiero, partner, lover, wife, husband, socialism, libertarian, libertarian-socialism,

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 Ṣubba (singular Ṣubbī). 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.




Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
black history,, black history month,, occult,, magick,, spiritualism,, 19th Century America,, history,, P B Randolph,, secret societies,, fraternal orders,, Rosicrucianism,, Civil War,, five points,, african-americans,,Yezedi, Blavetsky, OTO, Crowley, Reuss, Lafargue, sabians, Mandaeans, gnostic, heresy, Islam, Turks, Iran, Iraq, Syria