Anna Kingsford on the Speaking Tube

 

The rich and beautiful Anna Kingsford was famous in the Victorian era as an animal welfare campaigner, anti-vivisectionist, captivating "platform lady" and founder of a Hermetic society that was a precursor of the Golden Dawn. She was also a prolific dreamer who kept a dream journal. Though many of her papers are lost, 24 of her dream reports are preserved in a little book titled Dreams and Dream-Stories. 

In a dream recorded in Paris in 1880, Anna meets an art student in Rome. A voice speaks to her through something she describes as a "telephonic tube" and instructs her to question the young man closely because he is "an interesting type of spiritual pathology". The voice through the tube reveals that the once brilliant artist has lost his skill because he is no longer there. When he died from malaria at twenty, his grieving father took over his body - and is still in there, without the previous owner's artistic abilities. 

In 1883, Anna accepted the presidency of the British Theosophical Society, which she promptly renamed the London Lodge of the T.S. She declared from the platform that its purpose was "to unveil Isis; to restore the Mysteries."

Madame de Steiger recalled that gathering and wrote that Anna's hair "was dressed in the fashion of that time, which poetically inclined authors describe as an 'aureole of gold' - though it required hairpins to keep up the aureole form:"

Drawing: "Anna Kingsford on the Speaking Tube" by Robert Moss from the series Eminent Victorian Ghost Sers and Dream Travelers

Wotan Time: Being Seized by a Dark Archetype

In November 1932, Jung declared in a speech in Vienna that "the gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are…psychic events. To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by wars and revolutions which are nothing other than psychic epidemics.”
     Four years later, as the full horror of Nazism unfolded, Jung gave a name to the psychic epidemic that had seized Germany. He suggested that Hitler, in himself a hollow man, had been seized by a dark force and that through him the collective mind of the German people had been possessed. He expressed these thoughts in a 1936 essay titled “Wotan”.

     Jung brought out of Teutonic mythology a dark archetype, the wild and furious figure of a war god ever hungry for blood, who drives men to crazy and violent excess. “Because the behavior of a race takes on its specific character from its underlying images, we can speak of an archetype 'Wotan’... Wotan is an Ergreiffer [possessor] of men, and, unless one wishes to deify Hitler – which has indeed actually happened – he is really the only explanation."
     Jung observed, “We are always convinced that the modern world is a reasonable world, basing our opinion on economic, political, and psychological factors... In fact, I venture the heretical suggestion that the unfathomable depths of Wotan’s character explain more of National Socialism than all three reasonable factors put together.”

    In a letter to Miguel Serrano, he added, “When the belief in the god Wotan vanished and nobody thought of him anymore, the phenomenon originally called Wotan remained; nothing changed but its name, as National Socialism has demonstrated on a grand scale. A collective movement consists of millions of individuals, each of whom shows the symptoms of Wotanism and proves thereby that Wotan in reality never died, but has retained his original vitality and autonomy. Our consciousness only imagines that it has lost its gods; in reality they are still there and it only needs a certain general condition in order to bring them back in full force.”

   I wish we could say that none of this is relevant to our current conditions.

Note: We want to separate Odin, the shaman-god of the Eddas, from the bloodthirsty entity Jung was talking about. Just as we would wish to separate the swastika - a symbol of transformation in the Baltic, in India, and among the Pueblo - from the crooked cross of Naziism (though alas, thanks to the Nazis, it is now probably impossible to reclaim that symbol in the West).

Illustration: This is also troubling. In the year Hitler was born, 1889, Franz von Stuck made a painting of the Die Wilde Jagd, the Wild Hunt, showing Wotan leading a crazed band of hungry ghosts. At 13, Hitler saw the painting and was fascinated. Von Stuck became his favorite artist. Some people see a strong resemblance to Hitler in the face of the leader of the mad and deadly hunt in the picture.

A mythic view of what drives men to war

Sometimes it so happens in this material world that great personalities, even great devotees, can also be controlled by the asuras.

- Srimad-Bhagavatam 7:4:14


Myth, it's been said, is what never happened but is going on all the time. In he collective dreams of humanity, an ancient myth may cast light on the forces at work behind the surface of events in our world. The great Hindu epic known as the Mahabharata, supposedly dictated by the seer Vyasa to the scribe Ganapati in the time when gods and humans were in daily communication, relates the actions of humans to forces at play in the larger reality. Its account of how a race of Asuras (demonic entities) instigated a war makes compelling and disturbing reading today.

A Danava Plan to Possess Human War Leaders

In Vedic literature, the Danavas are a race of Asuras engaged in constant warfare with the gods, and forever interfering in the affairs of humans. They are sometimes identified with pre-Aryan peoples of the subcontinent. In the Vedas, they defeat the gods and the gods turn to great rishis – celestial seers – to “burn” their armies and consign them to an underworld beneath the oceans.
    In the Mahabharata the account of the abduction of King Duryodhana reveals certain modes of inhuman interference in human conflicts. Duryodhana, mortified that he was freed from captivity (among the Gandharvas) by his mortal enemy Arjuna, has decided to fast until death. This does not suit the agenda of the Danavas, who want to foment war between rival dynasties.
    By chanting magic words (mantras) the Danavas manifest a demonic female, known as a Kriya. She is described as “a wondrous woman with a gaping mouth”. She goes to Duryodhana, enchants him, and then carries him to the netherworld by means of “mystical travel”, for which the Sanskrit terms are mano-java (in which the body is transferred by mental action, moving on “the wind of the mind”) and vihayasa, which involves the ability to move bodies or objects through matter.
    Among the Danavas, the king is informed that his birth and his unusual powers were arranged by them as part of their plan for the world. He can’t take himself out of the game, because it is their game. The Danavas explain that Duryodhana and his clan will triumph in the coming battle with the Pandus because their warriors will be possessed by demons and given demonic strength:

The other Asuras will take possession of Bhishma, Drona, Kripa and the others; and possessed by them they will fight your enemies ruthlessly. When they engage in battle, best of the Kurus, they will give no quarter to either sons or brothers, parents or relatives, students or kinsmen, the young or the old. 
    Pitiless, possessed by the Danavas, their inner souls overwhelmed, they will battle their relations and cast all love far off. Gleefully, their minds darkened, the tiger-like men, befuddled with ignorance by a fate set by the Ordainer, will say to one another that – ‘ you will not escape from me with your life! ‘ Standing firm in their manly might in the unleashing of manifold weapons, best of the Kurus, they will boastfully perpetrate a holocaust.’

- J.A.B. van Buitenen (trans) The Mahabharata Books 2 &3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975) p.692.

Duryodhana is now returned by Kriya to the place from which he was taken. After she leaves, he decides it was all a dream. He is left with the thought: “I shall vanquish the Pandus in battle.” The Danavas have instigated a war.

It would be comforting to dismiss this report as fantasy from demon-haunted primitives, but the transactions here do not seem remote from the recent history of warfare and terror.

Afterword: One people’s gods may be another people’s demons. The Danavas take their name from a feminine entity known as Danu. So do the Tuatha de Danaan, “The People of Danu”, in Ireland. Danu is the mother of demons in India, but in Ireland she is the great goddess

Graphic: Duryodhana ready for war