With one or the other of two Skull and Bones men nearly certain to be our next president, it behooves us to ask, What does a Bonesman believe? I am going to suggest an answer to that question based on what prominent Bonesmen have so far revealed to the world through their actions. None of them appears to have spoken of the principles or ethic of their club and, in fact, when asked, they say it is all a dread secret so they can say nothing.
It has been remarked that this is an extraordinary thing for a high-level politician to say. It seems even more extraordinary that neither of the two men in question has been called upon by the demos and its megamouth media to resign from said club, as they surely would have been had they belonged to a country club that barred blacks or Jews.
But into this gap in our knowledge, I rush with my speculations, which, in the absence of any statement from the candidates or any other Bonesman, I think I am sovereignly entitled to do.
Incidentally, I note that this same organization has, so far as I have ever heard, no women members and no black members, which seems oddly unmulticultural and even misogynist in this age of Minorities and Women Triumphant. But then not all animals are equal as we learned long ago from Orwell.
Anyway, on with the show. I call this code I am going to set out:
The Code of the Bones: The Ethos of the Hasnamuss
Here it is in several nutshells.
- Personal ambition is ever the lodestar, giving direction and inspiration.
- Money is everything (in ex-Christendom) because money is power to realize ambition (in ex-Christendom).
- Words mean nothing except what you want them to mean.
- Consistency and integrity in morality and concern for justice are for the boobs.
- Crying religion is useful for bamboozling same.
- War is glorious, especially if someone else does the dying.
I suppose there are many more elements in the Bones Code, but they would, I think, all follow from the six I have isolated.
At this point I need to reach out a little and drag in some perhaps unfamiliar names and terms. I beg your indulgence.
A nation can afford to have a mad Ludwig (King of Bavaria) in charge only in relatively calm times, when the most that can go wrong is that a lot of energy gets used up building fanciful castles that later, when the madness passes, turn into tourist attractions.
But when you get what G.I. Gurdjieff1 called a "Hasnamuss" sitting on the top of the heap, and the times are of themselves dreadful, then it's head for the hills, the dam is busted. A Hasnamuss, in Gurdjieff's teaching, is the fourth of four categories of man he discerned, and the most disreputable. The four are: good-householder, tramp, lunatic, and Hasnamuss (made up of two words of Turkish). These are technical terms in the Gurdjieffian canon that take a little explaining, but except for Hasnamuss they are not terribly far off the ordinary meanings we all know. (One may think, however, of a tramp or lunatic as someone who might very well have a stout bank account and sharp clothes – it's more a matter of mind, morals, and behavior.)
A Hasnamuss, as Gurdjieff's disciple Ouspensky explained, is someone who was formerly both "a tramp and a lunatic at the same time." He arrives finally at a condition where ". . . he never hesitates to sacrifice people or to create an enormous amount of suffering, just for his own personal ambitions."2
I am of course making the point that our two Bonesmen are Hasnamuss men. You may well say that it takes more than a colon to make the one condition the equivalent of the other as I did when I wrote "The Code of the Bones: The Ethos of the Hasnamuss." Let me argue this a little further. My "Code of the Bones," on examination, is little different than the de facto stance of a run-of-the mill egotist, a stance that can in some minority of cases evolve into what people nowadays called psychopathology or sociopathology. That condition has been superbly defined in Cleckly's The Mask of Sanity.
But a Hasnamuss is evidently something beyond even that. Ouspensky also said, ". . . you have nothing to do with such people; but you meet with the results of their existence." What did he mean? I have my own answer. The Hasnamuss has been thrown by fate or by accident, which is a species of fate, to the top of the heap, where the ordinarily limited ability of an egotist to do much harm is greatly enhanced. Think of an officious minor military or police person. Then think of Napoleon (a Hasnamuss if there ever was one). Bush – the most ordinary of save-your-own-skin fellows – is suddenly catapulted by family connections and by the sort of Nominating Committee I will discuss shortly into Ruler of the Free World, Supreme Commander of the Forces of Freedom, President of the United States, etc. Petty officer changed into Napoleon, and doing a pretty good job in the role at that. Lots of mayhem.
Now look at this election scene. It would almost seem that Kerry was fingered (as was Bush before him) by some invisible World Rule Nominating Committee, which has a list of politically prominent people "who might do." It would surely have been against Kerry that he, too, was a Bonesman (Hey, let's not be too obvious!), but that objection had to be overruled finally as things shaped up in the Democratic primary campaign. One sometimes has to make do with less than the ideal, and Kerry was obviously sufficiently brainwashed, compromised, and manageable (as Dean was not) to be otherwise in all ways acceptable to my (admittedly somewhat occult) Nominating Committee members, whoever they are.
The trouble with Kerry is that he smells like a loser. At least that is my impression, although I am surely not willing to place any money on the contest at this point. Bush is clearly the more upstanding Hasnamuss of the two, but Kerry would probably grow in office, as the saying is.
Bush seems at present to be positively thriving on his situation. He is the better looking of the two, the more confidently assured, the more physically vigorous. He out and away wins on natty shirts and ties, and as Norman Mailer noted, he is almost absurdly photogenic. Pictures of him striding across the WH lawn to his helicopter or doing the furrowed-brow thing in the Oval office, routinely wow the camp followers. Long-faced and bushy-haired Kerry is a distant second in all this. But you never know.
It is a measure of the frivolity inherent in our selection process that the Wall Street Journal Online suggested the other day that Kerry's VP search committee needs to find someone with less hair.
Maybe it will come down to religion in the end. Of course I don't mean real religion, rather, the curious alignment of so-called religious voting blocks. Maybe Bush's fundy-Zionist Christians (latest label heard on a C-Span panel discussion: "Christian fascists"), and his assorted knee-jerk Republicans can overpower Kerry's yellow-dog Democrats and Catholics. As to Catholics, Kerry seems to be doing his best to convince them that no Catholic is he. But creedal orthodoxy seems to matter less and less to anyone.
The Democrat party is where, since FDR's time, an awful lot of Catholics have shoaled up for want of a home elsewhere (unless, like me, they have given up on the whole lot of pols, all so greedy for the spoils of office). But Catholics are no longer, en masse, a sure thing for anyone; they have been splintered by abortion, the sex revolution, the "modernization" of the Church, and by the failure and disappearance of the tremendously influential religious orders that used to staff Catholic schools and hospitals. As one Catholic writer has said, imagine Cardinal Spellman, back in the 40s, calling FDR. He was put through right away. Imagine (if you can) New York's late Cardinal O'Connor calling Clinton some years ago. Not likely to be available in any big hurry. The whole story of the decline of Catholic political clout is in the difference.
But leave aside this dreary talk of "religious voting blocks." The thing is more or less contemptible. Rather let us ask what is the real religion of a Bonesman and by extension of a Hasnamuss, if I am right that the code of both is essentially the same.
I long ago adopted the scheme of the Russian writer Dmitri Merejkowski (1865–1941) dividing all religions into two basic ones. I may have mentioned it on LRC before and well may again. M. (Merejkowski) extracts from the apparently irreconcilable diversity of ancient religions a central theme, a single tendency. In all the "shadows" that ultimately turn real in the primary figure of Western religion and history, the Lord Jesus Christ, carpenter of Galilee, he discerns the original "Atlantean" and now "Western" religion, the religion of the suffering God, God self-sacrificed for man.
There is, in the eleven or twelve thousand years of history of what he calls the "second (post-Atlantean) humanity," widespread evidence of another religion, the obverse or diabolical double of the true universal religion. As to that true and universal religion, M. cites approvingly Augustine's well-known mention of "Christianity before Christ."
The religion in opposition to it, the "second religion" (recall that the devil's number in the Pythagorean system is two), is the religion of man sacrificed to the "gods." And we know from the Bible that the gods men make for themselves are evil, of the devil. The one religion is addressed to God (Tolkien's term for God in the Trilogy was "The One.") The second religion addresses Lucifer or one of his stand-ins; and the requirement laid on the worshippers is human sacrifice. Think of the Moloch of Carthage and the immolation of infants the god required, so vividly presented by Flaubert in his Salammbo. Our Molochian thing is abortion. As well as war. A Luciferian beatitude: "Blessed are the warmakers for they shall inherit the earth." (Can it possibly be that another one is: "Blessed are the warmakers for they shall be raptured"?)
Atlantis went down, M. indicates, because it abandoned its true religion ("Christianity before Christ") and adopted the murderous "second religion." Noah's ark was the bridge from the first to the second humanity. That is, the Bible story is the condensed record of the salvation of a remnant of first humanity. You may consider this, as to history, truth or fiction; M. is by no means furnishing a detailed factual account of anything; but in my view it is precise psychological and spiritual truth. And we are still dealing with the same two fundamental religions.
I take religion to mean the understanding of man and the cosmos and the purpose of life one holds at the root of one's being, no kidding. It is not a matter of labels and shouting, of loud claims of having been born again. It is not merely crying Christ ("Lord, Lord!") and then ignoring his mandates. It is very much connected with what one wants out of life and what one thinks it is appropriate to do to get it.
For my part I am unable to view the people prosecuting our present war and the terrible foreign policy our government has espoused as anything but the most able Luciferians on the block, although I recognize that is not a trendy handle for the thing. And my Hasnamuss, what of him? A Luciferian from the ground up. And anyone bidding to replace the current occupant of the high throne, that "bad eminence," is one in the making. All the little Bonesmen everywhere are apprentices, candidates, trainee-Hasnamuss, an unending supply ever welling up because raw ego and raw ambition spring eternal.
- Gurdjieff (1866?–1949), as far as American tastes in intellectuals go, was an exotic, but he has had a considerable influence on the intellectual classes in Europe and America. It is a subterranean influence; not very often acknowledged even where present. (I googled for G. I. Gurdjieff just now and got 118,000 hits.) A great deal of his influence came over from his No. 1 disciple, the less exotic P.D. Ouspensky (25,000 hits), who worked in England in the 1920s and 1930s and in America in the 1940s. The best single book on the whole Gurdjieff phenomenon is Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1949).
- P.D. Ouspensky, The Fourth Way. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1957) page 300.
April 28, 2004
