The government of the Medici having subdued all its avowed enemies in order to obtain for that family undivided authority, and distinguish them from other citizens in their relation to the rest, found it necessary to subdue those who secretly plotted against them.

This is how Machiavelli, in The History of Florence, begins the narrative of the Pazzi conspiracy.

The Pazzis rivaled the Medicis in wealth and power in Florence. The Pope, who was an enemy of the Medicis, favored them. Lorenzo, in 1466, was the head of the Medici clan. He was, as Machiavelli puts it, “young and flush with power”. Jacobo was the head of the Pazzis. He had a natural daughter – whose marriage to a Medici had been arranged by Lorenzo – and a number of nephews.

Lorenzo, who feared the power of the Pazzis, began against them a campaign of petty affronts. It is by such half measures, such trivial breaks in the normality of the everyday, that power crystalizes. Trotsky found this out very well in the Soviet Union after Lenin’s death. The crowd that wasn't there when he was to address them -- the newspaper article that didn't appear -- the supporter who was suddenly arrested by the police -- troubles with the phone. Kafka had a prophetic sense of this, which is why, next to The Prince, the best book on power and politics in the Western canon is The Trial.

Out of small injuries an idea arose among the Pazzi nephews: the idea was that their fortune would be better if Lorenzo was dead. The first instigator of the idea lived mostly in Rome, and communicated with such powers as were, for one reason or another, disposed to dislike the Medici. From that dislike, they projected a latent dislike of the Medici in Florence, an ambiant williness, on the street level, to see the Medici family ruined.

Jacobo wasn’t so sure.

The idea became a plan, nevertheless; the pope was attracted to it, various of the enemies of the Medici were attracted to it, and it took on money and dates, as plans like this have a tendency to. However, when the conspirators got together in Florence, they kept having the problem of bringing together Lorenzo and his brother, Giuliano, in one spot for killing. If the brothers were separated, the Medici had the possibility of countering the Pazzi assassins.

“With this intention they appointed Sunday, the twenty-sixth of April, 1478, to give a great feast; and, resolving to assassinate them at table, the conspirators met on the Saturday evening to arrange all proceedings for the following day. In the morning it was intimated to Francesco that Giuliano would be absent; on which the conspirators again assembled and finding they could no longer defer the execution of their design, since it would be impossible among so many to preserve secrecy, they determined to complete it in the cathedral church of Santa Reparata, where the cardinal attending, the two brothers would be present as usual.”

So, the problem here becomes very specific: how to assassinate two guarded leaders in a church. The Pazzis, at the last moment, were deserted by the man they were counting on to lead the assassination squad, and so had to induce two priests to assail the Medicis. Machiavelli coolly comments: “for if firmness and resolution joined with experience in bloodshed be necessary upon any occasion, it is on such as these; and it often happens that those who are expert in arms, and have faced death in all forms on the field of battle, still fail in an affair like this.”

Indeed. The morning of the 26th, the conspirators get their game going: “The conspirators proceeded to Santa Reparata, where the cardinal and Lorenzo had already arrived. The church was crowded, and divine service commenced before Giuliano’s arrival. Francesco de’ Pazzi and Bernardo Bandini, who were appointed to be his murderers, went to his house, and finding him, they, by earnest entreaties, prevailed upon him to accompany them. It is surprising that such intense hatred, and designs so full of horror as those of Francesco and Bernardo, could be so perfectly concealed; for while conducting him to the church, and after they had reached it, they amused him with jests and playful discourse.”

Machiavelli displays that rhetorical touch that makes him so enigmaticly fascinating. A more superstitious (i.e., religious, or American) writer would find the murderers behavior suprising on moral grounds, since after all, human behavior just comes down to good or evil. Machiavelli, however, is more interested in the concealment. The mask is psychologically difficult, so one does want to know how those who successfully mask their thoughts proceed. How do you create the psychological state that would allow you to do this? That is his concern. Instead of good and evil, we are dealing with the norm and its exceptions.

At a signal from the cardinal – the elevation of the host – the attack was mounted. The Pazzi successfully brought down Giuliano. However, the priests only wounded Lorenzo, who made it out of to another part of the church. Meanwhile, other conspirators (the Archbishop de’ Salviati and Jacopo di Poggio) went to the signory – the counsel that officially ruled Florence – thinking that they would destroy the Medici adherents and cow the others. It didn’t work out that way. The counsel and its guards attacked the archbishop and di Poggio’s men. Soon the body of the archibishop was hanging from a window of the signory.

Lorenzo, it turned out, was popular in Florence – Machiavelli makes several ironic comments about the people’s sense of liberty having been suitably put to sleep by the people’s sense of greed, which was fed well by the Medici prosperity. The Pazzis failed to stage a revolt, and so the conspirators each tried to escape as they could. Here’s what happened to Jacobo:

Jacopo de’ Pazzi was taken while crossing the mountains of Romagna, for the inhabitants of these parts having heard what had occurred, and seeing him in flight, attacked and brought him back to the city; nor could he, though he frequently endeavored, prevail with them to put him to death upon the road. Jacopo and Rinato were condemned within four days after the murder of Giuliano. And though so many deaths had been inflicted that the roads were covered with fragments of human bodies, not one excited a feeling of regret, except that of Rinato; for he was considered a wise and good man, and possessed none of the pride for which the rest of his family were notorious. As if to mark the event by some extraordinary circumstance, Jacopo de’ Pazzi, after having been buried in the tomb of his ancestors, was disinterred like an excommunicated person, and thrown into a hole at the outside of the city walls; from this grave he was taken, and with the halter in which he had been hanged, his body was dragged naked through the city, and, as if unfit for sepulture on earth, thrown by the populace into the Arno, whose waters were then very high. It was an awful instance of the instability of fortune, to see so wealthy a man, possessing the utmost earthly felicity, brought down to such a depth of misery, such utter ruin and extreme degradation. It is said he had vices, among which were gaming and profane swearing, to which he was very much addicted; but these seem more than balanced by his numerous charities, for he relieved many in distress, and bestowed much money for pious uses. It may also be recorded in his favor, that upon the Saturday preceding the death of Giuliano, in order that none might suffer from his misfortunes, he discharged all his debts; and whatever property he possessed belonging to others, either in his own house or his place of business, he was particularly careful to return to its owners.”

Machiavelli always tells the moral of his stories before he tells the stories. Our modern habit is to reverse that order. So I retain for last what Machiavelli told first:

“But after the … government became so entirely centred in the Medici, and they acquired so much authority, that discontented spirits were obliged either to suffer in silence, or, if desirous to destroy them, to attempt it in secrecy, and by clandestine means;; which plots rarely succeed and most commonly involve the ruin of those concerned in them, while they frequently contribute to the aggrandizement of those against whom they are directed. Thus the prince of a city attacked by a conspiracy, if not slain like the duke of Milan (which seldom happens), almost always attains to a greater degree of power, and very often has his good disposition perverted to evil. The proceedings of his enemies give him cause for fear; fear suggests the necessity of providing for his own safety, which involves the injury of others; and hence arise animosities, and not unfrequently his ruin. Thus these conspiracies quickly occasion the destruction of their contrivers, and, in time, inevitably injure their primary object.”

We have our own object in bringing up this old story. We see certain lessons from Machiavelli which apply to Iraq. We will draw them in another post.

Via Harry’s Place, LI became aware of the Labourfriendsofiraq site. This seemed like our cup of tea. So we went via link to an article (by Peter Tatchell) criticizing the left for supporting the resistance in Iraq. It was the usual barrage – full of heated accusations, aimed at a foe that is never named. We know we are in for general bombardment when we begin, not with the current occupation of Iraq, but with – we kid you not – clitorectomies:

“Over 100 million young girls in Africa and the Middle East have had their clitorises excised and / or their vaginas sown up. We would not tolerate this patriarchal abuse in Britain. Why should we tolerate it in other countries? Female genital mutilation is a crime against humanity. Don’t we have a duty of international solidarity with the victims?”

Apparently, Tatchell believes that if we hold democratic elections in Iraq, the clitorectomy issue in Africa will be solved… But that is unfair. He sin’t as braindead as his rhetorical ploy. He does have something to say. Two things:
1. That it is alright to criticize jihadist movements;
2. That “…right now, the STWC supports “the resistance” in Iraq by any means necessary…” He is referring to the Stop the War Coalition.

Now, undoubtedly there are those on the left who support jihadist movements. However, their voices only seem to reach those on the right who want to accuse those on the left of supporting jihadist movements. Thus, Christopher Hitchens seems to be an eager reader of every pamphlet that recommends following the path of Zarqawi. The interesting thing about this, of course, is how wonderfully it provides cover for the right, since the legitimacy of the right would be a bit wobbly if we remembered that the jihadist movements were spawned by anti-communism; that the U.S. and its ally, Saudi Arabia, spent perhaps a billion dollars building up the most extreme Moslem movement of the twentieth century throughout the eighties, ardent drummers for the crusade in every backwater of Algeria or Egypt, in spite of being warned as to what was happening; that Osama bin Laden’s model of attacking the “infidel super-power” was surely influenced by memories of Bill Casey, Reagan’s best buddy, going to Pakistan in 1984 and chortlingly suggesting that jihadist groups penetrate the soviet union and commit acts of terror there; that the U.S. continues to be the leading donor to Pakistan, thus, de facto, sheltering probably the most effective radical Moslemist agency in the world, Pakistan’s ISI, as well as blessing the spread of nuclear weaponry around the world (continuing a policy initiated by Reagan, who made strenous efforts to keep Pakistan from being at all injured when, in the early eighties, it became evident that the Pakistanis were developing atomic weaponry). And on and on.

The dirty secret about the ‘war on terrorism’ is not that poverty causes terrorism, or the war between Israel and Palestine causes terrorism – no, we can be much more specific than that. We have the history, if we want to look at it. The terrorist network was set up, physically, financially, intentionally, by the US, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan in the eighties. It was a specific, long range operation, with a specific goal in mind: defeat the atheist infidel. Because, in the U.S., the triumphalist school of Cold War scholarship has prevailed, a very blind eye has been turned to a very dirty history. Thus the curious silence that has surrounded, for instance, the first attempt to blow up the WTC, which had the spiritual seal of approval of a blind Newark mullah who came to the U.S. on a visa signed by a CIA officer after having had his travel bills paid for by the CIA in their jolly attempt to move the wogs against the nasty Russians. Payback for Vietnam was the theme back then, and damn the consequences.

Now, since the same people who gave us the terrorist network and support for Saddam when he was gassing Kurds are assuring us that this time they only want to see democracy flower in Iraq, perhaps your average lefty could be given a little slack in the doubting the good intentions of the giver.

But no – the danger, as Tatchell sees it, is those peaceniks out there supporting the terrible people who want to behead NGO employees and sew up vaginas. Is this what the SWTC is all about? With trepidation, we went to their site. Oddly enough, there are no recommendations to the kids in Stepney to fill their cars with plastique and blow themselves up outside Parliament. In fact, the organization has a bland and ecumenical, not to say shapeless, program of “stopping the war on terrorism.” There was no jubilation over the resistance on the site that we could see.

Tatchell then heats up the bong and goes for another toke:

“Motivated more by hatred of the US and British governments than by love for the Iraqi people, many so-called leftists support a “resistance” that, if victorious, would bring to power Baathists, Islamic fundamentalists and pro-al-Qaeda militants. Is that what the left now stands for? Neo-fascism, so long as it is anti-western?”

Well, cards out on the table: LI does not have love for the Iraqi people. We don’t have love for the Kazakhs either. We don’t love the Jews. We don’t love the Canadians, the Eskimos or the Ainu. In fact, for us, love is pretty much a one to one operation.

However, we do like the Iraqi people. We like them enough that we don’t want to see their cities smashed, their wedding parties bombed, or family members trundled off in the night to be subject to the tiresome whims of post adolescent American torturers.

We like them enough to think that elections, which are now upon us in Iraq, would not be upon us if the original U.S. plan was still in operation – which would have put off elections until 2007, at the earliest. We like them enough to remember how the U.S. changed its policy – which was not due to the pleadings of such as Mr. Tatchell, still foaming from his rescue mission in Africa (all those vaginas to save, personally). No, it was due to the armed resistance and the prospect of it becoming general if the Americans didn’t negotiate with Sistani. That was it – that was the whole and entire reason that the election process came about. It wasn’t that Social Democrats for a more Swedish Iraq had a head to head with Bremer. He confined his head to heads with members of the Heritage Foundation.

So we would respectfully ask (knowing that, for the prowar left, he who asks for bread will be given a little polemical stone) for a little less nonsense from supposed leftist supporters of democracy and trade unions in Iraq. Especially pleasing would be some real calculation of the forces that are in play in Iraq, which don't include the pro-terrorist British or American left, who've had zero influence as far as I can see on any turn of the events there.

This is, undoubtedly, too much to expect from a culture that was raised on charging the straw man. It must be one of those Oxford things, much like the Monty Python episode where the village idiots tear the knickers off the mannikens. Hitch must have been quite good in the old days at that. Perks you up for resolutely charging against, say, George Galloway, and you've done your doubty deed for progressivism. Meanwhile, the only leftist pro-war person who actually tried to ward off the truly reactionary plans of the original occupying junta was Peter Galbraith – not a man much quoted on sites like Harry’s.

Headline in the WP : Fallujans to Begin Returning Home

First graf: Iraqi authorities said residents would begin returning to Fallujah within the next week, even as U.S. forces shelled a section of the city and insurgents proclaimed they would press the fight there, more than a month after American commanders declared the city "liberated."

Second graf: “Mayor Mahmoud Ibrahim Jirisi said families could start returning to some southern neighborhoods of the shattered city as early as Friday, though the Reuters news agency reported that there was no sign of such movement by late afternoon.”

In other words, headlines should read: Fallujans do not begin returning home – war crime continues – 200,000 people have now been dispersed, without any aid whatsoever, for two months – U.S. under Bush thus accomplishing a feat of inhumanity even the present Sudanese government, has hesitated to perform.

Ah, Liberation.

Holy bookburning

There are two starkly different views of religion that jostle each other in the media, without paying too much attention to each other, as compartmentalized media memes do. One is the usual lament over the straying from the religion of our fathers that characterizes all of modernity – usually this is considered to be a bad thing. And there is the story about evangelical fervor (Protestant or Islamic) that has, apparently, infected the masses – a great global dose of opium poisoning, to use Marx’s phrase.

Religion has poked into politics in Britain by way of the rank proposal, by Blair’s government, to criminalize poking fun at religion -- being nasty about Jesus or Mohammed or Blair’s piety or his wife’s new age gurus. Like a very unmerry King Cole, Blair’s second favorite thing about being prime minister is criminalizing. In reinstituting the pomp and, perhaps, the bonfires of the old blasphemy laws, Blair has even outdone his own combination of unctuousness and unscrupulousness.

We were researching a wholly different project for a client when we stumbled upon Harold Remus’ article about magic in the Bible in Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, which transfixed us with a reminder of how St. Paul’s visit to Ephesus was blessed with a bookburning:

“For example, in describing the books burnt in the city of Ephesus as a result of Paul's activity there, the author of canonical Acts uses a term (perierga) that translators commonly render as "magic" (19:19). The value of the books consigned to the flames is given as 50,000 silver coins (19:19). We're not told what assessor assigned the books that value. But it is clear that someone placed a high value on them.”

Remus does not go in the direction we were expecting – or maybe hoping for. He gives us St. Paul’s successors – those archaelogists and hermeneuts who have continued Paul’s contempt, if not the readiness to ignite, since the flood of magical texts from the excavations of nineteeth century in Egypt. There are, indeed, plums in this account, but what of… what of the magical gesture encoded in burning a magic book? There is, indeed, an enlightenment image of repression within the ranks of the repressors, an image that submits to the rational/pietistic theme that runs through book burning. But surely, of all spells, one of the most interesting, because of its perverted twist, is burning the book of spells?

Remus is more interested in the magic itself – which is fair. He imagines an interview with one of the magicians – he calls him Abraxus. Abraxus comes close to the fire:

Abrasax speaks:
Let me begin with this business of "secrecy". Do I practice and enjoin secrecy?
Of course I do. Magic as divine and a gift from the gods is sacred and must be protected from profanation, as has unfortunately happened in your day thanks to Messieurs Preisendanz, Betz, Gager kai ta loipa. You could take a lesson from some of your indigenous peoples who tell you that observing and discussing their sacred rites profanes them and should not be permitted.”

Ah, the secrecy of destruction. It is what keeps the Blairs going – it isn’t just finding and rooting out ‘blasphemy” in the name of tolerance, it is the act of destroying the written, erasing the tape, interfering with the radio broadcast. This is sorcery against sorcery – especially that sorcery that might overturn the system in which magical wealth flow to the most virtuous.

Remus, however, imagines himself as a skeptical, enlightened scholar – rather sympathetic to St. Paul’s impatience with all that nonsense – asking whether the magic trade isn’t all abracadabra:

“But, please, would you not agree that to address a deity one must speak the deity's language? Did not one of the prominent prophets of your culture respond to a request, "Lord, teach us to pray" (Luke 1 1:1)? Did not his follower say that glossolalia is god-language (1 Cor. 14:2, 28) or spirit language (13:1, glossai ton aggelon)? In our practice we greatly honor the deity who bears mysterious names in one of the chief holy scriptures of your culture. Some have maintained that he--if he is a he--spoke Hebrew, others German ("Adam, wo bist du?"), and others Elizabethan English. We know better. We address Iao, Sabaoth, Adonai(n56) in words he will understand.(n57) I refrain from examples, lest I profane them.(n58) You may call all this nonsense, but surely addressing deities in language they understand is not nonsensical.
Am I alone in thinking this? Indeed not. What do you make of the abba (Mark 14:36; Rom. 8:15; Gal. 4:6), or maran atha (1 Cor. 16:22), or ephatha (7:34) in certain sacred texts of your culture? Why these words in an alien tongue in a Greek text? If I pronounce the mystic words Sitz im Leben and Formgeschichte over them, does that shed some light on my question?”

Well, we will get nowhere if we confuse true piety (the mocking of which by magicians must be made against the law – it raises hatred, you know) with the magician’s mystifications. And we must believe, with folded hands, in the archaeologists busy finding the historical Jesus in the Holy Land. But the essay did make us think a few blasphemous and legal (at least, at the moment) thoughts. Look it up yourself.

LI has nearly completed its plan for a tee shirt. The tee shirt will be given to subscribers to this site (+40 bucks). When we floated this plan, some of our readers wrote in to complain about our unbelievable cheesiness. So we considered, instead of tee shirts, water soluble love oils in provocative scents, but looking over the guys we hired for tee shirt manufacture, we decided it might be a little indelicate, as well as lead to bodily harm of the management, if we raised the subject.

In the Times (London), today, one of the big name Conservative columnists, Anatole Kaletsky, laments the current runner up status of the Tories. He asks why, given Labor’s record current disorganization and the universal loathing that is justly heaped on Tony Blair’s head (he might be exaggerating a bit about that one), is the Conservative Party such a dog’s after-meal?

He gives two reasons. The first is the Tory expectation that the Labor party would create an economic crisis. This hasn’t happened. The second reason is more interesting:

“The tactical error on economics could at least be explained by the Tories' arrogant belief that they have a superior understanding of money. Their second tactical blunder was more surprising. Why on earth did the most oppositional Opposition in living memory support the Government on the one policy which was most obviously going wrong -Iraq? The Tories' initial backing for the invasion may have been justifiable on the standard ground of national security when Britain faced a military threat. But why did they not withdraw their support in the summer, once it became apparent that the Prime Minister had been misleading the nation and that the US was guilty of criminal negligence, or worse, in its occupation of Iraq?

It was only after the Hutton inquiry and Abu Ghraib that British public opinion turned decisively (and justifiably) against Mr Blair. This was the golden opportunity for Michael Howard to start demanding an orderly withdrawal from Iraq on the ground that the Prime Minister had deceived the nation into an unnecessary and mismanaged war. By failing to do this, the Tories ceded to the Liberal Democrats not only the huge anti-Blair protest vote, but also the principal constitutional role of the loyal Opposition in time of war.”

We think that Kaletsky is technically right about Iraq, and the position the Tories should have taken. But to take that position would mean to question the larger effect of the consistent Tory policy, since Churchill, to serve the U.S. as a perpetually faithful Gunga Din – a rather interesting inversion, considering the marmoreal Churchillian racism towards Indians that was evidenced, most brutally, in letting a million Bengalis starve to death in 1944. A party that was willing to break with the U.S. on Iraq would have to be a party that was willing to redo its genetic code, so to speak. D’israeli did just that for the tories in the 1860s; Blair did it to the Labor party in the 1990s. But there isn’t a Tory leader in sight that has the vision to do it now.
…
LI recommends looking at another op ed piece from another Brit pundit: Ash’s piece on supporting democracy in the Guardian. Ash concedes that the invasion of Iraq shows that this is not how democracy supporting is done, which implies that this the motivation for invading Iraq was to make it a democracy.

"War is not justified simply to promote democracy. So, the Iraq war was wrong. It would have been justified, in my view, if Saddam Hussein had been committing a genocide against his people at the time we went to war, or if he really was on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons, but he wasn't, so it wasn't. Using the promotion of democracy as the main justification for that war risks giving democracy a bad name."

We summarized our view of this in an exchange at the blog, Harry’s Bar, concerning Chavez in Venezuela. Quoting ourselves (hey, okay, stop with the rotten tomatoes! hey, that hurt!), this is what we think of that:

…. [this is] the real break between the anti-war left -- or anti-war period -- and the pro-war party. The pro-war party takes it as a given that U.S. foreign policy is to promote democracy. Hence, everything that happens in the occupation in Iraq is read through the prism that the U.S.'s chief pre-occupation is to crrate an Iraqi democracty.
The anti-war left does not share this presupposition. It isn't the case that the U.S. is always anti-democratic -- sometimes, the U.S. has acted for human rights and democracy. But the pattern of U.S. foreign policy has been determined globally by those factors that would advantage the American governing class.
How do you tell if, in one case or another, American foreign policy is promoting democracy? You don't take the words of the president of secretary of state as proof -- rather, you take the actions of the U.S. in a specific instance and ask what these actions are guided by.

That is why the occupation of Iraq appears to be one of those foreign policy actions that advance the American governing class agenda; or, I should say, started out pressing that agenda. Meeting resistance in Iraq, it modified itself drastically. Opposing elections at first, until a period of time had passed necessary for the occupiers to wipe out any resistance to the American agenda, the occupiers were forced to compromise and are now proclaim themselves the guardians of elections - to the extent that they will kill those who take the position, vis a vis elections, that Bremer took just a year ago. “

This is of course the whole problem with good natured liberals such as Ash. The first sentence of his piece speaks volumes for the lack of class analysis that vitiates it:

“Would you rather have democracies next door, or dictatorships? Democracies, right?”

Ignoring the folksiness of “next door” – remember that this is actually an asymmetric relationship. The U.S. may be next door to Nicarauga or Iran – but they are not next door to the U.S. That is, the U.S.(and the U.S. press, and probably Ash himself, along with the whole block of humanitarian interveners) would contemptuously ignore any opinions Nicarauga or Iran might take of U.S. governance, from the death penalty to the aggressive, and slightly insane, sums being spent by America on its war machine. Concentrate on the “you.” In that you is concentrated and dissolved the division between capital and labor that is the chief defining factor in the ways in which populations internationally exist. That you includes the maquilladora owner and worker, indistinguishably. Well, if the triumph of democracy is coincident with the triumph of capital over labor, the triumph will simply be… the triumph of capital over popular power -- in essence, democracy's triumph will mark another stage in the advance of oppression. This doesn't necessarily have to be so. But as long as the Ashes of the world refuse to recognize the contradictions and injustices in their position -- in the kind of power that has created a situation in which you can choose who your neighbor will be, without reciprocal choice from the other side -- they will not be promoting democracy, but a peculiar form of Victorian charity.

What is it about Christmas that LI dislikes? It is not the giftgiving. It is not the carols. It is not the trees. We like all of that.

What we don’t like is the sexlessness.

Christmas, after all, took over from Saturnalia. But as the baby Jesus has become more and more innocent, he has sucked the erotic energy out of the ocassion. This isn’t absolutely true – my friend T. sent me, just today, an article about celebrating Christmas in Japan. Evidently, the holiday is notable for being that time of year during which virgins get rid of their virginity in various Japanese hotels. Good for those guys and gals.

But in America, it is all about the kids, and not at all about the conception.

Perhaps what we need is the tantric Christmas.

Hugh Urban is a rising American scholar on tantric practices. He’s written an essay about the man who brought the Tantra to America: Pierre Arnold Bernard . Bernard was not, I think, mentioned in Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon, a book I always recommend to people for its enjoyable account of the first tentative movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that coalesced, eventually, into the New Age. From Urban’s description of Bernard, I don’t know how he was missed:

“Known in the popular American press as "Oom the Omnipotent," Bernard became notorious throughout newspapers and journals as a spiritual leader and philosopher as well as a philanderer, seducer of women and purveyor of scandalous indecencies. Not only did he found the first "Tantrik Order" in America (1906), but he was also the first in a long line of Tantric gurus who would come under intense criticism and suspicion for their alleged immoral, indecent and illegal sexual practices. As such, he has been a seminal influence on much later esotericism in the U.S. not only on later traditions of Western sexual magic, but also on contemporary New Religious Movements, such as the cult of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the Siddha Yoga Society, and more recent developments like American Tantra," the Church of Tantra and the New Tantrik Order in America.”

Damn, LI wanted to be the first to be known as Oom the Omnipotent! There goes our dream moniker.

Urban is at pains to separate Tantra, which is a complex and multiple meditative practice, from its reputation as orgiastic yoga-ing. He takes the point of classical tantra – which has to do with restraining and (somehow) retracting semen – as a sign that tantra is about power. Unsurprisingly, the reference is to Foucault here.

So how did Tantra gets the sex label? It started with the Victorians:

“It was really not until the early nineteenth century, with the arrival of Christian missionaries like the Baptist William Ward and the Scotsman, Alexander Duff, that Tantras became objects of intense interest and morbid fascination. Above all, the missionaries singled out the sexual element particularly transgressive and illicit sexuality as the most horrific aspect of the Tantras and the clearest evidence of their complete depravity. The Tantras, as Ward put it, involve "a most shocking mode of worship" centered around the worship of a naked woman (preferably a prostitute or outcast) and rites "too abominable to enter the ears of man and impossible to be revealed to a Christian public"”

Sounds like Christmas to me! LI might not be too pious, but we think we could possibly be interested in the worship of naked women. Nice to think that, all the time, our hobby could actually be incorporated into a tax free entity.

Bernard was a mysterious man. He came, of course, from California. He had traveled much in the mystic orient, and ended up in San Francisco teaching hypnotism and yoga and founding the Order of the Tantrik Brotherhood, which made marvelous promises to initiates. But things really got going after 1906:

"After the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, Bernard left California and eventually relocated to New York City, where he would open his "Oriental Sanctum" in 1910. Teaching Hatha Yoga in the downstairs room and offering secret Tantric initiation upstairs, the Oriental sanctum quickly became an object of scandal in the New York press: the notorious "Omnipotent Oom" was charged with kidnapping and briefly imprisoned, though the charges were later dropped. "I cannot tell you how Bernard got control over me or how he gets it over other people," said one of the alleged kidnapees, Zella Hopp, "He is the most wonderful man in the world. No women seem able to resist him.”

LI cannot resist the name Zella Hopp. It exerts a strange and effluvial influence over our thinking, it is as if vaseline were rubbed all over the inner lens, things are getting watery even as we type these words. We might have to go to a bar, soon. But wait…

The Omnipotent Oom became quite successful, according to Urban, who culls newspaper and magazine reports that claim that the Tantrik order included many celebrated names. The police raids probably helped, too. Nothing gives you publicity like a sex raid from the cops. O.O.’s credo was as follows: “The trained imagination no longer worships before the shrines of churches, pagodas and mosques or there would be blaspheming the greatest, grandest and most sublime temple in the universe, the miracle of miracles, the human body.”

Why that would be blaspheming, instead of something on the order of a spiritual acquisition and merger, we aren’t quite sure. In any case, O.O’s initiates paid fabulous fees to engage in mysterious physical activity with the great man himself, in a turban and flared Turkish pants, sitting on a throne, presiding.

Unfortunately, all things come to an end. The Omnipotent Oom, while retaining his belief in the worship of the naked body, eventually branched out into other fields, and in 1931 became the president of the State Bank of Pearl River. A rather daring act, actually, given the state of the banks in 1931. Perhaps this was a secret sexual act of a kind O.O. specialized in.

We highly recommend the article. And remember, have as much sexual congress as possible for a merrie, merrie christmas.