“discovered” until the 19th century and was not accurately mapped,
under the ice cap, until the middle of the 20th century.
There are some very basic features of Antarctica that one cannot
know unless one has mapped its contours beneath the ice, for
example, some of its mountain ranges are entirely buried by the ice,
it actual y consists of two distinct but closely joined landmasses, with one considerably larger than the other, and the so-called Palmer
Peninsula stretching towards Patagonia in Argentina is real y only an
island. The Ottoman Piri Reis map of 1513 and the 1531 Renaissance
European map of Oronteus Finnaeus depict these distinct sub-
glacial topographical features. These maps, which are thought to
have been copied from older ones in the Library of Alexandria,
also feature accurate longitudinal measurements despite the fact
that longitude was not properly grasped until the 18th century. What
primeval mariners already understood it?
After finding a number of other anomalous maps in the US
Library of Congress and elsewhere that depicted different parts of
the Earth as they were long ago, Hapgood came up with a theory.
There are mammoths in Siberia who were frozen so rapidly that they
have undigested food in their stomachs, and this food is suggestive
of a much warmer climate than obtains there today. What if the
earth’s crust occasional y slips over its mantle, and does so quite
precipitously, so that Antarctica was pulled into the southern polar
250 Colin Wilson, The Atlantis Blueprint, 1–30.
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lovers of sophia
region from a relatively more temperate latitude just as Siberia was
pushed upwards towards the north pole?
Hapgood entered into a lively correspondence with Einstein over
this theory, which involved complex calculations of how much ice
accumulating during ice ages would be sufficient to periodical y
make the Earth top heavy, so that the crust would slip. Einstein
eventual y wrote an introduction to Hapgood’s book, Earth’s Shifting Crust. In this book and its sequel, The Path of the Pole, Hapgood hypothesized that the North Pole used to be in Hudson Bay and a
large part of Antarctica was free of ice as recently as 12,000 years
ago. This area, on Antarctica’s Atlantic coast, which would then have
had the climate of Argentina, is the region that was dubbed Neu
Schwabenland (New Swabia) by the aforementioned 1938 German
expedition led by Rudolf Hess and Herman Goering. The Luftwaffe
claimed it by raining sharp stakes bearing Swastika banners down
onto the icy mountainsides.251
Hapgood’s shift of the pole theory explains, among other things,
the fact that the ice sheet in Antarctica is thicker in some areas
towards the outer perimeter opposite New Swabia than it is in those
areas now most centered on the South Pole. Snow has had less time
to glaciate in these areas, whereas the other parts of Antarctica
that are now further from the pole were already inside the polar
region before the crustal displacement. Of course, with ‘North’
and ‘South’, it should be noted that these are ultimately determined
with respect to the magnetic poles, which undergo an inversion at
intervals of several hundred thousand years. At the beginning of
the anthropological record of Man, Antarctica was a northern polar continent. A Nordic polar continent veiled by ice is, of course, at
the core of the classical myth of Hyperborea – which German
esotericists understood to be one and the same as the lost world of
Thule.252
251 Joseph P. Farrel , Reich of the Black Sun, 249.
252 Joscelyn Godwin, Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival (Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited Press, 1996), 47, 89.
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Hapgood wrote some very significant letters to a young
correspondent named Rand Flem-Ath at the end of his life in
1982, letters pointing beyond the thesis of his 1966 book Maps of
the Ancient Sea Kings, towards the conclusion that Antarctica was Atlantis and that a whole cycle of civilization had been lost with it.
Hapgood’s theory cal s for a very rapid displacement, which would
have produced just the kind of massive earthquake and tsunami that
Plato describes as the cause of the destruction of Atlantis (and of
culture, worldwide). It also would have had another terrifying effect
that is recorded in the myths of ancient and aboriginal peoples the world over: the sky would have fallen. Wherever it was nighttime,
people would have seen the stars, the supreme symbol of the
constancy of cosmic order, suddenly come loose and fall through
the void.
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PRISONERS OF PROPERTY AND
PROPRIETY
In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx writes that
“self-conscious self-determination is the meaning of
human freedom”, and in the Manuscripts of 1844 he
defines equality as “Ich-Ich” [I-I] or “universal self-
consciousness”, in other words, the collective self-consciousness
of the community.1 Which community? Humanity as such. Marx’s
conception of freedom arises from a consideration of man’s “life-
activity”. An animal cannot reflect on its activities, which are a
means of sustenance that directly determine its life. But human freedom consists in the fact that man’s consciousness allows him to
choose and direct his life-activity reflectively.2 Marx’s conception of equality is based on an understanding of this life-activity as a social product. Even a person’s language, and thus also his thought, is a
collective product of the community. In his natural state man is not
only a social being, but in a deeper sense a person is a refraction of the totality of the community’s collective Mind or “universal self-consciousness”.3
1 Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto (New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), 99.
2 Ibid., 76.
3 Ibid., 86.
412
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What this means is that the tired old arguments about the Marxist
denial of the right to private property are total y uprooted from
the metaphysical and psychological dimensions of Marx’s deepest
insights. Few Marxists have appreciated the extent to which Marx’s
argument that private property is a snare holding one back from
an actualization of one’s full human potential is also an argument
about the very structure of thought. What needs to be overcome is
not a property holding economic and political system. An attempt
to do that is hopeless without a deconstruction of the ego that one
takes to be one’s proper self, reinforced as it is by certain norms of propriety in one or another society. The ful y self-conscious and
universal human community can only come about by orchestrating
an escape from this prison of property and propriety, the prison of
what is taken to be proper to oneself as opposed to other individuals
and societies.
One of the very few people who has understood this is the
physicist David Bohm, whose Marxist political orientation
became grounds for his exile from the United States a
fter a federal
investigation in 1949. In his late work On Dialogue, Bohm develops a method for freeing ourselves from mechanisms of thought that
imprison us within a petty ego structured by unexamined beliefs and
prejudices. Taken together with the work of the sociologist Erving
Goffman on how selfhood is constituted in everyday life, Bohm’s
dialectical process for attaining self-consciousness promises the kind of radical transformation of the human condition presupposed by
Marx’s critique of property. It also requires abandoning conventional
notions of propriety, for example, monogamy.
It should not come as a surprise that it is a scientist, namely
Bohm, who draws out this dimension of Marx. As we shall see, the
kind of ‘objectivity’ aimed at by Science as a human enterprise is
itself a reflection of universal human self-consciousness and self-
determination. For scientific exploration to come into its own and
embrace its Promethean promise of liberating Man from every false
limitation, a revolt against oppressive ideologies – including and
especial y religious ones – is indispensable. Science will always be
413
lovers of sophia
an abortion and miscarriage of what Prometheus intended it to be
when he gifted us with techne, so long as Olympus keeps us alienated from ourselves through the worship of false gods that take us to be
their property. The communist revolution is, as Jacques Derrida
recognizes, a revolution that is radical y spectral.
The possibility of “private property” – i.e. of some-‘thing’ from
nature becoming mine to the exclusion of others when I put my
labor into it – rests on the assumption that man is separate from
and stands against nature. John Locke claimed that the earth
is given to man, as something separate from him and for his use.
Whereas for Marx nature and man are inseparable. Nature is man’s
“inorganic body” and so man always has nature.4 Through his
sensuous experience (hearing, seeing, smelling, feeling, thinking,
being aware, wanting, loving) he always already appropriates nature
as his, because in fact, his senses manifest the world of nature as a
projection of human consciousness.5 Moreover, man does not have
nature as an ‘individual’ but as the collective consciousness of his
society or community.
Thus the separation from nature (which is assumed in Locke and
European Enlightenment thought in general) is not the inherent
state of affairs but consists of an “estrangement” in which man
objectifies the entities of the natural world as mere “things” and
thereby alienates himself from them. Man is estranged from the
exterior manifestation of his own consciousness, which is to say he
loses self-consciousness. He forgets that nature is always already
given to him and tries to take it. In alienating himself from nature he simultaneously alienates himself from others and objectifies himself
as ‘the individual’ – in whose eyes the sensuous richness of reality
has been reduced to a matrix of functional ‘things’ for use in the projects of a life-activity which has also been objectified into being merely mechanical.6
4 Ibid., 75.
5 Ibid., 87.
6 Ibid., 75; 77.
414
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Only on the basis of this estrangement from nature and others is
an appropriation of nature as “private property” to the exclusion of
others even possible. Such an appropriation is an attempt to bridge a chasm which man himself has created by forgetting his own nature
as Nature. The more man tries to appropriate the more the chasm of estrangement widens. Thus, for Marx the real meaning of private
property is as the concrete expression of an estrangement of self-
consciousness which more abstractly and broadly includes God and
religion as forms of man’s alienation from his nature.7
In his book Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida rightly recognizes that “Religion… was never [just] one ideology among others for
Marx.”8 The most subversive and promising dimension of Capital
is that therein Marx advances a mode of thinking that, although
he takes it to be “scientific” lies beyond scientific ‘objectivity’
by designating Science as that which entails its own radical
transformation or mutation – not a scientific ‘objectivity’ whose end is a revolution, but a Science whose self-reflexive and transformative process is revolutionary.9 There has never yet been Science, but only sciences whose “scientificity” has remained dependent on ideologies
that they are powerless to reductively exorcise. Even human sciences
have not remedied this as a rejoinder to the natural sciences, as if
nature and human experience could be separated.10
The messianic eschatology of religion cannot simply be classified
among other elements of ideology or theology subject to the Marxist
critique, or for that matter to postmodern deconstruction, because
Marxist science necessarily carries within itself this messianic
eschatology in its formal structure and in such a way that precedes
and exceeds the content of the extant religions in its redemptive
promise.11 In a dangerously naïve manner, Derrida plays with
the idea that “Abrahamic messianism” was “but an exemplary
7 Ibid., 79.
8 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994), 131.
9 Ibid., 41.
10 Ibid., 43.
11 Ibid., 74.
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lovers of sophia
prefiguration” or “pre-name [ prénom] given against the background of the possibility” of the messianic that he is evoking as the spectral force of Marxism beyond its ideology.12 He sees in the desert mindset
of “the religions of the Book” a herald of the “open, waiting… a
waiting without horizon of expectation” for an undefined messianic
salvation.13
However, a good case can be made that although Derrida is right
to recognize the religious dimension of Marx’s scientific thinking,
he could not be more mistaken about the identity of Marx’s spectral
savior and the relationship of this ‘Messianism’ to the essential
thrust of the Abrahamic tradition of revelation. Marx did have a god, one with a very definite mythic heritage, but from the Abrahamic
perspective this god is the devil – the Rebel of the International’s fiery banner and emblematic star. The sickle moon and the hammer
are both symbols of Prometheus in Greek mythology.
In Prometheus Bound: The Mythic Structure of Karl Marx’s
Scientific Thinking, Leonard P. Wessell argues that while some have recognized a religious dimension to Marx’s thought and to Marxism
in general, even they have been mistaken to think that Marx is
mythic and poetic despite his ‘pretensions’ to founding a science, in fact to effecting the unification of the sciences in the historical y self-conscious and self-correcting Science that Hegel sought.
Wessell thinks that it is precisely Marx’s scientific thinking that is religious.14 Moreover, he advances this argument while affirming
the scientific status of Marx’s thought. Of course, many of Marx’s
theories may have been invalidated, but so have most of the theories
ever advanced by practitioners of any acknowledged sci
ence.
The basic structure of Marx’s thought is not only scientific but
is exemplary for Science as opposed to fragmentary sciences that
come up against each other’s boundaries and the boundaries of non-
scientific domains, such as the religious. Scientific thinking takes
12 Ibid., 210.
13 Ibid., 211.
14 Leonard P. Wessel , Prometheus Bound: The Mythic Structure of Karl Marx’s Scientific Thinking (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 60–61.
416
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empirical events and evaluates them against objectivity constants
that determine how they are to be ordered in a world model of
unlimited scope. How the objectivity constants are constructed
will yield different interpretations of the empirical manifold as
it is immediately encountered. What is exceptional about Marx’s
scientific thinking is that: “A mythos grounds the world hypothesis from which the categorical structure, the most general objectivity
constants are derived…”15 Not only is it the case that “Marx’s
scientific logos is grounded in a religious mythos”, but the particular mythos that grounds it is determinative of science in general – and
has always been so, even if only unconsciously. This is the mythos of
Prometheus.
Wessel ’s study of Marx as a thinker of the Promethean
spirit of Science argues that: “Marx’s thought is dominated by a
Prometheanism. Marx believed in the unlimited powers of man for
self-emancipation. Prometheus, the fire bringer, is a symbol for such
self-divinization.”16 In fact, this is not going far enough: “Prometheus is more than a mythopoetic symbol in Marx’s thinking. Prometheus
bound, suffering, striving for redemption, indeed, rebelling furnishes the root metaphor used to generate the categorical self-system Marx
used in his scientific thinking, including Capital.”17 It is not Marx’s socioeconomic thought that inclined him to adopt Prometheus as
a symbol or rhetorical device, after the fact, but rather a study of
the thinker’s youth and, especial y, his early poetic writings, reveals that: “Marx had to and did discover that the socioeconomic realm is
the subject of a redemptive process because his mythico-ontological
root metaphor of Prometheus bound so inclined him.”18 Already in
his doctoral dissertation of 1840, Marx had quoted the Prometheus
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