Hello all! This is the first free monthly digest of the new format of Melendy Avenue Review! This is what all the non-Citizen subscribers will get from here on out: a curated selection of the month’s review, a Reading in the Time of Monsters episode, and a nice Mithra pic!
I really do appreciate all of my subscribers, free and paid. But I also think I offer some good stuff, and it’s getting better, and becoming a paid Citizen-subscriber is well worth it. You get double the podcasts, more than double the reviews, all the Mithra pics, votes on my reading, and I think I might start a discord server?! Anyway, give it some thought, and enjoy reading at whatever level of subscription you decide to have.
CONTENTS
Podcast
Reading in the Time of Monsters 002 - Richardson, “Savage Journey”
Reviews
Wuehle, “Monarch”
Yates, “The Rosicrucian Enlightenment”
Lagniappe
Mithra Pic - Mithra Out Of Place
PODCAST
I’m having fun doing my podcast! This one is about a biography of Hunter S. Thompson that I was excited about and disappointed by. Why do so many biographies have no concept of change? Why do they insist everyone is a “child is the father of the man” case? These are the things I discuss.
If you want to get the next episode, and every odd-numbered episode, upgrade your subscription to Citizenship! You can do that by going into settings on substack, I think!
REVIEWS
Candace Wuehle, “Monarch” (2022) (read aloud by Rebecca Lowman) - This ruled pretty hard. In appropriately dreamlike manner I can’t quite remember where I first heard of this one. Something about nineties child beauty pageants, and a comparison to the movie “Hannah,” which I enjoy a lot? Anyway, I put it on the list.
It begins a little weird- nineties kid Jessica Clink is telling her story, and it’s in some pretty harsh but esoteric language (Wuehle is also a poet). She grows up upper middle class in the Midwest, her mom is a retired Norwegian beauty queen, her dad is a scientist in the field of Boredom Studies. I was worried for a bit this would be like “White Noise,” which I understand they've now adapted to film. I didn’t like “White Noise,” finding it too cute by half, at best a kind of monument to the anxieties of comfortable eighties pedants but not interesting enough to earn its place. I do plan on reading more DeLillo, at least to read “Libra,” but it’s awkward, as some of my reading friends and mentors despise DeLillo like poison, and others love him so much that one I knew named her firstborn child after a character in “White Noise.” In any event, suburban dread, Boredom Studies, a comparison to DeLillo on the front cover (though in Wuehle’s favor)…
Well, it didn’t turn out to be like “White Noise.” Among other things, Wuehle has a command of storytelling that DeLillo either didn’t have or just neglected. That’s not to say she writes in a straightforward way- that’s become a cliche or even a dog whistle, “storytelling” as code for “linear narrative.” Jessica’s story unfolds in pieces, each one adding to a general aura of dread and occult knowledge, with this tinge of power and possibility. It’s not always clear what is happening in terms of causation or whatever, but the overall picture comes across. Jessica gets entered into child and teen beauty pageants, and she learns odd lessons from them and from other sources- learns to always wear a mask over her real self, learns Morse code, learns strange esoteric lessons drawing from mythology, science, odd philosophy, numerous ways to make two plus two equal five, from her father’s academic mentor.
Wuehle mixes the creepiness of real extant things in life with the terror of discovery of conspiracies and a child’s place in them. I mean, child beauty pageants are one of the creepiest things I know about already, and their existence, juxtaposed to recurrent moral panics directed at queer people, single mothers, etc over child abuse, is one of those things that makes me think substantial portions of our culture need to not exist anymore. There’s also some nineties “the kids aren’t all right and have completely secret lives” stuff. The kids in Jessica’s suburbs play “night games,” doing odd pranks, making existential gestures. One night game is basically fight club, and that’s where Jessica finds out she knows how to fight, brutally and effectively, without knowing how she knows.
This is when Jessica starts realizing that she both doesn’t remember a lot of things she should, and has vague memories she can’t account for. She starts to question how much in her life is “real” and how much the contrivance of shadowy others she can’t identify. The babysitter, Christina, who teaches Jessica about ouija boards, new wave, and feminism- organic hire on her mom’s part, or a plant? The girl she falls in love, the fellow beauty queen her pageant trainers make her turn on- real or fake or part of whatever force made her? How about her college RA, from the brief period she stays in before the ghosts of dead girls drive her out?
Disassociation leads down various paths of both self-destruction and self-exploration for Jessica, until a breaking point comes, she comes to realize what she’s part of — some sort of system of sleeper agents programmed to seduce (or anyway entice- hard to know what term to use given the context they are all children) and kill, that both her parents are implicated in — and the blood and horror it involves. She goes rogue on the road, to try to figure out what it’s all about, what happened to her parents, and how much of her past is real.
I don’t want to belabor the DeLillo comparison, but let’s put it this way. Earlier “what’s real?!” paranoia writers drawn from literary fiction — DeLillo, but also, to varying degrees, Pynchon and other big names — couldn’t help but go highbrow, which usually meant, for them, “confusing on a sentence/paragraph level” (borrowed from literary modernism) and farragoes of references that either seemed like meaningless displays of erudition or just sad attempts to imitate pop culture (there are good versions of both in literature but also a lot of bad ones). On top of that there’s usually a kind of sneering ironic distance that occasionally compromises itself with sentimentality to get across the idea that you should care. That’s not how Wuehle does it. This is the voice of a survivor, and it feels very real even though she’s the survivor of a pretty whacked-out fiction. She wants to be understood but genuinely has a story that’s hard to get across in full through straightforward narrative. There’s plenty of references, to crimes of the nineties, to Norse mythology, the whole kaleidoscope of decontextualized bits of knowledge some “Studies” types use to make their points, but they contribute to a larger whole, both in narrative and in tone. Altogether a masterful series of risky gambles pulled off with bravura. Well worth reading for anyone who likes a really out there read. *****
Frances Yates, “The Rosicrucian Enlightenment” (1972) - I dabble in the history of occultism- seemingly, the only one who does who doesn’t either, at least a little in some ironic/post-ironic way, believe in magic, or want to believe in magic, or for that matter goes out of their way to debunk individual acts of supposed magic. Well, that’s all right. I’m a fan of the podcast “The SHWEP” - the Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast, a deeply exhaustive examination of the history of occult thought, and they start, if I recall, by discussing Frances Yates, one of the great historians of the topic and someone who did a lot to legitimize its study in the Anglophone academy. Yates, as far as the host, Earl Fontainelle is concerned, was well wide of the mark in insisting on a unitary history binding the late-antique hermetic tradition and renaissance magic. Fontainelle exhibits the carefulness of the contemporary historian, as opposed to Yates’ more sweeping vistas.
Yates vista certainly sweeps here, as she seeks to link the Rosicrucian movement, a hermetic magical movement originating in early seventeenth century Germany, to the Enlightenment. Truth be told, the individual elements of the relay race she tries to stage bear more interest for me than the result of the run. The linkages between Rosicrucianism and the Royal Society are long and tenuous, and it’s a bit of an odd insistence anyway, on two lines. First, the links between occult thought generally and the flowering of science in Britain are well-established. Isaac Newton spent as much time on alchemy and trying to find codes in the Bible as he did on physics, but evidence he was especially into the Rosy Cross is much more limited (and we know Francis Bacon, almost as important, was an enemy of Rosicrucianism). On the other side of things, Newtonian physics was important to Enlightenment thought, but, and maybe this is my inclination to think politically showing, seem more important as a symbol than anything else. Men, common men, not inspired by God, decoded the movements of bodies and the nature of light, therefore, we can be bosses of ourselves and not have God interfere. The actual beliefs of Newton, Galileo, or the rest beyond their scientific discoveries weren’t especially important in the Paris salons a century hence. So the linkage wouldn’t make that much sense anyway, and the links Yates does try to trace are full of “maybes” and “might haves.”
But still, there was a lot of interesting stuff here. That’s how it often is with these occult histories- weakly-supported theses argued tediously, fascinating content otherwise. Rosicrucianism popped up in a number of places across Europe – Germany first, then France, Italy, and England – with little in the way of connective tissue or organizational support that we can find. We’re pretty sure the guy who wrote the original Christian Rosenkreuz was a German hermetic philosopher from Heidelberg. That’s important- Heidelberg is an old university town and the site of the court of the Elector Palatinate. Real heads know that the Thirty Years’ War started when the Elector Palatine (I –believe– it’s “Palatine” for the guy and “Palatinate” as an adjective for the place… and “Palpatine” is altogether another thing… but who cares) accepted the throne of Bohemia from Protestant rebels who didn’t want it going to Hapsburg prince. The Hapsburgs were the arch-Catholic power of Europe, Christian Elector Palatine was a Calvinist, it set the whole thing off, Bohemia was strategically important and its throne one of the Electors of the Holy Roman Empire (you had to collect so many Electors, you see, to level your prince up from Inbred Shithead to Inbred Shithead Emperor), that was enough to set the whole domino chain in motion.
Christian of the Palatinate sucked as a general and leader and got his shit rocked by the mercenary armies of the Hapsburgs, ending all but the barest pretense of his ruling Bohemia. The Hapsburg/Catholic armies followed up by stomping all over the Palatinate, which is sometimes still called that, but you’d mostly know it as some of the nicer parts of the Rhineland. This is historically one of the cross-roads of Europe, so all kinds of influences have gone into its culture, and both Yates and other commentators have depicted the area as one of the more relaxed and tolerant in Germany as far as ideas and religion go.
Christian of the Palatinate was married to Princess Elizabeth, daughter of James I, the first king of both Scotland and England. People in both the Rhineland and in England were quite excited about this. They thought it presaged a glorious alliance of Protestant powers that would fend off the Hapsburgs, the Spaniards, and other forces backing the Counter-Reformation and trying to re-Catholicize Europe. It didn’t play out that way. King James was, depending on how you look at him, cowardly, clever, or both. He played both sides, marrying his daughter to Calvinist Christian and trying to marry his son, the eventual Charles I, to a Spanish infanta. He wanted to stay out of any European conflict. This was almost certainly the right strategic call- the fact that England did not pour significant resources down the rathole of the Thirty Years War probably helped it become the great power it did. That said, it angered a lot of James’s subjects, and that anger would help lead to the English Civil War and the toppling of James’s son… and his royal head.
For a little while there, though, in the 1610s, people in the Rhineland were excited. They were going to play in the big leagues. And the occultists of the area, or anyway the ones who tended towards a sort of Reformation occultism, were very excited, making big predictions, and possibly making some on-the-ground connections. The idea of the Papacy as a false church whose overthrow would lead to a golden age of knowledge – and possibly the restoration of humanity to its pre-Fall state, the “powers of the primal Adam” which included all kinds of sick-ass magic – was hard to resist for a clade of Renaissance humanists in the area. After all, as Yates helped point out in other works, the distinction between science and magic was not established at this time. Moreover, marriages are big deals in alchemical symbolism. A marriage between two young Protestant royals – it helps that they seemed visibly into each other, even after having to live in exile – who could be seen as leading a charge to this Protestant-humanist-occultist golden age, was like catnip to these people.
Yates demonstrates that a lot of occultists in the area doubled as pro-Palatinate propagandists, and less convincingly, argued that Elizabethan occultist John Dee set the whole thing in motion twenty-odd years before, seeding networks of occultists/propagandists/spies in Central Europe during visits there! It’s true Dee did spend time in both Heidelberg and Prague, the great center of European alchemical and hermetic learning, but it seems a bit much to say he laid the groundwork for a strategy involving a marriage of children not yet born, one of whom was the child of the daughter of Elizabeth’s worst domestic enemy.
Of course, it was not to be. Alchemical allegories and good vibes do not armies beat. Central Europe fell into the hole of war, and the Protestant hero, or anyway the guy who kept the Hapsburgs from winning a dozen-odd years later, would be Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, who did not exactly treat Germany gently himself. Christian died in the field, Elizabeth lived as a sort of pauper-princess-exile and courtly inspiration to assorted Protestant hardliners in England haranguing assorted Stuart monarchs for not doing enough for the cause. But the Rosicrucian dream, Yates argues, lived on, and it starts to slip from an occult philosophy – though one a lot closer to self-help than anything else, which might have something to do with why the Rosicrucians “came back” in twentieth century California – to a political statement of what Yates is not too persnickety to call “liberalism.” The intellectual history snob, to say nothing of the Marxist, in me reels to hear a very vague Renaissance humanism, under absolute monarchs empowered by occultist secret societies, called liberalism like it has anything to do with Mill or Dewey. I get what she means- it does seem they wanted a nicer, gentler Europe, and they thought both the sciences and mankind were perfectable (major strains of liberalism don’t, but still). But…
Well, hell, it was for sure interesting. The linkage to actual science seems not quite there. Among other things, beyond a general “be excellent to each other” vibe the main point of Rosicrucianism was the hermetic principle of microcosm- that everything is a reflection of some other greater principle of order, so the structure of human beings is somehow related to the structure of the universe, the structure of political systems, trees, geometry, all that stuff. I’m no historian of science. But Yates herself grants that Francis Bacon, who read all that hermetic stuff (annoying tic of historians of unusual or vernacular thought- they argue as though intellectuals, voracious readers generally, having read a given work, is proof they took it seriously), utterly rejected the concept of microcosm and saw it as inimical to the empiricism he placed at the center of scientific inquiry, especially in England. I’m sure many scientists going forward thought microcosmic thoughts (I admit to finding the symmetry attractive, but the obvious anthropocentrism… I’m an anthropocentrist most days but you don’t want me doing your physics…), but it doesn’t look like the main influence on science as I know it.
In any event! For all my quibbles this was still well worth reading. There’s a reason Yates still gets published, and it’s not just because there’s a sucker market for stuff about the occult. She wrote gracefully and with great verve, especially when it came to capturing these brief moments, like when Protestant hermetics thought there would be “a union of the Thames and the Rhine.” Geography didn’t favor it, even if James had, but that’d be a weird world if it did. You’d see the Rhineland as the center of united Germany, instead of Prussia, courtly philosophers, magicians, academics filling out the bureaucracy instead of army officers and landowners. Protestantism would be the colorful, spiritual one of the pair with Catholicism seeming all dour and counterreformation… Well. Fun to tinker with, and that counts for a lot, for me. ****’
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: Mithra Out Of Place
We had to temporarily move the printer and its cabinet on which Mithra likes to sit (and which also stores her treats). She stands where it was. The printer cabinet is three feet away and she could easily perch there but she likes things her way.