THE HOLBORN WORKING: 10 JULY 1994
Bolshevism and National Socialism were the twin currents that marked the final bifurcation of science and religion. They were contemporaries, although only in a relatively conscious manner, of the last ditch defence of the Newtonian world-view and the ultimate defeat of this ideology, which left them imprisoned on the same 'intellectual' field, whose degradation they announced. It is now a cliche within both liberal and libertarian circles to announce that Bolshevism and National Socialism were at once historically related and opposed. This opposition, which each considered to be their most important aspect and 'radical' contribution, revealed the internal inadequacy of their critique and its one-sided development. National Socialism wanted to suppress Masonry without realising it; Bolshevism wanted to realise Masonry without suppressing it. The critical position now elaborated by the Neoist Alliance shows that the realisation and suppression of Masonry are inseparable aspects of a single supersession of Sufi traditions in their Templar form.
Anyone who has allowed the scales to fall from their eyes can see that the world's top occultists are to be found among the ruling class and that those New Age groups who attract disciples by offering training in 'chaos magick', 'creative visualisation' or 'rubbing the Buddha for money', are worse than mere rank amateurs, they are shameless charlatans. Indeed, many of them are quite consciously working to prevent the development of a system of symbol manipulation that is completely autonomous of the state. Currently, Masonry is marshalled in defence of the status quo, but as the Bavarian Illuminati demonstrated in the eighteenth-century, power always flows in two directions and it rarely emanates from what is widely misperceived as constituting the 'centre'. The cellular form of secret societies devised by the founders for the security of the movement, can as readily be used to hoodwink the leadership, who thus become unwitting front men for activities they would never countenance. By infiltrating the Lodges of Masonry, it is possible to spread a heretical message of freedom across the world.
Nevertheless, there is a dual movement to all our activities and the dawn ritual conducted outside the Grand Lodge in London served to reduce the power of conservative elements within the Craft by applying the energies accumulated around their headquarters to progressive ends. The building itself, on Great Queen Street, mid-way between Holborn and Covent Garden tube stations, is imposing but generally featureless. From a distance the Grand Lodge, with its 200 foot tower, appears impressive. Close up it is rather dull, consisting as it does of flat stone work with very few decorative motifs. The eastern flank of the Grand Lodge incorporates a bank and various shops, while part of the northern side is given over to the Connaught Rooms, a Masonic bar and restaurant. Thus the casual observer is left with the impression that the Grand Lodge is not an individual unit but forms part of a block - and, as every Fleet Street hack knows, it's possible for 'regular' Masons to enter the building directly from the Connaught Rooms, thus avoiding the embarrassment of being exposed as 'on the square' among 'the profane'. As befits a secret society, Masonry's detachment from the rest of the world is not visible from the outside. A gap separates everything but the entrance to the Grand Temple from the rest of the building, which encloses it. Other than this, the United Grand Lodge is taken up with offices, meeting rooms, small temples, reception rooms, a library and a museum. Running on a bi-monthly schedule, a variety of these chambers are rented out to London's innumerable 'regular' Lodges.
However, rather than presenting further observations of my own about the building, which would offer the attentive reader a good many clues to the substance of the Holborn working - obviously such things are only revealed to initiates of the Neoist Alliance - we shall instead quote Harold P. Clunn's description of the site, from his book The Face Of London: 'The last remnant of squalor and poverty has now been removed from... Kingsway by the erection of the fine Masonic Temple, built at a cost of £1, 000, 000. It was opened by the Duke of Connaught on 19 July 1933, who also laid the foundation-stone on 14 July 1927. It covers a huge triangular site, previously occupied by some of the worst slums in London... the Masonic Temple... presents a vista of almost Eastern splendour when seen from Long Acre. A sort of square has been formed at the western end of Great Queen Street by/// extensive road-widening opposite the Masonic Temple and Wild Street.'
To move on to less immediately visible matters, while our occult theology is not unrelated to the assemblage of symbols found within Royal Arch Masonry, it clearly has a far greater historical import than a belief system built upon Pagan nostalgia. Just as the French Revolution was conducted in the costumes of ancient Rome, so its Freemasonic patrons abandoned Christ in their revival of Jehovah, Lucifer and Osiris - this choice of idols reflects the excessive love of the classical and pre-classical world prevalent among educated minds during that period of European history. Obviously, the theological innovations of The Process Church Of The Final Judgement - which shifted the devotional habits of post-Masonic thinkers towards Jehovah, Lucifer and Christ - constituted a considerable advance upon Royal Arch teachings. However, only the Neoist Alliance trinity of Marx, Christ and Satan united in struggle, accurately embodies the religious world view of the coming centuries.
Since the avant-garde of this century is a highly advanced outgrowth of post-Masonic culture, it has never sought recognition from the deeply conservative United Grand Lodge. Nevertheless, the covert connections between so called 'anti-art' and the Brotherhood are on open display to anyone with the ability to read the relevant signs. Dadaism was launched under the aegis of a club called the Cabaret Voltaire. As both a Mason, and one of the chief architects of the French revolution, Voltaire's name has often been used in the titles of Lodges affiliated to continental Grand Orient Masonry. Similarly, the fact that two leading members of the Lettriste Movement, Isidore Isou and Maurice Lemaitre, were introduced to each other by Louis Pauwels - co-author of the notorious Morning of the Magicians - is a matter of public knowledge. Likewise, Isou's adopted name can be read etymologically as Jesus Jesus, while Lettrisme itself is actually an advanced form of Qabalah whose real purpose is hidden from the profane under the guise of an 'art' movement.
A fast rising star of early Lettrisme, Ivan Chtcheglov, wrote the founding document of another Masonic organisation, the Situationist International. Formulary For A New Urbanism is a bold statement that makes typically ambiguous use of Masonic coded language in both its title and the main body of the text, by these means Chtcheglov laid the foundations for the Situationist's esoteric use of architectural and geographical imagery. The work begins with the observation that 'there is no longer any Temple of the Sun'. The Lettristes, and later the Situationists, were deeply disturbed by the fact that within 33rd degree Masonry the final syllable of the secret word JAHBULON was widely understood to refer to the Biblical city of On - more recently Heliopolis - during the period in which the monumental architecture erected to honour Ra, the Sun God, was re-dedicated to Osiris, the God of the Dead. As far as these post-war Parisian Qabalists were concerned, most Masons were making a fundamental theological error in taking their Light solely from Lucifer - referred to as Baal but corrupted to BUL within the secret word for God. Both the Lettristes and the Situationists felt that ON symbolised a broad period of Egyptian history and thus a sense of balance between darkness and light. The Neoist Alliance considers the Situationist obsession with harmony - usually expressed negatively through the use of what profane eyes misread as 'political' terminology clustered around the concept of 'reification' - to be one-sided. However, this does not blind us to the beautifully poetic way in which the SI developed the deeply coded form of Qabalah that Marx learnt from Hegel. Returning briefly to Chtcheglov, he later revealed that the 'secret chiefs' who controlled the Situationist International were based in Tibet, as had also been the case with a British forerunner of the group, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
From the above, it will be obvious to the attentive reader that the simultaneous realisation and suppression of Masonry will establish convincingly that in the many different - and necessarily mutually exclusive wills of wo/mankind - there is a common will that cannot be renounced. Since the notion of the 'total man' has been decisively exposed as an aristocratic fraud, our individual concerns are undoubtedly our only salvation. Three cheers for the Egoist who thinks only of herself! Once Masonry is realised and suppressed, social disintegration will be re-established at a higher level. From this time forth, religion in realising itself, will celebrate in feast its inability to reconcile darkness and light. The spontaneous appearance of division in unity and unity in division, make it unnecessary for the Lion to lie down with the Lamb. Humanity is the Devil, mean and corrupt, a liar blinded by her own deceptions - and so out will come the tricolour cockades and ribbons, decorating everything that is without consequence. Religion will separate itself from beauty too! Jacques de Molay, thou art avenged.
A document presented to individuals who have been invited to join the Neoist Alliance. On the basis of a number of texts of this type, Candidates for the Order are expected to make a carefully considered decision about whether or not they wish to be initiated into one of our Chapels. Candidates are then tested on this material before being allowed to proceed further into an understanding of our mysteries.
More about the Neoist Alliance
More on Neoism
The Empty Grave of Kurt Schwitters
Stewart Home's Funeral Instructions
Occulture
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The piece entitled "The Holborn Working" was first published in "Neoism, Plagiarism & Praxis" and the front cover of that book features a picture by Marc Atkins of Stewart Home at the working outside The Masonic Grand Lodge in London on 10 July 1984.
Beyond Chaos, Beyond Coherence
I. That desire should stand head and shoulders above all other mystifications as the most spectacularly effective agent of recuperation in our benighted epoch is the most sickeningly predictable achievement of a principle whose destruction has been the cornerstone of every half-baked orthodoxy from Buddhism to Christianity. With the disintegration of all religious systems in the eighteenth century, the means by which desire was foisted upon the human body underwent a dialectical inversion, enabling the rising bourgeois class to increase the repressive potential of this principle. Desire ceased to be a temptation that if indulged, led to suffering and/or damnation. Instead, it became an agent of the much vaunted gratifications of an illusory future against whose promises the actuality of the present is to be permanently deferred. Accordingly, the present is now rationally organised around the (future) fulfilment of desire. The success of this racket accounts for capital's apparent 'escape'. After two centuries in which to assimilate these facts, only an imbecile would stand up and wail about the continual domination of the past over the present (original sin). And, as if to prove their own idiocy, the self-styled (anti) militants of the (ultra) left continue to babble about the end of history. It should be patently obvious to everyone that under capitalism, desire acts as the central mechanism by which a non-existent future dominates not only the present but the past as well.
That desire should be held up as a 'revolutionary' principle by everyone from bedsit intellectuals such as 'the Pleasure Tendency' (whose name is sufficient to demonstrate the poverty of their theoretical practice) to the softest of the soft cops 'schizoanalysising' us with so called 'anti-psychiatry', serves to make patently obvious the distance between the proletarian movement and all ideologists.
Anyone who promotes the confusion of desire and sexuality, and then reifies this dichotomy into an acceptance of the separation between the present and life, stands in opposition to the revolutionary movement. Desire is the commodified form of sexual (non) relations. It is material proof of separation under capital, the principle by which the poverty and dissatisfactions of daily life are passed off as a 'natural' and 'universal' given.
II. When a group of self-styled 'radicals' such as 'the Pleasure Tendency' define 'art' as 'the commodity form of creativity' (Desire Value and The Pleasure Tendency), they pave the way for the reform of capital rather than its abolition. Art is any artefact, or even idea (conceptual art), packaged and sold as an expression of human values, the human spirit, the human condition &c. That art is valued economically is true enough, but what witless leftists such as 'the Pleasure Tendency' fail to understand is that 'art' is valued economically precisely because of the creativity (labour) put into it.
Creativity is labour raised to moral good, it lends credibility to the ridiculous notion that there is a 'universal' human need for 'expression'. The concept of creativity is just as repressive, moralistic and alienated as that of 'art'. That creativity should be held as the highest goal of human 'life' by self-styled 'revolutionaries' demonstrates the vast gulf between wannabe leaders and the impossible class.
III. The idea that (wo)man is somehow separated from nature is typical of the lies and anti-dialectical inversions propagated by apologists for the imagination. Nature does not exist somewhere outside us, it is a social construction, the BIG LIE propagated by so called 'creative' wo/men. For wo/men to build cities is as natural as birds building nests. If 'urban' environments are unnatural, then so are the lairs and burrows of other mammals. Bourgeois ideologists present our separation from 'nature' as a 'natural' fact that mirrors and explains all the social separations we suffer under capital. However, bourgeois ideologists cannot present us with the date at which our separation from nature occurred because the very idea of 'nature' is a monstrous fabrication. Ecology is the ultimate 'human' ideology. Green politics are based on notions of balance whose basic premises are drawn from the dualities induced by social separation. Ecologist equate change (which is inevitable) with destruction (a relative concept). Only a society fractured to its very core by capitalist social relations would allow concern about the 'future' (the 'desire' to be immortal) to dominate the present (life).
First published in Smile 9, London 1986.
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