News2008NovemberArticle02

//[Geoff Sea comments on Julian Delasantellis' Asia Times Online essay "When the big guns fail" which began: "In the 1939 movie adaptation of L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, all the characters were in awe of the tremendous magisterial power of the Wizard. Dorothy, the friends she met on her journey (the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow), and all the other various citizens of Munchkinland, they all believed that it was the Wizard, in his castle in the Emerald City, who possessed the powers to make all their problems right, to make all their lives sweet. Then Dorothy's little dog Toto pulled away the curtains that concealed the Wizard's supposed magic machine, and found only smoke and mirrors; as for the Wizard himself, he was just a rather ordinary little man." IB]//

On the Wizard of Oz imagery, it has long been a pet theory of literary critics that the book was an intentional populist allegory. By this interpretation, the "yellow brick road" represented the false path of the gold standard, leading to Oz (an ounce of gold), with the Wizard indeed standing for the chief of the federal treasury.

Dorothy came from Kansas, the birthplace of Great Plains populism, and her consorts were the tin man, the scarecrow, and the cowardly lion -- representing, respectively, the chief elements of the populist coalition of the 1880s and 1890s -- northern workers, midwestern farmers, and southern blacks. The impediments to a populist victory were that the workers lacked the "heart" to enter into coalition, the farmers lacked the "brain" needed for strategic action, and the blacks of Reconstruction lacked the "courage" to rise up in revolt.

It all seems so clear.

The Wicked Witch of the West represented the railroads -- slain by the populist tempest -- leaving alive the Wicked Witch of the East, who represented the Wall Street banks. The Good Witch of the North represented northern populism, in this view, sprinkling the stardust of "free silver" to get one "back home" from foreclosure to reclaimed Kansas soil.

This whole line of interpretation fell into disfavor, when biographers determined that Baum was by no means a populist, and after Baum himself disavowed any such intention in his work.

So why does the allegorical interpretation fit the book so well?

L. Frank Baum was an ardent spiritualist, a member of the Theosophical Society and follower of Madame Blavatsky. His children's book about Oz, published nine years after Blavatsky's death, was indeed an allegory, but of a different sort based on the Theosophical notion of the afterlife journey, converted into universal archetypal terms so to be accessible to children, who are engaged in grappling with the meaning of death. And that is why Baum was so upset with the base political interpretation of his work.

The story begins with Dorothy's lightly encrypted physical death from a Kansas tornado. Her spirit lives, of course, and travels the transmigratory path that all disembodied spirits do, in search of reincarnation. At first, she follows the "yellow brick road" toward "the Land of Oz," which indeed represented the false path of salvation by material means, that is, the path of gold. The Wizard represents the material alchemist or mephistophelian sorcerer, whose magic is aimed at the crass transmutation of lead into gold, but who cannot provide real help on the spiritual quest toward resurrection of the soul.

That help cannot come from any outside wizardry, but can only come from within ourselves, with assistance from companion souls who also are on spiritual quest. (Let's lay prefigurations of the Obama message aside.)

The Good Witch of the North represents that eternal maternal guidance, telling us always to remain true to ourselves, to "get back home," that is, to be reborn on earth. The theosophists had borrowed heavily from the symbolism of freemasonry, the rituals of which reenact the rites of resurrection, as borrowed from ancient and medieval alchemy, and from the older cosmology of northerm shamanism. In all these systems, the afterlife transmigration is seen as a northward journey through the planets and stars, toward the northern celestial pole, where the soul achieves its renovation and prepares for the journey back to earth.

We still incorporate this system into our folk beliefs, in innumerable ways. We tell children that new babies are delivered to earth by storks returning from summer roosts. Santa Claus, the patron saint of children, resides at the North Pole, and we place a star representing the North Star atop our Christmas trees, which themselves are symbols of "rebirth" in midst of winter, at the time that Nature' annual cycle is reborn, the New Year.

Indeed, a phenomenal number of the English words for the process of death and rebirth -- burial, berm, burrow, bier, bride, childbearing, birth, born, and the verbs to bare, to bear and to bring, etc. -- derive originally from the common transmutational earth-sky name of the two animals associated with this lifecycle transport of spirits -- the bird and the bear of the Great Bear constellation. (Demonstrating that this idea predates the principal Asiatic peopling of North America, in Algonquian cosmology, Ursa Major represents seven birds hunting a bear. We are talking of a belief system that predates Christianity by at least nine thousand years.)

It is within this widely-shared spiritual system that gold (i.e. sun worship) represents a false path, while the true path leads to the North Star and is colored silver. The Masons were the ones who gave modern political meaning to this symbolism. The all-seeing eye atop the cardinally-aligned Great Pyramid on the US dollar bill, represents the deity, or deified power, residing at the celestial North Pole, and that is clarified on the masonic apron given by Lafayette to George Washington. On that apron, the sun and moon are depicted to either side of the all-seeing eye, to ensure that those inferior bodies are not mistaken for the true goal of the afterlife journey.

Washington DC was planned by Masons as a cardinally-aligned square, like the base of the Great Pyramid but tipped so its northern point (pointing to the North Star) lies precisely on the 39th parallel -- the parallel from which the northern constellations are best observed. (The great ancient astronomical centers of southern Ohio, Cahokia, Pyonyang, Samarkand-Dushanbe, and ancient Greece were all arrayed along the same line of latitude, for the same basic reason.)

The star wand wielded by the Good Witch of the North, as she sprinkles stardust, is nothing but a Master Mason's wand of the precise type that George Washington wielded when presiding over his lodge. (I have a 19th century version.) The silver star at the end represents the North Star with it power of the soul's transmutation -- the power to get you back home after you die.

Conveniently, the North Star became the symbol of the Underground Railroad movement, and not only because the star was a practical guide along the path to freedom. Quilts made to send signals to slaves awaiting liberation encoded the North Star and the Bear Paw as code patterns, and a Negro spiritual called "Follow the Drinking Gourd" was a coded reference to the Big Dipper -- or the Great Bear. Follow the arrow of the bear paws to be reborn free -- a very ancient theme.

Thus the principal abolitionist paper was named The North Star, and the auditorium at the Freedom Center in Cincinnati is called the North Star Lounge. The Republican Party of Lincoln adopted a single five-pointed star as its principal emblem, for this reason, and that remains the most common symbol of the party today, incorporated into the McCain-Palin campaign logo.

The American populist movement fully embraced this symbolism in a Christianized form, and that is what gave religious fervor to the crusade for free silver against the gold standard. The crescendo of this political expropriation of shamanic symbolism was, of course, William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech, delivered at the Democratic National Convention in 1896. The real brilliance of this oratorical attack on gold-standard monetarism was Bryan's evocation of age-old invection against heliolatry as a worshipping of false gods. That was a mere four years before Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Baum didn't take his symbolism from the populists. Rather, the populists and the theosophists were likewise mining a vein of imagery older than the Ice Age, which had come to undergird American political iconography in various ways by the end of Reconstruction.

By the time of the film version in 1939, after the experience of the Great Depression, it was natural to interpret Baum's allegory in terms of political economy, more than in terms of the intended spiritualism. Thus the filmmakers enhanced the degree to which the story seemed a commentary on monetary policy. That transformation had already been accomplished for the filmmakers through the writings and rantings of Frederick Soddy.

Soddy had started out as a physical chemist in England with a historical interest in medieval alchemy. In 1900 -- the same year as the Wizard's publication -- Soddy began the study of radioactivity in the Montreal laboratory of Ernst Rutherford. It was Soddy who discovered and named the atomic Transmutation Theory, which he came to believe was a literal vindication of the alchemical idea that base metals could be transmuted into gold.

Humbly, Soddy did not believe that he had freshly discovered the transformation of uranium into thorium, radium and lead. Rather, he thought he had rediscovered a natural fact known to ancient scientists and civilizations. He speculated that the story of Atlantis related to an ancient society that had destroyed itself with atomic weaponry, and he invented the antisemitic libel that the ancient Hebrews had also known the secret of transmutation (stolen from Egyptian alchemists) and had built an atomic or radiological weapon that was kept in the Ark of the Covenant. (This wacky idea is now believed by the Raelian cult, and it found its way into the penultimate scene of the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark.)

It was at that point that Soddy went a bit off the deep end. He gave up chemistry altogether for political economy, and published scores of widely-disseminated books and pamphlets about the evils of the international banking system. His North American sojourn had acquainted him with the populist economic writings of Henry George, which he imported back to Britain, becoming co-founder of the proto-fascist British People's Party. The essence of Soddy's paranoia was that if the world monetary system is based on a gold standard, and if Jews control the banking system, and if Jews know the secret of metallic transmutation -- well you can fill in the rest. Soddy literally feared that cabals of Jewish alchemist-bankers could produce gold at will, and thereby control the world.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Soddy, as a Nobel Prize winner and prolific author, had a profound influence. He strongly influenced the fascistic populist parties of Britain, France and Germany. His economic rantings about banking conspiracies were taken whole-cloth by the Nazis. And his antisemitism fed that of Henry Ford in writing perhaps the most pernicious antisemitic tract of all time, The International Jew, first published in the 1920s. Soddy also went on lecture tours of the United States to spread his screed.

Whether the makers of the film version of The Wizard of Oz in 1939 had read or heard Soddy directly is beside the point. The idea of the "internationalist Jewish banker" controlling world events from behind the curtains, through his control of precious metals and especially gold, and manufacturing periodic economic crises thereby, had become firmly planted in the popular mind. As had the idea that this threat had to be combatted by a new nativist coalition rooted in the Kansas blood and soil. Visual imagery enhanced the "banking-conspiracy" version of the Wizard story, like the stereotypically Jewish crooked nose given to the evil witch who represented Wall Street -- a feature now so ingrained we assume it's some natural witchy trait. (The Good Shiksa Witch of the North was given an "Aryan" straight nose, of course.)

And that is how the modern image of the Wizard behind the curtains came to be. Just as an aside.

Geoffrey Sea Sargents Station, Ohio