Кое-что о научном материализме

At the age of 18, Marx wrote a poetic drama, which he called “Qulanem.” This strange name is an anagram of Emanuel, a Biblical name for Jesus (which means in Hebrew, “With us is God”); inversions of names mean antagonism to Christ and are used in black magic. The hero of the poem, Qulanem was clearly Marx’s self- portrait, his intellectual alter ego. The drama dealt with Satanism, homosexuality, and the ruining of the world.

“Qulanem” with its pompous language was a ridiculous attempt to rival great Goethe’s Faust. There is no logical course of events in “Qulanem”, says Payne (1968, 166), the characters are never clearly identified, speeches trail off. However, again and again in the play “we come upon themes which will stated later less poetically in his more famous works. The themes of corruption, damnation, doubt, mistrust are continually present, together with a special kind of sarcasm with a rough cutting edge... What is especially remarkable is the presence of a homosexual theme which is not implied but stated directly without any subterfuges.” (ibid, 68).

Qulanem and the handsome youth Lucindo (who is also the author’s double - a romantic part of Marx’s personality) are two Germans who are seemingly in deep love. “A rare alliance joins us to each other, one woven in the very depths of our hearts”. However, Lucindo is already corrupt. Though he has posed first as the innocent and troubled lover of Qulanem, he makes advances to another corrupt man, Pertini.

Marx, observes Payne (ibid, 69), evidently knew personally a good deal about corrupting boys, or else he had watched the process closely.

Of course, it is a matter of debate whether homosexual wishes attributed by Marx to his alter egos, Qulanem and Lucindo, were just fantasies or whether they reflected a real experience. But, taking into consideration the above-mentioned episode of his “deep friendship” with an older man, the second-guess sounds plausible. At that time, Marx didn’t see Jenny often, and when he did, they apparently had no sexual relations; during their engagement Jenny remained a virgin. Later Marx’s homosexuality was suppressed and replaced by his heterosexual experience with Jenny, but perhaps it remained in his psyche as a latent trend.
It may explain, at least in part, his tense and unstable relations with all his male friends - all his attachments had always shifted to hostility. This could be an expression of defense, a homosexual panic produced by closeness to the object.

“Qulanem” also contains other favorite Marx’s themes - mistrust, betrayal and revenge. Pertini is an old covert enemy of Qulanem; he wanted to use Lucindo as an instrument of his revenge. Pertini and Lucindo fight but, by fighting Lucindo, Pertini uses a cunning way to enslave the handsome youth. This is relatively easy. Lucindo accepts Pertini’s offer to take him to some secret place, where, far from Qulanem, they can enjoy one another. Lucindo exclaimed: “yes,” “take me where you will.”

The next theme is hate and a vision of destruction of the world. We see Qulanem working at a desk, surrounded, like Marx, with his papers scattered about. He asks himself whether he must ruin this miserable world unworthy of such a man with a great soul.
“My time has clean run out. The clock has stopped, the pygmy house has crumbled. Soon I shall embrace eternity to my breast and soon I shall howl gigantic curses on mankind.” This clearly represents Marx’s yearnings for deadly destruction, his annihilating judgment on the world, and his vision of humankind entering into the abyss of darkness (the Biblical equivalent of hell). That vision remains with him throughout the rest of his life. Who are the people, he asks himself? They are just “apes of a cold God,” eternally in bondage. He will demolish this miserable world.

And then the vague, unfinished theme of redemption paradoxically appears. He would like to consign the world and all the universes to perdition, but he would free those, who survived the world destruction, from the bondage.

Wasn’t it a prototype of Marx’s communist teaching?

In the last part of this tragedy Lucindo is confused because Pertini brings him to a beautiful girl, a “sweet child,” “an angel” Beatrice, who is, of course, of German descent. Lucindo is abandoning his homosexual inclination and falls in love with her. Like Marx in his poems dedicated to Jenny, Lucindo exclaimed, "‘My God, your virtue casts me to the ground. You speak as softly as the angels speak, and I’m ashamed, my heart is torn by the wild stream of long-forgotten passion.” And Beatrice, who left her previous attachment, is passionately in love with Lucindo. Repeating Jenny’s expressions of love to Marx, Beatrice calls Lucindo “my world, my God, my heart, my all”.

This section of the play may reflect the fact that Jenny’s love cured Marx from his homosexual inclinations.

[...]

Most of Marx’s poetic manuscripts were sent back to him by the publishers and he abandoned his hope to become a success as a poet, but he didn’t abandon his hope to become famous.

.........


Marx’s biographers make fun of an hypothesis that Karl Marx was initiated into a secret Satanist church. Yet, is this suggestion so absurd?

The title of Marx’s drama, “Qulanem,” was, as has already been indicated, an anagram of Emmanuel, a Biblical name for Jesus, which in Hebrew means “With us is God.” Such inversions of names is a common pattern in Satanic practice. In “Qualanem” Marx wrote, “I wish to avenge myself against the One who rules above.” It was a clear Satanic declaration of war against God.

“I have power within my youthful arms
To clench and crash you (i.e. personified humanity, BMS)
with tempestuous force,
While for us both the abyss yawns in darkness.
You will sink down and I shall follow laughing,
Whispering in your years, ‘Descend, come with me, friend’.”

The Bible, which Marx had studied during his student years, comments Wurmbrand (1979), “says that the devil will be bound by an angel and cast into the bottomless pit (‘abyssos’ in Greek: see revelation 20:3). Marx wishes to draw the whole of mankind into this pit... In ‘Qualanem’ Marx does what the devil does: he consigns the entire human race to damnation”(ibid, 12-15).

In the poem “Invocation of One in Despair” Marx exclaimed that he wishes to build his throne high overhead in order to emanate dread and agony. It reminds us of Lucifer’s rebellion against God.

In “The Player,” Marx holds,

“The hellish vapor rise and fill the brain,
Till I go mad and my heart Is utterly changed.
See this sword?
The prince of darkness Sold it to me.
For me beats the time and gives the signs,
Ever more boldly I play the dance of death.”

These lines take on special significance, says Wurmbrand, “when we learn that in the rites of higher initiation in the Satanist cult an ‘enchanted’ sword which ensures success is sold to the candidate. He pays for it by signing a covenant with blood taken from his wrists, that his soul will belong to Satan after death'’ (ibid, 12).

One of the reasons driving Marx out of heaven was the growing atheism among European intellectuals who read Darwin and Feuerbach. Most leading socialists of the time, for instance, Proudhon, as well as such Marx’s contemporaries and former collaborators as Bruno Bauer, Michail Bakunin, and Moses Hess, who declared the religion to be dead, were militant atheists.

Another motive for Marx’s transformation was personal - his enormous egotism, grandiosity and search for recognition, fame and power. These wishes were not satisfied. Marx blamed God for it and sought help from the devil.

Marx’s joining the secret Satanist church might have happened in Bonn when Marx was involved in heavy drinking, dueling and a questionable friendship with an unknown older man. From Marx’s correspondence we learn that he experienced, at that time, a kind of spiritual confusion and emotional crisis. However, it is only a guess.

Whether or not Marx was formally initiated into a Satanic cult, it is clear from his poems that he was thinking of Satan as his mighty ally. It is also obvious that he believed in his own demoniac power allowing him to control people. In the 1840s, during his confrontation with Heinzen, he alluded to this power stating that Heinzen was a helpless victim of his (i.e. Marx) spell.

Sergius Riis, a disciple of Marx, interviewed, after Marx’s death, Helen Demuth. She told him this amazing story about Marx, “He was a God-fearing man. When very sick, he prayed alone in his room before a row of lighted candles, tying a sort of a tape-measure around his forehead” (Riis, 1962). What was this ceremony? asks Wurmbrand (1979). “Jews when saying their prayers with philacteries on their forehead never have a row of candles before them. Could this have been some magic practice?” (ibid, 37).

Marx liked to tell his children various stories. One of his favorite stories was about a witch, named Hans Roeckle. Though he was a witch and magician, he was always in financial need. Therefore, he had to sell the beautiful things he had in his shop to the devil. Robert Payne has noticed that there can be very little doubt that those interminable stories were autobiographical.

Marx used the devil’s nicknames so willingly that it is difficult to avoid the impression that he identified with the demon. He signed his letters to daughters, “Old Nick” (a nickname of the devil). On April 14, 1856, he delivered to the Chartist audience one of the most “spine-chilling speeches”, as Payne calls it. He appealed to the coming revolutionary terror, the ruthless lynch law. And to whose authority did he refer? To “our old friend Robin Goodfellow” as a presiding spirit of the coming English revolution. Who was that friend? The 16th century evangelist, William Tyndal, used Robin Goodfellow as a name for the devil (Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1933, v. VIII, 735) and Marx knew about it (later, in folk tales Goodfellow was transformed into a prankish spirit).

Robert Payne observes that Marx, “had the devil’s view of the world, and the devil’s malignity. Sometimes he seemed to know that he was accomplishing works of evil.” In his later writings, Marx switched from poetic expressions of hate and damnation to the “scientific” descriptions of the coming socio-economic Armageddon.

Yet, the most important is this: as opposed to religion, in particular, the Judeo-Christian tradition, both Satanism and Marxism stress material aspects of life and moral relativism, or nihilism. They glorify scientific knowledge, human reason, self-reliance, the natural laws and deny spirituality. They rebel against God, challenge his ethical authority and advocate satisfaction of human needs - non spiritual, but mundane. In contrast to Christianity and Buddhism, Marxism and Satanism announce that their followers will attain their quest for happiness here on earth. Both deny such values as humility, obedience, asceticism, forgiveness, compassion, duty and recognize the right for hate, violence and revenge.

(B.M. Segal, "Karl Marx, the Apostle of Hate, and Marxist Legacy", 2002)