Dark Intrusions

 Foreword

By Colin Wilson

Still in his twenties, Louis Proud has demonstrated with this book that he is one of the most acute commentators on the paranormal to appear in recent years. His starting point is the condition called sleep paralysis – shortened to SP – when someone wakes in the middle of the night and finds himself unable to move; a state that may last seconds or minutes.

When I mentioned it to my wife this morning, she said: “But surely that’s purely a physical condition?” The answer is that it may be, but often is not.

Many “psychics” experience it as a prelude to an OBE, an out of the body experience. For example, Robert Monroe, founder of the Monroe Institute in Virginia, began to have them it in the late 1960s, when he was conducting personal experiments in “sleep learning.” He began to experience what he called “vibrations” on the point of sleep. One day his hand, which was touching the floor, seemed to go through the carpet so he could feel the floor space below. And soon Monroe was having full-fledged OBEs. Obviously, the “vibrations” were a kind of disconnection from his senses, as if his “spirit” was separating from his physical body. Or – using a more down-to-earth analogy – a car had slipped out of gear and into ‘”neutral.”

Louis Proud began to have similar experiences when he was 17. He says it is as if there is a malevolent presence nearby, sometimes as if something is squatting on the chest to prevent the sleeper from moving. Hallucinations, both visual and auditory, may also be experienced. Like my friend Stan Gooch, author of Total Man, Louis Proud has even had sexual encounters when in the SP state.

That certainly sounds as far from “normal” experience as one can get. Yet it is important to emphasize that many such experiences have a basis in normality. What makes Louis Proud’s book so interesting is that he is obviously the kind of person who often has experiences that are beyond the normal. Yet his book is not a collection of weird oddities, but an exploration of the world that lies behind our eyes, yours as well as mine.

It seems clear to me that Louis Proud has been intrigued by his own paranormal experiences and is therefore more “open” to a remarkable range of them. So what he has done here is to gather together many strange experiences, like the Enfield poltergeist, Whitley Strieber’s “contact” experiences, Stan Gooch’s hypnogogic visions, Trevor Constable’s UFO-related discarnates, Joe Fisher’s mendacious and deceitful ghosts, Van Dusen’s auditory hallucinations, and Dion Fortune’s alarming contacts with an ill-disposed “witch,” to make a book that grips the reader from beginning to end.

It seems to me immensely sad that the world should be polarized into hard-line skeptics – like “The Amazing Randi” – and people like myself who are perfectly willing to consider the paranormal as a reasonable possibility. Which is why, as I read Louis Proud’s book, I began to feel a rising excitement, and the feeling: “This man is so obviously sincere that a reader would need to be pretty prejudiced to dismiss it all as self-delusion.”

It gives me immense pleasure to be allowed to introduce a writer who will, I suspect, become widely admired for his enviable brilliance and clarity.

Introduction

When I was seventeen years old something changed within my mind; a shift of awareness occurred, and I became receptive to the presence of invisible beings – and I still am. Call them spirits if you like. Whenever I hear, feel, see, and sense these beings, I am always in an altered state of consciousness. Never am I fully awake. I do not have, and have never had, any kind of mental illness, nor am I on medication for any reason whatsoever; nor do I take recreational drugs.

The condition I suffer from is called sleep paralysis (SP), and it’s not all that uncommon. About 25-to-40 percent of the population will undergo an SP episode at least once in the course of their life. The experience may be so minor, or may have occurred so many years ago, that it’s now entirely forgotten, or remains but a dim memory. For some of us, however, these experiences occur frequently and cannot be forgotten. They have had, and continue to have, a profound impact on our spirituality.

So what is SP, and how is it associated with things that go bump in the night?

Explained simply, SP is a condition whereby a person experiences temporary paralysis of the body shortly after waking up (known as hypnopompic paralysis), and, less commonly, shortly after falling asleep (known as hypnagogic paralysis). Although their minds are reasonably awake and alert, they find themselves unable to move their bodies – sometimes for as long as a few minutes, though usually just for a few seconds.

The condition is closely related to the normal paralysis that occurs during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep – called muscle atonia – in which the body is paralyzed to inhibit a person from enacting dream activity, such as running while dreaming about running; this prevents us from causing ourselves physical harm. Some scientists and physicians believe it’s a normal part of the sleep cycle. Generally, when SP occurs, the brain has awakened from an REM state, yet bodily paralysis is still taking place. In some instances, the sufferer may experience hypnopompic or hypnagogic hallucinations, which can be auditory, tactile, or visual in nature.

So there you have it – a neat and succinct explanation of SP. If you were to look up the subject in an encyclopedia or textbook, you would probably come across an explanation much like the one above. To this day, the phenomenon, particularly its spiritual side, remains little understood. Any “expert” in these matters will smugly tell you that there is nothing more to SP than some temporary abnormal brain activity; that the hallucinations of SP sufferers are simply a product of the imagination. By holding such a view, however, one is almost denying the very existence of the phenomenon. My use of the term “hallucination” is only for simplicity’s sake. I do not consider these experiences, for the most part, to be hallucinations.

During an SP attack, a person often feels that there is a malevolent presence nearby – sometimes perceived as a demon or evil spirit – and that this being is holding you down by resting on your chest, preventing you from moving or fully waking up. The sensation is very uncomfortable and quite stifling. It is not uncommon, moreover, for a person to feel that you are being violently attacked by this “entity.” Being choked, being bitten, or having your limbs twisted are just a few of the sensations that people report.

The reader may be familiar with a famous painting by the British artist Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), called The Nightmare (1781), which shows a young woman lying on her bed, asleep, with a large hairy demon sitting on her chest. Floating above the foot of her bed is the ghostly head of a rather goofy-looking horse. The painting almost certainly depicts an SP attack. Was Fuseli an SP victim, I wonder? I wouldn’t be surprised if he was, though I guess we’ll never know.

As far as auditory hallucinations are concerned, the types of sounds and voices that SP sufferers hear vary widely. Buzzing, grinding, whirring, whistling, and ringing sounds are commonly reported. These are sometimes accompanied by strange bodily sensations, such as a tingling or numbness. Also reported are sounds of a “technological” nature. Siren noises and telephone noises are two typical examples.

Then there are the voices, some of them indistinct and unintelligible, others clear and comprehensible. For some strange reason, the latter are usually simple commands. Psychologist J. Allan Cheyne of the University of Waterloo (UW) in Canada, who, within the last decade or so, has collected in excess of 28,000 tales of SP, runs a popular SP webpage, from which I have obtained, for this book, numerous quotes by SP sufferers. On this webpage, one woman reported the following experience: “As I listened I could sense this ‘thing’ walk or hover over my head – very close directly over my ear. It said ‘Freya!’…The voice continued: ‘I’ve got work for you to do!’ Then I listened as the presence hovered for a few seconds more and moved across the room to sit on my roommate’s bed.”

It’s interesting to note that the sounds and voices people hear during SP episodes are, for the most part, distinctly experienced as being external to the hearer, rather than thought-like and “in the head.” Generally, they are not taken to be self-generated. In comparison to auditory hallucinations experienced during SP episodes, visual hallucinations are reported far less frequently and are often less vivid. The images people see are predominately indefinite and insubstantial. Often people see “shadowy” beings floating around the room or standing near the bed. Most of the entities I see are dark, shadowy serpentine creatures, with long, thrashing tails. I also see grey orbs of various sizes, which look like balls of liquid smoke. I will explain more about this later.

These days, SP is used to explain – and often unfairly dismiss – a significant number of nocturnal paranormal experiences, from alien abduction episodes to out-of-body experiences (OBEs). The phenomenon has had a profound impact on religion and mythology throughout the ages, not just in the West, but all over the world. Some have speculated that in medieval Europe, the belief in incubi and succubi, as well as other demons, and possibly even witchcraft, may have resulted from the SP phenomenon.

Although these days we refer to a nightmare as a fearful or disturbing dream, the meaning of the word has changed, and since around 1300 the word has been used in connection with the SP phenomenon. In England during the Middle Ages, to have a “nightmare” was to have an SP experience – an experience attributed to the influences of a “mare,” a demonic being thought to attack people in the night, causing a sensation of pressure on the chest.

The mare – or mara – also exists in Scandinavian mythology and is described as a malignant female wraith. This immaterial being is believed to be capable of moving through a keyhole or the crack under a door. Once inside the victim’s bedroom, she seats herself on their chest, then “rides” them. The sleeping victim is said to experience “nightmares” as a result.

Today, defined as having a worn or gaunt appearance through illness, lack of sleep, etc., the term “haggard” also relates to SP, for it was once believed that witches or hags attacked men in the night by riding on their chests as they slept. In Chinese folklore, SP is believed to be a form of minor body possession caused by forces of the dead, though it is said not to harm the victim in any real way. The Chinese name for SP translates as “ghost pressing on body,” or “ghost pressing on bed.”

References to SP-type phenomena can be found all over the world, in Japan, Thailand, Mexico, Greece, Indonesia, the Philippines, Hawaii, Russia, and Hungary. The list goes on. In most of these countries, spirits and other supernatural beings are thought to be behind SP episodes. Having had hundreds of SP experiences over the years, I can easily understand why this is the case. To become a victim of SP is to realize that invisible, non-physical beings do exist.

Apparently, it wasn’t until the publication of David J. Hufford’s groundbreaking 1982 book The Terror That Comes in the Night that researchers began to realize that SP affects the general population and is not exclusively a symptom of narcolepsy. Narcolepsy, as defined by The American Heritage Dictionary, “is a disorder characterized by sudden and uncontrollable, though often brief, attacks of deep sleep, sometimes accompanied by paralysis and hallucinations.” It should be mentioned, too, that SP experiences differ from both night terrors and nocturnal panic attacks.

Some researchers make a distinction between the types of SP episodes experienced by the general population and those experienced by the narcoleptic population. In his book Wrestling with Ghosts, sleep researcher Jorge Conesa Sevilla sometimes uses the term Isolated Sleep Paralysis (ISP) to refer to the SP experiences of people “in otherwise normal populations without other symptoms, even when the SP experience is a once-in-a-life time event.”

To say that SP is a subject about which there is much confusion would be putting it mildly. The fact that it was previously thought to be something that only narcoleptics suffered from is proof of this. And although it’s beginning to gain acceptance as a fairly common condition, it remains little understood. So to help clarify matters, I need to stress the point that there are various forms of SP, such as SP accompanied by hypnagogic/hypnopompic hallucinations (sometimes called hypnagogic SP), and what one might term non-hypnagogic SP, or simply SP. If you were to undergo the latter type of episode, the only thing you would experience is bodily paralysis. There would be no hallucinations, and, most likely, the experience wouldn’t leave much of an impression.

Some people, such as myself, experience episodes on a fairly regular basis and are sometimes referred to as chronic SP suffers. Others have episodes very infrequently – say every five years – and are therefore unlikely to think of themselves as having a disorder. The specific form of SP that I have – and which some alleged victims of alien abduction probably have also – is known as Recurrent Isolated Sleep Paralysis (RISP). RISP, as defined by Jean-Christophe Terrillon and Sirley Marques-Bonham in a paper published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, “is a rarer variant of sleep paralysis characterized by frequent episodes or a complex of sequential episodes of generally longer duration, and in particular by the range and intensity of the perceptual phenomena occurring during episodes.” Explained simply, RISP sufferers undergo, on a regular basis, generally long SP episodes, frequently accompanied by hypnagogic/hypnopompic hallucinations.

Although people are most likely to develop SP during their adolescent years – around the age of sixteen or seventeen – as happened to me, it is not uncommon to experience such episodes in childhood, nor is it impossible for a person to develop the condition at this age. I myself have vague memories of childhood SP episodes, some of them involving clear auditory hallucinations. I remember telling my brother when I was about six and he was about seven that “God” had spoken to me during the night. I was not asleep at the time, I insisted, but had just woken up. My brother said something to the effect of “Yeah, right!,” and I quickly forgot the incident, only to remember it about ten years later, when I developed RISP in my teens. The incidence of SP tends to decline as people move into their twenties, becoming significantly lower after the age of around thirty.

The condition is thought to be hereditary because it’s often shown to occur in families over many generations. This might explain why one of my uncles is, as far as I can determine, a chronic SP sufferer, as he claims to have had countless nocturnal visits from grey aliens and other entities. An artist of some note, my uncle is obsessed with fairly tale-type themes and frequently paints white rabbits dressed as people, gathered in the forest under the moonlight, surrounding nude, vulnerable girls. Some of these artworks remind one of Alice in Wonderland. Some of his other paintings feature fairies, cherubs, and other supernatural beings, many of them glowing.

Statistics for the prevalence of SP in the general population vary widely from study to study – depending, of course, in which country the study was conducted, how it was designed, what ages the participants were, and various other factors. Differing from the statistics mentioned earlier – that 25-to-40 percent of the population will undergo an SP episode at least once in the course of their life – are those provided by the 1990 International Classification of Sleep Disorders (ICSD), which states that the figure is 40-to-60 percent. On the University of Waterloo’s SP webpage, the figure given is 25-to-30 percent. The ICSD further states that SP experiences are frequent in about 3-to-6 percent of the population. I ask, once again, that the reader bear in mind that not all SP experiences feature hallucinations, and that these statistics apply equally to those who see flying green goblins and have full-blown OBEs, as well as to those who experience nothing but short bouts of uncomfortable paralysis.

In a study carried out in 1999 by the American Academy of Neurology, which surveyed the sleeping habits of 8,100 German and Italian participants, nearly 30 percent of people with severe SP were found to experience hallucinations during their episodes. Taking these figures, as well as those provided by the ICSD, in concert, one can easily calculate the percentage of RISP sufferers (chronic SP sufferers who experience hallucinations) in the general population, which is 0.9-1.8 percent. Not wanting to get bogged down in terminology, I will be using the term SP to refer to a whole range of such experiences, from those that involve hallucinations to some that don’t. This seems to be the norm these days, anyway, with SP being used as a very broad term. Because, as explained in The Abduction Enigma, written by Kevin Randle, Russ Estes, and William Cone, “there is no single, simple definition of what sleep paralysis is,” I feel it necessary to include a precise and comprehensive definition of the phenomenon, as given by R. J. Campbell in his dictionary of psychiatric terms:

“A benign neurological phenomenon, more probably due to some temporary dysfunction of the reticular activating system consisting of brief episodes of inability to move and/or speak when awakening or less commonly, when falling asleep. There is no accompanying disturbance of consciousness, and the subject has complete recall for the episode. The incidence of the phenomenon is highest in younger age groups (children and young adults) and much higher in males (80%) than females. It occurs in narcolepsy… The terms by which the phenomenon has been known are nocturnal hemiplegia, nocturnal paralysis, sleep numbness, delayed psychomotor awakening, cataplexy of awakening and post dormital chalastic fits.”

This book is an attempt to make sense of the SP phenomenon from an alternative, non-mechanistic perspective. Those of a skeptical disposition, who have little or no time for the occult or paranormal, will find nothing of value in this book. Only those who already have an interest in such subjects and are equipped with an open, but discerning, mind, are likely to enjoy this book and gain something from it. My hope is that SP sufferers like myself, who are fed up with the official explanation of SP, will find comfort within these pages and hopefully some answers, too.

Part one of Dark Intrusions deals primarily with the SP phenomenon and is rife with descriptions of my own SP episodes. Putting these experiences into words was by no means easy. When it comes to describing experiences of a paranormal nature – experiences that are of another realm and of another mode of consciousness – one is extremely limited by language. I ask that the reader bear this in mind. Please understand, moreover, that I am not recounting dreams, that what occurs during an SP episode goes far beyond anything that occurs during a dream and is a wholly different experience. If any of my SP experiences read like dreams, it’s because I’ve failed to describe them adequately.

Part two of Dark Intrusions expands on what I deal with in part one, placing the subject of SP in a much broader context. Many of the topics explored in this section – among them, poltergeist disturbances, mediumship, channeling, alien abduction, Spiritism, OBEs, and shamanism – may strike the reader as largely unrelated, and one is likely to wonder what any of them have to do with SP. I can assure the reader, however, that there is a method in my madness. Had I not examined the SP phenomenon from as many different angles as possible, what I now know about the subject would be very limited indeed. Furthermore, it has long been my understanding that there is no subject in the paranormal/occult field that isn’t related to another and which doesn’t supplement another. Having a comprehensive knowledge of such matters allows one to recognize this truth.

I have to admit that much of what I’ve written herein has been colored – though not dogmatically so – by my interest in Spiritism, an offshoot of Spiritualism, which began in France in the mid-1800s. I make frequent references to two Spiritist texts – The Spirits’ Book and The Mediums’ Book – and quote extensively from them. Not until I’d finished writing Dark Intrusions did I realize that it had such a strong Spiritist flavor. I even felt compelled to include a chapter on Chico Xavier, Brazil’s most famous Spiritist medium.

It would be accurate to say that this book, rather than being about SP, is essentially about the nature of incorporeal beings and the interactions that take place between them and us. I regard these matters as a kind of science – by no means a definite science, but a science nonetheless. It is my firm belief that we can bring the occult into the light, that what is classified as paranormal or supernatural need not remain elusive and incomprehensible.

One will notice, throughout the chapters of this book, a great many number of consistencies between the work of one paranormal researcher or shaman/occultist and that of another – consistencies that cannot be attributed to the sharing of information, or, for that matter, coincidence. These consistencies illuminate spiritual facts, and I think it is important that one takes notice of them. Only by piecing these facts together – rather than relying on purely subjective observations – can we begin to make any real progress with our understanding of the “spirit realm” and its inhabitants. It is my hope that this book is a step in the right direction.

DARK INTRUSIONS

An Investigation into the Paranormal Nature of Sleep Paralysis Experiences

By Louis Proud

Evola on Carlo Michelstaedter

Carlo Michelstaedter353   is one of those writers of the modern epoch who affirm the individual’s need to rise up to being, to an absolute value, by putting an end to all those compromises which mask an ἄβιοϛ βίοϛ,354   a life that is not life. Through this one brings oneself to that which man fears more than every other thing: facing oneself, measuring oneself in relation to “being.” Michelstaedter calls the state of being “persuasion,” and defines it essentially as a negation of correlations. When the I places the principle of its very consisting not in itself, but in the “other,” when its life is conditioned by things and by relations, where there is subjection to dependencies and to need—in this kind of existence, there can be no “persuasion,” but rather only the privation of value. Value is only an existing in oneself, not asking another for the ultimate principle and the sense of life itself: it is “autarchy” in the Hellenic sense.355   Thus not only the whole of an existence made of needs, of affects, of “sociality,” of intellectualistic adornment and the like is included in the sphere of non-value, but also the corporal organism and the system of nature itself (the experience of which is understood as generated, in its indefinite spatio-temporal development, by the incessant gravitation with which deficiency pursues being; however, insofar as being is sought outside of itself, deficiency will never succeed in possessing it).

The I which believes itself to be insofar as it persists, that is insofar as it ignores the fullness of an actual possession and carries its “persuasion” back to a subsequent moment, on which, moreover, it makes itself dependent; the I which in every present flees itself; the I which one does not have but seeks, and desires; the I which however in no future can ever be, since the future is the very symbol of its privation, the shadow that runs alongside the one that flees, at a given distance from the body of its reality, which at every point maintains itself unchanged—such an I is, for Michelstaedter, the meaning of daily life, but also of “non-value,” of the “must-not-be.” Against such a situation, “persuasion” postulates rather consisting, resisting existential deficiency with all one’s own life and at every point, never ceding to the life that is lacking to itself by searching beyond or in the future. It postulates not asking, but grasping “being” in one’s very fist: not to “go” but to endure. While existential deficiency accelerates time in its continuous anxiety for the future, and barters a present emptiness on a future one, the stability of the individual pre-occupies infinite time in the now, and arrests time. Its firmness is a dizzying slipstream for those who are still in the current. “Every one of the instants of such a man is a century of the life of the others—so long as he makes of himself a flame and reaches a consisting in the ultimate present.”356   To clarify this point, it is important to comprehend the nature of correlation which is contained in its premises: given that the world is understood as generated away from the right direction and toward deficiency, of which it is almost the tangible incarnation, it is an illusion to think that “persuasion” might be realized through an abstract and subjective consisting in that value (as in Stoicism) which has being (experienced nature) against it, such that, though it has no value, it is. He who tends toward absolute persuasion must arise instead to a cosmic responsibility. That is: I must not flee from my deficiency—which is mirrored by the world—but take it onto me, adjust myself to its weight and redeem it. For which Michelstaedter states: “You cannot call yourself persuaded as long as something is, that is not persuaded,” and he hints at persuasion as being “at the extreme consciousness of him who is one with things, who has all things in himself:  ἒ ουνεχές.”357  

To clarify Michelstaedter’s central problem, one can relate the concept of insufficiency to the Aristotelian concept of the imperfect act.358   The imperfect or “impure” act is an act of potencies that do not arrive in themselves (κάθ αὐτο)359   to the act, and for this have need of an other. This is the case, for instance, of sensory perception, whose potency of perceiving is not sufficient in and of itself: by itself this potency does not produce perception, but has need of some correlated object. Now, the fundamental point which connects this to Michelstaedter’s position is the following: in the transcendental realm the imperfect act resolves the privation of the I only apparently; in reality, it reconfirms it. To formulate an example through comparison, the I is thirsty. As long as it drinks it confirms the state of him who is not sufficient in his own life but who, in order to live, has need of “other”; water and the rest are naught but the symbols of his deficiency. (On this point one must fix one’s attention: one does not desire because there is a privation of being, but there is a privation of being because one desires—and, in the second place: there is not a desire, for example that of drinking, because there are determinate things, for example water, but the desired things, just as the privation of being which urges toward them, are created at one and the same point from out of the relative desire. Desire is, therefore, the prius360   which creates the correlation as its two ends, namely privation and corresponding object, or in our example thirst and water.) And insofar as one feeds of it and asks one’s life of it, the I feeds only of its own privation and endures in this privation, fleeing from that “pure” or perfect act, from that eternal water, of which speak the very words of Christ,361    and wherein every thirst, and likewise every other privation, would be forever conquered. This yearning, this dark emesis,362   which carries the I toward the external—toward the “other”—is that which generates in experience the system of finite and contingent reality. Persuasion, which burns such emesis in the state of absolute consisting, of the pure being-in-itself, has therefore also the sense of “consummation” of the world that reveals itself to me.

The sense of such a consummation is clarified by arriving at consequences which Michelstaedter has not completely succeeded in bringing out.

Before all, to say that I must not flee from my deficiency signifies, among other things, that I must recognize myself as the creative function of an experienced world. The justification of so-called transcendental idealism (that is the philosophical system according to which the world is posited by the I) might follow from this, based on a moral imperative. But according to this premise the world is considered as a negation of value. A second point thus proceeds from the general postulate of redeeming the world, of taking on its deficiency—a second point which is as much a practical postulate as a moral one: the very negation of value itself must be recognized, in a certain way, as a value. This is important. Indeed, if I consider the impulse which has generated the world as a pure, irrational datum, it is evident that persuasion, insofar as it is conceived as the negation of that datum, comes to depend on it, and so is not absolutely sufficient to itself but depends on the “other,” on the negation which permits it to affirm itself. In such a case, that is, in the case in which the same yearning is not reclaimed as the affirmation of value but remains entirely a datum, persuasion would therefore not at all be persuasion—the initiatory mystery would inevitably reduce perfection to an illusion. For which it is necessary to admit as a moral postulate that the same antithesis participates, in a certain way, in value. But in what way? Such a problem carries us to admit a certain dynamism in the concept of persuasion. Indeed it is obvious that if persuasion is not reduced to a pure, unrelated sufficiency (that is, to a state), but if it is rather sufficiency insofar as it is negation of an insufficiency (that is, an act, a relation), the antithesis certainly has value and is explained: the I at first must pose privation, non-value, if only under the condition that it is posed precisely so that it might be negated, because this act of negation, and it alone, generates the value of persuasion. But what does it mean to negate the antithesis—which in this context is equivalent to saying, nature? One recalls that for Michelstaedter nature is a non-value insofar as it is symbol and incarnation of the flight of the I from actual possession of itself, insofar as it is correlative to an imperfect or “impure” act in the sense mentioned above. One does not treat therefore of negating this or that determination of the existent, because with such negation one would strike only at the effect, the consequence, not the transcendental root, of non-value; nor even of eliminating in general every action, because the antithesis is not the action in general, but rather the action insofar as it is flight from oneself, insofar as it is “going”—and it is not a given that every action necessarily has such a sense. What must be resolved is rather the passive, heteronomous, extroverted mode of action. Now negation in such a mode is constituted by the action sufficient to itself, which is also potency. To live every act in perfect possession and so to transfigure the whole of the forms until these do not express anything but the very body of an infinite potestas363  —let us say, of the absolute Individual made of potency—this is therefore the sense of cosmic and, (at the same time), existential redemption. Just as the concretization of “rhetoric” is the development of the world of dependency and of necessity, so the concretization of persuasion is the development of a world of autarchy and of dominion, and the point of pure negation is only the neutral point between the two phases.

The development of Michelstaedter’s views on that which one might call a “magical idealism” appears therefore to proceed according to a logical continuity. Michelstaedter in a certain way however remained fixed in an indeterminate negation, and this, in great part, because he did not consider sufficiently that the finite and the infinite should not be referred to a particular object or action, but that they are two modes of living any object or action. The true Lord does not in general have need of negating (in the sense of nullifying) nor, under the pretext of rendering it absolute, of reducing life to an undifferentiated unity, almost, if you please, in a species of lightning flash: the act of potency—the which is not an act of desire or of violence—rather than destroying perfect possession, attests it and confirms it. But Michelstaedter, for the very intensity in which he lived the need of absolute value, did not know how to give this value a concrete body and simultaneously to develop it in the doctrine of potency; the which perhaps is related to the tragic end of his mortal existence.364  

However Michelstaedter himself affirmed that “we do not want to know in relation to what things a man is determined, but rather we want to know how he is determined,” which is to say, beyond the act, one treats of the form or value according to which the individual is to be seen. In fact every logical relation is in a certain way indeterminate, and value is a higher dimension in which it is specified. One of Michelstaedter’s merits is his reaffirmation of the importance of value in the metaphysical order: indeed “rhetoric” and the “path of persuasion” are distinguishable not from a purely logical point of view, but rather by the point of view of value alone. It is very important here that Michelstaedter in a certain way recognizes that there are two paths. This duplicity is itself a value: because the affirmation of persuasion cannot count as affirmation of liberty when one does not have the awareness of the possibility of affirmation as a value of non-value itself, a kind of indifference: for only the “Lord of Yes and No” is free and infinite (on this problem, cf. our Theory of the Absolute Individual, I, §§ 1-5). The other justification of the antithesis, introduced above, evidently takes as its presupposition the positive option for “persuasion.”  

[←353 ]  Michelstaedter (1887-1910) was a Jewish Italian writer, philosopher, and man of letters who was remarkably productive in the short span of his life. He was a student of the classic philosophers, especially Plato and Aristotle, and his work bears a decidedly classical stamp of rare purity. He attempted, as the classical philosophers, to extract himself from a tragic existence by becoming internally complete. His life runs in intriguing parallel to that of the Jewish Austrian Otto Weininger (see note 178 to Chapter 15 above). Michelstaedter’s most important work is thought to be his Persuasion and Rhetoric. All quotes in the following chapter, unless otherwise noted, come from that work.

[←354 ]  Ancient Greek: “lifeless life.”

[←355 ]  Autarchy comes from the Ancient Greek αὐτάρκεια, meaning literally “self-rule,” but coming thus to mean to the Hellenic mindset total self-sufficiency, perfect independence.

[←356 ]  [Evola’s note.]Taken from Michealstaedter’s Il dialogo della salute. [The Dialogue on Health, yet to be translated into English. -Trans.]

[←357 ]  ἒ ουνεχές is Ancient Greek, meaning “really or truly being ones own self” or “really and truly possessing one’s own self.”

[←358 ]  That is, an act which requires something external to itself for its realization.

[←359 ]  Ancient Greek: “just as the self” or “according to the self.”

[←360 ]  Latin: “first or primary thing, the prior thing.”

[←361 ]  [Evola’s note.] John 4:14. “But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.”

[←362 ]  Italian: conato oscuro.

[←363 ]  Latin: “power, ability, potency.” 

[←364 ]  On October 17, 1910, the very day that he finished the appendices of his Persuasion and Rhetoric, and following an argument with his mother, Michelstaedter took his own life. Evola’s speculation that this might have had something to do with Michelstaedter’s failure to bring his own ideas to necessary conclusion, his remaining on the plane of mere negation, is certainly an intriguing one. It is made all the more intriguing by the fact that thoughts of suicide were not altogether foreign to Evola. Indeed, in a kind of spiritual crisis following the First World War, Evola was almost carried away by such an urge. (See note 343 to Chapter 32 above; also, The Path of Cinnabar, “Personal Background and Early Experiences.”)

From the Prison Memoirs of 00040 aka Clifford Irving

 August 28, 1972

This morning I ate a good breakfast of orange juice, French toast, crisp bacon and a pot of hot coffee, and then surrendered to the U.S. Marshall at the courthouse in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

He handcuffed me, shackling the cuffs to a steel belt chained round my waist. He apologized for doing this, but the last man for whom they’d made an exception, the left-wing activist publisher Ralph Ginzburg, had stepped outside the courthouse and begun to yell and then burned a copy of the Federal Constitution in front of the TV cameras. They didn’t want anything like that to happen again. We drove off on a dusty road to the federal prison camp at Allenwood, about fifteen miles away. The day was hot and cloudy. Arriving, they took everything I owned, clothes, the works, including my diving watch and the gold ring I inherited from my father.

In its place they gave me my federal prison number – 00040. “It’s yours for life,” one of the guards explained to me.

Now I’m in Dorm Five, a ramshackle single-story wooden building that once was painted white but has since acquired the color and texture of a sheet that hasn’t been changed for months. The smell of sweat predominates. The men call it The Jungle. New arrivals are parked here until beds become available in the newer, better dormitories. A constant mutter, sometimes ascending to a din, assaults the ears; the entire population laughs, yells and curses at the same time.

Two blacks are my neighbors, each of them the size of NFL defensive guards, and they get into a religious debate after supper, which is meat loaf and baked beans. “Listen, brother,” one says. “I tell you one thing – in this life they ain’t no such thing as no motherfuckin salvation. This is just one mean motherfucker from the beginning when you born to the motherfuckin end when you die. Do you dig my meaning, brother? You better motherfuckin well believe it.”

They’ve given me an upper bunk next to the showers. The mattress is thin and gray, the springs sag, so that my back aches when I lie down. They give me clean sheets and I make the bed neatly. I want to behave. Just like summer camp back in Maine when I was a kid.

Do I feel depressed? Better motherfuckin well believe it.

August 29

I woke at 5 a.m., exhausted. The hot water dripped all night in the shower room. Steam billowed into the dormitory, so that it must have been well over 100 degrees. I got up and tried to turn off the hot water taps but they were fiery hot to the touch and the nuts had been stripped. With the crawling mist, rising steam and the steady drip of the water, as from branches, I felt as if I’d spent the night in a tropical rain forest. No one else seemed to mind.

I was called down later to the office of Mr. Weger, the Camp Superintendent, who looks like a 35-year-old, dapper version of Elvis Presley. He struck me as a bright, mean-minded man. The men despise him.

He said, “We don’t want any trouble out of you, Irving. Just don’t make waves. Don’t be a jailhouse lawyer.”

Me? All I want to do is make parole in June. I’m going to be as troublesome as a mouse.

Then Weger turned me over to Mr. Huntsinger, the Assistant Superintendent, an old bullnecked pro who was a Lieutenant of the Guard at Lewisburg penitentiary. I’ve already learned that he’s tough but that the men trust him. “I followed your case,” he said. “I was rooting for you. Tough luck. Stay out of trouble in here. Don’t trust anybody. Anybody.”

He assigned me to a job: clerk in the office of the prison factory. The factory makes wooden furniture for the government, for judges’ offices and the FBI. I’ll be paid 21 cents an hour, tax-free.

I went down there and met the men I’ll work with: Sioti, Willie Polk, Lembke, Claude and Joe D. Sioti was a big bookie. Willie’s a hillbilly who transported stolen cars from Kentucky to Ohio. Lembke was a mayor of some town in Pennsylvania; he pocketed government funds. Claude, a printer, went for the big score and counterfeited $4 million. Joe D. is a medium-echelon Mafioso doing time for possession of stolen securities. He’s already taken me under his wing (even though he’s eight inches shorter than I am) and shown me around the camp.

Carmine de Sapio of Tammany Hall is an inmate here, too. And an army general named Turner – he invented the handcuff-and-shackle system they use on us; but the army caught him selling machine guns, privately, to the highest bidder in Chicago – and the former Attorney General of West Virginia, and the assistant to a U.S. Senator, a sheriff, and a couple of judges. Classy company.

August 30

Sioti told me that at his trial in Philadelphia his lawyer, who was a sixty-year-old veteran and considered very good, made a long impassioned summation speech in his defense. His sick wife, his kids, his work in the community, etc. Then the very young U.S. Attorney spoke to the jury. “I don’t have the eloquence or the $350 suit of the defense attorney or the defendant. I’m wearing a suit from Robert Hall. But I’m working for the people, for you.”

Sioti: “That motherfucker convicted me on a lousy $70 suit.”

September 3

Allenwood is a minimum security “honor camp,” whatever that means. It spreads over 4500 pastoral acres and supports about 900 head of scrawny beef cattle, butchered periodically to feed the inmates of various eastern federal prisons. No gates, no walls, no guntowers – just an easy-to-penetrate wire fence that circles the perimeter. No rehabilitation, either. They just warehouse men. The men are called residents, not inmates or prisoners. They keep a constant population mix of about 40% white, 50% black, and 10% Spanish-speaking, mostly Puerto Ricans. There are five dormitories housing between three and four hundred men. They’re short-timers or else finishing out big bits begun elsewhere; this is supposed to be a decompression chamber.

The hacks – guards; or, as they call themselves, Correctional Officers – are mostly local yokels who’d be working in a lumber yard or on a farm if they didn’t have this job. Some of them seem decent enough.

It’s easy to escape from Allenwood. You just walk out when no one’s looking. Some men go out for a few hours to meet their wives or girlfriends at a local motel. It’s risky, though.

Joe D. says the government makes hardly an effort to recapture you if you escape. They just wait. “The feds know you can’t stay away from your family forever. It would destroy whatever faith you’ve still got in human nature to find out how many of those poor bastards are turned in by their wives or some other relative. Or else they get nailed committing some other crime. You gotta remember, most of our residents here ain’t playing with a full deck.”

September 5

Sure enough, four men went over the hill this weekend. One of them had only five weeks left to serve on a two-year sentence. They say he got a Dear John letter from his wife. That’s common, I’m told. The other three flipped out after the Saturday night movie, 99 Women, a skin flick about dikes on an Italian island prison. The men took off early the next morning. I had to leave the movie in the middle and go back to bed in the dorm and, surrounded by clouds of steam, jerk off. I don’t want to be reminded that there’s an outside world with women in it. I just don’t want to know. And I think the mind can do extraordinary things, block out what it wishes, create a companionable and easeful world where, by most standards, none exists.

September 7

I’ve learned a new vocabulary.

A hack is a guard. The joint, of course, is the prison. A good stop is an easy joint, like this one is supposed to be. Leavenworth and Terre Haute are bad stops. The Street is life outside. Lewisburg, our neighbor facility seventeen miles away — the maximum security prison for the northeastern United States — is The Wall. A shot is a disciplinary report for an infraction of the rules. To get shot is to be reported. A copout is an inmate’s written request to the administration for just about anything from a furlough to a change of jobs. A rat and a snitch are informers, and that’s about the worst thing you can be in the joint. Your bit is your prison term. Your beef is what you did to earn it. Your house is your bed and its environs, your slice of personal territory. The hole is solitary confinement – the administration calls it Segregation. A shank is a home-made knife, usually fashioned from the guts of an iron cot. A five-year sentence is a nickel. Ten years is a dime, 25 is a quarter. Two tens running wild would mean two consecutive ten-year sentences.

Willie Polk says, “I had bad luck. I went before a dime-store judge. All he knew was five, ten, and a quarter. First time out of the box he slips me a nickel.”

Other than vocabulary, I’ve been here ten days now and I’ve learned three basic things. How to use the word motherfucker in every sentence, how to eat an entire meal with a spoon, and how to steal. That may be the essential prison experience.

September 10

Joe D. is about 45, short, neat, slick, olive-skinned, with warm liquid brown eyes. He has a tic – he blinks constantly. He says it gets worse as the time approaches for him to go before the parole board.

He tells me about The Wall, where he recently spent a few years.

“There’s no Mickey Mouse at The Wall. Everything is security over there. It’s a five star penitentiary – max max max. You’re the garbage of the world and that’s where you belong. They expect you to play their game, try to con them. And they respect you for it, and they’re happy. The alternative is to be a hardnose and then they’ll play with your head. You’re a number. You’re constantly searched. The man examines you, sticks his nose up your asshole – it can’t be pleasant, but the man’s used to it by now. You’re not a body, see? – you’re a number.

“Good jobs go to the heavy men, the guys who are doing ten years up to double life, or else the Warden will have trouble. But he expects these men to keep order, to run the joint, and they do. Also the choice jobs, like clerks, go to the Jews and the Italians, then the Anglos. Blacks get sent to industry and work their ass off – they need the money. The PRs dominate food service, and they steal for you, for a price. Apparently they’ve proven statistically that Jews and affluent Italians can stay loyal to their own kind and at the same time not try to fuck the institution.

“It’s not really so bad over there. You get good food at night – I mean steaks stolen from the kitchen, packed in laundry carts. There are fourteen hundred men at The Wall, kid, scheming day and night – got nothing else to do. The man condones this to avoid pressure building up. The wops run the gambling. Men lose a lot of money. They play for cigarette cartons but it adds up, and if you can’t pay up inside you better fucking well have your old lady pay up on the street within a week or they give you a blanket party. And then there’s always, I’d say, thirty or forty thousand dollars in cash floating around inside The Wall at any given time, hidden here and there. They found a stash of ten grand once in the greenhouse, buried under the geraniums. No one ever raised his hand and said, `Hey, that’s mine, give it back.’

“Booze is made inside – yeast from the bakery, alcohol from the Medical Department. I’m telling you, these people have years to scheme and practice. The guys doing big bits know which of the hacks can be had. And they get drugs, too. They steal the drugs meant for other inmates. Their attitude is, `Fuck you. You’re here today, gone tomorrow, maybe doing a nickel, but I’m doing twenty years, man – I live here.’ You pass some guy in the hallway over there at The Wall and just brush his sleeve, and you better say, ‘Excuse me.’ A guy doing natural life don’t care if he kills you. What can they do to him? Put him in the hole? He’s been there. He don’t care. While I was there, a man was shanked in the chow hall over a jelly donut. These guys were on the chow line. There was one jelly donut left on the tray. The guy at the head of the chow line was about to take it when the guy in back of him reached around and took it from under his nose and laughed and says, `Fuck you, bubblehead.’ So the guy in front reached up his pants leg and whipped out a shank he had taped there and shoved it into the other guy’s stomach. And he laughed, and says, `You a bubblebelly, bubblehead.’ He took the jelly donut from the guy’s tray as this guy started to fall. Then he went over to a table and ate the jelly donut while the other guy lay on the tile practically at his feet, blood gushing out of him and crying for help. I saw that happen.

“My first job over there, they put me in food service, handing out pork chops. I was getting about two hours sleep a night around then because I was in F block, which is rough – I was shitscared. So these black dudes start fussing and saying, `Gimme a different pork chop, man,’ or `This pork chop’s too small. Gimme two, motherfucker.’ I dropped my spatula and went over to the hack and said, `You got a fucking nerve assigning me to this job. I got to live with these animals. Put me in the hole, but I ain’t working here any more. I may get killed in this joint, but I ain’t getting killed over a goddam pork chop.’ And so they gave me a job mopping the corridor.”

And Joe laughs.

Sounds interesting, but I think I’ll try to skip it.

J A I L I N G

Clifford Irving

Carlo Michelstaedter (1887-1910)

Trapped in the flow of time

Michelstaedter has been one of the few geniuses in human history who attempted to come to the very core of human suffering; to detect its true aetiology, and cure it once and for all. Born in Gorizia – currently at the Italian-Slovenian border – in the well-to-do Jewish family of Alberto Michelstaedter, the director of an insurance company and bibliomaniac, and Emma Luzzato, member of another prominent Jewish family, Carlo has been a victim of the fin de siècle nausea which afflicted in an even more pronounced manner the then collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire (Bini 1992, 28-29). To the fundamental question of why humans are suffering, Michelstaedter gave an answer very similar to the one bequeathed by the best philosophical – and religious – traditions of the East, the West, and his native Italy specifically:

“But man wants from other things in a future time what he lacks in himself: the possession of his own self,1 and as he wants and is busied so with the future he escapes himself in every present. Thus does he move differently from the things different from him, as he is different from his own self, continuing in time. What he wants is given within him, and wanting life he distances himself from himself: he does not know what he wants. … for he does not have himself as long as an irreducible, obscure hunger for life lives within him” (Michelstaedter 2004, 11).

Being human actually means being subject to that irreducible, obscure hunger for life. A human is the animal that never stops desiring. The very moment it would stop, its life would have automatically come to an end. Here lies the fundamental contradiction of human life, according to Michelstaedter. Life is de facto a motion in time, a perpetual sense of discontent which must be satisfied at any price, but which, strangely enough, can never be fully satisfied: “Because at no point is the will satisfied, each thing destroys itself in coming into being and in passing away: πάντα ῥεῖ, ‘everything flows,’ so that it transforms itself without respite in varied desiring” (Michelstaedter 2004, 15).

Life is de facto a motion in time, a perpetual sense of discontent which must be satisfied at any price… 

Human beings are condemned to strive for possessing themselves without ever being able to achieve it; were they ever to achieve it even for a single moment, their life would have to stop immediately. Schopenhauer had already shown that all life amounts to is will, and that this will is by definition insatiable: “For Schopenhauer, as for Leopardi, will is what constitutes the essence of human life. Will presents itself as a constant tension, as a search for what man lacks” (Bini 1992, 8). But insofar as human life’s conditio sine qua non is that constant lack of everything, it is also necessarily deduced that the tragedy of human beings is their entrapment in the flow of time: “In order to possess itself, to reach actual being, it flows in time: and time is infinite, for were it to succeed in possessing itself, in consisting, it would cease to be will for life (ἄπειρον οὗ ἀεί τι ἒξω, ‘an infinity beyond which there is always something’)” (Michelstaedter 2004, 14).

It was 1897 when Carlo enrolled in the Staatsgymnasium of Gorizia. There, he met his inseparable friends Nino Paternolli and Enrico Mreule. Mreule introduced Carlo to Schopenhauer and instilled in him the passion for philosophy (Bini 1992, xii). Michelstaedter’s book Il Dialogo della Salute [The Dialogue of Health] (1910) consists precisely of philosophical dialogues, in the Socratic style, between Carlo, Nino and Rico. His intimate relationship with Rico has also been the backdrop behind which Italian author Claudio Magris developed the story of his novel Un altro mare [A Different Sea] (1991).

Incarcerated in the prison of desire

And so, desire is a never-fulfilled possession; the indeterminacy that plagues humans in every single one of their present moments; a will for possession always postponed somewhere in the future; the negation of possession and of present par excellence: “Each thing at every point does not possess but is the will for determinate possession” (Michelstaedter 2004, 15). In order to feel that I am alive, I have to project a fulfillment of my own will in the future. Hence, willing negates being; desiring negates really possessing myself in the here and now; I am trapped in the snare of time.

Desire, in essence, means time. Desire and time together amount to “philopsychia [= love of life, cowardice]” (Michelstaedter 2004, 20), a term in which Michelstaedter recapitulated the eternal diseases of human life: ‘the yearning to live’ (Michelstaedter 2004, 15), desire, pleasure, hope, time; a term which, in the final analysis, he identified with what he called in one word the rhetoric. Desire and time convert humans into somnambulists immersed in their dreams of future fulfilment; in this process, in nothing do they differ from swine bathing in filth, as Heraclitus had warned: “Ὓες βορβόρῳ ἣδονται μᾶλλον ἤ καθαρῷ ὓδατι” [“Poultry bathe in dust and ashes, swine in filth”] (Heraclitus 2001, 36). “Liquescit voluptate” [“pleasure liquefies”] writes Michelstaedter (2013, 46) at another point, directly echoing Heraclitus. Heraclitus, Parmenides and the Presocratics constitute the philosophical foundations of the young Michelstaedter. He studies them in depth after he enrolls at the Istituto di Studi Superiori in Florence. At the age of nineteen Carlo was already able to work in five different languages: Italian, German, French, ancient Greek and Latin (Bini 1992, 4).

Desire and time convert humans into somnambulists immersed in their dreams of future fulfilment. 

Seen from another angle, philopsychia [φιλοψυχία] could be seen as Michelstaedter’s correlate of Schopenhauer’s Wille zum Leben, since it is “… the basis of human perpetuation through the fulfillment of finite needs, and thus inadequate self-affirmation” (Angelucci 2011, 53-54).

The Ego and his Own²

In this lineal concatenation of innumerable images of pleasure projected in the future, finally coagulated into what we perceive as time, the identity of the “I” is born; in Michelstaedter’s own term, the persona. I hope, therefore I am; I possess things, hence I am; even worse: I hope I will possess a thing somewhere in the future and hence I think that I am; I am the owner of a consciousness: “Nothing is for itself but with regard to a consciousness. Ἓως ἂν παρῇ μοι ἐλπίς τις – μένει μοί τι, ‘if there is any hope at all for me, there is something for me’ – for as long as I want in some manner, attribute value to some thing, there is something for me” (Michelstaedter 2004, 16). Actually, human consciousness could be defined as the locus of the constant postponement of a never-satisfied pleasure: hence hope, discontent and, finally, pain; it is in fact the archaeology of all those things which we could have potentially possessed here and now but which we have stubbornly been sacrificing in the name of some uncertain future gratification instead.

And thus, one’s persona is created out of the abstract materials of will, desire, possessiveness and time: “To the extent that a thing proves to be pleasurable, the whole person is there in action. And since it tends towards the thing as its own, it obtains from it the illusion of individuality. What I like, what is useful to me: this is my consciousness, this is my reality. Hence, the reality ὀνομάζεται καθ' ἡδονήν ἑκάστου,³ that is, it is defined according to the pleasure of each individual” (Michelstaedter 2013, 36).5⁴

This is the ‘Ego’, the “I”, with all its misery and pain. It is exactly at this point – at the solidification of the persona – where the plague of rhetoric emerges.

Rettorica – The Antipode of Persuasione

In the shallowness of a life confined to the suffocating limits posed by pleasure and desire, in the mire of a personality – a persona – concocted in terms of time from the abstract ingredients of false possession and dubious future achievement, rhetoric blossoms to the full. Humans need a false persona as a substitute for real life: “But men fear this [to have it out with life] more than accidental death: they fear life more than death” (Michelstaedter 2004, 95).

Humans need a false persona as a substitute for real life. 

It is thus out of uncertainty and fear that “… they abandon themselves to whatever brutish exertion presents itself: within each man hides the soul of a fakir. They need to see a stretch of road right before their eyes, presumably leading to some good, which certainly defers open pain, and, in continuing, flees from the abyss of cessation” (Michelstaedter 2004, 95). It is of this pain that humans are desperately trying to break free, and along the way they easily abandon themselves to every possible kind of illusion. How much in vain, though: “Therefore, each path forged is a new mine, each banner a mantle covering the insufficiency of the wretched, conceding to them a persona and a right: thus, does rhetoric flourish irresistibly” (Michelstaedter 2004, 95).

In his interpretation of what the mechanism of human thought actually is and how it works, Michelstaedter echoes the greatest masters of the Eastern religious and philosophical traditions – Buddha, Lao Tzu, the Sufi masters, and probably, more than anyone else, J. Krishnamurti – all of whom stressed the twofold drawback inherent in thought: first that it merely consists of abstract and hence inexistent concepts, and second, that it invariably manifests itself in the guise of time as desire and becoming. On this illusory path, humans are literally deprived of their entire being:

“But cogito does not mean “I know”; cogito means I seek to know: that is, I lack knowledge: I do not know… But if thinking means to agitate concepts, which merely by this activity must become knowledge, I am always empty in the present, and the care of the future wherein I feign my goal deprives me of my entire being. Cogito = non-entia coagito, ergo non sum, ‘I think = I agitate non-entities; therefore, I am not.’ This is the life rhetoric feigns for the man alongside life, the life of the thing they call intellect, which if it really were, would stop living” (Michelstaedter 2004, 71).

Enrico Mreule was again the one who introduced Carlo to Buddhism, although only one book with Buddhist maxims and aphorisms has been found in his library, entitled Indische Sprüche (Bini 1992, 254).

But rhetoric does not limit itself only to the domain of thought and knowledge. Actually, it stands for everything that lacks substance, reality, truth; on the contrary, it is identified with anything that is pretentious, inauthentic, superficial, imitative, conventional, obsequious, conformist. And so, easily enough, rhetoric explodes in every other field of human existence, destroying life and truth in their totality:

“… and out of the healthy life of the body, sensual degeneration and the rhetoric of pleasure are born; out of the right behavior of the one who has a mission to carry out, the ambition for power and the rhetoric of authority are born; out of the artistic work of the one who really had something to say, the pose of the artists and the artistic rhetoric are born; out of the words of those who showed the right path, the presumption of the thinkers, as well as the philosophical rhetoric – along with its little sister, the scientific rhetoric – are born. This way, the human beings ascribe names to the secure manifestations of life, they covet their forms, only to obtain their personas and joys; concerned about this life, which is slipping through their fingers, they enslave themselves to it.⁵ But destiny is always making a mockery of them” (Michelstaedter 2013, 65-66).

However, where rhetoric makes itself probably more conspicuous than anywhere else, is in the domain of language. In fact, rhetoric’s materia prima is the word.

Kαλλωπίσματα ὂρφνης

If the plague of the humans is their entrapment in the fictitious mechanism of need → time, and if one’s persona is the equally fictitious ‘solidification’ of time and need into an ‘entity’ created out of one’s desperate need for security and meaningfulness, then words are indeed the vehicle for such intellectual ‘sorcery’: “The words are, that is to say, the words spoken by the ‘will/need’: ‘Then if the truth… regarding bread were exhausted by his relationship with his stomach, the proposition would have never been made because as for the stomach it would have been persuaded with bread and would have asked for… nothing more’” (Michelstaedter, Parmenide ed Eraclito 31, cited in Cangiano 2019, 74).

It all started with Aristotle: “Words, the modes of language… become for Aristotle ‘things’ in themselves: they crystallize” (Michelstaedter, Opere 234, cited in Bini 1992, 29). Then, it was Plato, who “… gave reality to every idea and every name, and rettorica was born. The identity of ontology, thought, and language was forever broken. From then on, being was to be used as a predicate, words were to become technical terms, language was to become a game. … The Socratic dialectics was dead and “from its ashes” rettorica was born” (Bini 1992, 28).

From then on, being was to be used as a predicate, words were to become technical terms, language was to become a game. 

In the illusion of this ‘crystallization’ of mere sonic utterances into ‘things,’ out of this peculiar hypostatization of what undoubtedly belongs to the conceptual and symbolic realm, – ideas, concepts, names, – the humans think they find everything they lack – security, identity, hope, pleasure, and the most effective possible alleviation of their pain:

“… they feign words containing the absolute world, and with words they nourish their boredom, making for themselves a poultice for the pain; with words they show what they do not know and what they need in order to soothe the pain or make themselves numb to it. Each word contains mystery, and they entrust themselves to words, weaving with them thereby a new, tacitly agreed-upon veil over the obscurity: καλλωπίσματα ὂρφνης, ‘ornaments of the darkness’: “God help me”—because I haven’t the courage to help myself. They need “knowledge,” and knowledge is formed. “Knowledge” in and of itself becomes the goal of life. … Thus, rhetoric flourishes alongside life” (Michelstaedter 2004, 69).

After all, this is what Michelstaedter tried to point to with such terms as rettorica, persona, καλλωπίσματα ὂρφνης during his short but extremely fecund life: the overall symbolic and hence illusory constitution of the human being; the intrinsic lie of human existence; our fictitious identity; our absolute and irrevocable estrangement from truth and reality; our beastly indulgence in anything that is shallow, insubstantial, ideational. Of this harrowing situation Michelstaedter tried to make us aware by pointing to the path of persuasione.

Persuasione – In union with the world

Fully handed over to la rettorica, humans walk along the tightrope of time, brandishing words as their only weapon against the void of existence, building up their inadequate knowledge and science, until they suddenly discover that they have been engulfed in the empty shell of their persona, a mere armor consisting of the mechanical repetition of ‘colorless propositions’ – καλλωπίσματα ὂρφνης: “Their conjoined mode [of the words], as inadequate as their knowledge, is limited, reduced almost exclusively to the elementary relations of time and finality” (Michelstaedter 2004, 133).

But if one really wants to redeem his/her life back, he/she surely has to go beyond “the word that blurs and muddies the unity of being” (Michelstaedter 2011, 51).⁶ Were the word removed once and for all, then knowledge, for its part, would have automatically lost the very foundations upon which it rests: “Everyone can stop turning in the slavery of what he does not know and, refusing the payoff of empty words, have it out with life” (Michelstaedter 2004, 95); without knowledge and words, the grassroots of one’s persona would also be seriously shattered; and, in the void of a brain which does not know and which refuses to speak, space enough would have been created for silence to blossom: “He who is persuaded is silent because he has no ‘motive’ to speak” (Fondo Carlo Michelstaedter, cited in Bini 1992, 24).

Without the ever-chattering, knowing persona, the human brain would most probably resemble that of a Buddha: empty of any thought, words, or concepts, utterly silent and immobile in its ecstasy and bliss, completely devoid of any desire or hope. Michelstaedter’s persuasione is actually the Buddhist nirvana, the fanā of the Sufis, the contemplative state of Heraclitus’s mind while he is sitting by the fireplace. Michelstaedter’s vision has been that of a human being without a self, with no memory, empty of words and desire, in full possession of itself, living unconditionally in the here and now, never postponing anything to the future, never dreaming of anything in the future: “He who for one instant wants his life to be his, only for an instant to be persuaded of what he does, must take possession of the present, to see every present as the last, as if death were certain afterward, and to create his own life by himself in the obscurity” (Michelstaedter 2004, 39). Then only is there a possibility for the human being to come back to the unity of the nature and the universe, from which it has also sprung; then the humans would have actually turned into gods: “… the extreme consciousness of the man who is one with things, has all things in himself: ἕν συνεχές, ‘one, indivisible,’ the persuaded: god” (Michelstaedter 2004, 89).

But this “extreme consciousness” of the persuaso is actually the Absolute itself; that same Absolute which Michelstaedter set out to grasp during the few years of his life. He didn’t make it. He succumbed precociously to the very contradiction of the human condition: constantly tending towards the Absolute, and never being able to attain it:

“What I know is that my consciousness, whether corporeal or soulful, is made of deficiency, that I do not have the Absolute until I am absolute, that I do not have Justice until I am just, that I do not have Freedom, Possession, Reason, the End, until I am free and finite in myself, lacking nothing that would present itself as an end in the future, but I have a reasonable end here, now, all in the present. I do not wait, search, fear, and I am persuaded” (Michelstaedter 2004, 65-66).

By October 17, 1910, Michelstaedter had finished his dissertation entitled La Persuasione e la Rettorica. That same day, at two o’clock in the afternoon, after a short argument he had with his mother, Michelstaedter shot himself, not once but twice (Harrison 1996, 2). His suicide has correctly been associated with the overall mindset that had prevailed in Europe during the so called fin-de-siecle, more pronouncedly than anywhere else within the confines of the then collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire, as well as to a series of unfortunate facts which had seriously affected his sensitive idiosyncrasy: the suicide in 1907 of Nadia Baraden, a Russian divorcee with whom he had an affair, his having been rejected by the family of Iolanda De Blasi with whom he had fallen in love soon after Nadia’s suicide, and his successive failures to have his writings published, as well as to manage to translate and publish Schopenhauer’s works in Italian (Bini 1992, xii-xiii). However, it is more likely that Michelstaedter’s suicide was after all associated with the tragic dead-end his own philosophical project had reached: his failure to supersede the human nature itself and reach that different sea, the realm of the persuaso – the enlightened one – the one who has managed to get out of the flow of time, the one who has eliminated desire and hope overall and has become one with the silent void of nature and the universe.



Eleftherios Makedonas

https://daily-philosophy.com/authors/#EleftheriosMakedonas

Works Cited

Angelucci, Marco. 2011. Words Against Words: On the Rhetoric of Carlo Michelstaedter. Troubador Publishing.
Bini, Daniela. 1992. Carlo Michelstaedter and the Failure of Language. University Press of Florida.
Cangiano, Mimmo. 2019. The Wreckage of Philosophy: Carlo Michelstaedter and the Limits of Bourgeois Thought. University of Toronto Press.
Harrison, Thomas. 1996. 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance. University of California Press.
Heraclitus. 2001. Fragments. Translated by Brooks Haxton. Viking Penguin.
Michelstaedter, Carlo. 2013. Diálogo de la salud — Poesías [The Dialogue of Health — Poetries]. Translated by Tomás Lorma and Miguel Ángel Frontán. Ediciones De La Mirándola. Kindle edition.
Michelstaedter, Carlo. 2011. La Melodía del Joven Divino. Translated by Antonio Castilla Cerezo. Sexto Piso.
Michelstaedter, Carlo. 2004. Persuasion and Rhetoric. Translated by Russell Scott Valentino, Cinzia Sartini Blum, and David J. Depew. Yale University Press.

1 Unless otherwise stated, emphasis is in the original. ↩︎

2 Borrowed from Max Stirner’s (1806-1856) book of the same title (1844). 

3Heraclitus 2001: 24

4The translation from Spanish is ours. 

5 For the translation of a part of this passage we have also consulted (Cangiano 2019: 78). 

6The translation from Spanish is ours. 

The Russian Poetry Scandal That Ended in a Duel

Remembering the Cherubina de Gabriak hoax of 1909.


THERE IS A FINE TRADITION of taking the wind out of the stuffed shirts who run the literary world by tricking them into publishing the work of fictional authors. In the 1940s, an Australian poetry scandal erupted over the invented poet Ern Malley, disgracing the publisher once the hoax was revealed. More recently in the U.S., the wunderkind author JT LeRoy was exposed as a fake persona created by a writer named Laura Albert. But a similar ruse from early 20th century Russia may be the only such literary scandal that ended with two men shooting at each other.

According to an account in the Russian book The Fate of the Silver Age Poets, in August of 1909, Russia’s preeminent literary arts publication, Apollo, received a curious letter. The envelope contained poems written in exquisite handwriting, on perfumed paper, signed only with the Cyrillic letter Ч (che). The unsolicited submission raised the suspicions of Apollo’s de facto publisher and noted Russian art scene figure, Sergey Makovsky, until later that day, when the author called their office.

The woman on the phone identified herself as Cherubina de Gabriak, an unknown poet, looking to find her break in Apollo. Makovsky, who found the mystery poet’s voice quite charming, agreed to publish her work. In the October issue of Apollo, 12 of de Gabriak’s poems were included.

While the author remained a near complete mystery, tidbits of information about de Gabriak emerged through her poetry and correspondence. Supposedly, she was a young girl of French-Polish descent who lived in an oppressive Catholic household, which did not allow her to associate with the outside world. Her admirers caught only glimpses of her life, such as a poem that described her family’s coat of arms, but the riddles surrounding her past just made her all the more alluring. Soon, she was being published in a number of magazines, not just Apollo.

The mystique surrounding de Gabriak created quite a stir among the Russian poets of the day, and a number of Apollo contributors fell in love with her. Most famously, then up-and-coming poet Nikolay Gumilyov, who would go on to become a giant of Russian Symbolist poetry, began a red-blooded correspondence with de Gabriak, writing her a series of love letters.

Not everyone in the scene was quite convinced of the enigmatic poet, however, noting that if she was such a talent, she had no reason to hide.

In November of 1909, it was finally revealed that (as you have surely surmised) Cherubina de Gabriak was a fake persona. In reality, de Gabriak’s true identity was Elizaveta Dmitrieva, a school teacher who had worked with the poet Maximilian Voloshin to scam their contemporaries and get her work noticed. The name Cherubina de Gabriak, was a combination of references to a short story and a wooden imp that Voloshin had once given Dmitrieva. Voloshin was also an editor at Apollo, and knew Makovsky well enough to know what buttons to push to make their character appeal to him. 

Dmitrieva had been stricken with tuberculosis at a young age, leaving her with a lifelong limp that made it extremely difficult for her to walk. Her brothers were known to taunt her by tearing one leg off of each of her dolls. Far from being a poet princess cloistered in some far off tower, Dmitrieva was a teacher and studied French and Spanish literature. She had been trying to get her poetry published for some time, including sending unsuccessful submissions to Apollo.

As Voloshin would tell it, when they first met in the summer of 1909, she was writing “simple, sentimentally sweet poems.” But over time, her work evolved. Once the hoax was revealed, many found it hard to believe that Dmitrieva’s talent could have sprung from obscurity, instead choosing to believe that Voloshin must have been the true author. Both Voloshin and Dmitrieva insisted that it was she who wrote the words, while Voloshin edited her (today, it is widely accepted that Dmitrieva was the true author based on comparisons with her later work).

Neither Makovsky nor Gumilyov took the news very well. Both men, embarrassed at having been had, began publicly disparaging Dmitrieva. At one point, Voloshin overheard Gumilyov talking rudely about his affair with Dmitrieva “in the crudest sexual terms,” as 1994’s Dictionary of Russian Women Writers puts it. Voloshin, who was equally enamored with Dmitrieva, decided that enough was enough. He slapped Gumilyov in the face, inviting him to a duel.

Dmitrieva truly did have feelings for Gumilyov, and Voloshin as well. A critical analysis of her poetry from a 2013 issue of The Slavic and East European Journal describes her as “a natural seductress who maintained complex love relations with a number of Modernist poets, and was the cause of the well-publicized duel between Voloshin and Gumilev, both contenders for her heart and hand.”

Gumilyov agreed to the duel, and they met on the shore of the Chernaya River on November 22, near the same spot where the famed Russian poet and novelist Alexander Pushkin had been fatally wounded over half a century earlier. Gumilyov, an excellent marksman, fired at Voloshin but missed, possibly intentionally, and Voloshin’s gun repeatedly misfired. Both men walked away with their lives, though animosity would characterize their relationship for years to come. 

Voloshin and Gumilyov went on to become some of the most important Russian poets of their time. As for Dmitrieva, while she continued to write, she was never able to reach the same level of fame during her lifetime as she had when she was de Gabriak. 

Today, Dmitrieva’s life and work is finally receiving some much deserved attention. In addition to more academic explorations of her poetry, in 2008, the playwright Paul Cohen unveiled a poorly reviewed stage play based on the story of the hoax, Cherubina. The Village Voice said that it “softened and simplified the story […] bleaching it of much of its nuance and oddity.” Still, critical analysis of Dmitrieva’s work is beginning to place her as a vital member of the Symbolist movement, even if her story will always be tied to the scandal that brought her into the light.

Eric Grundhauser
https://www.atlasobscura.com/users/ericgrundhauser/articles

***
Duel

Nikolai Gumilyov was outraged by the thought that his passionate romantic correspondence might in fact have been with a mocking Maximilian Voloshin. Even so, Dmitrieva claimed that she had written the letters to Gumilyov herself, had indeed been in love, but had known the romance would end the moment Gumilyov saw her.

Gumilyov allegedly talked in public about his romantic affair with Dmitrieva and he did it in rather rude expressions, and on 19 November 1909, at the studio of artist Ivan Bilibin, Voloshin slapped Gumilyov across the face,[1] by the customs of the time made a duel inevitable. The duel took place on 22 November on the banks of the Chernaya River, which had been the site of the fatal duel between Alexander Pushkin and Georges d'Anthès. Voloshin's seconds were Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi and Count Shervashidze; Gumilyov's seconds were Mikhail Kuzmin and Eugene Znosko-Borovsky.

Antique flint smoothbore pistols without sights of the Pushkin era were chosen. Gumilyov shot first, but missed (or according to another version shot into the air). Voloshin's pistol misfired. He proposed to end the duel, but Gumilyov insisted that Voloshin has to shoot. Voloshin tried to shoot a second time - again a misfire. Gumilev insisted on Voloshin's third attempt, but the seconds refused and declared the duel over. Later, Voloshin confessed that he simply didn't know how to shoot. The seconds offered that they shake hands, but both refused.[1] All contacts between them were broken off until a few months before Gumilyov's death in 1921, when he visited Voloshin. The next meeting and reconciliation took place only in Feodosia (in Crimea) - Gumilev denied at the meeting that he had said the words attributed to him about Dmitrieva in 1909, accused Dmitrieva herself of pure fiction.

Elisaveta Dmitrieva

Elisaveta Ivanovna Dmitrieva
Елизаве́та Ива́новна Дми́триева

Born
31 March 1887
St Petersburg
Died
5 December 1928 (aged 41)
Tashkent

Writing career
Pen name
Cherubina de Gabriak
The real author of Gabriak's poetry, Elisaveta Dmitrieva, was born on 31 March 1887. Between 1890 and 1903 she suffered from tuberculosis of the bones and was left lame and barely able to walk.

She studied old French and Spanish literature at Saint Petersburg State University, and published some verses both before and after her Gabriak period but without much success. In 1911 she married Vsevolod Nikolaievitch Wassilieff, an engineer and uncle of French admiral Alexandre Wassilieff and took his last name.

In the early 1920s, she worked with poet and translator Samuil Marshak on theatrical plays for children. Later she also published prose and translations.

Starting from 1921, she was searched and interrogated by the State Political Directorate along with other members of the Anthroposophic Society. Finally in 1927 she was exiled to Tashkent where she died in 1928 of liver cancer. Shortly before her death, she was visited in Tashkent by her friend a prominent Sinologist Julian Shchutsky and wrote, influenced by him, 21 poems attributed to Li Xiang Zi, a fictional Chinese poet exiled for his "belief in immortality of human spirit". The name of Li Xiang, invented by Shchutsky, means "a house under a pear tree", where Dmitrieva indeed lived in Tashkent.

Origin of the name

The name, Cherubina, was taken from the story A Secret Of Telegraph Hill by Bret Harte. The last name, Gabriak, was derived from Gabriakh, the name of a toy, a wooden imp, presented by Voloshin to Elisaveta Dmitrieva. Voloshin found the name Gabriakh in the book Demonomanie des Sorciers by Jean Bodin, where it belonged to an imp, protecting people from evil spirits.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

If the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious.”

 THE WORK-WITHIN-THE-WORK. The self-referential devices in Nabokov, mirrors inserted into the books at oblique angles, are clearly of the author’s making, since no point of view within the fiction could possibly account for the dizzying inversions they create. The course of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, which purports to be an attempt to gather material for a proposed literary biography of the narrator’s half brother but ends by obfuscating even the narrator’s identity, is refracted in Knight’s first novel, The Prismatic Bezel, “a rollicking parody of the setting of a detective tale.” Like an Elizabethan play-within-a-play, Quilty’s play within Lolita, The Enchanted Hunters, offers a “message” that can be taken seriously as a commentary on the progression of the entire novel; and Who’s Who in the Limelight and the class list of the Ramsdale school magically mirror the action taking place around them, including, by implication, the writing of Lolita. The a-novelistic components of Pale Fire—Foreword, Poem, Commentary, and Index—create a mirror-lined labyrinth of involuted cross-references, a closed cosmos that can only be of the author’s making, rather than the product of an “unreliable” narrator. Pale Fire realizes the ultimate possibilities of works within works, already present twenty-four years earlier in the literary biography that serves as the fourth chapter of The Gift. If it is disturbing to discover that the characters in The Gift are also the readers of Chapter Four, this is because it suggests, as Jorge Luis Borges says of the play within Hamlet, “that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious.”[9]

[9] J. L. Borges, “Partial Magic in the Quixote,” in Labyrinths (New York, 1964), p. 196. For an excellent analysis of involuted or self-reflexive fiction, see Robert Alter, Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1975). <<

Specific Abilities: Female Advantages

 11a. Verbal Ability  

Females have higher average verbal ability than males in school students reported at .29d in a meta-analysis of American studies of more than 10 million students in grades 3 through 11, in which the female advantage increased in a linear pattern from grades 3 to 8 and then remained steady in high school (Petersen, 2018). The female advantage is also present in grammar and punctuation assessed in the Language Usage Test in the 14 to 18 year-old adolescent standardisation samples of the DAT (Differential Aptitude Test) of .43d in the United States, of .20d in 14-year-olds in Britain and .35d in 18-year-olds (Lynn, 1992). In a review of 24 large data sets (including several large representative samples of US students, working adults, and military personnel), Willingham & Cole (1997) reported that girls performed better than boys in the elementary school grades in language usage at fourth grade (d > 0.2) and at the end of high school, females performed better than males in language usage (d between 0.4 and 0.5). However, in adults, males have higher verbal ability than females at .25d assessed as the median of 42 studies of the WAIS verbal IQ, as given in Table 5.4 and consistent with the developmental theory.

11b. Verbal Fluency  Verbal fluency is the ability to produce a larger number of words in a given category (e.g., birds, dogs, etc.) in a short period of time. Kimura (1999) and Hyde (2014) have shown that females have higher verbal fluency than that of males. This female advantage has been confirmed by Colom, Juan-Espinoza, Abad & Garcia (2000) in a Spanish sample of applicants to a Spanish university (n=6879, age 23) in which females obtained a higher verbal fluency score of .15d; and further confirmed by Schaie (2005, p. 77) in a study of 4,850 American adults aged 25 to 81 in which females obtained a higher score than males of .17d, and again by Maylor, Reimers, Choi et al. (2007) who reported an adult female advantage of .18d. A recent longitudinal study of clinically normal adults found a female advantage in fluency tasks (e.g., name as many words as you can that begin with a selected letter or have a similar meaning to another word) and higher performance for males on some tests of visual-spatial abilities, with a steeper decline for men over time (McCarrey et al., 2016). However, higher verbal fluency in females has been confirmed by Kosmides, Vlahou, Panagiotaki & Kiosseoglou (2004) or by Waber, Skirrbek & Herlitz (2014), who have reported that in Northern Europe there is no sex difference and in Southern Europe males scored higher than females in verbal fluency. Despite the last two studies, most studies have reported a female advantage in verbal fluency. The likely evolutionary explanation for this is that women who produce a lot of words promote the acquisition of language in their children. 

11c. Second Language Ability  Several studies have reported that females have higher average ability than males in second language ability. A female advantage of .17d has been reported among 13-year-olds in England (Burstall, Jamieson, Cohen & Hargreaves, 1974), of .64d among 12-year-olds in Ireland (Lynn & Wilson, 1993), .20d among 12-year-olds in Israel (Lewy & Chen, 1974), .27d among 12-year-olds in Sweden (Ljung, 1965), .19d among 14-year-olds in Lebanon (El Hassan, 2001), .50d among college students in the United States (Payne & Lynn, 2011) and of .32d as the median of 17 studies in a number of countries given by Lynn & Piffer (2011). In all these studies of school students who learned the second language at school, females did not perform better than males in first language ability, consistent with the results given in Chapter 9, showing that females are not better than males in verbal abilities. 

The likely evolutionary explanation for the female advantage in second language ability is that normally in the great apes, including evolving hominids, females were exogamous. Thus, “[a]mong baboons, chimps and humans, males stay where they were born and females disperse” (Gamble, 1993, p. 115) and “[i]n the great apes, including humans, males tend to stay in their birth groups and females tend to reside in the birth group of their mate” (Geary, 1998, p. 296). These exchanges have the advantages that they strengthen alliances between neighbouring groups and reduce inbreeding and the numerous genetic disorders these cause, including an impairment of intelligence (Jensen, 1998). 

When females joined a neighbouring group by exchange or capture, they would have had to integrate with their new group, and the better they integrated, the greater their chances of survival and that of their children. The neighbouring groups that females joined would sometimes have spoken a different language. For instance, in West Africa “[t]he tribes are traditionally at war with each other and speak mutually incomprehensible languages” (Dembrovitz, 1945, p. 70). And when the Caribs (the original inhabitants of the Caribbean) defeated neighbouring groups, “[t]hey used to kill the men of conquered peoples and take the women for wives, which resulted in the men and women speaking different languages” (Muller-Lyer, 1930, p. 120). When this occurred, the ability of females to acquire the new language would have facilitated acceptance by the new group. Humans are co-operating animals. Males typically hunt for meat and share it with females and children, and females help other females in a variety of tasks, such as child rearing, food sharing and caring for one another during illness. To benefit from these co-operative activities, females joining a new group would have evolved a stronger module (an innate ability designed for a specific purpose) for the acquisition of a foreign language. A female who joined a new group but was unable to acquire its language would have found it much more difficult to gain acceptance. Men, however, who remained in their own group would have had no need of the aptitude for the acquisition of a new language.

11d. Visual Memory and 

 Memory for Object Location  Females have better average visual memory and memory for object location than that of males reported as .66d in a study by Eals & Silverman (1994) and confirmed at .58d by Barnfield (1999), at .33d by Maylor, Reimers, Choi et al. (2007) and at .31d in a meta-analysis by Archer (2019). The likely evolutionary explanation for this is that in the evolutionary environment, women specialized in foraging and gathering plant foods and this would have favored the development of accurate memory for their locations. In addition, Kimura (1999, p. 51) suggested that the female advantage may be attributable to their ability to detect small changes in the home environment because “[i]f a predator or vermin entered the home, noticing displacements of objects in domestic space could help in detection of the intruder, and so contribute to survival”. 

11e. Spelling Ability  Females have higher average spelling ability than that of males of .50d in the American and of .24d in the British standardisation samples of adolescents on the DAT (Differential Aptitude Test) (Lynn, 1992). The female advantage in the British standardisation sample increased from .09d in 14-year-olds to .39d in 18-year-olds (Lynn, 1992). Arribas-Agula, Abad, & Colom (2019) reported data for a Spanish sample giving a female advantage in spelling ability in all ages from 12 (.19d) through 18 (.11d) with no significant age trend. The greater female spelling ability is likely attributable to the female advantage in visual memory that enables them better to visualize the shape of words and hence their spelling. 

11f. Perceptual and Processing Speed  Females have higher average ability in perceptual and processing speed assessed in tasks requiring “the ability to make rapid comparisons among a number of designs (letters, numbers or pictures)” (Kimura, 1999, p. 87) and the rapid encoding of abstract symbols (Estes, 1974). The female advantage in perceptual speed is shown in the 9 studies in the WISC-III, WISC-IV and WISC-V, given in Table 5.3.The female advantage in processing speed is shown in the 12 studies in the WAIS-111 and WAIS-1V with a median advantage of .12d, given in Table 5.5. The female advantage in perceptual speed is shown in the Clerical Speed and Accuracy Test in 14 to 18 year-old adolescents in the standardisation sample of the DAT (Differential Aptitude Test) of .48d in the United States (Lynn, 1992). In the British standardisation sample of the DAT (Differential Aptitude Test), the female advantage increased from .19d in 14-year-olds to .54d in 18-year-olds (Lynn, 1992). The female advantage is also present in the latent processing speed (Gs) factor in the Woodcock–Johnson Tests of Cognitive Abilities (Keith, Reynolds, Patel & Ridley, 2008). Maitland et al. (2000) reported a study of sex differences in processing speed across the adult life span in three age categories of younger (22–49), middle-aged (50–63) and older (64–87). They found that women in the younger and middle-aged groups performed better than men in processing speed, and across all age groups, women performed better than men on verbal recall. 

11g. Reading Ability and Comprehension  Females have higher ability than males in reading ability and comprehension in a number of studies summarized by Halpern (2012, pp. 123f) and confirmed in America’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (Reilly, Neumann & Andrews, 2018) and in a meta-analysis of American studies at .19d by Petersen (2018). Higher female reading ability of .18d has also been found in a large sample of 149,465 German 9-year-olds by Loesche (2019). An expression of this advantage is that females have a lower prevalence of dyslexia than that of males (Arnett, Pennington, Peterson et al., 2017). The female advantage is probably a function of the greater female verbal ability given in section 11a. 

11h. Episodic Memory  Episodic memory consists of remembering past experiences such as what one did yesterday. A female advantage in most episodic memory tasks has been reported by Herlitz & Yonker (2002) and by Asperholm, Hogman, Rafi & Herlitz (2019) in a meta-analysis of 617 studies conducted between 1973 and 2013 with 1,233,921 participants. They reported a female advantage for more verbal tasks, such as words, sentences and prose, and for materials that cannot easily be placed along the verbal-spatial continuum, such as faces, odour, taste and colour, and a male advantage in more spatial tasks, such as abstract images. It has not proved possible to find studies on whether there are sex differences in episodic memory at different ages that would confirm or dis-confirm the developmental theory. The female advantage is likely attributable to the greater female verbal ability given in section 11a.

11i. Writing Ability  Females have higher writing ability than males in the United States in a review of the literature by Hedges & Nowell (1995) and confirmed by Willingham & Cole (1997) in a review of 24 large data sets (including several large representative samples of US students, working adults and military personnel) that concluded that girls performed better than boys in elementary school grades in writing and reading at fourth grade (d > 0.2), and by the end of high school, females performed better than males in writing (between .5 d and .6d). The female advantage was confirmed by Reynolds, Schreiber, Havjovsky et al. (2015) and again in the National Assessment of Educational Progress with an effect advantage of .55d among 17–18 year-olds (Reilly, Neumann & Andrews, 2018) and in a meta-analysis of American studies at .45d by Petersen (2018). These studies show that the female advantage in writing ability increases with age. The female advantage is likely attributable to the greater female verbal ability given in section 11a.

11j. Fine Motor Skills  A female advantage in fine motor skills in infants involving hand-eye coordination has been reported by Nagy, Kompagne, Orvos et al. (2007) and at older ages by Halpern (2012, p. 109). Kimura (1999, p. 37) suggested that the female advantage may be due to their better control of their fingers and in the ability to coordinate several movements into a unit, which also contributes to their advantage in perceptual and processing speed. There is no apparent evolutionary explanation for this female advantage. 

11k. Immediate Memory  Hedges & Newell (1995, Table 2) in their meta-analysis give a female advantage of .25d. However, immediate memory is measured by the digit span test in WISC and the WAIS tests and in these there is a negligible female advantage of .05d in the WISCs given in Table 5.4 and a negligible male advantage of .09d in the WAISs given in Table 5.6. 

11l. Vocabulary  It was stated by Kimura (1999, p. 91) that “[w]hen speaking first begins, girls on average articulate earlier and better than boys, and produce longer sentences. To the extent that they speak earlier, they also have larger working vocabularies at very young ages”. This contention is confirmed in studies reviewed in Chapter 3 that showed that in 4- or 5-year-olds, females have larger vocabularies than those of males. The majority of studies show that this female advantage ceases by the age of 6 years. This was confirmed by Lynn & Cheng (2021) in a study showing that girls obtained statistically significantly higher means on vocabulary at the ages of 3 and 5 years but not among 14-year-olds, as shown in Table 6.2. 

The evidence on this was reviewed more than half a century ago by Tyler (1965, p. 144), who concluded that “[o]n vocabulary, the sex groups have turned out not to differ significantly”. This conclusion has been confirmed in a number of subsequent studies. Hyde & Linn’s (1988) meta-analysis of 40 American studies gave a negligible female advantage of .02d. Hedges & Newell (1995, Table 2) in a subsequent meta-analysis gave a negligible male advantage of .02d. Salthouse (2004) gave a negligible male advantage of .03d, derived as the average of 33 studies of samples aged from 19 to 95 years, and more recently Hyde (2014) gave a negligible female advantage of .02d. All four of these results are effectively zero. This was confirmed in the American General Social Survey (2019) which gives a zero sex difference in the knowledge of 10 words in Wordsum. There was no sex difference in vocabulary in the United Kingdom in the standardisation samples of the Mill Hill Vocabulary Scale (mean age 12.5 years, d=.0; Raven, 2008a) and in a further sample on the Mill Hill Vocabulary Scale (mean age 10.5 years, d=.0; Raven, 2008b). 

There have been some contrary results. A study of a sample of 5,389 Nigerian public school students aged 11 to 19 years on the British Mill Hill Vocabulary Scale reported that females obtained a significantly higher score than males of .11d (Lynn & Hur, 2021). There have also been some studies that have reported larger vocabulary scores in males than in females. A large male advantage of .26d was reported on the norms (n=210) for adults aged 25 to 88 years on the Boston Naming Test (Tombaugh & Hubley, 1997). This test consists of 60 pictures of objects that have to be named in decreasing order of word frequency from “bed” to “abacus”. A small male advantage has been reported in Belgium on the Boston Naming Test (n=371, mean age 9 years, d=.08; Storms, Saerens & De Deyn, 2004) and in England in a sample on the Mill Hill Vocabulary Scale (n= 2000, mean age 9 years, d=.10; Dunstan & Roberts, 1955). In the vocabulary subtest of the Wechslers, males obtained negligibly higher median scores than females of .04d in the WPPSIs given in Table 5.1, of .01d in the WISCs given in Table 5.4, and of .09d given in Table 5.6. The sex differences reported in these studies are inconsistent and suggest that there is virtually no sex difference in vocabulary except in infants among whom girls have a larger average vocabulary than that of boys. There is no apparent evolutionary explanation for this female advantage in vocabulary in infants. It is likely an effect of the earlier maturation of girls.

11m. Social Cognition 

 and Emotional Intelligence  Social cognition is the ability to understand what other people are thinking and is a designated theory of mind. A female advantage in social cognition assessed by the ability to decode non-verbal cues was reported by Hall (1978) and by the ability to identify emotions by Thompson & Voyer (2014). Social cognition is associated with emotional intelligence, on which a meta-analysis by Joseph & Newman (2010) reported a female advantage of .47d. There is no apparent evolutionary explanation for this female advantage.

Richard Lynn 

Sex Differences in Intelligence ...