Current Projects

Here’s an update on current projects that I’m working on. I’ve just posted Alraune Chapter 4 on my webpage and look forward to chapter 5. This is very symbolic since chapter 4 was so very long and took a long time to translate because I had to leave it for awhile. The good news is that I’m commiting myself to having Alraune completely translated by Christmas and plan to have it available as an ebook by that time at least. I’m working with two other people on print versions though and don’t know a time frame for those yet.

Lakes Area Pagan: A Book OF Shadows will be out this month and will complete my commitment to Lakes Area Pagan Magazine. I will be turning the project over to others. Originally this book of shadows was to collect the first four volumes of Lakes Area Pagan into one book. What I’ve decided to do instead is to collect the first four volumes of Lakes Area Pagan and add enough material so it will be a complete book of shadows that represents the OAK 3rd degree materials.

Lakes Area Pagan: Art & Poems

Some of the art work and poetry submitted to Lakes Area Pagan has been so good that it requires a book of its own in full color. The cost of printing full color books makes it imperative that it contain only art and poetry to limit page count.

My books on amazon.com

Lulu, my publisher has just pioneered a deal with amazon to list some of their books. An unforeseen consequence of this is the listing of my books on amazon.com at the lower prices of aprox $16.50 per book. Normally to have them listed on amazon.com would require the price to list at over $21.00 so both Lulu and Amazon get their cut. The bottom line is more exposure for my books than ever before. I’ve also added three of my books on Kindle.

Scribd.com now lists my books as well and has all four of them for sale as ebooks. I’m experimenting with various options to see which seem to get the best results. The main focus is still on getting new readers so everything I’ve published so far is still available for free somewhere on the web if you know how to find it. In the meantime print books and kindle editions increase the options readers have. While I still offer things online for free it is important to note that I feel a fair price for any of my books is a $5.00 royalty and all prices reflect that. I accept donations as well.

If you have read and enjoyed Anarchist Knight:Apprentice, Magister Templi, Modern Survivalism, Hanns Heinz Ewers Volume I or the upcoming Lakes Area Pagan Book of Shadows as a free edition and wish to square karmic accounts there is a donation button for $5 on the Anarchist World website. Feel free to use it.

These books remain the best information available in the world as far as I’m concerned and contain lifetimes worth of information. You simply can not find this information anywhere else. I know because I’ve tried.

-joe

Memorial Day Weekend

Well it’s memorial day weekend and I get to work on Alraune a bit. My goal is to complete one chapter every month at the least and I’m falling behind. This is mainly because my everyday job has picked up and I’m working five 10 hour days plus weekend work and daily security runs where I live.  In this economy having too much work is a blessing so I can’t complain.

Visitors to Anarchist World remain steady. On scribd.com my books Magister Templi and Modern Survivalism draw many more readers than the fiction stories.

There is more OAK material but it is about group energy and as long as there is no group there can be no material. OAK is a movement that will either catch on or die. I’ve made the information as freely available as possible. Time will tell.

I’ve thought quite a bit about the general public and what makes things popular. The final conclusion is that self-evident truth will appeal to everyone.

Regarding the Hanns Heinz Ewers projects I’ve realized that I would rather spend my spare time doing quality translations of this fascinating writer than any other writer and I seem to have a knack for it.

I continue to pick up source material at every opportunity and currently have years worth of translation material that I want to read and translate. In competition with this is the growing need and desire to try my hand at screenplays. I fully intend to make a screen play of Alraune after I finish translating the book.

The Alraune blog is currently active and every few days I’m putting more on it. For those wanting to keep up with the latest that is where to find me.

I will have the entire Frank Braun trilogy translated within the next four years as well as some other stories. I can translate at least twice as fast as I can write my own material and I need to get more books out. Alraune will be my sixth book believe it or not. Lakes Area Pagan Book of Shadows will collect the first four volumes of Lakes Area Pagan into a full color hard cover book that will be out this summer or next fall.

till next time,

-joe

Beltaine

Well I made it through my birthday and Beltaine is coming up. How about Anarchist World?  Some interesting things going on. First I posted lots of my stuff on scribd.com and after two weeks have 800 views and 95 downloads, most of the downloads are for Modern Survivalism and Magister Templi is not doing bad either. The counter for Anarchist World has over 13,000 since last September. That means steady readers coming every day. Bottom line is that there is good content on my site and people are valuing even if they are not buying it.

This  increased demand for Modern Survivalism and Magister Templi has prompted me to lower my asking price for the paperbacks to $16 and some odd cents. Hopefully the new prices will be reflected this weekend if I can get to it. In the meantime if you try to buy one of these books it will give the proper price. The only reason I went with the higher price was because I was going to market them through amazon.com and they required $12 per book for their cut. Now I believe I can do better on my own.

I finished Hanns Heinz Ewers Volume I and it is now available as well. Lakes Area Pagan needs to be finished soon. So there is lots to do. I will be working seriously on finishing Alraune by Christmas and hope to see it published sometime in Spring.

Basically when I look at everything I’ve done I realize that I have created an interesting site that draws many people and will draw many more in the future. That has been my primary object. I do have one other project that is starting however.

Hanns Heinz Ewers Private Study Group

I translate Hanns Heinz Ewers out of love and interest. Most of the stories or novels I have never read before and I get to read them for the first time with everyone else. It is frustrating for me to spend hours translating Alraune when I could be translating something else that I have never read before. Still, the most pressing need is a new uncensored edition of Alraune and I’m up for it.

I’m trying very hard to introduce Ewers to new readers. By now everyone should realize my translations do stand apart from what you might have read before and that is my particular skill and passion. Hanns Heinz Ewers needs to reach a modern audience with modern translations. I seem to be the only one doing it.

I wish that there were more hours in the day available to me for translation work. I truly love to translate more than any other hobby I’ve ever had. Here’s the bottom line. I’d like to create a Hanns Heinz Ewers Private Study Group. This is how it would work:

I would create several private blogs available only to the study group:

Horst Wessel
Rider in the German Night
Fundvogel
The Cabaret
The Girl Wonder of Berlin
Ghost Seer
India and I
Travels Through the Latin World
Short Stories of Hanns Heinz Ewers

I have all but these two, Rider in the German Night and Travels Through the Latin World. I have all the rest and am itching to discover what is inside them but don’t have the time. I will be ordering these last two books within the next few months. I would not be publishing these but offering them for private study and discussion.

Each week I would post about six pages of never before translated text into one of these blogs. It would be a grab bag with no rhyme or reason. I would email everyone which blog I posted in. But each blog will be continuous. Horst Wessel will start with the first six pages and each time I post in that blog it will carry on from where it left off. If I started a thirty page short story that story would be completed before I started another story in that blog but it might be weeks before I once more posted six pages to that blog.

This might seem crazy but after six months or a year there would be significant material in all of these blogs that no one else in the world has ever read in English before. Progress would be slow but it is a study group and hopefully conversations and friendships can develop. Some people buy limited editions because they want to be the first ones to read the material or in some cases the only ones that can afford to read the material.

This is a way for people to get advance knowledge of material that might be years away from publication. If you love Hanns Heinz Ewers this would be perfect. It would cost $5/mo, the price of a cup of coffee and a donut. There would be a membership subscription set up through paypal.

The first three entries will be to Horst Wessel, Ghost Seer and India and I. I hope to have these set up this coming week to get a jump start on things. If you are interested in joining this private study group please email me at anarchistbanjo@live.com and have private study group in the heading. I will need at least ten people interested before I will do it. In the meantime I will be doing these scattered six pages anyway to take a little break from Alraune once in awhile. Let me know if you are interested and then I will set things up.

Email me and let’s talk. Please realize that these studies will be slow going at only six pages per week but it is also material that will have never been in English before and that might be worth something to some of you. I know it is to me. I translate simply because I want to know how it reads.

-joe

The Nation of Culture and OAK

I once read somewhere that if what you are doing doesn’t work, then try something else. Something else I read was about alchemical gold and turning lead into gold. The way to create alchemical gold is to take the gold you have and multiply it! First you need to have some!

So you take what works, even if it is not a huge success and multiply that. It seems simple enough but the reality is more challenging.

I recently made my books, Anarchist Knight-Apprentice, Magister Tempi, Modern Survivalism and my translated stories available on Scribd.com. I did this after careful consideration of stats and on sudden impulse as well.

This is all based on my thought that readership is much more important than making any money on my writing. How to boost readership has been a question that baffles lots of people on the internet. I am pleased to see a steady growth and don’t really have any complaints. I’m just impatient.

Magister Templi and Modern Survivalism are the study material for the 1st and 2nd degrees of the OAK magickal system. What about study material for the 3rd degree? It can’t exist yet!

The 3rd degree material is about group energy and group dynamics. It is about the power of collective purpose and collective agreement. It is about joint effort and beleif in a common system of values. Until there is a group there can be no 3rd degree. This is true for any magickal system, political system, religious system, educational system of any structure involving a number of people.

In these two books I’ve put down the morals and values that I believe will guide humanities future. It is a belief in hard work and individual competence. Today’s world has become so fragmented that people are following individual paths and not collective paths. They are opting for individual goals and not collective goals. There is nothing wrong with this. It is where people are in their development. All that I’m saying is there will be no progress until people once more learn to work together in collective agreement.

Forcing individual compliance through force backed laws, fear based coercion and rules will not work.

From a personal note Magister Templi and Modern Survivalism say everything that I feel I need to say. There is no more I can do until people gather together in common purpose. I was a member of the Rosicrucian Order AMORC for twenty two years and studied weekly monographs. The power that bound Rosicrucians together was a common education, a common conceptual understanding. The fact that everyone studied the same monographs in the same order and progressed through the material in the same manner was a very powerful and empowering thing for a person to do. I know that my Rosicrucian studies shaped my life and my very soul. No matter who I might become later in life I will always remain a Rosicrucian because of the way they have shaped me.

Hanns Heinz Ewers believed in a Nation of Culture that was destroyed by the two world wars. In his writing we can track the development of his soul as he first pursues spiritual and philosophical things, then confronts his own shadow and personal demons and finally late in life pours his heart and soul into the group.

He spent the first part of his life in selfish and solitary pursuits and only later became an ardent nationalist. Unfortunately his nation was Hitler’s Germany. Still, is there much difference in saying that one should be proud of their country, proud of thier roots, proud of their culture, proud of their own people?

As long as it is America that we are proud of it’s alright, or even any other country in the world except Nazi Germany. Ewers was a strong supporter of the Jewish cause and helped many aquire the visas they needed to leave Germany before World War II. The question is not about hate or race or superiority. It is about love of home and country taken to an extreme degree. It is about the belief in a nation of culture.

As I translate Hanns Heinz Ewers I realize that I share a passionate belief  in human potentials, rugged individualism, high ideals, personal freedom, and a longing to belong to a group of  like minded people. I feel frustrated at a society that feels it no longer needs collective agreement but can use blind force to attain compliance to its whims. I feel frustrated at a society that rewards weakness and dependency and punishes competency and skill.

The nation of culture that Hanns Heinz Ewers knew and loved was the mystery tradition of the west, namely Free Masonry, Rosicrucianism , Kabalistic groups and the sciences. One could even make the claim with some degree of accuracy that Masonry ruled the world. That is not true today. To  be a mason is to invite persecution once more.

Aleister Crowley dreamed that his organization, the OTO, could reinvent Freemasonry on a higher level and bring back the nation of culture but it never caught on. Without members even the most worthy ideals and goals will fail.

The OAK materials contained in Magister Templi and Modern Survivalism synthesize a life time of personal study and experience. Most importantly they have been simplified down to the point where they represent self-evident truths. They represent things common to everyone and experiences common to everyone. They represent a starting point of a new nation of culture if they can draw enough support from enough people. They stand upon the solid ground of the past and look with self-evident eyes into the future exposing the frauds and illusions of political correctness.

Let’s face it. Some things will never be popular and truth is one of them! As Hanns Heinz Ewers says, beautiful lies always destroy ugly truth!

Happy Holidays!

I think back on the past year and how much has changed for me. I have moved into a new stage of my life and leaving the old one has been kind of strange.

I put so much time and energy into my personal writing projects and trying to get them out and now it seems as if they are just lying there while I obsessively translate Hanns Heinz Ewers. What is going on!

Simply put, I thought about writing another metaphysical book, then realized that in Magister Templi and Modern Survivalism I had successfully said what I wanted to say. There was no real need for anything else. All that remained was to finish the Anarchist Knight trilogy and that still remains.

Ewers books Alraune, Vampire and Fundvogel are important to me because I wish to learn how to write that way. I am largely translating them to gain the writing skills needed to write my next two books.

Anarchist Knight Journeyman is a darker story and will need those things that I am now learning. It will be worth the wait. I am learning how to connect with my own dark nature in a positive and creative way. Each thing I translate stirs up emotions that I never knew existed. That is what is important because once they are stirred up I can capture them in words.

I am planning to publish Hanns Heinz EwersVolume I this spring. It will include many short stories and the first two chapters of Vampire, the first three chapters of Alraune.

It will only include material published by Ewers before 1923 so I can’t include chapters from Fundvogel or some of the short stories I have already translated. It will be 300-350 pages so look for it!

The Ewers estate apparently has no interest in talking with me about my translations. Both emails and letters go unanswered. Other than continuing the Fundvogel translation I will limit myself to only translating works that are in the public domain here in the United States. Things that are not in the public domain will remain on my website until I am asked personally by the estate to take them down. I will not attempt to make any money off them but offer them freely for fans to read.

Most of Hanns Heinz Ewers material was published before 1923 so I have a large assortment of material to work with including the novels The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Ghost Seer.

You can expect to see new translations of some short stories that have already been translated. The language in most of them sounds stilted and I’m itching to give it a try to see if I can do any better! The Spider will be the first of these that I will be translating fresh.

My translation skills are improving with each new page and I’m learning a lot. In a hard world taking a few hours each day to work on these is one of my greatest joys. I do it for love and because I want to find out what happens next.

 

bright blessings

-joe

The Nation of Culture!

I’ve finished Chapter one of Vampire and it will soon be posted on the main webpage, finished “My Mother the Witch”, started chapter three of Alraune, in the middle of chapter two of Fundvogel.

I will do one more short story before starting “The Spider”. I am curious if there will be any significant differences in my translation. I will only post things I have personally translated so it needs to be done. The Spider is probably HHE’s most famous short story. I should have it on my web page.

The translation work is taking form and so is the influence of Hanns Heinz Ewers in my own life. He represents my dark aspect just as my other books represent my spiritual/light side. On the pages of Anarchist World there are two polarities, one light and one dark. Both are related to each other in some mysterious way.

There is no doubt in my mind that this polarity will draw readers. It will draw members of the nation of culture! Hanns Heinz Ewers believed in the nation of culture, thought it was destroyed during world war I, thought that the third Reich might be able to bring it back. Vienna had been the cultural capital of the world.

Post World War I Germany gave the world many things including Psychology with Freud, Jung, Reich and others. It gave us Einstein, nuclear physics, rockets, the space program. It gave us German philosophers such as Kant and Neitzche.

This is just scratching the surface. Many of the medical miracles of today such as organ transplants have come out of the horrendous human experimentation done during world war II by the Nazis.

Was Nazi Germany a nation of culture? The frightening answer is that I don’t really know! I do know that something went horribly wrong. Hanns Heinz Ewers was banned in Nazi Germany, was on the death list but escaped to die in poverty, persona non grata. The nation that he believed in did not in the end believe in him. Hanns Heinz Ewers was a Jewish sympathiser as well as Hitler’s favorite author! What an explosive position to be in!

In today’s world, I wonder about a nation of culture. Is it possible? Is it too dangerous to consider? Would such a nation be corrupted to evil?  These are all questions that I would like the answer to.

All I know is that I long for people of culture! I tire of the petty lives of those that talk only of deer hunting, favorite restaurants and television shows. Sometimes I long so deeply for a decent conversation that I just need to be alone, there is no one there. That’s when I write on Anarchist World.

There is a nation of culture and Anarchist World is part of it!

The People have Spoken

Well the people have spoken and it is certainly not for rugged individualism, personal competency or the freedom to follow the voice of one’s conscience. In the question of internal authority vs external authority the people have spoken with a resounding “Fix everything for us and make it right!” The concept of keeping your own back yard clean appears alien to the American public.

Perhaps the thing that bothers me most is the feeling that we have been set up. I personally believe that there was a conscious and deliberate move to make the Bush presidency so bad that there would be an extreme pendulum swing in the opposite direction. Well that has certainly happened. The Democrats have practically no oppositon or voice of moderation to hold them in check.

The statement I just made will go over the heads of those not familiar with the writings of Albert Pike and high degree Scottish rite Freemasonry. That just makes me even more frustrated. There are people that have resolved the paradox of conflicting Democrat and Republican viewpoints and stand above them both maintaining the illusion of conflict and encouraging it by the masses.

In case anyone missed it a few weeks ago the government was forced into a $700 billion bank bailout during a Republican administration that has done its best to bankrupt the United States! Not only that, the banking institutions of the world are now acting in concert and will continue to work in concert. I don’t know about anyone else but that sounds to me like we have a global banking system in place and functioning right now as of three weeks ago. Don’t expect it to go away! Its taken a long time to make it happen at all!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Republican, certainly not a Democrat, I’m simply a mystic and an anarchist believing in internal authority as it speaks through my conscience. It troubles me to see people rush to create laws to coerce individuals to conform to what they believe is proper and right. Every law that has ever been passed had been passed with good intentions.

Hanns Heinz Ewers spoke of a nation of culture that rose above the common masses, a nation beyond race, beyond relgion, a higher nation. It was his dream and it’s becoming my dream as well, a nation where competency and effort are rewarded. A nation where people are expected to have self-discipline and be able to take care of themselves and those they love. Most of all a creative nation that will make a quantum leap beyond the small thinking and small lives are content to work in soul sucking jobs at near poverty wages and go home to passive entertainment like television.

Happy Halloween!

Things have been crazy around here! I finally got the third issue of Lakes Area Pagan out and it looks good. That was quite a task that was late coming. Then I’ve been working round robin fashion on the Ewers translations and getting a bit overwhelmed by the shear volume of what I am attempting to do.

I have heard nothing from the Ewers estate yet and hope they will get back to me soon. I’ve asked for permission to publish all of the short stories I’ve translated thus far plus a couple more and then chapters 1&2 of Alraune, Vampire and Fundvogel. With an introduction that will make a book of around 350 pages!

I will be making changes to commercialize the site meaning that as I publish books I will limit that material on the webpage. For example, you can currently read Anarchist Knight in it entirety on Anarchist World, purchase it as a low cost ebook and buy it as a paperback. No one is buying it because I have it for free on my webpage! In the meantime I’m putting out money, time and effort to produce even more material. So I will be clipping the final chapters on the webpage allowing readers to sample the book almost completely but not quite. They will be asked to buy it.

The same will happen to Magister Templi, Modern Survivalism and Hanns Heinz Ewers vol I when I get it completed.

Don’t panic, there will always be new material that is freely available including the books. Concerning books I need to make something else clear. I don’t seem to have enough time in the day to do everything I want. This includes the need to begin work on the second volume: Anarchist Knight:Journeyman.

To make a long story short after the first two chapters of Vampire and Fundvogel are done and go into the Hanns Heinz Ewers vol I they will be going on the back burner until I finish Journeyman and Alraune. The short stories will continue but at a slower pace.

I will be translating Vampire and Fundvogel but I simply have too many projects going at one time and need to get my priorities in order. Alraune is the most important, then Journeyman. That’s the way it is. With luck you can begin to see around ten pages of Alraune every week after I clear away the first two chapters of the others. That will probably not happen until the first of next year. I still have around 100 pages to translate just to reach that goal!

My other blogs are going to be hit and miss. I will get to them when I can, hopefully once a month. Anarchist Knight and Magister Templi continue to sell the most ebook downloads. Visitors seem to be finding the new webpage alright. I can’t complain about anything except the lack of time. It would be nice to be able to quit one of my part time jobs. Chuckle.

 

bright blessings

-anarchistbanjo

Don’t Panic!

Don’t panic! I’m working on the new issue of Lakes Area Pagan and need to get that out before I can add more translations. We might also be moving as well so if that happens there might be a little bump in the road here. As soon as things settle back down everything will get back to normal.

In case you haven’t noticed we are living in interesting times! The energy of the new eon is cutting its way straight across the board sending shockwaves around the world. It’s not coincidence that we are in the middle of a global financial crisis and a bitterly contested election, there is a lot at stake.

In the long run we need to understand what the new eon is all about. It is about individuation and the development of the individual ego. The old idea of a monarch and national leaders is falling away. The world is moving away from dictators and monarchs and becoming more democratic. That has been going on for some time now but no one has really understood what it means.

It means that the world is gradually and slowly moving toward living in a consensus oriented world and one of common self sufficiency. No one is going to be a follower, everyone will find themselves! We can see that on Utube and everywhere on the internet where individuals are making records, doing radio shows, publishing their own books and doing their own blogs.

In the financial crisis that we are facing it is the mutual funds, the small deposits of millions of small investors, that will stabalize and save the market. The independent investors trying to get rich or panicing and selling at a loss are the ones that will suffer. The bottom line is that the new eon runs on personal effort and not on the collective power of the masses. If that sounds like a contradiction I am not making myself plain.

A legitimate business produces a good or service that is of good value and in demand by the public. That will never change. That is the bottom line. Like the parable of the tortoise and the hare, the scheming get rich quick scams will not work the way they have in the past. Good old values of earned effort will apply if you let them.

Making Fresh Starts!

I am moving my personal blog here and discontinuing the squarespace blog simply because I’ve moved all the good stuff to Anarchistworld and am not willing to continue paying the $7/mo for a blog that is currently not getting many visitors. This means I will have completely severed my past links and really starting from scratch.

I can’t think of a better time to do it. It looks like we might be moving as well. Strange how life is at times. It will be all I can do to keep my translation work going. Right now I’ve got to take a few days off and work on the Fall Issue of Lakes Area Pagan. If you are wondering what I’m doing, well that’s part of it. I continue to work two jobs so my time is limited. Its a wonder I get as much done as I do!

I just started Chapter Two of Fundvogel and Alraune is starting to get interesting. Hell, they all are interesting! Keep in touch.