11) The dream of creating a mixed super-race

This is the latest entry in my Spiritual Eugenics project, which explores the overlap between eugenics and New Age spirituality. For a definition of those terms, an introduction to the project, and other chapters in it, go here.

Eugenics often overlapped (and still overlaps) with scientific racism and white supremacy, leading many people to confuse the two. It’s true that in the United States and Germany, the two countries which most enthusiastically embraced eugenics in the 1920s-1940s, eugenics did very often overlap with an ideology of white supremacy and scientific racism. However, as I’ve explored throughout this project, there were several different varieties of eugenics, including versions which promoted using selective breeding to encourage inter-racial mingling, thereby creating a spiritual master-race.

In this chapter, we’re going to examine four figures who promoted inter-racial forms of spiritual eugenics — ie they explored the idea that inter-racial breeding can help to create spiritually gifted individuals or even a new race of superbeings. They didn’t all necessarily believe in the state saying who can and can’t reproduce — but they did explore ideas of selective inter-racial breeding towards the goal of creating more spiritually advanced humans.

1. Pascal Beverley Randolph

Pascal Beverley Randolph was a pioneering figure in American occultism, who can claim to be the first person to introduce sex magic into the US, and the first to found a Rosicrucian order. He was born in New York in 1825. On his father’s side, he was a descendant of William Randolph, one of the founders of the state of Virginia. His mother was creole, and he claimed she was descended from Madagascan royalty. This blend of different races figured prominently in his self-image and his idea of himself as magically gifted. He wrote:

My peculiar characteristics have usually been attributed to a strain of blood not a drop of which flows in my veins for I, being tawny of hue, am taken for half-breed Indian, Lascar, East India man, mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, and I know not what else. The facts are that on one side directly, the blood of the Randolphs bounds, — a fiery torrent, along the veins; Caucasian, aboriginal, and the darker side strain mingling therewith is the royal blood, fresh from the veins of the Queen of Madagascar.

Pascal Randolph had a short but extraordinary life. His mother died young, leaving him penniless, so he ran away to sea, journeying through Europe and Persia. He early developed an interest in occultism, and when he returned to the United States, he joined the Spiritualist movement. Like many Spiritualists, he was involved in progressive politics and campaigned for the abolition of slavery. He left Spiritualism and developed his own form of occultism, inspired by his readings on Rosicrucianism. He made his living as a doctor, and promoted hashish as a means to health and clairvoyance — it has been claimed he was briefly the largest importer of hashish into the US.

As Christine Ferguson has noted, Randolph was a spiritual hereditarian — he believed your spiritual capacities are determined by your ancestry, your childhood upbringing (including the moment of your procreation), your personal will, and your interaction with the spirit world. He illustrated his spiritual hereditarianism in a book he wrote about the Davenport brothers, who were leading figures in Spiritualism. He notes that they came from an ‘ancient English family’, and put forward the theory that their spiritual powers were the result of higher intelligences carefully directing the breeding and rearing of the Davenport family for generations:

the invisible powers — whether they be of the angelic orders, or disembodied men and women, formerly of and now visiting the earth again for redemptive and educational purposes; in other words, the power behind the veil — had, possibly for generations back, been labouring with and operating on the progenitors of the Davenport youths, for the express purpose of obtaining the results now triumphantly achieved.

Randolph believed his own spiritual capacities were the result of selective cross-breeding of royal racial lines — the aristocratic Randolphs on his father’s side, and the Madagascan royalty that he believed his mother was descended from. In other words, it is the fact he is inter-racial — and aristocratic on both sides — that makes him the magician he is.

Randolph — like the occult eugenicists of the Golden Dawn — thought the moment of procreation was all important for determining the health and spirituality of children. He insisted that most marriages were unhealthy because the wives rarely achieved orgasm, and taught techniques of sexual magic to try and improve connubial bliss, thereby ensuring superior progeny.

2) Jean Toomer and the inter-racial ‘new race’ of the United States

When eugenics was at its high-point in the United States, in the 1920s and 1930s, its influence was so widespread that it was even championed by African-American intellectuals, despite the outright racism of much American eugenic science.

For example, WEB Dubois was one of the leading African-American intellectuals in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. He agreed with white supremacist eugenicists that the African-American community had lower average intelligence and higher incidence of feeble-mindedness than the white population, but he blamed this on the effect of centuries of slavery, and he promoted freedom and education as the antidote.

Dubois was also an intellectual elitist. He described a ‘talented tenth’ of African-American society who could pull the rest of the race forward culturally and economically. He believed most African-Americans bred too much and too indiscriminately. His race, he said, ‘must learn that among human races and groups, as among vegetables, quality and not mere quantity really counts.’ For that reason, he advocated better sex education and birth control as a way to decrease unwanted and unhealthy children. He never went so far as to advocate voluntary or forced sterilization.

Another leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance was Jean Toomer, who gained acclaim with his lyrical first novel, Cane, about life in poor African-American communities in the South. He was celebrated by white critics as a great ‘Negro’ writer, capable of authentically channeling the sensuality and ecstasy of the Negro people. But Toomer didn’t want to be celebrated as a Negro writer. In fact, he was mixed race — his father was taken for a white man in the South and a black man in the North. Toomer speculated that his ancestry was ‘French, Dutch, Welsh, Negro, German, Jewish, and Indian’. In 1922 he declared:

I have lived equally amid the two race groups. Now white, now colored. From my own point of view I am naturally and inevitably an American. I have striven for a spiritual fusion analogous to the fact of racial intermingling.

Jean Toomer

In 1924, Toomer came into the circle of AR Orage, who we met in the chapter on Nietzsche and the cult of the superman. In the UK, Orage had championed the idea of ‘spiritual eugenics’ in the pages of his New Age magazine, before he left the magazine to become a follower of GI Gurdjieff, the Armenian mystic and occultist. Orage became Gurdjieff’s principle apostle in New York.

The arcane intricacies of Gurdjieff’s esoteric system are not the subject of this book, but in brief Gurdjieff developed a magical system loosely inspired by Neoplatonic and Pythagorean magic. He claimed that most of humanity was asleep, and their thoughts and actions are entirely automatic and involuntary. Most people don’t really exist — they sleep, then die. It’s possible for a miniscule minority of humans to awaken and become conscious integrated selves, through a rigorous process of initiation and training led by an awakened master (ie Gurdjieff). This is known as ‘the Work’. The Master works to disrupt your automatic processes, wake you up, and help you forge the separate centres of your personality into an integrated whole. You become awakened superbeings.

AR Orage set up the Institute for Harmonious Development in New York, and developed various informal groups around the US, including one in Harlem. The groups followed his training in self-observation, non-identification and role play, all to help people disidentify with their false conventional selves and wake up to their cosmic super-selves.

As Jon Woodson has researched, Orage’s Harlem group attracted several leading figures in the Harlem Renaissance, including the authors Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larson, Langston Hughes, George Schuyler and Wallace Thurman. Jean Toomer saw Gurdjieff and his theatre troupe perform in New York in 1924, and was so inspired he travelled to France to study under Gurdjieff. He then returned to New York and, with Orage’s approval, started teaching the Work.

Gurdjieff’s Work seems to have appealed to figures in the Harlem renaissance because it offered a way to disidentify with the conventional identity of ‘the Negro’ and to shape-shift into multiple identities, as a means to attaining a super-cultural and super-racial cosmic consciousness (precisely the opposite goal of the ‘racial sensitivity’ courses one finds today, which seek to entrench people in racial identities).

Toomer felt he had attained this cosmic consciousness in an experience of 1926. He wrote: ‘I was discovering that my being was in vital contact with the vast universe. Through being, as had never been possible through body, I was becoming connected with the all-embracing world.

At the same time, there was an element of spiritual eugenics about Toomer’s occult philosophy. He was inspired by his reading of evolutionary theory, and by his reading of Madame Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine, which suggested humanity had evolved through various races, and was in the process of evolving into a new super-race. Toomer believed he was a member of this super-race. And he thought part of its unique characteristic was it would be an inter-racial mingling.

In his 1936 poem Blue Meridien, he imagined the dawning of a new race — beyond the white, black or yellow races, which would be uniquely American, and uniquely mixed:

Black is black, white is white,

East is east, west is west,

Is truth for the brain of contrasts;

Yet here the high way of the third,

The blue man, the purple man

Foretold by ancient minds who knew,

Not the place, not the name,

But the resultant of yes and no

Struggling for birth through ages.

We who exist today are the new people,

Born of elevated rock and lifted branches,

A race called Americans…

Through cycles of death and life,

Each stage a pod,

Perpetuating and perfecting

He imagined the power of eros breaking through taboos against miscegenation to create the new super-race:

Lift, lift, thou waking forces!

Let us feel the energy of animals,

The force of rumps and bull-bent heads

Crashing the barrier to man

He thought inter-racial couples ‘heralded the birth of a new order, a new vision, a new ideal of man’ , and his lovers and two wives were all white. Such marriages, he thought, would create children of ‘hybrid vigour’.

Toomer and his second wife, Marjery Latimer

This was a belief shared by some others in the Harlem Renaissance, such as the Jamaican writer JA Rogers, who wrote a 1940 book called Sex and Race, exploring how different races are naturally attracted to each other despite miscegenation laws. He thought this was a ‘cosmic process’ creating higher types. ‘Mongrel races are the best’, he wrote:

As it is with languages so it is with peoples. The most advanced are the so-called mongrel or ‘impure’ races. These have the greater proportion of human totality, that is, in their veins flow a greater variety of climatic accretion.…It happens to be that the most backward races of mankind are the purest, that is, those with the least variety of strains.

3) Luther Burbank and the creation of new human types

Luther Burbank (1849–1926) was a famous American horticulturalist and botanist, who lived in Santa Barbara, California, and worked to create new species of fruits, vegetables and flowers, which he presented to the world in his catalogs, such as the 1893 publication, ‘New Creations in Fruits and Flowers’.

He worked through the slow grafting and selection of species over generations, following the methods of Mendel and Darwin, and created hundreds of new species, including 113 types of plum, 69 types of nut, 16 types of blackberry, 10 types of apple, and 91 species of flowers. His most famous creations include the Shasta daisy, the Flaming Gold nectarine, the russet Burbank potato, and the spineless cactus. His work reminds us of how central selective breeding has been to human agriculture for millennia.

‘Plant wizard’ Luther Burbank

Burbank may sound like a Dr Moreau type figure, splicing species together, but he was in fact famed for his gentleness, and declared, ‘The secret of improved plant breeding, apart from scientific knowledge, is love’. He was a revered figure in American culture. The New York Times wrote after his death in 1926: ‘No prominent man in all the history of this country, outside of those connected with public affairs, has so touched the imagination of the people and so enlisted their interest as Luther Burbank’.

He was also something of a spiritual figure. Yogananda, also a resident of California, described him as a ‘saint among the roses’, and wrote about his meetings with Burbank in his book Autobiography of a Yogi.

Controversially, Burbank was not a Christian, but seemed to have been more drawn to a Californian eclectic spirituality, practicing yoga techniques taught to him by Yogananda. He told Yogananda: ‘Sometimes I feel very close to the Infinite Power… Then I have been able to heal sick persons around me, as well as many ailing plants.’

Burbank was also a believer in spiritual eugenics. He believed you could cultivate new types of human, just as he had new types of fruit and vegetable. In Yogananda’s Autobiography, he meets Burbank’s adopted daughter.

‘She is my human plant.’ Luther waved to her affectionately. ‘I see humanity now as one vast plant, needing for its highest fulfillments only love, the natural blessings of the great outdoors, and intelligent crossing and selection. In the span of my own lifetime I have observed such wondrous progress in plant evolution that I look forward optimistically to a healthy, happy world as soon as its children are taught the principles of simple and rational living. We must return to nature and nature’s God.’

In his 1907 book, Training of the Human Plant, he outlines his plan to create a new type of human. As with his creation of new plant species, he believed the crossing of different races was key:

I have come to find in the crossing of species and in selection, wisely directed, a great and powerful instrument for the transformation of the vegetable kingdom along lines that lead constantly upward. The crossing of species is to me paramount.

He thought the United States offered ‘the grandest opportunity ever presented of developing the finest race the world has ever known out of the vast mingling of races brought here by immigration’. This, he thought, would be the ‘race of the future’.

The idea of a mixed ‘race of the future’ was quite popular at this time, especially in spiritual and occult circles in the US. William Quan Judge, one of the founders of the Theosophical Society, wrote in his 1890 book Echoes of the Orient:

We are preparing here in America a new race which will exhibit the perfection of the glories that I said were being slowly brought to the surface from the long forgotten past … Here, and nowhere else, are to be found men and women of every race living together, being governed together, attacking nature and the problems of life together, and bringing forth children who combine, each one, two races. This process will go on until in the course of many generations there will be produced on the American continents an entirely new race; new bodies; new orders of intellect; new powers of the mind.

The head of the Theosophist Society of Pasadena, Gottfried de Purucker, likewise said in 1930: ‘the race of the future will be a composite, composed of the many different races on earth today.’

What did that mean in practice? Burbank thought plants were created through selective breeding and care and love. He thought humans should be bred and reared the same way, and argued American education should be reformed to be less intellectual and more holistic, caring and outdoors, along the lines of Yogananda’s ‘education for life’.

As for the ‘breeding’ part of the equation, Burbank didn’t seem to believe in the state ordering different races to breed together, but he did believe in negative eugenics — he thought those deemed ‘unfit’ should be forbidden from breeding. Unfortunately, there was apparently a limit to his enthusiasm for inter-racial breeding. In an interview published after his death, he said:

No permanent results have been generally achieved, for example, through the commingling of Mongolians and Aryan blood, or of Aryan and Negro. I have said before and I say it again, that part of America’s greatness and part of our country’s possibilities for influence and leadership in the world are due to the crossing or races — the mixing of blood. But…there is a limit in the crossing of diverse strains beyond which it is not politic to go.

So apparently Aryans should inter-breed with everyone except Africans or Chinese (and possibly not ‘Latins’, ‘Slavs’ and the ‘vast hordes of Semites that have come to us in recent years’ either). I’m not sure who that leaves.

4) Octavia Butler and the breeding of mutants

Finally, I want to look briefly at the spiritual eugenics one finds in the novels of Octavia Butler, acclaimed as the mother of ‘Afro-futurism’.

Octavia Butler, mother of Afro-Futurism

Butler, another Californian who dreamt of creating a new race, was born in Pasadena in 1947. Her father, a shoeshiner, died when she was seven and she was raised by her mother, who worked as a housemaid. Octavia was very tall (six foot) with a deep voice, and she felt painfully shy growing up. She escaped into comic books and fantasy novels.

She remembered:‘I fantasised living impossible, but interesting lives — magical lives in which I could fly like Superman, communicate with animals, control people’s minds”. As a teenager, she told her friends that her ultimate fantasy was ‘to live forever and breed people, which didn’t go over that well with my friends’.

Butler explores the idea of selective and forced breeding throughout her novels, such as the ‘Xenogenesis’ trilogy, in which humans are forced to interbreed with an alien species, and the Patternist novels.

The Patternist novels centre on Doro, a Nubian born in ancient Egypt, who through an evolutionary mutation has become a sort of spiritual parasite or vampire, who possesses and kills other humans and then inhabits their bodies, until he moves on to a new body. He discovers that some bodies ‘taste’ better than others, particularly those humans who have evolved psionic capacities like healing, telepathy and telekinesis. Doro starts to breed psionic humans over generations, telling his chattels who to breed with so as to create the most interesting and powerful types. He does this partly to create food for himself, and partly because he — like the young Butler — wants to create a new race.

In Wild Seed, Doro encounters an African woman called Ananywu, who has the ability to change her body into whatever shape she wants. She, like he, has lived for centuries. The novel tells the story of his attempt to force her to become one of his ‘people’, their love-hate relationship, and the eventual truce they work out. Mind of My Mind, meanwhile, tells the story of Mary, one of Doro’s creations, who has advanced telepathic skills. She creates a psychic pattern, forcing other telepaths to join the pattern. They eventually evolve into a new species and enslave humanity (or ‘mutes’, as they call them).

Butler explores ideas of race, slavery, spiritual eugenics and domination in a very interesting and morally-ambiguous way, avoiding the usual black-and-white outraged moralizing over eugenics. She resists the easy delineation of good versus evil. She once said:

One of the things I’ve discovered even with teachers using my books is that people tend to look for ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ , which always annoys the hell out of me. I’d be bored to death writing that way. But because that’s the only pattem they have, they try to fit my work into it.

Doro, for example, is an anti-hero. He’s a black slaver, a eugenicist who forces others to breed for him. And yet his ‘people’ love him. Why? Because he’s powerful. There’s a sort of Nietzschean-Darwinian morality to her Patternist books.

At one point, Ananywu notes, ‘there are people who are slaves, and people who are slavers’. And that’s not just a racial thing — Doro is a black slaver, Mary enslaves her fellow telepaths. Power does not always fall across clean racial lines, and black people are not always victims. If you want to escape enslavement, you have to be lucky and strong, as Ananywu is — she turns herself into other species to escape Doro’s power, like something out of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. The weak and the sick don’t last long — in Ananywu’s African culture, disabled children are killed.

You could say her heroes and heroines are black superhumans, like ‘the Black Panther’ — the spiritual aristocrat of the Marvel comics. But in another sense, like Toomer’s Blue Men, they have transcended race and even the human species. Doro, for example, takes on multiple bodies, becoming black, white, male and female. Mary insists that because Doro was born a Nubian, he’s black. He replies: ‘I’m not black or white or yellow, because I’m not human, Mary’. Ananywu likes being a black woman, but she’s also been white, she’s also been male, she’s been many different species. She and Doro are like a product of Gurdjieff’s Work — capable of shape shifting and taking on multiple roles.

Butler’s novels, then, frankly and rather shockingly explore ‘spiritual eugenics’ and the patterns of power, domination and sexual attraction that we all live in. She seems, at times, to put forward a rather severe evolutionary world-view, in which evolution doesn’t care for us much as individuals, but it does at least create interesting new types and wild talents — and her fantasies suggest this process can perhaps be somewhat steered. I find her morally ambiguous perspective on superheroes quite interesting. It kept me reading, anyway.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, eugenics is often equated with white supremacy, scientific racism and fascism, and that is often the case, but not always. As we explore throughout this project, there are many varieties of eugenics, including feminist, globalist, ecological and even queer. In this chapter, we’ve explored examples of inter-racial spiritual eugenics, and the dream of creating a spiritual super-race through the cross-breeding of different races or even different species.

One finds this idea more broadly in our culture, in statements like ‘the future is mixed race’. In fact, futurists as far back as HG Wells have predicted that the mingling of races would become more and more common. Contemporary futurist Charlie Brooker, who is one half of an inter-racial couple, seems to see this utopian possibility — many of the couples in his series Black Mirror are also inter-racial.

Inter-racial couples are, in fact, becoming more and more common, and that’s thanks to changing attitudes, to globalization, and to dating apps like Tinder, which are the principle mechanism of natural selection these days. Is that creating an inter-racial ‘super-race’, or just helping us get over the whole obsession with skin colour and arbitrary labels?

Black Mirror’s episode Hang the DJ, one of several to feature an inter-racial couple.