Born at the end of November

Some of the writers who have been mentioned in previous articles were born during the last two days of November. 

Here is some interesting information to mark the occasion.

Born on the 29th
November 29th is the 333rd day of the year (except in leap years). 

Amos Bronson Alcott entered this world on the 29th November 1799; Louisa May Alcott, his daughter, was born in the early hours of the 29th in 1832, thus they were born exactly 33 years apart.

C. S. Lewis was born on the 29th November 1898.

Madeleine L’Engle was born on the 29th November 1918.

Born on the 30th
Angela Brazil was born on the 30th November 1868.

L. M. (Lucy Maud) Montgomery was born on the 30th November 1874.

Influences and connections
For the Alcotts, sharing the same birthday was not the only connection. Bronson died in March 1888; Louisa died 2 days later.

C. S. Lewis died one week short of his 65th birthday and one hour before President John F. Kennedy died.

Louisa M. Alcott, L. M. Montgomery and Angela Brazil all wrote classic girls’ books.

One of Madeleine L’Engle’s main characters is called Meg; so is one of Louisa M. Alcott’s.

Madeleine L’Engle said this about books she read in childhood:

“My favorite was Emily of New Moon by Lucy Maude Montgomery, who is better known for her Anne of Green Gables books. Emily wanted to be a writer. Emily and I had a lot in common. Emily lived on Prince Edward Island and I live on Manhattan Island. Both are islands! Emily's father was dying of bad lungs and so was mine…“

Both C. S. Lewis and Madeleine L’Engle have been called Christian myth-makers. When asked whether her work has been compared to his, she replied:

“Yes, it has. I think that the main difference is that C. S. Lewis has more answers and I have more questions…”

C. S. Lewis created a flying horse, wrote a book called Surprised by Joy and married an American called Joy.

Madeleine L’Engle’s winged unicorn is called Gaudior, which has a meaning connected with joy and rejoicing. 

Being born at the end of November means that they were born under the astrological sign of Sagittarius. 

Flying horses, centaurs, philosophy, joyful religion and angels are all very Sagittarian. 

Be very careful what you dwell on: getting caught in one's own traps

I have had some more ideas about Charlotte Brontë, and I want to pass on my interpretation of certain significant events in her life. I think that some of them can be attributed to what I think of as psychological black magic.

Charlotte Brontë and her siblings were obsessed with the Duke of Wellington, England’s hero of the time. He starred in many of the wonderful, Byronic stories that they created from their imaginations. Both Charlotte and Emily Brontë created dark, romantic heroes; it is likely that they thought of the Duke, whose real name was Arthur Wellesley, as dark and romantic too.

Charlotte eventually married a dark man whose first name was Arthur. Was this just a coincidence, or a case of ‘Be very careful what you wish for ...’? He annoyed her when he hung around and dogged her footsteps through the village, but perhaps he was drawn in and caught in a psychic trap.

Her letters show that she was a great daydreamer: she had an almost lifelong habit of ‘making out’ as it was then called. This helped her to escape from her surroundings and painful memories, and provided some compensation for an unsatisfactory life. 

Some of her imaginings were so intensely vivid that they were almost hallucinations. She went in for two types of daydreaming: one where it was similar to watching TV and she did not know what would happen next, and the other where she mentally choreographed the events and invested a lot of energy in them, living them as if they were real. Some of the results went into her books.

Aryan supremacy: blond hair and blue eyes versus black hair and brown eyes

The idea that people from the Nordic race are superior to those from other races was of enormous importance to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. They propagated that the best kinds of human beings were Northwestern Europeans, white-skinned people with blue eyes and blond hair; this meant that races such as the Negroid, Slavic and Mediterranean and people with black hair and brown eyes were considered to be inferior. 

Similar ideas affected people whose lives are of interest to me. 

When I first read a biography of Louisa May Alcott, I learned that her father was what we would now call an Aryan supremacist. Bronson Alcott was tall, and he had blond hair and blue eyes. He said that such people were superior to dark-haired people with black hair and brown eyes. Louisa resembled her mother, who could have passed for Spanish or Italian.

Bronson Alcott thought that his colouring indicated associations with the light and good, angelic forces; this implied that Louisa and her mother were not only inferior, but also dark, evil and demonic. When Louisa brought home a young man with fair colouring, Bronson said, “Sir, you are a child of light”. Why was this issue so important to him? What effect did his views have on Louisa and her mother?

Is it just a coincidence that Louisa was born in Germantown, Philadelphia? This reminds me of the connection between the Mitford family, Unity Valkyrie and her Aryan supremacist grandfather Bertie Mitford in particular, and Swastika, Ontario.

Alcotts and Brontës and psychic crime

When I first read some biographies of the Brontë and the Alcott families, I immediately noticed some connections and common patterns. Some of these features are also present in and relevant to my own family. There are large numbers of scholarly, well researched and comprehensive books and articles about these families of interest and many analyses of their literary works, but they do not cover the aspects that I am most interested in. 

I always look out for possible examples of psychic crime or psychological black magic when researching the lives and works of people whose experiences and outlook on life have much in common with my own. I also look out for coincidences; for example, both Louisa May Alcott's father Bronson and Charlotte Brontë's father Patrick as young men slightly changed their last names to make them more 'up-market'. 

Louisa May Alcott was born on the same day as her father; she died a few days after he did, which could indicate some kind of psychic stranglehold. 

There was a lot of elevated and progressive ideology in the family, and Louisa bought the idea that the Alcotts were a breed apart. Her father frequently opted out of supporting the family, and Louisa was the sacrificial victim who was made to feel responsible for earning enough to support the lot of them. 

She disapproved when her older sister Anna married a very ordinary man called John Pratt, who died ten years later - shortly before the joint birthday.  

If marrying into the elite Alcott family was not acceptable, neither was escaping. Her youngest sister May travelled around Europe, then wrote to say that she had married and would not be coming back to the US. Her letters described the luxuries that she now had. She died some months later in Paris. 

The deaths of May and Anna's husband seem suspicious to me.

Mind control, brainwashing and psychological torture: an introduction

When I first started to read about the standard brainwashing and torture techniques that are used to influence, control and break people such as political prisoners, some of it sounded uncannily familiar. I thought immediately of what went on in my family; I was also reminded of the experiences of the young Jane Eyre, some of which were based on what actually happened to several of the Brontë sisters.

It is frightening to realise that some parents and other people in control of children apply these techniques instinctively.

It is devastating to read of such practices as isolating the victims, keeping them in a constant state of fear and uncertainty, keeping them torn between fight or flight and unable to do either, deprivation of food and sleep, constant humiliation, false accusations, making demands that are impossible to meet, random unfair and unjustified punishments, force feeding with political or religious ideology and mock executions and then to realise that they have been systematically applied to children, often in adapted and modified forms.

For example, where prisoners live in permanent fear of death and are forced to undergo mock executions, a child might live in permanent fear of being put in a children’s home and be forced to listen to frequent threats of abandonment or being sent away. I certainly was. Like the mock executions, these threats are never actually carried out, but on each occasion it seems that they will be.