The map
Three parts, read in order
Taken from the preface and from headings in REM volume I. A line here is a reader’s note, not the chapter. Where a synopsis would only be a guess, the title is listed and left alone.
Part I
Groundwork
The concepts required before the rest of the book will hold. Propaganda, myth, religion, culture, media, and art are treated as one kind of thing, and the method — REM — is stated through Biblical and popular examples rather than through a chronological history.
The Myth of Pygmalion
The opening chapter. Art is treated as a mating song: what a people venerates selects a type. The Jacob and Laban parable in Genesis 30 is the first worked example of the claim they name Racial Esoteric Moralization.
Japheth and Shem
How the book uses “Aryan,” and why it says language is not the same thing as race. Noah’s sons are read as the names of peoples, with Japheth and Shem as the pair the rest of the argument turns on.
Jews Before Jews
The hypothesis of a Proto-Jewish priestly continuity inside older civilizations, from Sumer forward, before the name “Jew” appears in pagan accounts.
The Tower of Babel
A named reading inside the groundwork. The site does not reproduce the chapter.
Degeneration and Unity
A named reading on mixture and decline. Synopsis withheld until a closer pass; the title is the book’s.
The Purposes of Myth and Religion
Where the volume says what myth is for, against the habit of treating it as a spontaneous map of the unconscious.
Transmission and Reception
How a symbol is sent, and how an audience takes it without being told it is a symbol.
Apollonian Transmission
Their name for an open reading of the code, set against what they call Promethean, or hidden, transmission.
Racial Esoteric Moralization
The formal statement of REM: symbols in myth, religion, and art used to moralize one group and unnerve another.
Opacity as Demoralization
A named argument that mystery itself can be a weapon, when the audience cannot tell which figure is meant to be itself.
The Poverty of Traditionalism
Their objection to reading myth as inherited mood rather than as a made instrument.
Fossilization
A religio-culture that can no longer make work at the strength of its own earlier forms, and keeps the shapes anyway. They apply it to Hollywood and to the later temple art of India.
Part II
Ancients & Moderns
History as they mean it: a “Proto-Jewish past” running from the Bronze Age and the Pelasgians, through the Greek myth body, to what they call Norse paganism, and on into Christianity. The preface says this part is where regime and peoples, not only symbols, are at stake.
Regime-change myths
Not offered here as a formal chapter title. In this part the book reads stories such as Zeus displacing Kronos as the replacement of one religio-culture by another, and sets Jacob and Esau beside that pattern.
Part III
Cults and Culture
Their definitions of culture and of civilization, and the often hostile relation between them. The preface places the old Mystery cults here, and the claim that the same phenomenon is still at work.
Mystery cults, still current
The section’s stated subject. Later volumes announced in the preface — The Caduceus, then The Death of Tragedy — are meant to carry the political and the tragic arguments further. They are not this book.