Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

THE NEW AGE 77

as we have said, on their value in relation to this end . . . There are no criminals in Our court . . . only races and nations of relative service or disservice to the functional organisation of the world . . . there is no world-advantage in a mere comparison of races to the prejudice of one or the other... The problem is a practical one, though it involves the study of racial psychology; and the end in view is no other than the welfare of the world.*°

Mitrinovic always maintained that the soul was an organ of knowledge as well as the intellect; and in constructing a world-plan based on a psychology of races and nations he acknowledged that his scheme could only be a tentative one, based on intuition and creative imagination as much as logic and reason. For, “to discover the natural, the intended functions of races would demand the intuitive study of history, of science, of philosophy and religion; a work that is only in its infancy in Europe.”*!

As we have seen, Mitrinovic, maintained the view that “westward the course of consciousness takes its way.” The East was associated with the unconscious of the “one great mind,” the West associated with the level of consciousness and rational thought. Just as the human unconscious can be understood as exerting a formative influence over the nature of an individual’s conscious thought and feeling, so Mitrinovi¢ wrote about the development of the white race from out of the coloured and black races of Asia and Africa. He referred to Asia as the father-aspect and Africa as the mother-aspect of human consciousness who, between them, could be said to have given birth to Europe as their child who was to attain self-consciousness. As we have also seen, he held that Christianity was the prime bearer of that self-consciousness which characterised European culture.

In the westward flow of human development in the direction of increased individual self-consciousness and the related development of the human capacity for rational thought at the cost of instinct, Mitrinovi¢ paid particular attention to the role played by the Jews. He interpreted the mythology of the Jewish people as recorded in the Old Testament as symbolic of their spiritual unfolding. According to his reading,

... from the coloured race of “Egypt” a particular people, the Jews or Israel, was “chosen” for the “mission” of becoming White; that this tremendous eugenic task necessitated “exodus” from “Egypt” (in other words, segregation from the inferior race), the crossing of the Red Sea, the Desert and the Jordan (all, no doubt, symbolic of actual physiological or psychological sublimations and transformations); and, finally, temporary isolation in the Promised Land under the Divine rule in preparation for their role as the inheritors or ruling race of the kingdom of the world .. . It is as a bridge between the East that was, and the West that was to be, that the Jewish race must be contemplated. Its exodus