Pros: Dabblers in psychology will have a field day trying to diagnose Texe Marr's problems.
Cons: This book is nasty. And absurd. And hateful. And overpriced.
The Bottom Line: Texe Marrs, a notorious "paytriot" propagandist, unleashes a welter of accusations against anyone with two hands who isn't named Texe.
Texe Marrs used to be an Air Force officer -- in intelligence, according to him, an ROTC instructor according to others -- and now runs a shortwave radio "ministry" called Power of Prophecy, which, for the last several years has given up preaching the Gospel in favor of relentless Jew-baiting. Marrs has churned out well over two dozen books accusing just about everyone of being in league with the devil. But this latest book, Codex Magica, supposedly his magnum opus, is the icing on the cake. Marrs modestly describes his own book as "awesome in its scope and revelations" -- well, he had to say it because I doubt anyone else will.
It's 624 pages thick, with many illustrations, and priced at $35. Dear Reader, if you have $35 burning a hole in your pocket, I could suggest several books that would be informative, enlightening, and even uplifting. And this piece of crap would not be among them.
Codex Magica is somewhat unfocused but its rather dull point is that we're absolutely awash with Satan worshippers, by which Texe Marrs means virtually everyone he dislikes or envies. Which means virtually everyone.
The evidence of all this is -- wait for it -- hand shapes. No matter what people do with their hands, Marrs is ready to find it's a diabolic signal. Hand in the vest, Napoleon-style, -- that's something Satanic. Hand flat with fingers together, hand flat with fingers spread, hands cupped, making fists, hand over the heart, two hands together, two hands with fingers interlaced, with palms together, whatever shape the hands take, Texe Marrs will tell you there's something evil about it. (By the way, Marrs's own publications use only face shots of him -- and never show his hands.)
Marrs's biggest drawback, as regards hand shapes, is his inability to distinguish between the "Hook'em Horns" sign used by fans of the University of Texas football team, the Texas Longhorns, and the "I Love You" sign used by deaf Americans (the Texas sign has the thumb tucked in, the deaf sign has the thumb stretched out) and the supposedly surfer or Hawaiian "party on" sign which has the thumb and little finger out and all the other fingers tucked in (I cannot find the origin of this sign but it closely resembles the deaf sign for "playing" as with toys). Marrs can't seem to tell them apart, nor does he try.
He tells us that Helen Keller "designed" the "I Love You" sign, but that she really meant it to signify the horns of Satan and that she was a Satanist and her sign really meant that she loved Satan. I have committed other E-pinions that mentioned that I dabble in Sign Language. Jack Gannon's exhaustive book, Deaf Heritage, makes it clear that the "I Love You" sign -- consisting of the letters of the American Sign alphabet I.L.Y. -- was already widely popular among American deaf by 1905, that's the year after Helen Keller's graduation from Radcliff. Not even Helen Keller is safe from Texe Marrs. For part of her life, Helen Keller was a Swedenborgian, a somewhat recondite form of Protestantism, but she is buried in Saint Joseph's Crypt in the National Episcopal Cathedral in Washington, DC, and she was never associated with a non-Christian religion. Further on in his book, Marrs actually claimed that Helen Keller was the "creator" of the entire system of Sign Language. Educated people know that the Sign Language was brought to America from France, by Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc, in 1816, more than sixty years before Helen Keller was born. The fact is that Helen Keller's use of Sign Language was mostly limited to spelling with the Sign Alphabet and hardly ever used a Sign Language "word". Marrs has some source notes at the end of his book -- an average of about one reference for every fifty pages -- and cites absolutely nothing for his accusations about Helen Keller or the Sign Language of the deaf. (Although this book is "lavishly" illustrated, Marrs has no picture - nor have I ever seen one anywhere - of Helen Keller using the ILY sign.) Once upon a time I read some book that said that we are forbidden to badmouth the deaf (Leviticus 19:14); evidently Marrs hasn't yet read that book. The only other people who trashed Helen Keller so enthusiastically were the Nazis. (They actually burned her books, notwithstanding years earlier she had assigned all the royalties from her German editions to the association of Blinded German veterans of the Great War.)
Of course, the assertion that the entire deaf Sign Language is tainted by Satanic roots suggests a conclusion which Marrs does not bother to articulate and I cannot bring myself to contemplate. Again, the only other people with such hostility to Deaf Culture were the Nazis.
Anyway, Marrs cannot tell the different signs apart so he has a photo of Bill Clinton using the ILY sign and claims it is the signal for the devil's horns -- the photo is from President Clinton's appearance at a graduation ceremony at Gallaudet University, so I think we can figure out what he meant by it. Marrs even uses a photo of former Miss America, Heather Whitestone, when she was crowned, and if you can't figure out which sign she's using you shouldn't be allowed to play with computers.
Marr's begins the book with that bit of doggerel about "Yesterday upon the stair, I saw a man who wasn't there." Marrs identified this as an "Old Nursery Rhyme." Not a good omen for the opening page! Alleged intelligence officer Marrs evidently couldn't find out (from Bartlett's Quotations and the like) that this is actually a poem by Hugh Mearns (1875-1965), first published by him in 1899 and then recycled in his 1910 play, "The Psycho-ed." This book is chockablock with lapses like that.
Remember Leonard Nimoy's "Vulcan salute" from the original Star Trek series? Marrs is sure it's something voodoo from the Jewish cabbalah (that's how Marrs spells it). Well, it is Jewish in origin. In Orthodox synagogues, the men who are of Aaronic descent (kohanim) bless the entire congregation using both hands with this shape, possibly to prevent any eye-to-eye contact, and supposedly inspired by the verse in the Song of Songs (2:9) that "The One who loves me ... peeks through the lattice" (Nimoy, being Jewish, deliberately co-opted the one hand form of this for the TV series). The gesture has Biblical origins (Lev. 9:22) and the handshape is decidedly pre-Cabbalah (see, e.g., Rabbi Avi Gold, Bircas Kohanim, NY: Mesorah Publ., 1981, pages 41-43). It is not from the Cabbalah and Marrs doesn't even pretend to have a reference to Cabbalistic literature for this hand shape (or anything else). Throughout the book, Marrs is eager to connect stuff to the Cabbalah -- but he never has even one reference to or a quotation from authentic Cabbalistic literature.
Marrs also has a fixation about geometric shapes -- circles, triangles, squares, figure eights, even the cross, etc -- and can be counted on to find a sinister emblem using each shape and then trying to tar every other use of the same Euclidean shape. There is, quite literally, nothing you can do with your hands or with a geometric figure that Marrs cannot figure out a way to associate with Satanism.
Marrs even admits his belief in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols makes some reference to Jews being like a giant serpent that is coiled around the earth, and Marrs has found a Rosh Hashona card from 1915 with a picture of the earth being ringed by a carp, a kosher fish - not an inedible serpent, and a popular holiday delicacy among European Jews (and in Hebrew the fish is labelled "Leviathan" - the mythic sea creature that the Righteous will feast on in Paradise). When someone takes the Protocols of Zion seriously there's almost nothing I can say that could make him look any more ridiculous. But that's not all, Marrs even takes seriously the medieval blood libels about Jews killing Christians for their blood. Ordinarily at this point, I'd probably throw the book through the picture window, but I want to finish this review.
Marrs reprints a photo of an elderly Jewish man on the streets of Jerusalem, in one of those long black coats, carrying home carrying a hen, for what Marrs says is a "voodoo" ceremony for the Day of Atonement. (Marrs identifies the man as a rabbi, the date as Yom Kippur, but the photographer who took the picture merely says it was a street scene in Jerusalem in 1967 -- see http://www.michabaram.com/index2.html, under Projects: Jewish Life, no clue as to how Marrs knew the man's vocation - although in Jerusalem the odds might favor him -- or the date - especially considering there are rain puddles everywhere but October 1967 in Jerusalem was dry -- or the fate of the chicken). I know the ritual he is alluding to but this lone hen would not be usable for that, it's just going to be the family's meal. In the whole book, Marrs presents only one "quotation" from the Talmud, and that one is a fake and he attaches to it a glaring typo that nobody who has ever seriously studied any part of the Talmud would have made. Almost no accusation against Jews is too far-fetched for Texe Marrs. The assassination of John F. Kennedy "was orchestrated by the Jewish Illuminati", but, while we're at it, Teddy Kennedy is also a member in good standing.
Marrs has decided that during the the American Revolutionary War, the Rothschild banking family played some evil part. He fixes on Haym Salomon, whom he regards as so obscure as to be kept a secret, who quite frankly ruined himself by personally and unstintingly subsidizing the American side of the War for Independence, and more than once was imprisoned by the Redcoats. Haym Salomon arrived in American from Poland in 1772, joined the Sons of Liberty, and traveled for a while with Washington's army. He's been on a postage stamp and given at least a paragraph in encyclopediae, and he's probably the first name any American Jew will offer as a Jewish hero of the War for Independence, but Marrs thinks he's being kept a deep dark Jewish secret. Marrs claims that Salomon was really the Rothschilds' agent in North America. To begin with, back in 1776, Meir Amschel Rothschild was still struggling at his coin shop in Frankfurt's ghetto, still far from wealthy and with only his immediate family participating in the business (and any historical account of the Rothschilds will tell you that; e.g., Amos Elon, Founder: A portrait of the first Rothschild and his time, Penguin 1996, page 71). Rothschild was German, although he could scarcely communicate in that language, being accustomed to a regional variant of Yiddish, and Salomon was Polish. Rothschild lived in Hesse and his best customers were the royal house of Hesse - so figure out for yourself if he'd bet on the side fighting the Hessians. Besides, the Rothschilds invested and lent money, Salomon gave it away and wasn't insistent on being repaid. There's no evidence that either Rothschild or Salomon knew of each other's existence; Rothschild biographies don't mention Salomon and vice versa. Marrs knows no limits when it comes to making accusations against the Rothschild family, even when the accusations are absurd or even impossible.
Marrs also is convinced that Twentieth Century Fox movie studios and Fox Home Entertainment and Fox TV network, being part of the same big company, are all part of a Satanic scheme as shown by the name Fox, for which Marrs cites a Biblical verse connecting a fox with the devil; Marrs doesn't make any connection with Movietone pioneer William Fox (1879-1952), who founded the Fox Film Company in 1915 and later merged it with 20th Century Films. And yet Marrs is so proud of having been an Intelligence Officer.
Without anything that resembles evidence, Marrs makes the dramatic leap that the people running the world, including those behind the scenes, whether running it with money or political power or influence or just celebrity, are in league with each other, and not just by a mutual interest in having money or power, but because they literally are Satan worshippers, having eschewed ordinary churches in order to belong to secretive satanic covens where they worship the Bible's biggest loser.
Somewhere Marrs ran across a 19th century book explaining various secret gestures of some order of the Freemasons. Even though that book itself explains these subtle signs as mere greetings and salutations, and used in just one faction of the Masons, Marrs contrives new and sinister significances to them. More important, he hunts up photos or even paintings of prominent people caught in poses vaguely resembling these Masonic signals and insists that they are all secret members who deliberately struck that pose to send a message to all other members around the world -- messages like "wish you luck" and "I could use a meal". Even candid photos of people who were not posing get this sort of treatment. Even Pope John Paul II in his declining years, when his hands were severely distorted and crippled by arthritis, gets this treatment. Why did they display these secret signs and handshakes on camera? - Duh, because you wouldn't know that President Bill Clinton and the Prime Minister of France were important if they didn't get photographed showing that secret handshake, which (being secret) you're not expected to recognize anyway.
Marrs has this notion that thousands of well known people, including mere entertainers as well as politicians and captains of industry, are somehow secret members of this secret Illuminati, which is somehow Jewish no matter that even the Pope - and Billy Graham, and Pat Robertson, and Bob Schuller - are all supposedly members of this conspiracy, and find it necessary to pose with one of these handshapes or gestures or geometric shapes simply to show their membership to all the other members who supposedly already know them from their secret meetings in someone's basement. This secretive society is so massive, so numerous and widespread, that the only two people on earth who haven't been asked to join are (1) Texe Marrs and (2) you.
The point of this book, if there's a point at all, is that the whole world is being run by secret members of this Illuminati - New World Order - Cabalistic conspiracy. It's so vast and overwhelming that you might as well give up ... after you throw all your money at Texe Marrs.
In his newsletter for February 2006, Marrs printed a photo supposedly showing George W. Bush carrying a volume of the Talmud, which was his proof that Dubya was a secret Jew, .... . . . . http://www.powerofprophecy.com/022006/george_w_bush_zionist_double_agent.htm Tracing this picture back to Marrs's source, it is obvious - and was labelled - a joke, done with Photoshop or something similar. Let's face it, Dubya hardly reads and to expect him to read something as bulky, dry, and complex as the Talmud is simply ... absurd. You didn't even need to be told that if you look carefully -- the book that Bush is supposedly carrying is the exact image, angle, lighting, shadows, and everything, of the photo of the same volume in the publisher's catalog, and it's fairly obvious that this photo was first flipped right-to-left -- either that or Bush is wearing a woman's coat with the buttons up the left. This is particularly obvious when you compare it with another Photoshopped version of the very same photo... . . . . http://www.funny-games.biz/pictures/95-presidency-for-dummies.html ... with the buttons on the correct side. "Intelligence officer" Marrs has yet to backtrack on his use of the photo. See also: ....... http://100777.com/node/1514.
In the very same Feb. 2006 issue of that newsletter, Texe Marrs claims that George W. Bush - and presumably his dad as well -- is a Jew by ancestry. Marrs's "proof" - a Jewish history essay that mentions that there were (at least) two Jewish heroes of the War for Independence with the (not uncommon) family name of Bush. That's the "proof". Neither of these Revolutionary War Bushes is listed in the much-published family tree of the Presidential Bushes. On the other hand, if you consult the listing of names on tombstones in Jewish cemeteries, available on JewishGen.org (http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/cemetery/), you will find that there are 126 people with the family name of Marrs buried in Jewish cemeteries in Texas -- that's just in Texas and just the spelling Marrs (not any of the easily expected variants like Marz, etc.). ... Are you thinking what I'm thinking??
On his radio show, Marrs exhibits a particular "tell" -- he has this annoying feminine giggle which seems to overcome him whenever he recites some particularly flimsy accusation or mentions a refutation of it. But in print this revealing tic doesn't come across. You just have to use your brain.
Because I'm your friend, I'll save you $35 by telling you that this entire book can be read for free on the internet:
.......*
___{* I originally posted the URL of a copy of this book on the Scribd website. About six weeks after this Epinion was posted, that Scribd version of Codex Magica was "deleted". Some months later another Scribd copy was posted at:
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