“I CLAIM THE WORLD” – BEHOLD!!! THE PROTONG (c1940)

STANISLAV SZUKALSKI (1893-1987) – Just as L. Ron Hubbard went from being a pulp story writer to founder of a nutzoid religion, Stanislav Szukalski went from being a celebrated, even brilliant, artist to founder of an equally irrational belief system.

Stanislav Szukalski the artist was a complicated figure who held a lot of ugly attitudes and he fled Poland after the Nazi invasion despite his own intense antisemitism. The war destroyed most of Szukalski’s artwork and he arrived in the U.S. without a penny. 

By all means check out Struggle, a 2018 Stanislav Szukalski documentary co-produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, whose father was friends with the artist. There’s even a photo of a very young Leo sitting next to Szukalski. 

The topic of this blog post, however, is Zermatism, the insane philosophy that Szukalski founded in 1940. He named it after the city of Zermatt, where he was convinced that survivors of a pre-deluge civilization settled.

Yes, it’s about to get weird, as in Scientology weird or even Yakub/ Tribe of Shabazz weird. And at 39 volumes,  Zermatism would be way too off-putting if not for some of the memorable artwork that Szukalski made to accompany his mad ravings. 

IN THE BEGINNING(ish) – Szukalski argued that all of humanity once dwelt on one huge continent and spoke one language (Protong) which still lives in fragmentary fashion in all modern languages. The Great Flood wiped out most life on Earth with the only survivors being on what is now Easter Island, which was the peak of the highest mountain of the now submerged mother continent.

From Rapa Nui/ Easter Island life spread once more across the globe as the flood waters continued to subside. Zermatism held that Polish culture and language were the purest surviving examples of the pre-deluge world. Szukalski himself was Polish, so his ethnic chauvinism shaped his bizarre concepts.

Mainline human beings were not the only intelligent life-forms to survive the Great Flood, however. Yetis also lived on and they mated with human women to spawn the Yetinsyny or “Sons of the Yeti.”

According to Zermatism their human/ animal hybrid offspring are the Bigfoot, yeti, sasquatch and other creatures spotted around the world to this very day. Szukalski maintained that the chimeric monsters depicted in global mythology are also offshoots of the Yetinsyny.     

The Yetinsyny are presented as the forces of evil locked in existential combat with human beings. Some of the most human-looking Yetinsyny have infiltrated humankind and became history’s most brutal and sadistic dictators. If powerful figures are remembered as evil, per Szukalski they were Yetinsyny.   

In Zermatism the Nazis, Communists and other oppressors are Yetinsyny and their human dupes. Szukalski even felt there were assorted physical attributes through which people could recognize modern day Yetinsyny.

Even the worst of humanity’s mortal enemies are not beyond redemption, however. The Yetinsyny can be taught to “overcome the burden of biology” through the creative arts, medicine, engineering and similar studies. 

To quote Szukalski “instead of ostracizing every Yetinsyny in every country, that they may not concoct from one of their political philosophers, Karl Marx, Mao Tse Tung, Nietzsche, Bakunin, Kropotkin, or other haters of humanity, encourage them to partake in the arts: creative Art, applied arts, literature, in medicine and all forms of engineering.”

Szukalski spent the rest of his life proselytizing about Zermatism. He even wrote an “Open letter to Pope John Paul II” in which he explained to him how Protong aka Macimowa (motherspeech) was humanity’s universal language long ago.

In Zermatism, the Biblical Tower of Babel story was just one of many global variations of the root myth of how the Protong Diaspora caused the spread of multiple languages. Naturally, Stanislav Szukalski provided some examples of the Protong language, as found HERE.

In addition to all of the preceding, part of the unintentional laughs from Zermatism come from Szukalski’s howlingly insane ideas about everything from science – he felt heat causes gravity – to linguistics – in Zermatism any words in different languages that sound anything alike are “proof” of the Protong, even if their meanings have nothing in common.

Obviously, most people won’t find this crackpot belief system to even be worth laughing at, but I appreciate it in the same spirit as a bad movie. If you have that same sensibility then embrace exclamation points and dive into Behold!!! The Protong.