My second example is the cover of the very first issue from 1906 of renowned anarchist Emma Goldman’s journal Mother Earth. At a verdant tree stands a young man and woman, maybe Ask and Embla. At the roots of the tree lays the fetters that they have just liberated themselves from. The man salutes the rising sun. They are both naked and the era seems to be simultaneously before the birth of civilisation and after its termination.
Despite the fact that Walter Crane now and then played with baccantic motives and portrayed ludic games out in the wild, the more carnal aspects of the thiasos were alien to the nature of his art. Likewise, the humans on this cover (by an unknown artist) lack any sense of sinfulness. Yet, the cover image, with the erected tree between the seperated lands, easily opens up for interpretations of a sexual sort. In any case, some kind of emancipated, physical senusalism is cherished. Reinforcing these arcadian qualities is the fact that whilst Crane maintained a hierarchical order, with the tree in the middle of the image, the visual “movement” on the cover is rather horizental: the glance of the viewers drift away from tree and mankind. The tree trunk may be pleasant to lean against, but it is the distant rising sun – and the utopian land its brings with it – that is the true centre of the world.
Thanks to 
Dr. Leipold concluded his mail to me pointing out that: “Since, Harney and the Fraternal Democrats were quite close to their French counterparts, it seems like the symbol might have been a frequent component of social-republican/socialist iconography at the time.“ I can not but agree.
By spring 1936, the French literati George Bataille famously came to the conclusion that Fascism had to be fought with its own means. For a surrealist inclined intellectual, this meant not jibbing at the darker sides of human existence: desire, perversion, violence, torture, sacrifice, fanaticism and death. For this aspiration, Bataille has been, quite erroneously according to my view, branded “Left fascist” by Richard Wolin.*
I wonder whether there are connections between this aspiration of Bataille and his friends and fascist-like feature in anarchism? I’m especially thinking about the obscure anarchist 
Already in the Russian Civil War, 
* I find the Wikipedia article on 
From the frontcover to The Democratic Review of British and Foreign Politics, History and Literature (1850). Harney, G. Julian (ed.). Vol. II. London: J. Watson.
Conspiracy theories about occult origins of socialism circulate on the Internet. Socialists who have been initiated into freemasonry or accidental similarities between socialist and esoteric iconography are taken as proof of an occult, virtually satanic, genesis of the worker’s movement. Not everything in these far-fetched theories is false however, as the existence of The Noble and Holy Order of the 
halfway between a pair of compasses and an A – “A” for Asociation/Association, I take it. It’s like the pair of compasses (and maybe the square/ruler) builds the letter. (There is probably also a plumb bob.)
Inspired by the masons, the above-mentioned Knights of Labor used an emblem called Great Seal of Knighthood, depicting simply an encircled triangle. (Here represented in the animated Sherlock Holmes and the Valley of Fear from 1984 as the ominous emblem of The Eminent Order of Freemen.) The triangle is a good start on the way to the letter A as in the anarchist A… After the collapse of the Knights of Labor, the anarcho-syndicalist 
Heart in a Heartless World 
