Further Reading:

• Winckelmann’s Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works, published by our friend Rogue Scholar, with a foreword from Bronze Age Pervert.

• Walter Pater’s The Renaissance, Studies in Art and Poetry.

• Henry Hatfield’s Aesthetic Paganism in German Literature.

• Excerpts from Trevelyan’s Goethe and the Greeks.

• Translation of Walter Otto’s The Greek Mythos of the Gods in Goethe and Hölderlin, at Cult of the Dark Gods:

  Cult of the Dark Gods

  The Greek Mythos of the Gods in Goethe and Hölderlin

  Note: The late W.F. Otto makes scant reference to Ludwig Klages, preferring to engage more extensively with Heidegger. However, Max Kommerell, in his commentary on the Otto’s essay Der griechische Göttermythos bei Goethe und Hölderlin, which I have translated below, asserts that Otto’s essay is “nothing but Klages.” This assertion, might not be immediat…

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  3 years ago · 8 likes · 7 comments · Farasha Euker

See parts one and two:

As the ancients testify, madness is superior to a sane mind, for one is only of human, but the other of divine origin.

—Plato, Phaedrus 244[a]

Today, as it was for millennia before, the word “philosophy”—particularly that of the Greeks—is synonymous with “reason”, “rationality”, “Logos”. To our age, it is but a backwards self-reflection, a self-justification, of the long and arduous triumph of intellectualism over barbarism. Progress, technology, democracy, the “uncovering of truth through rational dialogue”: it is these things which we place in the zygote of ancient Greece, from which we hail the birth of “Western Civilization”. Whether he is a saint, a salesman, or a scholar, all find themselves in the nature of their birth, wrapped as a child in the comforting bliss of the warm blanket of rational reassurance. Now a grown man, he works his deeds upon the world.

The truth of the matter—if we may appeal to reason—is that if Greek civilization itself was born and cultivated by word, it was not Logos, nor dialogue, but the dithyramb1: the uncontrollable, bursting state of exuberance and enthusiasm, where the words of the poet spill forth like honey and oil. Words which—as we are told by Socrates—nobody, not even the poet himself, can be said to actually understand the meaning of.2 Nonetheless, these were words to which men must dance to in wild processions, enraptured into a state of Rausch by fullness of wine-life. The tragedy, “ode of the goat-men”, was performed with the most sincere expressions of religious and ecstatic fervor long before the impiety of Socrates was put to trial, and even he was said to have participated in the Corybantic rites, howling and stepping in the orgiastic war-dance of armored Phrygians—as any young educated Athenian would.3 In truth, the Greek soul knew nothing of the type of rationalism we impose upon it today, not in its origins, and not even through the Platonists. It recognized technological devices as nifty and distracting toys for slaves, on other occasions it begged a chorus of gods and daimons for their understanding when a bridge was to be built over streams. True, we speak at length about the legends and stories of the Greeks, their pantheon of demons and personified natural forces (which no man would really believe in), and some thousand-years of rich rational dialogue—especially that which criticizes the former categories. Yet, evidently, we think comparatively little about Greek religious experience; how he, in the daily operations of his life, viewed his role in and relationship to a world in which the gods ceaselessly acted.

It has been the aim of this series to reemphasize this dimension of religiosity, the fundamentally irrational and preconscious aspects which, in the experience of divinity, the individual is thrown out of his typical and rational self. Merely uttering this word—irrational—throws off a series of alarms and check valves within the modern machine-mind, elucidating a response similar to that of towards evil itself. That which is not sufficiently rational can be safely thrown to the wayside, sure enough, but the appearance of something which is proudly irrational, boastful in its lust for contradictions and inexplicability, almost presents itself as a form of hubris, and perhaps a threat. In fact, the modern sentimentality could hardly bring itself to recognize Greek religion as “real religion”, casting it away in favor of its hand-selected philosophical traditions which bear a closer likeness to the secularized Christianity of the day. Why would we concern ourselves with any of it? It never set out to construct a rational proof of its gods or the efficacy of sacrifices or divinations, though it remains demanded today4 to even begin entertaining the “validity”—to conjure a term loaded with modern assumptions—of the old religious view. Nor did it ever occur to the myste of Eleusis to demand a proof of the image of life he had just received, to spend lifetimes gesticulating about what conclusions are demanded by uncaused causes and actual infinities, not because the thought never occurred to him—lest our Enlightened critic now turn to accuse his adored object of barbarity!—but because he did not yet, gripped in a state of anxiety, require its tranquilizing effect.

We may illustrate the contention at hand through one of the principle victims of the all-devouring march of ethical progress and “pure reason” was, in fact, psychology. We do not speak of movements pertaining to the modern scientific field, but its original understanding evidenced by its literal translation: “the study of the living soul”. Nor shall we blame the murder of its significance on modern innovations, or even on Christ or Plato, as its appearance as distantly as the oldest funerary inscriptions of ancient Egypt, etched into limestone a thousand years before Akhenaten thought to set forth his “one true God”!5 What we refer to is the ancient, perhaps primordial, belief in the intercession of a panoply of souls—δαίμονες—on the behaviors of men. Be it the temporary insanity of ἄτη which results in reckless and often fatal mistakes, the ignition of μένος in the chests of warriors in the heat of battle, causing them to behave like lions imbued with divine powers, or more vivid images such as when Athena plucks the hair of Achilles to prevent an outburst against Agamemnon—she visible to him alone6—the Greek is communicating clearly to us the belief of what the classicist E.R. Dodds describes as moments of divine “psychological intervention”, or for the purposes of this series, Rausch, ecstasy. These alterations in psychological states may be neutral, fatal, or beneficial. Like the “vital impules” of Lebensphilosophen, they may even combat, restrict, or amplify one another. The thread which unites all of these different states is that they are departures from the normal and unmolested state of one’s psyche, forcibly imposed upon the individual by a deity. Thus, for the Greek, an irrational state and the experience of a god were identical concepts. Indeed, these changing psychological states themselves became recognized as gods: envy became Phthonus, fury became Erynis, and recklessness became Ate. This was no poetic or theological glossing but, as shown by Dodds, an image into a cohesive religious worldview far older than Homer:

But the most characteristic feature of the Odyssey is the way in which its personages ascribe all sorts of mental (as well as physical) events to the intervention of a nameless and indeterminate daemon or “god” or “gods.” These vaguely conceived beings can inspire courage at a crisis or take away a man’s understanding, just as gods do in the Iliad. But they are also credited with a wide range of what may be called loosely “monitions.” Whenever someone has a particularly brilliant or a particularly foolish idea; when he suddenly recognizes another person’s identity, or sees in a flash the meaning of an omen; when he remembers what he might well have forgotten, or forgets what he should have remembered, he or someone else will see in it, if we are to take the words literally, a psychic intervention by one of these anonymous supernatural beings. Doubtless they do not always expect to be taken literally: Odysseus, for example, is hardly serious in ascribing to the machinations of a daemon the fact that he went out without his cloak on a cold night. But we are not dealing simply with an “epic convention.” For it is the poet’s characters who talk like this, and not the poet: his own convention is quite other—he operates, like the author of the Iliad, with clear-cut anthropomorphic gods such as Athena and Poseidon, not with anonymous daemons. If he has made his characters employ a different convention, he has presumably done so because that is how people did in fact talk: he is being “realistic.”

—E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (1952), pp. 10-11

Even as “late” as Socrates and Plato, we are still provided with clear expressions of a type of submission, if not a reverential awe (σέβας), to the fundamentally irrational character of religious experience, which causes men to act “unlike themselves”. In Phaedrus, we are told of four gifts of divine “μανική”, mania, which are associated with a particular (now-anthropomorphized) power: Apollo’s gift of prophecy (μαντική), Dionysus’ gift of orgiastic ritual, the Muses’ gift of poetry, and Eros & Aphrodite’s gift of erotic passion. Each arise in their own circumstances and provide their own effects, but the mechanism is the same as it was for ἄτη or μένος—these are sudden and forceful changes in the psyche of a man, caused by the intervention of a god or daimon. The language used in Phaedrus makes this perfectly clear: the Muses, for example, “take hold upon a gentle and pure soul, arousing it and inspiring it to songs and other poetry”7, granting it a power that could not be otherwise generated on its own. This is revealing enough about what could be considered one of the earliest “psychologies” in recorded history, and indeed Plato does move to utilize these conceptions to that effect, but here we must reemphasize its connection to religious experience: it was by this way, a fundamentally irrational and “manic” one, in which the Greeks were struck by the activity of the divine, and where the meeting point of mortal and immortal lay.

Tellingly, the Christian inversion of the δαίμονες and gods into the bastardization of “demons”, “fallen angels”, hails from the works of the early Christian in Augustine8, Tertullian9, and Lactantius10, who conclude the intrinsically evil nature of the daimones precisely upon their irrationality and unpredictability, a chaotic nature attained in their separation from the rational Logos. The residue of far older belief is thus preserved here, too, in their very condemnations of it: it is external forces which do not belong to man’s rational mind that invade from without—possessing, intoxicating, arousing—driving him outside of his normal self, that is, into a state of ecstasy, through the works of “dreams and illusion”. The since-buried Greek of old would enforce the obvious conclusion in reply: the Christian indeed instructs us to seek a state free from such perturbations and monitions which “wander over the whole earth”, enticing man to act outside of himself—that is, he instructs us, to be soul-less!

Such is precisely the stature of a religion—if this word may even be used—that concerns itself merely with the orchestration of a rationally-derived “system of ethics”; it is soulless, it is without character, it is dead. Yet it is precisely this conception of religion which is hurried to the battlements to resist the assault of yet more rational and ethical demands. Truly, the early critics of Christianity possessed more insight into its nature than they knew by calling them ἄθεοι, god-deniers, as today atheism is nothing but the pure distillation of a rational and ethical Christianity, stripped of all of its unnecessary “superstitions”. If modern man will ever once again find it in himself to be religious, to solve the now centuries-old problem of “the disenchantment of the world”, then he must cast away any aspirations to will such a reality back into existence. He must reject demands to simply think his way to the gods, or to prove himself worthy of ascent and Revelation merely through good moral conduct. The divine cannot, will not, and never before has been found through a set of rational proofs or the applause of others towards one conduct. Nor will any deity magically appear once more once we, through the sincere labors of such introspection, unearth the archaeological structure of a “true” religious society. What do any of these tired horses tell us about what it is to experience divinity, which remains the actual subject of our loss and amnesia? The unlearned lesson of our long march into atheism, and a reaction which has only served to magnify its potency, should inform us of the appropriate reply: absolutely nothing.

It is for this reason that we—now nearing the end of our series—have spent so many words appealing to that long-forgotten kernel of religiosity: its fundamentally irrational component. Reason and ethics will do no man good in describing the nearness of a god which produces irrational and sometimes unethical behavior, yet is divine nonetheless. Ecstasy—Rausch—on the other hand, drives to the very heart of religious experience, and we have since provided a full array of examples and illustrations to this effect. Be it possession, intoxication, infatuation, frenzy, love, or any other such alteration of psychological states in moments of extreme or meaningful passion, the oldest of religious traditions and expressions tell us that these alterations are produced by the intercession of a deity. It is precisely in service to this reality that the tragic mask, arising out of the most ancient of religious expressions and ritual, captured both the character and the full array of its emotions in a single, expressionless object. More important to this type of performance was the intermingling and blurring between the souls of the mask’s depicted character and of the performer, which has been described by a variety of terms: participation mystique, or the principle of transformation. The result is the same in any case: man is driven out of his typical, rational self. In this brief moment he is possessed, and as it were for the actor, the affliction is only cured by removing the mask. This “affliction”, understood by Greeks as ecstasy, and by the Romantics as Rausch, are the clear and immediate results of the nearness of deity: δαιμονίζομαι. Whether or not the interaction will be good for the “victim” in question is entirely out of his hands; similarly, no man “wills” a powerful thought into existence, but is rather thrust upon by it. Try as he may, the source of his genius cannot be brought about by the snap of his finger; the author will hereby verify this fact through his many blocks and frustrations in writing. It must come from without, or perhaps, so deeply and so intimately within that the individual ego loses all power and semblance.

The reader may repackage these findings into more familiar concepts if he would like—a call for animism, a call for “archetypes”, a call for mysticism—but already we have begun to lose sight of the image. The most critical implication about our “Ecstatic Principle”, if we are to begin pitching name ideas and suggest a contrast with other such “Principles”, is that this view is not the typical “traditional” operation which seeks to reanimate the ancient world by stitching together, like Victor Frankenstein, what scattered limbs we may find. As useful as an anatomical investigation might be, the problem of such a view is concisely stated by Al Ghazali: “the essential condition in the holder of a traditional faith is that he should not know he is a traditionalist”. Indeed, even embarking on the enterprise of “traditional religion” not only implies the errors of historical thinking, but worse, draws the efforts of suppliance away from the gods and towards “correct belief”, or in our case, mere “correct reconstruction”.

Of course, the illustration of ecstasy as “the original content of religious experience” plays into this problem to some extent. However, the key distinction is that the Ecstatic Principle is a phenomenon liberated of the artificial constraints of history and setting; like the rites of Dionysus, it is available to all. History, in our case, is utilized only to illustrate that ecstasy is no novel invention but in fact the fundamental stratum of religious experience, evidenced by its forceful present in the furthest reaches of religious expression. Nevertheless, the past is forever gone—life’s flux demands it, scorning conceptions of “permanence”—and there is nothing to be done about this fact. Soon, it will come the time for our own waves to recess back into the shimmering ocean. What hope can there be for illustrious divinity in the downward grip of the vines of the Mater? The answer relies precisely in ecstasy: for it is precisely the souls of the past—perhaps more accurately, the eternal present—that gently land upon our shoulders in flickering moments of intoxication and infatuation, throwing us outside of ourselves, and into the past. These experiences too must cease, and we are inevitably thrown back “within ourselves”; the daimon has departed, and we are left to assess the result. Despite these limitations, never will the “pathic” recipient of such an experience deny its religious quality, bestowing upon him far greater experience and meaning than he may ever derive himself from rational assumptions: “it must be” will always pale in comparison to “it is”.

Thus, it is the ecstatic experience of soul which throws us into a connection with the religion of the past, and never shall it be the folly of relying merely on rational “reconstruction”. And it is here that we recall the wisdom of Zarathustra: to cast off our form of a limping camel, and to become a child—exuberant, and creative.

We conclude these thoughts, at last, with the helpful words of his later disciple:

Imagine the scene: a traveler returning after forty years, perhaps unaware of where he is, to the village where he was born, catches sight of the lime- tree, the roofs with chimneys puffing smoke, the narrow lane, the spring, the moss-covered churchyard railings, and is amazed; what he sees is not these things, just the same as other things, but he sees memorials of generations-old destinies, both of themselves and of the people who, in their shadows, by their banks, under their protection, blossomed and grew old, came and went, were noisy and were silent, hated and loved, found each other and separated; he sees what he remembers, covered up by the flow of those times which, while it was, roared past and, in roaring past, transformed it: who would dare to deny that he is about to be transported into the past! And if the sense of wonder overcame him with such force that it transformed him entirely in a trice, then the distance of time would be awakened in him, and what constitutes his present would not be these things, it would be the reality of the images which, linked by endless chains, reaches back into what has not beginning: ‘Primordial images are appearing souls of the past’.

—Klages, Samtliche Werks II, p. 846 (Trans. Paul Bishop, Ludwig Klages and the Philosophy of Life).

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See part one:

Stop feeling oneself as this phantastic ego! Learn gradually to discard the supposed individual! Discover the fallacies of the ego! Recognize egoism as fallacy! The opposite is not to be understood as altruism! This would be love of other supposed individuals! No! Get beyond ‘myself’ and ‘yourself’! Experience cosmically!

—Nietzsche's Complete Works, Critical Study Edition, Book 9, Ch. 11, §7.

Our previous installment of this series introduced the concept of ecstasy—to be outside of oneself—through the ritualistic meaning of the tragic mask. The historical use of the mask in tragedy to essentially nullify the face and persona of the actor, inviting gods and souls to possess his body for the performance, gives us an incredibly rich insight into the essence of man's primordial religion. Through this, ecstasy—not “morality”, not “tradition”, not “reason”—presents itself as the central element of religious experience. But what exactly is ecstatic experience, and what is the point in illustrating its existence? For this, we turn to the rediscovery of ecstasy in the 19th and 20th centuries, from which a number of remarkable thinkers will serve as our guide. We begin with a piece that may be familiar to readers of this journal:

The German youths who celebrated the solstice with sheep-sacrifices were not the first to hear the rustling in the primeval forest of the unconsciousness [Rauschen im Urwald des Unbewußten]. They were anticipated by Nietzsche, Schuler, Stefan George, and Ludwig Klages. The literary tradition of the Rhineland and the country south of the Main has a classical stamp that cannot easily be got rid of; every interpretation of intoxication and exuberance [Rausch und Überschwang] is apt to be taken back to classical models, to Dionysus, to the puer aeternus and the cosmogonic Eros.

—Jung, Wotan, Neue Schweizer Rundschau (March, 1936)

So begins the 1936 edition of Carl Jung’s essay on Wotan, in which he argues that the movements of German culture and history in the preceding decades could only be explained by the psychic nearness of a god. In his view this god was not Dionysus as many had claimed, but Germany’s own Wotan. Yet the essay is interesting far beyond its typical use for matters of comparative mythology, in fact, the most interesting detail is what is already familiar to his audience: the German fascination with Dionysus. The youth were indeed sacrificing animals to the gods, and the heathen Kosmikers1 Jung names directly—Schuler, George, and Klages—held immense sway over the then-stirring hearts of Germany. All of this is evident in the surging movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—Lebensreform, Jugendbewegung, Kulturkritik, to note a few—which staked their lives on the complete upturning of society as it was known. Every artifice of contemporary society was to be judged and recoiled against, particularly those inextricably attached to the stifling, total state of Prussia’s Germany.

Thus Dionysus—called by a few of his many masks as “the Liberator” (Ἐλευθερεως), “the Cleanser” (Καθαίρως), “the Releaser” (Λὐσιος)—was implicitly, and often explicitly, understood as the patron of these movements which sought to, at a fundamental level, transgress. While this transgression certainly included the hedonism of the coming Weimar period, it must also necessarily include the transgression of naval treaties, international law, and all things up to and beyond the established moral order of the world itself. No construct of man was safe from the enraptured disciples of Dionysus who, much like the Bacchantes of old, took to the wilderness with instruments to sing the songs of rebellion.

Though the description of the upheaval thus far is certainly true to its essence, it is limited in its scope, and has in fact led us into a misconception. We would be in error to illustrate Dionysus and his disciples as simply “that which rebels against norms”; certainly, the horse thief nor the disgruntled teen have hardly anything to do with the rapturous ecstasy of Bromius. A few questions thus remain to be answered: which norms were being rebelled against, and why? What is the nature or mechanism of this rebellion, and, most importantly, what precisely did these initiates seek to gain from it? To answer, we need but one word, and it was one that found its way out the lips of Germans very often in these days: Rausch.

The Deutsches Wörterbuch (1854) of the Grimm brothers provides a lengthy and helpful investigation into the term and its various usages2. It the most literal sense it is translated into “intoxication”, and this is verified by a number of loanwords which allude to the state of half-drunkenness, or “being buzzed” in modern slang: Ruus in Scandinavian tongue, Roes in Dutch, or, more familiarly, arousal in English. It may additionally refer to stirring, rustling, or commotion, and the double-edged meaning allows for interesting wordplay in pieces which attempt to describe this state, for example, the experience of the 1870 Siege of Strasbourg as illustrated by Friedrich Ratzel3:

In reality, every one of us is a tree within the forest of his Volk; this is how it is, will be and must be. We live with it, we die with it, we harvest the fruits of its victories and pay for its mistakes, when exuberance and recklessness bring it to fall. Today, I can feel how we were intoxicated, and how all of us, people of this Volk who felt unique and lonely, rustled along [rauschten mit], just as a neighbour rakes his leaves.

—Ratzel, Glücksinseln und Träume (1905), p. 120.

By the mid-19th, as we are told by the Grimms, Rausch was undergoing a radical transformation in meaning. The state of drunkenness was liberated from its original alcoholic and drug-induced connotations and applied to the whole of life and experience, a Rausch of “spiritual intoxication, and inner rapture—even to the point of self-oblivion”. In other words, Rausch had become a “cosmic” ecstasy, a union with the world born from the destruction of the ego. We learn that the objective of Rausch was not the simple experience of pleasure, but religious experience of the highest order, and an assault on all things that stood in the way of it—ethics, technology, progress, history, and rationalism—these things must be treated as the restrictive chains of the soul.4

The distinction from popular misconceptions must be understood: Rausch is not the liberation of the individual from society or any such elevation of the ego above it; in fact, in such experiences the individual is, for a moment, utterly destroyed. We would be keen to remind ourselves that Dionysus is not merely associated with revelry and exuberance, but terror and bloodshed, too, the frenzied consumption of raw flesh and the “rendering of men”. Dionysus, called two-natured (διφυῆ) in Orphic Hymns5, reigned over both the fullness of life and its violent, tragic end; life lived to this fullest extent, enraptured in the state of Rausch, can only lead to tragedy. Yet this destruction, as it is for the two-natured god, immediately provides rebirth: the soul, finally broken free of its mental chains, is in this fleeting moment wedded in a cosmic union with the world. From here flows the beauty and vitality of meaningful life, tragic life, as it was put forth by Nietzsche:

Dionysian art, too, seeks to convince us of the eternal joy of existence: only we are to seek this joy not in phenomena, but behind phenomena. We are to perceive how all that comes into being must be ready for a sorrowful end; we are compelled to look into the terrors of individual existence—yet we are not to become torpid: a metaphysical comfort tears us momentarily from the bustle of the transforming figures. We are really for brief moments Primordial Being itself, and feel its indomitable desire for being and joy in existence; the struggle, the pain, the destruction of phenomena, now appear to us as something necessary, considering the surplus of innumerable forms of existence which throng and push one another into life, considering the exuberant fertility of the universal will. We are pierced by the maddening sting of these pains at the very moment when we have become, as it were, one with the immeasurable primordial joy in existence, and when we anticipate, in Dionysian Rausch, the indestructibility and eternity of this joy. In spite of fear and pity, we are the happy living beings, not as individuals, but as the one living being, with whose procreative joy we are blended.

—The Birth of Tragedy (1872), §17.

Rausch was a very familiar concept to Nietzsche, which he described as the fundamental prerequisite for any and all creative activity—“the outcome of all great desires”. It is arguably through Nietzsche that the concept of a “cosmic Rausch”, an ecstatic union with the world, is first bestowed to the wider public. In his writings, he is clear that he does not conceive of Rausch to be limited to sex, drugs, and alcohol as it is today, but extends through the whole range of human emotion and activity. Any desire, any passionate activation of the will or of vital forces, comes from the state of ecstasy, be it love, warfare, poetry, or prophecy. All may be experienced ever more deeply in the revelry of Rausch:

The same applies to that ecstasy which is the outcome of all great desires, all strong passions; the ecstasy of the feast, of the arena, of the act of bravery, of victory, of all extreme action; the ecstasy of cruelty; the ecstasy of destruction; the ecstasy following upon certain meteorological influences, as for instance that of spring-time, or upon the use of narcotics; and finally the ecstasy of will, that ecstasy which results from accumulated and surging will-power.—The essential feature of ecstasy is the feeling of increased strength and abundance.

—Twilight of the Idols (1888), §8. “Concerning the Psychology of the Artist”

What precisely is the state of Rausch like when one delves into it? Necessarily, it is to “see through” the world, rather, to melt into it; to transgress all self-imposed and externally-imposed limits between man and the world, to experience the total whole of reality. And what is the root of all of these obstacles? The Logos, which in the polarly contrasted state of pure Reason, selects and brackets off portions of experience into “objects” and “things”, interrupting the flow of life and “abstaining” from the gluttony and intoxication of full experience. This should not, however, be interpreted as “the will to transgress” or the conscious decision to do so—there is nothing conscious about transgression, no choice involved—the forces of existence are in this state “stuffed into us” with or without our approval, resulting in the state of pure experience. Only here is the tragedy and meaning of existence not necessarily “understood”, but “felt”. In an unpublished fragment, Nietzsche explains through imagery where clear words may fail:

To us, and to nobody else, an all-encompassing gaze is allowed, above all beyond and ignoring any end. This gives us a feeling of enormous distance, but also of enormous emptiness... In contrast to this feeling is Rausch, that sense that the world as a whole has been stuffed into us, that our suffering is the bliss of being full beyond repletion. Likewise, time takes on the most novel forms when Rausch is at the controls. We all know Rausch, whether as music or as self-blinding enthusiasm; we know that the Rausch of tragedy is the cruelty of observation.

—Nachgelassene Fragmente (1884), p. 213.

However, in his later years, he came to be critical of a particular flavor of this now-popular conception of ecstasy in that it, in an assault against its own intended purpose, offered man yet another avenue of life-denying detachment6. Rausch had lost its way: rather than seeking a union between body and life, “ecstasists” of the day used the state of Rausch to find, invent, the self-deceptive morphine of a new “true self”, from which the barriers to this state could be externalized and blamed for all of the sufferings of life. Thus Rausch, still for Nietzsche the source of great inspiration and meaning, had come to merely provide man with yet another tool to lie to himself with. Indeed, much of the same is true for the New-Age “spiritualists” of today, who employ all of the revelry and liberation of Dionysus with a complete aversion to resultant terror and tragedy.

Not all of those who followed Nietzsche succumbed to the error of employing Rausch for life-denial. The guardianship of this concept would soon pass to the Kosmiker Ludwig Klages, who in no uncertain terms put naked, tragic life back into the center of German culture. He is sure to credit his teacher in his popular 1922 Vom Kosmogonischen Eros: “Nietzsche discusses Rausch as the ultimate Dionysian state of mind. Erotic, ecstatic, and cosmic at the same moment, this was the ‘life of the elements.’” Klages seems conscious of Nietzsche’s late turn against the ecstatics, offering a conception of ecstasy that does not see liberation as an escape or ego-construction, but as a deepening, or melting-into the world—a κατάβασις (katabasis), a brief journey into the underworld where the images and souls of the eternal now may be communed with. Additionally, he is sure to stress what the state of Rausch precisely is: the complete loss of the individual, and a union with the cosmos:

If ecstasy is removing the spirit from the soul, then it must also be: removing the self from the soul. This is compellingly confirmed for us by, among other things, language and, above all, the German language. Literally translated, ecstasy does not mean ‘to be carried away’, but ‘to be outside oneself’ (=outside the ego). Drunken or intoxicated individuals, whether through enthusiasm or as a consequence of narcotics, no longer ‘feel right in themselves’, but are ‘out of it’; are in danger of ‘forgetting themselves’; and, when sober, ‘come to themselves again’.

[...]We come across first of all in initiatory societies the following recurrent fact of the matter: mystical certainty derives from the experience of the ‘epopteia’, i.e. in the visionary intuition—the visionary intuition relates to the appearance of the deity (epiphany, parousia)—and this in turn takes place on the occasion of the symbolic representation of his death with the subsequent rebirth out of a ‘sacred marriage’. To anticipate the final conclusion: the initiate experiences the consecration of the fulfilment as he, himself deified, is wed to a god (communion, unio mystica, hierosgamos), and he unites himself with him as he sees him.

[...]For anyone who, in ecstasy, explodes the form of being a person, the world of facts in that very moment comes to an end, and before him or her there arises, with an all-suppressing power of reality: the world of images.

—Klages, Sämtliche Werke pp. 391-417 (transl. Paul Bishop, Ludwig Klages and the Philosophy of Life, 2018).

This is the experience of Rausch, to “experience cosmically”, the true meaning of that since thoroughly-bastardized conception of “ego-death”: the world of images, of souls. One ceases to observe things as particular concrete objects which may be managed, moralized, rationalized, or quantified in value—this city, that forest, her hair, these birds—and sees in to the world as a ceaseless and dynamic stream of souls. Such is the state of the preconscious mind, and therefore, the fertile soil of the furthest reaches of man’s primordial religion. His was not merely the religion of ethical commands or a linear movement between beginning and end, but the immediate nearness of gods and the reception of souls. To the extent that we—if only for a fleeting moment, never to come again—gaze into the nocturnal heavens and see not constellations, but the cosmos, we have become enraptured by something external to us into the state of Rausch; here, we have rediscovered the divine.

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Banish the personality of the famous actor, and there enters a host of other figures, at the bidding of the playwright alone, a very multitude to delight your gaze.

—Goethe, Was wir Bringen (1802)

In any inquiry into the religiosity of long-departed peoples, the matter revolves around the question of, “what did these people believe?” Yet already, just a single grain of sand into the investigation, we have covered ourselves in the chains of modern assumptions. Belief, to the modern heart, is everything: “What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.” All are called to simply believe, to believe in miracles and theophany, in history and prophecy, and in law and morality. Given the fundamentally Abrahamic nature of this view, specifically a “belief in belief”, we cannot pour this assumption over the whole of humanity as perennial virtue. On the contrary, the ruling value of the pre-Christian world was not belief, but action1, animation. Therefore, we must instead ask, “what did these people do?” In an affirmation of this distinction, the fires and censures of zealots made it so that while we have plenty to read and observe today in regards to ancient myth, which those early fathers understood as harmless tales, we have very little in regards to ancient practice. Yet, as the Greek understood all daily activities to be in essence religious acts, the Early Church could not wholly destroy his religion—we need only some creativity in deciding where to look for it.

One area of “action” in regards to Greek culture that has been remarkably preserved over these thousands of years is its magnificent corpus of drama and tragedy. The original texts of Oresteia and Antigone are preserved in a number of tattered manuscripts, imagery of performances is found painted on amphorae, and even the masks of performers can be found safely preserved in modern museums. Those masks!—delightful, inquisitive, scornful, maddening, lustful, terrifying—and yet, empty; looking into the hollow eyes of these masks feels like peering into the soul of ancient Greece itself. From the blank expressions of these masks a world of character and emotions emerge, similar to the experience one obtains from a staring contest with marble statues, yet the feeling is far more of one of strangeness, and distance. The statue intends to solidify and immortalize a face; the mask intends to destroy it entirely. The persona of the actor, however important his voice and talents may be to the performance of Greek tragedy, does not exist on the stage—only the mask is seen.

This destruction of the wearer at the hands of his mask, or perhaps the union between the two, gives us one of these hidden insights into ancient religiosity that was not apparent enough to be destroyed alongside altars and groves. Indeed, masks are ubiquitous across all spatiotemporal lengths in religious rite and ceremony, be it the death masks of Rome, the towering headsets of the Baining fire dance, or the Potlatch masks of the natives of the Pacific Northwest, which they tellingly referred to as “transformation masks”. The point of the mask in these cultures, and too was it for the stage of Greek drama, was to serve as a conduit and anchor for the soul of the depicted being. The mask is an object of becoming, of participation, and possession: when a native puts on the mask of Sisiutl or a Greek actor dons the mask of Apollo, the persona of its wearer effectively ceases to exist. Only the soul which is expressed by the mask, put into motion by the body of the actor, shines forth from the stage. It was for this reason that Ezra Pound, in his days of fascination with the closely related Japanese Noh performances, described these as “god-dances”.2

Theatre and efficacious ritual are intertwined because not only are the gods and ancestors invited to visit the temple unseen, in spirit, but they are also revealed and embodied through the Topeng drama. The performer is the link between the two worlds, a human being who, through the mask, gives form to the gods.

— David Wiles, Mask and Performance in Greek Tragedy (2007), pp. 190-191

Our assumptions run deep, revealed in our frustrations with understanding the furthest reaches of religion, casting what we do not understand into the trash bin labels of “mysticism”, “animism”, or “primitive”. The traditional model of ancient religion situates man on one end, and a universe away, the god. We conceive a world of a finite number of individual and irreducible souls which meet and interact with one another. Yet these are relatively recent developments in the long history of man, first seen in faint sparks with the Platonist and Hermetic, and thrusted into dominance by the monotheism and dualism of the Abrahamic religions. Indeed, the mask itself is foreign to the Abrahamic tradition3. In a nearly polar contrast to the view of antiquity, we are instructed to be fearful of idolatry and possession. The mask came to be associated with harlequins and the devil, and similar treatment was given to those statues of antiquity which were “defaced” in accordance with the Jewish practice of idol nullification. These assumptions are unhelpful at best, and more likely prohibitive, in understanding a world that entails a plurality of uncountable gods and souls, which blend and transform in a world defined by flux, rhythm, and ceaseless change.

Thus the mask, in its service of the alteration of psychological states, the destruction of the actor’s persona and the blending of souls in a cosmic unity between form and animation, gives us an exceptionally old window into the religion and ritual acts of mankind. Here we do not see the establishment of concrete pantheons which are lofty and untouchable by man, but beings which must necessarily manifest themselves in the world, and to such an extent that there can be little distinction between “the natural” and “the supernatural”. Such beings are not typically offered gifts in exchange for some form of intercession (though we would of course not claim sacrifice to be a “new” inclusion to religious action), but rather invited to possess. Greg Hicks, the actor for Orestes in Sir Peter Hall’s Oresteia performance, remarked that even with the mechanics of the performance the mask compels the actor: “The body wants to go with the mask… I have to move in a particular way because the mask compels me to move that way."

It is on this distinction that Robert Bellah differs primitive religion from archaic religion4, and the rule which Lucien Lévy-Bruhl defined Aboriginal religion through the law of participation—participation mystique—or what Klages called the principle of transformation. Both illustrate the idea that the practitioner is possessed by a soul or being which releases him from himself, allowing the soul or being to be animated through material once more. This view of the furthest reaches of man’s religious concepts, and indeed his subconscious, would be picked up and championed by Carl Jung:

The further we go back into history, the more we see personality disappearing beneath the wrappings of collectivity. And if we go right back to primitive psychology, we find absolutely no trace of the concept of an individual. Instead of individuality we find only collective relationship or what Lévy-Bruhl calls participation mystique.

—Jung, Psychological Types (1921)

Among such [primitives], whose consciousness is at a different level of development from ours, the “soul” (or psyche) is not felt to be a unit. Many primitives assume that a man has a “bush soul” as well as his own, and that this bush soul is incarnate in a wild animal or a tree, with which the human individual has some kind of psychic identity. […] This identity takes a variety of forms among primitives. If the bush soul is that of an animal, the animal itself is considered as some sort of brother to the man. A man whose brother is a crocodile, for instance, is supposed to be safe when swimming a crocodile-infested river. If the bush soul is a tree, the tree is presumed to have something like parental authority over the individual concerned. In both cases an injury to the bush soul is interpreted as an injury to the man. In some tribes, it is assumed that a man has a number of soul; this belief expresses the feeling of some primitive individuals that they consist of several linked but distinct units. This means that the individual’s psyche is far from being safely synthesized; on the contrary, it threatens to fragment only too easily under the onslaught of unchecked emotions.

—Jung, Man and His Symbols (1964), pp. 6-7

The principle of transformation, and with it bringing souls into the power of the waking mind, is the ancient goal of all theurgists, spirit conjurers, and necromancers, and one of the pro-ethnic roots of mysticism, whose original form, untainted by any spiritualistic debauchery, we can grasp. For example, in the self-transformation of Germanic heroes into werewolves and berserkers, of the Zeylonian devil dancers into demons, of the ancient Thracian Sabos mystists into the rapturous thiasos of the raging bull god.

—Klages, Of Cosmogonic Eros5

The lack of all individuality, in which man is ensnared in communion with the cosmos, can only be described with one word: ecstasy. The term has its roots in the ancient Greek use of ἐξίστημι, existemi, to be displaced or driven out of something. While the term has modern connotations with psychedelics or sexual activity, it must necessarily be identified with the whole of religious experience: man, when come upon by a god, is “driven out” of and dissolved of his own personality and ego. He and the god or spirit become one, and there is no confusion in the contradiction that man could be simultaneously himself and someone else—be it an animal spirit, gods, ancestors, daemons, or all of the above. The result is madness, with the possessed acting as if he is no longer himself. The whole enterprise of ritual action—from the most primitive of man, to the ulfhednar of Iron Age Germanic peoples, to the modern Christian practice of “speaking in tongues”—must be and can only be seen through the seeking and invitation of ecstatic rapture. Religion may be credited with the generation of many things, and much is associated with religious belief and activity, but without ecstasy, it is nothing.

Of course, Dionysus is conveniently the god of theater, masks, ecstasy, and all aforementioned related themes. Yet this series will not be an investigation into the cult of Dionysus, but to argue that what is most traditionally associated with his cult is in fact intrinsic to all religious experience: ecstasy—not morality, not reason, not tradition—is the ruling principle of all that is religious. It is from here that we must completely dispense with the conception of religious and ritual act as a fundamentally rational effort: ritual and religious experience itself serves to annihilate the sober ego, driving the practitioner into a maddened state of uncontrollable frenzy. As important as corollaries such as tradition and ethics are to the larger coherence and stability of man himself and his relationship with the world, they have no bearing or importance to the undeniably irrational religious experience which precedes and maintains them.

The stage of strange and titled masks gives us a faint glimpse into the mode of thought that dominated the psyche, the soul, of primitive man—and thus the fertile soil of what man calls “religion”, his relationship with a fully divine world. In ecstatic rapture the performers cease to be the studious actors that had trained and prepared verses for years before, but form an animated union with the soul that shines through the hollow eyes of the mask. The performance of Greek tragedy or of Japanese Noh appears as a perfected form of the religious dances of American Indians or Papuans because it is precisely from these ritualistic ceremonies where the performance finds its forefather. This tells us a great deal about Greek tragedy and masks, but more so about the essence of religious experience: ecstasy, possession, and union.

In future installments, we will further explore the concepts of ecstasy and divine madness—highlighting a rare area of agreement between Socrates and Nietzsche.

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As many are aware, recent years have seen the resurgence of interest in the pre-Christian religiosity of Europe, often under terms such as “paganism” or “heathenry.” The reintroduction of the practice of such religiosity necessarily involves a rejection of the dominant religion of today—Christianity. However, it is apparent that the bulk of heathens today merely reject the symbols of Christianity without rejecting the core of Christian thought. Of course, singing praises to our ancestral gods is important, but without the ruthless excision of Semitic despotism, ignorance, and superstition, our heathen faith would be but a hollow mockery of the faith of our ancestors. Therefore, in this series I hope to examine the principal Semitic superstition I see so many would-be heathens witlessly fall into: the devotion to the supernatural. Being a Nordicist, I will elucidate the stark contrast between the unique European view and today’s standard Semitic view through the lens of Germanic heathenry. This series will examine the place of the supernatural in Germanic heathenry (or rather the lack thereof).

The dominant view of religions today centers on the miracle. As defined in the Abrahamic faiths, the miracle is an event whereby divinity (always viewed as outside of or separate from the world) acts directly upon our world in explicit violation of the “laws of nature” to affect a change. The effect of such miracles in Abrahamic myth is that their transcendent monotheistic god is the primary driver of events. Their jealous god acts according to his whims to drive outcomes for his people, who receive benefit from his actions. Such a view would be anathema to our Germanic ancestors. Instead, our ancestors saw divinity as immanent in nature and thought divine action unfolded through natural processes. In Germanic myth, men acting in concert with the divine drive events in ways that comport with the “laws of nature.” One could remove all reference to the divine in some myths (which, as we will see, would appear insane to our ancestors) without disturbing the sequence of events of the myth as a whole. That this view is authentic to how our ancestors understood their religion is evident when examining the origins of Germanic religion itself, the view of the nature of the gods at the pinnacle of Germanic achievement, and via an examination of an exemplary myth – the Saga of the Völsungs. This entry will begin by examining the first: the origin of Germanic religion.

To orient ourselves, we first must establish what is meant by “supernatural.” The word supernatural derives from Latin supernātūrālis, meaning “above” + “nature; that which we are born with.”1 That is, it is essential to the term that the event described goes beyond that which nature provides for. This creates some implications: firstly that there is something outside of nature that can act upon it and secondly that nature as it presents to us is subject to violation. In turn, it follows that nature (the world, what we experience) is subservient to something outside and superior to it. This thing could be a “true world” of the forms or in the Semitic view, the monotheistic god. This begs the question of how a people could come to hold this view. The answer the Semite will give you is quite simple and unquestioned: revelation.

The Torah (תורה) is the revelation of the Semite god to Moses at Sinai. Torah literally mean “instruction” and refers to both the first five books of Hebrew scripture as well as later oral laws such as the Talmud.2 Later, Christians added their own texts to the existing Hebrew scripture to create the Bible, with the final such text itself being named “Revelation.” These writings and teachings are indispensable to the Semitic religions. Without their propagation, the religions would cease to exist. If3 every copy of the Bible was destroyed, and every last person with knowledge of Christianity killed, then intuition and observation alone would be unable to rebuild the precepts of Christian religion. God coming from outside the world into the world either through prophets like Muhammed or himself like the person of Jesus is an essential part of Semitic faiths. Even Muhammed required instruction of the Quran from the transcendent being of the angel Gabriel much like the angel Moroni directed Joseph Smith to the golden plates. Taken on their face, all these Semitic religions are logically consistent with supernaturalism. If beings miraculously appear and state that miracles are possible, then of course we humans have to take their words as truth. Who would I be to question the hook-nosed apparition that suddenly appeared in my room in harsh violation of my heretofore known understanding of the laws of science and fundamental nature of the universe?

Friedrich Nietzsche in classic form psychologizes the origin of these instincts towards supernaturalism in the Abrahamic religions, finding that those who reject the natural for the supernatural are themselves “natural rejects” so to say:

Once the concept “nature” was taken to mean the opposite of the concept God, the word “natural” had to acquire the meaning of abominable,—the whole of that fictitious world takes its root in the hatred of nature (—reality!—), it is the expression of profound discomfiture in the presence of reality.... But this explains everything. What is the only kind of man who has reasons for wriggling out of reality by lies? The man who suffers from reality. But in order to suffer from reality one must be a bungled portion of it. The preponderance of pain over pleasure is the cause of that fictitious morality and religion: but any such preponderance furnishes the formula for decadence.4

Hatred of nature is not only a criticism leveled from outside the ranks of Abrahamic religions by characters such as Nietzsche, but so too do those within the ranks proclaim this hatred. In an article I highly doubt the author ever intended non-Jews to read, Jewish scholar Manfred Gerstenfeld juxtaposes Judeo-Christian law with the laws of nature:

Halakhah [Jewish law] is the antithesis of the laws of nature. The latter are cruel: there is no charity in nature; there is no mercy. There is no safety net in nature for marginal beings. The strong eat the weak. The old are abandoned. In the Bible, the Utopian Latter Days are characterized by the disappearance of these characteristics from the world, when Isaiah prophesies that “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb...the cow and the bear shall graze...a babe shall play over a viper’s hole.”5

He goes on to claim, “no nation in the twentieth century has lived as much ‘in harmony with nature’ as Hitler’s Germany. Blood and soil became central values. In the pseudo-religious world of national socialism, nature and its rule, i.e., the survival of the fittest, played an important role.”6 In the Judeo-Christian view, nature is something to be overcome. The existence of religion and law is to subjugate and control nature for the purposes of man, to make natural things available to safen the world for the lowest “marginal beings.” In this regard, the whole purpose of Semitic religion is to be supernatural, for man to go above nature to make it his own. The teleology of Judeo-Christian religion goes hand-in-hand with its cosmology: man ought to be supernatural, god is already supernatural.

The Germanic view of religion and the means by which our ancestors came to know the gods are entirely opposite of this Semitic view. It is evident that, along with all others in the world, Germanic religion developed naturally out of interaction with nature. Because of this, the idea of the supernatural is wholly unintuitive and goes counter to the foundation of Germanic heathenry because a religion built upon observation of the natural world can not include things not naturally possible. The Norrœna Society, a modern Germanic heathen reconstructionist group, clearly and succinctly lays out what we will see the historic Germanic view was in the Society’s declaration of the core tenets of its faith:

We believe in Immanent Divinity and deny the existence of the Supernatural. There is only Nature and nothing exists outside of it.

Within the Doctrine of Immanence, it is believed that the spiritual world pervades our physical world and that the two exist in harmony together rather than in opposition between the natural and the supernatural. We believe that our Gods created the material world and the cosmology within which it rests, and that all things, including the Divine, exist subject to logical principles within this natural existence. We acknowledge no First Cause or appeal to that which lies outside of reality. All things which exist are rationally understandable and logically ordered within reality, and this includes what many understand as “the supernatural.”7

To truly comprehend the incompatibility of the supernatural and Germanic religion we must first have a good grasp upon what is natural, or a strong definition of nature itself. Furthermore, this definition must be appropriate to our Germanic ancestors’ understanding. We can elucidate this historical understanding by looking at another Nordic Indo-European people’s word for nature, its etymology, and their purest-bred aristocracy’s understanding of it: the Greeks. We can then look at the corresponding Germanic word for nature, its etymology, and our ancestors’ understanding of it to see if it aligns with the Greek understanding.

The appropriate Greek word is phusis (φύσις), which literally translated means “to grow.”8 Costin Alamariu contextualizes the Greek use of phusis through Pindar, “the voice of the early Greek aristocracy.”9 The fundamental meaning of the word as expounded by Pindar centers around the body conceptualized biologically—flesh and blood.10 Furthermore, the word as used by Pindar has a botanical connotation connected with bounty, fruitfulness, and energy; which further develops into skill, strength, and general material prowess.11 Lastly, Pindar uses the word in contexts connected to breeding and heredity in an explicitly eugenic fashion.12 The Indo-European Greek aristocracy therefore viewed nature as man’s physical inborn capacities for vibrance, liveliness, and power. The lynchpin of this entire understanding is that these vital traits are inborn. They are given to man by descent, not acquired through one’s experiences. Indeed this focus on the particularity of the body (which will become important in part two of this series) does not preclude a wider inclusion of all things “given to” man in the world. Collin Cleary uses the literal translation of the Chinese word for nature, “of itself so.”13 Comparing this to the Greek understanding of phusis, Cleary writes that “The ‘of itself so’ is that which is, or has happened, independently of conscious, human action or intervention.”14 While eugenic traits may be cultivated through the process of selective breeding, they are not ultimately created by man but instead carefully refined. Their true origin remains ineffable, outside of the reach of man, and ultimately mysterious. Again, Cleary writes, “This is exactly how the Greeks conceived phusis, as surging forth continually out of an ultimate source – archē, in Greek.”15 In sum, the Greek understanding of nature in phusis is the constant outpouring or growth of vitality which is ultimately other from man insofar as it is outside his ultimate control yet which reaches its zenith in the bodies of the most gifted men.

The Old Norse word for nature is óðal (ᛟᚦᚨᛚ) (commonly rendered as aðal, eðli, öðli) which derives from Proto-Germanic *aþalą ultimately from Proto Indo-European *h₂et-olo- literally meaning “to grow over/beyond.”1617 The original sense of the word used in Norse poetry seems to have been “nature, inborn quality, property.”18 The word heavily connotated inborn characteristics as well as heredity, for the term came to be associated with inheritance and property that passed through descent.19 Additionally, all Germanic languages’ words for aristocracy and nobility (save English, which receives its word from Latin) descend from the same root word that their word for nature does, *aþalą.20 This same word also means “race,” thus connecting nobility with descent and ancestry.21 As an aside, this word has descended into German as adel which forms the prefix “A-” in the name “Adolf,” meaning “noble wolf.” The words óðal and phusis are essentially identical: both have meanings of growth and overflowing (over/beyond in *h₂et-), both connect to vitality via the principle of nobility, and both imply something given from otherness—that which is inborn. This parity makes perfect sense, for the Greeks and Germanics shared a common origin on the Indo-European steppe. Both peoples were intimately aware of heredity and how to cultivate traits eugenically having descended from generations of steppe pastoralists subsisting off herds of domesticated cattle whilst riding domesticated horses. Nature, that which is out there in the world and confronts us, was omnipresent for our ancestors.

This constant interaction with nature, which is severely lacking for so many modern people, is the backdrop by which we can understand our ancestors’ intuition and discovery of their religious beliefs. After discussing the meaning of nature itself, Cleary goes onto say, “My thesis is this: our wonder at the being of particular things is an intuition of a god, or divine being.”22 The reasoning follows quite simply, as when one contemplates a natural object such as lightning, his wonder at the being or existence of such lightning leads to the intuition of its divinity. This does not apply to manmade objects, such as a car, for wonder at the being or existence of a car leads simply to the thought of its creator. Instead, our ancestors developed religious thought in response to wonder at the being of nature, which has no such easy answer. That Germanic heathenry is naturalistic is likely not in contention, but nevertheless reference to functions of particular deities demonstrates as much. Among other things, Thor is a god of storms, Njord is a god of the sea, Jord is an Earth goddess—the list of natural domains ruled by Germanic deities can go on and on.

Popular understanding holds that paganism developed out of simple animism, and sees later paganism as a “progression” on this earlier animism and further sees Abrahamic monotheism as a further “progression” on polytheism. In fact, a common Christian criticism of Neopaganism is that it is primitive. The all-too-common trope of an internet Catholic saying that “the Germanic people were living in mud huts prior to their conversion to Christianity” comes to mind. Even if paganism was primitive like its e-Christian detractors makes it out to be, the thesis that it developed through interaction with nature holds true. Nature is something that is other to man, given from without. Man must work within nature, and indeed he himself in his very body is nature. Nature is harsh and uncompromising, it does not moralize nor make exceptions. Given this, and seeing as how our ancestors developed the Germanic religion through living so proximately to nature while always keeping its truths in mind, they could not possibly have come to intuit the possibility that forces existed that so explicitly contravened these natural truths. It is nonsensical to think the wise Icelander, who inherited his mastery of the seas from his ancestors that navigated there from Norway, would without outside input come to the conclusion that a magical unseen elder could miraculously part the sea so that his chosen people could scurry through the newly dried gap.

As an example of how life in close proximity to nature can develop into sophisticated pagan religion is given by Nietzsche in his discussion of the Code of Manu, the Vedic law recognizing the truth of strict caste division in pre-Hindu Vedic religion:

The order of castes, the highest, the dominating law, is only the sanction of a natural order, of a natural legislation of the first rank, over which no arbitrary innovation, no “modern idea” has any power. Every healthy society falls into three distinct types, which reciprocally condition one another and which gravitate differently in the physiological sense; and each of these has its own hygiene, its own sphere of work, its own special feeling of perfection, and its own mastership. It is Nature, not Manu, that separates from the rest, those individuals preponderating in intellectual power, those excelling in muscular strength and temperament, and the third class which is distinguished neither in one way nor the other, the mediocre,—the latter as the greatest number, the former as the élite.23

The Indo-Aryan Vedics too descend from the same Indo-European ancestors that gave rise to the Greek and Germanic branches of the Nordic race, and so too their early texts uphold and exemplify the principle of natural religion. Nietzsche lauds the inequality of the Code of Manu and contrasts its manly recognition and codification of natural truths with the feeble and slavish rejection of true reality we discussed earlier. Understanding nature allowed the Vedics to communicate nature and recognize the immanence of the divine in the world.

The Germanic faith saw, and still should see, the immanence of the divine within the world. When the crafty Norwegian carefully maintains course and spots the new land of Iceland, he does so with the assistance of a god. When the cruel berserker brings down his axe upon the neck of a pleading monk, he does so with the assistance of a god. This introduces Walter Otto’s thesis on the disposition of European religion, of which he counts the pinnacle as the Greek view laid out by Homer:

In all larger forms and conditions of life and existence the Greek perceived the eternal visage of divinity. Taken all together these essences constituted the holiness of the world. Hence the Homeric poems are filled with divine proximity and presence as are those of no other people or age. In their world the divine is not superimposed as a sovereign power over natural events; it is revealed in the forms of the natural, as their very essence and being. For other peoples miracles take place; but a greater miracle takes place in the spirit of the Greek, for he is capable of so regarding the objects of daily experience that they can display the awesome lineaments of the divine without losing a whit of their natural reality.24

Of course, this leaves many questions about the Germanic faith and its conception of the gods. Many may be willing to accept the derivation of some gods through interaction with nature, but what of the other gods that are not so neatly categorized by natural phenomena? On their face, ideas such as war, justice, or law do not appear as natural “things” out there in the world readily ascribable to the control of the god Tyr, yet our ancestors connected such things to him. Additionally, there are myths whose tales are wholly unintuitive and appear unconnectable to any natural process readily observable in the world. It seems the only way our ancestors could know about Thor hooking the world serpent on a fishing trip is if some higher power revealed it to them.25 Furthermore, the myths seem to speak of the gods performing supernatural actions all the time. To resolve these apparent issues, we must further delve into the Germanic conception of the nature of divinity itself with the help of Walter Otto. This will be the topic of the next entry in this series.

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Uncontrollable, the unbeliever goes,

in spitting rage, rebellious and amok,

madly assaulting the mysteries of god,

profaning the rites of the mother of god.

—Euripides, The Bacchae (995-999)

One may find it in a priest sanctifying an old house guilty of uttering a suspiciously demonic creak too many, or indeed as one is plunged below baptismal waters; too, perhaps, when the smoke of incense is waved about to clear a room of its spirits, and as well the cleansing of one’s body before entering the presence of gods: ritual purification exists as one of the most ubiquitous expressions of religiosity, across all barriers of time, culture, and race. We observe it in every corner of human expression available to the wandering eye.

You may find the most emotional, and therefore utterly foreign, example of this observance in the activities of the Athenian festival of Thargelia. By late spring, the fields were covered in verdant green thallos, young stalks of grain and cereal that were to be culled and offered to the gods. But what shall be offered must first be purified; thus the Athenians, on this day of every year, selected two of their own to serve as φαρμακοὶ.1 Two men, the ugliest of body and spirit that could be found, were cleaned, clad in holy garments, and adorned in wreaths and sacred flora. As a flute player processed them around the city, across every home, they were whipped with twigs and vines by the god-hungry people of Athens. Onto them they cast all sins and imperfections, all impurities and demonic essences, which these scapegoats strangely accepted… and then they were killed, their bodies utterly destroyed. Not the faintest trace of their flesh was to be found, bludgeoned and incinerated into dust along with every spirit cast upon them. Then, the jubilant festivities of a new spring heralded by the birth of Apollo began. In one moment the sludge that had accumulated in the polis’ preceding year had been driven out, and in another, the radiant beauty of the coming year was welcomed in.

It is customary to look at such episodes in antiquity with scorn and derision. In fact, the longstanding default of our worldview is to take the side of the ugly-and-pure offering, processed through the streets as he is whipped and injured as he ingests the sin of his fellow man. Here, we are told, is the final utterance of such a barbaric and senseless operation. Therefore, when the appearance of flesh-sacrifice presents itself once more, horror personifies the ensuing reaction, and charges of “heathenry”, “witchcraft”, and above all else, “the demonic”. In fact, in the few holdouts of contemporary life where religious sentiment still endures its laborious breathing, it is difficult to find any expression or occurrence of daily life that is not labeled as pagan or satanic. Of course, per the longstanding “wisdom” of those desert fathers, these two are one and the same, and already we are presented with the first of many errors that produce spiritual infantilization.

The confused and indeed oxymoronic assessment of post-Christian and counter-Christian sentiments as equally satanic, atheistic, and pagan is sometimes evident in just the front cover of popular bookstore titles, such as “Pagan Threat: Confronting America’s Godless Uprising”, which is dedicated “To the faithful—those who refuse to bow to Baal.” Indeed, out of a self-inflicted poverty which knows no occurrence of history outside of scripture, Baal has been erected as the “marbleman” of this apparent pagano-satanic-atheism, to which the chosen faithful are called to perform their customary act of nullification. Among a pile of curious claims (some of which, we should note, are openly admitted to by the author’s foes)—such as the demonic possession of Beyonce and Nicki Minaj, a gnostic-Hegelian feminist synthesis of Deepak Chopra and Oprah Winfrey, or the association of sage burning and meditative yoga with the worship of demons—the author is sure to include more familiar argumentation:

When a nation turns to idols, it does not remain spiritually or morally intact. This cycle of false empowerment, built on the worship of idols and the degradation of the human body, naturally paves the way for an even more demonic manifestation of power—a power that seeks control over life itself. This shift from sexual freedom to sexual dominance leads inexorably to the ultimate act of control: Abortion. Just as ancient deities demanded sacrifices, the modern goddess movement claims its power through the blood of the innocent.

—ibid.

No issue quite evokes the accusation of idolatry, “the demonic manifestation of power”, than the imagery of human sacrifice. The accuser is quick to list off the instances across antiquity where these acts were said to occur, contrasting this with the Biblical mandate to permanently end such behavior. Certainly, we would be cautious to reject this delineation on more than what would ultimately be trivial clarifications. Yet what must be fiercely contested is the insinuation that the sterile modern practice of the abortion pill has anything to do, whatsoever, with some form of non-Christian religiosity, and far less so a revival of the worship of the gods of antiquity. The identification of paganism with demons is a casual and longstanding belief within the Christian faith, yet the tail end of this triune moniker, which completes the circle, is all the more telling: this belief, actually, entails a disbelief. Not merely the disbelief of the Christian God, but of all gods, leaving only the individual man as worthy of veneration. To the extent that this is, in fact, the residue of a uniquely Abrahamic view of the world which elevated mankind to be worthy of such worship above nature, we direct to what has already been said.2 Nevertheless, the implicit admission that this worldview possesses an inherently atheistic flavor serves, as we shall see, the fundamental distinction between ancient man and those who claim the names of his gods, as well as the pastor, who is evidently confused by the vandalism.

To what extent can these activities be said to be a genuine reanimation, even if subconsciously so, of the worship of gods dispensed with some centuries ago? We return to the Athenian Thargelia for more clarification. The entire affair occurred because of, in part, the threat of or active presence of debilitating famines or outbreaks of disease. Thus, at least on an excruciatingly surface-level interpretation, we may say that these men were sacrificed in service to the protection and very survival of the polis. Already we see one key distinction, yet we must proceed further: as the philologist and historian of Greek religion Walter Otto tells us, looming over this rather serious and existential affair could only be the presence of a god. While modern man concerns himself solely with utility, ancient man knew only service and veneration. He explains:

The horrifying pomp of this tragedy, however, demands, as its counterpart, something portentous—a sinister, lofty greatness to whose presence the community responded with such terrible seriousness. There is no name we can give to this dark Being whose giant shadow fell over the habitations of mankind. His myth was the cult practices themselves which created for the destroyer his image in a gruesome drama. But this image would have never been created if he had not been overwhelmingly revealed from a position of immediate imminence. That which appears to our dull, unimaginative minds as a menace and poison of a material nature endowed the great generations of antiquity with a wealth of forms not because they thought about these matters even more superficially and mechanistically that we ourselves do, but rather because this image reared itself up before them as a colossal form which was not to be avoided, and forced them to express their emotion creatively in an awful monumental act. More exactly expressed—their ceremonial actions and the revelation of this colossal form were one and the same thing. Nor would they have been affected as deeply by the supernatural, as their creativity intimates, had the idea of utility been an integral part of their cult practices.

[…] That which seemed “primitive” and “understandable” to the evolutionists [Wilamowitz, Usener, etc.] was that which was secondary in nature: the regard for material wellbeing, which, it is true, soon had to be valued as the most important element by the unoriginal thinkers of later generations and was suited here, as elsewhere, to make sacred rites into acts of good common sense.

—Dionysus: Myth and Cult, pp. 40-41

The principal error committed in essentially all evaluations of ancient religion is the projection of utility onto those long-extinct cults. The modern scholar can only understand these expressions in terms of use and personal gain, because man himself remains as the sole deity to which offerings and veneration are presented. Unlike the modern culture crusader who sees his faith as a legal construct which can be raised against the coming tide of Islam, or the diligent missionary concerning his work with the material and spiritual enslavement of distant peoples in service to his own fetishes, ancient man knew nothing of his religion’s “utility”. He knew only the presence of the gods and the cultic practices which poured out of the hearts of those who bore witness, neither of which are present in the utilitarian mind of “the pagan-satanic left”. When the Phoenician offered his first-born child to the pyre, what do you think would have compelled him to such a dark act—and indeed they understood it as such—contrary to the instinct universal to all of life? “To project the slaughter of the hunt onto the maintenance of public order” as Burkert and Girard tell us3, or “to purchase and claim dark powers for himself” as the amateur exorcist would claim today. Neither conception of a sort of “spiritual economy” is rooted in the mind of ancient man4, but in fact can only come from the modern mind. Conversely, we know precisely why women procure abortions: to buy themselves 6 more years of financial independence, free from responsibility, happy in her undisturbed creation of more sales PowerPoints in a twelfth-floor cubicle. The overwhelming sense of a demanded submission is nowhere present; to the extent she may ululate about Artemis or Cybele, we may comfortably call everyone involved a liar.

These facts are likewise evident in the very mood or emotion present in these respective events. When ancient man offered another as a sacrifice to the gods, how is he said to have viewed the affair? As we are told, with the utmost seriousness and emotional vividness, at the knife’s edge between destruction and the necessity to obey the nearing-god. He understood it to involve the complete lack of control over himself, and indeed, offerings were said to have been given to the Fates as part of these rites as well. Conversely, what emotions does a woman feel today as she patiently sits in a waiting room before the administration of poison which will slowly kill her unborn child? To this we must necessarily reply: nothing at all. Our epoch is defined by the numbing anti-depressant, entrenching and enforcing the dull aloofness and utter separation from all sensuality. If there is any feeling present in the clinic it is anxiety, which is merely the anxiety that one will be stripped of her normal routines. Our contemporary mass anhedonia must be utterly contrasted with the rapturous ecstasy at the center of ancient rites and cults. For as much as one may gesticulate about the “sacred” nature of this clinical procedure, justified by self-serving allusions to the rights allotted to “divine femininity”, the act is precisely as it appears once stripped of all plastic accessories: quiet, unceremonious, and above all else, in respect and in service to the privacy of the individual. Indeed, privacy is the key word to any amendment, court ruling, or campaign slogan (to further distinguish it from anything “sacred”), as we find in “the right of privacy”, “guarantee of personal privacy”, or “the privacy of the informed-consent dialogue between the woman and her physician” throughout these elements. What could any of this possibly have in relation to the fundamentally public rituals of old, from which abstaining in participation could only incur fatal charges of ἀσέβεια?5

If Dionysus walks this Earth, he has assuredly been wired to an IV pole in a Toronto MAID ward.

The great “Nature gods” of antiquity—be it Dionysus, Artemis, or Cybele—to be sure, have nothing to do with the modern presentation of “Mother Earth”, a mere permissive godmother who gently guides humanity through daily life, and to whom environmentalists adoringly request peace, love, and forgiveness. Yet the gods of antiquity whom these plastic inventions imitate in the crudest fashion could only be described with the missing, indeed inverted, character: terror. Cybele, we are told by Lucretius, was depicted as a terrifying woman who charges down her heavenly peak in the form of a black meteor, hoisted upon a chariot driven by two ferocious lions, guarded by a Phrygian warband who blared horrible horns, bashed spears and bronze shields as they danced, and howled and shouted for blood. Dionysus and his maenads need little introduction in this regard, though we may remind the reader of a few epithets: the hunter and renderer of men, Ωμάδιος, the eater of raw flesh (a title shared only with Cerberus), and as kept in the Hymns of Orpheus, he who delights in “swords, and blood, and sacred rage”. Artemis likewise strikes terror into the hearts of men, though in a noticeably colder character than the other two: countless souls were destroyed in the most gruesome ways for the most infinitesimal of slights to the goddess—cursed Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia, curious Actaeon, and even her faithful Hippolytus. While we shall leave further investigation into this tangent for future works, this much is noted to remind the reader that ancient man understood all gods, and particularly the nature gods, as terrifying, demanding, and uncompromising forces which sought to destroy as much as they bestowed life. In fact, the two gifts were inseparable.

In addition, we must refer to what exactly this confers to the individual, namely her “right to choose”. We are told that the Earth Mother is invoked and offered the souls of children in specific service to this “bodily autonomy”, this freedom of will and of the individual, yet we see in ancient myth and cult the precise opposite of this claim. When Euripides tells us the story of Pentheus, King of Thebes, torn apart limb-by-limb by his own mother, it is noted that she was entirely maddened by Dionysus, and, through the hallucinations of divine frenzy thought her son to be a wild lion. Modern terms such as “epilepsy” and “seizure” still retain their original Greek meaning from λᾰμβᾰ́νω, meaning “to be seized from without”—implying the internal activity of a daimon or god. Plato himself in Phaedrus offers us several “blessings” of madness, where the individual is compelled beyond himself: the prophetic madness of Apollo, the mystical madness of Dionysus, the poetic madness of the Muses, and the erotic madness of Eros and Aphrodite. Time and time again, when we observe the activity of a god and particularly in relation to his worshippers, we witness nothing short of the complete destruction of the individual—sometimes but for a moment, other times permanently—and thus this activity must stand in the strongest opposition to those conceptions which elevate the autonomous individual and their “rights” above all other things!

Those who suggest the involvement of demons in the act of abortion or sexual depravity may offer that insanity and madness, in fact, aptly describe the entire phenomenon of the “modern progressives”, who, like the Bacchantes, seek to liberate themselves from the duties and responsibilities of daily life in favor of psychosis. Though we hope that we have already dispensed with the view that cultic veneration came through a rationally-sought benefit to the self such as “the release from one’s duties” and not the overpowering presence of a god—or demon, if a Christian were inclined to agree—it should be further demonstrated that whereas one madness arises from the total possession of a god, the other arises from nothing short of its total absence. We need to only revisit the language and behavior of “the possessed”: rites of self-help, prayers of self-affirmation, and above all else, the impiety that results from the belief that a god is to be used for his own benefit. Thus, the confusion stems from the entirely biblical belief that idolatry is merely that which seeks to venerate the self, making man himself the ultimate “graven image”. Here the desert father, mid-century scholar, and Neoplatonist, too, all find themselves in an agreed-upon ignorance in ascribing to the ancient mind a view of religion which seeks to merely engorge himself on divine powers, even as this conception reveals itself to be utterly incapable of explaining how these myths and cults arose in the first place, or how each and every one of them entail the complete loss of individuality, often at grave cost.

When we permit ourselves to engage in a genuine assessment of the character of these types, what sort of qualities do we find? Above all else the veneration of progress, a rejection of the tyranny of nature, an overbearing demand for apparent “human decency”, and the sacred protection of the rights of the human individual. Not one of these qualities were known to the Greek, and this leads us to ask, where, then, did they come from? Ultimately, Christianity! Surely, these express themselves in a clearly heretical manner; just as much as we can attribute the genesis of these views to Christianity can we say that the religion is very obviously no longer in control of the situation. How at all, then, can a “revival of the worship of gods” be defined by the mere residue of a since-abandoned Christianity? Perhaps this is precisely what these types want, a system of Christian ethics stripped of all sacral obligations and lacquered with the images of antiquity (they would not be the first to try!), but with this we may safely discard the notion that we are presented with the most remote sense of contact to any deity.

Christianity aimed at the preservation of the individual ego, in whose service it preaches “compassion.” Christian compassion is hostile to life, because the laws of life are not the laws of the ego: therefore, Nietzsche was correct in spurning it. The paganism that he wished to proclaim, on the other hand, was a splendid surrender of the ego and, hence, a phenomenon of life.

—Klages, Rythmen und Runen, p. 303

With the most fervent enthusiasm we dispense with the notion that the character of the apparent “pagan-satanic Left” has anything to do with “the worship of idols”, be they gods, demons, or some other supernatural or psychological presence. With the exception of those wondrous ancients, all are in agreement that man himself is in some sense divine—only the impious today has stripped all other divinities but him. He surrounds himself with innumerable temples and well-kept altars to this fact, and none are held in so high regard than the autonomy and free will of the individual. Here, he demands that he be permitted to do what thou will with no holds barred, imprinting upon Nature his own foolish whims then mistaking the resemblance as divine license. In his state of pure ego, his excretions of anhedonic miasma, and his demand that all of existence act in service to him alone, he situates himself as nothing short of the complete inversion of antiquity; and to the extent this persists, the pastor should not look to the old gods for the root of his concerns, but to his own necrotic flesh.

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Thus, if you find that you are unable to arouse your soul with heroes and wonder, then the dazzling spectacle of the world would remain a mere theater production. Since your soul cannot respond, its guide will abandon you, and then you can sit yourself down and listen, unharmed… to a lecture on ethics.

Klages, On Ethics (1918)

Our sight of the blooms and dew of the season at hand marks but the sixth year beyond the implementation of what could only be described as a terrible psychosis. Following the declaration of a national emergency on March 13th, we bore witness to the activation of valves and levers that were previously thought unthinkable: the required presentation of healthcare records to order McDonald’s, or SWAT teams rappelling from helicopters onto sun-soaking picnickers, to provide a quick jolt of memory and allow all other examples to come forth. Yet what was perhaps so crushing about these long years was the prescription and proscription of essentially all acts and desires, each and all inspected through the many thou shalt not’s derived from an ethereal, unspoken social consensus. Every singular expression of character or social habitude was due for inspection: have you considered that your Easter gathering will kill grandma, or, is your night at the gym worth its contravention of “public health”? We may have thought to ourselves that we would never forget such a period, but we do not remember if we made that pledge or not. We have a remarkable capacity for amnesia.

Of course, all of this was clearly visible on the horizon, steaming ahead with a cloud of dust and ash in tow, more than a decade ago. Society itself had increasingly come to be known, as a matter of intrinsic identity, as the moral command itself. Whereas previous peoples may have expected expression, productivity, or ingenuity, ours expects nothing but—and do not allow this language to suggest anything short of a totality—the submission of oneself to the category of “a decent freaking human being”. Nor should the reader be confused into thinking that this was a phenomenon exclusive to the pulpits of the left: thou shalt not disrespect the flag, thou shalt not dress immodestly, thou shalt not skip Sunday service, thou shalt not engage in sports betting or devilish music, thou shalt not contribute to the lowering of the TFR—among a million other more traditional (1990s) moral commands pertaining to sexuality, drugs, or alcohol.

Evidently any expectation that we would be permitted to return to some sense of individuality—which should be defined as the freedom to express what is inborn—was completely mistaken. Counterrevolutionary forces have devised a set of total moral commands of their own, and before they even have a whiff of institutional power, have already begun to picture themselves as paternalistic “fathers” of the people this will be imposed upon. This time the moral order will be “based!”, “Apollonian!”, by which they simply mean as necessarily all-encompassing and non-negotiable it can be; who wouldn’t want the most of what is possible out of such obviously good things! Yet what might be most revealing about these circumstances is who exactly is being addressed by this declaration by both sides of the tug-of-war: young men.

Indeed, the political current of the last few decades can be summarized simply by “we will pursue that which controls young men the most”, again, for both sides. There is no distinction in this fact other than the argument itself, which differs only in what precisely young men will be forced to do and expected to act. In some areas even this distinction is not so impressive, such as in the field of sexual ethics and courtship, where the heterosexual man is equally punished by both ends demanding that he not “sexualize women” by desiring them for their bodies. There are countless examples which may serve to illustrate the essential point: both ends are relentlessly dedicated to, in fact, the suppression of young men—but only one is honest about its intentions.

Each party can admit to the other that they represent two irreconcilably hostile powers, and thus they are in basic agreement on at least one crucial point. The opposition is crystal clear: they believe in the unyielding strife between Heaven and Hell. Each party, of course, sees Heaven in what the other regards to be Hell. On the other hand, no reconciliation is possible with the ethical teacher of today, who wages war against life, and who has no inclination to parley with the enemy. Like the Church Father, he stands on the side of the enemies of life, but, unlike them, he is ignorant, he hides behind a mask, he is a liar: and he is devoid of self-understanding.

—Klages, On Ethics (1918)

What persists in our circles can only be described as the not-so-proverbial youth pastor, typically a mildly-aged man, perhaps recently endowed with paternalistic duties in his own life, which he now brings to those poor souls he wills to shepherd. He elects himself as a conduit for spiritual blessings from a position of proximity to the youth, not necessarily to animate them, but to press them finely through the sieve of this proposed moral order. In fact, this moral order, despite the advice of wiser priors, has become God himself to him.

Therefore, he is a servant to the γέρων, ensuring that the young are consumed into the old through him. For as much as he may performatively gesticulate about “the feminist longhouse”, understand he is constructing precisely that, and doubly as it actually existed in antiquital matriarchies—which were in reality gerontocracies—in which, familiarly, the perpetual punishment and humiliation of young men benefitted women. He elevates, in fact, no one but himself and his own ontogeny retroactively—as is the nature for all of those of “priestly” character. In no uncertain terms, it is utterly essential to his nature that he act to control and suppress, ostensibly under the disguise of “moral guidance”. He exists for no other purpose. The same is true, be it in a church, or in the cultural world at large. Of course, the youth pastor may be found in higher concentration among circles which consider themselves as “the religious right”, or “Christian nationalists”. The newfound stole drapes over their slacked shoulders with a certain perfect, destined, fit, and to the right-wing youth they go to deliver the Good News:

Their syllogism is natural and simple: too much sexuality, do less of it. No more grinding in the club. Cover yourself modestly. Delete the apps and go to church. Once all of this nonsense about “sexual drive” is bottled back up and we complete our puff-chested condemnation of “horniness”, then we can get back to raising the fertility rate and buying our wives sundresses and books on Hügelkultur. Even for what is seen in Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body as the most liberal, or rather life-affirming stance on sexuality Christendom has begrudgingly managed, we are still instructed to never “desire”—for to desire one is to dehumanize them!—and elsewhere firmly reminds us to avoid a practice of natural family planning which results in the “lowering the number of births in their family below the morally correct level.” That is their Final Solution to the OnlyFans question. As a result, this reaction removes all matters of sexuality from the private and public alike in an over-zealous quarantine, incinerating the leprous and the immunized all together. What little can be said about this regrettable—sinful!—act of concupiscence driven by our animal bodies is that it may come with the gift of family and children. It is a reaction which bowdlerizes the vitality of antiquity with the placement of a fig leaf upon the body, mandated by the priest to not “excite one’s lust”. It is an awful silence over all of these matters held into strict compliance by the Panopticon of a youth pastor’s ire. It is an assault on life and the body itself, despised and feared by the mind as but a rebellious stumbling block—such is the root of all conceptions of “obscenity”.

Yet the precise moment they begin the sermon is when the curtain is lifted on this minstrel show, revealing to young men that what is offered is only yet more propositions detailing the nature of their submission. We have been provided with estimable examples of this fact in recent arguments from such corners of the “Christian Nationalist” right numerous times before, and it is certainly not a uniquely American phenomenon. Even in the United Kingdom, which is an essentially irreligious nation (more true for its young men, particularly), the youth pastor fulfills acts according to his instinct. Charlie Downes, now campaign director for the budding Restore Party, had this message to share with young men in 2023 through the Lotus Eaters platform:

Conservatives must recognise that what modern people—especially young people—lack is not freedom, but purpose. The modern world offers us freedom, but freedom to do what? To merely pursue our appetites? To endlessly consume? To drift, aimlessly, through the wilderness of modernity? Freedom is valuable, but in the absence of purpose, it invites nihilism. The individualistic, Rousseauian form of freedom towards which our societies have drifted over the decades sees sentimental attachment and personal responsibility as burdens from which we must be liberated. And now, we see a generation that is ‘free’, but entirely directionless.

—Freedom, Like Equality, is a False God. (June 26, 2023)

The need to differentiate “real freedom” from “appetite” in this way is a longstanding mental exercise in both conservative and Christian circles, so it is not particularly shocking to see this sentiment draped in its cursory coming-of-age expression. What is shocking, almost to an apoplectic level, is the description of the youth—in the United Kingdom of all places—as suffering from an overindulgence in freedom, that “freedom” is the one thing that the world offers to young men. We have thereby abandoned all aforementioned charges of amnesia (remember?) and entered the territory of full-blown delusional blindness. If there is any place on Earth where the expression of the young White man is punishable by jail, it is the United Kingdom, and it is completely unbelievable that someone so involved in British politics would overlook the fact! On the contrary, there is excruciatingly little left of freedom left available to young men on that island—everything mistaken for a “freedom to choose vice” is merely characteristic of the self-imposed distractions of a caged zoo animal.

It is not as if this is a one-off moment of an individual’s misjudgment, which would otherwise be entirely forgivable. We present Carl Benjamin, who had this to say in defense of his friend’s article, doubling down on the absurdity:

The second is a complaint about Charlie's perspective that young people "have too much freedom". This is just a demonstrably correct take: young men know they shouldn't have infinite porn on tap, legalised drugs, complete license to have premarital sex, etc and there is an argument to be made to young women that abortions should not be used as birth control and have exterminated a third of Gen Z. Moreover, they are protected from failure by an ever-expanding welfare state (tying into the Rousseauian liberalism we just mentioned) to prevent them from suffering the consequences of their choices. This is a state of affairs that can't last, and won't last. Objecting to the formulation "we have too much freedom" because it sounds bad to a foreigner, but actually a lot of British people have a puritanical moral streak and understand that duty means acting against one's base nature and reining oneself in. Perhaps someone called "Bronze Age Pervert" doesn't agree or care for Cromwellian morals, but so what?

—Mar 10, 2026

Young people have too much freedom: a demonstrably correct take. Is the message clear? Aside from obvious rebuttals such as that young people are actually having less premarital sex than any other generation before, and that the presentation of Gen Z as “protected by the welfare state” is the most bizarre of contradictions from two people who have repeatedly (correctly) stated elsewhere that young White men are in fact the principle victims of this gerontocratic, cosmopolitan welfare state, we set these aside to return to the core diagnosis. What is being presented is in fact yet another “moral order”, a new list of thou shalt not’s directed squarely at young men as the struggling Atlas of the occident itself, buttressed by the command presented in no uncertain terms: “duty means acting against one’s base nature”. What Benjamin and Downes are proposing is not the enabling of young men to pursue what they have been robbed of, for so long and by every imaginable form of politics, but yet another imposition upon them sold in a conspicuous package labeled in black ink, “Meaning”. It is appropriate to say: we have been here before.

Beyond all of the falsehoods and contradictions, there is another flaw: naivety. The reasoning behind the presentation of a “Cromwellian” moral order is the belief that a people must have one or the other either way, and that this is prescribed top-down from the command itself. If young men are told to stop sexualizing women, and this is enacted as a command from the highest levels of institutional power and legislated to this effect with all incentive and disincentive involved, then it shall actually become the ethical expression of the people, its new-found moral order. In shorter terms, commandment = creation. This is but one of many ways in which the youth pastor envisions himself as the father and prophet Moses!

But this is not the case, it is unequivocally not how culture or “ethics” is expressed or changed. Consider the obvious question, “why was the command given in the first place?” What our youth pastors present culture to be is a sort of mold or template which is given to a people rather than produced by them. This is proven by the case that, as the youth pastor provides freely, moral commands can only necessarily negate. What Benjamin and Downes have in mind, as they have repeatedly stated, is a list of things to take away and prohibit from young men. What can be generated can only come from the “sociobiological” itself, only life is capable of producing such a feat. Klages offers a particularly interesting illustration of this fact in an essay we have already quoted extensively:

When the sergeant shouts the order “Halt!” or “March!”, is the energy that sets the soldier in motion released as soon as the command is issued, or does it require the living force embodied in the soldier who hears it? What holds true in this case holds true in every other. Surely the command cannot produce results by itself, for it always requires the innate responsive force of the person who has heard it. In other words, the command requires the whole spatiotemporal world, particularly its vital energy and, ultimately, a conscious mind within that world, to recognize the existence of the command: without such responsive recognition, it is nothing.

What is the very essence of a command or an order? One must answer: a precept. But what exactly is a precept? To this we respond: always and everywhere it is a prohibition! The commands say, of course, “You must.” […] I have scarcely opened the pages of the Roman Catholic catechism when I discover that, out of the “Ten Commandments,” seven employ the formula “Thou shalt not,” whilst the remaining three take the “Thou shalt” form. But it requires no great critical astuteness to perceive that even these three have merely cloaked their negative substance in a positive verbal disguise. The essence of every commandment — and every categorical imperative — is to forbid something; that which is forbidden is, in every case, a natural or vital process. Therefore: the categorical imperative is the categorical annihilation of vitality.

—On Ethics (1918)

Thus, counterintuitively, any expectation for the expression of a living culture—and thereby its ethics—must actually come from some degree of permission. An ethical people must first have values, and values must first be generated out of their own ecological condition. As a matter of tautology, dead things express no ethics. Perhaps it can now be understood why the youth pastor is so puzzled and troubled by the apparent hedonism of young men, who have been barred from all means of expression, permitted to do no singular thing that could at all be said to be in their interests! The legalist-minded devotee is utterly incapable of generating any sort of moral virtue, in spite of how loud he may exclaim to the contrary, he may only serve to chisel and cudgel what is already present. These facts are apparently utterly foreign to the milieu of today, as no political party or movement has settled upon this conception for what it is. There is not an atom of it in existence today, evidenced by, such as, the repeatedly raised question of “where did all the art go?” We had an couple of artists, perhaps; one was jailed for tweets and the other entered seminary.

A subtle change in messaging is therefore suggested to the political movements of today, which is entirely achievable: for the first time in generations, permit, encourage, and allow young men to breathe. That is, to express itself for what it ought and wills, to actually be alive as this word is properly understood. In return for this, they will follow you to the stars. The alternative however remains equally true: offer yet more proscriptions, more expectations, more demands, and more commands—though you lie to yourself and to them that this is actually “Meaning”—they will call the bluff, and you will lose. At that point then, as the youth pastors have said, you will have “gotten what you deserved”. Is this an advocacy for the rejection of all virtue, to cast all but barbarism out? Certainly not. We merely ask for the following consideration to be kept in healthy mind: only once we have a living patient at all can we begin to discuss therapy; whether he can exercise or be limited to nothing heavier than a jug of milk for the time being. However we can be certain that this outpouring of youth pastors and clerics, which seeks nothing short of the dominion over the “right wing” itself, cannot be relied upon to do anything of the sort. That is not its job, and it must wait to be called forth.

Young men exist in conditions that were carefully manufactured explicitly for their subjugation and torment. At every turn they are reminded of their status in this menagerie, which is subsists entirely upon their suffering. They are, quite literally, in desperate need of liberation in all areas of life. Economic freedom, sexual freedom, artistic freedom, spiritual freedom—all of it and more!—but they will take what they are offered, if only someone would. Appeals to centuries-old critiques of Rousseau are beyond dead in the water. If these absurd pretenses about “Cromwell not Rousseau”, “the rejection of freedom”, “true Meaning!” are finally cast away—just for a moment—then maybe cultural momentum can be accrued. It is only a matter of who does so first.

Leftists offer their own everything, at the expense of young men.

What will you offer them?

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What else could you expect from a Brazilian? The cardinals wanted a new-style pope. For the universal Church, they said. Well, they certainly got one! I knew him well when he was still a bishop, badgering Europe with his pitiful tales of Third World despair. I remember telling him one day that by wearing down the wayward mother he would only harm the children all the more. You know what he answered? That poverty is all there is worth sharing!

—Raspail, The Camp of the Saints

The soil of the Occident is no stranger to the bloody meeting of these banners—both bearing a cross inverting the other. Many times before has the issue been settled—no, delayed—with contests of spear and wit. At Campaldino, surely (as Dante tells us first-hand), but also at Lützen, Castel Bolognese, and San Germano; perhaps the first of these may be found under the ruins of Amarna. What has driven so many distant men to shield and sunder was nothing short of the inheritance of all worldly and otherworldly power, the right to render, and the right to reign. In our diminished age, this ever-present contest between the priest and the ruler is conducted in manners far less glamorous than the romance of column and cavalry, yet still it rages on, no less important today than it was before.

It is important to frame the conflict as such from the onset, otherwise we enter the confusion of the assertions of “Marxist infiltration”, “the error of Vatican II”, or “the desacralization of the world” in ignorance of what is simply intrinsic to our nature. Where the statesman seeks to erect one world order, the priest seeks one of his own—any temporary agreement between these two characters is nothing short of a rare but welcome act of God.

The age of nation-states and democracy, surely, has only greatly complicated the matter by transforming the conflict into an asymmetrical one. In fact, it provided the priest with what has since proved his most cherished armament: the voting mass. It was Leo XIII first who, in response to the failure of Boulanger and the Ralliement, and Bismarck’s Kulturkampf too, officially ended all hopes of a restoration of the old agreements and turned to the common man. In a Europe in which all learned men and aristocrats held a level of animosity toward Rome, what other choice did they have but to conscript these prospective pilgrims in the armory of “Catholic social teaching”? With this, Leo generated into existence the phenomenon of liberal Catholicism, a political and ideological force of its own which operated within the confines of the nation-state to maintain the role and worldview of the priest against that of the statesman. This period at the fin de siècle transitioned naturally into the response of the Church against a new century of tyrannical governance ruled over by the German and Soviet, and the Church has remained true to Leo’s position ever since.

It is no coincidence that the Pontifex of our time has too chosen this name, himself stating that he intends to carry this teaching—this tactic—into the new millennium:

I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.

—Address to the College of Cardinals in the New Synod Hall, May 10, 2025

Yet, Leo XIV’s chosen is not merely the downtrodden agrarian folk of an industrializing Europe that Leo XIII had burdened himself with, but a novel class of its own: the migrant. To be sure, the Catholic Church is an old face in this arena; in fact it is its founding father, and today remains the single most influential and impactful agent in regards to this entirely inorganic endeavor we label “mass migration”. One may think of the Hesburgh Commission at Notre Dame, which provided the bishop-approved template for what later became Reagan’s amnesty and our visa & refugee programs, or he may think of Catholic testimony at the annual National Council of Churches, which, in harmony with most other Christian institutions at the time, maneuvered every lever and valve in its possession to convince the nation to absolve itself of the sin of racism and enact what became the Hart-Celler reform. These are not exactly esoteric claims; the USCCB’s Migrant and Refugee services proudly claims its status as the top resettler in the world. We leave the dead horse of the Church’s impact in regards to the sum of historical mass migration to be beaten further by previous (and future) articles, and turn back to the mission of Leo himself and his magisterium.

Wandervogel

Border Bishops: The Catholic Church's Migrant Trafficking Operation

It’s turned into an efficient assembly line. Right before the checkpoint, a welcome center staffed by volunteers. They offer food, shelter, legal representation, and transportation. When ready, they’re taken to a point of entry. The checkpoint of course being completely swamped, prints off ticket #46,992,137 for their court date 37 years from today. The…

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2 years ago · 92 likes · 21 comments · Gildhelm

Transmissions from the Hinterlands

Catholics and Immigration

The purpose of this article is to simply lay out, in the most informationally dense way I can, the largest instances in which the Catholic Church in the United States, through its national organizations and local dioceses, has played a large role in welcoming immigrants and refugees. This involvement spans formal partnerships with federal and state gove…

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8 months ago · 15 likes · Howie Dewin

In the autumn of 2025, the banners the whole of the Catholic institution—its bishops, a multitude of NGOs and volunteer groups, lawyers, speakers, financiers, and the Pope himself—mustered for a rapid chevauchee upon the people of the West in service of the migrant. In keeping with the plans and wishes of Francis, the entirety of 2025 was deemed a Jubilee Year for the migrant, “pilgrims of hope”, featuring a number of events, festivals, and directives. The USCCB hosted its 45th annual National Migration Week in September, hosted by the Justice for Immigrants non-profit: a coalition of dozens of Church-affiliated and Church-founded organizations such as Catholic Legal Immigration Network (CLINIC), Catholic Charities, and the USCCB’s own Migrant Relief Services. This was culminated by, at the request of Francis, the Church’s World Day of Migrants and Refugees and two-day Jubilee of Migrants. Leo XIV himself gave to an eager St. Peter crowd his Homily to the migrants, which after a courteous and brief reminder of the horrors of Auschwitz, tells us:

Brothers and sisters, today a new missionary age opens up in the history of the Church. […] Those boats which hope to catch sight of a safe port, and those eyes filled with anguish and hope seeking to reach the shore, cannot and must not find the coldness of indifference or the stigma of discrimination!

Documents and fliers advertising the events declare that Catholics are “commanded by Jesus (MT 25) to provide support and care” for the migrant, and that “we are called to accompany migrants at all stages of their journey: from the point of origin, through transit, and to their final destination”.

Indeed, this is precisely how the network of Catholic NGOs trafficking migrants across the globe works. To suggest that these organizations simply wait at the border for someone to request aid is naïve, and refuted by this network’s very structure. Take, for example, the notorious Catholic Charities—one of the single largest and most impactful trafficker of migrants into the US. Aside from being founded by the Church itself in 1910 as the National Conference of Catholic Charities, it remains integrated into the structure of the Church itself through its administration under Caritas Internationalis, together with Catholic Relief Services. Caritas is headquartered in the Vatican out of the Palazzo San Callisto, with branch offices in 200+ countries and territories across every corner of the globe. Thus, organizations such as Catholic Charities, while on the surface appear independent of the Church, are fundamentally intertwined with and in fact administered out of the Vatican itself, in direct communication with the numerous forward operating bases across the third world—at all stages of their journey, from the slums of Port au Prince to your own back yard.

We hope the position of the Church is no longer in question, though prepared we are to offer hours more of evidence and illustrations, and return to the question of this article. Leo, of course, assumed his duties at almost the precise moment a slim majority American people acted to bring back their champion to the seat of the nation-state for a mission which in many ways stands in polar opposition to the sought ends of the Vatican; and this is precisely the problem. Thus, red and white colors have been raised once more—only today, symbolically, seen only on the pins and ties of lawyers and bureaucrats.

Conflicts between the Church and the Trump administration were immediately evident, and have only since intensified. For decades the USCCB had enjoyed billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to the cause of mass migration, but just a couple of months into the year, cuts and reorganization downstream from the larger “DOGE” project forced the USCCB to end these programs entirely, at least for now. Vice President Vance, himself a Catholic, openly accused the Church of using these funds to facilitate illegal immigration into the country, causing a bitter divide between him and the bishops which lasts to this day. As a matter of fact, he was personally rebuked by a signed letter from Francis to the U.S. Bishops which criticized the administration:

I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church, and all men and women of good will, not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters. With charity and clarity we are all called to live in solidarity and fraternity, to build bridges that bring us ever closer together, to avoid walls of ignominy and to learn to give our lives as Jesus Christ gave his for the salvation of all.

As for Leo himself, he has been a faithful inheritor of the message of Francis, though many had hoped it would have died with him. With typical libtard crass fresh off a Facebook feed, he frequently questions if the Republicans are truly “pro-life” if they treat migrants so poorly. He rejected an invitation to the US’s 250th anniversary celebration, offered in-person by JD Vance, in favor of his prior commitments to visit migrants on the Italian island of Lampedusa, where a native population of under 6,000 has been forced to suffer some 120,000 migrants in the last 2 years. He has thus made himself clear.

So we must set forth the question: what exactly is a Catholic supposed to do when he is situated between the points of Two Swords? When your very own Pope Obama, the Nicar of Christ himself, looks down upon you and demands the emptying and eventual destruction of the people you swore—to God—to protect, what then? We can show how the Hohenstaufen reacted with swift effectiveness, but this is not an option in our time. The position of the Church is now unequivocally made, and it stands in direct opposition to what is perhaps the central justification of the administration: the curtailing of mass migration, and a reassertion of the nation against the universal. Of all those religions, institutions, and components of humanity that stand in opposition to national sovereignty, the Church is by far the most overlooked. No longer.

The right is no stranger to the problem of institutional capture, but this is no typical institution. It’s the body of God, a 2000-year-old structure which has carried the West to and through its most pivotal moments, for better or for worse. If a university, media company, or board of directors seems to fall into the errors of misjudgment, it can in some way be pressured into reform either through financial or political incentives—offers of a variety it cannot refuse. If the statesman himself or his government does not fulfill his duties, he is immediately replaced by one who will. Even for monarchies the abilities and power of the crown are directly linked to the support and activity of the nation itself. None of this is true for Rome today, as the genius of old Leo's strategy has specifically circumvented this check. It no longer has to rely on the statesman for wealth and protection as it did during the age of the Franks and Ottonians, and today it speaks only to God and his reflection in a mass of lifejackets coming to port.

Recent adjustments by the Church have come only due to its unpopularity among its worshipping body, perhaps best exemplified by the mission of Vatican II to modernize itself in a new age. But we should expect no demands to come from this new congregation, nor should we wait for one to serve as yet another Replacement for our own objections. Maybe the correct answer is more direct, as unpleasant as it may be. Maybe this sordid collective is “but an institution” as Goethe called it in his Strasbourg dissertation, reduced to little more than a bundle of Earth Day NGOs covered but superficially with the thin gold leaf of “holiness”. Maybe what lies underneath has long since dispossessed itself of any relation to God, and damn the naivety of those “desert fathers” who thought it could last for an eternity. Yet, though some surely have secularized or pursued other avenues of religion due to the political engagement of denominations before (such is the entire basis of the Evangelical churches today), even today it seems fantastical to threaten the Church with its nonexistence inside the confines of the West if it does not correct its course. Not only does it likely not care—this replacement is their response to such a fate!—but the remaining faithful evidently do not have the stomach to force the issue.

It seems there is only one choice left for those who would rather not embrace the fate of saintly Lampedusa, martyred under the weight of its own suicidal altruism: empower the statesman, and raise the banner of the Ghibelline. Like before, this in no way entails a rejection of God or religious principles, though surely men in red will come to inform you of your error in judgement, or perhaps even your excommunication. But as “the anti-Christ” Frederick once proved, even such an order as this is negotiable, his salvation returned in exchange for the end to his confidently-progressing campaign into Italy. If the Church cannot be begged out of its insistence to bring the Third World to our shores with only the slightest deceitful lip service to “the integrity of nations”, then the nation itself must find someone within itself to resist the Church. It has no other choice given the demands.

This poses an immediate problem for the current coalition of the right in America and elsewhere, which has formulated itself on explicitly Christian terms. This is perhaps the grandest of all contradictions on the right today, particularly those few crowds in D.C. which have taken to popularizing a wish-casted “Catholic takeover” as the inevitable rising tide of a new “based generation of trad youths”: in order to fulfill the clear directives it has been sent by the people to accomplish, it must first overcome the stated mission of the Church itself. Will it? How can we expect these people to respond to a fierce rebuke from the very representative of God on these issues right after they instruct us that the true and actionable avenue to right-wing dominance in the West is through the Church, who has explicitly stated other intentions for over two centuries? Perhaps we can take some comfort in the proposition that few of this crowd are as zealous of believers to take serious stock in the idea and consequences of excommunication, yet surely, we would prefer more iron guarantees.

Leo has already provided us with a clear example of the consequences of this entrapment. In Spain, the ultranationalist and traditionalist VOX Party has put forth a hope of a Spain that returns to its strong Catholic values, invoking the Reconquista against a new wave of Islamic invaders. It espouses the same simple calculus that is familiar to the worldview of many other right-wing groups across the West: our culture and values, which we exist to protect, are inextricably connected to our Christian heritage. Yet, the Church reacted predictably, with Pope Leo going as far to say that the “far right” (that is, VOX) is the single greatest threat facing Spain today—not economic stagnation, not Islam, not even the mass secularism currently shredding the country—but VOX, who has simply requested that Spain be Spain, all of the Catholicism included! The right in Spain undeniably suffers from this division, as it is now struggling to find out how exactly to root its conception of identity under such stress, and without the Church. Time will tell if they will be able to.

Thus, we must be incredibly skeptical of repeating the same mistakes in following the questionable pleas among those on the right who seek to “Catholicize” the country. We can expect neither friendship nor assistance in our goals from the Church, and in fact, it is difficult to find an institution that is more potently dedicated to our undoing than it. Short of the rejection of Catholicism itself, an avenue that has long since departed and will not present itself again for some time, our only other is to “render unto Caesar”, that is, embrace the statesman in his struggle against the priest. Only here can we wield the appropriate power to ensure the physical and cultural constitution of our nations through an era that poses to destroy them like no other era before. The Church, whatever its spiritual significance may be to the man of God, can be resisted—must be—through the open hand of the king. We have no other “world-historical” examples of another way, and looking forward we see only this struggle reasserting itself as it had before.

What theological problems arise for the Catholic as a result, I leave for him to contend with. We assume his resolution would ultimately be more charitable than ours. Nevertheless, it should be kept in healthy mind that the Church has unequivocally presented itself as an enemy to the right across the entire world. The days of crusades and Falanges bravely protecting the desecrated bodies of nuns have long since departed, and we are left to ourselves to find new ways to justify our own existence. To whatever extent the Cross is relied on for an answer, the institution that is Catholic Church itself cannot, it is even concurrently rejecting the offer. We advise the right, particularly its Catholics and converts, to take upon them the lessons of history and confront the harsh realities of the present.

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Our previous article looked at the forgotten Lebensphilosopher and myste of Dionysus, Ludwig Klages.

This article will transition to a starkly different conception of pagan philosophy through the still-venerated Thomas Taylor, perhaps one of the single most consequential translators and advocates of ancient thought in history.

All bounteous Hermes, hear my fervent prayer,

And make my future life thy constant care,

Teach me what rites th’ offended gods may please,

And what the means their anger to appease […]

—Hymn to Mercury, composed by Thomas Taylor

It is said that the entry and departure of great men is coronated by a procession of heavenly objects, most commonly of a bright-streaking comet which beckons all below to hear its message: “The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes” (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, II, ii). Thus in 1758, and again in 1835, the comet of Edmund Halley was visible over London, carrying to and away one of the most remarkable patrons of the ancients to have ever shared breath with our air. Upon his death bed he asked of talk of the comet’s reappearance, and upon hearing a confirmation of its presence above stated: “Then I shall die; I was born with it and shall die with it.”1

When one picks up an English translation of the many works of the Neoplatonists such as Plotinus, Proclus, or Iamblichus, he will be frequently greeted by one name: Thomas Taylor. Indeed, of the corpus of texts available to us today, essentially all of them are either direct translations into English by Taylor or would have been otherwise impossible without his early contributions. Consider the following feat: Taylor was the first man to translate into English the entire sum of the works of Plato and Aristotle, something that has not been attempted again to date. Thus his legacy is no contemptible or forgettable one: the revival of the light of Platonic & Neoplatonic philosophy and its enduring presence in the Anglophone world. Yet to go further, we may additionally claim that he may have even been personally responsible for, as we shall see, the explosion of a sort of polytheistic revival whose heart had beat through the Victorian empire.

What might be most remarkable about the life of Taylor is that nothing indicated in advance his venerable Fate. He was reared in a quiet and typical life of the then-blooming London middle class, the son of a tailor and himself under study to offer himself to the service of God’s ministry. Yet the gods had other plans, and his heart was tugged by the lure of mighty Eros: he married his school sweetheart Mary Morton whom he had known since fourteen years of age after learning that she was soon to be married off to a wealthy tradesman by her father. Disowned by each of their families for the act, the two entered “a wonderful life” of poverty, struggle, and hardship, living on what little Taylor brought home from his less-than-glamorous job as a bank teller.

Despite the circumstances, like many other great philosophers across history Taylor took to a number of intellectual interests purely for his own enjoyment and fulfillment, without pay, and without recognition: mathematics, chemistry, physics, and philosophy. In the intro to his first known contribution to literature, The Elements of A New Method of Reasoning in Geometry (1780), he says the following in defense of himself and his upbringing:

The author of the following small tract is not ashamed to confess, that it has been the employment of his leisure hours for a considerable time. If he has failed in the execution, he can, however, safely affirm he has not been wanting in the most earnest endeavors towards the completion of his purpose. He considered that the object of his search and enquiry, although arduous, was at the same time glorious, and that the discovery of Truth is always a sufficient recompense for the difficulty attending its investigation.

In short, animated by a sincere Love of Truth, he flatters himself the integrity of his intentions will in some measure atone for his want of greater genius and abilities. […] while Error sinks into the abyss of forgetfulness, TRUTH alone swims over the vast extent of the ages.

Yet, Taylor’s life would not begin in earnest until his discovery of the ancients. It is not known when or how exactly Taylor stumbled upon them, though surely through the inevitable mentioning of those such as Plato and Aristotle that could be find in any individual academic work in the Western library. It was said that he—we assume at the great displeasure of wife and mother of his children—developed a habit of nocturnal study, which granted him but a few hours of rest between his family, his studies, and that damnable bank job that called him away into distractions each fast-approaching morning. Those of us who often find ourselves in a similar predicament understand why he continued to do so: it was worth it. So at his lamplit desk deep in a sleeping England, Taylor worked at a pace and level of craftsmanship that has still today not been matched.

To the fruit of countless restless nights, at the age of 29 Taylor burst forth with his great works: he published the first English translations & commentary on the Hymns of Orpheus, Euclid’s Elements and Elements of Theology by the great Neoplatonist Proclus, and a number of essays, articles, and books detailing the Platonic system of thought. From here, Taylor was suddenly thrust into something utterly foreign to him—fame. A number of wealthy patrons stepped forward to offer him handsome payments for his continued work, including a full English translation of the entirety of Plato’s body of known writings. He even attracted at least one super fan, the young Marquis de Valady, who begged Taylor to initiate him in the fullest wisdoms of the Pythagorean tradition. A typical Frenchman, the Marquis also saw it necessary to suggest to Taylor that he should share the pleasures of his wife with him. Taylor sent him away on his own path. De Valady later remarked in frustration of the episode, “I have overcome Diogenes, and am returning to Alexander.” He was later beheaded by the guillotine at the order of Robespierre in 1793.2

It should be noted that Taylor was more than a mere translator, simply churning out into English what Ficino had put into Latin some centuries prior. Taylor was interested only in a full and comprehensive understanding of the Platonic system itself, and therefore delved further into the commentaries of others within the Platonic Academy over its many centuries. Thus, Taylor was able to illustrate for the reader in many compendiums and footnotes a proper exegesis of the Platonic tradition. In a remarkable anecdote, Taylor was later validated in his understanding when he was forced to “fill-in” incomplete manuscripts of Proclus’, writing in what he believed would have been written by Proclus himself. Some decades later more complete manuscripts were found, and Taylor had not even remotely erred in his assumption.

Of course, there remains a distinction between a mere translator of ancient texts and a genuine heathen, so, what can be said about Taylor’s personal belief? For starters, we can assert that someone who dedicates himself to the translation and enthusiastic promotion of these works for decades without much pay (and, as we shall see, plenty of scorn from his contemporaries) must have found something admirable in these texts—but more must be said. Unlike most other Greats which this series has and shall continue to reanimate, we are given a difficulty with Taylor in that he very rarely speaks of himself and his own views of the world. Indeed, how can one talk of Taylor without simply repeating what is known about Platonism, thanks to him? It would not be proper here to simply detail out the system of Platonic thought that had struck him, though he would certainly approve of the move. Rather, we will have to dig through the rare instances in which Taylor offered his own thoughts on the matter, as well as a handful of rumors pertaining to Taylor’s “practices”.

We may begin with a hidden footnote in Taylor’s 1788 The Philosophical and Mathematical Commentaries of Proclus, which is attached to a discussion on the Chaldean Oracles and the goddess Isis. After a lengthy illustration of Proclus’ ritual practices which entailed an observance of lunar cycles and bodily purification, the attached footnote reads:

The religion of the Heathens, has indeed, for many centuries, been the object of ridicule and contempt: yet the author of the present work is not ashamed to own, that he is a perfect convert to it in every particular, so far as it was understood and illustrated by the Pythagoric and Platonic philosophers.3

Taylor was also the author of a “Platonic Philosopher’s Creed”, found attached to his On the Theology of the Greeks (1820), which details out what should be considered the starting point of the philosophy he dedicated himself to. We provide a few helpful excerpts of this Creed:

1. I believe that there is one first cause of all things, whose nature is so immensely transcendent, that it is even superessential; and that in consequence of this it cannot properly either be named or spoken of, or conceived by opinion, or be known, or perceived by any being.

7. I believe that the most proper mode of venerating this great principle of principles is to extend in silence the ineffable parturitions of the soul to its ineffable co-sensation; and that if it be at all lawful to celebrate it, it is to be celebrated as a thrice unknown darkness, as the God of all Gods, and the unity of all unities, as more ineffable than all silence, and more occult than all essence, as holy among the holies, and concealed in its first progeny, the intelligible Gods.

14. I believe that a divine nature is not indigent of any thing. But the honours which are paid to the Gods are performed for the sake of the advantage of those who pay them. Hence, since the providence of the Gods is extended every where, a certain habitude or fitness is all that is requisite for the reception of their beneficent communications. But all habitude is produced through imitation and similitude. On this account temples imitate the heavens, but altars the earth. Statues resemble life, and on this account they are similar to animals. Herbs and stones resemble matter; and animals which are sacrificed, the irrational life of our souls. From all these, however, nothing happens to the Gods beyond what they already possess; for what accession can be made to a divine nature? But a conjunction of our souls with the gods is by these means effected.4

25. Lastly, I believe that souls that live according to virtue, shall in other respects be happy; and when separated from the irrational nature, and purified from all body, shall be conjoined with the Gods, and govern the whole world, together with the deities by whom it was produced.

Taylor’s work was not exactly esoteric in his day, and he drew upon himself the ire of many in England. One must recall that for essentially all of Christian history, and certainly during the time of Taylor, it was the position of the faithful to characterize Plato as one of those patronized by the absurd concept of “virtuous pagans”, who were said to have unknowingly and accidentally adhered to the revealed word and law of the triune God. To speak of Plato was to speak of his ethics and wisdom which heralded the birth of Christ, and no further. Taylor was unique in his efforts, and therefore a loathsome foe of many of the English clergy and universities, who rejected his clear insistence to buck the trend: he, rather, spoke of the necessity of a multitude of gods, the enrichment to be found in the myths and initiatory rites of antiquity, and a variety of hymns to the gods which he regularly published—some of which he composed himself. Neither did his frequent chiding and criticism of the Christian worldview do him any good in this regard, such as in the introductions of many of his translations where he delicately explains to the ignorant that Plato’s God, The One, has nothing to do with and is indeed contradictory to the triune God of Nicaea. Or where he, according to Isaac D’Israeli (father to Benjamin), stated: “[the Christian religion is] a bastardized and barbarous Platonism.”5

It is nothing short of a miracle, or perhaps thanks to friends in high places, that this openly sincere heathen was not subjected to the many blasphemy laws available at the time. His Christian contemporaries, however, did bestow upon him a number of mocking and honoring titles: “the modern Pletho”, “the apostle of Paganism”, and “the Gentile priest of England”.6 They backed this up with a number of charges towards Taylor’s personal practices, some of which are clearly legendary, but not all. Some rumors have him in Norwich sacrificing rams to Jupiter, others where he refuses to answer his door before he first reciting a hymn to Apollo. Another legend states that above his study loomed a crystal orb which diffracted the incoming light, which he associated with Zeus, moving about the room to follow this light as it changed throughout the day. An 1875 magazine recounts further legends some decades after his death:

It was one of the dreams of his life to establish in London a Pantheon, in which the worship of the deities should be performed in an appropriate and decorous manner. Failing this, he turned one of his rooms at Walworth into a sacrarium, in which at times he offered up sacrifices to his favorite gods. There is even a tradition that one night, when the fury of the French Revolution was at its height, the sleepy old Charlies who guarded the City were astonished by the appearance of a procession of priests, with Taylor at their head as Arch-flamen, who performed the sacred rites of lustration in front of the Old Exchange, formally receiving once more the sleeping city into the dominion of the king of the gods.7

While many of these accounts are highly unlikely, the common thread among these stories (and Taylor’s own self-admitted confessions) is that he was indeed a worshipper of the gods just as instructed by the Greeks, and it was imperative to him that he correctly understood this religious and philosophical system. We can see now why Taylor’s translations remain the gold standard of all Platonic texts in the English tongue, far superior to the few attempts to manage even the extent of work that he had in his leisurely hours. Unlike the various academics and teams of international professors sedated by their sinecures, who held firm to either the old Christian or new “critical” modes of thought, Taylor actually lived the Platonic tradition. Every day he spoke prayers and recited hymns in the language of the Platonists, meditating and giving offerings in the application of this tradition as it was actually intended by the ancients: to honor the gods, and to bring man but one infinitesimal step closer to them. To err for the contemporary academic was to risk his reputation, but for Taylor it was sacrilege and a grave offense to the gods. No other evaluation could be fit to explain the quantity and quality of Taylor’s work as well as the man himself.

Taylor’s open paganism had a profound and immediate impact on the Anglophone world, sparking what turned out to be a period of genuine heathen revivalism. Contemporaries such as John Fransham too would be said to have offered libations to Jupiter, although for John these offerings was far less committed as they found themselves going “down his own throat”.8 The Romantic poetry of Keats, Shelley, Blake, Coleridge, and Swinburne—each with varying pagan souls of their own—is owed to the fact that all of them had Taylor’s books on their shelves and consumed them with the utmost pleasure. Blavatsky, Crowley, and other neopagans frequently lauded Taylor as their progenitor. The American Transcendentalist movement was arguably even more enraptured by Taylor:

The American transcendentalist movement, too, regarded Taylor as one of their prime authorities, and relied on his translations for their access to Greek philosophical thought. Emerson is said to have expressed incredulity on visiting England a few years after Taylor’s death that he (Taylor) was virtually unknown, when, he said, “every library in America has books by him.”9

The century following Taylor’s death, the Victorian Era, is most commonly remembered for its strict and puritanical character, emphasizing good commerce and conduct above everything else. Yet it must be noted that an undercurrent of genuine pagan revivalism was taking place simultaneously. Fortune telling and other occult practices were common sights on the coal-dusted streets of London, Druidric fascination with the stone monuments across the landscape was becoming fashionable, and essential literature on the topic—such as Fraser’s Golden Bough (1890)—were being found in bookstores. Occult orders such as the Golden Dawn, too, were being founded across the country. Surely, these movements were likely far too chthonic for Taylor’s taste, and there are many reasons for this resurgence. But Taylor was one of them.

Where may we place Taylor in relation to other Great Heathens? Unlike the Romantics and Transcendentalists whom he directly inspired, Taylor took to a Pagan philosophy which prioritized the intellectual and the spiritual over the body and nature. It is still fiercely debated today to what extent Platonism, be it through Plato on one end or the vegetarian Porphyry10 on the other, was effectually dualistic or world-rejecting in some sense. In some presentations it shows itself as a rather monistic or at least panentheistic worldview in which nature can be counted on to mirror and thereby reveal the divine, rather than a more gnostic one which teaches to take flight from the world at all costs. For Taylor himself, however, we can assess that his view of religion did indeed prioritize the mind, the Intellect, and the soul over the body and nature in the same way it did for many of the late Platonists. In his five personally-composed hymns attached to his translation of Sallust’s On The Gods and The World, one will see a common rehearsal of sentiments that describe the body as a prison, from which the soul is liberated from at the moment of death, a moment which the philosopher trains himself for through the intellectual and ritualistic purification of the soul. As one recent paper illustrates, “wisdom” may have even been his daimon:

Taylor claimed to have a muse who was, significantly, not one of the chorus of nine led by Apollo. Taylor called his muse Phronimus. He dedicated this Cupid and Psyche to a gentleman friend, probably his patron William George Meredith, whom he praised in a panegyric poem at the end of his introduction. Taylor wrote:

Yes, PHRONIMUS, my muse, in lib'rallays,

This friendly tribute to thy merit pays;

And ardent hopes that ages yet unborn

May see well pleas'd thy name her works adorn!

His muse Phronimus, the Latin transliteration of the Greek phronimos (φρόνιμος), was a personification of practical wisdom or prudence; it was also the Pythagorean term for the number 'three', which might have held some significance for Taylor the mystical mathematician. The Greek term phronesis means practical wisdom, being in control of one's senses and judicial prudence.11

Certainly, the three preceding Great Heathens of this series—Goethe, Lawrence, and Klages—were in their own ways critical of this approach, which risks the danger of a world-rejecting dualism in its prioritization of the unseen world over the material. Klages went as far as to describe the philosophy of the late Platonists as “the highest cornice on the Babylonian Tower of life-denying detachment from the world which the mental confusion of paganism in its final burst could attain” (Sämtliche Werks II, p. 870). Yet Taylor’s overabundance of critics is a result of his inescapable influence in reviving, for the first time in thousands of years, a genuine form of Hellenism—the worship of the Greek gods through the understood philosophy of the Platonists. Thus, Taylor is owed an incalculable debt, billed to us as an unrepayable gratitude to his life of labor and devotion without concern of fortune, fame, or health. Indeed, the propulsion of a reemerged paganism into the 19th and 20th centuries is impossible to explain without him.

Axon concludes his biography justly:

The life of Thomas Taylor, the Platonist, is one which will receive a tribute of admiration from the thoughtful. However much of an anachronism a Pagan philosopher may seem in the London of the nineteenth century of Christianity, it must be acknowledged that a man who devotes himself to poverty and study in an age and country famous for the pursuit of wealth; who has the courage to adopt and the sincerity to avow opinions that are contrary to every prejudice of the time; who runs the risk of persecution and imprisonment; a man who “scorns delights and lives laborious days,” is entitled to our admiration and respect. And such was Thomas Taylor, the Platonist, whose name should be remembered by all friends of learning and freedom of thought.

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Final Note: If the reader is interested in further investigation into the work of Thomas Taylor or Platonism in general, I highly recommend The Prometheus Trust. Every article, book, and topic of research pertaining to Taylor can be found for purchase and download there.

Ask a Christian, and the answer is: “nowhere”. Or rather that the question misses the point: God simply is, as it was told in the tetragrammaton of יהוה, and it is this quality which binds all of existence into its extra-worldly root. Yet for the Neoplatonists and many others, they offered one explanation further, at the very rim of the knowable. Many ancient cosmogonic myths actually do start with nothing; no time, no space, no One or God. This is typically the default of the world to the Greek’s cosmogony. This stateless state, however, was a pregnant void; thus, the empty set contains all possible sets, and the factorial of zero is one. Or, in the (shockingly) more approachable words of Heidegger, “the nothing itself nihilates”, and per Kitaro Nishida absolute nothingness (zettai mu, 絶対無) is the overflowing wellspring of all of existence. In short, the None necessarily flagellates itself into the whole and indivisible One—it can do no other thing.

Very interesting. Now, what about the inverse? What if One, gripped in the anxiety of its totality, necessarily whips itself into nothing? Surely the reader of Hegel would appreciate such a concept, but I only illustrate this concept to introduce a more practical one: the monotheistic drive of spirit (Klages):

Geist’s essentially monotheistic drive motivates those scholars who seem to be compelled to subordinate everything that exists to one regnant principle. Geist aims at universal rule: it unites the world under the ego or under the logos. When Geist attained to hegemony, it introduced two novelties: the belief in historical progress on the one side, and religious fanaticism on the other. The Geist utilizes force to eliminate all possible rivals. Over the warring and agitated primordial forces, Geist erected the tyranny of the formula: for some it announces itself as the ‘ethical autonomy of the individual’; the Catholic Church, on the other hand, still relies on the idea of holiness. (Rhythmen und Runen, p. 306)

In the farthest reaches of antiquity we observe a multitude, if not an infinitude, of the number of gods. They were as infinite as the number of possible experiences—to experience at all was to experience a god—and indeed the names of gods stamp the initial experience of the “momentary god”. Turn a few pages more and you will see gods of not one phenomenologically unique experience, but of many. They became special gods: Perkwunos—the strike of thunder—became the enneagonal Perun, now associated also with law, fertility, weapons, horses, and mountains.1 In some cases, old gods were consumed and replaced by new ones which entirely digested their place: Amun and Ra became the singular Amun-Ra, and further after the roaring armies of Alexander he became Zeus-Ammon. Three gods, yet one. Across the development and urbanization of peoples we see this transition from animism to pantheism, the progression from gods of the moment to special gods of temples, polis, and patronage. Many gods were consumed in the process.

No god better exemplifies this hunger than God himself, Yahweh of the Israelites. Originally a lesser member of the court of El associated with storms, floods, and conquest, his Saturnine passion consumed the whole of Levantine religion: first he dethroned El and himself became “King of Heaven”, so convincingly so that modern peoples cannot tell the difference. Next came Ba’al Hadad, him too a god of storms and conquest; his priests butchered by Elijah’s men at the peak of Mount Carmel. Asherah, the consort of Hadad, became the possession of Yahweh until she too was consumed into what was finally left as only One: “no god but I.” Even after the crucifixion of Christ the consuming of gods into One continued in full force. The feasts, harvests, and boons of man were taken from the old gods and given to God, and what could not be reasonably attributed to him were given to his saints, angels, and often demons—which replaced that noble concept of the daimon with a being which pursues neither nurturing nor essence, but only evil. Yahweh is the devouring god, ceaseless in his hunger, unrelenting in his glutton… and now, there is no god left but him.

Necessarily, what occurs when we are left with a singular, all-encompassing force that only knows to consume? Self-annihilation, and eventually, nothing. Indeed, the commonplace slur towards Christians during the late Roman Empire was that of atheoi, god-deniers, as recorded by St. Justin Martyr: “Hence are we called atheists. And we confess that we are atheists, so far as gods of this sort are concerned…”2 What else can transpire other than the approaching of this ominous, liminal shade between One and None? Man cannot comprehend the infinite. As the edges of perception vanish onto the horizon, one cannot even pick out the blur. One iota of doubt, and the entire straining to focus on this vision gives in; it evaporates into nothingness.

Thus, the principle of “deconstruction” enters the highest towers of Christian institutions. In order to drive at a proper exegesis of all textual and religious matters pertaining to the faith, one begins only with the outright assumption of atheism—lest he be led astray by assumptions! The true nature and attitude of God is deconstructed, the inerrancy and dependability of scripture is deconstructed, the formulas of soteriology, eschatology, and even Christology—a term which itself proves the point, the meticulous deconstructive study of the son of God himself!—all serve to disassemble the body of God; woe to the believer if he finds one atom of this disassembled body out of place. It was reasoning and willing which drove the Cross over the kurgans and groves of old, utterly ceaseless and unquenchable willing, and now it has consumed God himself. Nothing is left but the since-deified anthropocentric man, now purely made in the image of his own divine self. This is precisely what happened to the European mind, leading to Nietzsche’s heralding of a corpse. For Gauchet Christianity was “the religion of the exit from religion”, and for Weber “the disenchantment of the world”.

Spirit, timeless will, is inherently ceaseless in its cravings… the One Father soon came under assault by the knives, and was reasoned into fiction. God was tossed into a landfill of every other plastic idol that came before him and to whom he directed his followers to cast out, a decision came about in thanks to the very Logos that he was said to have given to man. At the end of this deconstruction laid only the true essences of what lay behind “man’s foolish mind” (Goethe): progress, reason, and morality. In the ultimate proof of the ongoing thesis, there lies the Nicene Creed of the modern atheist.

As indicated with a number of pre-Christian examples in the leading paragraphs, Christianity is not the progenitor of the monotheistic tendency, which can end only in atheism. It is merely its flagship and finality, the last stage of religion prior to irreligion. Antiquity is rife with the habitude of aggregating multiple deities into one, and one could spend days detailing the contributions of Platonic philosophy to the Abrahamic metaphysical tradition. Indeed, it is a tendency which seems as old as religion itself: observe it at any point in time, and you will observe it to be in motion towards atheism. The Jews were not even the first monotheists; this title belongs to the Egyptians—it was Akhenaten who first declared the cult of the One God (Aten), destroying and outlawing the innumerable cults and practices towards all other gods in approximately 1340BC. Klages, too, makes special note of this:

As an embodiment of the hostility of the allegedly monotheistic, but in actuality atheistic, attitude of thought towards the polytheistic vision, the history of religious beliefs provides one instance that, in its immediate, illustrative force, surpasses even the development of Jewish “monotheism.” We allude to the attempt of the Egyptian monarch Amenhotep IV, who adopted the name Akhenaton, i.e., “the shining disc of the sun,” to overturn the innumerable daimonic cults of his people, and to replace them with the worship of the “one true godhead”… These were the results: on the Pharaoh’s side, a bitterly fanatical struggle against all the cultic sites of the polytheists…On the side of the people, whom he had sought to please with his “higher wisdom,” a passionate and ever-increasing opposition, which, in just a few years, led to the annihilation of his work, the shattering of his great temples, the consigning of the emperor’s teachings to the death of forgotten things, and the reestablishment of an unlimited polytheism, which was to last until the very end of the history of Pharaonic Egypt! (Sämtliche Werke II p. 1266)

I find it interesting that the Sun is most commonly associated with the monotheistic drive. It therefore may be more appropriate to warn one of the Apollonian drive, as we take stock of his many aggregated qualities: healing, the silver bow, music, rites of passage… the illumination of reason and philosophy against instinct and superstition, the progress of mankind from beastly bottomlands to the clean and elevated halls of Parnassus, the impulse to dominate and control—the Will to Power. Progress and reason brought the Hyperborean’s “icy wind” that Schiller tells us of3, compressing a plethora into One. The shining beams of the Sun cling to the skin of the pharaoh, the tyrant, and the hero; it serves to elevate the individual above all else. Apollo is the god which drives pure unearthen spirit, the pure “projection” of ceaseless willing, the pure Logos; Faust and Plus Ultra, a will-of-the-wisp, a ball of burning fire which blindly incinerates as it flails across a landscape it cannot immerse itself into. We can find no greater exemplification of this drive among neopagans, the rejection of Earth in favor of spirit, than in the writings of Julius Evola, a staunch advocate for the “solar” principle:

Thus, as far as the destiny of the soul after death is concerned, there are two opposite paths. The first is the “path of the gods,” also known as the “solar path” or Zeus’s path, which leads to the bright dwellings of the immortals. This dwelling was variously represented as a height, heaven, or an island, from the Nordic Valhalla and Asgard to the Aztec-Inca “House of the Sun” that was reserved for kings, heroes, and nobles. The other path is that trodden by those who do not survive in a real way, and who slowly yet inexorably dissolve back into their original stocks, into the “totems” that unlike single individuals, never die; this is the life of Hades, of the “infernals,” of Niflheim, of the chthonic deities.

—Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

The Sun’s necessarily “puritanical” essence, through its elevation of progress, reason, and the individual, therefore stands firmly against the Dionysian principles of ecstasy (to be outside of one’s “self”, his ego), and pulse (flux, πάντα ῥεῖ). The Apollonian elevates the spirit-possessed mind above the blood, while the Dionysian acts as the body’s exorcist of this Geist. Ergo, the festivals to Apollo featured philosophical and athletic contests, while those to Dionysus featured the consumption of raw meat by wandering, entranced processions who vanished into the wild. How can anyone possibly say that the solar principle is “vital”? In its own right, it has nothing to do with it in any remote sense, and in fact, it serves to antagonize it. This conception is only possible through the idea that life is understood in its capacity for or to do something, to bring the body some place, rather than what it may be described as by its own right.

Of course, even the Christian has readily adopted the image of the Sun into his own monotheistic drive: Christ as the Solar Redeemer, the King of Kings; Yahweh reshaped in the heavenly and Earth-subduing image of Dyaus. To the silver bow they readily flock, only here to claim yet more ownership: the Logos which previously belonged to Apollo now belonged to a Sun King of their own. Progress, reason, history, morality, and civilization: they claim all of it for the Cross! Only now, using the imagery of antiquity with no hint of contradiction as many Christians have done before, they proclaim the “revolt” against the Earth itself, latching onto the myths of heroic man vanquishing nature: Gilgamesh against Ishtar and the cedar-grove of Huwawa, virile Perseus slaying Medusa, Theseus or Achilles vanquishing the Amazons. They believe they see in ancient myth a heralding of their own King and their prescribed relationship to Nature, but in fact, it is something far more primordial having its way with them. As proof, scratch the Atheoi or Monotheoi, and he will bleed thus: have you considered ethics, the nature of consciousness, or what built Western civilization?

Klages devises the idea of “Geist”, spirit, as a force which uniquely effects man “from the outside”, descending upon him at some temporal point in the not-so-distant past. Like all other contemporaries he readily identifies the Earthly with the “Pelasgian”, and the Logos with the Aryan, though only he stated an ultimate preference for the former. I do not think I can follow him down his treaded path—not because of a necessary preference for the Aryan over the pre-Aryan, or of the bottomland over the heroic, but simply because it is futile for one to attempt to kill a god, in any case. It is one thing to illustrate polarity, it is another to break the magnet in half altogether. Perhaps the lively multitude of gods was intended to protect us from the worship of One—be it Aten, Zeus, or Kristos—and Nature, too, her terrifying and destructive allure which so many myths and Romantic poetry go to great lengths to warn us of.

Access to life’s vitality is only possible through the polarity and intensification which rules its telluric and animated poles. Otherwise, it stands as an idle obelisk without a soul, or a wisp in frantic search of a suitable body. The conception that one must be rejected is precisely the problem, chiseling away at the problem with conceptions of Good and Evil one finds himself with less than he had before. One would be remiss to propose a world without the heroic adventure, without the order of temples, and without our plenty of Promethean gifts. He would likewise be in error to propose “pure reason”, the conquest and ownership of Nature, and the unmitigated Will to Power. In one chasm we are forever beasts of the wood, in the other we have departed from Nature entirely. One should act as if he were Faust descending into the formless realm of the Mothers: respecting it for the primordial chaos it is, turning the key given to him by the Light-bringer, and shaping the void into the beauty of Helen.

Caution must be exercised, an understanding reached. Otherwise, the hungering Sun will devour many gods into One, and the One into None. In either case, may we hope that the void we find ourselves in today is as fertile as all others.

Faust [terrified]. Mothers!

Mephistopheles. Do you fear?

Faust. The Mothers! Mothers! Strange the word I hear.

Mephistopheles. Strange is it. Goddesses, to men unknown,

Whom we are loath to name or own.

Deep must you dig to reach their dwelling ever;

You are to blame that now we need their favour.

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Open are the double doors of the horizon, unlocked are its bolts

Clouds darken the sky, the stars rain down, the constellations stagger

The bones of the hellhounds tremble, the porters are silent

When they see this king: Dawning as a soul…

—Libretto of Akhnaten (Refrain, Verse I), Philip Glass (1983)

One of the most clarifying differences in religious practice between the pre-Christian world of ritual and pantheon and the successive world of the one God, both in its distinction and residue beyond the changing of the guard, is the practice of ancestor veneration. It is a section of religious practice that is accurately identified for its antiquated value: for the vast majority of those who breathe occidental air today, the concept of ancestor “veneration” or “worship” is met with philistine scorn; the mass individual wishes to hear nothing of his forebears. Even among the devout flock of the Cross the practice is seen anywhere from an unimportant side-story of hypodulia to an outright communing with the devil himself. Thus, the practice of genuine worship of one’s departed ancestors has clearly entrenched itself as the rallying point of a return to different religious values, against those of the atheoi and monotheoi — both equally zealous believers in the individual spirit.

Contemporary pagans and revivalists have latched onto this aspect of pagan religiosity as a result, devoting much study and practice to it. Indeed, for a variety of reasons of which only a few have been noted so far, it appears to be of recurring importance amongst those seeking to reconjure the Old Gods, be it purely academic or out of a sentiment of religious devotion; the works of figures such as Ficino, Herder, Novalis, Nietzsche, and Evola readily offer rich viewpoints of this religious view and practice in varying directions. To add to this list of individuals, I happily (and as a pagan, satisfactorily) offer to you the name of Ludwig Klages. This man is not only certainly representative of this pagan fixation on ancestors—himself a devoteè of Dionysus (or Wotan, if you ask Jung)—but perhaps greater than anyone else does his writings and worldview offer up the greatest bounty for those seeking to understand what it is to commune with one's ancestors.

Klages is somewhat of a subterranean figure today, unduly cast into a dark pit of chains following the sweeping coronation of a new worldview following the surrender at Flensburg. His pagan metaphysics, arguably the first cohesive presentation of such a religious system in nearly two thousand years, is even more neglected in favor of discussions of his contributions to psychology, environmentalism, and “anti-rationalism”. Yet underneath the rubble of Munich still sits his image, itself one which strove relentlessly to uncover far more ancient rubble in search of the primordial. It is my aim to bring his rich pagan worldview back into the light of Day, with a special emphasis on familiar and ripe ground for today’s revivalists. We need only to be careful archaeologists of these tombs and barrows.

The impetus of Klages’ interest in the cult of ancestors came in the form of a neatly-topping bow upon his system in the anthropological works of J.J. Bachofen. Largely forgotten by the time of Klages, Bachofen was resurrected by the accidental discovery of his works by Klages and the so-called Munich Kosmikerkreis, who as poets and servants of Dionysus saw great potential in Bachofen’s descriptions of a telluric and matriarchal primordial religion. The Circle members each saw themselves as “Dithyrambiker des Unterganges”, the bardic orators of man’s downfall from this primordial source. Though Bachofen is mostly known for his novel theory of clan matriarchy in primordial peoples, and indeed Klages takes some notable inspiration from this conception, what most significantly drove Klages to dedicate himself to the revival of Bachofen’s works (an effort to which we can solely credit for our contemporary awareness of Bachofen) was his focus on the ancient funerary rites and mythological symbols pertaining to the afterlife. In simpler terms, Klages was, through Bachofen, enraptured by the antiquital understanding of life and death.

The reader should be aware of two concepts in the Klagesian world before moving on much further, if only for the briefest time we have for this inquiry: ecstasy (Rausch) and the image (Bild). It may be helpful to link Bild to the etymologically similar Bilden, or form, as the image can be thought of the essential form or experience in which a soul presents itself. The image is, more simply the image/appearance of the soul. Yet Klages’ soul is a vital psyche (ψυχή), not the mind or intellect (νοῦς); in fact the intellect serves as a barrier and antagonist against the genuine experience of the reality of the images. Therefore, the only way to experience “soul”, the gods, is through ritualistic and dreamlike ecstasy—ἔκστασις, (ék-stasis), “outside of oneself”. Klages knows, as ancient man knew, of only three ways to the divine: to become a god, to die, or ecstasy. As we shall see, these three paths are more related than an initial impression suggests.

With these considerations buckled tightly in our satchel, we can progress to the substance of Klages’ deployment of ancestor veneration in service to these concepts. Much of this is found in one of only two complete works translated into English: his Vom Kosmogonischen Eros (1926), particularly in a chapter titled “Vom Ahnendienst” (On Ancestor Veneration).1 The difficulty of reading Klages is most evident in this chapter, with a ceaseless volley of mythological and poetic illustrations which are not explained in detail. However, this too reveals the richness of his writing, and offers us plenty for discussion. Consider, firstly, the opening paragraph:

Wreath = crown is the ancient symbol of completion, of Telete2, of attained perfection. Every crown is a “crown of life” or a sign of the gamos of life’s poles, the consummated marriage of a crowned soul with the soul of the universe. Therefore, the wreath or band adorns the mystic, therefore the victor, the ruler, the priest, therefore the bride! But now we know that the Mycenaean also adorned his dead with wreath and band! The dead was also bestowed with the highest consecration; he had become mystic, hero, even daimon to him, and the process of dying coincided with the consummation of the consummating gamos! They are highly revered as “Tritopatores” who in return bestow blessings, and because of this were present at every wedding.3

Immediately, we are met with anthropological and mythical territory, wrapped ever-so-beautifully in the metaphysical system Klages has developed. One may reflect deeply on the wreath that adorned Caesar, the wreath of Hedera that adorned the Maenads, the wreath of wheat that adorns the sacrificial bull of Mithraic tauroktonois, or even the ceramic wreath of flowers that adorned some buried young girls in Greece. Though we see a wide variety of applications and “moods” of the associated ceremonies, Klages is correct in identifying the central theme: the wreath, the symbol in and of itself, is the crown of unity with the world. Though the greats are crowned in life, all are crowned this way in death.

Already, we see Klages’ appreciation for ancient funerary rites. Understanding this and the relationship between the living and the dead in primordial religion is essential to understanding the practice of Ahnendienst, not only because one’s ancestors are of course dead, but because the “service” of ancestors in fact depends on the ancestors being dead. Your living father can be consulted in person, and as well and good as this is, he is limited to the circumstances of his body and experience. The departed ancestor, on the other hand, is of purely divine soul. Their soul can therefore be summoned at any time or place with all of the heavenly power associated with the pure soul. The dead, in this way, become daimons.

Klages offers us a key example of this relationship between the dead and living through the Attic belief in the Tritopatores, the thrice-ancestors, who were ritually worshipped particularly at weddings and events or circumstances pertaining to family, fertility, or the health of children. The function of the worship is perfectly clear, and it was precisely the opposite of our contemporary “fear of ghosts”: the ancestors of both families bring divine protection and blessing upon the continuation of their image and bloodlines, and are worshipped in seeking of this specific end. In this way, ancestors are “called upon” for certain things in certain settings that could not be otherwise provided by the living.

Just as important as what ancestors provide to the living is where and how they are doing so, which as Klages reminds us, is essentially always at a place dedicated specifically for their appearance, in the same way that a temple is the house of a particular god who is physically dwelling there—an understanding which has carried itself even through contemporary Christianity. He lists off a few examples of this in a section that is worth showing in full:

Nothing preoccupied Pelasgian man more than the solemnity of burial and the care for the corpse. The most deeply moving tragedy of all antiquity celebrates Antigone’s self-sacrifice in service to sacred rites for the body of her fallen brother—a motif unparalleled when compared to modern poetry! The original burial most likely took place in the house, under the hearth, or perhaps in the middle of the village, outside the walls, at the city gate, in the marketplace, in the prytaneum, or in the festival grounds! Thus, at Olympia, the tomb of Pelops was located next to the great fire altar of Zeus, and the temples were also the burial sites of a daimon (for example, the Temple of Apollo at Delphi over the tomb of the earth god Python.) Indeed, Christendom also formerly buried the dead of noble families in cathedrals and minsters, and even today, villagers gather their graves in the sanctuary of churches. The most colossal structures of the Egyptians, the pyramids, are burial sites, as are the rock temples of the Lycians and Rome’s catacombs. “Greater care,” Diodorus tells us of the Egyptians (according to Bachofen’s translation), “is taken in the dwellings of the dead than in those of the living; they regard the latter as mere lodgings for a brief, temporary stay, while tombs alone are considered the true and permanent residences for eternity.” No less important as burial sites were the sacred groves and hallowed mountains of so many peoples, the Manitou Stones of the Native Americans, the pagodas of the Chinese, and the stupas of the Indians. The soul of the dead flutters and hovers around the tomb, dwells there in serpentine form, and resides as the genius loci, as the Agathoaimon4, bestowing blessings in the house of the living!

The entire Roman cult originates from the veneration of ancestral spirits, the Lares, as does the Shintoism of the Japanese. The tribes of antiquity, and indeed all “savages,” often named themselves after a mythical ancestor. In honor of the deaths of celebrated heroes of the past, the Greek agon5 arose, symbolizing the cycle of birth and death! Who could fail to recognize that it is not ghosts that are feared and warded off here, but rather the loving veneration of the present, which woos the reciprocated affection of the elevated being of the past, drawing it anew with customs—some of immediate comprehensibility, others of mysterious depth of meaning! What could assure us of this more irrefutably than the poignant custom of late Greek times of depicting the heroized dead on terracotta tombs in the form of Eros himself, sometimes asleep with a torch, sometimes gently weary from the feast of life in the light, crowned and reclining on a bed of revelry, with the cup from the drinking party! But it was not “immortality” that the dead of ancient times had gained in this way, but rather, having not died at all, he had transformed himself!6

We could spend months driving out every worthwhile point from this selection. Instead, I will attempt to be brief in illustrating the highlights as it pertains to ancestor veneration. As indicated before, the funerary and religious customs of “Pelasgian man” (that is, the Greeks around and before the time of the Mycenaeans) possessed at its core the act of summoning: of bringing forth the dead (that is, the divine) to the moment of the present for some particular function. This cyclical, cosmogonic relationship between the two worlds, of one turning to the other and back again, was essential to the religiosity of pre-Christian peoples and is everywhere in ancient symbols. Bachofen, for example, had much to say about the “cosmic egg”—whose encasing-and-cracking shell represented the circular liminality between life, death, rebirth—which can be seen in the myths of Orpheus, the Shinto Nihongi, and the Finnish goddess/personification of Nature Luonnotar of the Kalevala.

Understanding that souls need a particular site to reside within, ancient peoples dedicated the first religious sites: tombs, pyramids, temples, mounds, obelisks, cenotaphs, groves, and so on. This conception, as Klages makes clear through multiple comparisons to the Christian understanding of the afterlife, is what strikes a resonating chord between both the life-denying tendency of Platonism and the Abrahamic religions, and the atheistic causal-materialism of the day. The soul was able to persist outside the body, and indeed be liberated from it in this sense, but it was not liberated from the world entirely. As a matter of fact, such a conception would leave the soul to wander aimlessly, completely divorced from life in a dark chasm of amnesia; and in a sense, truly, finally, dead. It is precisely this “spiritual” apprehension of life—body and soul—which has injected into man the terrifying fear of death. The soul of the departed does indeed wander, always seeking its proper host through which it can be animated again: be it a mound under a bright moon, a temple decorated for Thargelia, or a towering idol at the fork between two village roads. This is the distinction between an enduring existence and the lie of “eternal life”, which is in actuality nothing but the refusal to participate in the cycle of life itself!

As already indicated above, the wandering soul is threatened by the danger of being driven from expanse to expanse, from transformation to transformation, ultimately to becoming unrealized through the loss of the capacity for shaping. The Icelanders called the departure of souls “Gestaltenfahrt” (journey of form). While they gained the vast expanse of space as their homeland, they lost the homeland of place, of intimate and warm closeness. Now, space and place, distance and nearness, heaven and earth, wandering and clinging, periphery and center belong to each other as polar opposites. Separated from the ebb and flow of the firmament, the telluric withers; unanchored in the earth’s core, the sublime dissipates. If the former requires the fertilizing storm of past images for its blossoming, then the dreamlike, daimonic ancestral souls are preserved from disintegration in the nocturnal abysses of space by the fervent veneration and generous spirit of sacrifice of those embodied in the light. Therefore—to speak metaphorically—like thirsting wanderers, those who have been yearn for a place blossoming and preserved as sacred, and those, in turn, kindled by Eros, From afar, they prepare and seal with evocative symbols a grave or temple, grove or column, tree or stone pyramid, urn or cave, statue or figurine: that it may be the favorite seat and secret resting place of the soul, not banished from space, but released to wander aimlessly without the comforting love of those still protected by the body. If a warrior had fallen far away, or someone had been shipwrecked at sea, their relatives on land would erect a “cenotaph,” an empty grave: the protected place where the image of the dead was invited to dwell! The fabric of Eros spins inextricably between the images of the past and the minds of the present.7

There are two sentiments I wish the reader to hone in on from this excerpt. Firstly, is the sort of risk or endangerment the soul is in when it is utterly detached from body. If it finds itself “unanchored” in some distant realm, unable to perform what we so foolishly today call “haunting, possession” which is met with the frantic call for a priest’s exorcism, then the soul is in effect imprisoned by its limitless, formless space! Ergo, ancestor worship is the essential care of our departed kin. No exaggeration is found in the statement that ancestor veneration therefore saves them from the most grim of fates, of eternal torture… “Hel” is the resulting dominion of a scorned and forgotten ancestor. In return for sparing them of such a condition in which they are eternally imprisoned in, they bestow upon us the divine blessings that only become accessible to them through death, through that crowned “marriage with the cosmos”. That settles the “why” of ancestor worship on multiple grounds. Secondly, he makes note of what he calls “the Icelandic wandering of souls”, which if correct, I believe refers to the German folkloric concept of the hamr and fylgja8. The Hamr is a shifting form or shape which appears and disappears, able to take on multitudes of forms, such as Valkyries who appear on battlefields as ravens and elsewhere as swans. This not only refers to the souls of ancestors, daimons, or gods, but likewise the ritual participant himself who has become enraptured by the ecstatic moment. Ecstasy, for the Dionysian such as Klages, was to experience outside of one’s self. Only in these two states, dream and ecstasy (or the third, death!), do we possess the same gifts as gods:

We encounter a characteristic of dreams that seems to have been emphasized by all observers, yet not fully explored by any: the restless mutability of all dream images. The road I was just driving on in my dream has, in the next instant, transformed into a canal, the car into a ship, and already the walls of the houses have receded, and I am driving among many ships in the harbor; and yet I am not astonished, nor do I feel any lack of coherence in the sequence of events. If, above, we deduced from the transience of dream reality the predilection of mythical thought for cloud-like, plastic atmospheres, we now find the reason for this mood in the ability of every dream phenomenon to transform itself into any other, and for myth, the motive for its selection in the necessity of including gods, daimons, fairies, elves, and other divine beings are also equipped with the same gift. It is, after all, common to all of them, both to change their own form and to transform friend or foe, things, animals, or humans.9

….

The principle of transformation, and with it bringing souls into the power of the waking mind, is the ancient goal of all theurgists, spirit conjurers, and necromancers, and one of the pro-ethnic roots of mysticism, whose original form, untainted by any spiritualistic debauchery, we can grasp, for example, in the self-transformation of Germanic heroes into werewolves and berserkers, of the Zeylonian devil dancers into demons, of the ancient Thracian Sabos mystists into the rapturous thiasos of the raging bull god.10

To cut away from Klages and antiquity for a second, we can illustrate this further with a recent popularization of myth as seen in The Northman, which itself was based on old sagas and myth. Amleth’s father, The Raven King Aurvandill, is shown after his death in the form (hamr) of a fylgja—a raven who lands next to a bloodied idol and tilts his head curiously at Amleth to remind him of his fate, to whom he replies, “Father”. In a literal interpretation of the terms themselves, the fylgja is the freed and wandering soul itself, while the hamr is the specific shape or form it manifests as in the world. Thus, in a Klagesian lexicon, the hamr is the body and its image (soma; σώμα) while the fylgja is the soul (psyche, ψυχή). The two exist inseparably in a state of ceaseless flux and transition.

One final connection as we draw nearer to our conclusion. Consider, additionally, the Roman practice of casting imagines maiorum, or death masks. Upon the death of a family member, be it patriarch or infant, families would create wax relief casts of the deceased’s face and create replicas of their “image” with metal. Over time this cabinet grew, and given proper care, centuries of ancestry would be present in one’s home in the form of more-than-lifelike images. The Romans would store these masks in large cabinets near the entrance of the domus, the first to greet the family or guest as they entered the home. This served two functions: first, to remember the dead; their deeds, their character. Secondly, and more importantly, these masks would serve as receptacles for the wandering soul of that person, into which it can inhabit and in turn provide its blessings—like the Greek Tritopatores or Agathodaimon, protecting the house, keeping the family healthy, and guiding them through their daily lives. The dead become crowned as Lares, freed into an unconscionable means of existence; yet, thanks to the practice of ancestor worship, are allowed to frequently return home. Furthermore, the more attended and venerated this daimon was, the more powerful its protections over the household would be! This, if I could interject, is far more moving of a concept than comforting one with the loss of his beloved with the suggestion that they are now “in a better place”, never to return.

Clearly, as I have written before, the Early Christians were no fools when they ran around in packs of violent mobs defacing and destroying the sharp-eyed idols of antiquity through the Semitic practice of nullification (בַּטָּלָה, bitul, to make something idle and lifeless). These statues were literally “possessed by demons”, only for the mob of Abraham—now inflicted with the fear of death, the ecstatic, the animated—did this fact of existence incur a response of violence as opposed to that of veneration. When these statues were defaced, the ability of a soul to migrate into its body was effectively destroyed. There was nowhere that the soul recognized as home that it could imbue, and was thus cast into a homeless void of eternal longing, departing to and from what faint vestiges of a body it could. Klages offers the following on the Christian relationship to Ahnendienst:

And here we reflect on what the temples originally were! Not like Christian cathedrals, places of worship for the congregation, but houses of the gods, and accordingly, those places where reverential piety could behold them and truly beheld them in the sight of their “idols”! So much was the essence of daimonic powers to the pagans synonymous with the ability to appear that the most popular explanation of the word θεῖον (Theion), the divine, derived it from θέατον (Theaton), the visible! Therefore the pagan mocked the Jew and Christian as Atheoi, god-haters, and undeniably rightly so: for they had elevated the spirit, the invisible principle of the image-hating will, to the god-denying God! Early Christianity was well aware of this, as is evident, for example, from Augustine’s accounts in “The City of God” regarding the opinions held concerning the legendary bearer of Egyptian wisdom and magic, named Hermes Trismegistus. He was said to have known and taught how to inviting the spirits of the gods to inhabit “visible and tangible images,” which are now “endowed with senses and filled with spirits… know the future and proclaim it by lot, by priests, by dreams, and in many other ways.”

The images, flashing up in the event of vision, come and go, change, can never be grasped or held, and the place to be touched is, at best, their abode. They can be present there without the person necessarily noticing them. Not everyone recognizes the secret signs of their presence, and only the ecstatically raptured perceive their breath, overflowing with a shivering awe. But when sacrificial piety permeates the local symbol with a captivating essence, then it is revealed to the settling soul, which momentarily transforms the afterimage, dissolving it into the appearance of the god.11

I hope by now, if nothing else, we have illustrated the utter importance and meaning of idols in pre-Christian religion and why the Yahwists rejected them utterly out of fear for the dead and the daemonic: as frequently reported by Christians missionaries pagan lands, they worked!

I will conclude with a personal story. My in-laws have a sort of family garage that all sorts of people from various corners of the bloodline use to repair their vehicles and toil away on certain projects. They all agree, without hesitation, that it is haunted by the man who built it, my grandfather-in-law. They can hear him stomping up and down the wooden stairs towards its attic, the tinging and clanging of metal when no one is around, and above all else the suprarational “sense” of his presence in the garage. In paranormal contexts the multitudes of what was before his personal belongings are called “anchors”, though this erroneously implies the inability of a soul to leave them. This greatly troubles my in-laws; Klages would suggest it is a necessary conclusion of the Christian worldview that they devoutly hold onto. My reaction is contrary, even when I myself sense his presence in that room: “Of course he’s here, this is all of his stuff. Every atom in this garage is the work of his body.” How could you not be reminded of him? How could he not be here?—and I do not mean this in a purely rhetorical fashion. Surely, if I never wanted to hear of such hauntings of his on this world ever again, I would burn that shed to the ground and pave over it with asphalt. Consider him nullified. Of course, I would never do such a thing. Rather, when I am in that garage, I welcome the haunt as I would welcome any other: the reflection of crashing waves, the gathering of portent-bearing flocks, a howl and chill to the rear corner off a wooded trail.

Perhaps in a better time, a more lively one, can we relearn how best to venerate the dead in ways more fitting than leftover “anchors” atop a dusty attic, or a block of gravestones placed at the edge of a town in its appropriate building zone. I encourage those of a pagan soul to consider the words of Klages with heart, knowing now what it is to commune with one’s ancestors. All daimons are daimons of a particular place and essence, and it is—essential!—that they are allotted their due.

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Urge and urge and urge,

Always the procreant urge of the world.

—Wittman, Song of Myself (1892)

Our previous article delved into the curious, but now apparent, inverse association between Platonic and Darwinian thought. So apparent and so convincing is this relationship that the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr credited it to being a major stopping block in the delayed advancement of evolution as a science. Additionally, we have set forth the notion that Darwinian evolution can be thought of as a return to pre-Socratic thinking in that it rejects eternal discontinuities in nature in favor of the conception of “flux,” and we have evidenced the first fresh breaths of this return to pre-Socratic wisdom and scientific achievements in the Naturphilosophie of J.W. Goethe.

We spent a second or two illustrating the concept of “Goethean Science”, in comparison to Goethe’s evolutionist thought, through his renowned Farbenlehre, or theory of color—the principles of “intensification” and “polarity” driving his phenomenological approach to both color and organic life. Goethe was not alone in developing this theory of color; indeed, he was no exception in the longstanding academic tradition of selecting a worthy pupil to take under his wing for a period of time. The young man that Goethe selected for this endeavor is one very familiar to us today: Arthur Schopenhauer.

The two eventually split during this endeavor due to intellectual differences pertaining to their theories, with Schopenhauer going as far as to publish his own theory in competition to that of Goethe’s through his 1816 On Vision and Colors. Nevertheless, Goethe’s was a theory that Schopenhauer openly praised and admired its creator for its basis, whatever their disagreements may be. Much of the same can be said of Schopenhauer’s own flavor of “evolutionary” thought: there exists a tinge of the pre-Socratics, a salt lick of his mentor’s image—but, mostly, a treasure trove of his own maverick ingenuity. Such is Schopenhauer’s influence, as we will see, that strains of his thought can be seen in both vitalism and modern evolutionary thought.

Those who are more acquainted with Schopenhauer’s philosophy are already muttering to themselves, “Schopenhauer, a repudiation of Plato…? He deified him!” And for many reasons, they would be entirely correct. The aroma of Platonism seeps into every crevice of Schopenhauer’s philosophy: he happily borrows the concept of Form/Ideals precisely as defined by Plato, accepts discontinuities in nature, and does not permit them to change over any period of time or stress. That is the precise inverse of pre-Socratic and evolutionary thought, and we can see as much in the first volume of The World as Will and Representation (or Idea, Vorstellung):

Accordingly, what follows, and this has already impressed itself as a matter of course on every student of Plato, will be in the next book the subject of a detailed discussion. Those different grades of the will’s objectification, expressed in innumerable individuals, exist as the unattained patterns of these, or as the eternal forms of things. Not themselves entering into time and space, the medium of individuals, they remain fixed, subject to no change, always being, never having become. The particular things, however, arise and pass away; they are always becoming and never are. Now I say that these grades of the objectification of the will are nothing but Plato’s Ideas.

Further, the inverse relationship between Platonic and evolutionary thought is doubly reinforced through Schopenhauer’s use of the Platonic system within his own. For him, organic life too was such a “Representation” of the Ideal, and therefore, fundamentally immutable in terms of its population’s character and form. Of course species may go extinct, but the dog may not grow wings and become a bird, and the sludge of an agar of bacterium may not develop into a stalk of kelp. He explains:

This desire [of a species’ will to self preservation], regarded from without and under the form of time, shows itself in the maintenance of that same animal form throughout infinite time by means of the continual replacement of each individual of that species by another… in other words, in that alternation of death and birth which, so regarded, seems only the pulse-beat of that form (εἶδος, species) which remains constant throughout all time.

Even in Schopenhauer’s 1836 Über den Willen in der Natur, published just two decades before Darwin’s Origin of Species, we find Schopenhauer leveling a number of serious critiques against the (already not even Darwinian) theory of life from Jean Baptiste de Lamarck. For Schopenhauer, the idea that an organism could change in response to its environment was completely ludicrous—the animal’s structure was willed into existence, not forced upon it by the other way around. Put it this way: if the Will is what is responsible for a species’ Ideal, and the Will is purely outside of time and space, how could the Ideal of a species possibly change? This was a central assault on Schopenhauer’s early philosophy, and as Mayr had assessed for the other German Idealists, was a disparity which largely prevented him from engaging in the genuine evolutionist thought that would soon be put forth by Darwin and Haeckel. Or, as Kuno Fischer more bluntly put it, “Schopenhauer blames De Lamarck for representing animal species as evolved through a genetic and historical process, instead of conceiving of them after the Platonic manner.”

At least, this is the more simplistic view of Schopenhauer’s philosophy that the historian Arthur Lovejoy so beautifully dispensed with in his 1911 Schopenhauer As An Evolutionist. As Lovejoy points out, just a few pages down from this excessively Platonic conception of nature and species, one will begin to read in Schopenhauer’s explicitly evolutionist framing. More importantly, he does so by referring to what is still today one of the strongest arguments in favor of the idea of “descent with modification”—homologous structures. Strangely for him this was not evidence of modification as such or any notion of change, but rather the permanence of structures as generated by the Will:

But if [an animal] wishes to fly through the air as a bat, not only are the os humeri, radius and alnus prolonged in an incredible manner, but the usually small and subordinate carpus, metacarpus and phalanges digitorum expand to an immense length, as in St. Anthony’s vision, outmeasuring the length of the animal’s body, in order to spread out the wing-membrane. If, in order to browse upon the tops of very tall African trees, it has, as a giraffe, placed itself upon extraordinarily high fore-legs, the same seven vertebræ of the neck, which never vary as to number and which, in the mole, were contracted so as to be no longer recognizable, are now prolonged to such a degree, that here, as everywhere else, the neck acquires the same length as the fore-legs, in order to enable the head to reach down to drinking-water. […] In accordance with these transformations, we see in all of them the skull, the receptacle containing the understanding, at the same time proportionately expand, develop, curve itself, as the mode of procuring nourishment becomes more or less difficult and requires more or less intelligence; and the different degrees of the understanding manifest themselves clearly to the practiced eye in the curves of the skull. […]

We must therefore assume this anatomical element to be based, partly on the unity and identity of the will to live in general, partly on the circumstance, that the archetypal forms of animals have proceeded one from the other […] No other explanation or assumption enables us nearly as well to understand either the complete suitableness to purpose and to the external conditions of existence I have here shown in the skeleton, or the admirable harmony and fitness of internal mechanism in the structure of each animal, as the truth I have elsewhere firmly established: that the body of an animal is precisely nothing but the will itself of that animal brought to cerebral perception as representation—through the forms of Space, Time and Causality—in other words, the mere visibility, objectivity of Will. For, if this is once pre-supposed, everything in and belonging to that body must conspire towards the final end: the life of this animal. Nothing superfluous, nothing deficient, nothing inappropriate, nothing insufficient or incomplete of its kind, can therefore be found in it; on the contrary, all that is required must be there, and just in the proportion needed, never more. For here artist, work and materials are one and the same. […] Each organism is therefore a consummate master-piece of exceeding perfection.

—Schopenhauer, Über den Willen in der Natur, [273-277]

In a lesser-known essay of Schopenhauer’s titled Philosophy and Natural Science (Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol II), we read in Schopenhauer an increasing awareness of evolutionary evidence. He indicates that humans likely originated in the tropical Old World due to the lack of short-tailed apes in the New World, that Europeans acquired pale skin due to a long process climatological adaptation that affects all life, and even postulates that some species were generated from previous ones. As Lovejoy argues, this is likely due to the influence of two key early Darwinian theories circulating at the time. The first was Herbert Spencer’s “synthetic philosophy” in his First Principles, and the second Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Both set forth the conception that all of existence was in continual change with its current forms springing forth from earlier and more primitive forms, a process that included even inorganic matter such as stars and planets.

Of course, he mostly accuses Chambers and others such as Agassiz of making themselves “ridiculous by speaking of the origin of nature like old women” with “a mix of the crassest materialism and the crudest Jewish superstition, which are shaken together in their skulls like vinegar and oil”. Yet his forced awareness of fresh evolutionary evidence is apparent, and this, I believe, finally shows what Schopenhauer is trying to do exactly. He finds himself combatting to different elements in thought in Europe: on one flank the “Hebrew superstition” of Christianity and arguments of a “benevolent Creator”, and on the other flank the increasingly-popular materialism of the natural sciences—both of which are well represented by Spencer and Chambers, respectively. Thus, he requires an explanation for nature that does not rely on the trappings of either camp. The result is an early form of the biological vitalism of men such as Henri Bergson, the belief that mechanical or causal interactions alone cannot explain the inner workings of life:

For whoever denies life force basically denies his own existence, and therefore can boast of having reached the highest peak of absurdity. However, insofar as this cheeky nonsense has emanated from physicians and apothecaries, it moreover contains the basest ingratitude, since it is the life force that overwhelms illnesses and leads to the cures for which those gentlemen afterwards pocket the money and write receipts. – If it is not a unique force of nature, for which operating purposively is as essential as it is for gravity to bring bodies together, that moves the whole complicated machinery of an organism, steering, ordering and manifesting itself in it like gravity in the phenomena of falling and gravitation, or electric force in all the phenomena produced by the friction machine or the voltaic pile and so on – well then life is a false illusion, a deception, and in truth every being is a mere automaton, i.e., a play of mechanical, physical and chemical forces brought to this phenomenon either by accident, or by the intention of some artist who simply likes it this way. – Of course physical and chemical forces are at work in the animal organism, but what holds them together and guides them so that a proper organism comes of it and exists – that is the life force; it accordingly controls those forces and modifies their effect, which is therefore only a subordinate one in this case. On the other hand, to believe that they alone could bring about an organism is not merely false, but as I said, stupid. – In itself that life force is the will.

—Parerga and Paralipomena Vol II, §94

Biological vitalism was arguably entering its most prominent period during the mid-19th. At about the same time, Carl Reichenbach had published his theory of the “Odic force”, which imbued life with its electromagnetic properties. Even when Louis Pasteur refuted the idea of spontaneous generation from his famous experiments, he settled upon the notion that this was the case because of life’s inner vital force. Thus, Schopenhauer has plenty of company in his critiques of the mechanical (Darwinian) and Creationist arguments pertaining to life. Yet this cannot take away from the fact that in this one statement, “In itself that life force is the will”, Schopenhauer reminds us of his essential role in the generation of both biological vitalism and Lebensphilosophie more generally. How interesting given his ascetic (and often suicidal) inclinations!

In the history of Western thought, this is an important and remarkable conception, as it finds itself sitting right atop the knife’s edge of its Platonic past and its “mechanical” future. One can sense, from a very distant bird’s eye view, a sense of bargaining in the biological vitalist found in Schopenhauer as he seeks to create a new theory of life in contest of the other two. On one hand we are presented with a static universe full of discontinuities, seen in the existence of homologous structures which, for Schopenhauer, is somehow evidence of the unchanging form of the species itself. No greater discontinuity can be found than the sharp distinction between the living and non-living, and indeed, this is the entire impetus of biological vitalism. In this sense, Schopenhauer’s criticism of Lamarck, Spencer, and Chambers is somewhat similar to contemporary arguments pertaining to “irreducibly complex structures”, albeit in a purely metaphysical tone. The structures as possessed by these species are subtle variations of one primordial structure—the Urstruktur, if you will— otherwise, in the distant past of Lamarck’s evolutionary history we would see animals entirely without bodies, not yet willing towards anything! To go further, every animal is a perfect Representation of what it has Willed to be—otherwise, it could not exist, and would die from its own want.

On the other hand we have, as an indication of what was rapidly becoming common in Western thought, the conception that these forms are somehow related to each other through means of descent. Only for Schopenhauer, it was differences in how these species willed towards some phenomenon within its unique environment that spurred the variation. Nevertheless, the injection of descent into the discussion was crucial for the coming Darwinism.

In the previous article on Goethe, we discussed Ernst Mayer’s notion that the lasting residue of Platonism within Western thought greatly delayed the advancement of evolutionary thought and particularly so for the Germans. Schopenhauer can certainly serve as a clear example of this problem: his confrontation with the growing scientific evidence of the evolutionary process within life was forced to pass through a Platonic filter of his own insistence, and thus the bastard child of biological vitalism was born. It would not be until the late 1960s until this theory of life was completely defeated through the discovery of DNA and increasingly confident experiments and theories pertaining to abiogenesis, which made clear that life was fundamentally driven by chemical processes (the Central Dogma) and arose gradually from inorganic matter.

However, this is not to say Schopenhauer’s Lebensphilosophie more generally is to be cast out with the tumor. The illustration of nature as fundamentally a struggle for existence is essential to the Darwinian model, as is the notion that something which exists must necessarily will to do so. In this way, Schopenhauer’s philosophy can survive through a “generalized vitalism” which applies its concepts to all of existence rather than attempting to elevate biological life above the inorganic, all the way up to modern evolutionary theory. Consider the following passage from Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, which remains a core aspect of evolutionary theory today:

Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable. The universe is populated by stable things. A stable thing is a collection of atoms that is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name. It may be a unique collection of atoms, such as the Matterhorn, that lasts long enough to be worth naming. Or it may be a class of entities, such as rain drops, that come into existence at a sufficiently high rate to deserve a collective name, even if any one of them is short-lived. The things that we see around us, and which we think of as needing explanation—rocks, galaxies, ocean waves—are all, to a greater or lesser extent, stable patterns of atoms. Soap bubbles tend to be spherical because this is a stable configuration for thin films filled with gas. In a spacecraft, water is also stable in spherical globules, but on earth, where there is gravity, the stable surface for standing water is flat and horizontal. Salt crystals tend to be cubes because this is a stable way of packing sodium and chloride ions together. In the sun the simplest atoms of all, hydrogen atoms, are fusing to form helium atoms, because in the conditions that prevail there the helium configuration is more stable. Other even more complex atoms are being formed in stars all over the universe, ever since soon after the ‘big bang’ which, according to the prevailing theory, initiated the universe.

—Ch. 2, The Replicators

Doubtless, this is an echoing of the arguments made by Spencer and Chambers that Schopenhauer criticized so harshly. Yet there is an irony involved in that the Will can serve as a fascinating explanation for evolution and the origin of life, provided it is permitted to operated as a generalized vitalism. The will to exist may be interpreted as Dawkins’ “stable chemistry”, as that which does not strive towards or possess it ceases to be—tautologically. Even more interesting is that this harsh confrontation with death and nonexistence upon every glimmer of reality is the driving force of evolution found in selection: “stable” or “willing” things will tend towards variation and a stronger likelihood in its own survival through self-reproduction over an infinite time frame, or die! The existence of our own genes at the present, generated from an infinite past of such “willing” stable states, is firm and immediate evidence of this conception. Looking back upon the many ways this “immortal coil” has mutated to bring us into existence is a worthy meditation on the play between the pre-Socratic principle of flux and the Platonic principle of form.

Schopenhauer would surely object to much of this in some way if he were alive, as he would object to the materialism in Darwinian thought more generally. Yet as critics have been happy to point out to Dawkins and the rest of the mainstream of evolutionary science since the 1960s, the principle of the selfish gene achieves its finality in the destruction of the individual. It is not the species which evolves, it is not even the individual who is in control of his own body, rather he is a hostage to these willing replicators which had thrown him into existence a blink of the eye ago. Yet, rather than the inborn vital will of an organism stretching out into nature, it is the cold talons of nature herself which strikes and cudgels life into its diverse graveyard of fruits and errors. One wonders what a trove of lovely and terrifying thoughts someone like Schopenhauer would have to say on the matter. For these things, we leave to future thoughts.

Progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but a spiral with rhythms of progress and retrogression, of evolution and dissolution.

—J.W. Goethe

Contrary to the typical historical illustration, by the time Darwin had published his Origin of Species the West was already accustomed to his general trajectory of “evolutionist” thought. The relationship of species upon their homologous organs and structures was already long an accepted theory, advancements in geology had shown that the age of the Earth was certainly more than a few thousand years, and intellectuals such as Saint-Hilaire, Chambers, and Cuvier had already put forth a number of models showing the increasing diversification and complexity of organic life over distant eons. Darwin’s achievement was not so much as shocking the world—a duty belonging to the aforementioned—but more in making it comfortable for the public, now certain and beyond all possible disbelief in what would be called “evolution”.

Of course, strains of evolutionary thought can be seen even in the distant pre-Socratic Greeks, who offered no shortage of different theories on the essence and qualities of nature. Empedocles is often credited with the first naturalist theory of evolution, whereby organic life arose naturally by and remained driven by the push of “Strife” and the pull of “Eros” between the four classical elements. Perhaps most interestingly, he offered up the possibility that such a cosmogonic drama was bound to make innumerable strange mistakes: necks without heads, legs without feet, and even the mythological beasts of multiple combined natures—the minotaur, centaur, gryphon, and sphinx. Most of these mistakes were incompatible with nature, perishing immediately or eventually; those which were compatible or offered an advantage would persist. Thus, as distant as the 5th Century BC, we have shimmerings of the concept of “the survival of the fittest”. Yet even further back we may look to Thales and Anaximander, who offered that the essence of the world (Ἀρχή, first principle) was water—fluid, dynamic, and alive (τὸν κόσμον ἔμψυχον, the world lives). The fluid nature of the world could be, for the Meletians, symbolized by the mythological Proteus, that mythical shapeshifting ἅλιος γέρων (old man of the sea). Heraclitus in a similar but unique fashion postulated the first principle to be that of fire, of ceaseless and unending change which consumes the once-fixed position of all things.

Yet the strain of thought that was favorable to the naturalistic view of organic life would soon be replaced by another: that life-denying “instrument in the disintegration of Hellas” (Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols) that was put to work in the philosophy of Plato and Socrates, which in its intellectual and moralistic discomfort with “flux” set atop our world another of permanence and unchanging “Ideals”. The result of this shift in philosophy produced a set of ideas that earned Plato the title of “the great anti-hero of evolutionary thinking” according to the biologist Ernst Mayer, who attributed to this shift four distinct concepts:

There are four concepts that appear particularly important in Agassiz’ [a critic of Darwin] thinking: (1.) a rational plan of the universe, (2.) typological thinking, (3.) discontinuism, and (4.) and ontogenetic concept of evolution. Each of these concepts is rooted in Greek philosophy, particularly that of Plato, and we will not be able to discuss the evolutionary consequences without an occasional reference to the philosophical basis.

—Mayr, Agassiz, Darwin, and Evolution (1959)

Through its proud and long-lived daughter in the Christian Church, the Platonic conception of nature had rested its laurels on top of the West with this understanding for thousands of years. The world was rationally ordered in the higher realm, and from it came a certain “plan” that produces the material realm. This plan produced organisms which belonged to certain immutable categories or “body-types”, a fundamental discontinuity which could not be transgressed by mechanical causes; the concept of “species” is denied as a material reality and only a “category of thought” (Agassiz), in a clear Platonic spirit. One can see all of these philosophical assumptions in the whole of the Creationist reply to evolutionary theory even today, in its insistence that—to give a couple of examples—“a dolphin could not evolve from a dog” (violation of immutable types or “baramins”), or that “random mutation could not possibly explain the aggressive mimicry of the rove beetle, or of the spider-tailed viper” (appeal to the rational plan of the world). Looking at you, Bennett!

Thus, the relationship of Platonism and its slow repudiation across the history of Western thought remains an underappreciated element in explaining why the theory of evolution arose when and where it did. The first cracks of the eggshell which returned to the pre-Socratic world of ceaseless change, fully imbued with the life of the divine gods (πάντα ῥεῖ, πάντα πλήρη θεῶν), can be understood as a significant contribution to the genesis of evolutionary thought—even if their respective thinkers retained significant residues of Platonism in other respects.

As a matter of fact, the germinating seeds of evolutionary thought were so plentiful throughout the 18th and 19th centuries that one could wonder what took it so long to finally be presented as a cohesive and unique theory of life. Perhaps it was because there was an innumerable quantity of varied “philosophies of life” sprouting and spreading throughout this period: lebensphilosophie, idealism, naturphilosophie, vitalism, Romanticism, and so on. Mayr was of the belief that the residual Platonism in these systems of thought explained why German zoologists in the 19th century struggled to explain what the Englishman so effortlessly put to print. However, in each of these systems, it is not too difficult to detect both direct and indirect influences upon the later scientific evolutionary theory. Strangely, a system of thought which was intended to rebuke the “mere materialism” of its English and French contemporaries found itself as a key scaffold for the later whole of evolutionary theory between Darwin and Dawkins.

A fitting example of this philosophical inquiry towards organic life that heralds the future evolutionary dogma can be found in the works of J.W. Goethe, who himself was a key contributor to a number of “evolutionist” breakthroughs. During his travels to Italy in his 30’s, he studied the organs and structures of plant life in search of what he called the Urpflanze, the singular plant from which all other plant life could generate from. Though even the description of one species being produced from another is revolutionary, he went further in formulating the first theory of homologous structures in his Metamorphosis of Plants (1790), which showed that certain organs and structures of plant life were common to different species and, potentially, generated from the same ancient source. He even went as far to describe the nature of plant life as “Protean”, referring to that mythical god of ceaseless change and disguise which so perfectly illustrates the evolutionary perspective. To boot, some years later he would again display the importance of homologous structures by discovering the previously-mythical premaxilla bone in humans, which was at the time thought to have belonged only to apes—not man.

In Goethe’s early evolutionist thought we see two concepts utterly essential to the later theory of Darwin: 1.) the relationship of all life through modification, and 2.) the inclusion of man into this theoretical framework of nature. For thousands of years had the Platonic concept of the “Great Chain of Being” stood tall, enforcing not only a rigid and changeless description of nature with each species representing its designated “ideal form”, but the primacy of mankind atop all others as closest to divine perfection. Now, through Goethe and his contemporaries, we see the first inklings of its inevitable collapse. For the first time since the pre-Socratics, we were taking seriously the proposition that all of Nature is fundamentally interconnected into one—diversified only by degree, and never by kind.

However, one must remember Goethe’s position as the standard-bearer of Romanticism—it was not his intention, and would be his disgust, to simply formulate a material or subject-less science. Goethe and his contemporaries were more accurately “metaphysicians” of Nature, who sought to descend into the depths and essence of life, and in stark opposition to the materialism of Bacon and Descartes who sought to erect firm barriers between observer and the observed. This experiential approach to science was the basis of his namesake “Goethean Science”, which served as his guiding light for not just his own endeavors, but later philosophical approaches to science such as phenomenology, too.

We still see the residue of Platonism in Goethe’s evolutionism in that be describes organic life as ceaselessly “striving” (Streben)—just like his Faust, who himself delved into the eeriness of shadowy and formless realms—towards some preordained and perfect end. True to this general belief, in Metamorphosis he attributes the homologous structures of life to two natural forces he termed as “polarity” and “intensification” (Steigerung). While polarity more mystically refers to the push and pull of opposites (such as in sexuality, color, magnetism, chemistry, and other phenomena), intensification or “enhancement” refers to life’s unending striving towards complexity and perfection. For Goethe, and at some level not entirely incorrectly, this was the natural explanation for how more simple plant-types such as ferns could become the vibrant and reproductively-complex angiosperms from the same “primordial” leaf. Therefore in applying his own flavor of orthogenesis that is not too dissimilar from that of Lamarck, Goethe most significantly differs from Darwin in that he believed the variation in nature came not from the organism’s interaction with external nature, but from within life itself, from its own vital essence. The result is a teleological structure of nature where life—conscious of it or not—”strives” ever higher towards more complex, more perfect, more fit forms. In Goethe we can still see clearly something of a “Great Chain”, though now it is something which is in a perpetual state of self-driven flux.

To provide what may be an illuminating adjacent example, much of the same is visible in Goethe’s theory of color (Farbenlehre). Firstly, it too was presented specifically to counter a materialist theory, in this case Newton’s theories of light in Opticks. In doing so, Goethe once again relies on a primordial, immaterial existence of an Urphänomen which manifests itself in physical reality: color does not arise out of the diffraction of pure light as it does for Newton, but from the energy generated by the polarity between light and darkness. Each color has its polar opposite, and can be further manipulated by the force of intensification. For example, as the Sun lowers in the day and loses its power, yellow-white is darkened into red. So too is it the case for plants, and all of organic life: it is generated firstly out of the polarity between organic and inorganic, depends yet further on polarity for its (sexual, chemical) regeneration, and can be further intensified into different forms. In both theories of Goethe, as well as the whole of his approach to nature and science, we see clearly his emphasis on underlying, guiding forces which are external to mere materiality.

Goethe, who was adored by so many as an influential hero beyond all others, had one hero of his own that he repeatedly called back to in all of his endeavors—Baruch Spinoza—and it is here where his early theory of evolution is most clearly understood. The influence of Spinoza’s monistic philosophy on Goethe is precisely why he believed that scientific inquiries should reflect upon the wholeness of existence, rather than meticulously isolating, or “controlling”, various phenomena as a Baconian would. It further encouraged him along these endeavors in the first place, as according to Spinoza, “the more we understand particular things, the more we understand God.”

Ergo, Goethe’s Urpflanze is not an actual common ancestor as what would be shown in later Darwinian theory, but the archetype of “the plant” itself produced by an overabundant flowing of nature—natura naturata produced by natura naturans. This was no small thing: for the first time, the classification of organisms was being treated in a concrete rather than abstract sense of “body plans”. In a strange way, this metaphysical thinking provided a newfound basis for the art of taxonomy, to which modern scientists are still indebted to:

Goethe’s Spinozistic insight is that the grouping of things in a class is only symptomatic of their partaking in an underlying concrete thing. As such, their participation in a genus is not merely predicative, as in Linnaean taxonomy, but concrete. The theory behind this assertion is resoundingly Spinozistic: what makes me what I am is not the class I belong to but the thing I am modificatory of. In the context of Goethean morphology, the archetypal leaf, or the modular vertebra, or the vertebrate body plan are not categories but names for concrete processes that express themselves divergently, in certain and determinate ways. Ultimately, Goethe’s notion of the archetype takes us from a taxonomy of distinct species to a pre-classificatory field of generative processes. Ernst Cassirer brilliantly summed it up by saying he was the one who “completed the transition from the previous generic view to the modern genetic view of organic nature.”

—Michail Vlasopoulos, Spinoza’s God in Goethe’s Leaf: The Spinozist Foundation of Goethean Morphology

Where does all of this leave Goethe in our “Great Chain” of naturalistic philosophy? In many respects, Goethe is (like Spinoza) still a Platonist at heart: he relies upon the existence of “higher absolutes” to drive life in some direction, and had no conception of the idea of “common descent”. Yet despite the clear differences with contemporary evolutionary theory, Goethe still provided a clear template for organic life to change, adapt, and generate new form—the central essence of evolutionary theory in its rejection of Platonism. His was an illustration of nature that did not feature static and fixed forms decided upon some few thousand years ago by a benevolent Creator, but one of ceaseless flow, change, and evolving states of being. And so, in reflection of such an ever-changing and dynamic world, Goethe returned to the wisdom of the pre-Socratic Heraclitus:

If we look at all these ‘forms’ [Gestalten], particularly the organic ones, we will discover that nothing in them is permanent, defined, or at rest—but all is in a flux of continual motion [πάντα ῥεῖ]… When something has an acquired form, it immediately metamorphoses into the next.

Spirit resembles a wedge driven into life, a wedge whose goal is to tear it in half or, less metaphorically expressed, to deprive the body of soul, to deprive the soul of body, and in this way to kill life itself. —Klages

It’s Christmastime in the wastes of Old Vinland. The sun has recessed, the land has died and shriveled upon itself, and deep verdant green slumbers in anticipation of the coming salvific thaw. We have a few lovely traditions to help us cope with such an environment, if not celebrate it: amber lights about the roof to shine when the sun cannot, brandy to warm the cold body—songs, merriment, family… Apparently such a foreign sight has left someone feeling homesick, for in the second year in a row, Vivek Ramaswamy has elected this sacred time of seasons-turning to be when he judiciously scalpels the concept of an American.

Many of us recall that fateful day when Vivek took whatever faith the common American had in him, rolled it into a ball of dung, and threw it into a crowd of horrified patrons. You can find it very easily by simply searching “Vivek Christmas tweet”, as he has (sincerely bravely) left the tweet up. We learned from this post that the sorry state of Old Vinland was none other than our fault; see, we just weren’t studying hard enough and watched far too much Boy Meets World. His people, on the contrary, they never had Boy Meets World. His people ate gruel on the way here (complimentary Southwest Airlines pretzels), they understood suffering, hard work! Those are American values, and that’s why he’s just as American as you are. That’s why, with more of these real Americans on the way, Vinland will once again have its “Sputnik moment”.

It was a bizarre experience for many of us, to have our warm celebration of ancient traditions interrupted by some political interlocuter lecturing us that we, despite our opposition to mass migration and other transgressions against the culture we celebrated that day, had no one but ourselves to blame and better start saying sorry to this class of New Americans who will take us back to outer space. What was worse about it was the obvious ethnic resentment, the loathing of non-fungible American traditions right as we were engaging in the annual procession of them. More specifically, that it was this very happiness that had costed us our nation—thus sprach Ramaswamy. Vivek, arguably, has never recovered from it. Certainly not in our spheres, not the people who saw that. There is an argument that this post expedited his removal from the White House as an advisor and association with the DOGE program, and right into a campaign for Governor of Ohio. Today, he is polling even with an unknown Democratic candidate for that race, a state Trump won by almost twelve percent.

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It’s Christmastime in the wastes of Old Vinland, and Vivek is at it again. We all have our own traditions this time of year. This time he has taken to the opinion section of the New York Times in an article titled What Is an American?, in an effort to once again give lecture on his preferred conception of American identity. It’s a fairly short article, and interestingly, one that can’t seem to find an substantive argument. It is more of a wine tasting, asserting different notes on the label in the hopes to provoke a reaction. Much of it is wasted on tone-policing “The Groypers” for antisemitism or other racialized remarks, as if this assessment in the negative does anything in service to the title’s ambition of telling us what an American is, not merely what we would like it to be.

As a matter of fact, this is the entire impetus of Vivek’s reasoning. He is not presenting a useful categorical delineation between American and foreigner that can be readily applied to any civic or legal understanding, rather he is merely professing what he wishes it was. These of course are two entirely different arguments: one will promote the readily available centuries of historical precedent before 1965 and present this as the factual basis of our inherited identity, the other will merely assert what one wishes this identity should become. The following from Vivek’s article is the essential presentation of such an identity:

The alternative (and, in my view, correct) vision of American identity is based on ideals.

Americanness isn’t a scalar quality that varies based on your ancestry. It’s binary: Either you’re an American or you’re not. You are an American if you believe in the rule of law, in freedom of conscience and freedom of expression, in colorblind meritocracy, in the U.S. Constitution, in the American dream, and if you are a citizen who swears exclusive allegiance to our nation.

As Ronald Reagan quipped, you can go to live in France, but you can’t become a Frenchman; but anyone from any corner of the world can come to live in the United States and become an American. No matter your ancestry, if you wait your turn and obtain citizenship, you are every bit as American as a Mayflower descendant, as long as you subscribe to the creed of the American founding and the culture that was born of it. This is what makes American exceptionalism possible.

By the time this will be published I am sure there will be dozens of responses published in far more advertised places, leaning on the obvious counterarguments: quotes from the Founders, text from any immigration bill prior to Hart-Celler, and so on. I wish to draw the reader's attention to something more granular, a bit of dust hidden in Vivek's short article that actually serves as the whole basis of his philosophy: “You are an American if you believe”.

What Vivek wants is actually an American religion, a type of creed which—like much of the rest of the liberal project—bears faint residues of the crucifix of yore. The American is granted by faith alone, which is only later evidenced by his promised works. The American is identified by his profession of belief in The Idea™—who's idea?—We don't know, it's just some sort of aethereal Logos that descended upon the continent many unquantifiable years ago. Vivek would be more accurate if he called his vision of that of an “American spirit”, a spectral poltergeist which can be summoned or banished with the right incantations. In short, Vivek's American is air.

The essential drive of the liberal project is to boil all of humanity into one repugnant stew—a melting pot, if you will—where the same essential “ideas” lather over the whole of the Earth, which now rejoices in its newfound unity. You need only to believe—believe in law, in merit, the Constitution, and “the dream”. That whosoever believeth in It shall not perish in Mogadishu or Mumbai, but have everlasting opportunity (Jalandhar 3:16). If he hath sin too much, let him be purified in the cleansing purgatory that is the naturalization classroom. He needs only to wait in line! Vivek is not presenting a binary here at all, actually, he is not presenting a categorical delineation anywhere. An American is someone who believes in what it means to be an American. Do you see an actual definition of what an American is anywhere in this nonsense? A categorization that is plausibly everything is, in fact, plausibly nothing. Perhaps this is the point: once everyone is an American, no one is.

Believe in these ideas!—Who's ideas? Yours or the Founders? Vivek's entire thesis is upon the basis that blood is a scalar quantity while belief is binary, but any inquiry into “belief” at all immediately reveals how absurd this conception is. Blood can be quantified, measured and referred to upon its physical existence. Soil can be dug and cupped in the palm of your hand, the ecology of the American landscape pressing you into an indelible shape. But belief? Belief can be anything. Let us believe in the Constitution, the 14th Amendment above all others, which grants a woman the right to tear her unborn child’s head off its shoulders and Wong Kim Ark the right to birthright citizenship. Let us believe in freedom of expression, starting with the right of Zoomers to be critical of Israel or make fun of India. Let us believe in the colorblind meritocracy of Griggs v. Duke Power Co., and by God let us never falter from the American Dream of stock market investments and sensible interest rates. Are we so sure we have the same America in mind? Why is yours, Vivek, so different from mine; since you assert this is a binary, which of us is the American?

Not only is there profound disagreement between Americans as to what any of these things actually mean, but the way we derive the delusion of “consensus” upon any of these matters is radically altered by the increasing presence of foreigners and foreign communities who have been granted the privileges of citizenship. It is the quintessential tragedy of President Reagan, who Vivek champions, that his philia for foreigners and the mythos of transformative citizenship played no small role in the transformation of California from a place that believed in these ideals to a place that rejected them utterly. They were not dispossessed and repossessed by warring spirits, it was the people themselves—the body politic—that changed.

I am not interested in Vivek’s American Geist, which is nothing more than a wisp of the wind. I am interested in the American people, the nation, and the ways in which its character is expressed from its physical body. I encourage the reader to meditate further on the etymology of nation, which derives from the Latin gnatus—natal birth, breed, to spring forth from the womb. To go even further, this Latin word derives from none other than *gene. Ergo, when a naturalized foreigner refers to himself as “a patriot for this great American nation”, he has doubly lied to himself by erroneously declaring this place to be the place of his Mother and his Father. No, a people is not an idea, that is an inversion of the very concept! A people is a population, with a physical presence within a particular place. The American is an autochthone, someone who knows nothing other than the flesh and the dirt which reared him into a living being, one among a lengthy chain of many others who had nothing but such a conception to pass down to their descendants. The American is as native to this country as its green ash and red wolves, both now forced to deal with its own invasive foes bringing new ideas for the land. Perhaps it is no coincidence that for Aristotle the “intellect” or “spirit” was something that invaded the body and soul from the outside, νοῦς θύραθεν, nous thurathen.

In a previous article, I have given my own alternative proposal for what an American is, and it is one that emphasizes the land and the body in its proper roles in generating the American people. Consider the following story from America’s incubation as the article describes:

There is an analogous story in American folklore pertaining to a Penelope Stout and her husband Richard, two children of England sailing for New Amsterdam on a Dutch ship. Set off course by foul wind, the vessel ran aground several miles south on what is now Sandy Hook, New Jersey. The Dutch, keenly aware of the savagery that lurked in the landward woods, immediately abandoned the vessel and fled to the Hudson on foot. But the Stouts were left behind, as Richard was immobilized by fever and his wife could not bring herself to leave him. That night, a party of Lenape boarded the ship, butchering and scalping the defenseless Richard, “as a boy would kill a little harmless snake, for no reason whatever, except that he was able to do it”, as one account puts it. Penelope narrowly escaped, maimed and grieving, hiding in a tree trunk until her eventual capture by the Lenape. Some time later, the Dutch learned of a White woman held captive among the natives, and ransomed her back to safety. Upon her arrival to a familiar people, Penelope learned that she was the sole survivor of the voyage. The Dutch that fled on foot never made it.

Our generation thinks little of the Indian Wars, more concerned with new foes from Afghanistan to Mexico and everywhere in between. But we forget that these brutal wars lasted some three centuries, from the first sorties outside of Jamestown in 1609 to the last and final Apache raid against Americans in 1924. Every American generation had personal experience with this conflict until it was finally won, and the continent was made silent. We ascended up the slopes of Appalachia as colonists, but upon the peaks we saw the frontier, and upon our descent we were transformed into Americans.

One cannot begin to describe the American without first describing the frontier. This was the official story of America taught widely in schoolrooms across the country, the Frontier Thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner. As Europeans came to this continent, they were met with a less-than-figurative wall at the edge of wilderness. One can imagine himself atop the piked bulwark of Jamestown, frozen musket in hand, with one world behind him and another in front of him, somewhere in the dark rustling limbs echoing whoops and hollers at him. This frontier was gradually conquered, but it was never wholly defeated until the 20th Century. Appalachia became the Ohio Valley, then the Mississippi, the vast Great Plains of the West, and finally the gates of the Pacific. It was the frontier, the essential lawlessness and demand for competent self-sufficiency that exuded from its virgin soil, that shaped the European into the American. It is precisely this ethnogenesis where Vivek’s gaseous “ideas” come from. They were demanded of us in exchange for such a bountiful land, lest we perish on it. Many did.

That is the character—that is, the embodied soul—of the American. It has nothing to do with the Constitution, colorblindness, or free expression. These were values the American created for himself, and does nothing to explain anything about who the American is. This is the essential failure of Vivek’s thesis: out of a fear of “blood and soil” rhetoric born of his own identity and upbringing, he conjures up a specter of “the American idea”, which entirely neglects the physical American himself. He is thus left with nothing but a ghost, perhaps at best a golem, which bears only but the faintest resemblance to what came before. We could abandon these ideas in a second and still possess the same land and the same body. Only through Vivek’s appallingly self-serving conception can one see the plausibility of deporting a descendant of Jamestown for his lack of patriotism in favor of an African who merely believes in the idea of America.

It is this time of year which heralds in Americans to be reminded of his family and of his heritage, the gripping of the land’s changing image known as season, and the profound communion between land and people. Even as his Vinland continues to deteriorate and his neighborhood “progresses” towards the finality of a Brazilian slum, around this well-lit hearth he is given the comforts of his belonging. Vivek’s own tradition of calling this into question, year after year, only serves to further emphasize the shocking contrast of sturm und drang the contemporary American finds himself in. We thank him for the invitation for reflection, but respectfully turn our attention to the people in our homes, and not to an “idea” somewhere in the sky.

I have long engaged in prevarication on the question of my coming internment. Oh, the options!—so many options. Perhaps down in a plot amongst thousands in a well-kept sanctuary, or entombed deep below coursing sands with a sacrificed pet or two to keep me company, maybe set ablaze atop a grand pyre and ashes kept in a jar above the hearth; why not, far from the asphalt, simply sloped next to a fledgling oak for whom my bones may feed? I grant myself too much of a romantic vision, it could be my fate is to be pecked by crows as I rot in a small iron cage. Prevaricating, still. The truth is, the question troubles me substantially more that dying. There’s nothing to be done about one’s end, but here, the way I end my life and propel its memory into the world yet to come—if at all—is something where actions will be of consequence.

The graveyard is rightly seen as a place of the dead. For most, this is an antiphrasis of sorts—the graveyard is more accurately hallowed, haunted, a liminal keeping where spirits may be appeased by family or offended by thrill-seeking children. But the sentimentality I often find myself in knows the graveyard as truly a dead place. A place of nothing. They frighten me not by presence but by lack, and the sight of thousands of neatly-rowed tombstones where an individual is lost to the mass of human history is utterly forgotten. Here is the ignoble passing of everyday time, where new bodies pile besides yours in the mechanical work of a rented backhoe which shocks a funeral’s sacral nature into an abrupt end.

It can often be difficult to identify cultural practices in the West which are unique products of Christendom, unscathed by the inculturations of the converted heathen. This is less substantially a problem for our approaches to death and inhumation, which in many ways bear clear distinctions from the old understanding. For the Christian, the utmost care and respect is to be given to the dying and to the dead, as their bodies will one day be needed again. One day, for which no man knows the hour, the dead will rise out of their graves and embark on a grand procession of the un-dead to the end of the world. One would prefer to still have his limbs and tongue for this great day, and so for centuries the burial practices of the West entailed an elaborate art of preservation which went well beyond chucking someone into an exposed pit. We can be reminded of this conception’s staying power by the fact that at the end of the 17th Century, Robert Boyle was performing experimental proofs that such a “general resurrection” was possible under the laws of natural science. Today, this understanding is unconsciously carried forth by the embalming of the body and pumping-full of preserving formaldehyde, with the finishing touch of one’s Sunday best for when he meets his creator. Many other Christian rites retained this ancient character of the delicate care for the dead and dying, perhaps best seen in the Roman Catholic traditions of the anointing of the sick and Feast of All Souls, where candles are lit upon the tombstones of ancestors in their memory and their honor. It’s a lovely thing, something I have forced my own family to partake in.

Yet our contemporary understanding is much different, even if presented as only a technical addition to previous beliefs. Whether or not it is “true” to Christendom or native only to a few denominations, I leave aside, noting only what I witness among the many. Ours holds deeply to the idea of the soul—that is, the self—and its existence after death. When one dies, he shuts his eyes but only for an instant, and then he awakes in a corporeal form of his living body, and takes in an awareness of his Judgement. Perhaps it’s something of a court drama, where God takes his time rewinding your life’s moments before you. Or, maybe you just open your eyes and find yourself laying in either a golden meadow or scorching brimstone. To the point: you are not there, lifeless in your now-lowering casket, as strangers and old friends will be sure to console your family with the fact of your presence “in a better place”. The importance of the graveyard, as a result, suffers dearly. Pave over it if you’d like, these are but cadavers and dust who no longer bear any relation to the purified and eternally happy souls “beyond” in the bosom of God.

I do not know what “eternal life” means, only that it in actuality points away from life entirely—”not here”. I do not believe in it at all, this separation between an immortal soul and a perishing body as we understand it, and under the best circumstances of this belief I could only manage the conception of where it returns to its godly origin and loses all distinction—that is, finds its annihilation. But I do understand and believe in immortality, in unending presence. This is a different understanding, perhaps the most ancient, which slumbers at length before showing itself once more as it did with Iambichlus and Ludwig Klages. The distinction between the two (seemingly synonymous but in fact antonymical) concepts is that one pertains to the preservation of what has been, while the other promises something that never will. One instills everlasting life, the other relentless creation. One promises the defeat of death, the other necessitates it.

We can investigate this distinction by recalling, for a moment, that statue of the slain Commendatore in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, who is mockingly invited to dinner by the hubristic Don Juan. The vengeful statue comes to the dinner he was jokingly invited to—Don Giovanni! A cenar teco, m’invitasti! The statue commands Don Juan to repent for his acts of rape and murder, and when he refuses, opens up the gates of hell to claim Don Juan for eternity. Perhaps it is no wonder that those Early Christians, in a rare moment of worldly wisdom, ran around the continent exorcising the statues of antiquity of their imbued “daimons”, in which they vandalized their perceptibility by chiseling off the nose and face—if only for their own safety! What the Commendatore may serve as an example of is how images, memories, or copies of oneself may “haunt” the living, especially those who make the foolish mistake of assuming such “statues” are wholly inanimate.

In 2013 the French historian Dominique Venner wrote on a small note, “I am healthy in body and mind, and I am filled with love for my wife and children. I love life and expect nothing beyond it, if not the perpetuation of my race and my mind.” This note would be found on his body after he put a gun in his mouth before the altar in Notre Dame. I believe he had an intuitive sense of what I am describing here, something available only to those of a pagan disposition—that life, far from fit to be slandered as of a “fallen” nature, is all we have. Immortality is therefore conceivable only through two paths: memory, and progeny. Venner is survived firstly by the family he brought into existence from himself that he loved so much, and secondly “the perpetuation of race and mind”: his thoughts, his worldview, his disposition, which more than a decade after his death we still discuss here. He explains this sentiment further elsewhere, which by all accounts he held true to:

We must also remember, as Heidegger puts it, that the essence of man is in his existence and not in ‘another world’. It is here and now that we play with our destiny, right up until the final second. And this final second has every bit as much importance as the life which precedes it. We must then be entirely ourselves just up to this last moment. And it is in deciding this, in wishing directly your own destiny, that you vanquish the abyss. We cannot escape the requirement: we have only this one life, a life in which it falls to us to be entirely ourselves, or be nothing.

—Venner, La manif du 26 mai et Heidegger

Now I know why the ancients were not gripped by the terror of death as we are. Now I know why they buried their cherished greats in towering earthen mounds, where the living situated themselves between their buried ancestors below and the blazing moons above to receive wise council and to dance with gods. Now I know why the straight-tied victors at Nuremburg decided to gather the ashes of the executed into a single heap, and scattered them in an unknown ditch so that no future pilgrims could come to honor them.

When one drags his fingers across the faintly-chiseled names of eroding tombstones, he may reflect upon the necessity of the sting that brought forth the new sprout such as he, and how immortality is conferred only through death. Here we may consider an attempt to unravel the mysteries of Eleusinian rites, where a perfect ear of corn is harvested and processed from Athens to Eleusis. Initiates flocked to this procession along the road, seeking the immortality so strangely symbolized by a grain that had already begun to wither. In the Telesterium of Eleusis, initiates are said to have descended into the realm of Hades himself, where a hierophant forced them to witness a number of certain “hardships”. One such experience may have been the revealing of that ear of perfect corn, surely by now rotten and succumbed to mold, which was then cut in half as part of a dramatic sacrifice. The initiated, now having rehearsed death, return home with a full understanding of it—and with that, a full understanding of immortality. Now the Earth would go still for the winter, Persephone slumbers in the underworld as bargained, but soon to herald the promised bursting of new life.

No, the graveyard is a site of life. The graveyard is the place not of the dead or of the “departed”, but of the immortal and ever-present. The dead are not so indescribably distant but here, beneath our feet, within the rhythms of physical life and imbued within the flesh and memory of their progeny—us! It is here we may wish to be possessed by the image of our ancestors who act upon us in this eternal moment of the present.

Prevaricating, still.

One day I will have a tomb of my own, be it a concealed ditch or a grand mausoleum. I can only hope that it will be a place that is distinguished and identifiable, where descendants and initiates alike may flock to commune with me. May they situate themselves between my bones and the gods as others have done before. If I am so lucky for any of this—and indeed many of us will serve more silent and passive roles in this procession than others. In my summer I look onwards to winter, where I find myself at the call to retire. May it be a graceful bow, and may the next set of performers keep me well in mind and body, as my sinking-in forever stamps its mark onto the eternal now.

In a closing remark, allow me to quell the apparent narcissism in what I have said thus far. There is a scene from Philip Glass’s opera Akhnaten that I have come to adore and embody, though I am unsure if it is a message which was consciously put forth. The great pharaoh Amenhotep III has just died, and his spirit looks on as his body is embalmed, wrapped, and placed into a sarcophagus during a magnificent ceremony. His consort takes his heart, cut freshly from his cold chest, and places it upon the scale—light as a feather. No time is wasted, and his son Akhnaten is coronated as the new pharaoh, father still watching. Yet it is at this point where his son decides to abandon his father’s path, declaring for the first time in recorded history a monotheistic cult, devoted to the sun-god Aten. In this moment of the opera, which acts-out the famed Window of Appearances, the spirit of Amenhotep does not haunt or shout. He lowers to his knees and genuflects before the living body of his son, who now alone bears the god-king’s torch.

There is a way to harmonize the conceptions of ancestor worship and the dead prostrating before the living, as I have alluded, but I wish this to be an exercise left to the reader. Let that be this article’s lesser mystery. To my end I will carry this little gnosis, hoping it to be more noble than the prevailing sentiments of today—of hatred of life and fear of death.

Michel Houellebecq has always possessed a gift for presenting the absurd realities of modern life in the West in satirical prose. It might even be incorrect to call his stories satire as such, as they are—grimly—too close to the real world for us to be able to tell the difference. Maybe that is just the mark of an exceptional satirist. A perfect representative of this talent is his 2001 novel Platform, which follows the Parisian Michel Renault as he blows his father’s inheritance on sex tourism in Thailand after he is killed by a Muslim foreigner. He falls for a woman there, and offers to help her failing tourism business by making “Aphrodite Club” escapades as part of the vacations her business offers. The plan goes swimmingly, with Westerners scrambling to experience these glorified brothels, until a Muslim terrorist attack ends their enterprise, her life, and the novel. As one review cleverly put it, it is a novel that “plunges the reader into a moral universe where normal people feel sick, and sick people feel normal”. There is the encapsulation of contemporary woe.

Houellebecq’s novels almost universally contain a loathing of modern sexual attitudes and habits, and Platform is no different. Sex is everywhere throughout the events of the novel, and every character is described in some sexual act or context. Yet very few of the characters involved can ever be said to even enjoy true romance. It is even more bleak for the young Asian women who serve as the “meat” for this industry, who much like the rest of the developing world’s attitude towards production, trade their youthful and natural beauty for the speculatively-valued fiat bills of gluttoned “investors”. They do not mind the arrangement, and the tourists are not burdened in conscience by the implicit exploitation. All sex and all tourism is just exploitation—how was your one-off Tinder dinner-and-fuck any different than hiring a prostitute? Sex is just a part of life, or rather now a life-less and thoughtless rehearsal of it, and in the novel this malaise guised as a vacation package is in fact the only possible conclusion of modernity in regards to sexuality. In a world absent of transcendental values (or even immanent values), occupying oneself with such “motions” is the only lifeline between man and a longing to be killed.

Suggestions have been made that we are inching ever closer to the carnal debauchery of the Weimar Republic, and on some days it is difficult to find a way to disagree with the sentiment. It is not merely the “demonic” nature of it all that is such an affront, but how bizarre it is, these “motions” the masses—we—occupy ourselves with. There is no need to kickstart anyone’s memory here, we all have a few images seared firmly within our skulls. Mine just happens to be an obese latinx doing cartwheels at a family-friendly drag show, OK? Moving on from this. The common assertion today, in response to a world where streets are littered with pamphlets to LGBT-friendly Aphrodite Clubs down the block, is that matters of sexuality have gotten completely out of control… so perverse and so unimaginably ill, that only the cleansing fire of Cotton Mather can save us now.

The reaction is only natural. Disgust is natural, and here it is more than appropriate. Something has happened, and we are left with Renault’s world where love seems impossible. However, it is an incorrect diagnosis which in a strange way does not treat the disease with the level of contempt and sadness it truly deserves in the deepest cultural and spiritual senses, well beyond the mass-distribution of studies plotting a linear regression between porn consumption and erectile disfunction. We risk prescribing an adult circumcision for a metastasizing ass-cancer here, the blind but energetic return to the pulpit and the Good Book placed upon it to rewind us back to when these ills did not exist, whenever or wherever that was the case.

Enter such would-be doctors, who I have taken to labeling as the “Youth Pastor Right”. We all have fond memories of these well-meaning but utterly unimpressive stewards of Sunday morality, who were always sure to remind you of the demonic trappings of Avenged Sevenfold and amethyst crystal bracelets. For the most part they were normal people, but the archetype they took on—instructed to do so by more senior “Brothers”—was nothing short of an overbearing harridan. Perhaps they were truly embodied by the Holy Ghost of the jealous god, seeing as how every guidance or tutoring came in the form of a “thou shalt not”, only with a meek passive-aggressiveness unknown to the Almighty but intrinsic to the suburban expiring bachelor. I liked my youth pastors despite this, really, we had great conversations with them, my family and I, on our Saturday porch as they inquired if we would be taking the church bus tomorrow. Those meetings ended after they ran over my dog in my driveway on the way out. Anyways. I now assume your familiarity with this archetype.

The political right has no shortage of these youth pastors, identifying when the culture strays too far from the comforts of Vacation Bible School. They operate in the same ways and take on the same mission as actual youth pastors, seeing themselves as intertwined cultural and moral shepherds for the young. It just happens that our youth pastors are reading Sam Francis and de Maistre, learned a thing or two about the Jews from Dostoevsky. They identify a number of demons they wish to exorcise in this holy “culture war”: public secularism, abortion/IVF, UFOs and the CIA,—paganism!—which they are currently identifying as Beyonce’s “black girl magic” (see page 38 of Lucas Miles of TPUSA's Pagan Threat for proof I am not making a snide fantasy here). Yet the bulk of this opposition, this natural disgust, is directed invariably against the accusation of hedonism.

“These days openness about sex has gone too far”, you were once asked on that silly astrology called a Political Compass quiz—strongly agree! How could you not? Somewhere in the West there are two faggots blowing each other off on the street while children watch from the windows above, if not right now, then certainly when the Harvey Milk NGOs set out in June. I have seen women offer themselves up for the aforementioned exploitation, with increasingly creative and demeaning ways to be paid for it. Everyone is watching porn. I’ve been personally asked to stop posting images of transgender surgeries on minors where a patch of flesh is sewn on to a little girl’s crotch to simulate the weight and presence of a penis, so I won’t do that here. This is clearly the most sex-obsessed, most perverted people to ever exist and it is time to throw mankind in a mass nunnery until it comes back to its senses, yes?

Upon closer inspection, no, it is in a way worse than that. “Were it so easy”, Keith David once said. We do not have a hypersexualized, Bohemian culture of hedonism where men and women appear too intoxicated by the flower of Spring to participate in society at all. As a matter of fact, we exist in perhaps the most utterly asexual or even anti-sexual culture that has ever existed, in which every drive or instinct related to natural sexual behavior is pressed and winched out its rightful existence. Imagery of nudist protests, puff pieces for “sex workers”, or homosexual & transsexual instruction manuals for children only depict the darker, perverted side of our illness. If Dionysus walks this Earth, he has assuredly been wired to an IV pole in a Toronto MAID ward.

It would be preferable in a sense to have the hypersexualized culture that critics paint with superlatives, but we have only a culture which pretends to be sexual in any true sense. I should remind you, the same culture which parades fat retards in dog collars and gimp suits on Main Street is the same one that throws 20 year old men in jail for brushing a woman's hip without a notarized affidavit. As D.H. Lawrence put it, these perversions of a genuine, life-affirming sexuality are “the secondary life of the circus dog, acting up and showing off: and then collapsing.” Pornography, hook-ups, gay marriage laws, men in dresses… none of these things have anything to do with “an overabundance of sexuality”; this is a category of counterfeit expressions of something that has been taken from humanity and forgotten—mental illnesses aside. “Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself”, a prophet once said; I see no reason to exclude sexuality from this metaphor. To reframe the problem more simply, we do not have an overabundance of sexuality but have forgotten what is even “sexuality” in the first place.

Gen Z is far and beyond the most underfucked generation to live today. In 1989, the percent of Americans under 30 who remained virgins stood at 10% for women and 7% for men. Today that figure stands at 17% for women, and 27% for men. Twenty-seven percent!—and that was before COVID. Perhaps this is the result of a pervasive trend to limit and punish genuine sexual activity at every turn, from both the demands of a new feminism and the catechism of an old order. Every sexual interaction and theme must first be parsed through a bureaucratic checklist which seems constructed explicitly to debase it into an inauthentic, pathetic mating ritual fit. Only here can we find the dual-absurdity of a culture that is plastered with the technological litter of dating and hook-up apps, which promote short meetings that can be revoked of one’s consent after-the-fact and entered into criminal proceedings! What we have is almost the precise inverse of what is meant by the charge of “hedonism”, ours is a culture which utterly stifles any true expression of love or sexuality as discomforting and “weird”. If there is anything today’s masses hate, it is the shattering of aloofness by the hands of raw sincerity. That diagnosis alone is enough to tell you we do not have a society overrun by animalistic passion. More accurately it’s just sick, if not dead entirely, and completely afraid to live for itself. That’s not hedonism, that’s nothing, that’s illness.

This brings us back to the youth pastors. Their syllogism is natural and simple: too much sexuality, do less of it. No more grinding in the club. Cover yourself modestly. Delete the apps and go to church. Once all of this nonsense about “sexual drive” is bottled back up and we complete our puff-chested condemnation of “horniness”, then we can get back to raising the fertility rate and buying our wives sundresses and books on Hügelkultur. Even for what is seen in Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body as the most liberal, or rather life-affirming stance on sexuality Christendom has begrudgingly managed, we are still instructed to never “desire”—for to desire one is to dehumanize them!—and elsewhere firmly reminds us to avoid a practice of natural family planning which results in the “lowering the number of births in their family below the morally correct level.” That is their Final Solution to the OnlyFans question. As a result, this reaction removes all matters of sexuality from the private and public alike in an over-zealous quarantine, incinerating the leprous and the immunized all together. What little can be said about this regrettable—sinful!—act of concupiscence driven by our animal bodies is that it may come with the gift of family and children. It is a reaction which bowdlerizes the vitality of antiquity with the placement of a fig leaf upon the body, mandated by the priest to not “excite one's lust”. It is an awful silence over all of these matters held into strict compliance by the Panopticon of a youth pastor's ire. It is an assault on life and the body itself, despised and feared by the mind as but a rebellious stumbling block—such is the root of all conceptions of “obscenity”.

The youth pastor embodies that mocked character of Lawrence's in Clifford Chatterley, the astute, well-mannered, morally upright entrepreneur and family man who is bound to a wheelchair from his soldiering. Despite all of his quality, he is sexually impotent. He doesn't know how to be a man in the body, outside of his social and financial duties. He doesn't know woman-in-the-body either, outside of her duty to be a wife and provide children. Thus, his wife finds ecstasy in being plowed in the woods by a different man who does, and Clifford finds himself sobbing in the breasts of his elderly Magna Mater caretaker. An important warning here, but the youth pastors of Lawrence's time kept this book censored for decades. When the youth pastor finds himself pressed between the breasts of a scolding and commanding Mater such as Mrs. Bolton, they conclude rather immediately yet shallowly that the proximity of the breasts is the problem. They have not assessed that the reason why this situation ever came about in the first place was actually a complete collapse of sexuality, the real thing.

One good example of how these White Shariah calls to prayer can become entirely counterproductive is the obsessive tendency to render all of sexuality down to the “act of procreation”. Just the other week, one article here titled (slightly erroneously) Your Marriage Does Not Need Sex espouses this rather explicitly in stating, “procreative intent, not emotional craving, creates sexual intimacy”, and “men are buying [the lie] that men need sex”. Here, all of the passion of love, romance, and the bodily union at the heart of sexual emotion—all sexual emotion, even for animals, and therefore we can speak of this as a “metaphysical” concept if you’d like—is erased and squashed under the mere desire for a household. Not only will people never buy this, as it is contrary to good sense and mere service to eunuch “Patristics”, but it does not even address the idea of love to begin with. Rather, it sidesteps it as an uncomfortable and regrettable act of desiring at all—the original sin of concupiscence—that brings the joy of family into existence.

Klages in On Cosmogonic Eros prefaces the title’s use of that god's name instead of “love” through a weaving analysis of the numerous types of love, part of which gives us an interesting concept for the topic at hand. He makes note firstly of a distinction between an “inclination” (neigung), and a “drive” (trieb)—with an inclination assuming a passive, static preference for an object, and a drive assuming a non-negotiable motion towards an object. This is why, he says, we may speak of a “drive to revenge” (Rachetrieb), but never an “inclination to revenge” (Racheneigung). “Drive” may alternatively be interpreted as “instinct”, had it not lost its image of motion in the English tongue. From here, Klages gives us three distinct types of “driving love”: the drive to unity, the drive to devour, and the drive to sex. The unifying-drive is represented by the maternal instinct between her and her child, as the mother wishes for an inseparable unity with her child… separation inflicts physical pain upon her. The devouring-drive seeks a unity of its own, where one wholly consumes the object of love, hence its association with “the love of wine”. The sexual-drive, or Sexus, is the pure, bodily/animal instinct towards the sexual act itself.

It is here Klages is rather specific about something of great utility to our discussion: the sexual instinct is not the mere “drive to procreate”. The animal knows nothing of “procreation”, only his bodily craving to act in such regard. Worse, the confusion eliminates the sexual instinct entirely, replacing it with that maternal instinct that Lawrence made poor Clifford a victim of! This is a result of confusing real, natural drives with human, mental desires. He explains:

It would be a deliberate falsification to call it a “procreative drive”. Again, procreation is a possible consequence of sexual activity, but it does not lie as the goal in the experience of sexual excitement. The animal knows nothing about it, it is exclusive to man. Thus, it is not the animal in man that is driven to mating for reasons of procreation; rather it is his intellect which accompanies the actuation of the drive with the thought of procreation and with desires directed to it. […]

[S]ometimes, the male places his sexual drive in service of the interest of the preservation of the species, and this might be his “drive for procreation”. On the other hand, if a woman desires children, perhaps even a whole flock of them, then she has, as a rule, subordinated her sexual drive to her maternal drive, and this could be her “drive for procreation”, which therefore bears no resemblance to the male’s desires for the preservation of the species! This example shows irrefutably the abysses one get into when confusing real natural drives with human desires and thinks it to be permissible to deduce them from the imagined consequences of their activity.

—Klages, On Cosmogonic Eros (pp 12-13), trans. K.J. Elliott

It is here we begin our analysis as to what a healthy, natural “sexual drive” looks like, and how it operates within society. Firstly, the sexual drive is not a drive to procreation. Let this be a simple rule, and remember specifically that adopting such an equivocation completely subsumes the sexual instinct into something else entirely. We can expect nothing short of that result in a moral structure that insists upon the sexual instinct being beaten down within the confines of a woman’s ovulation window, tracked ever so neatly on a calendar app. Secondly, we see the perversion of involved in a more broad category of terms detailing sex as being a means to some other end: sex-worker, safe-sex, sex-education, sex-tourism, sex-therapy. The true nature and meaning of sexual instinct and activity is lost in each and all of these perversions. Genuine sexual intimacy can only be pursued for its own sake, otherwise it might as well not exist.

I must additionally be careful here and say that I am not advocating for the scornful tossing of wedding rings into the Seine in order to bury an antiquated institution, or anything of this sort. We are navigating between two absurd and ridiculous extremes at the present. How stupid are we as a people to find ourselves stuck with either divorced eunuchs or OnlyFans subscriptions? Do you see that genuine, personal intimacy driven by and from the body is utterly lacking in either case? Marriage, like procreation, is not the driving force in of itself but a culmination of the sexual drive… Lawrence referred to intercourse as “the blood-marriage” for a reason, implying that through this intimacy a sort of marriage is already completed, a union between two bodies. Marriage today is merely the State certifying what the mind has learned from the body, at least in the ideal case. For most normal people it will never be dignified to that level.

I do not know what a truly, purely, hedonistic society would look like—one that exists only to satisfy and pleasure itself—but surely it is preferable to the laughable psychosis that we have today. I have a Turkish friend who once remarked to me that he spent “all of the Summer of 2019” prowling the streets of İzmir performing mouth-sodomy on unsuspecting women, and while I was fiercely critical of his decision to not wait for cooler weather I can pronounce a level of preference for this over the muted asexual-fertility of today’s deacons… at least here the body is heeded for its wise council, and the instinct is obeyed.

So no, I am not going to shout at women to cover their breasts on the street and work diligently to get the prostitutes back into the pews. I am not going to submit to the shrieking performances of youth pastors who seek only to wage their own little Holy War against life itself. We have enough of this already today, do we not? We must cease striking poses and making performances for such things. The bureaucratic mind has tyrannized the body on this issue more than any other, and both have suffered from the disunion. I am interested only in the self-realization of man as the animal, the self-realization of woman as the animal, and the passionate and bursting clash of two unstoppable forces that inevitably comes as a result. The beauty of this should be celebrated in ways that make sense, not locked away in fear of “demons”. Only when this is allowed to flourish again can we even begin to speak of how best to organize society around the realities of human nature.

The youth pastors will fight this to the knife as they do with every other issue. It would not be the first time this inability to see the world for what it is or do anything about it other than appealing to this-or-that portion of Deuteronomy has only harmed the cultural and political momentum of the right. (You may notice that the right-vanguard in France or Germany doesn’t seem to have these issues.) Their job is not to push you through to an ideal victory, but to glue you to the floorboard and pray that Progress doesn’t have its way with you. Again, a noble intention, but on this charge of “hedonism” particularly this group is offering itself nothing but a laundry list of performative nonsense that seeks only to validate its own cultural presence—something it craves today more deeply than anything else. It must be recognized that there are more possibilities beyond what is presented as merely inside the church and outside of it, both for this issue and all others of this nature.

The problem is far darker than any imagery of “mass demonic possession” can ever illustrate, at least here it can be said that people are frenzied by some forcible compulsion. People today are nothing, they feel nothing, they are anhedonic above everything else. The solution is therefore not a further assault on the body and its drives, but an exuberant ignition of it and its passions. Knowing what that is, then we may one day begin to negotiate with it.

The boy lay tossing on his bed, and thought of the stranger and his talk. “It is not the treasures,” he said to himself, “that have stirred in me such an unspeakable longing; I care not for wealth and riches. But that blue flower I do long to see; it haunts me and I can think and dream of nothing else.”

—Novalis, A Romance: Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802)

There are a number of aspects that serve as delineations between pagan and Christian religiosity, of which are endlessly litigated in terms of their perceived and actual significance. The life-affirming and life-rejecting dialectic, revealed orthodoxy against experienced phenomena, or a universalist versus tribalist ethos. Much can be said about the success and failures of these criteria to accurately describe the sheer alienness of one worldview against the other. One distinction stands out above all of the others as possessing a certain level of bite that is undeniable to either side: fate.

Christian man has all but destroyed the concept of fate, labeling it a fancy of various misunderstandings of causality; and worse, the rejection of human moral agency. Fate was cast to the street and replaced with “Providence” by Aquinas, describing it as not a tragic fact of life but as—merely—the manner in which secondary causes proceed from the First. With this unraveling of the fetters of old covenants came the supremacy of the human individual and his will, along with all of the “fallen” nature entailed. Yet the transformation was complete: few today believe in fate as such, transgressing little further than Aquinas’ description of causality. Not even the most ardent of defenders in the doctrine of “predestination” are careless enough to confuse fate for God. The result is our common conception of religiosity: there is man and his foolish and heroic acts, and above patiently and curiously observes the Lord, ordaining a will of his own.

For the heathen, fate is the singular law which binds all of reality to its snare. It is known by many names in many cultures: the Moirai of the tragic Greek; the Parcae of the ever-pressing Roman; Belisama of the terrifying and mystic Celt; wyrd and the Norns of the icy-veined Teuton. Fate was not only a law laid down upon man by the gods, most principally Zeus and Wotan, but something the gods themselves were subject to. Aeschylus tells us in Prometheus Bound, “Even he (Zeus) cannot escape what is foretold.” Wotan is told of his coming and inescapable doom by a volva, and fetters himself to the world-tree to unlock the mystery of the runes; Prometheus is chained as punishment for his violation of divine order, and the Moirai spin and weave threads of cloth which ensnare the whole of existence. So too was this imagery of binding adopted in a literal sense among the rituals of pre-Christian peoples, exemplified best by the the Semnones according Tacitus, who describes a sacred grove of which no man may enter, “unless he is bound with a cord, by which he acknowledges his own inferiority and the power of the deity.” In contrast with the Christian worldview of free agency and an looming God above, the pagan worldview recognizes the futility of resisting one’s ordained nature and end. He willingly submits to it, as his gods have set a wise example of such.

There is an apparent, curious, contradiction upon the face of pre-Christian attitudes towards fate and free will. On one hand it presents a reality where inescapable destiny rules all affairs—not even the gods can escape their coming Twilight. On the other hand, it illustrates a world of powerful heroes and the actions of truly great people, each striving towards beauty, towards perfection, and towards excellence.

We can point to no greater example of this dilemma than that of Achilles himself. The literary device of “the choice of Achilles” has fascinated and granted great meaning to men for millennia, from Homer himself, to the Roman poet Horace, to Goethe, to Spengler, and finally with Mishima: shall this warrior-king of Phthia stay in his fertile land of the Spercheios, ending his long life surrounded by his well-reared descendants… or shall he don the burden of immortality, to leave behind the Argos Pelasgikon and land fifty ships of Myrmidons upon the shores of mighty Troy, never to return? He is given a clear choice in the matter—his agency is in fact meaningful—and yet, his tragic and glorious fate has already been settled. Achilles is a doomed man; he is reminded of such constantly, and it weighs heavily upon his conscience throughout his story.

What can be said of this? The reader must forgive me for skipping over nearly 2,700 years of fair answers to what I believe is most succinct, from the hearts of Germans who were seized by the phantasmal image of the hot bronze and windy seas of heroic Aegea. The Romantic poet Novalis is quoted in his unfinished revival of the legend of the Sängerkrieg, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, with the following: “I often feel, and ever more deeply I realize, that Fate and character are the same conception”. Or, more simply, “Character is fate”—a nearly identical revival of the wisdom of Heraclitus, “ethos anthropo daimon” (ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων). We see now more clearly how it can be said that a god, pure of its own essential character, can be ensnared by the loom of fate!

Achilles was offered a choice, as we all are in this life of an infinite series of such choices, significant or not. Yet Achilles was still Achilles, bound by his imprinted constitution, the fact of how “my native land has breathed upon me my earliest thoughts and imperishable colors”, as Novalis says before. Ergo, there is no reality where he elects to stay in his homeland, lest he not be Achilles! Choices are made upon us in our birth and rearing which determine our own, which set us upon paths were we react yet more predictably. I do not consider this slavery, for it is simply character. I am I, and if I were not, I would not be. This is an entirely different conception than the ones echoed today by vague sentiments of “the accidents of one’s birth”. I assure you it was no accident—no other reality could exist but it. Perhaps this is what Pindar meant through that oft-quoted line, “Become such as you are, having learned what that is”.

Novalis gifted the Romantic movement with its most cherished symbol through Ofterdingen, the blue flower, an image of the longing desire for the fundamentally unattainable. The association of the blue flower with fate is redoubled by the irony that Ofterdingen was never completed, with Novalis dying of tuberculosis at just 28 years old. In the fragments which he blessed us with while living, he illustrates the dream of a young boy (perhaps a dream of his own), of an overflowing bower in the center of which stands a tall, singular, light-blue flower. He is ensnared by it, desiring it, approaching… and then wakes. Novalis had much planned for this little flower which haunted his nights, intending to use it as both an impetus for romance, the relationship between poets and poetry, and the tragedy of life itself. Much is evident from the following note of his, which aimed to remind him of his story’s outline:

He soon reaches that wonderful land in which air and water, flowers and animals, differ entirely from those of earthly nature. The poem at the same time changes in many places to a play. Men, beasts, plants, stones and stars, the elements, sounds, colors, meet like one family, act and converse like one race. Flowers and brutes converge concerning men. The world of fable is again visible; the real world is itself regarded as a fable. He finds the blue flower; it is Matilda, who sleeps and [soon succumbs to illness]. A little girl, their child, sits by the coffin, and renews his youth. This child is the primeval world, the close of the golden time. Here the Christian religion is reconciled with the Heathen. The history of Orpheus, of Psyche, and others are sung.

Heinrich was fated to hold the blue flower for but a moment until it vanished in an event of unspeakable tragedy, so goes the unfinished work of an author who succumbed to such a sorrowful fate as his own. Why, at all, do we then strive towards the unattainable? It is not possible, fruitless and pointless, non Plus Ultra. Yet we persist—why, what is the point? For the Christian this is relatively simple to answer, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible” (Mt 19:26) as they are told in scripture, and the equation is similarly proofed through the blood-purchased promise of eternal life. Matilda, Novalis—they go to God. Where they do employ a sentimentality towards fate or “predestination”, it is shrouded in purely negative language, of “fear and trembling” (Ph 2:12, or Kierkegaard…), best exemplified by the fire and brimstone of later theologians. But for pre-Christian man, believing in no such thing, the worldview requires a different explanation. What existed was not a loathing and fear of fate, a hatred of the gods-who-bind and of the fates-who-weave, but rather a strangely exuberant joy and love of fate: amor fati.

Much has already been said elsewhere of the connection between Nietzsche and the Stoics, who have plenty to disagree upon, but here find themselves in harmony. It is the Emperor Aurelius who says, “The earth loves the shower; the solemn ether loves; and the universe loves to make whatever is about to be. I say then to the universe, that I love as you love.” Yet we must go further in recalling the fact that the worldview of ancient peoples, their obsession with warrior-heroism and the meaning of life itself, utterly depended upon the confines of fate. The Indo-European mythological frame entails the limitations of man in a juxtaposition with the loftiness of his gods, where there exists a Sturm und Drang with destiny in which it is laughed at in a strange reverence. It is what Goethe saves his Faust with, striving (Streben), the striving and toiling of life itself in which man “raises himself Godwards”. With one cheek he mocks fate; the turn of the other reveals a warm and playful welcoming of it. In this way man participates in the divine order, in the order of both himself and of the world, of which the tragedy of all of existence is certain:

Stronger, greater, deeper than all merely human tragedy is the tragedy of reality itself, according to which the following belong inseparably together: the perfection of life in the form of exuberant beauty, its flaming up in intoxicating bliss, its image-producing torrent and in the inexorable fate on which all life inevitably founders. After its pleasurable lusts have sounded their flute, there finally follows eternal silence.

—Ludwig Klages, Man and Earth (1913)

How can one defy what he embraces? This is the essential paradox, the essential struggle, of existence; it is the deliberate and constitutive essence of what it means to strive towards excellence (ἀρετή). Put it another way: what could be said of Achilles had he been completely unaware of the possibility of his doom, that what awaited at the end of his causal chain could have been an equally plausible end of vast riches and concubines, where he achieves both renown and a vast progeny? It is precisely that Achilles proceeded despite the knowledge of his fate which provides us with the template of excellence, where upon his “tragic moment” of death his life, his immortality, is fulfilled. This is but a counterfactual in the deepest violative sense: were he to act any other way, he would violate the very “spun and woven cloth” which defines his character, that is, his fate! Indeed, a true acceptance of one’s daimon can only result in both his creation and his destruction. Ergo, the Dionysian “Yes!” is born.

Above all else, the search for the Blue Flower is a search for the poetry of life—the identification of life as poetry, particularly from the perspective of the poet himself. It is an elusive thing, indescribable, only felt for the briefest moment—and then gone. It is the occupation of the artist who loves he destroys and destroys what he loves in his fleeting attempt to grasp and enslave what has enraptured his soul. Try as we may to pluck this flower from its fertile ground, though we may succeed for but a moment, this possession shall vanish. Yet in this death resides the mystical flourishing of the immortality of life. As Klages reflects upon the Eleusinian Mysteries and its harvests of grain:

Certainly it was not the immortality of ‘his’ body, of ‘his’ soul, or any thing or any other being that he would have been able to call ‘his own’; for, by contrast, it would have become clear to him, if he had previously been in any doubt, that such things will without exception irrevocably disappear. For this ear of corn will definitely wilt and die; indeed, as grown up and gathered in, it is already doomed to decline: a painful emblem of that state of having been, back into which everything in the present is destined inexorably to sink. Yet out of the transitoriness of this ear of corn and, in fact, reaffirmed by it there arises, shining and deathless, the primordial image of the ear of corn; a symbol of the eternity of the living renewal of each vital form in the womb of the Mater!

—Sämlitche Werks II, p. 1412. Trans. Paul Bishop

Fate, indeed, graciously presents us with a choice between two: to go happily as a dog leashed to a moving cart, or lash and bark as we are helplessly dragged along gravel as Chrysippus once told us. To die in fear and trembling, or to embody that nameless guard at Pompeii since-deified by Spengler:

We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be noble. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.

—Man and Technics (1931)

American politics has probably never changed so radically in its history as it has in these last ten years. After decades of mass migration, the unraveling of social cohesion, and the uncontested hegemony of leftist institutions, every point of what was once sacral and untouchable policy is now under ruthless criticism: all is up for liquidation.

The spearhead of this transformation is the return of a once-expunged form of American conservatism. This worldview of nationalism, isolationism, protectionist trade, and unilateral action against global institutions goes under many names, but most today would recognize it as America First. Originally derived from the same slate of policy in the interwar period of American politics, it experienced a rejuvenation first at the helm of Pat Buchanan, and later enshrined as the dominant political ideology of the country by President Trump. As much as the president is owed for this act of necromancy, this worldview had been bubbling in the currents of American society for quite some time as the inclinations of a global neoliberal consensus drained the interior of the nation. The two fangs of mass migration and globalism destroyed the economic and social wellbeing of the common American, particularly for younger generations, and he searched endlessly for an alternative.

The issue of foreign influence is central to this rejuvenated conception of America First politics. Nationalism, isolationism, and protectionism are diminished by the presence of foreign influence: one cannot be nationalist if he puts the interests of other nations above and before his own, he cannot be isolationist if he is constantly dragged into wars on behalf of foreign powers, and he will struggle to maintain his economic and diplomatic freedom if he is intertwined with the sanctions and deals of other nations. The opposition to foreign influence is clearly necessary and vital to the aims and identity of this movement.

This inevitably brought forth a fissure within the new Republican coalition over nationalist principles and obligations to longstanding allies and diplomatic pacts. Realignments and reforms within the diplomatic landscape has remained a key focus for the first and second Trump administration, and one only has to look at NATO’s evolution within the last decade as evidence. Yet as it pertains to foreign nations which reciprocate influence back into our own, few countries can claim to exert a level of influence over America’s foreign policy at a level accomplished by Israel, and certainly none relative to their size. Israel and Israeli-affiliated lobbying, fundraising, and media efforts has remained a perennial force within the US’s domestic political landscape, something which can be said of few other nations.

Our country developed an early consciousness of this in 2007, following the publishing of Mearsheimer and Walt’s still-controversial The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, a book which argues that “No lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical". It correctly identifies the American presence in various Middle Eastern proxy wars—particularly in Lebanon, Iran, and Syria—as part of a Gordian knot of relationships that Israel intended to cut apart in order to diminish Hezbollah’s influence in Palestine. The authors also note that at the onset of America’s involvement in the Middle East following 9/11, Bush intended to end the Israeli matter with a Two-State Solution and undercut Islamic radicalism across the region. The Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, immediately called a fifth column of several Jewish-American leaders in the country, asking for their advocacy to curate an understanding that America’s War on Terror was identical with Israel’s. By the end of it, the Bush Administration was entirely aligned with Israel on matters in the Middle East. Two decades of wars followed.

We as Americans have over time become accustomed and in a way immunized to this bizarre level of foreign influence over our affairs. No other country has been allowed to deliver an address to Congress than Israel: nine times since 1976, four of whom were delivered by Benjamin Netanyahu, another record. Americans may wonder what is so special about this alliance that demands such a continued level of attention, far and above what was given to the Queen of the British Commonwealth or Pontifex of the Catholic Church. Each year Americans see yet another ignition of arms in the region, with another plea for assistance and funding packages. Every election cycle we are forced to answer donors which of the candidates are more zealously in love with this tiny strip of arid Democracy. Billions of dollars are injected into nearly all of our domestic affairs in service to this effort.

In turn, fatigue has set in, and a slogan of sorts has been adopted by many in the America First movement: “Israel First is America Last”. Certainly, as a country which places the demands of a foreign lobby above the interests of its own people is no country at all. America First cannot be properly understood without this generation’s reaction to foreign wars, of which many current administration members (including the Vice President) personally served in. But as it was in the 2024 election cycle, the concerns did not know where to smartly apply its strategic brakes, and where to orient themselves within a now-complicated political picture. The correct identification that Israel First equates to America Last has rendered into a perversion that Israel Last therefore equates to America First. The conclusion is that if America First is ever to be a reality, then Israel and its various sources of influence must be “dealt with” in severe terms.

Such a stance turns out to be a snake that eats its own tail, abandoning the very principles it set out to protect in the first place in a number of ways. Firstly, this approach entangles us in foreign relationships just as much as the other side of the coin had before. Just as reckless as the decision to take on a favored nation (such as Israel) is the decision to take on a disfavored nation, where opposition to this enemy is conflated with patriotism for the homeland. In his Farewell Address, George Washington reminds us of this fact that post-war consensus diplomacy has seemingly never recognized:

Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots, who may resist the intrigues of the favorite, are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people to surrender their interests.

—Washington's Farewell Address, pp. 20-21, September 1796

In an Israel Last context, decisions in which poor policy or political deafness are advocated are happily excused—so long as they are wrapped up in an appropriate amount of antipathy towards Israel. Exemplifying this are a number of, safe to say, questionable ideological alliances curated entirely upon the basis of anti-Israeli sentiments. Immediately, followers of this doctrine seek out the enemies of the disfavored nation for common cause. Given that Israel has long entrenched itself in Western alliances, its enemies are naturally found in the former Soviet blocs and various Islamic states throughout the Middle East. Soon enough, alliances and associations with communist and Islamic parties are discussed as an opportunity to achieve the one sought after goal of serving as an inconvenience to Israeli interests. The end result is the aptly-criticized label of Third Worldism: an allegiance to various peoples and worldviews alien to the West procured out of a frustration that similar allegiances could not be found organically within the West. In previous generations, such a continued effort would be met with accusations of treason, and I see no reason to exclude the possibility here.

In search of a clear example we can point directly to the ongoing campaign for New York City's mayor, where avowed Muslim, socialist, and immigrant Zohran Mamdani has a serious chance to secure rulership over our nation's largest city. His proposed policies—such as active resistance to deportation operations, offices and funding for transgender mental health, city-owned grocery stores, and the gutting of a “racist, anti-queer” NYPD—completely cement his platform as that of an archetypal “gay race communist”. Handing over New York City to such a platform is unthinkable to any on the right. That is, until he began to speak out against Israel:

“As mayor, New York City would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu. This is a city where our values are in line with international law.”

—Interview with Medhi Hasan on Zeteo, Dec 5, 2024

Despite all of the hell that would be unleashed on NYC, despite what legitimizing this worldview on the altar of this city would do to Western politics at large, the fact that Mamdani could pose as the slightest inconvenience to Israel and Israeli interests is worth any price. As a consequence, we have seen several people come out in support of Mamdani precisely upon this singular, anti-Israeli premise. In doing so, Israel-Last proponents either consciously or subconsciously form alliances with explicitly anti-American and anti-White elements from around the world.

It is a little easier to see something as absurdly treasonous as this proposed sacrifice when you learn that these elements on “the right” have already made their bed with several anti-American elements, specifically Muslim foreigners, specifically on this gamble that legitimizing and enfranchising them in American politics would necessarily lead to the deterioration of Israeli influences. Many of them are themselves Islamists and foreigners, and indeed much of the phenomenon is explained by this. But for the ostensibly White “Christian Nationalist” type, for years they have entertained the possibility of a “Muslim-Christian alliance”, where the two team up politically with the specific goal of anti-Israeli action in mind.

It is good political wisdom in a general sense to understand that even the most pragmatic of coalitions come with costs, and to embark on an effort to fully understand the intentions of prospective allies before forming them in the first place. The America First objection to foreign influence should begin internally, with uniquely American objections to the relationship, which do not rely upon a paradoxical “alliance” with leftist and anti-American forces. It must be understood that a large sum of the global reaction to Israel’s actions is interpreted in an anti-colonial lense, where it exists merely as another tentacle of US and British imperialism. Indeed, it was not “the groypers” or Thomas Massie who formed the Reject AIPAC coalition to combat their influence in Congress, but a number of the largest and most prominent progressive organizations in the country—the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), IfNotNow, Working Families Party, and Justice Democrats to name a few.

The end result is obvious, as it is currently being manifested in the election of Mamdani: the enshrinement of explicitly anti-American ideologies within American society, helmed by a new class of affluent foreigners. With the “based!” (that is, performative) promise to imprison Benjamin Netanyahu and “get money out of politics” comes the rest of the anti-colonial project of which foreigners see anti-Israeli sentiments as but a tiny portion of: the complete dissolution of the West as it has historically existed, and the disenfranchisement of White Americans from their own nation and heritage.

This is the proverbial act of inviting a Vandal comites to deal with a pretender, with little plan for how to pay them or deal with their continued presence after the fact.

As it was foretold in older article:

Enter the final stage of festering rot: the total necrosis of one’s worldview. Individuals who amicably started off wanting to rid the West of (Jewish-promoted!) Marxism, remigrate (Jewish-imported!) invaders, and rid their homelands of (Jewish-funded!) foreign interests, have suddenly found themselves adopting Marxism, allying with invaders, and inviting foreign worldviews to replace the native liberalism of the West.

This is but a short list of examples of how the Israel Last worldview operates and suffers as a form of ideological cancer. It sets out with noble intentions, growth for the assumed benefits of growth. But without measures to direct and control this intention, it quickly develops into a tumor—harmful to the very body it set out to proliferate. Israel Last can never be confused for a genuine America First, however blurred the lines between them may appear.

America First operates on the principle that whatever generates the most long-term benefit to the American people is to be pursued as official policy. To what extent a foreign power benefits is irrelevant, so long as it understands the difference between a remora and a tick. Yet, for many, this is insufficient. As Washington had predicted, it soon becomes an indictment on one's patriotism if he does not take an aggressive enough stance against the foe. Indeed, we can be sure to receive some of these allegations in response to this article particularly.

The Israel Lobby is absolutely a problem—any foreign lobby that matter. The idea that we should tolerate a 5th Column of dual-citizens running the halls of Congress to direct our nation towards the ends of a foreign nation is completely antithetical to the principles of America First. But the agreement between these two worldviews ends here. There are far worse fates than the status quo, and an overemphasis towards a worldview that metastasizes into Israel Last threatens to bring many of them into existence, all to be in service to a narrow-minded ideological ambition.

We have good options for medication on the table. We should at least entertain the idea of using them effectively before ingesting gallons of rat poison to rid the parasite, and along with it the entire body. America First is not Israel Last.

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Our previous article looked at the still-impactful writings of the enigmatic Englishman D.H. Lawrence. Remembered best for his writings on romance and sexuality, a closer analysis revealed a deep reverence for ancient peoples and a burning pagan soul. This article will cover the forgotten Ludwig Klages, whose philosophy of life may be one of the most important body of works to be lost to the 20th Century.

My God, what is Klages actually? In the end, just a man with a mad and wonderful mind that captivated us all. But where does he take us?

—Diary of Franziska zu Reventlow, “The Bohemian Countess”

“We might well call Klages the most significant restorer of polytheism since Julian”, says Dr. Paul Bishop, one of Klages’ modern translators and author of Ludwig Klages and the Philosophy of Life: A Vitalist Toolkit. Not Nietzsche, not Heidegger, Wittgenstein, nor the Huxleys. Such a claim beckons us to pay attention, not to mention two nominations for a Nobel Prize in Literature and a Goethe Medal for Art and Sciences in 1932. Germany knows him as a priest for life itself, a faithful inheritor of the Lebensphilosophie of Goethe and Nietzsche—and perhaps its capstone. If only any of us in this distant Anglophone world had the slightest clue to who this Klages figure was to begin with! Indeed, despite his heroic status in the German world, here in the realm of Britannia and all of her daughters he remains an essentially unknown figure. Most of his works remain untranslated and completely inaccessible to the English reader, aside from a handful of excerpts, aphorisms, and short books which touch upon his worldview without much explanation or introduction.

Klages later in life once remarked he saw himself as “the most plundered author of the present age”, and it is not a claim without merit, nor was his boast to be the most original thinker of his time. If one has read Oswald Spengler1, Carl Jung, Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, Herman Hesse, Graf Keyserling, or Theodor Lessing, he has already been introduced to Klages in some fashion. Some of this list are thieves, others admirers, but all so typically unaware of the extent of the influence—tellingly, assuming what belonged to Klages was standard contemporary thought! Despite his renown in the early 20th, Klages has been unduly forgotten by this world, which stands against everything this great philosopher of life had orated. Here begins the effort to illustrate how tragic this fact is, and to remedy it where possible.

Let us begin with one interesting example from this list. Upon the banks of the mile-wide Zürichsee in Switzerland sat two modest homes in the early decades of the 20th Century; on the west bank in Kilchberg resided Klages, and across from him on the east bank in Küsnacht resided one Carl Gustav Jung—a name which needs little introduction. Curiously, the two never cooperated or much interacted, but were aware of each other and their work. Like Jung, Klages was something of a philosopher-psychologist, one who intertwined together various interests such as consciousness, life, the soul, ancients, ancestors… and gods. He was actively involved in the science of psychology, once referring to the concept of psychoanalysis as a “bizarre bastard”2, inferior to his own concept of characterology. Jung was well aware of Klages, even attesting to him by name in his now-famous essay Wotan:

The German youths who celebrated the solstice with sheep-sacrifices were not the first to hear a rustling in the primeval forest of the unconscious. They were anticipated by Nietzsche, Schuler, Stefan George, and Ludwig Klages. The literary tradition of the Rhineland and the country south of the Main has a classical stamp that cannot easily be got rid of; every interpretation of intoxication and exuberance is apt to be taken back to classical models, to Dionysus, to the puer aeternus and the cosmogonic Eros. No doubt it sounds better to academic ears to interpret these things as Dionysus, but Wotan might be a more correct interpretation. He is the god of storm and frenzy, the unleasher of passions and the lust of battle; moreover he is a superlative magician and artist in illusion who is versed in all secrets of an occult nature.

—C.G. Jung, Wotan (1936)3

Sheep-sacrifices upon the solstice? Dionysus and Wotan, the eternal boy and cosmogonic Eros? Would any of us expect to see such things in Germany in the decades preceding the Great War? Who is this man, and what exactly are we gazing upon here?

What will be illustrated here is, in what little can be said in a short article of this form, the reanimation of one of Germany’s best and most undeservedly forgotten thinkers.

One of Klages’ first works of literature was Man and Earth4, which was in actuality a written lecture. This was read aloud not in a university hall, but at the peak of the Hoher Meißner mountains in Hesse to a band of nationalist and Romantic youth leagues known as the Wandervogel, in 1913. This lecture, seemingly a perfect symbolization of this movement and Klages’ thought, was a viscous condemnation of modernity—particularly its notion of “progress”. This “progress” has fractured and paved over forests and refuges for highways and railroads, “progress” has marched forward with the extinction of countless species and ecosystems, “progress” has eliminated the national and bioregional cultures of the world, “progress” has abolished the existence of night in Germany’s cities, “progress” has reduced man to a hobbled technological and urban mass charted by its productivity.

Like an all-devouring conflagration, “progress” scours the Earth, and the place that has fallen to its flames, will flourish nevermore, so long as man still survives. The animal- and plant-species cannot renew themselves, man’s innate warmth of heart has gone, the inner springs that once nurtured the flourishing songs and sacred festivals are blocked, and there remains only a wretched and cold working day and the hollow show of noisy “entertainment.” There can be no doubt: we are living in the era of the decline [Untergangs] of the soul.

—Klages, Mensch und Erde (1913)

What is remarkable about this lecture is that while its initial impression is that a standard ecological or conservationist piece—lamenting the urbanization & technologization of mankind, resulting in the destruction of both him and the natural world—a closer inspection reveals the germination of Klages’ worldview which blended together mythology, Romanticism, psychology, and philosophy into a fundamentally unique metaphysical system. For Klages believed these issues were religious, to such a degree that the decayed religions of the day couldn’t capture. In fact, he shows no hesitation in blaming these dire straits chiefly upon the Christian religion, lamenting the destruction of ancients. He writes, ending with a quotation of Schiller’s Gods of Greece:

Capitalism, along with its pathfinder, science, is in point of fact the fulfillment of Christianity; the church, like science, constitutes a consortium of special interests; and the “one” that is addressed by a secularized morality is indistinguishable from the life-hostile “ego,” which, in the name of the unique godhead of the spirit — only now coupled with a blind cosmology — accounts for the war that has been waged against the innumerable, “many” gods of the world; earlier ages were at least more honest in their opposition to the cosmic deities, for they frankly approached the fray in the menacing aspect of judges.

Icy northern winds have gone

To devastate the blooms of May;

To make us worship only ONE,

A world of gods must fade away!

—ibid.

It is here we begin to see the center of Klages’ world view. We of contemporary society are familiar with philosophical strife involving some derivative of the old Cartesian mind-body dualism: mind and body, soul and material, natural and supernatural, science and metaphysics, man and animal, and on goes the list. But what Klages offers is a complete transcendence of this typical duality by offering up a whole that has been unduly splintered into warring factions—life itself. Klages instead details a polarity between life and the intellect, yes, life itself is elevated into its own metaphysical category, one which is supreme above all others! The intellect, unlike the “seat of the soul” and precious gift which elevated us above the animal as earlier thinkers had described it, was in fact the destroyer of soul, an antagonist from without that wages war upon body and soul alike. This structure is contained in Klages’ 1500-page long magnum opus Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele (1932), or The Spirit as Adversary of the Soul. Because of the book’s length, as well as the difficulty of Klages’ language and expressions, it has never been fully translated into English and likely, regrettably, never will be. Yet we can glean much from a selection of scholarly work, as well as a handful of brave individuals who translate sections for hobby alone.

Klages confusingly terms his metaphysical structure as the Pelasgian trinity, after the legendary ur-Greeks whom he saw as representative of his ideal, though it is more of a unified-polarity than a tripartite division of a whole. His “trinity” details a reality of polarized body and soul, which synthesize into the whole of life. Whereas the later Greeks developed a number of tripartite divisions of the soul which often put the logos or logistikon as its head, Klages instead presents the logos as an external enemy of the soul. The stress and tension between these two polarities—this sturm und drang—are two essential qualities of a unified whole, just as a sense of temperature is felt between hot and cold, or the seasons which oscillate between summer and winter. Break one off, and the unity of the whole is destroyed. It is precisely the intellect, the Geist, which exists to destroy this unity and experience of life:

Body and soul are poles of the life-cell which belong inseparably together, into which from outside the spirit, like a wedge, inserts itself, in the endeavor to split them apart, to ‘de-soul’ the body, to disembody the soul, and in this way finally to kill all the life it can reach. […] The soul is the transience of the body. […] As souls we are inescapably intertwined in what is essentially a fleeting reality, but as spirits we are based literally outside this reality, unable, even for the briefest moment, to merge with it!

—Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele (1932), excerpt translated by Paul Bishop in Ludwig Klages and the Philosophy of Life, A Vitalist Toolkit (2018)

Geist is the prevailing force which rules over our familiar day. In older days it was referred to pneuma, nous, or the logos; today we would simply refer to it as the rational mind. It is the force which destroys life through a relentless will-to-dominate, a drive towards a cold and aloof rationalism, the lie of “progress”, and the industry & technology it sires. A reader of Spengler may associate this with Faustian man, and a reader of Aristotle may interpret it as, the mind or intellect is something external to life—nous thurathen5—which invades, and adulterates, life.

More simply, we may say that Geist is the destroyer of life. Not just the internal meaning of life as experienced by man, but life itself, which Klages has uniquely elevated to the highest value.

What then is “life” and “Seele” to Klages? Life is not merely biological life, though certainly included. His was an ecological view of reality, which included within “life” not just wandering birds, mankind, or bacterial colonies, but also rocks, streams, sun, night, wind, and even space-time. Life is therefore the primordial, unconscious, and vital essence of existence. Seele, subtly different, is by no means meant to relate to our contemporary, Christian, understanding of a “soul” which inhabits and “gives life” to an entity (a contradiction in Klagesian terms!); rather it refers to the “identity” or “character” of an entity, so that we speak of “the soul of the city”, or “the soul of a nation”. More simply, life is the rhythm and flow of reality, while Seele is the identity or character of individual phenomena which drive life’s ceaseless animistic nature. Seele can be thought as an interpretation of the Greek psyche, and we can corroborate this association by the fact that Klages never referred to his psychology as “Psychologie”, but “Seelenkunde”!

Klages raises life to an absolute value. He hypostatizes it. There is no greater value than life, none that approaches it, none subordinate to it. He shares with the German romanticists their passionate devotion to intensity of living; as it was to them, life is festive to him, and he believes in honoring the feast of life by uninterrupted celebration.

He defines life as eternal flow, change, becoming, renewal, chaos. His chaotic world is actually that of the flux and flow of Heraclitus and the panta rei, but without the indwelling Logos.

—Lydia Baer, The Literary Criticism of Ludwig Klages, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 40, no. 1 (1941)

This is all better understood through Klages’ understanding of phenomena as timeless and rhythmic “images” (Bilder), a description of reality as a ceaseless expression of such images, which can only be understood as the soul of phenomena. This concept is unapologetically mystical, and can be difficult to penetrate. It is therefore useful to beckon the very inspiration in this riddle of Klages’, Heraclitus, who is recorded in fragments as saying “death is what we see when awake, and reality is what we see when asleep”. When one dreams, he has access to images which are not necessarily seen (and certainly not felt), but sensed.

Now, of course, dreams consist of repackaged memories, such that it is not possible for the human mind to generate a “new” face during its dance. This is not something Klages is intending to contest. What he is illustrating is that these dreams are not merely mental pictures or memories of the physical world but archetypal realities that exist independently of our sensory experience. He terms these realities as “elemental souls”, “essences” (in the phenomenological language of Edmund Husserl), or more simply, “gods”. Thus, Klages sees sleep as sacred ground where the soul receives the true rhythm of existence through a stream of images, unmarred by the confused and sensory-bound “death” of waking consciousness. Here lies the Mount Olympus of the cosmos:

There are gods of water and gods even of particular stretches of water, gods of the plant kingdom as well as of a particular tree, gods of the hearth as well as of the hearth of a particular house, but also gods of the night, of the day, of the dawn, of the light, of the darkness, of the thunderstorm, of the rainstorm, of lightning, furthermore of love, friendship, revenge, reconciliation, of anger, furthermore of death, of sickness, of fertility, finally of prayer, sacrifice, exchange, healing, making war, swearing, warding off evil and so on into infinity.

—Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele (1932), excerpt translated by Paul Bishop in Ludwig Klages and the Philosophy of Life, A Vitalist Toolkit (2018)

With a few concepts we conclude what I would consider but a mere introduction into the worldview of Ludwig Klages, and find ourselves at the hinge point between his technical metaphysics and his religiosity. From the skeleton of his worldview alone, we can conclude without hesitation that Klages was an avowed animist. He is interested not in the particular manifestation of religion from iron-age Germanics as others of his nation were and soon would be, but with religiosity as the experience of the world itself independent of the logos. This explains his infatuation with the Pelasgians: religion is only valid insofar as it resembles the precognitive relationship between Man and Earth, visible in the most primitive forms of human society (and far, far beyond). Such a religious disposition could not be “thought” of, or tricked into existence by the perversions of Geist, but so intrinsic to life itself that it could not possibly exist in any other way, seamlessly unifying all periods of human and pre-human existence.

Academic inquiry into the culture of the Pelasgians is tricky, and their exact identity is not entirely known even today6. But we can point to a specific culture and religious system which does fit the Klagesian bill, representing something of an ur-religion that operates upon the experience of life and the reception of images: “The Dreaming” of the Aboriginals. What a convenient name for our inquiry!

The Dreaming is a world unlike anything the West and its distant ancestors had been accustomed to for thousands of years. There are no idols, no sin or afterlife, no concretely-depicted or named gods with special associations and anthropomorphic qualities… there is only the eternal now, a cosmos filled with a never-ending stream of images and energized life. The closely-associated translations of various Aboriginal tribes elucidate this fact even further, for they are called “the Everywhen”, “the ancestral present”, and “unfixed in time”. Furthermore, as we are told by academics such as Lucien Levy-Bruhl, the driving emphasis of Aboriginal religion has been a participation with the divine reality of the world, of which they themselves are inextricably tied:

That they can be both the human beings they are and the birds of scarlet plumage at the same time appears to be inconceivable, but to the mentality that is covered by the law of participation there is no difficulty in the matter…

[T]he mentality of these undeveloped peoples which, for want of a better term, I call prelogical, does not partake of that nature. It is not antilogical, it is not alogical either. By designating it ‘prelogical’ I merely wish to state that it does not bind itself down, as our thought does, to avoiding contradictions. It obeys the law of participation first and foremost.

—Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Revival: How Natives Think (1926)

In regards to ancestor worship (not only for the Aboriginals, but for all of mankind), Klages has much to offer in understanding this tradition through his metaphysical scaffolding, as well as why we no longer understand it. He cites an account from the ethnologist Julius Lippert, which states his observation of an African chief who removed himself from company to deal with a migraine, which reminded him that he had fallen behind in the care for his deceased father’s soul. He compares this attitude to ours, dominated by Geist:

Art and culture of the prehistorical world prospered on the soil of the grave cult, because they did not know immortality of the soul, but instead knew only of its permanent presence; the whole of Christianity that believes in immortality sees in the corpse merely a cadaver, in the grave merely a place, which after thirty or forty years one plows over it again for a more useful purpose, and once the alive ancestor is a completely powerless being: the dead in no way intervenes in the interests in the living anymore. To transfer the soul as immortal into the hereafter means to deprive it of its worldly home, to make it a “secluded” and thus void soul!

It was not the “memory” of an ancestor’s soul in need of being worshipped, but its apparition [Phantasma] that took possession of its mind. His animal-like feeling of fear and his primitive will for knowledge does not need any explanation: the rationally inaccessible manner of his interpretation, however, shows irrefutably that he was also connected with a reality of dreamlike images while awake. Even he who in principle denies any claim of a phantasmal reality can’t help but admit this.

—On Cosmogonic Eros (1922), p. 101, trans. K.J. Elliott (2023)

Like a handful of other thinkers of his time (particularly Heidegger), Klages is concerned with the ways in which an obsession with the rational element of consciousness that can disrupt true experience. Klages illustrates this by returning again to Heraclitus, highlighting the character of the flow of reality which Geist adulterates. Consider the difference in character between a beating hummingbird’s wings, or the changing seasons, versus the driving action of the pistons of a steam engine and striking gears of a clock. One represents rhythm, the other repetition. We are often disgruntled or surprised by the northern wind’s refusal to herald autumn’s expected entry, and caught off guard by the torrentuous flooding and storms for which we clearly designate a “season” for. Conversely, it is the steam engine and the clock which operate through repetition, striking pistons and gears at the precise, engineered, moment. Repetition is the language of the Geist; rhythm is the language of the Seele. Klages reminds us of the etymology of rhythm in Greek—rheein (ῥεῖν), “to flow”, cognate with “the Rhine”—in a perfect extrapolation of Heraclitus’ famous wisdom, “no man enters the same river, for he is not the same man, and it is not the same river”. The rhythm of soul participates in an eternal creation of similarities, while the repetition of Geist flattens the whole of reality under a single regnant principle—the vitality of existence, destroyed! For this reason, Klages saw the monotheism of Abraham and the monism of later philosophies to be but masks for what can only be considered atheism.

[Rhythm] reveals to us first of all a constancy that can appear with particular beauty in a wave of water. Its incessant alternation of peak and trough takes place without break, leap, or gap from an indivisible, gradual change between two limiting states. And thus a second characteristic of rhythm becomes immediately apparent: to bring back in always similar periods of time something only ever similar. No wave of water has precisely the same shape and duration as the previous one, no breath and pulse exactly the same length as the following one, no left side of a leaf, an animal, or a human being exactly mirrors the right side.

Spirit’s essentially monotheistic tendency can be witnessed in the pronouncements of the numerous scholars who seem to be compelled to subordinate everything that exists to one regnant principle. Spirit aims at universal rule: it unites the world under the ego or under the logos. When spirit attained to hegemony, it introduced two novelties: the belief in historical progress on the one side, and religious fanaticism on the other. The spirit utilizes force to eliminate all possible rivals. Over the warring and agitated primordial forces, spirit erected the tyranny of the formula: for some it announces itself as the “ethical autonomy of the individual”; the Catholic Church, on the other hand, still relies on the idea of holiness.

—Aphorisms from Rhythmen und Runen (1944)

One may notice Klages’ curious obsession with the language and imagery of dreams. This is more than a useful illustrative scaffolding for his metaphysical system, but in fact an extension of his life. Klages was an insomniac, waking often and violently due to the emphysema that plagued him his entire life (perhaps due to his smoking habit). Sleep was a rare luxury to him, and when he once remarked that “true pagans regard sleeplessness as the most monstrous conceivable evil”, he was not speaking entirely metaphorically. Perhaps it was this restlessness that gave him an awareness and love of sleep and dreams, and hatred of the heightened-wakefulness that his active life demanded of him. Perhaps this is why in his youth he, rather than enjoying a good night’s sleep, frightened the local townspeople by donning a masked costume of Dionysus and dancing in the streets with knives.7

Moving on from dreaming, we have seen but a hint of the contempt Klages had for Christianity in all forms, if it was not already evident by his association of the logos with the life-devouring Geist. The concept of the Christian God, the Abrahamic God, is everything his metaphysical system is structured to detest as its enemy. It is the only conclusion available to Klages: Christianity is “the machine” and all it represents. As Goethe had once remarked in a poem titled Great is Diana of the Ephesians, the conception of Abraham’s Yahweh is that of a purely mental god, offering no relation to the body… “And once he heard a raging crowd/ Howl through the streets, and clamor loud/ That somewhere existed a God behind/Man’s foolish forehead in his mind,/ And that He was greater and loftier too,/ Than the breadth and the depth of the gods he knew”, so goes the pen of Goethe.8

Klages, however, treated this as more than just a silly mistake, but the very epicenter of the rot of the West’s spiritual and cultural values that Nietzsche had diagnosed. Though Klages does not entirely blame the god of Abraham for the entrance of the Geist as some Gnostics would, placing its fixation upon man well before even our first civilizations, he does associate it with the clearest agent of such a possession in our time. Indeed, Christianity prides itself upon an awareness of the logos (reinterpreted to be Christ himself!), as well as a number of purely-rational “proofs” of the existence of the One God, which themselves were borrowed from Aristotle and the later Neoplatonists:

It is impossible to conceive of a more fatal blindness than that of the cult instigated by this Jewish sectarian and his apostles and camp followers. Torn from the bonds of nature and the past, man must now direct his gaze at the wasteland known as the “future”; into that desert he stares, paralyzed by dread of the vengeful Jew-God. And before this insane masquerade of the “kingdom come,” the “last judgment,” and “eternal punishment” can complete its conquest of the world, the true heroes and the real gods must first be made to grovel before the cross!

The values endorsed by Christian philosophical systems are either ethical or logical, i.e., functional values devoid of living substance. With that one statement, however, we have judged Christian philosophy.

—Aphorisms from Rhythmen und Runen (1944)

Perhaps this is why—exemplifying an implicit yet perfect understanding of this worldview—the Early Christians practiced the rite of nullification during its pillaging and destruction of the marble of Antiquity, chopping off the face and nose of statues to exorcise the statue, that is, remove its ability to serve as an image!

The legacy of Ludwig Klages is a difficult, and tragic, one. During the early 1930s, he enjoyed a level of prestige and admiration that catapulted him to the highest levels of cultural and academic interest in Europe. In the eyes of Germany, he was the most important psychologist and philosopher at hand. This would be overturned in the coming apocalypse of the 1940s. The Nationalist Socialist regime outright rejected him, going as far to publish in 1942:

“On the 70^th birthday of Ludwig Klages, we wish once again to insist that we regard this man as our enemy. With regard to all of the decisive philosophical questions, we state that there can be no reconciliation whatsoever between the World-View of Klages and that of the National Socialist Movement. His view of nature and history, of man and his future, is, in principle, utterly incompatible with the fundamental theses of National Socialism!”

—Völkischer Beobachter, Dec. 10th, 1942

While the Third Reich was not kind to him, the following order would arguably be worse. With the convergence of Allied and Soviet columns came a new hegemony under which the flower of German culture was utterly crushed. “The West” was reshaped under the colors of American character, which brought the dominance of economy, technology, and rationality—computers, plastics, and the atom bomb. The Geist had finally achieved its total victory over the human soul.

Klages spent the final days of his life in Kilchberg, editing and completing manuscripts of his life's work. Though there was little else to do, he was already aware of his circumstances, remarking some time near his end, “My teachings are buried.” Characteristically, upon the publishing of his biography 10 years after his death, the German paper Der Spiegel complained that the author had not properly condemned the dead man for his antisemitism and hatred of the Jewish god. For much of the Cold War (and still today), academic interest in Klages is understood as verboten, an association with a dangerous racist and antisemite.

Yet today, that old world is crumbling. The youth of today share much in common with that jovial band to which Klages had preached to in the autumn of 1913—acknowledging the spiritual importance of nature, singing the forgotten hymns of the nation, reviving the heroes and gods of times gone by. Let the mesmerizing phantasm of Ludwig Klages be among those heroes! Academics have consistently scoffed at the prospect of an English translation of Spirit as Adversary of the Soul, and I can think of no better people than our own to prove them wrong, as our talented friends have already revived many of the forgotten works of Junger and Mishima. One page at a time if it must… no matter the pace, the worldview of Klages has much to offer to us in a time of the swelling of the Geist, where it manifests itself utterly in the form of artificial intelligence and other impediments to genuine human flourishing. It is up to us to summon his phantasm, and some have already begun:

Cult of the Dark Gods

The Spirit as Adversary of the Soul

Note: Life is short and “Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele” is very long. Few books; perhaps no book, written in the last few hundred (few thousand?) years are as important as Klages’ masterpiece, yet it has, unjustifiably failed to receive an English translation. I have read the German text of over 1,500 pages numerous times, and have translated a nu…

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3 years ago · 13 likes · 8 comments · Farasha Euker

The legacy of Ludwig Klages is still being written. His place as the “pillaged” genesis of so much great thought from the early 20th is certain to be remembered, but whether or not this remains stuck in a forgotten time is to be seen. What we may contribute to his legacy is thus: it was the great project of all of the Romantics from Goethe to Nietzsche to set forth a Lebensphilosophie, a philosophy of life, which sought to ground itself in the experience and affirmation of life. Klages may therefore correctly be seen honorably as not only The Last Romantic, but the perfect capstone to everything this philosophy had set out to accomplish. The world that Klages leaves for us is a world of rhythm and divine poetry, a wellspring of being which beckons us to dance.

Out of Phlegethon! Out of Phlegethon, Gerhart, art thou come forth out of Phlegethon?

With Buxtehude and Klages in your satchel, with the Ständebuch of Sachs in your luggage—not of one bird, but many

—Ezra Pound, Canto LXXV

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The laws of life are not the laws of self-preservation. This is the dreadful side of life, and it serves as the basis of all tragedy.

—Ludwig Klages, Rhythms and Runes (1944)

At the heart of the question of life, of its nature and of its origins, is the phenomenon of ordering and integration. The organism, we are told, is a self-integrated system of otherwise independent components; a handful of organs, a few billion nucleotides, ten trillion proteins… one man. Death, we are told, is the loss of this self-integrating quality, when a brain wiring together dozens of trillions of cells ceases to be, and the body falls into disarray.

For man, this conception is ideal. But nature is comprised of life far more alien to man than his own still so poorly understood res extensa, offering a number of inconveniences to our heuristics. I can think of no greater example of this than a peculiar—simple—little slime mold, Dictyostelium discoideum1. These are normally your typical and mundane amoeba, feasting on the E. coli of dirt and litter. But when a state of starvation or life-threatening stress is introduced, something peculiar happens, and the lines between mere slime-matter and self-integrated organisms become blurred. A stressed amoeba leeches cAMP molecules into the environment, and its nearby kin begin migrating towards it. Multitudes of individual organisms begin to aggregate and subsume within another into a multicellular slug-beast. Individuals willingly sacrifice themselves to the zygotic hulking daughter, consumed and repurposed. Has the many become one? Has the multitudes of organisms perished in its act of creation? The slime concerns itself with none of this, stretching its tentacles out in search an ideal environment. Satisfied with its setting, it again metamorphosizes into a stalk of spores, resigning itself to death, and the propagation of a new generation.

And to think that at some distant era in our evolutionary past, our own bodies were once identical to these alien pseudoplasmodiae. Perhaps we have been misled about our uniqueness by prior scaffolding; perhaps the line that divides life and mere molecules is but a foggy blur. It has been suggested—with firm and seemingly insurmountable evidence—that there exists between us and a primordial gaseous cloud but a measurable chain of molecular reactions. Indeed, the indelible march of evolutionary and biological science has left us with no conclusion but as much. There is no need to further relitigate here what is already an essential understanding of our culture, all are aware of its conclusions.

This biologization of mankind, a lightning bolt hurled down by Charles Darwin and others, had struck man into the awareness of his separation from nature as only by degree—not by kind. The effect was immediate and profound, quickly serving as an accelerant for ongoing debates around matters of secularism and culture. For most evolution became accepted wisdom—the final nail in antiquated traditions already buried by advances in chemistry, geology, and physics2. Yet for others, this total resignation of what man had accomplished and experiences to the accidents of molecules was a bridge too far; shims were needed to distance civilization from something so caustic. How can man rationalize his position in front of (or rather, within) nature in light of such revelations? What can he make of this newfound juggling act he finds himself in between the new thermodynamics or genetics and the old theology?

To this end, three irreconcilable philosophical positions have emerged: Lebensphilosophie, vitalism, and natural science. Natural science charts life to material mechanisms—quantifiable molecular processes—which seek to present the abolition of any functional distinction between life and material. Lebensphilosophie rejects such a reduction, emphasizing a type of idealism that places life as firmly distinct from mere material, a metaphysical category of its own right that can only be apprehended by itself. Between them stands biological vitalism, which insists upon a quasi-scientific, metaphysical “vital force” that animates matter, distinguishing living organisms from mere molecular machinery.

Such a tripartite division of philosophies into related yet fundamentally irreconcilable categories is not new. The polymath Wilhelm Dilthey once identified three Weltanschauungen in response to scientific materialism3: the “naturalism” of the Epicureans and scientists of today (reducing life to physical processes), the “subjective idealism” of the pre-Socratics and many Romantics (accepting unity with nature’s laws), and an “idealism of freedom” of the old Athenians and the poetry of Schiller (preserving dualistic primacy of mind/soul over matter).

Dilthey of course makes many generalizations, but a number of deceased and contemporary philosophies do fit neatly within these categories. Naturalism is without question the prevailing wisdom of today, permeating every cubic inch of our technological culture. The freedom of idealism entails the traditional and/or religious reaction, promoting a dualistic conception of a human soul or consciousness that firmly separates it from nature. Between them exists subjective idealism, which while rarer, can nonetheless be found today in intellectual circles promoting conceptions of pantheism or monistic philosophy.

Whereas Dilthey operated purely on the realm of the metaphysical, our partition at hand will strike a similar chord, but instead dealing with the line where the biological meets the metaphysical. What can these three philosophies of life offer us in terms of man’s relation to nature, where do they err, and how do they contradict? We will begin first with Lebensphilosophie.

Lebensphilosophie

In Germany, a movement had been ongoing for a century by the time of Darwin that almost seemed engineered as an anachronistic response to his theories. In response to the Enlightenment values of scientism, rationalism, and progress, the German Romantic movement born of Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, and Schelling was well underway. For these men, the Enlightenment was no longer capable of properly describing and illustrating the human condition; it had removed the element of human experience and individuality from the equation entirely in search of objectivity. While the rationalism found in France and England at the time removed man as a subjective roadblock, the Germans turned inward, viewing the internal subjective experience of life as the only true known quality, and philosophy’s bedrock. Here the pure human experience took primacy over an aloof rationality, even on scientific matters themselves:

The ultimate goal would be: to grasp that everything in the realm of fact is already theory. The blue of the sky shows us the basic law of chromatics. Let us not seek for something behind the phenomena… they themselves are the theory.

—Goethe, Scientific Studies (Maxims & Aphorisms), trans. Douglass Miller

How the Romantics approached science—something they were by no means afraid to do4—entailed confident rejection of the manner in which empirical sciences greatly distances the observer from the phenomenal, and a lauding of the poetry found in the individual’s own experience of nature. Such was a sentiment which continued to germinate within the fledgling German nation over its first century, soon becoming a generalized approach to and understanding of nature—Lebensphilosophie, the philosophy of life. This was the worldview of titans such as Nietzsche: an embodied affirmation of life, not merely of biological life, but of life as it is experienced by man… its will, its ecstasy, and its tragedy.

Life for the Lebensphilosopher—and this is especially true of figures such as Goethe and Schiller—is not a product of random natural mechanics, but a type of process which can only be understood within itself through its inborn intuition and will. What is meant by this sentiment is twofold: First, it states that “mechanics” cannot satisfactorily explain more the human relation to aesthetics (indeed, Kant excluded this specifically from his Wissenschaft), such as beauty, taste; or particularly for Henri Bergson, laughter. Secondly, it is a faithful inheritor of earlier philosophical movements in that subjective internal experience is the only rational given. From this arises the conclusion that any proper understanding of life can only be apprehended from such an internal inquiry into the experience of nature. What remains in this distinction for man is essential: his freedom. Dilthey elected Schiller has the poet of his idealism of freedom, and in Schiller’s works we see such a fair wisdom:

But Man can be at odds with himself in a double fashion: either as savage if his feelings rule his principles, or as barbarian if his principles destroy his feelings. The savage despises Art and recognizes Nature as his sovereign mistress; the barbarian derides and dishonours Nature, but—more contemptible than the savage—he continues frequently enough to become the slave of his slave. The cultured man makes a friend of Nature and respects her freedom while merely curbing her caprice.

—Schiller, Fourth Letter on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795)

To repeat an earlier point, a philosophy built for the human experience predictably does wonders for those concerned with the human experience as such. But what does it tell us about the fundamental nature of life itself, which this philosophy alleges to detail? We return back to our humble slime molds to serve as an appropriate illustration of these positions. The application of scientific rationalism finds a purely molecular, mechanistic explanation: genes encode for proteins, which trigger reactive cascades in response to internal and external chemical stimuli such as starvation. More chemicals are excreted, drawing in its peers which are bound by yet more proteins, yet more enzymatic reactions and signaling pathways. The “gene-centric” view of biology states that in its death and reproduction of the reproduction it fulfills the things it was encoded by its very nature to achieve, and there is little sense of a mystery. What can be said of “the freedom in the internal apprehension of life” here?

A philosopher of life may reply here by pointing to the peculiarity of an organism choosing to act in such a way, from which arises an incredulity to the notion that mere signals could fully explain the why of life in this scenario. Perhaps there is underneath all of this, unknown to the blind eye of natural science, a wholistic animating force of life which drives such events.

Vitalism

It is here we introduce a third philosophy of life, bisecting Lebensphilosophie and the natural sciences: biological vitalism. I am sure to address it now specifically as such biological vitalism, because there exists a number of different “vitalist” philosophies, some of which are explicitly human-focused and have little to do with biological life. It is often the case that an individual will address himself as a vitalist simply upon the premise that he affirms a “yes to life” as a prophet once said, but here I address a more specific tradition in relation to natural life. Biological vitalism is a quasi-scientific metaphysical tradition which highlights a certain type of “vital force” within life that separates it from purely material or mechanical forces. It is such a vital force which grants life both its origin and nature, otherwise inexplicable by modern science. Peculiarly, it simultaneously rejects natural science while attempting to engage in it at some level, perhaps aiming to replace it with a science of its own.

The “vital force” has seen a number of different names and interpretations across human history. Some have labeled it vril, in Taoism it is Qi, in Vedic texts prana and/or soma, and for the Stoics and later Europeans it flew under the color of pneuma. Each of these concepts represent the same essential idea that biological life is firstly not explained by material forces, and secondly that it is instead driven by one of these vital forces. Such a force is responsible for the mysterious wills and drives that differentiate even the most simple organisms from simple molecules, such as a will-to-live, regeneration, and self-integration.

Perhaps the best known theory of vitalism belongs to Henri Bergson, a proponent of his own vital force known as élan vital. Following him came Hans Driesch, offering his own vital force under the umbrella of what he called “entelechies”, forces which actualizes life from purely potential material. The vital force in these descriptions acts as a self-actualizing principle, which animates life from matter by actualizing a potentiality. Such a force implies a sort of orthogenesis, a tendency for matter to organize itself to increasingly higher and more perfect forms. Aristotle emanates off of these pages very clearly.

Bergson was careful to keep élan vital in a category of its own, distanced a fair deal from the natural sciences. Yet following thinkers were confident they could find such a vital force under the microscope as a quantifiable phenomenon, provable by testable hypotheses. In a peculiar turn, biological vitalism began to try to repeal the findings of natural sciences by engaging in its own methodology. These biological vitalists began criticizing earlier philosophers of life for not being sufficiently materialist, and searched for the nature of life in novel pseudosciences. Such a sentiment is evident from one biological vitalist, Wilhelm Reich:

“Between 1919 and 1921, I became familiar with Driesch’s ‘Philosophie des Organischen’ and his ‘Ordnungslehre’… Driesch’s contention seemed incontestable to me. He argued that, in the sphere of the life function, the whole could be developed from a part, whereas a machine could not be made from a screw… However, I couldn’t quite accept the transcendentalism of the life principle. Seventeen years later I was able to resolve the contradiction on the basis of a formula pertaining to the function of energy. Driesch’s theory was always present in my mind when I thought about vitalism. The vague feeling I had about the irrational nature of his assumption turned out to be justified in the end. He landed among the spiritualists.”

—Reich, Genitality in the Theory and Therapy of Neurosis (1927)

Baron Carl von Reichenbach was an early proponent of what he coined as the Odic force, after the Germanic god Odin. Rather than associating it with metaphysical concepts such as Qi or prana, von Reichenbach and his supporters saw the Odic force as an electromagnetic phenomenon specific to life, emanating a faint blue-hued light in total darkness. Following him came Reich and his concept of “orgones”5, a massless magnetic force which permeated all of existence and actualized life from dead matter. Just as he had promised, Reich’s endeavor was almost entirely scientific, producing testable hypotheses and quantifiable results. New-age websites of today are rife with boastful presentations of these confidence intervals and p-values of proof of life’s vital soul.6

One wonders if this is merely a nebulous reinvention of the soul, done so in so many knots and twists to allow its existence under the modern hegemony of the natural sciences. Further, it remains an essential question as to what is resolved about the problem of materialism through the promotion of a purely material “organizing principle”. On these grounds, vitalism has been consistently charged with a fleeting and inconsequential character. Julian Huxley summarized the modern scientist’s contempt of such an approach with a famous quip: “To say that biological progress is explained by the élan vital is to say that the movement of the train is ‘explained’ by an élan locomotif of the engine.” If the vitalist is indeed attempting to elaborately redefine the soul under the impersonation of natural science’s own concepts such as free energy or electromagnetism, then he has been caught in the act red-handed.

Even in its effort to strike a balance between Lebensphilosophie and natural science, it cannot meet the strict demands of either. By the middle of the 20th century, scientific attempts to enshrine biological vitalism had ceased entirely. It does not offer much to Lebensphilosophie’s poetic interpretation of life and freedom, and to the natural scientist, a far more egregious violation of its principles are at hand. Vitalism, in its insistence of the autonomy of biology and the uniqueness of life contrasted with mere matter, displays a readiness to accept an ultimate discontinuity among aspects of the universe. There can be no greater sacrilege among the prevailing philosophy of the natural sciences, which offers a fundamental unity of all things and a mutual intelligibility of all sciences.

This discontinuity is a glaring weakness in the biological vitalist’s armor, and in a way contradictory to the entire enterprise: it is a core belief of vitalism that life must be looked at from a wholistic viewpoint to properly understand its nature and origin, but is unable (and unwilling) to coagulate life with the rest of nature by that very wholistic framing. Perhaps for many vitalists, this is essentially the point… to cut off scientific rationalism at the trunk and create a clearing for more preferable religious and metaphysical systems to propagate. For instance, one of Bergson’s criticisms of modern science is its evaluation of a “space-time continuum”—where time and matter are intertwined and relative to one another—in favor of his dualistic conception of durée, which distinguished time as phenomenologically distinct from space. Here, too, would dualist thought struggle to communicate with science; Bergson’s critiques of the contemporary Albert Einstein received little popularity.

Natural Science

We assume, as it has been assumed for the topic insofar, that the reader has an implicit familiarity with what natural science represents and how it operates. Indeed, of the three philosophies of life, none enjoy the cultural and technological hegemony over our contemporary lives than it. But a number of theories bear a needed mentioning particular to this division between philosophies of life, and what specifically it offers beyond merely hand-waving off the metaphysical as untestable.

Our two earlier philosophies bore a sort of dualism in varying degrees. For the Lebensphilosopher, life belonged to a category of its own entirely, offering in that distinction a way for human vitality and freedom. For the biological vitalist, life more generally possessed a fundamental organizing principle that did not operate upon mere material. But for the modern scientist, the distinction between life and material is fiction. What separates the complex mind reading this text and the protons of distant stars is merely a matter of degree, and not by kind. The earlier case provided by the model organism D. discoideum certainly applies to this count, but we can illustrate something more essential. Today we possess robust scientific theories that operate right upon the threshold between life and matter, and conclude it to be but a small part of one giant physical process stemming from the act of Creation. Here we speak of theories pertaining to abiogenesis, which purport to answer in its own blunt way the origin and nature of life.

It is assumed here that the reader is accustomed to the theory of evolution and abiogenesis in the most general sense, including experiments such as that of Miller-Urey and theories such as RNA-world7. Starting here, critics are happy to point out that these do not exactly show a continuous mechanism which could explain life, and in a way they are correct. However modern science has been able to produce such a mechanism that shows a seamless gradient between molecular chemistry and life, including the odd implication that chemistry itself behaves as a sort of life.

Primitive life requires a few fundamental (perhaps metaphysical, if a vitalist is inquired) qualities to count as under such a classification. A hypothetical ur-life must: 1.) metabolize, taking in energy and processing it to some other output, 2.) be self-integrated into a closed system of reactions, and 3.) be self-sustaining and self-replicating over multiple “generations”. Modern science has been able to satisfy all of these conditions within simple chemical networks known as autocatalytic sets. In such a system, the reaction is sustained (or catalyzed) by molecules which themselves are produced at some point in the reaction. A very simple example of this is the decomposition of arsine, which is catalyzed by the arsenic produced in the reaction (2AsH₃ → 2As + 3H₂). Several studies have capitalized on this theoretical framework and produced a number of ways from which random chemical reactions can produce basic hereditary components of life, such as through template replication or RNA-enzymes8.

The relevance of this to our discussion is thus: what is most peculiar about this theory is that it allows for evolution event at the level of these simple molecular reactions, which few would dare to call “living”. These sets are self-replicating, meaning they can produce new generations. The introduction of a molecular form of genetic drift, or random interference, can slightly alter these sets and provide variation within a population. The sets that were negatively altered become chemically unstable or metabolically inferior, slowly replaced by the sets that were positively altered to be more efficient with its use of energy and ability to replicate. Richard Dawkins had once hypothesized such a primitive form of life, which transitioned into the gene:

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is satisfying because it shows us a way in which simplicity could change into complexity, how unordered atoms could group themselves into ever more complex patterns until they ended up manufacturing people[…] At some point a particularly remarkable molecule was formed by accident. We will call it the Replicator. It may not necessarily have been the biggest or the most complex molecule around, but it had the extraordinary property of being able to create copies of itself.

—Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Ch. 2, The Replicators)

In a way we ourselves are such an autocatalytic set, along with the rest of past, current, and future life as it is known. No individual part of our bodies or cellular machinery are capable of self-replication without assistance from other parts of the whole, and it is the set as a whole which must be replicated including all of its constituent parts for the set to continue function in perpetuity. Who knows what else this could be applied to? The simple point is thus: despite our reliance on firm distinctions between various forms including ourselves and the Earth, modern science promotes evidence that these are illusory. The only possible conclusion of such a brutally materialistic philosophy horseshoes into a remarkably metaphysical one: monism.

No one recognized this more than “The German Darwin” Ernst Haeckel, himself an essential promoter and defendant of Darwin’s evolutionary theory from his seat at the University of Jena. As an aside from his zoological work, he founded the Monistenbund, an intellectual league in Germany which aimed to promote a monistic philosophy which natural science left no option but to accept. Echoing Dilthey, he aimed to establish “a natural Weltanshaaung”, embodying the “subjective idealism” that Dilthey associated with Spinoza and Giordano Bruno. Indeed, Haeckel himself was a firm proponent of both of these individuals:

We have at least attained to a clear view of the fact that all the partial questions of creation are indivisibly connected, that they represent one single, comprehensive “cosmic problem,” and that the key to this problem is found in the one magic word—evolution. The great questions of the creation of man, the creation of the animals and plants, the creation of the earth and the sun, etc., are all parts of the general question, What is the origin of the whole world? Has it been created by supernatural power, or has it been evolved by a natural process? What are the causes and the manner of this evolution? If we succeed in finding the correct answer to one of these questions, we have, according to our monistic conception of the world, cast a brilliant light on the solution of them all, and on the entire cosmic problem. […]

The monistic idea of God, which alone is compatible with our present knowledge of nature, recognizes the divine spirit in all things. It can never recognize in God a “personal being,” or, in other words, an individual of limited extension in space, or even of human form. God is everywhere. As Giordano Bruno has it: “There is one spirit in all things, and nobody is so small that it does not contain a part of the divine substance whereby it is animated.” Every atom is thus animated, and so is the ether; we might, therefore, represent God as the infinite sum of all natural forces, the sum of all atomic forces and all ether-vibrations. It comes virtually to the same thing when (as was done here by a speaker on a former occasion) God is defined as “the supreme law of the universe,” and the latter is represented as the “working of universal space”.

—Haeckel, Die Welträthsel (1899)

This is an encapsulation of the stance of the natural sciences: a harmony between all things, which can be ascribed to natural laws simple enough to fit on a chalkboard. It was to the Monistenbund in a series of private lectures that one Albert Einstein proposed such a unifying law of nature, uniting Mayer and Lavoisier under a single equation: E = mc².9

Closing Remarks

We arrive at a point of conclusion, where the irreconcilable nature of these philosophies of life and their effects on human society become evident. Natural science has offered a relentless barrage of inescapable realities of the world, offering itself as a selection pressure of its own against which few philosophies and traditions have survived. Multiple responses have been leveled against the assault on older systems, and they are not all identical.

The Lebensphilosopher is cautious about its engagements, aiming to maintain the element of human experience in freedom—particularly through aesthetics—and gives natural science its due only when needed. It was Goethe who put the human experience to paper in a way that no man since has been able to, but it was also Goethe who was credited by Haeckel himself as one of the first and foremost theorists of biological evolution.10 However, the modern scientists remain explicit about what they think about “the soul”, and its relation to the body: a meaningless abstraction of material forces, which dies alongside the body it purports to organize. The Romantics would find little company in such a cold conception.

The Vitalist attempts a new strategy in defeating the modern scientist on his own terms, offering quantifiable evidence of the philosophies of the ancients. As a cost of its approach towards natural science, it is inflicted with a cost of distancing away from the Lebensphilosopher, offering little substantive in service to “the human experience” and worrying more about electromagnetic organizing principles. Yet as discussed before, its inherent dualism conflicts with the essential spirit of science, which seeks to establish a mutual intelligibility among all philosophies and establish a single, unified description of the world.

As for the natural scientist, we should be careful to depict him as an uncontested victor. Men such as Ludwig Klages were well aware of modern science’s tendency to aggregate all of reality under a single whole, and had a few choice words. In its tendency to coagulate all into one, it has killed the very vitality and essence of the life it wishes to quantify and described. To him natural science renders life as a moribund and defunct blob of bouncing particles, and in an ironic twist only reinvents the problems of the religious traditions natural science has scalped:

Spirit’s essentially monotheistic tendency can be witnessed in the pronouncements of the numerous scholars who seem to be compelled to subordinate everything that exists to one regnant principle. Spirit aims at universal rule: it unites the world under the ego or under the logos. When spirit attained to hegemony, it introduced two novelties: the belief in historical progress on the one side, and religious fanaticism on the other. The spirit utilizes force to eliminate all possible rivals. Over the warring and agitated primordial forces, spirit erected the tyranny of the formula: for some it announces itself as the “ethical autonomy of the individual”; the Catholic Church, on the other hand, still relies on the idea of holiness.

There is a knowledge that kills and a knowledge that awakens. The first can be seen in the verbal jugglery of our intellectuals; the second blossoms in the dithyrambic creativity of the poet and the visionary. As has been said of the latter type, he lives his life to the full as long as he inhabits the earth. He renews himself as if by a perpetual series of rebirths. The other sort is merely the mummified ash-heap of a once-living fire, the fossilized relic of a perished substance. His knowledge does produce mechanized results, but as he manipulates his carcasses, he speaks as if this dead matter were yet among the living. One sees with horror how he deludes himself into believing that he finds life only within his clockwork mechanisms.

—Ludwig Klages, Rhythms and Runes (1944)

It is difficult to criticize this sentiment, which can be found in both the Vitalist’s and Lebensphilosopher’s reply to men such as Haeckel (a near-contemporary of Klages’). Modern science has indeed crushed traditions into their graves, along with them their utility and benefits. But Klages’ project is perhaps a rare exception to our tripartite division, in which he offers Life itself as its own metaphysical principle. This must be left aside for evaluation in future projects. What will be noted here, in a reminder to Klages’ sentiments, is that myth and poetry is only valuable insofar it retains the ability to speak to truth in ways common discernment may not.

One claims an affront to poetry, a second denounces an assault against data, and the third attempts a scientific proof of the metaphysical. It is not my place to settle for all of human history which is to be declared victor. Which of the approaches that individuals and our collective culture come to reply upon can be assured to change and be reevaluated in terms of their importance, just as it had done so in all of the preceding peoples civilizations.

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