Defining Paganism – Faye

Defining Paganism

By Guillaume Faye

 

Paganism: The philosophic and/or religious attitude, generally polytheistic and pantheistic, that is the antipode to the revealed salvation religions, to religious or secular monotheism, or to Western materialism.

For Christopher Gérard, one of the principal contemporary practicing authorities on the subject: ‘Paganism, as a coherent vision of the world … is faithful to an ancestry, considered part of a very long memory, enrooted in multiple terrains, opened to the invisible … an active participant in the world, a sought-after harmony between microcosm and macrocosm. Paganism in essence is a natural religion, the most ancient of a world “born” with its birth – if the world were ever born. Rather than an eccentric fad – or the elegant nostalgia of literary refugees from some mythic Golden age, I think paganism is on the way to becoming the first of the world’s religions.’ He mentions 1.5 billion pagans on five continents, which would make it the world’s largest religious group. Gérard adds, ‘Without being narrowly moralistic … a lived paganism seems to me incompatible with whatever makes man servile. As the exaltation of life – of the eternal élan – paganism refuses everything that debases man: drugs, dependencies, every kind of unhealthy life.’ A lived paganism, in other words, is not destructuring, nor linked to the permissive, anti-vitalist mores of the present West (as certain prelates would have us believe). Gay Pride has nothing in common with the pagan bacchanalia! Paganism, moreover, is neither superstitious nor vacuously ritualistic, in contrast to Islam (this belief system which is most opposed to it), for Islam is all these things to the highest degree.

Pierre Vial has written that paganism is not anti-Christian, but a-Christian and post-Christian. ‘To be pagan is to refuse the inversion of values that Nietzsche denounced in Christianity. It is to take the hero, not the martyr, as the model. Christian suffering has always repulsed me. To celebrate the redemptive value of suffering seems life a form of masochism.’ (Today, modern European Christians practice their ethno-masochism and culpability on the immigrant colonisers; in every domain they practice the ‘duty to repent.’) Vial continues, ‘To exalt wretchedness, suffering, and sickness is unhealthy and I much prefer the Greek ideal of transcendence or the Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius. Paganism ought not, though, to be confused with anti-clericalism or atheism. Another point: a purely intellectual definition of paganism … won’t suffice. It’s perhaps necessary, but it doesn’t go far enough. For paganism to exist, it must be lived. Not simply in gestures, but in life’s most ordinary expressions. Paganism is defined primarily in reference to the sacred … It affirms the immanence of the sacred.’

For both Gérard and Vial, paganism the authentic ‘religion,’ for it ties men of the same community together and ties them to a cosmos in which the divine is everywhere, where the gods are not separated from, but part of, the profane world.

Similarly, Gnosticism, which inspires Freemasonry, has nothing to do with paganism. Paganism’s constituting traits are: the presence of the sacred and the supernatural within nature; a cyclical or spherical conception of time; the refusal to consider nature the ‘property’ of the men who exploit and thus destroy it; the coming-and-going of sensuality and asceticism; the unqualified apology of the life-force (the ‘yes to life’ and ‘the Great Health’ of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra); the idea that the world is ‘uncreated’ and corresponds to a river of becoming, without beginning or end; the tragic sentiment of life refusing all nihilism; the cult of ancestors, of the line, of our people’s biological and cultural identity; the refusal of all revealed and universal Truths and thus the refusal of all fanaticism, dogmatism, and forced proselytism.

We need to beware, though, of certain so-called pagans who hold that paganism stands for ‘absolute tolerance,’ in the name of ‘social polytheism.’ Such pagans, like the post-conciliar Church, support, for instance, immigration and Islam and refuse to struggle against the reigning social decadence. This pseudo-paganism of secular clerics gives the pagan spirit a Leftist slant. It’s a pseudo-paganism, in effect – purely negative and reactive, a hollow Judaeo-Christianity, an anti-Catholic fixation.

It’s not a philosophy of life, but an attitude of resentment. Besides, these pseudo-pagans, who lack true culture, have never been able to define nor positively live their assumed ‘paganism.’ In a totally absurd way, it’s even led them to a pro-Islam position (whose Qur’an considers pagans ‘idolaters’ – and whose lot is that of the Eid al-Adha’s slaughtered sheep) – and to the egalitarianism of absolute toleration for every form of deviance, justified in the name of a purely casuistic ‘social polytheism’ (hemophilia, antiracism, ethno-pluralism, tribalism, etc.) One doesn’t even have to criticise the Church to assume the position of Monsignor Gaillot and the post-conciliar humanitarians.

Against this, we affirm that paganism is in essence a partisan of social order – which it sees as reflecting the cosmic order, it equally opposes the fusion of peoples, random mixing, and thus a massifying individualism. The pagan vision of the world is holistic and organic and views its people as a hierarchical community of destiny. Like ancient Greek paganism, the notion of the City, inseparable from notions of patriotism and ethnic identity, is fundamental the pagan conception of the world. Similarly, Nietzsche’s notion of the will to power perfectly accords with paganism (to the degree it respects the natural, cosmic order).

In Europe, paganism – her ancient religion, far older than Christianity – has taken several forms: first there’s a ‘philosophical’ paganism (or neo-paganism), with Hellenic, Roman, Germanic, Scandinavian, etc., components, all of which hold no belief in anthropocentric gods, but rather in a sacred, polytheistic, and pantheistic vision of the world, in which the divinities are eternal allegories representing the multiplicities of life and cosmos; this paganism knows numerous communal rituals linked to the different stages of human life and to the seasonal cycles; it’s been evident in European art for centuries. There’s also a ‘wild’ paganism that stretches from the (pseudo-pagan) New Age to European Buddhism. Another false paganism is intellectualist paganism, which is often just a form of anti-Catholic hatred; what Gérard calls ‘salon paganism.’ And finally, there’s the latent or implicit paganism of traditional Catholicism and Orthodoxy, especially evident in their polytheistic cults.

There’s no pagan ‘Church.’ Paganism isn’t sociologically unified – one needs to speak of paganisms. The word itself is ambiguous, coined by Christians to designate the religion of peasants (pagani).

It might also be noted that sects belong neither to paganism nor its philosophy, but to derivations of the mystic monotheistic salvation religions.

Pagans today need to have the intelligence and wisdom to not – apriori – reject traditional Christianity, and vice versa, for the struggle against the common enemy is what’s most important. Not sectarianism, but a historic compromise, is needed here. No reconciliation, by contrast, is possible with the Judaeo-Christianity of the post-conciliar Left.

The main pagan reproach of Christianity (as made by Pierre Vial, Giorgio Locchi, and Louis Rougier) is its roots in universalism and egalitarianism and its progressive view of history; totalitarian ideologies of salvation, such as globalist liberalism, with its end to history and its disarming humanitarianism, are simply secularised forms of Christianity. Universalism, for example, has been transformed into a secular cosmopolitanism, and Christian charity into a masochistic humanitarianism. Universal charity, as it comes from Judaeo-Christianity and clashes with the pagan world vision, has been central to Europe’s moral disarmament, to its failure to resist the Third World’s colonising invasion. Similarly, in situating God outside or above the universe and declaring the latter profane, Judaeo-Christianity opened the way to an atheistic materialism. Following Augustine and Aquinas, traditional Christianity claimed that the equality and universality of men before God is destined not for the City, but for the beyond, following the Last Judgment.

We need, henceforth, to recognise that the egalitarian, universalist, and anti-nationalist virus of the early Christians, neutralised by the Medieval Church and by chivalry, has returned in force with the modern post-conciliar Church. Traditional Christianity, whether Catholic or Orthodox, incorporated important pagan elements, notably in the polytheism of the Holy Trinity, the cult of the saints and the Virgin Mary, etc. We might also mention Pelagius, Teilhard de Chardin, Giordano Bruno, or other Churchmen who attempted a synthesis of European Christianity and paganism.

The most important thing today is to confront the common enemy, Islam – the most abstract, the most intolerant, the most dangerous of the monotheistic religions (founding model of totalitarianism, even more so than Communism), with which, unfortunately, the Catholic hierarchy and our pseudo-pagan ‘ethno-pluralist’ intellectuals suicidally collaborate. In the course of the Twenty-first century, it’s not unreasonable to expect that authentic pagans in Europe and India will be the ones manning the front line in the struggle against the desert’s totalitarian religion – not the Catholic clerics or republican ‘secularists.’

It would be vain to instrumentalise paganism as a ‘political religion.’ For paganism is above all an attitude, a philosophical, spiritual positioning, a choice of values, and in no case does it have a vocation to institutionalise itself as a religion – as a ‘new Church.’ European Catholicism – before it was desacralised by Vatican II – included important pagan elements, to such a degree that certain modern theologians accuse it of having been a ‘pagano-Christianity’ – the same reproach Luther and Calvin made of it. Slavic-Greek Orthodoxy still retains many pagan remnants.

The historic alliance of authentic pagan philosophers (inspired by the heritage of Greece, Rome, and India) to traditional European Christianity is a prerequisite to the merciless struggle that is to be waged against the Masonic gnosis, the obscurantism of the Muslim colonisers, and the virus of materialism.

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Excerpt from: Faye, Guillaume. Why We Fight: Manifesto for the European Resistance. London: Arktos Media, 2011, pp. 205-210.

 

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European Son – Interview with Benoist

“European Son: An Interview with Alain de Benoist” (PDF – 191 KB):

European Son: An Interview with Alain de Benoist

Additional document with portions of the original interview containing critical commentaries on Christianity and the Human Sciences which were cut out from the official interview in The Occidental Quarterly (PDF – 314 KB):

Interview with Alain de Benoist on the Human Sciences and Christianity by Bryan Sylvain

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Citation for the official The Occidental Quarterly interview: De Benoist, Alain. “European Son: An Interview with Alain de Benoist.” Interview by Brian Sylvian. The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Fall 2005), pp. 7-27. <https://www.toqonline.com/archives/v5n3/53-bs-debenoist.pdf >.

Citations for the original sources of the “Interview with Alain de Benoist on the Human Sciences and Christianity by Bryan Sylvain”: De Benoist, Alain. “Interview on Christianity, Part 1.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 28 January 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/01/interview-on-christianity-part-1/ >; “Interview on Christianity, Part 2.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 29 January 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/01/interview-on-christianity-part-2/ >; “Interview on the Human Sciences, Part 1.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 9 February 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/02/interview-on-the-human-sciences-part-1/ >; “Benoist on Eugenics & Intelligence: Interview on the Human Sciences, Part 2.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 11 February 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/02/benoist-on-eugenics-and-intelligence-interview-on-the-human-sciences-part-2/ >; “Benoist on J. Philippe Rushton: Interview on the Human Sciences, Part 3.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 14 February 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/02/interview-on-the-human-sciences-part-3/ >; “Benoist on Feminism, IQ, & the Wealth of Nations: Interview on the Human Sciences, Part 4.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 14 February 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/02/benoist-on-feminism-iq-the-wealth-of-nations-interview-on-the-human-sciences-part-4/ >.

 

Mircea Eliade: An Appreciation – Levy

Mircea Eliade: An Appreciation

by David J. Levy

 

The work of Mircea Eliade has found a ready audience among thinking conservatives ever since it began to be widely known in the 1950’s. It may seem strange that a current of thought rooted as self-consciously as conservatism in the distinctive religious and cultural heritage of the West should be so stimulated by the writings of this student of oriental and archaic religions. To understand the reasons for this is to grasp not only the meaning of Eliade’s work in the context of our present cultural plight but an important point about any coherent conservative philosophy. Let me label that point, the postulate of permanence. It may be expressed as follows: that coherent conservatism rests on the belief that what is permanent in the human condition, that is to say in human nature and in the enveloping reality in which we participate, is more significant for political philosophy than what changes. Eliade’s lifelong vocation has been to grasp and communicate the meaning of the symbols, rites and myths of cultures remote from our own. His insistence that these cultural expressions can and must be understood as an integral part of the human response to the mysteries of existence strikes a responsive chord in the conservative consciousness; just as the conservative emphasis on the unchanging character of man’s nature and status in the order of being finds a ready echo in Eliade’s work. For underlying the stress which he places upon the abiding truth to be discovered in the symbols of oriental and archaic, or non-literate, religions is the recognition that there is an order of being which persists through history – an order to which man responds through the creation of symbols allowing him to discover and express the meaning of his existence. Eliade’s voluminous writings and wide-ranging scholarship introduce the reader to unfamiliar facets of this process. Yet the shock of unfamiliarity is only the prelude to recognition. Exploration prepares the way for anamnesis in that the encounter with an apparently exotic world of thought and beliefs can restore awareness of truths that have slipped from Western consciousness. This is an integral part of Eliade’s purpose. As he conceives it, the history of religions, of which he is our foremost practitioner, is both a journey into strange territory and a long path home. The encounter with other, religiously centered cultures is meant to reawaken us to the spiritual sources of our own.

Eliade is a Romanian, born in Bucharest in 1907. After graduating from Bucharest University in 1928 he was awarded a scholarship by the Maharajah of Kasimbazar which allowed him to spend the next four years studying in India. This period of immersion in Hindu culture was enormously important for the development of the young scholar’s thought. In his experience of Indian life and religion lies the source of Eliade’s belief that the central meaning of religion is to be found in man’s effort to transcend his status as a historical being subject to change and decay and reach a realm of changeless perfection. “It is difficult,” Eliade writes, “to imagine how the human mind could function without the conviction that there is something irreducibly real in the world, and it is impossible to imagine how consciousness could arise without conferring meaning on man’s drives and experience.. . Through the experience .of the sacred, the human mind grasped the difference between that which reveals itself as real, powerful, rich and meaningful, and that which does not – i.e. the chaotic and dangerous flux of things, their fortuitous, meaningless appearances and disappearances.”[1] In Hinduism Eliade first saw something that he later found to be true of all religion – that the achievement of meaning in human existence and the experience of the sacred are intimately linked. Homo religiosus of whatever tradition catches and clings to intimations of the sacred in the profane course of events. What this means is not that the consciousness of religious man rejects the conditions of human existence as unworthy of his true spiritual nature, as the Gnostics would have us believe, but that he sees the world as itself symbolic, a universal cipher of a reality beyond. This according to Eliade is at the heart of every religious world view.

When he returned to Romania in 1932, Eliade found that his years in India   him a new capacity to sympathize with the popular the peasantry of his native land.Practices and beliefs that had earlier puzzled and even embarrassed him took on a fresh significance. He now understood, the religious function of the  icons so characteristic of Orthodoxy: “Before my stay in India,” he recalls, “I was rather disturbed by the fetishistic side of such an action, and I thought that ‘true religion’ was first of all contemplation and meditation, like any Christian who sees himself as an enlightened believer. But when I saw the extraordinary importance of symbolism for the Indian people, I realized that until then I had very much underestimated the existential scope of symbol and image.”[2] The power of the symbol, as object of veneration,to open the mind to awareness of the sacred was one of the most important lessons that Eliade learned in India.Another was the value of spiritual disciplines. For during his stay he not only learned Sanscrit and studied Hindu thought but spent some time practicing Yoga in the Himalayas under the noted master Swami Shivananda.

Yoga was the subject of the doctoral dissertation which Eliade presented in 1933. In the same year his first novel Maitreyi was published to great acclaim. The young university teacher became instantaneously a well-known figure on the Romanian cultural scene. Indeed, among his fellow countrymen his reputation as a novelist and teller of tales has always been at least as great as his name for scholarship. When a Festschrift, Myths and Symbols, was published in his honor in 1969 most of the Romanian contributors chose to write about his literary works which are, even now, scarcely known in the English speaking world.[3] In this they echoed Eliade’s own judgment of their importance. Reading his journal, it is clear that at times the demands of scholarship have seemed an almost intolerable distraction from the pursuit of his vocation as a novelist. Nor is this altogether surprising. Eliade comes from a culture in which the scholar, the poet, and the novelist were often one and the same. He sees the novel as a literary form occupying an essential place in modern Western consciousness. The novel is, we might say, the present incarnation of fable and, as such, a privileged ground for the survival of mythical themes and symbols which retain a compelling power over the human psyche. Eliade’s sense of the living force of symbol informs his literary no less than his scholarly work.

With the French publication of his book on Yoga in 1936 Eliade began to acquire an international reputation. In 1940 he was appointed cultural attaché to the Romanian legation in London, being transferred to Lisbon the next year. The years surrounding the war provide the setting for Eliade’s most ambitious novel The Forbidden Forest. It is a long book, almost six hundred pages in English translation, whose scope and manner invite comparison with Proust. Through the life of his central character, Stefan Viziru, Eliade explores a theme which is never far from his mind – man’s quest for an escape from time and “the terror of history.” The rise of Romanian fascism, the disastrous war against the Soviet Union and the subsequent communist invasion and takeover of the country form the terrifying backdrop to this epic of spiritual survival. Stefan Viziru is caught in the tragic rush of events and yet, as Virgil Nemoianu puts it, somehow distanced from them by his will “to capture or recapture a secret experience of ‘totality’ which partakes equally of an absolute love and of a revelation of the sacred in the profane. Ultimately this amounts to a stepping outside Time, which the individual has to attempt, not only for the sake of his personal redemption, but also as a matter of national concern: Romanians can survive only by boycotting History… , by evading its crushing hostility to them through some decisive ontological withdrawal.”

Nemoianu’s reference to Romanian history is appropriate. There is in every authentic thinker, every true philosopher or lover of wisdom, an intimate relationship between the challenge of life and the path of reflection. In Eliade’s case, the consciousness of Romania as a nation more often the victim than the maker of its destiny played an important, if largely covert part in the development of his thought, especially his opposition to every intellectual system that tries to identify ultimate reality with the course of history. If it was the Indian experience that formed Eliade’s conception of religion as man’s effort to achieve contact with an absolute reality beyond the ravages of time, then it was his consciousness of himself as a Romanian that opened his mind to such a view in the first place and later confirmed its truth in the harsh experience of personal exile and national defeat. Eliade knows as well as anyone that history cannot be ignored – the finger on the trigger is as real as the life it takes – and yet there is, he insists, something more, a realm of being revealed only in religious experience.

Since Eliade is sometimes accused of regarding history as unimportant it is worth quoting a passage in which he makes his position clear: “The expressions ‘history’ and ‘historic’ can occasion much confusion; they indicate, on the one hand, all that is concrete and authentic in a given human existence, as opposed to the unauthentic existence constituted by evasions and automatisms of every kind. On the other hand, in the various historicist and existentialist currents of thought, ‘history’ and ‘historic’ seem to imply that human existence is authentic only insofar as it is reduced to the awakened consciousness of its historic moment. It is to the latter, the ‘totalitarian’ meaning of history that I am referring when I take issue against ‘historicisms’. . . the authenticity of an existence cannot be limited to the consciousness of its own historicity.”[4] Eliade speaks of love, anxiety, melancholy and joy as fundamental experiences which together constitute the integral man “who neither denies himself to his historic moment, nor consents to be identified with it.” Historicism, as Eliade describes it, is mistaken because it identifies man’s essence with historical existence and does not see that history determines neither the nature of reality nor the consciousness which responds to it. Fundamental experiences of consciousness, love and anxiety, melancholy and joy, happen in history but they are not historically relative. Rather they represent permanent forms of human response. They are the precondition and not the product of history. While existing in the historical stream man never loses touch with that which is beyond history and it is the peculiar function of religious symbolism to express this relationship to the ground of his being – the ultimate reality that makes him what he is and gives meaning to his existence. Religious man, Eliade suggests, does not deny the truth of experience but seeks to grasp its covert meaning. Awareness of the sacred, the “wholly other” which may paradoxically manifest itself in the most familiar item of experience, is a matter of spiritual growth and not sensual atrophy. What Eliade calls “the dialectic of the sacred’ is the process by which a being or event becomes the cipher or symbol of something beyond without ceasing to be itself. Employing the vocabulary of Hinduism, Maya, the divine play or cosmic illusion of the passing world, is simultaneously Brahman, the sign of the absolute. As the Chandogya Upanishad put it, for the religious man, “Verily, this whole world is Brahman, from which he comes forth, without which he will be dissolved and in which he breathes. Tranquil, he should meditate on it.” Was Henri Bergson saying anything other when he declared in a lecture that enthralled the young Jacques Maritain: “it is in the absolute that we live and move and have our being”? As Eliade frequently points out, while the terms of religious discourse vary from place to place and time to time, the reality which they try to express is everywhere the same. The dialectic of the sacred expresses the mystery of the manifestation of eternal Being in time. It is small wonder if the effort to express it seems at times to break the bounds of what can be said. The inadequacy of expression to experience in the sphere of religion is a fact of life and quite beyond repair. We see through a glass darkly or not at all.

Eliade did not return to Romania after the war. He lived at first in Paris and then, since 1956, in Chicago where he succeeded Joachim Wach as Professor of the History of Religions. America is now his home but his sense of exile remains, giving a unique. personal tone to his continuing meditation on the meaning of religious experience in the frequently distressing course of life. This personal note comes out most clearly in the journal which Eliade kept between 1945 and 1969, a portion of which appeared in English translation under the title No Souvenirs. It is a work of the greatest interest to anyone wishing to understand the driving force behind his work, which is found in his belief in the enduring existential relevance of the material he studies. No Souvenirs records Eliade’s meetings with many of the significant figures in contemporary culture but, more than that, it provides a chronicle of his spiritual Odyssey through the postwar years. Eliade interprets his own fate and that of his nation in the light of his unequalled acquaintance with parallels and archetypes drawn from the full range of human experience. The tragic but not hopeless history of one man and people becomes exemplary for the understanding of permanent features of man’s being in the world.

“Every exile,” he wrote in 1960, “is a Ulysses traveling toward Ithaca. Every real existence reproduces the Odyssey. The path toward Ithaca, toward the center. I had known all that for a long time. What I have just discovered is that the chance to become a new Ulysses is given to any exile whatsoever (precisely because he has been condemned by the gods, that is, by the ‘powers’ which decide historical, earthly destinies). But to realize this, the exile must be capable of penetrating the hidden meaning of his wanderings, and understanding them as a long series of initiation trials (willed by the gods) and so many obstacles on the path which brings him back to the hearth (toward the center). That means: seeing signs, hidden meanings, symbols, in the sufferings, the depressions, the dry periods in everyday life. Seeing them and reading them even if they aren’t there; if one sees them one can build a structure and read a message in the formless flow of things and the monotonous flux of historical facts.”[5] Behind this passage lies a whole philosophy of man, a philosophical anthropology which stresses the need to find meaning in existence while resolutely facing the fact that there is no reassurance to be found in the temporal order of events. In other words, Eliade introduces his readers to the dimension of meaning conveyed by ancient myth while rejecting the specifically modern, historicist myth, the superstition of “progress” and “the meaning of history” which identifies temporal succession with ontological and ethical order. The experience of the historical disasters of the twentieth century has already done much to undermine this view and Eliade believes that we are now more likely than were our grandparents to understand the Weltanschauung of men for whom history was no freeway to redemption but a time of trial and terror. Indeed, he suggests that it is only insofar as we are able to do this that we will avoid the cultural despair typical of recent Western thought and art.

But how can this be done? The cultures of other times and places exist for us as complexes of symbols whose meaning is not transparent but demands interpretation. The theory and practice of interpretation – hermeneutics as it is often called – thus lies at the center of the history of religions as it must in every area where the works of man are the object of study. The philosopher Paul Ricoeur points out that Eliade’s approach to symbols stands in stark contrast to the hermeneutics of suspicion as practiced by Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. While the latter, each in his fashion, aim to demystify symbolic expression in order to expose the harsh and unacceptable reality that lies beneath – class interest, the will to power, and infantile sexuality respectively – Eliade conceives his task in terms of the recollection of meaning, the deciphering of the truth of being embodied in the symbol and culturally maintained in myths and rituals: “Symbolic thinking,” he writes, “…is consubstantial with human existence, it comes before language and discursive reason. The symbol reveals certain aspects of reality – the deepest aspects – which defy other means of knowledge. Images, symbols and myths are not irresponsible creations of the psyche; they respond to a need and fulfill a function, that of bringing to light the most hidden modalities of being.”[6]

This tendency to treat symbols as coded truths rather than irresponsible fantasies or indices of cultural immaturity is characteristic not only of Eliade’s work but of much of the most fruitful scholarship in the humanities. Eric Voegelin, for instance, speaks of an equivalence between experience and symbols, meaning the way in which a certain type of symbol appears in history as a response to certain identifiable circumstances. Eliade for his part says: “The greatest claim to merit of the history of religions is precisely its effort to decipher in a ‘fact,’ conditioned as it is by the historical moment and cultural style of its epoch, the existential situation that made it possible.”[7] To understand the meaning of a particular myth or rite involves setting it in its context. The specific insight of men like Eliade and Voegelin is that there is more to this context than the transient or merely historical. Whatever the course of events that an individual or group endures, the structure of existence remains the same. Birth, copulation and death, the fact of coming into being and passing away, must be faced in a way consistent with the no less universal need of the psyche to see life as possessing a certain meaning or order.

In Eliade’s case the attempt to recollect and communicate the truths expressed in the symbolism of archaic and oriental religions leads him to reject many of the assumptions of previous scholars. Explicitly or not, most of his predecessors in the field have approached the data with minds conditioned by belief in the self-evident superiority of modem Western thought forms. Eliade’s opposition to historicism and sensitivity to the coherence of non-Western world views produces a radical questioning of all such complacency. Referring to the author of The Golden Bough, he writes: “Where a Frazer could see nothing but ‘superstition,’ a metaphysic was already implicit, even though it was expressed by a pattern of symbols rather than by the interplay of concepts: a metaphysic – that is, a whole and coherent conception of Reality, not a series of instinctive gestures ruled by the same fundamental ‘reaction of the human animal in confrontation with Nature.’”[8]

Eliade calls the implicit metaphysic of religious symbolism “archaic ontology.” However this is in one sense a misleading phrase, for the conception of reality involved is not confined to the religious universe of archaic, or non-literate, peoples. Rather, it is the living core of the religious view of the world as such, one which neither Indian speculation nor Judaeo-Christian revelation definitively transcend. Archaic ontology embodies the effort to express awareness of an ultimate reality beyond history and change. There is nothing intellectually primitive about it. When the intelligible essence of myth, rite and symbol is grasped what we find is not a shoddy tissue of superstition but a creative interpretation of human existence as participation in universal, cosmological order. Simply put, the fundamental problem which man faces is how he may interpret his existence as meaningful in spite of the disasters that befall him in life. Somehow the order to which the psyche aspires must be matched to the experienced nature of the cosmos. As Eliade puts it, the terror of history must be overcome, for history tears the fabric of meaning by bringing everything to oblivion.

Insofar as there is a historical dimension to archaic ontology it is a “sacred history.” Sacred history, in the form of myth, recounts the origins of the cosmos or any part of it. It tells how the world was made as it is by the gods and of the exemplary deeds of mythical heroes. Through myth man accounts for his own existence and nature as well as that of the cosmos. Myths tell him what he is and why. They “preserve and transmit the paradigms, the exemplary models, for all responsible activities in which men engage. By virtue of these paradigmatic models revealed to men in mythical times, the Cosmos and society are periodically regenerated.”[9] Myth recounts origins, in illo tempore, and this mythical time can be reactualized through the ritual repetition of archetypal gestures and events. To recollect or repeat is to reactualize a time when everything was new and uncorrupted. It is to participate in the renewal of the world through repetition of the original act of creation by which the order of the cosmos was brought out of chaos. This theme of the regeneration of the world is difficult for the modem Westerner to grasp. The image of the arrow of time which expresses the irreversibility of the historical moment is deeply etched in our consciousness. Nevertheless it is not impossible to understand the significance which the repetition of archetypal events and gestures has for archaic man. Our own ceremonies and celebrations – Christmas, Passover, or Thanksgiving for instance – recall culturally or spiritually significant events, while in at least one case, the celebration of Holy Communion, what is involved is nothing less than the reactualization of an event which, in terms of historical time alone, belongs irredeemably to the past. The sacred time of the Mass and the ever presence of Christ’s sacrifice within it testifies to a continuity between Christianity and the most profound conceptions of archaic ontology.

Eliade’s analysis of archaic ontology in The Myth of the Eternal Return is remarkably successful as an attempt to communicate the meaning of ancient myth and ritual to the modern reader. The universality of the ontology he discovers, as well as the possibility of making it comprehensible to his audience, is rooted in the unity of man as a symbol making animal and the permanence of the fundamental cosmic structures to which the human mind responds. From the conjunction of the two – the creative meeting of psyche and cosmos – there is born a coherent interpretation of existence which, to a unique extent, provides man with answers to the questions that trouble him most deeply. The symbols of religion reveal a continuity between the structures of human existence and those of the cosmos. In doing isolation in a cold and heartless universe, to see himself as a partner in a world that manifests order. When archaic man interprets his life and destiny by analogy with the repetitive and cyclical rhythms of nature he lays claim to a unity between psychic and cosmic reality that assuages the fear of oblivion. He is never far from death but he knows that when the moon vanishes from the sky the darkness is only a prelude to its return. The barren surface of the winter landscape is no more than a mask before the promise of spring renewal. As part of the cosmos, archaic man sees his life as participating in the same rhythms. No end is final. No merely historical disaster is more than moment in a process which renews and restores. “The religious symbols which point to the structures of life… unveil the miraculous, inexplicable side of life, and at the same time the sacramental dimensions of human existence. ‘Deciphered’ in the light of religious symbols, human life reveals a hidden side: it comes from ‘another part,’ from far off; it is ‘divine’ in the sense that it is the work of the gods or of supernatural beings.”[10] Thus religious symbols do not only bind the structures of psyche and cosmos in a tight web of meaning but also serve to link the limited space of experienced reality with the mysterious unknown out of which it emerges and into which it passes. What happened in illo tempore provides the mind with sufficient reason for the world we know.

Eliade believes that the history of religions can provide the foundation for a new humanism. The reflection of the West upon its own past, the core of traditional humanism, must be supplemented with a dialogue between East and West and a widening of the historical and anthropological horizon to include archaic cultures. “More than any other humanistic discipline,” he claims, “… history of religions can open the way to a philosophical anthropology. For the sacred is a universal dimension and… the beginnings of culture are rooted in religious experiences and beliefs. Furthermore, even after they are radically secularized, such cultural creations as social institutions, technology, moral ideas, arts, etc., cannot be understood correctly if one does not know their original religious matrix, which they tacitly criticized, modified, or rejected on becoming what they are now: secular cultural values. Thus, the historian of religions is in a position to grasp the permanence of what has been called man’s specific existential situation of ‘being in the world,’ for the experience of the sacred is its correlate. In fact, man’s becoming aware of his own mode of being and assuming his presence in the world constitute a ‘religious’ experience.”[ 11]

This emphasis upon the discovery of the religious dimension as original to and formative of man’s discovery of the truth of his being is certainly a major reason for Eliade’s appeal to conservatives. Even among those whose thought is not anchored in Christian or Jewish belief there is a natural affinity for a religious conception of the unchanging conditions of human existence. At the same time the breadth of Eliade’s horizon, his incorporation of the widest possible range of data, poses a special challenge. The symbols we encounter are strange and do not yield their meaning easily. As Ricoeur puts it, “Le symbole donne à penser”: symbolism invites thought, the symbol provokes philosophical reflection which extracts a meaning not visible to the initial glance. If appreciation of the permanence of the human condition is a central feature of any coherent conservative philosophy we can learn as much from other cultures as from our own past. To do this, however, we must first learn to decipher the symbols in which the men of other times and places have articulated their response to the tensions of existence. The sympathy which Mircea Eliade has brought to this task makes him a model for us all.

Notes

[1] Mircea Eliade: The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 1.

[2] Encounter, Vol. LIV, No. 3 (March 1980).

[3] The University of Notre Dame has recently, published English translations of two of Eliade’s novels. These are The Forbidden Forest (1978) and The Old Man and the Bureaucrats (1979).

[4] Mircea Eliade: Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism (London: Harvill Press, 1961), pp. 171-2.

[5] Mircea Eliade: No Souvenirs (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). pp. 84-5.

[6] 1mages and Symbols, p. 12.

[7] Mircea Eliade: “Methodological Remarks on the Study of Religious Symbolism,” in The History of Religions, edited by Mircea Eliade and Joseph M. Kitagawa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), p. 88.

[8] Images and Symbols. p. 176.

[9] The Myth of the Eternal Return or Cosmos and History (Princeton University Press, 1954). p. xiv.

[10] “Methodological Remarks etc.” loc.cit., p. 98.

[11] The Quest, p. 9.

 

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Levy, David J. “Mircea Eliade: An Appreciation.” Modern Age, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Spring 1981), pp. 155-161. Retrieved from: <http://www.mmisi.org/ma/25_02/levy.pdf >.

Note: We also recommend to our readers the key excerpts from Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane, made available on our site along with some information on further reading: <https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2012/09/28/sacred-profane-eliade/ >.

 

New Paradigm of Science – Dugin

New Paradigm of Science

Speech in the Tokyo University

By Alexander Dugin

 

We regard the science as a system of relations of a rational man with a mechanistically interpreted reality. Having arisen at the edge of the New Time in Europe, that system of relations includes both theory – the knowledge about that reality (which claims its own objective character, verifiability and indisputability) – and practice (technics) – the methods of affecting that reality.

The rational man, the man who bases his perception of the world on the “common sense” (“la bonne raison”, “bon sens” or “la bonne foi”) is the subject of the modern science, its self, its creator, its main developer. In the pre-scientific period such a subject did not exist purely or, at least, it did not claim for the rational approach as the only one to formulate the truths of the surrounding reality’s nature. Some certain superrational dogmas and myths always prevailed over the rational man. As to science, it set itself to emancipation from non-rational foundations from the very beginning. And this is just what one of its specific distinctive features consists in. Where this criterion is not observed, we cannot talk about the science in the strict (modern) sense of that word and should use other formulas, such as “pre-scientific conceptions”, “para-scientific method”, “pre-scientific” and in some situations even “post-scientific” approaches.

The mechanistic and atomistic interpretation of reality is the other necessary criterion of understanding science. Only the mechanistic nature, deprived of any faint resemblance of “its immanent-essential life” must be the object of the science. As regards this, Martin Heidegger wrote:

“The science establishes the Actual. It presses for the Actual to appear every time as a result of one or another action, in other words, to appear in the form of visible aftereffects of some causes, which give a good ground for them.”

Such objective-made reality functions completely according to cause-and-effect relationship and is subordinate to a mechanistic determinism. That reality is supposed to be “accessible to strict measurement” (as M. Plank said). As to M. Heidegger, he emphasizes that “any objectivation is calculation”. So then the outside world in the modern science is taken as the Absolute Object, lying before the Absolute Subject, the “Subjective Subject”, and they do not have any common mediating substance with each other. Hence follows the most important classic science principle of reducing “the organism to the mechanism”, the representation of an organism as a complicated, intricate version of a mechanism. In turn, from this emerged the Cartesian thesis of “the animals as mechanical apparatuses” and the radical Lamerti’s statement that “the man is nothing else but the machine”.

Such vision of the world and of the man attains prevalence (in Europe) only in New Time and just in the same period the concept of “science” is realized as describing some system of “exact” relations of two set-apart poles – of the “Subjective Subject” and of the “Objective Object”. In other epochs the term “science” was used in some other, more wide and less precise sense, since both the man and the Nature were perceived absolutely otherwise and their interrelations had fundamentally different character.

So, the main quality of a science as itself consists in striving to attach some autonomous character to the deterministic and mechanistic system of relations between the subject and the object, in purifying that system of relations from any collateral and unscientific, extrascientific factors (theology, traditions, myths, “superstitions” and so forth).

In turn, such an autonomous state, attained by the science, should have brought to ranking the scientific knowledge in its own opinion above the rest gnoseological patterns of pre-scientific and unscientific origin. This last point is extremely essential, since in a historical process the substance of the science was developed in dispute with comprehensive gnoseological systems, mostly related with religions and other topping institutes of a traditional society. The opposition of the science as specific gnoseological system, claiming independence and dominance, to other patterns of cognition and perception of reality, that are inherent in a traditional society, makes the science an ideologically concerned phenomenon.

Methodology of meta-paradigms (Sphere, Ray, Segment)

The main methodological instrument we employ is a principle of paradigms.

The Greek word “paradeigma” literally means “what predetermines the character of the manifested, but at the same time remains outside the manifested” (“para” signifies “over”, “above”, “by what”, “about what”, and “deigma” signifies “manifestation”). In the most broad sense, it is an initial pattern, a matrix, which prefers to act not directly, but through its own manifestations, having predetermined their structure. The paradigm is not manifested by itself and represents a structure-forming reality, which, being not accessible to direct introspection, always remaining “off screen”, establishes the main, basic, fundamental parameters of human thinking and human being. The specificity of paradigm consists in that gnoseological and ontological aspects in it are not divided yet and are subject to distinguishing only as our basic intuitions, having been sifted through the paradigmatic sieve, take form of one or another affirmation of gnoseological or ontological character.

The term “paradigm” was applied by the Platonic and neo-Platonic philosophy schools for describing some supreme, transcendent example, predetermining the structure and form of material things. It was introduced in the science history methodology anew by G. Bergman, who interpreted it as some common principles and standards of the methodological research. T. Kuhn gave more wide interpretation (than by Bergman) of the term, summarizing in it the general context of the scientific conceptions, axioms, methods and certainties, which predetermine weltanshaaung orientations, shared by the scientific community in the given historical situation. Kuhn made the paradigmatic method of research a principle instrument for researching the structure of scientific-technical revolutions. Kuhn’s term “disciplinary matrix” was a specified synonym for “paradigm”.

Even more broad sense was implied in that term by Fritjof Capra, who proposed opposition of two paradigms: the old (classic, Cartesian-Newtonian) one and the new, named by him as “holistic” or “ecologic”, one, destined to replace the rational-discontinuous methodology of mainstream science of New Time.

We use the term “paradigm” in the most common sense, different from those of G. Bergman, T. Kuhn, F. Capra, in the sense of generalization universality. That’s why, to give a more accurate definition, we have had to introduce a concept of “metaparadigm”. We interpret it as a vast aggregate of non-manifest orientations that predetermine the manner itself of understanding and viewing reality’s nature and that, being formed, may give birth to manifold philosophical, scientific, religious, mythological, cultural systems and conceptions, which have some common denominator despite all their formal difference.

In other words, the paradigm is not a myth, but a system of myths and it is able to generate new mythological subjects and recombinations. The paradigm is not a theology, but a system of theologies, which, differing in their concrete affirmations, are reduced to the common proto-matrix. The paradigm is not an ideology, but some pre-ideological nebula, able to crystallize out of itself (as in Laplace’s hypothesis) uncertainly large system of ideologies. The paradigm is not an ideology, but an ultimately underlying reason for ideologies, able to reveal similarity in ideologies, not just different externally, but even opposite, and vice versa, show a fundamental differences in ideologies, very like formally.

In such a vision one cannot draw a strict distinction between a gnoseological ingredient and an ontological ingredient of a paradigm. Each of the global paradigms certainly sets up axiomatic structures, where the statuses of Being, Consciousness, Spirit, World, Origin and their interrelations are predetermined. As to empirical confirmations or refutations of those axiomatic structures, they do not even apply to the paradigms directly, since they affect intermediate levels of formal realization. The question of reflection on the paradigms themselves and their quality is put in special historical moments only, when transition from one paradigm to another occurs. But as soon as the change is accomplished, the possibility itself of such reflection is reduced to minimum. The paradigm predetermines how is what is, what is what is, and finally, how we cognize what is. It is a closed set. In some paradigms the ontology and the gnoseology are knowingly merged, in the others are separated. But it is not a property of level or degree of cognition, it is a result of a paradigmatic influence, which is expressed in multiform series of scientifical, philosiphical, mythological and cultural discourses.

As the most general paradigms we propose to take three paradigms – paradigms of Sphere, of Ray and of Segment. Each of these paradigms might underlie philosophy, science, mythology, theology, gnoseology, and so on. Each paradigm dictates its own model of association with the world, world’s general structure conception, world’s cognition aspects and models.

It is exactly the dialectical development of these paradigms, their interrelationship, and their change determine, in our opinion, the flow of human history, determine the emergence of science itself, its development, conditions of its coming into being. Each of the paradigms totally and radically changes the meaning of the terms and intellectual constructions, which in the formal and lexical way might look identical. The transition from one paradigm to another basically changes the main parameters of reality perception by a human, transforms the status of a human himself.

Each of the paradigms gains prevalence in certain historical periods. And at first sight, their evolution has the character of succession: for example, the paradigm of Sphere was peculiar to the ancient humankind and to traditional societies initially. It is primordial and is found in most ancient and modern (mostly Oriental) civilizations. In historical and geographical senses that paradigm is spread more widely than two others. It corresponds with basic, profound and deep strata of human’s psyche and therefore remains surprisingly stable even in the periods when on the surface it is displaced by other alternative paradigms. The paradigm of the Sphere is based on the fact that the Deity / proto-Principle / Origin is found inside the World, is cosubstantial to the World, inseparably and substantially linked with the World. This gives birth to conception of “cyclic time”, “eternal return”. This motive is a commonplace in all mythological and religious teachings except for Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam; but it is still present in those three in the form of mystical, esoteric trends, somewhat different from dogmatic norms.

The paradigm of the Ray is the next one both in logical and historical aspect. It is connected with the unique theology of those religious forms, that are called “religions of Revelation” or “monotheism”. The idea of world creation from nothing, “ex nihilo” underlies the paradigm of Ray. Such an approach momentarily breaks the continuity of the spherical world, evenly imbued by the Divine presence, the presence of proto-Principle. Here God-Creator seems to be external to the Universe, separated from the nature of Universe. The relation of the beings, present on Earth, to the Origin immediately changes. The reality becomes locked from one side, from the side of its emergence, its origin. The Ray paradigm gives birth to one-directional time, gives grounds for turning history into a “time arrow”. However, the religions of Revelation (though in varied forms) teach that in certain stages of humankind history the alienation, which underlies creation ex nihilo, will be overcome as a display of the “Divine mercy”. And starting from a certain moment the immanent created reality will be “atoned”, “saved” and elevated to the transcendent Origin. That epoch of atonement is called “eschatological” or “messianic”. The world to that moment discontinues being alienated from the Creator and transits to some other mode of being, which roughly reminds of the reality conceptions in the Sphere paradigm. Hence follows that the Ray (or the Hemisphere) is limited from one side, from the side of ‘world creation from nothing’ dogma, and is unlimited from the other side. This “unlimitedness” does not imply indefinitely long duration. The symbol of Ray is taken here metaphorically, just in order to stress the “half-indefinite” character of the model, beginning with the radical rupture and resulting in the blessed reconciliation and reunification. That messianic motive is to varied extent inherent in all monotheistic religions, but is especially clearly expressed in Judaism and Christianity, and in Christianity the eschatological aspect is accentuated unprecedentedly.

The Ray paradigm follows the Sphere paradigm both in logical and historical aspect. It is as if it dissects the Sphere, cutting off the half, that postulated the direct resulting from God (what is called “manifestationism” or “ex deo” creation).

Further, the Segment paradigm follows the Ray paradigm. Here the world’s limitedness from both sides is postulated. Such world appears from nothing and disappears in nothing. It has no direct Divine Origin and no hope for return to Deity. The Universe is conceived as God-abandoned objective reality, closed from all sides by non-existence and death. That paradigm is characteristic for New Time and underlies the modern science.

The Segment paradigm insists that no transition of immanent reality to the transcendent levels is possible, in its most complete forms that paradigm denies the existence of those levels at all. That’s why the Segment paradigm gravitates to atheism, rejecting the transcendent principle. In some cases, however, instead of atheism there is deism in it, which affirms a transcendent Creator, but denies messianism and eschatology. In the viewpoint of Segment paradigm, such deism does not differ from atheism and materialism in almost any way.

The Segment Paradigm gravitates to mechanistic conception of reality nature, to atomism and local situations’ priority. In that paradigm the General, the universal live interrelationship among objects, beings and phenomena is denied. The prevalent approach is discontinuity, divisibility, relativity.

The Segment paradigm follows the Ray paradigm as a result of its development. It is significant, that the Segment paradigm becomes established only where the Sphere paradigm was replaced by the Ray paradigm beforehand. There is a logical and symmetrical correspondence in that fact. With certain approximation and considering the fact that New Time is exactly characterized by the process of the Segment paradigm’s obtaining universal character and its extensive development, one may conceive the paradigm development process as a consequent transition from Sphere through Ray to Segment. In some reality aspects it is so.

So, the general process of paradigm evolution has a whole series of fine points, defining that process, as well as there is some dimensions, where the external successive transition from Sphere to Ray is compensated by the reverse phenomena, that shows ancient Sphere paradigm’ resistibility and stability as regards competing “innovative” paradigms.

We would like to solve the comprehension problem of “scientific epoch” as a whole and having an autonomous structure intellectual paradigm (the Segment paradigm) which exists along with other paradigms (the Sphere and Ray paradigm) which are based on the other premises, that are to the same extent well-grounded (or groundless) as “scientific dogmata”. Sometimes unscientific and even pre-scientific paradigms affect the evolution of the scientific orthodoxy itself, admixing to it and creating intermediate and quasi-homogeneous variants, that often evade looks of researchers who operate with conventional schemes and methodologies.

Apart from “critical rationalism” we are absolutely not sure that preserving modified norms of “classical rationality” is a self-evident truth and that giving the scientific orthodoxy up would bring to humankind’s intellectual degradation. We would like to show that the other, non-scientific paradigms also rest on quite harmonious and complete intellectual constructions, arranged otherwise (which does not mean certainly worse). On the other hand, the “epistemological anarchism” as mixture of all possible paradigms and giving up any general gnoseologic vectors at all can scarcely give really useful and correct intellectual results (though in some cases such an approach may be justified). As to theses of radical positivists, today they are not regarded as serious by anyone.

In our viewpoint, the method of “meta-paradigms” just may set one of the possible landmarks for the further scientific self-consciousness development and the evolution of the phenomenon that according some certain historical inertion (despite the obvious change of functions) is still common to call “science”.

 

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The text of this speech was originally published online at the official Fourth Political Theory website (n.d.): <http://www.4pt.su/el/node/708#sthash.Okm75fc6.dpuf >. (See this essay in PDF format here: New Paradigm of Science).

Note: Our research shows that the theory of paradigms discussed in this speech is based upon the ideas which Aleksandr Dugin expounded in more depth in his dissertation Эволюция парадигмальных оснований науки (Москва: Арктогея, 2002). On the relationship between science and religion and the idea of a reform of science from a religious perspective, related ideas to Dugin’s have been advanced by Mircea Eliade and Gilbert Durand (both of whom influenced Dugin’s thought). For Dugin’s studies on these matters, see also his book Социология Воображения (Москва: Академический проект, 2010), which is his most comprehensive sociological work.

Additional note: We also recommend that our audience read Alexander Dugin’s article on modern Japanese society and culture: ‘In the Country of Rising “Do”’, <https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2015/01/04/on-japan-dugin/ >. According to Dugin’s description, Japan has a society in which the qualities of modernity and tradition are very well combined. The Japanese society of recent times (the late 20^th Century and early 21^st Century) is highly advanced technologically, scientifically, and economically, but it simultaneously possesses a rich and high-quality culture which is very religious, spiritual, conservative, and ethnically identitarian in nature. In other words, it is “revolutionary conservative” because it possesses a culture where the progress of modern science is fused with the spiritual qualities of traditional society. Thus, modern Japanese society can be seen as a source of inspiration and also as a model for European Conservatives and Identitarians, who aim to create a similar type of society for European nations.

 

On Being a Pagan – Benoist

On Being a Pagan by Alain de Benoist (PDF – 52.8 MB):

On Being a Pagan – Alain de Benoist

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Note: This is the complete book by Alain de Benoist, On Being a Pagan (Atlanta: Ultra, 2004), the English translation of the French original: Comment peut-on être païen? (Paris: A. Michel, 1981). The book is also available in Spanish translation as ¿Cómo se puede ser pagano? (Molins de Rei: Nueva República, 2004), in German translation as Heide sein zu einem neuen Anfang (Tübingen: Grabert, 1982), in Italian translation as Come si può essere pagani? (Roma: Basaia, 1984), in Dutch translation as Heiden zijn vandaag de dag (Monnickendam: Stichting Deltapers, 1985), and in Russian translation as Как можно быть язычником (Москва: Русская Правда, 2004).

Another notable work by Alain de Benoist on religious matters is the book written in cooperation with Thomas Molnar, L’éclipse du sacré: discours et réponses (Paris: Table ronde, 1986), translated into Italian as L’eclisse del sacro (Vibo Valentia: Edizioni settecolori, 1992). We should mention that it needs to be recognised, in this regard, that Benoist is not rigidly anti-Christian (in fact, there are many Christians in the New Right, who have found ways to reconcile Pagan values with Christianity). See in Spanish the commentary on the New Right and its approach to religion by Rodrigo Agulló (Interview on his book Disidencia Perfecta, published at El Manifiesto, 9 June 2011): <http://www.elmanifiesto.com/articulos.asp?idarticulo=3729 >. The section of Agulló’s Disidencia Perfecta dealing with religion has been excerpted and published as “¿Qué religión para Europa? La polémica del neopaganismo” in Elementos No. 82.

On religious and spiritual issues, we also recommend that people consider Mircea Eliade’s understanding of Paganism, Christianity, and religion in general. A good introduction to Eliade’s studies is provided by the excerpts from his The Sacred and the Profane, made available on our site here: <https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2012/09/28/sacred-profane-eliade/ >.

 

La Nueva Derecha Europea en Español (The European New Right in Spanish)

La Nueva Derecha Europea en Español

(The European New Right in Spanish)

Note in English: Due to the fact that the Spanish is one of the most important languages (along with French, Italian, and German) in which many key works of the European New Right have been published, we have created this page to bring attention to some of the more significant Spanish-language resources on the European New Right which are available on the Internet and which we have chosen to republish on our website. These include certain selected issues of Sebastian J. Lorenz’s online journal Elementos which we have deemed to be the most important, along with Alain de Benoist’s and Charles Champetier’s “Manifesto of the New Right” (Spanish version).

Aquí vamos a poner en conocimiento de los recursos más importantes en el idioma español para el pensamiento de la Nueva Derecha Europea. El recurso más importante es la revista de Sebastián J. Lorenz: Elementos: Revista de Metapolítica para una Civilización Europea, que se ha anunciado y publicado en línea en su sitio web: <http://elementosdemetapolitica.blogspot.com.es/ >. Hemos seleccionado y publicado en nuestra página web lo que hemos considerado que son los números más esenciales de esta revista en lo que respecta a las ideas de la Nueva Derecha. En el espacio a continuación vamos a enumerar y enlace en el espacio por debajo de estos números de Elementos y sus contenidos, junto con el manifiesto de Alain de Benoist y Charles Champetier.

Aquí también queremos mencionar los libros más importantes de la Nueva Derecha en español que están disponibles en formato impreso: Alain de Benoist, ¿Es un Problema la Democracia? (Barcelona: Nueva República, 2013); Benoist, La Nueva Derecha: Una respuesta clara, profunda e inteligente (Barcelona : Planeta, 1982); Alain de Benoist, Guillaume Faye, & Carlos Pinedo Cestafe, Las Ideas de la “Nueva Derecha”: Una respuesta al colonialismo cultural (Barcelona: Nuevo Arte Thor, 1986); Guillaume Faye, Pierre Freson, & Robert Steuckers, Pequeño Léxico del Partisano Europeo (Molins de Rei, Barcelona: Nueva República, 2012); Tomislav Sunic, Homo Americanus: Hijo de la Era Postmoderna (Barcelona: Ediciones Nueva Republica, 2008); Dominique Venner, Europa y su Destino: De ayer a mañana (Barcelona: Áltera, 2010); Rodrigo Agulló, Disidencia Perfecta: La Nueva Derecha y la batalla de las ideas (Barcelona & Madrid: Altera, 2011); Jesús J. Sebastián Lorente (ed.), Alain de Benoist: Elogio de la disidencia (Tarragona: Ediciones Fides, 2015).

 

Manifiesto: La Nueva Derecha del año 2000 por Alain de Benoist y Charles Champetier

(Nota: Este libro también fue publicado en forma impresa como: Manifiesto para un renacimiento europeo [Mollet del Vallès, Barcelona: GRECE, 2000])

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 15 – “Moeller van den Bruck: Conservadurismo Revolucionario”  (publicado 1 Junio 2011)

Contenidos:

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck y la Nouvelle Droite, por Sebastian J. Lorenz

Moeller van den Bruck: un rebelde conservador, por Luca Leonello Rimbotti

Moeller van den Bruck: ¿un “precursor póstumo”?, por Denis Goedel

Moeller y Dostoievski, por Robert Steuckers

Moeller y la Kulturpessimismus de Weimar, por Ferran Gallego

Moeller y los Jungkonservativen, por Erik Norling

Moeller y Spengler, por Ernesto Milá

Moeller y la Konservative Revolution, por Keith Bullivant

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, por Alain de Benoist

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 16 – “Un Diálogo Contra la Modernidad: Julius Evola y Alain de Benoist”  (publicado 9 Junio 2011)

Contenidos:

Julius Evola, por Alain de Benoist

Posmodernidad y antimodernidad: Alain de Benoist y Julius Evola, por Marcos Ghio

Julius Evola, reaccionario radical y metafísico comprometido. Análisis crítico del pensamiento político de Julius Evola, por Alain de Benoist

Evola y la crítica de la modernidad, por Luisa Bonesio

La recepción internacional de Rebelión contra el mundo moderno, por Giovanni Monastra

Rebelión contra el mundo moderno, por Julius Evola

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 24 – “Europeismo Identitario”  (publicado 25 Mayo 2012)

Contenidos:

Hacia el reencuentro de Europa: Lo que piensa la Nueva Derecha, por Diego L. Sanromán

Europa a la búsqueda de su identidad, por Isidro J. Palacios

La cuestión europea: Bases ideológicas de la Nueva Derecha, por Carlos Pinedo Cestafe

Europa: la memoria del futuro, por Alain de Benoist

Una cierta idea de Europa. El debate sobre la construcción europea, por Rodrigo Agulló

La memoria en herencia: Europa y su destino, por Dominique Venner

Siglo XXI: Europa, un árbol en la tempestad, por Guillaume Faye

La identidad europea, por Enrique Ravello

Europa: no es herencia sino misión futura, por Giorgio Locchi

El proyecto de la Gran Europa, por Alexander Dugin

¿Unión Europea o Gran Espacio?, por J. Molina

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 26 – “Economía Orgánica. Una Alternativa a la Economía de Mercado” (publicado 11 Junio 2012)

Contenidos:

Salir de la Economía, por Rodrigo Agulló

La Economía no es el Destino, por Guillaume Faye

La Economía Orgánica en la Nueva Derecha, por Carlos Pinedo

Adam Müller: la Economía Orgánica como vivienca romántica, por Luis Fernando Torres

Friedrich List: Sistema Nacional de Economía Política, ¿proteccionismo?, por Arturo C. Meyer, Carlos Gómez y Jurgen Schuldt

Crear la Economía Orgánica, por A.L. Arrigoni

El principio de reciprocidad en los cambios, por Alberto Buela

¿Homo oeconomicus o idiota moral?, por Ramón Alcoberro

Por una Economía Mundial de dos velocidades, por Guillaume Faye

La Economía Local contra la Economía Global, por Edward Goldsmith

Dictadura de la economía y sociedad mercantilista, por Stefano Vaj

Crisis económica: aproximación a un modelo económico alternativo, por Juan P. Viñuela

La crítica de la Economía de Mercado de Karl Polanyi, por Arturo Lahera Sánchez

Por la independencia económica europea, por Guillaume Faye

¿Decrecimiento o barbarie?, por Serge Latouche

Decrecimiento: hacia un nuevo paradigma económico, por Luis Picazo Casariego

La Economía del Bien Común: un modelo económico alternativo, por Christian Felber

Charles Champetier: por una subversión de la lógica economicista, por Diego L. Sanromán

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 28 – “Contra el Liberalismo: El Principal Enemigo” (publicado 29 junio 2012)

Contenidos:

El liberalismo, enemigo principal, por Alain de Benoist y Charles Champetier

El liberalismo en las ideas de la “Nueva Derecha”, por Carlos Pinedo Cestafe

Liberalismo, por Francis Parker Yockey

Frente al Peligro de la Hegemonía Liberal, por Marco Tarchi

La esencia del neoliberalismo, por Pierre Bourdieu

El error del liberalismo, por Alain de Benoist

Liberalismo y Democracia: Paradojas y Rompecabezas, por Joseph Margolis

El liberalismo y las identidades, por Eduardo Arroyo

Dinámica histórica del Liberalismo: del mercado total al Estado total, por Tomislav Sunic

Neoliberalismo: la lucha de todos contra todos, por Pierre Bourdieu

La impostura liberal, por Adriano Scianca

Una crítica liberal del liberalismo, por Adrián Fernández Martín

Leo Strauss y su crítica al liberalismo, por Alberto Buela

Charles Taylor: una crítica comunitaria al liberalismo político, por Carlos Donoso Pacheco

El liberalismo norteamericano y sus críticos: Rawls, Taylor, Sandel, Walzer, por Chantal Mouffe

La crítica comunitaria a la moral liberal, por Renato Cristi

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 31 – “Armin Mohler y la “Konservative Revolution” Alemana” (publicado 12 Agosto 2012)

Contenidos:

El movimiento de la Revolución Conservadora, por Robert Steuckers

La herencia del movimiento de la “Revolución Conservadora” en Europa, por Ian B. Warren

La Revolución Conservadora, por Keith Bullivant

La crisis de la democracia en Weimar:Oposición ideológica de la Revolución

Conservadora,por José Ramón Díez Espinosa

La Revolución Conservadora en Alemania, por Marqués de Valdeiglesias

Ideas para Europa: la Revolución Conservadora, por Luca Leonello Rimbotti

Revolución Conservadora y nacionalsocialismo, por Andrea Virga

Evola y la Revolución Conservadora, por Giano Accame

La Konservative Revolution como doctrina de la decadencia de Alemania, por Miguel Ángel Simón

La influencia de Armin Mohler sobre la cosmovision de la Nueva Derecha, por Robert Steuckers

De la «Konservative Revolution» a la «Nouvelle Droite»: ¿apropiación o rehabilitación?, por Sebastian J. Lorenz

La Revolución Conservadora y la cuestión de las minorías nacionales, por Xoxé M. Núzez Seixas

El sinsentido de la Revolución Conservadora Historia de la idea, nacionalismo y habitus, por Henning Eichberg

Índice de los autores de la «Konservative Revolution”, según Armin Mohler

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 32 – “Imperio: Orden Especial y Espiritual” (publicado 11 septiembre 2012)

Contenidos:

La idea de Imperio, por Alain de Benoist

Translatio Imperii: del Imperio a la Unión, por Peter Sloterdijk

¿Hacia un modelo neoimperialista? Gran espacio e Imperio en Carl Schmitt, por Alessandro Campi

¿Europa imperial?, por Rodrigo Agulló

Imperialismo pagano, por Julius Evola

El concepto de Imperio en el Derecho internacional, por Carl Schmitt

Nación e Imperio, por Giorgio Locchi

El Imperium a la luz de la Tradición, por Eduard Alcántara

Imperio sin Imperator, por Celso Sánchez Capdequí

Imperio: Constitución y Autoridad imperial, por Michael Hardt y Antonio Negri

La teoría posmoderna del Imperio, por Alan Rush

El Imperium espiritual de Europa: de Ortega a Sloterdijk, por Sebastian J. Lorenz

 

ELEMENTOS N° 37 – “Federalismo Poliárquico Neoalthusiano” (publicado 28 Noviembre 2012)

Contenidos:

El primer federalista. Johannes Althusius, por Alain de Benoist

Carl Schmitt y el Federalismo, por Luis María Bandieri

Nacionalismo, Democracia y Federalismo, por Ramón Máiz

Europa federal y el principio de subsidiariedad, por Rodrigo Agulló

España, ¿federación o autodeterminación?, por Sebastian J. Lorenz

Plurinacionalidad, Federalismo y Derecho de Autodeterminación, por Jaime Pastor

El federalismo pluralista. Del federalismo nacional al federalismo plurinacional, por Miquel Caminal

Federalismo plurinacional, por Ramón Máiz

Estado federal y Confederación de Estados, por Max Sercq

De la Confederación a la Federación. Reflexiones sobre la finalidad de la integración europea, por Joschka Fischer

Federalismo versus Imperialismo, por Juan Beneyto

Europa. De imperio a federación, por Josep M. Colomer

Entrevistas imaginarias con el Presidente de Europa y el Jefe del Gobierno europeo

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 39 – “Una Crítica Metapolítica de la Democracia: De Carl Schmitt a Alain de Benoist, Vol. I” (publicado 23 Enero 2013)

Contenidos:

Democracia, el problema

Democracia representativa y democracia participativa, por Alain de Benoist

La crítica de la democracia, por Felipe Giménez Pérez

La democracia: Un análisis a partir de los críticos, por Eva Garrell Zulueta

La crítica decisionista de Carl Schmitt a la democracia liberal, por Antonella Attili

Rectificación metapolítica de la democracia, por Primo Siena

La crítica de Nietzsche a la Democracia  en Humano, demasiado humano, por Diego Felipe Paredes

Teoría democrática: Joseph Schumpeter y la síntesis moderna, por Godofredo Vidal de la Rosa

La crisis de la Democracia, por Marcel Gauchet

Democracia morbosa. Variaciones sobre un tema de Ortega, por Ignacio Sánchez Cámara

La democracia capitalista como forma extrema del totalitarismo. Entrevista con Philip Allot, por Irene Hernández Velasco

Sobre Nietzsche contra la democracia, de Nicolás González Varela, por Salvador López Arnal

La Democracia como Nematología. Sobre El fundamentalismo democrático, de Gustavo Bueno, por Íñigo Ongay de Felipe

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 40 – “Antonio Gramsci y el Poder Cultural. Por un Gramscismo de Derecha” (publicado 11 Febrero 2013)

Contenidos:

El gramscismo de derecha, por Marcos Ghio

Antonio Gramsci, marxista independiente, por Alain de Benoist

La estrategia metapolítica de la Nueva Derecha, por Carlos Pinedo

Un gramcismo de derechas. La Nueva derecha y la batalla de las ideas, por Rodrigo Agulló

El Poder Cultural, por Alain de Benoist

Gramsci, la revolución cultural y la estrategia para Occidente, por Ricardo Miguel Flore

El concepto de hegemonia en Gramsci, por Luciano Grupp

Gramsci y la sociología del conocimiento,por Salvador Orlando Alfaro

Antonio Gramsci: orientaciones, por Daniel Campione

Cómo Ganar la Guerra de las Ideas: Lecciones de la Derecha Gramsciana Neoliberal, por Susan George

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 41 – “Una Crítica Metapolítica de la Democracia: De Carl Schmitt a Alain de Benoist, Vol. II” (publicado 18 Febrero 2013)

Contenidos:

Democracia antigua y “Democracia” moderna, por Alain de Benoist

¿Es eterna la democracia liberal? Algunas opiniones al respecto,por Pedro Carlos González Cuevas

La democracia según la Escuela de Frankfurt y Carl Schmitt: ¿Opuestos y complementarios?, por Emmanuel Brugaletta

Carl Schmitt y René Capitant. Parlamentarismo y Democracia, por Xavier Marchand

La democracia federalista, por Sergio Fernández Riquelme

Tres modelos de democracia. Sobre el concepto de una política deliberativa, por Jürgen Habermas

Carl Schmitt y la paradoja de la democracia liberal, por Chantal Mouffe

Elitismo y Democracia: de Pareto a Schumpeter, por Mercedes Carreras

Democracia como sistema, democracia como ideología, por Pelayo García Sierra

Filósofos para una nueva democracia, por Braulio García Jaén

¿Hacia un nueva democracia? Habermas y Schmitt, por Ellen Kennedy

El invierno de la democracia, por Guy Hermet

Los enemigos de la democracia: la dictadura neoliberal, por Eduardo Álvarez Puga

Democracia sin demócratas, de Marcos Roitman, por Josep Pradas

 

ELEMENTOS N° 43 – “La Causa de los Pueblos: Etnicidad e Identidad” (publicado 18 Marzo 2013)

Contenidos:

La causa de los pueblos, por Isidro Juan Palacios

El etnocidio contra los pueblos: Mecánica y consecuencias del neo-colonialismo cultural, por José Javier Esparza

Etnopluralismo: las ideas de la Nueva Derecha, por Carlos Pinedo

El Arraigo por Alain de Benoist

La Europa de las etnias: nuestro único futuro posible, por Olegario de las Eras

La cuestión étnica: Aproximación a los conceptos de grupo étnico, identidad étnica, etnicidad y relaciones interétnicas, por Maria Cristina Bari

Visiones de la etnicidad, por Manuel Ángel Río Ruiz

Sobre la identidad de los pueblos, por Luis Villoro

La etnicidad y sus formas: aproximación a un modelo complejo de la pertenencia étnica, por Eduardo Terrén

El problema del etnocentrismo en el debate antropológico entre Clifford Geertz, Richard Rorty y Lévi-Strauss, por Rafael Aguilera Portales

La negación de la realidad étnica, por Guillaume Faye

Etnicidad y nacionalismo, por Isidoro Moreno Navarro

Etnicidad sin garantías: contribuciones de Stuart Hall, por Eduardo Restrepo

Etnia y etnicidad: dos categorías en construcción, por Carlos Ramiro Bravo Molina

 

ELEMENTOS N° 47 – “Elogio de la Diferencia. Diferencialismo versus Racismo” (publicado 28 Mayo 2013)

Contenidos:

Identidad y diferencia, por Alain de Benoist

Sobre racismo y antirracismo. Entrevista a Alain de Benoist, por Peter Krause

Diferencialismo contra racismo. Sobre los orígenes modernos del racismo, por Gilbert Destrées

El racismo. Génesis y desarrollo de una ideología de la Modernidad, por Carlos Caballero Jurado

Hacia un concepto convencional de raza, por Sebastian J. Lorenz

Nihilismo Racial, por Richard McCulloch

El antirracismo como religión de Estado, por Guillaume Faye

Un asunto tenebroso: el problema del racismo en la Nueva Derecha, por Diego Luis Sanromán

El racismo como ideología política. El discurso anti-inmigración de la Nueva Derecha, por José Luis Solana Ruiz

Sobre viejos y nuevos racismos. Las ideas de la Nueva Derecha, por Rodrigo Agulló

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 54 – “La Falsa Ideología de los Derechos Humanos” (publicado 30 Agosto 2013)

Contenidos:

Más allá de los Derechos Humanos. Defender las Libertades, por Alain de Benoist

Reflexiones en torno a los Derechos Humanos, por Charles Champetier

El Derecho de los Hombres, por Guillaume Faye

Derechos Humanos: una ideología para la mundialización, por Rodrigo Agulló

En torno a la Doctrina de los Derechos Humanos, por Erwin Robertson

¿Derechos del hombre?, por Adriano Scianca

¿Son universales los Derechos Humanos?, por François Julien

Los Derechos Humanos  como derechos de propiedad, por Murray Rothbard

La religión de los Derechos Humanos, por Guillaume Faye

Derechos comunes y Derechos personales en Ortega y Gasset, por Alejandro de Haro Honrubia

Derechos Humanos: disyuntiva de nuestro tiempo, por Alberto Buela

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 61 – “La Condición Femenina. ¿Feminismo o Feminidad?” (publicado 28 Noviembre 2013)

Contenidos:

Visión ontológico-teológica de lo masculino y lo femenino, por Leonardo Boff

El ser oculto de la cultura femenina en la obra de Georg Simmel, por Josetxo Beriain

El feminismo de la diferencia, por Marta Colorado López, Liliana Arango Palacio, Sofía Fernández Fuente

La condición femenina, por Alain de Benoist

La mujer objeto de la dominación masculina, por Pierre Bourdieu

Feminidad versus Feminismo, por Cesáreo Marítimo

Afirmando las diferencias. El feminismo de Nietzsche, por Elvira Burgos Díaz

La mujer como madre y la mujer como amante, por Julius Evola

El “recelo feminista” a proposito del ensayo La dominacion masculina de

Pierre Bourdieu, por Yuliuva Hernández García

Friedrich Nietzsche y Sigmund Freud: una subversión feminista, por Eva Parrondo Coppel

Hombres y mujeres. Un análisis desde la teoría de la polaridad, por Raúl Martínez Ibars

Identidad femenina y humanización del mundo, por Rodrigo Guerra
Simmel y la cultura femenina, por Raquel Osborne

La nueva feminidad, Entrevista a Annalinde Nightwind

El hombre no es un enemigo a batir, Entrevista con Elisabeth Badinter

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 64 – “El Eterno Retorno de Mircea Eliade”  (publicado 20 Marzo 2014)

Contenidos:

Bibliografía comentada de Mircea Eliade, por José Antonio Hernández García

Antropología y religión en el pensamiento de Mircea Eliade, por Pedro Gómez García

Mircea Eliade y el ideal del hombre universal, por Ioan Petru Culianu

Mircea Eliade y la Revolución Conservadora en Rumanía, por Claudio Mutti

Paisaje espiritual de Mircea Eliade, por Sergio Fritz Roa

Ingenieros de almas. Cioran, Elíade y la Guardia de Hierro, por Luis de León Barga

La experiencia de lo sagrado según Mircea Eliade, por François Chirpaz

Muerte y religión en Mircea Eliade, por Margarita Ossorio Menéndez

El paradigma del mito-ontológico de Mircea Eliade y su significación metodológica, por Nataly Nikonovich

Eliade y la antropología, por José Antonio González Alcantud

Mircea Eliade: hombre histórico, hombre mítico, por Hugo Basile

Mircea Eliade: un parsifal extraviado, por Enrico Montarani

Las huellas de la ideología en el pensamiento antropológico. El caso de

Mircea Eliade, por Pedro Jesús Pérez Zafrilla

Mircea Eliade, el novelista, por Constantin Sorin Catrinescu

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 70 – “Alexander Dugin y la Cuarta Teoría Política: La Nueva Derecha Rusa Eurasiática” (publicado 29 Mayo 2014)

Contenidos:

Alexander Dugin: la Nueva Derecha rusa, entre el Neo-Eurasianismo y la Cuarta Teoría Política, por Jesús J. Sebastián

Más allá del liberalismo: hacia la Cuarta Teoría Política, por Alexander Dugin

Necesidad de la Cuarta Teoría Política, por Leonid Savin

La Cuarta Teoría Política y la “Otra Europa”, por Natella Speranskaya

El Liberalismo y la Guerra Rusia-Occidente, por Alexander Dugin

Alexander Dugin, o cuando la metafísica y la política se unen, por Sergio Fritz

La Cuarta Teoría Política, entrevista a Natella Speranskaya, por Claudio Mutti

El quinto estado: una réplica a Alexander Dugin, por Marcos Ghio

La Tercera Teoría Política. Una crítica a la Cuarta Teoría Política, por Michael O’Meara

La gran guerra de los continentes. Geopolítica y fuerzas ocultas de la historia, por Alexander Dugin

La globalización para bien de los pueblos. Perspectivas de la nueva teoría política, por Leonid Savin

Alianza Global Revolucionaria, entrevista a Natella Speranskaya

Contribución a la teoría actual de la protesta radical, por Geidar Dzhemal

El proyecto de la Gran Europa. Un esbozo geopolítico para un futuro mundo multipolar, por Alexander Dugin

Rusia, clave de bóveda del sistema multipolar, por Tiberio Graziani

La dinámica ideológica en Rusia y los cambios del curso de su política exterior, por Alexander Dugin

Un Estado étnico para Rusia. El fracaso del proyecto multicultural, por Vladimir Putin

Reportaje sobre Dugin (revista alemana Zuerst!), por Manuel Ochsenreiter

Dugin: de la Unión Nacional-Bolchevique al Partido Euroasiático, por Xavier Casals Meseguer

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 79 – “Contra Occidente: Salir del Sistema Occidental” (publicado 29 Agosto 2014)

Contenidos:

Occidente debe ser olvidado, por Alain de Benoist

Occidente como decadencia, por Carlos Pinedo

¿Existe todavía el mundo occidental?, por Immanuel Wallerstein

¿Qué es Occidente?, por Juan Pablo Vitali

Romper con la civilización occidental, por Guillaume Faye

Sobre Nietzsche y el masoquismo occidental, por Carlos Javier Blanco Martín

Hispanoamérica contra Occidente, por Alberto Buela

El paradigma occidental, por H.C.F. Mansilla

El decadentismo occidental, por Jesús J. Sebastián

Critica del sistema occidental, por Guillaume Faye

¿El ascenso de Occidente?, por Immanuel Wallerstein

René Guénon, ¿profeta del fin de Occidente?, por Antonio Martínez

Más allá de Oriente y Occidente, por María Teresa Román López

Civilización y hegemonía de Occidente, por Jaime Parra

Apogeo y decadencia de Occidente, por Mario Vargas Llosa
Europa vs. Occidente, por Claudi Finzi

Occidente contra Occidente. Brecha intelectual francesa, por José Andrés Fernández Leost

Civilización e Ideología occidentales, por Guillaume Faye

Occidente como destino. Una lectura weberiana, por Jacobo Muñoz

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 82 – “El Debate sobre el Paganismo de la Nueva Derecha (Vol. 1)” (publicado 11 Octubre 2014)

Contenidos:

¿Cómo se puede ser pagano? (I), por Alain de Benoist

La cuestión religiosa y la Nueva Derecha, por José Javier Esparza

¿Qué aliento sagrado puede salvarnos? Carta abierta a José Javier Esparza, por Javier Ruiz Portella

La tentación pagana, por Thomas Molnar

Paganismo, la nueva religión europea, por Guillaume Faye

¿Qué religión para Europa? La polémica del neopaganismo, por Rodrigo Agulló

La Derecha pagana, por Tomislav Sunic

Monoteísmo versus Politeísmo, por Alain de Benoist

El paganismo: religión de la vida terrenal, por José Vicente Pascual

La religión en las sociedades occidentales, por Alain de Benoist

El paganismo de Hamsun y Lawrence, por Robert Steuckers

El eclipse de lo sagrado, ¿o el sagrado eclipse?, por Paul Gottfried

La reacción contra la modernidad y la secularización del cristianismo, por Adolfo Galeano Ofm

El Paganismo como concepción del Mundo, por Ramón Bau

Contra Dawkins: qué esconden sus preferencias por el politeísmo, por Javier del Arco

Politeísmo versus monoteísmo: el desarrollo de la crítica a la religión cristiana en la obra de Friedrich Nietzsche, por Herbert Fre

El origen de la Navidad. Las raíces paganas de una fiesta cristiana, por Alfredo Martorell

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 83 – “El Debate sobre el Paganismo de la Nueva Derecha (Vol. 2)” (publicado 11 Octubre 2014)

Contenidos:

¿Cómo se puede ser pagano? (II), por Alain de Benoist

Lo sagrado en la cultura europea, por Carlos Martínez-Cava

Marx, Moisés y los Paganos en la Ciudad Secular, por Tomislav Sunic

Dioses y titanes: entrevista con Guillaume Faye sobre el paganismo, por Christopher Gérard

¿Es preciso ser cristiano? La Derecha tradicional, por José Javier Esparza

La religión de Europa, por Alain de Benoist

¿Qué religión para Europa?, por Diego L. Sanromán

Entre el paganismo y la derecha radical, por Stéphane François

Europa: pagana y cristiana, por Juan Pablo Vitali

Humanismo profano y neopaganismo moderno, por Arnaud Imatz

Del politeísmo al monoteísmo: los riesgos de los fundamentalismos, por Juan Antonio Estrada

El Frente Nacional de Marine Le Pen y la derecha pagana, por Fernando José Vaquero Oroquieta

La cuestión del paganismo. Entrevista a Alain de Benoist, por Charles Champetier

Paganismo y nihilismo, por Daniel Aragón Ortiz

El neopaganismo pessoano, por Antonio López Martín

El nuevo paganismo ¿triunfo del ilusionismo?, por José Miguel Odero

Paganismo y Cristianismo, por Eduard Alcántara

 

ELEMENTOS Nº 84 – Julien Freund: Lo Político en Esencia (publicado 31 Octubre 2014)

Contenidos:

Julien Freund: una introducción, por Juan Carlos Corbetta

Julien Freund, un politique para nuestro tiempo, por Jerónimo Molina

Julien Freund y la impolítica, por Alain de Benoist

Evocación de Julien Freund, por Günter Maschke

Julien Freund, por Dalmacio Negro Pavón

Conflicto, política y polemología en el pensamiento de Julien Freund, por Jerónimo Molina

Julien Freund, analista político: contextos y perspectivas de interpretación, por Juan C. Valderrama Abenza

Lo público y la libertad en el pensamiento de Julien Freund, por Cristián Rojas González

El realismo político. A propósito de La esencia de lo político, de Julien Freund, por Felipe Giménez Pérez

Julien Freund. Del Realismo Político al Maquiavelismo, por Jerónimo Molina

Situación polémica y terceros en Schmitt y Freund, por Jorge Giraldo Ramírez

Orden y situación política en Julien Freund, por Juan C. Valderrama Abenza

Las nociones de mando y obediencia en la teoría política de Julien Freund, por Jerónimo Molina

Julien  Freund: la paz como medio de la política, por José Romero Serrano

Julien Freund: entre liberalismo y conservadurismo, por Sébastien de la Touanne

 

Otros Ensayos:

“Alain de Benoist y su crítica del capitalismo” por Carlos Javier Blanco Martín

“La Nueva Derecha Criolla” por Francisco Albanese

 

Tradition? – Benoist

Tradition?

By Alain de Benoist

There are many ways to understand tradition. Its etymology is Latin, from the verb tradere, which means “to give, to hand in, to transmit directly.” Originally tradition designated “that which is transmitted” and it had a religious meaning. Tradition understood as “the action of transmitting” was nevertheless in common usage in France up to the end of the 18th century and is still part of today’s legal lexicon. Yet tradere has also meant “betray,” in the sense of delivering up a man or a secret. In the plural, traditions are generally considered as forming part of the distinctive features of a culture in a particular period. They evoke a body of accepted and immutable hereditary characteristics inherited from the past customs, ways of being, but also celebrations, work cycles, and popular traditions. Tradition here implies a sense of duration: it contrasts with novelty, even if one accepts its evolution. It also implies the idea of standard or norm, even if the traditions in question can be challenged. Tradition encompasses what is permanent and immutable, as opposed to the succession of events and fashions. An older definition describes it as marking the submission of the living to the authority of the dead, encompassing accepted customs and habits (we obey traditions because we always have) that modern people denounce as conventions, prejudices or superstitions. The term can have a positive or pejorative meaning, depending on the context in which it is used. When advertisers and tourist offices extol the virtues of “traditional craftsmanship,” they implicitly refer to a tried set of values and know-how. Tradition here evokes quality and authenticity. But it may also be seen as what is outmoded, as in the modernist critics’ use of “traditional morality.”

But there is another meaning to the word tradition, articulated by the representatives of traditional thought. Here the term is singular and has a capital T: Tradition. The first name that comes to mind is that of Rene Guenon (1886-1951), who published his Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines in 1921 and died thirty. years later in Cairo under the pseudonym AbdeI Wahed Yahia.[1] Julius Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World appeared in 1934. Other names are Arturo Reghini, Guido De Giorgio and Attilo Mordini,[2] Frithjof Schuon, whose writings began to appear in 1933 in Etudes Traditionelles, Michel Valsn, Titus Burckhardt, Ananda N. Coormaraswamy, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Marco Pallis, Martin Lings and Philip Sherrard.

In defining this school of thought, the word “traditionalism” (which appeared in France only in the middle of the 19th century) may lend itself to misunderstandings the representatives of traditional thought have been the first to denounce.[3] Rene Guenon qualifies as “traditionalists” those who “have only one sort of tendency or aspiration toward Tradition, without any real knowledge of it.”[4] Guido de Giorgio presents an even more radical opinion. “Tradition is absolutely different from traditionalism: one is an eternally fecund living patrimony, rich with infinite potentialities in all times and circumstances …. the other is but sterile residue, an inefficient, self-enclosing concreteness impossible to adapt and lacking all energetic and creative force. Tradition is clearly opposed to traditionalism, just as truth is opposed to commonplaces.”[5]

The word “traditionalism” contains yet another ambiguity. The way it is used by the representatives of traditional thought could be confused with counter-revolutionary political traditionalism or with Catholic traditionalism, sometimes referred to as “integral,” which is hostile to “progressivism” within the Church, to liturgical reform and to newer “modernist” theologies. If the school of traditional thought is perfectly counter-revolutionary, it is so in a way very different from those who claim to be linked politically to the Counter-Revolution. While some of the school’s adherents call themselves Catholics (or at least accord Catholicism a privileged place with respect to Tradition in general) others do not. Some even affirm themselves as anti-Christian. Mario Polia states: “Considering it more closely, ‘Catholic traditionalism’ is an ambiguous expression, as if being Catholic were only a specification of a more general and absolute category: ‘traditionalism.’ It is equally unsatisfactory to speak of ‘traditionalist Catholicism’, giving the expression the sense of ‘traditional’, for it either presupposes the parallel and antithetical possibility of a Catholicism outside of tradition or, by defining ‘traditionalism’ as the ‘traditional interpretation’ of Catholicism, reserves for the traditionalist movements the prerogative of being the only true Catholicism. Traditionalist movements would then assume the prerogative of being Catholicism. To speak of ‘traditional Catholicism’ does not make much sense, either because one cannot define Catholicism in terms of Tradition, or because it presupposes an anti-traditional type of Catholicism.”[6] In fact, there is much difference between, for example, a traditionalist like Marcel Lefebvre and a “Christian traditionalist” like Attilo Mordini.

In seeking to define the “Indo-European tradition,”Jean Haudry speaks of a “constituted literary heritage, essentially of formulas and schemes expressing and transmitting a concept of the world that guides individual actions and that can be materialized within institutions.”[7] Such a definition, with its reference to a “literary” origin, obviously does not conform to what traditional thought understands by Tradition. According to this school, Tradition cannot be defined through sociological or cultural data, nor can it be appreciated in purely human terms. Tradition is not the body of customs but rather that which derives from the philosophia perenis.[8] Far from encompassing a body of observed and accepted rules, it constitutes a doctrine voluntarily and consciously transmitted as principles — a series of transcendental truths of permanent worth and of non-human origin. According to traditional thought, tradition is only secondarily cultural. At most, it can be said to inspire certain cultural or social activities. It is fundamentally spiritual, possesses a religious character and implies the metaphysical. Taking it as unique or ‘primordial’ and anterior to all local traditions. Tradition becomes a metaphysical doctrine — drawing on knowledge of ultimate, invariable and universal principles. It is not a human invention but a supra-human ‘gift’ manifesting the existence of a superior order of reality. On this point, all are unanimous. For Antonio Medrano, Tradition must be understood as “a sacred articulation of reality based on metaphysical principles.” Frithjof Schuon, who espouses the principle of the “transcendental unity” of all religions, sees in Tradition a body of truths principally uniting “all that is human to a divine reality.” Guenon connects Tradition with metaphysics, defining it as “suprarational knowledge, intuitive and immediate.”

Thus conceived, Tradition is defined as a coherent body of intangible and sacred principles imposed on all which delineates the essential rules of conduct, allowing man to accede to the supra-human level, allowing the homo to detach from the humus, to pass from the terrestrial to the celestial order. In this light, the transmission of Tradition from generation to generation obviously plays an essential role. Mario Polia writes: “There is Tradition — in the spiritual sense — only if there is the ‘transmission’ of a truth of metaphysical (not simply cultural) order embodied in a doctrinal system, transmitted and guarded by a spiritually qualified hierarchy, encompassing the possibility of acceding to such truth through ‘spiritual’ or ‘religious’ means. In addition, a tradition must ensure a qualified and uninterrupted transmission through time from the source to the beneficiary, and the continuance of liturgical, ritualistic and “sacrificial” practices, without which transmission would become a purely cultural variable.”

Symbolic language is thus quintessentially traditional. Just as myth is beyond events and a properly historical significance, the symbol, contrary to allegory, is beyond words and semantic definition. Seeking to manifest the inexpressible, it communicates the abstract by transfiguring it into an always provisional and imperfectly concrete representation. It arouses affectivity in the body as much as in the mind. D.H. Lawrence said in Apocalypse: “Symbols are organic entities of conscience that have their own life: one can never exhaust their meaning, because they have a dynamic emotional value to the sensorial conscience of the body and spirit that is more than just intellectual.”

Above all, symbolic language constitutes the main path of analogical thinking that, by expressing correspondences between different levels of reality, simultaneously unveils the unity of the world and the subtle complementarity of the One and the Many. Reasoning by analogy can establish qualitative correspondences between these levels of reality and situate the backgrounds of meaning corresponding to symbols. Guenon evokes this “law of correspondence, which is the very foundation of all symbolism and by virtue of which each thing, while proceeding from a single metaphysical principle which guarantees its reality, translates or expresses this principle in its own way and according to its order of existence, such that all things are drawn together and correspond from one order to the next.” [10] According to the traditional outlook, the idea of non-separation is essential. “What is below is like what is above. Miracles are performed from one and the same thing,” according to the famed Emerald Table of Hermes Trismegistus. The city of men must reproduce the harmony pervading the city of God or expressed in the well-ordered cosmos. Similarly, Meister Eckhart writes: “The eye with which I see myself and the eye with which God sees Himself are one and the same” (Sermon 12), and Goethe adds: “What is inside is also outside.” For Raymond Abellio, the gnosis is also defined as a vision of universal interdependence, challenging the idea that there are separate beings or phenomena, though they may be distinct (union without confusion). This universal interdependence, says Abellio, implies an “intentionality of the world.” Being general, it can be applied to emotions as well as thoughts. Nothing — no thing, no person — can claim to be autonomous in the absolute.

This “holistic” vision is traditional in esotericism. From the viewpoint of traditional thought, the difference between esoteric and exoteric levels is also fundamental. One can say that Tradition constitutes the esoteric aspect of a spiritual reality. In their more immediately perceivable forms, institutionalized religions then express the esoteric aspect of this spiritual reality. Here esotericism should be taken in the sense of initiation and not the occult, which the school considers more a phenomenon of decadence or “counter-initiation.” Abellio states that esotericism dispels interior darkness .just as positive knowledge dispels exterior darkness. He adds that transcendental interior darkness does not proceed from an opposition or a duality between consciousness and the world but from a correlation between the world and consciousness of our own consciousness. “This genitive encapsulates the secret of esotericism. One must consider it in its immediate genetic function: it serves to generate another consciousness. Hence the deep meaning of what we call initiation, which is the awakening of consciousness to its own transcendental self-consciousness.” [11] This consciousness of consciousness, grounded in the internalized perception of external perception, is by definition fundamentally “self-intensifying.” Esotericism is the mode of knowledge and activity whereby man seeks to situate himself from a viewpoint which is no longer merely human.

Traditional thought, which began to develop seriously in the 1920s, has devoted itself to restoring order to the “occultist” jumble of the preceding century. It is a modern version of Oswald Spengler’s “second religiosity.” This demand for rigor undoubtedly distances it radically from false spiritualities and the “religious” pseudo-syncretisms of which the New Age doctrine is an extreme example. The boundary, however, is not always as clear-cut as desired. Should we treat the problems of sacredness and spirituality in general, as they are found within different religions? Should we speak of traditionalisms that do not conform to the traditional doctrine as we have defined it and which may be directly opposed to it? Where should the “theocratic” ideas of a Bonald, a Donoso Cortes or a Joseph de Maistre be placed? How can we avoid evoking the question of gnosis, as posed by Jean Borella, Raymond Ruyer and Raymond Abellio? Traditional thought emphasizes the study of myths and symbols. Jung and de Bachelar, Roger Caillois and perhaps also Rene Daumal immediately come to mind, as do the historical studies of religion by Mircea Eliade and the works on “myth analysis” and studies of the imaginary by Gibert Durand and various other contemporaries inspired by Jung. The traditional school also has its great ancestors, from Plato to Pericles, Meister Eckhart and many others. Should we also refer to the studies of Frederic Tristan and Antoine Faivre on hermetic philosophy and alchemy, and those of Jacob Bohme and Swedenborg about occultist Masonry and the Cabbala? Finally, how can we not also consider Islam, to which many of the school’s major representatives have turned? Little by little, one touches on the history of religions, mysticism, esotericism, even psychoanalysis, and the risk is therefore great from Annie Besant to Blavasky, from Rudolf Steiner to Krishnamurti, from Gurdjieff to Aurobindo, to arrive at a syncretism interested in all and feeding off anything (from holistic medicine to transcendental meditation, from popular astrology to runic divination, etc.). By keeping to the exposition of the fundamental themes of traditional thought, we have attempted to focus on and elucidate a few contiguous subjects.

Would Julius Evola’s denunciation of the “modern world” be as scandalous today, when criticism of modernity comes from all sides? The Greens question productivism. Post-modernists want to abolish the grandiose historicist narratives of legitimation. From Left and Right, modernism as the role of individualism, as the atomization of the world, as the triumph of the values of the market, as the dictatorial hegemony of the economy and money is being challenged. Felix Guatarri has recently written: “We focus our attention on impending catastrophes, while the true catastrophes are already here, under our noses, with the degeneration of social practices, with the mass media’s numbing effect, with a collective will blinded by the ideology of the ‘market’, in other words, succumbing to the law of the masses, to entropy, to the loss of singularity, to a general and collective infantilization. The old types of social relations, the old relations with sex, with time, with the cosmos, with human finitude have been rattled, not to say devastated, by the ‘progress’ generated by industrial firms.”[12] Clearly stated: the ideology of progress is crumbling. Novelty is no longer to be interpreted as increased well-being. It may well be that it is generally regressive and that we are living out the end of a cycle.

It is not surprising for the representatives of traditional thought who, in criticizing modernity, exhibit a radicalism difficult to surpass. Generally adhering to a cyclic conception of history, the school affirms that, within each cycle, humanity runs a course leading inexorably from a state of perfection and simplicity to a state of spiritual decline and accentuated materialism. The history of humanity is interpreted as “metaphysical entropy,” as fall, degradation from an original primordial state. All traditional authors see in modern times the time of Kali-Yuga [in Hinduism, the present age of the world, full of conflicts and sin], the apogee of the blackest age, the terminal phase of the cycle, the ne plus ultra of spiritual decline. The conflict between Tradition and anti-Tradition in fact crystallizes itself in decadence, and it is this decadence that the decadents call “progress”. The opposition between traditional thought and the ideology of progress is therefore total, while being perfectly symmetrical (but inversely). All that modern consciousness analyses and perceives as progress, the school interprets as decline: the Renaissance was a fall (decline); the Enlightenment, a darkening.

For Guenon, the crisis of the modern world is essentially explained by the weakening and extinction of principles that originally inspired the institutions and, afterwards, by the multiplication of structures charged with remedying the situation. These structures bring about the proliferation of abstract and contradictory rules, such that finally “the contradictions proper to the institutional system overcome the satisfaction that it is supposed to afford.” [13] Again, nothing is separated: the spiritual level falls as the material level rises, the maintenance of quality (in all areas) is incompatible with the dominance of quantity. Social life becomes mechanical and abstract as the very result of the dissolution of organic and concrete communities. Secularization — the disenchantment of the world (Max Weber’s Entzauberung), social atomization, the materialist hegemony of traded goods, the primacy of the principle of reason (an exclusively technical and reductionist reason), all the phenomena characteristic of the contemporary word — proceed (according to the school) from a sole logic that must be understood as the end of a secular and probably millenary involution. The ultimate effect of the hegemony of the principle of subjective individuation is the death of God, which entails the death of man and allows for, in the best case, only the self-consciousness of the radical void which constitutes the truth of an ego separated from the world and of the nonsense of a social life without finality, completely enclosed in the race for growth and the negation of being in exchange for material possessions.

The modern world is thus perceived first and foremost as distraction: literally, it diverts man away from the essential and keeps him in a state of a perpetual estrangement that prevents him from returning to and regrounding himself authentically. We must search for sense in a world which no longer seems to make sense. We have almost become incapable of understanding even the meaning of the word, “sense.” Guenon writes: “If all men understood what the modern world truly is, it would cease to exist.” Nihilism is also put to the test.

Notes

1. Guenon’s three fundamental works are Orient and Occident (1924), La crise du monde moderne (1927) and Le regne de la quantite et les signes des temps (1945).
2. Arturo Reghini, founder of the Italian Theosophical Society, editor of the journal Atanor, translator of Agrippa de Nettesheim’s De occulta philosophia, introduced Guenon to Evola. Guido de Giorgio (1890-1957) also collaborated with Evola in the journals Ur and La Torre. For more on Mordini (1923-1966), see Carlo Fabrizio Carli, Attilio Mordini, il Cattolico Ghibellino (Rome: Settimo Sigillo, 1989).
3. “Integral traditionalism” has also been discussed. See Karlheinz Weissmann, “Vom Geist der Uberlieferung. Die Lehre von der integralen Tradition,” in Etappe 2 (October 1988), pp. 79-90.
4. Le regne de la quantite et les signes du temps, op. cit., p. 280.
5. Linstant et l’eternite et autres textes sur la tradition (Milan: Arche, 1987), p. 148.
6. “Tradizione. 11 significato di un Termine,” in I Quaderni di Avallon 10 (January-April 1986).
7. Etudes indo-europeenes (December 19, 1986), p. 2.
8. This expression, often attributed to Leibniz, probably comes from Augustinus Steuchus’ book, De perinni philosophia, published in 1540 and read by Leibniz.
9. “Tradizione: il Significato di un Termine,” op. cit.
10. Le symbolisme de la croix (Paris: Vega, 1931), p. 12.
11. L’esprit moderne et la tradition, preface to Paul Serant, Au seuil de 1 ‘esoterisme‘ (Paris: Grasset, 1955), p. 18.
12. Liberation (June 30, 1989).
13. F. Jean Borella, “Rene Guenon et la crise du monde moderne” in Connaissance des religions (June 1989), p. 15.

 

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De Benoist, Alain. “Tradition?” Telos, Vol. 1992, No. 94 (December 1992), pp. 82-88. Text retrieved from: <http://www.amerika.org/globalism/tradition-alain-de-benoist/ >.

 

Sacred & Profane – Eliade

Key Excerpts from The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion by Mircea Eliade

 

The extraordinary interest aroused all over the world by Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige (The Sacred), published in 1917, still persists. Its success was certainly due to the author’s new and original point of view. Instead of studying the ideas of God and religion, Otto undertook to analyze the modalities of the religious experience. Gifted with great psychological subtlety, and thoroughly prepared by his twofold training as theologian and historian of religions, he succeeded in determining the content and specific characteristics of religious experience. Passing over the rational and speculative side of religion, he concentrated chiefly on its irrational aspect. For Otto had read Luther and had understood what the “living God” meant to a believer. It was not the God of the philosophers – of Erasmus, for example; it was not an idea, an abstract notion, a mere moral allegory. It was a terrible power, manifested in the divine wrath.

In Das Heilige Otto sets himself to discover the characteristics of this frightening and irrational experience. He finds the feeling of terror before the sacred, before the awe-inspiring mystery (mysterium tremendum), the majesty (majestas) that emanates an overwhelming superiority of power; he finds religious fear before the fascinating mystery (mysterium fascinans) in which perfect fullness of being flowers. Otto characterizes all these experiences as numinous (from Latin numen, god), for they are induced by the revelation of an aspect of divine power. The numinous presents itself as something wholly other” (ganz andere), something basically and totally different. It is like nothing human or cosmic; confronted with it, man senses his profound nothingness, feels that he is only a creature, or, in the words in which Abraham addressed the Lord, is “but dust and ashes” (Genesis, 18, 27).

The sacred always manifests itself as a reality of a wholly different order from “natural” realities. It is true that language naively expresses the tremendum, or the majestas, or the mysterium fascinans by terms borrowed from the world of nature or from man’s secular mental life. But we know that this analogical terminology is due precisely to human inability to express the ganz andere; all that goes beyond man’s natural experience, language is reduced to suggesting by terms taken from that experience.

After forty years, Otto’s analyses have not lost their value; readers of this book will profit by reading and reflecting on them. But in the following pages we adopt a different perspective. We propose to present the phenomenon of the sacred in all its complexity, and not only in so far as it is irrational. What will concern us is not the relation between the rational and nonrational elements of religion but the sacred in its entirety. The first possible definition of the sacred is that it is the opposite of the profane. The aim of the following pages is to illustrate and define this opposition between sacred and profane.

When the Sacred Manifests Itself

Man becomes aware of the sacred because it itself, shows itself, as something wholly different

from the profane. To designate the act of manifestation of the sacred, we have proposed the term hierophany. It is a fitting term, because it does not imply further; it expresses no more than is implicit in its etymological content, i.e., that something sacred shows itself to us. [Note: Cf. Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, New York, Sheed & Ward, 1958, pp. 7 ff. Cited hereafter as Patterns.] It could be said that the history of religions – from the most primitive to the most highly developed – is constituted by a great number of hierophanies, by manifestations of sacred realities. From the most elementary hierophany – e.g., manifestation of the sacred in some ordinary object, a stone or a tree-to the supreme hierophany (which, for a Christian, is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ) there is no solution of continuity. In each case we are confronted by the same mysterious act-the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural “profane” world.

The modern Occidental experiences a certain uneasiness before many manifestations of the sacred. He finds it difficult to accept the fact that, for many human beings, the sacred can be manifested in stones or trees, for example. But as we shall soon see, what is involved is not a veneration of the stone in itself, a cult of the tree in itself. The sacred tree, the sacred stone are not adored as stone or tree; they are worshiped precisely because they are hierophanies, because they show something that is no longer stone or tree but the sacred, the ganz andere.

It is impossible to overemphasize the paradox represented by every hierophany, even the most elementary. By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself, for it continues to participate in its surrounding cosmic milieu. A sacred stone remains a stone; apparently (or, more precisely, from the profane point of view), nothing distinguishes it from all other stones. But for those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into a supernatural reality. In other words, for those who have a religious experience all nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality. The, cosmos in its entirety can become a hierophany.

The man of the archaic societies tends to live as much as possible in the sacred or in close proximity to consecrated objects. The tendency is perfectly understandable, because, for primitives as for the man of all pre-modern societies, the sacred is equivalent to a power, and, in the last analysis, to reality. The sacred is saturated with being. Sacred power means reality and at the same time enduringness and efficacity. The polarity sacred profane is often expressed as an opposition between real and unreal or pseudoreal. (Naturally, we must not expect to find the archaic languages in possession of this philosophical terminology, real-unreal, etc.; but we find the thing). Thus it is easy to understand that religious man deeply desires to be, to participate in reality, to be saturated with power.

Two Modes of Being in the World

The reader will very soon realize that sacred and profane are two modes of being in the world, two existential situations assumed by man in the course of his history. These modes of being in the world are not of concern only to the history of religions or to sociology; they are not the object only of historical, sociological, or ethnological study. In the last analysis, the sacred and profane modes of being depend upon the different positions that man has conquered in the cosmos; hence they are of concern both to the philosopher and to anyone seeking to discover the possible dimensions of human existence.

It is for this reason that, though he is a historian of religions, the author of this book proposes not to confine himself only to the perspective of his particular science. The man of the traditional societies is admittedly a homo religiosus, but his behavior forms part of the general behavior of mankind and hence is of concern to philosophical anthropology, to phenomenology, to psychology….

The Sacred and History

Our primary concern is to present the specific dimensions of religious experience, to bring out the differences between it and profane experience of the world. I shall not dwell on the variations that religious experience of the world has undergone in the course of time. It is obvious, for example, that the symbolisms and cults of Mother Earth, of human and agricultural fertility, of the sacrality of woman, and the like, could not develop and constitute a complex religious system except through the discovery of agriculture; it is equally obvious that a preagricultural society, devoted to hunting, could not feel the sacrality of Mother Earth in the same way or with the same intensity. Hence there are differences in religious experience explained by differences in economy, culture, and social organization-in short, by history. Nevertheless, between the nomadic hunters and the sedentary cultivators there is a similarity in behavior that seems to us infinitely more important than their differences: both live in a sacralized cosmos, both share in a cosmic sacrality manifested equally in the animal world and in the vegetable world. We need only compare their existential situations with that of a man of the modern societies, living in a desacralized cosmos, and we shall immediately be aware of all that separates him from them. At the same time we realize the validity of comparisons between religious facts pertaining to different cultures; all these facts arise from a single type of behavior, that of homo religiosus….

Homogeneity of Space and Hierophany

For religious man, space is not homogeneous; he experiences interruptions, breaks in it; some parts of’ space are qualitatively different from others. “Draw not nigh hither,” says the Lord to Moses; “put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground” (Exodus, 3, 5). There is, then, a sacred space, and hence a strong, significant space; there are other spaces that are not sacred and so are without structure or consistency, amorphous. Nor is this all. For religious man, this spatial nonhomogeneity finds expression in the experience of an opposition between space’ that is sacred-the only real and real-ly existing space and all other space, the formless expanse surrounding it.

It must be said at once that the religious experience of the nonhomogeneity of space is a primordial experience, homologizable to a founding of the world. It is not a matter of theoretical speculation, but of a primary religious experience that precedes all reflection on the world. For it is the break effected in space that allows the world to be constituted, because it reveals the fixed point, the central axis for all future orientation. When the sacred manifests itself in any hierophany, there is not only a break in the homogeneity of space; there is also revelation of an absolute reality, opposed to the nonreality of the vast surrounding expanse. The manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world. In the homogeneous and infinite expanse, in which no point of reference is possible and hence no orientation can be established, the hierophany reveals an absolute fixed point, a center.

So it is clear to what a degree the discovery-that is, the revelation – of a sacred space possesses existential value for religious man; for nothing can begin, nothing can be done, without a previous orientation-and any orientation implies acquiring a fixed point. It is for this reason that religious man has always sought to fix his abode at the “center of the world.” If the world is to be lived in, it must be founded – and no world can come to birth in the chaos of the homogeneity and relativity of profane space. The discovery or projection of a fixed point – the center – is equivalent to the creation of the world; and we shall soon give some examples that will unmistakably show the cosmogonic value of the ritual orientation and construction of sacred space.

For profane experience, on the contrary, space is homogeneous and neutral; no break qualitatively differentiates the various parts of its mass. Geometrical space can be cut and delimited in any direction; but no qualitative differentiation and, hence, no orientation are given by virtue of its inherent structure. We need only remember how a classical geometrician defines space. Naturally, we must not confuse the concept of homogeneous and neutral geometrical space with the experience of profane space, which is in direct contrast to the experience of sacred space and which alone concerns our investigation. The concept of homogeneous space and the history of the concept (for it has been part of the common stock of philosophical and scientific thought since antiquity) are a wholly different problem, up which we shall not enter here. What matters for our purpose is the experience of space known to nonreligious man, that is, to a man who rejects the sacrality of the world, who accepts only a profane existence, divested of all religious presuppositions.

It must be added at once that such a profane existence is never found in the pure state. To whatever degree he may have desacralized the world, the man who has made his choice in favor of profane life never succeeds in completely doing away with religious behavior. This will become clearer as we proceed; it will appear that even the most desacralized existence still preserves traces of a religious valorization of the world.

But for the moment we will set aside this aspect of the problem and confine ourselves to comparing the two experiences in question-that of sacred space and that of profane space. The implications of the former experience have already been pointed out. Revelation of a sacred space makes it possible to obtain a fixed point and hence to acquire orientation in the chaos of homogeneity, to “found the world” and to live in a real sense. The profane experience, on the contrary, maintains the homogeneity and hence the relativity of space. No true orientation is now possible, for the fixed point no longer enjoys a unique ontological status; it appears and disappears in accordance with the needs of the day. Properly speaking, there is no longer any world, there are only fragments of a shattered universe, an amorphous mass consisting of an infinite number of more or less neutral places in which man moves, governed and driven by the obligations of an existence incorporated into an industrial society.

Yet this experience of profane space still includes values that to some extent recall the nonhomogeneity peculiar to the religious experience of space. There are, for example, privileged places, qualitatively different from all others-a man’s birthplace, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the “holy places” of his private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life….

Theophanies and Signs

To exemplify the nonhomogeneity of space as experienced by nonreligious man, we may turn to any religion. We will choose an example that is accessible to everyone a church in a modern city. For a believer, the church shares in a different space from the street in which it stands. The door that opens on the interior of the church actually signifies a solution of continuity. The threshold that separates the two spaces also indicates the distance between two modes of being, the profane and the religious. The threshold is the limit, the boundary, the frontier that distinguishes and opposes two worlds-and at the same time the paradoxical place where those worlds communicate, where passage from the profane to the sacred world becomes possible.

A similar ritual function falls to the threshold of the human habitation, and it is for this reason that the threshold is an object of great importance. Numerous rites accompany passing the domestic threshold-a bow, a prostration, a pious touch of the hand, and so on. The threshold has its guardians-gods and spirits who forbid entrance both to human enemies and to demons and the powers of pestilence. It is on the threshold that sacrifices to the guardian divinities are offered. Here too certain palaeo-oriental cultures (Babylon, Egypt, Israel) situated the judgment place. The threshold, the door show the solution of continuity in space immediately and concretely; hence their great religious importance, for they are symbols and at the same time vehicles of passage from the one space to the other.

What has been said will make it clear why the church shares in an entirely different space from the buildings that surround it. Within the sacred precincts the profane world is transcended. On the most archaic levels of culture this possibility of transcendence is expressed by various images of an opening; here, in the sacred enclosure, communication with the gods is made possible; hence there must be a door to the world above, by which the gods can descend to earth and man can symbolically ascend to heaven. We shall soon see that this was the case in many religions; properly speaking, the temple constitutes an opening in the upward direction and ensures communication with the world of the gods.

Every sacred space implies a hierophany, an irruption of the sacred that results in detaching a territory from the surrounding cosmic milieu and making it qualitatively different….

Often there is no need for a theophany or hierophany properly speaking; some sign suffices to indicate the sacredness of a place. “According to the legend, the marabout who founded El-Hamel at the end of the sixteenth century stopped to spend the night near a spring and planted his stick in the ground. The next morning, when he went for it to resume his journey, he found that it had taken root and that buds had sprouted on it. He considered this a sign of God’s will and settled in that place.”[Note: René Basset, in Revue des Traditions Populaires, XXII, 1907, p. 287.] In such cases the sign, fraught with religious meaning, introduces an absolute element and puts an end to relativity and confusion. Something that does not belong to this world has manifested itself apodictically and in so doing has indicated an orientation or determined a course of conduct.

When no sign manifests itself, it is provoked. For example, a sort of evocation is performed with the help of animals; it is they who show what place is fit to receive the sanctuary or the village. This amounts to an evocation of sacred forms or figures for the immediate Purpose of establishing an orientation in the homogeneity of space. A sign is asked, to put an end to the tension and anxiety caused by relativity and disorientation. In short, to reveal an absolute point of support. For example, a wild animal is hunted, and the sanctuary is built at the place where it is killed. Or a domestic animal-such as a bull-is turned loose; some days later it is searched for and sacrificed at the place where it is found. Later the altar will be raised there and the village will be built around the altar. In all these cases, the sacrality of a place is revealed by animals. This is as much as to say that men are not free to choose the sacred site, that they only seek for it and find it by the help of mysterious signs.

These few examples have shown the different means by which religious man receives the revelation of a sacred place. In each case the hierophany has annulled the homogeneity of space and revealed a fixed point. But since religious man cannot live except in an atmosphere impregnated with the sacred, we must expect to find a large number of techniques for consecrating space. As we saw, the sacred is pre-eminently the real, at once power, efficacity, the source of life and fecundity. Religious man’s desire to live in the sacred is in fact equivalent to his desire to take up his abode in objective reality, not to let himself be paralyzed by the never-ceasing relativity of purely subjective experiences, to live in a real and effective world, and not in an illusion. This behavior is documented on every plane of religious man’s existence, but it is particularly evident in his desire to move about only in a sanctified world, that is, in a sacred space. This is the reason for the elaboration of techniques of orientation which, properly speaking, are techniques for the construction of sacred space. But we must not suppose that human work is in question here, that it is through his own efforts that man can consecrate a space. In reality the ritual by which he constructs a sacred space is efficacious in the measure in which it reproduces the work of the gods. But the better to understand the need for ritual construction of a sacred space, we must dwell a little on the traditional concept of the “world”; it will then be apparent that for religious man every world is a sacred world.

Chaos and Cosmos

One of the outstanding characteristics of traditional societies is the opposition that they assume between their inhabited territory and the unknown and indeterminate space that surrounds it. The former is the world (more precisely, our world), the cosmos; everything outside it is no longer a cosmos but a sort of “other world,” a foreign, chaotic space, peopled by ghosts, demons, “foreigners” (who are assimilated to demons and the souls of the dead). At first sight this cleavage in space appears to be due to the opposition between an inhabited and organized – hence cosmicized – territory and the unknown space that extends beyond its frontiers; on one side there is a cosmos, on the other a chaos. But we shall see that if every inhabited territory is a cosmos, this is precisely because it was first consecrated, because, in one way or another, it is the work of the gods or is in communication with the world of the gods. The world (that is, our world) is a universe within which the sacred has already manifested itself, in which, consequently, the break-through from plane to plane has become possible and repeatable. It is not difficult to see why the religious moment implies the cosmogonic moment. The sacred reveals absolute reality and at the same time makes orientation possible; hence it founds the world in the sense that it fixes the limits and establishes the order of the world….

An unknown, foreign, and unoccupied territory (which often means, “unoccupied by our people”) still shares in the fluid and larval modality of chaos. By occupying it and, above all, by settling in it, man symbolically transforms it into a cosmos through a ritual repetition of the cosmogony. What is to become “our world” must first be “created,” and every creation has a paradigmatic model – the creation of the universe by the gods. When the Scandinavian colonists took possession of Iceland (land-náma) and cleared it, they regarded the enterprise neither as an original undertaking nor as human and profane work. For them, their labor was only repetition of a primordial act, the transformation of chaos into cosmos by the divine act of creation. When they tilled the desert soil, they were in fact repeating the act of the gods who had organized chaos by giving it a structure, forms, and norms.[Note: Cf. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, New York, Pantheon Books, Bollingen Series XLVI, 1954, pp. 11 ff. Cited hereafter as Myth.]

Whether it is a case of clearing uncultivated ground or of conquering and occupying a territory already inhabited by “other” human beings, ritual taking possession must always repeat the cosmogony. For in the view of archaic societies everything that is not “our world” is not yet a world. A territory can be made ours only by creating it anew, that is, by consecrating it….

Consecration of a Place = Repetition of the Cosmogony

It must be understood that the cosmicization of unknown territories is always a consecration; to organize a space is to repeat the paradigmatic work of the gods….

Life is not possible without an opening toward the transcendent; in other words, human beings cannot live in chaos. Once contact with the transcendent is lost, existence in the world ceases to be possible….

To settle in a territory is, in the last analysis, equivalent to consecrating it. When settlement is not temporary, as among the nomads, but permanent, as among sedentary peoples, it implies a vital decision that involves the existence of the entire community. Establishment in a particular place, organizing it, inhabiting it, are acts that presuppose an existential choice – the choice of the universe that one is prepared to assume by “creating” it. Now, this universe is always the replica of the paradigmatic universe created and inhabited by the gods; hence it shares in the sanctity of the gods’ work….

The Center of the World

The cry of the Kwakiutl neophyte, “I am at the Center of the World!” at once reveals one of the deepest meanings of sacred space. Where the break-through from plane to plane has been effected by a hierophany, there too an opening has been made, either upward (the divine world) or downward (the underworld, the world of the dead). The three cosmic levels – earth, heaven, underworld – have been put in communication. As we just saw, this communication is sometimes expressed through the image of a universal pillar, axis mundi, which at once connects and supports heaven and earth and whose base is fixed in the world below (the infernal regions). Such a cosmic pillar can be only at the very center of the universe, for the whole of the habitable world extends around it. Here, then, we have a sequence of religious conceptions and cosmological images that are inseparably connected and form a system that may be called the “system of the world” prevalent in traditional societies: (a) a sacred place constitutes a break in the homogeneity of space; (b) this break is symbolized by an opening by which passage from one cosmic region to another is made possible (from heaven to earth and vice versa; from earth to the underworld) ; (c) communication with heaven is expressed by one or another of certain images, all of which refer to the axis mundi: pillar (cf. the universalis columna) , ladder (cf. Jacob’s ladder), mountain, tree, vine, etc. ; (d) around this cosmic axis lies the world (= our world), hence the axis is located “in the middle,” at the “navel of the earth”; it is the Center of the World….

We shall begin with an example that has the advantage of immediately showing not only the consistency but also the complexity of this type of symbolism – the cosmic mountain….

According to Islamic tradition, the highest place on earth is the ka’aba, because “the Pole Star bears witness that it faces the center of Heaven.”‘ For Christians, it is Golgotha that is on the summit of the cosmic mountain. All these beliefs express the same feeling, which is profoundly religious: “our world is holy ground because it is the place nearest to heaven, because from here, from our abode, it is possible to reach heaven; hence our world is a high place. In cosmological terms, this religious conception is expressed by the projection of the favored territory which is “ours” onto the summit of the cosmic mountain….

This same symbolism of the center explains other series of cosmological images and religious beliefs. Among these the most important are: (a) holy sites and sanctuaries are believed to be situated at the center of the world; (b) temples are replicas of the cosmic mountain and hence constitute the pre-eminent “link” between earth and heaven; (c) the foundations of temples descend deep into the lower regions….

“Our World” is Always Situated at the Center

From all that has been said, it follows that the true world is always in the middle, at the Center, for it is here that there is a break in plane and hence communication among the three cosmic zones. Whatever the extent of the territory involved, the cosmos that it represents is always perfect. An entire country (e.g., Palestine), a city (Jerusalem), a sanctuary (the Temple in Jerusalem), all equally well present an imago mundi. Treating of the symbolism of the Temple, Flavius Josephus wrote that the court represented the sea (i.e., the lower regions), the Holy Place represented earth, and the Holy of Holies heaven (Ant. Jud., 111, 7, 7). It is clear, then, that both the imago mundi and the Center are repeated in the inhabited world. Palestine, Jerusalem, and the Temple severally and concurrently represent the image of the universe and the Center of the World. This multiplicity of centers and this reiteration of the image of the world on smaller and smaller scales constitute one of the specific characteristics of traditional societies.

To us, it seems an inescapable conclusion that the religious man sought to live as near as possible to the Center of the World. He knew that his country lay at the midpoint of the earth; he knew too that his city constituted the navel of the universe, and, above all, that the temple or the palace were veritably Centers of the World. But he also wanted his own house to be at the Center and to be an imago mundi….

In short, whatever the dimensions of the space with which he is familiar and in which he regards himself as situated – his country, his city, his village, his house – religious man feels the need always to exist in a total and organized world, in a cosmos.

A universe comes to birth from its center; it spreads out from a central point that is, as it were, its navel. It is in this way that, according to the Rig Veda (X, 149), the universe was born and developed – from a core, a central point….

1t follows that every construction or fabrication has the cosmogony as paradigmatic model. The creation of the world becomes the archetype of every creative human gesture, whatever its plane of reference may be….

City-Cosmos

Since “our world” is a cosmos, any attack from without threatens to turn it into chaos. And as “our world” was founded by imitating the paradigmatic work of the gods, the cosmogony, so the enemies who attack it are assimilated to the enemies of the gods, the demons, and especially to the archdemon, the primordial dragon conquered by the gods at the beginning of time. An attack on “our world” is equivalent to an act of revenge by the mythical dragon, who rebels against the work of the gods, the cosmos, and struggles to annihilate it. “Our” enemies belong to the powers of chaos. Any destruction of a city is equivalent to a retrogression to chaos. Any victory over the attackers reiterates the paradigmatic victory of the gods over the dragon (that is, over chaos)….

Some Conclusions

….There is no need to dwell on the truism that, since the religious life of humanity is realized in history, its expressions are inevitably conditioned by the variety of historical moments and cultural styles. But for our purpose it is not the infinite variety of the religious experiences of space that concerns us but, on the contrary, their elements of unity. Pointing out the contrast between the behavior of nonreligious man with respect to the space in which he lives and the behavior of religious man in respect to sacred space is enough to make the difference in structure between the two attitudes clearly apparent.

If we should attempt to summarize the result of the descriptions that have been presented in this chapter, we could say that the experience of sacred space makes possible the “founding of the world”: where the sacred manifests itself in space, the real unveils itself, the world comes into existence. But the irruption of the sacred does not only project a fixed point into the formless fluidity of profane space, a center into chaos; it also effects a break in plane, that is, it opens communication between the cosmic planes (between earth and heaven) and makes possible ontological passage from one mode of being to another. It is such a break in the heterogeneity of profane space that creates the center through which communication with the transmundane is established, that, consequently, founds the world, for the center renders orientation possible. Hence the manifestation of the sacred in space has a cosmological valence; every spatial hierophany or consecration of a space is equivalent to a cosmogony. The first conclusion we might draw would be: the world becomes apprehensible as world, as cosmos, in the measure in which it reveals itself as a sacred world.

Every world is the work of the gods, for it was either created directly by the gods or was consecrated, hence cosmicized, by men ritually reactualizing the paradigmatic act of Creation. This is as much as to say that religious man can live only in a sacred world, because it is only in such a world that he participates in being, that he has a real existence. This religious need expresses an unquenchable ontological thirst. Religious man thirsts for being. His terror of the chaos that surrounds his inhabited world corresponds to his terror of nothingness. The unknown space that extends beyond his world – an uncosmicized because unconsecrated space, a mere amorphous extent into which no orientation has yet been projected, and hence in which no structure has yet arisen – for religious man, this profane space represents absolute nonbeing. If, by some evil chance, he strays into it, he feels emptied of his ontic substance, as if he were dissolving in Chaos, and he finally dies.

This ontological thirst is manifested in many ways. ‘In the realm of sacred space which we are now considering, its most striking manifestation is religious man’s will to take his stand at the very heart of the real, at the Center of the World – that is, exactly where the cosmos came into existence and began to spread out toward the four horizons, and where, too, there is the possibility of communication with the gods; in short, precisely where he is closest to the gods. We have seen that the symbolism of the center is the formative principle not only of countries, cities, temples, and palaces but also of the humblest human dwelling, be it the tent of a nomad hunter, the shepherd’s yurt, or the house of the sedentary cultivator. This is as much as to say that every religious man places himself at the Center of the World and by the same token at the very source of absolute reality, as close as possible to the opening that ensures him communication with the gods.

But since to settle somewhere, to inhabit a space, is equivalent to repeating the cosmogony and hence to imitating the work of the gods, it follows that, for religious man, every existential decision to situate himself in space in fact constitutes a religious decision. By assuming the responsibility of creating the world that he has chosen to inhabit, he not only cosmicizes chaos but also sanctifies his little cosmos by making it like the world of the gods. Religious man’s profound nostalgia is to inhabit a “divine world,” is his desire that his house shall be like the house of the gods, as it was later represented in temples and sanctuaries. In short, this religious nostalgia the desire to live in a pure and holy cosmos, as it was in the beginning, when it came fresh from the Creator’s hands.

The experience of sacred time will make it possible for religious man periodically to experience the cosmos it was in principio, that is, at the mythical moment of Creation.

 

—————

Excerpts from: Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (Orlando: Harcourt, 1987), pp. 8-65.

Note: The Sacred and the Profane is Mircea Eliade’s most important introductory book to a deeper understanding of religion and has been translated into a large number of other languages. Also notable in this regard are Eliade’s books: The Myth of the Eternal Return (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: the Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities (New York & Evanston: Harper & Row, 1975), and The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). For a record of all works by Mircea Eliade in various languages, see the World Catalogue: <http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3AMircea+Eliade > (lists of translations of Eliade’s works are also oftentimes recorded in bibliographies in their respective languages).

Additional note: See also the overviews of Mircea Eliade’s religious philosophy in “Mircea Eliade: An Appreciation” by David J. Levy and “Mircea Eliade: The hermeneutics of the religious phenomenon” by Livia Durac.

In the Spanish language, commentaries and resources on Eliade can be found in Sebastian J. Lorenz’s Elementos, N° 64, “El Eterno Retorno de Mircea Eliade” (Marzo 2014), <http://issuu.com/sebastianjlorenz/docs/elementos_n___64._mircea_eliade >. (We have made Elementos N° 64 available for download on our site: Elementos No. 64).

 

Evola’s Critique of Modernity – Bertonneau

Against Nihilism: Julius Evola’s “Traditionalist” Critique of Modernity

By Thomas F. Bertonneau

With the likes of Oswald Spengler, whose Decline he translated for an Italian readership, and Jose Ortega y Gasset, Julius Evola (1898 – 1974) stands as one of the notably incisive mid-Twentieth Century critics of modernity. Like Spengler and Ortega, Evola understood himself to owe a formative debt to Friedrich Nietzsche, but more forcefully than Spengler or Ortega, Evola saw the limitations – the contradictions and inconsistencies – in Nietzsche’s thinking.

Evola differed from Spengler and Ortega in another way: like certain other Men of the Right during the same decades, he involved himself deeply in matters mystical and occult, creating a reputation during the last part of his life as an expert in such topics as Eastern religiosity, alchemy, and the vast range of esoteric doctrines. Hermann Keyserling comes to mind also, as having directed his interest to these matters. Nevertheless, Keyserling, who knew Evola’s work, avoided Evola, rather as Spengler had shied from Keyserling. It would have been in part because Evola’s occult investment struck Keyserling as more blatant and far-reaching than his own and in part because Evola appeared, in the early 1930s, to be sympathetic to Fascism and National Socialism, whereas Keyserling, like Spengler, saw these unequivocally as signs of the spreading decadence of his time and so criticized them from their beginnings.

While Evola’s transient proclivities justified Keyserling’s misgivings, swift mounting mutual distaste put actual distance between Evola and the dictatorships. Had he known, Keyserling might have warmed to Evola. By the time war broke out, the self-styled Baron had explicitly repudiated dictatorial principles. Evola, who had his own theory of race, expressed particular revulsion towards Nazi race-policy and Mussolini’s aping of it in Italy after 1938.

Evola nevertheless makes difficulties for those of conservative temperament who would appreciate his critique of modernity. He could be dismissive of Christianity, at least in its modern form, as a social religion; and like his counterparts on the Left, he despised the bourgeoisie and its values, so much so that at least one of his biographers has compared him, by no means implausibly, to Frankfurt-School types like Herbert Marcuse and Theodor W. Adorno. Yet Evola’s all-around prickliness belongs to his allure. Thus in a 1929 article, “Bolchevismo ed Americanismo,” Evola condemns with equal fervor Muscovite communism and American money-democracy, as representing, the both of them, the mechanization and dehumanization of life. Unlike the Marxists – and unlike the Fascists and National Socialists – Evola saw the only hope for Western Civilization as lying in a revival of what he liked to capitalize, on the one hand, as Tradition and, on the other, as Transcendence; he thus rejected all materialism and instrumentalism as crude reductions of reality for coarse minds and, so too, as symptoms of a prevailing and altogether repugnant decadence.

I. Evola scholar H. T. Hansen sets out the details of his subject’s political involvements, making a generous exculpatory case, in the article that serves as introduction to the English translation of Men among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist (1951). I direct readers to that article and to Evola’s own Autodifesa, which the same volume offers as an appendix to the main text, should they be interested in the particulars. Evola’s analysis of modernity interests me in what follows more than his vanishing political affinities in the Italy of his early maturity. Evola’s passionate distaste for the vulgarity of such things as democracy (that fetish of the modern world), “the social question,” and economics – which, as E. Christian Kopff points out in a recent article at the online journal Alternative Right, he regarded as “demonic” – belongs to his absolute conviction that the West has been locked in a downward-spiraling crisis of nihilism since the Eighteenth Century at the latest. The break-up of the Holy Roman Empire in the wars of religious factionalism presaged the break-up of coherent wisdom in the self-nominating Enlightenment’s war against faith. The era of the nation-state, as Evola sees it, disestablished the principle that political authority derives from a transcendent source. Evola admired what he calls the Ghibellinism of the Empire although he defends it against its modern detractors without nostalgia. One can never go back; one must deal with conditions, as they exist.

Evola seems to have conceived Men among the Ruins, its title already commenting on existing conditions, and Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for Aristocrats of the Soul (1961) as a dual introduction to his masterwork, Revolt against the Modern World (1934).

In Men among the Ruins, Evola assesses the contemporary crisis, the “disease” and “the disorder of our age,” paradoxically: Totalitarianism, a grim trend fully abetted by eager widespread conformism, is, in effect, a type of chaos such that the maximum of illegitimate coercion exists in a society simultaneously with the maximum of riotous lawlessness; meanwhile the proliferation of dazzling technical gadgetry, in fascination with which the masses believe themselves to be participating in progress, coexists with a descent from the social and ethical refinements of medieval civilization into various resurgences of degrading primitivism. One might think of the way in which the Internet is bound up with pornography and gambling. In Evola’s scheme, the Reformation, the rise of science, and the Industrial Revolution mark stages of descent, not of ascent, in the history of viable socio-political forms. For Evola, the modern exaltation of the instrumental, the practical, and the material is tantamount not only to a petulant rejection of every “higher dimension of life” but also to a perverse embrace of “spiritual formlessness.”

Thus the degradation of the person, a term that Evola uses in a special way, belongs to a regime that achieves control, entirely for the sake of control, by encouraging the lowest appetitive urges of that desperate but useful creature, the mere numerical individual. Evola here avails himself frankly of Ortega’s category of the mass man, whose sole quality consists in his unavoidable overwhelming quantity.

Evola identifies the proximate source of these trends in “the subversion introduced in Europe by the revolutions of 1789 and 1848” although analysis could trace both outbursts to prior stages and events. In equality, the central fetish of revolutionary subversion, Evola sees a phenomenon neither natural nor properly cultural that suggests the deeply seated aversion of a reputedly liberated consciousness to the actual, graduated structure of reality. In particular, as Evola remarks, contemporary humanity has cut itself off entirely from the only context that could clarify a man’s worth for him and integrate him into a meaningful life: that concinnity of “sovereignty, authority, and legitimacy” by which “every true State” achieves “transcendence of its own principle.” More Platonist than Christian – perhaps in certain moods, as I have suggested, anti-Christian – Evola insists that the meaning of a polity consists solely in its embodying “a higher order,” through which alone its “power” derives. A traditional polity, being essentially hierarchical, will thus never adopt the face of democracy; indeed, its aristocrats will rule by “absoluteness,” in the sense that their stewardship of order, their “Imperium,” will always take direction from their spiritual participation in the same “aeterna auctoritas” that bestows intelligibility on the physical cosmos.

The social classes of the traditional polity recognize the authority embodied in their governors by its outward signs of dignity and justice proper to regal persons. Democracy represents the opposite principle to these (insofar, that is, as it can be said to represent any principle): democracy is dissolute; it liquefies all achieved structure and all justified value-subordination in its amoeba-like abolition of true differences.

One might note that a faint echo of what Evola would recognize as genuine order informs even so late a stage of modernity as the American founding, with its references to a “Creator.” Nevertheless, Evola’s assertion that the polity and its governors must make manifest a transcendent order – cosmic, divine, and paternal – lies so far from the prevailing definition of existence that even most of those calling themselves conservative must gape at it in dumb non-understanding. Modern practice has crassly inverted the traditional vision of order, orienting itself downwards to the chthonic, the animistic, and the maternal. Democracy, for Evola, belongs with this infantilizing abasement of life, as does the obsessive and vacuous notion, as he sees it, of individuality. Here too the prevailing mentality must recoil – how could anyone not advocate for the individual? Is not the sanctity of the individual the indispensable basis of Anglo-Saxon society? Is not the Bill of Right a set of guarantees for the individual?

But Evola rigorously distinguishes the individual from the person, valorizing the latter. “The person,” Evola writes, “is an individual who is differentiated through his qualities, endowed with his own face, his proper nature, and a series of attributes that make him who he is and distinguish him from all others.” By distinction, “the individual may be conceived only as an atomic unit… a mere fiction of an abstraction.” Persons, being actually individuated, hold rank as “peers” in the differentiated company; in “the will to equality,” by contrast, Evola sees only “the will to what is formless.”

Evola also insists on distinguishing “the organic State” from “the totalitarian State,” linking the former to individuation within a functioning hierarchy (to persons) and the latter to the featurelessness of democracy: “A state is organic when it has a center, and this center is an idea that shapes the various domains of life in an efficacious way; it is organic when it ignores the division and the autonomization of the particular and when, by virtue of the system of hierarchical participation, every part within its relative autonomy performs its own function and enjoys an intimate connection with the whole.” Evola writes that, “In totalitarianism we usually find a tendency toward uniformity and intolerance for any autonomy and any degree of freedom, [and] for any intermediate body between the center and periphery, between the peak and the bottom of the social pyramid.” In a society where Tradition governs, the “axiom… is that the supreme values… are not liable to change and becoming.” In a liberal society where democracy governs (which will be indistinguishable from a dictatorship), “there are no principles, systems, and norms with values independent from the period in which they have assumed a historical form, on the basis of contingent… and irrational factors.”

Evola refuses to retreat from the two phases of a stark judgment: First that “the beginning of the disintegration of the traditional sociopolitical structures, or at least what was left of them in Europe, occurred through liberalism,” which is the direct precursor of revolution; and second that “the essence of liberalism is individualism.” Because the notion of equality amounts to “sheer nonsense” and constitutes a “logical absurdity,” any implementation of equality will necessarily entail a destruction of that which, by existing really and actually, offends democratic sentiment. Thus for Evola democracy itself is nihilism.

II. Where Men among the Ruins takes on the task of describing our post-catastrophic predicament, Ride the Tiger prescribes how a genuinely individuated person might comport himself in a culturally devastated and morally degenerate environment. Ride the Tiger nevertheless also analyzes the topics that fascinate Evola, generally the grand spectacle of civilization in deliquescence and particularly the outward forms of the dominant corruption. The reader finds then, in Ride the Tiger, chapters devoted to “The Disguises of European Nihilism,” “[The] Collapse of Existentialism,” “Covering Up Nature – Phenomenology,” “The Dissolution of Modern Art,” and “Second Religiosity,” among many others. In respect of the mid-Twentieth Century situation Evola urges his readers not to mistake the ongoing visible disintegration of the bourgeois world for the primary cataclysm in whose shattered landscape they live: “Socially, politically, and culturally, what is crashing down [today] is the system that took shape after the revolution of the Third Estate and the first industrial revolution, even though there were often mixed up in it some remnants of a more ancient order, drained of their original vitality.” Evola remains steadfastly loyal to that “more ancient order,” in the resurrection of whose vitality the wellbeing of persons in a hostile world is implicated.

Nihilism, in Evola’s discussion of it, knows how to conceal and dissimulate itself, how to smile, soothe, and cajole. The ability to ferret out nihilism’s hiding places and to penetrate its masks thus plays a key role in the continued autonomy of the individuated person or “aristocrat of the spirit.” Evola takes Nietzsche’s trope of “The Death of God” as usefully designating a particular “fracture… of an ontological character” that afflicts the contemporary scene. Through this “fracture,” Evola writes, “human life loses any real reference to transcendence,” and in its train the innumerable “doubles and surrogates” of “the God who is Dead” rise into prominence. Thus “when the level of the sacred is lost,” only empty formulas – ideologies – persist, like the “categorical imperative” posited by Kant or the “ethical rationalism” (as Evola names it) promulgated by Mill and his followers. Lurking beyond the scrim of these and other constructions, Evola sees “nihilism already visible.” For example, nihilism bodies forth in “the Romantic hero: the man who feels himself alone in the face of divine indifference” and who “claims for himself exceptional rights to what is forbidden.”

After Romanticism, the spirit of negation appears under the label of “the absurd,” with its axiom of universal non-meaning and its dramatis personae of “lost youth,” “teddy boys,” and “rebels without a cause.” Hollywood and commercial culture continuously reinvent these limited types.

With a reference to Kopff’s recent article, I mentioned earlier how Evola characterizes modern economic theory as “demonic.” Evola applies this label irrespective of whether the theory under scrutiny advocates a view rooted in Karl Marx or in Adam Smith because both represent masquerading nihilism. A rational concept of wealth becomes a “demonic” theory when the idea of money and its relation to goods, first, reduces itself to something entirely abstract and, next, inflates itself until it is the central and dominating Mumbo-Jumbo of a polity. It matters not whether the prevailing ideology is socialism or capitalism: “The error and illusion are the same,” namely that “material want” is the cause of all “existential misery” and that abundance generates happiness and lawfulness. In a stunning sentence, whose import almost no currently serving politician could grasp, Evola offers that, “the truth of the matter is that the meaning of existence can be as lacking in one group [rich or poor] as in the other, and that there is no correlation between material and spiritual misery.” Evola remarks that all of modern politics tends towards “socioeconomic messianism.”

According to Evola, virtually all of modern and Twentieth Century philosophy is evasion or deception. Ride the Tiger’s chapters on Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre – not to mention Nietzsche – exposit the view that these thinkers, too, partake in the process of reducing reality to nothingness. Nietzsche, in Evola’s commentary, participates in the reduction of Transcendence to immanence: “Once the idols have fallen, good and evil have been surpassed, along with all the surrogates of God, and this mist has lifted from one’s eyes, nothing is left to Nietzsche but ‘this world,’ life, the body.” The Übermensch is Nietzsche’s ersatz-Transcendence. Evola ranks the Übermensch, a deferred futurity that supposedly justifies action now on its non-present behalf, as “not very different from Marxist-communist ideology,” with its sinewy image of Socialist Humanity. Nietzsche’s Will and Power are mere guises of “formlessness.” Husserl strikes Evola also as misguided, engaging in the old project of Saving the Appearances by de-realizing the appearances even further and so cutting off consciousness from its contact both with nature and Transcendence. As for Heidegger, as Evola sees things, the Dasein-philosopher has failed to go beyond Nietzsche and like his precursor has reduced life to desperate immanence. Heidegger’s doctrine “is a projection of modern man in crisis, rather than of modern man beyond crisis.”

Nihilism can counterfeit itself in the guise of spirituality and religion. Thus what Evola calls “modern naturalism” and “the animal ideal” is linked to what he calls, while borrowing the term from Spengler, “second religiosity.” The labels “modern naturalism” and “the animal ideal” refer to the “back to nature” idea that the history of concepts traces to an original codification in Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “The natural state for man has never existed,” writes Evola, because “at the beginning [man] was placed in a supranatural state from which he has now fallen.” A de-individuating descent to the bosom of Mother Earth remains impossible by definition for culturally mature persons. Thus “every return to nature is a regressive phenomenon, including any protest in the name of instinctual rights, the unconscious, the flesh, life uninhibited by the intellect, and so forth.” The neo-Chthonic movements familiar on the modern scene belong to “second religiosity.” Like the “second religiosity” of the ancient world, that of the modern world is effeminate, matriarchal, and anti-intellectual; it is also thoroughly anti-spiritual. “Second religiosity” permeates modern life in “sporadic forms of spirituality and mysticism, even in irruptions from the supersensible.” However, such “symptoms” definitely “do not indicate re-ascent” to anything genuinely metaphysical.

Evola died before environmentalism found its pseudo-Gospel in the scientifically now-discredited “Global Warming” hysteria, before organized feminism began its systematic emasculation of Western institutions, and before these trends had coalesced in Mountebanks and Priests-of-Atargatis like “Gaia” theorist James Lovelock and ex-Senator Albert “We-are-the-Enemy” Gore. Readers may take Evola as prescient when he writes that, “nothing is more indicative of the level of… neospiritualism than the human material of the majority of those who cultivate it.” Evola notes that, “mystification and superstition are constantly mingled in neospiritualism, another of whose traits, especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries, is the high percentage of women (women who are failures, dropouts, or ‘past it’).” In a metaphor, Evola compares these manifestations of “escapism, alienation, and confused compensation” to “the fluorescence that appears when corpses decay.”

III. It might seem to have entailed an insuperable contradiction when, in my introduction, I wrote that Hermann Keyserling had shunned Evola because Evola’s investment in occult ideas stood in uncomfortable excess to Keyserling’s own; whereas, at the end of the foregoing section I reported on Evola’s critical hostility to “mysticism” and “superstition,” using his own terms from Ride the Tiger. There is no actual contradiction. Evola’s idea of Transcendence lies not so distant from similar ideas in the work of Giambattist Vico, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Eric Voegelin, and Richard Weaver. Evola, whose literary education was large, knows from the ancient texts that the sequence of intense visionary experience – followed by virile propagation of an at-first essentially religious order – lies at the inception of all known complex societies and civilizations. The similitude of mythic or prophetic foundations suggests that they all correspond to a singular source even though they cannot tell us, in modern rational language, what that source is.

Whether it is Homer’s “Dike” (“Justice”) whose origin is Zeus, the Hebrew’s “I am that I am,” the Middle Kingdom’s “Dao,” or the beatific vision in Plato, Augustine, and Dante – the formative effect of the experience is to establish a notional hierarchy of structures, oriented to that which is “above” the human world, which, while announcing itself as eternal Being, takes physical form through human creative activity in the actual world. Founding visions organize people anagogically. That is an historical fact. Even Spengler, a rigorous skeptic, writes, in The Decline (Vol. I), that, “a Culture is born when a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirituality… and detaches itself, a form from the formless.” Toynbee, quirkily Catholic, writing in Civilization on Trial (1948), recognizes Christianity as a vision of life that “arose out of the spiritual travail which was a consequence of the breakdown of the Graeco-Roman civilization” and which forecast the shape of a successor-civilization amidst the ruins of the old. As for Voegelin, in Israel and Civilization (1956), he writes: “Cosmological symbolization is neither a theory nor an allegory. It is the mythical expression of the participation, experienced as real, of the order of society in the divine being that also orders the cosmos.”

Evola, while prickly and eccentric, may nevertheless claim lively company in the convergent testimonies of so many legends and sagas from antiquity and the middle ages. Evola’s great work, Revolt against the Modern World, makes explicit the philological and anthropological bases of his convictions concerning Tradition. Evola divides Revolt into two parts: First, a comprehensive description of the structures and assumptions of those historical societies that body forth Tradition; Second, a “genealogy” of modern decadence. In Part One of Revolt, Evola draws heavily on James G. Frazer, Franz Cumont, Georges Dumézil, Fustel de Coulanges, and other scholars who, without prejudice, had attempted to understand primitive and archaic customs and institutions, as it were, from the inside out. Evola admires ancient and historical societies for the virility of their structures – royalty, aristocracy, priesthood, warrior, worker, and serf – which, in his view, allowed people to integrate themselves in a meaningful, living arrangement with others, including their superiors, with a minimum of invidious friction. Every station in the hierarchy has its privileges, but every station also has its obligations to the stations below it, just as each has its duties to the whole.

Modern people find in social hierarchies, and such institutions as castes and guilds, something arbitrary and limiting, but Evola insists that traditional estates and vocations allowed for a natural sorting-out of talents and potentials and that they permitted people, by apprenticeship and initiation, to realize personal progress in a well-defined context. Evola also remarks that, especially in medieval society, certain institutions cut across the estates, so that a man whose trade, say, was a cobbler, might, as a member of one or another lay order, attain social recognition for activity outside that by which he earned his bread. Hans Sachs, in Richard Wagner’s Meistersinger, is by trade a shoemaker, but his peers celebrate him as an artist-adept of Stabreim and Minnelied. The Church, too, cut across the estates and offered avenues of mobility. By constant implication, Evola suggests that, insofar as happiness concerns us, people have been happier in traditional societies than they are, despite material comforts, in modern society. Evola is aware, as was Nietzsche, that the dissolution of forms exacerbates resentment and that modern people are more resentful than their predecessors.

Evola goes so far as to defend the attitudes of Aristotle and the Old Testament to slavery, attitudes that occasion reflexive dudgeon in modern commentary: “Let us set aside the fact that Europeans reintroduced and maintained slavery up to the nineteenth century in their overseas colonies in such heinous forms as to be rarely found in the ancient world; what should be emphasized is that if there ever were a civilization of slaves on a grand scale, the one in which we are living is it.” Modern people wear the badge of their “dignity” brazenly. Yet “no traditional civilization ever saw such great masses of people condemned to perform shallow, impersonal, automatic jobs.” It is the case furthermore that, “in the contemporary slave system the counterparts of figures such as lords or enlightened rulers are nowhere to be found,” but only rather “the absurd structures of a more or less collectivized society.” Must one say that this makes no brief for slavery? Rather it condemns the parochialism and self-righteousness of liberals and democrats, and castigates the spiritually destructive tedium of the bureaucratic functions on which liberal-democratic society bases itself.

In the same paragraph from which I draw the foregoing lines, Evola mentions the Soviet slave-labor camps, which attest for him the evil inherent in “the physical and moral subjection of man to the goals of collectivization.”

As any admirer of chivalry must, Evola deplores feminism and female enfranchisement, both belonging, in his view, to the trend of the purely quantitative individual, with his infantilized egocentrism. “A practical and superficial lifestyle of a masculine type,” Evola writes, “has perverted [woman’s] nature and thrown her into the same male pit of work, profits, frantic activity, and politics.” It follows that, “modern woman in wanting to be for herself has destroyed herself” because “the ‘personality’ she so much yearned for is killing all semblance of female personality in her.” But Evola never spares anyone: “We must not forget that man is mostly responsible for [female] decadence… In a society run by real men, woman would never have yearned for or even been capable of taking the path she is following today.” As Kopff writes: “Evola rejected the Enlightenment Project lock, stock, and barrel, and had little use for the Renaissance and the Reformation. For Evola those really opposed to the leftist regime, the true Right, are not embarrassed to describe themselves as reactionary and counterrevolutionary.”

IV. Part Two of Revolt against the Modern World traces the pedigree of the existing nihilism-crisis by providing “a bird’s eye view of history.” Naturally, Evola refuses to follow standard historiography, dismissing roundly its most basic assumption – namely that the original human societies were primitive and that civilization is a late stage in the social development of humanity. Evola similarly rejects the related Darwinian idea that complex entities evolve from primitive entities. In both instances he sees things the other way around, not out of egocentric crankiness, but rather as he writes, because Tradition itself, to which he defers, sees things the other way around. He takes seriously, for example, the archaic poet Hesiod’s five phases of humanity from the didactic poem Works and Days; he takes seriously Plato’s “Atlantis” story from the tandem dialogues Timaeus and Critias, and he admits as respectable similar model polities or societies that the variety of myth and literature locates in an antediluvian age. In the Hesiodic scheme, the earliest men were those of the Golden Race after which came the Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and Iron Races. Hesiod famously vows that he wished he did not belong to the degenerate Iron Race, so wicked and unsalvageable is it. In Plato’s “Atlantis” story, the original Atlanteans are demigods, who live in a technically and morally perfected state; but their descendants become gross, materialistic, and degenerate.

Before one dismisses this framework as an instance of irremediable credulity, one should carefully note two things. The first is that unlike the ideologues whom he criticizes, who place their Social Justice or their Master Race in the indefinite future, Evola places the irreproducible model-polity in an irretrievable past, from which locus it can justify no reality-altering agenda; it can only serve as a remote measure for conscientious persons who seek standards other than contemporary ones. The second is that Evola thinks by habit in mythopoeic terms, as did Plato and Giambattist Vico; and it is through symbols and metaphors that he defeats the mechanistic-literalistic pseudo-cognition that he deplores. Like Plato and Vico – and like P. D. Ouspensky, who also entertained the idea of cycles of civilization and destruction, and who was certainly not a fantasist – Evola would advise honest people to begin their contemplation of human achievement from a position of humbleness rather than arrogance. I note that this tenet, central to Evola’s ethos, excuses him from the charge of Gnosticism. Despite Evola’s many references to esoteric knowledge, he never qualifies such knowledge as miraculously or uniquely vouchsafed him. He asserts that he has teased it out of myth, saga, and folklore by diligent study.

One might also note that in the last fifty years archeology has steadily deepened the chronologies of complex human associations and of material achievement; and that in the same period the once-discredited idea of a primordial human language from which all others descend has reappeared, quite respectably, in the “Nostratic” and “World” hypotheses. Why, one might ask, as long as the theory of African Genesis remains formally unobjectionable, should anyone object to Evola’s theory of Far-Northern or Hyperborean ethogenesis, formally speaking? The theory of the Hyperborean Ur-Tradition explains cultural diffusion as adequately as the standing theory; the preference for which is a matter largely of sanctified prejudice. Indeed, a “boreal” first formation of high culture in no way makes impossible a prior equatorial appearance of Homo sapiens, considered under a purely biological category. As Evola points out, many southern people place their culture-ancestors in a northern homeland. Of course, the main interest in Revolt, Part Two, is in the diagnosis of modern corruption.

What is Evola’s history of that corruption? In a remote first collapse in “the regression of the castes,” as Evola calls the long-term degenerative process, “the regality of blood replaced the regality of spirit,” and this alteration corresponded with an insurgency of “The Civilization of the Mother” over the original “Patriciate.” Much later – in the Late Medieval Period – “a second collapse occurred as the aristocracies began to fall and the monarchies to shake at the foundations,” when “through revolutions and constitutions they became useless institutions subject to the ‘will of the nation.’” Next comes the collapse from an already-narrowed nation-consciousness to the paradoxical undifferentiated collectivism of the bourgeois society of mere individuals, where equality is the tyrannical Shibboleth and absolute conformity the mode. Next, out of the incipient collectivism of the bourgeois society, comes “the proletarian revolt against capitalism,” in which Evola discerns “a reduction of horizon and value to the plane of matter, the machine, and the reign of quantity.” The phenomenon is a nadir, entirely “subhuman.” Thus, “in the leaders of the Bolshevik revolution it is possible to detect a ruthless ideological coherence.”

As his early article “Bolschevismus ed Americanismus” should lead one to guess, Evola never spares the United States: “America too, in the essential way it views life and the world, has created a ‘civilization’ that represents the exact contradiction of the ancient European tradition.” In words reminiscent of Spengler’s diction, Evola describes the United States “a soulless greatness of a purely technological and collective nature, lacking in any background of transcendence.” Whereas “Soviet communism officially professes atheism,” Evola remarks, and whereas “America does not go that far”; nevertheless, “without realizing it, and often believing the contrary, it is running down the same path in which nothing is left of… religious meaning.” According to Evola, “the great majority of Americans could be said to represent a refutation on a large scale of the Cartesian principle… they ‘do not think and are.’” Evola links American anti-intellectualism with the proliferation in the United States of “the feminist idiocy,” which travels in tandem with “the materialistic and practical degradation of man.”

In its conclusion, Evola’s Revolt forecasts a new “dark age,” for which his preferred term is the Vedic Kali Yuga. America will assimilate the crusading impulse of Soviet communism and will begin to try to universalize its destructive pseudo-values through imperialistic aggression; the Imperium will be a short-lived calamity leading to global wreckage. When Evola speaks thusly in 1934, one listens, and dismissing him becomes difficult.

What is one to do then with a writer of foresight, whose literacy and education remain indubitable, who nevertheless serves up his social and political analysis, however trenchant it is, in the context of an alternate history, the details of which resemble the background of story by Lord Dunsany or Clark Ashton Smith? I am strongly tempted to answer my own question in this way: That perhaps we should begin by reassessing Dunsany and Smith, especially Smith, whose tales of decadent remnant-societies – half-ruined, eroticized, brooding over a shored-up luxuriance, and succumbing to momentary appetite with fatalistic abandon – speak with powerful intuition to our actual circumstances. I do not mean to say, however, that Evola is only metaphorically true, as though his work, like Smith’s, were fiction. I mean that Evola is truly true, on the order of one of Plato’s “True Myths,” no matter how much his truth disconcerts us.

 

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Bertonneau, Thomas F. “Against Nihilism: Julius Evola’s ‘Traditionalist’ Critique of Modernity.” The Brussels Journal, 29 March 2010. <http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4371 >.

Notes on further reading: For a larger introduction to Evola’s thought, see H.T. Hansen’s “Julius Evola’s Political Endeavors” in Evola’s Men Among the Ruins: Postwar Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2002), available online here: <http://www.juliusevola.com/julius_evola/texts/MenAmongtheRuins.pdf >. Also significant in this regard is Evola’s autobiography The Path of Cinnabar (London: Integral Tradition Publishing, 2009). For a record of written works by Evola and translations, see the World Catalogue: <http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3AEvola%2C+Julius%2C >.

For an interesting evaluation of Evola’s thoughts on authority and the state as well as the ideas of other traditionalists, see Alain de Benoist’s “Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power” (originally published in: TYR: Myth, Culture, Tradition, vol. 3 [Atlanta: Ultra, 2007–2008]), available online here: <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/11/spiritual-authority-and-temporal-power/ >. (See this essay in PDF format here: Spiritual Authority & Temporal Power).

For a notable critical analysis of Evola’s philosophy from a New Right perspective, see: Alain de Benoist, “Julius Evola, réactionnaire radical et métaphysicien engagé. Analyse critique de la pensée politique de Julius Evola,” Nouvelle Ecole, No. 53–54 (2003), pp. 147–69. Available online here: <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/julius_evola.pdf >. This essay was also translated into Spanish as “Julius Evola, Reaccionario Radical y Metafísico Comprometido. Análisis crítico de su pensamiento político” (originally published in Sebastian J. Lorenz’s Elementos Nº 16 [9 Junio 2011], published online on the ISSUU site), available online here: <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/julius_evola_reaccionario_radical.pdf > (alt. link). There is also a recent translation of this essay into English as “Julius Evola, Radical Reactionary and Committed Metaphysician: A Critical Analysis of the Political Thought of Julius Evola” (The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 1 [Spring 2015], pp. 17-62). In this analytical essay, Benoist agrees with some of Evola’s ideas, such as his critique of nationalism, the support of the imperial idea, the basic anti-egalitarian idea, and certain ethical principles. However, Benoist also criticises and rejects other ideas and attitudes in Evola’s thought, including many (although not all) of his metaphysical and religious principles, his rigid elitism, his contempt for social and popular principles, his rejection of the value of collective identities (such as ethnicity), his lack of true organicism and rejection of the value of community solidarity (in the anti-individualist sense), and his hostility to feminine values. Benoist’s basic conclusion is that Evola is an interesting thinker worthy of study, but who must be studied with a critical eye.