Counter-Currents
  • Private Events
  • T&C
  • Rss
  • DLive
  • Telegram
  • Gab
  • Entropy
  • Rss
  • DLive
  • Telegram
  • Gab
  • Entropy
  • Webzine
  • Books
  • Podcasts
  • Donate
  • Paywall
  • Crypto
  • Mailing List
  • About
  • Contact
  • RSS
    • Main feed
    • Comments feed
    • Podcast feed
  • Advertise

LEVEL2

  • Webzine
  • Books
  • Podcasts
  • Donate
  • Paywall
  • Crypto
  • Mailing List
  • About
  • Contact
  • RSS
    • Main feed
    • Comments feed
    • Podcast feed
  • Advertise
  • Private Events
  • T&C
  • Rss
  • DLive
  • Telegram
  • Gab
  • Entropy
Print November 17, 2014 2 comments

Ever Sacred, Ever Vexed:
Getting Down with the Lord of the Codes

James J. O'Meara

3,618 words

NomadCodesErik Davis
Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica
Portland, Or.: Yeti Publishing, 2010

“I find the internet-driven pressure to make pieces short, data-dense, and crisply opinionated — as opposed to thoughtful, multi-perspectival, and lyrical — rather oppressive, leading to a certain kind of superficial smugness as well as general submission to the forces of reference over reflection.” — Erik Davis[1]

Nomad Codes collects about twenty years of Erik Davis’ essays and journalism. Some has appeared in rather obscure ’zines and websites, but much of it comes from mainstream outlets like the Village Voice, Wired, Salon, and Slate. That, along with titles like “The Technofreak Legacy of Golden Goa,” “UFO Epistemology,” and “My Date with a Burmese Transvestite Spirit Medium,” might lead you to pass it by, but that would be a mistake.[2]

What’s distinctive about Erik Davis’s journalism is a unique combination of immersive reportage from the most eccentric subcultures — think Tom Wolfe among the Pranksters or Hunter Thompson riding with the Hell’s Angels — with the kind of profound insights derived from a lifetime (at least since the release of Led Zeppelin IV[3]) of practical study of the mythological and esoteric realms that Wolfe or Thompson could only dream of.

A Klingon Con, for example, is revealed to me rather more than a sad collection of acned-scarred basement-dwellers — an awful lot seem to be drawn from law enforcement or the army, which Davis notes is a hotbed of Neopaganism as well; he quotes one Klingon saying that “The Klingons are very similar to the Norse” and then draws back to offer some commentary:

But as good myth-weavers know, the potency of myth lies in the magic of ambiguity. . . . No matter how much you allegorize Klingons, as Russkies or black nationalists or creatures from the id, they are compelling because they retain a certain nomadic volatility — what the ’zine Katra calls “outliness”

Further along, after observing a Klingon ritual and noting that everyone is aware that it’s “not real,” he neither scoffs like a Huffington Post secular bigot nor sniffs about “inauthentic pagan reconstructions” but makes the same point we have been arguing from in our own reviews of pop culture:

Both fans and witches share a very concrete sense of the power of imagination, seen not as an elite realm restricted to “artists” (or TV producers) but as a vital phantasmic faculty that links the realms of fantasy with the here and now. . . .

By performing their spiritual sensibilities in the trapping so a TV show, Karizans also revived the oldest derivation of the word “fan:” fanaticus, a devotee of the ancient mystery cults.[4]

The term Davis likes to use for this kind of intersection of the sacred and profane is “occulture”:

the place where popular culture meets the underground and very real currents of magic, mysticism, and the esoteric — a stream that has always been with us, but which was rediscovered and reaffirmed, in not always healthy ways, in the ’60s. “Occulture” is also a way to claim the occult or the religious fringe as a kind of cultural identity or playground, rather than an overly serious and hidden realm.

I try to look at the mysteries from both ends — I think its important to look at, say, the contemporary ayahausca scene as a scene, with dress codes and slang and rock stars, not as a sacred separate realm.[5] (Even though sacred things can and do go down there.) At the same time I think it is important (or at least more rewarding) to look at our often junky[6] world of late capitalist culture as a place where the seeds of insight and vision might be found, if only you look at the landscape in just the right way . . .[7]

Davis unpacks this idea right from the start by opening this collection with what he (or his editors) dubs a “Prolegomenon” in the form of an autobiographical account: “Teenage Head: Confessions of a High School Stoner.”

[P]ot also gave me something that has stuck with me far longer than the urge to bake the brain: a love of slippage, founded in the realization that altering perception alters the claims reality makes on you. The various social agendas of parents, teachers, and the ghost of God could be sidestepped not only by sullen monosyllables and the worship of unwholesome heavy metal guitarists but by tinkering with consciousness itself. What greater rebellion than rewiring one’s experience of the world?

Davis then adds this intriguing note:

It’s no accident that many kids start taking drugs at about the same age when children in traditional societies are tossed into a terrifying rite of passage, often involving some freaked-out combination of blood, darkness, self-sufficiency, and secrets. For better or worse, acid, ’shrooms, and massive bongloads now perform this rite, leaving marks that are both scars and the deep patterns of change.

That’s where subculture steps in, collective identities which can shore up the threat of dissolution and excess.

Teenage cults of drugs and music (psychedelic, heavy metal, trance, as opposed to the squeaky-clean world of pop and the thug culture of [c]rap) are the modern equivalents of the traditional adolescent rites of passage, where drugs, music (and sex) are used to break the bonds of childhood and forge new ties with the adult world, or perhaps a “subculture” such as the Männerbund, the military, or the priesthood.

[T]hat aimless and reckless quest for the silliest of grails (a party, pot, a parent-free abode)

The particular role of drugs (to an extent shared with music and sex) is to produce a state Michael Hoffman has called “loose cognition,” where the tight bonds of what passes for common sense (Kuhn’s “normal science”) are loosen or broken, allowing new combinations to arise (Kuhn’s “new paradigm”).[8]

Phasing between the reveries of a bookish childhood and the hormone-fueled angst of teendom, my mind liquefied, running through the cracks and creases of a suddenly unfolded world.

For some, the shamanistic, shall we say, a lasting taste for such adventures in perception is retained, ideally combined with some ability to maintain an ability to function in normal society. The point is not to gain some new dogma, but to retain the ability to see.

Acid doesn’t give you truths; it builds machines that push the envelope of perception. Whatever revelations came to me then have dissolved like skywriting. All I really know is that those few years saddled me with a faith in the redemptive potential of the imagination.

It produces a bubbling, crackling connection-machine which quickly sinks into the mire. Trivial objects, words, and glances stitch together webs of deep and intense meaning that uncomfortably thicken—once a Greek salad in New Haven set off a rumination on the flows of Western history which overwhelmed my puny mind like a tidal wave.

But I take great satisfaction in the fact that many people acquainted with either my writing or my person assume I’m a total stoner.[9]

But Deleuze and Guattari are fairly down on drugs themselves. To quote them quoting Henry Miller, the point is to get drunk on a glass of water.

Or, to quote William Burroughs, the self-styled “master drug addict” himself, “Learn to make it without chemical corn.”

This is somewhat like what Peter Lamborn Wilson, subject of another fascinating piece — “The Wandering Sufi” — calls “sacred drift,” which Davis calls “a magical mode of writing: recombinant, luminous, fragmentary.” Even so, as Davis notes, “for an anarchist, he has a remarkably traditional respect for rigor and cautious argument, as well as a real love of the dusty bibliographies and arcane disputes of classic scholarship.” (He was, after all, part of Seyyed Nasr’s Iranian Academy of Philosophy, and remembers their patroness, “Mrs. Shaw,” with great fondness).[10]

Unlike the kids, not everyone likes the Drift; for example, H. P. Lovecraft, who even though he was dead in his forties, had long since taken to referring to himself as “Old Grandpa.” In “Calling Cthulhu,”[11] Davis describes the then-nascent cult of pop-Cthulhu, and noted that Lovecraft’s “dread” and “horror” seemed to belong to a 19th-century materialist confronting vast new vistas opened up by science, not unlike those opened by the ’60s drug culture; as he describes it in a later article on Cthulhu porn:

In this tangy bon-bon of nihilistic materialism, Lovecraft anticipates a peculiarly modern experience of dread, one conjured not by irrational fears of the dark but rather by the speculative realism of reason itself, staring into the cosmic void. . . . This terror before the empty and ultimately unknowable universe of scientific materialism is what gives the cosmic edge to the cosmic horror that Lovecraft, more than any other writer, injected into the modern imagination (though props must be given up as well to Arthur Machen, William Hope Hodgson, and, in the closing chapters of The Time Machine at least, H. G. Wells). While many secular people proclaim an almost childlike wonder at the mind-melting prospect of the incomprehensibly vast universe sketched out by astrophysics and bodied forth by doctored Hubble shots, Lovecraft would say that we have not really swallowed the implication of this inhuman immensity—that we have not, in other words, correlated our contents.[12]

Or, as Davis says in “Teenage Head”:

Whether or not the sense that everything fits together is perceived as a holistic liberation or a dire trap depends a lot on how tightly you are clutching to your frame of mind.

“Calling Cthulhu” also explores the “curiously literal dimension” of Lovecraft’s cult, “made all the more intriguing by the fact that Lovecraft himself was . . . philosophically opposed to spirituality and magic of any kind.” Yet in his work, thanks to the “tension between fact and fable” called magic, “ancient and amoral forces violently puncture the realistic surface of his tales,” drawing the reader “into the chaos that lies ‘between the worlds’ of magic and reality.” Davis calls this “Lovecraft’s magical realism” but we have elsewhere suggested that it also resembles what has been called “archeofuturism,” the continued accessibility of the past in the future, now.[13]

The resurgence of weed as cultural icon may not be a matter of returning to nature but recovering its flow in the urban milieu: how to slip through the cracks in the concrete,[14] how to grow wilderness in the most degraded or rigidly stratified of circumstances. That’s not a spoon or a needle or a bottle on all those caps around town. It’s a leaf.

Speaking of Cthulhu, and theurgy (acting on the gods) in general, Lovecraft, in “The Call” and elsewhere liked to bring in voodoo cults and other darkie woo-woo to suggest parallels, or equivalents, to his fictional cults of the Elder Gods; Lovecraft the Village Atheist no doubt also liked to imply this was the real nature of more respectable religions like Puritan Christianity.[15]

Here again, once you make the connection, you can’t really control where it will take you (“sacred drift”); perhaps there’s more to those “primitive” cults, perhaps as much as the White man’s fancy theology? “Trickster at the Crossroads” explores African cults that may make the White “neopagan” uncomfortable, but may have something to teach us moderns.

Perhaps that discomfort arises not (only) from “a lingering afterimage of colonialism” but from an uncomfortable similarity:

As one Neopagan I know put it, “why be interested in these grotesque and parasitic deities?” You could answer that these deities are not so much grotesque as rich with character, not so much parasitic as deeply and reciprocally bound up with the daily lives of their devotees.”

Though they possess godlike powers, the orisha are not transcendent beings; rather, they are idiosyncratic personalities thoroughly bound up with ritual, practice, and the sort of exchanges that define human community.

In short, rather more pagan than the alien Christianity imposed on us.[16] Traditionalists like Guénon and Coomaraswamy scorned the whole notion of “primitive” peoples,[17] either as vertigoes of a past left behind by religious or scientific “progress” or as role models to be emulated, considering them rather as degenerate traces of lost primordial civilizations; but the degenerate culture, by definition, bear some connection to the healthy, unlike the deviationism of Judeo-Christianity and Modernity.[18]

In fact, in the spirit of archeofuturism, the orisha suggest not merely the past but the present future:

In our wired world, Eshu can also be seen as the spirit of the network, nomadic lord of the codes and protocols that tie movement and trade, images and perspective, data and sex. Of all the orisha, he perhaps speaks most forcefully to us today because he is about the very process that we engage in order to understand and recognize him: the tangle process of communication itself, ever sacred, ever vexed.

Erik Davis lecturing at Burning Man in 2003

Erik Davis lecturing at Burning Man in 2003

Now, I know what many of you are thinking: this Davis cat is just another aging neo-hippie, and no doubt some kinda eco-friendly anti-Westerner, peddling more new-age pap. Admittedly, there are times when Davis does seem to lean perilously close to becoming some kind of Burning Man trendster (see “Beyond Belief: The Cults of Burning Man”)

or just another fruity California nut (see the section on “Kalifornika” as well as his historical/spiritual/psycho-geographical travelogue, The Visionary State: A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape[19]).

But at his best, which is most of the time, Davis is made of sterner stuff. Take “Snakes and Ladders,” an important Gnostic manifesto that echoes, not only in the title, James Hillman’s “Peaks and Vales.” Here the “tension” we’ve seen is abstracted into

two contrasting modes of spiritual movement, two pervasive “styles” or religious impulses. One the one hand, the desire to establish an intense, deeply wedded connection with the imaginative matrix of the natural world; on the other hand, a desire to overcome desire, to ascend towards virtual light, to escape the demands of matter and wake up to a new order of knowledge and being.

This wariness of what Ken Wilber might call “premature unity” leads him to suggest that

the impulse to transcend—the Neo-Platonist’s ascent through the spheres, the Gnostic’s sudden awakening, the desert monk’s rejection of the élan vital—is not simply a philosophical error or the mark of patriarchy, but is fired by an intensely lucid yearning for the highest of goals: liberation.

Davis avows that he distrusts

[A]ny easy attempt to shove them under one roof. It’s too simple to paper over their real differences be appealing to the supposed unity of mystical experience or the clichéd notion that various religious languages describe the same truth from different perspectives. What if the truth itself is multiple?

Like Hillman, Davis sees that polytheism is not — or should not be — just another dogma like monotheism:

The polytheistic alternative does not set up conflicting opposites between beast and Bethlehem, between chaos and unity; it permits the coexistence of the psychic fragments and gives them patterns in the imagination . . .[20]

On the other hand, Davis is admittedly given to the usual knee-jerking; he can’t help but interrupt an account of his first encounter with the OnStar system — when he sets it off accidentally in a rental car — without wondering not just what the cops in Skokie would do if they had arrived and he was black. (The answer, of course, is “Nothing as bad as the brothers would do if they found you in Compton.”)

But even so. Constant Readers will find his positive take on “The Matrix Way of Knowledge” — “the Wachowski brothers realize that the cybernetic problem of control reboots the hoary old struggle between freedom and fate” — to be an interesting contrast to Trevor Lynch’s disgust,[21] and his musing over

What, then, is the proper rejoinder to determinism? The Oracle tells Neo that “You are here to understand why you made the choice, not to make the choice.” I take this to mean that, to an awakened one, events and decisions have always already occurred, but that understanding and compassion can still dissolve their karmic hold.

intersects nicely with our own obsession with finding the rather more amoral “passing the buck” motif — escape from karma through a scapegoat or “sucker” — in genre flicks.[22]

“Intersection” is really what it — and Erik Davis’ writing — is all about. Knowledge may be fragmentary, but Wisdom arise from the intersection — ever repeated — of the fragments. This collection will expose the intrepid spiritual adventurer to many of those “Shards of the Diamond Matrix,” from jazzbo Islamic heresies, to the hash-addled surf epiphanies of California teenagers, to “Scratch” Perry churning out dub from Switzerland. Like another one of its own topics — how appropriately fractal — it is truly “a mighty bizarre volume known as The Secret Museum of Mankind.”

Yeti has done a great service to esoteric adventurers by bringing out this collection. It has a great personal introduction by Marcus Boon, but one does miss — in the spirit of Peter L. Wilson, and Davis’s “bookish” boyhood, if not Melville’s Sub-Sub Librarian[23] — a list of first appearances rather than just dates; moreover this sort of writing calls out for an index to guide the reader who is sure Davis mentioned something about something somewhere.

But perhaps they hope the reader with enter into the spirit of the thing, and just dive in and wait for the sacred drift to take them . . . somewhere.

Notes

1. Klint Finley, “Erik Davis – Technoccult Interview,” November 23, 2010, here.

2. In the interests of full disclosure, our paths first intersected through mutual interests in lectures given at the New York Open Center when Erik was writing for the Village Voice; in the Wild West days of the Internets I passed for something of an expert, believe it or not, and lent research assistance to a piece, post-Oklahoma City, on neo-Right websites; later, as guest editor of an issue of FringeWare Review, he solicited an article on my involvement with the Da Free John sect.

3. See his Led Zeppelin IV, #17 in the “33 and 1/3” series (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005).

4. See Greg Johnson’s “Interview with James J. O’Meara,” here and reprinted in The Homo and the Negro: Masculinist Meditations on Politics and Popular Culture, ed. Greg Johnson (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2012), where I discuss Jeremy Reed’s appropriation of the pop culture “fan” as a model for the intense awareness of the “mundane” that characterizes the poet, and the relationship of this notion to Archetypal psychology (Moore, Hillman) and Sufi mysticism (Peter Lamborn Wilson, to be mentioned later); see also Michael Hoffman’s egodeath.com for research on, among much else dear to the hearts of Davis and myself, psychedelic rock music as modern mystery rituals.

5. Compare my discussion of the role of dress codes and themes as constitutive of anti-modern zones in “Mad Männerbund?” and “Fashion Tips for the Far From Fashionable Right” in The Homo and the Negro.

6. He means of course “filled with junk” (in “The Technofreak Legacy of Golden Goa” he refers to “junky speakers”) but the link to Burroughs’ Junky, his one piece of hardboiled realism, is interesting.

7. Antonio Lopez, “Follow your Weird: A Conversation with Erik Davis,” Reality Sandwich, here.

8. For drugs, sex and the Männerbund, see the work of Wulf Grimsson, generally, and my review of his Loki’s Way here and reprinted in The Homo and the Negro; for drugs, music and loose cognition, see the work of Michael Hoffman collected at his egodeath.com.

9. I too have had this ambiguous pleasure: “Reading James O’Meara is a psychedelic experience.” — Jack Donovan, jacket copy for The Homo and the Negro.

10. Wilson is another seminal influence on my own writing and research, as noted in my interview with Greg Johnson.

11. “Calling Cthulhu: H. P. Lovecraft’s Magical Realism” in op. cit.

12. Erik Davis, “Cthulhu is not cute!”

13. Thus Ed Wood’s Grade-Z films, an equivalent genre to Lovecraft’s pulp fictions, paradoxically produced real effects in the present day (“Future events like these will affect your lives in the future, as Criswell predicts) due to the principle that “any endeavor pursued with sufficient vigor [e.g., magick, even performed by a non-believer] will achieve results, those results potentially surpassing the endeavor’s original intentions.” Lovecraft might be compared to the bogus psychic is Wood’s Night of the Ghouls (a rather Lovecraftian title) whose fake séances actually raise the dead and bring about his doom. See my “Getting Wood: Closely Watching the Cinematic Alchemy of Ed Wood, Jr.,” here.

14. Cf. the Situationist slogan from ’68: “Beneath the pavement, the beach!”

15. E.g., “The Dunwich Horror” as a blasphemous reworking of the Incarnation and Crucifixion; see my “Knowing All the Angles: the Lovecraftian Fiction of Don Webb,” here.

16. See the essays of Collin Cleary, here and collected in Summoning the Gods: Essays on Paganism in a God-Forsaken World, ed. Greg Johnson (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2010) and most recently “What is Odinism” in TYR 4 (Ultra, 2014) reviewed here; also, Greg Johnson’s “The Philosophy of Collin Cleary,” here.

17. Tellingly euphemized in Canadian PC-speak as “First Peoples.”

18. See “Shamanism and Sorcery,” chapter 26 of The Reign of Quantity (Ghent, N.Y.: Sophia Perennis, 2001), especially the cautions expressed on p. 181. In the same way, the stoner culture Davis emerged from is a degenerate modern version of the ancient rites of passage, and so more valuable than mere bourgeois normality.

19. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2006.

20. Davis quoting James Hillman, A Blue Fire (New York: HarperCollins, 1989), p. 44.

21. “About twenty minutes into The Matrix Reloaded I was feeling sick to my stomach — literally.” See his review here and in Trevor Lynch’s White Nationalist Guide to the Movies (San Francisco: Counter Currents, 2013).

22. See the discussion in “Getting Wood,” above.

23. Melville, of course, was a pioneer of the esoteric methods of linguistic warp and woof; see Harold Beaver’s 300-page commentary attached to the Penguin English Library edition of Moby Dick (New York: Penguin, 1972), and my recent comments here.

 

Related

  • Ian Smith’s Great Betrayal

  • The German Colonial Empire:
    A Miracle of Progress

  • Hunter S. Thompson:
    The Father of Fake News, Part 7

  • صحفي أسترالي وجحر الأرانب الفلسطينية

  • Hunter S. Thompson:
    The Father of Fake News, Part 6

  • Hunter S. Thompson:
    The Father of Fake News, Part 5

  • Rozhovor s Alainom de Benoistom o kresťanstve

  • Knut Hamsun’s The Women at the Pump

Tags

book reviewsCaliforniadrugsH. P. LovecraftJames J. O'Mearamonotheismneo-paganismpaganismthe occult

Previous

« Was Roman Citizenship Based on Laws for “All of Humanity”?

Next

» Heidegger in San Francisco

2 comments

  1. Remnant says:
    November 18, 2014 at 4:12 am

    The perception that drugs / rock’n’roll / teenage rebellion act as an ad hoc substitute for rites of passage in cultures that have failed to provide a tradition of such rites is an important insight.

    It highlights the fact that many traditional cultures provided the young with terrifying, fantastical and extremely difficult trials through which they would enter _mainstream_ adult society and _identify_ with it. Thus, they were able to “channel rebellion” (concerning which see the Trevor Lynch review of Matrix Reloaded cites by O’Meara) in a way that actually rejuvenated and carried on traditional culture, while imbuing those who experienced it with an awe and wonder that encouraged the imagination and creativity necessary to carry on that tradition in a living way. Among other things, it enabled the young to see their own culture, the culture of their parents and grandparents, as “cool”.

    Modern Western society, by no longer providing such outlets, has left the young to “rebel” on their own terms, and in ways that generally speaking put them at odds with their parents, with tradition and with the idea of entering adult society at all. We should not, then, be surprised, that the generation that first came of age on such explicit “rebellion”* in the 60s, when they themselves are finally in charge, are largely contemptuous of tradition, of their parents and of their own roots. Lacking the experience of a true rite of passage into their own culture, they flounder and lose the ability, and the desire, to join with and then pass down the traditions of their ancestors.

    Of course this is a simplification of things: those who “rebel” in our society may find their way back to traditions, some even more so than those who more explicitly identified with their culture all along. And in today’s world, rebelling against one’s parents may well mean _recovering_ the neglected traditions of one’s ancestors. Also, the lack of an explicit rite of passage may in itself mark out Western culture: allowing the young man to find his own way, and then return to the fold in his own good time.

    Despite these simplifications, the contrast between true rites of passage and the toothless, a la carte rebellion of youth today does offer a lens through which to understand some of the failures of our society to channel youthful rebellion in a way that guides them into their own traditions and leads them to _identify with_ their own culture.

    * The scare quotes I keep using around that word reflect the fact that such rebellion is often an impotent, self-deluding rebellion that ends up succumbing to the worst aspects of consumerist society; again, the Lynch review of Matrix Unloaded cited in footnote 21 above expresses this idea well.

  2. R_Moreland says:
    November 19, 2014 at 4:02 am

    It just may be that there are a lot of people out there who imagine there’s more to life than cubicle farms, rush hour traffic and 500 channels of static. One thing I’ve observed about Star Trekkers, D&Ders, Halo legionaries, club kids, and Lord of the Rings faithful is a desire forsomething beyond what the System offers, a place where one can go to live the magic.

    Look at the impact of the movie Fight Club. Go to places in the middle of the night and participate in rituals which will connect you to the world as it ought to be…and give the power to turn down the volume on what does not really matter.

    I’ve speculated that one reason the US government launched the war on drugs was not because of the negative aspects of drugs (crime, addiction, birth defects) but because of the positive. i.e., the ritualistic use of drugs for higher states of consciousness and initiation into peer group societies. A heroin addict or crackhead is not a threat to the System. If anything, they justify more repression by the System. But what of a potential warband sharing a psychoactive drug in a shamanistic ritual?

    The CIA had its MK Ultra program, involving LSD among other things. What if they realized that if people used drugs intelligently (I stress intelligently) the System could not stand the competition?

    Two decades ago, Douglas Ruhskoff wrote along lines similar in Cyberia, about the intersection between cybernetic technology, psychoactive drugs, and what was then the countercultural scene. You not only live the myth, but create a new one.

    All this bears further exploration…

Comments are closed.

If you have Paywall access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.

Note on comments privacy & moderation

Your email is never published nor shared.

Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.

  • Recent posts

    • The Counter-Currents 2022 Fundraiser
      Viva la nazione! 

      Kathryn S.

      6

    • Elvis Presley, Professor Quigley, & the Africanization of Youth

      Kerry Bolton

      1

    • Flip-Flop Nationalism

      Nicholas R. Jeelvy

      3

    • Ian Smith’s Great Betrayal

      Spencer J. Quinn

      25

    • Ask Not What They’re Doing to Trump — Ask What Trump Did For You

      Jim Goad

      57

    • Stop LARPing & Start Preparing

      Aquilonius

      5

    • The German Colonial Empire:
      A Miracle of Progress

      Morris van de Camp

    • The Rise of the “Bubble People”

      Stephen Paul Foster

      9

    • Weimerican Horror Story

      Tom Zaja

      3

    • Hunter S. Thompson:
      The Father of Fake News, Part 7

      James J. O'Meara

      2

    • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 474
      Anthony Bavaria Brings the Best Month Ever on The Writers’ Bloc

      Counter-Currents Radio

    • Remembering Philip Larkin:
      August 9, 1922–December 2, 1985

      Greg Johnson

      8

    • The Selfie Poet

      Margot Metroland

      6

    • Philip Larkin on Jazz:
      Invigorating Disagreeableness

      Frank Allen

      8

    • Quidditch By Any Other Name

      Beau Albrecht

    • صحفي أسترالي وجحر الأرانب الفلسطينية

      Morris van de Camp

    • The Worst Week Yet:
      July 31-August 6, 2022

      Jim Goad

      29

    • Hunter S. Thompson:
      The Father of Fake News, Part 6

      James J. O'Meara

      3

    • The Journey:
      Russian Views, Part One

      Steven Clark

      4

    • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 473
      Ask Me Anything with Greg Johnson

      Counter-Currents Radio

    • This Weekend’s Livestreams
      Ask Me Anything on Counter-Currents Radio & Anthony Bavaria on The Writers’ Bloc

      Greg Johnson

      1

    • The Counter-Currents 2022 Fundraiser
      Raising Our Spirits

      Howe Abbott-Hiss

      6

    • Hunter S. Thompson:
      The Father of Fake News, Part 5

      James J. O'Meara

      11

    • The Freedom Convoy & Its Enemies

      Gunnar Alfredsson

      3

    • The China Question

      Nicholas R. Jeelvy

      52

    • Rozhovor s Alainom de Benoistom o kresťanstve

      Greg Johnson

    • Your Donations at Work
      New Improvements at Counter-Currents

      Greg Johnson

      13

    • Mau-Mauing the Theme-Park Mascots

      Jim Goad

      19

    • The Overload

      Mark Gullick

      13

    • Knut Hamsun’s The Women at the Pump

      Spencer J. Quinn

      3

    • Remembering Knut Hamsun
      (August 4, 1859–February 19, 1952)

      Greg Johnson

      8

    • Tito Perdue’s Cynosura

      Anthony Bavaria

    • Hunter S. Thompson:
      The Father of Fake News, Part 4

      James J. O'Meara

      4

    • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 472
      Hwitgeard on The Writers’ Bloc

      Counter-Currents Radio

    • Ask A. Wyatt Nationalist
      Is it Rational for Blacks to Distrust Whites?

      Greg Johnson

      29

    • سكوت هوارد مجمع المتحولين جنسياً الصناعي لسكوت هوار

      Kenneth Vinther

    • Europa Esoterica

      Veiko Hessler

      21

    • Hunter S. Thompson:
      The Father of Fake News, Part 3

      James J. O'Meara

      4

    • Yarvin the (((Elf)))

      Aquilonius

      12

    • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 471
      Ask Me Anything with Greg Johnson & Mark Collett

      Counter-Currents Radio

      1

    • The Worst Week Yet:
      July 23-30, 2022

      Jim Goad

      37

    • Hunter S. Thompson:
      The Father of Fake News, Part 2

      James J. O'Meara

      2

    • Real Team-Building

      Nicholas R. Jeelvy

      10

    • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 470
      Greg Johnson Interviews Bubba Kate Paris

      Counter-Currents Radio

    • This Weekend’s Livestreams
      Bubba Kate Paris followed by Mark Collett on Counter-Currents Radio & Hwitgeard on The Writers’ Bloc

      Greg Johnson

      2

    • Význam starej pravice

      Greg Johnson

    • The Counter-Currents 2022 Fundraiser
      Reasons to Give to Counter-Currents Now

      Karl Thorburn

      1

    • Hunter S. Thompson:
      The Father of Fake News, Part 1

      James J. O'Meara

      16

    • I Dream of Djinni:
      Orientalist Manias in Western Lands, Part Two

      Kathryn S.

      31

    • مأساة الأولاد المزيفين

      Morris van de Camp

  • Classics Corner

    • Pulp Fiction

      Trevor Lynch

      46

    • Now in Audio Version
      In Defense of Prejudice

      Greg Johnson

      31

    • Blaming Your Parents

      Greg Johnson

      29

    • No Time to Die:
      Bond’s Essential Whiteness Affirmed

      Buttercup Dew

      14

    • Lawrence of Arabia

      Trevor Lynch

      16

    • Notes on Schmitt’s Crisis & Ours

      Greg Johnson

      8

    • “Death My Bride”
      David Lynch’s Lost Highway

      Trevor Lynch

      9

    • Whiteness

      Greg Johnson

      30

    • What is American Nationalism?

      Greg Johnson

      39

    • Notes on the Ethnostate

      Greg Johnson

      16

    • Heidegger & Ethnic Nationalism

      Greg Johnson

      14

    • To a Reluctant Bridegroom

      Greg Johnson

      26

    • Lessing’s Ideal Conservative Freemasonry

      Greg Johnson

      16

    • Restoring White Homelands

      Greg Johnson

      34

    • Introduction to Plato’s Republic, Parts 1 & 2

      Greg Johnson

      2

    • White Nationalist Delusions About Russia

      Émile Durand

      116

    • Batman Begins

      Trevor Lynch

    • The Dark Knight

      Trevor Lynch

    • Leo Strauss, the Conservative Revolution, & National Socialism, Part 1

      Greg Johnson

      22

    • The Dark Knight Rises

      Trevor Lynch

      22

    • Introduction to Aristotle’s Politics

      Greg Johnson

      16

    • Hegemony

      Greg Johnson

      11

    • Reflections on Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political

      Greg Johnson

      14

  • Paroled from the Paywall

    • Literal Human Garbage:
      Trashiness as a Revolt Against the Modern World

      Nicholas R. Jeelvy

      7

    • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 463
      Riley Waggaman on Russia Since the Sanctions

      Counter-Currents Radio

    • Contemplating Suicide

      Greg Johnson

      7

    • What Is the Ideology of Sameness?
      Part 2

      Alain de Benoist

    • On the Use & Abuse of Language in Debates

      Spencer J. Quinn

      26

    • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 462
      The Best Month Ever on The Writers’ Bloc with Cyan Quinn

      Counter-Currents Radio

    • A White Golden Age Descending into Exotic Dystopian Consumerism

      James Dunphy

      1

    • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 460
      American Krogan on Repatriation, Democracy, Populism, & America’s Finest Hour

      Counter-Currents Radio

      2

    • Cryptocurrency:
      A Faustian Solution to a Faustian Problem

      Thomas Steuben

      1

    • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 458
      Gregory Hood & Greg Johnson on Burnham & Machiavellianism

      Counter-Currents Radio

      3

    • Brokeback Mountain

      Beau Albrecht

      10

    • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 457
      Greg Johnson & Millennial Woes on Common Mistakes in English

      Counter-Currents Radio

      12

    • Deconstructing Our Own Religion to Own the Libs

      Aquilonius

      20

    • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 456
      A Special Juneteenth Episode of The Writers’ Bloc with Jim Goad

      Counter-Currents Radio

      2

    • “I Write About Communist Space Goths”:
      An Interview with Beau Albrecht

      Ondrej Mann

      6

    • Christianity is a Vast Reservoir of Potential White Allies

      Joshua Lawrence

      42

    • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 455
      The Counter-Currents 12th Birthday Celebration, Part 2

      Counter-Currents Radio

    • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 454
      Muhammad Aryan on The Writers’ Bloc

      Counter-Currents Radio

      8

    • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 453
      The Counter-Currents 12th Birthday Celebration, Part 1

      Counter-Currents Radio

      3

    • Look What You Made Me Do:
      Dead Man’s Shoes

      Mark Gullick

      4

    • Rome’s Le Ceneri di Heliodoro

      Ondrej Mann

      8

    • Anti-Semitic Zionism

      Nicholas R. Jeelvy

      11

    • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 452
      The Best Month Ever on The Writers’ Bloc with Stephen Paul Foster

      Counter-Currents Radio

    • No More Brother Wars?

      Veiko Hessler

    • After the Empire of Nothing

      Morris van de Camp

      2

    • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 451
      The Writers’ Bloc with Josh Neal on Political Ponerology

      Counter-Currents Radio

    • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 450
      The Latest Ask Me Anything with Greg Johnson

      Counter-Currents Radio

      3

    • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 449
      Greg Johnson & Gregory Hood on The Northman

      Counter-Currents Radio

      2

    • Paying for Veils:
      1979 as a Watershed for Islamic Revivalists

      Morris van de Camp

      3

    • Céline vs. Houellebecq

      Margot Metroland

      2

  • Recent comments

    • Beau Albrecht Ask Not What They’re Doing to Trump — Ask What Trump Did For You I concur fully.  The Donald did that much, even though his term otherwise had all too many missed...
    • Beau Albrecht Ian Smith’s Great Betrayal And it was Kermit Roosevelt who did the Iran job.
    • Kathryn S The Counter-Currents 2022 Fundraiser
      Viva la nazione! 
      I second Cutler's recommendation, and since I'm an obnoxiously elitist proponent of primary over...
    • Lord Shang Flip-Flop Nationalism In urban America, Mr. Jeelvy, there aren't that many fights because usually either a) the bad guys (...
    • J Wilcox Ask Not What They’re Doing to Trump — Ask What Trump Did For You Trump has become the Hillary Clinton of the Republicans.  Polarizing and hated viciously by even...
    • Lord Shang Ask Not What They’re Doing to Trump — Ask What Trump Did For You "while the right has no concrete ideas for anything" WTF?? We have concrete ideas for everything...
    • Jim Goad Ask Not What They’re Doing to Trump — Ask What Trump Did For You That's good. I asked a question, I got an answer.
    • NND Ask Not What They’re Doing to Trump — Ask What Trump Did For You I can name 20.
    • Al Dante The Counter-Currents 2022 Fundraiser
      Viva la nazione! 
      The nationalism of that time period was akin to the globalism of today only on a smaller scale. &...
    • Alexandra O. The Counter-Currents 2022 Fundraiser
      Viva la nazione! 
      I'd like to suggest the fine art of horseback riding to our readers, and if we were really serious...
    • Bob Roberts Ask Not What They’re Doing to Trump — Ask What Trump Did For You All your points may be true but it was still something tangible he did in my favor. Then when...
    • Spencer Quinn Ian Smith’s Great Betrayal Smith speaks highly of PK in his memoirs. Can't wait to read your review, Margot!
    • Spencer Quinn Ian Smith’s Great Betrayal Well okay,  but this was after England and France declared war against Germany to protect the honor...
    • Jim Goad Ask Not What They’re Doing to Trump — Ask What Trump Did For You re: George Wallace
    • Hamburger Today The Counter-Currents 2022 Fundraiser
      Viva la nazione! 
      Thank you!
    • Michael Ask Not What They’re Doing to Trump — Ask What Trump Did For You Trump governed like a moderate republican. Lowered some taxes, reduced some regulations. The main...
    • Danesovic Ian Smith’s Great Betrayal Nazi Germany supported Japan in destroying European/Anglo outposts in Asia. Nazis really didn't care...
    • Hamburger Today Elvis Presley, Professor Quigley, & the Africanization of Youth The problem with much right-wing analysis is that it always leads to a dead-end as far as the 'What...
    • La-Z-Man Ask Not What They’re Doing to Trump — Ask What Trump Did For You The best schadenfreude was when Pfizer decided to delay their jab report till after election night,...
    • Cutler The Counter-Currents 2022 Fundraiser
      Viva la nazione! 
      Garibaldi Hero of Italian unification by Christopher Hibbert is one, He was known as The Hero of Two...
  • Book Authors

    • Anthony M. Ludovici
    • Beau Albrecht
    • Buttercup Dew
    • Christopher Pankhurst
    • Collin Cleary
    • F. Roger Devlin
    • Fenek Solère
    • Francis Parker Yockey
    • Greg Johnson
    • Gregory Hood
    • H. L. Mencken
    • Irmin Vinson
    • J. A. Nicholl
    • James J. O’Meara
    • Jef Costello
    • Jim Goad
    • Jonathan Bowden
    • Juleigh Howard-Hobson
    • Julius Evola
    • Kerry Bolton
    • Leo Yankevich
    • Michael Polignano
    • Multiple authors
    • Savitri Devi
    • Spencer Quinn
    • Tito Perdue
    • Trevor Lynch
  • Webzine Authors

    Contemporary authors

    • Howe Abbott-Hiss
    • Beau Albrecht
    • Aquilonius
    • Anthony Bavaria
    • Michael Bell
    • Alain de Benoist
    • Kerry Bolton
    • Jonathan Bowden
    • Buttercup Dew
    • Collin Cleary
    • Giles Corey
    • Jef Costello
    • Morris V. de Camp
    • F. Roger Devlin
    • Bain Dewitt
    • Jack Donovan
    • Ricardo Duchesne
    • Émile Durand
    • Guillaume Durocher
    • Mark Dyal
    • Guillaume Faye
    • Stephen Paul Foster
    • Fullmoon Ancestry
    • Jim Goad
    • Tom Goodrich
    • Alex Graham
    • Mark Gullick
    • Andrew Hamilton
    • Robert Hampton
    • Huntley Haverstock
    • Derek Hawthorne
    • Gregory Hood
    • Juleigh Howard-Hobson
    • Richard Houck
    • Alexander Jacob
    • Nicholas R. Jeelvy
    • Greg Johnson
    • Ruuben Kaalep
    • Tobias Langdon
    • Julian Langness
    • Travis LeBlanc
    • Patrick Le Brun
    • Trevor Lynch
    • Kevin MacDonald
    • G. A. Malvicini
    • John Michael McCloughlin
    • Margot Metroland
    • Millennial Woes
    • John Morgan
    • James J. O'Meara
    • Michael O'Meara
    • Christopher Pankhurst
    • Michael Polignano
    • J. J. Przybylski
    • Spencer J. Quinn
    • Quintilian
    • Edouard Rix
    • C. B. Robertson
    • C. F. Robinson
    • Hervé Ryssen
    • Kathryn S.
    • Alan Smithee
    • Fenek Solère
    • Ann Sterzinger
    • Thomas Steuben
    • Robert Steuckers
    • Tomislav Sunić
    • Donald Thoresen
    • Marian Van Court
    • Dominique Venner
    • Irmin Vinson
    • Michael Walker
    • Aylmer Wedgwood
    • Scott Weisswald
    • Leo Yankevich

    Classic Authors

    • Maurice Bardèche
    • Julius Evola
    • Ernst Jünger
    • D. H. Lawrence
    • Charles Lindbergh
    • Jack London
    • H. P. Lovecraft
    • Anthony M. Ludovici
    • Sir Oswald Mosley
    • National Vanguard
    • Friedrich Nietzsche
    • Revilo Oliver
    • William Pierce
    • Ezra Pound
    • Saint-Loup
    • Savitri Devi
    • Carl Schmitt
    • Miguel Serrano
    • Oswald Spengler
    • P. R. Stephensen
    • Jean Thiriart
    • John Tyndall
    • Francis Parker Yockey
  • Departments

    • Book Reviews
    • Movie Reviews
    • TV Reviews
    • Music Reviews
    • Art Criticism
    • Graphic Novels & Comics
    • Video Game Reviews
    • Fiction
    • Poems
    • Interviews
    • Videos
    • English Translations
    • Other Languages
      • Arabic
      • Bulgarian
      • Croatian
      • Czech
      • Danish
      • Dutch
      • Estonian
      • Finnish
      • French
      • German
      • Greek
      • Hungarian
      • Italian
      • Lithuanian
      • Norwegian
      • Polish
      • Portuguese
      • Romanian
      • Russian
      • Slovak
      • Spanish
      • Swedish
      • Ukrainian
    • Commemorations
    • Why We Write
  • Archives
  • Top 100 Commenters
Sponsored Links
Alaska Chaga Antelope Hill Publishing Paul Waggener Breakey Imperium Press American Renaissance A Dissident’s Guide to Blacks and Africa The Patrick Ryan Show Jim Goad The Occidental Observer
Editor-in-Chief
Greg Johnson
Books for sale
  • Trevor Lynch’s Classics of Right-Wing Cinema
  • The Enemy of Europe
  • Imperium
  • Reactionary Modernism
  • Manifesto del Nazionalismo Bianco
  • O Manifesto Nacionalista Branco
  • Vade Mecum
  • Whiteness: The Original Sin
  • Space Vixen Trek Episode 17: Tomorrow the Stars
  • The Year America Died
  • Passing the Buck
  • Mysticism After Modernism
  • Gold in the Furnace
  • Defiance
  • Forever & Ever
  • Wagner’s Ring & the Germanic Tradition
  • Resistance
  • Materials for All Future Historians
  • Love Song of the Australopiths
  • White Identity Politics
  • Here’s the Thing
  • Trevor Lynch: Part Four of the Trilogy
  • Graduate School with Heidegger
  • It’s Okay to Be White
  • The World in Flames
  • The White Nationalist Manifesto
  • From Plato to Postmodernism
  • The Gizmo
  • Return of the Son of Trevor Lynch’s CENSORED Guide to the Movies
  • Toward a New Nationalism
  • The Smut Book
  • The Alternative Right
  • My Nationalist Pony
  • Dark Right: Batman Viewed From the Right
  • The Philatelist
  • Confessions of an Anti-Feminist
  • East and West
  • Though We Be Dead, Yet Our Day Will Come
  • White Like You
  • Numinous Machines
  • Venus and Her Thugs
  • Cynosura
  • North American New Right, vol. 2
  • You Asked For It
  • More Artists of the Right
  • Extremists: Studies in Metapolitics
  • The Homo & the Negro
  • Rising
  • The Importance of James Bond
  • In Defense of Prejudice
  • Confessions of a Reluctant Hater (2nd ed.)
  • The Hypocrisies of Heaven
  • Waking Up from the American Dream
  • Green Nazis in Space!
  • Truth, Justice, and a Nice White Country
  • Heidegger in Chicago
  • End of an Era: Mad Men & the Ordeal of Civility
  • Sexual Utopia in Power
  • What is a Rune? & Other Essays
  • Son of Trevor Lynch’s White Nationalist Guide to the Movies
  • The Lightning & the Sun
  • The Eldritch Evola
  • Western Civilization Bites Back
  • New Right vs. Old Right
  • Journey Late at Night: Poems and Translations
  • The Non-Hindu Indians & Indian Unity
  • I do not belong to the Baader-Meinhof Group
  • Pulp Fascism
  • The Lost Philosopher, Second Expanded Edition
  • Trevor Lynch’s A White Nationalist Guide to the Movies
  • And Time Rolls On
  • Artists of the Right: Resisting Decadence
  • North American New Right, Vol. 1
  • Some Thoughts on Hitler
  • Tikkun Olam and Other Poems
  • Summoning the Gods
  • Taking Our Own Side
  • Reuben
  • The Node
  • The New Austerities
  • Morning Crafts
  • The Passing of a Profit & Other Forgotten Stories
Sponsored Links
Alaska Chaga Antelope Hill Publishing Paul Waggener Breakey Imperium Press American Renaissance A Dissident’s Guide to Blacks and Africa The Patrick Ryan Show Jim Goad The Occidental Observer
  • Rss
  • DLive
  • Telegram
  • Gab
  • Entropy
Copyright © 2022 Counter-Currents Publishing, Ltd.

Paywall Access





Please enter your email address. You will receive mail with link to set new password.

Edit your comment