Counter-Currents
Luck vs. Reason, or Kismet vs. the Lightbringer
Nicholas R. Jeelvy
Philosophy Consoling Boethius and Fortune Turning the Wheel, 15th-century France
1,569 words
As part of an effort to better understand, and if possible, return to tradition, I’ve been plumbing the depths of folk tales, reading accounts of oral traditions, stories, legends, myths, sayings, epic songs, and other linguistic cultural artifacts of times past. One significant understanding I reached in my explorations is that pre-modern man placed a great value on luck as a factor in success or failure. Contrasting that is the modern view that chance plays a lesser role in the world. But what if the old folks had it right?
Here is an example: A man would always complain of his luck (k’smet in the original, which has leaked into English as kismet) and about how he was poor and nothing went well for him. His luck, personified as a man and angered at being slandered, sent him a dream that he ought to find his fortune in a rotten cherry stump in a different town. The man went there and found the rotten cherry stump in front of a grocery. As he picked up the stump, the grocer asked him what he was doing. When the man told him, the grocer laughed at him for having travelled all that way on account of a dream, recounting his own dream of finding a pot of gold under the fireplace of a house next to a spring. The man realized that the grocer was describing his own home and fireplace, so he went home, dug up the fireplace, and found a pot of gold.
What’s that supposed to mean? Is it a moral story? What’s the moral of that story? Follow your dreams, even if they sound absurd? Complaining will jumpstart your luck? Don’t mock people who do seemingly stupid things? It’s certainly a very fun story (in the original telling). It’s not even especially magical. If it were written today, we’d call it magical realism and toffs would scoff at it for being lowbrow (as magical realism is perceived in the literary mainstream). It is sort of nonchalant about the supernatural, treating the humanoid personification of a specific person’s luck as no big deal; that luck is an entity in itself, similar to an ancient daemon, is not even commented on. Lafcadio Hearn noticed the same nonplussed attitude towards the supernatural in Japanese folklore. Yes, you came across a woman with a neck three fathoms long, but did she have any gossip to share?
Indeed, the only moralism we see in the story is the grocer exhorting the man to look to his trade and labor and make his fortune by mundane and material means, ignoring prophetic and portentous dreams in favor of keeping his nose to the grindstone. And so the grocer, who dreamt of the pot of gold so that the man could find it, is made the fool of the story, the butt of a cosmic joke played on him by another man’s kismet. From the perspective of the grocer, life is tragicomic.
Before we can write the story off as Balkan peasant superstition, let us consider a passage from David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America:
The gentlemen of Virginia were deeply absorbed in the study of stars, planets, spheres and portents — not as signs of God’s purpose, but as clues to their own fate. They believed every man possessed a certain fixed quality called fortune, which could be understood by knowledge of these things. The idea was widely accepted in Elizabethan England.
Many gentlemen kept “fortune books” which were collections of magical and astrological lore for good luck in love, marriage, sex, health, travel. One such fortune book included an entire chapter on marriage with entries on “whether a man shall marry, the time of marriage, how many husbands a woman shall have, who shall be the master of the two, how they shall agree after marriage, and whether the man or his wife shall die first and the time when. The cult of fortuna implied that life was a game of chance in which the odds were rigged by mysterious powers in the universe.
We see here that the Virginian gentlemen planters had a view of destiny and luck that is cognate with the view in the folktales I’ve been unearthing. This commonality likely reaches far back into the past, to the ur-religion and ur-folk belief of Indo-European people about how the world functions, as we see such perception of luck and destiny in many different European folkloric traditions.
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When we speak of destiny, we speak of a quality which is fixed but unknown to man. Lucky men have a good destiny, unlucky men don’t. Some are destined to have, others to want. Some are destined to rule, others to be ruled. Some are destined to find meaning, fulfillment, and love; others to wander the Earth with a hunger that cannot be sated at the center of their being. Luck is the visible part of destiny: its effects on our day-to-day lives, the manifestation of this metaphysical reality in the physical realm. I purchase a lottery ticket and win. That is luck, but luck transpired because I was destined to win the lottery. And indeed, luck seems convoluted to observers, and so men will claim that “events conspired,” but this is nothing more than destiny unfolding as it was supposed to be and as it always was foretold, but man could not see or hear it.
Pre-modern man did not question luck. Another story concerns a bet between “the Mind” (but better understood as the Wit) and the Kismet on who is more important. The Kismet, endeavoring to prove that he is the more important one, takes a simple shepherd boy and has him married to the King’s daughter so that he is to inherit the kingdom. It is not specified how. It was luck — sheer, dumb luck that did it. Now, the Wit gets his comeuppance, as it is demonstrated that Wit is necessary to keep the gains made by luck, but at the end, The Wit and the Kismet come to an understanding that both of them are necessary for a man’s success and endeavor to work together in the future.
This is an attitude toward economic and political status that would scandalize a modern bourgeois and ostensibly rational mind. Fortune comes from the sweat of man’s brow, or as per Ayn Rand, from his intellect. If some men are wealthier than others, it is because they worked harder, or are smarter, or both. The notion that wealth is related to luck and that a shepherd could become a king through good luck, or that a king could be reduced to the level of a shepherd through bad luck, scandalizes the modern mind. The bourgeois liberals aren’t the only ones who reject luck; their managerialist frenemies who run the modern bureaucratic states also scoff at fortune and luck. They do not fit into the models on which the bureaucrat depends for his schemes and plans. How does one account for the ebbs and flows of fortune in a five-year-plan?
The very unknowable nature of destiny means that it repels the modern mind, especially the modern Western mind, which recoils from that which it cannot re-present in the Heideggerian sense, or more precisely, that which it cannot isolate, illuminate, and keep in mind. What cannot exist in the mind (or cannot be grasped in the mind) cannot exist and is rejected as superstition, generally provoking an outsized reaction in Western thinkers. It goes to show that we are thoroughly metaphysicized as a civilization: few of us have the sense of wonderment that Macedonian peasants and Virginia gentry had at the unknown and unknowable workings of fortune.
The unknown — and more importantly, unknowable — factors which lead to the success or failure of human ventures, or God playing dice with the universe, frighten and disgust the metaphysical thinker. They conflate human categorical ignorance of the laws of the universe as non-existence of the laws of the universe, meaning complete metaphysical and physical anarchy: up is down, the law of gravity isn’t being inforced, and the interpunction signs in this article are leaping off your screen and engaging in a spirited game of polo.
Luck and destiny operate according to their own laws, which man might or might not learn. Men have certainly tried to use divination and astrology to control their fortune and luck, with mixed success. I’m not a believer in astrology, though it has been pointed out to me that I possess the freewheeling and whimsical ego typical of the male Sagittarius. But ultimately, I do not have to know my destiny in order to put my trust in it. That may be a privilege of the East, where faith is not an empirical category and theology doesn’t try to re-present God. Accordingly, men of the East still put their trust in luck, even as our own traditions are slowly devoured by the Western Weltanschauung.
To accept the phenomenon of luck is to accept an unknowable factor in outcomes, something beyond the ken of man. To accept the phenomenon of luck is to accept a limiting principle to man’s artifice and the light he can bring to an unrevealed universe. To accept the phenomenon of luck is to reject the Luciferian (light-bringing) scientism of the Western metaphysical tradition.
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15 comments
I think this shift in consciousness can also be attributed to the shift from the countryside to the town and city as the basis of civilization. To urban man, everything in life is well-ordered by man himself, and if anything goes wrong it’s because someone was incompetent or made a mistake. Even if a city falls victim to a natural disaster, an urbanite is more likely to attribute it to being inadequately prepared. Those who spend their lives in nature can see that the order of the natural world has nothing to do with reason, justice, or morality.
Or as the bible would have it, God is not a respecter of persons.
There is man’s idea of justice and there is universal (God’s, or natural) justice, which is constantly and forever at play. Sorry, folks, but that’s the way it is.
Outstanding. What an engaging read. Articles like this one make me proud to regularly recommend C-C to trusted friends and loved ones.
Apropos of the “wit-luck balance,” I wonder if any other C-C readers consult/meditate on tarot (in particular the historic Tarot(s) de Marseille). Not as goofy gypsy fortune-telling schlock, rather as an instrument for considering potential and/or likely outcomes should one continue this way or that.
You mean something similar to the Abulafia computer that churned out random possibilities in Umberto Eco’s “Pendulum of Foucault”?
There’s an approach to tarot reading that is not divinatory; the cards according to this approach do not portend the future.
The tarot deck contains 78 cards. Briefly, the Minor Arcana (there are 56 of them) deal with milestones of life and the degrees of personal maturity within the respective suits’ realms: air (swords: thought and intellect), water (cups: emotional and spiritual pursuits), fire (wands: visceral passions and yearnings), earth (pentacles: mundane concerns like physical well-being and vocation). Major Arcana (there are 22 of these) represent overarching universal archetypes and archetypal situations/struggles/experiences one can expect to meet, become, or experience in his life.
The querent (person for whom a tarot reading is being done) draws cards which will provide insight about possible facets of the area of concern he is considering. Relevant cards present themselves somehow, one trusts, through synchronicity since the querent wills to understand a situation better. But the cards at best suggest a direction that things could be heading; the course can be changed by choice, wisdom, caution, foolishness, etc., for example. There is no magic nor spirits nor god(s) involved.
The cards, in this sense, are more of a meditational tool than anything. Some people who use them for this don’t even do readings or spreads. They just look at them and contemplate their meanings.
I had a Cuban girlfriend who got me into their religion, called ‘Santeria’. They do tarot and shell readings. I took notes, and they got 50% right. So, if I had flipped a coin, I would have been just as correct.
When I was involved in this, people used to say that I probably had ‘African blood’. as I started getting into White Nationalism, I also got into Asatru, which eventually replaced Santeria, as my pagan belief system, The fact that I also had a DNA test done also strengthened my present beliefs: I don’t have a single drop of African blood (not that there is anything wrong with that); I am 100% European. I then realised that I had to drink from my own well, and honour the Gods of my Ancestors, and not African Gods that are not in my collective psyche (for lack of a better word).
Where I’m going with all this is that I not only studied Asatru, but also rune-casting. It has not failed me once. But I only use it in very special occasions.
So, in a nutshell: put your faith in your family, your Ancestors, and your Gods, and they will not fail you with their advice –whether they speak to you through Tarot, runes, dreams, or a flash of inspiration is secondary.
Does that help?
I like that the Germans use the same word for “happiness” and “luck”- “Glück”
I prefer the concept of Karma as opposed to the concept of luck. In other words, what is done by freewill today will be experienced as fate tomorrow.
The Left is acutely aware of luck being a significant factor in success- luck is what they call “privilege”. Seeing as there is the perception in the modern mind that birth is completely accidental, there is an unconscious drive to make the accidental just, which I believe is a strong motivating factor in moves towards equality and equity.
Privilege is a simple and re-presentable proposition. Whites have privilege, therefore all whites have privilege, and no non-whites have privilege. This is fairly simple and easy to grasp by a human mind. Luck can grace white and nonwhite with no rhyme or reason as understood by human minds. It cannot be put in a model, a box, nor can human rules be imposed on it (hence the futility of astrology and divination).
The lightbringer was occasionally used on German talers of the late 1500’s. I wonder if there’s any relation to your story. Too bad we can’t post pictures here.
In the old stories, is ‘luck’ always good luck? Is the opposite of good luck ‘fate’?
A really nice collection of pre-modern tales from the Middle East are those of Nassruddin.
The story you conveyed reminded me of the unique logic of many of the Nassruddin tales.
The first part this essay was beautiful and evocative. Then you had to drag in Heidegger. It was like a splash of cold water right when I was enjoying the warm bath of pre-modern Whiteness.
Due to certain historical events, Nasruddin also appears in Macedonian folklore, usually as a humorous figure, often a benevolent one. I’m also glad to hear that the Jeelvy narrative spa treatment is working.
Due to certain historical events, your story illustrating Balkan peasant superstition is a reprise of The Ruined Man Who Became Rich Again Through a Dream from One Thousand and One Nights. The Arabian compilers of the tales had themselves adapted Indian and Persian originals.
So Scheherazade was actually an Aryan!
Oh, those pesky historical events.
:-]
Mr Jeelvy:
I wonder if in your ‘plumbing the depths of folk tales, reading accounts of oral traditions, stories, legends, myths, sayings, epic songs, and other linguistic cultural artifacts of times past’, you came across a very hard to find old book called ‘The Culture of the Teutons Vol. 1 & 2’ by Wilhelm Gronbech (1931, the English translation)?
It has two chapters related to the theme of your essay: Ch. IV: Luck, Ch. V: Luck is the Life of the Clan.
If not, some quotes to whet your appetite:
‘Besides honour, man needs something which in the ancient language is called luck’ [Hamingja]. (I won’t bother with page numbers because I don’t know what edition you might read).
‘the king was so full of luck that he could radiate it out to all those near him and could even send it away to act at a distance’.
‘The lucky man’s speech would fall in those short, sharp images that the Norsemen loved; the well-formed sentences leading one another forward, instead of stumbling over one another’.
‘The ancient word rede –Anglo-Saxon ræd, Icel. ráð’’ is a perfect illustration of Teutonic psychology. When given to others, it means counsel when applied to the luck working within the mind, it means wisdom or good plan’.
‘Luck is dependent on the mutual love of kinsmen. With the flourishing of frith go luck and well-being’.
‘The Germanic mind actually counts on the fact that unluck sooner or later will arise in the place where dishonour has manifested its appearance’.
Anyway, I hope that these random quotes may spur readers to search for this old book.
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