Your Faith Is Your Future:
For Neville, Bowden, & Prince Harry!

2,495 words

All those who place their faith in fire
In fire their fate shall be repaid[1]

“The New Monarchy: Wokeness as a Survival Strategy” is another great essay by Gregory Hood, which should be read by all. Being a total narcissist, I was struck by a couple of points that seemed to tie in with some of my own thinking, which I’d like to expand on here.

In the course of his own reflections on the British monarchy’s degeneracy, as exemplified by the decline from the promise of Elizabeth’s coronation and the spectacle of Mr. and Mrs. Markle, Hood presents some thoughts on the nature of monarchy itself:

A monarch represents a link to transcendence and organic national unity. Even fierce political struggles are fought between the Sovereign’s government and the “loyal opposition.” In constitutional theory, the nation, the monarch, and the divine order are one. This was once something people did not just believe but knew.

Monarchy/aristocracy, if I may mix the language of both Schopenhauer and Traditionalists, provides for continuity, horizontally in both space (one’s fellows) and time (heritage, tradition), as well as vertically (link to the transcendent). Hood’s insight here is to see that mass media, specifically the electronic mass media, have usurped that role.

As time passed, monarchy cloaked itself in spectacle, and became just another faction.

After Elizabeth II, the royals will be nothing more than glorified celebrities. Media create celebrities, so control over media represents real political power, the power beyond constitutional formalities. Traditions and myth, after all, were especially powerful forms of proto-media.

Today, when we see calls for statues to national heroes to be replaced by statues of fictional or pop-culture characters, we shouldn’t laugh it off. It reflects a deeper truth. Fictional settings such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe draw more passionate attachment and real belief than exhausted religious denominations or national traditions. The remnants of European aristocracy have lost their purpose. Rather than being a source of power and authority separate from the power of money and pop culture, they are subject to it.

The idea, as I take it, of monarchy and celebrity as rival sources of images by which people structure their lives, is rather like my own thinking, inspired by the New Thought lectures and writings of Neville Goddard, on the role of imagination in constructing — and changing — reality.[2]

I’ve been particularly drawn to exploring the parallels between Neville’s[3] New Thought and the writings of that icon of the Dissident Right, Baron Julius Evola: principally, his initial philosophical work, which he called “Magical Idealism,” and his subsequent investigations into what he insisted on calling by its traditional name, “magic.”[4] So it’s interesting to see Hood quoting Evola twice, the first time thus: “What thinkers like Julius Evola would consider eternal values never really vanish, but re-emerge in different ways.”

What Evola and Neville both emphasized was the need not just to vaguely hold or assent to an idea, but to create an image, or small dramatic scene, and replay it in the imagination over and over, endowing it with power and love.[5] Only in this way can it be introduced into the unconscious, thence to “outpicture” itself in our shared reality.[6]

“Feeling is the Secret,” as Neville titled one of his early books,[7] and Evola also insisted on the need to “bathe” the image with warm fire and love.

In order for any image to act in the way I am talking about, it must be loved. It must be assumed in a great, inner calm and then warmed up, almost nourished, with sweetness, without bringing the will or any effort into play, and much less without expectations. The Hermeticists called this agent “sweet fire,” “fire that does not burn,” and even “fire of the lamp” since it really has an enlightening effect on the images.[8]

You can buy James O’Meara’s book The Eldritch Evola here.

And so it comes as no surprise that Hood makes the same point, contrasting the “passionate attachment and real belief” that are invested in, say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe rather “than exhausted religious denominations or national traditions.”

Moreover, Hood implicitly dismisses the usual autistic approach of the Right-winger who thinks that reciting “facts” and “statistics” on race, crime, or whatever will finally, at last, cause the Leftist to give up; to the smug Philistine slogan “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away,”[9] he boldly asserts that “[f]eelings don’t care about your facts, and faith can best be fought with faith”; a formulation both Evola and Neville would applaud.[10]

Interestingly, Neville’s repeated mantra, “An assumption, though false, if persisted in, will harden into fact,” is often attributed to Winston Churchill, who figures in Hood’s essay as someone who “fought the war to preserve the Empire, but bears more responsibility for destroying it than anyone else. He paved the way to a world that now spits on his memory.”

Hood immediately follows his quote from Evola with, in turn, a reference to a more recent icon of the Dissident Right, Jonathan Bowden: “In times of decline, Jonathan Bowden observed, they re-emerge in perverse ways.”

This caught my eye because I have just been reading Bowden’s Why I am Not a Liberal, the inaugural release in Imperium Press’ “Studies in Reaction” series,[11] which the publishers describe thus:

Bowden’s oratorical firepower is on full display in this 2009 interview. Members of the London New-Right put every question to him you ever wanted to ask, letting Bowden hold forth on such topics as race and politics, the EU, Islam, gender roles, paganism and Christianity, modern art, and his own vision of the future. This volume also includes three short reflections on Bowden the man by members of the London New-Right.

Apparently they took him out to “the bar in a private members’ club” after a meeting of the London New Right in 2009, plied him no doubt with great lashings of beer, and began firing questions; I like to think it looked a bit like this. Fortunately, the results were being filmed and (thanks to Counter-Currents) transcribed.

The publishers also suggest Bowden’s importance for the Dissident Right:

Far from suggesting a misty-eyed return to a nostalgic past, the picture Bowden paints here is one of great intellectual daring, aesthetic dynamism, and the sort of bravado needed for any political movement to succeed. This is a foundational voice of the dissident right reminding it of lessons it has forgotten.

In his remembrance (titled a bit lugubriously “A Memorial”), Michael Woodbridge gives us some idea of what gave Bowden that daring, dynamism, and bravado: the power of Imagination (italics mine):

Jonathan looked at his own tabula rasa as a completely clean slate, but, instead of allowing the chance happenings of the outside world to write his story, he would assume complete control. He would write his own fictitious story. Jonathan decided from an early age to write his own life story. That doesn’t mean that real things never happened to him, of course they did, but his creative imagination allowed him to recreate, reinvent himself. He recreated himself as the principal protagonist in his own novel.

If he were ever a materialist, it would have been of the ethereal variety!

Like Mycroft [Holmes, Sherlock’s brother], Jonathan existed largely through his own thoughts and imagination. The material world, apart from a sometimes hearty appetite, was almost extraneous to his life.[12]

Of course, Bowden should speak for himself, as he does in this remarkable passage:

The decline is inside, and the decline is mental. Only when the mental processes change all the physical outside phenomena can naturally be reorganized. Not easily, it will be very difficult, but when the mentality is different everything else changes. What you see around you is the expression of the mentality, not the reverse . . . just by adopting a coherent form of thinking you can actually change reality quite a bit.

As I’ve often pointed out, New Thought, despite its current “airy fairy” reputation, is as rooted in the American heritage as the Founding Fathers and “muh Constitution,” while also a recurrent expression of Aryan metaphysics from Evola back to Parmenides (versus the crude materialism of the Semites[13]). Its most salient current expression is in the Dissident Right’s meme warfare; it’s no coincidence that the Trump family attended the services of Norman Vincent Peale at the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan.[14]

What you see around you is the expression of the mentality, not the reverse. Neville wouldn’t have disagreed or said it better. In fact, we may have discovered the Neville of the New Right![15]

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Notes

[1] Hamilton Camp, “Pride of Man”; his original version; Quicksilver Messenger Service version.

[2] See the essays collected in my Mysticism after Modernism: Crowley, Evola, Neville, Watts, Colin Wilson & Other Populist Gurus (Melbourne, Australia: Manticore Press, 2020), reviewed here; as well as several essays since then which appear here on Counter-Currents.

[3] Like later celebrities, Neville went by his first name only.

[4] See especially “Magick for Housewives: The Not-So-New and Really Rather Traditional Thought of Neville Goddard,” which appeared in Aristokratia IV and is reprinted in O’Meara, op. cit., and more recently “Old Thought, New Thought: Evola Between Coue and Neville,” at Academia.edu.

[5] Mitch Horowitz, the leading scholar on New Thought and on Neville in particular, deplores the emphasis of today’s New Thought teachers on, well, thinking, and emphasizes Neville’s insight that feeling is essential; see The Miracle Club: How Thoughts Become Reality (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2018), which I reviewed here.

[6] Neville explicitly connects “outpicturing” with the Founding Fathers’ efforts to replace royalty with their own idea of a republic: “Your life is nothing more than the out picturing of your imaginal activity, for your imagination fulfills itself in what your life becomes.

“The last year that Robert Frost was with us, he was interviewed by Life Magazine and said: ‘Our founding fathers did not believe in the future, they believed it in.’ This is true. Having broken with England, our founding fathers could have established their own royalty here by making one of them the king, thereby perpetuating a royal family. They could have chosen a form of dictatorship, but they agreed to imagine a form of government that had not been tried since the days of the Greeks. Democracy is the most difficult form of government in the world, yet our founding fathers agreed to believe it in. They knew it would take place, because they knew the power of belief — the power I hope to show you that you are, tonight.” Neville, “Believe it In,” October 6, 1969.

[7] See Feeling is the Secret (1944), deluxe edition with biography and timeline by Mitch Horowitz (G&L Media, 2020).

[8] “Commentary on the Opus Magicum,” in Evola, Introduction to Magic: Rituals and Practical Techniques for the Magus (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2001), p. 57. One recalls Dr. Lechter’s protégés, The Tooth Fairy and Buffalo Bill, who are perverted sorts of New Thinkers; an investigator muses, “Somebody grew this guy. Fed him honey and nightshade, kept him warm. Somebody loved him.” Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1990). Lechter references “the fire of the lamp” thus: “What’s your father, dear? Is he a coal miner? Does he stink of the lamp?”

[9] Apparently from Philip K. Dick, which seems odd given his Gnostic inclinations.

[10] As Evola said, in his Magical Idealist treatise Teoria dell’Individuo assolutio: “Error is nothing but a feeble truth, truth but a potent error,” which certainly puts his later, more familiar and Right-friendly works on Traditionalism and Fascism in a new light. Quoted from Jocelyn Godwin, “Politica Romana Pro and Contra Evola,” in Arthur Versluis, Lee Irwin, and Melinda Phillips (eds.), Esotericism, Religion, and Politics (Minneapolis: New Cultures Press, 2012), p. 45. Mark Sedgwick concludes that Traditionalism cannot be judged as one would a scientific or scholarly theory, on the basis of evidence, but is simply offered as a truth to be accepted: “To judge Traditionalism as one would a university thesis makes no more sense than to dismiss Christianity for having insufficient evidence of Christ’s divinity, or to dismiss Islam for ignoring crucial elements of the doctrine of the Trinity.” Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 285.

[11] Jonathan Bowden, Why I Am Not a Liberal (Studies in Reaction); Imperium Press, 2020.

[12] I discuss Conan Doyle’s ability to create a character that has taken on its own albeit virtual life in “Sherlock Holmes, Superstar.” Woodbridge describes Mycroft as “a character who was virtually a disembodied brain having only a tentative connection with physical reality”; Zack Dundas, in the book I review there, describes one of the dozens of recreations of Holmes’ lair as “a fragment of a long-dead man’s imagination that somehow detached itself from his physical brain.”

[13] The Jewish lack of any notion of the spiritual is unique among world cultures. “This biblical anti-spiritualism is not to be explained as a ‘primitive’ trait proving the Hebrew Bible’s great antiquity, as if the belief in an Otherworld of the dead was a late development in the history of religious ideas. On the contrary, the Hebrew denial of the afterlife was linked to the rejection of foreign cults, which universally included a concern for the afterlife. The Book of Genesis, whose anthropological materialism is the most explicit, . . . uses the Persian word Pardes to designate the “Garden” (of Eden), but turns its meaning upside down: whereas in Indo-European myths, Paradise is the happy world where the righteous dead become immortal by eating from the tree of life, in Genesis, it is a past lost forever for all mankind, and the stage of the drama that brought into the world the double scourge of death and labor; for death bears no promise, and work no spiritual reward.” Instead, the Jew is obsessed with the survival of his race on Earth and securing its real estate. Laurent Guyénot, “Israel as One Man: A Theory of Jewish Power,” but especially the copious documentation of this in his From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land . . . Clash of Civilizations; trans. and ed. Kevin Barrett (Lone Rock, Wisc.: Sifting and Winnowing Books, 2018). I leave it to the reader to decide where those on the Dissident Right who demand “facts” belong on the cultural map. Even the sacred IQ and other “natural characteristics” can be subject to the will of man; what, after all, is eugenics all about? “Not easily, it will be very difficult,” but not impossible. See my “Look out honey, ’cause I’m using technology! Eumaios, Evola, & Neville on Race.”

[14] See my “The Secret of Trump’s A Peale,” reprinted in O’Meara, op. cit.

[15] Research may show that the connection is through Blake, whose poetry was one of three books (the others being the Bible and Charles Fillmore’s Metaphysical Bible Dictionary) that Neville said he would take on a desert island. One notices the similarity of both men presenting their work through small, self-published books and lectures freely taped, transcribed, and distributed (a method Neville pioneered before the Grateful Dead or Mystery Science Theater).