Europa Esoterica

The Togatus Barberini in the Capitoline Museums is believed by some scholars to represent a Roman Senator holding two ancestral funerary portraits.

2,865 words

For early man there could not have been a difference between “living” and “dead” things, or even “imaginary” and “real,” instead for him there was only a hierarchy of forms, an order of images and signs in accordance with their force. — Dr. Ernest Schertel, Magic: History, Theory, Practice

If you can no longer stand the world you’re living in, it’s time to imagine a new one. We have now surpassed the time where changes to civilization can be made through rational argumentation and the presentation of pure facts, if such a time ever existed. No material advance in science or technology will lift us out of our current morass.

The quest for rationality has stripped us of our monks and mystics, our knights and our priests, who were the spiritual guardians of our people. Without their protection, we are at the mercy of all-consuming entropic forces; we have lost the favor of the Gods. All the chaos we see in the world today is the result of the severing of our connection to the esoteric and the spiritual. We do not need a political revolution; we need a mytho-spiritual reawakening. This is a manifesto of that awakening.

The history of Europe is the history of thousands of years of theological debate wrought in blood and iron. Since the Minoan Kings sat atop their lofty thrones millennia ago, the driving impetus of the grand narrative of European civilization has been the question of who are our Gods, and how best can we worship them? Europeans have uniquely set themselves apart by their ability to revitalize themselves by reimagining their divine pantheon from Zeus, Odin, and Janus to Christ, his angels, and his saints. While rationalists have lamented the excesses of our religious feuding and the massacres, forced conversions, inquisitions, and witch hunts it entailed, they have missed the purpose of such struggles. Thousands of years of religious dialogue conducted by pen and sword has kept our people strong; we have practiced a form of spiritual Darwinism.

The rationalist viewpoint that our world would be better if we did away with the trappings of mumbo-jumbo and superstition is informed by their belief in evolution and progress. In the spiritual domain, however, the exact opposite is true: We have instead undergone a period of involution in which the primeval shamans of old were much closer to divinity and magic than we could ever imagine today. This devolution in spiritual life has in part been brought about by a rationalist undermining of faith, yet they have succeeded only in weakening our ethno-spiritual consciousness; they have failed to slow the march of religion in other corners of the globe, or to stamp out superstition and irrationality amongst our own people. In practice, they have simply misdirected our natural spiritual impulses away from the worship of the ancestors and the Gods and instead encouraged profane modern cults. Are we really more rational in the age of QAnon, Black Lives Matter, and transgenderism, or is it that we are now simply disarmed in the great battle for the human soul?

Even amongst the Dissident right, it is popular to merely describe the positive effects of faith and religion without wishing to sincerely engage with them. Commentators can point to improved birth rates, higher-trust societies, a greater ability to cope with stress, and a thousand other benefits of religion as the complementary software to the hardware of our genes, yet they do not wish to practice it.

Likewise, those faith-seekers of the Right who are looking to “choose” their Gods do so on an infirm basis. They at first examine the empirical outcomes of religions and the societies they have created. They weigh the pros and cons of each faith against the others in a utilitarian calculus. By doing so, they are misguidedly applying a rationalist mindset to the spiritual domain. This is an impious and worldly approach to the divine.

Of course, it is almost entirely a modern conundrum, as faith throughout European history was almost always inherited. It is therefore inextricably linked with ancestral worship. Any meaningful attempt to build a new spiritually must thus first engage with our ancestors.

I. Dialogue with the Ancestors

To be human is to enter into a compact with history. We do not come into this world untrammelled by its baggage, but as the next link in the great chain that stretches back all the way into the mists of prehistory. Europeans have been always acutely aware of this fact. As Caesar aped Alexander, so did Napoleon ape Caesar. But not only the great men of history come down to us. The Romans honored their immediate ancestors, as did all venerable Europeans. The dead have influence that echoes far beyond their own lives and can aid us now in the present. The historian who devotes himself to the study of his own people in our contemporary age is the closest to the priests and shamans of old, for by learning who we are, we strengthen the roots of our own resolve in the present.

You can buy Collin Cleary’s Summoning the Gods here.

The idle platitude which holds that we learn history so that we are not doomed to repeat it is a falsehood. We are powerless to stop the cycles of history, but by knowing well the deeds of our ancestors, we are bolstered by their example when the great crises of our time arise. At these moments of great stress, when our people are imperiled, the veil between the living and dead is thinnest. In all our travails today, we must imagine we are being cheered on to victory by a heavenly host: All those millions of our people who answered when duty called, and now spur us on to victory. We carry the weight of a huge burden, the understanding that we are the degenerated heirs of a great lineage, and we risk being the final stewards of our race.

We are not alone in our struggle, however, for we can call on our ancestors and they shall answer. Each act of sacrilege that modernity commits against the statues and graves of our kin disturbs their spirits, just as the desecration of any burial mound does. These restless spirits are thus alerted that we are in mortal peril and that now is the time when we need their wisdom and encouragement the most.

When we walk the streets of our towns and cities, we do not do so as lone atoms in an uncaring world, but rather as the custodians of thousands of years of history and the sum total of all the hopes of those who came before us. We must understand that in all our endeavors, they want us to succeed. If we only open our hearts and minds to them and their noble examples, we are granted a mighty boon. Those who know that when they die, they shall be returned to the bosom of their own kind will crush those who live only for themselves.

But the aid of the ancestors comes with a supreme duty. In all things that we do, we must understand that when we die and enter the hallowed halls of our own kind, they will ask a single question of us: “What did you do in the great crisis, when the race was almost extinguished?”

No excuse for dereliction of duty will be sufficient. Pleas that our enemies were too numerous and our chances too few will be but the mewling of a coward to all those esteemed heroes of history who thought nothing of their own depredations and sacrifices. They will not be swayed by stories of great fortunes amassed or lives of hedonism lived. It will be much better to be able to answer with true sincerity: “I did all I could, and I fought to the bitter end.”

Though we are but stunted pygmies and unworthy heirs of a grand tradition, to say that we fought with all our might in an unheroic age in the final reckoning makes us the greatest of our kind. When all others were untrue, we gave our all.

Many on the Dissident Right today are too concerned with the fate of the faithless; they froth in impotent rage at all our people who have abandoned their duties and wallow in filth. It is not our task to try and convince lesser men to do their duty, but instead by our example to shame them for their own cravenness.

The judgement of our deeds will not be reckoned by the petty fads of our day. We answer to a divine council. Tolerance and meekness may gain the admiration of the fashionable for some today, but they shall not dine with us in Valhalla, at the table of the greatest. They will not receive the blessing of the ancestors. We must labor to make sure that we do.

II. From the Volk

All great political movements are preceded by a spiritual earthquake. It is not a coincidence that the great tumult that occurred in the Germany during the twentieth century grew out of the renewed occult and esoteric societies of that time. Those who wish to build a movement based purely on temporal concerns would be wise to take note of this. We need metaphysical objectives and a grand and eternal purpose, not merely political goals. This is why we must rebuild our priestly class, we must seek hidden truths, and we must listen to whispers from the Gods. In short, before we turn outwards, we must turn inwards and overthrow our doubts and cynicism.

Humans are but beacons. We stoke the fire within ourselves in the hope that we may draw the best and the brightest to us. Our passage through life is nothing but the totality of the connections we make within and beyond it. We create great works in the hope they may stir the imaginations of others. We make great speeches in the belief it will rouse the passions of the noblest.

Our race is the clay from which the great men are molded. But not every man is great, and we must understand that we are not trying to connect with the masses. We are forging the spear tip that will pierce our enemies’ armor. Only 13 men crossed Francisco Pizzaro’s line in the sand to aid him in his Faustian quest to topple the Incas. Jesus had but 12 disciples. The great questions of the age are therefore settled by only a handful.

We must understand that our enemies are not other men, but perennial forces which attack every generation of our people. We are engaged in an existential struggle with entropy itself. The problems we face are not unique to our age, but universal. The dangers of degeneration, vice, indolence, treachery, and stupidity have always faced us. In every crop of our people, there have been those willing to sell us out, scorn their duty, and gleefully attempt to destroy everything that has gone before. Our eternal mission is to always seek those heroic few who will be our allies in casting the dark forces back into the shadows once again. In short, our lives are determined by a few meaningful comrades and lovers. We must pray that we find them, and hope the Gods intercede on our behalf.

The drive to increase the chances that these great minds and great souls will meet has been the guiding purpose of all our eugenic efforts in the past. The rationalist believes in transhumanism – the idea that all men can be improved. We know this to be false, as we believe that while some of the best men can be enabled to be better, greatness is particular and not general. Just as not all people can enjoy the favor of the Gods, nor can all peoples. Our faith must therefore be specific and idiosyncratic. Christianity collapsed under its universalist pretensions, and now we must labor for a strand of religion particular to us. This was the driving principle behind the Völkisch movements of the last century. To incorporate the veneration of our own people into a new religion of the future was the natural evolution of our spiritual journey, but this was snuffed out in the great cataclysm of the Second World War.

It is now for us to take up this mantle and work towards a new faith with our people at the center of it. It is likely that this will be a synthesis of forms of worship from both present and past, of religious truths of old fused with the revealed truths of the present. Our ability to renew ourselves through the creation of new religious doctrines has been one of the crowning achievements of our phoenix-spirited race. This is why the more far-sighted on the Dissident Right have ceased to concern themselves purely with the political, and now turn their mind to the esoteric. Our continuation depends on the successful completion of this radical synthesis.

III. The Way of Janus

We are the first generation to be tasked with choosing our God. Much like how the rationalistic approach to debate is defunct, approaching faith with modern liberal and utilitarian ideas is wrongheaded. There is no marketplace of Gods. Without a truer, more esoteric, and contemplative approach to religion, any faith will be merely superficial.

This pivot away from divine contemplation to religions concerned only with this world is evident in Christianity’s trajectory. The Evangelical Christianity that dominates the United States is devoid of any esoteric truths or dedicated mystical thinkers. Faith has been stripped down to a mere social club in which the faithful sign up to follow a nebulous set of club rules. These shallow roots were therefore easy for modernity to wash away under a tide of hedonism and relativism. Christianity in its contemporary formulation cannot act as a bulwark against spiritual decay because its roots have withered, and the thin theological topsoil has been thoroughly polluted. As the scholar of magic Ernst Schertel surmised:

European Catholicism which is mainly derived from Egypt still fosters the old traditions of the magical significance of the body, the picture, in short, the concrete-designed in general. The Catholic cult was built on magical ceremonies, in its center the sacrifice was still featured like in old times, its world was still replete with demons and even the supreme God still appeared in the guise of bread and wine. Here there was still an air of magic of all kinds, and it was not coincidental that with the resignation of Catholicism, magic also dried out in Europe.

While the modern conservative seeks to turn the clock back by 50 or 100 years, we instead seek to soar back to the very origins of our people, to ask those first men what wisdom they possessed. Yet without any records, we have but the faintest of ideas. We must instead turn to an approximation, a guide who cannot furnish us with direct truth but can instead direct our inquiries. In ancient Rome the god Janus was the deity of beginnings, transitions, and duality, amongst many other roles. In the pantheon he acted as a form of meta-god, invoked at the beginning of each religious ceremony regardless of its main deity. He had no dedicated priesthood, but instead was the preserve of the King of the Sacred Rites, rex sacrorum.

For the neophyte faith-seeker of the modern age, it is useful to think about the divine at first not as an entity to be worshipped, but as a dialectic. In contemporary life, perhaps more than at any other time, we are forced to constantly be in two minds. We interact with a world we know to be false but must pretend it is true. We are Janus-spirited in all things. There is perhaps no better spiritual chaperone for the postmodern world. Just as Virgil was Dante’s guide through Heaven and Hell, we must let Janus lead us from atheism to agnosticism. Some are touched by a deep religious experience and accept faith as true all at once. Others come to the realization slowly, at first splitting their thoughts between the secular and the divine.

No one can ultimately tell you what to believe in your heart. The pilgrimages of times long past were undertaken to reaffirm faith, but in modernity we must make pilgrimages only to find the faintest lost echoes of the divine. God is not dead, but he nevertheless will not reveal himself to the unworthy. Great truths about reality are to be sought and discovered; they will not be revealed by inaction.

We must reverse our spiritual decline just as assuredly as we must reverse our demographic decline. To do so begins with the chosen few once again pondering the profound and esoteric meanings of the universe. We have no masters to guide us in this task, but this should not deter us. We are all now kings of our own sacred rites, and it is up to us to reconvene with the Gods once more. Our fate depends on it.

* * *

Like all journals of dissident ideas, Counter-Currents depends on the support of readers like you. Help us compete with the censors of the Left and the violent accelerationists of the Right with a donation today. (The easiest way to help is with an e-check donation. All you need is your checkbook.)

For other ways to donate, click here.