Counter-Currents
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.
Enjoyed this article?
Be the first to leave a tip in the jar!
21 comments
Esoterism without a gnosis is utterly sterile. Our ancestors depended upon the unifying power of collective action leading to affirmation of the collective. This was ‘religion’ and was a binding force, not an elevating one. The ancients knew there were secrets (such as those of the Vestals or the Eleusinians), and it was knowing these things existed and that the select had access to them that radiated through the mystical body of the people. If you want to know how a cult becomes a religion (and then dies), just look at the Q phenomenon. That was as pure an instance of ‘the oracular’ spawning a very real faith in prophesy that can be had right now. Even though it appears to have been a con designed to reinforce learned helplessness, its success was, nonetheless, terrifying to the powers that be. It almost became self-organizing. And that can not be.
The emergency of National Socialism served as the catalyst for our collective racial awakening in the 20th century, and will continue to be the shining beacon for any White who is racially aware and yearning for purpose. National Socialism, in the political sense, as embodied by the SA, will be the foundation on which we wage our struggle for survival in the real world. Esoteric Hitlerism, our weltanschauung, embodied by the way and order of the SS, will be the spiritual guide for the burgeoning aristocracy of the blood and soul that reside among us, and who will be the priests, shamans, mystics, and knights, as the author mentioned, that will embody the necessary mytho-spiritual reawakening. This is the only path forward for our race if we hope to survive.
This is utter BS.
And how long did that “Thousand-Year Reich” paradise last ? 1933-1945 ?
So you want to take us for the glorious ride as you did the gullible Germans ?
Thank you, inq, you said it very well. And the judgement or intentions of anyone with the moniker “Dirlewanger” should immediately be suspect, to put it mildly.
A battle, one that was a part of a greater cosmic war, is lost and therefore everything you’ve said or done is wrong? If that’s the case, you’ll remain the eternal loser as the reactionaries you doubtless are. Happily, what you think is inconsequential. The truth doesn’t cease to be because “inq” or “traddles” dislike something. It just is.
It seems to me that the role of the “esoteric” in the rise of the Third Reich is greatly exaggerated after the fact, especially by pseudo-historians and authors of popular books like Bergier or Ravenscroft. Mr. Kerry Bolton wrote about this an interesting article Religion, Mysticism and the Myth of the “Occult Reich”.
And the great racologist Prof. Hans Günther, in his memoirs My Impressions of Adolf Hitler, also writes that Hitler was a completely rational person. The same is confirmed by Prince von Schaumburg-Lippe in his book Was Hitler a Dictator? In M.K. Hitler writes very critically and with big sarcasm, for example, about the fans of “ancient Germans.”
Of course, there was also a real occultist at the top of the Reich. It was Heinrich Himmler, a failed poultry farmer. But here I would say that the soldiers and officers of the Waffen-SS troops had a very negative attitude towards Himmler and openly despised him. He was also surrounded by various psychos like the drunkard Wiligut and the dreamer Wirth. There was also the Anenerbe society, in which those who did not want to fight at the front or work in the military industry got comfortable. It is of course easier to talk about “magic crystals” and other BS, than to invent Wunderwaffe or to fly Stuka.
Ahnenerbe, of course. My error.
While I have disagreements with some of what you said, nothing of which is worth addressing because it is inconsequential to my overall point, the main issue at hand isn’t to what extent the Reich was connected with the occult. Rather, it’s about creating a founding myth on which to base a spiritual revival of our people, or at least the spiritual revival of a new aristocratic class that will serve as a model for the layman. This, a knightly/priestly order, is exactly what the SS was intended to be.
On the note of esoteric, I read this article the same day (also published the same day) I went to visit the burial ground in one the earliest settlements in America that one of my ancestors helped establish. I say burial grounds because I was not able to identify the actual grave marker or tombstone of this ancestor. Still though, it was a pilgrimage of sorts. Sort of random that I even made this trip to some quaint New England town in the countryside.
One of the profound things I felt was seeing a house with a rainbow flag, transgender flag, and sign saying something like, “real freedom begins with reproductive freedom!” a few blocks from the burial ground of fire and brimstones God fearing puritans. There was also some of the workers at the local coffee house that looked like they would be prime suspects for a witch trial.
This article mentioned entropy. Part of the reason of not being able to identify the grave was because of the entropy of the tombstones. Erosion made many of the tombstones completely illegible. I wondered what my puritan ancestor who helped established this town would have thought of a house with these flags and the sign on it. It doesn’t matter, he is dead, and has been for almost four centuries. Another thing was trying to read some of the tombstones covered in lichens. It made me dizzy trying to make out the letters. This was also complicated by me chasing after my toddler daughter running off. I think that was the most profound thing of all, was realizing that the divine echoes of the past I was searching for in this pilgrimage also reverberate in the present and God willing in the future when my daughter has children. We can use the past for inspiration the same way the founders of America were inspired by Greece and Rome. Sure, it would have been nice to have found the actual tombstone but maybe that does not matter. Maybe it was the searching and the act of this little pilgrimage itself that matters most.
But, he and many others who came with him did what this very article mentioned. They chose their God in the form of a Christian God that wants you to go to Church and not play sports on Sunday as opposed to the heathens in the Church of England. Eventually though, new generations came and we now have the joke that is Evangelical Christianity that the article mentions.
The article with its use of “Gods” in the plural invokes one of my favorite translations of one of my favorite versus in the Bible, Psalm 82:1, “A Psalme committed to Asaph. God standeth in the assemblie of gods: hee iudgeth among gods.” It’s a sort of subversive translation in that presumably there is supposed to be one God. The idea that the gods man creates exist in our minds and are therefore “real” in a esoteric sense and that there is a God of gods that rules over them I find a very profound and esoteric idea.
gods
Elohim is in the Hebrew gods, not god – ending -im always means plural.
And here I can add, that the meaning of the Shahadah is not simply that there is only ONE GOD, but that there is ONLY ONE GOD which you should WORSHIP (none is worthy of worship but Allah), and then it does not mean that there are no other gods, but the worshipping of them is forbidden, taboo (haram), because they are false gods, idols (taghuts). No one monotheistis religion is really absolutely monotheistic.
I think there is at least one instance where a plural verb conjugation is used in the Hebrew Bible in the context of Elohim. I think it’s when Jacob has his vision of the ladder. And yes, the name “El Shaddai” suggests a “God that is enough.” The four letter name of God in Hebrew is a sort of mishmash of past, present, and future verb conjugations of “to be.”
After seeing Vikings and Game of Thrones the idea of Elohim meaning “gods” really resonates with me for some reason and the idea of there being a God of gods.
“El Shaddai”
For 20 or 25 years, also, at the end of 90s and begin of 2000s, I was a big fan of German author Jan van Helsing (Jan Udo Holey) and his books Geheimgesellschaften und ihre Macht im 20. Jahrhundert, particularly Book 2. Herr Holey was a big supporter of both the Hollow Earth and the Nazis on the Moon theories (yes, many years before the movie “Iron Sky”), and also of paleocontacts. So he wrote that the Elohim, or what the ancient people thought were gods, were simply extraterrestrials visiting Earth. Some of those aliens were kind to people and helped them, while others were evil and wanted to enslave people. This very El Shaddai was in his interpretation the leader of the evil space pirates.
Oddly enough, I believe that new-age, hippie boomers already produced some answers for us.
For example, in the field of alternative archeology there are theories of lost civilizations such as Atlantis and Hyperobrea and inconveniently people who supposedly lived there were White.
Then, there are also exotic things such as remote viewing (nonetheless, acknowledged to have been used by CIA), and more mundane ones like daily meditation practice that has many benefits.
Some shitlibs have already noticed this connection and were complaining about it, so as a result that whole community is now extremely anti-racist. It would be a delicious irony however, if their beliefs can be repurposed to serve racially concious White people.
That stuff is absolutely not going to help us. Any sort of “White Mysticism” is larping and a complete waste of time.
Oliver would agree with it. He was an outspoken enemy of everything “mystical” and critic of everything unscholarly and unscientific.
Well, this article argues that “white mysticism” is not necessarily bad.
But in general, I believe we should keep an open mind and seek evidence. After all, there are myths such as White gods od Aztecs that supposedly visited them many thousands of years and taught them civilization. That’s why Indian tribes didn’t resist invading Spaniards. It’s not impossible that in the coming years we discover there is a kernel of truth in these stories.
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.
Qazaqs for centuries had to know their genealogy, şejıre. This word comes from an Arabic word meaning tree. Each Qazaq had to know 10 or even 25 names of generation of his ancestors, and the noble families of Hoja and Töre (Cingizids), so called ak suyek, white bones, up to forty generations. This was also necessary in order to avoid incest due to the small population in the vast Steppe. Until now, it is believed that you need to know your seven grandfathers (Jeti Ata).
Dr. Ernest Schertel, Magic, Theory, Practice
A little incorrect title of the book. The German title was “Magie – Geschichte, Theorie, Praxis”. Also, it should be: Magic: History, Theory, Practice.
I agree that utilitarian shopping for gods is a bad idea. Most people come to religion after politics, and while this sometimes works, there is a tendency to devolve into larping and irony. I spent about a year trying to reconcile Evola’s metaphysics with my former libertarian politics until Tradition triumphed. I have never looked back because I entered dissident politics on firm ground. How our people are to find authentic religion and magic in an age as drab as this is a difficult question, but the difficulty makes the reward all the better.
The trouble I have is that European indigenous religions (polytheism) are tied to the physical geography of Europe: Mt Olympus, the seven hills of Rome, the Rhine, etc. Americans are descended from Europeans but at the same time we’re not European. We conquered a different geography and it shaped us in the process. We intermarried and become Americans instead of English, German, Irish, etc.
In this context, what would an “indigenous” American polytheism look like? Our American ancestors were not pagans. They were Christians. That Christianity has been defiled. Our historic cities and monuments have been defiled. So I understand the impulse to create something new from our pre-Christian roots, but how to make it authentic to the American people and soil?
I’m not sure plucking a Roman god ala carte and out of context is the answer. I’m not attacking the author. He’s on the right track. And perhaps I’m just a peasant and not one of the chosen disciples, but this whole “Way of Janus” is just a bit too, well, esoteric, to move my heart. I need something more American to stir my soul.
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.
Paywall Access
Lost your password?Edit your comment