Toward a New Political Cosmogony for The Republic

The Apotheosis of Abraham Lincoln, ca. 1865

2,695 words

The US midterm elections have come and gone and not much has changed in the world because of them. The consensus among my esteemed colleagues here at Counter-Currents is that the GOP’s lackluster performance reflected its lackluster nature. Aquilonius’ devastating rhetorical body blow sums it up best: “What is the one thing that is less cool than a dude who cut off his own frank and beans? Answer: A stuffy Republican in a suit droning on about the free market and political decency.” Indeed, the GOP performance was uninspired, uninspiring, formulaic, and above all, boring. Call me old-fashioned, but a revolution against an evil ruling class should be at the very least mildly entertaining.

In the aftermath of the midterms, Donald Trump announced his intention to once again run for President of the United States. In stark contrast to his grand entry in 2015, the announcement was very low energy, opening with appeals to low black unemployment and reeking of an old man’s desperation. And hey, who can blame him? At 76 years old, he’s no spring chicken. Then again, neither is his presumed opponent, President Joe Biden. America, it would seem, is out of young men to entrust with leadership. But the players’ age is not the only problem we can see in this tragicomedy we call America. No, our problem may well be with the times.

Them’s the times. Strange expression, isn’t it? It’s used as a quick and dirty sociodicy when something is going badly. Them’s the times. Indeed, them it is. But maybe if them’s the times, we need new times. Ah, yes, that old chestnut. Turn a new page, let bygones be bygones, start afresh, hit the reset button, or in simpler terms, let the old times die so the good times can roll.

When we speak about good times and bad, we speak about chaos and cosmos: a state of hostile nature opposed to a state of order. Normally, this division manifests in space, but when we say them’s the times, we observe this distinction in time. And here let me quote from Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane about the nature of time as experienced by religious man:

It was from the body of the marine monster Tiamat that Marduk fashioned the world. Yahweh created the universe after his victory over the primordial monster Rahab. But, as we shall see, this victory of the gods over the dragon must be symbolically repeated each year, for each year the world must be created anew.

The underlying meaning of all these facts seems to be the following: for religious man of the archaic cultures, the world is renewed annually; in other words, with each year it recovers its original sanctity, the sanctity that it possessed when it came from the Creator’s hands.

Marduk created the cosmos from Tiamat’s dismembered body and created man from the blood of the demon Kingu, Tiamat’s chief ally. That the annual commemoration of the Creation was in fact a reactualization of the cosmogonic act is shown both by the rituals and in the formulas recited during the ceremony.

Since the New Year is a reactualization of the cosmogony, it implies starting time over again at its beginning, that is, restoration of the primordial time, the “pure” time, that existed at the moment of Creation. This is why the New Year is the occasion for “purifications,” for the expulsion of sins, of demons, or merely of a scapegoat. It is also a matter of abolishing the past year and past time. Indeed, this is the meaning of ritual purifications; there is more than a mere “purification”; the sins and faults of the individual and of the community as a whole are annulled, consumed as if by fire.

Our ancestors saw the cosmos as being worn out by the passage of time. They considered movement in time away from the cosmogony — the act of the creation of the world and defeat of the chaos-dragon — as a process of degradation, of moving away from the sacred. They therefore resacralized their existence through the ritualized reenactment of the cosmogonic acts. The King, standing in for Marduk, would fight an actor standing in for Tiamat, or sacrifice an animal standing in for the demon Kingu. In so doing, they revitalized the cosmos and regained that sacrality which time and temporal distance had worn out during the preceding year. They moved closer in time to the Golden Age, fondly referred to in Macedonian folklore as “the time when God walked on Earth.”

In modern times, our annual religious celebrations aren’t usually in the service of our cosmogony’s reactualization. This is because we no longer believe in religious cosmogony; not in any substantial way, at least. When we say cosmogony, we don’t just mean “he who created the universe,” but also the notion of where the institutions such as work, marriage, property, dinner, fatherhood, war, family, city, nation, and sundry others come from. In past times, men believed that the gods had created these institutions, and that at one point the goddess of agriculture taught man to work the land, the god of justice taught laws to human judges, the god of war taught them how to fight, and the goddess of peace taught them how to stop fighting. Each human organ, each human activity, each aspect of life was sacralized, or in Eliade’s terms, given a sacral homology. We jokingly refer to the sexual act as “ploughing,” but in many cosmologies the world began exactly in that way, in a sacred union between woman-Earth and man the ploughman, their sexual organs being a fertile field and a phallic plough, respectively. We do not go to our supposed gods for that wisdom anymore because the old religions are no longer our actual and practiced religion.

Our actual and practiced religion is derived from that which we believe instituted these things that we do. Even atheists have a religion in this sense. Oftentimes we don’t have a specific personage to whom we can tie these institutions’ founding, but we do have the concept. Thus, “rational self-interest” instituted these things in the Randian and libertarian religions, and the Church in her infinite wisdom instituted these things in the TradCath religion, whereas the liberal (or derisively, libtard) religion — which is followed by an overwhelming majority of the population and the entire elite — believes that the god Enlightenment, whom the ancient Mesopotamians knew as Marduk, slew Superstition (Tiamat) and the demon king Ignorance (Kingu) and made the world out of their bodies. But the passage of time wears the world out and each year we are again at risk of chaos seizing the world, thus necessitating the ritualized resacralization of the world by a reenactment of the cosmogonic myth.

I believe that the liberal religion and its two largest sects, the progressives and conservatives, and whose major organizations in America are the Democratic and Republican parties, have a peculiar way of reactualizing their cosmogonies: by reenacting the founding of their respective states as an expression of the cosmos in the realm of law and politics. Let’s take a trip through them.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Year America Died here.

In a previous text, I chastised those Right-wingers who sought an American Caesar, counselling them to seek an American Atatürk instead. My chief reason was and remains the fact that America has already had its Caesar. In fact, it has had four Caesarian figures, by my reckoning, the latest one being Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who is most analogous to Emperor Constantine.

In the progressive sect of the liberal religion, he is the great founder. His are the institutions which make governing possible, and each generation of Leftists must find for itself a sacred, youthful reincarnation of FDR to vote for in order to “usher in a new era” — a New Deal, if you will, for every 20 or so years, the Deal must be renewed lest the forces of fascist Tiamat devour the cosmos. And so Emperor Franklin the Great has been reincarnated no less than four times — as John Fitzgerald Kennedy, as Jimmy Carter, as Bill Clinton, and as Barack Obama. Each slew an incarnation of Tiamat in order to heal America, and each defeated the forces of entrenched and reactionary interests by being young, cool, and sexy. This was true of Kennedy in particular, since he was killed while in office, becoming something of a minor deity to older progressives; not to mention that his time, the 1960s, is considered a Golden Age for the Left, a sacral time to which we must annually return by constantly “breaking boundaries.” And of course, who can forget the messianic fervor that surrounded the election of Barack Hussein Obama, the man who was supposed to absolve America of her racist past?

The conservative sect of the faith chooses rather to venerate Abraham Lincoln, America’s first Caesar, as the state’s great, mythical founder. While they may pay lip service to America’s Founding Fathers, they see them as the ancient Greeks saw the Titans in relation to the Olympians. Guided by the Jewish prophet Harry Jaffa’s myth of the civil war, and especially the Gettysburg Address, as the second founding, just as the ancient Babylonians expected their kings to embody the god Marduk, the GOP expects each of its leaders and presidential candidates to embody Lincoln. When they wax poetic or nostalgic about The Republic, they speak of The Golden Age of Lincoln. When they gather in their boring suits to pontificate to each other about individual freedom, low taxes, and their love for Israel, they strive to emulate what they imagine to be Lincoln. Despite reaching back further in time for their inspirational figure, the conservatives are the younger sect, and have so far only managed to inaugurate three reincarnations of Lord Lincoln, those being Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. Since this is the younger sect, and the one catering to their civilization’s less religious portion, it is less formal and more lax with its rules in how the cosmogony is to be reactualized. The incarnation of the godhead, Lord Lincoln, is supposed to own and/or trigger rather than slay the libtard Tiamat, just as Lincoln defeated those Democrat racists in the Civil War, and thereby liberate the sacred blacks — or Mexicans — from their oppression by the racist Democrats. Since he is the god of downmarket worshippers who like to think of themselves as practical and down-to-earth, he shouldn’t be too eloquent or appear too intellectual, especially if his lack of intellectual chops annoys the libtarded Tiamat. Evn here the theme of rebirth is constant and even stronger, however. It’s Morning in America. We’re gonna Make America Great Again. We’re returning to the global stage after a long Holiday from History. With this election, with this triumphant return of Lincoln reborn, the twin specters of racism and libtardism will be kept at bay once more, the world will be resacralized, and the Republic will be founded anew.

I believe that these ritualized reconsecrations serve a very important secular purpose, aside from anchoring the faithful to their ancestral and sacred Tradition. I believe that they give each generation of the faithful the illusion of having made their own world and fought their own struggle. Does it really matter that the system treated the flower children of the sixties with kid gloves and was already on its way toward adopting their positions if they believe they defeated it? They earned their right to rule, goddammit, by dancing naked in Haight-Ashbury or tripping on LSD at Woodstock. It ritualized the routine changing of the guard, with the New Deal-era elders being replaced by the New Left youngsters as revolution lit a much-needed fire in these youngsters’ bellies. When you’re simply given something, you take it for granted. It therefore behooves the wise elder not to bequeath power without a struggle, so that the young one may at least believe that he has earned, rather than received, the power and honors he acquires. The grand narrative of revolution and overcoming is what serves as a self-legitimizing myth for the flower-child generation, and they see their own glorious struggle played out again and again. Maybe such a powerful myth will someday exist for us benighted millennials as well.

Now that we more or less understand America’s religious landscape, we have a better idea of why it is so moribund. The Right has not had a resacralization ceremony since 2016. The Left has not had a resacralization ceremony since 2008. America’s politics are dominated by old men who refuse to yield the stage. In 2016, the Democratic Party disrupted the ceremony by nominating Tiamat herself, unleashing chaos on the world, although one wonders if it could come up with a plausible reincarnation of FDR at all. In 2020, the Republican ceremony was disrupted when Lord Lincoln’s avatar was defeated by the dragon of chaos, but there was no resacralization on the Democrat side: Joe Biden is many things, but he is not a cool, young rebel who is showing these old fuddy-duddies what’s up. The faith and both of its major sects are in crisis, and Trump’s announcement that he’ll run in 2024 tells me that the crisis is here to stay.

There will be no reinvigoration, and there will be no reactualization of the cosmogony. The faith is worn out, and even though the people still want to believe, they cannot bring themselves to do so. Who in their right mind thinks that voting changes anything anymore? Who in their right mind thinks that a cool, slick Democrat will destroy a decrepit and ageing system and usher in a New Era? Nobody on that side has Kennedy or Clinton’s effortless charisma, nor do they have Obama or Carter’s messianic image. Who on the Republican side will take up the top hat and beard to be another Lincoln and bring the lowest-ever unemployment to America’s increasingly hostile and greedy non-white masses? The will to rebirth isn’t there anymore. Faith was not lost because of a lack of will to believe; it was lost because of a lack of will to practice — because orthopraxy was violated, and because someone, somewhere got greedy and proud and stupid and violated the ritual’s rules.

We are now in a transitional period. Many people, including an overwhelming majority of the elite, want nothing better than to have a proper resacralization ceremony and return to sacred time. Many people can feel in their bones that they’ve lived in a profane, dirty, sinful time for a very long time now — much longer than they’re supposed to. Part of this is the Internet’s time-dilating effect and its attendant informational abundance: We feel that decades pass in the short years that actually do. Part of it is the realization that an orderly resacralization ceremony is impossible; Tiamat is already rampaging through the city’s outskirts.

What is necessary is an actual sacralization. What is necessary is for the god Marduk himself to destroy the dragon and remake the world anew — for real, this time. In practical terms, someone must put an end to the raging chaos and impose a new political and moral paradigm upon America from which the renewed institutions of daily life will spring forth and a new Golden Age will commence. That someone will not come from the decrepit Roosevelt and Lincoln cults, but rather from outside — from a hitherto ignored or hated minor sect which has its own ideas on how to organize society.

This is the chance for white identitarian nationalism to be that sect. With our ideology acting as the asabiyyah that binds us together and informs our movements against chaos, we stand in a position to seize the initiative and take upon us the role of Marduk, of the cosmogonic god-king who defines the new sacral paradigm for people in the West, but especially America. Having correctly identified Tiamat, the dragon of chaos, as the presence of non-whites in white homelands, with a special focus on a certain tribe of chaos-addicted troublemakers, we must act as a force of order against this beast, remove it from the our people’s homelands, and forge a new order out of its bones.

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