Auguring Well

1,808 words

The auguries, which were so often used for the purposes of political obstruction or intrigue.
-Goldwin Smith, Lectures and Essays

I behold the surest pledges that as on one side, no local prejudices, or attachments; no separate views, nor party animosities, will misdirect the comprehensive and equal eye which ought to watch over this great assemblage of communities and interests.
-George Washington, 1789 Inaugural Address

There is only one word in town this week: inauguration. But what does it mean? The white West is currently under threat from all angles and is forced to fight on many battlefields, one of which is language, and holding onto the definition of words is crucial for the Dissident Right. More than any other language, English is that of the white man. Without definition, consensual and as fixed as possible (depending on the degree of abstraction of the word defined), language becomes the possession of whoever has the power to decide the meaning of words, a power God granted to Adam in Eden before Eve got peckish. This elasticity of meaning, as we know, leads to the kind of cultural relativity which is wreaking havoc throughout our nations. And they are our nations, and thus our language. So, we have to see the world through the lens of definition, the white man’s definition. Inauguration, then.

The word “inauguration” was first used in England in the late 16th century, and its Latin root is inaugurāre, which has a somewhat different meaning from today’s description of a very specific ceremony to mark the official induction to and acceptance of high public office. It incorporates augēre, meaning “increase” – it is also the root of the modern verb “to augment” – but there was a public office in Ancient Rome known as an augur.

The augurs were a distinct department of Roman government, responsible for advising Senators and Emperors through the reading and interpretation of natural signs and portents. (I think we call them “economists” now). Pliny the Elder has much to say about them, and the methods of auguries themselves, in Chapter 23 of his vast, 37-volume, Natural History. Chicken entrails, the scales of fishes, the flight patterns of birds, cloud formations; These were all vital indicators of future success or failure at the highest political level. Caesar himself made his decision to cross the Rubicon only after seeing what a chicken’s insides looked like that morning. Each to his own, I suppose. (I wonder if it works for horse-racing). Cicero, on the other hand, was most disapproving, and was severely critical of auguries in the Second Book of the De Divinatione.

Birds were of particular importance to the augurs. The word auspicium – from which we derive our term “auspicious” – meant, quite literally, a bird-watcher. The Romans even had a sacred chicken who performed a role similar to today’s Speaker of the House, although on recent showings was probably blessed with marginally more intelligence. And it did not pay to ignore these pecking prophets. During the naval battle of Drepana in 249BC, the Roman fleet commander was told that the sacred chicken would not eat, a bad omen for attacking the Carthaginians. “Then let it drink!”, said the foolhardy captain, and threw it overboard. The entire Roman fleet was sunk, proving not only that you should not count your chickens before they are hatched, but that you should not ignore them once they are.

Livy, in his History of Rome, tells of the election of Numa Pompilius to the Senate, and how the augurs were consulted specifically through avian media, just as Romulus himself had heeded the omen of the famous eagles. For the augurs, birds had a scale of importance – a sort of pecking order, I suppose – at the top of which was the eagle, the bird which, as it were, trumped all the others.

These auguries did not purport to tell the future (something I am at pains to point out to those for whom I read Tarot cards), but rather to determine whether the will of the gods was favorable towards the undertaking for which they were consulted. Divine sanction, rather than futurology, was of paramount importance.

Here in Latin America, auguries are rather gentler, although still connected with winged creatures. Now that I no longer live in the rain-forest, I don’t see so much of Morpho menelaus, a huge and beautiful blue butterfly which guarantees good luck if one should, as it were, flutter by. On the other hand, the cinnamon hummingbird – Amazilia rutila – regularly visits the flowers outside my current apartment, and is held throughout CentroAmerica to be a harbinger of good fortune.

Foretelling the affairs of men is a pleasingly multicultural affair. In Singapore, should you so wish, a tame parrot will select your Tarot cards, although Vedic astrologers in India take their prognostications from the stars above, while the Turks take theirs from coffee-grounds below. If you have ever had Turkish coffee, you will be all too aware that, while it cannot see into the future, it does bring the present into sharp focus.

The mainstay of European futurology were the Scandinavian rune stones, featuring carved symbols, or sigils, which can apparently still be found on standing-stones in parts of Sweden. This runic system, which is at least 2,000 years old, was both divinatory and a rudimentary alphabet. Runes would have been used, for example, by the Vikings, to advise them concerning harvests, the weather, the tides, love, or medicine. They would have been made from pieces of stone or flint, wood, or pottery. The sigils, in the divinatory system which grew from the runes, came to take on their own, deeper meaning. Ralph Blum, in The Book of Runes, perfectly describes consulting the runes in a way which also serves for the Tarot deck:

The runes are a system of guidance and self-counselling. They assist us in navigating familiar waters in difficult times when the old charts no longer serve and we are required to be our own cartographers… The runes are a compass for conduct.

In deference to the fact that this week’s inauguration is American, I defer to that country’s excellent dictionary, Merriam-Webster, concerning augury, and it informs us that the role of the augurs is what led to the word “inauguration” coming to mean “to consecrate, install, or invest”. High office means nothing without divine approval, and we recall Trump’s stated belief that his survival of an assassination attempt was a sign that God wanted him to stay on earth for a reason.

Looking back into the past rather than forward into the unknown future, US Presidential inaugurations were austere affairs until James Madison and his wife decided to throw a reception and host a ball in honor of the event in 1809. You can’t really expect someone named Dolley Madison not to want a bit of a dance and some champagne, and festivities surrounding the world’s most important opening ceremony seem appropriately American, a healthy mix of official ceremony and razzmatazz, a word which could only be American. It is unlikely that the guests would have danced the Madison, however, that particular craze not due to arrive until the 1950s. One hopes, incidentally, that at Trump’s Inauguration Ball, orchestral prominence was given to the tuba, tuba being the Latin word for “Trump”.

Donald Trump’s inauguration (and the presence of gangsta rappers at his so-called “crypto ball” doesn’t bode well, chickens or no chickens) has already indicated the attitude the 47th President is going to take to the United Kingdom, and the omens are not looking good for what is fast becoming a failed state. The UK, which once led the world, is now lagging behind it. The archaically named Great Britain is fast becoming out of step with both Europe and the US, both of which are moving healthily to the political right, while the Labour government seems to be intent on producing a reboot of the Soviet Union. If the ancient British Druids were still running the show, their auguries would not look too promising just at the moment. They tended to give chicken guts a miss for their prognostications, opting instead for the weather, or casting earth onto tightened drum-skins before observing the patterns formed, a bit like reading tea-leaves before the British Empire brought that wonderful English drink back to Albion. This method of divination can’t have been easy, given that the Druids felt the need to wrap themselves in bull-hides to boost their clairvoyant powers, but not all jobs have convenient uniforms. Just ask bee-keepers. Bee-watching was a Greek method of augury, and Pausanias relates that the locals at Delphi believed the great oracle itself was built by bees. This was, of course, in an age before fact-checking.

What of the soothsayers of today’s Left with regards to the return of the king in the form of Donald Trump? There is, alas, still no vaccine for Trump Derangement Syndrome, and the prognostications of today’s Leftist augurs are nothing if not entertaining. London’s odious little Mayor, Sadiq Khan, was close to tears as he spoke of “resurgent fascism”. Stephen Colbert, a man who trades under false pretenses as a comedian, believes Trump will have him locked up (we can but hope), and lesbian skinhead black quarterback Joy Reed thinks… Well, I have no doubt that if you know who she is, you know what she thinks, and do not need to tell fortunes to guess.

One thing that augurs well for those of us in the reality-based community – although not quite so well for the others – is the difference in tone between Trump’s inaugural portrait in 2017, and its glowering counterpart today. The resemblance to his (in)famous mugshot has been noted.

What, then, of the future under a new emperor? Prepare your rune stones, drink your coffee down to the dregs, gut your chicken, and we’ll try to look ahead and peer into the mists of what will be. Control of American borders. Soldiers rather than cross-dressing freaks in the army. A government with the fat trimmed off the bone. Europe slapped into place. The UK slapped into place, extra hard. No more money for the Jew of Ukraine. No more diversity hiring. Far less attention paid to women just because they are women. The terrorism that is black street crime treated as terrorism. Protection of the Amendments as sacrosanct, particularly the first two. A shakedown of the educational system and a return to classical, white educational practice. And, more than anything else, kick the Democrats while they are down, kick them hard and keep kicking until flatline. If those things are in the cards, then the white West stands a fighting chance.

For now, all things considered, looking at the signs and portents and auguries, and to steal from the old advertising slogan of a mobile telephone company, the future’s bright. The future’s orange, man.