Tag: myth

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Gerhard Hallstatt is an Upper Austrian musician, photographer, and writer, though he currently focuses primarily on music with his experimental band Allerseelen. He previously served as the publisher of the small but influential underground magazines Aorta and Ahnstern, using the pseudonym Adam Kadmon. These limited-circulation publications focused primarily on esoteric philosophy, magic, sacred architecture, art history, and cultural poetry, as well as half-forgotten National Socialist artists and occultists. (more…)

Aesop Tells his Fables by Johann Michael Wittmer. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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As discussed in Part 2, the primary issue in Plato’s Atlantis story is the cyclical nature of time. Questions of close secondary importance are what do stories, regardless of their veracity, tell about how people see themselves and others? What are their values? What stories should we tell?

Plato has Critias’ grandfather claim that if Solon hadn’t had to focus on politics and war instead of poetry that he would have surpassed Homer, especially if he had been able to finish the Atlantis story. Thus, the Iliad and Odyssey became the most beloved stories of ancient Greece rather than Atlantis could have been determined by the dimly remembered geopolitics of the Archaic period. (more…)

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Many dismiss Atlantis as merely a myth or allegory by Plato. The theosophists and other peddlers of pop culture esotericism embrace the myth and embroider it, for instance, claiming that Atlantis had flying machines. I have always taken the radical centrist stance that Atlantis existed, minus the fantastical claims. It was probably a settlement in North Africa that was advanced for its time, like Göbekli Tepe in Anatolia.

The only two primary sources on Atlantis are Plato’s Timaeus and Critias which are sequels to The Republic.[1] But modern myth mongers rarely examine them, even in passing.  A close reading of them suggests that the Greeks remembered Homer’s Troy but not Solon’s Atlantis because it was closer in time with fewer intervening disasters and because Homer could devote his attention to poetry while Solon could not. The Critias ends abruptly mid-sentence with a council of the gods to echo the start of the Odyssey, further emphasizing the comparison to Homer’s Troy. (more…)

Hermanubis, Vatican Museum

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(Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here, Part 6 here, Part 7 here, Part 8 here, Part 9 here, Part 10 here, Part 11 here, Part 12 here, Part 13 here, Part 14 here, Part 15 here, Part 16 here, Part 17 here, Part 18 here, Part 19 here.)

Socrates the Dog

At the end of our last installment, Socrates has announced that, if forced to choose, he prefers death to dishonor. (more…)

You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Trial of Socrates here.

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Three dissident Right philosophers discussed Greg Johnson‘s book The Trial of Socrates during the second meeting of the Counter-Currents Book Club: F. Roger Devlin (author of Sexual Utopia in Power), Mike Maxwell of Imperium Press, and the author himself. All of the participants have an academic background in philosophy. The trial of Socrates is a pivotal event in world history. Before Socrates, philosophy had put society on trial. Now society was striking back. The recording of the stream is now available for download and online listening. Find out what some of the leading luminaries of our movement have to say about this defining moment of our civilization. (more…)

You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Trial of Socrates here.

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The trial and death of Socrates is one of the most compelling places to begin one’s philosophical education. — Greg Johnson, The Trial of Socrates

Everyone strives to obtain the law. — Franz Kafka, The Trial

Philosophy in the West has been withering on the vine for decades. A combination of Jacques Derrida’s “death of the civilization of the book” and the replacement of that civilization with Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle” has rendered philosophy outmoded, antique, and frankly too much like hard work for an intellectually undemanding generation. (more…)

You can pre-order Greg Johnson’s The Trial of Socrates here.

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Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

The following is an excerpt from Greg Johnson’s forthcoming book, The Trial of Socrates, which is available for pre-order at a $5 discount from now until its release on June 30. See here for details.

Socrates’s Flight to the Logoi

Socrates literally calls his second-best method his “second sailing,” which is an allusion to a comment made earlier by Simmias: (more…)

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Cryptids are an endless source of fascination, and explanations for the phenomenon abound. My personal theory is that they are for the most part real, albeit in strange extradimensional, metaphysical ways. Regardless, whether they are real or not, and if so and in what manner, is a question of fact. Right now I want to deal with the question of their meaning. (more…)

Unknown artist and date, The Pilgrimage to Canterbury

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Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)

There’s an old story within a story told by a pilgrim knight about ancient Thebes and two Theban cousins named Arcite and Palamon.^[1] According to everyone who knew them, no two warriors were more perfect. (more…)

Georges Sorel

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Note: This essay is occasioned by the new Imperium Press edition of Sorel’s Reflections on Violence, which is required reading.

Like Jack London, Georges Sorel (1847–1922) was a Left-wing writer whose primary influence today is on the Right. Sorel’s most influential book is Reflections on Violence, written in 1905–1906. (more…)

You can buy Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence from Imperium Press here.

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Host Greg Johnson welcomed Mike from Imperium Press back to the show on the latest broadcast of Counter-Currents Radio to discuss Georges Sorel’s On Violence, which was recently published by Imperium, and it is now available for download and online listening.

Topics discussed include:

01:02 Who was George Sorel?
07:33 Why did Sorel, a Marxist, hate progressives?
11:42 Sorel also criticized the working class (more…)

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During my short stint on this Earth, I’ve come to realize that people really aren’t that complicated. While we all have free will, hardly everything — or even the majority of the things we do — is of this divine spark. (more…)

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Michael Brendan Dougherty
My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son’s Search for Home
New York: Sentinel Books, 2019

When this was first published a couple of years ago, reviewers had two distinct takes about the book. One was that it was a wistful, sometimes bittersweet memoir about growing up without a father, because the father was off in Ireland, having never married Dougherty’s American mother; and also, the author had some romantic notions about Ireland, and wasn’t that special.  (more…)