Racism as Self-Hatred

Racists hate themselves. It is plain to see that I can only do to another what I have first done – psychologically speaking – to myself.

To hate you for your race, I first have to empty out my self-esteem. So much so that my only remaining life raft of self-acceptance is pinned to the flimsy veneer that is the shade of my skin.

The more I hate on you, the more I run away from myself, from self-love. The more I run from self-love, the more I loathe myself, and so the more compelled I feel to hate on you. If I could just outrun myself in the act of hurting you, I might finally have peace.

But the only way to outrun oneself is death. Hence the racist may be tempted to escalate to the point of violence. Secretly, they hope they will be killed. Racism is the mangled expression of a death wish.

Who profits from this death wish? The profiteers of course, that tiny economic elite. They’re so afraid. But they’re much better at manipulating their fear than the typical racist is. They know how to control the fight/flight reactions of millions of racists, each of them enslaved to self-hatred.

This is why racists need to say things like ‘all lives matter,’ or ‘but white people face racism too!’ They know firsthand how much they hate themselves. They know firsthand how little they themselves believe their lives matter. But they are dishonest with themselves about it. So instead of wanting to elevate themselves they would rather drag everyone else down to their level of misery.

This is why racists will never be Heathen, even the ones that claim to be Heathen. Heathenry doesn’t work without the bonds of love – of self, of family, of friends, of ancestors, of spirits, you name it. Racism is a love vacuum, a superficial layer over a yawning chasm. A chasm that will never be filled by more of the very thinking and behavior that fuels it. Racists are in a no-win battle with their own self-hatred.

Now I’ll be first to say that, though I might wish better for them, people are certainly entitled to hate themselves if they want to. The problem is when they are dishonest or ignorant, and as a result choose to lash out at others. The problem is when they conjure specters of evil as a justification for sinking to even worse, actual, expressions of ill doing. That is contemptible. Racists, deep down, know that their stance is contemptible, but they run from that knowledge too, caught in a vicious cycle, projecting disowned self-hatred onto whoever they judge to be ‘other.’

Racism is a cowardly practice, a dedicated running away from oneself. If only racists were to give themselves even one breath of compassion. They might discover they like themselves. They might discover the world is far more beautiful than they ever dared imagine. They might rise up and overthrow the cynics that continue to manipulate and control them. They might learn how to laugh honest, buoyant, delighted laughter.

They might find their way back to being human.

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Ancestor Worship is Not About Biology

There’s this notion among some Heathens (even, occasionally, progressive ones) whereby ancestry is reduced to biology. This is unfortunate for a few reasons.

First, it is anachronistic. There are interesting saga references by which an individual’s personal orloeg could be inherited by someone named after them – even if not related, in fact, even if the child of their enemy! So if ancestry can be determined by intentional naming, that’s much more complex and nuanced than the crass rigidity of biological reductionism, which really only emerged as a convenient way of legitimating colonial invasions in the last few hundred years.

Jettisoning biological reductionism opens up the realization that a connection to ancestry is rooted in an ongoing relationship, not mere static membership of a group based on some kind of (possibly quite arbitrary) putative genetic connection. After all, geneticists consistently find that there is more genetic variation within specified racial or ethnic groups than between different groups!

Biological reductionism implies that the work of being connected to the ancestors is done by default. This is a short step from basically ignoring the ancestral currents that might be present. If I recognize that ancestral connection is an ongoing conversation, one in which at best I am an equal partner, well that’s going to have a very different implication for what “ancestor worship” might mean to me.

When we look at traditional cultures we see an emphasis on regular personal and ritual practice aiming at maintaining and strengthening relationships with ancestral figures, be they specific individuals or more nonspecific (and that can include animal spirits, plant spirits, spirits of place, etc.). Ancestral connectedness is rooted in practice, not in labels. There is little room for the cultivation of reverence if we burden ourselves with the blinders of biological reductionism.

Secondly, biological reductionism, particularly in the context of painfully modern (and unscientific) racial categorizations, obscures the fact that ancestor worship is not about abstract categories and groupings (like “white” or “Asian” or whatever). It is about my personal, specific lineages, the specific threads of relationships that bind me to the weave of history.

So when the now openly white supremacist Stephen McNallen says he would never have had children with a Tibetan woman because he would want his descendants to “look like us,” he is missing something really obvious, namely that by having children with our hypothetical Tibetan lady, he would be melding lineages with that woman, and thus the Tibetan ‘them’ and McNallen’s white ‘us’ would be united, woven as one. His Tibetan-European children would look like “us,” because in his marital union his “us” would have expanded from what he had before.

Indeed, this applies even if two people of the same race marry, since as I noted genetic variation within groups is greater than between them. Thus, genetically speaking, McNallen might have actually promoted more uniformity in his genetic descendants precisely by marrying and procreating with someone of a different race! I am sure this nicety would be lost on someone as dim as McNallen, of course.

Thirdly, biological reductionism excludes the possibility of spiritual and philosophical ancestors. Figures such as C. G. Jung, Lao Zi, Sylvia Rivera, Milton Erickson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Peter Kropotkin, Nelson Mandela, and Marie-Louise Von Franz are all philosophical or spiritual ancestors to me, even though I am not biologically related to any of them.

Similarly, I have much deeper connection to the people I choose as family than almost all of my biological family – why should that be devalued in the name of biological reductionism? And that’s before I get to the Heathens I’ve known who are not of European descent yet who have taught me such profound lessons about the old gods and ways, and who are clearly and deeply connected to the Heathen current (much more so, in fact, than many, perhaps most, of the European-descended Heathens I have met).

And now I think about it, I have no Heathen blood relatives, so all of my experience of Heathen ritual and community has been shared with people I am unrelated to. Does our at-best distant ancestral similarity somehow undermine the very real depth and power of our relationships? I should think not.

In our book I write about how ancestor worship ultimately articulates an animistic vision of mutual symbiosis, interconnection, and relationship among all things. If I am really serious about worshipping my ancestors, it is arbitrary to say that they end at the elusive and ever-shifting boundaries of skin color or nationality.

Odin, Vili, and Ve are described as creating the first humans from trees. Those trees are ultimately formed from the remnants of Ymir’s corpse, since that is what the whole cosmos is shaped from. How can Odin be the ancestor of any human, therefore, if ancestry merely means biological relationship? Indeed, how can we call him a god when he is clearly described as being of giant stock? And yet we are assured that he is the Allfather, and the highest of the Aesir; apparently his kind of ancestrality transcends mere blood relatedness.

Thus ancestor worship, once it is freed from biological reductionism, opens an infinity of doors. But when it is burdened by biological reductionism it merely amounts to stagnation, hypocrisy, and denial. It takes fertile possibility and makes a barren waste of them.

Ultimately, reducing ancestry to biology is a move from the miser’s playbook. It’s anachronistic as far as Heathenry goes, and it stifles the free flow of the creative spirit. It reduces living relationships to empty, static formalisms. It violates both the primary sources and the philosophical foundations of Heathenry, assuming we understand the Heathen worldview to be based on a vision of wyrd as the interconnecting matrix of all.

Thus: it is really crucial that we divest the concept of ancestor worship from modern oppressive concepts of biological race. Not only for the above reasons (i.e. that biological reductionism undermines the quality of our Heathenry), but because biological reductionism threatens to reduce Heathenry and/or ancestor worship to being an excuse for hatred and bigotry. No thanks!

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Tearing the Veil of the Mentally Blind

From the mentally blind come ideas that are poison; take away the power, a shallow person you will find.

What would you do without your pathetic narrow-minded approach to life that reflects your lack of abilities?

– “Mentally Blind,” Death (Chuck Schuldiner)

I could just post these two quotes from the above-mentioned song, but perhaps laboring the point is warranted.

The more that Trump and his cronies lash out, the more empty and pathetic they feel. The more pathetic and empty they feel, the more they lash out. The more they cultivate the cowardice of ‘ends justify means,’ the more they abandon faith in inner spiritual power and embrace their slavery to the veil of Maya. ‘I can only feel ok if you do exactly what I want, and I want you to go away forever!’ What contemptible weakness.

Thus the genesis of the endless hyperbole, straight from the Hitlerian playbook: make the lie ridiculous enough and people will start to believe it. Keep them caught up in their anxiety, fear, confusion, and anger and you can make them do whatever you want: “those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities” (Voltaire).

Eventually the edifice of tyranny, the tower of xenophobia, paranoia, racism, sexism, undisciplined militarism, and above all the funneling of ever more wealth into ever fewer hands, will fall. The more engorged this leech of arrogance becomes, the more explosive will be its demise. That’s bad, because the rest of us will be the collateral damage.

So fight these small-minded, shallow scumbags. Defeat them before they reach terminal bloat detonation. Fight the infectious stupidity that they seek to promulgate. Fight their pathetic, narrow-minded approach to life that reflects their lack of abilities.

Now, more than ever, magic must be marshaled against the buffoon brigade: the Trump administration and all the white supremacists who have forgotten that the Nazis lost World War II because their philosophy is weak.

Magic must be marshaled to shatter Trump’s mange-riddled egregore of mediocrity and hatred. The rabid pig must be dealt with, and magic must play its part.

Magic must be marshaled, with fierce and unrelenting delight. Delight in the downfall of the jotun in the White House, in the downfall of all his twisted hypocrisy, delight in the technicolor possibilities of a world wrested from the clutches of late-stage authoritarian capitalism.

A simple enough sigil will suffice: Thurisaz Jera Tiwaz. Add a valknut to conjure the blessing of the master of death. Invoke with delighted fury and banish with furious mirth.

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Belief is Not Your Friend

Why Chaos Magic and Heathenism fused together? The guiding thread is skepticism about the importance of belief.

Christianity ushered into prominence the notion that right belief (orthodoxy) is fundamental to religious or spiritual life. This notion has profoundly shaped how most modern Westerners understand spirituality and religion. However it is not a notion that is particularly relevant to ancient paganisms.

Therefore it is important for anyone who wants to explore Heathenry or other reconstructed spiritual approaches to develop a sense of irony about the importance of belief that modern Western culture still seems fettered by. Otherwise any attempt to re-enter old spiritual-historical currents will be hiddenly and thoroughly warped by the ubiquitous notion that spirituality entails the holding of beliefs.

One of the reasons that Christianity jived so poorly with Roman paganism is that the latter didn’t place much emphasis on belief. Individuals were able to have whatever theories about the metaphysics of divinity that they wanted. The important thing was not right thinking, it was participation. It was knowing the right way to make spiritual (and cultural) contributions and observations.

This is a really, really radical idea for anyone in the modern Western world. Spirituality for pagan peoples had little, perhaps nothing, to do with right belief and everything to do with what we might term ‘right participation.’

One consequence of this attitude is that syncretism was a common religious phenomenon in ancient times. Everywhere one looks, one finds cross-cultural hybrid deities. Apparently no one thought this to be problematic, perhaps because they had a sense of irony about belief and recognized that praxis was the more important thing.

(Or maybe they had no sense of irony about belief at all and never even pondered the vexing, burdensome dilemmas of early Christian moral philosophy, where for example the thought is as ‘bad’ as the deed, and the abstraction of ‘purity’ is elevated above all else).

When we review Havamal there is a section that appears to be referring to magical or spiritual (perhaps runic?) practice, here is what it says (Hollander translation):

Know’st how to write,                   know’st know to read,
know’st how to stain,                    how to understand,
know’st how to ask,                       how’st to offer,
knows’st how to supplicate,       know’st how to sacrifice?

Observe that the knowledges here referenced are not about dogma or belief, but rather about the practical dimensions of spiritual or magical activity. It might shock many modern Heathens, but there is no rider along the lines of “and if you don’t believe that Loki is anathema then I’ll never let your magic work!” It seems like anyone with the technical knowledge could participate. Right belief? Whatever, pal.

Ok, so this brings us to Chaos Magic because the stanza quoted above could be straight out of a modern Chaos Magic grimoire. Chaos Magic is the first Western occult or spiritual tradition in many centuries to openly express contempt for right belief in favor of a focus on correct technical practice. Chaos Magic is ridiculed for inventing deities or using pop culture figures as spirits, yet its methods are effective, and they are effective for the same reason that ancient pagan religions were satisfying to their adherents – the emphasis is on praxis, not belief.

Modern Heathenry is so bound up in obsession with orthodoxy. I do not believe Heathenry could be used to justify racism and other bigotries if it were not polluted by the Christian obsession with ‘pure,’ binary thought processes. The more we look at ancient paganisms, the more we find they had their moments of outrageous free-for-all. Even the runes, supposedly the unique spiritual DNA of the Germanic peoples, appear to have been cribbed almost wholesale from the Etruscans (or Romans, depending on your biases).

Chaos Magic offers a useful model (the map is not the territory!), a way out of unconscious adherence to orthodoxic thinking. Combined with the grounding of a Heathen perspective that takes reconstructionism seriously yet playfully, the yield is a model of Heathen spirituality that has at least a small chance of recapturing the character of the ancient ways (which is about as good an outcome as is likely possible, given the gulf of time and the lack of information).

It won’t be perfect, and many mistakes will be made, but that’s why we have to keep trying to keep up with the academics and the archaeologists, a problem that all Heathens, whether they have achieved a sense of irony about belief or not, must face. Better to be honest with ourselves than boxing with our own shadows.

Naturally, Chaos Heathenry is subject to any number of uninformed criticisms, often based on the notion that it professes or promotes false beliefs. Oops. We can only say that we never claimed to be anything other than what we claimed to be. There’s no shame in syncretism when it is embraced consciously, in an informed way. That’s what the ancients did, and we are reconstructing that.

This statement should not be understood as an attempt to excuse sloppy thinking or new agism. We have our own particular kind of discipline, and Loki is only as subversive as the dominant culture is repressive. Belief is in various respects an epiphenomenon, the cart put before the horse. Let’s set it back into its appropriate place, and restore playful, open-minded, and fumbling-toward-rigor praxis to its rightful role.

*

(Don’t forget, our first ever book is out and available!)
Print edition available at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0692984712
Ebook edition available at: https://www.amazon.com/Elhaz-Ablaze-Compendium-Chaos-Heathenry-ebook/dp/B079WCH3RK

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What are You Willing to Do to Make Yourself More Free?

We know there is no system of social organization that can reliably facilitate individual freedom, because systems are forged from people and people are fallible. Certainly there are better and worse systems – the farce of US ‘democracy’ being a nice example of a rapidly disintegrating system that was never that great in the first place – but the best system in the world is still fallible.

(This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t care about what system of social organization we adopt, more on that later).

Since systems are fallible it follows that I might be curious about the fallible humans that make them so. Why are we fallible? Other than the fact that there is a vicious cycle such that a bad system creates more fallible humans, who in turn make for a worse system.

Hmm – a vicious cycle. Perhaps the nature of a circle is that it matters not where we choose to puncture the circumference, so long as we do.

Two significant factors that affect the question of freedom suggest themselves: imagination and fear.

If I lack the time, space, and wit to imagine possibilities for myself I am unlikely to explore them. Tunnel vision is devastating for the possibility that I can exercise my freedom. If I have internalized a thin narrative to the effect that my possibilities are few and rigidly defined, then I again find myself in a vicious cycle. The less I can imagine possibilities, the less I am likely to explore them, the more the story of my limited nature seems compelling.

Authorities sustain their power and domination through constricting our sense of possibilities, our ability to imagine ourselves into multiplicity. To the extent that we base our sense of self on the framework of external authorities we run the risk of choking ourselves. If my self-image is little more than a tangle of (possibly malevolent, at least arbitrary) introjects, then how can I know myself? If I do not know myself, in what sense can my thoughts, feelings, or actions be considered free?

A major mechanism by which authorities impose introjects is fear. Fear that I am doing something wrong. Fear that I will be punished for some shortcoming or other. Fear chokes my capacity for spontaneity. It sets chains of judgment on the bare facts of my experiencing myself. It introduces the burden of better and worse, right and wrong, valid and invalid. These are external values shoehorned onto my experience of myself.

I have to learn how to be myself, and this is a process of identifying and discarding the introjects of control that authority has imposed upon me from birth. Every single narrative of identity needs to be discerned, evaluated, possibly discarded. I must use these constrictions as opportunities to encounter myself. Reflexivity, reflection, are the means by which internalized judgment can be held out and defanged.

Nothing is wasted and there is no need to resent authorities for their imposition of fear. The need lies rather in the process of reflection so that a less mangled relationship with self is possible. Indeed, if we waste time on resentment then we remain entangled with authoritarian, judgmental introjects (this is yet another tactic that authorities use, turning our instinct for courageous freedom against us).

My preferred mechanisms for free-making reflection are meditation and psychotherapy.

Meditation is the patient sitting with my own experience regardless of whether I like it or not. Over time I begin to build an immediate and direct knowledge of my thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations. This is a language of self-understanding that no authority can ever claim. As this deepens, a growing immunity to fear emerges. As I know myself better, I shed layers of attachment to the illusions of my palimpsest sense of self.

This is a slow process. It works. Quick fixes fade all too swiftly by comparison. A year’s worth of meditation will grant far more progress than a year’s worth of desperate, insecure, flamboyant magicking.

Psychotherapy is an opportunity to utilize a relationship as a territory for testing one’s permission to be oneself. As the connection strengthens, safety increases and the pressure to conform to the introjects of society, family, and institutions can wither away. Thus the imagination can begin to flower into a strange and savage new garden.

The process of self-transformation can facilitate increasing compassion, generosity, and sense of humor. As I begin to nourish myself through building an irreducible relationship to self (meditation), through softening the grip of fear (through meditation again), I no longer need to ape the noxious authorities that would have me believe that only through introjected judgment can I be strong or safe.

As my courage to be myself flourishes, perhaps I begin to find ways to play a role in changing or dismantling institutions of authority. If I want to change the systems for the better, and I do not in parallel work to shed my personal fear and poverty of imagination, then it is likely that the best I will do is play a role in exchanging one noxious system for another. This is perhaps part of why revolutions have often replaced one authoritarian regime with another.

Learning love for oneself is a decisive political act that provides a deep basis for, in turn, transforming systems toward permissiveness, curiosity, trust in human spontaneity. It takes courage and a Quixotic sensibility to begin the hunt for freedom. Break the seamless surface of the circle’s skin. The circumference is everywhere and nowhere.

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Jung & Serrano: A Phenomenological Critique of Radical Traditionalism

Chrysopoea_of_Cleopatra_1I recently read an academic paper that critiqued Radical Traditionalism (RT). The paper was dissatisfying because it lacked any compelling argument against RT. It relied on a common left wing habit of assuming RT to be mistaken by default of its political orientation – no need to critique its claims, assumptions, and conclusions. Flowing from that superficiality, the paper seemed to assume that since RT claims to be anti-modernist, anti-modernism must ipso facto be worthless. This seemed ill-considered and, frankly, intellectually lazy.

Radical right wing notions will continue to propagate so long as leftist thinkers content themselves with critiques that amount to the accusation of crimethink! We inadvertently endorse RT’s claims to legitimacy when we decline to challenge it for the intellectual turf to which it lays claim. Therefore, this paper sets out to destructure and dismantle RT, and in doing so perhaps rescue anti-modernism from RT’s undeserving (and ironically modernist) clutches. Additionally, I hope to provide a basis on which all variants of RT can be shredded at will.

Reclaiming Anti-Modernism from the Right

The right have worked hard to convince themselves and everyone else that the pre-modern world offers an arsenal of validation for patriarchy, racism, violence, rigid hierarchy, domination, objectification, cultural and ethnic isolation, etc. Yet even a cursory review of human history indicates that RT’s appeal to the pre-modern world is nothing more or less than a twisted nostalgia, an invocation of  heavily distorted (if not outright fabricated) and selective cultural memories. Thoughtful reflection reveals that the only way pre-modernity can become a sound basis for RT ideology is if RT writers dumb down historical narratives and keep them shallow.

For example, we often see right wing Heathens appeal to the original Heathens as a justification for racism, isolationism, militarism, or cultural paranoia. Yet when we review the historical record or read the old myths we struggle to find much justification for such notions. This is not to say that violence and fear were not parts of the historical Heathen experience (they are universals of all human experience), but it is to say that so were hospitality, generosity, and harmonious cross-cultural exchange. Ancient Heathen cultures would have collapsed without the latter aspects, but probably could have got along just fine (and indeed tried to prevent, though customs such as wergild) the former aspects. Why would we neglect values such as generosity, hospitality, and open-mindedness? Why would we collude with the Right to submerge such values in the brackish, amnesiac waters of conservative revisionism?

To the extent that we do make this concession, I believe we do out of lack of self-belief. The hyperbole of RT is compelling (at least so long as it remains unexamined). It seeks to stake out an emotional and spiritual sensibility, one seemingly  resonant with legitimacy. Yet I assure my reader: we are just as entitled to that sensibility on the Left, and indeed if we follow the suggestions made in this essay, we will find ourselves far better positioned to preserve and cultivate the magical spark to which RT presumes to lay an exclusive claim.

If we reflect for even a moment, we recognize that anti-modernism is a venerable companion of progressive critique. Marx’s “alienation of the worker” is a central element of the critique of modern capitalism, and depends almost entirely upon an appreciation for the pre-modern experience of craft, creativity, and labor. Weber’s “disenchantment of the world” offers a similar, fundamental critique of modernity, of its tendency to reduce all relationships to processes of objectification and domination. Kropotkin’s studies on mutual aid throughout history illustrate dozens of examples of pre-modern cultures that operated on principles of community, de-centralization, and hospitality.

These brief remarks provide plenty of foundation to contest and dismantle the RT appropriation of anti-modernism, the RT appropriation of nostalgia for a Romantic history that probably only ever existed in our hearts and imaginations (though there is no shame in that, so long as we own it). It is fashionable in Leftist circles to cede any ground that the Right lays claim, out of a misguided loyalty to some notion of white-light ideological purity. We need a more compelling critique of RT than those usually proffered, one that does not cede the territory of anti-modern critique and pre-modern fascination without a fight. We have to end the RT theft of anti-modernism. To do that we have to get beyond the goal of mere ideological hygiene.

Phenomenology and Coherence

Phenomenology is the much-neglected ancestor of both existentialism and post-structuralism, neither of which seemed to grasp the fundamental point of phenomenology (to all our cost). The slogan of phenomenology’s founder Edmund Husserl was “back to the things themselves,” by which  he partly meant that we cannot understand any phenomenon  – even a political phenomenon like RT – unless we attempt to understand it on its own terms.

This approach amounts to a test of coherence. Is the phenomenon coherent with itself? Is RT coherent with itself? The move to assess an ideology by attempting to square the various major elements of its structure is far more powerful than attacking it on the basis of partisan acceptability, on whether we approve or disapprove of that ideology’s conclusions.

With this thought in mind I intend to present a specific instance of RT which I believe speaks to the broader fault line upon which the whole ideology collapses. This collapse, I must stress, is an internal collapse, that is to say, RT does not cohere with its own methodology and objectives. My critique is such that if the adherents to RT understand it they will be forced to either abandon right-wing dogma, or throw themselves into open embrace of hypocrisy and absurdity.

Before we proceed, it is appropriate to speak a little more to the phenomenological orientation. In this orientation we are encouraged to set aside any concern about matters of fact, that is to say, the ‘true’ state of matters in the world. Instead, our focus is on phenomena, propositions, ideas, etc., as they present themselves. We set aside any concern about their ultimate substance, whatever that might or might not comprise. This is liberating because it frees us from a host of metaphysical and epistemological burdens.

If I am not obliged to reach constantly to the conclusion that RT is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ then I am more likely to be able to dig into its roots and understand it. Without such an understanding, there is little hope of any further productive work. And of course, I suspect that most adherents to RT have not themselves engaged in such an investigation and therefore themselves are ignorant of the structure and framework of their own ideology. All of which offers a wonderful opportunity and modality for critical analysis.

Serrano and Jung

Miguel Serrano (1917-2009) was a somewhat less prominent RT writer; however I have made him my point of departure because his case offers rich pickings for phenomenological analysis. A Chilean diplomat, Serrano spent some years living in India (among other countries), and was strongly influenced by yoga and Hindu mysticism.

Serrano regarded himself as an elite (like many RTs), and so naturally wanted to surround himself with the most rarified of atmospheres. He was something of a collector – he liked to collect visits to spiritually significant locales, and he liked to collect friendships with spiritually impressive people. The precipitate of these tendencies is his 1966 book C. G. Jung and Herman Hesse: A Tale of Two Friendships, which documents his relationship with each of the luminaries named in the title.

Serrano was significantly younger than Hesse and Jung and so knew them in their twilight years (though even in their twilight it appears they remained mentally undiminished). The book is somewhat painful to read, for the relationships it documents are rather one-sided. While both Hesse and Jung appeared to have a fondness for Serrano, he nevertheless comes off – even in his own book – as being a little like a toy dog excitedly yapping at the heels of much larger, more graceful and powerful hounds.

A Tale of Two Friendships is valuable because it offers a view to the phenomenological question of whether RT can claim internal coherence. The book is riddled with fascinating contradictions, in part because it reflects the thoughts of a writer who was himself in a state of intellectual flux.

As a RT, Serrano expresses many of the expected regressive opinions – patriarchy, racism, totalitarianism, individualism – along with some of the more benign RT notions such as the belief in a perennial philosophy, a hidden cosmic order that structures the universe and to which humanity, to varying degrees, can either conform to or diverge from. His international life experiences further complicated and enriched his perspective. Thus we find Serrano making some interesting, complex statements about history and politics, as RTs sometimes do. For example, he says that,

I thought the West was now interested in rediscovering the values of the soul, while the East was beginning to experience technology and the results of a purely extroverted civilization. I said that I thought this development posed a tremendous threat for the white man, who would have to face the expansion of the many colored races all over the world. The only solution for the white man was to dive under, like a swimmer when confronted by a huge wave, in order to come out on the other side. I felt that he ought to keep quiet and allow the colored races to speak. The white man would also have to withdraw somewhat, in order to preserve a legacy for the future. This, I felt, was the only possible way to deal with the millions of hitherto oppressed people who have a just desire for vengeance.

If Serrano’s allegiance to white supremacy and patriarchy is evident here, along with an uncritical adoption of binary thinking (c.f. the rigid projections of “East” and “West”), there is nevertheless also recognition of the profound injustices of European colonial imperialism. This multifacetedness is precisely what makes RT so fascinating, and at times so perplexing to its Leftist critics. Consider, then, this further quote from the book:

This act of diving under should not be merely a political or social act, but a spiritual one in which the white man tries to rediscover his Myth and Legend. Only in this way would the white man preserve the essence of his civilization. What was needed most of all, then, was work of individual perfection. And success in this line depended on the realization of magic. In social terms, it involved the emergence in the West of strong individualists capable of equalizing the incoherent movements of the masses.

Again we see the interweaving of regressive politics (e.g. lionizing the ‘strong individualist’) with something deeper, a recognition that white people (what a problematic term!) cannot negotiate a healthy relationship with people of color if they do not undertake major work within themselves (a point that James Baldwin so powerfully argued but from the perspective of the recipient of racial oppression).

There’s a powerful stench of modernity around the RT obsessions with the perfected, isolate individual – despite the appeal to the spiritual, we know that venerable pre-modern traditions entail far more nuanced and complex understandings of the relationship of self to community. The attempt to reduce culture to isolated, individual agency is also rather resonant with Thatcherism and neoliberalism, both supposedly outlooks that RT opposes.

In Serrano’s words on the one hand we find an allegiance to a vision of history as a process of irresolvable conflict, in which civilizations are inevitably either oppressed or oppressor (both internally and in relation to one another). A worldview based on a presumed incommensurability between races and cultures, a fiction of history as a record of hermetically sealed, unchanging groups grinding one another to dust. This worldview lionizes the absurd image of the isolate, perfected individualist, an intellectual swindle that obfuscates the profound difference between independence of thought and the sullen act of refusing to play with others for fear of being tested and found wanting.

On the other hand we find a thread of thought which recognizes that individual, inner work is not about posturing and shows of power, but about exploring within. And that with this work goes a process of stepping back, acknowledging wrong, showing ownership and accountability: whites facing their shadows, be they collective (genocide, colonialism) or personal. The recognition that healing, growth, and psychic wholeness cannot be achieved through brute egoic violence. That armor and aggression as a basis for a sense of self or a sense of cultural destiny leave a core that is hollow and rotten.

Viewing the incongruous juxtapositions evident in Serrano’s thought with a phenomenological lens exposes an interesting rupture. Serrano calls for inner work, a process that typically requires vulnerability, curiosity, the relinquishing of the ego unto the mysteries of the deeper self. Yet his mechanism for achieving this goal is “strong individualism,” which is to say, the denial of vulnerability and the assertion of linear, egoic force. The matrilineal embrace of the unknown is conjured, then immediately subverted back into the patriarchal lust for the illusion of certainty and control. Thus we begin to trace entangled yet contradictory currents active in Serrano’s thinking as a RT.

Serrano is only one example of RT, and A Tale of Two Friendships is far from the definitive RT statement, yet we have found something here that is worth further exploration. Can Serrano effect a rapprochement of these two, conflicted, ideologies? Can RT? If not, then RT fails the test of phenomenological coherence. And naturally, I believe that it fails miserably. Indeed, it does not even understand the task it sets itself (despite Evola’s superficial appeals to the primacy of enantiodromia, the process by which polar extremes trade places and transform themselves).

In the course of reading A Tale of Two Friendships, Serrano makes clear that his endorsement of the second perspective – that of genuine inner work – sprang in large part from his reading of Jung’s book The Undiscovered Self ­– and indeed from his relationship with Jung as a whole. Serrano had been caught in a psychic rigidity, a collapsed relationship to self, from which birthed his worldview of clashing cultures, of ‘Western’ literalism against ‘Eastern’ mystery, of introjected racist, sexist, and classist authoritarianism against repressed curiosity, vulnerability, and imagination.

In Serrano, we see how RT thus plants its feet in two contradictory currents – historically conditioned authoritarianism on the one and a claim to timeless reverence for mystery on the other. What happened to Serrano when he lost the major support for the latter current in his own thought? What happened to his thought in the wake of Jung’s death? The answer to this question will determine whether RT can lay claim to phenomenological coherence.

Literalism and the Numinous

There is an incident in A Tale of Two Friendships that offers important context for understanding the basis of Serrano’s RT thought. In the book, Serrano relates that he underwent an out of body experience which left a marked impression on him. He was convinced it was a significant and meaningful encounter with the numinous. Later, he described the experience to Jung on one of his visits to Switzerland. Jung’s advice to Serrano was to treat the experience psychologically. Serrano was angered, because he thought that in making this recommendation Jung was suggesting that the experience was ‘merely’ psychological, that Jung was somehow undermining the validity of the revelation.

Serrano was not alone in rejecting Jung’s habit of psychologizing religious experience; in The Mystery of the Grail, Evola rejects Jungian-style appeals to the unconscious as a basis for the recurring motifs of myth and magic. He prefers to appeal to a “supraconscious” basis for these phenomena. He appears to think that Jung is somehow undermining the reality of these phenomena as spiritually significant or meaningful, and attempts to save them from this psychological oblivion through the appeal to hidden, overarching dimensions of existence to which (presumably) only Evola’s own exalted consciousness could attain. Both Evola and Serrano are guilty of an unfortunate and blocked-headed literalism; they simply did not understand Jung.

(To be fair, this could be said of many contemporary folk, too. Jung is often mistakenly understood to be ‘reducing’ the spiritual to the ‘merely’ psychological, even by some of his putative followers, let alone his critics! The difference is, Evola and Serrano had direct access to Jung, free from the chaotic misdirection of New Age appropriation of Jung’s work, and yet still they could not grasp the purpose and significance of the procedure of psychologizing spiritual phenomena).

So what did Jung mean when he told Serrano to understand his out of body experience psychologically? He was inviting Serrano to adopt a phenomenological perspective.

Let us consider. An experience presents itself to me. If I lack a phenomenological perspective, then I am obliged to reduce the experience to whatever underlying framework of belief I might have – at least if I want to attach significance to that experience. Yet as soon as I am reaching past the experience into some conjectured hidden reality, I have abandoned the experience itself. Serrano’s out of body experience was (presumably) an irruption of something magical into his life, yet in his literalism he felt compelled to bastardize it, to leap past the phenomena itself and appropriate the experience into a narrative of the ‘perennial philosophy’ over which he could assert some kind of domination.

When we are confronted with the numinous, we are usually also confronted with the question of our relationship to the numinous. The numinous is alive, active, behaves as though it has intention (it may well do). There is dense, vibrant, intense power to an experience such as traveling beyond one’s body. Yet Serrano, and RT more generally, will not tarry with the experience as it reveals itself; for Serrano, the experience can only be of ‘real’ significance if he can tie it to some sort of supraconscious reality. This is like the spiritual version of the logical fallacy of appealing to authority. It stems not from a superior consciousness, as RT would like to think, but from self-doubt and shallowness.

Serrano, as a Radical Traditionalist, needs to allocate his experience of spontaneous numinosity into a neat, literal category because he is profoundly entangled in the modernist tradition of objectification. The Radical Traditionalist experiences something that moves their heart. Yet their worldview is a worldview of hierarchy, domination, subjection, objectification. They do not know how to tarry with the numinous experience. They can only make sense of that experience if they can attach it to a hierarchy of  evaluations, either base or elevated. In the rush to objectify the experience it slips away, buried beneath the clutching of some notion of spiritual status, of soul aristocracy. The magic slips away, and all that is left is the hollow armor of possessiveness and gnawing anxiety. If magic is a cicada, RT only ever manages to grasp its discarded shells.

Literalism – the need to entrap experience in dogma – destroys RT’s relationship to the numinous. The numinous is not property or an object, but rather a process that unfolds quite independently of any human categorization. It confronts us with mystery. The rejection of that mystery – the cowardice of modernity – resonates throughout RT, its addiction to rules, hierarchy, habitual grasping for ownership. This rejection becomes a vicious circle; the more the Radical Traditionalist tries to ground the numinous experience in appeals to some arbitrary yet rigid table of values, the more numinosity slips away. The more it slips away, the more scarcity the Radical Traditionalist feels, the more rigidly they cling to their abstractions. The more they violently insist on the absolute and eternal reality of the numinous as property, the more the numinous  mocks, defies, and abandons them.

Thus the younger Serrano washed up on the shores of puerile literalism in his later ‘spiritual’ writings. With the loss of Jung’s influence it appears that Serrano began to drift in his sense of place in the world (which he felt was already in question for, as a South American, Serrano described a sense of struggle around his identity, which he could not readily force into his typology of Eastern and Western culture).

Specifically, the tenuous balance between Serrano’s authoritarian self-hatred and his desire to give over into numinous exploration was thrown off, and he thrust himself whole-heartedly into the former mentality, with the added irony of attempting to clad it in convoluted pseudo-spiritual dressing (a contradiction that we can see again and again in the pages of RT writings). The sad nadir of Serrano’s rootlessness appeared in 1984 with the publication of his book Adolf Hitler: The Last Avatar. This 600+ page text is an unintentionally comedic tour de force of racist fantasy, with a healthy lashing of esoteric veneer; an extravaganza of nihilistic, dissociated, binary modern thought.

The Last Avatar is a kind of pseudo-Gnostic epic in which he outlines his belief that white people – “Aryans” – came to earth from outer space and landed on the north pole; whereas all other races are native to the earth and  (naturally) of inferior terrestrial origin, etc., etc. Yes, bad science-fantasy writing on a par with the inane Xenu ramblings of L. Ron Hubbard, himself another fashion victim(-izer) of modern pseudo-Gnosticism.

Serrano’s book speaks of ectoplasmic alien beings, a Demiurge dedicated to preventing white people from manifesting their true perfection, and various bizarre earth-shattering wars to determine the spiritual fate of the planet through recovering the mysteries of the “perennial philosophy,” the sacred, eternal, universal esoteric tradition that apparently waits breathlessly to be rediscovered by its blonde-haired liberators.

The book takes pains to weave in the odd reference to real earth history here and there, for example citing Neanderthals as an example of an inferior race created to foil the lovely Aryans. How ironic that we now know that European-descended peoples have a small amount of Neanderthal heritage – whereas African folks do not. In other words…the biological evidence would only fit Serrano’s fantasies if those with dark skin were the flawless aliens from another world, and those with light skin the degenerate earthly stooges of the Demiurge! Hmmm, there could actually be something to that…

Polar UFO immortal Aryan overlords fighting for cosmic right by oppressing people of color is about as hilariously awful as it gets, and this is more or less what Serrano’s thought devolved into. Yes, we will be told that it is all intended as metaphor, and yet that somehow almost makes it worse: this is your notion of poesis? This farce is the pinnacle of spiritually ‘elite’ expression?

We are left pondering: What happened to Serrano? His writing in the 1960s might have been marred by totalitarian political sentiments, but it also evinces a tension with something else, a sense of vulnerability, wonder, and reason.

Contrasting A Tale of Two Friendships with The Last Avatar, we can see the fumbling Radical  Traditionalist adulation of mystery and the perennial tradition invariably seems to collapse into an embarrassing farce of literal-minded white patriarchal anxieties. How convenient that patently historically-bound ideologies of colonial domination, or racial and gender stratification, should be rooted in an eternal order of esoteric wisdom. The Christian appeal to Divine Right is the true ancestor of RT, no matter that RT (particularly as appropriated by right-wing Heathens) might claim to revile Christianity.

Of course, we know that humans love to appeal to eternity in order to excuse the passing fashion of the day. ‘That’s just how it is’ must be the most overused justification for injustice ever conceived. Notice how, in the case of Radical Traditionalism, a genuine desire to engage with the mystery, magic, and beauty of the world (the appeal to a perennial philosophy), gets turned into self-parody by the boys’ club obsession with temporal hierarchy? Helpful hint for the haters out there: your hatred of others is a kind of self-hatred, and it will always ruin your intuition for the divine.

Everything is Projection

Jung’s strategy to avoid the pitfalls of literalism, of objectification, of the modern urge to reduce numinosity into the dust of dead matter, is psychologization. As alluded, psychologization is a phenomenological strategy, that is, it privileges the phenomena, the experience, the irruption of the numinous, over the constructions and artifices of human reason. It does not discard rational analysis, but it does attempt to activate rational analysis on the basis of phenomenological patience, respect, and intuition. The strategy has an air of paradox, but in unpacking it the paradox will be seen to subside (this being a true expression of enantiodromia, the mutual embrace of opposition).

When I am confronted by the divine, it may be tempting to anchor that experience in belief, dogma, or ideology. This will inevitably lead me to edit my relationship with that experience in order to make it conform with what my pre-existing beliefs tell me it ‘should’ be. The experience becomes something which can be right or wrong, real or fake, valuable or worthless. Its reality as an experience of something magical is utterly abandoned; I pass over it completely, instead diving into all sorts of arbitrary ideas, beliefs, evaluations, judgments; I begin taking the becoming-present of the numinous as a license to see these necessary yet ephemeral mental constructions as real, eternal, concrete entities.

Jung’s genius move is to say that if I treat my experience – be it numinous or (seemingly) mundane – as being primarily psychological, then I am immediately freed from the burdens of ‘objective’ truth, that is to say, of objectifying truth. I am freed from the obligation to prune my understanding of the experience to make it fit received wisdom. I am freed from the need to defend its validity or to impose that validity on others. I set aside all the intellectual and emotional hubbub that humans construct around the raw honesty of our experiencing selves.

In short, by psychologizing, by setting aside all question about the ‘real,’ ‘objective’ nature of my experience, I become free to truly pay heed to the experience itself. To attend to its subtleties. To map out how it unfolds in my awareness. To lay hold of my reactions and responses. This phenomenological orientation is a stance of reverence. So long as I feel obliged to adopt a stance of literalism, I am at risk of ignoring the unique specialness of the very numinosity I think I value. I reduce its value to a unit of trade in the market of spiritual or psychological dogma.

Now, here is the really important thing: Jung is emphatically clear that the move to psychologize the numinous (or anything else) is not a judgment on the ‘real’ existence of the experience. He is simply saying, ‘let’s set aside the question of underlying reality and attend to the phenomena as they present themselves, that is, psychologically.’ This enables a posture that is deeply engaged, yet also non-attached, a balanced perspective in which faithful attention can be offered without becoming lost in the traps of normal objectificatory human consciousness.

When we adopt this posture, two things happen. First, we no longer need to prove ourselves in contests of hierarchical chest-thumping, because we now have a sense of irony. I recognize that even when my projections are accurate (and often projections  are accurate) they are still projections. They are still psychological processes. So I don’t need to prove the literal reality of my experience. I have internalized my sense of worth. This is a real individuality, not the oxymoronic, totalitarian individuality of RT, which is based entirely on an extraverted stance of dominance and submission; RT is a religion of hollow idols.

Second, we orient ourselves to the inherent mystery that seems to be the basis of all experience. This is an accepting yet active stance. I am freed of the need for denial, since I am no longer attempting to live up to some pre-determined notion of what I think I ‘should’ be. This orientation is reverential. It draws us into the present. It integrates us into the past. It is the enigma that RT tries and fails to capture in the phrase ‘perennial tradition.’

Jung’s stance can be adopted by anyone, regardless of their beliefs. The implication of his approach is that the way we believe (preferably with irony, humor, and ardent yet light touch) is much more important than what we believe. When the latter, dogmatic, stance becomes primary, we become lost in mazes of disowned projection, we feel the numinous turning from us, we start objectifying, and then we are back in the vicious reductive cycle of modernity, which in its lust for magic leaves a wake of endless mundane devastation.

The statement that ‘everything is projection’ is not, therefore, reductive. It is not taking away the magic of numinous experience or devaluing spirituality as being ‘merely’ psychological. Rather, it is emancipatory; when I become open to the possibility that everything is projection, I become free to form truly reverential, open, playful, heartful relationship with the numinous.

There is also considerable discipline entailed by Jung’s approach, and this discipline can be unforgiving. It is far more exacting than Radical Traditionalists seem capable of; for all their martial pretensions, they lack the basic discipline of self-awareness. For all his claimed adherence to yoga, Serrano lacked even the slightest reflexivity or non-attachment when challenged by Jung. Thus, again, the Radical Traditionalist must convert what might be genuine spiritual inspiration into the puerile ramble of Serrano’s later work, or of Evola’s endlessly obscurantist mutterings about the Grail or Hermetic philosophy (which somehow seem to wash up on the shores of Italian fascism’s almost comedic  incompetence).

The Ego and the Depths

Egotism cannot abide psychologization, because the latter forces the ego to cease its misplaced despotism and assume a smaller, more appropriate role. The ego is the part of self most intimately bound up in modernity; psychologization is a profound weapon against modernity with its endless impulses for dogma, objectification, and denial. RT is egotism par excellence, and this is why Evola is absolutely obliged to reject Jung. In so doing, he mires himself in the very modernism that he claims to despise.

Jung explored the dynamics of ego and unconscious extensively in his writings on alchemy. In particular, he made the observation that since patriarchal Christianity set out to impose a rigid, ego-based dogma on spiritual expression, it was necessary for a feminine, underground alchemical tradition to emerge and undermine – or at least transform – that imbalanced order. Everything about RT’s social ideology – hierarchy based on patriarchal violence, elitism, scarcity mentality, paranoia about the Other – is part and parcel of the very Christian social order that suppressed the unconscious, the numinous. RT is absolutely built on a template that rejects the ‘perennial philosophy,’ because the latter can only be fully encountered in the sinuous coils of the phenomenological orientation.

Ultimately, for Jung, the collective unconscious connects the individual psyche through to matter itself; indeed, it dissolves the very distinction even as it preserves it, and thus does psyche speak to us through the ‘material’ manifestations of the phenomenon of synchronicity. To put that another way: Jung does not, at bottom, conceptualize a rigid distinction between mind and matter. This view is reflected in more modern psychologies of embodied consciousness, just as it is in the teachings of the Buddha and many other pre-modern spiritual traditions. So when Jung says we should psychologize our experiences, he is not making a statement that they have no material or objective reality. He is talking about whether we take a reverent, phenomenological stance, or a self-defeating, dogmatic, egotistical stance. Whether we embrace mystery, or entertain the illusion that we can exploit it.

The latter stance, so redolent of RT, is the same stance that produces fast food franchises, factory farms, Third-World industrial exploitation, and the destruction of the planet at the behest of a few rich, shallow, sociopathic white males at the top of the pile. Anti-modernism is a rejection, therefore, of RT, which like modernity itself is utterly unable to reconcile its contradictions. And if we wish to reject RT without also moving beyond literalism we are at risk of turning into the very sort of thing we claim to despise.

The tactic of psychologization, by virtue of its phenomenological orientation, gives over to a poetic consciousness. It tends to the interrelatedness that is so fundamental to the structure of the world – not some hidden, ‘perennial’ property of existence, but one that coils through every moment and every place in plain sight. The occult nature of existence is concealed from us only by our tendency to slip into literalism. Every moment is a priceless gift that comes without cost, for it is beyond the circus of domination and submission, the circus of objectification to which RT is enslaved.

The proof of the failure of RT is revealed in the form of Steve Bannon, certainly its most famous adherent (Bannon is reportedly a big fan of Evola). Bannon is clearly a shallow hack; a reactive, paranoid, self-congratulatory buffoon whose scarcity demons are such that no amount of grasping will ever satisfy the yawning pit in his heart. He lacks the most basic of dignity. If this is the vaunted philosopher king, if this is what an aristocrat of the soul looks like, then RT is a tragic and ugly farce, lost in the mirrored hall of its totalitarian anxieties and haunted by the specters of its disowned projections.

The antidote to RT is anti-modernism, for RT is the very non pareil of modernism – even its fumbling nostalgia for carefully sanitized histories is classic, even archetypal, modernity. And the road to anti-modernism – or perhaps we should call it trans-modernism – is through psychologization, that magical process by which matter and spirit may be reunited through the reverent embrace of mystery. Let us review what traces of literalism – the driver of RT – we might find in ourselves, and let us root them out in a spirit of vulnerable, creative, open-minded playfulness.

For there is a genuine magical impulse entangled in the confusions and hypocrisies of RT. The mistake of RT is to take this impulse of the heart – feminine, grounded in feeling, fleeting yet persistent – and pass it off as an artifact of patriarchal reason. This subterfuge leaves a horrible scar on the Radical Traditionalist’s conscience, and this bad faith in turn impels the embrace of bitter, empty, obscurantist arrogance. The same bad faith is the true root of white supremacy, of patriarchy, of colonialism, of technocracy. In dismantling Radical Traditionalism, let us not abandon the heart impulse, but rather offer it a better home in the arms of a phenomenological orientation, so that it might heal the course of history rather than dam it into oblivion.

One final point remains to be made: Jungian psychological irony is not a call to apathy. It does not mean we give up since ‘everything is projection so who cares?’ That attitude, again, secretly smuggles literalism into the equation. When I truly adopt a phenomenological attitude, I become able to hold resolute beliefs even as I recognize them for the subjective, more or less arbitrary, processes that they are as products of my own subjectivity. No longer am I perverting my conviction for the sake of ego payoff. I can stand with unyielding strength, yet without slipping into the noxious waters of righteous arrogance. I thus give myself the chance to embody the ideal of so much of Hindu thought: to be non-attached, yet deeply caring. This is the well-spring in which progressive politics – particularly as it presents in the world of Heathenry, paganism, and occultism – will most profitably root itself.

Afterword: Jung, Uncertainty, Paradise

In A Tale of Two Friendships, Serrano expresses disappointment with Jung. He comments that, right up to the very end, Jung seemed haunted by a sense of searching, of longing, of questioning. Serrano much preferred Hesse, who he saw as complete, settled, final. Serrano’s projection toward Jung is telling here: he could not understand how curiosity or questioning could be a strength. Jung never ceased to plunge himself into the challenge of embracing mystery; Serrano, in the grip of literalism, could not understand that this was a profound strength of Jung’s character.

This is not to say that Jung was free of colonialist, racist, or patriarchal prejudices. Although his ideas undermine such ill-considered outlooks, Jung was like most great (and privileged) thinkers, not entirely the equal of his own thought, and there are places in his writing where he does not embody his own philosophy. Jung, too, must be overcome in favor of his ideas – if we are to both benefit from his legacy, and if we are to successfully dismantle the noxious weed that is Radical Traditionalism. Nietzsche has Zarathustra tell his followers, “to find me, first lose me and find yourself.” This is a genuine kind of individuality, not the totalitarian sleight of hand that characterizes Radical Traditionalism, in which the oppression of nature and humanity alike is seen as perfectly reasonable collateral damage inflicted for the sake of a supposedly enlightened few.

I hope that by working through the phenomenon of Radical Traditionalism I have not only shown how this ideology collapses under its own weight, but also offered some helpful clues on how we can better proceed as anti-modern progressive thinkers. I choose to conclude with the words of Milan Kundera, who could have easily been speaking of Radical Traditionalism and its right wing totalitarianism bedfellow, though the object of his words was in fact Iron Curtain tyranny. In both instances, the phenomenological orientation could have offered the quicksilver to turn political lead into gold.

Totalitarianism is not only hell, but also the dream of paradise – the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another…If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way, and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets ever smaller and poorer…It is extremely easy to condemn gulags but to reject the totalitarian poesy which leads to the gulag by way of paradise is as difficult as ever.

(Quoted in Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark, p. 85).

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Abundance as a Key to Results Magic

NKS_1867_4to,_92r,_Mead_of_PoetryMagic likes an atmosphere of luxury, or rather, a state of mind that encompasses abundance. Grasping for an outcome, for a result, with an attitude of greed and lust does not impress the warp and weft of wyrd. The Norns laugh at those who clutch in a spirit of desperation. This is not to demean those who find themselves in dire straits, but it is to say that the Norns find it hard to want to reward those who dwell in greed and doubt.

Greed and doubt are killjoys for sure. What deity, what spirit, what force of nature would reward magic cast in a spirit of meanness and faithlessness? There is nothing attractive about the bulging eyes, the sweaty palms, the clumsy gestures, the bloated, yet self-destructive, ego trip of greed and doubt.

As much as the chaos approach to magic emphasizes technique, attitude is the keystone of getting a result. All the technique in the world, indeed, all the ornate ritual pomp in the world, will fail if I cannot detach myself from my desire to achieve an effect. The problem isn’t the wanting – wanting something is powerful magic. The problem is the attachment to that desire, as though my own existence were at stake.

This desperate attitude, this misuse of desire, sends out a radiance of lack. And lack is not attractive to plenty. And plenty is what our magic is supposed to be attracting. The law of sympathy: like begets like. My magic spells need to be exercises in magnetism, or in other words, my desire is counterproductive if I do not harness it to the wagon of playfulness and non-attachment.

The emptiness of non-attachment is the vehicle of the attitude of plenty. This isn’t so much a paradox as a hand in a glove. If I fill my glove with attachment to lust for result then there will be no room for the fingers of my true will, let alone the palm of my highest destiny.

How to achieve non-attachment? Adopt a mentality of luxurious abundance. Oh look, we just traced a circle!

We live in a world that constantly tries to tell us that there is not enough. The scarcity mentality is a tool used by the tiny elites to keep the rest of us in line. It is fuel to the fire of every kind of bigotry, destructiveness, and stupidity. Ironically, it also triggers tremendous waste – witness the gratuitous squandering of modern corporations with their faith in the disposability of things and people alike.

Abundance mentality, therefore, is a kind of political subversion. Note, however, that abundance mentality is different to greed. Abundance by definition is non-attached because it does not assume any reason (e.g. scarcity) to adopt an attitude of desperation. With an abundance mindset there can be passionate desire for something, but it is free of fear of missing out. In other words, capitalism is predicated on scarcity, so abundance is inherently anti-capitalist.

Right, so anyway. An attitude of non-attachment and abundance – wrenched from the maw of this ridiculous consensus reality – makes all the difference between crap magic and wonderful magic. This is why, if you want to get good at magic, you can get a lot out of practicing by doing magic on behalf of others.

The other day my other half and I were having breakfast in our favorite restaurant. The place is amazing but rarely well patronized. Which is ridiculous! I decided to cast a little rune magic – just scrawled Isa, Fehu, and Wunjo in the window and whispered their names over and over with a self-satisfied smirk.

I hadn’t even finished the spell before a table of five walked in. In the space of 10 minutes four more tables filled up. Not bad given we were the only customers prior to casting my spell! It worked so fast that I almost didn’t realize my spell was the cause.

Now that’s a pretty trivial thing to cast a spell for, and not something I was particularly attached to, so an abundance attitude was easy. I am not sure I could so easily access an attitude of playful plenty in the midst of a personal financial crisis. But perhaps by practicing magic under low stress conditions we also begin to inoculate ourselves against scarcity mentality and make ourselves more attractive to abundance mentality.

I suspect that a master of Abundance Mind needs rituals and spells less and less (though they might like to keep doing them for the fun of it). Such practices are ultimately attempts to break the tide of scarcity and attachment and self-defeating lusts. With Abundance Mind, desire becomes unburdened by attachment, and perhaps every gesture, thought, and smile becomes an act of positive manifestation.

But don’t worry if you’re not such a master (who is?). Just set a symbolic intention to become such a being, then let it go. Does not matter, need not be…or…that or something better. Two mantras you can use to seal the deal of a magic spell…and to get closer to approximating the lightness of touch that grants the true power.

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Odin Says: “Shut it!”

MELLIN(1850)_p1.156_ODENOf his wit hath need       who widely fareth
a dull wit will do at home
A laughingstock he          who lacketh words
among smart wits when he sits.
Havamal, st. 5

It has long been my observation that bigotry is stupid and hackneyed. When one looks back at, say, racist humor from the 1970s, one marvels at how anyone ever found the old jokes funny (though sadly it remains the case that there are still plenty of souls who would).

From the vantage point of how public discourse has improved, getting rid of racist humor has raised the quality of comic performance. This is marvelously ironic, since we’ve been assured time and again that “political correctness” would be the death of humor. Perhaps the folks preaching that line never noticed the observation I described above, namely that bigotry is stupid and hackneyed. Indeed, as comedians set bigotry aside they found their creativity flowed more powerfully.

One of the motifs of the Old Norse poem Havamal is its repeated admonishments to silence. There are two general aspects to this advice. The first is that even if you really are possessed of wisdom, it is still best to be cautious in speaking, to present oneself as “middle wise.” In Old Norse times, impression management was a matter of dignity, and being impressive had little to do with having a big mouth.

The second general aspect to the Havamal’s advice is that even a fool can pass without censure if that fool at least has the sense to keep quiet. Apparently there were a lot of loud mouths in Heathen times that needed to be told to hush themselves up.

(Which goes to show that the endless hordes of loud mouthed contemporary Heathens are probably more faithfully engaged in reconstructive Heathenry that they get credit for, though it is unfortunate that they are reviving aspects of former times that even the original Heathens would have preferred to do without).

You can almost imagine Odin (Havamal’s  author by reputation) as trying to shut down some foolish interlocutor, perhaps at an important social function. “Shut it!” Cries Odin. “But –” says the fool. “Shut it!” Roars Odin. “How about if –” says the fool. “Shut it!” Shrieks Odin. And so on. Actually, if one were to substitute “back to the breath” for “shut it” one would have a pretty good approximation of anapana meditation. Maybe Havamal can also be read as a handy guide to technologies of enlightenment (well we knew that anyway). But I digress.

The point is, fools wag their tongues and do so thoughtlessly. Whereas the wise are considered in their choices of speech – not that they never say anything, but that their communication is deliberate and thoughtful. And also, if the foolish were to stay silent – well they might learn and grow and become better people.

Now let us return to my observation that bigotry is hackneyed and stupid and uncreative. Is it possible to be any of these things while also possessing wisdom? Probably not. We must conclude therefore that bigotry is part of the language of the fool, the language that Odin repeatedly silences in the stanzas of Havamal.

My (not entirely tongue in cheek) conclusion is that we have a clear reconstructionist mandate for telling bigoted Heathens to shut their mouths. And indeed, I think we probably have a responsibility to do so if we want to have a happy, healthy Heathen community; if we want a Heathen community that has maximum access to positive, creative (divine? Odinnic?) energy.

Your choice: be a hackneyed bigot, or be a conduit for the gods, spirits, and ancestors. Hmm, that’s a hard one (and surprisingly, for some people it really is…makes you wonder why they think they want to be Heathen).

If getting rid of bigotry makes for better comedy, I think it reasonable to expect the same holds for Heathenry. Certainly in my observation the shallowest, silliest antics in modern Heathenry come from groups like the AFA (anyone remember their hilarious space program?) rather than from the more serious, focused groups like The Troth. (And that’s before we even touch the new AFA leader’s all-but-card-carrying-neo-Nazi statements from last year).

Anyway, right now the political tide is bursting with stupid, petty hatred. Scumbags who want to tear down the very institutions and communities they have claimed leadership over will try to ooze their poison into every little corner of the world, including Heathenry. That’s not something to which we should acquiesce.

And those Heathens who were already on board the poison ooze parade need, more than ever, to know that they are being stupid, boorish, and hackneyed. If they won’t divest themselves of their stupid bigotries then I think the rest of us can assume that they have burning desires to be made laughingstocks (we have it on Odin’s authority, after all), and respond accordingly. Just as we must respond to that fragile little ego in the White House and his nasty little cronies…and then some.

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Generosity Means Resistance

Sutton.hoo.helmetRecently I wrote about the importance of hospitality within Heathen tradition, as well as about the importance of generosity. Something I did not point out in that article was this: the virtues of hospitality and generosity were of particular significance when it came to rulers. The tight fisted king could not expect to win good regard, nor expect to have a comfortable reign. The community was worth more than any one individual, and was not afraid to flex its muscles.

As I discussed in my essay on Heathen Harvest about why universalism makes infinitely more sense than folkism, the picture of unitary ethnic tribes ruled by monarchs was something more or less invented by Christian missionaries. It was a tactic, since it legitimated the fiction that converting the ruler of a tribe or group was de facto converting every member of the community. A transparent bit of political sleight of hand, yet history teaches us that even the flimsiest pretext can be enough to excuse all sorts of outrage. (I love the irony, too, that the folkish notion of ethnic exclusivity was originally a Roman Catholic concoction to facilitate the pacification of the Northern barbarians).

Let’s compare these two ideas: on the one hand the miserly king, on the other, the pretense of uniformity as a device for making a monarch into a tool. We can see how tight-fistedness in a ruler saps the strength of the people ruled, rendering them both more and more vulnerable to abuse and less and less empowered to be creative, magical, and vigorous in their lives. No wonder the mean master was deplored and the unwelcoming lord held in contempt.

The original Heathens, I suspect, were conversant in what we now call game theory; they recognized that a co-operative strategy for dealing with life yields richer rewards than a war of all against all. This doesn’t mean there was never conflict, greed, or selfishness of course; but individualism and aggression for its own sake would have likely been seen as absurdities and death wishes by anyone grounded in the lore of Heathen spiritual tradition.

Underlying this co-operative approach to life, I suspect, was the awareness of the concept of wyrd, the recognition that all events have some degree of significance, and that all things are interconnected in profound ways. As such, rash actions easily have undesired consequences, possibly far in excess of anything that could be expected (who could have predicted, for example, the unfolding crisis triggered by the decision so many years ago to start burning fossil fuels in industrial quantities?).

Generosity makes sense when one recognizes the interconnections of wyrd and grasps that the value of another person cannot easily be gauged by first impressions. When we consider that the smallest action could have incalculable implications (the classic chaos butterfly at work), and that we are incapable of guessing which, when, and how, it makes sense that generosity and hospitality should be default stances. In other words, generosity and hospitality are not just noble gestures; they are expressions of self-interest, and expressions of care for the horizon of mystery, that which rune magicians  refer to as Runa.

To trust Runa is to embrace the unknown. One who is strong with mystery, who has powerful will, is able to trust in all the unimaginable threads of the web of time, in all the infinity of rivulets that trickle down from the fleeting present back into the well of the past. So generosity and hospitality are gestures of grace and power and trust that one can become aligned with Runa for the betterment of all.

Modernity has been rife with masters who have been misers. Colonialism, capitalism, (ironically, given its stated values) communism, and (especially) fascism have been built on principles of miserliness. Of tight-fistedness and inhospitability. Indeed, one could argue that modernity has been a process of attempting to abolish mystery, to abolish uncertainty and the awe and fear that is inseparable from Runa herself. It does not work of course; the tighter the fist is clenched, the less it is able to grasp.

And so that brings me to the topic of January 20, 2017. The day that one of the most flagrant misers in the world, one of the pettiest haters of all time, will ascend to mastery of the most powerful empire in human history. This man, who has done so well at convincing his own victims to vote for him and celebrate him, does not understand generosity and hospitality. He fears and hates wyrd, for it is the omnipresent threat to his callow ego. And in his (and his followers’) attempts to clutch to illusions of certainty (such as illusions of lost glory days that never were), he will gladly sacrifice anything. And for a man with that much power, that means sacrificing everything.

Heathens must stand against this fool and his lackeys. Trump and his gang of thieves have  nothing but contempt for the institutions that have elevated them, for the people that have elected them, and for the people their actions have and will hurt (which includes those who elected them and many others besides, nationally and internationally). We must not be fooled, distracted, discouraged, or bought off. The ancestral ways are clear: Trump and his lackeys are terrible rulers, guided by nothing but cowardice and willful ignorance.

This is not to pretend that Trump is an accident, or that the pointless greed of the corporate-controlled Republicans is an accident, or that we should be surprised that the Democrats have become so ineffectual, bought off as they are by the same masters as those who rule the Republicans. It is apparent that few in positions of power have the slightest interest in service. That the institutions of the US have never protected its citizens with even a pretense of equality.

Yet here is where we stand. We must fight the miser with weapons of generosity and hospitality that can build unbreakable communities. We must reach out without stint and resist every outrage. This new master, who holds his own office and responsibilities in contempt, must be contained and constrained. The institutions of power and governance must be reclaimed from the control of the corrupt. Because of our values of generosity and hospitality, our honoring of wyrd and Runa, we Heathens have more obligation than most to stand up and be counted. Let us not waste any time.

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Thoughts on Generosity

img_0612-1Generosity shows up as a central value in the remnant corpus of Old Norse Heathen literature. Whether celebrating the ruler who shares wealth readily, or exhorting the hall to welcome the stranger without hesitation, it is clear that for the old Heathens generosity and hospitality were fundamental practices that benefitted both the individual and the collective. The Gebo rune, and other references in the lore, also suggest the importance of gratitude, an attitude that recent research indicates can physically heal the brain of trauma.

Arguably a component of generosity is acceptance. Acceptance is a stance I can adopt or set aside, and it entails a gift to both myself and my recipient. Naturally, my acceptance of the other provides them the  freedom to set aside armor (literal or psychic) and find either repose or the opportunity for deeper engagement with life. And in accepting the other I free myself from the burden of resisting what wyrd has brought to pass. As such I become more free to respond with creativity and intelligence.

A common mistake one encounters is the confusion of acceptance and acquiescence. The latter refers to a passive submission, often involving allowing another to harm me. This, however, is not acceptance. Acceptance is merely the act of recognizing what is before me. It does not instruct me on any course of action, be it passive or active. It merely instructs me not to waste my energy on phantasms of my own mind and instead attend to what is.

If I were to wax poetic, acceptance is a means of romancing the Norns and the work that they do. It is a form of religious piety; if Heathenry is a this-worldly tradition (in contrast to, say, the otherworldly focus of much of Christianity) then acceptance must be a fundamental Heathen practice.

Acceptance runs both directions when the question of generosity or hospitality arises. Not only is it poor Heathen form to decline to extend the generous hospitality of acceptance, it is also poor form to decline generosity or hospitality when they are offered. The Heathen perspective, being fundamentally practical, sees reality in terms of relationships (this is what Wyrd is, the dynamic unfolding of relationships). It follows that isolationism and autarky are ill practices from a Heathen point of view.

As such, in the practice of generosity we discover that the ancient Heathen customs are designed to break down rigid dualities. This is difficult for modern people to approach because the modern world – rooted in Christian assumptions – is founded on irreconcilable binaries: good and evil; progression and regression; rich and poor; black and white; colonizing and colonized; dominance and submission. Given such a context it is no wonder that people cannot tell the difference between acquiescence and acceptance, seeing as the latter violates the prevalent binary mentality.

Rigid binaries also existed in premodern times and non-Western cultures of course; the difference is that in some times and places, people realized that binary opposition is just one link in the eternal pattern that wyrd weaves, and not the absolute condition of existence. Thus it is that non-dual philosophies exist, and are often misunderstood by those coming from a Western context. Buddhism, for example, has often been called ‘world-denying,’ yet in reality it teaches radical embrace of this reality as it is right now. How ironic projection can be.

Well, the ancient Heathens left many clues for the overcoming of rigid binaries. We modern Heathens have a lot of work ahead of us. The great danger we face is that, lacking perspective on just how deeply binary thinking has been embedded in our bodies and minds, we will anachronistically project dualism onto the Heathen current as we rebuild it.

This is what is happening when we encounter, for example, folkish Heathens who cannot escape the very modern terms of racial categorization (and often too, poisonous and gratuitous narratives of dominance and submission, which are ultimately founded on a very modern autarkism that would not have been well received in Heathen circles).

One generous way to approach Heathenry itself is to treat it like an estranged lover with whom we have just begun to reconnect. We must be tentative. We must reach out from beyond our own assumptions. We must be wary of cutting the Heathen cultural corpus to fit our pre-existing prejudices and perspectives (those who use Heathenry to justify the worst in themselves would be better off removing themselves). If we can resist the lures of disowned projection, we extend hospitality to Heathenry itself. Only then might it begin to enter our halls and enrich them with its songs.

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