An Invocation to Mystery

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Enigma!
I invite you to grasp
and transform me! Console me with
the unexpected, that which opens door
upon door of magical confusion. Let
your wit not falter, but lather me
in cascades of shimmering charm
and terror. Unveil your worst and
best in an infinite spiral that
circuits itself: end-beginning-end and again.

Enigma!
Defy the narratives encrusted
in the weary sediment of habit, boredom,
and sure expectation. Grace not with
forgetfulness but rather slice with
the cold blade of spirit into the
meaty flesh of life. Be thou no
astringent, but let the red flow
freely to shade and enliven the deep
grooves of your mysteries.

Enigma!
Crack the armor of halfway
and conditions and ambivalence. Set
the course firmly for life in her richest
fertility, her warmest smile, her
graceful savagery, her perplexing delight.

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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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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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Prismatic Reflections

prismHere is a thought experiment for you.

Suppose that you are a kind of transmitter and receiver. Just for the sake of argument – and you can modify the metaphor as much as you like – that your heart is constantly sending and receiving beams of white light, which are the currents, threads, attractions, and repulsions of the web of wyrd, the vast interconnectedness of existence.

This gift of being a vessel of light is pretty handy, because everything else is also such a thing. Imagine all of existence as a vast lattice of interconnection. Call it cosmic fornication, or universal empathy, or even (if you’re a glass-half-empty sort) the unending savagery and strife of existence. Hey, it’s your metaphor, you can do whatever you like with it.

Uh oh, now it gets more complex. You know that heart of yours? Turns out that it is a prism. So every time white light hits it, seven beams of rainbow color spray forth, Dark Side of the Moon style. Suddenly we have this riotous panoply of color bursting from our chest. And, oh, everything is spraying this stuff all over the place. It is possible that actually there is nothing at all but light, in ever more complex refractions and hues.

And all of this light is communication, did I mention that? It is. How much of it are you aware of right now? Probably not so much. Can you feel the sensations right now as you, for example, scrunch your toes together? Can you feel the floor or your shoes or whatever against your feet? Can you feel the light from your screen hitting your retinas, plunging down your optic nerves, turning into words? Maybe you can now.

Chances are that, if you’re like me, most of the time you’re so deeply inside this endless torrent of sensation that you completely take it for granted. You become utterly habituated. This infinite magical matrix of existence, and we become habituated and bored by it! We resent its inconveniences, its inefficiencies. We become armored. The armor prevents the entry and exit of light. Which means we start to deaden.

This deadening does not reduce our yearning for the light’s nourishment, variety, and beauty. We become misers, greedily hoarding what little sparks we can grasp. The more we tighten around the pathetic bits of color left to us, the more they wash free of our possession. For light is not property.

Here the tragedy is in full swing, a vicious cycle of clutching and scarcity. A whole universe of abundant, multi-colored light! And we glower in the shadows, resentful, wounded, blaming everyone and everything else. Eventually the light hurts our once glorious senses, and we cannot even bear it, so now we are greedy for a thing of scarcity that we have taught ourselves to hate.

Need this be the end of our story? Or might we somehow begin to become willing to do something different? To hazard the slightest risk of vulnerability. Oh, and maybe a little bit of scaled psychic armor comes free and we feel good. And maybe that feeling good is frightening, and it feels like what the grey-minded authorities are always telling us is sinful and wrong. So we shrink back.

Perhaps, however, that little taste of our prismatic birthright is too good to forget, to abandon. And so, with great care, with false starts, mistakes, setbacks, we begin a quest for the prism-heart. And then for the light that it emits and receives. And for the whole, vast, interconnected cosmos that the light literally is.

This requires us to recover the sensitivity of our organs – of our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, mind. Our nervous system has to gradually be completely re-calibrated, reorganized. We fear we are losing ourselves, and we have to mourn the loss of our captor, our miser self, for we are victims of Stockholm Syndrome. It is important to honor even the poisoned, barren parts of ourselves, to mourn the loss of the one who causes our self-inflicted wounds.

Is there an end to the story? Chances are, you’ve been making your own metaphor up this whole time, and now my words are gibberish. And if your own metaphor is telling you what you need to hear, then that’s better than if you slavishly molded yourself to my little tale. What happens as more of the prismatic light enters our life? This business of becoming is no certain thing. I am a worshiper of mystery, however, and so I can do aught but follow on.

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Across the Wild Seas

Infinite SeaOne year ago, almost to the day, I crossed the Pacific Ocean to begin a new life in a different land. shortly before I left my band Ironwood released an album called Storm Over Sea, a sonic exploration of oceanic voyages as a metaphor for psychic transformation. For a song entitled “Will to Live,” I penned the following:

Lonely, lashing through the swell
Blackened sky of seething blight
Driven from forgotten lands
Into the sea’s raging night!

Hail-struck with self-disdain
Need-fire set our lives aflame
Thorn piercing the veil of pain
Longing for new Odal to claim!

Laguz light the way!

Ocean lured us to depart
Fled Alfheim, embraced Midgard
Wove our wyrd to wrathful waves
Praying Logr will ward our path

Sang oaths on bright-shining gold
Honest fearlessness to hold
When at last our fleet finds land
We’ll burn our ships and make our stand!

The significance of these sentiments resonates throughout me as I read over them now. Though they were written years ago, their full meaning has only now come into resolution. And I will embrace the sentiment.

I was born on a day of the year when the walls between worlds are considered thin. And often I have felt like the proverbial changeling, an otherworldly child swapped for a human at birth, ill suited to the dare and challenge of being present in a terrestrial, human world. Being what I am, existence in this world has proved a difficult problem, and if I have had some success in bringing myself into material manifestation it has nevertheless been tempered by much pain and reversal.

The will to be present in the world does not come naturally to me by birth, and too many times I have chosen to avoid the struggles that forge depth of character. Yet I have also striven mightily to reach terms with incarnate life, and it is true that my victories are many. The difficulty remains though: when one is coming from a long way behind, a great slew of advances may nevertheless seem to produce little progress.

I say this not in an attempt to extract undeserved sympathy; I am more than conscious that there are others in the world who have overcome much harder biographies and genealogies than I. No: I say this to express my determination to fulfil the vow of the lyrics of “Will to Live.” For truly those words were a vow, though I did not know it when they were composed.

My first year in this new land has been difficult. Many of the structures I have built around myself to allow myself to function emotionally and spiritually were left behind; yet somehow I expected myself to meet a slew of new challenges without any replacement for those supports, and this absurd expectation caused much gratuitous pain. It is only now that I recognise the extent of my self-inflicted folly. I am fortunate to be loved and known in this new life.

Well: I have burned my ships, like the Tuatha de Danaan on the shores of Ireland. If Ireland is incarnate life, then here I am, declaring myself to be for life itself, to be willing to grasp and reach and risk and dare. There was reason in my decision to throw myself into a new life: to give myself no more opportunities to avoid committing to the fine art of being present, of occupying my life.

For it is true that mind and body are one; and too long have I indulged a schizoid fantasy. I recognise that. If for a year I have tangled myself between acceptance of my path and absurd denial, then my errors and confusions stand redeemed in the perspective that I have been given. The encroaching threat of meaninglessness and bewilderment comes into a new light, and the sense and beauty of my chaos and lostness stands in relief.

So: the formula for a full life. One: acceptance of what is, unconditionally. No more fruitless rage and despair that the world does not gratify my every small desire. No more denial of the self-evident. Two: Lust for life. The willingness to reach out, to dare, to risk, to struggle. To embrace the joy of personal power, to cease to cut myself down in the name of supposed enlightenment. To embrace struggle as the terrain of transformation, not as an impassable foe.

“Riding is in the hall easy,
but very hard for the one who sits
on a powerful horse, over miles of road.”

I call my ancestors, literally and figuratively. I imbibe the infinite concatenation of liquid memory from which I am spun.

777  times the Norns I call.

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Thor Says: “Let Go!”

So long as I live, my ego is indestructible. It is a condition of being a finite being of the sort we call human that an ego is part of the complex called Self (albeit only a part, and not even the greatest).

I have often advocated for the destruction of the ego. Then realizing this brought me little peace, I have advocated for its curtailing, hemming in, restricting. In short, advocated for controlling and regulating the ego. I could not see how ironic it was that activities such as controlling and regulating (and destroying for that matter) are all very much par for the ego’s course. No wonder I have struggled with myself despite the rich spiritual life I have been gifted.

Thor gave me a valuable lesson. I kneeled, and he stood behind me. “You want to be free of the ego’s insanity?” He asked. “You want to stop trying to force reality to fit your lazy wish-fulfillment childishness by sheer force of thinking and emoting?” (he knows that I have found such mental activity to bring nothing but suffering and pessimism).

“So!” he cried, and struck my head clean from my shoulders with his hammer.

But immediately, my head grew back, good as new.

“Again!” He cried, and Mjolnir’s reverse sweep decapitated me again. A new head immediately popped out of the gaping cavity of my neck.

“And again!” He was laughing now, as his hammer swished back and forth as though light as a switch of birch. With each swing, he sent my head flying. Yet by the time the backswing was on its way, a new head had appeared, ready to be knocked off again.

Finally, his point made, Thor stopped. “So,” he declared, “now you see that as soon as the ego is in any way attacked, it reappears. Its roots run deep, and at a certain point cannot be destroyed without ending your life.” I realized that the addiction to ego is like an addictive relationship to food (what we might call compulsive overeating). A food addiction is trickier than, say, a drug addiction, because you cannot quit food as an aid to overcoming the addiction. You have to manage a stable relationship with food, while constantly placing your hand in the wolf’s maw.

Now, how then to deal with the ego, its endless complaining, whining, raging, resenting, fearing, overthinking, superstitions, paranoia, and all the rest? How, if not by controlling or abolishing it?

“Just hand it over to me, or whoever you wish to hand it over to,” Thor says, reading my mind. “Just say, ‘Thor, I’m handing this over. I’m letting go.’ You can trust me that I’ll put your ego in a nice safe place for the duration, and you can get on with developing all the other parts of your psyche that have been atrophied in the shadow of your ego’s unruly canopy.”

Just hand it over? Just hand it over. Mind turns to powerless worrying? Hand it over. Mind turns to self-righteous pomposity (designed to inflate a feeling of well-being with little merit of effort)? Hand it over. Even the need to always let go…can be let go.

Like all human beings, I am lopsided, uneven, in my psychic anatomy. It is very hard to straighten a crooked spine when the load that bent it is still on your shoulder. Better to give it to the Divine so that your posture can be healed. The gods want us to be hale in order to better serve and celebrate them. They want to help. But we have to ask (know you how?).

How do we ask? The simplest formula I have heard is the prayer that goes, “God – help.” And then the trick is not to immediately look for the magical solution of all your problems. Causality doesn’t work like that. Let that go. And the need to let it go. And then in the next moment, whatever comes up – let it go. And that too. And that objection. And that digression. And that worry that you digressed. And so on.

Thor reminded me of his Marvel Comics incarnation. The comic book Thor flies, but not through force of will, not through effortful thinking, not through having a specific flying power.

No, how he flies is by whirling his hammer violently, around and around, until it builds up tremendous centrifugal force. Then he throws it, which actually amounts to releasing its circular momentum into a straight line. Just as it leaps away, he grabs the strap on the end of the handle and the hammer carries him with it.

So! This, Thor told me, is the ideal model for how to proceed. If we want to advance, if we want to fly, the way to do it is not through direct effort. No, instead we build momentum, or find momentum, or tap into momentum. When the time comes to move, we do not provide the power ourselves, we just channel the energy we have invoked through right action, self care, sensitivity, intuition, and all the rest.

If we overthink this at all then it will not work. Thor is a god of action (this is what makes him such a profound mystic). Overthinking, egoism whether self-aggrandizing or self-destroying, has a way of subtly creeping back into the mind. Vigilance but also self-compassion are necessary. It will never totally subside, but it can become more and more easily sated and salved – and therefore gradually takes up less space that could otherwise be held by happiness, laughter, play, and power.

So! Whirl the psychic hammer – do not try to somehow force forward. Instead, when the time is right just – let go, and catch the strap. The inner Mjolnir will do the rest. Our job is not to be big, strong, heroic, and striving. Our job is to make ourselves available for forces much more powerful and playful.

Hail Thor!

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Fear, Ego, Surrender

Fear! You can hand over your fear to Wod. It is not yours alone to bear, your unique and disastrous burden. Fear is lack of trust in Wod, and lack of trust in World. It is a symptom of ego, of believing you have to do everything yourself. How frightening a notion to entertain! How heavy and dreadful. Let’s not burden ourselves unnecessarily.

Fear often manifests for me in hesitation. Hesitate to phone someone. Hesitate to express my understanding without loading it first with childish “attitude.” Resistance to doing many tasks – stems from fear. Laziness and resentment are both also driven by fear. Resistance to being present, to negotiating complexity or interpersonal ambiguity – all rooted in fear, which is to say, impiety against Mystery and the Tree and the Well.

“Feel the fear but do it anyway” does not break out of the ego as a basic framework (a cage, if you will). This notion counsels that we accept the ego…but then force aside its resistance. But I just cannot sustainably or reliably win that. Even if I could, I could never relax, feel confident or secure. That was a big part of what fed/feeds anxiety in me: the knowledge that I am not enough to meet the challenges of life by myself.

Formerly I imagined that I needed to make myself equal to the challenge of life. I thought if I could just be hard enough on myself then I would force myself into the person I wanted to be. This did not work.

Then I thought that if I just obliterated my ego then what remained of me would become a vessel for the divine. Superhuman power would swiftly follow and thus I could become equal to the challenge of life (and equal to my ever skyrocketing standards). This also did not work.

The first approach failed because you cannot get something from nothing. Trying to force myself to be font and foundation of my own existence was futile, foolish, and impossible. It guaranteed failure in vicious cycles; I learned to think that if I punished myself more then maybe I’d get somewhere. Astride a horse carcass, I whipped and flayed with exponential urgency. I could not see my whip was only cutting my own flesh.

The second approach was better, I admit. But I became righteous and inflated by my knowledge of the need to embrace Mystery and the simultaneous oneness and difference of all things. I easily became complacent; my ego found ways to claim credit for achievements that my moments of reverence and surrender were responsible for. Eventually I realised that despite my supposedly advanced spirituality, supposed humility (in distinction to humiliation), supposed wisdom and dedication – I still suffered, flailed, became entangled in my own poison. I had finally found truth, but then proceeded to abuse it. Consequently: self punishment, suffering, self pity, pessimism. As before.

My new way I am only beginning to approach, to trace out and understand. It remains as yet a sketch and projection of possibility. Yet it seems to be the best option so far. It is to trust in the Divine and in my patron Wod (id est Mercurius). If I truly trust then I abandon my grandiose expectations of perfection, adolescent/egoistic wish fulfilment, self-obsession (other-obliviousness), overweening hypocrisy. If I truly trust then I hand over my fear. Not try to dominate it through force of will. Not try to obliterate it as part of the ego.

No. Just hand it over. Fear is an expression of lack of trust. So I will trust and accept that whatever happens is meant to be. Even if I don’t like it. Guess what? That’s real ego shedding. Being willing to be a flawed, finite mortal if that is my patron’s will (which it manifestly is, for I am human). I cannot defeat fear, but I can be willing to hand it away. If I trust my patron then I must hand over my fear. And thus transcend the binary madhouse of courage and cowardice altogether.

Fingers crossed.

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Composing Heathenry

I wrestle endlessly with the somewhat related themes of reconstructionism and cultural specificity as they pertain to Heathenry. Tonight some playful (pun unintended but welcome) analogies to music occurred to me. They might help to elucidate my thoughts on both reconstructionism and the Folkish/universalist thing. First I’ll set the scene with some comments about music, but stick with me, even if it seems tangential or obscure at first – I promise to bring my rumination to bear on the field of contemporary Heathen thinking.

As a musician I’m big on knowing theory. I can talk about double harmonic minors, and 13:8 time, and 16th note sweep picking (on a bass, whee!) all day long. And I can effortlessly apply that theory: it isn’t just words or ideas (well, ok, the 16th note bass sweeps do take a bit of effort, but I’m getting there!).

The discipline of all that structure is paradoxically freeing. When I want to do fast, complex music, my hands know what to do because my brain is so well versed. I know intuitively how different tones will combine from my theoretical understanding. I can break down compositions and assemble arrangements with both flair and rapidity. I can store a lot of information about musical structure very simply through the application of underlying rules of harmony or rhythm, which makes learning, performing, and remembering material a lot easier.

I’m far from perfect, and my music theory is very much geared towards practical usage rather than armchair reflection (I’m 100% self-trained). But nonetheless, I think the point is made.

I have even found that, being so deeply grounded in the “rules” of music, I can break them freely. I often find myself doing this with harmonic construction these days. I like the challenge of creating fresh tonal canvasses within the “rules” of conventional scales and chords, but I also find myself freely able to break up recognisable patterns and work atonally. Because I know what the “rules” of music are I can break them in interesting and enjoyable ways.

Occasionally I encounter the view that learning a lot of music theory can be a straightjacket that destroys spontaneity and the creative impulse. I know this does happen sometimes, especially for heavily drilled classical students.

Yet most people I’ve met who claim to avoid learning theory in order to preserve their freedom of expression actually have a rather limited range. They often seem to devolve to the same two or three tricks over and over again, not understanding how to develop their sound. They might be able to “hear” how to give flesh to the bones of their ideas, but lack the skill to embody their creations in a satisfying way.

In the worst cases they resort to “experimentalism” as a substitute for inspiration and ability, hiding behind provocative bungling as though it were a purposeful choice and not an inarticulate flailing.

So my point should be clear: with prudence and an adventurous attitude one can free oneself by submitting to the rigour of musical theory. One needs to avoid the reef of drudging slavery to musical form, and one needs to avoid the seemingly free – but actually inarticulate and blundering – position of being anti-theory.

Well, I see Heathenry in a similar light.

Sure, reconstructionism produces various boffins who shackle themselves to academic minutiae and end up saying the most ridiculous things. On the other hand, without the discipline of historical grounding, people cook up the most half-baked spiritual repast and, not knowing any better, think that they’re somehow creating something wonderful! Yet their efforts lack depth, grit, character (and you see this just as much among “Folkish” Heathens as among Universalists, incidentally).

The better road is to take the adventurousness of the Unsubstantiated Personal Gnosis (UPG) brigade (the anti-theory, or anti-reconstruction types), and the rigour of the reconstructionists. In this way, theory can offer a discipline which frees the creative spark to express itself with great subtlety.

For me this manifests as what I generally refer to as Psychological Reconstructionism. For example, to me understanding the worldview of the old Heathens – the importance of wyrd, time, interconnection, sacredness, hospitality, gift-giving, and reciprocity – stands over and above particular debates about exactly what clothes were worn when or the like.

And this attitude frees me to recognise the similarities between Heathenry and other traditions, even while simultaneously preserving a feel for the uniqueness of the Heathen traditions (and others). Just as music is a universal language spoken in an infinite range of nuances – so too culture. Hence, for example, when I see in Odin the archetype of (among others) the Wounded Healer, I can recognise how this connects him to many other cultures and traditions, even though I can still celebrate the manner in which he is a unique manifestation of that meme.

As a musician I’ve played in prog rock bands, death metal bands, world music outfits, experimental groups, folk ensembles, and bands that have fused various of the aforementioned influences. I’ve touched on genres as varied as black metal, hip hop, and ‘live’ dance music. I’ve played with blast beating metal drummers from hell, African percussionists, tabla masters, Middle Eastern percussionists, you name it (in some cases, I’ve played with people who’ve had mastery of several of these domains!). In all of these configurations, I’ve used the same language to find my way, bringing my particular idiom (to borrow from Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail) to bear in each case.

And I have the same attitude with culture. I bring my own spiritual idiom to the world, but I can freely interface with kindred spirits across all sorts of literal and figurative borders. My deep sense of specific identity – my interest in reconstructionism and ancestor worship – informs my spirit in ways that also enable me to interface with the Other, until I come to appreciate the ways in which seemingly hard barriers are always more porous and fascinating than first shallow glances might suggest.

Hence I am a reconstructionist who loves UPG; and I am a staunch ancestor worshipper and Europhile who embraces cross-cultural exchange and intermingling at the same time. Because to me, the latter is part of the heritage I glean from the former. Just as I am a theory-based musician who thinks nothing of violating every harmonic law in the book if it creates the effect I want (and indeed, I use my knowledge of the ‘rules’ of music and spirituality to break themselves in creative and appealing ways).

The fundamental question is this: are the forms of tradition (be it musical or spiritual or whatever) there to serve us, or are we to serve them? Or is it a bit of both? If we respect them we recognise that they were born from the inspiration of our predecessors, and hence to truly be “reconstructionist” (which, I should mention, is NOT at all necessarily synonymous with being Folkish or Universalist or any other -ism, as these comments on the whole imply) one might have to break the rules of reconstructionism now and again.

In my personal microcosmos Elric and Odin and alchemical Mercury are deeply related (yet naturally distinct); and for me the profound obsession with memory in Heathenry seems uncannily like the same obsession in Sufism (yet I at least cannot seem to effect a straightforward, simple fusion of the two). Things can be different yet the same; in fact this is what the symbol of Yggdrasill is all about: reminding us of the simultaneous oneness and difference of all things, and reminding us of the necessary interdependence that binds the archetypes of  isolation and dissolution.

Blur the lines and we see things as they are; blur the lines and we begin to shed abstraction and embrace the endless mystery from which our world is woven. The closer you examine any boundary, the less distinct it becomes – that might not make it less real, but it forces us to recognise that our specific, localised uniqueness is not dependent on rigid separation, nor necessarily threatened by absence of the same.

What counts is our integrity and our vulnerable imagination. Rigidly clinging to rules about either isolated specificity or generalised universality amounts to underutilising our human faculties and potential. As always, George Orwell had it right to blame the ills of the world on the gramophone mind and not on the particular records being played at any given time.

For like it or not, we are all hedgewalkers like Odin (another reason to call him Allfather), whether it comes to musical expression or spiritual inspiration. The point of being strict…is so that we can become free of all restriction.

All only in my humble, internally contradictory, and frighteningly arbitrary opinion, of course.

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I Have a Dream

By special guest contributor MichaElf Allson


The night I dreamt a dream that altered my mind forever, was a night like any other.

The young’uns were in bed and I had spent the morning at an accountant in the city, processing the contents of a brown shoebox full of my year’s worth of receipts.

Nothing odd, whatsoever. But as the years roll on, I consider it to be one of the weirdest days of my life.

I will describe most of the dream but not in its entirety.

I found myself on a dark strip of road in the bush at night. There were dim yellow lights of homes in the near distance. My daughter Freyja was standing besides me and she was holding an open shoebox with a small hare cuddled up inside on a piece of warm fabric. Its eyes were huge and black. Shining in the darkness. We both looked at it fondly and Freyja replaced the lid of the box as we walked along the path through the bush. As we were walking and talking, my parents drove past us in their sedan. Both of them saw us and acknowledged our presence but kept on driving into the night. I yelled out to them, wondering why they would have left us out here with hours of walking between us and the next township.

We finally came across a tidy brick home that was occupied by a couple in their early seventies. They were very welcoming and very soon we were all enjoying a warm conversation in addition to a light meal and some much needed drink.

Freyja opened the shoe box again to proudly show the couple her pet. The hare was in the process of changing into some kind of sea creature with stumpy tendrils or tentacles perhaps, it was squirming around in the shoebox with the same moist cow eyes staring silently back at us. Before we could utter our surprise, a small opening appeared on its underside and a stream of clear liquid pissed out of the creature, splashing onto the polished white tiles of the old couple’s kitchen floor.

The room then became filled with brightness and a washing machine appeared in full swing vibrating on a spin cycle in the middle of the room. Was it the same room?

On top of the buzzing machine was a light grey bird-like animal. It had the appearance of an owl or a hawk and I noticed that its head was turning from left to right in a kind of happy rhythm. Out of the sides of its head sprang two long feathery horns, like a kind of Muppet monster, and it was shrugging its fuzzy shoulders in a very contented fashion. The animal was vibrating at an incredibly rapid rate, and as it did so, emitted waves of what I could only describe to you as love towards me. More love than I thought I could bear. I remember almost weeping with joy and fear, as the power that this thing possessed obviously was well out of my range of experience and I could do nothing to slow the vibrations running through my heart and soul.

As I concentrated on its face, I could make out three black dots where two eyes and a mouth should have been. The dots were hollow and solid, like black plastic beads. Behind the dots, swirling in the creatures bristling grey fur was an endless streaming of beautiful women’s faces in ecstatic expression. These faces were representative of all ethnicities and they all appeared to be on the brink of orgasmic climax.

It was at this point that I asked the creature its name (standard practice I suppose).

It replied in an English speaking women’s voice with a recognizable Australian tone. Its voice was the loudest sound I had ever heard, or could ever imagine hearing.

She calmly answered my question as I asked it. Her reply completing itself simultaneously in the space of time I spent finishing my shocked enquiry. She said “My name is Chardakiel, and I’ve known you forever!”

She then held out her left hand to me. It was a petite white hand with beautiful tapered fingers. She was reaching out to me with all her love, all at once. I fell away in terror and found myself wide awake in bed with my heart about to leap out of my chest. I was drenched in sweat and very confused indeed.

I had always been in the habit of writing down as many dreams as I could. They always made for good reading at a later date, and this dream was no exception. I began at once to document everything I could recall. I was soon to discover that this dream was totally different to every dream I’d experienced before.

The next morning I made a phone call to my Beastianity band mate Richard Horner. He was a most knowledgeable chap (he still is), and I knew that he had a couple of dictionaries in his possession that listed demonic entities in alphabetical order. He told me that according to his books, the Enochian demon Chardakiel was known to be the ‘Guardian of the South Winds’ and was also described in another dictionary as ‘The spirit of Libra’.

Now I thought to myself…’I haven’t studied anything remotely Enochian since I was a child’, but then I thought…‘Australia is really about as South as it gets’ and even Richard knew that I had been born under the sign of the scales. I continued to “go hmmm”…

I went about my day off as usual, but found it difficult to organize my dream into the back of my mind with any efficacy. I received a telephone call in the late morning from the principal of Freyja’s primary school. She reported that Freyja had injured her shoulder playing silly buggers in the school grounds, and requested that I come and pick her up.

When I arrived at the school sick bay I found Freyja lying on a stretcher bed in the company of her little friend Danielle (Danielle?). She was a little upset and in a great deal of pain. We found out via an X-Ray that Freyja has broken her clavicle or ‘collar bone’.

The shrugging shoulders of the grey and vibrating hawk entity flooded back into my memory as I equated my daughters name with the symbol of the hawk in the knowing that the two were inseparable.

This was just the beginning of the journey that my children and I were to embark on. I remember speaking of this dream to many friends. Some had tears after hearing it.

The years played out in big and dangerous ways. I found myself in the process of planning a brutal homicide close to home. There were scores of sad junkies blasting away in the streets around our inner city home. The insulin syringes would crunch under my boots as I walked Freyja and Otto to their schools each morning. I experienced numerous break-ins to my home. Chasing stray teenagers out of my house in the middle of the day as they were sprung rifling through our kitchen drawers. And without going into too much detail it got much, much worse.

I escaped the city, never to return. I brought with me the kids and the dogs, and returned to my childhood home up North. We settled in a tiny beachside settlement called Blackhead Beach Village. Our daggy little wooden beach house was nestled in a thick rainforest atop a high rocky headland. To walk to the ‘back beach’, we would start down a single lane road that was only partially tarred. The road was covered by a thick canopy of shade trees and at night would silently remind me of the place where ‘the dream’ began.

We met some amazing folk in Blackhead. Wise women taught Freyja and Otto about the animals that lived in the surrounding bush.

There were Possums, Gliders, and Goannas that stretched as long as my two ton truck. There were also families of hares living there. We now dwelled within a community that knew us and respected us and would look out for Freyja and Otto at all times. The spirit of place extended it’s peace and it’s freedom to us. There were no fences dividing properties, no letter boxes and plenty of kindly couples in their 70’s (or so I guessed). No more danger, no more needles for us.

Four years passed before I met my Melinda. We found ourselves at a pact meeting for many of Australia’s underground magic groups held in a bush camp on the outskirts of Sydney. Sweyn and Kara Plowright of the Rune Net were the organizers every year I attended. It was always a very special event, and I thank my man Mark Morte for introducing me into it so many years ago. Melinda attended due to her deep knowledge of the Runes, and hoped to meet someone there who could share her magical life. When she first put her hands on my naked chest it was like receiving a shock from a defibrillator attached to a power station that had been attached to two more power stations. To me it was an unmistakable sign that I’d found a girl who truly knew about magic and that my painful wait was over.

I asked Melinda to be my bride six months down the track and Lokily for me she said “yes”.

Our first ‘date’ was on ‘Imbolg’, or The Feast of St Brigit and we though it would be a grand idea to go out dressed as the elderly. I had my grandfather’s deerstalker hat, a walking cane and a crappy old tweed jacket with fawn elbow pads. The ensemble was topped off with a pair of horn rimmed spectacles. As we discussed our ideas to surprise our friends with our ingenious disguises, we researched the feast of Imbolg only to discover that it was the ancient custom to wear old clothes for the entire day and beg for alms. Melinda donned a huge woolen cardigan that came down to her mid-calf and it was made of a mohair blend. It was light grey in colour and was shaggy and furry and reminded me again of my beautiful and terrible female guardian. We were smitten and married to each other in a beautiful private ceremony on a quiet grassy headland near the ‘back beach’ in Blackhead Beach Village not long after that.

The love I receive from Melinda is comparable to that of the spirit in my dream. The same can be said of the love and patience that my Freyja bestows on me.

I can also say that the love and support that I have received from practically all of the women in my forty odd years of living is unconditionally astonishing.

My dream continues to unfold in beautiful ways throughout my life and may it continue to do so…

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Death and Dagaz

I recently declared that I wanted to embrace the idea of memento mori. The universe obliged. An old ring from childhood reappeared, a skull that I can carry on my hand, a silent and implacable reminder of mortality and perhaps the freedom that comes when one is released from the illusion of eternal existence.

It is important not to trivialise mortality in the name of spiritual or philosophical reflection of course. There are others far more qualified to write about the subject than I. Nevertheless, mortality has been a leit-motif throughout my life and it is a theme that figures importantly for me. Thus I am moved to write.

Death provokes fear. Fear provokes the desire to escape the threat of death. Since we are unavoidably mortal, fear therefore resorts to the deployment of belief as a bulwark against our inevitable demise. This is the essence of what in psychology is known as Terror Management Theory. In order to manage our terror in the face of the awful dark horizon we construct beliefs which simplify the world for our brains, reduce it to digestible symbols that paper over the screaming horror of our infinitesimal powerlessness before the frightful majesty of creation.

Hence, when we make the commitment to live a spiritual life and embrace the horizon of the unknown, we offer ourselves up to a state of tremendous vulnerability. It is here that the double nature of mythology, on one hand door, on the other refuge, is revealed.

Myth is a door. What is a door? A door is an opening in a wall through which we may pass. The door is an invitation into a larger world beyond the limits of the walls we immediately perceive. Even when closed, it is a constant reminder to us of a bigger picture: there is more to be experienced than just our immediate existence.

What lies through the door? It could be anything. A larger world, a different perspective. It could be dark or light, joyous or miserable. It could be a cul de sac or a road that ever ends. Likely enough all of these things await those that step through the door that is called myth.

For where the myth itself is done, safe, secure in its form, recognisable in its character, shaped and regulated by convention, the world that awaits us on its other side is wild, unpredictable, untameable. It is one thing to read about the fury and ecstasy that Odin inspires; another to be swept into a tide of poetic frenzy. It is one thing to praise Jord’s bounty; another to sink your hands into the soil, to plant a tree, to be lost in wild country, to be tossed by storm or tremor.

How does myth open itself? How do we step through? It opens itself when we slow down, when we listen to our heart beating, when we give space for its secrets to give themselves. When we open ourselves to uncertainty, when we put aside our fear of death and the need for control and faith that this fear impels.

Myth is by itself mere words. It can be justified only by the worlds into which it opens. Myth is not property, cultural, intellectual, or otherwise. Myth is a seduction, a lover, an agent provocateur set on unsettling our settled, death denying articles of faith. Myth is always in motion. It is a verb, an action carried out endlessly by the horizon of mystery – Runa – herself.

And so those that want to control myth, to make it dead, predictable, to make it into property, to make it into a rigid template for the construction of stale identity – these we accuse of impiety. If we use myth as nothing more than a vehicle for mere belief – and not as an opportunity to open our spirits to the unknown – then we blaspheme.

I am not afraid, therefore, to declare that it appears that many Heathens blaspheme against their own professed faith without so much as realising it. Yet such folk should not be blamed, unless of course they know better but are too cowardly to embrace the dare of the door. Unless of course, though knowing better, they bar the door up and declare that it is the thing to be worshipped, not the infinite magic that glowers beyond it.

Yet myth is also a refuge. For if we were to stand, naked and purged, before the raw intensity of this mystery-woven universe without any railing to grasp then we would be swept away in the torrent. The universe is so incredibly vast, and often as cruel and arbitrary as she is loving and rational, at least from the narrow glimpse of her secrets that we mere mortals are afforded.

How then are we to cope with true piety – with steeling ourselves against our fear of death and stepping through the door of myth? What protection might we give ourselves?

Myth is redolent with symbolism, with endless layers of associations, connections, refractions, reflections. We find ourselves making sense of the world in the truisms of Havamal, or putting words to the ineffable art of creation when we invoke the subterranean skulduggery of Bolverkr. In the rune poems we find endless fractional images of reality, metaphors which offer moments of order and sense in this vast chaotic carnival of life.

Thus myth invites us to shed all form and embrace the pure unknown, and myth provides language and sense for us to recover and integrate the experiences we find beyond the mythic door. When too distilled our experience becomes, myth offers a refuge, a stable retreat and ward. It helps us to recover from the shock of being finite in this infinite cosmic passion play.

And thus is the art of the alchemist, the magician, the saint, the shaman: to move back and forth across the very threshold of myth. To step out into the unknown, to drink its thick, roaring waters; and then to step back into the warm embrace of mythic refuge, to clothe oneself in the images and metaphor, the traces and patterns which are ultimately inspired by the Unknown and which help us to integrate the Unknown into our finite forms.

In other words, the spiritual art, the art of stepping back and forth through the doors of myth, is the art of living on the threshold of death, which is the ever-present spectre of the Unknown in life. We can only taste the gush of our lifeblood if we are willing to shed it.

Yet we continually lose ourselves in the small doings of daily life, the invisible but compelling stories we tell ourselves: lose ourselves in a futile attempt to avoid facing death’s gaze. Therefore, to surround oneself with memento mori, with reminders of death, is to continually draw oneself back to the door of myth, and the Beyond, and to the refuge of myth, and the need to care for one’s finitude even amid infinity.

To those who dare to remember myth:
Drink deep of the Well!

To those who dare to remember death:
Dance joyous on the threshold!

To those who have ears to hear:

Carpe Diem!

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