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Traditionalism

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Craig Smith [OP]

2003-12-31 14:53 | User Profile

Ahn Fyuh Wi Dizayah's Anti-Racist Resources List Presents

TRADITIONALISM: EVOLAN AND SCHOPENHAUERIAN POLITICAL RESPONSES TO MORALISM

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If you like this kind of political material of an informational nature, you might like Ahn Fyuh Wi Dizayah's Anti-Racist Resources List, a list of anti-fascist, anti-racism and radical leftist resource.

[url]http://www.geocities.com/g848138/[/url]

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WARNING: Material within is not suitable for young viewers. It is frequently controversial and upsetting and in the interest of space, we have not added the often-obvious editorial commentary. Many people, especially Holocaust survivors and the very sensitive, should avoid the descriptions of extremist political figures and their ideologies.

That being said, on to...

Traditionalism: Evolan and Schopenhauerian Political Responses to Moralism

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The term Tradition refers to the concept that all authentic religions derive from a single Primordial Tradition and are therefore equally valid paths to Salvation. Traditionalism is therefore the school of religious studies that strives to illuminate the unifying Principles underlying the various manifest Traditions of the world.

Traditionalism was founded (if one can say such a thing about a perennial wisdom) by the French scholar Rene Guenon (1886-1951). Other notable Traditionalists include Julius Evola, Frithjof Schuon, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Lord Northbourne, Titus Burkhardt, Martin Lings, Seyyed Hossain Nasr, Whitall Perry, Robin Waterfield, Arthur Versluis, R.A. Schwaller deLubicz, and William Stoddart. Thinkers sympathetic to some extent or other to the Traditionalist view include Mircea Eliade, Huston Smith, Jacob Needleman, Alain Danielou, and Joseph Campbell.

[url]http://www.kiva.net/~julianus/tradition.html[/url]

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THE CRISIS OF THE MODERN WORLD, GLOABLISM, THE NEW WORLD ORDER AND KALI YUGA

THE REVOLUTION AND THE CRISIS OF THE MODERN WORLD "Any historical prospect reveals that, just as man civilizations know, after a dawn and a development, a decline and an end. Some tried to discover the law which governs such a destiny, the cause of the decline of civilizations. This cause could never be brought back to purely historical factors and naturalists." (Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World) "There are diseases that incubate for a long time and become manifest only when their hidden work has almost ended. This is the case of man's fall from the ways of what he once glorified as civilization par excellence. Though modern men have come to perceive the West's bleak future only recently, there are causes that have been active for centuries that have contributed to spiritual and material degeneration. These causes have not only taken away from most people the possibility of revolt and the return to normalcy and health, but most of all, they have taken away the ability to understand what true normalcy and health really mean." (Julius Evola in Revolt Against The Modern World) "This present "civilization"... has brought to all strata of society and to all races the following "gifts": restlessness, dissatisfaction, resentment, the need to go further and faster, and the inability to possess one's life in simplicity, independence, and balance. Modern civilization has pushed man onward; it has generated in him the need for an increasingly greater number of things; it has made him more and more insufficient to himself and powerless." (Julius Evola in Revolt Against The Modern World) We live among ruins in a World in which "god is dead" as Nietzsche stated. The ideals of today are comfort, expediency, surface knowledge, disregard for one’s ancestral heritage and traditions, catering to the lowest standards of taste and intelligence, apotheosis of the pathetic, hording of material objects and possessions, disrespect for all that is inherently higher and better - in other words a complete inversion of true values and ideals, the raising of the victory flag of ignorance and the banner of degeneracy. In such a time, social decadence is so widespread that it appears as a natural component of all political institutions. The crises that dominate the daily lives of our societies are part of a secret occult war to remove the support of spiritual and traditional values in order to turn man into a passive instrument of dark powers. The common ground of both Capitalism and Socialism is a materialistic view of life and being. Materialism in its war with the Spirit has taken on many forms; some have promoted its goals with great subtlety, whilst others have done so with an alarming lack of subtlety, but all have added, in greater or lesser measure, to the growing misery of Mankind. The forms which have done the most damage in our time may be enumerated as: Freemasonry, Liberalism, Nihilism, Capitalism, Socialism, Marxism, Imperialism, Anarchism, Modernism and the New Age. Each of these creeds - materialist at base - is philosophically wrong and discredited in practice. Our definition of modern and modernism has nothing to do with what may be 'new or in the shape of the present', instead, what is here defined as modern, is that which is cut off from the Divine, the Transcendant, or the 'Supernatural', everything that does not refer to - and is isolated from - "the immutable principles which govern everything and which are known to man through revelation." (S. H. Nasr) The French Revolution of 1789 which was effect of the ideas on which modern society is based upon was only one markable eruption of this development towards annihilation. It was the primary event which thrust philosophical materialism from under surface onto the world stage. In the intervening two centuries, the power of Organized Naturalism in all its diverse forms - that is to say, the systematic tendency to deny in theory and practice the reality of Soul and Spirit - has grown steadily to the point that it now threatens to engulf the entire world. "The disappearance of conscious personality and the turning of feelings and thoughts in a definite direction, which are the primary characteristics of a crowd about to become organized, do not always involve the simultaneous presence of a number of individuals on one spot. Thousands of isolated individuals may acquire at certain moments, and under the influence of certain violent emotions--such, for example, as a great national event -- the characteristics of a psychological crowd." (Gustave Le Bon) "The idea that institutions can remedy the defects of societies, that national progress is the consequence of the improvement of institutions and governments, and that social changes can be effected by decrees...was the starting point of the French Revolution, and the social theories of the present day are based upon it. The most continuous experience has been unsuccessful in shaking this grave delusion ... institutions are the outcome of ideas, sentiments, and customs, and...are not to be recast by recasting legislative codes. A nation does not choose its institutions at will any more than it chooses the colour of its hair or eyes. Institutions and governments are the product of the race. They are not the creators of an epoch, but are created by it." (Gustave Le Bon)

"The civilization of the modern West appears in history a veritable anomaly: among all those which are known to us more or less completely, this civilization is the only one which has developed along purely material lines and this monstrous development, whose beginning coincindes with the so-called Renaissance, has been accompanied, as indeed it was fated to be, with a corresponding intellectual regress; we say corresponding and not equivalent, because here are two orders of things between which there can be no common measure. This regress has reached such a point that the Westerners of today no longer know what pure intellect is; in fact they do not even suspect that anything of the kind can exist; hence their disdain, not only for eastern civilization, but also for the Middle Ages of Europe, whose spirit escapes them scarcely less completely. How is the interest of a purely speculative knowledge to be brought home to people for whom intelligence is nothing but a means of acting on matter and turning it to practical ends, and for whom science, in their limited understanding of it, is above all important in so far as it may be applied to industrial purposes ?" (Rene Guenon, East and West)

KALI YUGA AND THE IRON AGE The modern world has case broken away from all historical awareness whereas "traditional" structures, for example the Greco-Roman or the Irano-Indian, were organized on the basis of their awareness of their own belonging, belonging that is, to the "eternal" unchanging cycles of human history. The Ancient World at the time of Plato was aware of everything recurring in history. The modern world has put an end to every traditional order and has replaced it with chaos. The individualism of modern societies, which are without Tradition, accepts neither that people are unequal nor that Authority and Hierarchy as such defy analysis. In "Works and Days" Hesiod divided time into five ages:--the Golden age, ruled by Cronos, when people lived extremely long lives 'without sorrow of heart'; the Silver age, ruled by Zeus; the Bronze age, an epoch of war; the Heroic age, the time of the Trojan war; and lastly the Iron age, the corrupt present. This is similar to Hindu and Buddhist concepts of the Kali Yuga. The idea of a Golden Age has likewise had a profound impact on western thought. The characteristic of the modern Age, which can be equated with the "Age of Iron", the "Kali Yuga", outlines and forseen in nearly all pre-modern societies, is the loss of identity and the rise of collectivism, a characteristic of Bolshevist and Western societies alike. De Maistre explained that savage peoples are not primitive peoples in the sense of original peoples, but rather the degenerated and/or degenerating remains of ancient peoples that have disappeared. In contrary to the evolutionary dogma animal species clearly show the degeneration of primordial man’s potential. Julius Evola wrote: “These unfulfilled or deviant potentials manifest themselves as by-products of the true evolutionary process that man has led since the beginning. For this reason, ontogenesis, the biological history of the individual, does not repeat in any way the process of phylogenesis, the presumed evolutionary history of the species, but passes again through some eliminated possibilities. It stops to roughly outline them and then moves beyond, subordinating these possibilities to the superior and specifically human principle, which is defined and fulfilled little by little in the development of the individual.” If anything characterizes our times, it is a sense of pervading chaos. In every field of human endeavor, the windstorms of change are fast altering the ways we live. Contemporary man is no longer anchored in certainties and thus has lost sight of who he is, where he comes from and where he is going. We are now living in an age of increasing strife and chaos. Almost every nation of the West has entered a dangerous age of mediocrity, weakness, and decline. Europe has fallen and brought its destructing forces to the whole world. The whole World faces a profound crisis. The so called progress and the development of mankind have brought us to a point near the end. That "no more tradition's chains shall bind us" is one of the fundamental ideas of socialist/progressivist thinking. Man must be freed from tradition. Reason is to be the guiding light. The devil can cite scripture for his purposes. Reason can often be used to support any position. If men and women are freed from tradition, the experiences of history and the family environment, they can be manipulated and used by ideological and religious leaders, eccentrics and maniacs. If tradition declines, ideologues can mould and influence individuals.

THE NEW WORLD ORDER AND GLOBALISATION The process of building the "new world order", at the centre of which stand the political-financial oligarchic groups of the West, is called as globalisation. The victims of this process are the sovereign states, the national cultures, the religious doctrines, the economic traditions, the manifestations of social justice, the surrounding environment - every spiritual, intellectual and material variety on the planet. The term "globalism" in the customary political lexicon means just "unipolar globalism", i.e. not the fusion of the different cultures, social-political and economic systems into something new (as this would be "multi-polar globalism", "eurasist globalism"), as the imposition of Western stereotypes upon mankind. The type of world under construction was implicit in the history of imperialism and capitalism since the Second World War. The sudden and apparent collapse of Communism as the dominant and official political ideology in Eastern Europe was quickly heralded as proof of the technical superiority of Capitalism and Liberal Parliamentary Democracy, not only over State Socialism, but over all other political philosophies. From this background, the moral superiority of the current Western political order was also assumed, not by a process of rational and informed debate, but by simply stating it as axiomatic, as something which did not need to be discussed since it was 'self-evident'. But it has not been enough to dismiss the great thinkers and leaders of two millennia by whom Europe was originally formed and moulded as irrelevant to education in the modern world, except in a purely historical sense. It has also become necessary to create a sustained campaign against any manifestation of what might be regarded as 'anti-liberal' or 'anti-modern' thought. Current political debate has become increasingly focused on matters on minor importance while issues of greater significance are not given a public airing. There has been a steady internationalization of capital leading to the growth of the multinational corporations and the international banks to a stage where their power is organized through international institutions- the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement On Tariffs And Trade forums and the European Economic Community bureaucracy. The forces of global capital have created political ‘clubs’ such as the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberger Group. In Australia we have the Committee For The Economic Development Of Australia. We are witnessing before our eyes the emergence of a transnational class. This group has no allegiance to any ‘Western’ state, to any race or cultural identity. It is beyond the structures of international politics as have developed over centuries. The ownership of capital is not the sole entry ticket to membership of this class. Service in politics, management, the arts, academia or in certain professions, will win admission. The "values" of the transnational class are economic. In the free-market of goods and ideas, a New World Order of plenty and peace will be built. All countries, all peoples are welcome to "join". All barriers to the movement of money and people will come down. Philosophies and religions will all become aspects of a cultural pluralism which can be ‘chosen’ by people on the basis of taste. Like a new Roman Empire, all is permissible if loyalty is rendered unto Caesar. This New World Order was proclaimed the moment the old Eastern Bloc disintegrated. It is obvious that there are peoples who are not part of this Order. The Chinese superpower is not a member of the club; nor is India, and Russia remains unwelcome. The Islamic world cannot be part of a system that directly involves Zionism. African countries scarcely count at all. This does not mean that these lands are not penetrated by international capital, nor that they don’t contain sectors who would dearly welcome globalism. It does not mean that cheap labour countries are not exploited to provide cheap products – or immigrants to the factories of the home-bases of the NWO. The fact that whole areas of the globe are outside this system means that its claim to political normality is a basic lie. It must thence rely upon the impact of economic globalisation for its power. In the struggle against the New World Order it is necessary to appreciate the presence of peoples and states outside of it, and possibly opposed to it. Not all these forces are fulsome or even conditional friends. Some are eying Australia also as an open-land available for possible settlement. Yet, in the world of realpolitik, facts are facts and it is necessary to surrender to the facts. It is obligatory that we mobilize our ideological weapons to win allies where we can, or to disintegrate or damage those structures imposed upon any people by the new Order. We must weaken this system. This means we understand that if we demand national freedom for ourselves, we cannot repudiate it for others. We must favour national independence struggles. We must accept the genuine plurality of cultures and peoples, as opposed to the false pluralism of liberal-internationalism, which seeks to standardize humanity and culture. We must encourage armed neutrality against alien blocs and support - even critically - any regime bullied by the new Order.

[url]http://www.geocities.com/integral_tradition/crisis.html[/url]

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The Faith Of Life And Order Tradition, Racialism and National Socialism

12/28/2003 12:10:26 AM Discuss this story in the forum Bill White

Commentary -- The Faith Of Life And Order Tradition, Racialism and National Socialism

Traditionalism is the occult understanding of the ancient faiths of the great civilizations. It is an understanding of the nature of the world as one of conflict between two primordial forces – creation and destruction – in which, after a long period of disintegration, where death appears to dominate life, the life force reasserts itself, annihilating its opposition. While these fundamental propositions are not in accordance with the crude racialism of American white nationalism, they cannot be understood outside of their racial implications.

The nature of the Life force – the force of creation – is one of Order. As the Egyptian Pharoah Akhnaton once prayed, the God of Life and Order both created the Earth’s peoples and divided them by race – then separated them and placed them in their own distinct portions of the world. A Christian who believed in God’s creation of the Earth would see it similarly – that the divisions between men are part of God’s creation, and thus to deny or attempt to undo those divisions is a rejection of the divine majesty of God – it is the sin of pride in the belief that man can arrange the Earth better than the divinity himself.

The nature of the Death force – the force of destruction and disintegration – is one of Chaos. As the Jew preaches and has preached, it is the destruction of the Order of nature, and the disintegration of the divisions between men, that is the essence of the faith of evil. The Traditionalist sees the Jew as an occult force of hatred for Life and Traditional humanity; the Christian sees the Jew as both the child of Satan and the congregant of Satan’s synagogue.

Within each race of man exists the same Order as exists between each race of man. While the races of men are separated by geography, the Order within each race is separated by caste – a division more fundamental than the economic accidents of the Marxist Jewish concept of social class. Some members of a race are the guardians of Tradition, whether intellectually as a priest caste, or physically as a warrior caste.

Other members of the race conduct the practical business of material living, either as merchants or as works. Within each race is also an out-caste – the defectives of the race whose lives possess no character which give them value, or whose actions sum to a net drain on society without any potential of a net contribution.

Further, in the true society of Life and Order, the ultimate government of a race or a people is entrusted to a living god – a man whose body is possessed by the God-king of that race. The divine being uses the man’s body as his vehicle for communication with his people, and for providing his wisdom is guiding the people’s development upon the Earth.

The nature of the Death force is to confound and confuse these orders and these divisions, first so as to cause the God-king to leave his people, and second so as to cause the people to fall into progressively worse forms of government. The Death force confounds the castes, and causes individuals within the castes to see themselves not as men and women dedicated to the performance of a particular function, but as individuals who have no function other than that which they themselves determine.

By isolating in-caste individuals from the social whole, the Death force pushes these individuals into the status of out- castes, though this type of individual outside of their caste should be confused with those individuals who are incapable of caste at all. The corrupted individual is capable of production if they can be rescued from the Death force; the other type of individual is incapable of ever contributing productively to the continuation of Life and Order. The people of the Death force are the Jews and all those who adhere to Jewish doctrines.

Besides the Jews, there are those people who have never possessed Tradition or the civilization and culture which accompany it. On Earth, these people are primarily the two people of Africa, Australia and Oceana, and those peoples of the Americas and Asia which never developed beyond tribal society. The major peoples of Tradition are the Northern Europeans (Germans, Nordics and Celts), the Southern Europeans (Greco-Romans), the people of the Middle East (from Babylon and Assyria to the modern people of Islam), the Egyptians, the people of East Asia (China and Japan), the people of Southern Asia (the Indians), and the people of Central America (the Mayans, Aztecs and Incas).

Those who stand outside of those cultures and their derivatives and who are not Jews are simply animals that never developed – they are blank slates who played no role in the battle of Life and Death until those forces discovered them in their primitive ignorance, and play a role only insofar as the people of Tradition or Destruction use them for that purpose.

Left to themselves, the native peoples of Africa, Australia and the American and Asian tribes would never have any meaningful role in the larger conflict that defines existence. Because the nature of the Jew is to destroy, and because those who adhere to or embrace Judaism or any of its derivatives are inherently destructive by nature, those who follow the God of Life and Order must live in conflict with the Jew until the time of the Jew’s final destruction in the battle of Ragnarok, or Armageddon.

Some outspoken Traditionalists today try to avoid this essential element by misrepresenting the fundamental teachings of men like Julius Evola; this practice is itself evidence that the influence of the God of Death extends even to the minds of the Traditionally-oriented among modern men. While it is true that there are elements among every race that are worthy of being despised, either because of their defective nature or because of their embrace of the culture of the destructive God, the only race of man that willingly exists in the near universal service of the Death God is the Jew – and that a man born into Judaism can only be redeemed by a fundamental rejection of their inner nature – a process whose existence itself is questionable.

Similarly, the argument that men are of different castes, or that some men within every race are naturally defective, is used by some to argue that there is no inherently racialist aspect to Tradition – that one would prefer the company of an Indian Brahmin to that of a white sudra. While it is true that the company of the Hindu Brahmin may be more intellectually stimulating, and such a cultural exchange between people of Tradition should be encouraged, it is the duty of the white religious caste to provide for, to lead, and to protect the white worker.

The fact that there are caste divisions among white people, and that there are people in other branches of Tradition that are natural leaders among their people, does not invalidate the idea of Order, and its corollaries of division, specialization and hierarchy, among the races of mankind. While it may be true that it would be immoral for a white worker to presume to dominate or fulfill the role of a Hindu Brahmin, that does not imply that the Hindu Brahmin’s role is one of domination of the white worker or make any implication on the natural relationship between European and Indian society.

White workers exist within a caste system with white priests, warriors and merchants, and Hindu workers exist within a caste system with Hindu priests, warriors and merchants. The two caste systems have a relationship between them which defines the manner in which the individuals of the societies’ castes interact. National Socialism, as practiced by Adolf Hitler in the Third Reich, is seen by many as the most recent manifestation of the rule of the God of Order on Earth. Evola, it is true, had difficulty with the worker-oriented nature of National Socialism, but those objections, to a large degree, can be dismissed as a deficiency in Evola’s understanding; Evola, in his writings, is overly focused on his personal superiority to others of his own race, rather than on his role in a healthy Traditional society in which others of his own race co- exist in different positions.

Evola saw the hierarchy of the castes as being a pecking order of domination instead of a cooperative differentiation of function – it is a bit like the old joke where the organs of the body come together and think themselves more important than the asshole, until one day the asshole decides to stop working and the body dies. Even the “lowest” of the castes is as vital to the functioning of the Traditional social body as the highest, and thus the members of each caste must be respected within the context of their social role – a worker who performs admirably as a worker is as respectable as a rich merchant, a decorated warrior, or a wisened priest.

Part of Hitler’s genius was his preaching of the integration of society into a social whole where, while the divisions of warrior, worker and merchant still existed, they existed in a complimentary, rather than oppositional, manner. The Third Reich stressed the unity of all the people of the race and nation, and worked to expel those elements which seeked to disrupt the natural harmony that occurs when people of all social roles struggle together for the common end. Hitler’s rise and fall is seen as a fulfillment of prophecy.

One of the God- king’s Traditional names is He-Who-Comes-Back. The God of Order is to return in different manifestations during the Kali Yuga -- the Age of the Death God – to remind those men and women who adhere to Tradition that the time of the final battle is coming. In the past, men such as Genghis Khan have appeared on Earth as the physical manifestations of the Life God and his pantheon – Genghis Khan’s role was the manifestation of the Life God as a destroyer of wicked men.

Adolf Hitler was an avatar of the God of Order who appeared to rally men to the old faith in preparation for the God of Order’s final coming. The individual existences of the men and women who live in the way of the God of Life and Order have meaning only insofar as their personal existences contribute to the larger construct whose life is eternal; the spirits of those men and women who struggle for Tradition are eternal and are subject to perpetual reincarnation as their spirits are needed by the Life God later in the cycles. The idea of reincarnation, whether once as a warrior from Valhalla who is brought back at the final battle, or perpetually as part of the soul’s development and enlightenment, is fundamental to the Traditionalist worldview.

However, reincarnation is not universal – those peoples who exist without souls, such as the Jews, and those people who do not perform their obligations to their larger social construct die without resurrection, and their life-force dissipates and is destroyed. This idea is best captured in the Norse view of Hel and the Greek view of Hades as places where the souls of those who did not excel were sent to exist in eternal nothingness. Some could argue that men who do not perform their proper caste roles, like the Jews and the servants of Death, never possess souls at all – that while the number of souls was fixed at a finite number at the beginning of time, the number of soulless walking corpses have grown substantially.

The God who comes back returns to Earth periodically to give hope to the men and women of the Traditional faith. Though there is an inherent hostility to Christianity within much of the current body of Traditionalist thought, I believe that both Jesus Christ and Mohammed can be brought within this world view, as can men like the aforementioned Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan and Akhnaton, and many others whose manifestations on Earth have fundamentally altered the relationships between Life and Death. I do not believe that the misguided and decadent followers of Christ in the United States – followers who embrace the Jew and the God of Death at every opportunity, and who spit on Life, Order and the love and health of the world – can be held against the teacher himself.

Further, the fact of conflict between the adherents of a Traditionalist teacher and other Traditional cultures is not prima facae evidence that the new teacher is a manifestation of the Death God; Genghis Khan destroyed the decadent Traditional cultures he encountered simply because they were so withered by the Death God that they needed to be destroyed so that creation could again spring up amongst them. Similarly – the fact that the teachings of Christ were propagated in a decadent and destructive form among the Romans, who had already been possessed by decadence and destruction, or that Charlemagne destroyed the healthy paganism of the Germans in the name of Christ – does not inherently eliminate any Traditionalist understanding of the Christian teachings.

Some Christian teachings – such as the teaching that there is no God other than the Jewish God the Christians attempted to inherit – and most of the Jewish teachings wrapped around Christ’s life, must, however, be rejected out of hand. As adherents of a Life-oriented worldview, the individual Traditionalist accepts certain ritualistic taboos as evidence of adherence to the faith. Savitri Devi has proposed abstinence from the consumption of meat as a taboo to demonstrate that one believes in the destruction only of unhealthy Life, which is inedible because it is tainted.

Because the Death Force exists to corrupt and destroy healthy life and healthy existence, one refrains from the destruction of all healthy creatures. By refraining from eating meat, one is reminded not only of the duty to protect the innocent, but of the duty to kill and punish the wicked and the unjust. By integrating the taboo into one’s daily life, one is given a constant reminder of this duty – much as the Muslim habit of five-times-daily prayer is a constant reminder of his submission to God.

By understanding the world as being the stage where a conflict between good and evil – Creation and Destruction – is being played out, the Traditionalist has a higher understanding of the nature of men and natural forces, and is better equipped to contribute to the world and to claim his place in the Hall of the Gods, awaiting reincarnation to participate in future battles for the health of the world. The Traditionalist knows what the petty materialist intellectuals of modern times do not, and thus can understand the behavior of the Jew in politics and finance in a way that men who utilize economic analysis with the assumption that there are no significant differences in the nature of the races of man cannot.

The Traditionalist can see the wickedness of the followers of the Death God and knows they pursue that wickedness even if it causes them material adversity, while the class analyst or the analyst of the petty politics of conservatism and liberalism remains shocked without proper explanation of their behavior. The Traditionalist knows that the Death God and his servants intend to consume the world, while the capitalist, communist, conservative or liberal believes that the world will continue ever and on, and that the way the world is in the modern age is the way the world always has been.

The Traditionalist brings tens if not hundreds of thousands of years of religious teaching with him, while the petty intellectual has only the data of the past century, if that, to analyze. Traditionalism is the only view of mankind that adequately explains the events of the current age and the means by which humanity can be rescued and the world’s human relationships can be made whole. Traditionalism predicts future events while adequately explaining the past, and does so in the most simple fashion. It is the faith of Life and Order, and it is the only faith from which an intelligent and healthy racial and social outlook can be formed – an outlook which gives each people their proper place and which only opposes those elements of the races which attempt to corrupt or destroy the position in the natural order which each race occupies.

[url]http://www.overthrow.com/lsn/news.asp?articleID=6421[/url]

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In order to understand Pierce's millenarian worldview, it is necessary briefly to explore the racially rooted theology upon which his organization is based. This philosophy, which Pierce calls 'Cosmotheism,' resonates in his literary work, particularly in Turner, and provides adherents with a totalistic logic explaining the order of the universe.<12> Blending Darwinian evolutionary theory with ideas from ancient Teutonic legend, Cosmotheism synthesizes the scientific with the mystical in its construction of reality. While the empirical and otherworldly components of this belief system might initially appear incompatible, in a strange sense each reinforces the other in an all-encompassing concept for human evolutionary development.<13>

Pierce perceives the world in terms of separate, biologically differentiated evolutions of racial groups. Reflecting strong traces of the theories of scientific racism he read while at Oregon State University,<14> Pierce's conception of racial progress would seem, at first glance, to be merely an extension of the early twentieth century's 'racial anthropology' literature. Here it is important to see that Pierce's system of thought diverges significantly from the purely scientific structure adopted by early racial theorists. In the Cosmotheist thoughtworld, evolution takes on a spiritual meaning as mankind follows predetermined courses of racial destiny. Pierce has described this process as an 'upward path' with its end point leading to the goal of 'oneness with the Creator.'<15> This ultimate Cosmotheist objective, the white race's realization of godhood, is viewed as a genetically wired certainty. According to Pierce, who has lectured on the subject to small gatherings of National Alliance members, the race's 'divine spark' has propelled it to greatness throughout history and separates it from all other forms of life.<16>

The concept of a unique Aryan path to godhood has parallels with the 'secret wisdom' beliefs found in ancient Gnosticism. Although lacking the racial mystique that would come to preoccupy some of its distant offshoots, Gnosticism established an early foundation for alternative expressions of salvationism. Embracing a mysterious and syncretic belief system borrowed from Platonism, oriental religions, Judaism, and Christianity, Gnosticism flourished in the first few centuries c.e. in the Mediterranean Basin as a counter religious movement to orthodox Christianity.<17> The importance of Gnosticism as a forebearer of other elite, alternative theological systems is found in its dualistic interpretation of reality. Perceiving in themselves a divine spark that differentiated those within the sect from outsiders, the early Gnostics held that the realization of spiritual unity with God could be achieved through secret revelation and initiation into the group's esoteric tradition.<18> This knowledge, which was deemed unavailable to group outsiders, permitted the 'release' of one's godly potential, and thus facilitated the 'insider's' personal path to divinity.

The Gnostic gravitation toward dualism and group secrecy was continued by a host of esoteric orders in the Western world. In particular, notions of occult revelations resonated with many of the secret societies which drew their inspiration from the Gnostic worldview. It is interesting to note that the uniquely German permutations of Gnostic belief, which in the nineteenth century combined Volkish nationalism with the mysticism of legendary secret societies, became the prime expositors of a 'revolutionary gnosis' that possessed both a racial basis and a political agenda.<19> The best-known of these relatively obscure ideas was Ariosophy, an Aryan variant of the era's widely popular Theosophy. Blending German nationalistic sentiments, occultism, and Teutonic belief, Ariosophy emerged as a 'crisis cult' in response to its adherents' sense of dislocation within late nineteenth-century German society and the disunified nature of the German state.<20>

Pierce has consistently displayed a fascination with various figures who are commonly associated with the Western esoteric tradition. Throughout his writing career, Pierce has admired the metaphysical ideas of mystical philosophers such as Meister Eckhart (1260-1327 c.e.) and Giordano Bruno (1548-1600 c.e.).<21> Scholars have generally located Eckhart and Bruno in the lineage of esotericists whose brand of mysticism incorporated Gnostic and Neoplationist themes.<22> For Pierce, these theological scholars provided their race with a glimpse of the Divine in man's soul. Inspired by similar views about the innate urge to achieve union with a higher nature, Eckhart and Bruno observed cosmologies which, while subtly differentiated, stressed the possibility of the soul's perfectibility.<23> It was, in fact, the mystical reference to this divine spark, a point of central important in Eckhart's philosophy,<24> which Pierce integrated into his own racially based cosmology. In a 1978 essay entitled 'The Faustian Spirit,' Pierce employs the Gnostic understanding of the soul's upward path in his racially deterministic framework of thought:

The race which is the bearer of this spirit must, therefore, be doubly careful that its genetic basis is preserved'that it does not become a race solely of lawyers, clerks, laborers, and merchants but remains a race also of philosophers, explorers, poets, and inventors: of seekers of ultimate knowledge, of strivers toward the perfection which is Godhood.<25>

Cosmotheism appears to be philosophically related to this ancient esoteric tradition in some important ways. First, Cosmotheism can be viewed as an extension of the same type of protest subculture which organized around groups in the Gnostic constellation. Galvanized by the feeling that society was flawed and on the wrong course of development, these groups turned inward, away from the surrounding social system, and sought security in a group-specific, utopian image of the world. Second, despite the chronological gap between the emergence of the Gnostic outlook and that of Cosmotheism, there are similarities in their respective uses of dualism. Employed by each as a means to divide society into camps comprised of the 'enlightened' and the 'unknowing,' these philosophies provide believers with a neat, systematized way of differentiating between insider and outsider. Such an outlook provides the group with a sense of unity and a means to coalesce around shared ideals which are held to be superior to those of the outside culture.<26>

DESTRUCTION AND REBIRTH

Cosmotheism is partly differentiated from what some scholars of radical mass movements have termed the 'reconstructed tradition,' which defines the outlook of groups seeking to return society to a past golden age.<27> Finding the dominant culture unsatisfying and threatening, separatist movements of this type are mobilized around inspirational themes taken from a putatively untarnished past. Despite sharing this tendency to look backward through history'particularly to Viking lore and classical antiquity'for models of an earlier, glorified existence, Cosmotheism possesses an inherently forward-looking character which extends from its emphasis on evolutionary development. In this respect, the Cosmotheist vision for the future is presented as a linear path of racial progress, with each forward step taking the race closer to the threshold of divinity. Whereas other factions in the radical right constellation (such as the Christian Identity fold and the various Klan organizations) perceive in bygone eras a purity of life to which they long to return,<28> the National Alliance uses utopian imagery drawn from both the past and the future. It is the more forward-looking component of Pierce's philosophy which carries revolutionary implications.

Like all millennial beliefs, Cosmotheism is a salvific philosophy that anticipates the dissolution of an existing world order and the eventual realization of a new and perfect society. Its bio-racial underpinnings reflect a deterministic view of history in which the anticipated age of ultimate renewal is arrived at through evolutionary means. This process of 'racial advancement,' as Pierce sees it, is preordained, and thus part of a cosmic plan for universal order.<29> The connotations of logical progress in Cosmotheism, albeit disturbing, convey optimism about the future, an attitude which is linked to an underlying faith in racial destiny. But unlike those 'progressive' millenarians whose beliefs are anchored in a view of history defined by constant improvement,<30> Pierce and his adherents envision the secular world in an eroded and decaying condition.

The conviction that the entire social system is headed for destruction is actually a key source of faith for millenarians whose dreams of renewal are contingent upon the realization of a sweeping disaster period. This system of thought, which religion scholar Catherine Wessinger has termed 'catastrophic millennialism,' is predicated upon a group's belief that the imminent destruction of the existing order must first take place before the perfect age, the new millennium, is brought about.<31> From the perspective of the believer, the catastrophe initiates the process whereby the forces of total worldly transformation are set in motion. In this vision, hope for the future is inextricably tied to the catastrophic event which alone has the power to recast an impure environment in a more hallowed form.

The redemptive quality of the apocalyptic vision for world transformation is understood in two ways by catastrophic millenarians. At one level, the disaster completely eradicates the past, giving birth to the new order in which life starts in a pristine form. The second level at which redemption occurs takes place within the community, which sees itself as benefiting from the destruction of the old way of life. As Norman Cohn observed, for revolutionary chiliasts the meaning of the Heavenly City on earth is inherently exclusive. Salvation is reserved for the 'chosen people' who will reap the reward for their faith when history is brought to its consummation.<32>

Catastrophic millennial theory provides us with a starting point from which to gauge the connection between disaster and salvation, but it fails to elaborate on an important aspect of this nexus. What is left undeveloped is the notion that disaster assumes a role in the renewal process that carries with it a faith-sustaining power. When considered from this vantage point, catastrophic events designed to bring down the decayed order of things perform a critical function in the totalistic mindset of those engaged in 'the final struggle.' This function, as Michael Barkun notes, is illusory and gives catastrophically inclined millenarians the appearance that the ultimate dream for change is unfolding.<33> Thus, for the believer, the disaster may be seen to be as much an act of self-confirmation, or reassurance, as it is part of the transformative cycle. At this point we begin to encounter the strong possibility that disaster is itself part of the millennial dream and not merely a precursor to it or a separate time on the millennial clock. The result is that whereas disaster and the era of perfection might, in other situations, be viewed as distinct epochs of history, here they are joined together in a synthesis of revolutionary change.

Pierce's conception of total change from the degraded state of present affairs to a sublime future has as its major obstacle the societal institutions which are believed to be responsible for the decline of white America. Presented in National Alliance literature in pathological terms, the government, courts, media, universities, and all other vestiges of the modern democratic social system are considered sick and inherently corrupted.<34> Comprising the core of this societal power structure are the same groups Pierce portrayed in Turner as 'unassimiliable,' especially Jews and non-whites.<35> These groups, along with the government and its supporters, are seen as the promoters of a subversive 'diversity' agenda which has as its goal the disintegration of white culture. There is, however, a strong hint of hopefulness to be found in the National Alliance's appraisal of America's diseased condition. As Pierce points out in a recent article he wrote outlining the future strategy of his organization, the nation's advanced state of social decay represents the beginning of the end for the old Order:

The situation in America is no longer quasi-static, as it was during most of the 1970s and 1980s. During that earlier period the Jewish media were able to keep nearly all of the public hypnotized, to provide a false reality for them in the place of the real world around them. . . . Now the process of decay and disintegration has accelerated; now the hypnosis is beginning to wear off as reality becomes too harsh to ignore. This process will continue to accelerate in the future.<36>

TAPPING INTO THE MILLENNIAL OUTLOOK

The theme of 'rebirth' undergrids all expressions of millennialism; but when catastrophe is eagerly anticipated as a precondition for earthly bliss, critical questions should be asked about the implications of the group's beliefs. Above all, it is necessary to consider whether the group's vision of disaster promotes action on the part of adherents to 'trigger' the events leading to the perfect age. It is this specific behavior, the act of forcing the millennium through human effort, which may place the group on a collision course with society. The distinction between the passive expectation and active promotion of catastrophe is important because it effectively separates disaster-prone millennialism into either nonviolent or potentially violent types. When we turn our attention to the Cosmotheist impulse which informs Pierce's literary work, it becomes clear that the doctrine legitimizes violence as a tool for implementing its program for change.

The Turner Diaries' fictionalized route to racial Armageddon provides us with a glimpse of Cosmotheism's track of logic. Presented in the novel in its most highly distilled form, the philosophy mandates the complete eradication of enemies who are portrayed as subhuman. Only by purging the world of their degenerate and impure society can a new system'an Aryan order of life'be created. The pure vs. impure dynamic in Turner does not lend itself to strategies of change which are less than total. This interpretive framework is ultimately reductionistic. Absolute distinctions drawn between 'the righteous' and 'the alien' take the form of a timeless truth and propel the believer on a course running counter to the interests and values of the larger society.

With these insights in mind, we can begin to see how Pierce's Cosmotheist beliefs, if followed to their logical ends, may activate the revolutionary forces needed to overthrow the opposing power structure. As the designs for an Aryan society are increasingly thwarted by the despised regime, some members of the faith may take it upon themselves to 'make history.' Although Pierce has been quick to dismiss as 'impulsive and overzealous' the perpetrators of the Oklahoma City bombing,<37> his early writings reveal an entirely different perspective on the use of terrorism to further organizational goals. In a 1971 essay, Pierce minces no words about the resolve necessary to do battle with the 'system':

We do not need to reason with the monster; we need to put a bullet into its brain and hammer a stake through its heart. If that means blood and chaos and battling the alien enemy from house to house in burning cities throughout our land'then, by God, it is better that we get on with it now than later.<38>

[url]http://www.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/usanazis/cosmotheism.html[/url]

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Evola's system of thought is a philosophy of Nietzschean descent, but with a transcendent element. It both rejects and resembles Existentialism: Evola's ethics and politics are based on a defense of the essential self that goes beyond mere self-preservation. Personal action should be absolute, without looking for punishment or reward. Even the state rests not on force, but on the power of its idea. This Platonic foundation transcends mere history. This is what Evola, and his sometime colleague René Guénon, meant by Tradition.

Evola represents a segment of the Right that is simultaneously anti-socialist, anti-capitalist, anti-democratic, and anti-Christian. It is even, to some degree, anti-national. Though sometimes associated with the German “Conservative Revolution” (an association of which Evola approved), there is nothing very conservative about this Traditionalism. As Evola himself acknowledged, little now deserves to be preserved. Tradition is as revolutionary a doctrine as any that has appeared since the 18th century.

The model for Evola is a New Rome, governed by a sacral, organic hierarchy, at the pinnacle of which is a sacred monarch. His idea of monarchy is rather Taoist; the monarch rules by non-action, by the mere magic of his existence. Evola's Traditionalism is sometimes called “Magical Idealism.” Simply invoking the Transcendent has an effect. The principle of social organization seems to be that “if we build it, they will come.” “They” are the men suited by training and enlightenment to constitute the hierarchy; “we” are an esoteric Order, dedicated to Tradition.

In some ways, the Fascist and National Socialist regimes were moving toward Tradition, though in their decadence they turned toward socialism. In the end, it was the people, the race, who failed fascism. As for Nazism, the Führer principle was defective; the Führer acted for the Volk, not for the Transcendent. For Tradition, in contrast, “common ideas are the fatherland.”

The Conservative Revolution does not seek to preserve antique forms, but to actualize perennial principles. Pretty much the whole of politics and culture since 1789 should be overthrown. This need not happen, of course. The future is a myth; it is not determined beforehand. Moreover, the future promises no real novelty, but simply the struggle to reverse decay. Those who have dominated history have not been adventurers, but those who sought to reconnect with essential Tradition. Though the discussion in “Men Among the Ruins” is too compressed to explain the grounds for these notions, Evola was probably thinking about the repeated restorations of Confucian orthodoxy in Chinese history.

[url]http://pages.prodigy.net/aesir/mar2.htm[/url]

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Cosmotheism is a religion which positively asserts that there is a internal purpose in life and in cosmos, and there is an essential unity, or consciousness that binds all living beings and all of the inorganic cosmos, as one. What is our true human identity is we are the cosmos made self-aware and self-conscious by evolution. Our true human purpose is to know and to complete ourselves as conscious Individuals and also as a self-aware species and thereby to co-evolve with the cosmos towards total and universal awareness, and towards the ever higher perfection of consciousness and being.

[url]http://www.cosmotheism.net/[/url]

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"Confusing truth with fact, people often read mythology without realizing that it speaks about their deepest feelings and situations. They look at art and think it is mere representation or self-expression. They don't realize that a good painting is a window onto the land beyond Lethe. They hear the teachings and stories of religion and take them as history, missing out on the deeper truth conveyed in the charm of language. By trying to avoid illusion, we make our truths flat, cold, and soulless." --Thomas Moore, from Parabola's Winter 2003 issue on "Truth & Illusion"

[url]http://www.parabola.org/[/url]

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We Prometheans are voluntarily coming together to purposefully direct the creation of a new post-human species. A species with higher intellect, consciousness and love of ones people. A communion of intellect and beauty, for the simple reason that it can be done. This creation is what gives us purpose and meaning. No other justification is required for this program to advance our Promethean species.

[url]http://www.prometheism.net/[/url]

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What does it mean to be a radical traditionalist?

It means to reject the modern, materialist reign of "quantity over quality," the absence of any meaningful spiritual values, environmental devastation, the mechanization and over-specialization of urban life, and the imperialism of corporate mono-culture, with it's vulgar "values" of progress and efficiency. It means to yearn for the small, homogeneous tribal societies that flourished before Christianity -- societies in which every aspect of life was integrated into a holistic system.

What we represent:

Resacralization of the world versus materialism; folk/traditional culture versus mass culture; natural social order versus an artificial hierarchy based on wealth; the tribal community versus the nation-state; stewardship of the earth versus the “maximization of resources”; a harmonious relationship between men and women versus the “war between the sexes”; handicrafts and artisanship versus industrial mass-production.

[url]http://tyrjournal.tripod.com/[/url]

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Julius Evola: A Radical Traditionalist

Troy Southgate examines late Italian philosopher Julius Evola-s Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist. PRAVDA.Ru will present this summary as a series.

  1. REVOLUTION-COUNTER-REVOLUTION - TRADITION

In the opening chapter of his work, Evola can be forgiven for appearing to sound like a typical Catholic fundamentalist. According to the Baron, socio-political subversion (eversio) was introduced into Europe for the first time with the 1789 and 1848 revolutions. Catholic writers like Chesterton, Belloc and a whole array of popes and cardinals would agree with him. Indeed, Evola even suggests that the term -reactionary- should be adopted by those who realise the true extent to which the forces of liberalism, Marxism and democracy are advancing their secret agenda. We are informed that if this term had not been so furiously rejected by the conservative opponents of revolution, our European nations would have been relatively more salvageable. But now that several decades have passed since the book was first published, had the author still been alive he may well have been surprised to learn that his ideas have found significant expression within the ranks of those who have become known as -conservative revolutionaries-. For Evola, therefore, perhaps the apparently conflicting terminology in this phrase would have been a misnomer. On the contrary, it was used throughout the twentieth century by men such as Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Michael Walker, Armin Mohler and Otto Strasser. In fact Evola tells us himself that -conservative revolution- should not be connected with the term -reaction- because the former has distinctly positive and energetic connotations. Revolution in this sense, he admits, simply means restoring order and thus avoiding entirely its chaotic antithesis. He even defines revolution (revolutio) - not as a departure from prevailing trends - but as a return to origins. Thus revolution, in his evaluation of the term, indicates a replenishment of that which has gone before.

But the word "conservative" can also be very misleading. Evola argues that "it is necessary to first establish as exactly as possible what needs to be 'preserved'". He is also under no illusion that capitalists have long used this term with which to advance the interests of their own class, rather than "committing themselves to a stout defence of a higher right, dignity, and impersonal legacy of values, ideas and principles." This suggests a kind of aristocratic benevolence, a chivalric sense of duty and sacrifice. Evola also believes that the State must not concern itself with economic matters, rather assuming a transcendent role in opposition to the class-oriented obsessions of both the bourgeoisie and Marxists alike. Furthermore, he tells us, "what really counts is to be faithful not to past forms and institutions, but rather to principles of which such forms and institutions have been particular expressions." So, therefore, the success of tradition lies in our ability to create new forms from the etymological drawing-board which inspired those of the past, a process which works its way down through the generations as though divinely inspired. In other words it is not the transitory or - in the case of historical personality cults - even the idolatrous facets which are of value, but those which are everlasting and permanent. Indeed, Evola pours scorn upon the very term -historical- because such matters rise above and beyond the whole notion of history altogether. Mircea Eliade has discussed this idea at length in The Myth of The Eternal Return [Princeton, 1991], echoed here by Evola: "These principles are not compromised by the fact that in various instances an individual, out of weakness or due to other reasons, was able to actualise them or to even implement them partially at one point in his life rather than another." The designers and schemers of the modern age, of course, dismiss these aspects as having been a consequence of the period in which they were apparently expressed. So therefore tradition and historicism are totally irreconcilable. The author-s own homeland also comes in for some criticism, with Evola firmly believing that Italy has no material or ideological connection with tradition and that her only hope lies in a spiritual renewal.

Returning to the dangers of revolution - at least in the purely negative sense as defined above - we are reminded of the more positive, Hegelian analysis: "the negation of the negation." In other words, eradicating that which in itself has been the great eradicator is a worthwhile objective. On the other hand, Evola is being slightly pedantic when he criticises the adoption of the "revolutionary spirit," lest it sound too progressive or wild. His denunciation of the unfulfilling legend of technological advancement, however, is very accurate indeed: "Those who are not subject to the predominant materialism of our times, upon recognising the only context in which it is legitimate to speak of progress, will be on guard against any orientation in which the modern 'myth of progress' is reflected." Indeed, there are many such examples, all of which contend either blindly or knowingly that the past must be eradicated for the good of the present. This, says Evola, is "history-s demolition squad." It is rather surprising, therefore, to consider that in his youth Evola offered his support to Italian Futurism. Not, of course, that Marinetti-s pledge to raze libraries and museums to the ground was ever designed to be an attempt to destroy the perennial essence which always transcends the purely anachronistic. The contentious issue of Fascism is also tackled by Evola and is here regarded as being valid only when it concords with tradition. To stand vigorously in favour of Fascism simply for its own sake, is akin to the fulminating negativity inherent within many of its anti-fascist opponents.

Troy Southgate submitted this work to PRAVDA.Ru

[url]http://english.pravda.ru/columnists/2002/05/11/28502.html[/url]

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A major challenge facing contemporary society, one that becomes more acute from day to day, is the intermingling of diverse religions and cultural traditions both across international borders between civilizations and nations and within the boundaries of individual countries, many of which until now had been dominated by a single homogeneous culture. In a world in which the acceptance of pluralism and inclusivity is vital to human survival, mutual tolerance, understanding, and ultimately appreciation among members of different religions and cultures is therefore critical to peaceful co-existence both within nations and globally.

The Foundation for Traditional Studies seeks to contribute toward the achievement of such understanding not through dilution of religious or cultural traditions until one arrives at a pale common denominator, but rather through preserving and strengthening the traditions which have been transmitted through the ages and which have so much to teach contemporary society.

Through its programs the Foundation seeks to make known the principles and philosophies at the heart of various traditions and to provide access in a variety of ways to their religious practices, arts, sciences, and social structures. It also seeks to create better understanding of traditional in the context of the modern world view and to provide a forum wherein traditional and modern modes of thought and perception can engage in dialogue with each other in a productive, creative manner.

Furthermore, the Foundation strives to preserve and make available in a contemporary language the extremely rich treasury of traditional wisdom and thought and to apply these millennial traditional teachings to the contemporary situation. To this end we are active in the fields of publishing, the performing arts, and sponsorship and organization of international conferences.

[url]http://www.traditional-studies.org/[/url]

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Any historical prospect reveals that, just as man civilizations know, after a dawn and a development, a decline and an end. Some tried to discover the law which governs such a destiny, the cause of the decline of civilizations. This cause could never be brought back to purely historical factors and naturalists. ~~ Julius Evola, The Revolt Against the Modern World (1934) Baron Julius Cesare Andrea Evola is one of history's most enigmatic occult and parapolitical figures. Little-known outside Europe, Evola is often cited as the Godfather of contemporary Italian fascism and radical politics. A close examination of the historical record reveals a more complex figure. Evola wore many masks: a parapolitical philosopher who ranked with Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, a religious historian who coresponded with Mircea Eliade, and a provocateur who dabbled in Dada.

Born to a Catholic aristocratic family on May 19, 1898, Evola led an extraordinary life as a mountaineer, philosopher, solider, religious historian, artist, magician and political theorist.

Fluent in French and German, the young Evola was significantly influenced by the virtue theory of German philosopher Friedrich Neitzsche. As an ardent Mountain climber, the young Italian found spiritual invigoration upon the peaks of the Alps. Coming to age on the dawn of the First World War, Evola joined the Italian Army serving in the Mount