Squatting the Chapel Perilous 1

Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, originally published in 1899, is the account of a story told on the deck of the Nellie, "a cruising yawl, " which is anchored on the River Thames and awaiting a journey to the sea. The heart of darkness, geographical and psychospiritual, is no one particular place. The story unwinds itself deep into the Congo, but the seaman Charles Marlow, our narrator, makes it clear from the outset that it is London, the capital of Empire, which is the real heart of all existing darkness.

"And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth."

 He continues,

I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago—the other day .... Light came out of this river since—you say Knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday....

 
Marlow asks his listeners, all of us, to imagine the original Roman explorers making their way up the Thames. The commander of such an expedition was tasked to lead his men into unknowable darkness.

Imagine him here—the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a concertina—and going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you like. Sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages,—precious little to eat fit for a civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink.

They become the unwilling subjects of a terrible initiation:

Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him—all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There's no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination—you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.

And this is really the whole tale, ending in the first few pages of Conrad's novella. Did the Empire bring Light to the riverside of the Thames, to the Congo, to Vietnam, to the banks of the Potomac or the Tigris, or was it only the bearer of a much deeper Darkness? Conrad is not vague about his answer.

Near the close of his tale, after the death of Kurtz, Marlow tells of his return to "the sepulchral city." The imperial metropolis is a tomb built on plunder and murder. The perspective is flipped. Turned inside out. The "wilderness" is full of light. The Empire, which never ended, is a Waste Land, the true wilderness of pain.

Yet the heart is also a heart. An emotional sun is at the core of us all, now mostly occluded and eclipsed by the very same lead and smoke. A river also runs through this, a snake which invites us to ride. For a while, along the river, the sky clears and things begin to shimmer, locations in time and place begin to coalesce and to take on meaning.

They Never Left

Ezra Pound, a big fan of Conrad and an even bigger devotee of Confucius, used to often quote these words of the Chinese sage:

Observe the phenomena of nature as one in whom the ancestral voices speak. -- The Analects

Pound echoes this in his Cantos placing it in the context of Greek and Roman mythology:

The Gods have not returned. "They never left us."
  They have not returned.
Cloud's processional and the air moves with their living.

Gods and ancestors of West and East still await us. In nature they can be found ready to speak, happy to blow our minds, but they also inhabit, mostly undetected, the phenomena of culture. Sync is a movement up this river, observing and letting the living voices speak, portents and auguries of the mediascape.

 

This most recent journey, for me, began on Nov. 23rd of last year. The entry point is often unexpected. This was the day I first watched Alan Abbadessa Green's incredible video, "Suicide Kings Part 1."

The video is part of a larger and ongoing book project by Green to document the relevance of James Frazer's massive study of the killing of the King ritual, comprising the twelve volumes of The Golden Bough, to the highly charged events of our modern era. The "King-Kill," Green presents, may be the dominant subtext behind the assassinations of Lincoln, JFK and Osama bin Laden as well as the attacks of 9/11. The King-Kill is the hidden link between parapolitics and occult ritual.

This is not a "Truther" video. Green refreshingly does not reach any conclusions. He, as Confucius advocates, is only observing phenomena. And when this happens with a clear eye and with the intent to report back in good faith, intensely interconnected weirdness begins to surface. The production of this video perfectly mirrors the complexity and sheer bafflement of its themes. A facebook review (on Nov. 24th) by the sinister and sagacious Mark LeClair puts this best:

This IS the New Cinema & I phucking LOVE IT!
No easy answers, GREAT & brilliant questions & thus the essence of Life & Expression....The dramatic tension of narrative allegory plus the direct mining of a dead art form to create a new one. Goddard is trying to do the same right now, but this is better, more real, more dangerous. Positively gripping & oh so well imagined AND executed. 

There is really nothing to add here. It should have come as no surprise that embedded within a piece of media about signs and portents embedded in media was a sign for myself. A sync is a sign. And yet it did surprise me.

The video features a scene from Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's cinematic adaptation of Heart of Darkness, which focuses on a couple of books lying on Colonel Kurtz's bedside table. One is an abridged copy of The Golden Bough, which is why Green highlights this scene, but the other is Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance (1920).



The synchronicity for me was that I had just found this book by accident, as I do, a week before at a second-hand shop. It was the same Doubleday yellow cover edition as is shown in AN. I remembered this book from the movie, and it had recently come up in my study of the Modernists, but its appearance in Green's video right after I had bought it was as if it was crying out "read me!" So I did.

Stimulating the Energy of the Vegetable

From Ritual to Romance is probably best known for being cited in the notes of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Here is what Eliot writes about Weston's book:

Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston's book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston's book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble. 

Eliot goes on to further direct his readers to The Golden Bough, revealing the close relation between his own celebrated poem and the studies of Frazer and Weston. All three, he unveils in his notes, are intimately concerned with certain "vegetation ceremonies." Weston's book applies Frazer's theories on the killing of the King ritual to the myths and legends of the Holy Grail.

 

Weston's major thesis is that the Grail is something far more profound, more ancient, than simply the cup that Christ drank from at his Last Supper. It was through her study of Frazer that she arrived at her wider conclusions:

Some years ago, when fresh from the study of Sir J. G. Frazer's epoch-making work, The Golden Bough, I was struck by the resemblance existing between certain features of the Grail story, and characteristic details of the Nature Cults described. The more closely I analysed the tale, the more striking became the resemblance, and I finally asked myself whether it were not possible that in this mysterious legend--mysterious alike in its character, its sudden appearance, the importance apparently assigned to it, followed by as sudden and complete a disappearance--we might not have the confused record of a ritual, once popular, later surviving under conditions of strict secrecy?

And yet what is this secret and surviving ritual? Its roots are archaic. As Frazer explains it stems from the sympathetic magic of so-called primitive tribes across the globe:

They commonly believed that the tie between the animal and vegetable world was even closer than it really is--to them the principle of life and fertility, whether animal or vegetable, was one and indivisible. Hence actions that induced fertility in the animal world were held to be equally efficacious in stimulating the reproductive energies of the vegetable.

From this awareness of the fundamental sympathy of all the realms of nature (and we can question Frazer's downplaying of this) emerged rituals in order to reenact and perpetuate the indivisibility of life.

Weston traces the development and continuation of these rites from the ancient Magna Mater mystery cult of the Near East, to the mysteries of Eleusis, to the later Hellenic mystery schools including early Christianity. While, with the establishment and hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church, the fertility rites were suppressed within orthodox Christianity their essence and symbolism reappear through the medieval legends of the Grail.



In her introduction, Weston claims:

...we can now prove by printed texts the parallels existing between each and every feature of the Grail story and the recorded symbolism of the Mystery cults. Further, we can show that between these Mystery cults and Christianity there existed at one time a close and intimate union, such a union as of itself involved the practical assimilation of the central rite, in each case a 'Eucharistic' Feast, in which the worshippers partook of the Food of Life from the sacred vessels.

The form of this cult is remarkably similar across the ancient world. Again Weston refers to Frazer's research:

As Sir J. G. Frazer has before now pointed out, there are parallel and over-lapping forms of this cult, the name of the god, and certain details of the ritual, may differ in different countries, but whether he hails from Babylon, Phrygia, or Phoenicia, whether he be called Tammuz, Attis, or Adonis, the main lines of the story are fixed, and invariable.

And this is also where the basic structure of the Grail legend conforms to the larger pattern. The Grail King, either suffering from a wound to the leg or groin and/or experiencing sexual impotence, is effectively dead to the world. His infirmity, his infertility, causes through sympathetic magic the decay of his kingdom. The Fisher King and the Waste Land. The afflicted or dead king is, in the wider mythology, either revived to full power or replaced by the equivalent of his younger, more virile, self. And the cycle continues.

Always he is young and beautiful, always the beloved of a great goddess; always he is the victim of a tragic and untimely death, a death which entails bitter loss and misfortune upon a mourning world, and which, for the salvation of that world, is followed by a resurrection. Death and Resurrection, mourning and rejoicing, present themselves in sharp antithesis in each and all of the forms.

The Full Eidous

Clearly this is the turning of the seasons, of the utmost importance to agricultural societies. The new flowering of Spring ripens to the abundance of golden Harvest. The land then becomes brown and withered in the Winter cold to be followed, God willing, by the rebirth of a fresh Spring. The Waste Land is trapped in endless Winter, in decay without new growth.



This, as Weston points out, is really only the exoteric form of the archaic mystery. What close contemplation of the Grail myth reveals, however, is something that appears to go much deeper than even Frazer explored.   

Sir James Frazer, and those who followed him, have dealt with the public side of the cult, with its importance as a recognized vehicle for obtaining material advantages; it was the social, rather than the individual, aspect which appealed to them. Now we find that in the immediate pre- and post-Christian era these cults were considered not only most potent factors for assuring the material prosperity of land and folk, but were also held to be the most appropriate vehicle for imparting the highest religious teaching. The Vegetation deities, Adonis-Attis, and more especially the Phrygian god, were the chosen guides to the knowledge of, and union with, the supreme Spiritual Source of Life, of which they were the communicating medium.

"The most appropriate vehicle for imparting the highest religious teaching" -- this was the full esoteric function of these cults. Weston refers to the work of G.R.S. Mead to fully flesh out this idea.

Mead undoubtedly was an initiate himself. He was at one time the private secretary of Helen Blavatsky. He became the head of the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society. He was the author of over twenty books on arcane subjects. And he was the founder of the very instrumental Quest Society, of which Jessie Weston was a member and lecturer. Mead was also a huge influence on Ezra Pound and, in all likelihood, Carl Jung.



Weston cites a section from Mead's translation of the Hermetic writings, Thrice-Greatest Hermes, which includes a document from the Naassene Gnostic sect. Weston quotes Mead's introductory remarks to this "secret" document:

The claim of these Gnostics was practically that Christianity, or rather the Good News of The Christ, was precisely the consummation of the inner doctrine of the Mystery-institutions of all the nations: the end of them all was the revelation of the Mystery of Man.

Weston interprets this to mean that the teaching of the Naassenes was "practically a synthesis of all the Mystery-religions." With this document, according to Weston, the esoteric aspect of the Mysteries becomes clear and the final meaning of the Grail legends is explained.

The Exoteric side of the cult gives us the Human, the Folk-lore, elements--the Suffering King; the Waste Land; the effect upon the Folk; the task that lies before the hero; the group of Grail symbols. The Esoteric side provides us with the Mystic Meal, the Food of Life, connected in some mysterious way with a Vessel which is the centre of the cult; the combination of that vessel with a Weapon, a combination bearing a well-known 'generative' significance; a double initiation into the source of the lower and higher spheres of Life. 

The Vessel and the Weapon, the Grail and the Spear, the yoni and the lingham, point to a whole other dimension of the esoteric that Weston does not shy away from: sacred sexuality. Sex is, of course, obvious throughout this entire story. We have all heard of pagan peasant orgies on the fields in order to ensure the fecundity of their crops. The journey up the river, with its inevitable Oedipal undercurrent, is also a sexual journey. But all of this is still at a lower sphere of life. It is what Leon Surette, in his study of Weston's influence on The Waste Land, calls palingenesis, rebirth.

In a palingenetic rite one must pass through death in order to reach the divine revelation -- much as Dante passes through Hell and Purgatory, or as Odysseus nearly drowns before being rescued by Leucothea. Being born again involves "dying" first and typically includes all of the fear and loathing that we associate with death. Weston distinguished between the palingenetic rite, which leads only to a lower initiation into the mystery of life, and the hieros gamos, which leads to a higher initiation into the mystery of death. -- The Birth of Modernism

Sex can lead to reproduction, to rebirth, to palingenesis, but this alone is only concerned with the cycle of life. Hieros gamos, divine marriage -- the sexual union of a god with a goddess or, even more significantly, a deity with a mortal man or woman -- both culminates and transcends this cycle. Rebirth is a profound outcome of this act, of this vision, but even more so is redeath. The Spring will bless and the Winter will curse, but this singular union initiates the lover into physical and spiritual knowledge of the entire cycle, at every scale within the cosmos, all at once.



This takes us well beyond the fertility cults of Frazer -- or at least what Frazer publicly expressed. Surette explains:

In Frazer, the symbolism of sexuality is given a positivistic, not an esoteric, reading. Sexual rites are literal and involve the transmission of political or clerical power, not of noumenal revelation of metaphysical energy. 

Sexuality invoking a "noumenal revelation of metaphysical energy" rapidly reminds one of the doctrines and practices of Taoism and Tantra, but it should be kept in mind that the light of sacred sexuality, though stomped down to a faintly glowing ember, was never entirely extinguished in the West. Ezra Pound in his Cantos called it "the full eidous" -- thus linking it intriguingly to Pythagorean number mysticism -- and also "Sacrum, sacrum, inluminatio coitu," or "Sacred, sacred the illumination in coitus."

Lines and Streams

Hieros gamos can be found throughout the Cantos -- which can be read as an epic of the flow and blockage of sexual and creative energy throughout myth and history -- and it seems clear that it was experienced by Pound himself. While confined to a tent within a U.S. military detention camp outside of Pisa, Pounds records a vision of the goddess Aphrodite, who he also equates with Isis and the Chinese/Japanese bodhisattva, Kuanon.



The story of sexual union of a mortal man with the goddess of beauty, Aphrodite or Venus, is very ancient. Anchises, the father of the Trojan hero Aeneas, was the lover of Aphrodite. Aeneas, with his divine mother's guidance and protection, was able to escape with his father from the fiery ruin of Troy and went on to lay the foundations of Rome. Julius Caesar, and the emperors who followed in his lineage, claimed to be a successor of Aeneas and thus the goddess.

According to Geoffrey of Monmouth's The History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1136), Brutus, the discoverer of Britain and the original founder of London (the heart of darkness, remember?) was the great-grandson of Aeneas, and the legendary King Arthur was the direct descendent of Brutus. In this way, through Arthur, there is a unbroken narrative from Troy to the Holy Grail. All of this results from the divine marriage with the lustrous goddess of love and beauty.

Beyond this progenitive, yet largely mythical, lineage is a very historical initiatic lineage which the line of kings appears to be the exoteric expression of. The Holy Grail is a key symbol of this underground tradition. In an earlier book, The Quest for the Holy Grail (1913), Weston writes explicitly of this tradition:

There is a stream of tradition, running as it were underground, which from time to time rises to the surface, only to be relentlessly suppressed. It may be the Troubadours, the symbolical language of whose love poems is held to convey another, and less innocent, meaning; or the Albigenses, whose destruction the Church holds for a sacred duty. Alchemy, whose Elixir of Life and Philosopher's Stone are but names veiling a deeper and more spiritual meaning, belongs to the same family.   

This "stream of tradition," with Weston's mention of troubadours, Albigensians and alchemists is practically identical to the "celestial tradition" that Pound delineates. There are slight differences of emphasis between the two. Pound celebrates the Eleusinian mysteries and the Fedeli d'Amore, involving Dante and Cavalcanti. Weston, in contrast, focuses on the even more ancient Phrygian mysteries, the Gnostics, the cults of Attis and Mithras, and the Grail literature.



Both Pound and Weston, however, had close ties with G.R.S. Mead and his Quest Society. It is plain that their varying notions of the esoteric tradition stemmed from this common source. It is also evident that at least Weston, and very likely Pound as well, believed that this tradition was still playing a crucial yet clandestine role in the modern world. In her "Preface" to From Ritual to Romance she refers to certain "agents of evolution."

I was no longer engaged merely in enquiring into the sources of a fascinating legend, but on the identification of another field of activity for forces whose potency as agents of evolution we were only now beginning rightly to appreciate.

What these forces and agents happen to be, Weston does not readily disclose in this fairly academically cautious book. But, as the poet Robert Duncan -- another great link in this chain -- indicates and quotes, even by the introduction she is openly admitting that much of her information was derived from contemporary initiates.

No inconsiderable part of the information at my disposal depended upon personal testimony, the testimony of those who knew of the continued existence of such a ritual, and had actually been initiated into its mysteries.

The rituals, mysteries and initiates still exist -- in 1920 and there is much evidence to believe even now -- and in hidden ways act as agents of human evolution. The rites of palingenesis and hieros gamos persist and influence much of what is happening. Certainly rituals of this apparent type are everywhere evident. The question is to what extent these mass media events, such as those Green spotlights in his video, are authentic rituals of the the type Weston and Mead write about, and to what extent they are counterfeits of this type, intentional inversions and falsifications?



Many streams are converging on one point. It's easy to imagine that a program is being enacted. And yet there seem to be both spells and counter-spells battling in the aether. Which are aiding in "evolution," in Weston's sense of the word, and which are designed to perpetuate stagnation, to guard and expand the Waste Land? And could there be any way in which these two could be the same?

Poured We Libations

The principal editor of The Waste Land was none other than Ezra Pound. The critic Leon Surette (The Birth of Modernism) has uncovered an interesting pattern in Pound's editing of Eliot's vastly influential poem. By observing what Pound advised Eliot to elide or alter in the poem a clear intention is discernible.

If we look at Pound's editing, we shall find that it tends to remove the esoteric of mystical elements of the original draft -- particularly the linking of eros and apotheosis implied in the hieros gamos topos. When the poem issues from the hand of Pound, sexuality no longer has a transcendent function. It is merely spiritually and emotionally barren, even when, paradoxically for the fertility cult motif, it is progenitively fertile. 

Pound's editing assures that The Waste Land remains a waste land. A particular phase of the cycle is portrayed, the decay of the land and its people, and any possible transcendence from this state is obscured, remaining illusive. The published poem stops quite short of the initiation through eros that Weston focuses on. Surette reiterates:   

Pound's editing greatly reduces the palingenetic and erotic representations of transcendence that Eliot seems to have adapted from Weston's characterization of the ancient initiation rites in Ritual to Romance. The elisions have left a poem that depicts a bleak, hopeless, and wasted world occupied by the spiritually dead.

One important example of how Pound's editing altered the tone of Eliot's poem is in the substitution of its epigraph. Originally, Eliot wanted to include a key passage from Heart of Darkness as his epigraph:

Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision,—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—

'The horror! The horror!'

Kurtz, at the very moment of his death, fully awakens to the meaninglessness of his own life, to the total darkness that envelopes the modern, so-called "enlightened" world. It is a instant of horrible transcendence, and yet it is transcendence. Only in experiencing the sheer terror and despair of existence could he ever hope to move beyond it.



We are never sure that he did move beyond, and it is probable that he did not, but Kurtz's devastating epiphany reveals, at least, that there is something beyond. He had, at the very end, woken up within the Waste Land, while most still sleep. 

This epigraph, at the insistence of Pound, is replaced by a passage from Petronius' Satyricon. The quote is in Latin and Greek in The Waste Land, but it can be translated as such:

For with my own eyes I saw the Sibyl hanging in a bottle, and when the young boys asked her, 'Sibyl, what do you want?', she replied, 'I want to die'. 

The Sibyl of Cumae requested to Apollo, and was granted, maximal longevity -- as many years as the grains of sand that she grasped in her hand -- but she forget to also ask for eternal youth. As a result, she could not die even as her body became increasingly shriveled and decrepit with extreme old age.

She diminished to a point where she could do nothing except hang in a jar and speak. She was also granted the gift of prophecy, but she could foresee no escape for herself. Even Kurtz's terrifying transcendence was denied to her. She remained trapped within the Waste Land.



This Sibyl is also a crucial figure in the wider story, the story of stories, examined here. It is the Sibyl of Cumae who escorts Aeneas to the Underworld, instructing him first to gather the "golden bough" -- possibly mistletoe -- to present to Proserpine/Persephone, the goddess of the dead.

Virgil's account of this story is an obvious retelling of the tale of Odysseus's own descent to the Underworld, as relayed in the eleventh book of The Odyssey. This nekyia section of The Odyssey, which Pound considered to be its oldest, was translated by Pound and became the very first of his Cantos.

Poured we libations unto each the dead,
First mead and then sweet wine, water mixed with white flour.
Then prayed I many a prayer to the sickly death's-head;
As set in Ithaca, sterile bulls of the best
For sacrifice, heaping the pyre with goods,
A sheep to Tiresias only, black and a bell-sheep.  

The Cantos began to be published after 1922, the year of The Waste Land''s publication. As Pound's epic begins in the Underworld, in the Inferno, in the Waste Land, and only several decades afterwards is his full vision of Paradise published, it is possible that he wanted Eliot's poem to also focus on the image of this world as fallen and not yet redeemed.



It could be that Eliot and Pound intended to present a clear image of a singular moment within the greater cycle of death and rebirth, a moment which happens to encompass all of history. 1922, assuming that there was a plan or a conspiracy behind this, was not to be the time of resurrection. That was to come later. Surette explains this in terms of The Waste Land and the poem's allusions to the Grail myth and the story of Christ:

The Waste Land, of course, does not fulfil the palingenetic pattern. There is no resurrection, only death and perhaps a descent. In Grail terms, the poem stops in the Chapel Perilous; in terms of Christ's passion, it stops on Easter Sunday while Christ is, according to tradition, harrowing Hell. The reader is left in doubt, as the apostles were, with the Saviour dead, and only obscure and ambiguous messages left as a guide -- messages typified in the poem by the voice of the thunder. 

The Waste Land here is equated with the Chapel Perilous, of which Weston writes at length, and Christ's harrowing of Hell -- His descent into the Underworld to free the souls of the righteous. Northrop Frye, the colleague and rival of Marshall McLuhan (and a synthesis of these two may lead to salvation), also notes this overlay:

In the final section of The Waste Land the Chapel Perilous represents the underworld of death and burial, the tomb from which Christ rises.

Before Daybreak

The Chapel Perilous, Klingsor's castle, the Black Iron Prison, the nightmare of history -- ominous terms that circle and cackle like crows at sundown in the pages of this blog -- all point to the same point. It is the instant just before resurrection, the resurrection that is continually deferred, "to come." The righteous have not yet all been loaded onto the lifeboats. The heart of darkness is the endless obscurity before the triumphant dawn of the third day. As Frye notes, Dante is another who undertook this arduous journey:

Dante's journey through hell begins on Good Friday evening, and he emerges on the other side of the earth on Easter Sunday morning. Thus his journey fits inside the three-day rhythm of the redemption, where Christ is buried on Friday evening, descends to hell on Saturday, and rises on Sunday morning.

Surette, another cautious scholar, does not speculate on why Pound tended to pencil out transcendent elements in his editing of The Waste Land, but does it not appear that he was intent on crystallizing an image -- a freeze frame of everything "modern"-- for maximal impact?

The other option, terrible to consider, is that Pound and Eliot and the other Modernists were essentially casting a spell over culture through their art. The aim was to prolong the enchantment, to keep the sawdust in our eyes, to extend the reign of the impotent king who deceptively projects his omnipotence. 

Or could it be that both are occurring at once? The story is simply unfolding and it is not the tellers of the tale, however it seems in the thick of it, who are trying to prevent the pages from being turned. The heart beats elsewhere.

Hermetic Anarchism and Uddering the Author 3

The poets, in this instance Shelley on the "Left," all recognized that political and spiritual freedom were identical and impossible to sever:

The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king
Over himself; just, gentle, wise. -- "Prometheus Unbound"

"Equal, unclassed, tribeless, nationless" -- this is what liberty truly consists of. The individual imagination is subject to no xenophobic or provincial limitations and boundaries. We are creators, makers, poets. The very act of sensing and perceiving, to refer to Nietzsche again, make us all better artists than we realize. We are the Unique Ones, as the individualist anarchist Max Stirner declared, and it is only through our own particular and unique visions that we sneak a peak at eternity.

The Scornful Aristocracy of Tramps

The age of revelations never ended. There are countless gods. We reject both the rigid monotheism of the Abrahamic orthodoxies and the equally suffocating monotheism of scientific materialism and reason. Sterner acolyte, Renzo Novatore, proclaimed the end to all -ologies and -isms. The only principle wide enough to encompass all of our desires and imaginings is life itself:

History, materialism, monism, positivism and all the isms of this world are old and rusty tools which I don’t need or mind anymore. My principle is life and my end is death. I wish to live my life intensely and embrace my death tragically. 

You are waiting for the revolution? Let it be! My own began a long time ago! When you are ready (god, what an endless wait!) I won’t mind going with you for a while. But when you stop, I shall continue on my way toward the great and sublime conquest of the nothing!

Any society that you build will have its limits. And outside the limits of any society, unruly and heroic tramps will wander with their wild and virgin thought — those who cannot live without planning ever new and dreadful outbursts of rebellion! I shall be among them!...

All societies tremble when the scornful aristocracy of tramps, inaccessibles, unique ones, rulers over the ideal and conquerors of the nothing resolutely advances. So, come on, iconoclasts, forward!

Already the foreboding sky grows dark and silent! -- "Iconoclasts, Forward"

The sublime conquest of nothing! The only ground that truly exists, the only firmament where our stars can be hung, is nothingness itself. And nothingness is itself not a thing. Flowing emptiness -- endless, timeless, vacuumous and ecstatic. Beyond Church and State, Time and Space, Ear and Eye, Saturn and Jupiter. Hermetic anarchism should be first to be tossed on the intellectual bonfire of the vanities.

But of what practical use is this? How is this in any sense realistic? How does this help the suffering masses of Syria -- to name just one topical hellhole in a world full of dire agony? But anarchy dances on all floors. It is the closest thing we have to a liberation from all politics -- the terrible game that could be defined as the science of concentrating and wielding power. Anarchism, the reverse of this, is simply the process of maximally distributing and decentralizing all forms of power. And it is a process that does not end.

The miserable masses of Syria may in fact be best off in PKK-run Kurdish villages that are apparently (fingers crossed) practicing an effective form of "libertarian municipalism," as advocated by Murray Bookchin. Unfortunately, and this should come as no surprise, these Kurdish villages are precisely those under vicious attack from the U.S.'s latest bête noire, the terrorist supergroup, ISIS. The veil tends to fall hard quickly after it is raised even a sliver.

But, as in the anarchist city of Barcelona briefly during the thirties, these Kurdish experiments in anti-authoritarian living actually function. There is no shock here. History, or more accurately the cracks and margins within and outside the official pages of history, is dripping with similar stories of communities who were successfully able to become, at least temporarily, truly free.



Peter Kropotkin wrote an anarchist masterpiece on the immense influence of mutual aid on both the natural and social worlds. Kropotkin points out that the medieval city, free from feudal domination, with its craft guilds and other voluntary associations was a model of mutual aid and liberty.

In short, the more we begin to know the mediaeval city the more we see that it was not simply a political organization for the protection of certain political liberties. It was an attempt at organizing, on a much grander scale than in a village community, a close union for mutual aid and support, for consumption and production, and for social life altogether, without imposing upon men the fetters of the State, but giving full liberty of expression to the creative genius of each separate group of individuals in art, crafts, science, commerce, and political organization. -- Mutual Aid

Kropotkin goes on to say that much, in our own time, of what even anarchists consider to be utopian was already realized in the High Middle Ages.  

More than that; not only many aspirations of our modern radicals were already realized in the middle ages, but much of what is described now as Utopian was accepted then as a matter of fact.

The point being that by no means are these ideals unachievable. Official history is only a fraction of the whole human story. And much of this story involves people living beyond the grasp of Church and State.

Imbecile Illusions

By now, though, it is difficult to even imagine a condition of freedom. Usura determines even the aesthetics of our our society. Everything has become utilitarian, mass-produced, conformist, disposable. Only those items which can easily be resold for a profit are not designed to be almost immediately obsolete. Nothing is built to last. All "products" are useful, convenient, unoriginal, ugly.

To overthrow usura is to qualitatively transform reality. Something like the medieval guild system would be restored. Objects would be crafted with pride, stamped with originality, made to please the eye and elevate the spirit. Cities transformed into collective works of art.

This is the polar opposite of the automotive hell that most of us somehow persist within today. Lawrence Ferlinghetti captured this best:

They still are ranged along the roads   

          plagued by legionnaires

                     false windmills and demented roosters

They are the same people

                                     only further from home

      on freeways fifty lanes wide

                              on a concrete continent

                                        spaced with bland billboards   

                        illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness

"This could be anywhere, this could be everywhere." To break this dark spell, a necrotic curse that materially binds us, has deep spiritual effects. Creation, reality construction, for the highest values sets off an upward spiral towards the eternal. Robert Duncan explains that everything taken from the commons is a step away from eternity and one more enmired in the suck of time.

It is toward what I have called the eternal that time is disturbed to awaken the workers of the world to the virtue, the power, that lies in their labor. The poet, too, is a worker, for the language, even as the field and the factory, belongs to the productive orders and means in which the communal good lies. All that is unjust, all that has been taken over for private exploitation from the commune, leaves us restless with time, divorced from the eternal. -- The H.D. Book

This process, though, can be reversed. It also provides a third option, a new direction. Beyond and outside of both private property and state control, with all the devices and mechanisms of oppression and imposed misery implied by these two, is the commons. This is an archaic place of freedom, now reduced to back alleys, weedlots and the unexploitable wild.

And yet this is the same place in which we all imagine. And in this fashion it is infinite. The commons stretches back through the free cities to the cave sanctuaries of the old stone age. And when it wells up again, first in the imagination, matter itself will be transmuted.

A Balance of Contradictions

Anarchy is the struggle for and celebration of the commons. It is not bound by property. Only a (non-)space of no limitations is able to satisfy it. And let us not be limited either by rigid categories. There is a plurality of anarchisms. Neither communist, nor individualist, nor both, nor neither. Robert Anton Wilson, as always, along with Robert Shea lay out the terms in sparkling lucidity. They begin by contrasting the free market with the state:

FREE MARKET: That condition of society in which all economic transactions result from voluntary choice without coercion.

THE STATE: That institution which interferes with the Free Market through the direct exercise of coercion or the granting of privileges (backed by coercion).

They go on to list and define the most prevalent forms of privilege -- taxes, usury, landlordism, tariffs -- and the dominant political-economic systems -- capitalism, conservatism, liberalism, socialism -- which are constructed around these varying forms of privilege. They finally arrive at anarchism itself:

ANARCHISM: That organization of society in which the Free Market operates freely, without taxes, usury, landlordism, tariffs, or other forms of coercion or privilege. “Right” anarchists predict that in the Free Market people would voluntarily choose to compete more often than to cooperate; “left” anarchists predict that in the Free Market people would voluntarily choose to cooperate more often than to compete. -- The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Thus, long before the current and sham craze to get beyond the left-right paradigm, Wilson and Shea were already pointing to anarchism as a system which both encompasses and transcends both. Their definition quickly karate chops both participants in the debate, sadly still continuing, between individualist and communist anarchists. True anarchy is both and neither. Both the individual and collective dissolve into what Kropotkin, and Proudhon earlier, termed the mutual. Proudhon's philosophy of mutualism is very solidly carried on and made new in the writings of Kevin Carson.

All individuals are always already members of collectives and all collectives are composed of unique individuals. Again, only through the particular is glimpsed the universal. There is no final stage in history, no ultimate ground upon which we all, humanity in general, will behold eternity. The difference, then, between Proudhon and Marx is essentially metaphysical.

James Billington, in his compelling history of radicalism, Fire in the Minds of Men, argues that the key split between Proudhon and Marx can be traced back to their diverging takes on the philosophy of Hegel.

Their different views of history were evidenced in the contrasting
uses they made of Hegel's thought. Broadly stated, Marx turned Hegel
upside down, making his theory materialistic rather than idealistic;
but he maintained the basic Hegelian view that reality was monistic and
that history was moving necessarily and dialectically toward the
realization of an ideal future order. In contrast, Proudhon left Hegel
right side up, maintaining the Hegelian image of history as a process
of ideas unfolding through contradictions.

But Proudhon insisted that the agony of contradiction would not lead
to despair or resignation as long as man did not look on the situation
with complacency or cynicism. The real answer for society was not
the mythic conclusion of some future, final synthesis; but the realistic
possibility that at every stage the contradictions which are part and
parcel of life itself could be held in equilibrium. Proudhon spoke of a
dynamic ever-changing equilibrium: an "equilibration" between forces
that would never either vanish or lose their venality. The balancing of
such rival forces, though always tense and precarious, was the highest
good that man can hope for on earth. -- Fire in the Minds of Men

A dynamic ever-changing balance of contradictions -- this is anarchy. It itself is a process and not a state. It is never completed. There is no ability for a monopoly of power to congeal. It makes no sense to say that anarchy or anarchism would never work. It is working right now. It will never be total, this is correct, but if it was it would not be anarchy. The final socio-political synthesis that the Marxists pine for is anathema to any anarchist worth his salt.



Even revolution is totalizing in this respect. The revolution is ongoing or it is nothing -- it is only the means for a new faction of power heads to seize the reins of the state. Lenin himself recognized this incongruity within classical anarchism. In The State and Revolution, Lenin quotes Engels on just this point:

Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is an act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon, all of which are highly authoritarian means. And the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted more than a day if it had not used the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Cannot we, on the contrary, blame it for having made too little use of that authority? Therefore, one of two things: either that anti-authoritarians don't know what they are talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion. Or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the cause of the proletariat. In either case they serve only reaction. -- quoted in The State and Revolution

The authoritarian nature of revolution is hard to deny. The dire necessity of using force in order to remove force is one way that violent revolution is justified by classical anarchists. Another possibility, though, is to change our understanding of revolution. The revolution, or perhaps a more neutral term like "the ruckus" is preferable, could be defined as any action that moves towards individual autonomy and freedom and away from authoritarian control.

The ruckus, in this sense, is perpetual and all-pervasive. It continually creeps closer to anarchy but it never entirely reaches it. And yet it is not dissatisfied. The moment of ruckus itself is a "break thru" to eternity.

Outcast and Vagabond

Totality can only exist in the imagination. The anarchists, like the mystics, have had a vision of this, but they cease to be anarchists or mystics when they attempt to force their formulations of this vision upon others. Yet as vision alone it is pure and it inspires action toward liberty -- the ruckus.

One of the greatest of these visions came from an early anarchist, a friend and comrade of William Godwin, the poet William Blake. Blake also viewed secular revolutions as being mere steps to something greater which could only culminate in eternity. Revolution must lead to revelation or it must fail. The ultimate goal is apocalypse. Northrop Frye explains Blake's view:

If there is greater imaginative power in the revolutionary impulse, it is not so much because of what it accomplishes as because of what it is in itself. Revolution is always an attempt to smash the structure of tyranny and create a better world, even when revolutionaries do not understand what creation implies or what a better world is. The apocalypse will necessarily begin with a slaughter of tyrants, and Christ came, Blake says, to deliver those bound under the knave, not to deliver the knave.

Therefore the real war in society is the “Mental Fight” between the visionaries and the champions of tyranny. -- Fearful Symmetry

The "slaughter of tyrants" is general. It includes the deposing of earthly despots and psuedo-democrats, but it reaches beyond this to the principalities and powers in high places, the Archons, Jupiter and Saturn, space and time. The fight is mental. The battle field is the imagination and the final outcome of this great struggle is one world, really one man:

Once the heart and stomach of a larger human body appear, a larger human brain will soon follow them, and the Golden Age of Atlantis, when "all had originally one language, and one religion," will be restored. The religion will be the religion of Jesus, the Everlasting Gospel, and the language will be the tongue of Albion. Blake does not mean by one religion the the acceptance of a uniform set of doctrines by all men: he means the attainment of civilized liberty and the common vision of the divinity and unity of Man which is life in Jesus. By one language he does not mean English: he means, quoting the Bible and repeating Milton in Areopagitica, that all the Lord's people will become prophets: speak the language of the imagination, and the perception of the sun as a company of angels will be the rule rather than the exception. Further, he does not say that all were originally of one race or kingdom or empire, and though he symbolizes humanity by the name of his own nation, his has nothing to do with the frantic jingoism which a confused idea of the same symbolism might easily develop, and has developed in our day.

One language and one religion -- this sounds dangerously close to the most horrible projections of NWO paranoids. But this has nothing to do with the New World Order. The language is of the imagination and the gospel is everlasting. Both are are beyond representation. Both resist definition and monopolization by priests or kings. Both only exist in the particular and the singular, and both are embodied and rooted in the sounds and scents of untamed nature.

The one man is all men and women -- at once singularity and teeming multitude, universal but bewilderingly diverse. Blake called this man, Albion, and later Joyce named the same man, Finn and H.C.E. -- Here Comes Everybody. Adam Kadmon is another one of his names. And he is not only "he." The veiled exile returns. Shiva and his Shakti fucking eternally, always on the brink of orgasm and annihilation.

Robert Duncan, the anarchist and poet, extends Blake's vision even further. Beyond tribe, beyond nation, beyond race, beyond even the human species -- yet at the same time in the celebration of all of these. Finn manifests a universalism of all nature, of Pound's "stone alive, wood alive," a universe of singularities.

To compose such a symposium of the whole, such a totality, all the old excluded orders must be included. The female, the lumpen-proletariat, the foreign; the animal and vegetative; the unconscious and the unknown; the criminal and failure -- all that has been outcast and vagabond in our consideration of the figure of Man -- must return return to be admitted in the creation of what we are. -- The H.D. Book

Prism Planet

All attempts at summary, while welcomed, are inadequate and if taken as authority are intolerable. In the collapse of the priests and kings proper, science has taken on this authority for many. Hermetic anarchism accepts it as metaphor, as a practical means to limited ends, but as only one facet of the imagination. The scientific method is merely one method of many, useful in certain instances and pernicious in others. Paul Feyerabend called this embrace of a plurality of methods, epistemological anarchism.

Epistemological anarchism differs both from scepticism and from political (religious) anarchism. While the sceptic either regards every view as equally good, or as equally bad, or desists from making such judgements altogether, the epistemological anarchist has no compunction to defend the most trite, or the most outrageous statement.... His favourite pastime is to confuse rationalists by inventing compelling reasons for unreasonable doctrines. There is no view, however 'absurd' or 'immoral', he refuses to consider or to act upon, and no method is regarded as indispensable. The one thing he opposes positively and absolutely are universal standards, universal laws, universal ideas such as "Truth", "Reason", "Justice", "Love" and the behaviour they bring along, though he does not deny that it is often good policy to act as if such laws (such standards, such ideas) existed, and as if he believed in them.

The anarchism of being conjoins the anarchism of knowing. The so-called "new science" can be lucratively plundered for inspiring metaphors. Non-locality, self-organization, indeterminism, uncertainty, self-similarity, holographic structure, etc. are attractive not because they somehow, as scientific terminology, add credence and respectability to similar concepts within visionary traditions, but because they "make new" very ancient, even archaic or "primitive," understandings.



We did not, however, overthrow the authority of the church and its dogma only to accept the new mediation of scientists/specialists/experts. Instead, each is the exclusive expert of their own perception and reflection. The new science may resonate with much older mystical sources, but these latter go far deeper and explore the entire spectrum of human experience.

William Blake was one of the first to sound the alarm against the new dogma of scientific materialism. Blake called it "Newton's sleep," the "natural religion," an extreme narrowing of the range of the imagination and perception.

If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things, & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again. -- "There Is No Natural Religion"

Other romantic poets followed in Blake's wake. Romanticism, in this sense, was not a new movement. It was a return to a a poetic understanding of life based on the primacy of the imagination. The only disagreement within the Romantic movement was whether, as Blake taught, nature was merely a facet of the imagination or, following Wordsworth, the imagination and nature perfectly mirrored one another. All Romantics, however, and all genuine poets of all countries and ages, are in agreement on the oppressive limitations of scientific materialism.

An anecdote of John Keats and William Wordsworth wonderfully reveals this critical spirit. The two poets were at dinner together, and Keats proposed a toast:

Confusion to the memory of Newton!

To Wordsworth's questioning of the reason for this toast, Keats replied that Newton "destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism." [The Romantic Imagination, Maurice Bowra.] It is easy to share Keats's concern. For reductive scientism a prism is really a prison of perception. It attempts to provide for humanity a final word on things, an authoritative explanation that can only be challenged by officially recognized experts.

Individual, singular visions and revelations are only accepted as potentially entertaining fancies -- nothing to be taken seriously unless one, like Pound and very nearly Blake, plans for an extended and enforced stay at the local bughouse. Private apocalypses are only tolerated if one is quiet about them, or if they are presented as harmless "fiction." This is the true extent of "freedom of speech."  

Hermetic anarchists, though, perhaps now know more about Newton than did the romantic poets. Newton was really one of the last of the alchemists, his own allegiance to dogmatic materialism is only a projection onto him by later adherents of the new faith. And, contra Keats, the prism far from necessarily limiting our understanding of perception also demonstrates the ubiquity of the rainbow. Where there is light there is mystery. Keats's sentiment is sincere, but he need not have been concerned. Imagination is not that fragile.

Guerrillas gonna Guerrilla

The task of current poets and anarchists of the imagination appears to be more arduous than in the Romantic era. Nearly everything has become simulacra -- preformed, programmed, plastic, each a fully disposable and interchangeable unit in a uniform series with no original and no real difference.

How could it be possible for vision to penetrate into the eternal within a global system of usury where the real has been reduced to that which can be cheaply reproduced, priced and sold in non-localized, abstract markets? Even within this automotive, automated hell, though, the poets have not yet become extinct. There are cracks, glitches, blindspots in the panopticon, and enlightened madmen like PKD are always there to discover the divine in the detritus of the death culture.



The vision is particular, singular, individual but it always opens up a vista of the whole. Both the neo-nats and the skeptoids offer only further fragmentation. The categories are defined slightly differently but we remain boxed in, fenced off. The other is othered.

Instead, the penetrating vision is fluid, polymorphic, eclectic. It remains polytheistic and pagan, unmediated and promiscuous, indefinite and contradictory. It is non-dualist but not dogmatically so. There is polarity in nature, in thought -- Crowley's 2=0. We affirm Nietzsche's rejection of Platonism -- there is immense value in the earth, in the flesh -- but there is a wide gap between the mundane view and that of eternity. This is reflected in Blake's "double vision," in Nagarjuna's "two truths." There is a kind of coitus of perception entwining the particular and the eternal, the renewal of the Golden Age within the present world.

And all agents of mediation have been eliminated from this vision. They are no longer there to take their cut, to add distance and alienation. And perhaps this is what is manifesting. The absolute panopticon can only exist as a nearly perfect mirror of the collective imagination set absolutely free. Total control may be only a hairsbreadth away from total liberation, just as the State's most effective strategy against a guerrilla insurgency is to go guerrilla itself.

It is not the internet that is liberating humanity, it is the collective imagination that is surfacing and manifesting as the architecture of the world soul.

The net is not the world; it is the imagination of the world. -- The H.D. Book (1961) 

Already the parasitic middlemen are falling away, becoming irrelevant. In the music industry, in the film industry, the transformation is occurring in any place where information is abundant and can be given away without loss -- in education, in media, in medicine, even in design and manufacturing. And the trajectory here is extremely clear. The final gatekeepers who bar the doors to eternity are about to be swept aside, bypassed, ignored. The state and the big banks are the final middlemen to fall.

Direct democracy is now fully possible and is becoming a reality in places like Iceland and the central squares and parks of cities across Europe and America. Bitcoin ushers in a new era of P2P banking -- not the solution but a start, a Napster of peer financing. Even Bitcoin is already obsolete, needlessly centralized, too easy to manipulate. It is now but one of numerous cyptocurrencies. A few like Freicoin are modeled after one of Pound's heroes', the German anarchist Silvio Gesell's, ideas of an alternative currency based on demurrage. Gesell's conviction was that a currency, like any other commodity, should lose value over time, thus discouraging hoarding.

Pound's central concern about currency, of "the problem of issue. Who issues it? How?," is about to be addressed on a mass scale. And, beyond the purposeful summoning of oblivion which may also come, there seems to be no way of stopping this process. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri spell this out beautifully in Multitude:

The deployments of marines and military bases scattered around the globe are not insignificant. And yet this picture, like an Escher drawing, is completely unstable and with a shift of perspective can quickly be inverted. The strength of unilateral deployments is suddenly re­vealed
as weakness; the center it raises up is revealed as a point of maximum vulnerability to all forms of attack. In order to maintain it­self Empire must create a network form of power that does not isolate a center of control and excludes no outside lands or productive forces. As Empire forms, in other words, geopolitics ceases to function. Soon unilateralist and multilateralist strategies will both prove equally in­effective. The multitude will have to rise to the challenge and develop a new framework for the democratic constitution of the world.

As Blake and PKD taught, though, the Empire is not only externalized in bases and forces. Both it and the Temple are also within, but the way forward is the same. The commons will be expanded into all fields. All the representatives of time and space, and ultimately these Archons themselves, will melt away as the illusions they have always been. All authority will become drowned by the issue of the udder of eternity. Tits up!

The cycle has come round again. America is where Anatolia was. It is a place where human beings, just to stay alive, have to jump, to dance, and by dancing revive the rhythms, recover cyclical time. An-archic and pantheistic dancers no longer sense the artifice and its linear His-story as All, but as merely one cycle, one long night, a stormy night that left Earth wounded, but a night that ends, as all nights end, when the sun rises. -- Against His-story, Against Leviathan!

Hermetic Anarchism and Uttering the Otter 2

And for ages men had gazed upward as he was gazing at birds in flight. The colonnade above him made him think vaguely of an ancient temple and the ashplant on which he leaned wearily of the curved stick of an augur. A sense of fear of the unknown moved in the heart of his weariness, a fear of symbols and portents, of the hawk-like man whose name he bore soaring out of his captivity on osier-woven wings, of Thoth, the god of writers, writing with a reed upon a tablet and bearing on his narrow ibis head the cusped moon. -- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Foxes and Hares

Two distinct and antagonistic camps can be found inhabiting and waging battle within the "alternative" media landscape. These two camps are much more like shifting and fluid tendencies of thought than organized factions. There are no clear lines of demarcation.

Even within the same circles of "friends," in the same social media groups or web forums, these opposed tendencies can be identified. At times even a single individual will express agreement to certain talking points of one while also believing in the basic tenets of the other. Only in the abstract can we really speak of two distinct groups.

This may be changing. As global conditions continue to deteriorate a polarization is becoming evident. Increasingly, people are being asked to choose a side. This polarization within "alternative" media circles can be seen as a reflection of the wider polarization in more mainstream culture. The split between "conservatives" and "liberals," "right" and "left" has its direct parallel in the so-called alternative movement, whether this is admitted or not.



Both of these camps widely differ from their mainstream counterparts in their view that the status quo is intolerable, that radical change is needed. While their opposition to the mainstream (and this dichotomy of the mainstream vs. the alternative is also problematic) unifies the two camps this is about the only common ground that they share.

The aim of this post is to clearly delineate what these two are, to demonstrate how both are lacking, and to propose a third choice -- another Other. Provisionally, and more in jest than anything else, I've been calling this "Hermetic Anarchism," a term mostly borrowed from Peter Lamborn Wilson. But it can be given many names. Before it can be defined, though, the two opposing camps which are also in opposition to it must be laid out on the dissection table.

 Evidense

One side, one tendency, which could be called the alter-mondists, identifies itself as "skeptical." By this, in contrast to the classical philosophy of skepticism which advocated a full suspension of judgement, it means a more or less dogmatic opposition to anything which does not conform to the accepted limits of scientific materialism.

The skeptics are openly hostile to anything that smacks of the "spiritual." They require "evidence," conforming to the narrow bounds of the scientific method, and they utterly reject knowledge gained by faith, intuition, visions or extra sensory perception. All this gets dismissed as being mere "woo."



In arguments they insist on strict logic. Debates with skeptics largely devolve into semantic battles over whether or not a particular point is one or another logical fallacy. They equate finding fallacies in the arguments of their opponents with making a convincing case.

Naturally, they have nothing to tell us about the singular, the subjective, the immeasurable, the imaginative. None of these can be proven, regardless of the meaning generated by these kinds of experiences, so they are ignored or more often than not ridiculed.

Nearly everyone now has a "friend" or two that falls into this camp. They are the kind of person whose pastime it is to pick fights with religious people on web forums. They are the evangelizing New Atheists who refuse to take any more religious bullshit. Even agnostics are labelled fence-sitters and appeasers. They seem to be unaware how they make even the most hell-fearing Christian fundie appear like a beacon of tolerance and open-mindedness compared to themselves.



Politically, many claim to be libertarians but paradoxically they fervently support industries and technologies which are among the most state-subsidized -- nuclear power, vaccines, GMOs, etc. To be opposed to these industries is to be anti-science, a far greater sin, it appears, than being pro-corporation or pro-state. Their libertarianism is far from true anarchism. The state should exist only to protect private property. This means that the more property you have, the more protection you will get. A terrific system for robber barons and pirates.



Some skeptics, though, have apparently come to notice this contradiction or else they never made the compromise with libertarianism in the first place. Conventional Marxists fall into this category. Instead of being opponents of globalization they argue that the real problem is the lack of regulations at the international level. They are also in favour of the technologies listed above and seem to genuinely believe that these can, once in public hands, greatly advance the living conditions of the vast unwashed.

These two sub-factions appear to be at war with one another, but they fundamentally agree on one level. They both believe change needs to happen on an international scale. They both think that this change is entirely material in basis. There are no spiritual solutions, no necessary transformations of consciousness, no magic.

They have no patience for conspiracy theories, UFO accounts or anecdotes of the supernatural. They are intolerant of non-scientific belief systems, but at heart they are pluralists. All individuals, regardless of race, age, sexual orientation, etc. are to be welcomed into the new secular world order. In this way they are similar to mainstream NWO proponents, but they are opposed, both libertarians and socialists, to hierarchy and elitism.

Again?

The opposite camp, what might be called the neo-nationalists, is even more varied and even less united. A binding factor is a strict opposition to One World Government. Instead there is a renewed emphasis on nationalism or even tribalism. The ultimate goal of the NWO, the neo-nats argue, is complete control of all facets of our lives. This the global government hopes to accomplish by eliminating all natural social ties between individuals.



The only agent of social mediation must be the State. The family, "nuclear" and no longer "extended," must be completely destroyed. Individuals are to be entirely atomized and alienated, utterly dependent on the State. When finally all familial, religious, racial and cultural connections are severed the World State will have the mind, body and spirit of the individual at its complete disposal. He or she (and gender will also no longer matter) will have no will of his or her own. Two plus two will equal five.

There exists, the neo-nats insist, a long-term conspiracy to bring about this goal. At the apex of the conspiracy, in the very eye of the pyramid, are the Elite. In conspiracy theory lore there are varied and often contradictory views as to the true identity of the shadowy masters. More exotically they are presented as Reptilians, demons, Archons, shadow aspects of ourselves. More mundanely they are viewed as being the 1%, the old aristocracies and increasingly, when pressed to be realistic and concrete, the Jooooos.

History repeats itself in this way. It is the Jews that seem always at hand to play the dreaded role of scapegoat. Increasingly, once open-minded, open-ended and sincere researchers have come to feed at the common trough of anti-semitism.

All of the tired old cliches are put back into service. The Jews, or more subtly, the "Zionists," have wormed their way into the highest ranks of the most influential sectors of white society -- the media, real estate and especially banking and finance. They pose as "whites" within these positions of power but they both covertly and quite openly act to bring down the noble white race. They have many weapons at their disposal.

The script is recycled straight from the Protocols: The Zionists employ their unlimited capital, immense media influence and activist leaders in the streets to promote multiculturalism, mass immigration, race-mixing, feminism, pacifism, vegetarianism, mysticism, relativism, Agenda 21, counterculture, psychedelic drugs, minority rights movements, the New Age and so on.

Recently all of these have been conveniently lumped together under the umbrella term "cultural Marxism," even though nobody seems to know what this term really means. All of these, according to this view, are designed from the get-go. They are the fruits of conspiracies that span decades and even centuries.

The neo-nationalists argue that each race is unique, that each race struggles for dominance against every other racial group. Each race should have their own separate languages, cultures, mythologies, traditions, political systems. There should be no mixture, no adulteration, no unnatural co-mingling.

 

The Jews, the white neo-nationalists froth on about, are not playing the racial game fairly. They are using cunning and deceit to destroy the white race from the inside. The combined complex of "cultural Marxism" is the means to this end.

The white neo-nationalists, once very marginalized even within the conspiracy theory milieu, are beginning to take centre stage. Like the Nazis before them, they are well-poised to hijack, both physically and intellectually, the whole movement. Perhaps this was the plan from the start?

Volk Off

After the failure of 2012 to mark an obvious and dramatic turning point in history, and faced with heightened ridicule and taunting from the materialists and skeptoids, many conspiracy theorists became entirely antagonistic to anything smacking of mysticism and the New Age. They had been duped. They had danced blindly behind the pied pipers and had very nearly fallen off the cliff. They had been made fools of, victims of yet another tentacle of "cultural Marxism." Never again! It was time to become hard.



The real masters, the ultimate controllers of the Machine, the new dispensation announced, are not some shadowy or mystical group of other-worldly or interdimensional spirits or entities. They are not even abstract groups like the 1% or the NWO.

Instead, they are actual men and women with actual addresses and identities, and who wield nothing more magical or supernatural besides highly advanced technology. And this group was named over and over again throughout history. They are the Jews and their ultimate aim, through infiltration and subversion, is to irreparably shatter the supremacy of the white race.

After 2012, the religious and spiritual thinking of the neo-nationalists also hardened. They are increasingly hostile to "soft" Christianity, which has always been weakened by its Judaic roots. The Nazis, once universally derided by conspiracy theorists as being the very epitome of the type of totalitarianism they despised, are now looked at in a brand new light. History, after all, is written by the victors, and the victor of WW2 is the "Jew World Order."

Hitler, it is now argued (conveniently ignoring older research that traced Nazi financial ties to Wall Street and the Bush family), was really fighting against the banks and the global system of usury. The Holocaust was largely a figment of Bolshevik propaganda -- an early manifestation of "cultural Marxism" before the term was even invented. The Holocaust, they warn, is still successfully employed to justify Zionist schemes everywhere.



And like the Nazis, the neo-nationalists are returning to Nordic myths, Germanic and Anglo-Saxon lore, the religion of the "volk" or the "folk." There is an embrace of paganism but a complete rejection of the universalism of Theosophy or New Age one world religion.

The politics of the neo-nationalists, though, are not necessarily Nazi or even fascist. Many remain very hostile to the centralized state, although they are not internationalists like other libertarians. There is an appeal for "national anarchism," an anarchist tendency that views the centralized state, which enforces an artificial and essentially perverse multiculturalism, as being the primary problem. The alternative to this, they hold, is a patchwork of ethnically and culturally distinct and purified "nations."

Within these bantustan-like statelets the system of government is entirely up to their respective members. It is each "nations'" prerogative whether it will be draconian, intolerant, illiberal or not. National anarchists have thus made alliances with many other nationalist groups some of which could not be classed as "anarchist" at all, just as long as they are united in their opposition to the federal or central government. For this reason many anarchists are opposed to national anarchism. It has been described as "letting a hundred authoritarianisms bloom."

Neither Nor

The national anarchists tend to make the assumption that what individuals truly desire is to live with their own kind, to follow only the customs and traditions of their "tribe." But many people do not want this at all. I, for instance, come from a "tribe" of friendly, yet insular and conservative, Christian fundamentalist rednecks. In no way do I feel that I am represented by this "tribe" or that I represent it. I have always felt alienated from it. I have always been different.

And I know that I am by no means alone in this. Many of us feel different and love difference. We, the freaks, the misfits, the hermetic anarchists, love the swirling, colourful, riotous sights, sounds, smells and tastes of big multicultural cities and human diversity wherever it can be found.



We like to be able to live, work, play, eat, fuck where and who and what we want. We abhor equally the UN, globalist, state capitalist/state socialist, monocultural corporate nightmare and a hypothetical system of ethnically-cleansed, racially pure, mutually hostile "nations." We reject both options.

In a sense the hermetic anarchists are "beyond left and right," but not in the way that this term is usually abused these days. "Beyond left and right" is now a term successfully employed by the Right to attract leftists to its brand of intolerance. By all means we refuse conventional liberalism and leftism. We have long broken free of the ideological straightjacket of Marxist historical materialism.

We want none of its narrow, mean-spirited categorization, but the tradition of the Left we call ourselves a part of is much older, much deeper, much more diverse than anything that currently is identified as leftist. Only in this way we are beyond both.

It may seem strange to associate the Left with a tradition. Generally it is the Right that is called traditional. There is a spirituality of the Right that became evident in fascism and the Nazi movement, a kind of race mysticism, which is abhorrent to the Left. The Left, insofar as it will admit to having a tradition at all, is materialist and atheist. Can we really speak about a spiritual tradition of the Left?

Returning To A Plot That Has Already Begun

 
And yet there is such a tradition, one that reaches back far further than when socialism became synonymous, due to its being commandeered by the Fabians and the Marxists, with the oppressive nanny state. Socialism was the movement for the democratic and social rights of the people, both of the country and of the city, and the people were (and largely are) polytheist and pagan. There is an intellectual tradition coinciding with this which Peter Lamborn Wilson, who I borrowed from, referred to as the "Hermetic Left."

If we have learned to associate ceremonial magic with right-wing politics thanks to such figures as W B . Yeats and Aleister Crowley, we should learn to be more careful in our categorical assumptions. The idea of "tradition" was only hi-jacked by the Right in very recent times (and thanks in part to such "traditionalists" as Guenon, Evola, Jung, Eliade, or T. S. Eliot) . Formerly the Left had its tradition as well, the "Good Old Cause" that combined unmediated autonomy and unmediated spirituality. While the traditionalist Right veers toward a dualism of good and evil, spirit and body, hierarchy and separation, the Hermetic Left emphasizes "ancient rights and customs"of freedom, equality, justice-and bodily pleasure (e.g., Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell). The Left is "radical monist", Saturnian and Dionysian; the Right is "Gnostic", authoritarian and Apollonian. Naturally these terms and categories get, mingled and confused, combined and recombined, in an excessive exfoliation of the
strangest hybrids and freaks. The Right has its mystical revolutionaries, the Left has its Gnostic Dualists. But as generalizations or ideal models I believe that the rival traditions can be clearly distinguished. -- "The Shamanic Trace" 

A combination of "unmediated autonomy and unmediated spirituality"  -- this is the essence of the "hermetic left" or "hermetic anarchism."The heroes of the "hermetic right," Yeats and Crowley and Jung and Evola, can also have their ideas ransacked and plundered. Theoretical promiscuity. Swallow the mystical insights and spit or shit out the elitism and the bland and stifling categorization.



Every man and woman is a star, as Crowley wrote. We are all far better artists than we know, as Nietzsche taught. Each individual does provide a unique perspective for God, as according to Yeats. All three of these writers are associated with the Right, but these ideas are deeply shared by hermetic anarchists.

The absence of mediation, both by the State and by the Church -- by Space and Time, is only possible because each individual is the co-creator of whatever it is that is taken for reality. These men, when they express such insights, are certainly part of a shared tradition.

The poet Robert Duncan, himself a spiritual anarchist inspired by Ezra Pound, H.D. and other Modernists and in turn a big influence on Wilson, tied this archaic, underground tradition of "spiritual resistance" to the wider poetic tradition:

Our work is to arouse in a contemporary consciousness reverberations of old myth, to prepare the ground so that when we return to read we will see our modern texts charged with a plot that had already begun before the first signs and signatures we have found worked upon the walls of Altamira or Pech-Merle. -- The H.D. Book

The timeless plot continues. It is beginning to be aroused again. The old myth, fashioned in images and sounds, stretches from the caves of the Paleolithic to the stars reflecting eyes reflecting stars. The signatures are found in Altamira and in Alpha Centauri. The marvelous penetrates it all. P.L. Wilson directly follows from Duncan:

That there exists an unbroken underground tradition
of spiritual resistance, a kind of hermetic "left" that has roots in Stone Age shamanism, and flowers in the heresies of the "Free Spirit".

Duncan saw Ezra Pound as being a key figure of this tradition, even though Pound was certainly not of the "Left":

As important for me is Pound's role as the carrier of a tradition or lore in poetry, that flowered in the Renaissance after Gemisthos Plethon, the Provence of the twelfth century that gave rise to the Albigensian gnosis, the trobar clus, and the Kabbalah, in the Hellenic world that furnished the ground for orientalizing Greek mystery cults, Christianity, and neo-Platonism. "The tradition is a beauty which we preserve and not a set of fetters to bind us," Pound wrote in 1913. -- "The Lasting Contribution of Ezra Pound"

"A beauty that we preserve" -- a glimpse of the eternal, of the truly unmediated or immediate. A peak behind the curtain. We are all straw men.