by Greg Johnson
THE KALI YUGA: THE AGE OF VICE
The Epic of Arya is set in the Kali Yuga, the last age in the Hindu cycle of ages (which roughly correspond to the ages outlined by Hesiod in Works and Days). In the Golden Age, men and gods lived on the earth together. In the Kali Yuga (or Dark Age), mankind is the furthest removed from God and the most spiritually decadent. This age is ruled by the demon Kali, a negative manifestation of the god Vishnu. The Kali Yuga is described in the Vishnu Purana as a time when Brahmanical clothing constitutes a Brahman; when agriculture is abandoned for mechanization; the Earth is honored for mineral treasures and is exploited; there is no transcendent connection to sacraments like marriage; men are fixated on money; and women are selfish. As Arya puts it, “in the Golden Age, before the hotchpotch of mob rule melted races and classes into a maelstrom from hell, there was one divine race on earth” (p. 182).
Being born in such a world is distressing to Arya—she is alone with no kindred soul. Even when she reaches a city lauded by the masses, Arya is disgusted:
You call yourselves “civilized,” but yours is the civilization of accumulation and mediocrity bearing the banner of justice and equality, a sham civilization which buries all higher aspirations in the stagnant mud of materialism, and drowns all will to elevation in the murky waters of degeneracy. (p. 257)
MERITOCRACY AS THE TRUE ARISTOCRACY
Another main theme of Arya is that of hierarchies, as opposed to the egalitarianism prevalent in the world today. The Epic of Arya does not extol an aristocracy based on blood or material possessions, but a meritocracy like that described by Plato in The Republic.
Hereditary aristocracy makes even less sense in the Kali Yuga than other times, since it brings a degeneration of form that does not allow Traditions to be passed by blood, as “True superiority is seldom inherited” (p. 209). Arya is interesting in part because of the many descriptions given for what is truly noble:
Something that cannot be bought or sold
Something that cannot be inherited or given, only earned
Not related to titles, but to abilities
Determined by how much someone gives, not owns
Involves merit, talent, honor, duty, and honesty
The real aristocrat is: “a complete human being, a synthetic man, an accomplished person. He combines a healthy body with a brilliant mind and a noble soul, a radiant spirit and beauty within and without. But the soul is primary, and a pure soul is more beautiful than the most perfect body” (p. 216).
“All greatness is humble and magnanimous, all baseness is wicked and conceited” (p. 229).
RACE OF THE SPIRIT
The Epic of Arya expresses a concept of race similar to that of Julius Evola, Oswald Spengler, and Francis Parker Yockey—the notion of a race of the spirit. Arya does not come by this view naturally, however: For most of the book she is obsessed with finding her true sons, others of her race who are from the North. When she eventually finds the city she longs for, however, the people there are as crude, materialistic, and greedy as those of any other place. Familial and racial connections have lost their transcendent connections, and the men she finds are simply the “unworthy sons that every mother has” (p. 199).
According to the doctrine of the Yugas, in the Golden Age, race was an indication of an inner quality. A person was formed from a substance that represented his true nature. Thus, the beautiful body revealed a beautiful soul and noble character, and male and female souls formed corresponding bodies. It is the opposite of the current Dark Age, when most men no longer possess true virility and pariahs comprise the ruling class who desecrate the sacred earth.
In addition to not being applicable in the Kali Yuga, the biological doctrine of race also is a hindrance to enlightenment. Arya is told:
Cling to no nation, no tribe, and no creed, these are but chains of enslavement to the limited and the transient. How could you call a nation your own, you whose soul dwells with the gods? How could you embrace but one creed, when Truth is the source of all creeds. (p. 374)
Not only is the biological determinist view of race invalid in the Kali Yuga, it also is disproved by the very nature used to support it. The Epic illustrates this point when Arya is told: “how many beautiful flowers contain the deadliest poison! How many worms dwell in the loveliest apples! Do not cling much to form, Arya, for it deceives . . . and though spirit moulds the form, yet the form is not the spirit!” (p. 108).
The discourse on race also comments on the notion of a chosen people: “Eternal Religion has no holy land or chosen people” (p. 33), and again, “There are no chosen people, save those who have chosen out themselves” (p. 116). Arya also comments on Yahweh, the God of the Hebrew Bible: “let this god from the desert stay away from me, away from us truly chosen ones—we who have chosen Pan over Yahweh—for his lost tribes are doomed to aimlessly wander the earth in search of a promise that never was” . . . “That is the curse of the gods: those who stray from the Inner Path shall nowhere feel at home and never find peace, though they may wander the earth in search of their lost soul; the desert remains their only home” (p. 38).
If race is not determined by blood or soil, a question naturally arises as to how a race of the spirit could be defined. The Epic of Arya has an answer for this question as well:
A race is a spiritual brotherhood of blood and honor; it is defined by the dream that it shares, the truth that it reveres and fights for, the god that it venerates . . . and only he or she who shares my truth and believes in my god do I call a brother or a sister, a son or a daughter, for blood means little if it does not serve the soul. (p. 50)
THE HERD & THE OVERMAN
Another Nietzschean concept in Arya is the Übermensch. In Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote, “man is something which ought to be overcome.” Arya is told that there are no races anymore, only masters and slaves, godmen and undermen. Some need a god “before whom you can all be slaves—but equal slaves” (p. 67). These are the people who fulfill themselves only through their slavery (p. 67).
Nietzsche’s notion of being a bridge appears in Arya as well: “Hence the Higher Man, that god in the making, remains trapped between heaven and earth—while men are trapped between earth and hell” (p. 115). Arya eventually learns that she should focus not on bridging the gap between herself and the herd, but on bridging the gap between the human and the god.
The plight of godmen, then, is to endure the agony of humanity while remaining divine in spirit: “choosing the cold dangers of the pure and innocent wilderness to the warm comfort of the filthy and decadent human wastelands of civilization; for where herds live, there you find the wastelands and the deserts of the spirit; and where no man has set foot, there the air remains pure and undefiled, and a ray of hope shines on the horizon of a better tomorrow” (p. 139).
The Epic of Arya is such a ray of hope, a connection to the transcendent to help guide mankind through the end of the Kali Yuga to the establishment once again of the Golden Age.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right,
July 2, 2010
ANDROPHILIA: A MANIFESTO
DEREK HAWTHORNE
_____________________
Jack Malebranche (Jack Donovan)
Androphilia: A Manifesto
Baltimore, Md.: Scapegoat Publishing, 2006
Near the end of Androphilia, Jack Donovan writes, “It has always seemed like some profoundly ironic cosmic joke to me that the culture of men who love men is a culture that deifies women and celebrates effeminacy. Wouldn’t it make more sense if the culture of men who are sexually fascinated by men actually idolized men and celebrated masculinity?” (p. 115).
He has a point there. As Donovan notes, homosexual pornography is almost exclusively focused on hypermasculine archetypes: the lumberjack, the Marine, the jock, the cop, etc. (I am going to employ the term “homosexual,” despite its problematic history, as a neutral term to denote same-sex desire among men. I am avoiding the term “gay,” for reasons
that will soon be apparent.) So why are homosexuals, who worship masculine men, so damn queeny? Most straight men (and women too) would offer what they see as the obvious answer: homosexuals are not real men. They are a sort of strange breed of womanly man, and it is precisely the otherness of masculine men that attracts them so. This is, after all, the way things work with straight people: men are attracted to women, and vice versa, because they are other. We want what we are not. Therefore, if a man desires another man then he must not be a real man.
What makes this theory so plausible is that so many self-identified homosexuals do behave in the most excruciatingly effeminate manner. They certainly seem to be not-quite-men. Donovan thinks (and I believe he is correct) that it is this womanish behavior in homosexuals that bothers straight men so much—more so, actually, than the fact that homosexuals have sex with other men in the privacy of their bedrooms.
Donovan objects to effeminacy in homosexuals as well, but he sees this effeminacy as a socially-constructed behavior pattern, as a consequence of the flawed logic that claims “since we’re attracted to what’s other, if you’re a man attracted to a man you must not be a real man.” Having bought into this way of seeing things, the “gay community” actually encourages its members to “camp it up” and get in touch with their feminine side. They think they are liberating themselves, but what they don’t see is that they have bought into a specific set of cultural assumptions which effectively rob them of their manhood, in their own eyes and in the eyes of society.
Donovan argues, plausibly, that homosexual attraction should be seen as a “variation in desire” among men (p. 21). Homosexuals are men—men who happen to be attracted to other men. Their sexual desire does not make them into a separate species of quasi-men. This is a point that will be resisted by many, but it is easily defended. One can see this simply by reflecting on how difficult it is to comprehend the homosexuals of yore in the terms we use today to deal with these matters. There was, after all, unlikely to have been anything “queeny” (and certainly not cowardly) about the “Sacred Band” of Thebes—a contingent of warriors consisting of same-sex couples. And the samurai in feudal Japan were doing it too—just to mention two examples. These are not the sort of people one thinks of as “sensitive” and who one would expect to show up at a Lady Gaga concert, were they around today. It is unlikely that Achilles and his “favorite” Patroclus would have cruised around with a rainbow flag flying from their chariot. These were manly men, who happened to sexually desire other men. If there can be such men, then there is no necessary disjunction between homosexuality and masculinity. QED.
In essential terms, what Donovan argues in Androphilia is that homosexuals should reject the “gay culture” of effeminacy and reclaim masculinity for themselves. Ironically, gay culture is really the product of an internalization of the Judeo-Christian demonization of same-sex desire, and its insistence that homosexuality and masculinity are incompatible. Donovan wants gays to become “androphiles”: men who love men, but who are not defined by that love. “Gay men” are men who allow themselves to be defined entirely by their desire, defined into a separate segment of humanity that talks alike, walks alike, dresses alike, thinks alike, votes alike, and has set itself apart from “breeders” in fashionable urban ghettos. “Gay” really denotes a whole way of life “that promotes anti-male feminism, victim mentality, and leftist politics” (p. 18). (This is the reason Donovan often uses “homo” instead of “gay”: gay is a package deal denoting much more than same-sex desire.) He argues that in an effort to promote acceptance of men with same-sex desire, homosexuals encouraged others to regard them as, in effect, a separate sex—really, almost a separate race. “Gay,” Donovan remarks, is really “sexuality as ethnicity” (p. 18). As a result, gay men have cut themselves off from the fraternity of men and, arguably, trapped themselves in a lifestyle that stunts them into perpetual adolescence. Donovan asks, reasonably, “Why should I identify more closely with a lesbian folk singer than with [straight] men my age who share my interests?”
Many of those who have made it this far into my review might conclude now that Androphilia is really a book for homosexuals, and doesn’t have much to say to the rest of the world. But this is not the case. Donovan’s book contains profound reflections on sexuality and its historical construction (yes, there really are some things that are historically constructed), the nature of masculinity, the role of male bonding in the formation of culture, and the connection between masculinity and politics. This book has implications for how men—all men—understand themselves.
Donovan attacks head-on the attempt by gays to set themselves up as an “oppressed group” on the model of blacks and women, and to compel all of us to refrain from uttering a critical word about them. He attacks feminism as the anti-male ideology it is. And he zeroes in on the connection, taken for granted by nearly everyone, between gay culture and advocacy of Left-wing causes. Androphilia, in short, is a book that belongs squarely on the political Right. It should be no surprise to anyone to discover that Donovan has been busy since the publication of Androphilia writing for sites like Alternative Right and The Spearhead.
Donovan himself was a part of the gay community when he was younger, but never really felt like he belonged. He so much as tells us that his desire for men is his religion; that he worships masculinity in men. But it seemed natural to Donovan that since he was a man, he should cultivate in himself the very qualities he admired in others. His desire was decidedly not for an “other” but for the qualities that he saw, proudly, in himself. (He says at one point, “I experience androphilia not as an attraction to some alien opposite, but as an attraction to variations in sameness,” p. 49.)
Donovan is certainly not alone. It’s natural when we think of homosexuals to visualize effeminate men, because those are the ones that stand out. If I asked you to visualize a Swede you’d probably conjure up a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Nordic exemplar. But, of course, a great many Swedes are brunettes (famous ones, too; e.g., Ingmar Bergman). The effeminate types are merely the most conspicuous homosexuals. But there also exists a silent multitude of masculine men who love men, men whom no one typically pegs as “gay.” These men are often referred to as “straight-acting”—as if masculinity in a homosexual is necessarily some kind of act. These men are really Donovan’s target audience, and they live a tragic predicament. They are masculine men who see their own masculinity as a virtue, thus they cannot identify with what Donovan calls the Gay Party (i.e., “gay community”) and its celebration of effeminacy. They identify far more closely with straight men, who, of course, will not fully accept them. This is partly due to fear (“is he going to make a pass at me?”), and partly, again, due to the prevailing view which equates same-sex desire with lack of manliness. The Jack Donovans out there are lost between two worlds, at home in neither. Loneliness and sexual desire compels such men to live on the periphery of the gay community, hoping always to find someone like themselves. If they have at all internalized the message that their desires make them less-than-men (and most have), then their relationship to masculinity will always be a problematic one. They will always have “something to prove,” and always fear, deep down, that perhaps they are inadequate in some fundamental way.
Androphilia is therapy for such men, and a call for them to form a new identity and group solidarity quite independent of the “gay community.” On the one hand, Donovan asserts that, again, homosexuality should be seen as a “variation in desire” among men; that homosexuals should see themselves as men first, and not be defined entirely by their same-sex desire. On the other hand, it is very clear that Donovan also has high hopes that self-identified androphiles will become a force to be reckoned with. He writes at one point, “While other men struggle to keep food on the table or get new sneakers for Junior, androphiles can use their extra income to fund their endeavors. This is a significant advantage. Androphiles could become leaders of men in virtually any field with comparative ease. By holding
personal achievement in high esteem, androphiles could become more than men; they could become great men” (p. 88).
Is Jack Donovan—the androphile Tyler Durden—building an army? Actually, it looks more like he’s building a religion, and this brings us to one of the most interesting aspects of Androphilia. Repeatedly, Donovan tells us that “masculinity is a religion,” or words to that effect (see especially pp. 65, 72, 76, 80, 116).
A first step to understanding what he is talking about is to recognize that masculinity is an ideal, and a virtue. Men strive to cultivate masculinity in themselves, and they admire it in other men. Further, masculinity is something that has to be achieved. Better yet, it has to be won. Femininity, on the other hand, is quite different. Femininity is essentially a state of being that simply comes with being female; it is not an accomplishment. Women are, but men must become. If femininity has anything to do with achievement, the achievement usually consists in artifice: dressing in a certain manner, putting on makeup, learning how to be coy, etc. Femininity is almost exclusively bound up with being attractive to men. If a man’s “masculinity” consisted in dressing butch and not shaving, he would be laughed at; his “masculinity” would be essentially effeminate. (Such is the masculinity, for example, of gay “bears” and “leatherman.”) Similarly, if a man’s “masculinity” consists entirely in pursuing women and making himself attractive to them, he is scorned by other men. (Ironically, such “gigolos” are often far more effeminate mama’s boys than many homosexuals.) No, true masculinity is achieved by accomplishing something difficult in the world: by fighting, building something, discovering something, winning a contest, setting a record, etc. In order for it to count, a man has to overcome things like fear and opposition. He has to exhibit such virtues as bravery, perseverance, commitment, consistency, integrity, and, often, loyalty. Masculinity is inextricably tied to virtue (which is no surprise—given that the root vir-, from which we also get “virile,” means “man”). A woman can be petty, fickle, dishonest, fearful, inconstant, weak, and unserious—and still be thought of as 100% feminine.
