by Frank Gelli
He said one of his favourite Nietzsche aphorisms was not the ad nauseam quoted “God is dead” but the less known words that came after it: “Given the ways of men, God for years will still cast his shadow – and we shall have to vanquish that shadow, too.”
‘One of the titles of the Ottoman Sultan was “Shadow of God” and for centuries it was a very powerful shadow indeed. His armies almost took Vienna in 1683. But, as time went by, the Sultan’s rule gradually grew weaker, until it became, one could say, the shadow of its former self. The last Sultan and Caliph of the Ottoman Empire was a poor larva of a man. You should look at his picture and compare it with that of Osman, the founder of the Ottoman dynasty. Osman, a powerfully-built, barbarous-looking chieftain, exudes strength, brute force, while timid, bespectacled Vahiddin looks like a primary school teacher. When Ataturk at last suppressed the Caliphate hardly anybody noticed. He had become a shadow’s shadow. By “God’s shadow” Nietzsche of course meant Christian morality, which lingered on after Christian dogma had become defunct. In that sense, God’s shadow is still with us. Democracy, equality and the rights of man have grown out of Christianity. “Liberty, Equality, fraternity” - very easy to imagine Jesus of Nazareth saying that, don’t you think? Whenever I watch on TV all those appeals to relieve poverty and famine in Africa or South America, I am reminded of the shadow’s lingering hold on mankind. To the Greeks and the Roman, the ancient Germans, the notion of feeling sorry for alien races and peoples would have been nonsensical. As if you neglected your own family, your brothers and your children to give out your money and goods to utter strangers! You would consider someone like that as worse than just eccentric. Mad, perhaps. Or criminal. It is the same of the altruistic mania gripping the West. All down to God’s shadow. Christian morality. Nietzsche saw the problem but did not come up with any solution. Worse, no solution is possible until the cosmic cycle we are in, the Khali Yuga, has run its course...’
THE BERSERKERS
He urged me to read the Norse saga, Heimskringla. It narrates the exploits of Harald Sigurdson, also known as Harald Hardrada, or Harald the Implacable. Fitting sobriquet. ‘The half-brother of King Olaf of Norway – most implausibly honoured as a saint and patron of many churches – you might as well canonise a wild beast! At the battle of Stiklestad, aged 15, Harald went to Russia and later travelled to Constantinople, where he become commander of the imperial guard, the Varangians. He quarrelled with the Byzantine generals , so he went off to campaign in Africa, Palestine and Sicily. Back in Constantinople, he was thrown into a dungeon, then he escaped. Took his revenge by blinding the Emperor – a mere bagatelle, by his standards. Then he fled to Russia, Novgorod, to claim the treasure he had stashed away there. Loaded with riches, he married the daughter of King Yaroslav. In Scandinavia, he allied himself with King Svein of Denmark. Later, he bought a share of the Norwegian throne from his nephew, King Magnus. He went on to invade Denmark and claim both thrones. Married his concubine, Thora. She gave him two children, although his bastards are said to be innumerable. While building churches in Trondheim, he slaughtered the peasant leader Einar Paunch-Shaker and his son. Age seems to have made him increasingly war-like and he fought battles up and down Scandinavia, too many to record even in the Heimskringla. At last, he decided to invade England. His ally there was Tostig, Earl of Northumbria, the brother of King Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon ruler of England. After sailing to Orkney, Harald landed in Yorkshire where he routed an English army at the battle of Fulford. Alas, he should have read the runes. At Stanford Bridge English King Harold crushed the invaders. Tostig and Harald fell fighting – a type of death, I am sure, Harald would have been proud of.’
‘This splendid Viking, this medieval marauder would have matched Nietzsche’s idea of the “Blond Beast” much better than black-haired, Spanish Cesare Borgia, don’t you think? The problem is that Nietzsche was a classical philologist. All throughout his life, the South mesmerised him. Had he directed his learning towards the North, studied the Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons, as the Englishman, Tolkien did, they would have provided him with far better models.’
‘That Viking rage, the spirit of the berserkers - the Nordic warriors who fought with wild frenzy – is not dead yet. You cannot extinguish the soul of a race for good. Present-day Scandinavia, with its welfare state, social democracy and peaceful, women-dominated societies is only the surface. Underneath, fires are smouldering. One day the flames will flare up again, believe you me. Then people will realise Harald Hardrada is back.’
The date today is 18 July 2011. A young, blond, Aryan-looking Norwegian man has just bombed and mass-shot himself into the world news. By massacring nearly a hundred innocent people in Oslo. Whatever the motives of Anders Behring Breivik’s action, Evola’s words, insofar as I can remember them, resonate like a prophecy . Harald Hardrada has come again. As a studied, planned, ideological berserker, Breivik embodies, to some extent, the martial, savage spirit of the old Viking warriors. Unlike his ancestors, he has not gone as far as raping and pillaging his victims but he has carried out his beastly and joyful butchering just the same. This fellow apparently believes in God, calls himself a Christian. His murderous actions illustrate the third aspect of the Transcendent, the destructive one, as Evola unsentimentally taught. Breivik’s mild, right-thinking, bourgeois fellow citizens may be horrified, hold memorial services in usually deserted Lutheran churches and swear up and down that this slaughter was not true religion. They are kidding themselves. Hardrada was, technically speaking, a Christian. Did it moderate his fighting rage? No. Blood is thicker than water...The Vikings, even if baptised, were not nice guys. It is the return of the repressed. Peace, love and neighbourliness can be a bit too much at times. You can see why Jesus of Nazareth commanded love of neighbour to his hearers. He had to. Because natural inclinations run the other way. The truth is that sometimes people may actually enjoy slaughtering their neighbours. (We saw that in former Yugoslavia.) No doubt Breivik will invoke holy texts to justify his action. From the Flood in Genesis to the avenging angels in the Book of Revelation. The destroying Spirit, the exterminating angel crops up fairly regularly in human history. No good to deny it. From where he is now – I refuse to believe he has gone for ever - I imagine Evola smiling on me: ‘I told you so. See?’
Aryan ideology at times can have droll results. We of the Solstice group were in touch with various groups with similar views across the world. As I knew English, they asked me to draught a letter to a certain Aryan suprematist organisation in Holland. A couple of weeks later the answer came: “We cannot agree to enter into regular contacts with you. We are a Nordic movement and stand for pure Aryan blood. You Italians do not qualify for that. You belong to an inferior Mediterranean stratum. There is no way in which you could be described as Aryan. Please, refrain from writing to us again.”
I found that message hugely funny. I had to tell the Baron. I expected him to joke about it but he did not. ‘A narrow position but one deserving respect. In a way, they are right. In the mixture of ethnic strands making up the Italian people the Roman-Aryan element is tiny, compared with, say, the percentage in Scandinavia. Of course, even in putatively Nordic countries you still have a melange of racial factors. No race is ethnically “pure”, whatever that may mean today. It is a matter of percentage...However, you could point out to our Dutch friends that understanding race from a simply biological point of view is naive, a fatal mistake. If being Nordic was simply a matter of outwards racial traits, or even genes or DNA, as they like to say today, then it would be hard to understand how Nordic nations like Holland and Norway resisted and fought against the Third Reich. They stubbornly strove to defeat their Nordic, German brothers. The values the Dutch espoused were antithetical to Aryanism, as a matter of fact...Yes, there were Dutch and Norwegian volunteers in the Waffen SS but they were a small minority...People who live in glass houses should not throw stones, our Dutch brethren should be told. The whole thrust of my teachings on these matte
rs has been to stress that race is an inward, spiritual fact, not a crude biological thing...The Dutch empire in the East was a mercantile affair. Its values were the same as those of the English. And the political arrangement in Holland has been liberal and anti-traditional for centuries. Italy, never mind our bastardised her make-up, came up with the fascist revolution. With all its flaws, at least it was an attempt to fight back the waves of subversion that were engulfing Europe after WW1. Holland just basked in its small, opulent colonial empire and the goodies it looted from it...Until the Japanese gave the whole thing a well-deserved coup de grace. Well done!’
GRACE AND KARMA
On Sunday morning I had accompanied my mother to church. In his sermon the preacher - a swarthy, gesticulating priest - has exalted the role of divine grace in human affairs. Grace was not one of Evola’s favourite words, unlike karma. Next time I saw him I managed to get him to talk on that. He began by telling me a story. (Later I discovered the very same story narrated by the film director Orson Wells. God knows where it came from originally.)
‘Once upon a time there was a scorpion who wanted to get across a river. Swimming was not his forte, however. So he asked a friendly-looking frog to carry him across. “You kidding?” the frog answered, “I have no death wish – you would sting me!” “No”, the rational arachnid countered, “Why would I do that? Suicide is not my thing either. We would both drown. Rest assured I would never harm you. It comes down to self-preservation. I am not irrational, am I?”
‘That won the amiable amphibian over. “Hop on”, the frog said. The scorpion on her back, the frog started swimming vigorously towards the farther shore when...she felt a dreadful upsurge of pain. “You have stung me! Bloody idiot! Why have you done this? Now we are both drowning. There is no logic in this!”
“Sure” gurgled the dying scorpion. “It is illogical but...you see, I am a scorpion. To sting is in my nature – it is my karma.”
That was that. Grim tale. It sounded rather fatalistic. Individuals determined by their natures. The good bound to be good and the bad to be bad. No free choice. I was unsure how to respond. Lots of examples to the contrary crossed my mind. St Paul’s encounter with the risen Jesus on the Damascus Road, turning him from persecutor of the Nazarenes to lover of Christ. The preacher had called that a typical work of grace. Like the case of the Innominato, the nameless one, an iconic character from Alessandro Manzoni’s historical novel, The Betrothed. A man whom divine grace transforms from villain to saint, the preacher had said. And so on. Would they have fallen on stony ground before the Baron?
He seemed to read my mind. He observed that grace and karma were really two different sides of the same coin. Transcendence includes both. Not that he elucidated. But he said that the popular notion of karma was worthless...Did he mean that he himself was an instance of grace overriding the laws of cause and effect? I recall a wonderful mystic of Jewish origins, Martin Israel, a priest and a physician, once assuring me that even Hitler, where he is now, “if he is willing to do undergo much penance and do much work” will one day be saved. So will the Black Baron, the preacher of racism, anti-Semitism and aristocratic counter-revolution also be saved eventually? Ahem, I can imagine him scorning this. He would spurn conventional ‘salvation’, even in Hell. He would prefer to dwell amongst the scorching fires below, next to the proud, damned Ghibellines, like Farinata degli Uberti, to listening to soppy harp music above. I think that but then, again, I am not so sure...
‘Anglo-Welsh folklore witnesses to the past existence of people called “sin eaters”. Men who literally devoured the unatoned sins of a dying person. A way of easing his admission into eternity. I wonder whether gorging oneself on some big sinner’s faults would entail unpleasant side-effects for the eater? The spiritual equivalent of a physical indigestion, perhaps. There are antecedents in the Old Testament, amongst the Jews. In the book of Leviticus you see Aaron, Moses’ brother and the father of all priests, laying the sins of the Jews on a scapegoat. Then the animal would be drive into the wilderness, to be devoured by the demon Azazel. In the New Testament, the Letter to the Hebrews suggests Christ was the new scapegoat, “bearing the sins of many”. They tell me in America they speak of a “fall guy” – is that true? I imagine these days the equivalent of the sin eaters of old would be the so-called caring professions. Charity workers, analysts and counsellors, all that gang...Don’t think the clergy would have liked the sin eaters, though. They never put up with outside competition. Excommunications and anathemas would have been hurled at the sin eaters thick and fast. Maybe they gobbled those up, as well...Today the problem with sin-eating, if it still existed, would be worse than church wrath. What does a permissive society care for concepts like sin? Unless of course they redefine it to mean things like racism and fascism...That is why the influence of the Catholic Church is waning. The number of Catholics going to confess their sins to a priest has fallen dramatically, I was reading about it earlier today. It figures. The notion of sin and that of hedonism are hardly compatible – unless by sin you meant ‘pain’, held to be the opposite of pleasure...But today the word ‘sin’ has become an archaism. Not that it was ever one of my words, as you well know. It has been contaminated by cheap moralising, cheerless Puritanism and all that...’
He did not have any time for the standard, rationalistic proofs for God’s existence as set forth by natural theology. Too abstract and sterile for him. He scoffed at the defence of reason given by Chesterton’s Father Brown in the story The Blue Cross, which I had related to him. About the Church having enthroned Reason in the very heart of the Divine. But once, I am sure it was St Anselm’s feast day, he spoke approvingly of the famous ontological argument put forward by that remote Italian who became Archbishop of Canterbury. From the existing idea of God in your mind, the argument goes on to prove that there is actually an existing being matching the God-idea. Because God is defined as ‘the being that than which no greater can be conceived’. I did not expect him to approve of it but he did - in his own way.
‘Allahu Akbar. God is greatest. It is the proud proclamation of Islam. You see? Allah is that than which no greater can be conceived. But Islam does not make the rationalistic mistake of seeking to ‘prove’ that philosophically, by wordy argument. Did Anselm’s proof ever actually win over any single person to belief in God? I doubt it...Not that Islam is irrational. No, not at all. The Qur’an is full of discussions. Questions and answers. Quite a dialogical book... Instead, its practical “argument” is in the way of life it offers. One that millions found appealing. Deceptively simple. To grasp the secret of Islam’s extraordinary victories, which are not over yet, you have to delve into the meaning of Allahu Akbar. Sufis show the way...’ He would not, unfortunately, say more about that.
THE VIEW FROM ABOVE
Indignation had been stirred up by a journalist using the word “subhuman” during a broadcast. Too reminiscent of the Nazis’ addiction to the same language. Naturally the Baron had his own take on that: ‘Past ages might not have overtly spoken of “subhumans” but the idea was there implicitly, for example, in Homer. When Odysseus’ ship reached the island of Aiaia, he did not know it was inhabited by Circe, the sorceress. When Odysseus’ unaware companions go ashore, they come upon a stately house, whose beautiful lady invites them in. They eat and drink rich food, spiked with a magic potion. No sooner have they done that, lo and behold, they sprout pigs’ heads, grunt and grovel and turn pigs all over. The triumphant witch then shuts them into a pigsty, where they live like true pigs, feeding on corn.’
‘You know the rest of the story. The god Hermes tells Odysseus how to tackle Circe while remaining human. The hero then compels the witch to restore his companions to human shape. Oh, by the way, Homer also tells her that Odysseus lived on with Circe on the island for a whole year, in uxorious pleasure. She must have taught him a trick or two, I suppose...’
‘The exegetes of the Alexandrian school pointed out long ago how Homer’s narrative can be
read as more than just a poetic tale. It is about what happens when human beings renounce the higher, divine element in their nature. I would say that it has to do with an involution, the regression or degradation of the castes...At the simplest level the story suggests that men can become less than men. Yes, they turn subhuman. They sink below the human. They can sink to the level of pigs. Animals of course are not wrong, as animals. They are perfectly all right as they are. Human beings, however, are not merely animals. Even a rationalist like Aristotle teaches that the animal aspect in man is not the only one – certainly not the highest...’
‘There is a suggestion of that even in Christianity...in Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son, for example. You find it in the Gospel of St Luke. To convey a full measure of the degradation in which the young man has fallen, it tells how he has been reduced to looking after pigs. Well, at least he did not become a pig! Not quite subhuman. The Gospel writers had to keep it simple. Their readership was not too smart... By the way, the Qur’an implies a similar viewpoint, when it forbids the eating of pig’ flesh. Sufi commentators speak about that. Remember also how the Mahdi, the awaited Islamic redeemer, when he comes will kill all pigs. Mark my words, before the Mahdi’s arrival we are destined to witness more and more men been turned into pigs. More and more forsaking of humanity. Consumers...isn’t that the word for that in our time? Man’s materialistic nature gets more and more to the fore. Yes, I cannot see how our journalist friend was in any way wrong. In our society, subhumanity rules OK.’
