What is a Rune

by Collin Cleary

  In “The Gifts of Odin and his Brothers,” Cleary applies the same approach to understanding the Germanic anthropogeny (the account of human origins) found in the Eddas. According to the myth, two trees (Ask and Embla) were transformed into human beings when a trio of gods conferred certain properties upon them. Cleary argues that the key to understanding the Germanic view of human nature lies in the gods who figure in this myth, rather than in the properties they confer. And he focuses upon the names of the gods given in the Prose Edda: Odin, Vili, and Ve. These three (who may be, as Edred Thorsson argues, three aspects of one divinity) represent a triad of organically related qualities of human nature—indeed, its fundamental qualities. They are, in Cleary’s terminology: ekstasis (Odin), will (Vili), and hallowing (Ve).

  We have already touched on what ekstasis is (though it is in this essay and in “The Stones Cry Out” that Cleary gives his fullest account of it). Will is simply our capacity to alter the given according to our conception of what might be or ought to be. It is also obvious how will is uniquely human. Animals do alter their environments (e.g., beavers build dams) but not as a result of imaginatively conceiving counterfactual possibilities.

  However, will depends upon ekstasis, and indeed will is one of the forms through which ekstasis comes to expression (thus, they are interdependent). Cleary writes, “‘will’ depends upon our capacity to stand outside of ourselves . . . and outside of the immediate moment and receive or register both the Being of things, and be seized by a glimpse of their possible Being, what ‘ought’ to be.” “Hallowing” is the human act of separating (in thought or in deed) something from its context and investing it with “sacredness,” or special significance (e.g., a holy relic, a flag, a certain space). Again, this is something only human beings are capable of. Unlike will, it does not involve a literal change to the object. But in order to hallow an object we must first be open to the Being of that thing—and then, in a sense, we confer a new Being upon it (e.g., this grove is not merely a grove, it is a space in which the divine appears). Both will and hallowing thus depend upon ekstasis—but ekstasis comes to expression through will and hallowing. This interdependent triad names the three fundamental things that separate us from the beasts.

  If will is described simply as our capacity to alter the given according to our plans or ideals, it is morally neutral. However, those who have read Cleary’s early essay “Knowing the Gods” will recall his account of will as “an impulse to ‘close off’ to the not-self [or to ‘the higher’]. It is a shutting-off that is at the same time an elevation and exalting of the self to absolute status.” Cleary refers to the modern age as the “Age of Will,” in which everything is regarded as raw material to be made over according to human plans, fitting human desires. (Here he also draws on Heidegger, specifically “The Question Concerning Technology.”) In the present volume, Cleary discusses will as having both positive and negative aspects, while only the negative aspect was covered in “Knowing the Gods.”

  In truth, both will and ekstasis itself are ambivalent—capable of leading us to the good (to greatness, even), or of tricking us and leading us astray. These same oppositions are present in the god of ekstasis/óðr, Odin. And they are present in us, in human beings—but chiefly in Northern European man, in what Cleary calls (following Oswald Spengler) “Faustian man.” This is an important concept for Cleary, and it is discussed in several essays in this volume (most fully in “Ásatrú and the Political”). As Cleary states explicitly in his contribution to TYR, volume 4 (“What is Odinism?”), the Faustian is equivalent to the Odinic.

  And Cleary links the Faustian-Odinic to Hegel’s account of the nature of the “Germanic peoples,” which (quoting Hegel) exhibits “an infinite thirst for knowledge which is alien to other races”; which “opposes the world [i.e., nature] to itself, makes itself free of it, but in turn annuls this opposition . . . [taking] an interest in everything in order to become present to itself therein.” The Germanic (Faustian-Odinic) spirit “subdues the outer world to its ends with an energy which has ensured for it the mastery of the world.”

  In what is by far the longest piece in this volume, “The Stones Cry Out,” Cleary advances the truly revolutionary thesis that the emergence of ekstasis explains the sudden appearance of representational art in Europe roughly 40,000 years ago. It is fascinating that representational art does not appear anywhere else in the world until about 30,000 years later. As Cleary discusses, this presents quite a problem for politically correct archaeologists and paleontologists desperate to avoid admitting that there might be anything special about Europe. But, if Cleary’s thesis is correct, it is reasonable to conclude that ekstasis appears first in Europe. And if he is right to link ekstasis not only to representational art, but to philosophy, science, religion, and poetry, it is no surprise that the earliest unequivocal evidence for the emergence of all of these comes from Europe.

  It is at this point that we move into what many will regard as the most strange and fantastic aspects of Cleary’s philosophy. He argues that the universe exists in order that it might know itself; that this is a process that involves the universe giving rise to (or “evolving”) ever-more conscious or self-reflective beings; that this process culminates in the emergence of human beings capable of ekstasis; and that the primary carriers of ekstasis among human beings are the European peoples. In short, it is through our people’s Faustian-Odinic quest for knowledge of the universe that the universe confronts itself, and is completed. (This thesis is, in fact, an implication of Hegel’s philosophy, though Hegel never expressed it explicitly. It also parallels William Pierce’s “Cosmotheism,” although Cleary was not influenced by it.)

  In “The Stones Cry Out,” Cleary puts these ideas forward partly in order to explain why ekstasis arose in Europe in the Upper Paleolithic. As he discusses, most scientists are aware that some major shift in human consciousness occurred in Europe in this period, but have no way to explain it. Cleary recognizes that we need a new understanding of evolution—not just because of the difficulty of explaining the origin of ekstasis, but also because of serious philosophical difficulties with Darwinism. What he provides, however, is not just a new way of looking at evolution, but a new scientific paradigm: a grand, all-encompassing “theory of everything.”

  Cleary argues that ekstasis is inexplicable in Darwinian terms, principally because in ekstasis we are released from a natural, utilitarian focus (on survival, reproduction, etc.) and seized by pure wonder in the face of Being. This makes man an oddity in nature. We are creatures of nature, we are animals, yet we are in a sense removed from nature, through our ability to prescind from all animal concerns and register the simple fact that what is, is. How and why could this capacity have arisen in us? Our duality—that we are of the world yet “above” it, registering its Being—is a clue to our purpose: it is in us and through us that existence comes face to face with itself. We are the culmination of the universe’s long struggle to come to awareness of itself. Every man or woman who experiences ekstasis, who registers Being, just is the universe saying, in effect, “I am.”

  Cleary draws upon Hegelian philosophy and modern physics (which fit hand in glove, incidentally), arguing that the universe is constituted in such a way as to give rise to beings that know the universe. Those beings are us, of course. But we have arisen as a result of an extremely long process of evolution. This process cannot, however, be understood purely in terms of accident and natural selection, as Darwinism insists. Instead, there is a kind of teleology involved which drives the production of new forms, some of which may appear quite suddenly and without apparent precedent. This teleology is simply the self-development (or self-specification) of the whole.

  Cleary’s “theory of everything” has multiple implications. For one thing, we must note that it constitutes a myth, in the original Greek sense of muthos, a story that explains or makes sense out of things (as opposed to the modern use of “myth” to mean “falsehood”). Cleary’s “my
th” has explanatory power, is supported by empirical data, and is simple and elegant. Further, it does not just satisfy the mind but the heart and spirit as well—the heart and spirit, that is, of Faustian-Odinic man. It explains why we are here. Indeed, it allots to us a role of quite literally cosmic proportions. It explains why we are both blessed and cursed with this daimonic nature.

  Further, Cleary’s “myth” also has the virtue of showing why it is so imperative that we preserve and protect our people. To act for our people’s interests, to take up the cause of White Nationalism, is to protect those who practice, to use Heidegger’s words, “the saying of the unconcealedness of what is”; who “save the earth” and “receive the sky.” For those who need a philosophical justification for saving our people, look no further. For those who need none, it is enough to want to save our people simply because they are our people. But those latter individuals, those thumotic types, don’t need a book like this one. It is a peculiarity of European people that they need a reason for being; and a reason to see themselves as worth saving.

  Cleary avoided dealing with “politics” for a long time, but in “Ásatrú and the Political” he takes the bold step not just of linking Ásatrú with White Nationalism but of, in a sense, identifying the two. Cleary’s argument is simple. Ásatrú is an ethnic religion, a religion of a specific people (like Judaism or Hinduism), not a creedal or universalistic religion (like Christianity or Islam). Cleary makes the Hegelian point that in a folk or ethnic religion, a people is, in a real sense, worshipping itself. For the religion is a way in which the people expresses, confronts, and celebrates its spirit. (Hence, as discussed earlier, Odin is the embodiment of both the good and bad in the Northern European soul.) To practice Ásatrú is thus to keep faith with one’s own people—for the two are inseparable. As Cleary puts it, “The heroic commitment to our people and to its spirit just is Ásatrú. Compared to this all else—the runes, Old Norse, drinking horns, mead, skaldic verse, and so on—is external and inessential.”

  The problem with our people, however, is that it is possessed by this wily, changeful god. Sometimes he helps us to “save the earth” and “receive the sky.” But sometimes, in the ecstatic transport he makes possible, we shut one eye, just like our half-blind god, and are deluded by impossible visions of what “might be.” Impossible visions of infinite possibilities. And so we fall into the modern nihilism that parades itself as idealism—the promise that we can be anything we want to be (which is really the desire to be nothing at all). The belief that our nature is to have no nature is a peculiarly Western affliction. But we imagine that others yearn for the same “ideal”; that inside every Hottentot is a Westerner aching to live in an inclusive, “multicultural,” democratic society dotted with gas stations and shopping malls as far as the eye can see. We don’t recognize that we have projected our own denatured nature onto others; we don’t recognize the modern ideals of inclusiveness and multiculturalism as new forms of Western ethnocentrism. Why? Because, again, we imagine ourselves to have no nature and no real ethnos at all.

  Cleary makes most of these points in his extensive review essay of Ricardo Duchesne’s The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (which appears online at Counter-Currents/North American New Right and will be reprinted in North American New Right, volume 2). In the present volume, in his essay “Are We Free?,” Cleary skewers the false conception of freedom to which we Westerners seem particularly prone. He writes, memorably:

  To be means to be something—something definite. The will to be nothing definite is simply the will not to be. This is the awful telos of modern, Western civilization. Our quest for a false freedom is at root a will to erase ourselves from the world; a death wish. Life is identity, definiteness, form, order, hierarchy, and limits. Those who would affirm life must affirm all of these things. We must say a great YES to all that which says a still greater NO to our hubris, a voice to which we moderns have become practically deaf.

  We Westerners most definitely have a nature, by which we are “determined.” And, to borrow an image from Hegel, we can no more escape that nature than a man can leap over the statue of Rhodes. Cleary argues, following Hegel, that true freedom means willing, or accepting, our determination. And celebrating it. For given the glories of our history and the nobility of our souls, why would we wish to be anything other than what we are?

  In his essay on Duchesne, Cleary argues that our present state of apparent decline is a stage in a historical dialectic, in which our people is coming to consciousness of itself. (And placed in the larger context of Cleary’s cosmology, this is part of the process of the universe coming to consciousness of itself.) In the next historical phase, Cleary projects (optimistically) that we will recognize the folly of denying our nature, and the unchosen biological and cultural conditions that make it possible. We will instead choose to affirm these conditions, to will our determination. This will be the Western spirit come to complete and perfect consciousness of itself—and complete possession of itself. At that point, free of all that has hitherto bound us, we will truly “become who we are,” as Cleary puts it. First camel, then lion, then child.

  The above merely scratches the surface of these wonderful essays. And I have said nothing about one of the volume’s real treats, Cleary’s essay “‘All or Nothing’: The Prisoner and Ibsen’s Brand.” This is a sequel to the essay on Patrick McGoohan’s television series The Prisoner published in Summoning the Gods. Readers who care nothing about this series will still find Cleary’s account of Brand to be extremely compelling.

  Those who are awake know that today’s mainstream culture, dominated by the sensibilities of the Left, is utterly bankrupt. There is virtually nothing of merit in “serious” art, literature, or philosophy—nothing that is not somehow compromised by shallowness, cowardice, ressentiment, and lies. Artists and thinkers of the caliber of Wagner, Nietzsche, Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, Pound, Eliot, D’Annunzio, Marinetti, and Heidegger—to say nothing of Plato and Aristotle—could never get started today. To find real food for the soul, we must look to the fringes, to the vibrant counter-currents of the “New Right,” from which new and promising figures are emerging each year. We have our artists, novelists, poets, essayists, and musicians. With Collin Cleary we have a philosopher whose works will surely survive and be celebrated when the present system is but a bad memory.

  Counter-Currents/North American New Right,

  August 14, 2014

  AUTHOR’S PREFACE

  People sometimes ask me if I am primarily a philosopher, or an exponent of Ásatrú and the runes. The answer is that I am primarily a philosopher: a lover of wisdom, a seeker of truth.

  I feel a strong, pre-rational attraction to the lore of my ancestors, because it is fundamentally mine. To think and believe as my ancestors did feels as right to me as eating the way they ate (perhaps the most sensible of recent dietary fads).

  But if I thought for a moment that the worldview of my ancestors was wrong, then I would be compelled, as a seeker of truth, to abandon it. In fact, I have not abandoned it because it has always been, and still is my conviction that my ancestors glimpsed fundamental truths. As I have delved more deeply into the lore, I have become still more secure in that conviction. The evidence that I am right about this is contained in the book you now hold in your hands (but not in my book exclusively).

  I value truth more than tradition or authority. And in the pursuit of truth I am willing to do anything, go anywhere, and question everything—including Ásatrú. This is the philosophic nature, which Plato recognized as daimonic. And it is also the very essence of what it means to be a follower of Odin. Thus, in putting Ásatrú to the test, in being a philosopher, I am true to the Æsir.

  Tacitus declared that no one surpassed the Germanic tribes in loyalty, and so, faithful to that spirit, I must acknowledge my debts. Edred Thorsson is the only man I have ever personally met who has influenced the ideas in this book—but he has influenced them tremendously, hence I have dedic
ated the book to him. Without Edred, none of what I have written here would have been possible, and I never would have embarked on my present course. (I must also thank him for permission to reprint his diagram of the nine worlds, originally published in Runelore.)

  My principal philosophical debts, as Greg Johnson points out in his Introduction, are to Hegel and Heidegger. What Greg does not mention is that he himself has been an influence on my interpretation of Heidegger. I am also greatly indebted to Greg for his Introduction, which does a better job of summarizing my philosophy than I could have done myself. All of these essays were originally published on the site Greg edits, Counter-Currents/North American New Right.

  I have been criticized for allowing Counter-Currents to publish my work. I make no apologies for this. I am loyal to Counter-Currents because I am loyal to my friends—but most importantly because, as noted earlier, I am loyal to the truth. And the intellectual movement that is the North American New Right is a beacon of truth in today’s world.

  I must acknowledge the advice Michael Moynihan gave me on issues of etymology and transliteration. Thanks must also go to Max Ribaric of Occidental Congress for his photo of me and to Kevin I. Slaughter for his striking cover design.

  These nine essays have been changed little since they were originally published. The only change worth mentioning, in fact, is that I have now adopted the practice of Anglicizing most names and terms in Old Norse.

  Collin Cleary