by Kerry Bolton
3 Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, Foreword, xxxvii.
4 Benny Widyono, Dancing in the Shadows, 56.
5 Lao Zi, Dao De Jing, Chapter 25.
6 D. Phillips, “Wheel”, Man, Myth & Magic, Vol. 7, 3014-3015.
7 Boethius, “Fortune Pleads Her Case”, II: 2. Chaucer edition, circa 1382.
8 Carmina Burana, (2) Fortune Plango Vulnera (“I Bemoan the Wounds of Fortune”).
9 The Jains derive from the same roots as Buddhism and Sankhya Hinduism, confined to India with 1,700,000 adherents, but traces its founding “saviour” to Parsva ca. 743 B.C., the first of a series of “saviours”, the last being Mahavira, contemporary to Buddha, ca. 540 B.C. Jainism is marked by a severe asceticism. C. Furer-Haimendorf Von. “Jains”, Man, Myth & Magic.
10 Graham Phillips and Martin Keatman, 1993.
11 Basil Ivan Rakoczi, “Fate”, Man, Myth & Magic, Vol. 3, 918.
12 Ibid., 920.
13 Ibid.
14 Voluspo, verse 20.
15 Richard Wagner, Siegfried, Act III.
16 S. Radhakrishnan, Constituent Assembly, 1947, “Flag Code of India,” http://web.archive.org/web/20060110155908/http://mha.nic.in/nationalflag2002.htm
17 James B. Carroll (ed.), Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, 57.
18 D. Zotigh, “History of the Modern Hoop Dance”.
19 Bhagavad-Gita, 9:8.
20 J. Assmann, 2002, 72.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, 177-78.
24 According to the Creation Myth, the Popul Vuh, the First Cycle or “Sun” fell with the “heat of heaven blowing mist into their eyes…” All wisdom and knowledge of the beginning was destroyed. Christensen (translator), Popul Vuh.
25 Coe, The Maya Vase Book, 163,
26 Coe, Ibid., 164.
27 Graham Hancock, 213.
28 Ibid., 532.
29 Ibid., 533.
30 Book of Daniel, 2.
31 M. D. Coogan, 95.
32 Graham Hancock, 213.
33 Voluspo, verse 2.
34 Ibid., 33-60.
35 Ibid., 45.
36 Ibid., 47.
37 Ibid., 45.
38 Ibid., 50.
39 Ibid., 59.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid., 62.
42 Ibid., 66.
43 Ibid., 61.
44 Evola, 2003, passim.
45 Book of Genesis 2-3.
46 Book of the Revelation of St. John, 19: 11-15.
47 Hancock, 403.
48 Evola, 1938.
49 Ignatius Donnelly, 6-21.
50 Michael A. Cremo, and Richard L Thompson, 1999.
51 Leif A. Jensen, 2010.
52 Carl Sagan, 2002, 258.
53 Mircea Eliade, 1959.
54 Ibid., 68.
55 Ibid., 71.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid.
58 Romans 12: 2.
59 Mircea Eliade, 72.
60 Ambrose, Aeterne Rerum Conditor.
61 Mircea Eliade, 74.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid., 75.
64 Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews (circa 93 A.D.), III, 7, 7.
65 Mircea Eliade, 75.
66 Ibid., 77.
67 Ibid., 78.
68 Ibid., 80.
69 Robert A. Nisbet, 3.
70 Gilbert S. Sewall, “Robert Nisbet’s Conservativism”. Nisbet was a libertarian, not a conservative; an example of the careless use of such terms. He saw history in terms of the individual; hence his aversion to the organic, morphological approach to sociology and history.
71 Jeremiah, 5: 21.
72 Spengler, The Decline of The West, Vol. 1, 21-22.
73 Vishnu Purana , 310.
74 Hesiod, “The Story of the Ages of Man”, Works and Days, ca. 700 B.C.
75 Revelation of John, 18:2.
76 Ibid., 18: 3.
77 Ibid., 18: 8-10.
78 Ibid., 18: 12.
79 Ibid., 18: 23.
80 John K. Fairbank, 100-101.
81 Sima Guang’s Collected Works as Transmitted in His Family, quoted by Philip Clart, 239.
82 Sima, cited in Clart, 240.
83 Clart, Ibid.
84 Ibid., 241.
85 Yukio Mishima, 81-82.
86 Ibid., 83.
87 Ibid.
88 Marquis de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1794), “Introduction”.
89 Ibid.
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid.
92 Quoted by Asa Briggs (ed.), 29.
93 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?”, 1989.
94 Quoted by Robert A. Nisbet, 100.
95 Ibid., 101.
96 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, “The Parable of the Madman”, para. 125,181-82.
97 C. G. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. X, 75-76.
98 Jay Sherry, 58.
99 G. Vico, paragraphs 1104-1106.
100 Spengler, The Decline …, passim.
101 Quoted by Sherry, 18.
102 Jay Sherry, 17.
103 Ibid.
104 Ibid., 18.
105 Enrico Coen, Rosemary Carpenter, 1992.
106 Spengler, The Decline…, Vol. I, 105.
107 Ibid.
108 Ibid., Vol. II, 37.
109 Erich Heller, 18-19.
110 Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, “Proletarians and Bourgeois”.
111 Amaury De Riencourt, xvii.
112 Ibid.
113 Ibid., xvii-xviii.
114 The basis of Sufism is the renunciation of the material world and of the ego and the pursuit of union with the Godhead via asceticism and gnosis.
115 Dr. Martin Lings taught for many years at the University of Cairo before becoming Keeper of Oriental Manuscripts at the British Library. He has authored many books including The Eleventh Hour, Symbol and Archetype, and Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources. Lings was an authority on tradition and particularly on Sufism.
116 M. Lings, “Rene Guénon”.
117 Rene Guénon, Crisis of the Modern World.
118 Julius Evola, The Hermetic Tradition, 13.
119 Ibid., 14.
120 Julius Evola, “On the Secret of Degeneration”.
121 Ibid.
122 Ibid.
123 Ibid.
124 Ibid.
125 Ibid.
126 Aristotle, Politics.
127 Evola, Revolt, 105.
128 Plutarch, Numus Pompilius.
129 Catholic Encyclopaedia, “Guilds”.
130 Paul, I Corinthians 12: 21-27.
131 Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 1891. Pius XI Quadragesimo Anno, 1931.
132 Paul, Corinthians, op. cit., 12: 5-6.
133 Ibid., 12: 7.
134 Ibid., 12: 8-11.
135 Ibid., 12: 28-31.
136 Ibid., 12: 25-27.
137 Catholic Encyclopaedia, “Guilds”.
138 Ibid.
139 Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 57.
140 Leo, 19.
141 Paul Carus, 1904, 16.
142 Ibid.
143 Ibid., 20.
144 Ibid., 24-25.
145 Ibid., 40.
146 Ibid.
147 Ibid., 43.
148 W. D. P. Bliss, 545.
149 Ibid., 545.
150 Howard J. Wiarda, 17.
151 E. Kennedy, 13.
152 Quoted by Kennedy, 15.
153 Kennedy, Ibid.
154 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 235-236.
155 Lorenz, 61.
156 Ibid., 64.
157 Lorenz, 64.
158 Lorenz, 64-65.
159 Lorenz, 69.
160 Lorenz, 69-70.
161 Lorenz, 73.
162 Such as the destruction of Confederate monuments in the USA, as this is being written.
Part II - Ethnos
Race and Ethnos
Julius Evola, while repudiating the zoological primacy of “racism” as another form of materialism, suggested that a “spiritual racism” is necessary to oppose the forces seeking to turn man into an amorphous mass; as interchangeable economic units without roots; what is now called “globalisation”. Evola gave the traditional view when stating that there “have been many cases in which a culture has collapsed even when its race has remained pure, as is especially clear in certain groups that have suffered slow, inexorable extinction despite remaining as racially isolated as if they were islands”. He gives Sweden and The Netherlands as recent examples, pointing out that although the race has remained unchanged, there is little of the “heroic disposition” those cultures possessed just several centuries previously. He referred to other great cultures as having remained in a state as if like mummies, inwardly dead, awaiting a push “to knock them down”. These are what Spengler called Fellaheen, spiritually exhausted and historically passé. Evola gives Peru as an example of how readily a static culture succumbed to Spain.1 Hence, such examples, even as vigorous cultures such as that of the Dutch and Scandinavian, once wide-roaming and dynamic, have declined to nonentities despite the maintenance of racial homogeneity.
The Khmer Empire with its Hindu foundations, underwent its crisis and a lengthy decline from the 14th century, after the Hindu foundations were replaced by Theravada Buddhism, which eliminated the Godhead of the King, meaning a collapse of the traditional social order. The epoch of the grand temples had gone.
Mount Meru is the mythic axial point of the cosmos for Hindus, Jains and Buddhists. It exists both in the visible and invisible realms and hence is the nexus and the abode of Siva and Vishnu; analogous to the Greek gods’ Mount Olympus. It is Mount Meru that is the centre of the Tibetan Mandala Wheel of the cosmos, the Kalachakra (Wheel of Time). The end of the cosmos of this cycle according to Tibetan cosmology sees the burning up of Mount Meru in this universe, and its counterparts in other universes.2
Seeking causes of decay and death for civilisations that might be averted by laws, is like the individual who seeks the Elixir of Life to achieve personal immortality. Reality is obscured. The mortality that is inherent in every organism is called “pessimism” paradoxically by the scientific epoch that claims to be based on reality but believes the modern era to be uniquely immortal. Tradition does not know immortality even among the gods. Odin, Tyr and Thor die at Ragnarok. Tibetan Buddhism states:
Whatever is born is impermanent and is bound to die.
Whatever is stored up is impermanent and is bound to run out.
Whatever comes together is impermanent and is bound to come apart.
Whatever is built is impermanent and is bound to collapse.
Whatever rises up is impermanent and is bound to fall down.3
While Spengler and Evola eschewed zoological race, “race” was nonetheless central to their philosophies and historical analyses. “Race” as a doctrine of form against formlessness, cosmos against chaos was, for Evola, an important weapon against universalism, egalitarianism and the chaos that is unleashed by to create a nebulous mass-man in the name of “liberty, equality, fraternity”. In the descent of castes, from higher to lower, that is to say, the inversion of hierarchy, the result is the disappearance of all “qualitative difference”, the creation of “mineralised masses”. Race is posited by Evola against all disintegrative tendencies whether from plutocrats, bourgeois or proletarians. The “race” that is posited against disintegrative forces must be “distinctly heroic and aristocratic”, of “heroic soul, of a style of honour and loyalty”, a “race of the soul”, transcending the race of “materialism” and “zoologism”.4 This “heroic soul of style and honour” formed the warrior castes of all traditional societies, whether of Vedic India, Medieval Europe, Imperial Japan, or Zulu Africa. It was what Evola and Spengler meant by “having race”.
Many assumptions have long been made on the interbreeding of races to the point of becoming the central dogma to much of the Right. The only alternative views are assumed by genetic determinists to be intrinsically Communist or some variant of the Left, or of the Ayn Rand libertarian variety that upholds the individual as a fractured atom and opposes the concept of “race” as being “the lowest form of collectivism”.5
The traditionalist sees matters differently from any of these, whether genetic determinist, classical liberal or Marxist. The traditionalist sees the genetic determinist conception of “race” as the mirror-image to the liberal and Marxist rejection of “race”, for the same reason that he sees Marxism as the mirror image of capitalism. All of these ideologies arose during the same Zeitgeist (Spirit of the Age): materialism. Anything that is beyond quantifying statistically is regarded as superstition. Hence, “race” becomes a matter of skull and bone measurements, and of counting genes. The Marxist and the classical liberal posit in opposition to this the measuring of man in terms of material accumulation, disposing of the divine spark in man.
The traditionalist conception of “race” was expressed especially among the German Idealists. German Idealism gave history a spiritual content; in contrast to English economic theories. Hegel and Herder gave us metaphysical concepts of history and sociology such as Zeitgeist, and the “spirit of nations”. In the 20th century Oswald Spengler developed this conception of history as a spiritual unfolding, and Carl Jung did something similar in studying the human psyche as something more than quantifying brain structure. This is not to deny, like Lysenko in the USSR, the insights of genetics and microbiology. There are new scientific fields such as epigenetics and morphic field theory that provide added insights into nature in ways that were until recently dismissed by materialists as “superstition”.
“Race” exists beyond skull measurements and gene clusters. As Spengler wrote, one cannot discern character by looking at bones, but rather by looking at the mien suggested by a portrait painting, or sculpture. What can one tell of the character of the Greeks by studying a skull rather than studying a sculpture; by studying the DNA rather than studying the architecture or mathematics?
Ethnos (plural ethnoi), is the expression of a race, or races amalgamating as an ethnos, based on common experiences forming a common outlook, with a consciousness of being distinct from others. How this common outlook is acquired and passed along to subsequent generations might now be explained by epigenetics, and in particular behavioural epigenetics. This psycho-spiritual formation of ethnos was perceived by the German Idealists such as Herder and Fichte, and continued into the twentieth century by Spengler and the Swiss father of analytical psychology, Carl G. Jung.
The Russian ethnologist Lev Gumilev discussed types of ethnic relations moulded by historical experiences:
coexistence, in which the ethnoi do not merge and do not imitate each other, borrowing only technical innovations;
assimilation, i.e. the swallowing-up of one ethnos by another with complete forgetting of origin and old traditions;
cross-breeding, in which traditions of the preceding ethnoi and a memory of the ancestors are retained and combined (these variants are usually unstable, and exist through replenishment by new metises 6);
merging, in which the traditions of the original components are forgotten and a third, new ethnos arises alongside the two precursors, or in place of them.7
In regard to (a) “coexistence”, Gumilev introduces an aspect of ethnic relations that is seldom considered, that of symbiosis. He gives the example of Bantu and pygmy in the Congo:
“In the upper reaches of the Congo, for instance, Bantu and pygmies live in a symbiosis. The Negroes cannot move in the forest, except by paths, without the help of the pygmies, while the paths are rapidly overgrown unless cleared. The Bantu can get lost in the forest, like a European, and die within twenty meters of his own home. But the pygmies need knives, vessels, and other articles of daily use. For these two ethnoi dissimilarity is the guarantee of well-being, and their friendsh
ip is founded on that”.8
“Complementarity” of relations between ethnoi within an “ecological niche”, where different ethnoi have common interests, might form a “superethnos” to contend with common challenges and enemies, while retaining their separate identities.
With (b) “assimilation” is an ultimatum demanded by a conquering ethnos, Gumilev referring to the Irish vis-a-vis the English, but this does not mean that such subservience is a genuine internal assimilation. Such an artificial construct is a weakness, tantamount to living with a fifth column at times of conflict. One might consider the falsely “assimilated” Marranos Jews in Spain who outwardly converted to Catholicism but secretly maintained their Jewishness.
“Cross-breeding” as an attempt to synthesise the traditions of two or more ethnoi, is regarded by Gumilev as a cause of decline. Note that what is being discussed is the result of the mixing not of genes but the discordant merger of race souls, or archetypes, or what Gumilev calls the “stereotypes of behaviour” formed over millennia of historical experience and muddled or obliterated over a generation. Gumilev gives the quite recent example of Turkey as a state that collapsed through the corruption of the Turkish traditional ethnos by foreign elements:
“The decline of the Sublime Porte in the seventeenth century attracted the attention in its time of contemporaneous Turkish writers. In their view ajen-oglani, i.e. the children of renegades, were the reason for the decline. The influx of the foreign-born spoiled the stereotype of behavior, which told in the venality of viziers, the purchasability of judges, the fall in the fighting capacity of troops, and the collapse of the economy. By the beginning of the nineteenth century Turkey had become the ‘sick man’”.9
Gumilev placed geography at the basis of ethnogenesis, much as Spengler placed landscape at the formation of a “race” and “people”. The processes of race-formation, or as Gumilev calls it, ethnogenesis, are differentiated from the zoological definition of race as much by Gumilev as by Spengler. Gumilev explains the significance of ethnic “rhythms”, energised by the biosphere. These rhythms we might identify as life cycles subjected to cosmic rays. Gumilev’s theory is not part of our enquiry however, and we will confine ourselves to his comments on the various components of ethnoi. What Gumilev describes is the disruption of the rhythms specific to ethnoi when they meet, as for example in a multicultural state. Gumilev defines ethnic “stereotypes” as inherited group-memories expressing fear, hope, life and death, around which religions and myths emerge to sustain an ethnos as unifying factors. When such differing group-memories meet one might expect the fracturing of both the individual and the culture. This fractured state is lauded as “cultural enrichment” by the zealots of multiculturalism. Gumilev refers to the role of marriage within and outside an ethnoi, referring to the children of mixed ethnoi inheriting conflicting “stereotypes”.
