AD: Precisely so. In polemics with me, some contemporary traditionalists insist that geopolitics is not a sacred science but is fully exhausted by profane, modernistic considerations in the spirit of strategic studies or political analysis. The example of Proclus disproves that opinion. Geopolitics is built on the comprehension of qualitative space, which lies at the basis of sacred geography. We can say that geopolitics is a simplified and rationalized version of sacred geography. The entire structure of Ishraq philosophy, analyzed by Corbin in particular, is based on this metaphysical understanding of space. Yes, the academic version of geopolitics is entirely rational and scientific, but it is easy to recognize deeper roots at its basis, which, by the way, is easy to see in my early book Foundations of Geopolitics, where there is a chapter called “From Sacred Geography to Geopolitics.” In Proclus’s interpretation of the history of Atlantis, given in the beginning of the Timaeus, we see precisely an example of “sacred geopolitics.” I think that the symbols and models used by Plato, and interpreted by Proclus, in relation to the Atlantids and Athenians, describes with perfect precision the basic characteristics of thalassocracy on one hand and telurocracy on the other. In our time these symbols and signs are still recognizable and intelligible, right up to the Pillars of Hercules on the dollar bill, with the reversed motto Plus Ultra instead of Nec Plus Ultra. Passing beyond the Western limit of the Mediterranean, Indo-European culture enters the phase of hubris (ὕβρις), i.e. it violates measure and falls under the influence of the Logos of Cybele and the elements of titanism. That is exactly what happened in Europe beginning in the 17th century and ending in the establishment of a New Babylon in the US. An analysis based on the three Logoi is indeed fully relevant for the analysis of contemporary events and processes in a hiero-historical perspective.
NS: In his book Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, Mark Sedgwick notes that the origins of traditionalism should be sought in Renaissance-era Italy, i.e. the era when, according to Guénon, an inversion of traditional wisdom occurred. Essentially, traditionalism was a reaction and answer to this inversion. Sedgwick calls the eminent Italian thinker, Marsilio Ficino, one of the predecessors of traditionalism. Ficino translated the Corpus Hermeticum, regarding it as an ancient expression of the Perennial Philosophy, Philosophia Perennis. However, as Isaac Casaubon and later Frances Yates showed (see Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition), the texts ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus were written, not in pre-Christian antiquity, but in the 2nd-3rd centuries of the common era. In approximately 1460, as Yates writes, a Greek manuscript came from Macedonia to Florence containing the list of the Corpus Hermeticum (excluding the last, fifteenth tract). Although earlier Cosimo de’ Medici gave Ficino the directive to translate the texts of the great Plato, the sudden appearance of works of Thrice-Great Hermes forced him to set aside the translation of Platonic texts. He asked Ficino to urgently translate the Hermetic Corpus. “From the Church fathers Cosimo and Ficino knew that Hermes Trismegistus is much older than Plato,” Yates writes.
They also knew the Latin ‘Asclepius,’ who kindled the thirst for ancient Egyptian wisdom from that same original source. Egypt is older than Greece; Hermes is older than Plato. The Renaissance honored everything old and original as standing closer to the divine truth. Accordingly, the Hermetic Corpus had to be translated before Plato’s Republic or Symposium. That is why that project became Ficino’s first translation.
At that time, no one entertained the thought of chronological error. The Corpus Hermeticum, a post-Christian text, proved to be at the center of the rebirth of magic in the Renaissance era, and is also regarded as an authentic and ancient expression of Philosophia Perennis. The Vedic texts (whose wisdom was adopted by the traditionalists of the 20th century, and also by their predecessors, like Reuben Barrow in the 18th century) could not have been the source of traditionalism in the Renaissance because the thinkers of that period couldn’t have known them. One can ask why the thinkers of the Renaissance era did not look for the origins of Perennial Philosophy in the wisdom of earlier, ancient philosophers, especially in the fundamental problematic of Titano- and Gigantomachy, but put their entire interest in the early (pre-Socratic, as we can say now) ancient philosophy focused on Epicureanism (Lorenzo Valla’s attention to the philosophy of Epicurus and Lucretius, and, in consequence, his essay “On Pleasure”) and the atomism of Democritus (which gets its “second life” precisely at that time).
AD: Lorenzo Valla is not the entire Renaissance. The Florentine Academy discovered Platonism and Neo-Platonism, as well as Hermeticism, as you noted. Precisely that was the most striking moment of the Renaissance. In my opinion, Philosophia Perennis can very well be regarded as broadly understood Platonism and, to an even greater extent, Neo-Platonism. There are many parallels here to the Vedas and other forms of traditional metaphysics, but for Western European thought, Platonism fits optimally. Pure Platonism is pure Apollonianism: it has no room for Titanomachy only because it has no room for Titans. Plato completely defeats and destroys the Titans. In Neo-Platonism one can see a certain element of struggle, but it is removed by a vertical dash into the sphere of the transcendent, which removes the tension of the battle and makes philosophy more of a game. This is victorious Dionysus abstracted from his passionate, theopathic side, hence the Renaissance’s increased attention to the game. At the same time hermeticism blossomed, in which there are many subjects similar to Titanomachy. This hermeticism could have both a purely Dionysian nature or a Cybelean one, where we approach the theme of “black alchemy,” and, accordingly, atomism, Epicurus, and Lucretius, but, to repeat, that is just one of the possibilities of the Renaissance, alongside the Apollo and Dionysus of the Florentine Platonists. As for the pre-Socratics, they were for a long time part of general hermetic discourse, and reference to them (most often apocryphal) was typical of a certain sort of alchemical literature, for instance, in one of the oldest texts of the Turba Philosophorum.
NS: Your teacher Yevgeny Golovin said that in the Renaissance and Modernity, the so-called “magic of black water” (aqua nigra, sal nibri) flourished. One of the aims of this was to receive “black lunar magnesium,” which was regarded as the infernal counterpart to the lapis philosophorum. That substance was capable of transforming ordinary metals into pure silver or gold. At issue, if I understand correctly, is what can be called “black alchemy.” Appealing to Bonardel’s investigations, you distinguish “negative alchemy,” which is found under the sign of the Titan Prometheus. Accordingly, this alchemy can be called titanic, the “black alchemy” of the Great Mother, Cybele. In contrast to Hermetic alchemy, this alchemy works with natural substances and prioritizes the zone of the Earth and underground world. According to Bonardel, the Hermetic art moved under the sign of Prometheus in the Renaissance era. That was when, in Golovin’s words, the “magic of black water” flourished. Who are they, these adepts of “black Hermeticism”? What forms did Noomachy take in the period when the difference between two types of Hermetic art became clear?
AD: The most frightful adepts of “black magnesia” are modern scientists [the scientists of the modern era], who built their concepts on a scientific picture of the world. The black magic and alchemy of the Renaissance are children compared to modern physics, chemistry, or biology. At the end of the Middle Ages, the process of placing being in matter (atomism, the hylozoism of Bernardino Telesio, Gassendi, or Spinoza) was just beginning; that was the “attraction of black magnesium.” Material operations and interpretations of doctrines and alchemical practices began to prevail in the context of the Hermetic Corpus, later leading to modern chemistry. The scientific picture of the world, representing the cosmic of Cybele, was formed on their basis. Plato’s ideas disappeared beyond the horizon, and Aristotle’s eidoi were reduced to eidolons and then to “black water,” i.e. to matter and its vortices. Modern science is well-organized Satanism, operating with that which, in the world, is the most
chimerical, illusionary, and infernal, a collection of material bodies, atoms, and particles, disappearing into the matrix of the lord-mother, and emerging therefrom, only to disappear again. Eliade said something similar when he spoke of the origins of modern European science and its connections with hermeticism (in the book Aspects du Mythe, if I recall correctly).
NS: We have become used to the concept of the androgyne, the male-female divinity, from the perspective of the Logos of Dionysus, i.e. as the combination of the male and female principles. In Noomachy, you explain in detail that there is another perspective on the androgyne, from the position of Apollo and from the position of Cybele. What is the main difference in these perspectives? Don’t you think that Plato was the one who was able to realize the Apollonian androgyne?
AD: Yes, the androgyne is interpreted in accordance with the predominance of one or another Logos. In the Apollonian androgyne, the female principle is entirely subsumed by the male. Its example is Pallas Athena, in whom almost absolute masculinity is embodied. Beginning from birth — she was born from Zeus himself (like Dionysus in his second birth, incidentally, sown into Zeus’s thigh) — and ending in her fundamental characteristics: wisdom and courage, two typical features of male Indo-European solar culture. The Apollonian androgyne is an entity in which the female [adj.] is reduced to a minimum and transformed into the male [adj.]. The Cybelean androgyne — Agdistis — is the opposite case. I address this in the first volume of Noomachy. In this case, on the contrary, the female [adj.] completely seizes and subjugates the male [adj.]. This male principle is placed inside the female one like a fold, a muscle spasm of the Great Mother. Essentially, this is Dionysus’s double, Attis or Adonis. The Great Mother parthenogenetically produces from herself the male alter-ego, which it falls in love with and takes delight in, but which it later castrates and kills, returning to the bottomless darkness of its desperate and insatiable female privation. The Son-Beloved of the Great Mother is a man only externally. Internally he is the Mother herself. The skoptsy and eunuchs are ritual types of this androgyne.
NS: You say that each time a generation of the Great Mother (Titans, Giants) challenges the Olympian gods, they suffer defeat, and you unexpectedly add, “Or is that so only in the Olympian versions of the myth?” This forces one to think. Even more so, it knocks the ground out from under one’s feet. Indeed, until now we have known about Titanomachy and Gigantomachy from ancient sources, whose creators were poets and mythographers clearly standing on the side of the gods of Olympus (Hesiod, Homer, Pausanias, Apollodorus, Onomacritus, and others). Neither Xenophanes, nor Democritus, nor Leucippus, nor Epicurus, nor other “priests” of the Great Mother said a word about the battle of Titans and gods (although I should note that Xenophanes did decide to ridicule Titanomachy in his satirical verses). Do you admit the existence of another, “non-Olympian” version of these myths? Not one source has come down to us in which we could see “reversed proportions,” i.e. the final victory of the Titans over the gods, but in Noomachy you mention the literary works of later periods where a similar finale occurs. I recall that, for instance, Hölderlin’s poem “Nature and Art, or Saturn and Jupiter” calls for the “restoration by the Olympian gods of the entire titanic sphere, so that Zeus would give thanks to Kronos and serve him.” That is not the only example.
AD: Yes, the stories connected with Prometheus among the Romantics (Keats) also belong here, or the romanticization of Lucifer among the Decadents. The Gigantomachy and Titanomachy of classical antiquity were described by members of orthodox Indo-European culture from the position of two higher functions: priests and warriors. Metaphysical models of the third caste, or even more peripheral elements, indeed suppressed this line, avoiding strict, belliciste models, as befits peaceful workers, but the insurrection of the Earth against the Sky, i.e. of producers under the leadership of the god-fighting bourgeois, or revolutionaries against the clergy and aristocracy, is a phenomenon of modernity, and precisely then was the Titanomachy again broadly disseminated in culture, but this time seen through the eyes of the Titans. It is possible that we can find traces of this picture in other civilizations, for instance in the ancient Semitic one, and also among “sea peoples,” representatives of the pre-Indo-European matriarchy in the Mediterranean. True, in these cases the scenarios of inverted Titanomachy, described from the position of the Titans, was not fully preserved, and we are forced to reconstruct the topic from indirect data.
NS: What in your opinion is Cybele’s main secret? The chthonic double of Dionysus?
AD: Cybele has many secrets. Nietzsche said that a woman must find a depth in her surface. Cybele is extremely banal, but this banality has its own special endless depth. One of Cybele’s secrets is infernal parthenogenesis or the simulacrum of divine parthenogenesis. Mother Earth begets Titans, and that is also a secret: from where does she get the solar seed, the eidetic impulse necessary for conception? Or does she operate with a simulacrum of the eidos, with an eidolon? Everything connected with Cybele raises questions. … As for Dionysus’s double, that is in fact the main problem of eschatology. Christianity expresses that metaphysical dilemma in the pair Christ-Antichrist. In the second volume of Noomachy, “The Logos of Europe,” I come to the conclusion that the problematic of Dionysus’s double determines the nerve of European philosophy and the culture of modernity, but that concerns not only European civilization. I suspect that Dionysus’s chthonic double stands at the center of a few other civilizations also, which makes this problem almost universal, though I reject all universalism, or at least the kind that projects the typological problems of one civilization onto another. So we must raise and study the problem of Dionysus’s double very delicately and carefully, without disrupting the inner proportions of each civilization. Nevertheless, I am inclined to think that that is one of the main themes of any civilization, especially the one in which the Logos of Cybele and the Logos of Dionysus predominate. Dionysus’s double appears in the juxtaposition of two zones; the zone of Cybele’s influence and the zone of influence of Dionysus proper. The most difficult and most important problems of metaphysics and eschatology are concentrated there.
NS: Do you share the hope of the ancient epopts for the rebirth and coming of a “third Dionysus,” the last king?
AD: I am an Orthodox Christian and I experience this eschatological and metaphysical problem as an expectation [ozhidaniye, awaiting] of the Second Coming of Christ.
9.
The Existential Theory of Society
Implicit Sociology
Alfred Schütz, Husserl’s student, applied philosophical phenomenology to the domain of society.2 As a result of doing so, he developed an original theory that enriched the discipline of sociology. We can do something analogous with Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. Neither Heidegger nor Husserl was especially occupied with society and a fortiori sociology, but the profundity of their methods and novelty of their perspectives concerning the essential problems of gnoseology and ontology fully permit application to diverse areas of expertise, including those to which they did not give their attention for one reason or another. To do so is entirely in the spirit of Heidegger’s own thought, as he asserted that philosophy contains all other sciences in paradigmatic form, in nuce. It is a technical question to extract from a full-fledged and original philosophy a spectrum of disciplines implicitly contained in it. On the whole, the construction of the Fourth Political Theory is based in many respects on Heidegger’s philosophy and represents precisely the development of implicit content. Since the domain of the political is intimately connected to the domain of the social, an outline of Heideggerian sociology will be extremely useful in the matter of constructing the Fourth Political Theory more generally.
Heidegger almost never uses the term “society” (Gesellschaft),3 but one encounters the term “narod” (Volk) in his texts rather often. We will rely primarily on the lecture course from the summer of 1934, Logic as the Question Concerning The Essence of L
anguage4 and the Black Notebooks,5 where Heidegger recalls the “narod” (Volk) most often and where he lays the foundations for the further development of his implicit teaching about society.
Volk Als Dasein
First we should consider the central concept of all of Heidegger’s philosophy: Dasein. Dasein’s peculiarity consists in the fact that it cannot be regarded strictly as either individual human being or as collective, i.e. social [being]. Dasein is primary in relation to both individual and society. Everything that is human originates from Dasein; accordingly, Dasein is pre-individual and pre-social, but at the same time Heidegger’s existential analytic brings the most diverse aspects of human thought, action, culture, and habits — i.e. existence — into correlation with Dasein on the whole, so Dasein explains the individual that it includes wholly in itself. There is nothing in the individual human entity that would not be in Dasein. That is the basis for the existential analytic. Everything that is human is traced to Dasein and finds its sanction [razresheniye] in it.
This is explicit with regard to the individual, but we could do exactly the same thing with regard to society. After all, society is purely human. Accordingly, just as with the individual, society is rooted in Dasein and sanctioned [razreshayetsya] in it. Like an individual, a society should have existentials, and so we can perfectly well set ourselves the task of an existential analytic of society. Dasein is neither individual nor social (collective), but the individual, on the contrary, leads to Dasein and is contained in it. This is also true of society. Society is also contained in Dasein. It follows that society can be examined from the perspective of Dasein, as Dasein itself.
Political Platonism- the Philosophy of Politics Page 8
