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Category: Faith

Europa Esoterica

Art: Janus by Yaroslav Kurbanov

“For early man there could not have been a difference between “living” and “dead” things, or even “imaginary” and “real”, instead for him there was only a hierarchy of forms, an order of images and signs in accordance with their force.” – Dr. Ernst Schertel, Magic, Theory, Practice

If you can no longer stand the world you’re living in, it’s time to imagine a new one. We have now surpassed the time where changes to civilisation can be made through rational argumentation and the presentation of pure facts, if such a time ever existed. No material advance in science or technology will lift us out of our current morass. The quest for rationality has stripped us of our monks and mystics, our knights and our priests who were the spiritual guardians of our people. Without their protection we are at the mercy of all consuming entropic forces; we have lost the favour of the Gods. All the chaos we see in the world today is the result of the severing of our connection to the esoteric and the spiritual. We do not need a political revolution, we need a mytho-spiritual reawakening. This is a manifesto of that awakening.

The history of Europe is the history of thousands of years of theological debate wrought in blood and iron. Since the Minoan Kings sat atop their lofty thrones’ millennia ago the driving impetus of the grand narrative of European civilisation has been the question of who are our Gods, and how best can we worship them? Europeans uniquely have set themselves apart by their ability to revitalise themselves by reimagining their divine pantheon from Zeus, Odin and Janus to Christ, his angels, and his saints. While rationalists have lamented the excesses of our religious feuding and the massacres, forced conversions, inquisitions, and witch hunts it entailed, they have missed the purpose of such struggle. Thousands of years of religious dialogue conducted by pen and sword has kept our people strong; we have practiced a form of spiritual Darwinism.

The rationalist viewpoint that our world would be better if we did away with the trappings of mumbo-jumbo and superstition is informed by their belief in evolution and progress. In the spiritual domain however, the exact opposite is true: we have instead undergone a period of involution in which the primeval shamans of old were much closer to divinity and magic than we could ever imagine today. This devolution in spiritual life has in part been brought about by rationalist undermining of faith, yet they have succeeded only in weakening our ethno-spiritual consciousness; they have failed to slow the march of religion in other corners of the globe, or to stamp out superstition and irrationality amongst our own people. In practice, they have simply misdirected our natural spiritual impulses away from the worship of the ancestors and the Gods and instead encouraged profane modern cults. Are we really more rational in the age of Q-Anon, BLM, and transgenderism, or is it that we are now simply disarmed in the great battle for the human soul?

Even amongst the dissident right it is popular to merely describe the positive effects of faith and religion without wishing to sincerely engage with it. Commentators can point to improved birth rates, higher trust societies, a greater ability to cope with stress, and a thousand other benefits of religion as the complementary software to the hardware of our genes, yet they do not wish to practice it. Likewise, those faith-seekers of the right who are looking to ‘choose’ their Gods do so on an infirm basis. They at first examine the empirical outcomes of religions and the societies they have created. They weigh the pros and cons of each faith against each other in a utilitarian calculus. By doing so they are misguidedly applying a rationalist mindset to the spiritual domain. This is an impious and worldly approach to the divine. Of course, it is almost entirely a modern conundrum as faith throughout European history was almost always inherited. It is therefore inextricably linked with ancestral worship. Any meaningful attempt to build a new spiritually must thus first engage with our ancestors.

I. Dialogue with the Ancestors

To be human is to enter into a compact with history. We do not come into this world untrammelled by its baggage, but as the next link in the great chain that stretches back all the way into the mists of prehistory. Europeans have been always acutely aware of this fact. As Caesar aped Alexander, so thus did Napoleon ape Caesar. But not only the great men of history come down to us, but as the Romans honoured their immediate ancestors so too did all venerable Europeans. The dead have influence that echoes far beyond their own lives and can aid us now in the present. The historian who devotes himself to the study of his own people is in our contemporary age the closest to the priests and shamans of old, for by learning who we are, we strengthen the roots of our own resolve now here in the present.

The idle platitude that we learn history, so we are not doomed to repeat it is a falsehood. We are powerless to stop the cycles of history, but by knowing well the deeds of our ancestors we are bolstered by their example when the great crises of our time arise. At these moments of great stress, when our people are imperilled the veil between the living and dead is thinnest. In all our travails now, we must imagine we are being cheered on to victory by a heavenly host: all those millions of our people that when duty called answered, and now spur us on to victory. We carry the weight of a huge burden, the understanding we are the degenerated heirs of a great lineage, and we risk being the final stewards of our race.

We are not alone in our struggle, however, for we can call on the ancestors and they shall answer. Each act of sacrilege that modernity commits against the statues and graves of our kin disturbs their spirits, just as desecration of any burial mound does. These restless spirits are thus alerted that we are in mortal peril, now is the time we need their wisdom and encouragement the most. When we walk the streets of our towns and cities, we do not do so as a lone atom in an uncaring world, but as the custodian of thousands of years of history and the sum total of all the hopes of those who came before us. We must understand in all our endeavours, they want us to succeed. If we but only open our hearts and minds to them, and to their noble examples, we are granted a mighty boon. Those who know that when they die, they shall be returned to the bosom of their own kind will crush those who live only for themselves.

But the aid of the ancestors comes with a supreme duty. In all things that we do, we must understand that when we die and enter the hallowed halls of our own kind, they will ask a single question of us:

“What did you do in the great crisis, when the race was almost extinguished?”

No excuse for dereliction of duty will be sufficient. Pleas that our enemies were too numerous and our chances too few will be but the mewling of a coward to all those esteemed heroes of history who thought nothing of their own depredations and sacrifices. They will be unswayed by stories of great fortunes amassed or lives of hedonism lived, much better to be able to answer with true sincerity:

“I did all I could, and I fought to the bitter end.”

Though we are but stunted pygmies and unworthy heirs to a grand tradition, to say that we fought with all our might in an unheroic age in the final reckoning makes us the greatest of our kind. When all others were untrue, we gave our all. Many on the dissident right today are too concerned with the fate of the faithless, they froth in impotent rage at all our people who have abandoned their duties and wallow in filth. It is not our task to try and convince lesser men to do their duty, but instead by our example to shame them for their own cravenness. The judgement of our deeds will not be reckoned by the petty fads of our day, we answer to a divine council. Tolerance and meekness may gain some today the admiration of the fashionable, but they shall not dine with us in Valhalla, at the table of the greatest. They will not receive the blessing of the ancestors. We must labour to make sure that we do.

II. From the Volk

All great political movements are preceded by a spiritual earthquake. It is not a coincidence that the great tumult that occurred in the Germany of the 20th century grew out of the renewed occult and esoteric societies of that time. Those who wish to build a movement purely based on temporal concerns would be wise to take note of this. We need metaphysical objectives, a grand and eternal purpose, not merely political goals. This is why we must rebuild our priestly class, we must seek hidden truths, we must listen to whispers from the Gods. In short, before we turn outwards, we must turn inwards, and overthrow our doubts and our cynicism.

Humans are but beacons. We stoke the fire within ourselves in the hope that we may draw the best and the brightest to us. Our passage through life is nothing but the total of the connections we make within and beyond it. We create great works in the hope they may stir the imaginations of others. We make great speeches in the belief it will rouse the passions of the noblest. Our race is the clay from which the great men are moulded. But not every man is great, and we must understand that we are not trying to connect with the masses. We are forging the spear tip that will pierce the armour of our enemies. Only thirteen men crossed Francisco Pizzaro’s line in the sand to aid him in his Faustian quest to topple the Incas. Jesus had but twelve disciples. The great questions of the age are settled by but a handful.

We must understand our enemies are not other men, but perennial forces which attack every generation of our people. We are engaged in an existential struggle with entropy itself. The problems we face are not unique to our age, but universal. The dangers of degeneration, vice, indolence, treachery, and stupidity have faced us always. In every crop of our people there have been those willing to sell us out, to scorn their duty, to gleefully attempt to destroy everything that has gone before. Our eternal mission is to always seek those heroic few who will be our allies in casting the dark forces back into shadow once again. In short, our lives are determined by a few meaningful comrades and lovers. We must pray that we find them, and hope the Gods intercede on our behalf.

The drive to increase the chance of these great minds and great souls meeting has been the guiding purpose of all our eugenic efforts of the past. The rationalist believes in transhumanism, that all men can be improved. We know this to be false, we believe that some of the best men can be enabled to be better, but greatness is particular and not general. Just as not all people can enjoy the favour of the Gods, nor can all peoples. Our faith must therefore be specific and idiosyncratic. Christianity collapsed under its universalist pretensions, and now we must labour for a strand of religion particular to us. This was the driving principle behind the Völkisch movements of the last century. To incorporate the veneration of our own people into a new religion of the future was the natural evolution of our spiritual journey, but this was snuffed out in the great cataclysm of the Second World War.

It is for us now to take up this mantle and to work towards a new faith with our people at the centre of it. It is likely that this will be a synthesis of forms of worship both present and past, of religious truths of old fused with the revealed truths of the present. Our ability to renew ourselves through the creation of new religious doctrines has been one of the crowning achievements of our phoenix spirited race. This is why the more far sighted on the dissident right have ceased to concern themselves purely with the political, and now turn their mind to the esoteric. Our continuation depends on the successful completion of this radical synthesis.

III. The Way of Janus

We are the first generation to be tasked with choosing our God. Much like the rationalistic approach to debate is defunct, approaching faith with modern liberal and utilitarian ideas is wrongheaded. There is no marketplace of Gods. Without a truer, more esoteric, and contemplative approach to religion, any faith will be merely superficial. This pivot away from divine contemplation to religions concerned only with this world is evident in the trajectory of Christianity. The Evangelical Christianity that dominates the United States is devoid of any esoteric truths or dedicated mystical thinkers. Faith has been stripped back to a mere a social club in which the faithful sign up to a nebulous set of club rules. These shallow roots were therefore easy for modernity to wash away under a tide of hedonism and relativism. Christianity in its contemporary formulation cannot act as a bulwark against spiritual decay because its roots have withered, and the thin theological topsoil has been thoroughly polluted. As the scholar of magic Ernst Schertel surmised:

“European Catholicism which is mainly derived from Egypt still fosters the old traditions of the magical significance of the body, the picture, in short, the concrete-designed in general. The Catholic cult was built on magical ceremonies, in its centre the sacrifice was still featured like in old times, its world was still replete with demons and even the supreme God still appeared in the guise of bread and wine. Here there was still an air of magic of all kinds, and it was not coincidental that with the resignation of Catholicism, magic also dried out in Europe.”

While the modern conservative seeks to turn the clock back by fifty or one hundred years, we instead seek to soar back to the very origin point of our people, to ask the first men what wisdom they possessed. Yet without any records, we have but the faintest of ideas. We must instead then turn to an approximation, a guide who cannot furnish us with direct truth but can instead direct our enquiries. In ancient Rome the god Janus was the deity of beginnings, transitions, and duality, amongst many other roles. In the pantheon he acted as a form of meta-god, invoked at the beginning of each religious ceremony regardless of its main deity. He had no dedicated priesthood, but instead was the preserve of the King of the Sacred Rites, rex sacrorum.

For the neophyte faith-seeker of the modern age, it is useful to think about the divine at first not as an entity to be worshipped, but as a dialectic. In contemporary life, perhaps more than at any other time, we are forced to be constantly in two minds. We interact with a world we know to be false but must pretend it is true. We are Janus-spirited in all things. There is perhaps no better spiritual chaperone for the postmodern world. Just as Virgil was Dante’s guide through heaven and hell, we must let Janus lead us from atheism to agnosticism. Some are touched by a deep religious experience and accept faith as true all at once. Others come to the realisation slowly, at first splitting their thoughts between the secular and the divine.

No one can ultimately tell you what to believe in your heart. The pilgrimages of times long past were undertaken to reaffirm faith, but in modernity we must make pilgrimages just to find the merest lost echoes of the divine. God is not dead, but he nevertheless will not reveal himself to the unworthy. Great truths about reality are to be sought and discovered, they will not be revealed by inaction. We must reverse our spiritual decline just as assuredly we must reverse our demographic decline. To do so begins with the chosen few once again pondering the profound and esoteric meanings of the universe. We have no masters to guide us in this task, but this should not deter us. We are all now kings of our own sacred rites, and it is up to us to reconvene with the Gods once more. Our fate depends on it.

How to Believe: Becoming The Men of Janus

November 11, 2017 / admin / 0 Comments

We are living in an age of dissolution. Every institution of government and society is in a state of seemingly terminal decline. At the individual level the notions of honour, personal responsibility, and self-sacrifice have largely vanished from public life. The cause of this malaise is not material inequality, but the collapse of faith. The credo of sterile rationalism has triumphed over the metaphysical vision of a divinely ordained world ruled by angels and Gods. For many, the transition from the esoteric world of faith and divine truth seeking to the clockwork universe of the rationalist is vindicated by our cornucopia of material wealth and the unparalleled ease of our lives. Yet is plain to see, for all our prosperity and plenty, the average person remains deeply unfulfilled. No matter the veracity of their nihilistic consumption and hedonistic hoarding, the experience of the modern world is ultimately a shallow and an empty one. Despite all its garish efforts to distract from it, modernity cannot hide the incompleteness it has created by the denial of faith.

It is in fact impossible for the acolytes of modernism to admit to the necessity of faith, because faith itself is incompatible with the primary tenet of today’s anti-faith: an unwavering commitment to total equality. To have a metaphysical belief, to be religious, is to accept that you must subordinate yourself to a higher being – to something outside of, and above, yourself. In doing so you create a cosmic hierarchy; and in following a strict set of moral tenets you exercise discrimination. The sinner thus becomes lesser than the righteous. God becomes greater than the individual. It is these two acts that make faith antithetical to modernity and make its practice a primary existential threat to the modern order. The atheist of today thus screams loudest that no metaphysical world is possible, because he has the most to lose if such an order did exist. He is at once fearful of the collapse of the modern world and its hedonistic pleasures, and simultaneously driven by pathological terror at the idea of being judged by the divine and being found utterly wanting.

It is fundamentally fear that accounts for the lack of true heroism in modernity – a fear of death. A long life is treated as an inherently good life, because the ardent deniers of faith must strenuously attempt to reassure themselves that is the truth. Today’s society seeks to cling to life at all costs. The citizen of today embraces infirmity and avoids danger because if existence itself is the only objective moral criteria, remaining alive is the only true metric of success. What kind of life you lead is irrelevant, only cold utilitarian survival matters. It is ironic that this mode of thought which values only survival has in fact precipitated the gravest danger to the West’s security it has ever faced. In abandoning faith, in retreating into a fear of the great unknown after death, the West has singularly failed to respond to the threat of militant Islam. It is not political correctness that has hamstrung our efforts to repel this new invasion, but our fundamental lack of faith. The burning zeal of a believer will always prevail over the fearful who believes only in living at any cost. The atheist is a slave; the believer is the master.

It can thus be seen both for our personal salvation and to save our way of life we must return to the path of faith. Yet we are the first generation largely to be born without any predetermined spiritual path. We have been totally severed from the great continuum of our native religions. We are thus the first generation presented with the task of choosing a faith for ourselves, rather than simply inheriting it from history as every other generation has. To many traditionalists the solution is simple – we must return to Christianity. In their view, if we all began attending our local church on a Sunday, faith would be restored, and Western civilization would flourish once more. Not only is this a ridiculously parsimonious answer to the complex question of how to regain our faith, it is also an incorrect answer. It does not address the primary reason most of us were driven away from Christianity in the first place: The Church itself. Five hundred years after Martin Luther’s tumultuous revolt against Church corruption and decadence, the selling of indulgences pales in comparison to the scale of hypocrisy, debauchery and outright treachery present in nearly all forms of modern Christianity.

Both spiritually and temporally Catholicism and Protestantism in their modern format are so nauseating it is almost impossible for this new generation of faith seekers to take them in any way seriously. The Catholic Church – once the bejewelled repository of European faith – is now reduced to a shadow of its former self, more associated in the popular imagination with paedophilia than spirituality; and headed by a Pontiff who is more concerned with kissing refugee’s feet than engineering a resurgence of the European spirit. Protestantism fares no better. European national churches which have always been wedded to the zeitgeist of the state have simply joined modernity’s war on faith. In their Evangelical and American form, the Protestant faith is reduced to little more than an activity group, a superficial faithstyle choice which has no serious capacity for esoteric knowledge and searching for divine truths. The nouveau branches of Christianity such as Mormonism and the Jehovah’s Witnesses seem almost as alien to the European spirit as Islam itself.

It is undeniable that the political influence of the Church has been harnessed in almost every occasion against the traditionalist world view – whether supporting mass migration or lending its support to regimes beyond our shores. The reason for this is that at the heart of modern Christianity, the doctrine of universalism has been placed on a pedestal above all other values; and universalism is in actuality simply a euphemism for the total equality of atheism. It is for this reason that flocking back to our local Church will neither enlighten us nor shield us from the ravages of modernity – it will merely grant legitimacy to another tainted, destructive force and add voices to the deafening chorus demanding more equality, more nothingness. Faced with the seeming irredeemable nature of modern Christianity, an increasing number of spiritual nomads have decided to take their quest to an earlier, more primordial form of faith. Perhaps we do not need the return of God, but the return of Gods.

The neo-Pagan revival which is underway in many parts of Europe is fuelled by a wholesale rejection of Christianity as a proto-modernist credo which usurped the true faith of Europe. Certainly, Paganism has many attributes which lends it to be seriously considered as a possible solution to our modern predicament. In an era which is increasingly barbaric, the revival of the Gods of war, strength, and honour seems a welcome and necessary step. The inherent fluidity of divinity in Paganism – the notion that Gods walk amongst us, and that we ourselves may attain a modicum of divine power provides the mechanism by which Paganism can turn life itself into a heroic adventure. Just as in Wagner’s epic Ring Cycle it was Siegfried who was the embodiment of divine heroism, by reconnecting with the Pagan Gods of the past we too can transform our lives into an epic saga as we seek self-mastery and to both revere and chafe against the divine hierarchy.

Thus, by accepting Wotan into our hearts, while the average person drowns helplessly in the slime of modern life, we soar above them as we are carried on the wings of Valkyries. Paganism is an antidote to the timid veneration of luxury and safety which has replaced faith in modern life. A man who believes he will cross the Rainbow Bridge to join his Gods and comrades in the vaunted halls of Valhalla is not paralyzed by the fear of death and therefore is not acquiescent in trading his freedom and integrity for a few more years of the easy life. While the huddled masses view the impending clash of Western and Islamic civilization as a disaster, the pagan relishes it as a chance to attain honour and glory – the pagan revolt is truly a total inversion of modern values which enjoins the strength of the Gods with a personal quest for self-betterment.

Yet while this appeal to heroic individualism may captivate some – more serious-minded faith seekers have their reservations. It is certainly true that Paganism creates a hierarchy and reignites the metaphysical, but it at times can seem a narrow, limited faith system which has little space for the monastic intellectual, esoteric, and spiritual truth seeking which Christianity once provided. To return to Paganism would naturally entail the regression of certain aspects of civilised life we have come to enjoy for centuries, and its kinetic nature is seemingly incompatible with fixed stability. It may prove, at best, to be a temporary solution to our crisis of faith. After all, Paganism was washed away once by Christianity, and it is perhaps possible that a reformed Christianity could provide an even greater dynamo for our spiritual revolution. It is true that almost anyone that enters the great cathedrals of Europe can still hear the faint whispers of God.

The very success of Christianity has always been its ability to be reinterpreted and reformed. It has provided the impetus and driving force for Western civilization because its schisms, its doctrinal disputes, its interminable and blood drenched civil wars have kept Western civilization vital and have driven it onwards to ever greater heights of aesthetic and doctrinal beauty. When Luther launched his withering attack on Catholicism, it responded not by timidity and acquiesce – but by launching the greatest programme of artistic and intellectual prowess the world had ever seen: The Counter Reformation. Just because almost all Christian churches of today are weak-willed and unfit custodians of the faith, it does not mean the faith itself is the problem. On the contrary, Christianity can also provide a framework for man to ascend the golden path and leap from the gutters of modern life.

The most useful example of this is to take seriously the notion of St. Peter and his eternal watch over the Gates of Heaven. It is pertinent to always ask yourself the question, could I justify myself to Him right now if I died? If the answer is no, then it is time to revolt against the materialistic considerations of this life, and prepare instead a life worthy not of the judgement of your self-absorbed peers, but one which holds up to Divine scrutiny. It is this test of St. Peter which so terrifies the nihilists and atheists of modernity, who in the dark recesses of their mind know that if they are wrong, if their conduct in life was ever set against any objective test of morality, they would fail. This vision of St. Peter’s judgement becomes all the more powerful when we view Christ not as the meek, hapless Shepherd he has been portrayed as by the modern Church, but as Christ the destroyer of evil, vanquisher of the moneylenders, Christ the morally inflexible, crucified and whipped because he would not renounce his views or his mission. Once we view Christianity as an armour of faith which lends its power to our cause, we reconnect with the muscular Christianity that inspired the Templars, turned back the Ottoman’s at the gates of Vienna, and can now traverse the chasm of lost confidence we need to restore Western civilization. Once we accept our task as being able to look St. Peter in the eye and say with total honesty that we fought for the good, then we are no longer simply the agreeable Anglican or mildly contrarian Catholic. We have moved our frame of reference from the worldly to the divine – we have become Knights of Christ.

A case then has been made for both Western Christianity and Paganism being the true faith which can revitalise both the individual spirit and Western civilization itself. Yet the question which preoccupies many of a traditionalist persuasion, is how do I choose – Paganism or Christianity? In a world of inherited religions, this question would have never arisen. Yet in our modern situation it can become a serious philosophical stumbling block. And this is without speaking at all of other alternatives – of Eastern Orthodoxy, of a Nietzschean transcendental quest for self-betterment, or of the elevation of nation or nature to the place of God. Thus, how can one choose between one faith or another? By what criteria can we decide?

That is fundamentally the wrong question. We must understand that we live in an aspiritual age – that we have been conditioned from birth to reject faith in all its forms. We are in the position of the barbarians of the dark ages who slowly came to understand the ruins they were huddled in were not made by God, but by men. We are at the very beginning of the process of relearning what faith is, of understanding what the world of religious sites we have inherited mean. We must at this stage merely examine, and attempt to understand the religious heritage of Western man. We must straddle the dualistic, even contradictory nature of our faith. We must become Men of Janus who understand that Western man was both the Roman, and the Gaul. He was both the Viking, and the Templar. The Men of Janus understand that in the quest to save themselves and Western civilization, the final reckoning will be decided by how many faithful stand against the indifferent. By exploring faith, by studying religions, by re-learning spirituality we will come to know what appeals to us, which god speaks to us, and in the end – how we can escape the spiritual wasteland we find ourselves in and finally free ourselves from our fear of death and what awaits us.

Transcendental Titans

Revolt Against Modernity

Category: Faith

Europa Esoterica

How to Believe: Becoming The Men of Janus

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