3,523 words

Part 3 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)

Chapter Nine, “Europe and the Indo-Europeans,” addresses another required subject: the origins and development of the white race and its civilizations. These discussions, mixing science (genomes), soft science (anthropology), and “esoteric” science (Evola, again), usually make me want to lie down and take a nap — wake me when the Funnelbeaker Farmers annihilate the Corded Ware culture — but I think I now have the hang of this Indo-European business — the various ways the genetics of three peoples and the resulting cultures (male initiation, warrior bands, and caste systems) have intertwined in our history — thanks to The Golden One!

And yet, his final paragraph is curious:

The Eastern Roman Empire, also known as the Byzantine Empire, with its intrigues and decadence, was a far cry from the Roman Empire during its golden years — thus, it is unreasonable to view it as a worthy heir of the Spirit of Rome. Perhaps the Spirit was dormant for a few centuries until it imbued Charlemagne a few centuries later.

Now, you might think he’s just upset about getting ripped off in a Turkish hostel, but it’s much worse: not a private grudge, but the all too common — almost universal, at least in the West — of over a millennium of propaganda aimed at propping up the shaky foundations of imperial and papal claims to supremacy over Christendom.[1]

Lately, however, another view has come into view:

In recent decades, the study of the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as Byzantium, has been revolutionized by new approaches and more sophisticated models for how its society and state operated. No longer looked upon as a pale facsimile of classical Rome, Byzantium is now considered a vigorous state of its own, inheritor of many of Rome’s features, and a vital node in the first truly globalized world, with far-flung connections to the Carolingians, Vikings, Arabs, Ethiopians, Indians, and Chinese.[2]

So what? Well, consider:

At the turn of the first millennium the empire of New Rome was the oldest and most dynamic state in the world and comprised the most civilized portions of the Christian world. Its borders, long defended by native frontier troops, were being expanded by the most disciplined and technologically advanced army of its time.[3] The unity of Byzantine society was grounded in the equality of Roman law and a deep sense of a common and ancient Roman identity; cemented by the efficiency of a complex bureaucracy; nourished and strengthened by the institutions and principles of the Christian Church; sublimated by Greek rhetoric; and confirmed by the passage of ten centuries. At the end of the reign of Basileios II (976-1025), the longest in Roman history, its territory included Asia Minor and Armenia, the Balkan peninsula south of the Danube, and the southern regions of both Italy and the Crimea. Serbia, Croatia, Georgia, and some Arab emirates in Syria and Mesopotamia had accepted a dependent status.[4]

In fact, they seem rather like people TGO would like:

The Romans of the east did not survive for so long by praying or burying talismans to avert the apocalypse, though they did those things too. They survived by investing in institutions of resilience, pooling resources to promote common goals, and building consensus around shared values, especially regarding justice, social order, correct religion, and the common good.^[5]

Some revisionists go even further, arguing that Classical Rome never existed, being a fantasy invented to provide a noble origin for an upstart Italian emperor and a schismatic pope and plagiarized from the authentic history of the “Eastern” Empire, which was the true descendent of the Classical Greek civilization.[6] Since this book will undoubtedly go into many editions, perhaps TGO will revisit this at a future date.[7]

The next chapter does the same service for Indo-European religion(s), dealing with such topics as the Trifunctional Hypothesis, the wars of the gods, the Arctic homeland, the Koryos or Männerbund, etc. All this demonstrates how, since the “pagan” or non-Abrahamic religions are expressions of particular ethnic groups, Indo-European religion can only be understood using the anthropological data discussed in the previous chapter; for example, the Teutonic Order as a Christian Männerbund.

TGO notes the Indo-European “acceptance of foreign influences,” which is a useful trait, and very different from such “destructive phenomena” as mass immigration from the non-Western worlds. Christianity illustrates both sides of this, leading to both the “destruction of the Classical world” as well as the later “Germanization” of Christianity in the North, leading to the “syncretic paganism and Christianity” that led to the European civilization of the Middle Ages.

Again, it is unfortunate but all too typical that TGO ignores the Eastern Empire entirely, which had a very different encounter with Christianity: the latter was fully assimilated into the Roman system, and rather than “destroying” the Classical world, Greek culture was preserved and extended, until the Christian crusaders were able to loot it for the West’s “Renaissance.”[8]

Also all too typical is the assumption that Christianity itself was a “foreign influence”; perhaps, when stripped of its Jewish encumbrances (which were bolted on at the Council of Nicaea), it can be recognized as an expression of true Indo-European spirituality. Richard Wagner, at least, thought so.[9]

Speaking of Wagner, and moving to a more particular point, TGO adopts Evola’s notion (in The Mystery of the Grail) that the Grail cycle is the resurrection of a positive, “masculine,” Nordic spirit, in contrast to a negative, “feminine” spirit reborn in Catharism. Arguably, “it is possible that the Knights of the Holy Grail in the Medieval Parzifal legend referred to the Cathars.”[10]

Nevertheless, TGO acknowledges that while “the purely Christian elements (i.e. the early Christian ones) can be cast aside,” nothing should be “cast aside just because there is a (literal or metaphorical) cross on them.”[11]

The penultimate chapter returns to the personal level and regales us with his experiences in “sacred places,” places with a “certain aura” of good vibes and energy, or a “negative, haunted aura” — ranging from Uppsala to San Francisco and Utah. He also narrates his personal explorations of moon cycles and astrology, and reflects on sacred clothing, nutritional supplements, and coffee, where losing controversy-shy sponsorships led to positive outcomes as he was led to crafting his own sacred brands.

After all these trials and personal experiences, it was only in 2022 that TGO began the serious study of the work of Julius Evola, and there found confirmation of his 2014 decision to aspire to the title he holds today:

In relation to the Aryan element, in India the attribute used for salvific deities and heroes in hari and harit, a term which means “the golden one” and the “blond god.”[12]

A brief final chapter announces “the insight that has fueled and guided” the journey of The Golden One: that “there can be no greater glory than to accomplish regime change” across European civilization. If this seems depressingly unlikely, he reiterates “the most important teaching” he has shared in this book:

Nothing is set in stone. Reality and, indeed, the very course of history can be altered by the determination and will of divinely inspired individuals.

* * *

Before bringing our time with The Golden One to a close — at which point you should immediately head to his site to purchase your own copy — I want to revert to talking about the will as well, and about Neville, as I find comparisons between him and our current author to be interesting and valuable (and I hope you will agree).

Both men are — to start at a level that only seems superficial — tall, handsome, and charismatic, a necessary qualification for their role as effective public speakers. Here is Israel Regardie, Aleister Crowley’s private secretary and the first to write about Neville (whom he called “the most magickal” of the New Thought writers), on Neville the man, which should remind us of what we’ve seen and heard from TGO:

A young man, not more than 36 years of age, he is a dynamic, handsome and most charming personality. He has a winning smile — thoroughly and completely disarming. His presentation of truth is forceful and sincere. Charged with feeling, and reflecting his own integrity and purposefulness, he communicates himself readily from the pulpit.

Four to five hundred men and women flock to the Old Actor’s Church on each of these nights that he talks. How much of his evident popularity is due to his charm and how much to his dynamic orations, is not for me to say. Some, however, have hazarded an opinion. Some suspect it is the former. Nevertheless, this judgment does not in the least detract from the value and worth of what he is impelled to teach. His method and content of teaching are entirely too good and provocative readily to appeal to so many and to such different varieties of people. However that may be, his readers and the listeners must be the judges. He does get a crowd — and he satisfies most of them. ^[13]

As we’ve seen, TGO is an athlete, a competitive bodybuilder, and a fitness model, all of which both manifest and contribute to both his charismatic appearance and his metaphysical outlook. This recalls what Regardie noticed as most distinctive about Neville: He was a professional dancer, starring in several shows on Broadway. This gave Neville the physical training needed to be able to easily fall into the relaxed physical states needed to access and control his imagination; moreover, he also thought Neville failed to realize that his listeners and readers lacked such training and failed to get the same effects. TGO has not made the same mistake, and in both books and videos emphasizes the importance of physical training: Mens sana in corpore sano.[14]

One difference between them is their attitude toward military service. TGO is proud of his and discusses its valuable contributions to his maturity. Neville, however, delighted in telling the story of how he used the power of imagination to persuade his commanding officer — the son of the famous Mississippi segregationist, Sen. Theodore Bilbo — to release him after he was drafted in late 1942.

And of course, their situations were quite different. TGO was an 18-year-old fulfilling his responsibilities as a citizen, and gaining additional physical training and insights, while Neville, though in fine physical condition, was nearly 40 and married, with two children, one serving in the Pacific, and was a British subject; under ordinary circumstances he would have been exempt from service. And of course, readers of Counter-Currents know that the war was unjust, anyway.[15]

Neville, like Schopenhauer during the Napoleonic Wars, simply believed that his “service” consisted in his metaphysical work, not marching around in Georgia.[16] For what it’s worth, the Army agreed: Neville was honorably discharged after six months, to return to “essential civilian employment”: lecturing on the occult in Greenwich Village.[17] (Perhaps the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime version of the CIA, was already interested in such topics?) Ultimately, Neville held that all this rigamarole was how the Universe fulfilled his desire for American citizenship, which was automatically granted to all draftees.

* * *

Some final thoughts on Demigod Mentality. Though not a native speaker, TGO’s English is about perfect, not merely in grammar but in the far more telling area of syntax. A sentence such as “The lesson I learned was that the fact that I had competed did not matter much particularly at all”[18] displays a sure grasp of the analytic nature of English and would doubtless dumbfound the speaker of a synthetic language, like Hungarian (and vice versa, of course).

Turning from the physical author to the physical book, we find the same unity of purpose — to succeed — and result: success. The binding, printing, and jacket are well-designed and well-made, a pleasure to hold and peruse. I can only recall one typo (some kind of stray printer’s mark on p. 86), a true rarity on today’s market.

A while back, you may recall that I described Greg Johnson’s Graduate School with Heidegger as a book that I would have liked to have had given to me in college; this one I would say should be given to every white youth in their earliest years, to inspire them and give them the hints and information they will need to survive, prosper, and overcome the challenges of the coming years. As Jonathan Bowden lamented:

Truthfully, in this age those with intellect have no courage and those with some modicum of physical courage have no intellect. If things are to alter during the next fifty years then we must re-embrace Byron’s ideal: the cultured thug.[19]

Consider another contemporary example, Conor Macgregor:

To the extent that Conor’s ever been a political figure, he is the “anarch” described by Ernst Jünger in Eumeswill — not to be confused with an “anarchist”. “The anarchist is dependent,” Jünger claims, “Both on his unclear desires and on the powers that be.” Nothing about Conor’s desires is unclear, and he is dependent on nothing but his talent and determination. Alongside very few men of our era — Kanye West and Donald Trump among them — Conor has willed his own reality into existence. He is the perpetual anarch who “expelled society from himself” and became immortal through the mastering of his craft and the accumulation of knowledge of an ancient art form.[20]

Anarch, cultured thug, demigod: a new type of man is rising, and our enemies are right to be afraid.

Notes

[1] There are not a few footnotes to scholarly literature in this chapter, some in foreign languages, but none for this paragraph.

[2] Publisher’s description of Anthony Kaldellis: The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium (Oxford University Press, 2023).

[3] TGO correctly notes how the Western Empire extended citizenship to more and more immigrants, especially in the army, and that rather than being overrun by barbarians, “they were already on the inside.” The lessons for today are obvious.

[4] Anthony Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformation of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 189.

[5] Anthony Kaldellis, The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium (Oxford University Press, 2023), Introduction.

[6] “The Byzantine did not receive their Romanness from Italy. It was always in the Balkans with them. The Byzantine are neither the descendants nor the spiritual heirs of the Italians. Their civilization originated directly from the Hellenistic civilization of the last three centuries BC. What happened, I suggest, is that the Franko-Italians have copyrighted the name ‘Roman’ by erasing its eastern origin, as part of an elaborate deception that included the false Donation of Constantine, the tale of Peter as first bishop of Rome, and many other pious frauds. The main purpose was the usurpation of Constantinople’s birthright by Rome and Aachen, and the outcome was the fratricide that destroyed the East and drove the West insane.” Laurent Guyénot, “Byzantine Revisionism Unlocks World History.”

[7] Does this have any relevance for White Nationalism? Consider: “Byzantine revisionism is not . . . a mirror for White [sic] man to hate himself. On the contrary, I will argue that it is a path of repentance for what White [sic] man did to himself, under the influence of an evil, deceitful and divisive god. It is a path to self-healing, renewed pride, and invigorating hope.” Guyénot, op. cit. “The Romans of the east did not survive for so long by praying or burying talismans to avert the apocalypse, though they did those things too. They survived by investing in institutions of resilience, pooling resources to promote common goals, and building consensus around shared values, especially regarding justice, social order, correct religion, and the common good.” Kaldellis, The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium, Introduction.

[8] “Whether they know it or not, modern classicists stand in a tradition that goes directly back to these east Romans, a tradition that . . . was transported to the west and curated by the Italian humanists.” Kaldellis, op. cit., Chapter 34: Territorial Retrenchment and Cultural Innovation (1282–1328).

[9] “Wagner’s philosophical ideals revive Platonic, Schopenhauerian and Proudhonian Socialistic ones in a message of Christian Love that is as exalted as his music. To those who object today to Christianity as a Judaic monotheistic religion that must be abjured in favour of nebulous neo-pagan revivals, Wagner’s writings reveal the true Indo-European virtue of a religion that was certainly Indo-European in its origins and has, when divorced from its later immersion into the history of the Jewish people, continued to possess a deep spiritual value for the elevation of mankind.” Alexander Jacob, “The Aryan-Christian Religion and Politics of Richard Wagner,” and his Richard Wagner on Tragedy, Christianity, and the State (Colac, Victoria, Australia: Manticore, 2021).

[10] And Wagner thought so, too: ““In his introductory notes Wagner . . . located the Grail knights in the mountains of northern Spain, which in Wolfram’s time were controlled by Cathar heretics. . . . So rather than thinking of Wagner’s knights as Templars or Crusaders, perhaps we should regard them as a community of believers who have been persecuted by a Crusade and taken refuge in a forest deep in the mountains . . . It has been suggested (in the writings of Otto Rahn, E. Anitchkof and J. Evola) that some of the ideas provided to Wolfram by the mysterious Kyot originated with this sect, with whom Kyot may have come into contact in Provence or the Languedoc.” Consider: “For both Wagner and the Gnostics, . . . all those who worship the creator of this world and man are worshipping an evil and false deity. This is the fundamental Gnostic critique of Yahwistic-Abrahamic religions — a heinous heresy in the eyes of mainstream theology, and one which it has been trying to desperately suppress for centuries. It is what ultimately lead to the persecution of the Gnostic Cathars, whose unrepentant followers were burnt at the stake. It also explains the complete lack of invocation of God in Parsifal, whose Knights of the Holy Grail are probably based on the order of the Cathars.” See “Gnosticism, Schopenhauer and the Ring of the Nibelungs.”

[11] In context, “early Christian” refers to Nicaean Christian doctrines, before “Germanization,” but the Gnostic and Marcionite elements, which are at least compatible with Indo-European spirituality, existed from the beginning, and are arguably the earliest elements. Removing the cross reminds me of the “German Christianity” movement, which among other things wanted to remove all crosses as a “Jewish symbol”; fortunately, they eventually lost favor with the Fuhrer. The cross, of course, is a fundamental metaphysical symbol; see René Guénon, The Symbolism of the Cross (Hillsdale, N. Y.: Sophia Perennis, 2004) and many other texts.

[12] Revolt Against the Modern World, trans. Guido Stucco (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions International, 1995), p. 245.

[13] See Regardie, The Romance of Metaphysics (1946; reprinted as Teachers of Fulfillment by New Falcon in 2017, with an Introduction by Colin Wilson); the relevant chapter on Neville appears on the Penguin website and as the Introduction to The Power of Imagination: The Neville Goddard Treasury; Mitch Horowitz, ed. (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2015).

[14] Compare: “Aleister Crowley possessed far too much technical knowledge of magick to readily understand the problems of ordinary students. He frequently asked his younger colleagues to help make his teachings more accessible, and once explained that “it’s the sort of thing I can’t do myself, not knowing the scope of the mind of the ‘gentle reader.’” Hymenaeus Beta, Foreword to Lon Milo DuQuette, The Magick of Aleister Crowley (Newburyport, Mass.: Weiser, 2022).

[15] According to Colin Wilson (op. cit.), Regardie, also a British subject, enlisted in the Army when the United States entered the war, but later admitted this was “a ghastly mistake.”

[16] “To [Schopenhauer] the warlike events were ‘sound and smoke’, an exceedingly foolish game. A few months later, looking back on those weeks, he wrote a letter to the Dean of the philosophical faculty in Jena, where he wanted to take his degree: ‘When, in the early summer of this year, the noise of war drove the Muses from Berlin, where I was studying philosophy . . . I, who had sworn allegiance to their colours alone, likewise left the city with their retinue — not so much because, due to a special concatenation of circumstances, I am a stranger everywhere and have no civic duties to discharge anywhere, but because I was most deeply pervaded by the conviction that I was not born to serve mankind with my fist but with my head, and that my fatherland is greater than Germany’.” Rüdiger Safranski, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy (Harvard, 1990), p. 147.

[17] “A profile in The New Yorker of September 11, 1943, described the handsome speaker back at the lectern before swooning (and often female) New York audiences.” Mitch Horowitz, here.

[18] “A very useful phrase for fluency and articulacy is the fact that.  This allows you to be more flexible with your sentences, but also makes your English sound more articulate and fluent.“ https://www.londonschool.com/blog/despite-the-fact-that/

[19] Jonathan Bowden, “Why I Write,” in his Pulp Fascism: Right-Wing Themes in Comics, Graphic Novels, & Popular Literature, ed. Greg Johnson (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2013), p. 166.  See now also the latest Bowden collection, The Cultured Thug (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2023).

[20] “The Anarch” by Adam Lehrer. For more on Trump creating his own reality, see my “The Secret of Trump’s A Peale: Traditionalism Triumphant! Or: He’s Our Evola, Only Better?” and “Lord Kek Commands! A Look at the Origins of Meme Magic”; both reprinted in Mysticism After Modernism, op. cit.