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For years there has been a healthy dynamism in the right-wing sphere between what we could call the trads and the vitalists. This is not a pagan or Christian thing, but this typology exists in both camps, although pagans tend to be a bit more vitalist and Christians a bit more trad.
In paganism, the trads are represented by folks like Tom Rowsell, Tristan Powers, and Mark Puryear. These are pagans with a scholarly inclination who try to get all the details right, to reconstruct authentic practice, and to give people a solid grounding in history and anthropology. The vitalists are represented by folks like Paul Waggener and Marcus Follin. These are pagans who are concerned with physical culture, and with living high-thumos lives of action according to the spirit of paganism. This is not a hard dichotomy. The trads I mentioned work out and do martial arts. The vitalists I mentioned scrupulously adhere to ritual praxis and have substantive understanding of the theology. Both understand the supreme value of folk, authority, and thrownness.
Within the past several years a different strain has emerged. In truth it isn’t that new, but has grown quickly around a number of personalities—most prominently, Bronze Age Pervert. Its greatest stronghold is Twitter. It’s highly Nietzschean, individualist, and substantially liberal, in its morality and even its politics. It’s ironic, meme-heavy, and even folkish in a way—its labyrinth of in-jokes and niche personalities make it a bit impenetrable to the newcomer. This, what we’ll call Twitter vitalism, above all is Faustian. It believes in transgressing boundaries and striving for the endless horizon.
Twitter vitalism also inherits traditional aesthetics of the West. It loves marble statues, the Greeks, martial prowess, and paganism. Discussions revolve around hoplite formations, the intrigues of Renaissance court politics, Napoleonic war, and English pirates. The problem with this Twitter vitalism is that it almost completely misunderstands the spiritual essence of the West, and so its attempts to “go hard” result in very little heroic action after the manner of an Achilles.
The Faustian Penguin
An example of the poverty of this vitalism is the meme that has emerged recently around that penguin from the Herzog documentary. Now, this is a meme, so on one hand we shouldn’t read into it too deeply. On the other hand, memes and aesthetics are anything but trivial—memes are the 21st century expression of folk culture, and aesthetics are upstream of almost everything else. So this is not something silly or unserious.
In the documentary, Werner Herzog asks if a penguin can go insane, and a biologist explains how some penguins can become disoriented and end up in places they shouldn’t be. Herzog notes one penguin:
He would neither go towards the feeding grounds at the edge of the ice, nor return to the colony. Shortly afterwards, we saw him heading straight towards a mountains, some seventy kilometers away. Dr Ainslie explained that even if we caught him and brought him back to the colony, he would immediately head right back for the mountains… but why? […] He is heading off into the interior of the vast continent. With five thousand kilometers ahead of him, he is heading towards certain death.
This penguin has now exploded into a famous meme with Herzog’s narration set atop a suitably moody organ solo which culminates in a furious montage of traditional Western iconography including medieval knights, marble statues, the Acropolis, Renaissance paintings, men launching javelins, supernovae, and other epic things. Herzog’s penguin has come to stand for all things Faustian:
As one commenter says of the penguin, “He lived, the rest survived.” This has often been paired with the Nietzsche quote “I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible.” To hear these Chudjaks tell it, the penguin represents the Faustian spirit of the West, of giant strides across distant horizons, of exploding breathlessly into the infinite, of “going hard” no matter the cost—indeed, of going hard precisely because of the cost. The penguin leaves his comrades to blaze like a comet across the Antarctic prairie, to become like the gods—nay, to become a god. The penguin does not merely possess the spirit of the West. The penguin is the West.
This is, of course, “just a meme,” but it is more than that. It is the veneration of a whole ethos. The ethos of a mentally ill penguin. Unlike any of the traditional heroes of the West, the penguin has no enemy. No oath. No god. No home. No command. Just movement toward death.
The penguin is not heroic. It is not tragic in the epic sense. It is not “seeking the infinite.” It is unbound from cult and colony, immune to correction, and unreachable by authority—not even by the imperatives of nature. This is Faustianism, and Faustianism is pathological. It is exceeding boundaries as a value, and once all the poetry is stripped away, what remains is unbidden motion terminating in purposeless death. The penguin has no god, no law, no people, no oath, and no altar, so its death is not tragic in the epic sense, but waste. Faustianism is sterile. Not only can it not stand as the spirit of a people, it cannot even give death meaning.
Western Man is Not Faustian
The West was not built by restless horizon-seekers, but by men who answered command. It was built by men who were bound. Look through the Western Canon and you will not find it filled with autonomous men, but with great deeds of obedience and duty, oath and fatherhood. You will find men fighting for hearth and home.
To understand the problem we must understand Faustianism. And to understand Faust, we must understand Odin and Tyr. These two are the Norse gods of kingship and war, they occupy Dumézil’s first function—the sovereign. But they are co-sovereigns, not adversaries, and a culture dies when either pole collapses.
The Odinic is the great man. Not “individualist,” not expressive, not libertine. The Odinic is esoteric, exceptional and dangerous—Odin stands somewhat outside the pale, he “decides the exception.” Sky-bound and imperious, he authors morality, is realist and absolute in his judgment. The Odinic is often mistaken for the Faustian, but Odinic power is not freedom from limits. It is the power to remake limits. Odin does not say “do what thou wilt,” he simply seizes the terrifying prerogative of sovereignty. Caesar is Odinic—terrifying to one generation, a god to the next.
The Tyrrhic is the upholder of order. Not weakness, not stagnation, not “trad vibes.” The Tyrrhic is exoteric, covenantal, and binding—Tyr does the necessary thing and pays for it. Earth-bound and lawful, he understands that the wolf must be bound, that words alone will not do it, and that someone must lose something real to make order hold. The Tyrrhic eschews creativity for legitimacy. Augustus is Tyrrhic—he affixes Caesar with the stamp of legitimacy, then ruthlessly binds, preserves, and holds what he has himself not founded.
Now we can understand Faustianism in light of these two elemental archetypes of the Western soul. Faustianism is not the Odinic. It is the Odinic grotesquely unconstrained by the Tyrrhic.
This is why Twitter “vitalism” is jokey and thin, why it burns hot but produces nothing enduring, why it is anti-canonical by instinct. Faustianism is “do what thou wilt,” reframed as traditional. This is not the traditional spirit of the West—it is not traditional anything. This is the spirit of the transsexual cutting off his own penis to spite his father and retroactively declaring it “morality.” This is the spirit of a penguin on a suicide mission. It is nothing more than mental illness.
This mental illness is not the spiritual core of the West—it can’t be, because you can’t build a civilization on individual conscience. But it has informed the West for a long time.
Why the Western Canon Goes Hard
From the beginning of time, men have understood that authority rules and commands are to be obeyed. About the time of Socrates, though, morality shifted. At this point, men began to believe that you must see for yourself that the command is right, which means the command is no longer a command, it is a proposal, subject to veto by the individual.
This all sounds very “nice.” It respects the subject’s autonomy, grants him a measure of dignity, and refuses to instrumentalize him. But 2,400 years later it has led to nihilism, to where not only are we all our own supreme pontiff, but where we lack even a common set of conceptual tools with which moral disagreements could even in principle be settled. The West’s crisis is not over moral disagreement, decadence, or loss of faith, but the loss of the grammar of command. Moral injunctions are now heard as suggestions, as invitations to evaluate a claim, rather than as duties expected to be discharged.
The poison-pill is found in Plato’s Euthyphro, in the suggestion that “the gods love it because it’s good.” Axial morality relocates judgment inside the individual, to where even gods (or God) are made answerable to standards. The decisive question is no longer “what is commanded?” but “is this command good?” with the implication that authority is conditional, obedience optional, and command a form of violence.
What built the West was not autonomy or conscience. It was not self-authorization. These are all polite formulations of “Fuck you Dad.” No, what built the West was “Yes, Father.”1 Faustian “vitalism” is Odinic energy released into a civilization that has abolished the grammar of command, which explains why it is theatrical and narcissistic, and why it can’t found anything.
The counter-image—pre-axial, epic, cultic civilization—does not ask “is this command justified?” Whether the command is or is not aligned with one’s values is irrelevant. It asks only “who commands?” and then “am I bound?” That is the world of Achilles and Beowulf, Roland and Siegfried. That is the world the Western canon actually encodes.
The hardest texts in the Western canon are not Faustian at all. Epic heroes do terrifying things because they are oath-bound, shame-bound, and role-bound. Achilles, Roland, Aeneas, and Beowulf function inside a covenantal order; their greatness emerges from constraint. Theirs are Odinic acts enclosed within Tyrrhic worlds. That’s why Aeneas’ pietas trumps power. That is why Roland’s obedience drives him into action. That is why Odysseus’ power is in continence, not ferocity.
The Twitter vitalist places himself upon Odin’s throne Hlidskjalf, but he despises Tyr because he confuses law with weakness. He wants fire without altar, power without bond, eruption without oath, and so he produces not worlds, but noise on your feed. Meanwhile, epic cultures forged men who could endure horror precisely because they were bound—precisely because at the heart of Western civilization is an affirmation: “Yes, Father.”
Next article we will go through the major texts of the Western Canon to show how anti-Faustian they really are.
Respect to Big Dave Martel for this formulation.
Beautifully and well said.
thank you, very helpful !!!