Myth of the 21st Century
On the rebirth of the truly archaic in identitarianism and environmentalism
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What is our myth today?
This question was posed to me by Greg Johnson in a recent discussion on Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence, where Sorel sets out his notion of myth. We should note as always that a myth is not a falsehood, nor is it something believed in cynically. A myth is an animating story, one not oriented primarily toward the past, but toward the future. An example is the myth of the imminent return of Christ, where believers were to prepare the way for Christ’s apocalyptic return expected at the end of the first generation after his death. The myth fuses a community together by giving them a common purpose. It is a story, but it has at its foundation a command: do that, be this.
I answered Johnson with a few possible myths. The main one I offered was the awakening of white racial consciousness, but as another possibility I offered the rebirth of archaic paganism. In reality, these two are not different, they are one and the same myth—let us call this mythic rebirth the archaic revival.1 There is, however, another side of this archaic revival beyond racial awakening: there is also the re-situation of man within, and not in opposition to, nature.
Morgoth recently wrote an article The Disenchantment Of The Rhine (And Europe) where he sees the drying up of the Rhine as the apocalyptic sign that it is. The response throughout the West has been utilitarian and decadent—it has been to mourn the loss of a transport route rather than a potent symbol of Europe herself. The perfunctory hand-wringing over climate change feels especially hollow considering that this bug worldview is precisely what creates those forces (cosmopolitanism, capitalism, hedonism) that produce environmental degradation in the first place. In our world, nothing is sacred, quantity alone reigns.
But this bug worldview is not new. Hwitgeard locates its origins in what amounts to the shift from pre-Axial worldviews to the Axial:
In my view the change from divine immanence (divinity within the world) into transcendence (divinity beyond the world) has provided this biggest transformation, it has split the spiritual from the material along hard lines, and made the spiritual inaccessible except under controlled gatekeepers. Since then the physical world has been stripped of any and all divinity, a desacralised carcass left to be scavenged by the vultures of communism and capitalism.
The sentiments of Hwitgeard and Morgoth exemplify the “nature worship” side of the archaic revival. “Nature worship” is really a misnomer though. Archaic man did not worship nature, but through his unique theology—which against all probability seems to be coming back subconsciously—he was intimately bound up with it and empowered to defend it. This theology has been called by scholars of religion cosmic maintenance, and to understand it and its remarkable consequences for the modern world, we will examine it in further detail.
The notion of the spiritual progress of mankind is obvious nonsense, but certain things have changed through time. The spiritual paradigms through which man has passed mirror strikingly his linguistic paradigms, because language is inseparable from thought, and thought is the gift of the divine.
These linguistic paradigms have been most clearly sketched out by Eric Gans in The Origin of Language, and follow the pattern ostensive > imperative > declarative. The ostensive is where the word and what it signifies are present to each other. If I yell “fire!” in a crowded theatre, then unless I’m an asshole it’s because the fire is right there and you’d better watch out. This leads to the imperative or command. In this case, there is an implicit command in yelling out “fire!”, which is to a) look over there, and b) get moving. The most basic command is definition, where you are commanded by your tradition—whether by your parents, your teachers, or some other authority—to “take X as a real thing”. If I say “this is what blue is”, what I’m really doing is to command you to notice blue. By defining nouns, whether concrete or abstract, I am paving the way for the proposition, or declarative sentence, which relies on the noun in order to produce the subject/predicate relationship. The declarative enables us to discourse about the world.2
Religion has passed through the same set of paradigms. This is not a “progression”, because nothing has been left behind. We don’t leave behind the ostensive or the imperative; they are embedded in our language and stand at the foundation of the proposition—we can only forget them, which is not a kind of progress but a kind of ignorance, one with all sorts of consequences.3
The most foundational spiritual paradigm is animism, often run together with shamanism where the divinity and the participant are radically immanent. Just as the ostensive is the radical presence of sign and signifier, the shaman participates ecstatically in the divine, with no mediation between the god and himself—man is his own high priest. The shaman carries out a specific, often expiatory function in archaic societies, which are usually animistic. Under animism, nature itself is charged with the divine presence; divine will pervades all of nature, including man. This paradigm is expressed communally in totemism, where the totemic animal is the ancestor or tutelary deity of a group, but is still identified with that group, in some sense is that group.
From this paradigm we get the cultic. The ancestor, whether the totem, human ancestor, god, or all of these at once, is no longer radically present to the celebrant, but issues him commands that are religiously binding.4 These commands take the form of rites, which are performed in a pre-reflective and formalistic way—so formalist, in fact, that the liturgy may even no longer be understood by the celebrant, but still demand total fidelity to the literal word. These cultic religions are typified by the ancestor cult, the most well known of which in the West is the state cult of Rome, but which exists elsewhere such as in Shinto. And it is here, in the cultic paradigm, that we find cosmic maintenance.
Cosmic maintenance takes its purest form in the sacrificial offerings performed throughout the Indo-European world,5 particularly in the state cults. In performing the specialized sacrifice, the priests re-enact the creation myth and thereby participate in the divine. If the rites are not performed just so, as a perfect microcosm of creation itself, creation will no longer be sustained—the sun will not rise, crops will fail, and chaos will again reign as it did in primordial time. Mankind has a part to play in the maintenance of the world itself, and his negligence is a matter of infinite significance.
The parallels with modern environmentalism are clear. The structure of the world itself is at stake, and man’s participation in the maintenance of the world order is required. The Rhine running dry is not simply a logistical or economic problem, not even just an aesthetic or symbolic failure, but a literal threat to existence itself.
Environmentalism has never fit comfortably within liberalism. Under liberalism, man is commanded to subdue the earth, to bring nature under his control. The liberal does not care about the earth, and this is reflected in the nakedly cynical way the environment is used as a political weapon. When environmentalism can be used to centralize power, it is used; when it can’t, it is ignored. Climate change demands global partnership across nations and is therefore a problem. When the obvious solution of not exporting capitalism and industrialism to the third world is offered, along with not importing the third world into the industrialized West, climate change is no longer a problem—the real problem is racism (effectively, “satanism”). Liberalism has no consistent relationship to environmentalism.
The right, however, does. Ecofascism arose as a rhetorical self-pwn in describing liberal useful idiots like Greenpeace as “fascist”, but has since come to describe a genuinely fascist blood and soil approach to the natural environment.6 The true right has always been environmentalist, as has European man himself, and this can be seen in the genuinely religious fervour which climate change excites in in him, and him alone it seems.7 Liberalism prefers just about any other issue to exploit for its centralization aims than environmentalism, as seen in its willingness to shelve climate change in favour of COVID, George Floyd, or anything else at all. The problem with environmentalism is that, apart from racial guilt, there is no communal force that brings together whites quite like it. The communalist aspect of environmentalism is also part of the archaic revival.
About 12,000 years ago, the earth began to warm again, and men in the Fertile Crescent began to move their places of worship far afield from the caves that housed them during the Ice Age. This is the beginning of the Neolithic, and its crowning architectural achievement is Göbekli Tepe. Here, a quarter mile away from the rock faces, men erected massive stone pillars stylized like a T-shaped human being, with reliefs of animals, and even with what appear to be engraved vestments clothing the pillars themselves. No one lived near them, so these monoliths probably had only cultic uses. Klaus Schmidt, who headed the Göbekli Tepe excavations, remarked that the pillars stood “like a meeting of stone beings,” and this is precisely the function they served for our Neolithic ancestors. This ritual complex acted as a cultic site where various bands might gather and perform ceremonies, acting as a centripetal force gathering ever larger communities, all of whom had a part to play in the vast drama of cosmic maintenance.
The story of how this radically immanent worldview was subverted, perverted, and ultimately, turned into modernity, is a long one. As these cultic religions built the basic structures upon which our world stands today, they brought with them steeper and steeper hierarchies, to where a disenfranchised underclass emerged and was weaponized against tradition. The Axial Age was born, along with a truly propositional religious paradigm, which I have detailed in the articles Axial Antinomianism and The Hard Problem of Conscience.
Propositional or declarative religion, characterized by myth and especially by scripture and dogma, is not in itself a mistake. There is nothing wrong with myth. The mistake is in thinking that the myth generates the cult, or put in modern terms, that the proposition comes before the nation. In inverting this crucial relationship, in reversing the ostensive (totem) > imperative (cult) > declarative (myth) relationship, we have the birth of civic nationalism, where you are what you believe—the real you exists apart from your body, your blood, and your lineage, in another, incorporeal realm. Your body and soul are radically detached, the one not dependent upon the other, and the soul can depart from the body, can transcend its immanent selfhood, and can choose its tradition, which is just to say, it can be bound by nothing.
Today this transcendence takes its most radical form in transgenderism and transhumanism. It takes a less radical, but no less pernicious form in the denial of race as a reality, and in the pathologizing of ethnocentrism. However, against all odds, identitarianism is being reborn among our people, the modern, secular expression of what is truly archaic—the ancestor cult.
This radical transcendence of the world also takes the form of indifference toward nature, and toward the Rhine running dry. But something is being reborn, and has been for at least half a millennium. Morgoth is right to point to the romantic period as emblematic of European soil and spirit, and as emblematic of re-enchantment. After all, what does enchantment suggest but magic? Magic, as in the magical worldview of Weber (whom Morgoth cites), synonymous with pre-Axial worldviews. The coming of the alt right, as the descendent of romanticism, is the birth pang of something that has never been left behind, certainly has not died. It lies fallow, but it has begun to stir. Its return is assured, we have only to prepare the way for it.
The archaic revival—this is the myth of the 21st century.
After Terence McKenna who coined the term. McKenna was not a serious scholar and projected a lot of nonsense onto such a revival, but was prescient in seeing it, and saw some of its genuine elements.
In fact, “the world” as a holistic concept only comes into our purview with the declarative, comparatively late.
In short, modernity.
This is the archetype of religion in the sense of religio, re-ligere, to re-“bind”. One can only be bound by something other than oneself, that is to say, something whose presence differs from oneself.
And elsewhere, e.g. among the Aztecs, Egyptians, etc.
Exemplified by Pentti Linkola, Richard Walther Darré, and others.
Great to see the themes of the previous few posts being tied together. Long live the ancestral cult!