The Odinic vs. the Tyrrhic

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I’ve been using the Odinic-Tyrrhic framework in several of my last interviews and people have started to latch on to it. This is a major conceptual breakthrough in understanding the modern world, maybe even more fundamental than Coulanges, because what he describes in Ancient City can be folded into it—indeed, the ancestor cult is only one half of the dichotomy. But I find myself having to re-explain what Odinic-Tyrrhic means, so this article will do just that in a concise way.

First, I hope that it’s obvious that the left-right dichotomy is not terribly useful. When Ron Paul, Joseph de Maistre, and Alfred Rosenberg can be classed under one category, that category does not carve reality at the joints. Liberal-conservative is not much better. Both take as their fundamental principle “freedom”, and as is terribly cliché now, the one is just yesterday’s version of the other. Globalist-nationalist is better, but this only gets at one aspect of politics (universalism vs. particularism) and does not provide a complete picture. Odinic-Tyrrhic does. It is at once the highest resolution version of all of these, and also the most fundamental. I will return to just how powerful this framework is later in this article.

Second, the concept is not mine, although the name is. I took it from Georges Dumézil’s book Mitra-Varuna, which is one of the most important books in the last century. The book suffers from one “flaw” though—it is steeped in Indo-European (IE) theology and linguistics, making it inaccessible to most people who could benefit from it. Nevertheless, it should and will become a classic in the radical right. In this book, Dumézil identifies a duality in the concept of sovereignty that is found across the IE world. It is associated with a pair of gods whose names change across the various IE branches, but who take up similar structural functions within their respective pantheons. Dumézil uses the Vedic gods Varuna and Mitra—I use the corresponding Norse gods Odin and Tyr.

Here is the most condensed version possible: Odin represents the Great Man, and Tyr represents the Maintainer of Order. Moreover, you may notice that these are not opposites, but complements. Any sovereign necessarily discharges both functions—Odin and Tyr are co-sovereigns. Lastly, these are not equals; the one prevails over the other—Odin is the high god, Tyr subordinate to him.

An example will make this clear—we will take the mythical founding of Rome. A quick summary:

The twins Romulus and Remus,¹ the sons of Mars, were born into a royal family of Alba Longa, but their great uncle ordered that they be killed as infants. They were exposed but then found by a she-wolf who suckled them until a shepherd found them and raised them. Upon reaching manhood they killed their great uncle and set out to found a new city with their followers, but Romulus killed Remus,² after which Romulus founded Rome and established the city’s political institutions. In order to procure women, the newly minted Romans abducted women from the Sabines, sparking a war that ended in a truce and the integration of the Sabines into Rome. Romulus ruled until his death, variously given as disappearing into a whirlwind, being murdered by the Roman senate, or being taken up to the heavens by Mars. The next king, Numa Pompilius, was chosen from among the Sabines. A wise and pious man, Numa only reluctantly accepted kingship, demanding that an augur consecrate his rule. He disbanded Romulus’ war band,³ and founded Rome’s religious institutions including the state cult.

The Odinic Romulus is a very different figure than the Tyrrhic Numa. Romulus is the founder who brings the sacred fire and has an element of wildness and barbarism about him.⁴ He is somewhat beyond the pale, being a fratricide, and being eventually killed by the senate who represents what is venerable and ancient. He is a dark, violent, revolutionary, uncanny figure. You are not meant to emulate him—a civilization of Romuluses could not work—you are meant to respect him, maybe even fear him a little. He is a wartime king.⁵ Numa, on the other hand, is your moral exemplar. He reluctantly accepts power in middle age, founds the religious institutions, and is concerned with justice. He is the model of gravitas, the successor, the peacetime king. Again, we must note that Romulus and Numa are not incompatible—the Romans considered both representative of divine rulership, both authoritative. Note also that Romulus, while not the moral exemplar, is “senior”, even if he represents youth,⁶ speed, frenzy—the child the father of the man. He has “firstness”, he is the founder, and his will necessarily prevails; Numa’s job is to carry out and interpret that will.

Let us look at another example closer to our time: legal realism vs. legal formalism.

Realism and formalism are two philosophical approaches to law, and have been with us as long as law itself. If we look at the American context,⁷ we can see a very distinct Odinic-Tyrrhic dynamic at play. Legal realism is the idea that the law is a living body that evolves—law is subject to the will of the judge, who must continually reinterpret it according to circumstances particular to time and place.⁸ Legal formalism—also known as “originalism”—is the idea that the law is something logical and self-evident, that legal interpretations are guided by formal principles.⁹ Without giving a blow-by-blow account, American legal history is the history of the realist as the creator of law and the formalist as maintainer. In one generation—say, that of Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall—the realist and the formalist battle for supremacy, with the realist prevailing and the formalist of the next generation affixing to his creation the stamp of traditional legitimacy. To his own generation, the realist looks frenzied and disordered, a lawgiver beyond the pale, awful to behold;¹⁰ but to the next generation he just is the tradition, and the function of the formalist is to sanctify, order, and interpret the creative power wielded by the realist.

Now, having explained what the categories of Odinic and Tyrrhic are, we will say a word about what they are not.

They are not liberal and conservative, at least in the contemporary sense of those terms. Political liberals have played the role of both great man (e.g., FDR) and maintainer (e.g., Antonin Scalia). Conservatives of the current year, unlike Numa, are not paragons of moral virtue, but pathetic cowards. These categories are not Apollonian and Dionysiac. While there are similarities between the Odinic/Dionysiac and Apollonian/Tyrrhic, the Odinic represents the sky whereas the Dionysiac is chthonic, Apollonian/Tyrrhic the reverse.¹¹ This has important political implications which would carry us too far afield in this short survey, but suffice it to say that a “rooted” preservative principle enables the Odinic-Tyrrhic framework to illuminate politics in a way that Apollonian-Dionysiac muddles. Lastly, although the Odinic is clearly active and the Tyrrhic passive, they are not masculine and feminine. The purest expression of the Tyrrhic function is the IE ancestor cult, which was a phenomenon so patriarchal that it makes even the radical right flinch, for all our love of patriarchy.¹² At the same time the purest expression of the Odinic function—the IE koryos—was also a masculine phenomenon. It depends on the culture.

There is a superficial reading of politics where what we have now is purely revolutionary and your favourite thing—Christianity, paganism, capitalism, feudalism, etc.—is pristinely traditional. But what we have now is not purely revolutionary; there is a strong preservative element in it. America’s Odinic figures such as Washington, Lincoln, FDR, are in the past, and it is now a Tyrrhic country—painfully so. Hectoring, woke harpies are simply what Tipper Gore was in the 1980s and Puritan church ladies were in the 1680s. From a structural standpoint, woke cancel mobs are the church ladies of today; all that has changed is the church. This is the Tyrrhic principle, defiled and degraded. The NPC bugman is almost comically conventional, unable to think outside of the parameters that his own distorted tradition has handed him, which is why he is utterly confounded by the radical right. In fact, he thinks the term “radical right” is an oxymoron, and if he uses the left-right, liberal-conservative framework, he is right to think that, because the logic of these frameworks dictates that “revolutionary right” is something like a four-sided triangle.

The thing is, that logic is retarded, hence the NPC bugman is retarded, and those categories are only useful in talking to people like him. We are the radical right, but put more precisely we are the Odinic right. We are both creator and destroyer. We are beyond the pale, here to raze a decadent civilization to the ground. We are the Romulus here to clear a path for a healthy Numa to reign for a thousand years, and if we succeed, we will salt the earth around liberalism so completely that not a trace will be left.

There was an Odinic right once—recently, even. It is now so proscribed that even to mention it is dangerous. Modern liberalism has long ago ceded all its lifeblood to this Odinic right, and has simply become the negation of it, and therefore utterly governed by it, with no will of its own, a dead husk with no vitality left. The great man is striding over the horizon—do you see him? He comes with fire. The liberal sees him. And do what he might, he cannot forestall his coming by one moment. This is why a vanguard right is feared, and a traditional right is not. Let us learn to think of the one as something more than an oxymoron, and the other as something more than redundant.

1. You will notice that IE theology is absolutely shot through with duality and the metaphysics of difference.

2. Different traditions give different accounts of why.

3. The celeres.

4. e.g., suckled by a she-wolf, leads his war band outside of civilization, founded the Luperci, etc.

5. He founds the political institutions; cf. Clausewitz’s “war is politics by other means”.

6. His war band, the celeres, was originally called iuvenes, “youths”.

7. Speaking of Firstness, I cannot highly enough recommend the article The American Legal Landscape published in Firstness Journal #2 on the topic of legal realism vs. formalism.
https://firstness.org/issues/2/the-american-legal-landscape

8. “All law is case law”, as the saying goes.

9. “All you need to form a science of law is a library”.

10. “Awful” in the original sense of both “terrible” and “awesome”.

11. This is complicated by the fact that both Odin and Tyr are sky gods. Ideally, this dichotomy would be something like Odinic-Mithraic (Mithra being the rock-born god of cattle, harvest, and waters), but framing it in this way would imply an absence of the Tyrrhic function in the Germanics and an absence of the Odinic function in the Iranians that is simply not the case. No pantheon shows these categories in their purest form, hence the need for the comparative method, and hence the radical breakthrough of Dumézil’s discovery of them.

12. You either endorse the father’s power of capital—yes, capital—punishment over his family, or you don’t.