Mishima is also, like Jünger, at war with the outside world. Postwar Japan and its rapid infusion of both Western capital and culture (and its ensuing decadence) made the budding writer a conservative force to be reckoned with. First as a writer and then gradually within his own little military society, which had sworn to be at the service of the recently emasculated emperor. In the intense training of his own body, Mishima not only prepared for new levels of awareness as a writer but also ultimately for his own suicide in 1970 (Sun and Steel was written just prior to his death). That this suicide should be seen as a sacrifice is obvious.
Mishima battles with the enigmatic force field between words as conveyors of morals and spiritual values and their equally seductive power to entertain, this process being very much extended to and in the public persona of Mishima himself. In this strange mix between aspiration, bodybuilding, and a romanticized death wish, Sun and Steel is like an intellectual tornado of both a highly refined (wished for) control and a desperation to overcome weakness in order to meet the inevitable on one’s own terms. It is a way of cheating death, yes, but only by tricking it ahead of time through one’s own design.
Jünger’s protagonist—as is often the case, truly a reflection of the author’s own persona—is aloof and reflective, yet not passive and escapist. His botanical studies contain fodder for haughty philosophical speculation and even catalysts for interpreting the threatening outside world. As with Mishima’s own body, Jünger’s lofty “naturalism” becomes both an extension of inner processes that eventually drift out and an entry into an even deeper potential introspection. When the protagonist leaves the sanctuary on the marble cliffs that contains all the remnants and collections of years of study and reflection, he makes sure to burn it to the ground—thereby making it a sacrifice rather than having it soiled by the approaching oppressive forces. Order, beauty, and life itself seem evanescent and temporal, but within certain limits we can decide how to begin, how to develop, and how to end it all. Again, it’s a way of assuming slight control before the inevitable occurs.
These actions could of course be seen as vain, in vain, and illusory, but in both cases I can’t see it quite so negatively. After all, Mishima did succeed in every aspect in achieving what he wanted and is today what he hoped to be: a symbol of a poetic and traditional resistance to the Western “nothingness” and consumerism that was already apparent in Japan (and elsewhere) right after the Second World War. Jünger was lucky to escape the Nazi “bureaucracy of death” and Goebbels’s love-hate relationship with him. On the Marble Cliffs was published in 1939, and its criticism of totalitarian strategies, attitudes, and negative effects would have had any other author killed. According to contemporary Jünger mythos, he was basically saved or spared because Hitler himself liked Jünger as a type/character—impressions founded on Jünger’s initial claim to literary fame, the First World War novel The Storm of Steel (1920).
Jünger himself classified On the Marble Cliffs as a general overview of the dynamics of tyranny and has stated that it wasn’t specifically about Nazi Germany at all. Be that as it may, that angle of specific interpretation will of course always be there. Mishima is similarly elusive. His own paramilitary “Society of Shields” made no claims to oppose anything but the general morass of contemporary life and culture. Yet Japan had been one of the Axis powers fighting side by side with Nazi Germany, and even more adamantly so for several months after Germany had surrendered. In this we can find more similarities between the authors mainly, but also between these specific books. Jünger refused to adapt or succumb to the new regime’s “denazification” process simply because he had never been a Nazi. This of course initially led to problematic stigmatization for him in those truly dualistic times. It wasn’t until 1947 that On the Marble Cliffs was published in an English translation (incidentally, made by a British officer, Stuart Hood, who had met Jünger right at the end of the war). For Mishima the situation was even stranger, as his pro-nationalistic ultraconservatism came much later, some twenty years after the end of the war. The romantic yearning for an idyllic society or era is fundamental in both books, but both authors seem aware that it’s an evanescent pipe dream that can only truly exist in a constructed memory or within the unlimited world of fiction: “Anything that comes into our minds, even for the briefest of moments, exists. Even though it may not exist at the actual moment, it has existed somewhere in the past, or will exist at some time in the future.”3
The pro-militaristic stance of the authors permeates both books. Jünger had indeed been a soldier in both world wars and was imbued early on with a chivalric Prussian attitude toward military life—one that never really left him. Mishima was a faint and fey aesthete during the war, and his pro-militaristic stance became part therapy and part mission much later on: “The thing that lay at the far end of my dreams was extreme danger and destruction; never once had I envisaged happiness. The most appropriate type of daily life for me was a day-by-day world destruction; peace was the most difficult and abnormal state to live in.”4 Where On the Marble Cliffs is a fairy tale–like allegory of cyclic history and chivalric resistance, Sun and Steel is a more concrete report of a similar process, albeit individual. Both authors positioned themselves outside contemporary concerns in almost anachronistic ways and relayed their philosophy through literature. What permeates both books is an elegant display not only of a personal approach (that could have ended with execution for Jünger and possibly prosecution for Mishima) but also of a deep conviction and love for literature as such. Jünger found his vocation in letters early on, as did Mishima. Jünger seemingly had no qualms about it—on the contrary, the audacity in his works is sometimes staggering and, to some, provocative. Mishima’s doubts lay not so much in his qualities as an author but rather in the self-esteem that the public persona as author made obvious to him. Both of these short books show so clearly how evocative and thereby inspirational writing can be, regardless if it’s a question of allegorical fiction or a call to arms in regard to personal weaknesses.
At the same time, both do battle with the very process of writing and storytelling itself. Mishima’s struggle in Sun and Steel is an overcoming of the apparent contradiction of literary creation—at least his own. Hence, I assume, is the fact that it is not a novel at all but rather a straight recounting of his own call to arms—arms that were ideally to be part writing and part physical excellence in anticipation of death. Jünger experienced similar concerns. He knew all along that to be free one has to be outside of polarities and attachments. More and more, he refined the anarch’s stance of being outside by integrating the fable’s form as narrative and nature as such as the perfect allegorical platform for his various protagonists’ voices. It is as if they both constantly evaluated not only story itself but also storytelling. The awareness of the dangers of verbiage, demagogic or not, was present in them both, but they seemingly had different approaches in this regard. Jünger drifted methodically into mythological evanescence and Mishima painstakingly into a physical one. Jünger wrote
If I do not describe the details of our work it is because we were busied with things which lie beyond speech and which therefore elude the spell that words exert. But everyone will remember how his mind has labored in regions which he cannot portray, whether it were in dreams or in deep thought. It seemed as if he were groping for the right road in labyrinths or sought to unravel the figures among the patterns of an optical illusion. And often he awoke wonderfully strengthened. That is where our best work takes place, and so it seemed to us, too, that in our struggle speech was still inadequate, and that we must penetrate into the depths of the dream if we were to withstand the threat against us.5
And Mishima: “The cynicism that regards all hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority.”6
Both gentlemen are balancing on a tightrope between free-spirited, amazing individual creativity and conservative demagogy. A little bit more (of anything) would have position
ed them elsewhere, but this fine-tuned awareness, not only of personal approach but also of literary skill, instead place them as steady beacons in the reader’s mind.
I had my hesitations about writing this short essay simply because I was afraid that the process of analysis would create a de-attraction to both books. Sometimes the magic should remain unquestioned and just enjoyed. But I still feel attracted to them, so no harm done. In this wild speculation of mine, what unites the books (and perhaps the authors themselves too) is the anachronistic outsider’s advantage of being able to be free to create at will, undisturbed by temporal concerns or, even worse, literary styles or trends. Their force lies not so much in the themes written about as in the way they are written. They both contain a perfect blend of style and content that was truly unique not only to “their masters’ voices” but also to the very lives they led. Perhaps one could call it all a highly enjoyable tangible evanescence?
To me, these authors, and these titles specifically, have been very inspiring. The meta-level of their language (extreme and literal in Mishima’s case; alluded to in Jünger’s) creates a totality that transcends mere fiction. Their existential positions as reflective anarch (Jünger) and active combatant (Mishima) in a world of utter complacency and existential nothingness fill me with the energy I need to evaluate which is the best attitude for me. As literature is so fully integrated in my life, the books I’m attracted to help me decide on the outlook of the day. These two beautiful gems have helped me many times to cope with the astounding stupidity of our contemporary times. So I guess it’s no wonder that I keep returning to them again and again.
9
Anton LaVey, Magical Innovator
Originally a lecture delivered at Nekropolis Bogcafé in Copenhagen, Denmark, 2013.
ASSUMING THAT THERE IS already a fundamental knowledge of Satanism in this illustrious crowd, I’m going to allow myself to delve deeper into a few specialized sections of Anton LaVey’s contribution to contemporary magical philosophy.
Let’s generalize a bit and say that the first half of the twentieth century was all about synthesizing. East met West, and this was integrated into esoteric systems by intelligent structure makers. The Golden Dawn was one such group of structure makers. Theosophy under Blavatsky was another. Gurdjieff was another protagonist, and Steiner yet another. Aleister Crowley was perhaps the most well-known one. They all made nutritious stews but basically out of already existing ingredients.
The second half of the twentieth century was more violent and also more creative in many ways. As the recent structures had become established and their once-so-pioneering key people had become accepted teachers or gurus, a new breed bred on first-generation Thelema, Golden Dawn splinter groups, and assorted pre-1960s swamis from the East concocted their own syntheses and groups, taking, however, considerably more contemporary fodder into account than previously.
Science, psychology, irony and humor, art, speculative philosophies, and other previously rare phenomena within occultism suddenly overrode arcane concepts like invocation, banishing, Kabbalah, tarot, wands, astrology, mystical angelic languages and ancient demonic names, and so forth. Instead, the focus lay in spheres of experimentation, neurology, psychodrama, sexuality, and other nonsectarian core human phenomena. Old structures were dissolved in new ways of looking at things.
The Church of Satan was one of these precursors of radical change. Established in 1966 by Anton LaVey, the church’s first phase up until the late 1970s was one of visibility and provocation. LaVey’s colorful presence made both him and his church celebrities. As a well-formulated and intriguing antidote to the mellow and essentially selfless hippies of the era, LaVey was cabled all over the world into news and men’s magazines, who found the naked women on his altar just shocking enough to print.
During the second phase, from the late 1970s and up until his death in 1997, LaVey became much more of a recluse and solitaire. He was established, and his Satanic Bible kept on selling and generated an income that meant he could thereby devote his time and energies to one of the key concepts of the Church of Satan: “indulgence instead of abstinence.” One of the things he enjoyed and indulged in was writing.
Although his books The Satanic Bible, The Satanic Rituals, and The Satanic Witch are his most well-known, I would say that the later anthologies The Devil’s Notebook and Satan Speaks are much more substantial when it comes to his own thinking. The Bible and the Rituals were basically assemblage volumes, in which pragmatically chosen material was edited together and augmented further by explanatory comments. But the two volumes of essays and maxims that followed much later, The Devil’s Notebook and Satan Speaks, genuinely contain the essence of LaVey’s latter-day wit and creativity.
The essays are also a great source of some groundbreaking magical concepts, both on the “lesser magic” level (willed manipulation of everyday life) and “greater magic” level (ritualized programming of a willed “Is to Be” situation or development).
Already in The Satanic Bible, LaVey had shown considerable creativity. Concepts like “psychic vampires” and the “balance factor” soon became household terms in America and the rest of the world. His description of the ritual space as an intellectual decompression chamber also hit home outside the strictly Satanic perimeters. As did the slightly later term occultnik, signifying a person who is lost within old structures of occultism without being able to see what’s really of use on a practical, material level.
In The Satanic Bible we can also find an old-school method within occult writing: creative appropriation of an older source. In this case, LaVey’s use of the Enochian keys originally written by Dee and Kelly via the biographer Meric Casaubon in 1659 and then regurgitated throughout the centuries up until Crowley. LaVey exchanged the final intonations traditionally translated as “the highest” with “Saitan,” claiming the previous translations and vibrations had been erroneous. “The barbaric tonal qualities of this language give it a truly magical effect which cannot be described.”1 He also claimed that the nature of the scrying that Kelly as the “gazer” used had been mispresented as via the grace of angels, when in fact, according to LaVey, it has to do with ocular and psychic “angles,” which can, metaphorically or not, open wide the Gates of Hell.
The Satanic Witch was a primer in applied, practical feminism. It also brought in concepts like the LaVey “personality synthesizer,” or the personality clock. This is a method to be used in various kinds of matchmaking, human as well as within other areas of choice and resonance, not as a spiritual oracle of some kind, but as a down-to-earth method of applied psychology.
There was also the important concept of ECI, or erotic crystallization inertia, meaning that our very first defining erotic moments, like the first orgasm for instance, will be forever linked to the surroundings, emotional atmospheres, and so on, inside our psyche. That crystallizing moment will be with us forever and affect us all throughout life. As it is an overwhelmingly emotional moment, for good and bad, it can be tapped as a source of energy in magical workings. As with a general and honest definition of one’s own sexuality, the conscious working with ECI brings several benefits to the magician.
One telling example most of us can see within our own culture is the fact that both men and women seem to get stuck, time-wise and looks-wise, in the period when they were most sexually active and attractive. LaVey pointed out some concrete situations where ECI is usually unconsciously used but even more visible. Solitary elderly people, like widows or widowers, usually become depressed and lacking in motivation. When in the company of people of the same generation, and in an environment that is created to evoke this sexual peak period of life, vitality and general health come back in almost miraculous ways. We’ll return to this in the form of another LaVeyan construct: the total environment.
One important aspect of The Satanic Witch was the development of what LaVey called “the law of the forbidden,” meaning that to attract a person or a desired situation, one n
eeds to be genuinely aware of one’s own qualities (this is very much tied in to “the balance factor” mentioned earlier) and the alluring display of sections of the body but not all of it. Showing a little bit of flesh by mistake can create a greater jolt and impact than quickly undressing and revealing it all. “Nothing is so fascinating as that which is not meant to be seen.” There is even a chapter in The Satanic Witch called “The Secrets of Indecent Exposure.” However, the dynamic need not be sexual at all. The law of the forbidden can be used in many different areas.
Sexual honesty is paramount in the LaVeyan universe. Personal fetishes are also extremely important, whether sexual or emotional. To feel strongly about something that concerns no one else is to generate a force field that can be tapped indefinitely. To feel strongly about something that concerns a multitude of people is to generate leakage and distortion. To savor small items of active preference in a fetishistic way thereby becomes a highly conscious magical act. Emulation is not a key to Satanism. Passion, on the other hand, is.
What follows here is an overview of some further key concepts that can hopefully inspire the student to delve further into the mysteries of him- or herself via the Satanic grid.
INTEGRATION OF THE EGO
Almost all previous magical systems were developed within a dichotomy that was structured around the relationship between “higher” and “lower,” no doubt having to do with monotheistic religious imprints in which this life is insufficient and that some kind of idealized pie in the sky is better.
The heavy influx of Freudian energy during the twentieth century revealed the power of the conscious ego. LaVey integrated the ego as a valid and relevant component in magical thought and thereby made void invisible moralisms that had up until then permeated the world-view of practically all previous magical conceptualists.
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