Heritage and Foundations

by Alain de Benoist

  We live today in a blocked society. On a global level, we are just beginning to identify the means of departing from the order instituted at Yalta. On a national level, as always in times of peace, the division between political factions has been equally vivid. On the philosophical and ideological plane, we continually oscillate between opposing extremes without finding any equilibrium. The cause as well as the remedy for this situation finds itself in man. To say that our society is in crisis is a commonplace. Man is a crisis. He is tragedy itself. For him, nothing is ever definitively said. Man can always find within himself the thread of a new discourse corresponding to a new way of being-in-the-world, a new form of his humanity. Man has been in crisis ever since he existed. The originality of our time does not lie here. The originality — the sad originality — of our time resides in the fact that, for the first time, man recoils before the implications of what his desire and will would require of him in order to resolve the crisis. For the first time, man believes that the problems surpass him. And they effectively surpass him to the degree to which he believes this, whereas the problems are born from him, are equal to him and to the solutions that he carries within him.

  We are no longer in the age where men kill one another because they are born on different sides of a border. Wars today no longer oppose nations (or, more exactly, only oppose them secondarily) but rather different worldviews, ideologies, and opposed ways of being. The fight for which the world is currently the theatre, the fight of which only one protagonist is fully known at this time and to which, also for the first time, the entirety of the planet participates, opposes different ways of perceiving the world, of conceiving it, and of seeking to reproduce it. A differentialist way and a universalist way. An anti-egalitarian way and an egalitarian way. A way which aspires to an organic society, founded and governed by increasing diversity, and a way that aspires to a mechanistic society, where increasing homogeneity reigns.

  I think, finally, that we are entering the prelude to war. Since around 1965–1968, the principal political events have been direct prolongations of the situation created in 1945. Christian democracy, the cold war, decolonisation and so forth have all been more or less residual phenomena. The events that we live today do not end or ‘complete’ an age. They announce a new one. They are already forming another. They are forerunners. Of what? Of what we want the end of the century to be. Since 1974–1975, we have entered the ‘decisive decade’ — where things settle, where the waters separate, where new factions are put into place. I am convinced that the lines of division to come will be very different from those that still exist today. I believe that this decade, which was discussed in L’épée de Damoclès (Plon, 1967)68 by General Gambiez, then-director of l’Institut des hautes études de Défense nationale (IHEDN), will ruin many of the predictions of the ‘futurologists’. It will also restore its importance to foreign policy — the only policy, ultimately, that truly counts. Ernst Jünger said: ‘there was no creation at the beginning, but it is possible for each age to ignite itself in its own time’. I still believe that we can ‘ignite’ ourselves.

  This book attempts to provide an account of the movement of ideas since the beginning of the 1970s. More precisely, it takes into account the majority of the debates that have developed here and there in the wake of the great vogue of structuralism (following that of existentialism in the 1950s). Unfortunately its scope does not, of course, cover the debates in their entirety. From Montherlant to Cioran, passing through Dumézil, Mircéa Eliade, Raymond Aron, and so on, there are many ‘gaps’ that I regret not having filled. It serves as an anthology, not a true encyclopaedia — although at the end of the day a comparable enough concern to the encyclopaedists of the eighteenth century would be equally at work. But I have not entirely chosen my subjects. They have often been dictated by current events. I have essentially based myself on the books published in recent years, which have appeared to be either the most important or the most notable for developing an edifice that is receptive to serving a right of these times.

  Within these pages we will express a double critique: an ideological critique of the left, and a methodological critique of the right. Throughout these texts, I have sought to trace the features of a possible right. I do not pretend — nor do I wish — that every man of the right will recognise himself. I have above all wanted to contribute to the clarification of a debate, the departure from confusion, and the assessment of ideas and men — beyond words and labels — in light of the same style and sentiment. I have striven to present ‘openings’. The paths will follow. This book presents a great number of arguments, and yet it does not truly seek to convince. I do not think ‘convincing’ people is important. And while I don’t disdain them, I do not believe in those great intellectual constructions that only address themselves to reason. One does not create a sensibility, but one can, at times, awaken it. Such is the ultimate goal of this work: to awaken a certain form of sensibility, to give birth to the conscious grasp of a certain allegiance of spirit, to provide a text to read where someone can recognise the form that they have never truly ceased seeking.

  Alain de Benoist

  Heritage

  The Roots of Civilisation

  The great cultural revolution took place here 35,000 years ago. If not earlier. ‘It seems’, writes Professor Marshack, ‘that in an age as remote as 30,000 years before our era, during the glacial period, the western European hunter had made use of a previously evolved, complex system of notation whose tradition might go back many thousands of years. This notation proceeded from a cognitive technique that was time-factored and time-factoring’.

  It is probably one of the most important discoveries of the century in matters concerning prehistory.

  Everything started at the beginning of the sixties. Alexander Marshack, solid, jovial, short haired, researcher at the Peabody Museum of Ethnology and Archaeology at Harvard University, investigated the problem of ‘origins’. He would seek to determine the nature of mental processes among the most ancient humans.

  ‘Within the limits of the evolution of the species’, he observed, ‘the brain has remained a constant for one to two-hundred thousand years’. There is thus no ‘progress of humanity’, but a continued transformation of the world by a humanity who has remained the same since the remotest of times. If the human phenomenon forms a whole, ‘culture’ is also equally as old.

  ‘I therefore pose as a hypothesis’, continues Marshack, ‘that pre-historical man, man of the glacial period, did not differ greatly from contemporary man. What differs most of all are the facts, the ideas and the relations inculcated in his brain, but not his manner of functioning, his aptitudes, his capacities, or his intelligence’.

  In other words, Homo sapiens would not have simply been a ‘maker of tools’, he was also capable of recognising and employing forms. He would have been conscious of notions of ‘consequence’, of symbol, and time. The author qualifies this by a term: his activities would have been ‘time-factored’.

  Nevertheless, he still needed to prove the sound foundations of this hypothesis. Alexander Marshack thinks he has succeeded. He deciphers inscribed bones.

  Lunar ‘Phrases’

  Up until now, prehistorians, when they discovered signs engraved on bones and small stones, contented themselves to speak of ‘decorative motifs’ or ‘hunting marks’. It was necessary to take a closer look.

  Between 1965 and 1970, professor Marshack had studied more than a thousand prehistoric objects from nine European countries and subjected them to meticulous analysis: photographs, mouldings, duplications, microscopic examinations. The results surpassed his expectations: details have appeared that no one has ever noticed.

  On most of the objects, the notches, points, and striations were found arranged in lines or groups which were carved ‘at different times, from different angles, and with different tools upon which one has exerted different pressure’. Certain marks reveal the sig
n of a single stroke, others many. The techniques also vary: simple impressions, partial turnings of the tool, large shallow holes, deep and narrow holes, etc. It is difficult to speak of coincidence. One notes a precise intention. But what is it?

  ‘These marks’, notes Marshack, ‘have not been made at the same time with the same rhythm, the same thought, or the same tool. They are therefore “time-factored”’.

  Continuing his work, Marshack has observed that the marks are not arranged randomly. We generally find a multiple number of twenty-nine or thirty, which immediately allows us to see a relationship with the months of the lunar cycle (the easiest to observe). Now, in the middle of the same ‘sequence’, the ‘sub-groups’ of the carved signs correspond exactly to different phases of the moon. We thus obtain what Marshack calls ‘an almost perfect lunar phrasing right down to its subdivisions’.

  In his copiously illustrated book, Marshack gives innumerable examples of such ‘phrases’ and presents digitally verified diagrams.

  He also cites characteristic pieces: the bone from la Marche (21 cm) whose 221 marks correspond approximately to seven lunar months; the bone of Abri-Blanchard in Dordogne, which bears on its principal face a double line of sixty-nine rounded wells, during the tracing of which the tool-tip has been changed twenty-four times; the Barma Grande pebble, etc.

  The Great Hunters

  Prehistoric man thus had a ‘visual memory aid of the seasons and lunations’ at his disposal; a system of notation common to the whole Upper Palaeolithic in Europe, and a technique already more evidenced than certain attested systems of the historical era, notably among the Indians of North America.

  In the second part of the book, Professor Marshack brings this evidence together with the notation system of the great rock engravings. More specifically, with representations of animals, feminine silhouettes and the vulvic symbols proper to the Aurignacian. Microscopic examination seems to suggest that these figures were also composed over time and that they too are therefore ‘time-factored’. This enables us to situate them in a context of ‘dramatic-narrative’ and ritual.

  Commenting on these discoveries, Henri de Saint-Blanquat has written in Sciences et avenir:69 ‘The representations of animals can provide a testimony of their method. One of the horses visible on the bone of La Marche reveals itself upon examination to possess three ears and three eyes, two manes, and two back lines. The three ears have been carved with three different tool-tips, and the same is true for the three eyes and two manes. The stratigraphy of the marks shows that two of the ears were carved after one of the manes. Everything appears to suggest that the horse had been ‘used’ many times, each ‘use’ corresponding to the addition of organs to the carving’.

  ‘If we suppose’, adds Marshack, ‘that a first month tells the story of a lunar hero who gets devoured by some spirit animal, this story could belong to its own season. A second month could then recount the adventures of the same hero with another seasonal animal or some divine spirit. The notation could therefore emphasise the narrative or symbolic time of these adventures, etc.’.

  Due to the essentially seasonal rhythm of Palaeolithic life, we consequently see the contours of a religion of great hunters, where the rites of pregnancy, for example, are associated with the animal ‘ancestors’ of the clan: the mammoth, the reindeer, the bison, the rhinoceros.

  In the process, Marshack rejects the ‘sexual’ or psychoanalytic interpretations that satisfy some prehistorians. ‘The magic of fecundity’, he writes, ‘is only one of the forms of participation in history and myth which surround pregnancy and birth (...) The vulva itself is to a certain degree a “non sexual” symbol, that is to say, non-copulative and non-erotic, representing the stories of processes that include birth and death, menstruation and the time-factored cycles of nature’. How far does this system of notation go back in time? It is difficult to know. Marks made on the bone of Pech-de-Lazé (–230,000 years), the most ancient of the bone carvings discovered to this day — it was discovered in 1968, close to Sarlat, by the prehistorian François Bordes — open fantastic perspectives which are yet to be explored.

  The tradition, in any case, is maintained through to the Mesolithic and Neolithic. Perhaps even to the dawn of history. In regards to a lunar calendar carved on the mattock of Urgerlöse (Denmark), Alexander Marshack writes:

  ‘This calendar could explain the presence of a tradition of notation and observation in northern and central Europe in an age where the distant agrarian cultures of the south practiced a different regional tradition. It could explain the origin of calendric wands and runic calendars discovered in northern Europe in the modern historical era. It is equally possible that this European tradition would not be unfamiliar to the extremely late megalithic alignments of Stonehenge.

  A Revolutionary Role

  Prehistory and writing have been contradictory terms up until now. But linguistics and archaeology have already allowed us to breach the wall separating us from the ‘silent millennia’. Marshack now speaks of the ‘roots of science and writing’.

  ‘We would then have’, notes de Saint-Blanquat, ‘something like a pre-writing, a pre-numeric notation, in sum: the substructure upon which, much later, true writing and true numeration has been built’.

  ‘This ability to note and to symbolise’, he adds, ‘seems proper for the time of the European cultures of the Upper Paleolithic (...) The ancient European cultures could thus have played a relatively dynamic role, formative and revolutionary in relation to subsequent cultural developments’.

  From here on out, prehistoric man transforms before our eyes. The ‘primitive’ hominid, crouching before his fire, cutting flint all day long, fades to leave in its place a ‘finished’ man, possessing a practical knowledge of time, of place, of direction, of the limits of his territory, capable of describing his experiences and of expressing them with symbols. A man, remarks Marshack, of a ‘level of evolution and sophistication that we could call proto-modern’.

  Hominisation thus appears linked to a sense for difference in duration. The ‘human fact’ characterises itself by the appearance of a perception ‘in two stages’: man is animal who is conscious of having consciousness. The historical dimension is the human dimension par excellence.

  To the simple Darwinian notion of man fabricating tools, working by natural selection and the survival of the fittest, is now added the idea of ‘time-factoring man’. Archaeology risks becoming an ‘obsession of the collector’ (Glyn Daniel). It becomes an auxiliary science of ethno-sociology.

  *

  Les raciness de la civilisation, a study by Alexander Marshack.70 Plon, 415 pages.

  *

  Since the 1970s, the theses of Professor Marshack have continued to inspire impassioned discussion. After the publication of Racines de la civilisation in the United States (The Roots of Civilisation: The Cognitive Beginnings of Man’s First Art, Symbol, and Notation. McGraw Hill, New York, 1972), the controversy extended to many disciplines, such that the press assured the work considerable publicity (cf. notably The New York Post, 16 May 1972; The Washington Post, 17 April 1972; Mosaic, autumn 1972; Antiquity, December 1972; The Boston Globe, 2 December 1972; Newsweek, 18 December 1972). Numerous specialists, such as Hallam L. Movius Jr, from Harvard University, and Gerald S. Hawkins (author of Stonehenge Decoded) from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, have declared themselves convinced. ‘It is not only anthropology, but our entire conception of man’s past that finds itself called into question’, observes Lewis Mumford, author of La cite dans l’histoire (Seuil, 1972).71 ‘A revolutionary document’, adds Professor Carleton S. Coon (The Origin of Races, The Living Races of Man).

  In November 1972, Alexander Marshack presented an important communication to the Anthropological Congress of Toronto. He also updated his works in three articles of premiere importance: Cognitive Aspects of Upper Paleolithic Engraving (in Current Anthropology, June–October 1972), Upper Paleolithic Notation and Symbol (in S
cience, 24 November 1972) and Exploring the Mind of Ice Age Man (in National Geographic Magazine, January 1975).

  In France, where he had undertaken the study of numerous prehistoric sites (Pech-Merle, Cougnac, Rouffignac, Niaux, etc.), Marshack published a highly technical monograph as early as 1970, which unfortunately passed by almost unnoticed: Notations dans les gravures du paléolithique supérieur (Imprimirie Delmas. 6 place Saint-Christoly, 33000 Bordeaux).72 This work was patronised by the Institut de préhistoire of the Université de Bordeaux. On the reception of Racines de la civilisation,73 we can refer to the article by Henri de Saint-Blanquat, in Science et avenir (‘Un pithécanthrope dessinateur’ Febuary 1973), and to the Monde of 27 December 1972. Cf. also the interesting work by Maxime Gorce, Les pré-écritures et l’évolution des civilisations (Klincksieck, 1974).74

  The works of Professor Marshack inscribe themselves in the framework of a general re-evaluation of antiquity and of the importance of the pre- and proto-historical cultures of western and northern Europe, a re-evaluation principally developed in Anglo-Saxon countries from 1965–1970. The key works in this regard are those of Colin Renfrew on chronology and dating (Before Civilisation, The Emergence of Civilisation), by Alexander Thom on prehistoric astronomy (Megalithic Lunar Observatories, Megalithic Sites in Britain), and by John Dayon on technology and metallography (Minerals, Metals, Glazing, and Man).