The Decline and Fall of Western Art

by Brendan Heard

  In Plato and the legends of the netherworld and the Socratic story of Er can be seen the ancient precursors to our concepts of Heaven and Hell (similarly the Norse Hel of the Eddas from whence the word comes), the judgement and punishment concept harkening back to the Egyptian rituals of the dead. The difference is that in Er’s case, there was the addition of an ancient Aryan reincarnation element similar to the Hindu tradition. To Socrates and others, only the philosophical virtue could guide a soul through the cycles and stages of life and afterlife wisely. Reason and truth are the ultimate virtues.

  “You are everywhere at once, in the earth, in the sea, in heaven. You are not yet born, you are in the womb, you are old, a youth, dead, in an afterlife. Realise all of these things simultaneously, all times, places, things, qualities, and you can realise God.”

  – Plotinus, 270 BC.

  We will not regain our culture or art or strength of any sort until we earnestly undergo a religious revival, to reclaim a metaphysical view, even a rational one, as the kernel of creativity. I personally feel the study of Platonism/Neoplatonism is a worthy starting point, with its historical syncretism, rational discourse, and healthy primordial traditionalism. The truth behind the curtain of our lives is something far more vast, strange and cryptic than can be outlined in any doctrine, as can be psychedelically triggered by the archaic shamanism of the Eleusinian Mysteries. From there, initiates commune with God by following instinct.

  “What a strange, strange world it must be if there are alternative continua operating all around us filled with strange alien information that is the product of its own history and has an appetite for its own future.’”

  – Terrence McKenna

  Neoplatonism strongly influenced Christian theology throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. This was largely thanks to Christian writers St Augustine of Hippo (354-430AD) and Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite (late fifth and early sixth centuries AD), who were influenced by Plotinus (204-270AD) and Porphyry (233-305AD). By bridging the gulf between major Western religions, Neoplatonism validates eternal principles that we express through ritual. It also means that the tenets of Platonic thinking are already grounded within our dormant Christian morality today. As a rational belief, Neoplatonism defines a direct influence on material human realities (such as visual art, music and architecture) via its veneration of the aforementioned Golden Ratio, which it teaches as fundamental to both art and nature. And this belief is undeniably true and tangibly experienced by everyone who has ever appreciated high art. The ratio cannot be repeated or referenced often enough.

  4) The Golden Ratio.

  As we have stated, these Platonic principles are the foundations of art as expressions of natural beauty and goodness. They can be measured in experienced reality, as we see the bliss of ultimate reason manifest through mathematics and geometry. And from understanding and application of those concepts, the divine intellect becomes represented in the creative works of an artist. This geometry, this equation, is the dominant magic element in all pre-Modernist Western art, both pagan and Christian. The divine mathematical formula we know as the Golden Ratio must be stressed constantly as the vital underpinning of all artistic activity, from music to city planning. Even the layout of this book follows its calculations.

  Here, we see art and mathematics intertwined; a quotient that has ethereal significance. We see the lost rationality of art, art as an objective trade or study, spiritual (but not contrived). It is creative and orderly, and reasonable, the polar opposite of our current worship of false ‘freedoms’. Reason, truth and beauty are religious and material truths. Striving upward, testing yourself against the measure of nature, is the goal and journey of a soul. And this is real, undeniable, to everyone. The spiritual dimension is entwined with the creation of real art, in seeking perfection inspired by the divine intellect found in each of us.

  “For whenever in any three numbers, whether cube or square, there is a mean, which is to the last term what the first term is to it; and again, when the mean is to the first term as the last term is to the mean—then the mean becoming first and last, and the first and last both becoming means, they will all of them of necessity come to be the same, and having become the same with one another will be all one.”

  – Plato, Timaeus

  5) Material spirituality, theosophy and initiation.

  “The sun is God.”

  – Dying words of J.M.W. Turner

  We should include here a mention of beliefs from the traditions with the deepest art-related values: nature worship, initiation (which we will later relate to guilds) and wyrd (destiny). There are other engaging and very corporal religious archetypes in nature that, while materially real and worthy of adulation, are no longer considered in the devotional way they should be. Like an initiate who has had a veil removed from his eyes, things we have known all our lives can take on a new light by altering the way we view them. To see and to paint the sunset or a woodland scene at a master level is to pay devotion to it both internally and before the world. Christianity, while diverting focus to man as above nature, still in many ways retained a reverence for nature and creation. Post-Christianity largely does not — everything becomes secondary to economy and comfort.

  An easy example of a routine natural phenomenon worthy of numinous praise is the sun: Ra (Egypt), Apollo (Greece), Lugh (Ireland), Sól or Freyr (Norse). The sun is a tangible superforce that appears every morning, clearly visible — and which also happens to be a miraculous self-sustaining thermonuclear explosion hovering in the æther. It has been worshipped before and if you stop to consider it, how can we not have reverence for such a miracle? Or view it macrocosmically, as something superior to us that we are absolutely reliant upon? The more you remove the veil of our spiritless materialism, the more you see that revelations worthy of exultation are around us constantly, and not just in permanent sky-explosions but in old trees and lichen-covered rocks, individual things that are part of the greater whole. Opening your eyes to the world anew brings greater awareness to two issues: that we have developed a dangerous, indifferent arrogance towards nature and that we have lost an art that once emulated, respected and complimented nature’s miracles.

  Old trees were for a long time considered sacred, and rightly so. There are few things more dignified and awe inspiring than an ancient tree – silent, knotted, consecrated nature. Trees have often been seen as symbols of knowledge and immortality, as well as growth, death and rebirth. The Celtic druids venerated trees as well as rocks, streams and mountains, all of which often contained residing spirits. These would have been local deities, known and respected by inhabitants living near to the shrine itself. Many heroes in Homer’s Iliad were descended from river gods, powerful spirits who even the Olympians were reticent to cross. These are natural objects, deserving of respect, as they are inexplicability numinous: a landscape, the ocean, the constellations. There is undeniably a great mystery at work here and it is not unseen. Nature has always been the intrinsic devotional centre from whence poetry and all art emanates.

  Primordial tradition is the practice of a prisca theologia, or theosophy, which is theories of wisdom or knowledge of God. There were many European sacred initiation religions, many different routes to spirituality, which also never fully disappeared but continued to exert subtle influence, sometimes directly upon culture through artistic impulse, or through esoteric traditions as mystery wisdom. Though we are unaware when we express their theories, their influence has never quite vanished. A prime example of such is the Mithraic cult, once a religion in competition with Christianity and very popular in the Roman army. The iconic scenes of Mithras (an original Indo-Aryan god Mitra) in their remaining monuments show him being born from a rock, slaughtering a bull and sharing a banquet with the god Sol (the Sun). These artefacts are often discovered in relief and sculpture at sites across Europe.

  To the Mithraics, there were seven stages of initiation, representing the seven Hierarchies of Creative Powers
. These stages were connected with the Seven Sacred Planets, which are Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and two others, which are exoterically said to be the Sun and the Moon. The initiate’s goal was to ascend these spheres. Beyond the seventh sphere was a dimension of ‘the Father’, which was an endless ocean of calm enlightenment. Further beyond that lay the apex dimension: the Eagle, the maelstrom world of powers. This was similar to the plane of ‘pure fire’ or ‘pure soul’ believed in by the stoics, or Plato’s plane of pure reason, or the Christian concept of Heaven.

  These beliefs were once cross-fertilising and nebulous, and each had an associative art, as we can see with the Mosaic of Christ as Sol Invictus or Apollo-Helios in from the pre-fourth-century Necropolis, now in St Peter’s in the Vatican, which has been interpreted as a syncretic image representing Christ. Many Hermeticists see Jesus as a practitioner who achieved the highest level of alchemical transformation, gaining godhood (rubedo, the reddening) and immortality. And that God himself is the greatest alchemist of all time, with every star in the universe as his alchemical forge.

  6) Sacred hierarchy.

  In terms of human society, the rules governing us are not wholly motivated by materialist ‘reality’, although this is an easy illusion to be ensnared by. Impulse and direction can only be the product of belief, being a spiritual and cultural brotherhood bounded by religious morality. As anyone who is widely travelled knows, many moral staples are quite malleable and differ wildly from place to place rather shockingly. Many religious morals are evolutionarily adapted to suit the racial expression of the disciples but even within our own peoples there have been some fairly seismic religious changes. Yet there are a few eternal values the various major Indo-Aryan-descended religions do share, at least in source and spirit. These are the morals and culture we feel as good and healthy, as laid out for us by our ancestors before and during early recorded history. These are an expression of their instincts, which is the core of religious belief that we must preserve — morals that are philosophised in Nordic proverbs, Celtic fables, certain biblical commandments and Hellenic discourse. These are eternal values such as: fides, nobility of blood, hierarchy, cultivation of personal honour, hospitality, courage, æsthetics, reason, truth, sacrifice and the family as cornerstone. At its core, the true religious tradition concerns philosophy and reverence for life’s wonders more than superstition and literal myth-belief. The tradition creates art that aims to capture that reverence for nature and the guardians of religion work hand-in-hand with influential artisans to form a culture.

  Also inherent to traditional Indo-Aryan religions was a rigid sense of caste, even at the spiritual level and the limits of the spirit’s abilities. A man born a sculptor knew his place in the world and cosmos indelibly, and the rank of his caste was axiomatic. Caste is another concept only very recently lost (in the post-1960s Anglo-Saxon liberal culture war). The priestly class held paramount position in this hierarchy, as keepers of

  the tradition. They were also part of the royalty. They looked up to and answered only to the king. However, unlike in mercantile systems like ours, the king did not look back down from on high but had his back to them as he looked upwards further still, towards God and the great mystery. By this striving for the unattainable, a high material benchmark was set for cultural standards of self-improvement. Everybody strove upward, without measure or point of end. This cultural motif plays into important societal protocols that safeguard high art such as craft guilds, which are vital to sustaining craft standards, diversity of style and non-materialistic high art.

  By keeping the mysteries and the priestly warrior class at the top, the roots of authority had a metaphysical character and every manifest individual or cultural action proceeded from spiritual authority. Art flowed quite casually from the minds and hands of these men, almost unthinkingly, like breathing, and their ways were æsthetic in all disciplines. It was likely something they never imagined could be lost. Or maybe I am wrong and order-keepers understood their important charge all too well. A motivated, anti-luxury middle and upper caste with free time will create and ensure high culture and high art. We can see the result of this from our entire pre-twentieth century history. Was social stratification unequal? Perhaps but that is unavoidable in any situation, our ancestors were merely honest about it. Did they have a cultural habit of hard work, did they produce priceless high art and culture of value to all ages? Yes.

  This ordered society corresponding to caste, still alive in India as living Aryan tradition, has been dismantled for now in the Western struggles with socialism. But traces remain in delineations of the abilities and habits of peasants, bourgeois, business class, nobility and clergy. The Olympian man still exists. He is, as always, a master of the inner life, in the chivalric tradition, who answers to his own inner commitment. And his will is enacted by his spiritual awareness and presence of mind, and his unstoppable patience and dismissiveness for the meaninglessness of pain, irrational passions and weakness. A self-testing ascetic concerned only with over-becoming.

  Then out spake brave Horatius,

  The Captain of the Gate:

  “To every man upon this earth

  Death cometh soon or late.

  And how can man die better

  Than facing fearful odds,

  For the ashes of his fathers,

  And the temples of his gods.

  – Lord Macaulay

  Our word ‘necessity’ comes from the latin necessitas, which means: The mysterious power who, more especially among the Greeks, is always described as ruling even over the gods. You can see the true meaning contains undeniable sacred mystery and philosophy, and dispels as lifeless and mechanistic our materialist modern definition.

  7) Atheism & agnosticism.

  For agnostics and others who cringe at talk of metaphysics, there must be acknowledgement of the benefits of social cohesion in an agreed morality, which derives from ritual and tradition. Even atheists celebrate Christmas. While our Western scientific pursuit of truth (Darwin, Kelvin, Nietzsche) has weakened Christianity and left us prone to nihilism and moral chaos, there is a slowly dawning realization among artists and philosophers that we cannot live without a metaphysic, a philosophy which observes the important root principles and keeps focus on the inner life. When we, individually or as a society, determine that human religion is not true and do away with the concept of God, it seems we cannot do so without leaving behind what is best in us. It is the tragic irony of striving for and then crossing a threshold that unexpectedly transforms us into something unrecognizable. An evolution that removes or destroys the reason you were progressing to begin with. We can see vividly in our artworks of today (all of which are failures) the loss of this spiritual element.

  8) Primordial belief and the rejection of materialist Puritanism.

  The direct relationship between spirituality and art is fundamental. We need to believe in ourselves to have an art. True art is laborious and requires a lot of supportive infrastructure. The regaining of the prime principles of our tradition can begin when we are done with destroying our identity in the name of an impossible equality quest.

  “It is contradictory to say that the same person can be at the same time ruler and ruled. … The great ability of those who are in control in the modern world lies in making the people believe that they are governing themselves; and the people are the more inclined to believe this as they are flattered by it, as they are in any case incapable of sufficient reflection to see its impossibility. It was to create this illusion that ‘universal suffrage’ was invented: the law is supposed to be made by the opinion of the majority, but what is overlooked is that this opinion is something that can very easily be guided and modified; it is always possible, by means of suitable suggestions, to arouse in it currents moving in this or that direction as desired.

  We cannot recall who it was that first spoke of ‘manufacturing opinion’, but this expression is very apt.”

  – René Guénon
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  But is faith really the missing element in creating true art? Inspiring art does require myth and self-belief. It also obviously withers in atheistic systems like communism, consumerism and liberal democracy. Art is vitality, or the expression of a culture’s strength of vitality. Self-belief comes from hope and rationality. They are enshrined in the universe-as-God Neoplatonic philosophy that early Christian writers such as Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) believed. In that sense, true art is our worship of sacred nature.

  Today, we pat our own backs continually, thinking ourselves smarter than our ancestors, scolding their stupidity for not understanding the need to worship equality, when in truth we are just a pale shadow of our ancestral betters, who must look down from on high with great pity and great disgust for our own traitorous weaklings who have turned us against their teachings. In having squandered our inheritance, we are gearing up for some very substantial problems. Can we will ourselves back to belief? Or does it need to happen organically? There are many difficult crossroads before us and to be saved we must reignite the same struggle that Frederick Barbarossa undertook, for the divine right of kings against economic rule of the soulless business class. The only way to safeguard the future, realistically, is by stricture of moral code, by imposing the spiritual struggle for striving upward, beyond the physical world and to an unattainable point. While the target may be impossible, a high-aiming bow ensures the missile lands at the highest mark. We collectively reach the near-unattainable excellence, the moral goodness that knows nothing of sloth or self-pity. And never to forget, that goodness and beauty are inseparable.

  Decadence and nihilism are the enemy. This is, I believe, the core of what some traditionalists call the solar struggle. The path of the ascetic inner struggle should factor, by degrees, into every person’s life. We might fancifully call this the Atlantean inheritance, the ancient material purpose of rules handed down from God and hidden in myth and the storytelling arts. The Golden Ratio ensures æsthetics and beauty are synonymous with the truth of this primordial philosophy. So let us accept religion, myth, tradition and ritual are a necessity, even in the absence of a literal myth-belief. Materialist and atheist freedoms are an illusion. Like art, religious tradition is not something to be derided by empiricists and discarded — it has an organic purpose beyond the obvious and the materialists will discard anything outside the control of money power. We can see all around us today the misery that results when we discard the baton as it is passed to us.