Woe until them that call evil good and good evil;
that put darkness for light and light for darkness;
that put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!
— Isaiah 5:20
The Poisoned Cup of Anti-Identity
Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence;
supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.
— Sun Tzu
A Traditionalist analysis clarifies the Cultural Nihilist agenda of the globalist hostile elite. A central theme in Traditionalist thought is how all temporal power, beauty, goodness and innocence in the microcosm of the earthly sphere reflect eternal archetypes in the macrocosm of the heavenly sphere. For Traditional mankind, with its Traditional experiential capacities, these heavenly (transcendental) archetypes are therefore earthly (immanent) realities. For Modern mankind, they can only be rationally reconstructed as archetypal identities, i.e. ‘model identities’ of which the earthly identities of Traditional mankind were merely temporal and imperfect reflections. Modernity causes a fading and loss of these reflections: the downward — negative, inverse — movement of Modernity is gradually distancing mankind from all forms of authentic identity. From a Traditionalist perspective, it is the ‘cosmic task’ of the Cultural Nihilist hostile elite to maximize this distance, and to finally abolish all authentic forms of identity. The highest priority of its anti-identitarian agenda is the eradication of the most powerful remnants of authentic identity that still exist in the world: if these remaining identities can be ‘tamed’, then the other remnants will fall into line soon enough. Thus, the highest priority target of the anti-identitarian agenda is Western ethnic identity, as structured around a sublimely transcendental Evangelion, a superlatively interiorized Nomos and a masterly command of Techne. Given the insurmountable material power of Western civilization, the success of the anti-identitarian assault depends on immaterial factors. Western civilization has proven its remarkable material resilience: even after the unprecedented sacrifices of two world wars, the total loss of four centuries of imperialist expansion during four decades of ‘decolonization’ and the radical anti-Traditional tyrannies of Communism and Fascism, the West is still at the pinnacle of material development. Therefore, the only way in which Western civilization can be destroyed is through the psychological manipulation and intellectual disorientation of the Western peoples. In other words: the Western peoples have to be tricked into destroying themselves — this is the strategy behind the anti-identitarian agenda.
The globalist hostile elites have diagnosed the Western people as ‘terminally ill’ and they have prescribed a recipe in accordance with this diagnosis: the fatal cup of Cultural Nihilist poison. Thus, the globalist hostile elite means to end Western civilization by self-medicated euthanasia, after a short respite of palliative care for the baby boomers, to whom it owes its power. Here applies the maxim that the greatest lie is most readily believed. The first politico-philosophical draught that the Western peoples took from the poisoned cup of anti-identity included the greatest lie of human history since the Seduction of Eve, viz. the fundamental denial of Traditional identity embodied in the basic premise of ‘The Communist Manifesto’: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. This lie is so patently absurd that even the authors of the Manifesto felt obliged to backtrack somewhat by immediately adding the most dramatic footnote of all times: That is, all written history. But even after discarding the 99% of human presence on Earth that is unwritten, this lie remains breathtakingly audacious. Decades of politically correct academic historiography has yet to unearth a single trace of ‘classes’ — let alone ‘class struggle’ — in Ancient Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Classical Greece or Medieval Europe. There have been forbidding hierarchies, hermetically closed castes, privileged estates and marginalized slave populations, but in the world of Tradition, all social groups were always holistically positioned in self-regulating communities and integrated within coherent ethnic structures. ‘Classes’ did not exist until they were programmatically ‘invented’ by the resentful nihilist ideologues of Historical Materialism: in Western public discourse, ‘classes’ did not exist before the so-called ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘class struggles’ did not exist before ‘The Communist Manifesto’. That is something entirely different than the ‘history of all hitherto existing society’.
Nevertheless, the grotesquely absurd lie of the history of ‘class struggle’ still remains effective in the Postmodern West: the Cultural Nihilist hostile is inventing ever new ‘classes’ on whose behalf it ‘struggles’. After the social-economic ‘class struggle’ between ‘labour’ and ‘bourgeoisie’ was shipwrecked on the cold rocks of capitalist reality at the end of the Cold War, ‘Cultural Marxism’ shifted its agenda to the cultural-identitarian ‘class struggle’ (Paul Cliteur, 2018). The collective defeat of the European peoples in two world wars, multiple decolonization wars and the Cold War — and the historical settling of accounts with Imperialism, Communism and Fascism — created an appropriate mental climate for the new anti-identitarian agenda. Deep historical trauma, a twisted self-image and extreme cultural discontinuity resulted in a nihilistic ‘slave discourse’ of hedonistic escapism, sublimated self-hatred and pathological sadomasochism: an ideal climate for an anti-identitarian ‘class struggle’ aimed at the mutual cancellation of ‘repressive’ Traditional identities. New ‘classes’ with repressive ‘privileges’ and ‘reactionary’ worldviews were quickly identified in the last outer symbols of power and identity: ethnicity, gender and vocation. The top priorities listed on the Cultural Marxist agenda are obviously the white race and the male gender — especially in their fatal combination of the ‘white male’, on whom the Cultural Marxists consistently project their anger complexes. This is the new spectre of the cultural-identitarian ‘class struggle’ that is now haunting the Western world: it is the spectre of anti-identitarian resentment.
This new spectre is much more effective than the old spectre of ‘The Communist Manifesto’: it works on a subtly sub-rational level and it exploits immaterial (psychohistorical) instead of material (social-economic) realities. The anti-identitarian spectre literally possesses Postmodern mankind and changes it from the inside out: it accurately reflects the outer Postmodern existential reality of Entfremdung, anomie and disenchantment in an inner experiential modality of soulless possession. The poisoned cup of anti-identity works in stages: the pleasurable sensation of hedonist exhilaration extends across the entire baby boom generation and only changes into spasmodic convulsions in their children; only their grandchildren will have to swallow the last bitter draught. Through hyper-individualism and hyper-democracy, the poison of anti-identity is gradually spreading through the whole of Western society and civilization. Individuals can arm themselves and bravely resist the resulting wave of collective hallucination, regression and atavism, but in the long term, every form of mere individual resistance is doomed. There is no individual psychoanalytic cure that can match the collective psychohistorical condition of anti-identity: even the elegant ‘antidotes’ of Jordan Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, 2018) are doomed to fail. From a psychohistorical perspective, such ‘antidotes’ can be no more than individual ‘palliatives’: they can lessen the social-psychological suffering of an individual, but they cannot combat the structural causes of that suffering.
Only a collective volte-face can still prevent der Untergang des Abendlandes. In the hour of their need, the Western peoples can still resort to the oldest and strongest weapon in the cultural-historical arsenal of the West: Traditionalist thought. The Western peoples will have to dislodge the Traditionalist Sword of Knowledge from the silent stone of history before they can hack a way through the deceptive webs of Cultural Nihilist anti-identity. At an intellectual level, this requires in-depth epistemological archaeology to uncover the psychohistorical roots of the
‘anti-identitarian movement’. This epistemological-archaeological project will require nothing less than a macro-historical diagnosis of the archetypal powers that direct Modernity itself. Here Traditionalist thought can offer solutions, but only if the Western mind is still strong enough to accept its last consequences and to reject some very comfortable Modernist illusions — the illusion of ‘equality’ above all. The first illusion of ‘equality’ that needs to be relegated to the museum of historical curiosities is at the same time the most comfortable of all: the ‘equality’ between man and woman.
Kali Yuga
A basic characteristic of the last [of the four Hindu Ages of the World], the so-called Dark Age, [or the] Kali Yuga, is that during this era Kâli is fully awake… [A]nd thus that entire era is under her power… in her basic role as goddess of destruction, lust and sexuality.
— Julius Evola
A central tenet of Traditionalist thought is the cyclical concept of world history. Traditionalist consensus teaches that the Modern Age represents the last era of the present time cycle (Sunset places its commencement somewhat arbitrarily in the year 1488). In cosmological terms, the Modern Age is the ‘Dark Age’, i.e. the age during which the world is farthest removed from the Divine Light. Different Traditions have different expressions to deal with this concept: in Norse mythology, it is the Ragnarök (the Wagnerian Götterdämmerung); in Christian eschatology, it is the ‘Endtime’; and in Spenglerian historiography, it is the ‘Winter Time’. In the oldest historically preserved Indo-European Tradition, the Vedic Tradition, this era is termed the Kali Yuga, i.e. the reign of the demon Kali, the ‘Torturer’, incestuously born from the demons Anger and Violence, in their turn born from the demons Impropriety and Falsehood. In Traditional symbolic systems, the Dark Age is consistently characterized by the blind creative force of the female archetype: it is characterized as the gradual eclipse of the ‘heavenly’, ordering and legislating male principle by the ‘earthly’, irrepressibly fertile female principle. In the world of Tradition the universal binary opposition male-female is consistently projected on cosmology: from an anthropologically structuralist perspective, the fundamental symbolic-mythological opposition between Tradition/Male and Modernity/Female is a fixed feature of all Traditional cultures.
From a Traditionalist perspective, the final total eclipse of the heavenly male principle, symbolically associated with authority as representative of law and order, is an inevitable feature of the Dark Age. Its logical counterpart is the final supremacy of the earthly female principle, symbolically associated with irrepressible fecundity and unrestrained promiscuity. Under the aegis of Dark Age Matriarchy, the collapse of Traditional male authority will inevitably end with the removal of all restraints on materialism and hedonism, resulting in apocalyptic atavistic regression. Conforming to this principle the contemporary world is simultaneously witnessing an unprecedented combination of collective Narcissism, demographic catastrophe and unrestrained Ecocide. Matriarchy, which represents the hypertrophy of the female gift of protecting all life with unreasoning devotion, will inevitably destroy all higher forms of life — everything that is strong, intelligent and beautiful — by fostering all lower forms of life — everything that is weak, stupid and ugly.
— Sunset
There is a number of ancient literary texts that specify this terrifying prospect. The Mesopotamian Tradition preserves the threat spoken by the great goddess Ishtar, who is less the goddess of ‘love’ and ‘procreation’ than the goddess of elementary sex and war. In case she is hindered in fulfilling her ritual obligations, she pronounces the following warning: (Babylonian) Shumma la tapatta babu, la erruba anaku, amahhats daltum, sikkuru ashabbir, amahhats sippuma, ushabalakat dalati, ushella mituti, ikallu baltuti, eli baltuti ima‘idu mituti! ‘If you do not open the gate [and] I cannot enter, [then] I will force in the door, break the bolts, tear down the doorposts, throw down the doors, raise the dead [and] they will eat the living — the dead will outnumber the living!’ (Inanna’s Descent into the Underworld — K[uyuncuk-Nineveh] 162 Obv. 16–20). Here the ‘doorposts’ refer to the border between the world of men and the underworld: in the world of Tradition, this border was ritually and institutionally guarded by the Katechon provisions of Royalty, Nobility, Temple and Scholarship. The existential threat that emanates from the creative primordial chaos that underpins the archetypal female principle — permanently lurking as ‘primordial nature’ under and beyond the ‘doorposts’ of high culture — marks the entire ancient world of Tradition.
A reflection of this profound insight may also be found in a well-known Ancient Near Eastern trope that has been incorporated in the Old Testament: (Hebrew) Mi-zot, hannishqafah kmo shachar, yafah chalwanah, barah kachamah, ajummah kanniedgalot? ‘Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?’ (Solomon’s Song 6:10). In this context, ‘she’ refers to the archetypal female principle, both abstractly and concretely. Abstractly, it can refer to the terrifying ‘Great Goddess’, as it does in Robert Graves’ The White Goddess (1948). Concretely, it can also refer to a dangerously seductive peasant girl, as it does in Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa (1980). At both levels, it unites the female blessing of stainless purity (the virgin theme of the hortus conclusus) and the female curse of the black death of the soul (the theme of Durga and Kāli as a destructive force of nature). This elementary duality is still explicitly expressed in contemporary cults such as the Roma cult of Sara-la-Kali, ‘Black Sarah’, in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. It is this negative (blind earthly and sub-rational downward) potential within the female principle which increasingly dominates Modernity as the balancing and the mitigating forces of the male principle fail. In this sense, Modernity can be understood as a combination of the deflation of the male principle to a state of ultimate degeneracy and the inflation of the female principle to a state of ultimate perversity. The extreme consequence of this double development is the perverse reign of the Great Whore: in the Bible, this reign is identified in the context of the Seven Plagues of the Endtime.
And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters: With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abomination and filthiness of her fornication: And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration.
— Revelation 17:1–6
In xiv and lxxxviii good hope is (g)rounded,
The Torturer’s Time (con)founded,
In The Sunset it is expounded.
3. Hortus Conclusus
Arcite and Pacamon admire Emilia (unknown master, ca. 1470), illustration from the oldest French translation of Boccaccio’s La teseida delle nozze d’Emilia, MS 2617 Folio 53, Vienna National Library. Hortus conclusus, ‘enclosed garden’, is one of the titles of the Virgin Mary (Solomon’s Song 4:12, ‘A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.’): it is the archetypal representations of the sublime female principle in the Western Tradition. It is often depicted in conjunction with a plantatio rosae, in reference to the rose as another attribute of the Virgin (Solomon’s Song 2:1, ‘I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.’). In terms of cultural anthropological analysis, it is important to note that the decline of the Christian devotion to the Virgin Ma
ry throughout the West is structurally juxtaposed with the rise of an inverted — entirely degraded — vision of the female principle.
Matriarchy
When the patriarchy that was founded by the warriors is finally eliminated, the individualist and martial society of the last millennia returns to its prenatal state of collectivist atavism.
Alba Rosa Page 19