THE ELDRITCH EVOLA
. . . & OTHERS
TRADITIONALIST MEDITATIONS ON
LITERATURE, ART, & CULTURE
by
JAMES J. O’MEARA
EDITED BY GREG JOHNSON
Counter-Currents Publishing Ltd.
San Francisco
2013
Copyright © 2013 by James J. O’Meara
All rights reserved
Cover image:
Cover design by Kevin I. Slaughter
Published in the United States by
COUNTER-CURRENTS PUBLISHING LTD.
P.O. Box 22638
San Francisco, CA 94122
USA
http://www.counter-currents.com/
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-935965-69-5
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-935965-70-1
E-book ISBN: 978-1-935965-71-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
O'Meara, James J., 1956-
The Eldritch Evola . . . & others : traditionalist meditations on literature, art & culture / by James J. O'Meara ; edited by Greg Johnson.
1 online resource.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary: "The Eldritch Evola . . . collects a number of essays by James J. O'Meara in which he applies his Traditionalist, New Right, and masculinist analysis to such figures as Julius Evola, H. P. Lovecraft, Henry James, Thorstein Veblen, Ralph Adams Cram, Richard Wagner, Owen Wister, Olaf Stapledon, Harry Partch, Scott Walker, Andy Nowicki, and Graham Harman" -- Provided by publisher.
Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.
ISBN 978-1-935965-71-8 (epub) -- ISBN 978-1-935965-69-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Literature and society. 2. Arts and society. 3. Popular culture. I. Johnson, Greg, 1971- editor. II. Title. III. Title: Traditionalist meditations on literature, art & culture.
PN51
809'.93358--dc23
2013019932
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgements
1. The Eldritch Evola
2. The Lesson of the Monster;
or, the Great, Good Thing on the Doorstep
3. The Princess & the Maggot
4. The Corner at the Center of the World:
Traditional Metaphysics in a Late Tale of Henry James
5. “A General Outline of the Whole”:
Lovecraft as Heideggerian Event
6. Mike Hammer, Occult Dick:
Kiss Me Deadly as Lovecraftian Tale
7. A Light Unto the Nations:
Reflections on Olaf Stapledon’s The Flames
8. My Wagner Problem—& Ours
9. Our Wagner, Only Better:
Harry Partch, Wild Boy of American Music
10. Ralph Adams Cram:
Wild Boy of American Architecture
11. The Eternal Outsider:
Veblen on the Gentleman & the Jew
12. The WinkleTwins Win One!
Owen Wister’s Philosophy 4: A Tale of Harvard University
13. Light Entertainment:
The (Implicitly) White Music of Scott Walker
14. Andy Nowicki’s The Columbine Pilgrim
15. The Huxley of the Alternative Right:
Andy Nowicki’s The Doctor & the Heretic & Other Stories
16. Bright Lights, Big Nothing:
Andy Nowicki’s Under the Nihil
About the Author
For
Ricky Devereaux
1954–?
The Boy Next Door
PREFACE
“Writing was perdifficult for him; and he detested it; but his stars forced him to write; and the overcoming of difficulties was not unpleasant.”
—Fr. Rolfe (Baron Corvo), Nicolas Crabbe or The One and the Many
“Well, I’m not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad!”
—Howard Beale, “The Mad Prophet of the Airwaves,” Network
It had to happen.
After the release of my first book, or, more properly, first collection of essays, late last year; after the ecstatic and dismayed reviews, the tumultuous interviews, the viral internet campaigns, the flame wars, and yes, regretfully, the loss of so many brave American boys in the subsequent Marrakech Riots so unfairly, yet understandably, laid at my doorstep, another volume was inevitable.
The People, the People had spoken! And while normally I say The People be damned, ungrateful, ignorant wretches that they are, I was persuaded, or prevailed upon to consider, that this time vox populi was indeed vox dei.
I clearly recall the night the decision was made, “the die it was cast”; for I beheld on my TV screen the return of the Gilmore Girls! Sure, it was a different, even crappier cable network, and there was a young woman actually named “Sutton” pretending to be Lauren Graham, and doing a damn’d fine job of it (I imagine the painful meeting with the network execs shouting “I’ve got a thousand actresses that can give me that Gilmore Girl feeling!”), and many other actors were missing, and the rest were obstinately pretending to be entirely different people, and above all, what had kept me away so long, the title had been changed to the cringingly awful Bunheads, but otherwise it was all there, what really mattered: the smug look of unearned superiority, the knowing yet strangely irrelevant pop culture references, the endless, run-on dialogue that was maddeningly never really about what it was supposedly about (the “gap,” as Graham Harman will say, in a book reviewed within this collection), it was all there again, and so too was the need for another book—to strike another blow!
Whenever and wherever there is a decline of righteousness, O descendant of Bharata, and a rise of unrighteousness, at that time I descend Myself.
—Bhagavad Gita, 4.7
The wheel had turned! The stars were once more aligned, in that blasphemously suggestive way.
The time had come to brave the creaking service elevator of The Glove Factory and slowly descend to the surface world once more, there to deliver a strangely, damnably wet brown paper-wrapped package to the waiting, hooded figured known only as “The Publisher.”
It was the book you now hold in your hands.
Constant Readers will notice that this collection, like the first, spans quite a—as the kids say—“gamut.” You will find the very first pieces that graced the virtual pages of the Counter-Currents website, as well as some that appeared after the last book, and even, through some rip in the space-time continuum, at least one that hasn’t appeared yet—but which will surely appear by the time this collection gets to print. There’s something for the whole Family, Mom and Dad, Buddy and Sis, and even Charlie.
Perhaps now is the time, and perhaps this is the place, to say a few words about that vexed and vexing topic, “why I write.” Though well intentioned, it is a question that evokes the same wry response “William Lee,” the narrator of William Burroughs’ Junkie and the author’s Doppelgänger, gives to the inevitable question, “Mr. Lee, why do you take drugs?” I do not write in order to save the world, or change the world, or make anyone better or happier, although that would be nice. I write because, like the character in Fritz Lang’s M, my head is, from time to time, usually in the too-early morning, full of voices and ideas, and if I am to escape them, then I must . . . write. If, like him, I had to use a stubby pencil on a window sill, rather than the free word processor bundled into Windows (not even Word!) and address myself to the local newspapers rather than the World Wide Web, I’d never have produced all this that follows here; on the other hand, if I lived back then, I might not have as much to write against.
And so, Dear, Constant Reader, it is time for us to
part. As a wise man once said, “You go your way, and I’ll go mine; and if we meet, it’s beautiful.” According to a poster on the wall of Ricky Devereaux’s basement dope den in 1968, that man’s name was . . . Adolf Hitler. Whatever happened to that guy?
James J. O’Meara
Rust Belt, USA
March 3, 2013
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Once again I must thank first Herr Professor Doktor Doktor Greg Johnson, B.A., M.A., PhD., D. Phil. honoris causis, éminence grise, miglio fabro, etc., etc., for suggesting, nay, demanding this new collection. Thanks also to Gwendolyn von Taunton, who was kind enough to select one of these pieces for the first issue of her fine new journal Aristokratia.
My numberless intellectual debts should be clear from what follows, but I have especially benefited, to the extent that I could remember them afterwards, from numerous sake-driven conversations with Collin Cleary, Jef Costello, and Derek Hawthorne—although Dr. Cleary did insist that my piece on Wagner was “absurd.”
And a special thanks to all those Constant Readers, especially to those who, during a recent period of financial instability, made contributions to my blog, bought me books online, and otherwise kept me from taking the long ride on the Night Train to Mundo Fine.
“Black sheep, outcast, misfit, Ishmael
Every stranger each his own tale”
SRC, “Black Sheep”
Detroit, 1968
THE ELDRITCH EVOLA
“And thus, as a closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom.”
—E. A. Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”
“Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists and made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity.”
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”
“Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival . . . a survival of a hugely remote period when . . . consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity . . . forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds.”
—Algernon Blackwood
A little while ago, I decided to use up more of my enforced leisure by reading Part Two of Baron Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World
, or at least the first few chapters, with an eye towards once and for all getting a straight picture of the various “ages” and “races” that constitute his take on Tradition, filtering René Guénon’s model through the more historically oriented work of Herman Wirth and Co.1
Damned if I didn’t start coming all over with fear and dread, and not just in my attic (if I had one), not unlike those that prevented me from reading completely through Guénon’s Reign of Quantity
until several false starts over 25 years.
This time I decided to try and analyze what this dread consisted in, and I think I’ve got it: By the time one reaches the farthest limits of recorded, or even archeologically validated history, the worst has already happened, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
And is this not indeed the theme of “horror” fiction?
Now, I’ve never paid attention to the occasional “smart” comments about Traditionalism as reading like “science fiction,” based largely on supposed borrowing from Theosophy. In fact, I agree with this guy, who makes a modus tollens out of the mockers’ modus ponens:
What is one to do then with a writer of foresight, whose literacy and education remain indubitable, who nevertheless serves up his social and political analysis, however trenchant it is, in the context of an alternate history, the details of which resemble the background of story by Lord Dunsany or Clark Ashton Smith? I am strongly tempted to answer my own question in this way: That perhaps we should begin by reassessing Dunsany and Smith, especially Smith, whose tales of decadent remnant-societies—half-ruined, eroticized, brooding over a shored-up luxuriance, and succumbing to momentary appetite with fatalistic abandon—speak with powerful intuition to our actual circumstances. I do not mean to say, however, that Evola is only metaphorically true, as though his work, like Smith’s, were fiction. I mean that Evola is truly true, on the order of one of Plato’s “True Myths,” no matter how much his truth disconcerts us.2
I’m ashamed to say I’ve never read more than one Clark Ashton Smith story, and that years ago in some Lovecraft Mythos anthology, but I’m more inclined anyway to take this back to the Master himself, Lovecraft. How much does Lovecraft resemble Evola, and moreover, is this superficial, or is there a reason?
The answer may lie in Lovecraft’s essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature”: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
In a 1927 letter to Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, Lovecraft writes: “I consider the touch of cosmic outsideness—of dim, shadowy non-terrestrial hints—to be the characteristic feature of my writing.”
Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden eons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it.3
Lovecraft takes fear as his theme, and he knows that the greatest fear is inspired not by ghoulies and gore but by the dread of nameless eons. Nameless eons are the stock in trade of Traditionalist cyclical cosmology
.
It’s no surprise that Michel Houellebecq, today’s Prince of Nihilism, gets it: “The human race will disappear. Other races will appear and disappear in turn. The sky will become icy and void, pierced by the feeble light of half-dead stars. Which will also disappear. Everything will disappear.”4
But surely Evola and Co. are not frivolous entertainers, but serious initiates. If Lovecraft seeks to inspire fear, does Evola, and if so, how is that connected to initiation?
We could try this: if Evola inspires new respect for the Lovecraftians, then what if we read Lovecraft as if he were Evola?
It was Alisdair Clarke who called my attention to Polaria: The Gift of the White Stone by W. H. Müller.5 I’ve never seen more than a couple other references to it (such as this amused and bemused review by one Julianus6) and copies of the barely 200 page paperback seem to have become quite rare, fetching over $200.00 on Amazon.
Müller takes off, with all apparent sincerity, from the preposterous thesis that H. P. Lovecraft “was a Practicing Occultist and that the Lovecraft Circle was a group of High Adepts,” despite overwhelming evidence, found in literally dozens of volumes of letters and innumerable personal reminiscences, to say nothing of S. T. Joshi’s many works, of being a cast-iron materialist of the village atheist ilk. As Julianus says:
The book itself is a Vast Muddle of Mystical Verbiage that draws on Sufism, Theosophy, Réne Guénon, Robert Graves, and others to create a bizarre Syncretic Symbolism from “Phonetic Encodings” in Lovecraft’s work. The Linguistic Fog is comparable only to the work of Kenneth Grant, and it is truly strange that Herr Müller nowhere acknowledges his debt to the Typhonian Titan.7
Actually, in its preposterous thesis defended with po-faced sincerity by means of vast scholarship and word and le
tter mumbo-jumbo, as well as its overall atmosphere of occult doom, I was more put in mind of such works of Ariosophic fascism as Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels’ Theozoology.
Never the less, there are some good bits, relevant to our theme; if Lovecraft’s tales can be given an initiatic spin, then the connection with Evola becomes clearer:
Lovecraft cloaked his profound esoteric insight in an imagery of horror. . . . Thus it was given a subtle but clear initiatory nature. Many feel attracted by Lovecraft’s forceful imagery, but only a very few know the reason. Only those with a preparedness and already drawn toward the Threshold would be ready to delve into Lovecraft’s work and recover from its depths the eonian Polar message.8
Remember, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear.” For Fear read “initiation via experiencing the death of the ego and its world.”
Both ego-less animal existence and man’s ego, which is but matrical sensory cognition, originate in the same Matrix of Dream. This must be transcended. It is Polar insight, the inward-looking way that leads out of this cyclic Matrix. However, the man’s ego, being the man-god, fears mystical dissolution, because it fears its “death.” Only if “death” is realized as illusion by experiencing it mystically in life, [perhaps by reading some “weird tales”] can essencification and spiritual unity be achieved. The ego fears “death” because it does not know that there is none. “Fear” is the sword the ego wields, yet its iron melts away in the black heat of Wisdom.
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