The Dark and the Light: What A German Secret Society Can Teach Us

It may seem like cheating to take a pre-existing item (much of this has already appeared in my LiveJournal) and then re-apply it to the Zaadz blog.  But the virtue of blog-plundering is that you can have a second bite at an earlier cherry and see if the thoughts of one week stand up to scrutiny in the next.

What is Truth, Said the Roman

I have a very unconventional view of truth.  Facts change, new thoughts come, and the world changes accordingly.  Better to accept this and anticipate it than to become rigid in pure principle.  Universalism is, I am afraid, the beginning of the end of human creativity and progress.

After all, if any of us had lived a hundred years ago, we would probably have accepted such truths as self-evident as that : eugenics was a reasonable proposition in ensuring the progress of the human species; that women were the weaker sex and needed guidance from men; that tribal peoples were inherently inferior and required a Christian mission to make them whole; and that a member of a trades union was, by very definition, a dangerous agitator.

I like to think that I plough dangerous ground sometimes in trying to think ahead, perhaps to what might be normal in a hundred years.  My earlier thoughts on sexual honesty and the web (since re-published in Social Computing magazine, which shows that Zaadz is read out there in Normal Land) were of this type.  My opinion that any society made rigid by the thoughts and plans of a group of benign eighteenth century gentlemen is bound to show signs of tension and collapse after a period of time - yes, I am talking about your much-loved Constitution - is another 'future thought'.  Another theme of this blog is that the minority religions and irrationalisms emerging in the margins of late capitalist society are as pregnant with meaning as was Christianity in the Age of Augustus.

The Strength of Irrational Feeling

I attended a lecture recently by a leading Heathen (representing a serious minority attempt to reconstruct what the pre-Roman tribal peoples of Europe felt and believed).  What has struck me is the profound depth of feeling amongst those who have engaged deeply with these new 'reconstructed' pagan religions.  I may not share their views, but I must recognise that their peculiar brands of irrationalism, no less so than the Catholic or the Jewish,are powerful enough to motivate actions that might, one day, be those of the martyr or, the Deity forbid, a Crusade or should we say an Ankhade or (after Thor) a Hammerade.

Two days later, at the same venue, an articulate young German from public service stock, gave a very coherent and stimulating account of a pagan German secret society from the second post-Nietzchean wave of German romanticism (1870s). This had been forced underground successively by racial politics and then by the taint of association of romantic irrationalism with national socialism in post-war Germany.  The society has been revived and no doubt partially transformed in a model that was clearly one part Germanic by philosophy (idealist rather than existentialist), one part Germanic by cultural heritage, with talk of Ragnarok and Frigg, and one part gnostic-hermetic with all the expected debt to Jung and Ascona.

This was 'aristocracy of the soul' stuff and is part of a new trend to rediscover roots in the defeated powers of '45 that is as inevitable as it was once feared.  In my view, it is a necessary part of the healing of '45.  I would have few concerns if all those involved were as intelligent and self-aware as the speaker. But I do have concerns and I think we need to be aware of what is happening more widely in global culture.

Traditionalism As Revenge

The racial and imperialist aspects of both German and Japanese culture have perhaps dissipated, but the culture suppressed in 1945 by the combined force of Western rational liberalism and Marxist scientific materialism went underground - it was never crushed completely.  It is not merely returning at the margins as a transformed 'spirituality' in these countries.  We also see those who 'collaborated' against both the West and Communism in other countries re-emerge - in a revived Hindu nationalism, in the re-emergence of the European Right in The Low Countries, France, Spain and Italy (and elsewhere) and, paradoxically, in the many East European petty nationalisms and fascisms.  Poland's current bout of irrationalism is a resurgence of Catholic authoritarianism but it is of the same type - the suppressed rage of a nationalism crushed by two forces with more guns and more men.

We even see traces of it in the development of that post-Baathist 'Caliphate' traditionalism that, owing some debt to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, has emerged as 'Al-Qaeda'.  In short, the irrational politics of tradition, identity and the soul - and of blut and kultur however defined - is back with a vengeance.  A relatively few 'souls' can now wreak destructive power far beyond anything such irregulars could have done fifty years ago, while troubled elites increasingly see traditionalist ideas as a means of capturing and retaining power.

So, something culturally significant is happening.  Much of it comes down to frustration with both traditional religion and with the Enlightenment - and the hole on the Left left by the failures of both Marxism and secular liberation movements.  Just as Baathism was the twin brother of Zionism, so 'Caliphate' Islamism is arising out of the ashes of the failures of the secular leftist liberation strategies of the PLO and of the more sensible pre-Saddamite versions of Baathism.

The Attraction of the Coherently Irrational

What interested me was that (although I am of the Left) I could see that the ideas of this spiritual and non-political secret society was reaching out to something lost in people's souls - that very drive for the coherent irrational that is always going to be more holy and more meaningful than the politically correct nonsense forced on us by both market democracy in the West and by a world of all-too-appropriate behaviour, rights, duties and citizenship. 

One person of German descent at the event (in conversation afterwards) was clearly attracted by that aspect of David's talk that was 'tribal' - it reached down to the roots of her personal Yggdrasil.  The British audience was (as is our way) more pragmatic about all this and rather unnerved by some of the highly conservative gender implications, but many people outside the liberal heartlands of the West are ready for something that roots them in their ancestors and their place - in blut und boden.

Personally, I see nothing wrong with this if it can develop within a classic secular liberal culture, the law is obeyed and no-one is forced to make temple blood sacrifices or mount revenge raids on the next street ... but my concern is where this desperate need to belong and to believe may be taken by less scrupulous and more manipulative operators.

Rudgley on the Odinic Experiment

A recent popular book on paganism [Richard Rudgley, Pagan Resurrection: A Force for Evil or the Future of Western Spirituality, 2006] raises some of the issues, albeit without much sophistication and exaggerating the political potential of what he calls the Second Odinic Experiment (essentially the post-war appropriation of Odin by the Westen Radical Right).  Nevertheless, he is raising some serious issues that are being completely ignored by the mainstream media. It is highly probable that some of these developments are being monitored by the security services and simultaneously studiously ignored, or becoming a matter of denial, by the politicians they serve.  Much like the Minister of Magic studiously ignores the return of Lord Valdemort until the bugger is presented to his own eyesight in the current Harry Potter movie.

The relevance of minority religion thinking to this may seem distant.  Ridgley's book is unsatisfying precisely because he is sympathetic to pagan thought and yet his story tells of its systematic appropriation by the extreme Right.  He cannot bring himself to criticise Odinic thinking nor its darker aspects. 

In fact, much of what passes for paganism is not so much paganism as traditionalism - there is not only state-sponsored Shinto in Japan to deal with but there is (not uncoincidentally) those Arab writers from the era of the Mongol invasions who are emerging as the ideologists of 'Caliphate' Islam.  It seems not accidental that Polish neo-fascists in government, Islamic extremists and 'divine wind' Japanese nationalists can all centre their narratives ultimately on national resistance to the Mongol horde.  But, today, the West in all its manifestations, including Communist [scientific materialist] China, is the Mongol Horde to many middling nations under threat from rapid global change.

Good People & Dark Forces

The German secret society is not sinister at all - its narrative myth is attractive, even sexy in its way.  I loved it - as noble fantasy.  Wiccans and most neo-pagans, too, love nature and the rest of humanity in a way that is wholly benign.  Jewish and Islamic cultures have rich magical aspects that are only now being explored in any depth in the West.  I could go on - neo-paganism is largely a positive and benign force in the world.  But we have to be on guard ... because traditionalism and paganism are not the same thing.  The attempted appropriation of the latter by the former when it switches out of Judaeo-Christian mode is something to be very wary of in the covens and moots of the world.

Out there, there are people that are frightened.  They see their identity under threat.  They see changes that they cannot adapt to.  They are looking for crutches.  Whether it be the 'leaderless resistance' strategies of terrorism migrating from Christian Identity to extremist Odinist circles and on to Al-Qaeda or the national manipulation of folk religions like Shinto, we have to stop being naive about the connexion between religion and politics in general and the possibility of the manipulation of new religious thinking in particular.  

These new religions are emerging because of anxiety and the failure of the old religions.  Scientism, Dawkins' aggressive atheism, liberalism and the Enlightenment are not meeting their needs.  It is a small step to the politicisation of this rage and anxiety by unscrupulous politicians.

The Warning from History

Even the history of the secret society is its own warning from history - romantic pagan-inclined men of good faith were displaced by the appropriation of German culture by something that even Hitler considered absurd, the potty neo-paganism of Guido von List, of Karl von Wiligut, of the Ahnenerbe and of Heinrich Himmler.  Once that madness and its equally mad pseudo-science was discredited, two generations of Germans dared not explore the dissident ideas at the very heart of this and other societies.  To talk of Ragnarok was to imply that such thinkers wanted to bring it on rather than see it as an alchemical metaphor.

What is troubling is who might be rehabilitated and who might not as we go deeper into the current century.  This could be the world of Savitri Devi, of Julius Evola and Miguel Serrano.  Athough some of these thinkers (notably Evola) may have things of value to impart if only in stimulating debate, they can be potentially very dangerous thinkers indeed in free societies - if they remain unchallenged.  If the Wiccan world of Gerald Gardner, currently the home of liberals, greens and feminists, is ever captured by the world of Evola, many good and honourable people will be moths burnt in the flames - especially if those attracted to the spirituality of faux-tradition are sucked into the politics of resistance to the modern world.  We must all consider ourselves on watch ...