High Irrationalism and Far Right Politics
Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism & Nazi Survival (1992)Joscelyn Godwin The Magus of the North: J.G. Hamann & the Origins of Modern Irrationalism (1993)Isaiah Berlin Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (2004)Mark Sedgwick Politics and the Occult: The Left, the Right, and the Radically Unseen (2008)Gary Lachman
Although published by Adventures Unlimited which
tends not to be, shall we say, conventional in its authors (who cover
conspiracy, lost worlds, free energy and what-have-you), Arktos is a
serious and interesting account of polar mythology in popular culture,
in the history of science and in esoteric lore.
Joscelyn Goodwin
provides an intelligent and often wry overview that remains well within
scholarly standards. It is a valuable addition to that shelf in the
library that is dominated by the work of Goodrick Clark (of whom more in a later review) and it is a
useful guide to the fringe science and theosophical speculation of a
world now lost.
Given its hysterical conclusion in the exploits
of educationally challenged SS officers and demented neo-Nazi diplomats,
it is a world that we hope will never return. Hyperborea, Agartha,
Thule, Shambhala, the Hollow Earth - these are names to conjure with in
pulp science fiction, which is where they belong and should remain. The Magus of the North is minor academic work by the grand old man of British liberalism, Isaiah Berlin, but is an interesting account of an eighteenth century Lutheran
'irrationalist', J. G Hamann, whose ideas should not entirely be discounted and who
offered an imperfect but necessary critique of some of the enthusiasms of the
Enlightenment.
A useful addition to the intellectual history
bookshelf. Sedgwick's Against The Modern World explores the highways and by-ways of that mode of
thinking which brings perennialism, initiation into a tradition and
anti-modernism together to make a potent brew that has had effects on
areas as diverse as the academic study of religion (Eliade), Western
engagement with Islam (Guenon), Italian right wing terrorism (Evola) ,
Iranian Islamic thought (Nasr) and Russian politics (Dugin and the
National Bolsheviks) amongst many other zones of intellectual endeavour.
This is, in fact, fairly marginal stuff - traditionalism has no
real role in Political Islam, which largely derives from indigenous
rather than Western sources, and most of the political and intellectual
directions traditionalism has taken have ended up in dead ends or was manipulated by third parties
for more material ends (as the Kremlin manipulated Eurasianism). The dabblings of some with the SS, the Iron
Guard and Italian Fascism also indicate an inherent naivete about the
ways of the world.
Too many of the movement's gurus ended up
behaving like sad old gits looking to justify a tormented sexuality or
living in poverty for their ideas, half saint, half mad, all holy fool.
Perhaps only the French thinker Henri Hartung was able to use it as
constructive critique intended to bring balance to the modern world
without the intrinsic hysteria of most, though not all, other such
thinkers.
But this is still a very valuable monograph that adds important
detail (though not quite the analysis of its importance or lack of it
that I would have liked) to little known aspects of Western, Orthodox
and Islamic cultural and religious history. Nevertheless, the book does
require that you are already moderately well educated in both esoteric
and mainstream intellectual history. Gary Lachman has carved himself a niche as
popular historian of counter-culture. In his Turn Off Your Mind, a
critical view of Sixties counter-culture, he was not afraid to remind us
of the dark and even silly side of the Age of Aquarius. His general
stance is liberal but open-minded, steering a fine line between genuine sympathy for the
search for meaning in the irrational and an urbane anxiety about where
the irrational may lead once it leaves the commune and enters the wider
culture.
In his books, Lachman has placed counter cultural
thinking in a much wider historical context. We can now see it as a more
normal response to the world than we have assumed. He has, with perhaps
only very occasional slips into credulity, set the gold standard for
sympathetic yet critical rational description of these cultures. And he
has brought the conclusions of a wide range of more academic
investigators and thinkers to a much wider audience.
Politics
& The Occult looks at those who believe in 'occult' forces at work
in society and who then seek to act on society in accordance with them.
Lachman has decided wisely not to look into secret societies. There are
many other interesting books on such societies and on the mythology of
secret government. We recommend David V. Barrett's fair minded (perhaps
excessively so) A Brief History of Secret Societies which we reviewed
in Oracle magazine in 2008.
Some very serious
academic historians have been looking into the history of the occult as a
cultural phenomenon in recent years, notably the incomparable Nicholas
Goodrick-Clarke who has already been mentioned. They have been uncovering more and more about specific
groups at nodal points of history and society who have held occult
views. Awareness of these movements has been limited by one great truth
of history - the winners write it. Yet the pragmatic and materialist view of
history, indeed of existence as a whole, is always the winner because
it works.
This is not to say that there are not major triumphs
by irrationalist or half-rationalist movements - the triumph of
Christianity was that of one mystery religion over many, Communism had
many occult aspects in organisation and belief system despite its avowed
scientific materialism. Yet most occult interventions in politics are
literally against reason, attempts to mould reality through will or in
accordance with some dream-state, even if it is shared by many others. Irrational political forces either get crushed by reality (as National Socialsm did) or are forced to become 'real' in their administrative and economic arrangements (as the Catholic Church has done).
Lachman
owes a big debt to other writers and acknowledges that debt throughout.
He has clearly read deeply in the occultist tradition himself - whether
Swedenborg, Guenon or Evola. But the total picture he gives has to be a
little unsatisfactory to the reader through no fault of Lachman's. A
narrative of a nation may have discontinuities (we may call them
'revolutions') but there is still a continuous recorded tale - history being 'one damn thing after another'.
With occultists there is
rarely a proven connection between one set of occult interventions and
another. This either looks like the same phenomenon of resistance to the
prevailing current repeating itself in a parody of the 'eternal return'
or history degenerates into one of those stories where every occult
intervention is linked to its predecessor until the whole process
becomes a conspiracy theory in which the Hidden Masters can be traced
back to the dawn of time.
Lachman's book implies something
different (though he does not state this) - a series of genuine occult
interventions waxing and waning during key periods in history, rather
marginal in most cases but occasionally, like Zelig in the Woody Allen
film of that time, appearing at key points in history as more or less
important bit-players.
Are there links between one intervention
and another? Sometimes, sometimes not? What provides the link is not a
'Hidden Master' or a secret society but the literature that is left
behind by one generation to be rediscovered and used by another. Let us
take just three stories ...
* There is the Rosicrucian experience
which appears to be a reformation within the Reformation. It
represented an ideological faction that attempted (much like modern
neo-conservatives) to bend pragmatic politicians to idealist ends. They
may have persuaded the Elector of the Palatinate to undertake a
pre-emptive strike against the Vatican and the Habsburgs that was doomed
to fail on fundamentals but which may have contributed to the horrors of Central Europe's Thirty Years Wars (perhaps a lesson for us in watching hawks like hawks lest they do the same to us).
* There is the obscure Masonic
experience that was not merely linked to the Jacobite cause (this time
oddly in the Catholic cause) but resulted in the association of
continental Masonic activity with conspiratorial dissidence. This would
lead, amongst other things, to the destruction of 'working class' hero
Cagliostro and widespread fear and loathing of the Illuminati as well as the now-proven if exaggerated Masonic link to the founding of the USA.
*
There is the antinomianism of the Moravian Brethren and of Swedenborg
which, within the general Christian rhetoric of the day, anticipated the
sexual revolution.Although not sexually influential in its day, their thinking and that of other isolated dissidents evetually created a respectable past authority for later intellectual justifications for sexual freedom.
Yet these are all only minor parts of a much
bigger story. The Rosicrucians were only an incident in the struggles
between the Habsburgs and their enemies. The Jacobites were soon
marginalised, most Masons were thoroughly respectable and Masonic
influence was influential in the form the American Revolution took but
it did not cause it. As for sexuality, matters got more rather than less
repressed in the hundred and fifty years after Blake.
If we see
the occult as a back drop to revolt by those excluded and passionate for
change, then we see a shift somewhere between the blood-letting of the
French Revolution and the pessimism about the world of the second half
of the Nineteenth Century. One symbolic figure might be the socialist
Alphone Louis Constant who became Eliphas Levy as he discovered magic
and made his own disillusioned turn to the right.
Before this
time, occultists had represented light and liberation - typical figures
would be William Blake or Cagliostro who gave free health treatment to
the poor. Something happened at that turn. Occultists became not merely
conservative but reactionary. Jews increasingly became a problem
whereas, before, they were allies in the general emancipation.
Lachman
has pushed his agenda too far to ensure that he can refer to Campbell
(in passing), Jung and Eliade in this context. None of these were truly
occultists but Guenon's traditionalism, the Martinists and Synarchists
(no, these are not a myth) and Evola are more than on the boundary of
the occult. The most interesting figure - at the polar opposite of
enlightened humanist reformers like the Rosicrucian Andreae - is
indoubtedly Julius Evola. You can taste Lachman's grudging respect for
the most intelligent and dangerous thinker of the European radical
Right.
But perhaps it is not Constant-Levy but the manipulative
social-psychopath Weisshaupt who is the key figure in the turn. The
scare about the Illuminati, capable of over-turning all things for a
dream, not only affected the dynasts of Europe but, as modernisation and
industrialisation took hold, it scared the living daylights of the
educated middle class. Revolt against the feudal and the clerical, the
natural mode of political discourse for intelligent minor aristocrats
and rising middle class intellectuals, suddenly became a defence of
their status as priestly class against the collective.
Over and
over again, the common denominator in occult political action is an
attempted seizure of influence or power by a small group of the educated
from people perceived to be less bright than they are. This is the
arrogance of the frustrated middle. We have a political syndrome here.
Lachman's book gives us the raw material and references for further
research
Exceptions do not contradict the thrust of my argument.
The harum-scarum Theosophist movement with its passionate interest in
anti-imperialism and the 'progressive' counter-cultural movements of
Steiner, Ouspensky and others (where basic decency overwhelmed the
tight-arsed neurosis of the pessimists) took place in relatively free,
open and fluid societies. The latter thinkers would make their way West
as Europe closed up into various forms of authoritarianism.
Today
we have two competing 'occultisms' - a liberal individualist, almost
anarchist, dissent against the 'Man' (the machinery of government and
commerce) and a traditionalist and anti-Western tribal approach, based
on struggle, that owes a great deal not just to Evola but to Benoist
and, latterly, Southgate. Both can sometimes lay claim paganism but these two models of
the political universe could not be more different. I am sorry that
Lachman does not go more deeply into this.
I have only one major
disagreement with Lachman's analysis. I think he has got it very wrong
on where the 'next threat' comes from. He thinks that the 'occultist'
Christian Right represents the greatest coming threat to civilised
values. The threat may rather come from the undergrowth of Europe whenever economic recession bites. Europe is a Continent divided within itself,
caught between a friend it does not like (USA) and an enemy it needs
(Russia). It contains the seeds of nationalism and regionalist revolt in
every corner. Racism remains a hidden reality in most parts, certainly
compared to the United Kingdom, and populism is on the rise. There is even a
race against time by the New Right to establish its agenda before
manipulable migrants become bloc votes for the Centre and the Left.
How this will play out over the
coming years is impossible to predict but it is a safe bet that, in a
Europe where Berlusconi once modelled himself on Evola's 'uomo
differenziato', the next 'occult' strike will be from a revived Right
because only the revived Right has the appropriate cadre or elite
mentality and sense of some reality greater than the one the rest of us
live in. And only the Radical Right wants to insert the world of Spirit
into the very heart of practical politics. So far populism has kept occultism at bay and ensured that irrationalist theory is marginalised within the the true Far Right but irrationalism remains in place as QANON and other conspiracy modes of thought - not occult except in seeing the Establishment as occult, indeed seeing the occult as the dark side in yet another twist in acomplex and fluid story.
Joscelyn Goodwin provides an intelligent and often wry overview that remains well within scholarly standards. It is a valuable addition to that shelf in the library that is dominated by the work of Goodrick Clark (of whom more in a later review) and it is a useful guide to the fringe science and theosophical speculation of a world now lost.
Given its hysterical conclusion in the exploits of educationally challenged SS officers and demented neo-Nazi diplomats, it is a world that we hope will never return. Hyperborea, Agartha, Thule, Shambhala, the Hollow Earth - these are names to conjure with in pulp science fiction, which is where they belong and should remain.
This is, in fact, fairly marginal stuff - traditionalism has no real role in Political Islam, which largely derives from indigenous rather than Western sources, and most of the political and intellectual directions traditionalism has taken have ended up in dead ends or was manipulated by third parties for more material ends (as the Kremlin manipulated Eurasianism). The dabblings of some with the SS, the Iron Guard and Italian Fascism also indicate an inherent naivete about the ways of the world.
Too many of the movement's gurus ended up behaving like sad old gits looking to justify a tormented sexuality or living in poverty for their ideas, half saint, half mad, all holy fool. Perhaps only the French thinker Henri Hartung was able to use it as constructive critique intended to bring balance to the modern world without the intrinsic hysteria of most, though not all, other such thinkers.
But this is still a very valuable monograph that adds important detail (though not quite the analysis of its importance or lack of it that I would have liked) to little known aspects of Western, Orthodox and Islamic cultural and religious history. Nevertheless, the book does require that you are already moderately well educated in both esoteric and mainstream intellectual history.
In his books, Lachman has placed counter cultural thinking in a much wider historical context. We can now see it as a more normal response to the world than we have assumed. He has, with perhaps only very occasional slips into credulity, set the gold standard for sympathetic yet critical rational description of these cultures. And he has brought the conclusions of a wide range of more academic investigators and thinkers to a much wider audience.
Some very serious academic historians have been looking into the history of the occult as a cultural phenomenon in recent years, notably the incomparable Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke who has already been mentioned. They have been uncovering more and more about specific groups at nodal points of history and society who have held occult views. Awareness of these movements has been limited by one great truth of history - the winners write it. Yet the pragmatic and materialist view of history, indeed of existence as a whole, is always the winner because it works.
This is not to say that there are not major triumphs by irrationalist or half-rationalist movements - the triumph of Christianity was that of one mystery religion over many, Communism had many occult aspects in organisation and belief system despite its avowed scientific materialism. Yet most occult interventions in politics are literally against reason, attempts to mould reality through will or in accordance with some dream-state, even if it is shared by many others. Irrational political forces either get crushed by reality (as National Socialsm did) or are forced to become 'real' in their administrative and economic arrangements (as the Catholic Church has done).
Lachman owes a big debt to other writers and acknowledges that debt throughout. He has clearly read deeply in the occultist tradition himself - whether Swedenborg, Guenon or Evola. But the total picture he gives has to be a little unsatisfactory to the reader through no fault of Lachman's. A narrative of a nation may have discontinuities (we may call them 'revolutions') but there is still a continuous recorded tale - history being 'one damn thing after another'.
With occultists there is rarely a proven connection between one set of occult interventions and another. This either looks like the same phenomenon of resistance to the prevailing current repeating itself in a parody of the 'eternal return' or history degenerates into one of those stories where every occult intervention is linked to its predecessor until the whole process becomes a conspiracy theory in which the Hidden Masters can be traced back to the dawn of time.
Lachman's book implies something different (though he does not state this) - a series of genuine occult interventions waxing and waning during key periods in history, rather marginal in most cases but occasionally, like Zelig in the Woody Allen film of that time, appearing at key points in history as more or less important bit-players.
Are there links between one intervention and another? Sometimes, sometimes not? What provides the link is not a 'Hidden Master' or a secret society but the literature that is left behind by one generation to be rediscovered and used by another. Let us take just three stories ...
* There is the Rosicrucian experience which appears to be a reformation within the Reformation. It represented an ideological faction that attempted (much like modern neo-conservatives) to bend pragmatic politicians to idealist ends. They may have persuaded the Elector of the Palatinate to undertake a pre-emptive strike against the Vatican and the Habsburgs that was doomed to fail on fundamentals but which may have contributed to the horrors of Central Europe's Thirty Years Wars (perhaps a lesson for us in watching hawks like hawks lest they do the same to us).
* There is the obscure Masonic experience that was not merely linked to the Jacobite cause (this time oddly in the Catholic cause) but resulted in the association of continental Masonic activity with conspiratorial dissidence. This would lead, amongst other things, to the destruction of 'working class' hero Cagliostro and widespread fear and loathing of the Illuminati as well as the now-proven if exaggerated Masonic link to the founding of the USA.
* There is the antinomianism of the Moravian Brethren and of Swedenborg which, within the general Christian rhetoric of the day, anticipated the sexual revolution.Although not sexually influential in its day, their thinking and that of other isolated dissidents evetually created a respectable past authority for later intellectual justifications for sexual freedom.
Yet these are all only minor parts of a much bigger story. The Rosicrucians were only an incident in the struggles between the Habsburgs and their enemies. The Jacobites were soon marginalised, most Masons were thoroughly respectable and Masonic influence was influential in the form the American Revolution took but it did not cause it. As for sexuality, matters got more rather than less repressed in the hundred and fifty years after Blake.
If we see the occult as a back drop to revolt by those excluded and passionate for change, then we see a shift somewhere between the blood-letting of the French Revolution and the pessimism about the world of the second half of the Nineteenth Century. One symbolic figure might be the socialist Alphone Louis Constant who became Eliphas Levy as he discovered magic and made his own disillusioned turn to the right.
Before this time, occultists had represented light and liberation - typical figures would be William Blake or Cagliostro who gave free health treatment to the poor. Something happened at that turn. Occultists became not merely conservative but reactionary. Jews increasingly became a problem whereas, before, they were allies in the general emancipation.
Lachman has pushed his agenda too far to ensure that he can refer to Campbell (in passing), Jung and Eliade in this context. None of these were truly occultists but Guenon's traditionalism, the Martinists and Synarchists (no, these are not a myth) and Evola are more than on the boundary of the occult. The most interesting figure - at the polar opposite of enlightened humanist reformers like the Rosicrucian Andreae - is indoubtedly Julius Evola. You can taste Lachman's grudging respect for the most intelligent and dangerous thinker of the European radical Right.
But perhaps it is not Constant-Levy but the manipulative social-psychopath Weisshaupt who is the key figure in the turn. The scare about the Illuminati, capable of over-turning all things for a dream, not only affected the dynasts of Europe but, as modernisation and industrialisation took hold, it scared the living daylights of the educated middle class. Revolt against the feudal and the clerical, the natural mode of political discourse for intelligent minor aristocrats and rising middle class intellectuals, suddenly became a defence of their status as priestly class against the collective.
Over and over again, the common denominator in occult political action is an attempted seizure of influence or power by a small group of the educated from people perceived to be less bright than they are. This is the arrogance of the frustrated middle. We have a political syndrome here. Lachman's book gives us the raw material and references for further research
Exceptions do not contradict the thrust of my argument. The harum-scarum Theosophist movement with its passionate interest in anti-imperialism and the 'progressive' counter-cultural movements of Steiner, Ouspensky and others (where basic decency overwhelmed the tight-arsed neurosis of the pessimists) took place in relatively free, open and fluid societies. The latter thinkers would make their way West as Europe closed up into various forms of authoritarianism.
Today we have two competing 'occultisms' - a liberal individualist, almost anarchist, dissent against the 'Man' (the machinery of government and commerce) and a traditionalist and anti-Western tribal approach, based on struggle, that owes a great deal not just to Evola but to Benoist and, latterly, Southgate. Both can sometimes lay claim paganism but these two models of the political universe could not be more different. I am sorry that Lachman does not go more deeply into this.
I have only one major disagreement with Lachman's analysis. I think he has got it very wrong on where the 'next threat' comes from. He thinks that the 'occultist' Christian Right represents the greatest coming threat to civilised values. The threat may rather come from the undergrowth of Europe whenever economic recession bites.
How this will play out over the coming years is impossible to predict but it is a safe bet that, in a Europe where Berlusconi once modelled himself on Evola's 'uomo differenziato', the next 'occult' strike will be from a revived Right because only the revived Right has the appropriate cadre or elite mentality and sense of some reality greater than the one the rest of us live in. And only the Radical Right wants to insert the world of Spirit into the very heart of practical politics.