Instead of a Thesis: A Short Letter Against Humanism
It is in my estimation that the following appear as the central contradictions of humanism, which in turn have led to our crisis of culture and identity:
1) We are forever in flight, and as such there can be no grounding upon which form may find its herald. We have appeased Fate through our survival rites, and released Doom from the turning of her broken axis.
2) The apostasy of the spirit ensures that we are in opposition to ourselves—so rather than circling in the muse of memory we become servants to a God of the Barrel Organ.
3) The academy is nothing more than an instrumentarium of the mind; that greatest of Acephali to which no one dares speak, let alone bare a libation.
4) The whole of society is consumed by its extrication of the Old World, and within this disgorgement all rites have become a succession of our waiting to heave ourselves over the bridge and into the vastness of the bog.
5) In turning our backs to the God of Fortune, whom we had once cared for as our kin, we have encircled ourselves as spectral Gods of Death in fear of the lines of old saints—who stand before us, daggers drawn within this enclosure. Our skin powdered ghostly white as our lips are forever embalmed into crimson.
To accept these things, first of all, is no easy matter. And the greater task for our spectral race is to find the shield to which we shall draw against a haunting enemy—unknown to the harrows of the monstrous, and invisible to the rest of us. Its monstrous weapons have turned us as Maenads: we conjure the sparagmos of our own being, setting their elements within the vitality of our organs; once born of earth and the primordial gods. There can be no easy answers here, and anyone who says otherwise is merely stroked by this terrific flailing into hackles.
However, as something of a toss of crust against a murder of ashen crows, I propose the following:
i) We must set ourselves in search of a new home; even if this means exile, or having to endure the doom-lit asceticism of wandering. As the perfidious path has already been set before us, there is no choice in either case. Witches wait in the ditches and hollowed trees, in darkness and light, turning the hand-mills of our crafted ruin—even the greatest among us have sipped from their concoction in triumph over fear. And in this doomed hut we gamble with the cutting of thread which binds us within the inescapable cloak of Atropos.
ii) The theological turn, which is lapping at the banks of these roads of flight, can be seen neither in the humanist nor religious spirits known to us. The Gods are eternal. We, and our religions, are merely interpreting them and attempting to cultivate our being within their laws. A new series of myths for our age must be created in keeping with this unfolding spirit. Anything else is hubris.
iii) To wage a spiritual war against armies of the Acephali we are compelled by necessity to take a wholly other approach: the amateur woodworker in construction of ash-framed ordnance shall be our guide. But such a guide can only be an augury, for our heroic struggle must find the tool to which the Janus-faced seeks out its own self-destruction. And in the final journey we must endure the ruins as Hecate turns away from us, her torch and sword shrouding itself in the distance.
iv) The Leviathan may endure beyond all attrition, rending itself within the bodies who resort to cannibalism amidst the desecrated. Our response cannot be that of a Machiavellian rebuilding. We must instead stare into the eternal devouring set upon the world by Cronus; at these pillars of desecrated Caryatids; into that Aegis more enduring than the gaze of Medusa—until our sundered eye once again turns to sight. Only then may the creations of stone be left to heal.
v) Within these subsets of laws it is necessary that we return a hierarchy to the figures of religion. But our tales of the gods can never be viewed in place of the Gods themselves—and, as such, the myths shall not become the rending of their being within worldly law. The cosmos is forever beyond us, and the Great Father, Chaos, shall return us to that chasm of the Cosmomachy before we can even come close to its end. Even lesser Gods may destroy us in our mere appearance beyond this world—just as they have turned on one another against time and worlds of the past. Only a theology in depth can hold out against the mobilised lunacy of humanism.
Here we are in that final moment of the Iron Age, and we must not falter before this field—upon which Erebus begins to shake the earth into night. Sing within this great darkness, of that enduring which overstretches our being into new worlds.
1) We are forever in flight, and as such there can be no grounding upon which form may find its herald. We have appeased Fate through our survival rites, and released Doom from the turning of her broken axis.
2) The apostasy of the spirit ensures that we are in opposition to ourselves—so rather than circling in the muse of memory we become servants to a God of the Barrel Organ.
3) The academy is nothing more than an instrumentarium of the mind; that greatest of Acephali to which no one dares speak, let alone bare a libation.
4) The whole of society is consumed by its extrication of the Old World, and within this disgorgement all rites have become a succession of our waiting to heave ourselves over the bridge and into the vastness of the bog.
5) In turning our backs to the God of Fortune, whom we had once cared for as our kin, we have encircled ourselves as spectral Gods of Death in fear of the lines of old saints—who stand before us, daggers drawn within this enclosure. Our skin powdered ghostly white as our lips are forever embalmed into crimson.
To accept these things, first of all, is no easy matter. And the greater task for our spectral race is to find the shield to which we shall draw against a haunting enemy—unknown to the harrows of the monstrous, and invisible to the rest of us. Its monstrous weapons have turned us as Maenads: we conjure the sparagmos of our own being, setting their elements within the vitality of our organs; once born of earth and the primordial gods. There can be no easy answers here, and anyone who says otherwise is merely stroked by this terrific flailing into hackles.
However, as something of a toss of crust against a murder of ashen crows, I propose the following:
i) We must set ourselves in search of a new home; even if this means exile, or having to endure the doom-lit asceticism of wandering. As the perfidious path has already been set before us, there is no choice in either case. Witches wait in the ditches and hollowed trees, in darkness and light, turning the hand-mills of our crafted ruin—even the greatest among us have sipped from their concoction in triumph over fear. And in this doomed hut we gamble with the cutting of thread which binds us within the inescapable cloak of Atropos.
ii) The theological turn, which is lapping at the banks of these roads of flight, can be seen neither in the humanist nor religious spirits known to us. The Gods are eternal. We, and our religions, are merely interpreting them and attempting to cultivate our being within their laws. A new series of myths for our age must be created in keeping with this unfolding spirit. Anything else is hubris.
iii) To wage a spiritual war against armies of the Acephali we are compelled by necessity to take a wholly other approach: the amateur woodworker in construction of ash-framed ordnance shall be our guide. But such a guide can only be an augury, for our heroic struggle must find the tool to which the Janus-faced seeks out its own self-destruction. And in the final journey we must endure the ruins as Hecate turns away from us, her torch and sword shrouding itself in the distance.
iv) The Leviathan may endure beyond all attrition, rending itself within the bodies who resort to cannibalism amidst the desecrated. Our response cannot be that of a Machiavellian rebuilding. We must instead stare into the eternal devouring set upon the world by Cronus; at these pillars of desecrated Caryatids; into that Aegis more enduring than the gaze of Medusa—until our sundered eye once again turns to sight. Only then may the creations of stone be left to heal.
v) Within these subsets of laws it is necessary that we return a hierarchy to the figures of religion. But our tales of the gods can never be viewed in place of the Gods themselves—and, as such, the myths shall not become the rending of their being within worldly law. The cosmos is forever beyond us, and the Great Father, Chaos, shall return us to that chasm of the Cosmomachy before we can even come close to its end. Even lesser Gods may destroy us in our mere appearance beyond this world—just as they have turned on one another against time and worlds of the past. Only a theology in depth can hold out against the mobilised lunacy of humanism.
Here we are in that final moment of the Iron Age, and we must not falter before this field—upon which Erebus begins to shake the earth into night. Sing within this great darkness, of that enduring which overstretches our being into new worlds.
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