This is a response to the ongoing debate about my Wednesday post ‘Part of the System’.
I can’t weigh in on the issue Thankmar and Vlad Tepes debate because I woke up racially until after half a century of existence, and never had time to read in-depth the authors Thankmar or Vlad mention (e.g. The Edda, compilations of stories related to Norse mythology, and what scholars debate about it). But even from my ignorance of these classics, I can contribute my two cents.
Recall what on pages 149-156 of my book Daybreak I wrote about Johann Sebastian Bach in the context of what Thankmar says: Christian propaganda. I think that in what I wrote there is the key to this matter.
Let’s think about Hitler. He was indeed initiated spiritually with Richard Wagner, as Savitri well saw in her book. But when I saw my first Wagnerian opera I was surprised that, at the end, Tannhäuser repudiated Venus and invoked the Virgin Mary! Wagner acted as a transitional bridge between a purely Christian art (like Bach’s St Matthew Passion) and an art that, although still inspired by Christianity, already has pagan elements, like Tannhäuser or Parsifal.
In other words, we must be tolerant of these ‘bridges’. When the Third Reich was already underway, Richard Strauss, a fanatic Wagnerian, even left behind the Christian tail that Wagner still suffered from, and composed the symphonic poem I like best of his, Thus Spake Zarathustra, his opus 30. Strauss himself acknowledged that that symphonic poem was ‘freely inspired in Nietzsche’ and he also composed some operas. (Many years ago I was lent the visual DVD of Strauss’ Elektra, based on the Greek myth according to Sophocles’ tragedy.)
So, considering that musically Strauss was heavily influenced by Wagner, and that Hitler himself also was a fanatic Wagnerian, why not be tolerant of bridges? Ultimately, that bridge, from the Christian Bach to the half-pagan Wagner, lead to Strauss and eventually to us (as a child and pubescent I listened a lot of times to the LP we see on the left). It could even be argued, as I do in the featured post, that Hitler and Rosenberg themselves could be bridges to an even more refined NS than the one they promoted (an Aryan Jesus, etc.).
Because of the majesty of the music, I can enjoy Wagner’s Parsifal without being much bothered by the Christian inspiration precisely because it already represents a breakthrough, or bridge, to our side of the Wall.
7 replies on “Bridges”
I don’t know if it was clear what I meant above but it is something like the following:
The Edda or even LOTR can have transitional value to our side of the Wall as long as the passerby doesn’t get stuck in the middle of the bridge (or tunnel, to use the metaphor from my featured post).
There is tremendous inertia or magnet from the south side of the tunnel—Xtian ethics—, but normies, among whom I include ‘neo-normies’ (recall that Hunter Wallace once defined himself that way), require bridges or tunnels. It is impossible to cross the Wall without them, so I am very tolerant of Hitler’s infatuation with Wagner, the Edda, or that some Nazis imagined that Jesus was semi-Aryan, and so on.
I am only intolerant of those who get stuck in the middle of the bridge for life and no longer want to cross it (which is why I have been as sarcastic about the racial right as Gonzalo Lira was about people in Western power).
Thank you, C.T., for this clarification!
It might indeed be true that even cultural products as ‘magnetized’ by Christianity as Wagner’s “Parsifal” could, at least for some individuals under the right circumstances, turn out to be of instrumental value in bringing said individuals nearer to the psychological Rubicon. What I am highly sceptical of, though, is that anyone could be swept across this boundary stream by them; and after crossing it—and from his pagan self-portrayal I take it that Vlad would claim to have done this—one should not be in need of them any longer, nor should one feel the need to deny their basic Christian defectiveness: their instrumental value being exhausted after all, even if one would maintain to have crossed the psychological Rubicon with them (at the bottom of one’s field pack, already half-forgotten, I take it).
However, I think it is much more likely that one will go under ladened with such a load, for the psychological Rubicon is not known to let anyone pass who, before trying its waters, has not stepped out of the shadow of God.
Something similar has happened to Greg Johnson, who began his racial career in 2009 and 2010 by awarding excellent authors like Michael O’Meara and ended up de facto conservative.
By the way, do you think the Rubicon metaphor is better than the Wall metaphor? Recently I used the latter precisely so that the average normie visiting the site would have a pop-culture image of crossing the Wall (as in the first minute of this video: the first scene of the first episode of the first season of Game of Thrones).
I think that depends on our target group: if it is semi- or neo-normies (regular normies would hardly find their way near this site anyway) of the younger generation, the Wall metaphor will surely be more intelligible simply by virtue of their mass media acculturation; if it is superior free spirits of a more classical bend, then the Rubicon metaphor will hit harder simply by virtue of its belligerent and decisionist import.
I, personally, prefer the latter; it is also more appealing or ‘tempting,’ at least to my sensibilities, for what lies beyond the Wall and the Rubicon, respectively? An inhabitable frozen wasteland on the one side—and on the other: Latium’s fertile soil, beautiful river nymphs, and, above all, the high-reaching walls of Rome!
Yes, well: but that’s precisely because the Jews Daniel Brett Weiss and David Benioff, the directors of Game of Thrones (GoT), betrayed Martin’s novels, where the conditions north of the Wall aren’t as arctic as in the television series.
Over the last few years I’ve noticed that visitors don’t like my GoT-related metaphors, but unlike Julius Caesar and his Rubicon, the idea of knowing what really happened in the historical past has delighted me even in fiction that has nothing to do with Martin’s cave. For example, the past-viewing machines in Clarke’s Childhood’s End destroyed religions simply by visually showing the religions’ real past.
And we need the semi-normies to know what really happened so they can finish crossing the bridge / tunnel / river (for example, the semi-normies who believe that Jesus existed or who ignore that Christians destroyed the classical world).
Without a doubt there is an argument to be made for the Wall metaphor, especially if knowledge about the past is to be our highest virtue.
What I want to point out, though, is that going beyond the Wall and into the wilderness would not suffice to reach said knowledge as the semi-normie would still have to find and enter the cave of the Three-Eyed Raven first—and then accept the knowledge imparted to him there. And, as exponents of psychological insight, you as well as I should be well aware of the phenomenon of denial rather often seen in weak and feeble minds when confronted with the ugly truth (for that truth was beautiful is a Platonic myth, not to say lie): and the historical truth is indeed ugly—ugly perhaps even beyond compare!
And even if our semi-normie was of able mind to take in the ugly truth, what are the odds that in this day and age—the Kali Yuga, mind you—he will not be brought down to his kness by it, utterly alone with his newly acquired forbidden knowledge, and reel straight into nihilism? Did not Bran himself end up “the Broken?” Plus, is it really wise to adopt a metaphor wherein a cripple ends up as king? Is that not an echo—more than an echo—of an, at least to us, all-too-familiar tune now some two thousand years old: about “the last shall be first” and a mythical king of the Jews with a crown of thorns on his head?
In short, knowledge about the past may not suffice to stand tall against the tides of the present day—to say nothing of wading through this murk and mire towards the dry and high ground of the future!
(Of course, as you will only all to easily have recognized, it is again the metaphor of the Rubicon—which may indeed, at its deepest layer, be conceived as a Heraclitean metaphor—that speaks from these words of mine.)
What you say at the beginning reminded me of what Robert Morgan recently replied to me in one of The Unz Review discussion threads:
Regarding Bran the Broken reflecting the crucified, the metaphor, at least as I use it, has a very distinct and autobiographical twist (click on the words in red in this paragraph and you’ll see what I mean). I delve more into this subject in the final pages of my third autobiographical book. For now, here’s what one YouTubber had to say about Bran:
Link to my transcript: here.