Category: Beauty

In the 17th photograph of our ‘European beauty’ series, which I uploaded to this site today, we see a mountain backdrop in northern Italy (see my exchange yesterday about the locations that the photos represent). That Italian mountain may well have inspired Leonardo da Vinci for some of his drawings of the Holy Family, or the Annunciation with mountains in the background. It was a time when artists were almost compelled to paint pictures with religious motifs, although the angel of the Annunciation, beyond the Nordic and the hyperborean, is the absolute opposite of any Semitic profile. These are the antecedents of the nymphs that Parrish painted last century against the background of majestic mountains.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, when artists became independent of the patronage of the Church, they were finally able to admire the mountains and Aryan beauty from a more secular viewpoint. On a mountain excursion in 1739 the poet Thomas Gray, visiting the Grande Chartreuse, wrote: ‘Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and beauty’.

More famous for admiring nature were Goethe and poets like Coleridge and Wordsworth, and in painting Turner came to capture more abstractly the vital spirit of nature. While Constable painted the plains the poet Wordsworth was more associated with the mountains. I confess that Wordsworth’s leisurely, long solo walks in the English countryside prompted me to ask about prices for houses in Perth when I visited Scotland because that town was perfect for my long solo walks. Of course, it was only a fantasy as I have no money in the bank. Still, I cherished the idea of moving to a place where I could feel European Nature without interference from Gomorrah.

The inhabitants of Gomorrah may believe that by going to the gym they’ll be healthy, ignoring that a healthy body can only inhabit a healthy mind. It can only be obtained through the spirit of romantic poets and painters who understood, through their art, what Hitler would later understand through pantheism. The Aryan dissident who feels like Lot in Gomorrah and cannot afford a cosy cottage in the countryside should undertake the study of art in the solitude of his room, though unlike what Catholic Kenneth Clark told us, from the panentheist point of view.

This is one of the tremendous deficits of American white nationalism. Without the feeling of the numinous, it is impossible to awaken what Jung called the Self, as the full understanding of beauty is the royal road to a true racial awakening.