The Genealogy of Evil, Part II

Further Thoughts on the Origins of the Counter-Tradition

In last week’s issue, we discussed some of the more, shall we say, outlandish ideas about the origins of the Counter-Tradition, particularly as conveyed in the occult histories of the College of Seth.

But from the perspective of the Traditionalist, none of these appeals to palaeogean and pre-existing races—nor the need to convoke the sinister machinations of non-human or perhaps even non-terrestrial or other-dimensional beings—are even necessary. Admittedly, I haven’t the knowledge or multi-generational experience in paranaturalism that the College of Seth and other, similar societies claim for themselves; still, I am a simple man, and in many ways the admonition of William of Ockham is best—baroque complexity and intricacy is always to be avoided.

For the Traditionalist, the Counter-Tradition is inherent in the reality whereof we are a part. It “must needs come,” as must evil in all its many forms; it is woven into the warp and weft, so to speak, of all history, and its initial thread may be isolated as a single red strand that continues from the Kali-Yuga of the previous cycle, and which comes gradually to dominate the fabric of our cycle in its waning age, appearing as a sinister scarlet design that overwhelms the overall beauty of the pattern with its lurid imagery.

This is, of course, the deeper significance to be found in the third chapter of Genesis, where the inkling of evil and the first germ of the Counter-Tradition is present, as the Serpent, in the Garden of Eden—right from the beginning, ab origine, ἐχ ἀρχῆς:

“And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:

“But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

“And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:

“For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

“And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

“And the eyes of them both were opened…”¹

But even the Counter-Tradition is beautiful in its own way, because necessary. As the world falls further into involvement with matter, and with materiality of every kind, and the Regnum Quantitatis—the Reign or Kingdom of Quantity—impends, the Counter-Tradition manifests itself according to an inevitable law: rather like the law of gravitation, with which it bears much in common, at least analogically. Like a ray of light falling into a black hole, the elapse of time itself is dragging us into a singularity of sorts, a world dominated by that materia signata quantitate—undifferentiated matter pure and simple, and utterly devoid of quality—that is dreamt of by the materialist physicists, and which is properly the domain of the Reign of Quantity.

It is in this world that the Counter-Tradition, the Counter-Initiation, and the “Great Parody” shall reign supreme; but it is also a world the depths of which time will never plumb, for pure quantity, devoid of all quality, cannot exist, anymore than can pure quality, devoid of quantity.

Even so, the law must be obeyed, and the Counter-Tradition must prevail for a little while, and the way for the Reign of Quantity must be prepared. This is what we see in the world around us, and in the myriad tableaux of history, whose trend is ever downward, despite what the most ardent progressives would have us believe.

And this brings us to the aim of the Counter-Tradition, and the shape of things to come—that is to say, the shape of the Reign of Quantity, in which we are living, and which may be compared to the Reign of the Antichrist. For the work of the materialists and the worshippers of quantity was well executed; and the advent of the Reign of Quantity—at least in its more perfect form—is not to be sought for in 1789, nor in 1917, but rather in 1776. For the American Republic was the reification of that materialistic, scientistic, and thoroughly economized and eventually nihilistic utopia first conceived of by Francis Bacon in his The New Atlantis (1626).

The Counter-Traditional utopia—some might say dystopia—conceived in this book was eventually realized in the New World in the final quarter of the eighteenth century (and there is a legend, among Theosophists, that all great events in occult world history appear in the final quarter of each century). The founding of the American Republic was couched in lofty language—the language and rhetoric of liberty and freedom and the sloughing-off of the unbearable fetters of Tradition—but it was really always the subversive language of the Counter-Tradition, informing the creation of the first germ of what was to become the future world empire of subversion and inverted Tradition.

It is the United States, and not the French Republic or the Soviet Union, that has managed to build an Empire of Nothing—an empire populated by the swarming hordes of the “new barbarians”—whose black tentacles engulf fully half the world, if not indeed much more, and which is striving to someday “wither away” amidst a welter of integrated polities in a truly global empire or world state, adapting the noxious metaphor of the “melting pot” to the world at large. For as I explored in last week’s article, it is in the United States that the terrifying visage of the Counter-Tradition, in all its nefandous hideousness, is most truly bodied forth.

And what is the next phase of the Counter-Tradition? That is not so difficult to see, for those who have eyes to see. There is a book, an informal sequel of sorts to Bacon’s The New Atlantis, which is called—rather unimaginatively—The Newer Atlantis (2012). I know that the author of this book—though it is not common knowledge by any means—is associated with and perhaps initiated into some of the blackest Counter-Traditional and Counter-Initiatic orders and organizations of our time, including the Order of the Red Glyph, the Paladins of the Left-Hand Path, and perhaps even the Fraternitas Chnoumis.

But what matters is that this book is, like Bacon’s before it, nothing more than a forecast or prevision of a Counter-Traditional utopia, a futuristic vision of what the Reign of Quantity is envisioned to be by its partisans and slavish votaries. In this vision of the future, society is to be organized not merely around the ferreting out of the mysteries of matter or “nature,” but also of reducing all of existence and indeed humanity itself to a numbered, mathematized, and thoroughly schematized quantity.

The spiritual aspect of mankind is overlooked or dismissed entirely, and the species is cosmologically centered in an evolutionistic horizon that extends from simple matter to, presumably, the pure and god-like mentation of the far future. Society is entirely technocratic and materialistic, and human beings themselves are reduced to the materia secunda or materia signata quantitate mentioned by René Guénon—they are a putty or building block, of sorts, which is to be molded through elaborate forms of germ-line genetic engineering, as well as social and psychologistic manipulation.

In short, it is the goal of the Counter-Tradition and the Reign of Quantity—whether its agents are aware of this or not—to produce that human type and society that the philosopher Roderick Seidenberg aptly called “Posthistoric Man.” It is a human being in which the faculty of intelligence has become so routinized as to be unconscious; it is where the intellect converges with instinct to become something mechanical and reflexive, and mankind becomes nothing more than the mammalian counterpart of the invertebrate eusocial insects—the ants and bees and termites.

We can see the beginnings of this evil trend in the anti-civilization of our own time, but Seidenberg foresees that the advent of the Reign of Quantity will bring about the temporal apotheosis of this type of human. Seidenberg couches his ideas in evolutionist language, but they seem to be broadly in comportment with those of the Traditionalists; collectivism—whether communistic or of the liberal-democratic type—is part of the future trend toward the unification of mankind in a Reign of Quantity that will witness the extinction of all those qualities that made man what he was:

“The trend of events, however, is set, it would seem, irrevocably. Whether men choose to stand still or attempt to recover an earlier status, mankind is being ushered relentlessly through a series of unstable equilibria, through changing empires and mutable civilizations, toward an ever more stringently organized state…”²

It is clear to any thinking person that this is the case; and it is in the liberal-democratic, incipient world empire that this “stringently organized state” is attaining its most complete and odious form. And the inevitable culmination of this process will be in the creation of Seidenberg’s “Posthistoric Man:”

“The extent to which the formulations of intelligence may come to supplant the directive guidance of the instincts is virtually unlimited, from our point of view; and however different life may come to be in the far future from what it is today, the integration of society will be effected, we may be sure, on the basis of conscious procedures and organized efforts…The organization of society will unquestionably proceed until its final crystallization shall have been achieved ecumenically, because of the relationship of this trend with the inherent dominance of the principle of intelligence. But the process, once dominant, implies in turn a steady decrease and retardation of social change—the gradual slowing down of the momentum of history until, indeed, we shall be confronted by the inverse of our historic ascent in ever more delayed sequences of stability and permanence in the conditions of life. And thus, in a period devoid of change, we may truly say that man will enter upon a posthistoric age in which, perhaps, he will remain encased in an endless routine and sequence of events, not unlike that of the ants, the bees, and the termites. Their essentially unchanged survival during some sixty million years testifies to the perfection of their adjustment, internally and externally, to the conditions of life: man may likewise find himself entombed in a perpetual round of perfectly adjusted responses.

“Curiously, we seem to have returned, via the route of intelligence, to the very status from which man departed, aeons ago, under the undivided dominance of the instincts. For here, too, in the conditions of the future, the organism appears suspended within set responses, following interminably the selfsame patterns until altered by the slow processes of biologic mutations…Thus we are led to perceive that history itself, however inclusive we may conceive its sway, must be counted in reality as a high transitional era of relatively short duration in comparison with the slumbering eternity that preceded it, or the ever more static ages that will follow upon it. Consciousness will gradually evaporate and disappear in this posthistoric period, very much as it condensed step by step into ever sharper focus during man’s prehistoric era. In the ultimate state of crystallization to which the principle of organization leads, consciousness will have accomplished its task, leaving mankind sealed, as it were, within patterns of frigid and unalterable perfection. In this consummation we perceive the essential meaning of the posthistoric period of man’s development.”³

Seidenberg, along with the author of The Newer Atlantis and a whole host of evolutionists and materialistic utopians, foresees in genetic manipulation the vehicle for the attainment of this “posthistoric period” of man’s civilization:

“…we may thus confidently predict that the direction of [mankind’s] genetic aims will coincide and reinforce its now deeply established trends. In this redoubled adjustment man may achieve a supreme fitness as his self-willed goal merges imperceptibly with his predestined condition. If freedom is indeed an acceptance of necessity, he will surely approach his fate with a bland sense of divine accomplishment. Unerringly, his drive toward conformity will guide him into an ever more static condition of fixity and permanence; and the perfection of his adjustment will come to be synonymous with a slow but ultimate fading out of his consciousness. His triumph will be complete, and by that very token his awareness, no longer necessary, will evaporate, leaving only a fixed routine of actions whose perfect suitability will erase all memory of thought. Man will have attained a crystallized phase of complete and universal organization.”⁴

The end of all this relentless organization is in a future that any Traditionalist must contemplate with dread, and one must imagine that even its most rabid partisans—the starry-eyed evolutionists and progressives of today—could not regard it with any degree of complacence, were they truly aware of that miserable and pitiable end toward which all their striving tends:

“That the vast drama of human history should eventually find its denouement in the sterile perspectives of a world at least analogous if not similar to that of the social insects may seem to us at once forbidding and incredible. But that, moreover, such an apparently blind and aimless state of fixity should finally crown the triumph of intelligence seems like a bitter and ironic anticlimax to all our efforts, reducing the long travail of our development to a kind of ultimate reductio ad absurdum. Against the high faith of man in an ever wiser and more meaningful dispensation, such a fate smacks of a contradiction in terms; and behind the confusion and doubt aroused by the contemplation of such an end, we cling desperately to our faith in another destiny. Proud and confident in our attainments, conscious of representing the very pinnacle of all living forms, we prefer to face an inscrutable future of uncharted regions and unexplored potentialities to one that at best will grant us only a final sense of security and adjustment, like a prepared niche in the scheme of things. But quite apart from our Promethean zeal, we are led to inquire whether the forces that have carried man to his high eminence will sustain him in his quest toward an ever more heroic future, or whether, reaching the zenith of their trajectory, they will deposit him, a deflated being, among the discards of evolution. All living forms appear, sooner or later, to attain a fixed status, or, having run their course, to become extinct.”⁵

This would indeed be a grim and unbearable dénouement to the human story, and it is without question the fate toward which the machinations of the totalitarians, leftists, and relentless materialists would lash us. These are the people who are the most inextricably immersed in matter and quantity; they are the principalities of the Reign of Quantity, of the Iron Age, of the Kali-Yuga, and for the nonce the entire world and the very “arc of history” moves at their behest.

But there is no need for despair. Their time must soon come to an end, obeying the decrees of the very same law that swept them into an intoxicating, but temporary, period of power and uncontested empery. For the Traditionalist, there can be no “Posthistoric Man,” just as the Reign of Quantity can never reach the fullness of its potential; these things can only ever be ideal, but never will they be reified in our universe. A rectification will intervene before that can happen; the pattern, borrowing from our earlier metaphor, will be undone, and all the strands unloosed preparatory to the weaving of a new one.

In other words, our cycle must come to its close, and the future will be that of a Regnum Qualitatis—a Reign of Quality, so to speak, corresponding to the world of the instinct or “Prehistoric Man” in Seidenberg’s threefold division of human history.

A new cycle will begin, but even in that future Golden Age will lie latent the spoiling thread of its own Counter-Tradition—whether it be the work of Icke’s “Reptilians,” or the “Serpent Men” and the “Elder Race” of the College of Seth, or even just the snake in the Book of Genesis—which will mature and metastasize as the cycle evolves, marring the perfection of the Golden Age with the disorder and confusion of the Iron Age, and ever striving toward the futile triumph of the Reign of Quantity in its own Kali-Yuga…

1. Gen. 3:2-7.

2. Roderick Seidenberg, Posthistoric Man: An Inquiry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950) [New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1974, pp. 24-5]. This book is a fascinating, wide-ranging, and thought-provoking inquiry into the future of mankind, and it is highly recommended.

3. Ibid., pp. 179-80.

4. Ibid., pp. 186-7.

5. Ibid., pp. 194-5. I think it’s worth pointing out that the author of The Newer Atlantis, with whom I am slightly acquainted (though he is unaware of my Traditionalist sympathies and virulent hostility to his ideas), and the manuscripts of whose work I have had occasion to proof, has written another, unpublished work of futuristic history that is far larger in scope than his earlier book. It chronicles the future evolutionary history of mankind, and includes a lengthy segment that details a stage in human development that is very similar to Seidenberg’s “posthistoric age.” The genetically-engineered humans of this stage are in total stasis, in a society that endures unchanged for millions of years within a massive “arcology” at the South Pole. Even so, the author goes on to imagine that two defective members of this society, atavistically male and female, are exiled to the uninhabited outside world, and are able to reproduce, eventually giving rise to new human species in which evolution is resumed. The chronicle records the future evolution of life on earth for further billions or even trillions of years; it all ends in some sort of quasi-mystical subsumption of all intelligent life in the universe—including humanity—within a kind of gestalt, god-like being, as such fantasies often do. That is a frequent heresy—the notion of a “god that evolves,” and which is limited and constrained within the world of Becoming, rather than a god that is Absolute, unfettered, and associated with the world of Being or Eternity. The absurdity of this heresy is amply demonstrated by René Guénon in the bravura ninth chapter of the second part of The Spiritist Fallacy. The reason I mention this here is because there seems to be a kind of law that these Counter-Traditionalists must abide by, and which compels them to make public their most odious beliefs, if one only knows where to look—a case in point being the recent matter of the “Balenciaga scandal.”