I don’t often comment in this newsletter about what are commonly called “current events.”
The quotidian political back-and-forth is entirely too banal, temporal, and transitory to be of any real interest to me; it is the most contingent and materialistic aspect of a world that is already irretrievably gone in contingency and materialization. Even so, I cannot help but make a few contemporary observations in this week’s issue—if only because the urgency is so great, and the hour is so late.
Some weeks ago, I came across a rather fascinating article by the author Rod Dreher, which appeared in The American Conservative. This Mr. Dreher, it appears, is a man of some religious and spiritual conviction, though he suffers from that uniquely American disease of unseriousness and restlessness, as manifested by the fact that he capriciously and serially converts from one Christian faith to another—from Protestant, to Roman Catholic, to now Eastern Orthodoxy, if I remember correctly—which, if nothing else, attests to a pathological inability to commit. He is also apparently inclined to pettiness and pusillanimity.
But his instincts, from time to time, serve him rather well in his criticisms of the modern world, though he labors under the unfair burden of a poisonous liberal education—as we all do—and it is this intellectual malady that seems so often to lead him astray. In any case, that is a personal observation, and largely irrelevant to the subject matter of this article; but the point I wish to make is that this Mr. Dreher, inadvertently or otherwise, hits upon a very important subject in the abovementioned article, which is of inestimable significance to the current state of world in the closing years of the Kali-Yuga.
Mr. Dreher’s article is entitled “Three Worlds of Evangelicalism and The Gods’ Return,” and it is a rather lengthy lament on the fact that Christianity—the uniquely European manifestation of Tradition—has been dethroned in the West, and has essentially been forced underground. That is unquestionably a true statement, for although Christianity is for now tolerated—barely—in the totalitarian Empire of Nothing, of which America is at the heart, the Tradition has been all but smothered and fatally extinguished by the Counter-Tradition.
Intriguingly, however, Mr. Dreher proceeds to mention a book called Return of the Gods by a Jonathan Cahn; now, I have never encountered this book, nor heard of its author. But in Dreher’s telling, the book makes a case that the old gods of the Near East have reappeared; for although they were cast into the outer darkness by the advent of Christ—the progenitor of the Christian tradition and the quintessential manifestation of eternity and timelessness in the non-eternal and temporal world—they were not banished forever.
And it is apparently Cahn’s contention that the demonic elder gods have found fertile new ground for worship and adoration in America, which has forsaken its connection with the Tradition, with Christianity, and with God:
“Cahn points out that the priests and prophets of ancient Israel were constantly contending with the rival gods of the Near East. The Israelites were always being tempted to abandon worship of the true God in favor of Baal or other demonic entities worshiped as [divinities] by other tribes of the region. Cahn’s view (and mine) is that these false gods were actual spiritual entities, but demonic. He points out that whenever the Israelites abandoned the Lord, and began to worship these demonic entities, God punished them.
“Cahn’s claim in this book is Jesus Christ sent all these demonic gods into civilizational exile. It’s not that they ceased to exist, but that they did not have the power over civilization that they once did…
[…]
“…Cahn argues that these deities—as demonic spiritual entities—did not cease to exist. In fact, he argues that they are coming back under different names, or under no particular theological name at all. He says that the de-Christianization of our society in the twentieth century has brought back all the old demons, and many more. Return Of The Gods centers on Cahn’s belief that three particular Ancient Near East gods—Baal, Ishtar, and Molech—have now been enthroned, in some sense, over the post-Christian West—and that the West (the United States in particular) is going to face the same fate as ancient Israel when it whored after false gods. It’s a more compelling case than you might expect.”
Indeed it is.
Dreher goes on to associate the three ancient Oriental demon-gods with signal aspects of modern American society: Baal, with its rampant greed and materialism; Ishtar, with its sexual obsessions, its degeneracy and depravity, its transgenderism and “gender fluidity;” and lastly Molech, with its thirsting after the blood of innocents and children in the widespread abortion and mass-killings that are so appallingly and inextricably a part of our societal fabric.
Dreher concludes his article with a quote from Cahn’s book, which is worth reproducing here:
“‘The gods brought judgment and destruction to Israel. Could America likewise be in danger of judgment and destruction? Both nations had been dedicated to God at their inception, both had turned away from God, both had followed the gods Baal, Molech, and the goddess.
“‘But America had gone further. It had become the world’s primary vessel for the return of the gods. It had become the world's chief proponent of materialism, the worship of prosperity, and money, sexual immorality, pornography, abortion, homosexuality, transsexuality, and the alteration of gender. America had singlehandedly resurrected the goddess’s midsummer festivals and processions, which now covered the world.
“‘America had hallowed and championed the sign of the rainbow, not only within its borders, but around the world. To take the sign given of God’s mercy in the wake of judgment and turn it against the ways of God is to call upon oneself a judgment with no mercy.
“‘… America has turned away from God and now follows after the gods. To what then will it lead? It must as well, in the end, lead to destruction.”
Now I reiterate that I have not read Mr. Cahn’s book, but the arguments presented in it—at least according to Mr. Dreher’s second-hand rendition—are not new to any perceptive Traditionalist; we are indeed mired in the Kali-Yuga, the Iron Age, and it is only to be expected that the old gods would return.
In fact, I have mentioned before that René Guénon explored this very matter in his unexampled masterpiece Le Règne de la Quantité et les Signes des Temps, particularly when discussing the materialization of this latter-day world, and how the hardening of human hearts and minds led to a corresponding spiritual “encystment,” whereby we became dissevered from the superior world, and yet very much open to the inferior world and those entities—“gods” some might say—that inhabit it.
The “shell” that a materialistic and scientistic Western man erected about himself, all unknowingly, in recent centuries and especially in the wake of the Enlightenment, was more or less sufficient to protect him from inferior subtle forces…even if it had the deleterious effect of also leaving him totally sejunct from superior subtle forces. But we are now entering a phase of the cycle when that shell is beginning to show cracks and multiplying fissures—but only in the downward direction. The activities of the modern West, of the United States, and its all-encompassing anti-traditional Empire, have only further opened us to the influences of the Abyss:
“…because the ‘descent’ has not yet come to an end, the ‘shell’ must necessarily remain intact overhead, that is, in the direction of that from which humanity need not be protected since on the contrary only beneficient influences can come that way; the ‘fissures’ occur only at the base, and therefore in the actual protective wall itself, and the inferior forces that make their way in through them meet with a much reduced resistance because under such conditions no power of a superior order can intervene in order to oppose them effectively.1 Thus the world is exposed defenceless to all the attacks of its enemies, the more so because, the present-day mentality being what it is, the dangers that threaten it are wholly unperceived.
“In the Islamic tradition these ‘fissures’ are those by which, at the end of the cycle, the devastating hordes of Gog and Magog will force their way in, for they are unremitting in their efforts to invade this world; these ‘entities’ represent the inferior influences in question. They are considered as maintaining an underground existence, and are described both as giants and as dwarfs;2 they may thus be identified, in accordance with what was said earlier on the subject, and at least in certain connections, with the ‘guardians of the hidden treasure’ and with the smiths of the ‘subterranean fire,’ who have, it may be recalled, an exceedingly malefic aspect; in all such symbolisms the same kind of ‘infra-corporeal’ subtle influences are really always involved. If the truth be told, the attempts of these ‘entities’ to insinuate themselves into the corporeal and human world are no new thing, for they go back at least to somewhere near the beginning of the Kali-Yuga, a period far more remote than that of ‘classical’ antiquity, by which the horizon of profane historians is bounded.”3
And what part does the United States, and indeed the entire anti-civilization of modernity, have to play in this opening of mankind toward the inferior subtle influences, the “entities” that clamor from below for admittance to the human world? That is where things become interesting.
We must turn now to the ideas of another “Traditionalist” (though that appellation must be used reservedly when referring to this thinker), the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, who has been much in the news of late, and is often referred to—inaccurately, or so I am told—as a kind of “Rasputin” figure or shadowy intellectual vizier to Russia’s Valdimir Putin.
In any case, if the United States represents, in Guénon’s words, a kind of “far west,” and is now the widely acknowledged leader of the modern project—which broadly encompasses the agendas of the “Great Reset,” transgenderism, trans- and post-humanism, the unquestioning worship of evolutionism as a putative vehicle of transcendence, and the many other proliferating heresies of modern scientistic gnosticism—then it is fair to see the reappearance of the old gods in this country, under whatever name they now go by, as the natural dénouement of modernity.
And this, in turn, gives great weight to these words of Dugin, abstracted from an interview published in The Great Awakening vs The Great Reset, in which he declares that the ultimate end of modernity, and its materialist philosophy, is the destruction of humanity and all life on earth—is, in other words, nothing more than a preparation for the reign of the Antichrist:
“Before, it was just a black caricature of traditionalists against progressivists, because progress always affirmed that we are fighting for the liberation of humanity, for life on Earth, or human beings and freedom. Now appear a group of more progressive, more modernised, more futurist thinkers. ‘No, not at all. To be human is fascism. To be human is to impose the subjects on the objects…’
“They have arrived on the other side of the object. Where, supposedly, should be the void of nothing, they are discovering another subject. They are called the idiot gods of Lovecraft—the Old Ones—the figures that are beyond the objects, but at the same time inside of them. So the objects are liberated from the human subject, from humanity, and they open their hidden dimension, which is the real Devil. Object-oriented ontology is a kind of premonition or foreseeing of the advent of the philosophical Devil. So the philosophical Devil is here on the other side of the objects, and he appears little by little in academia, in gender studies, and that is the next step after analytical philosophy, which has prepared the territory for this non-human way of thought—artificial intelligence that could exist without humans and without life on earth.
“So with object-oriented ontology, we’re dealing with the real truth, not with a lie. For the first time, modernity has told the truth about itself. What was before was a lie of modernity. Modernity lied to everybody. ‘Oh, we’re in favour of humanity. We’re in favour of life. We are trying to liberate human beings and nature from the transcendental fascist God.’ That was a lie and not in favour of humanity but against humanity and God. The main idea was to liberate the Devil from the chains with which he was fixed in Hell. This was the liberation of the Devil, not of man, and now comes the moment to liberate the Devil from humanity and life…
“So for traditionalists, modernity was not neutral. Modernity from the very beginning was a satanic creation, and that is the main traditional line. Now there appear among the most progressivist philosophers schools of thought that say the same, but in favour of Satan. It is not Aleister Crowley or black masses or LaVey—the real black magic is modern science and modern culture. Modern civilisation is a kind of preparation for the advent of the Antichrist, and Islamic tradition identifies it as Dajjal. Christians see it as the Antichrist. I think that this appeal to Lovecraft, to black magic and to the extermination of mankind and nature is disclosed by Nick Land as the real nature of science and modernity as well, and this is why it serves the Great Awakening.”4
So it is in the anti-civilization of modernity, in America’s Empire of Nothing, that the demon-gods have awakened from their ages-long slumber. And perhaps this is why, Dugin concludes, the birth-throes of what he calls the “Great Awakening”—the movement of resistance against the satanic counter-hierarchy of the “Great Parody” that rules the world as the cycle comes to a close—are most violent in the United States: “…that is why [the Great Awakening] is coming from within the United States, that civilisation where the twilight of liberalism is thickest. It is a cry from the centre of hell itself, from that zone where the black future has already partly arrived.”5
As a final note, I will mention in passing the recent contretemps involving the Spanish haute couture clothing manufacturer Balenciaga, which has so bestirred what the Chaldean Brothers would call ἡ ἀγέλη (“the herd”) or the College of Seth οἱ σκοτεινοί (“the sightless ones”) to unwonted wrath. I mean, of course, the intimations of pederasty, and the occult symbolism and iconography alluding to the very “old gods” mentioned in Dreher’s article—including, notably, Baal—that were clandestinely coded into the overpriced couturier’s recent photographic and advertisement campaigns.
Many have wondered what it all means, and what these people were up to; most, either naturally oblivious or conditioned to ignorance of spiritual symbology and the occult war, simply chalk it up to a desire to “push boundaries” or to be “subversive.” But one wonders what is “subversive” about such behavior, in an anti-civilization that is the very epitome of Subversion; in modernity, the only possible subversive act is to adhere to a regular tradition, or to participate in a regular initiatic chain. No, what we see with Balenciaga is quite the opposite: it is a sign of the times, and it is what it appears to be—the placation and propitiation of the demon-gods of old, who have indeed returned, and found a most propitious home and a most complaisant class of celebrants and hierophants in the modern world.
How could it be otherwise? The widespread infanticide, the parasitic battening of the senile and vitiated elderly upon the vitality of the youth—for the young and innocent have ever been the richest sacrifices to the evil ones—to say nothing of the degeneracy, the perversion, the castrations and genital mutilations redolent of the rituals of Magna Mater and Attis, the almost alchemical creation of vast quantities of fake and fraudulent “wealth” in cryptocurrency schemes…yes, these are indeed the unmistakable signs of the times, and they are incontrovertible proof that many human beings are active, if unwitting, participants in the Counter-Tradition and the Counter-Initiation.
That is a difficult thing for many “rationalists,” steeped in the miseducation of modernity, to accept; such notions are dismissed and traduced as “conspiracy theories,” which of course they certainly are, as they could not be otherwise. But that does not, of course, invalidate their truth. Harder still is it for such people to believe that the resolute left-wing materialists and evolutionists—for these are indisputably the sorts of people behind the Balenciaga campaigns—could be worshippers or devotees of the ancient gods.
But here, as in so much else, René Guénon exposes the true nature of the agents of the Counter-Tradition and the Counter-Initiation:
“…to what extent are the people who most fully represent the ‘counter-initiation’ effectively conscious of the part they are playing, and to what extent are they on the other hand but the tools of a will surpassing their own and therefore hidden from them, though they be inescapably subordinated to it?…the limits between the two points of view from which their action can be envisaged is necessarily determined by the limits of the spiritual world, into which they can in no way penetrate; they may possess a knowledge of the possibilities of the ‘intermediary world’ as extensive as anyone cares to think, but this knowledge will nevertheless always be irremediably falsified by the absence of the spirit, which alone could give it its true meaning. Obviously such beings can never be mechanists or materialists, nor even partisans of ‘progress’ or ‘evolutionists’ in the popular sense of the words, and when they promulgate in the world the ideas which these words express, they are practicing a conscious deceit; but these ideas concern only the merely negative ‘anti-tradition,’ which for them is but a means and not an end, and they could, just like anyone else, seek to excuse their deception by saying that ‘the end justifies the means.’ Their error is of a much more profound order than that of the men whom they influence and to whom they apply ‘suggestion’ by means of those ideas, for it arises in no other way than as the consequence of their total and invincible ignorance of the true nature of all spirituality; this makes it much more difficult to say exactly up to what point they may be conscious of the falsity of the ‘counter-tradition’ they aim at setting up, for they may really believe that in doing so they are opposing the spirit as manifested in every normal and regular tradition, and that they are situated on the same level as those who represent it in this world…”6
In short, the agents of the Counter-Tradition and the Counter-Initiation in the modern world are legion, and many of them are unconscious of the fact or are, at the very least, the mere instruments of other, far more terrible forces that are acting through them to bring about the reappearance of monstrous inferior influences in the world:
“The logical sequence here would be to consider in the first place the more or less ‘determining’ part played by the actual agents of the whole modern deviation, since the intervention of inferior influences really represents a new phase in the said deviation, and fits in exactly with the sequence of the ‘plan’ by which it is brought about; it would clearly be necessary to seek in some such direction for the conscious auxiliaries of the malefic forces, though the extent to which they are individually conscious of what they are doing may actually differ greatly in particular cases. As for the other auxiliaries, those who act in good faith then, because they know nothing of the true nature of the forces involved (thanks to the recently mentioned influence of the modern spirit) are never anything but mere dupes, though this does not prevent their activity from being proportional to their sincerity and to their blindness; these auxiliaries are already virtually numberless…”7
Nothing is by accident nor by mistake, and the brief, perhaps not-so-inadvertent glimpse of the “Great Parody” in this whole Balenciaga affair is not something to be overlooked, no matter how much its authors wish it to be so. It is of a kind with other hallmarks of our catastrophic downfall and spiritual declension, from the acceptance and even heartfelt agitation for infanticide, to the sexual confusions, castrations, mutilations, and financial chicanery of our age.
When the enemy tells you his plans, and names the master he serves, you had better listen to him.
And so if a man may act as an instrument of the true agents that are behind the modern deviation, so may an entire nation—even an entire civilization. This is the predicament that the United States finds itself in, as well as the Empire over which it presides, and the many Western nations that fall within its ambit. As Dreher and Cahn hint at, America and the broader civilization of which it is a part has turned its back on the Tradition and on God, wherefore a judgment is now inevitable:
“Modern civilization, like all things, has of necessity its reason for existing, and if indeed it represents the state of affairs that terminates a cycle, one can say that it is what it should be and that it comes in its appointed time and place; but it should nonetheless be judged according to the words of the Gospel, so often misunderstood: ‘Offense must needs come, but woe unto him through whom offense cometh.’”8
As for the Counter-Tradition and the Counter-Initiation, I shall explore these topics in some greater detail in the coming weeks…
There is, incidentally, a great deal of—no doubt fortuitous—coincidence between Guénon’s conception here of “superior” and “inferior” forces battling over the destiny of mankind, and the situation in the Edwardian English author William Hope Hodgson’s science-fictional masterpiece The Night Land (1912), in which the last remnants of mankind who dared to venture into the earth’s far-future, nightmare landscape were sometimes fought over by good and evil “powers.” There is, undoubtedly even if inadvertently, a great deal of metaphorical and allegorical potency in that novel—certainly from a Traditionalist perspective, if nothing else—and which has yet to be adequately explored; perhaps I shall undertake that task myself in some future post, or even a lengthier monograph.
Guénon’s “entities” and “inferior influences” can be identified, of course, with the seemingly increased prevalence during these latter days of sightings of what are termed “paranormal” phenomena, including even so-called “cryptids” and UFOs (or, in the updated parlance, “UAPs”); as far as “dwarfs” and entities that maintain a subterraneous existence, I need hardly recall the reader’s attention to my earlier article on the “Little People.”
René Guénon, La Règne de la Quantité et les Signes des Temps (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1945)[The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times (Hillsdale NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001), pp. 173-4].
Alexander Dugin, The Great Awakening vs The Great Reset (London: Arktos, 2021), pp. 55-6.
Ibid., pg. 29.
The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, pg. 277.
Ibid., pg. 176.
René Guénon, La Crise du Monde Moderne (Éditions Gallimard, 1946). [The Crisis of the Modern World (Hillsdale NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001), pg. 20.]