Here are some of my notes and incomplete thoughts from my first time working my way through Revolt Against the Modern World. It’s a big book, it took a long time, and yet many of the references are lost on me and will require much re-reading. There are entire chapters I feel I’m only barely grasping, which I will have to go back and re-read many times over before I can integrate.
What I do know, though, is that it was a great read.
This is what justifies the very existence of literature.
The fall of a civilizations is not caused by a reduced population, adverse events or the “corruption of morals” in the bourgeois sense, or by the mixing of races. These things are mostly effects, not causes, even if they do slightly compound the issue. Although I haven’t been able to find the passages this comes from, Evola says that Nietzsche makes the point that a preoccupation with morals is a sign of a culture in decline. That this preoccupation is a lamenting of the loss of implicit morality, and an attempt to replace it with an explicit, but corrupted morality.
The far-Eastern tradition especially has emphasized the idea that morals and laws in general, in a conformist and social sense, arise where virtue and The Way are no longer known.
He then quotes Legge’s translation of chapter 38 of the Dà odéjÄ«ng: “Thus it was that when the Dao was lost, its attributes appeared; when its attributes were lost, benevolence appeared; when benevolence was lost, righteousness appeared; and when righteousness was lost, the proprieties appeared.”
He says the fall of civilization comes from the exhaustion or death of a society’s spiritual race or divine spark from above. When the king and his descending hierarchy are no longer divine.
Rites, institutions, laws, and customs may continue to exist for a certain time, but with their meaning lost and their virtue paralyzed, they are nothing but empty shells. Once they are abandoned to themselves and have become secularized, they crumble like parched clay, and become increasingly disfigured and altered despite all attempts to retain from the outside, whether through violence or imposition, the lost inner unity. As long as a shadow of the action of the superior element remains, however, and an echo of it remains in the blood, the structure remains standing. The body still appears endowed with a soul, and the corpse […] walks, and is still capable of knocking down obstacles in its path.
When the last residue of the force from above, and of the race of the spirit is exhausted, in the new generations, nothing else remains. There is no longer a river bed to channel the current that is now dispersed in every direction. What emerges at this point is individualism, chaos, anarchy, a humanist hubris and degeneration in every domain. The dam is broken. Although a semblance of ancient grandeur still remains, the smallest impact is enough to make an empire or state collapse, and be replaced by a demonic inversion. Namely with the modern, omnipotent leviathan. Which is a mechanized and totalitarian, collective system.
On the requirement of spiritual virility placed upon the church after she desecrated the regal function:
The religious view, typical of Christianity, however, did not allow for anything of this sort. From Pope Galazius I onwards, the Church’s claim was that since Christ had come, nobody could be king and priest at the same time. Despite her hierocratic claims, the chrurch does not embody the virile, solar pole of the spirit, but the feminine lunar pole. She may lay claim to the key, but not to the scepter.
Because of her role as a mediatrix of the devine, conceived theistically, and because of her view of spirituality as contemplative life, essentially different from active life (Not even Dante was able to go beyond this opposition), the Church cannot represent the best integration of all particular organisations. That is to say, she cannot represent the pinnacle of a great homogeneous ordinatio ad unum capable of encompassing both the peak and the essence of the providential design that is foreshadowed according to the above mentioned view in single organic and hierarchical political unity.
In Rome, […] a woman, far from being equal to man, was juridically regarded as a daughter of her own husband (filiae loco) and a sister of her children (sororis loco).
Regarding regality’s fall from it’s traditional supremacy, and it’s domination by the priestly class, beginning the lunar age.
If we go from Egypt to Kalia and Assyria, we will find an even more distinct version of the theme of the southern civilizations and of their materializations and alterations. In the more ancient substratum of those people, which was constituted by the Sumerian element, we find the characteristic theme of a primordial heavenly mother ruling over various manifested deities, as well as the theme of a son whom she generates without the need of father. This son was sometimes represented as a hero or as a god still subject to the law of death and resurrection. In the late Hittite civilization, the goddess overcame the god and ended up absorbing the attributes of the god of war by presenting herself as an Amazonian goddess. In such a civilization, there were also plenty of eunuch priests and armed priestesses of the great goddess.
The yearly humiliation of the King in Babel, when he laid down his regal insignia before the statue of the God, put on the robes of a slave, and implored the God’s mercy by confessing his sins, is characteristic of this dominance. He was even flogged by the priest who represented the deity.
Re-read this. Completely understanding his categorization of Christianity as a fall, and it’s part in Rome’s fall was tough.
The modern form of Dionysysm that we see is actually much lower than the actual Dionysysm of the past, because it contains no invocation of or reference to the sacred, and therefore no invocation of or reference to its balance with the rest of the Pantheon.
The warrior cast eventually lost its high position and gave way to democracy, capitalism, and the rule of the mercantile class. Democracy naturally leads to a situation where the merchants, the Masters of gold, sales, and opinion-making, which are the chief skills of all in business, become the de facto rulers. It is no different to grant Coca-Cola rule over the minds of the demos, than it is for any convenient politician. The process is the same. When you put voting power among the people who are natural slaves, you actually only give power to those who have the most resources to control them.
In the aesthetic dimension, a shift occurred from a symbolic sacred art, closely related to the possibilities of predicting future events and magic, the first cast, to the predominance of epic art and poems, the cast of the warriors. This was followed by a shift to a romantic, conventional, sentimentalist, erotic, and psychological art that is produced for the consumption of the bourgeois class. Until finally, new social or socially involved views of art, begin to emerge to advocate an art for the use and consumption of the masses.
In the world of the final caste, it is no longer the need that requires the work. It is the work that requires the need. The work must continue, and so it must be fed demand, economic demand. We must serve the existence of the work by feeding it demand, no matter what it does to the human spirit. Because otherwise, we will be punished with either invasion from a more economically powerful nation, or mere unemployment.
[…] the superman idea, which is Nietzsche at his worst.
Interesting. I should interrogate his other writing on this point.
He hints towards Riding the Tiger at the end. I must read that too.