“…The main motto of the forest rebel is ‘here and now’: passing into the Forest here and now, freedom here and now, death here and now, action here and now. The Forest is in principle everywhere: in cities, in abandoned places, in deserts, on the ship entwined in the vine. The forest rebel dwells at the center of Hell, fearing neither death nor shipwreck.
The concept of the forest rebel is consonant with the ideas which Evola expounded in his Ride the Tiger. Evola cites the ancient myth that if a person meets a tiger in the jungle, he must saddle it and hold on tight so that the tiger cannot throw him off. Only when the tiger weakens and can no longer carry the person can it be killed. For Evola, the tiger was Modernity and the person in question is the lone Traditionalist standing among the ruins. Fighting Modernity (and Postmodernity) is about saddling the tiger, i.e., dwelling in profane society while at once using its means and breakthroughs in one’s favor so as to, at the key moment of relaxation, inflict a fatal blow to the ‘tiger.’ Evola rightly pointed out that this could turn out to be a long-term perspective. Evola distinguishes the differentiated person who can withstand life in a world without the Sacred and, most importantly, comprehend the absence of the Gods. The differentiated man is he who connects with the transcendent directly from his essence, bypassing the instances of the external world, i.e., estates, the church, parties, and the State. We might add that ‘riding the tiger’ is an even more difficult task in Postmodernity. If in the myth cited by Evola man encounters a real tiger, a real beast in the jungle, then in Postmodernity the Pagan Traditionalist might find this tiger drawn as an illustration, as a set of pixels, or as not a tiger at all. In other words, grasping onto Postmodernity like a tiger means catching the thinnest hypnotic veil which Postmodernity casts upon things and simulacra, making them into something they are not. Do not let thyself be fooled – this is the pledge of survival in the fight against the ‘tiger.’
The ‘forest rebel’ and the ‘tiger rider’, like ‘inward migration’ and primitivism, are special topics and strategies for Traditionalists…They appeared as conceptualizations of the events of the first half of the 20th century when great hopes were pinned on the collective identities of ‘race’, ‘nation’, ‘aristocracy’, ‘proletariat’, etc. All of the latter proved incapable of conquering or overcoming the liberalism and bourgeois capitalism which they stood up against…
Literal exodus from society is one form of the ‘forest passage’, but of much greater importance is the existential and value-based attitude towards the whole surrounding world. One can be in the very center of the technological and semiotic flows of Postmodernity while absolutely not belonging to it, instead being ready to blow up everything, to pass into the Forest here and now…”
