Hi. First of all, can you briefly describe to our readers your path of thought and the nature of your project, Svarte Aske, born in Russia but connected to many european and non-european countries?
Greetings!
«Svarte Aske» is our community of pagan traditionalists in Russia. It includes both the followers of the German-Scandinavian Odinism and the believers in the Slavic-Russian Gods. We also have many friends, like-minded people, and readers in different countries all around the World. Despite the different traditions and revered Gods, it is the philosophy of traditionalism that is our common ideological platform. In 2021, the community will be ten years old.
Traditionalism is in a sense a metalanguage for describing the era of degradation and decline of human being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein) in all aspects. Therefore, it is a suitable base for the Indo-European pagan traditions, and those facing the destructive Western, eurocentric logos of the Modern era. That is for everyone.
As part of my path, I develop this philosophy, its theological and applied aspects, relying on the German-Scandinavian Odinism and the hermeneutics of the figure of our supreme God Wotan. Our other colleagues turn to the Slavic Veles, to the tantric cults of Shiva and Kali, for example. I think in every tradition one can find the right figure and keys to express this truth in authentic language.
Our other project which we started to develop a couple of years ago, is «The Foundation for Traditional Religions». This is our think tank, which is engaged in the development of pagan theology, sociology, research, information gathering, and work with the media in Russia. Just recently we presented a description of our work in English: www.tradition.foundation/about_the_ftr
As always, we are open to work and cooperation in all areas.
In Polemos while describing the attitude of the ‘Pagan Traditionalism’ towards Modernity and Post-Modernism, you express though criticism towards ‘internet’ and the ‘world wide web’. Nevertheless, those instruments allowed different pagan groups to connect together in a way which was previously impossible. So, it is not possible to think of a ‘traditional’ use of technology, even in a partial way?
No, there are no options for the «traditionalistic» use of modern technologies in principle. Hence the quick and uncontested conclusion that all the ideas of so-called «archeofuturism» have nothing to do with either traditionalism or conservatism, or the European New Right.
I still belong to the generation that grew up without mobile communications, ubiquitous Wi-Fi access, and the Internet in general. For the younger generations, this is all an uncontested reality. Even in half-abandoned Siberian villages.
Yes, we use the Global Web and some of its tools, but not all. I propose to consider this as some objective unfavorable environment. As if we are the kind of people who live at the foot of a volcano or in a very bad climate. Our possibilities to control that is very low, people have long lost all control over technology, from a banal refrigerator to global control systems, Internet of Things, BigData, Data Politics, etc.
It can rightly be compared to addiction, but the situation is even worse. Today, not only people, ethnic groups, cultures, countries, but even ordinary things, like kitchen stuff, or animals and natural phenomena literally do not exist if they are not connected to the network or if they are somehow not built into digital surveillance. This is a radical pathological violation of our being-there (Dasein), which boils down to be-connected. To be is to be-in-online.
A layer of alienation is created between the being of the people, the being of a person, the being of the sacred, and many different natural landscapes (a plurality of Natures), which becomes a totalitarian mediator and arbiter of all that exists. It is a technique, that Heidegger called Gestell in its industrial, scientific, and economical global power. Hence one more conclusion that an independent, autonomous technique as «just a tool» is a myth. The Technique is the ideology of Modern and Postmodern embodied in concrete objective reality, and it will always, slowly or quickly, work to destroy any forms of the Sacred.
Therefore, everything that depends on communication networks, on energy and electricity, are the weakest points of the post-industrial civilization. But people, fascinated by progress, absolutely seriously believe that the End of the World will sooner happen than the power blackout. That is even the eschatology becomes something secondary in comparison with the violation of the boring mode of life of the das Man.
We should use the Global Web or other technologies as if we were handling a very dangerous, demonic substance. And in opposition to this immersion, we need to create stronger, closer ties and footholds in the real world, create our own centers, settlements away from cities, observe digital hygiene, etc.
Again, while talking about technology, you labeled biopolitics as a manifestation of the work of antitraditional titanic forces in this dark age. You also put the mass media manipulation of informations in the sphere of the ‘simulacra’, a term borrowed from Gilles Deleuze (Jean Baudrillard?) to define representations void of concrete reality. Which is your position about the ‘Covid-19 pandemic’ emergency, which is now the main political and mediatic topic of these days, and about the politics of vaccination?
I deliberately waited for the first six months or even a year to pass to see what would happen to this pandemic. In the spring of 2020, I saw many different conspiracies, scientific and geopolitical theories about what was going on. So, that what I think to this moment.
The virus itself, the disease itself, exists. Its mortality rate is very low compared to other pandemics. It doesn’t matter if this strain appeared in nature or is a leak of a biological weapon.
All the most important and essential events unfold not in the lungs of an infected person, but in the world of media, politics, and capital. This is infodemic. The pandemic has accelerated all processes for the large-scale implementation of digital control systems for the global population. If it hadn’t been for the pandemic, they would have found a different argument, as they used the hysteria around terrorism two decades ago. Arguments are secondary, their goals are primary.
The Covid-19 infodemic has given many global actors the necessary window of opportunity, arguments, and leverage for a breakthrough. One can name Klaus Schwab and his idea of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, his project called «Global Reset». We can name the Russian government and our main bank «Sberbank», which is involved in all this. People were subjected to mass training through the fulfillment of requirements, which is senseless from a sanitary point of view. Some countries have even introduced criminal penalties for failure to comply or doubts about their appropriateness. This is aimed at breaking the will, creative and even critical thinking, to gain biopolitical subordination of the bodies of citizens to the will of the elites. And the split of the «elites vs. peoples» — this is the main nerve of protests, left and right populism, around the World in recent years.
Finally, although the number of international flights fell sharply, tourism almost disappeared, the logistics of products were disrupted, etc., genuine globalism received a powerful boost. The people locked at home were forced to submerge themselves on the Internet, register on websites, create accounts, tie their finances to electronic wallets, work via the Internet, etc. Genuine globalization is the migration of the population into virtual reality, where it loses all the features of its ethnic cultures, turning into users, MMORPG players, consumers of left-liberal propaganda from Netflix, etc. And at the same time, all people are rigidly attached to the body of technology, to physical wires or wireless waves of networks. This is what I researched and described in the book «Tradition and Future Shock».
The Covid-19 pandemic has drastically reduced the timing of this process. Taking Russia as an example, I expected the installation of some Chinese-style control systems within the next ten years, but they were created and tested over the past year or two. And not only in Russia, but this is also a global process of destruction of the free world and the plurality of peoples and their cultures.
In your analysis of Post-Modernism, you consider the United States of America as the homeland of Post-Modernism and the centre of its diffusion. Now, in this historical phase we are seeing the emergence of a multipolar system, with the ascent of China as a new superpower. How do you judge this phenomenon? Your country, Russia, is often viewed here in Europe as an antagonist of the USA also on a civilization and ethical level. How do you judge this analysis?
America is a tabula rasa project. Here you can remember Jean Baudrillard and his philosophical travels in America.
Old Europe was moving towards the Enlightenment, towards the Modern. Through Rome, through Christianity, through the Middle Ages, through the Renaissance, and humanism. And the key definitions of the Postmodern situation are also reflected in Europe. Europe has a history, its millennia-old cultural background, deepest roots, and complex connections. America has none of this, hence the enormous popularity of the era of the Frontier and the libertarian pioneer, explorer, and adventurer who conquers the empty lands of the West (the Indians were not considered as humans, therefore they were considered as part of the fauna). And hence the huge problems with such an important part of life like Home. A huge layer of literature and horror films in the United States is devoted to demonic, sinister, and killing houses; Victorian mansions or houses that stand in Indian cemeteries. America is metaphysically homeless, rootless. Anything that is rooted in the native land (the native land of the Indians or the European roots of the colonists) is terrifying. Therefore, America immediately repels from the point to which Europe has degraded for centuries. If Europe has options, there are different faces, then America has only an emptiness inside, a plastic Hollywood smile and a melting pot. America is only a futurological project; it has no past at all.
This is one of the reasons why I do not understand American patriotism among heathens in the United States. A heathen from the US, especially from the most conservative middle America, inhabited by Germanic colonists, must seek roots and ways to connect with his true European homeland. And gradually eradicate the globalist identity of the «American Dream» in itself, up to migration back to Europe.
Let’s go further. China. China today is the same West. China has a Western socialist ideology, which in its era was the most progressive on the European part of the continent. China has a capitalist, global economy and consumer market. China is one of the technology and logistics leaders in the World. Yes, they have their own cultural specificity at the level of aesthetics and everyday life, but on all fronts, it is a continuation and embodiment of Western Modern metaphysics at the other end of the Eurasian continent. Therefore, the fight between the US and China is a battle within the West itself, within Modern globalism, within Gestell for who will be the main subject and conductor of globalization, technologization, and capitalism in the future.
After the Second World War, Martin Heidegger wrote that Europe was caught in the claws between America and the USSR. That both sides are the embodiment of the already dead Western metaphysics, and that there is no point in choosing between one or the other option. Today we are in the same situation, the world is clenched between the US and China, and they are both the same form of evil, acting under different masks and flags.
Now Russia. Russia is ruled by the same «swamp» that is used to describe the American Deep State (Drain the swamp). Despite the fact that the discourse about civilizational uniqueness has long become commonplace, no real steps have been taken in this direction. Only simulations and profanation. The conservative agenda has been successfully simulated for TV and vote conversion during elections, as well as for external propaganda for Western conservative audiences.
The financial elites in the banking sector and in the government are actively implementing the Klaus Schwab program, with amendments to the interests of the local special services. Russia has one of the best Internet coverage in the World and one of the cheapest Internet access. Cultural elites and young people are completely left-liberal and cosmopolitan, the State has completely lost entire generations. The ruling oligarchic stratum is only interested in improving tax policy and still controlling the citizens. Therefore, I am a complete pessimist about the future of Russia.
I support the idea of multipolarity, but I see no reason to consider the World as such. Each of the so-called «new poles» is engaged in the same thing: modernization of industry, economic growth, the establishment of Global or Glocal alliances, investing in development and progress, etc. In a word, this is still the same World of Modernity and Gestell, only more difficult than the period of the 1990s. Therefore, China or Russia differ from the West only cosmetically, inside we see the same set of bytes, program code, machine tools, consumer markets, exploitation, control, Western thinking, and culture. An analogy can be drawn to a computer on which two programs conflict over memory and processor access. But what difference does it make if each of the programs, in the end, is rigidly tied to one general technical support, to the «hardware»? As long as this tie and one common «hardware» exists, multipolarity is fiction.
Recently, the world of nordic paganism has been rocked by harsh arguments because of the pagan symbols showed by some of the Capitol Hill protestors. What’s you opinion on that? You’ve also expresse a negative judgement of tv series and movies with ‘pagan’ and ‘nordic’ themes. It is not possible that at least some of these products, even if embedded in the logics of the consumer society’, can positively spark an interest in their audience towards the quest for identity and native spirituality?
The character in Capitol Hill was an actor, this is already a known fact. But it was funny at least. Even better was the reaction from the camp of progressive LGBT pagans, Wiccans, and so on. They immediately called for a «fight against hatred» and worked out their agenda. The enemy clearly identified himself. Therefore, we generally support a rigid polarization within the pagan community into supporters of traditionalism, and opponents from among the supporters of secular, progressive, and rainbow pseudo-paganism.
A contemporary pop culture which appeals to paganism only generates nonsense. I have seen many people who became interested in paganism after successful TV shows or computer games. All of them, in the end, have not made any progress and most often find themselves a refuge among cosplayers and virtual weekend pagans. Why do you even need fantasy and TV series if there are original sacred texts, myths, songs, and sagas that can be made a guiding star of your life and destiny? But people prefer to just chew their food in front of the screen and look at a life they don’t even intend to live. The consumer of pop-cultural distorted paganism is our inner enemy, one of the worst.
From the very beginning, I have been and remain a supporter of the fact that the direct path to the sacred runs through extreme existential states of horror, tragedy, death, war, a delight from unearthly beauty, love, through a collision with the impossible, etc.
In your ‘Gods in the Abyss’ you engage in a complex analysis of the Germanic Logos, with continuous referenced to ancient germanic literature and Heidegger’s philosophy, delving around the Mistery of the Seyn-Vacuity. Can you describe how this path of thought connects to a broader European Logos, speaking to non-germanic europeans?
«Gods in the Abyss» from the very beginning was conceived as a work addressed to the Germans in general, and the followers of the German-Scandinavian pagan tradition in particular. I`m a descendant of Germans from Schwabia, so this book is about us and for us. Non-Germans can freely read, study, translate to better understand the Germanic peoples and their logos. Usually, most often we mean the continental Germans, the Deutschland, but we are talking more broadly about the Germanic peoples in general. About the pole of conservation of mythology in Scandinavia, and about the political and philosophical pole in the center of Europe. This book also offers a deeper look at the very essence of European history, to which the Germans made a decisive contribution, together with the Greeks and Romans. In the final chapters of the book, questions and problems are really go beyond strictly Germanic boundaries and affect Europe in general. It would not be superfluous to add to this that the influence of some of the later ideas of the Italian thinker Julius Evola can also be traced in the last chapters. And through all two volumes of «Polemos» too.
You define yourself as a practitioner of the ‘Left Hand Path’, and you define this approach to spirituality as the fittest for this Dark Age. This term has been often misused to define spiritual paths totally incompatible with traditionalism. Would you like to tell us your definition of ‘Left Hand Path’?
It is worth remembering that one of the «fathers» of traditionalism Julius Evola devoted a lot of attention, articles, and books to the Left-Hand Path: about Dionysus and Tantra.
Incompatible with traditionalism is the pity teaching of A. Crowley and his followers, as well as Satanism such as LaVey, New Age, etc. This is the problem of the Western Left Hand Path, that it is still fascinated by anti-Christian images and did not grow out of the cradle of Kabbalah and spiritualism of the XVII-XX centuries.
What we are talking about has to do with Advaita and Tantrism, with Dionysus, with the dark enigmatic sides of the cult of Odin. We can recall the early French concept that the sacred is not opposed to the profane, but is a single whole, which includes both light and dark poles. In the era of the Iron Age, the light pole was obviously destroyed to the level of ruins, but the dark one remained. The task is to break through to the One (Greek ἕν), that is, to one’s true self (Selbst) through the passage through darkness and the lower pole. Having avoided all the same simulacra and just vulgarity. I believe that in the book «Gods in the Abyss» I was able to clearly show and formulate what I mean by the example of the Germanic Logos.
This year we will see the publishing of the second volume of ‘Polemos’ in English, together with your new book ‘Tradition and Future Shoсk’. What do we have to expect from these texts?
The second volume of «Polemos» continues and develops the methods outlined in the first part. It is devoted to the most difficult issues: the relation of paganism to the Abrahamic religions, illustrations of how pagan thinking from the inside overcomes the limitations of monotheism and creationism. The most important topic is the question of Eros and, for example, the denial of all forms of feminism and gender perversion. Leftists inside paganism often try to justify their pathologies through opposition to Christianity (for example, there is even a queer interpretation of Odin). I show that there is no reason for this within European paganism.
Another topic that I touched on briefly is the political dimensions of modern paganism. This is a very voluminous area, I believe that within the framework of pagan traditionalism, an absolutely independent political direction should be developed that meets the interests of the plurality of pagan traditions and peoples. In short, I see no reason for pagans to support states, parties, and regimes that do not openly and sufficiently express their ideas, interests, and goals. This runs counter to the current situation where conservatives are trying to unite and act legally, — well, okay.
The volume concludes with a more detailed answer to your previous question about the nature and different forms of manifestation of the Left-Hand Path teachings in the Indo-European context.
Regarding the book «Tradition and Future Shock: Visions of a Future that Isn’t Ours», then it exists as a manuscript in Russian. It will not be published because the pagan community is not ready for this text. From the extensive preface and table of contents that are available in English, it is clear that the book expands on some of the topics covered in the second volume of «Polemos» and during our discussion. This is a frontal criticism of industrial and post-industrial civilization, the new European concept of truth, technology, progress, archeofuturism, and right-wing accelerationism. Study of transhumanist projects in culture, science, and the reality around us. And also the necessary reading of the ideological spectrum of primitivism and simplification (simple living, plain people) from the position of sacrocentrism and pagan traditionalism.
As I said, our themes and ideas concern many and many representatives of various Indo-European traditions, therefore we invite everyone who shares our positions and our eschatological attitude to cooperate to dialogue and joint projects.
