There are two types of modern pagans: atheists and pagans.[i]
All of us who come to rediscover the ancestral religious tradition that Abrahamism displaced do so in a bad time. Modernity and its so-called successor, post-modernity, create a fluid environment in which finding one’s spiritual bearings becomes an almost insurmountable challenge. Materialism is at the door constantly, everything becomes commodified, and the crassest aspects of life dominate in all spheres. It is, quite simply, a bad time to be a pagan.
And yet, amidst this Typhonian tumult, there are those who claim to keep the flame of antiquity alive. We must be very cautious when it comes to people of that sort. The times are bad, and everything is liable to become corrupted from the overabundant badness that surrounds us. With this in mind, those of us who possess, or aspire to possess, eyes yet clear enough to see things the way the ancients did, unmarred by the rot of modernity, must know to recognise when we are being deceived.
There are those who claim to worship the gods while putting more energy to modernist slander such as that Achilles and Patroclus were gay, and there are those who claim to worship the gods while saying that the ancient cults were really about eugenics, not devotion. Make no mistake: none of these two types is a friend to the one who wishes to restore the ancient traditions as they were. Both are modernist, and both, ultimately, are rooted in American rootlessness. The American liberal will distort history to wring out of it liberal humanist values where these do not exist, and the American racialist will say whatever it takes to get closer to the vision of playing eugenicist and flooding the world with blond babies (that will promptly stamp out millennia-old ethnic identities left and right). Both are manifestations of American deracination. Left, right—irrelevant modernist categorisations. Look behind them, and the American tide poised to swallow the world is the same, whether it dreams of making it a universal caffelatte colour, or a milky Ahnenerbe white.
The most common of the modernist heresies that plague modern pagans is the same, whether on the left or on the right, and that is applying modern ideas to the ancients. This takes many forms but the most common seem to be, first, the idea, clearly derived from Christianity, that gods are immortal persons with which mortals can establish relationships of a personal nature, and second, the idea that gods are forces of nature, not that, say, the sun is a manifestation of the god we call Helios/Phoebus, but that the god we call Helios/Phoebus is a manifestation of the sun in a purely nominalist framework. This maps rather neatly onto the view the ancients have bequeathed us about the extremes in religion. One extreme is superstition: undue fear of the gods; the other is atheism: denial of the gods and their presence. It would be unwise to take this parallel too far, but the basic form of it reveals something valuable to us, and that we should heed: the evils that the ancients identified are with us today, even as we take our first steps to restoring the right relations between the mortal and divine spheres after centuries of impious experimentations with alternative spirituality of the Abrahamic sort. Which of these two currents poses the greatest threat is a matter far from settled. I will perhaps counter the first form of impiety, no less dangerous—or perhaps more—at a later date.
Let me make clear that any attempts to turn our religion into a post-hippy cult where the gods "call on you regardless of the colour of your skin" represents no less of a terrible threat to tradition. Modern liberal American ideals will not be allowed to decree what shapes our worship is to take, nor will they be allowed to erase ethnic identities in the name of some Abrahamic ecumenist vision wearing the mask of pagan tradition. America is to keep its notions to herself. But here I would like to limit my focus on the second form of impiety, the purely race-centred atheism which seeks to subvert our efforts to return to the traditions of our ancestors.
These "biologists" are the most commonly encountered among the atheistic subversives within pagan spheres, provided one avoids the haunts of the more liberal types. People who see senseless archetypes in place of the divine and who see religion as nothing more than a tool to preserve racial characteristics. We could summarise this worldview in the phrase "every social phenomenon is a biological phenomenon", and with that phrase alone we would have an accurate enough picture. These types will often be encountered claiming that Plato stands at the head of the decay which "killed" Hellenism. This is the mark by which they can most easily be recognised, and we must know how to fight them, for they threaten our very existence and any hope that divine peace may again be established on earth.
One of the modern Internet cults that fall within this category are the so-called Apollonians, centred around someone going by the name Mark Brahmin. Seeing as these people are blasphemers who hubristically substitute worship of genes and evolutionary fitness for the pure worship of the gods, I will refer to them as Pseudapollonians. The name of Apollo, shining too bright to be beheld in the encosmic sphere, should never be associated with such low appetitive types.
These Pseudapollonians appear to be very standard neoNietzscheans, inspired primarily by a racial view of the world and their own post-modern spin on 20th century fascism. They recognise no power above clashing wills within the world of generation and have chosen Apollo as their symbol because he is the god who walks among the Hyperboreans. If this sounds like crankery of the Alfred Rosenberg type, that is because it’s nothing more sophisticated than crankery of the Alfred Rosenberg type. Yes, we are indeed dealing with people who sat down and looked for a blond deity that would serve their purpose. They set out to find "the most Aryan god", and settled on Apollo. The transparency of their impiety and materialist crankery shouldn’t be mistaken for harmlessness. They are skilled at propaganda and present a credible threat.
Their lies include a twisted web of fabrications that divide the deities to suit their debased purpose, with our traditional gods seen Euhemeristically as either Aryan or Semitic. Within this schema, Cronus is Yahweh, the god of the Jews. Hermes too, they see as a Semite. They reject the tradition of the Germanic peoples wholesale, which they base on the fact that, in its latter form, Germanic religion recognised Wotan as king of the gods. Since the Romans identified Wotan with Mercury, the Pseudapollonians declare Germanic tradition in the form that it came down to us a Semitic innovation. Their lies are many, and they form a complex picture, but the most important thing to keep in mind is that what they seek to preserve is a cult of Apollo as a cult of eugenics. Worship of Apollo then becomes nothing more than a tool to preserve and propagate Aryan blood. They assert that the ancients used the divine cults to maintain "racial health" within a materialistic framework, and that any honest worship of the gods as unities transcending nature, is superstition. In short, they seek to subvert Hellenism in order to transform it into nothing more than a natalist cult in the service of Aryan domination.
Their lies collapse if one logs off Twitter for a day and goes through the texts they are misusing. Achilles is one hero in the Homeric world. Odysseus is another. One is Apollonian, the other is Hermetic. Both, for Homer, are equally heroic. Odysseus, when approached by Agamemnon to fight, pretends to be insane by sowing his fields with salt so he can avoid going to war. Achilles, on the other hand, when faced with a choice, prefers to die young and be remembered forever than to reach old age and be forgotten. Homer never steps in to judge one choice more heroic than the other. Odysseus the draft-dodger who will use his wiles to achieve his goal of reaching old age at his wife’s side is, for Homer, as heroic a figure as Achilles who chooses to die young and beautiful with sword held high and bloodied. I will not go into greater detail about how the martial ethics designed around modern war that these deluded moderns impose upon the ancient mythic heroes are wrong. Suffice it to say that Achilles also hid from the war, disguised as a woman, and duplicity was once again what saved the Greeks. His rage is selfish and completely overrides any lust for battle. As presented in the poetry of Homer, Achilles appears great in everything, but not above human foible. Without a correct reading of the text, one cannot extract from it even the sort of values that the Pseudapollonians do. Of course, with the correct reading, the heroes become worthy of worship, but that has only been preserved to us via the Platonists whom impious readers of myth love to deny.
But I am not writing this to offer arguments against Pseudapollonian positions. I will not be looking into Brahmin’s claims one after the other in order to counter them point by point. There is no need. I am writing this to declaim in terms as forceful as I can make them that our tradition is not up for debate. By slandering our gods and daring to say that, say, Hephaestus or Dionysus should not be worshiped, the Pseudapollonians reveal themselves as impious atheists. Slander of the gods which all the states of ancient Greece (as well as the state of Rome) traditionally worshiped over thousands of years is not a matter fit for debate. There is to be no argument. We must let these slanderers know they are not our friends, and we must let them know we will not stand for their hubris. Post-modernist pluralism, the pluralism of chaos where up is down and down is up, should not be confused with the openness inherent in the Hellenic view of the world, philosophically elucidated (as with all things) by the followers of the divine Plato.
The Platonic view of the world is inherently pluralistic insofar as the divine links create unique conditions in different parts of the world, which explains the multiplicity of religious traditions, yet all the links, if followed, will converge, which affirms the ultimate validity of traditional religious devotion across the world. Whatever path you follow, the Platonist recognises that, as long as it is rooted in pristine tradition and remains free of innovation, it is a path worthy to walk. The cults of Palestine, Syria, Arabia and Persia were particularly honoured by the latter Platonists. The Semites that the Pseudapollonians so abhor were deemed pious by the members of the Academy. The sole exception were the Jews, whom Roman religionists saw as followers of an innovation conjured by a man, Moses, cut off from the divine. By blurring the lines between the innovation of Moses and the ancient cults of the Semites (which they even extend all across Europe, having them dominating as far as Greenland in their schema), the Pseudapollonians seek to subvert tradition as it was preserved for us.
They do this because they are moderns. Quintessentially so, for they approach everything through a quintessentially modern lens. Their view of the ancients is fundamentally alien to the ancients themselves. They may appeal to antiquity and claim they worship the gods, but if pressured, they will reveal that materialistic reductionism is the very core of their beliefs. Therefore, their views are to be discarded, taken out with the trash of modernity. The ancients are not dumb. They left us encapsulations of their wisdom which easily dispel any attempts at subversion. All we have to do is turn to them alone, rejecting any post-modern attempts to redefine tradition. And in doing so, we must take a stand.
We must erect barriers, lest we succumb to the Typhonian energies that surround us on all sides. And the simplest barrier which we cannot afford not to erect, is having a zero tolerance policy on reductionism to matter. In this we must follow the wisdom of Julian, who despite his young age proved himself, filled as he was with the divine, an extraordinarily thoughtful ruler. When he set out to unite Hellenism, the one current of thought he deemed fundamentally incompatible with the Hellenic ethos was Epicureanism. Things have progressed, and however harshly we may today elect to judge Epicurus and his followers, we must keep in mind that they did not call for the abolition of ritual and that even they were significantly more pious than today’s blasphemers and liars. We are called upon today not to exclude Epicureans, but real atheists of a type that barely existed in antiquity, people who would worship flesh before they would worship an actual god.
If the liberal cults that emerge out of the US are cults of fragility and acceptance, where the most important dictum is "you are loved as you are", the regressive cults that emerge in opposition, still centred in the US, are cults of robustness and exclusion, where the most important dictum is "love yourself and your tribe above any abstractions". Seeing the problems we face, they take shelter in the crassest materialism and say, "to hell with you, Crom. I’ll do it on my own". They say, "ideas don’t matter. Philosophy won’t save you." Well, our contention is that nothing but philosophy can save us. If you reject this fundamental premise, then you are not one of us. Because philosophy saved Hellenism when it came under threat, not some non-existent post-modern perversion of Homeric heroism. When Rome faced its greatest crisis, its leaders abandoning the very sacred bonds between mortal and immortal upon which it had been built, the divine Julian donned the purple and showed the way: philosophy must take the throne if humanity is to be saved. When the impious Galileans removed the statue of Athena from the Parthenon, the ancient cult took shelter in the home of Proclus. The Academy, blessed by Athena from its beginning, now became her temple in a sense as literal as dictated by the desperate times. Not only did Platonism not herald the decay as in the fever dreams of Nietzscheans, but on the very contrary the task of preserving tradition fell entirely on Platonists. They set out to synthesise all philosophic schools, opened themselves to every pious cult, did what they could to enrich Hellenism with the knowledge safeguarded by other traditions, and took the fatal blows at the head of the army. Julian, remember, was struck on horseback, in his armor, his legions behind him. We’re still here, so the blows weren’t truly fatal, were they?
Today the modern pagan—and if you, reader, would claim this title, then you as well—like Achilles, is called to make a choice. The choice of our times is: materialism or idealism? If you choose materialism, know that you have chosen to be cut off from the Hellenic ethos. I doubt the Christians will take you, so go chase whatever sad little dream breathes some semblance of false vigour into the desiccated corpse you have made out of life. You will, of course, regret your choice and realise that life denuded of what makes it good in the Platonic sense is not worth living, but you get what you deserve if you’d rather "choose life itself, unqualified" over "chasing abstractions". If, on the other hand, you choose idealism, then welcome. You will be among friends. Help us restore order among mortals so that once again our relationship with the divine can be harmonious and something worthier than Chaos may be the master of the earth.
And make no mistake. Behind the mask of all these atheists who would make our gods into winds, flame and DNA strands, hides Chaos—an acceptance of materialism. An admission of defeat. Deep-rooted atheism. These types will say they are religious, but they are lying, to others and, in many cases, to themselves. They have stared into the abyss long enough to fall prey to its call. They have so deeply internalised the paradigm of modernity that they cannot even imagine abandoning materialism. Paganism then becomes an affectation. They appreciate the aesthetics, they appreciate the mythic haze that allows them to project their own amoralism to the Homeric age, but they are not interested in anything beyond the surface. At the core of their worldview there is space only for materialism. Materialism, or, in other words, cowardice. These yellow-bellied reptiles will say they rage, rage against the dying of the light. They do not rage against the dying of the light. As materialists, they have accepted that darkness is true whereas light is false. They cower in the corner, trembling in terror at the thought that death might be the end, and in their terror, some pathetic shadow of what in a lustier lifeform might be termed "rage" blinks awake and expresses itself in their ramblings, all of it nothing but torrents of cope for the fact that they don’t dare look past the shadows of Maya, that they don’t have the spine to put their eggs in the basket of idealism. In that sense they rage, but they rage only at themselves for being such despicable cowards as to fear the death of flesh above all things. Welcome to the 21st century.
Such cowardice must not be allowed among our ranks. Nietzschean ideas on asceticism have no place in paganism. They are a faulty view of man’s relationship to the body, and adopting them leads away from Truth, as we see with the Pseudapollonians and the rest of the neoNietzschean right. Such views open the path to reductionism. How many must walk it and fall in love with the reflection before we take a decisive stand against this pollution threatening the health of our faith? We must say unequivocally:
Our religion is not up for debate.
Our religion is not a natalist cult. Our religion will not be made into a natalist cult.
Our religion is not the handmaiden of genetics.
Traditionally-worshiped deities are not going to be rejected because Internet cranks with post-modernism-addled brains deem them to be Semitic in origin, nor of course if the pious ancient Semites themselves worshiped them.
Moreover, our religion will not be used as cover for American ideologies to run roughshod over the world’s ethne. Our ethnic identities are not up for debate. A policy of zero tolerance must be applied both to those who seek to play games of racial domination and would use the names of our gods as a cover to turn the whole world into a playground for Nordic blonds, as well to those who seek to play games of racial abolition and use the names of our gods while pursuing an agenda of exporting the melting pot model from America. Keep your American games to yourselves.
If you demean our gods, you are not a pagan. You are an enemy. And you will be opposed.
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[i] A note: I am using the term "pagan", which is of course far from uncontroversial, but per Late Antique and Byzantine use, what in Greek is called "Hellene" or "ethnikos" is very much the equivalent of English "pagan". My use of the term therefore reflects standard Byzantine use and shouldn’t be seen as controversial in this context.