I suspect that having a lousy summer (weather-wise) has finally got to me - and most everyone around me.  Fortunately, our annual holiday tied in with the only two weeks of decent weather to be had and, living on the high ground in the Weald of Kent, flooding was never an issue. The whole miserable thing was tolerated on the assumption that a bad July and August usually means an Indian Summer in September.  No such luck as we have sidled now into low temperatures and gloomy skies.  

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Peter Mahoney's events once a month on a Friday night at Treadwells are already stimulating the spirit - one wishes one could say more but the whole point (in my opinion) is that it is experienced and not talked about.  Whether I will stick the course, given the dangers of my dark side infecting a rather sunny programme of work, is a moot point but the whole thing is worthwhile and that opinon is clearly shared by others.

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The business of life can be enervating.  Two businesses to run and a domestic economy with all the juggling involved ... and we don't even have to worry about having any funds in Northern Rock.  Sometimes it is harder when it is going well (as seems to be the case now), simply because time then becomes available to do all those jobs that one put off as not so important - they then catch up on you and prove to be important after all.  So, it's away from living with the fairies and back down amongst the dark elves in sorting out insurances and pensions.  I am not that sort of anal personality that gets their bourgeois rocks off by listening to the money programmes on Radio 4 and studying interest rates in the personal finance columns of the Sunday Press, but I have to accept that the job has to be done - eventually.  And eventually is becoming now.

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Book reviews now go on my Facebook Virtual Bookshop but I have to commend (as a short sharp guide) the little book on "What Do Astrologers Believe" in the Granta Series by Nicholas Campion as a sound and readable guide to this contentious area.  I noted the odd accuracy of my 'stars' in my last entry but I retain an open mind - in both directions of scepticism and acceptance.  What I am prepared to accept in all these occult arts (or sciences) is that something is going on in a space that is within the mind and maybe within matter itself where interpretation and action, will and intellect, being and becoming, operate as a grey liminality.  Things are never as truly knowable as scientists and religions of the book may like to claim.  This space may not be quite what many of its believers think it to be, but, with its shifting boundaries and symbolisms, it has been too easily dismissed as 'non-sense' by our intellectual elites, certainly in the last 350 years.  It is not 'non-sense', it is 'different-sense'.

I still hold to my view that the secrets of this unknown space will never be uncovered by conventional means. - though conventional science may push the boundaries forward to isolate the phenomena. it will create doubt that intellectual explanations are sufficient for what remains.  Scientists may say that such-and-such falls within some Darwinian, neuro-physiological or physical framework but there is going to be a point where such claims are going to be matters of faith without serious recourse to scientific method.  

What will probably be uncovered will be fragile, shifting, subjective and dependent on time rather than space - and yet expressive of a reality no less for that.  The proven impossibility of knowing anything formal about the numinous and the subjective is surely going to make the latter more interesting as its boundaries become more defined.  At a certain point, rationalism will simply cease to deliver the goods and either have to cede ground or become what it despises - a religion of faith.

Traditional faith and science-based ways of seeing have not protected us from discovering just how little control rational elites have over the course of current and future events - and how the interpretation of past events is so often contingent.  The necessity of the present is generally drawn as a backward working from a fixed point when it might be equally fruitful to make imaginative leaps into the many possibilities that might have resulted from different decisions.  Re-thinking time as possibility as well as actuality may be the most liberating development yet in the human condition, enabling decision-makers to halt their cowardly determination to act like cogs in a machine, no longer digging deeper when they are in a hole of their own making.

Tags: general news, philosophy, religion
Current Location: Tunbridge Wells
Current Mood: tired

One of my few rules is not to write (except for money or mineral rights) in August.  This has nothing to do with holidays since I tend to work through the month in any case.  The rule is based on a belief that you can become staid and repetitive if you do not stop to think about whether what you are doing really works for you and others  So, this will be the last posting until September when I expect to resume with whatever strikes me as important then ....

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Meanwhile, falling ill has its discoveries.  My illness represented no more than 24 hours of quasi-flu, enough to have me knocked out in bed for a day or so, but it threw me back onto the radio as the only entertainment available when reading was too tiring and painful and my aching muscles and head required me to lay flat in near-darkness.

When I was younger, BBC's Radio 4 seemed like comfort food at such times, but no longer.  After half a day of being repeatedly, incessantly , preached at - over climate change, humanitarian intervention overseas, multiculturalism and the importance of the Olympics in 2012 - I came to the conclusion that the 'crusties' who complained of it being taken over by the liberal left were absolutely right.  Classic FM and even Radio 2 came as a blessed relief and my long term allegiances have now changed permanently.

Was this burst of institutional group-think on Radio 4 a temporary reaction to the many BBC-related tabloid scandals of recent days?  Was it merely a recognition that the Corporation's fate lay with political masters who had a liberal 'rights and duties' agenda?  Was it just the second team in charge while everyone else was on holiday?  Or was this unutterably dull, repetitive and feeble-minded c**p arriving in my ears because the sort of person who is employed by the BBC actually believes that we are all interested in being told a combination of the bleeding obvious and the unproven but politically correct?  And has national group-think reached such critical mass that the dear old Beeb is now little better than Pravda or Radio Moscow in the heyday of Soviet mass culture.

Whatever!  I don't care.  There are plenty of other sources of information and it is Radio 4 not the BBC that is the problem.  In desperation, I certainly switched channels and rediscovered Radio 3 which had an exceptionally lucid and interesting account of the political ideology of Pope Urban II and of his management of the Council of Clermont.  This, you may recall, was the occasion for the start of the Crusades and the Radio 3 analysis provided more insight into the origins and politics of current day events in the Middle East than a whole afternoon of over-hyped human interest news and holier-than-thou environmental and cultural evangelism on its second rate sister channel: even the comedies on Radio 4 are less funny than they used to be, a few old stalwarts and dangerous satirists excepted.

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The Pope's inner circle helped me to this conclusion by continuing to say outrageously stupid things about Islam and confirming that Radio 3 had educated and informed me whereas Radio 4 had merely used up my valuable time with gerede [mere useless chatter] - the latest gem from the Vatican can be noted in brief at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtmlxml=/news/2007/07/27/wislam127.xml  Here,we have a Church that links a rival religion to violence as if, as was made clear by the independent academics on Radio 3 that very evening, Pope Urban II had not unleashed the psychopathic boot-boys of the European aristocracy against the civilisations of the East as a deliberate tactic to divert domestic violence.  His reasons may have seemed moral to him but a lot of people were to die from that essentially political decision.

Really, the Pope's Private Secretary should not go there.  Should we raise complicity in the murders involved in the forced conversion of pagans in Germany under Charlemagne, the deliberate and truly evil murder of civilian Cathars or the bringing of the Cross by the sword to the Amerindians?  Let alone an extremely odd view of how to deal with AIDS in Africa and the perhaps more ambiguous and sometimes comprehensible role of the Papacy in tolerating any brutal fascism or authoritarian obscurantism that might be regarded as a barrier to the atheist Left (Iberia under Franco and Salazar, inter-war Slovakia, Croatia under the Ustase, Latin American military men, Poland under the 'brothers" fortunately restrained by the EU, the list seems endless) - and then not using its influence to halt the operations of death squads, torturers and the more than occasional mass murder and victimisation.

No, this is not an anti-Catholic diatribe.  On the contrary, I was raised a Catholic.  I married into a High Catholic Opus Dei family.  I respect Catholicism as a civilising force in many circumstances.  It is a sincerely held faith.  It provided the nearest thing we had in the West to a welfare state until it was unravelled by the Protestants.  I also know enough of politics and history to know that compromises must be made and that principles can be contingent for good reason.  But I also smell when 'evil' starts to creep in by the back door and it makes its home easiest where authority is not placed under scrutiny.  (Oh, did I mention the toleration of child abuse?)

The Catholic Church has had its swings from the authoritarian Right to the cuddly Left and back again.  Pope Benedict's circle seems to represent the final stage of a shift from the easy, lazy pragmatism of the Italians to the intense dogmatism of a Middle Europe whose old men are still fighting the intellectual battles of the Middle European 1930s - first through a Pole and then through a German.  And if you think that I am engaged in ethnic or ageist sterotyping, then listen to what Archbishop Meisner of Koln has to say: " .. immigration of Muslims has created a breach in our German, European culture."  So much for the universal church, so much for the equality of all before God.  And as for the ageism charge, you might not think much of the Communist Chinese, but there's a bunch of old men who have certainly moved with the times.

Can you imagine Radio 4 or even a High Tory, or anyone outside the BNP, saying that " ... immigration of Muslims has created a breach in our English, Western culture."  We do not say it because it is not true.  Yet this sort of nasty primitivist thinking is common currency on the German, French, Italian and Spanish Right where it is associated with the Catholic vote for Merkel (who is, in fact, liberal-minded by standards), Sarkozy (who at least promotes Muslims in office), Berlusconi (who fortunately knows that his vote just wants low taxes and more football and scantily clad women on the television) and Aznar (about whom we should perhaps stay silent).  It lurks there, in danger of bending otherwise pragmatic politicians to obscurantism and prejudice.

The New Right in Europe now includes, of course, a chunk of the Liberal Left, notably the late Oriana Fallaci, the Dutch radical liberals and the Parisian Left Bank 'de nos jours', who share this negative vision of Islam as non-Western and so, therefore, a threat by its very nature.  If we are talking about threats, the political threat really lies in a new rather dark and odd coalition of right-wing Catholics and radical liberals who hate all things Arabic and Turkish as 'alien' and threatening.  Never has it been more important for liberal Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Secularists and new religionists to assert the separation of Church and State and the utter meaninglessness of fascistic definitions of the superiority of the Christian West. 

Meisner's 'German' privileging of his own culture, of its implied centrality to Europe and of the implied centrality of Europe to the world contains the unintentional seeds of evil within the bosom of an agency that claims to speak for God.  Is the Pope, who grew up in a Germany of resentment and violence, surrounding himself with dark forces?  Is traditionalism cover for something?  Have we seen yet another political coup, one in which yet another inadequately accountable centre of global power, like the British State under Blair or the White House under Bush, has been captured by single-minded, perhaps simple-minded, faith-based utopians who are prepared to play fast and loose with peoples' lives in order to effect change in the world?  

I hope not.  But that small bit of me that remains Catholic knows that it would be a 'sin' not to speak out, despite the claimed absolute authority of the Vatican, much as it was necessary to speak out against Blair within the Labour Movement against the assumption of 'solidarity' - and to leave when one felt complicit in the darkness.  As I say, sometimes one can start to smell evil cloaked in apparent goodness.  When you can smell evil in your kitchen, that is the time to make sure that you empty the bin.



 

Tags: culture, religion
Current Location: tunbridge wells
Current Mood: angry

Away with evil [see last posting] - or should I be so complacent?  The week has been an entertaining one, with two interesting lectures at Treadwells and the Harry Potter movie seen earlier today.  At last, slowly but steadily, a number of things are coming together on the business front - a sensible repositioning of Pendry White for changes in the PR market should be completed by the end of the summer and we are in the final stages of a new TPPR web site with its own international relations and terror blog (launch targeted for August 27th).

The lecture by Peter Jennings on the Heathen priesthood was interesting enough - not least for his personal expression of 'faith'.  This indicated the profound depth of feeling amongst those who have engaged deeply with the new 'reconstructed' pagan religions.  

Two days later, David Beth, an articulate young German from public service stock, gave a very coherent and stimulating account of a pagan German secret society from the second post-Nietzchean wave of German romanticism (1870s). This was forced underground successively by national socialist racial politics and then by the taint of association of romantic irrationalism with national socialism in post-war Germany.  The society has been revived by Beth and no doubt partially transformed by him (he mentioned Evola, of whom more in due course) in a model that was clearly one part Germanic by philosophy (idealist rather than existentialist), one part Germanic by cultural heritage, with talk of Ragnarok and Frigg, and one part gnostic-hermetic with all the expected debt to Jung and Ascona.

This was 'aristocracy of the soul' stuff and is part of a new trend to rediscover roots in the defeated powers of '45 that is as inevitable as it was once feared.  In my view, it is a necessary part of the healing of '45 and I would have few concerns if all those involved were as intelligent and self-aware as Beth. But I do have concerns and I think we need to be aware of what is happening more widely in global culture.

The racial and imperialist aspects of both German and Japanese culture have perhaps dissipated, but the culture suppressed in 1945 by the combined force of Western rational liberalism and Marxist scientific materialism went underground - it was never crushed completely.  It has not merely returned as a transformed 'spirituality' in these countries.  We also see those who 'collaborated' in other countries, in the great struggle against the West and Bolshevism, re-emerge - in a revived Hindu nationalism, in the re-emergence of the European Right in The Low Countries, France, Spain and Italy (and elsewhere) and, paradoxically, in the many East European petty nationalisms and fascisms. 

We even see traces of it in the development of that post-Baathist 'Caliphate' traditionalism that, owing some debt to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, has emerged as 'Al-Qaeda'.  In short, the irrational politics of tradition, identity and the soul - and of blut and kultur however defined - is back with a vengeance.  A relatively few 'souls' can now wreak destructive power far beyond anything such irregulars could have done fifty years ago while troubled elites see traditionalist ideas as a means of capturing and retaining power where democracy enables it.

Something culturally significant is happening.  Much of it comes down to frustration with both traditional religion and with the Enlightenment and by the hole on the Left left by the failure of both Marxism and secular liberation movements.  Just as Baathism was twin brother of Zionism, so 'Caliphate' Islamism is arising out of the ashes of the failures of the secular leftist liberation strategies of the PLO and of the more sensible pre-Saddamite versions of the Baathism.

What interested me on Thursday was that (although I am of the Left) I could see that Beth's spiritual and non-political secret society was reaching out to something lost in people's souls - that drive for the coherent irrational that is always going to  be more holy and more meaningful than the politically correct nonsense forced on us by both market democracy in the West and by a world of all-too-appropriate behaviour, rights, duties and citizenship.  One person of German descent at the event (in conversation afterwards) was clearly attracted by that aspect of David's talk that was 'tribal' - it reached down to the roots of her personal Yggdrasil.  Peter Jennings, of course, was more pragmatically British about all this, but the strength of feeling about identity and culture was still there in his talk.  In short, many people are ready for something that roots them in their ancestors and their place - in blut und boden.

Personally, I see nothing wrong with this if it develops within a classic secular liberal culture, the law is obeyed and no-one is forced to make temple blood sacrifices or mount revenge raids on the next street ... but my concern is where this desperate need to belong and to believe may be taken by less scrupulous and more manipulative operators.

A recent popular book on paganism [Richard Rudgley, Pagan Resurrection: A Force for Evil or the Future of Western Spirituality, 2006] raises some of the issues, albeit without much sophistication and exaggerating the political potential of what he calls the Second Odinic Experiment (essentially the post-war appropriation of Odin by the Westen Radical Right).  Nevertheless, he is raising some serious issues that are being completely ignored by the mainstream media. It is highly probable that some of these developments are being monitored by the security services and simultaneously studiously ignored, or becoming a matter of denial, by the politicians they serve (much like the Minister of Magic studiously ignores the return of Lord Valdemort until the bugger is presented to his own eyesight in the current Harry Potter movie) .

Japan is a type-case in the potential for revival of the dark side.  China is emerging from being a poor Communist superpower, hitherto constrained by the West, and is becoming a major global economic player that may well be in partnership with the USA in the coming struggle to manage a resource-rich but anarchic third world that has to be policed to keep the global economic system working.  From a Japanese perspective, this means that the American strategic umbrella may not be so secure in the century to come if China flexes its growing muscles and so (like many European Atlanticists) Japan is developing an instinctive rhetoric of 'traditional values' that elides into a wider nationalist defiance of global change.  This is not the nationalism of imperial expansion but a defensive nationalism that arises from a fear of economic strangulation and of uncontrollable change as new powers emerge on the block.  Japan is becoming inward-looking towards those national roots that will give some 'bottom' to its identity.

Germany, too, is both strong and weak.  The 1945 Settlement (as in Japan) created the basis for its economic success but it also handed over control of foreign and security policy to what are now increasingly unreliable masters.  If China psychologically overwhelms Japan, so Russia psychologically overwhelms Germany - in both cases, Russia and China have long memories of unparallelled slaughter that the Germans and Japanese insistently either try to ignore or argue away.  

This is why the Poles caused such disquiet in the discussion over the European Treaty - they raised what their population would have been in numbers if the Germans had not occupied Poland from 1939 to 1945.  It was not merely bad manners.  A claim based on events 60 or more years ago threatened to re-open wounds from a European Civil War (1914 to 1945) that could still return in a muted form to rip apart politically a Continent living on the lie that liberal values can crush ancient hatreds by ignoring them.  When liberals rewrite history, they expect it to stay rewritten.

The relevance of pagan thinking to this may seem distant.  Ridgley's book is unsatisfying precisely because he is sympathetic to pagan thought and yet his story tells of its systematic appropriation by the extreme Right.  He cannot bring himself to criticise Odinic thinking nor its darker aspects.  In fact, much of what passes for paganism is not so much paganism as traditionalism - there is not only state-sponsored Shinto in Japan to deal with but there is (not uncoincidentally) those Arab writers from the era of the Mongol invasions who are emerging as the ideologists of 'Caliphate' Islam.  It seems not accidental that Polish neo-fascists in government, Islamic extremists and 'divine wind' Japanese nationalists can all centre their narratives ultimately on national resistance to the Mongol horde.  Today, the West in all its manifestations, including Communist [scientific materialist] China, is the Mongol Horde to many middling nations under threat from rapid global change.

Beth''s secret society is not sinister at all - its narrative myth is attractive, even sexy in its way.  I loved it - as noble fantasy.  Wiccans and most neo-pagans, too, love nature and the rest of humanity in a way that is wholly benign.  Jewish and Islamic cultures have rich magical aspects that are only now being explored in any depth in the West.  I could go on - neo-paganism is largely a positive and benign force in the world.  But we have to be on guard ... because traditionalism and paganism are not the same thing and the attempted appropriation of the latter by the former when it switches out of Judaeo-Christian mode is something to be very wary of in the covens and moots of Britain.

Out there, there are people that are frightened.  They see their identity under threat.  They see changes that they cannot adapt to.  They are looking for crutches.  Whether it be the 'leaderless resistance' strategies of terrorism migrating from Christian Identity to extremist Odinist circles and on to Al-Qaeda or the national manipulation of folk religions like Shinto, we have to stop being naive about the connexion between religion and politics in general and the possibility of the manipulation of neo-pagan thinking in particular.  Precisely because most neo-pagans are ignorant of or uninterested in politics, they must be vigilant.  

The history of David's 'Secret Society ' is its own warning from history - pagan-inclined men of good faith were displaced by the appropriation of German culture by something that even Hitler considered absurd, the potty neo-paganism of Guido von List, of Karl von Wiligut, of the Ahnenerbe and of Heinrich Himmler.  Once that madness and its equally mad pseudo-science was discredited, two generations of Germans dared not explore the profound ideas at the very heart of this and other societies.

But what is troubling is who might be rehabilitated and who might not as we go deeper into the current century.  This may not be the gentle world of former imperial civil servant Gerald Gardner.  This could be the world of Savitri Devi, of Julius Evola and Miguel Serrano.  Athough some of these thinkers (notably Evola) have things of value to impart if only in stimulating debate, they can be potentially very dangerous thinkers indeed in free societies - if they remain unchallenged.  If the world of Gardner is ever captured by the world of Evola, many good and honourable people will be moths burnt in the flames - especially those attracted to the spirituality of faux-tradition only to be sucked into the politics of resistance to the modern world.  We must all consider ourselves on watch ...

Tags: new religions, religion
Current Location: Tunbridge Wells
Current Mood: determined

Dr. Christina Oakley Harrington gave a crystal clear account of the magical grimoire at Treadwells last night, placing the texts very firmly within the Judaeo-Christian culture of the late medieval and early modern period.  Amongst its many other intriguing threads, Treadwells is becoming the place to get an intelligent person's guide to the cultural history of the esoteric in a way that ought to be covered by the BBC.  A great deal of the value comes in the discussion immediately after the lecture where an unusual mix of academics, those practicing in the esoteric traditions and open-minded interested lay people raise questions in an environment where I have not yet heard a word spoken in anger or condemnation - even pedantry is worn lightly.  

As so often happens, I bought a book - four in fact - to create a small section in my library on Chaos Magic.  Since virtually every other intellectual trend of the last few thousand years has its representation, why not Chaos Magic?  My thanks to George for advising on the order in which they should be read.  The respectability of the study of esoteric religious experience is now well established.  The University of Exeter has a Special Centre under Professor Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke - http://www.huss.ex.ac.uk/research/exeseso/index.htm - and, since 2005, there has been a pan-European learned society, based in the Netherlands, devoted to the subject - http://www.esswe.org/ .

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Now to the other side of the religious spectrum, the bit that decisively rejected the happy incoherencies of the magical and the Catholic for purity.  Social networking sites are really quite remarkable.  One old friend from thirty years ago with an interest in reformation history turns up at the beginning of the week and then I reconnect with Dr. Jeremy Ive, a pastor and academic in Kent, through Facebook.  Two links to the Reformation (and I a catholic-origin existentialist with strong neo-pagan leanings) in one week means that someone is working in mysterious ways.

More seriously, although I cannot believe what Jeremy believes, his private blog at http://jgaive.wordpress.com/ is a very clear exposition of what Reformed Theology actually means to those who have this view and is an interesting resource which I very much recommend.  The only time that I ever see my Wiccan friends get angry and even intolerant (and you know how easy-going most neo-pagans are: there has to be a word beyond 'laid-back' for their attitude) is when the Christian Church comes up and not always without cause.  In fact, I hope I have a broader view, distinguishing the community-institutional (which can have the same social effects as any illiberal imposition of one faith on another as the Christian communities of the Middle East are now finding) and the religious-spiritual.  Do not think that neo-pagans in power could not be equally oppressive and cruel ...

The essence of Jeremy's world seems to me to be centred on one 'mysterium tremendum', the sacrificial act of Jesus Christ, and this 'mysterium tremendum' is the leap of faith of which Kierkegaard spoke - meaningless unless taken at full tilt and without questioning.  This is so powerful a human commitment that it reveals and it blinds at the same time.  In a sense, it is magnificent.  Its very shattering and shifting of perception in conversion is probably more comprehensible to the 'magical' personality than it can be to the modern 'psychological' personality (as described by Christina last night).  The difference, of course, is that for the Christian it is a life change for all time whereas for the Pagan changing oneself is generally a constant process of fluidity and change centred on moments of perceptual revolution, some more important than others, that can move a person on in many stages as life progresses 'from maiden to crone'.  There are lots of "Ah, now I see" moments for the seeking mind.

This difference also represents (for me) a contrast, at the extremes, between the universalist (with his or her propensity for the authoritarian solution and order) and the existentialist (with his or her tendency to liminality and change, possibly anarchy).  I prefer freedom but I refuse to deny my respect for those whose leaps of faith re-construct the world in either way, whether permanently (though I find this limiting) or constantly  and progressively (with all its excitements and dangers) - with this proviso, derived from my liberal instincts, that all live by example and not by force or power.

Tags: new religions, religion
Current Location: London & Kent
Current Mood: calm