Love in a cold climate
I’m reading a great book right now called On Being a Pagan by a french guy named Alaan de Benoist. Despite the D&D wizard on the cover (marketing?) it actually has turned out to be very dense and intellectually rigorous. The thrust of it is that authoritarian montheism is so deeply rooted in the western psyche that most “pagans” aren’t actually pagan at all but are still living under the shadow of a foreign ideology that revolves around the humiliation of the human being and the castration and mutilation of human potential. He makes a number of extremely interesting arguments (mostly from a Nietzschean perspective), among them:
- Monotheism posits a god separate from his own creation but entirely responsible for it. This reduces man to the status of object who can never be his own cause
- Montheism could only emerge from the desert environment, a place so bleak it could never produce a natural pantheon
- Atheism, global capitalism, etc are not antagonistic to monotheism but instead flow out of it as they share its basic premises, i.e., man as helpless cog in a larger universalist system which seeks always to expand and refuses to tolerate difference
- Monotheism is not so much about God per se as it is about man’s relationship to god, which is as the relationship of the son to a father who jealously guards against the risk of being surpassed and would rather slaughter his own children than allow himself to be challenged.
- Antisemitism arose from Christainity’s rupture with Judaism. Christains have projected upon Jews the role of the superego which they consciously deny and yet unconsciously resent.
Interesting stuff! I’ve been reading like crazy lately the last couple of weeks, some other books I recently finished (this is why I rarely buy books, it sucks paying $20 for something you read in one or two days and then have to shelve):
Mean Genes
Path Notes of an American Ninja Master
Mind Beside Itself: Writings at the Edge of Science, Mysticism & Delusion
Finite and Infinite Games
I find myself tending towards the view lately that the big problem that gnosticism is discussing - really - is not a genetic one but a memetic one. There is nothing wrong with our genes or with human nature per se, the problem is a sickness in our minds, the mind-body split that alienates us from nature and causes otherwise reasonable people to pour their energy into fantastic abstractions which bear no fundamental relationship to our status as creatures of the earth.
Speaking of monotheism as a product of the desert, I actually saw an archon once, in the desert, and will post on this soon.
Other books I’ve started but am only halfway through:
Breaking Open the Head: Breaking Open the Head : A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism
Lords of the Left Hand Path
More on these as I finish them…
In other news I recently rented and watched The Magdalene Sisters DVD. Reviews I read afterwards noted that this film really makes your blood boil and that was my experience as well. In a nutshell, it concerns a practice in Ireland (only stopped in 1996) whereby retarded, flirtatious and promiscuous women were seized by the police and remanded to convents where they were stripped of their names and forced to work 12 hour days washing clothing, not allowed to speak, humilated, beaten, cut off from contact with outside world, etc. The villains who ran this dehumanizing, depersonalizing program? LOL, nuns of course.
Apparently this scandal hit the Irish National consciousness for the first time in the early 90s when a convent was sold as part of a real estate deal and the buyer found 130+ bodies in an unmarked grave on site. This prompted and investigation and eventually a documentary about these modern-day slaves called “Love in a cold climate.”
Not fun to watch - brutal, depressing, tragic - but worth it to be reminded of just exactly what it is that we are dealing with when we talk about “authoritarian monotheism.”
Reminded me a bit of my own childhood in Catholic school too. Whoever decided that putting a bunch of sexually frustrated middle-aged women in charge of little kids would be a good idea anyway? If they are anything nuns are vectors for the transmission of the emotional plague described by Wilhelm Reich.
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