Relating Robert Jordan and Baptism

Guest post.

Jordan's idea of "tainting the elements' is an ancient Christian doctrine - one is "washed" from the fires of passion by being sealed in the sacrament of baptism, thus allowing one heavenly power to overcome the tainting of the four elements through ancient demonism, patterns which have to be changed so that God's Kingdom can grow.

An Interlude of Scourging

Occasionally, your humble blogger has had enough....and finds something quite hilarious to comment on. In this case, a progressive, feminine blog from Canada:

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"Wilson means for us to accept a theology that revolves around authoritarian hierarchy, with white, straight, cis, Western men at the top, and everyone else knowing our proper place. We’re meant to accept that movements for racial and gender equality are actually the causes of racist and misogynist abuse and violence, and that the real root of such violence – white male patriarchy – is actually its remedy...."

One of the commentators states "this is one of the most horrifying things I've ever read". It's safe to assume she doesn't get out much. We are warned that these people "exist" and (gasp) "have followers" - all that the poor defenceless women can do is pray and "hope they lose their power". Another commentator thanks her for "digging up good content".

This is hilarious. I've happened to hear Wilson preach, and know for a fact he rejects the Islamic view of feminine submission, because I heard him say and teach so with his own ears (to a friendly crowd). I'm glad they managed to dig around wide and far enough to drag up someone they could batter with their feminist platitudes and misconceptions - it must have been hard scouring the country to find a dinosaur like Wilson who dares to disagree with the full-blown feminist gospel of gender equality, sexual liberation, and the exaltation of the feminine at the expense of everything (including truth and Reason).

On the other hand, they could just read Otto Weiniger.

Clement Continues to Wander, with Guidance, through the "Old World"

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Everything Repeats Itself

It's kind of depressing that man never learns. As Burke teaches, he only learns collectively (which is to say, as a species, but not a group - if that distinction makes any sense to anyone).

The debate between Past & Future has been going on for more than just three hundred years...

In our "modern" Era, man is still so resolutely unsure of himself, who he is, what is "Good", what is less desirable, what is Evil and Damnation, that practically all we hear from our intellectual elite is re-hashed Fontanelle: We are smarter than the ancients, our scholarship is more elaborate, we follow reason and possess empirical science, we are going to download our consciousness onto computers and surf the Noosphere, etc. etc.

It's almost as if our uncertainty is overcompensated by belligerent hatred of the Past, a denial of all its worth, and certitude on "one thing and one thing only" - that all is Good and Light and Best and Better today.

The Past isn't irrelevant, or over - it isn't even Past (W. Faulkner). I agree (of course) that mere antiquarianism looks a little ridiculous, and that a man who can't be of his own time can't be of any Time (Goethe). However, only someone who is connected to the Past (at a deeper level than drawing on Voltaire for their spiritual inspiration, or Fontanelle) can hope to show the unity of Time through marrying the Past, Present, and Future in Eternity. This love of the past can be individual (the individual's pre-existence) and have no intellectual roots in the past that are obvious - it can even be existential. However, the one thing it cannot be is openly, ideologically committed to hating the Past. Which is exactly what our "Leaders" are committed to.

Providence & Fate

"It is necessary to remark that there are souls that God keeps hidden and little in their own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Far from giving them striking qualities, His design for them is that they should remain in obscurity. They would be deceived if they desired to attempt a different way. If they are well instructed they will recognise that fidelity to their nothingness is their right path, and they will find peace in their lowliness."

Jean-Pierre de Caussade (1675-1751),
Abandonment to Divine Providence

Divine Providence

Guest post.

Clement is rewarded for his love of truth by receiving back "the dead"; Peter wears the palladium and bestows baptismal regeneration (because Christ is the one who "made the waters").

Eye of the World Shifts Towards Russia and the Old Right

According to Erich Khuenhelt-Ledhin (Baron, actually), a figure a Leftist acquaintance of mine denounced as a velveteen dandy-fop simply because of his privilege and rank (never mind the guy worked 60+ hour weeks in literary pursuits), the Right has never succeeded in providing an alternative Utopia of their own over against the proposed Utopia of the Left. If I understand this rightly, what he is proposing is actually a form of Ideology for the Right. At first hearing, this sounds horrific. Counter-intuitively, it is not, because Ideas are not simple, nor should they be. He is not prescribing a huge dose of Nazi Totalitarianism, but pointing out the Right never coherently unified their worldview during the Monarchical struggles against the "Spirit of 1848". We run into lots of counter-intuitive things in Nature, things like Countable versus Uncountable Infinity, the hypoxic versus hypercarbic drive for respiration, curved space and time, etc., etc. Why would the realm of Ideas work any differently? Because what looks like Ideology to the darkened Nous and Intellect of man is actually a stabilizing platform from which higher perceptions of Reality are possible (but not necessarily inevitable). This is the missing "ingredient" or twist that the Right keeps stumbling over - they don't want to be Nazis, so they reject "ideology" (never mind that ANY intellectual system is to some extent an ideology, a fact the Left is much more smugly aware of, and does their best to exploit ruthlessly - they push for "freedom" when the ideology is against them, and for conformity, when it is not). John Romanides addresses this extensively in his theological work (not all of which is fair to the West, but whose basic point is very well-taken): Man needs a cure, and is not "right" to begin with. This, the necessity for clearing the ground of bad ideology by laying a framework where some form of order and stability can be taken for some degree of "grantedness". In medical terms, this would be called "stabilizing" a patient - it doesn't cure them, but then, it isn't intended to cure, but to make a cure possible. And this is where the Right simply won't exercise either honesty (witness Benoist's repeated rejection of Cortes or Maurras' worldviews) or clarity (the traditional "Right" of the Lord Acton variety actually operates from liberal premises and categories). The New Right is dishonest, and wants to play fast and loose (like the enemy), the traditional Right (Pat Buchanan, Russell Kirk, etc.) won't recognize that the Anglo world desperately needs a traditional ideology to begin anything at all. Hence, the West's default slide into more and more chaos.

Russia is in much better position to understand this - they've seen what "liberalization" and "democratization" leads to, and still possess an intellectual heritage which doesn't accept dialectical and abstract Reason as the sole, supreme arbiter of Man. If the Slavic world is intelligent and devoted and firm enough, she (and she alone, at this point) can extricate herself from the downward spiral and offer an alternative to Asiatic forms and Western debauchery. This makes her the sole possible champion of Christendom, and a possible re-awakener of such in the West.

Man is not, by nature free - it is his task to become so. But it can only be done by an integral spiritual vision which is Rightist, Utopian, coherent, complete, etc. Which is the launching pad for (then) what is possible (see Guenon, R.). Gornahoor is trying to do this. Who wants to help?

It looks dangerous and scary - Good. It looks that way anyway, and any real answer would fall foul of that rhetorical charge. In any case, this has to do with Truth and clarity, not what we wish were true. We wish the West hadn't fallen afoul of Enlightenment, Democracy, etc, but this isn't true. We wish the West had retained its spiritual character, but it didn't happen. The only way out is back: the Opposite of a Revolution. Only this can consistently, coherently oppose the Eternal Revolution (Degeneration) that the Left offers in its Utopia of Lies and Illusions.

Arcturus

"“For you, the world will continue to wear a noble, awful face. You will never rise above mysticism, but be happy in your own way.”
Voyage to Arcturus
(hat-tip to Andrew, poster at Gornahoor)

God Bless America, the Dumb

Americans have a penchant for stupidity - we specialize in molly-coddling it, in ourselves first, and then in others, if we have any patience left.

"In November 2011, I met an American missionary who has served in Guatemala for 36 years. He described a recent (unpublished) doctoral study examining Protestantism in one part of Guatemala. The Hispanic scholar had hoped to substantiate Max Weber’s thesis on the connection between Protestantism and economic development. The data, however, drove him to conclude that the gospel taught by present-day American missions makes no perceptible difference to the economic life of the believing communities."

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What about the vaunted "Third Wave" of Protestantism that is supposed to save us all, in the West?

Simon Magus & Peter Debate

Guest post.

I had no idea, till I did the research on this, that Simon Magus was so pivotal to the Church in initiating its struggle against Gnosticism. Simon is the archetypal Gnostic - a mage and miracle worker before the Gnostics devolved into "sects". Notice the typical Gnostic arguments (which are well put). Very helpful to consider this stuff, as our current milieu greatly resembles that of the early Church (minus some of the supernatural stuff, for now).

Power Corrupts, and so does this dictum

"I identified Acton’s position as a Gnostic one. On second glance, this appears to me as unfair to the Gnostics. They were much more logical in their approach. Acton is a selective and illogical enemy of nature as it really is, aiming his ire primarily at the essential tool of authority. It would, therefore, perhaps be better to label him a semi-Gnostic. But I stand by the comparison of the Acton Institute dedicated to the spread of his ideas in the Catholic world with Manicheanism. Like so many other conservative Catholic organizations today, it works with familiar Christian language. It can even defend itself against the charge of Gnosticism by pointing out how much it loves money. Meanwhile, it systematically works to deconstruct the essence of the Christian message and redirect it to the service of its own subversive purpose: the equation of our Faith with an unnatural, semi-Gnostic, Enlightenment concept of a self-destructive freedom destined to ensure the victory of the strong over the weak. For this is the ultimate goal of Acton’s contemporary followers: to make it seem that God created and redeemed the world in order to make it safe for the exercise of a raw power masquerading as true freedom...."

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Again, since I see I have so many Slavic (particularly Russian) readers, I will go ahead and encourage them - the better part of the Anglo world (and admittedly it is a tiny remnant at this point, perhaps less than 5%) stands with you in understanding that Authority and Power are real, God-given, and that the entire exercise of Liberalism is a mock trial in which it is pretended by those who have power that they actually do not, that they instead are intuiting or exercising some sort of mystical General Will (which they alone see and honestly, create, as the new managerial elite of a Sorcerer State). Democracy is a lie, because "people" never rule - those who hold power, hold power. This is always true. The question is, does your "King" wear his crown and carry his sceptre "like a cross", or does he instead mouth lies about tolerance, all the while executing a secret agenda, as he is bound to do when he mouths the lie?

The Slavic world is the only part of the West that has not succumbed wholesale to the Biggest Lie of All - that "Consciousness" can somehow magically be brought to rule the people neutrally in a sort of techno-State that dispenses with all ancient categories of Justice, Truth, Beauty or Goodness. That is why Russia is still "the enemy", for our elite.

Be worthy of your calling, and a great destiny awaits you; fail, either through hypocrisy, or through temptation (going our route) and you will curse your fate.

Putin still wears his mother's silver cross; perhaps, one day, he will become entirely worthy of it.

There are still some here who remember the Europe of old, and who understand what America has become.

Apres moi, l'deluge

"It’s all too common for the political class of a troubled nation to lose track of the fact that, after all, its power depends on the willingness of a great many people outside the political class to do what they’re told. In Paris in 1789, in St. Petersburg in 1917, and in a great many other places and times, the people who thought that they held the levers of power and repression discovered to their shock that the only power they actually had was the power to issue orders, and those who were supposed to carry those orders out could, when matters came to a head, decide that their own interests lay elsewhere. In today’s America, equally, it’s not the crisply dressed executives, politicians, and bureaucrats who currently hold power who would be in a position to enforce that power in a crisis; it’s the hundreds of thousands of soldiers, police officers and Homeland Security personnel, who are by and large poorly paid, poorly treated, and poorly equipped, and who have not necessarily been given convincing reasons to support the interests of a political class that most of them privately despise, against the interests of the classes to which they themselves belong."
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How did America arrive at this impasse? Very easily, as easy as just taking "a holiday from history" (in De Gaulle's immortal words). America was a commonwealth, not a nation (as Rosenstock Huessy points out), and if the "common good" is undermined (or in our case, inverted to represent the lowest caste of degenerates, whether holding PhDs and political power, or basking in self-victimization and violent crime), the commonwealth goes up in smoke. Then (as they say in Oklahoma) "where are you going to be at?" I think the answer will appear rather sooner than later, although it could take a "long descent" and a bitter road, as history repeats itself as tragedy, then farce.

Spirit Wisdom

"I will give an analogy, in order for you to understand where the distorted conceptions of things stem from. For example, I give to someone a walnut and tell him to do research on it. Someone will do research on its taste, he will try the external green shell, he will bite it and will throw it away. I give the walnut to another person, he, [being] quite sensible already, peels off its external green shell, but when he tries the second shell he breaks his teeth, and also throws it away. I give the walnut to a third person, he, however, [being] even more sensible, peels off the external shell, breaks the hard nutshell with a stone, takes out the kernel and eats it. If we gather these three together and ask them what [sort of thing] a walnut is, one will say that the walnut is an astringent, pungent and poisonous fruit; the second - that it is a hard fruit that breaks people's teeth, the third - that it is something delicious and pleasant. This analogy can be adapted to our errors: all things in the world are wrapped in shells, and if we do not have enough knowledge, we will not find the essence. Food is necessary for the body, but also necessary is food for the mind and the soul; that is, we have to eat in two ways. And when we say that it is not good for a man to overeat, we understand that the body, the mind and the soul have to be equally fed. It is a whole triple circle, which forms the man. This is why those three people who pronounced themselves on the walnut are not sufficiently clever. The one who ate the walnut thinks he is the cleverest. No! I give the walnut to a fourth person, he takes it, but instead of eating it, plants it and in 10 or 15 years this single walnut gives thousands of walnuts. So, we have four categories of people in the world who philosophize: some say: "The world is no good, lecherous, it is not worth living"; others say: "In it [the world] egoism rules, it cannot be worse"; the third: "The world is good, pleasant"; they are closer to the truth. And who are the fourth? Those who have entered the Divine school and have started studying i.e. started planting the good things. The best conception for man is to know that the Earth is a Divine school in which he is set to study, to learn to peel off the upper and the lower shell of the walnut, and not to eat the walnut but to plant it..."
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This is Precisely What the Orthodox are Saying!

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It is precisely the novelty of scholastic thought and the "sacred heart" (which undoubtedly has a spiritual place and worth in a proper context) which lead to the abandonment of the existence/essence distinction, along with a misunderstanding of the energies of God, which lead the West down the "sentimental" primrose path of ruin towards Hell. This is why we are powerless to stop the "Revolution", conservatives!

Sex, Family, & Amerika

"Many of us drift toward conservatism because we realize just how vast a disaster liberalism has been. In the United States, our parents and grandparents in the 1960s inherited the wealthiest nation on earth, and they’ve turned it into a third-world Kali-Yuga ruin."

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As this blog has argued before, Liberalism is nothing other than instantiated suicide, personal AND collective, because it lies to itself about having no "intolerance", meanwhile having the greatest intolerance of all towards precisely those who 1) support the state (the beta-class of workers and middle class who do not want bigger government or special favors) 2) are fighting to save the state (conservative intellectuals of various stripes).

At this point, however, in Amerika's decline, if you are an enemy of the Liberal Super-State, all you have to do is kick back and watch it burn.

Golden Book & St. Clement

Gornahoor Link

A post on Oral tradition and esotericism, through the Diaries of St. Clement & the story of St. Peter (Kepha) and his struggle against Simon Magus.

Miracles and Suffering

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"God, sometimes, when a person does not understand with the good, gives him a trial, to recover. If there was not a little pain, sickness, etc., people would become beasts, and would not approach God at all." - Elder Paisios