Associations and Reflections around Tradition and Future Shock

Associations and Reflections around Askr Svarte’s Tradition and Future Shock: Visions of a Future that Isn’t Ours (PRAV Publishing, 2023).

By Sergei Zhigalkin

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“The overwhelming majority.” The overwhelming majority is that mass of people that turns the modern, materialistic myth of the universe, ourselves, and being — everything in general — into a reality. In other words, this “majority” just adds an earthly element, thanks to which flimsy dreams, absurd theories, strange mirages, as well as deep metaphysical concepts become stable, inescapable, ineludible, and hold their own weight, i.e., they take on reality. The more often we look at one and the same object, picture one and the same image, and repeat the same thought, the more significant they seem to be to us, until, finally, they turn into something absolutely indubitable, into an inalienable part of our external and inner world.

What makes technogenic civilization and the era of Modernity and Postmodernity so attractive to the ordinary person, to the overwhelming majority? Why do they assume such to be the pinnacle reached by mankind, and drawing on the “indubitable” ideas of progress and evolution, why do they draw out its prospects to even greater, happy heights, in contrast to the point of view expressed in this book, Tradition and Future Shock: Visions of a Future that Isn’t Ours, according to which these heights are but nightmarish abysses and infernal darkness?

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Naming Tradition: The Word and World of Pagandom

[Статья доступна на русском языке во 2-ом выпуске альманаха Alföðr (Всеотец)]

Naming Tradition: The Word and World of Pagandom

By Evgeny Nechkasov (Askr Svarte) and Jafe Arnold

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“Language is the house of Being” – these words of the great German philosopher Martin Heidegger not only indicate how in everyday speech as well as in philosophy Being pronounces itself, its moods and attunements (Stimmungen) and care (Sorge), but also refer to an important notion in the thinking of this “Black Forest shaman”: dwelling in the world. Dasein is thrown into the world in which it dwells (Wohnen), like in a raised wooden house. To dwell means to experience, to come to know and to make known a surrounding place, to make it one’s own, to become local to and with it, to become “native” and “original.” Dwelling in the world therefore means, among other things, “selecting”[1] the right words for naming things. Words themselves grow forth to meet the meanings and things which are called by them. Authentic existence in the world, according to Heidegger, can thus be found named in a fragment of Hölderlin’s verse: “poetically man dwells.” 

In the world of Tradition, to which much in Heidegger’s thought leads us back in new light, and in which such dwelling was the archetypal norm, naming is always and everywhere a sacred matter. Like the magical word, a name encompasses and touches the essence of an entity, manifests and affects it, and connects it amidst the so many dimensions of correspondences, manifestations, and phenomena that make up the beingful world of the cosmos. Cosmos itself is a name – κόσμος – which the ancient Greeks called the world ordered out of the Gods’ victory over the Titans in the beginnings of time. 

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Plato’s Cave and the Truth of Secret History

Plato’s Cave and the Truth of Secret History

By Jafe Arnold

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“Secret history.” This term, or rather notion, evokes passionate intuitions and suspicions. For some, “secret history” immediately rings like a provocative slogan, behind which lurks a Pandora’s box of “conspiracy theories” muddying, twisting, or, as is officially, fashionably said nowadays, “disinforming” otherwise “explainable” all-too-human affairs. For others, however, “secret history” speaks precisely to “all-too-human” reality on a deeper level. On the one hand, it is affirmed that humans have agency, and that the agencies of some (or any for the matter) are never fully transparent to others. On the other hand, the agency of humans is historical, i.e., such is hardly if ever purely “individual” or “subjective”, but rather is part of and realized within long-standing states of affairs, grander pictures, and forces which are hardly explainable by the immediate agencies of any given number of humans alone at any given time. 

Between these poles of the “all-too-human” reaction to “secret history”, one often finds themself faced by two most visible extremes: a blind, agency-surrendering faith in some “disclosed history”, which as a matter of course “happens” to be whatever revolves around the “official” one, or dissipation into epistemological chaos, into paranoia before unknowable forces and their actors. In both cases, something truly human and truly historical about “secret history” is lost.

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Geydar Dzhemal – “A Word on Dugin”

The seventh day of January is not only Orthodox Christmas according to the Julian calendar, but also the birthday of the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin. This 7 January marks Dugin’s 60th birthday, on which occasion Continental-Conscious presents for the first time in English translation an editorial by the Russian Islamic thinker and Dugin’s former Yuzhinsky Circle mentor, Geydar Dzhemal (1947-2016), authored for Dugin’s 50th birthday and published in the newspaper Zavtra (“Tomorrow”, formerly Den – “Day”) in 2012.

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Eurasian Myth, New Dawn – 3 Translations of Boris Nad

Over the past several months, fruitful collaboration with “the world’s most unusual magazine”, New Dawn, has furthered the endeavor of bringing the works of the Serbian author Boris Nad into the English language. (See “(Re-)Writing Myth: An Interview with Boris Nad”)

To date, three texts by Boris Nad have come to light on the pages of New Dawn:

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(Re-)Writing Myth: An Interview with Boris Nad

Athena Appearing To Odysseus To Reveal The Island Of Ithaca by Giuseppe Bottani  

There is an often-quoted saying about books whose attribution is unknown (perhaps rightfully so): “A book is a magical portal to another dimension.” Of course, this is usually taken to refer to exercises of the sensuous imagination imitated by profane fiction… There are some books, however, belonging to neither of the modern categories of “fiction” or “non-fiction”, that are not merely portals to another dimension, but initiations into whole worlds – worlds which reflect back upon the reader the fragility, relativity, and even illusions or “non-reality” of their apparent present own. Such works embody the genuine “danger” of books that has served as the pretext for censorship for centuries: opening an unknown book, one can have their entire world and worldview shattered and transformed, entire worlds discredited or revealed… And such books, as is well known to those who should know, rarely lie waiting out in the open (if they do, then such is only one aspect of their concealment), and they and their authors’ names pass hands at first only between small circles, often exerting their impact and worlding long before they ever enter the “public bibliography”, the “general market”, or the sights of critics and scholars…

These observations outline at least one of the possible paths leading to the works of Boris Nad. 

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Travel Thoughts – Visiting Prehistory: Malta’s Neolithic Temples

Travel Thoughts

Visiting Prehistory: Malta’s Neolithic Temples

By Jafe Arnold

Mnajdra Temple, Malta / Photo source: Malta Sotheby’s International Realty

Traveling for the first time since the plague broke out is like a breath of fresh air…

Several days ago I had the opportunity to visit some of the prehistoric temples of Malta, which have been on my bucket-list for some time. I first heard of and became fascinated by the temples thanks to Richard Rudgley’s books Secrets of the Stone Age and Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age. Although our time window was short and so itinerary limited, the experience was nonetheless unforgettable… Continue reading “Travel Thoughts – Visiting Prehistory: Malta’s Neolithic Temples” →