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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(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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