Author: Boris Nad

From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 15 No 5 (Oct 2021)

Myth for us – except in exceptional cases of extreme degradation and the secularisation of tradition and culture – is not the fiction of primitives, superstition, or misunderstanding. Instead, myth is a concise expression of the highest sacred truths and principles, which are “translated” into a specific language for worldly life to the extent that such is practically possible. Myth is sacred truth expressed in popular language. Wherever the preconditions for a myth’s understanding disappear, the mythical content must be discarded for another to take its place. 

The contradictory processes of de-mythologisation and re-mythologisation were not unknown to ancient civilisations, in which old myths were sometimes destroyed (de-mythologisation) and replaced with new myths (re-mythologisation). In other words, the processes of de-mythologisation and re-mythologisation are mutually conditioned and dependent processes. They do not call into question the very foundation of traditional mythical associations; rather, they keep them eternally current and alive. 

Dangerous Intuitions 

In Greece, the process of de-mythologisation reached its complete and radical peak after Xenophanes (565–470). This was not followed by any process of re-mythologisation, it was the consequence of a total de-sacralisation and profanation of culture, whose result was the extinguishing of the mythical and the awakening of historical consciousness, in which man ceases to see himself as mythical and instead begins to understand himself as a historical being. This is a phenomenon that has analogies in two moments in history: the first was the process of de-mythologisation brought by early Christianity. 

For the first Christian theologians, myth was the opposite of the Gospel, and Jesus was a historical figure whose historicity the Church Fathers proved and defended to the unbelieving. This was contrasted by the process of re-mythologisation of the Middle Ages which saw a whole series of revitalisations of ancient mythical content, often conflicting and irreconcilable, ranging from the Grail myths to the myth of Frederick II, eschatological myths in the era of the Crusades, and various millenarian myths. Such was, without a doubt, the re-actualisation of mythical content and their “dangerous intuitions” which transcend their causes and serve as evidence of the very presence of mythical forces within the historical world, which no process of de-mythologisation is capable of destroying or extinguishing. 

The Consumer Mythology: The Midnight of History

Another example of the radical process of de-mythologisation was that brought by the Enlightenment era to its peak in the “technological universe.” This is the direct expression of the degradation and decline of modern man, who is no longer a mythical or historical being but merely a “consumer” within the “consumerist and technocratic civilisation,” or simply an “appendix” to the technological universe. The heroic impulse of man as a mythical being, or even a historical being, was extinguished. The destructive forces of de-mythologisation constantly purged and expunged mythical components from the domain of consumerist civilisation and human memory in general, exterminating the “dangerous intuitions” harboured within them. Within the technological universe, which is only the final stage of the fall of (modern) man, the human horizon is finally closing because here man has only one power and only one freedom: the power to spend and the freedom to buy and sell. This freedom and this power testify to the death of man (as known by myth and history) because within the universe of technology and the consumer civilisation anything that transcends this “animal of consumption” cannot exist. “The death of art” spoken of by the historical avant-garde was simply a consequence of the death of man, first as a mythical being, then as a historical being. 

Of course, the process of de-mythologisation can never be completed for the simple reason that destruction does not touch the mythical forces themselves. They continue to appear and return through history, whether under the guise of the “historical” or as something opposed to history. This is also true for the one-dimensional universe of the technocratic utopia. As a result, in the consumer civilisation, real mythical components are replaced by mythical simulacra, by self-sown sub-cultural ideologies and the “myths” of the consumer mythology whose heroes are comic book figures such as Superman. But the exhaustion of the long and destructive processes of de-mythologisation does not mean a return to mythical time. The German author Ernst Jünger wrote in his At the Wall of Time: 

We are standing at the midnight of history, the clock has struck twelve and we look ahead into the darkness, where we see the contours of future things. This view is followed by fear and heavy premonition. Things we see or think that we can see still do not have a name, they are nameless. If we address them, we do not intuit them accurately and they escape the noose of our control. When we say peace, it could be war. Plans of happiness turn into murderous ones, often overnight. 

In short: “Rough incursions, which in many places convert historical landscapes into elementary ones, hide subtle changes of a more aggressive kind.” 

At the Dawn of History

Ernst Jünger’s At the Wall of Time conveys much about the transition of myth into history, about the moment in which mythical consciousness is replaced by the historical. History, of course, has not existed as long as man has historical consciousness and rejects as non-historical the vast spaces and epochs of “pre-history” – whole peoples, civilisations, and countries – because “some person or some event must have very specific characteristics that would make them historical.” The key to this transition, according to Jünger, is provided in the work of Herodotus through which man today “passes as through a land illuminated by the rays of dawn”: 

Before him (Herodotus) there was something else: mythical night. That night, however, was not darkness. It was more of a dream, and it knew of a different connection between people and events than that of historical consciousness and its selective forces. This brings rays of dawn into Herodotus’ work. He stands on top of the mountain that separates day from night: not only are there two epochs, but also two types of epochs, two types of light. 

In other words, what we call history is the moment of transition from one mode of existence to something quite different. This is the time of the shift of two cycles which we cannot identify with a change of historical epochs – the matter in question is a profound change in the very existence of man. The sacred in the manner of previous epochs retreats, ancient cults disappear, and in their place come religions which soon afterwards become historical or anti-historical, even when they trigger events and historical plots. The Crusades called by the Western Church deepened divisions and schisms, and eventually gave birth to the Reformation, which began with religious enthusiasm and the desire to return to “biblical beginnings,” only to end with a historical movement which opened the way for the unhampered development of industry and technology unconstrained by the norms of (Christian) tradition and free from human hopes and desires. 

The Grimace of Horror 

The historical world, the outlines of which we can find in Homer and which were shaped by Thucydides, reached its zenith somewhere at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century with unclear boundaries in time and space. But upon clear consciousness of its laws and regulations, it started to collapse and the vast edifice of history became unstable, signifying penetration by hitherto unknown foreign forces. These forces have a Titanic elementary character, first seen in technological disasters which claimed hundreds of thousands of victims and then in the cataclysmic events of the 20th century, in the world wars and revolutions in which millions were killed and crippled. The release of nuclear energy, radiation, and the environmental destruction that enormous areas were exposed to, the daily toll in blood, whether it was sacrificed to “progress” in peacetime conditions or as a direct consequence of military intervention and conflicts, represented something that emerged out of the framework established by the historical world. 

Of course, history did not end there, as was expected by Marx or Fukuyama. Rather, what really became apparent is the acceleration of historical time, which condenses events and shortens the distances between key turning points of history. The point, however, is that those forces which we have called historical do not operate alone, and man’s role in these events is fundamentally changing: he is no longer able to act on an equal footing with the gods, to follow them, oppose them, or even subdue them as is represented in myth. As was still the case in the mature historical era, he is no longer an active participant in history guided by passions or his own will. Instead, he now becomes the plaything of something unknown, involved in events that surpass him, against his will and outside of his ideas. 

The expression of cheerful self-confidence is gradually replaced by a grimace of horror. Man, who until yesterday considered himself a sovereign and master, realises his weakness. The means on which he relied to turn against his creator at the decisive moment prove powerless. Technological systems and social arrangements have their reverse side, their automatic features that do not restrain but encourage destruction, putting man in the position of a wizard’s apprentice who frees forces that he is too immature to handle. Corruption, crime, violence, and terror are consequences rather than causes, and political responses, regardless of colour and sign, do not offer solutions but increase disarray. If the hour of panic had not descended, man would have at least gained awareness of his own downfall. 

All of this was unthinkable in the mature historical age because man then was still ruled by himself, and thus history as well. History, therefore, could have no sense of direction other than the one given by man himself, his own deeds and thoughts. Each concept of the “meaning of history” was a concept of the emergence of man, whereas in the classical historical age man did not emerge but simply was. The question of the “meaning of history” was a meaningless question, and it is not found in the works of classical writers from Herodotus and beyond. The question of the “meaning of history,” which is always found outside of man, becomes possible only when the focus of history shifts beyond man himself, whether into the sphere of social or technological relations. 

Modern man discovers his weakness too late. His collapse is not to be blamed on myth or history but on none other than the weakness and cowardice of modern man. The world of “civilised values,” and the historical world in general which he created, proves to be much weaker than we have been accustomed to believe – weaker structurally, spiritually, and ethically. At the first sign of alarm, it begins to collapse, revealing what is, in fact, modern man’s inner readiness for capitulation. 

This is the “midnight of history” that will soon be replaced by something different; this moment is marked by the spread of Titanic forces demanding sacrifices of blood. 

Toward Post-History: The Awakening of Myth

History, let us repeat, has not lasted as long as has man on Earth. But consciousness of this only occurs late within history, perhaps only at its end, when the boundaries of time and space change – on the one hand with the discovery of the distant past of man and lost civilisations, then the past of the planet and the cosmos, and on the other with the discovery of space, of the ocean depths, and the interior of the Earth through archaeological and geological layers in a virtually Vernean way. New perspectives cause dizziness. Pre-history and post-history gain in importance only when history becomes a crumbling edifice. Yet, man’s turn from history towards something that he is not yet able to define or see clearly now resembles escape. 

In one way or another, the technological universe and the consumer civilisation will come to an end, in the same way that the classical historical epoch ended with technocracy and totalitarian order in its complete form, which arose not out of courage or strength but out of cowardice, weakness, and fear. It is impossible to say how long this will take. It is also irrelevant whether this will happen due to internal attrition, overreach, disaster, or a combination of all these factors together. But in each of these cases, collapse is the consequence of man’s inability to dwell within the historical world and to rule it as a sovereign-supreme being. 

However, the return of myth is not possible in the sense of a return to the state of “pre-history.” Mythological forces remain present, just as they have been during the entire historical period, but they cannot establish the previous state for lack of the necessary preconditions. First and foremost, the “substrate,” the fertile ground, is missing, as modern man is too weak in the spiritual, psychological, and even “physiological” senses. 

Together with history, culture and its current meaning gradually disappear as well, remaining a mere instrument of social engineering. In the technocratic utopia, mass culture (as opposed to the culture of the historical period) is just one of the ways for the utopian fantasies and desires of the masses to be channelled. The elite culture, meanwhile, which constantly drifts between conformism and negation, between scepticism and denial, between scepticism and irony and back again to conformism, remains essentially a tool of de-mythologisation and the suppression of the dangerous intuitions contained in myth, thus enabling more or less painless integration into the technological universe under the illusion of free will. The appearance and awakening of dangerous intuitions and dormant archetypes on the margins of the technocratic social mechanism creates a situation of conflict and leads to glitches in its functioning. 

In the domains beyond the technocratic utopia, culture will need to take a more traditional role than the one it assumes under consumer civilisation. The disintegration of the historical world in its final stage, which we are witnessing today, allows us to see something out of it. 

For much of the historical period, culture was the privileged domain of sacred and mythical forces. This is one of the ways in which mythical forces can penetrate the world again – historically, realising themselves in history, unlike in the technological universe where they usually manifest themselves through the uncontrolled elements of folkloric subcultures and are often distorted to the point of being unrecognisable simulacra of the mythical, not veritable expressions. Such testify more to the eternal and unquenched need of man for mythical content than they represent a sign of the real presence of the mythical. 

In the post-technocratic era, culture will be very closely tied to re-mythologisation under the sign of re-recognising and re-awakening true mythical content, the revitalisation and innovation of ancient and traditional forms instead of, as before, their exorcism. The meaning and purpose of de-mythologisation, on the other hand, must be limited to its capacity in traditional societies – to the purification of degenerate “folkloric” mythical forms so that in their place may come forms which veritably represent tradition. 

The above text is based on passages from Boris Nad’s first volume of selected works in English, The Reawakening of Myth (PRAV Publishing, 2020), available from PravPublishing.com. 

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From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 15 No 3 (June 2021)

The Eurasian idea is an open idea. It is open toward both the past and the future – what will happen in the future depends on how we understand and interpret the past. This is a very urgent problem, for we are by all means witnessing the collapse of the current international order, an order which was not really international but rather defined by the order of “one sovereign and one master.” In practice, this was a liberal order, defined by very specific visions and ideas into whose circles we inadvertently moved. Now we are finally free from this. We can take a breath of fresh air with full lungs and start “from scratch.” 

Of course, this does not really mean starting from nothing. In the 1920s, the foundations for the Eurasian vision were laid by the persistent, quiet, patient work of enthusiasts (such as Petr Savitsky) and, even before, in the works of Danilevsky, Leontiev, and Dostoyevsky. These thinkers outlined a “Copernican revolution of history”: the future is not predetermined, and time does not run linearly. There are no privileged points on the globe, nor is there one privileged time, unless we adopt the axioms of liberal ideology. There is no singular and binding direction of historical development; rather, there are many divergent directions that cannot be compared to one another in terms of stages in the development of a single process. 

Taken together, Danilevsky believed that these directions make up the richness of history and express the different possibilities of mankind’s development. In fact, every civilisation has its own time, and it draws its own schemata over the course of its development. Only the totality of civilisational paths gives the unique tracing that is the “development of humanity.” The new beginning for world order based on this recognition would correspond to the “other beginning” of which the philosopher Martin Heidegger spoke. 

Liberal ideology has hitherto prescribed what “progress” is: it is always in the same direction, the only direction allowed. Behind this ideology has stood one world power: the United States of America. There is fundamentally only one world – that is the teaching they preached, a teaching which emerged out of the Enlightenment and quickly spread across the planet. 

But, if the world is not a universe, then it is, in fact, a pluriverse: there are many worlds. Many of them have been hidden under the illusion of one world: opposite the First World during the Cold War stood the Second (Communist) World, and behind this, somewhere in the shadows, was the Third World (the non-aligned world which is today called the “Global South”). 

This reality was not all-encompassing: the illusion of “convergence” revealed the reality of many worlds which were, in fact, many different civilisations – the American, the European, the Russian, Islamic, Indian, Chinese, etc. This is the truth that the West failed to grasp. Nor does it understand this today. The West was intoxicated by its victory in the Cold War in 1991, which was supposed to be followed by the “end of history” of which Francis Fukuyama spoke. That was what the West wanted to hear at the moment… And it seemed that all of humanity was obeying its will. 

Yet, this obedience was only seemingly voluntary. It was backed by the world’s strongest power with its aircraft carriers capable of projecting its military might at “any point on the planet.” Then came the regime changes (of “undesirables” making up the “axis of evil”): colour revolutions, more or less violent coups, open military interventions, the occupation of entire countries… This is what the proclaimed “freedom” boiled down to. This was, however, only the “unipolar moment” in the history of the world. It is finished now. 

The End of Western Hegemony

What’s happened with the hitherto hegemon? The hegemon is “tired” and is no longer capable of dictating to the whole of humanity. At first glance, it seems that all of this has been done by one tiny virus: the coronavirus. This, of course, is not the case. The virus was preceded by a prolonged fatigue, a crisis that has progressed within the West itself since at least the 1970s. 

First, there was the “retreat of the West” (which is not a civilisation, but rather an ideological construct based on several basic Enlightenment ideas currently holding a certain number of countries together), and today its collapse is underway. The virus only made this crisis visible, and it will not be solved by any monetary measures, nor by ever-new military interventions as the globalists are now demanding. 

Many are not yet aware of this major change. What about them? That is not our problem. What is important is grasping that the fundamental paradigms for the world of the future are being shaped today – or rather, it would be more appropriate to say, for the worlds of the future, because in such a world there will obviously be no single binding model that would be true for everyone. 

“Western universalism” was only an illusion. Perhaps it was sweet and appealing to a few countries in which these ideas originated, but it was still only that: an illusion. Living in illusions is ill-advised. The awakening had to come sooner or later. But if it comes too much later, this awakening will be bitter. Today, people are waking up from the “American dream” to discover that it was a well-promoted nightmare and that they can live quite well without it.

At the same time, this poses a challenge to Eurasia which, after a brief absence, is finally returning to the historical scene. How can this transition be made as painless and with as few victims as possible? In other words, how can it be made known to the hitherto hegemon that it is no longer the hegemon (the one determining the future of all of humanity)? This is no easy task. 

Today, of course, the hegemon is threatening and rattling its weapons. It is gathering forces for what appears to be a “final showdown” for the “final battle of history.” Will this decisive battle take place at all? It has nothing new to offer. It is only a more militant, slightly upgraded version of the same, with tolerance or its illusion abolished. In its upgraded edition, liberalism is becoming openly totalitarian (having hitherto been so covertly: “If you don’t want to be a liberal, you will be excluded from history” is now “Everyone must be a liberal”).

Rise of Eurasia

Meanwhile, new concepts and ideas have taken shape in Eurasia and are quickly being transformed into reality. One of these important projects is the “New Silk Road.” It is, in fact, a very old project that is now being revived, dressed in the new spirit of our times, a project to which the hegemon offers nothing other than interference (the same with the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline). The hegemon wants quarrels, conflicts, and wars between peoples to thereby impose its dominance. This is how it ruled before. The Russian thinker Aleksandr Dugin has recently spoken of the need to “internationalise peoples” to oppose this hegemony, i.e., nations must not lose sight of the larger whole. They have to look at the much broader picture. This is a fundamental geopolitical reality which we cannot afford to forget. 

The other reality is that of Eurasia itself. First and foremost, an alliance between China and Russia has taken shape. Integration in different forms is taking effect across the Eurasian continent – integration from which America is to be expelled. The Eurasian Economic Union is the initial form of such, its first incarnation, so to speak. The term “first in history,” however, should be used only with caution because it was preceded by the Soviet Union, before that by the Russian Empire, and still earlier by the empire of Genghis Khan. After all, every real historical project has its reflection in the distant past. The hope remains that for now, this “empire” still in outline develops in the direction of a fully-fledged Eurasian Empire. 

This process could encourage others on other continents. We could imagine, for example, a Brazilian Empire, sovereign and independent, around which a circle of South American countries would gradually take shape. We could think of African empires or an Islamic caliphate (a true, not a fake one). And we could, in the distant future, imagine a North American Empire, one which would not claim universality for itself and which would express the North American people’s characteristic way of self-understanding, their internal Logos. Every empire, in fact, offers its own answer to the question of what the human being is. The North American people have not yet found a way to understand themselves (there is simply no “American dream”) and have thrown themselves into slavery to false elites in the service of “globalism.”

Future of Humanity an Open Project

Either way, the future of humanity is now an open project. Its future actors are defining their places. This is why it is imperative to move away from what the Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin calls the “Western codification of consciousness,” which is the custom of looking at the world through Western eyes. The Western cultural, political, social, and economic models are exhausted or have become a burden – an unnecessary, harmful, even dangerous burden. It is important to reassess these models or (if necessary) to abandon them altogether, once and for all, as soon as possible. The Western models for a “mandatory future” should be opposed by our own models of a possible and desirable future. 

First and foremost, the concept of the nation-state and nationalist state has been overcome. As Rodrigo Sobota remarked, “we cannot forget the fact that the crystallisation of the nation-state as an artificial notion of the specifically Western character has deeply divided us.” The modern nation, reared within the homogenous nation-state and inspired by narrow and exclusive ethnonationalism, is not the same as the people, the community reared by long-standing history and culture, nor is the nation-state the only possible state. Along with the concept of the nation-state, “we must necessarily admit that the ancient Hegelian myth of the state, crystallised as he saw it in the venerable Imperial Germany, is in terminal decline.”

In today’s globalised world, nation-states, the undoubted product of the 19th century, as well as their firmly fixed borders, are disappearing, and new, supranational, continental or even global entities are being created. These are not merely processes of inevitable “dissolution,” but also processes of creating something new – opportunities for building new relations and ties between peoples. These processes are usually ambiguous in history: it is difficult to determine what is actually collapsing and what is being built. Not everything goes as planned. Processes can be reversed in one direction or another. In the new conditions, both colonialism and anti-colonialism are taking on new forms. Those ideas and concepts, which over the past three or more centuries gave impetus to the “modern West” and enabled its planetary supremacy in a brief historical period, are now exhausted. 

This is most clearly visible today in the West itself: individualism, liberalism, and utilitarianism no longer ensure superiority – not even material – but are instead turning into obstacles and hindrances. Moreover, they are the reason for the internal collapse and rapid disintegration of Western society and its entire civilisation. All of them belong to the age of the Enlightenment as the fruits of the reason of “enlightened man,” “his majesty the Western European thinker.” It is vain to continue fruitless debates about “values” which are already dead and belong to the irreversible past. Is there a more obvious sign of “internal decay” than this?

Death of the Old, Birth of the New

We need to build new political, civilisational, and economic structures of continental proportions. We think that empires would be the most suitable for this. When we say “empire,” we have in mind the broadest possible meaning, entities sufficiently elastic and robust (at the same time) to protect their civilisational space from “outside intrusion.” This does not mean that existing nations will disintegrate or disappear within them. On the contrary, by being within them, they will acquire the conditions for normal development. 

As for where this development will lead them, let the question remain open. “Human” in the plural is “the people,” and every people has its own unique face and character. Every people ought to continue their own particular development, with their own language, tradition, history, culture, and the special heritage which makes them precious and different from others. Empires arise out of the pursuit of this freedom. But this is not “freedom from,” but “freedom for”: freedom for everyone to be who they are. 

Today, let us repeat, we live in an age of the agony and death of one civilisation – the Western one. This is a time of crisis, an interregnum, of which the great Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci said: “Crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” The agonal cramps of one civilisation allow us to sense the contours of the future world. The “new” often comes into the world with birth pangs. There is no way for the sounds and voices of this to be silenced, no matter how hard they try to do so in the West. 

The death of a civilisation, as a rule, means the birth of a new civilisation, or civilisations, which are in part created over its corpse (in this case, the dead body of the “West”). The new states and new arrangements are not completely “new,” just as “old” civilisations never die completely and entirely. Something will be taken over or inherited and given a whole new meaning and significance in a completely different context, while other things will be condemned to oblivion. The paradigms of new civilisations are built on old foundations. Both the Soviet Union and America, for instance, mysteriously resurrected the concept of empire and thus shaped the bipolar world of the past century. 

Cultivating All Unique Cultures

In the first place, this applies to the sphere of culture. Culture is no longer and can no longer be dictated from one centre. We must free culture, or rather cultures, from everything that is outlived, boring, and stereotypical and return cultures to their original meaning. Culture and art are not planetary entertainment for bedtime; culture and art are revelations, awakenings, something that disquiets and moves us to search further for the “new.” Instead of one planetary and commercialised culture, pleasure for the masses, an intoxicating narcotic that always bears the same stamp (“made in the USA”), we will have cultures in the plural. “Yes” to Chinese, Russian, Korean, Greek, French, Finnish, Serbian, and many other cultures – as well as true American culture, a culture that has its own deep roots. “No” to the culture of stereotypes that boils down to faceless imitations, tediously and always repeating the same dilapidated, banal, and now wholly outdated clichés. We must return culture to its original meaning by creating it (anew). And this is, perhaps, our foremost task at the moment. 

Today we are concentrating our thoughts on the future, on the “new beginning,” while looking back on the past. This is natural and logical. It cannot be otherwise, for everything new “is only a new expression of an ancient, eternal desire,” just as any true “other beginning” is not a mere return to or imitation of the past, but a “new beginning, more primordial than the previous.”

Boris Nad’s book The Reawakening of Myth is available to purchase from PRAV Publishing (www.pravpublishing.com) and online booksellers. With thanks to Jafe Arnold for the translation.

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