Category: Articles

From New Dawn 184 (Jan-Feb 2021)

The twentieth-century esoteric philosopher Valentin Tomberg was born in 1900 in St. Petersburg to a Russian father and an Estonian mother. Little is known about his early life; indeed, Tomberg seems to have gone out of his way to draw as little attention to his life as possible. As his editor and translator Robert Powell remarked, Tomberg himself “attached no significance whatever to the biographical details concerning him.”¹ In fact, the main reason he is known today is that he is recognised as the author of a remarkable book, Meditations on the Tarot, that was and still is published anonymously. Ironically, the very steps Tomberg took to obscure his identity led to a great deal of interest in it.

What we do know about him is that by his late teens he had become deeply interested in Theosophy and the spiritual philosophy of Vladimir Soloviev, as well as in the more mystical aspects of the Russian Orthodox Church. 

Russia in the early twentieth century was a remarkable time for a young man with spiritual interests to come of age. Soloviev, Russia’s first philosopher, who has found a new reader in Vladimir Putin, was one of the major philosophical and religious figures of a period in Russian history known as the Silver Age. This stretched from around 1890 to 1917, the year of the Bolshevik revolution, a historical eruption that devastated Tomberg’s family, as it did many others. 

As I show in my book The Return of Holy Russia, the Silver Age was a time of deep interest in and almost obsession with religion, spirituality, mysticism and the occult, and it produced a powerful surge of creativity in literature, music, philosophy, and art. For a young man of Tomberg’s inclinations, having his spiritual awakening at this time no doubt made an impression on him that remained for the rest of his life.

A New Cultural Epoch

Although Madame Blavatsky, one of the founders of the Theosophical Society, was Russian, her focus on Eastern sources of wisdom, continued by her successors, alienated many Russians, who were deeply Christian. Tomberg was one of them, and soon after joining the Theosophical Society he left, turning his allegiance to the work of Rudolf Steiner. 

Steiner was immensely popular in Russia in the years leading up to the revolution, his highly Christianised version of Theosophy – which he would soon rechristen Anthroposophy – appealing to the generation of “God Seekers” that characterised the Silver Age. As I show in my book, both Steiner and the God Seekers had great hopes for a new “cultural epoch” to emerge from Russia at this time. In the view of Steiner and others, including Soloviev, Russia was charged with the mission of uniting the scientific knowledge of the west with the mystic intuition of the east, their integration giving birth, it was hoped, to a new creative consciousness that would transcend the limits of its parents.

Sadly, this marriage between east and west was precluded by the revolution and, as we know, something radically different emerged from Russia. Lenin’s adamantly anti-spiritual ideology put paid to any notion of a new “cultural epoch,” and the chaos of the revolution cost Tomberg dearly. His family’s fortunes were lost, as were his father – who had a position in the czar’s government – mother, and brother. One story has it that during the chaos, Tomberg’s mother ventured into the streets. She never returned, and Tomberg later found her and their dog, both shot dead and tied to a tree. Like many who escaped the terror, Tomberg was unquestioningly anti-communist for the rest of his life.

Upstart Anthroposophist

In 1920, Tomberg made his way to Tallinn, Estonia. From there, he wrote several letters to Rudolf Steiner, asking if he could become his student. His letters went unanswered; it is unclear if Steiner ever read them or simply ignored them. Steiner’s silence evidently did not put Tomberg off Anthroposophy; in 1925, the year of Steiner’s death, Tomberg joined the Estonian branch of the Anthroposophical Society, eventually becoming its secretary-general. But friction soon appeared between Tomberg and the society; he was too individual a mind to remain merely a good anthroposophist. 

Throughout the 1930s he wrote many articles for Anthroposophical journals, on a variety of subjects; many had to do with what Steiner called “the return of Christ in the etheric,” and the “mission” of different nationalities. Tomberg claimed that these articles were informed by an experience he had in 1931 when he was put in contact with the “angelic world.” This, no doubt, set him further apart from his fellows, and eventually he was asked to leave the society. At around this time he had also tried to find a place for himself at the Goetheanum, the society’s headquarters in Switzerland, but was denied this by Steiner’s widow.

In 1938, Tomberg moved to Holland; after the Nazis invaded in 1940, he joined the resistance. His relations with the Anthroposophical Society in Holland ran into the same problems as before. It seems the essence of the trouble was that Tomberg’s esotericism was even more Christocentric than Steiner’s; if you know Steiner’s work, you’ll know this is no easy feat. After the war, Tomberg moved to Cologne where he earned a degree in jurisprudence and became deeply engaged with Catholicism. It is unclear if he actually converted, but he become alienated from the Russian Orthodox Church because its leadership had seemed sympathetic to Hitler.

In 1948, Tomberg moved again, this time to England, where friends found him work with the BBC as a translator; he was a polyglot and would later monitor Soviet broadcasts. In 1960 he retired, devoting himself to study and writing. He died in 1973, from a heart attack while on holiday with his wife and their son in Majorca. Aside from his early essays, practically all his work appeared only after his death, and one work in particular was designed by Tomberg himself to appear in precisely that way.

The work in question is Tomberg’s magnum opus, Meditations on the Tarot, subtitled “A Journey into Christian Hermeticism.” This was first published in French – the language in which it was written – in 1980, seven years after Tomberg’s death and nearly twice that long after the work’s completion, which Tomberg noted as 21 May 1967, the “Festival of the Holy Trinity.” German and English translations soon followed, but it was not until 2002 that a full English edition appeared through a mainstream American publisher, bringing Tomberg’s work to a wider reading public, albeit still a marginal one with a taste for the arcane and esoteric. It was also at this point that it became known Tomberg was the author of this work. And although by now his authorship is well known, as mentioned the book is still published anonymously, as was Tomberg’s wish.

Letters From Beyond the Grave

Meditations on the Tarot consists of twenty-two “letters to the Unknown Friend,” sent “from beyond the grave,” dispatched, that is, well after Tomberg’s death. The reason for these tardy communiques is that Tomberg wanted to mute any personal element in them, to have the reader of these letters focus on their message, not on the messenger. Tomberg himself insists that he has “said more about himself” in these letters than he “would have been able to in any other way.”² The unknown friend to whom Tomberg is writing is the reader, and Tomberg’s letters are long, discursive, deeply pondered and occasionally meandering essays on the twenty-two trumps of the Tarot, filled with references to Steiner, Teilhard de Chardin, Bergson, Nietzsche, Gurdjieff, the Corpus Hermeticum, Catholic dogma, and many other writers, philosophers, mystics, and saints. (I should point out that the Meditations run to more than 600 pages.) Tomberg’s letters do not touch upon the divinatory character of the Tarot. Nor does he relate the trumps to the usual astrological or cabbalistic correspondences, as do most books on the Tarot, although both Cabbala and astrology make appearances.³ Instead, the Meditations are illuminating, insightful, and not infrequently baffling excursions into the meaning of the symbols presented in the trumps, which Tomberg tells his unknown friends are arcana. 

Arcana

Arcana, Tomberg tells us, are more than secrets, which are merely facts that are hidden from us, or allegories, which are figurative representations of abstract ideas. Arcana are “authentic symbols,” “magic, mental, psychic, and moral operations” that can awaken “new notions, ideas, sentiments and aspirations,” and which require more than an intellectual understanding for their power to be felt.⁴ 

One way of recognising authentic symbols, and of differentiating them from mere signs, Tomberg tells us, is that they have the power to “conceal and reveal their sense at one and the same time according to the depth of meditation” one reaches in their contemplation.⁵ A sign is nothing more than an indicator of what it points to. An arrow pointing to a door shows you the way out, but it does not share in you taking it. A symbol participates in the reality it presents, and its meaning, when grasped, should have an almost visceral effect on us. That is, it should affect us in such a way that it effects a change in our consciousness, our awareness, adding not only an intellectual knowledge but offering an existential encounter with hitherto unknown dimensions of Being. It introduces us to a bit of reality of which we were unaware.

This “transformational” power of symbols lead Tomberg to speak of the trumps as “enzymes” that enable us to be “fruitful in a given spiritual domain.” The trumps “ferment” the knowledge necessary for spiritual experience. This is why Tomberg speaks of them as “spiritual exercises,” whose aim is “to awaken from sleep… deeper layers of consciousness.”⁶ They are definite encounters with esoteric realities, through which we, the unknown friends, are changed. 

In this way, the trumps are similar to great works of art. According to Tomberg, the symbols of the Tarot should have the same effect on us as the “archaic torso of Apollo” had on the poet Rilke when he saw it while living in Paris. In its presence, Rilke knew that he “must change his life.”⁷ A true encounter with the Tarot’s symbolism, Tomberg tells us, should make us feel the same. His aim is to get us to think Hermetically, to allow the rich symbolism of the trumps to reach into our imagination and trigger our faculty for seeing connections between things which we would otherwise ignore. For Tomberg, the essence of Hermeticism is the ability to perceive “the totality of things,” “the One, the All,” as the ancient alchemists called it, the deep, underlying unity at the heart of the multiplicity of Being.

The French Connection

I should point out that Tomberg is writing in the French tradition of the Tarot – he bases his letters on the Tarot de Marseilles – and that this connection brings in the central theme of the book: to show how Roman Catholicism is an indubitable repository of Hermetic wisdom. Hence the subtitle, “A Journey into Christian Hermeticism.” Understandably, this may be sufficient reason for some unknown friends to forgo that journey. Yet we need not accept Tomberg’s thesis in order to profit from his book. 

I can respect the high regard Tomberg has for Catholicism, without agreeing with him that “the more one advances on the way of free research… the more one approaches the Church.”⁸ After much spiritual searching, the author of these meditations found a home in the Catholic church, but that does not mean that for us to learn from him we must take up residency there too. What strikes me as most important about the Meditations is not the arguments Tomberg makes for, say, the Ten Commandments as instructions in Hermetic philosophy or his belief that the fundamental virtues of the Christian faith – obedience, poverty and chastity – are the sine qua non of any esoteric pursuit, ingenious and thought-provoking as they are. We can embrace these dicta, take them with as many grains of salt as needed, or simply reject them. What strikes me as important about Tomberg’s Meditations for the non-Christian reader is the way Tomberg approaches the Tarot, his understanding of what we can call a Hermetic “way of knowledge.”

Christ and Hermes

Having said this, a look at history shows that Christ and Hermes are not such strange bedfellows as we may think. For a time during the Renaissance, Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary founder of the tradition which bears his name, was seen as a figure of equal importance with Christ, and vigorous attempts were made to incorporate the Hermetic teachings, found in the Corpus Hermeticum, into Catholic dogma.⁹ In France there is a long tradition of a kind of “Catholic occultism,” reaching back to the nineteenth-century French mage Eliphas Levi, and leading on to characters like the eccentric Saint-Yves d’Alveydre and his disciple Gérard Encausse, who wrote under the pseudonym Papus; all three turn up in the Meditations. It is also true that there is a long tradition of literature on the Tarot in French. Indeed, it was Levi himself who first hit on the idea of linking the twenty-two trumps with the twenty-two “paths” on the Cabbalistic Tree of Life, a correspondence that is at the heart of practically all modern magic. 

Hermetic Syncretism

This linkage has subsequently been discredited, and most modern historians of the Tarot accept that there is no historical connection between the Tarot and the Cabbala.¹⁰ Nor, for that matter, does there seem to be one with Egypt, which many occultists regarded as the Tarot’s source, seeing it as the so-called “Book of Thoth,” the Egyptian god of magic with whom Hermes Trismegistus is associated. 

Yet for all his historical inaccuracy, Levi’s inspired howler has proved remarkably effective for the many occultists who have worked with his ideas. These include the members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its most notorious associate, Aleister Crowley, as well as their many epigone. This seems to suggest that purists, who eschew such “romantic” notions as Levi’s and reject much that has accreted around the Tarot as nonsense, ignore the syncretic, synthesising character of Hermeticism. This was with it from the start, ages ago, when Thoth met the Greek god Hermes in ancient Alexandria, their fusion creating the “thrice great” one. This syncretic approach continued during the Renaissance when figures like Pico della Mirandola and others developed the notion of a “perennial philosophy,” which allowed for a Christian Cabbala – “culturally appropriating” a radically Jewish tradition – and, as mentioned, even a Christian Hermeticism. In this light, Levi seems merely to have done what Hermetic thinkers had been doing all along.

Analogy

Although Tomberg is aware of the historical appearance of the Tarot in the late Middle Ages – he does argue, though, for a kind of “archetypal” link to an Egyptian source; Jung makes many appearances throughout the book – a similar syncretic approach is taken in his Meditations. This makes perfect sense. For Tomberg, Hermeticism itself is a synthesis of magic, gnosis, mysticism, and philosophy, and its aim is not to supplant science or to uncover new facts, but to perceive the facts we already possess from a different perspective, and to infuse them with an additional depth, the kind of depth we discover through our encounter with the arcana of the Tarot. 

For Tomberg, analogy is the fundamental mode of acquiring knowledge in the Hermetic tradition, which proceeds through a process of synthesising the known and the unknown. The “open recognition of the relationship of all things and beings has engendered an exactly corresponding method of knowledge,” he writes.¹¹ That method is analogy, through which the “sympathy of all things” becomes apparent, not as a concept, or an idea or belief, but through a perception of it “in action” as it were, through the “fermenting” effect of the symbolic “enzymes” produced by our meditations on the trumps.¹²

This transformative effect is perhaps best seen in the Magician, the trump that Tomberg says is “the key to all the other Major Arcana.”¹³ By understanding and performing the “spiritual exercise” the Magician presents, Tomberg tells us that we will be able to work our way through to the knowledge and experience contained in the arcana that follow. As I do not have space to more than touch on some of the insights that the Magician presents, I trust the unknown friends that read this article will be encouraged to accept Tomberg’s invitation to journey with him and perform some of these spiritual exercises themselves. 

Concentration Without Effort

The spiritual exercise of the Magician, Tomberg tells us, is aimed at developing two essential abilities, necessary for any successful Hermetic work. They are “concentration without effort” and “turning work into play.”¹⁴ 

“Concentration without effort” – what he also calls “active relaxation” – is achieved, Tomberg tells us, when we can direct our attention to whatever occupies us, without the constant chatter of the care-ridden ego leading our minds elsewhere. When we can achieve an inner silence, free from the distractions of thought – the basic requirement of any inner work – the kind of concentration that would usually cost strenuous efforts can be reached “effortlessly.” 

As an example, Tomberg suggests a tightrope walker – an aptly symbolic choice. He is certainly concentrating on his actions; if he wasn’t, he would fall. But Tomberg asks: “Do you believe that his thought and his imagination are occupied with what he is doing?”¹⁵ The tightrope walker does not “calculate” or “plan” his next step because he has shifted his consciousness from his head – the worrying ego – to what Tomberg calls his “rhythmic system,” which possesses an intelligence of its own, the “intelligence of the heart” I have written about elsewhere.¹⁶

This shift from head to heart, Tomberg says, is symbolised by the lemniscate, or horizontal 8, that is formed by the Magician’s hat. This is the symbol of infinity, but, Tomberg tells us, it is also the symbol of “eternal rhythm,” the natural “flow” – as the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls it – that our ever-worrying mind interferes with. When we have quieted our inner monologue, we can enter this flow. If we think of the “concentration without effort” we achieve when we are deeply “into” a book we are reading, we can get an idea of what Tomberg means. Our concentration is so focused we forget our surroundings. Yet it requires no effort at all; in fact, we enjoy it.

This is the arcanum of “transforming work into play,” which is a result of achieving this kind of concentration.¹⁷ When we enter the “zone of perpetual silence,” we can not only concentrate our consciousness “effortlessly;” any task we may be obliged to perform can become a source of delight.¹⁸ Because we can draw from a “secret and intimate respiration,” he “who finds silence in the solitude of concentration without effort, is never alone.”¹⁹ 

He or she is never alone, because the Magician who has achieved this has “attained harmony and equilibrium between the spontaneity of the unconscious… and the deliberate action of the conscious,” the “I” or ego.²⁰ The Magician symbolises a state that is the “synthesis of the conscious and the unconscious,” or, as I have suggested, between our left and right brains.²¹ Tomberg says this is equivalent to what Jung speaks of as “individuation,” which can result in what Marie-Louise von Franz calls “conscious spontaneity,” a paradoxical state in which one is “consciously active and still spontaneous,” in which the conscious and unconscious minds have an equal say.²²

Tulpas and Egregores

This brief account of Tomberg’s interpretation of the Magician should give the reader an idea of what he may find if he dips into the Meditations. One other trump that I should at least mention is the Devil, the theme of Letter XV. This trump, Tomberg tells us, introduces us to the secrets and dangers of what he calls “counter-inspiration.” It presents a warning about the “intoxication” we experience when we become aware of our own power to “engender demons.”²³ The demon before whom the man and the woman stand enchained, Tomberg tells us, is one of their own making. It is a result of their misuse of the powers of will and imagination, the Magician’s tools in trade.

The specific demons Tomberg speaks of are tulpas and egregores. Tulpas are part of the esoteric psychology of Tibetan Buddhism. They are thought-forms created by a single individual, through prolonged efforts of visualisation. Eventually, after much mental work, the tulpa can take on a life of its own, much to the dismay of its creator. As I point out in my book, Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump, both the traveller Alexandra David-Neel and the occultist Dion Fortune had experiences creating tulpas, and both write of their difficulties in regaining control of and eventually dissolving them.²⁴ 

An egregore – which means “watcher” in ancient Greek – is a thought-form brought into existence by a group. As Tomberg tells us, there are no “good” egregores, only “evil” ones.²⁵ They can be “engendered by the collective will and imagination of nations,” Tomberg writes, but the aims of an egregore are always selfish, centred exclusively on gaining power and growing stronger at the expense of its creators. Once brought into existence, an egregore is harder to “dissolve” than a tulpa, given that it is the work of a group. This can be a cabal of occultists, or a political party – hence their inclusion in Dark Star Rising, which looks at the resurgence of a kind of “occult politics” in recent times. This seems to have raised its head during the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election and has remained on the scene since. It has also been at work in Russia. 

Should we take tulpas and egregores seriously? A good question. Tomberg certainly did, and as he tells us, the Devil is one trump we should clearly keep an eye on.

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Footnotes

1. Robert Powell, introduction to Valentin Tomberg, Lazarus Come Forth! (Great Barrington, VT: Inner Traditions, 2006) p. ix.

2. Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2002) p. ix.

3. The question of where and with whom Tomberg studied the Tarot is an interesting one. He speaks of a work, The Sacred Book of Thoth – The Major Arcana of the Tarot, by an “engineer” named Schmakov, published in 1916 which was “twice as large as Oswald Wirth’s” book on the Tarot (p. 590). He also says he read Ouspensky’s The Symbolism of the Tarot (1917). He tells his unknown friends that after the Bolshevik revolution, and presumably before going to Estonia, he became friends with members of a group of esoteric students that had been led by a mathematics professor, Gregory Ottonovitch Mebes. Mebes was the author of a book, The Course of Encyclopaedia of Occultism that is said to have influenced Tomberg. In 1926, Mebes was sent to a gulag, where he died. The group had been dispersed by the revolution, but the members he met “transmitted all they knew and recounted everything concerning the work of their group” to Tomberg. (Ibid.) The group seemed to have studied the Tarot in the traditional French way, relating it to Cabala, magic, astrology, etc. Tomberg says that through the “forty-five years” of his own study, he has “surpassed” what he learned from them and that throughout the Letters – aside for one exception – he does not draw on it. Another esoteric thinker who wrote about the Tarot, Mouni Sadhu, is said, like Tomberg, to have been in contact with members of this group, and influenced by Mebes’ book. Some have seen similarities between Sadhu’s The Tarot (1962) and the Meditations, which the link with Mebes may explain.

4. Ibid. p.4.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid. p. 91

7. https://poets.org/poem/archaic-torso-apollo 

8. Ibid. p. 283

9. See my book The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 2011) pp. 154-56.

10. Robert M. Place, The Tarot (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2005) p. 73.

11. Anonymous p. 12.

12. Ibid. p. 4.

13. Ibid. p. 3.

14. Ibid. p. 8.

15. Ibid. p. 9.

16. Gary Lachman, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 2017) pp. 52-53.

17. Anonymous p. 11. This is an arcana evidently known to Mark Twain, who makes good use of it in Tom Sawyer. There the wily Tom convinces his friends to paint a fence because he pretends to be enjoying it. Yet the trick is really on Tom because his friends actually do enjoy it; they have transformed work into play, by telling themselves it is play.

18. See my article “Getting Beyond the Robot” in New Dawn 182 (Sept–Oct 2020).

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid. p. 20.

21. Gary Lachman, The Secret Teachers of the Western World (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2015). In this book I argue that such a harmony is at the heart of the western esoteric tradition.

22. Marie-Louise von Franz, Alchemy (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1980) p. 238.

23. Anonymous p. 401.

24. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump (New York: Tarcher Perigee, 2018) pp. 90-92.

25. Ibid. pp. 419-20.

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 18 No 1 (Feb 2024)

In the year and a half since 29-year-old Daria Dugina was killed in a car bombing near Moscow, the question “Who is Daria Dugina?” has not gone away. On the contrary, as the smoke cleared, this question only intensified and broadened.

This is perhaps one of the reasons why, just this past October [2023], The Washington Post released an “exposé” admitting what most sober people already knew: Dugina’s young life was cut short in an act of state-sponsored terrorism carried out by Ukrainian spec-ops created, trained, armed, and funded by the CIA.¹ Of course, the US and Ukrainian officials who confirmed this to the Post “spoke on the condition of anonymity citing security concerns as well as the sensitivity of the subject,” as Kiev and Washington still officially refuse to comment. In other words, it is the “same old story” with the same old actors now playing with their latest “junior partners.”

These assassins still find themselves at a loss for words out of “concern” for the “sensitivity” of what they have done: killing a young thinker, writer, and activist, whose death opened a Pandora’s box into the real Daria Dugina – her thoughts and writings, and what her activism and death mean for many people around the world.

Following the publication of her posthumous book, Eschatological Optimism, Daria ‘Platonova’ Dugina – the philosopher – emerged into the spotlight.² Readers across the entire planet now know what many in her native Russia already did: Dugina was not only the daughter of the leading Russian philosopher, Aleksandr Dugin, but a profound, radical philosopher in her own right.

On the eve of her death, Dugina was working on a PhD in ancient political philosophy and beginning to present key ideas to the public.

She was a lifelong activist of the International Eurasian Movement, whose vision advocates the (re)establishment of a multipolar world in which diverse civilisations and cultures are not subordinated to the diktat of the US imperialist bloc and the Modern West.

Hand in hand with her (geo)political activism, Dugina’s young yet far-flung and veteran career as a daring journalist and analyst has been revealed. Daria was also a woman of the arts: she had a music project (Dasein May Refuse), authored poetry, and frequented and curated art exhibitions and theatre.³ She planned to try her hand at film.

On a more personal note, those who read Russian can learn from her recently published diaries that Daria was a human being who constantly struggled with melancholy and exhaustion. She constantly pushed herself to be the best she could be for others and a higher purpose.

The same Western media that rushed to celebrate her death as a loud and clear “message” have begun to complain about a rising “Daria Dugina cult” and worry about the actual message that her life and death now signify.

Indeed, perhaps they should be concerned because one of Dugina’s messages rings loud and clear in our days: We are on the brink of the abyss. In one of her most significant public lectures delivered just days before COVID-19 lockdowns began in March 2020, Dugina emphasised: “We are likely living in the era of the end of the world – this can be seen in the pandemic, in the various natural disasters that have become more frequent, and in the fundamental shifts in politics, geopolitics, and philosophy.”⁴

In a talk a year later, Dugina spoke of a “sharp apocalyptic feeling of an approaching end,” and she referred to our age as the Kali-Yuga, the final “dark age” in the Hindu cycle.⁵ When an audience member asked what dissidents could draw from modern culture, Dugina quipped sceptically: “Through modern culture? Which one? Through the culture of object-oriented ontology, cyborgs, and mutants?”⁶

In another talk on post-feminist philosophy, Dugina spoke of the need to “save humankind from approaching death,” and she proceeded to warn of the consequences of the advent of Transhumanism in no uncertain terms: “When the feminine and the masculine are finally abolished and replaced by cyborgs, it will signal the End of the World… Together with the loss of man and women, we will lose being itself.”⁷

In other words, the young woman whose life was heinously taken while driving home one night saw her life – and all of ours – as facing an apocalyptic dusk on the eve of a doomsday-midnight.

According to Daria, the end rushing towards us entails none other than the end of humanity, of humankind as such. The most glaring aspect of this end is the rise of an omnipotent technological matrix in which, in her words, “modern man finds himself under the destructive influence of matter, under the clichés of the consumer society, under the proliferating pressure of technology, which represses him and dictates to him the need to follow its intrusive, alienating algorithms.”⁸

The human of the “high-tech” 21st century is a creature that finds itself “thrown into a space in which technology and matter essentially destroy him, in which he loses his axis of rebellion and sovereignty in the face of materiality and illusoriness.”⁹

Soon enough – and Dugina was by no means the first nor the last person to forecast this – the technology that increasingly governs our lives will drown out our ability to think, act, and even exist. Everything we understand or suspect to define the human being – mortality, thought, freedom, will, heart, soul, the capacity for relationships with others, as well as relationships with the sacred and the beyond – is slated to be controlled, simulated, replaced, or displaced by the technological forces we unleashed and which we naively think we can stably control.

Dugina sought to uncover the roots of our technologically aligned apocalypse in Modern and Postmodern philosophy. She saw herself as a reconnaissance scout in the cosmic War of the Mind(s) (“Noomakhia”): One of her missions was intensely studying and exposing the thinking that enables and prefigures this, on that subtle philosophical plane too few pay attention.

Dugina insisted that Postmodern philosophising – which most people dismiss as mere “word salads” or idle “theorising” confined to academic departments and so-called “identity politics” – is the incubation chamber, laboratory, and Achilles’ heel of the outward apocalyptic crisis.

Decades before Transhumanism, one of the godfathers of Postmodern philosophy, Gilles Deleuze, argued that because the human being is too hierarchical, oppressive, and problematic of a subject, it therefore needs to be transformed – or deformed – into a mucus-like slime-web that randomly spreads out and coagulates like a rhizome.

“Object-oriented ontology,” one of the latest ‘fashionable’ trends in philosophy, claims that existence needs to be liberated from human thought so that the real nexus of being can be “returned” to the inanimate objects and machines around us. Daria Dugina did not mince words when she said: “This is the real end of philosophy.”¹⁰ Of course, “philosophy” here should be understood as Dugina meant it: not as superfluous thought experiments but as a radical, essential capacity of being human, as the spiritual architecture of the “software” behind the “hardware” – and even, as in her case, a matter of life and death.

Two anecdotes illustrate Daria’s daring forays into the dark trends of our Zeitgeist.

During the launch of the Russian edition of Iranian-American philosopher Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia (about a demon in the Earth’s core that is increasingly empowered and released by oil extraction), an audience member seized the opportunity to ask for Dugina’s hand in marriage. She responded by stating she would agree only if he learned Cyclonopedia by heart in English. In other words: “Know thy enemy.”

On another occasion, Dugina attended an exhibition by English-American philosopher Timothy Morton, during which Morton yelled at his hand for not living its own separate life and rising up against its human oppressor.

Dugina spent her time thinking with the likes of Negarestani and Morton because she believed – or rather knew – that they represent the thinking and way of (not-)being behind the technological, Transhumanist, “object-oriented” dystopia into which we are dragging and (not-)thinking ourselves into. For probing this territory and philosophical “no-man’s-land,” for naming names and exposing certain ideas, Daria’s philosophical activism posed a real threat.¹¹

Yet, this rising philosopher of the end times – cut down before her time – was not merely a deep thinker and observer. The central concept of her philosophy is eschatological optimism. Daria Dugina’s vision of the apocalypse was revolutionary in the original sense of this word – a “turning around” or transforming our way of being in the world. Turning around and seeing what is happening around us, turning around and seeing that others in the past and present have alternative orientations to offer, turning around all the preconceptions and ideologies that reigned over our age and now lead us towards doom.

In a time when we are fixated on screens, plugged into so-called ‘social media’, and bound (“connected”) to forces and signals beyond our wanting and doing, Dugina says there is only one way out for the conscientious human being, the dissident, the authentic thinker: accept the challenge – the fate – of living, thinking, and speaking out, here and now, at this point in time. By so doing, our being reflects and attunes to the same stream of dissidents and thinking in societies, systems, and situations before and elsewhere; we are profoundly human at this last moment when emasculated, thoughtless, clicking-and-scrolling human entities are slated for “troubleshooting.”

Dugina offers a simple but brutal truth as the starting point: “Everyone has their own place in the world, their spiritual Homeland… What is certain is that wherever we find ourselves in the modern world, we are in the centre of hell. It is difficult to see authenticity anywhere. We are cursed. But this is no reason not to rush toward salvation.”¹²

We are challenged to seize the opportunity to be radicals in an age of machines, bots, algorithms, and the rise of the non-human and the inhumane.

Of course, none of the above is found in any mainstream journalism or AI-assisted news reports on Daria Dugina’s life, thoughts, and death. All they can repeat is that Dugina was a Russian “propagandist” whose “aggressive rhetoric” against Ukraine justified civilian assassination.

Dugina had insisted that Russia’s “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine was a daring offensive-defensive manoeuvre to stop the Postmodern virus and apocalyptic deluge, already consuming the West, from overtaking one of Russia’s historical and cultural heartlands (or borderlands). Regardless of one’s interpretation of the conflict, it nevertheless fits into Dugina’s eschatological optimism concept: against all the odds, no matter what, we are obliged to wage a final struggle against the “End of History,” which, as we now can foresee, will no longer include humans – not to mention cultures and peoples like Russians, Ukrainians, Americans, Australians, etc.

Daria Dugina’s favourite, oft-recited quote comes from René Guénon, an author of prophetic eschatological works: “The end of a world never is and can never be anything but the end of an illusion.”¹³

According to Dugina, the scenarios ahead of us are the apocalyptic culmination of a deep, perfidious illusion. Our task is to end this illusion by and in ourselves, reclaim reality, and do so against all odds as humble, daring, inspired, aspiring eschatological optimists. For this reason, this young woman with a grand, startling awakening message was assassinated, and her death and life are of the utmost significance to us all.

Daria Platonova Dugina’s Eschatological Optimism is available from Prav Publishing at pravpublishing.com/product/eschatological-optimism.

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Footnotes

1. Greg Miller, Isabelle Khurshudyan, Shane Harris, and Marya Ilushina, “Ukrainian spies with deep ties to CIA wage shadow war against Russia,” The Washington Post, washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/23/ukraine-cia-shadow-war-russia

2. Daria Platonova Dugina, Eschatological Optimism, trans. Jafe Arnold, ed. John Stachelski (PRAV Publishing, 2023); Jafe Arnold, “Life in the End: The Message of Daria Dugina,” Continental-Conscious, 19 December 2023, continentalconscious.com/2023/12/19/life-in the-end-the-message-of-daria-dugina

3. Daria was close with Alexey Belyaev-Guintovt, on whom see David Herbst, “Alexey Belyaev-Guintovt: Court Painter of the Eurasian Empire,” New Dawn Special Issue Vol 15 No 3 (2021)

4. Dugina, Eschatological Optimism, 39

5. Ibid., 73-74

6. Ibid., 107-108

7. Ibid., 137-138

8. Ibid., 55

9. Ibid., 54

10. Ibid., 39

11. See: Askr Svarte, Tradition and Future Shock: Visions of a Future that Isn’t Ours (PRAV Publishing, 2023)

12. Dugina, Eschatological Optimism, 114

13. René Guénon, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, trans. Lord Northbourne (Hillsdale: Sophia Perennis, 2004), 279

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