Metapolitics & Occult Warfare, Part 3

1,165 words

Translations: Estonian ^[1], French ^[2]

^[3]Part 3 of 4

If the dominant current of decline is, to one extent or another, actually created, sustained, and guided by occult warfare, is it possible to use the same means to reverse decline? No—and yes. 

The Traditionalists do not think it is possible to replace decline with “progress,” i.e., progress toward the realization of Golden Age ideals, since Traditionalists believe that decline is the dominant current of time. One declines from the Golden Age; one does not progress toward it. But at the end of the Dark Age, a new Golden Age will dawn, so although one cannot progress toward a Golden Age, one can decline toward it; one can slide into it. Thus, from this perspective, further decline can actually be seen as a kind of progress, for things cannot get better until decline has run its course.

But this is no argument for quietism, for inaction, for just waiting for an impersonal historical destiny to do our work for us. For, as we have seen, historical destiny is not impersonal. It works through concrete individuals and groups who have a place to stand and a lever to move the human world. In The Crisis of the Modern World,[1] Guénon writes:

. . . the characteristic features of this epoch are in actual fact those which the traditional doctrines have from all time indicated for the cyclic period to which it corresponds [namely the Dark Age or Kali Yuga]. . . . what is anomaly and disorder from a certain point of view is nevertheless a necessary element of a vaster order and an inevitable consequence of the laws which govern the development of all manifestation. However, let it be said at once, this is no reason for consenting to submit passively to the disorder and obscurity which seem momentarily to triumph, for, were it so, we should have nothing better to do than keep silence [which Guénon did not do]; on the contrary, it is a reason for striving to the utmost to prepare the way out of this “dark age,” for there are many signs that its end is already near, if not imminent. (Crisis, p. 9)

Guénon does not merely claim that we ought to resist the Dark Age, but that resistance already exists. He offers a metaphysical argument for this claim:

This [resistance] also is part of the appointed order of things, for equilibrium is the result of the simultaneous action of two contrary tendencies; if one or the other could cease to act entirely, equilibrium would never be restored, and the world itself would disappear; but this supposition has no possibility of realization, for the two terms of an opposition have no meaning apart from one another, and whatever the appearances, one may be sure, that all partial and transitory disequilibriums contribute in the end toward realizing the total equilibrium. (Crisis, p. 9)

Guénon’s point is that all realities are comprised of opposed forces in equilibrium. Today, Dark Age currents are dominant. But that does not mean that Golden Age counter-currents are entirely absent, for if they were absent, the world would collapse into total chaos, rather than display the evil and inverted order that exists today. (If chaos reigned, one would expect the good guys to win once in a while.) Thus a Golden Age counter-current must exist and exert a countervailing influence to the Dark Age, but in a hidden and recessive manner. Furthermore, as with the forces of subversion, this Golden Age counter-current does not exist merely as a disembodied tendency. It is the work of concrete individuals and groups.

In the final chapter of The Crisis of the Modern World, Guénon further discusses this counter-current. He claims that, “the modern world would cease to exist at once if men understood what it really is, since its existence, like that of ignorance and all that implies limitation, is purely negative: it exits only through negation of the traditional and superhuman truth” (Crisis, p. 157).

Such truth cannot be understood by the vast majority, but this is not necessary, since “it would be enough if there were a numerically small but powerfully established elect to guide the masses, who would obey their suggestions without suspecting their existence or having any idea of their means of action . . .” (Crisis, p. 157). Clearly, this elect must operate at least in part through dissimulation, as do the initiates of the Counter-Tradition.

Guénon discusses how such a Traditional elect might work to end the Kali Yuga. First, he emphasizes that there cannot be any absolute discontinuity between the Kali Yuga and the coming Golden Age, meaning that they exist within the same causal nexus, so that things we do now will affect the Golden Age to come. A Traditional elect with the knowledge and the power to end the Kali Yuga, “could so prepare the change that it would take place in the most favorable conditions possible, and the disturbances that must inevitably accompany it would in this way be reduced to a minimum.” But, even if that proved impossible, the Traditionalist elect could perform “another yet more important task, that of helping to preserve the elements which must survive from the present world to be used in building up the one to follow” (Crisis, p. 158).

Along the way, Guénon drops a bombshell in question form: “is it still possible for this elect to be effectively established in the West?” (Crisis, p. 157)—implying that the elect does not exist in the West. He goes on to explain that such Traditional elites do, however, still exist in the East, safeguarding the “ark” of Tradition (Crisis, p. 159). He also speculates on how a Western elect might be reconstituted, either by finding and reviving a living remnant of Tradition in the West, which Guénon thinks unlikely, or by Westerners becoming initiates of Eastern masters. The latter path was, for instance, taken by Savitri Devi, probably under Guénon’s influence:

I embraced Hinduism because it was the only religion in the world that is compatible with National Socialism. And the dream of my life is to integrate Hitlerism into the old Aryan tradition, to show that it is really a resurgence of the original Tradition. It’s not Indian, not European, but Indo-European. It comes from back to those days when the Aryans were one people near the North Pole. The Hyperborean Tradition.[2]

I do not know if a Traditionalist elect has emerged in the West since 1927, when Guénon published The Crisis of the Modern World, but if Guénon is right, we can rest assured that Eastern masters (a kind of League of Shadows ^[4], perhaps) are waging the occult war on our behalf, otherwise the Dark Age—which is not chaos but a kind of negative order—would have given way to complete chaos long ago.