Gnostic individuation as an alternative to mass politics

Through Stephan Hoeller's "Freedom"

This is a post properly summarized by the title. It discusses the benefits of turning one’s attention to individual spiritual growth instead of to mass politics.

“The natural world, society, the state, the nation and the rest are partial, and their claim to totality is an enslaving lie, which is born of the idolatry of men.” - Nicholas Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End

“I would not encourage in your minds the delusion which you must carefully foster in the minds of your human victims. I mean the delusion that the fate of nations is in itself more important than that of individual souls. The overthrow of free peoples and the multiplication of slave-states are for us a means…; the real end is the destruction of individual souls. For only individuals can be saved or damned…” - the demon Screwtape in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters

This is a post about gnostic bishop Stephan Hoeller’s book Freedom: Alchemy for a Voluntary Society (1992). I’ve covered his work previously offering an introduction to gnosticism, and I will cover more of his work in the future.

Why is Freedom relevant? In it Hoeller articulates the hope that individuals will be able to increase their spiritual consciousness, which he believes then has the potential to transform society as a whole. This perspective is not properly understood in the materialist, secular, “extraverted as Hell” (per Jung) West, so it is worth exploring, and will be augmented with other sources.

What I’ve appreciated about Hoeller’s books is that they are clear, simple, and easy to understand; a pleasure to read. It is the mark of genius to communicate in a language the common man understands. Alternatively, philosopher Martin Heidegger is considered a genius by many, but he is widely considered unreadable and obtuse.¹ That isn’t a mark of greatness to me. As I’ve begun what will be a deep dive into the esoteric tradition (after I asked the universe for a greater challenge after becoming bored by politics and culture, which I think I’ve mostly figured out) I’ve felt drawn to certain aspects and repelled by others. For example, Damien Echols’ High Magick did not appeal to me (which I will also cover in the future) and the Corpus Hermiticum was unfortunately unreadable without a study guide, while Hoeller is a pleasure and I will continue to read more of his work.

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Hoeller’s background

Hoeller has been a bishop of a gnostic church called the Ecclesia Gnostica for fifty seven years and which is slowly growing. It now has six chapters. Here’s an article about the Church and an interview with him. Hoeller originally fled from Hungary as the communists were taking over, where his uncle was killed and his father narrowly avoided the same fate.²

He immigrated to the United States and then to Los Angeles where the Theosophical society and Manly P. Hall’s Philosophical Research Society were gaining ground, where he helped found and build the Ecclesia Gnostica and the Gnostic Society. He did not take the relative freedom within the United States for granted and his status as a European outsider who survived the horrors of World War 2 and its aftermath offered him a unique perspective, much as Solzhenitsyn did during his long exile in Vermont. Hoeller is still alive and in his 90s now.

Hoeller in January 2020

Freedom was written in 1992 as the Soviet Union was failing, Francis Fukuyama was gloating about the end of history in his The End of History and the Last Man, and irreverent libertarian South Park was on the horizon (1997). It was an optimistic period materially and there was a lot of hope in the air — libertarianism was popular, especially economic libertarianism and the growth of secularism and consumerism — but it was also a sign of increasing shallowness, decadence and nihilism. Nirvana - whose whiney, complaining empty-rage music I dislike, except for their unplugged covers of The Man who Sold the World and Lake of Fire - exemplified this era. Libertarianism as an economic model would eventually be discredited as everyone other than whites and Christians clung furiously to group identity.

Hoeller looked at this period as a period of transition and opportunity, hopeful that the United States would be able to rise to a new spiritual level. He was ultimately wrong about this as America and the West doubled and tripled down on materialism, nihilism, and secularism, following those trends right off the cliff, but it seemed like a reasonable hope at the time. While much of the book isn’t quite relevant to today’s environment, there are certain aspects about gnostic thought, individuation, and the mass mind that are perennial issues that deserve highlighting and comment.

Let’s delve into this.

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The masses are asses

In Gustave Le Bon’s famous book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895), Le Bon noted that there were certain characteristics that described crowd psychology: "impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of sentiments, and others", and Le Bon claimed that "an individual immersed for some length of time in a crowd soon finds himself – either in consequence of magnetic influence given out by the crowd or from some other cause of which we are ignorant – in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer."

The way it works is this: individuals have different life paths as well as different ideas, values, and impulses. When you bring together a group of people in order to find commonality and agreement, a speaker is forced to both simplify ideas and to simplify the number of ideas covered; this in turn has a hypnotic and dumbing-down effect on the crowd. Therefore the bigger the crowd the dumber it has to be to reach consensus — without exception.

Furthermore, the individuals that make up crowds are generally of a lower quality because most people are of a lower quality. I have discussed this before but a surprisingly high percentage of people may have little internal thoughts according to a 2007 University of Nevada Department of Psychology study on college students.  Per the study, regarding the frequency of common phenomena of inner experience (inner speech, inner seeing (aka images), unsymbolized thinking, feeling, and sensory awareness), the frequency of common phenomena of inner experience is low, with 13-30% of participants lacking a specific form of inner experience during the study at all:

If this study is accurate, many people may lack specific types of inner experience entirely, and the overall frequency of some types of inner experience may be surprisingly low. So a speaker who wants to sway a crowd has to sway the lowest common denominator, i.e. people who lack internal experiences. As Gustave Le Bon said, “The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” Francis Parker Yockey agreed.³

Carl Jung piles on further. The modern mass man is different and worse than the mass man of the past:

Here are some of the characteristics [of the mass man]…A person with a mass psyche is socially isolated from other human beings, separated from the unconscious and not in touch with the instincts. Moreover, this person is spiritually uprooted, having no vital connection with symbol systems and having no authentic traditions of a religious-mythical nature. Such a person is aesthetically insensitive, having little appreciation of beauty either in nature or in art, and is lacking in a sense of romance and imagination to see beyond the personal concerns of the ego. Finally, the mass-minded person expects economic and political changes and upheavals to solve all problems and perplexities, because he or she seeks for the source of all good and evil in the objective environment rather than in subtle, interior factors. Jung once said that he was tempted “to construct a political theory of neurosis, in so far as the man of today is chiefly excited by his political passions.”…

The modern person with a mass psyche misuses politics as an unrealistic extraverted projection and an occasion for living out the pressures and evils of the unconscious….They take to collective and political movements wherein their already precarious and puny individuality dwindles to minuscule proportions. Imitation, dependence, lack of personal judgment, a lowering of the mental level are the inevitable accompaniment of the submerging of the individual in a mass movement…The morality of a group or movement exists in inverse ratio to its size. Jung said that any large company composed of wholly admirable persons has the morality and intelligence of an unwieldy, stupid and violent animal, and that the bigger the organization, the more unavoidable is its immorality and blind stupidity. As the Romans (who had a wise saying for every occasion) used to say: Senatus bestia, senatores boni viri (“The senate is a monster, but the senators are good men”).

What then is the answer to the great problem of mass mindedness? It is evident…that the answer will not be found in ideologies and even less in movements, no matter how commendable their proclaimed objectives. The answer is not a movement, but the individual. The individual is the only hope, and since even the mass-minded person is latently an individual, this is a hope of considerable magnitude and promise.

Jacques Ellul had commented in 1965 that repeated, sustained messages aimed at highlighting fear stimulated an unavoidable conditioned reflex: “Some people object to this [the efficacy of propaganda] ... after a careful look at Stalinist propaganda…one comes to this conclusion: Stalinist propaganda was in great measure founded on Pavlov’s theory of the conditioned reflex…let us not forget that if this theory, put to use by the propagandist, brings results and proves to be effective…. doctrinal criticism can then no longer demonstrate its inaccuracy.” This link, recommended by

Andrew N

, delves into how the mass mind has been hacked by globohomo in a Pavlovian sense, especially in the context of the COVID scare.

Because of these issues, the populist masses will never serve as a political solution to the problems of the day - they will have to, if one comes, come from an elite with different values. (But let’s be careful with our definition of elite here: as Ernst Junger stated when he was 100 years old, “The sociological definition of elite is already an indication of the corruption of the concept. A warning, for me, to no longer trust even the elites, but now only the great loners.”)

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The nature of reality

Another problem is the nature of reality itself, which is constructed so that whatever end-state Heaven on Earth promises are made politically will always ultimately remain unfulfilled. As discussed previously, the very nature of existence means that our wants are always unmet. To the extent we fulfill them, we merely temporarily experience boredom followed by new unmet desires to strive for:

All striving is in some sense futile; whatever goal one achieves will disappear the moment it arrives. We suffer most from the lack of permanence in the people and things we most care about. The more we care, the more we suffer. Animals lose whatever it is they possess too, but “only humans feel the pain of that loss since only human consciousness retains a sense of these things as past. Nor is our capacity for hope or anticipation of the future a compensation for this condition. Indeed, it compounds our situation, since most of our hopes are bound to be disappointed, and those that are fulfilled are disfulfilled in the next moment as the objects of our hopes slip into the past.” Time-consciousness, then, results in unhappiness, even though we receive the compensation of consciousness itself - the intellectual ability for higher thought.

Putting together the inherent stupidity of the masses, the lack of internal thoughts for most people, the nature of reality itself as constituting perpetually unmet desires, and perhaps a proper understanding of history where sociopaths animated by a Demiurgic spirit perpetually conquer and destroy good people, and it may lead one into a perspective of the dreaded, derided blackpill: that this reality is a place of suffering which cannot change, as per Schopenhauer:

As a reliable compass for orienting yourself in life nothing is more useful than to accustom yourself to regarding this world as a place of atonement, a sort of penal colony. When you have done this you will order your expectations of life according to the nature of things and no longer regard the calamities, sufferings, torments, and miseries of life as something irregular and not to be expected but will find them entirely in order, well knowing that each of us is here being punished for his existence and each in his own particular way.

There are three common ways to respond to being blackpilled:

1. A retreat into hedonism or nihilism, to seek pleasure as the world collapses around you;

2. A turn to exoteric religion as seen the push for “trad Cath” or “Ortho-bros”; push out pleasure into the afterlife and hope for salvation then, or

3. A hope for acceleration, either (1) faster into collapse so something new can be rebuilt from the ruins, or (2) a hope that “the only way out is through” and that something better with more freedom may result from increases in technology.

There are problems with all of these approaches:

1. A retreat into hedonism or nihilism is an embrace of meaninglessness, misery, self-destruction and death;

2. A turn to exoteric religion is reactionary and short-sighted given it has been on a losing retreat for many centuries due to the death of God from empiricism and technology; and

3. A hope for acceleration is nihilistic and assumes that something can eventually be rebuilt better than what currently exists, which is a secularized version of the Christian hope for salvation upon death. Also, there is no reason to assume that technology will result in more freedom down the road; sometimes technology has a by-product of temporarily increased freedom, but the great historical trend of increased centralization ultimately subsumes it.

However, there is a fourth possible response: the gnostic, Hermetic, individuated, esoteric quest.

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The individuated gnostic journey

I’ve discussed previously how gnosticism views this world as controlled by the Demiurge - a malevolent, bumbling creator entity who sees nothing above himself - and if one seeks gnosis one may connect to the Source above and beyond his reach.

Under this perspective gnosis is attained through the synthesis of opposites (the Coincidentia Oppositorum which will be the focus of it’s own post). Combining one’s thoughts, intuition, feelings and senses, listening to them and trying to synthesize them when they conflict to achieve a higher unity, and to practice this consistently. But that doesn’t mean one becomes saved as a final end state either here or necessarily in the afterlife — this perspective stresses continuous and sustained struggle for further individuation.⁴ The benefits of this process are felt in the here and now; one becomes more integrated and connected, more thoughtful, calmer and wiser, more able to live in the moment, and it also helps re-enchant one’s worldview. The spiritual ascent of achieving higher consciousness is marked with a feeling of operating on a higher frequency of vibration; those on lower levels have lower vibration frequencies.

Such figures who sought to synthesize opposites - even though not all these figures are gnostics - include Carl Jung, Stephan Hoeller, Nietzsche, and Ernst Junger.

Let’s start with Nietzsche. According to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Society,

“Nietzsche’s concept of knowledge did not only allow for contradictions. It required them. Only total, comprehensive knowledge, which incorporated opposite opinions, was true knowledge for him. Thus, it was possible for him to write for and against Judaism, for and against Christianity, for and against racism. The National Socialists could interpret his writings any way they wished and manipulate them for their ends because of Nietzsche’s explicit rejection of reason and logic.”⁵

Jünger’s contradictions were less explicit than Nietzsche’s. I covered him previously here. His concept of the anarch, of following one’s internal intuition and thought process despite pressure from mainstream society, seems to be in strong accordance with the gnostic process. As Junger stated:

The anarch’s state is the state that each man carries within himself. He embodies the viewpoint of Stirner, the author of The Unique and its Property - that is, the anarch is unique. Stirner says: “Nothing gets the better of me.” The anarch is really the natural man. He is corrected only by the resistance he comes up against when he wishes to extend his will further than is permitted by the prevailing circumstances. In his ambition to realize himself, he inevitably encounters certain limits; but if they didn’t exist, his expansion would be indefinite. That as the fate of, say, the caesars, or the child how does whatever he pleases. So barriers have to be imposed.

The anarch can don any disguise. He remains wherever he feels comfortable but once a place no longer suits him, he moves on. He can, for instance, work tranquilly behind a counter or in an office. But upon leaving it at night, he plays an entirely different role. Convinced of his own inner independence, he can even show a certain benevolence to the powers that be….the anarch is a pragmatist. He sees what can serve him- him and the common good; but he is closed to ideological excesses. It is in this sense that I define the anarch’s position as a completely natural attitude. First of all, there is the man, and then comes his environment. That is the position that I favor at present….Society demands certain forms, certain ruses; but basically, it cannot penetrate a man’s innermost core….the difference between the anarchist and the anarch also resides in the fact that the anarchist needs society, because he wants to prove it, which the anarch does not seek to do.

Or from his War Journals: “I want to examine human growth as the symbolic key to cosmic structure.” (January 4, 1944).

Meanwhile, Carl Jung had deeply gnostic views, even though it was approached from a depth psychology perspective:

Jung’s teachings contain the theme that the soul has an inherent tendency toward individuation, a process whose objective is ultimate wholeness, sovereignty, freedom and autonomy. The process of individuation, according to Jung, consists to a large extent of the union of the opposites in the psyche. High and low, masculine and feminine, good and evil must eventually be reconciled in the souls of human beings. The union of these opposites, moreover, always involves liberating the shadow, bringing the darkness to light within oneself, which is to a great extent an antinomian gnostic principle. Jung’s psychology is in essence about freedom, liberty and liberation, or the increase in freedom…⁶

According to Hoeller, “The psychologically wise attitude therefore must be one which is invariably distrustful of situations which can lead to mass neurosis or herdlike behavior, in short, to all those blandishments of the collective which usurp the judgment and discrimination of the individual….What is needed then in order to produce social progress is the integrative process of the individual. The elixir of human history is not political, social or even religious ideology with its movements, parties, organizations and churches, but the psychic life of the individual, with its growth and integration, its becoming whole and complete."

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The gnostic conception

Gnostics are focused on the concept of individual freedom, the freedom to follow one’s own thought processes, impulses and journey to become the best version of yourself you can become. Gnostic ethics is overwhelmingly a matter of how one acts toward one’s own soul and the wider divinity of which it is a part as opposed to one’s relation to others or to society. As Hoeller explains,

The gnostic preoccupation with the issue of liberty led to the much debated and maligned position of antinomianism, which means opposition to rigid structures of religious legalism (anti means “against”; nomos means “law”). The gnostic approach to religion was and is highly individualistic and nonconformist. All in all, it would be quite correct to say that gnostics throughout history were spiritual libertarians. Of course, this libertarianism proved to be their downfall. The gnostics were not organized in an authoritarian fashion and thus had no effective power structures. Thus they were overwhelmed by forces that possessed the power they themselves lacked - the authoritarian, organized orthodoxy of the newly streamlined Constantinian church, supported by the mightiest power structure of ancient history, Imperial Rome. In more ways that one, gnosis and gnosticism were intimately connected with the ideals of a spiritually based political freedom. The gnostic schools were, in fact, the last vestiges of such freedom when they were obliterated in the third and fourth centuries.

Under the gnostic conception there are three types of people:

• hylics – the lowest order of the three types of human. Difficult to be saved since their thinking is entirely material; close to incapable of understanding gnosis. Understanding the fundamentally emptiness of materialism is the precursor to achieving higher development. Equivalent to the NPC.

• psychics – "soulful", partially initiated. Matter-dwelling spirits.

• pneumatics – "spiritual", fully initiated immaterial souls escaping the doom of the material world via gnosis.

Hoeller articulated these concepts further:

The gnostics said that everyone does not come to the same conclusion as to what is right and what is wrong because everyone does not perceive reality in the same manner. One’s perception of reality, whether moral reality or any other, depends on one’s spiritual development. While Plato looked for the criteria of morality in ideas, and the Semitic religion looked for it in the Law of Moses, the gnostics held that these criteria are in the person….Significantly, the gnostics also declared that morality depends on consciousness, and that one cannot expect the same level of morality from an unconscious person (hylic) as one can from a partially conscious individual or from a fully conscious person - the true pneumatic gnostic.

The gnostics generally understood that the unconscious or material person was in need of a moral code appropriate to his or her condition, and the partially conscious or psychic person was in need of a moral code that was appropriate to this status. Similarly the pneumatic, or true gnostic, who received moral inspiration directly from the spiritual nature was in turn entitled to live according to his or her inspired pneumatic ethic. (This view was known to the common sense of the ancient world. It was embodied in the popular Latin proverb, “What is permissible for Jupiter is not permissible for the ox.”)

As discussed above, a significant percentage of people have little internal thinking. These hylics need an exoteric, liturgic, organized mass religion with an external Daddy God who will send them to Hell if they don’t perform in conjunction with its dictates because they are generally incapable of or unwilling to feel and respond to the spark of gnosis within themselves. (This isn’t to claim that all exoteric religious believers are hylics; see the wonderful Archibishop Vigano, who Pope Bergoglio just excommunicated, as an exception). Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor was right about the hylics of humanity needing to be told what to do and believe⁷ — but so was Jesus in the story, where people needed to be given the opportunity to choose to grow spiritually, even if only a small number would take it.

Hylics are very open to herd/group mentality and big government and being told what to do. Psychics are in some intermediate ground, while pneumatics have the capacity to achieve gnosis if they focus on their individuated and decentralized journeys.

There is therefore an inegalitarian hierarchy on the level of spirituality. Hoeller adds,

“Can there be a moral equality? Can there be a morality that is equal and applicable to all? The answer is that such a thing cannot be. People are equal in ultimate spiritual potential, but they are anything but equal in actual development. Not all people are conscious; in fact few are. Some are only partially or occasionally conscious and many, many are very unconscious. There are today, just as there were long ago in Alexandria and other gnostic cities, people who are materialists or hyletics. They are in need of swift justice, of physical deterrents to crime, of punishment rather than rehabilitation. There are in our days also people at the psychic level who are people of the law and of the book. They need a code, a system, whether written by Moses or by Kant or Hume which will guide them. The believers must believe so that by believing they may live in peace and order. In God’s good time they will perhaps come to the place where they may know and then they will not need to believe any longer. Until then let them worship their laws and live by them as best they can. And, assuredly, there are today also pneumatics - gnostics, those who know, those who are conscious. They have outgrown the law; indeed, they are the true law embodied. They hear the command within, daily, hourly, and thus they have little need of commandment. These are the men and women who have come out of great tribulations, painful and stressful existential encounters, hard, perilous moral choices and who have nevertheless prevailed.

In other words, depending on one’s level of spiritual development one’s relationship to the outside world changes, as do our psychological, emotional, and spiritual needs. As we develop more we require outside rules less and less, listening to our inner intuition (balanced against our emotions, intellect and senses) more. As

L.P. Koch

eloquently stated, “Everybody criticizes genetic/biological blank slatism, but it’s soul-level blank slatism that stands in the way of understanding so many aspects of our world. Perhaps we just haven’t (re-)found a language to talk about these things yet, although the NPC meme has done much to bring such heresy back into the modern world.”

By changing who we are we in turn effect the world in a natural, whole and positive way. Jung expressed himself on this topic as follows in his Civilization in Transition:

Great innovations never come from above; they come invariably from below; just as trees never grow from the sky downward but upward from the earth however true it is that their seeds have fallen from above. The upheaval of our world and the upheaval in consciousness is one and the same. Everything becomes relative and therefore doubtful. And while man, hesitant and questioning contemplates a world that is distracted with treaties of peace and pacts of friendship, democracy and dictatorship, capitalism and bolshevism, his spirit yearns for the answer that twill allay the turmoil of doubt and uncertainty.

There are some other ways to analyze this. I previously outlined in the second half of this post how ideological dissidents to the current system arise exclusively from the “loser clique”, because they are the only group who feel intense psychological pain from having the lowest status in society. From a Myers-Briggs perspective many of the non-hylics will be INTJ or ISTJ; from a Big 5 perspective they will be introverts and disagreeable. Indeed, a combination of introversion plus sustained, longterm psychological pain may be a necessary precondition toward spiritual advancement.

It is quite hard for the wealthy to be pneumatics. Jesus said in Matthew 19:24 “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” Achieving power and wealth in this world usually requires moral compromises; one may be required to take advantage of others, to take parts of the fruits of their labors using guile or strength in order to build wealth. Yet in this era due to the egalitarian ratchet effect only wealth is an allowed metric to differentiate people; not possessing differentiated and superior values, outlook, beliefs or spirit. Compared to elites of the past which emphasized superior values and culture, a sense of noblesse oblige, our rich but empty materialist elites are sick facsimiles of equivalent versions from the past.

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Conclusions

The following is a long quote from Hoeller about the four steps toward actualizing consciousness and is worth quoting:

The first step in the actualization of the myth of consciousness is that we permit the destruction of the universe in which we have existed. More often than not this involves primarily a “relativation” of our “personal” reality. The word ‘personal” means that just as our perception of reality is our own, so too its altering must be confined to our own selves. “Relativation” implies that this process is not an extinction of old values, but rather a process which renders relative the concepts and values which we previously considered to be absolute. Specific values increase while general values decrease. Concrete realities become more important than abstract principles. While this may seem a terrible thing to say, as a result of this process we become in a certain sense unprincipled. What actually happens is that when reality takes over abstractions are reduced to their proper size. When we enter the practical realm of the myth of consciousness we enter the fluid, mercurial realm of psychic reality where all rules engraved in stone are inappropriate. Attachment to rigidly held abstractions, to theories and doctrines of any variety diminishes and eventually vanishes. What remains is the living reality of the deeper psyche operating from its own vision and guidance….

The second step in the enactment of the myth is the entry of the psyche into the process of creative conflict. This means that we must leave behind our attachment to the current overvaluation of tranqulity or lack of conflict and also to the overvaluation of health, wealth and power. One of the ways that this change may be approached is by contrasting the conditions of a static state with those of a process. We must recognize that tranquility, peace, health, wealth and power are all descriptions of states or conditions. They are not processes. Consciousness, on the other hand, is a process, not a state of being. This brings up the issue of commitment. To what is an individual committed in an active pursuit of the myth of consciousness? The commitment must always be to the process and never to the outcome. Persons, symbols, ideas and ideals can all find their proper places within the process but the process itself must be regarded as primary, other goals as secondary….The sense of the drama of the soul is growth through conflict. The creation and enlargement of consciousness cannot take place without the creative alchemy of conflict…in the conflict we may need to experience defeat and lamentation before the archetypally facilitated resolution can occur. If the process is interrupted when it becomes dark and painful the chances are lessened that the resolution we desire will come about.

Thus by the conflict of will and counterwill, of yes and no, affirmation and negation, and in the ultimate resolution of these conflicts brought about by the wisdom of the archetypal psyche, consciousness is born and expands. Moral opposites are very much part of this process so that the psyche is forced to make choices that are not dictated by external commandment but by individual, conscious insight. The objective of this process is not moral goodness but conscious wholeness of the psyche.

At this point, we come to another predicament. Since in the course of the pursuit of the myth of consciousness we cannot follow the accustomed moral impulse to espouse one opposite as against another (not even good against evil), we no longer have the luxury of feeling righteous. We are, in fact, no longer “good” men and women….Instead, we must become alchemical vessels in which light and darkness, good and evil, male and female struggle, embrace, commingle, fuse, die, and are born. All our cherished ethical beliefs - monotheism, the belief of Jews and Calvinists that they are chosen people, predestined for righteousness - vanish before our eyes. Our moral superiority also evaporates. Not only are we no longer able to condemn others we may consider unrighteous but we are also not able to condemn that side of ourselves that we have been taught to despise and abominate….

The third step in the actualization of the myth is the conjuction of the opposites which follows their conflictual interaction. This step represents the best mechanism for the generation of consciousness. When the union of opposites occurs consciousness is born…leisure and work, altruism and self-love, youthful energy and mature wisdom, idealistic self-sacrifice and common sense frequently wrestle and conjoin within us, thus bringing us to more highly developed states of consciousness….

The fourth and last step of the myth is…”the transformation of God”…unlike the gnostics who remained silent about the possibility that the Demiurge could be redeemed, Jung time and again affirmed that the Creator-God could be redeemed by becoming conscious, and that this process could be facilitated by humanity. While mainstream Christianity holds that God redeems human beings, Jung held that humans could redeem God. The question is how can this redemption be accomplished?

God’s unconsciousness, Jung said, has one primary manifestation - the loss of its feminine side. In Answer to Job, Jung wrote that the Creator-God once had a feminine side who was his sister, consort and possibly his mother all at once and that her name is Sophia, which means “wisdom".” By losing contact with Sophia God became unwise or, in psychological terms, unconscious. Thus it is evident that the Creator-God’s way to consciousness leads to the feminine which he needs to recognize and to rehabilitate, and with which he must achieve union….

The significant conclusion that needs to be drawn for our purposes is that, while the wholeness that needs to be brought to the Creator requires rescuing and elevating the Divine Feminine, this task need not be wedded to historical and anthropological theories which are highly speculative. Thus, bringing wholeness to the lonely, irascible and in part unconscious male Creator-God is not a political task but a psychological one and even a spiritual one. The problem with this task, as Jung very bluntly stated, is that “America is extroverted as hell.”…Money, prestige and power are goals that appeal strongly to the extroverted psyche; psychological transformation does not….

Thus we must recognize that the issue of God versus Goddess is not about class warfare or political power, but rather about psychological and ultimately metaphysical wholeness. Those people who recognize this clearly and are willing to act upon it will be the true heroes of consciousness. They will help to restore wholeness and create consciousness in the souls of men and women and, beyond that, in the subtle, metaphysical dimensions of gods and goddesses. To quote Edinger…”As it gradually dawns on people, one by one, that the transformation of God is not an interesting idea but is a living reality, it may begin to function as a new myth. Whoever recognizes this myth as his own personal reality will put his life in the service of this process.”

Powerful stuff - to me anyway.

I hope this offered some potential insight into a way of re-enchanting the world via the blending of opposite ideas, feelings and impulses in order to achieve higher level synthesis and connection to the ineffable; a hierarchy not based on group identity but one’s individual esoteric progress on this path.

Thanks for reading.

1. See Emil Cioran’s comments here as an example: “The German influence in France was disastrous on that whole level, I find.  The French can’t say things simply anymore….it’s the influence of Heidegger, which was very big in France.  For example, he’s speaking about death, he employs so complicated a language, to say very simple things, and I well understand how one could be tempted by that style.  But the danger of philosophical style is that one loses complete contact with reality.  Philosophical language leads to megalomania.  One creates an artificial world where one is God.  I was very proud being young and very pleased to know this jargon.  But my stay in France totally cured me of that.”

2. “My prospects in the now entrenched communist society were bleak indeed. As a “class alien” I would not qualify for higher education, and virtually any career of a promising nature would be closed to me for the same reason. Within a year of my departure most of my friends and relatives, along with tens of thousands of upper and middle class “suspicious persons” were forcibly deported from the cities and assigned to menial labor in the countryside, a practice employed during the cultural revolution in China and in the “killing fields” of Cambodia. Exile thus appeared the lesser of evils.”

3. Yockey in Imperium, p. 140:

“The common man is unjust, but not on principle; he is selfish, but he is incapable of the imperative of Ibsen’s exalted selfishness; he is the slave of his passions, but incapable of higher sexual love, for even this is an expression of Culture - primitive man would not understand Western erotic even if it were explained to him, this sublimation of passion into metaphysics. He lacks any sort of honor, and will submit to any humiliation rather than revolt - it is always leader-natures who revolt. He gambles in the hope of winning, and if he loses, he whimpers. He would rather live on his knees than die on his feet. He accepts the loudest voice as the true one. He follows the leader of the moment - but only so far, and when the leader is eclipsed by a new one, he points out his record of opposition. In victory he is a bully, in defeat he is a lackey. His talk is big, his deeds small. He likes to play, but has no sportsmanship. Great thoughts and plans he castigates as “megalomania.” Anyone who tries to pull him up along the road of higher accomplishment he hates, and when the chance offers, he crucifies him, like Christ, burns him, like Savonarola, kicks his dead body in the square in Milan. He is always laughing at the discomfiture of another, but has no sense of humor, and is equally incapable of true seriousness. He denounces the crime of passion, but eagerly reads the literature of such crimes. He herds in the street to see an accident, and enjoys seeing another sustain the blows of fate. He does not care if his countrymen are spilling their blood as long as he is secure.”

4. The process by which individual beings are formed and differentiated [from other human beings]; in particular, it is the development of the psychological individual as a being distinct from the general, collective psychology.

5. Also see

Brett Andersen

’s discussion on Nietzsche’s synthesis of opposites here, and in regards to evolutionary psychology in general and mythology here.

6. This reminds me of a recent comment by populist Mike Benz, where he states about his singular obsession - revealing to the public the inner workings of the globohomo civil service - “On the one hand, I wish I hadn't lost pretty much everything I ever loved & worked for in the process of pursuing this. On the other, this was pretty much always my destiny. I was happier then, in a way, but dying inside of feeling I was betraying what I was put on earth to do.” Here’s his very interesting Tucker interview; also see here. Also see

ARX-Han

’s recent post about how to define success as he followed his passion as an independent writer focusing on the sidelined low-status male youth, or even

Thumbnail Green

’s fun rap about doomsday prepping. Pursuing one’s inner calling has no guarantee of earthly success as Scott Locklin correctly rants about; but it answers the nagging feeling/question about doing what one has been put on earth to accomplish.

7. As the Grand Inquisitor stated to Jesus: “You thirsted for love that is free, and not for the servile raptures of a slave before a power that has left him permanently terrified. But here, too, you overestimated mankind, for, of course, they are slaves, though they were created rebels. Behold and judge, now that fifteen centuries have passed, take a look at them: whom have you raised up to yourself? I swear, man is created weaker and baser than you thought him! How, how can he ever accomplish the same things as you? Respecting him so much, you behaved as if you had ceased to be compassionate, because you demanded too much of him—and who did this? He who loved him more than himself! Respecting him less, you would have demanded less of him, and that would be closer to love, for his burden would be lighter. He is weak and mean” ….

And as Ivan, the man telling the story to his brother, stated: “Look, suppose that one…is like my old Inquisitor, who himself ate roots in the desert and raved, overcoming his flesh, in order to make himself free and perfect, but who still loved mankind all his life, and suddenly opened his eyes and saw that there is no great moral blessedness in achieving perfection of the will only to become convinced, at the same time, that millions of the rest of God’s creatures have been set up only for mockery, that they will never be strong enough to manage their freedom, that from such pitiful rebels will never come giants to complete the tower, that it was not for such geese that the great idealist had his dream of harmony. Having understood all that, he returned and joined ... the intelligent people [i.e. those who would oppress the masses with lies so the masses would live in happiness]. Couldn’t this have happened?”