Heaven's Gate

Place your stake in holy ground

Our movement has the kindling and the spark. So where is the fire? We have exceptional people and a fervent desire to build a new order from chaos. So where is the action?

We have failed to study how a crusade begins. It cannot coalesce spontaneously out of a distributed caste of willing actors. It must have a single inception point, a moment when the spark touches the kindling and the flames burst into existence.

This fire will rise in a sacred space - a fixed geographic point that will be the center of our new universe, of our new world conception.

We must understand the magnitude of our task. We do not merely desire a new political configuration. We desire a total re-sacralization of the cosmos, a bursting through of the sacred, the eternal, the transcendent, an unstoppable spring that will wash away our trash world.

In the words of the great historian of religion of the 20th century Mircea Eliade, we must move from the profane to the sacred.

…sacred and profane are two modes of being in the world, two existential situations assumed by man in the course of his history.

The sacred, with all its terrifying power, is distinguished from its opposite - the profane, the worldly, the barren chaos of the desacralized. In modernity, we live firmly in the profane. How do we step from one mode of being to the other?

We must discover a fixed point for the sacred to break through, and our world to be founded. A sacred space.

Revelation of a sacred space makes it possible to obtain a fixed point and hence to acquire orientation in the chaos of homogeneity, to “found the world” and to live in a real sense. The profane experience, on the contrary, maintains the homogeneity and hence the relativity of space…

For it is the break effected in space that allows the world to be constituted, because it reveals the fixed point, the central axis for all future orientation. When the sacred manifests itself… there is not only a break in the homogeneity of space; there is also revelation of an absolute reality, opposed to the non-reality of the vast surrounding expanse.

Here the Christian and the Vitalist Right have different tasks.

My belief (as a ‘Christian with vitalist tendencies’) is that the Christian task is to re-sacralize our existing sacred spaces. We know what these spaces are - our churches, our holy sites, the spaces in which we gather and pray. We have allowed too many of these to collapse into a profane, modern existence. We have lost the sense that when we pass through our church doors, we are entering a totally separate reality.

For religious man, space is not homogeneous; he experiences interruptions, breaks in it; some parts of space are qualitatively different from others. “Draw not nigh hither,” says the Lord to Moses; “put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground” (Exodus, 3, 5).

Nicholas Roerich, Saint Sophia the Almighty Wisdom (1932)

The task of the Nietzschean vitalists, in contrast, is to establish what and where (and how) their sacred spaces will be.

Neither task will be easy. How many Christians truly know what it is to lead a sacred existence? Do I?

The desecration of our holy ground is so common as to be unremarkable. Sometimes awareness of it bursts through into public consciousness. We hear occasional outcries about secular (or Muslim!) events being held in churches. These are so offensive because we recognise that, in using spaces of worship in this mundane way, we are transforming sacred spaces into profane ones. A church becomes a ‘community center’. This is deeply unsettling, as we know that no man of true faith would allow such an event to occur. If we knew the room in which the Last Supper took place, would we invite Muslims to worship their god there?

I have great hope that the total re-sacralization of the Christian existence is possible. Who can deny the communion with God occurring in this Georgian church as the Lord’s Prayer is chanted in the ancient language of Aramaic?

The task of the Nietzschean atheists - quite different from ours - comes with its own challenges. They must coalesce in space, in contrast to their current online form. They must discern the central geographic point on which to found their new order. Traditionally, this happens according to divine omens. What will theirs be? They must consecrate this point (how?) to let their divine ontology (what?) manifest and break through into this plane.

What will their Jacobean moment be?

When Jacob in his dream at Haran saw a ladder reaching to heaven, with angels ascending and descending on it, and heard the Lord speaking from above it, saying: “I am the Lord God of Abraham,” he awoke and was afraid and cried out: “How dreadful is this place, this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” And he took the stone that had been his pillow, and set it up as a monument, and poured oil on the top of it. He called the place Beth-el, that is, house of God (Genesis, 28, 12-19).

It is hard to imagine an act of consecration that they would have total, true belief in. Theirs is a intellectual movement, a modern movement, self-consciously trying to intellectualize the sacred into existence. I have my doubts that this is possible.

Without this authentic act of total, unselfconscious faith in the consecration of their home, will they really summon the resolve to take the radical acts that they often describe but never take? Will they ever find the religion they seek?

…religious man can live only in a sacred world, because it is only in such a world that he participates in being, that he has a real existence. This religious need expresses an unquenchable ontological thirst. Religious man thirsts for being. His terror of the chaos that surrounds his inhabited world corresponds to his terror of nothingness. The unknown space that extends beyond his world, an uncosmicized because unconsecrated space, a mere amorphous extent into which no orientation has yet been projected, and hence in which no structure has yet arisen for religious man, this profane space represents absolute non-being. If, by some evil chance, he strays into it, he feels emptied of his ontic substance, as if he were dissolving in Chaos, and he finally dies.

Let us each strive to seek total assumption into the sacred mode. We will see who succeeds.

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Sic transit imperium,

Johann