Hormesis

Shamil, Part III: Ethnos & the making of the Fremen

Whatever maketh them rule and conquer and shine, to the dismay and envy of their neighbours, they regard as the high and foremost thing, the test and the meaning of all else.

Verily, my brother, if thou knewest but a people's need, its land, its sky, and its neighbour, then wouldst thou divine the law of its surmountings, and why it climbeth up that ladder to its hope.¹

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I. 

Rare are the men that forge themselves. 

For civilizational greatness to endure, there must be a deep logic of environment, people, and individual. The environment births a strong people; the people define a strong culture; the culture produces strong individuals. 

The greatest of the resulting men have the strength necessary to shape the environment, and to begin this system anew. Only on this basis can a culture generate great men across time. Without it, entropy and decay take hold. 

Today we will examine the logic of ethnogenesis that produced a people as beautiful and dangerous as Shamil’s Avars. 

This is the third in our series about Shamil, the Avar, terror of Russia, whose wars against the Russian Empire inspired the creation of Dune. You can find Part I here, which outlines the historical foundation of these events, and Part II here, which discusses how to wield tribalism and fanaticism against a superior foe.  

II. 

If landscape affects character and gives to the inhabitants of a region something of its own characteristics, no two men reflected better their environment. The icy marble regularity and magnificence of St Petersburg was embodied in Nicholas I; while Shamyl’s violent nature, at once exotic and harsh, was reflected in the mountains and valleys of the Caucasus.²

Decadence breeds weakness. In a time of danger, it is a blessing to be born into an environment that forces you from infancy to contend with nature itself, in all its unforgiving violence. The desolate peaks of the Caucasus met this standard. 

These men - the Avars - were made in dark abysses, crevasses of razor-sharp rock, sneaking mists and harsh winds, eerie silence and searing sun. It was a land between heaven and earth, in which only the chosen could survive.  

Against this backdrop, the Avars scratched their aôuls - fortified mountain hamlets - into the rock. These were bare to the elements and devoid of tree or crop. Only hunstmen, daring shepherds, and the Murid fighting monks could call such a place home. 

Consider Shamil’s chosen base of operations during the peak of his campaigning:

In the Tartar language, Akhulgo signifies ‘a meeting place in time of danger.’ The aôul was well named. It was an eyrie perched on the summit of an isolated, conical peak rising sheer six hundred feet above the river Köisu which serpented round three sides of its base. All around lay desolation: bare rocks and gorges, the only approach a razor-edged path zigzagging up the peak. Local tradition held that it was the Devil’s handiwork; that Shaitan had, with Allah’s permission, built it for his lair.³ 

III. 

The Avars were the children of the mountains. Like the mountains, they were savage and grand; like the wind they were swift and free; like the cliff’s edge they were mortally dangerous. 

Life on the precipice allowed no room for laxity. Surviving against invaders and against the land itself meant rigid discipline and absolute codes of conduct and honor.   

To the Caucasians, cruelty was incidental, part of the price they paid to maintain those stern standards of justice and revenge, without which there was no honour. (And if there was no honour, there was no life, to a Caucasian.) Their history and legends always centre round these two themes: justice, vengeance. Cruelty, suffering, as a price, hardly counted.⁴ 

This ever-present suffering gave them a clear sense of just how much punishment the individual could endure. Russian soldiers frequently complained that the Murids didn’t know when to die.

The tradition of the people was not only stoic, but fatalistic. It was in God’s hands. God hath preordained five things on his servants: the duration of life, their actions, their dwelling places, their travels and their portions. If it was written that they were to live, to fight again − for to live was to fight − they would recover, however shattered their bodies. They lay there, mangled, pierced and bled white; they drank the herbal brews, submitted to torturing treatments − and generally recovered. The Russians found them a most stubborn enemy. Killed − or so it seemed − they still lived.⁵

Given this wealth of suffering, the Avars forged a culture that served to instrumentalize their pain, to use it as the fire in which to temper their souls and bodies. The Fremen evolved to endure water deprivation. The Avars evolved to endure violence. 

A century later, Japanese warrior-poet Yukio Mishima - commenting on his own people - would describe a similar mechanism with striking clarity:

Only through the group, I realised — through sharing the suffering of the group — could the body reach that height of existence that the individual alone could never attain. And for the body to reach that level at which the divine might be glimpsed, a dissolution of individuality was necessary. The tragic quality of the group was also necessary, the quality that constantly raised the group out of the abandon and torpor into which it was prone to lapse, leading it to an ever-mounting shared suffering and so to death, which was the ultimate suffering. The group must be open to death — which meant, of course, that it must be a community of warriors.⁶

The conditions necessary to form such a community of warriors in the Caucasus were present. Let us examine the mechanisms by which the Avars achieved it. 

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IV. 

From youth, every aspect of the Avar culture was oriented to the refinement of their warrior, to the forging of men that could move like dark spirits through the mountain passes and terrify their Russian foes. Their rituals honored men of violence, their training was refined brutality, their swords were talismans valued above all other possessions.   

Just as they had their own methods of curing wounds, so they had their jealously guarded methods of training and hardening both themselves and their horses, (usually bred in the plains, or from Kabarda), to be able to cover the enormous distances and endure the violent changes of climate their raiding tactics and the country demanded. And likewise, the djighits, delikans, or Caucasian braves, the dashing young mountaineers, trained themselves to an extraordinary stamina. They were by breed, a slim wiry lot, generally considered the world’s most handsome people; tall, dark, eagle-faced with narrow, beautifully formed hands and feet and wasp-waists, (partially induced by binding them tightly with the still-warm skin of a freshly slaughtered sheep). Overall, they had an indefinable air of elegance − of breeding.⁷ 

They subjected themselves to brutal fasts; remaining slim was essential to maintaining the stamina necessary to cover great distances and span great heights. They had no need for the heavy supply wagons which so hampered Russian columns on the move. They trained to sprint great distances without panting - silence was key - by carrying a bullet in their mouths as they ran. 

I saw one of them, today,’ writes a Tiflis visitor, recording his first glimpse of the dreaded mountaineers. ‘He was riding a steed as fiery as himself. They flew away together like the wind and the clouds and seemed but one … a stream of silvery light, for the horse was grey, and the man’s clothes glittered with chain mail, his arms silver and steel …’⁸

When a Caucasian boy became a man, he was expected to have proved himself with violence; either against an external foe, or else in an intra-tribal vendetta (kanly). He must have demonstrated mastery of horsemanship, swordsmanship, and the chants by which their people handed down its histories and battles, and roused themselves for war. When the elders agreed that a boy had met these standards, a celebration was held which the whole aôul attended. He was presented with his arms - the finest his family could afford. 

To the Caucasians, their arms were their most valued possessions, preserved and handed down from generation to generation: some of the weapons dated from the Crusaders who had passed that way; they bore Italian or Latin inscriptions, telling of their maker and first owner. Some of these swords were so tempered that they were known to have cut through the barrel of a Russian musket at one stroke.⁹ 

Franz Roubaud, The Storming of Gimry (1891)

V.

Out of this total cultural orientation towards violence, the greatest men would rise, the few individuals for whom everything aligned: talent, will, place, time, destiny. 

The formation of a new ethnos is always linked with existence among some individuals of an uncontrollable internal drive towards a single-minded activity, always related to changes in either social or natural environment, while the attainment of their chosen goal, which is often illusory or fatal for the subject himself, is perceived by him as being more valuable than even the preservation of one’s life.¹⁰

The greatest of these individuals was Shamil. From youth, he was a boy of singular will. By adolescence, he could out-fight, out-ride, out-swim and out-run any man from his tribe. 

Shamyl lashed himself to their strenuous pattern until, at twenty, he was famous for his feats. He could sever the butt of a rifle with one blow of his kindjal and was once seen to cleave a Cossack horseman almost to the saddle in one cut. He could clear a seven-foot wall at a leap or, as they said in local idiom, ‘stride a Khevsour’. (This tribe, strangely blond giants, were believed to be descendants of the Crusaders.)¹¹

Examples of his unparalleled will began emerging early in his life. As a boy, his arrogance grew with his abilities. It grew to a point that it so enraged the other boys that one night they ambushed him, beat him unconscious, knifed his stomach, and left him for dead. When Shamil regained consciousness, he knew that he could not tolerate sympathy or nursing, and dragged himself away from the village and his family up into the mountains. There he stoically bound his own wounds and brewed the tribe’s secret herbal concoctions which gradually revived him. 

After this he would never again be bested by his contemporaries. He established an implacable, self-imposed regime of physical discipline in order to turn his body to iron, growing to six foot three in the process. After this, his leadership never again came into question. 

And so emerged a rare individual that has the power to alter the trajectory of the history of a people. Shamil - the Avar.  

The creative personality is impelled to transfigure his fellow men into fellow creators by re-creating them in his own image. The creative mutation which has taken place in the microcosm of the mystic requires an adaptative modification in macrocosm before it can become either complete or secure…¹²

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Sic transit imperium,

Johann

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

2. Lesley Blanch, The Sabres of Paradise: Conquest and Vengeance in the Caucasus

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Yukio Mishima, Sun & Steel

7. Lesley Blanch, The Sabres of Paradise: Conquest and Vengeance in the Caucasus

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Lev Gumilev, Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere of Earth

11. Lesley Blanch, The Sabres of Paradise: Conquest and Vengeance in the Caucasus

12. Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol. 1