The Abyss

Against artificial religion

Barbaric Disciple

wants to found a warrior religion.

I’ve been following this endeavor with interest for some time. This week I had an evening free, so I read all eighty-seven essays he has written on the subject.

The project makes for exciting reading, but I believe it to be deeply flawed in its approach to truth, belief, action, and divinity.

Peter Nicolai Arbo, The Wild Hunt of Odin (1872)

Barbaric Disciple, inspired by Frank Herbert’s titanic work Dune, believes that a warrior religion is necessary to elevate our men to a higher state in which they will be capable of surmounting the coming chaos.

(Here, as elsewhere in the essay, I will make significant use of block quotations. I hope the reader can forgive this. This is partly because I do not want to misrepresent Disciple’s ideas, and partly because there are so many issues to address that re-phrasing all of the relevant passages would be overly time-consuming).

Disciple’s central thesis is this:

“Only through a warrior religion can men be filled with the fanaticism and devotion necessary to vanquish the massive leviathan that’s taken hold over our people. What’s needed are gods of strength and war, of overcoming, of fighting and surviving. Gods who will put the lightning back into our eyes and reawaken the holy fire. Men must believe in natural law and trust in the will of the gods again.”

— Barbaric Disciple, Vindications for a Warrior Religion

“The Warrior Religion has a Great Task ahead. To revitalize a people and lead them out of hell. It’s been my belief that The Gods are unknowable to us moderns. We’re not worthy enough to receive their influence. My Great Work for this Warrior Religion is to forge a strong people as offering to one of these Gods who will lead us to victory against our enemies.”

— Barbaric Disciple, A Fallen God For a Fallen People in the Warrior Religion

Much of my analysis of his project will be critical. I will start, then, by emphasizing that I believe him to be prescient and correct about his fundamental motivations for the project.

“Christians are coming out against leftism, but not with the fervor and fanaticism necessary to win. The left is far more fanatical in their beliefs.”

— Barbaric Disciple, Something Darker to Consider

As a Christian myself, it is undeniable that the intensity of belief of many who profess the faith has grown so lukewarm as to be functionally meaningless. These people will neither triumph in this world nor the next.

“But because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold, nor hot, I will begin to vomit thee out of my mouth.”

— Revelations 3:16

Disciple is correct in his prescription that victory is not possible until our belief in the Divine is fanatical beyond the Left’s belief in their gods. He is right to say that the source of this power is not to be found in our time.

“What’s needed now is a unifying force, something I believe must draw from our ancestral history beyond the founding.”

— Barbaric Disciple, Vindications for a Warrior Religion

What, then, should we disagree with?

The first - rather unavoidable - issue is that he’s attempting to form a religion that does not yet have a god.

“The hardest requirement for the warrior religion will be its theology. What gods will rally us? What gods will we honor and worship?”

— Barbaric Disciple, What’s Needed for a Warrior Religion?

“I’ve been incredibly vague on what gods a warrior religion should worship. It could be one or many. Only a Moses can tell us this.”

— Barbaric Disciple, The Nature of the Gods

This unanswered question, difficult to ignore, slightly haunts the reader throughout the series. Disciple’s hope is that, if we make ourselves worthy, the gods will reveal themselves to us.

His focus is therefore on the actions we should take in the meantime. These sections, in a different context, would be spirited and invigorating, full of compelling writing on war, conquest, and nobility.

But it is difficult to fully enjoy these passages - and Disciple’s energetic prose is enjoyable - due to the nagging distraction of the central, unanswered question. He proceeds to sort out every aspect of the religion except the religion itself.

He describes possible forms of worship of many different gods: Odin, Nemesis, Thor, Heracles, and, at times, the Christian God. The variety of his offering, however, serves to undermine its central premise. It is impossible to ignore that these these deities, understood as their worshippers have always understood them, are mutually exclusive.

By suggesting that all are possible for us to adopt, and that various ‘gods’ may reveal themselves to us in the future, it is clear that a rigorous understanding of absolute and coherent metaphysical truth is secondary in Disciple’s thought to the production of physical outcomes he identifies as desirable (the generation of warlike men).

This central contention marks the beginning of the unfortunate descent of Disciple’s thought into what can only be described as nihilism - even according to the standards of the thinkers that he most admires, like Nietzsche.

“That there is no truth; that there is no absolute state of affairs - no ‘thing-in-itself.’ This alone is Nihilism, and of the most extreme kind.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

If one concedes the inexistence of absolute Truth - one God who makes no compromises to any others - and thereby enters into a nihilist dimension, it is unfortunately not possible to re-create an absolute and inviolable truth from within this void, however desirable. A god does not spring into existence because you need him to.

Any suggestion that this is possible ultimately relies on word games given color by the invocation of various mystical terms. Man cannot create gods, only the idea of them. The prescient Orthodox hieromonk Seraphim Rose, writing in the 1960s, put it thusly:

“…the new god is not a Being but an idea, not revealed to faith and humility but constructed by the proud mind…

…such a god is, in fact, the same as no god at all. Uninterested in man, powerless to act in the world (except to inspire a worldly “optimism”), he is a god considerably weaker than the men who invented him. On such a foundation, needless to say, nothing secure can be built…

Whatever psychological justification such an attitude may have, it has nothing whatever to do with the truth of things; and the consequences have been nothing but harmful…

…a rootless eclecticism that draws ideas from every civilization and every age and finds a totally arbitrary connection between these misunderstood fragments and its own debased conceptions. Pseudo-spirituality and pseudo-traditionalism, one or both, are integral elements of many Vitalist systems.”

— Seraphim Rose, Nihilism: the Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age

Perhaps, however, to continue our analysis past this point to other issues in Disciple’s suggested programme, we should concede the possibility that our entire movement manages to agree on the worship of a single god. This, then, would at least be free of surface-level contradictions.

Let us next understand why Disciple believes that we should worship this god.

…religion helped create traditions and rites conducive to the survival of our people. It perpetuated the skills needed to remain on top of the food chain.

Religion is a means of forging culture and it’s attached not just to culture, but to the people of that culture. Religion is the means of steering the race toward strength, survival, and greatness. It builds strong devotion and traditions that solidify a people.

— Barbaric Disciple, Something Darker to Consider

His conception of religion appears to be utilitarian and practical (although this is sometimes confused by passages in which he writes as though he is certain that gods actually exist).

This conception is one of artificial religion adopted as political technology. It is thus a practical science rather than a divine mandate. Again, we find a disturbing contradiction in Disciple’s philosophy: the call for the summoning of ancient powers emerging from a technical, de-sacralized, (and modern) realpolitics. As phrased in the above quotation, you will notice that the values (strength, survival, and greatness) appear to come from outside the religion - and the religion merely serves to support the thriving of these external values.

This attempted extension of profane, worldly needs into the dimension of the sacred - if successful - would be quite horrific in its implications. The logical consequence of this transplant would be to suggest that the metaphysical is not that important after all; and that it can change to suit our temporary physical needs. This cheapening of the divine erodes any fundamental reason for existence.

There is no form of Vitalism that is not naturalistic, none whose entire program does not begin and end in this world, none whose approach to any other world is anything but a parody….

It is the last attempt of the unbeliever to hide his abandonment of truth behind a cloud of noble rhetoric, and, more positively, it is at the same time the exaltation of petty curiosity to the place once occupied by the genuine love of truth.

— Seraphim Rose, Nihilism: the Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age

Ultimately the logic that would underpin a ‘warrior religion’ becomes sufficiently circular that any need for religion at all is nullified.

It’s not so much about finding a god to worship right now. You must worship man’s true nature: WAR. What matters is you pay proper reverence to WAR because as Heraclitus says, “War is the Father of all and the King of all.” And he also says, “Strife is justice.” Be devoted to the religious rites and rituals you and your friends practice. It’s your DEVOTION to the Warrior Religion that’s important.

Barbaric Disciple, The Disciple of the Warrior Religion

Is convincing people to love an artificial religion that convinces them to love war really easier than just convincing them to love war directly?

It seems impossible to reconcile the various imperatives that Disciple outlines: the religion must be chosen for practical reasons; adherents’ faith in the religion must be more fanatical than those of any other faith, and; adherents don’t get to properly enact their faith any time soon (because ‘going to war’ wouldn’t currently be politically expedient and would get everyone arrested).

This simply isn’t how religion works! True faith is born from an unmediated encounter with the divine, an unselfconscious acceptance of a divine revelation that has actually occurred. Without this, there will be no adoption of the faith that he’s working to create.

I’m also unconvinced of the principles that Disciple suggests we should select for in choosing our faith. Take violence, for example. Violence should not be understood as a good in and of itself. It is the capacity for necessary violence in service of a just cause - a higher ideal (unfortunately left undefined by Barbaric Disciple) - that is good.

Anyone who has seen genuine violence for its own sake knows that it is fundamentally ugly. It is not beautiful. It is not righteous. The men committing this kind of unthinking violence usually look basically retarded. Eighty IQ orcs enacting their dumb instincts isn’t beautiful.

Violence for its own sake is a characteristic of lower, not higher life. Isn’t it strange, for example, how the most resentful Bolsheviks called for an ideology of violence in exactly the same fashion?

According to Marxist “dogma,” “force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one”; appeals to violence, and even a kind of ecstasy at the prospect of its use, abound in revolutionary literature. Bakunin invoked the “evil passions” and called for the unchaining of “popular anarchy” in the cause of “universal destruction,” and his “Revolutionary Catechism” is the primer of ruthless violence; Marx was fervent in his advocacy of “revolutionary terror” as the one means of hastening the advent of Communism; Lenin defined the “dictatorship of the proletariat” (the stage in which the Soviet Union still finds itself) as “a domination that is untrammeled by law and based on violence.” Demagogic incitement of the masses and the arousing of the basest passions for revolutionary purposes have long been standard Nihilist practice.

— Seraphim Rose, Nihilism: the Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age

The obvious question is: in a system without an absolute God and absolute Truth, where do the absolute values of the new religions - like war and violence - come from?

Disciple’s answer is Nature.

A belief of the Warrior Religion that God is unknown to us, but by following the doctrines of nature, we may find him again. By becoming great, brave, hard, and manly we will make ourselves worthy of The Gods again. The doctrines of nature are the path back to God.

— Barbaric Disciple, The White God of the Warrior Religion

A secular, NIETZSCHEAN warrior religion can be the same. It doesn’t require belief in the gods, only in nature. You must at least see yourself as Mike Ma says, an “image of Nature.” You must acknowledge that there is a way of nature, a way man is supposed to be in order to survive and thrive in nature.

— Barbaric Disciple, Something Darker to Consider

The scriptures, from whatever religion they come from, are only valid so far as they line up with the doctrines of nature.

— Barbaric Disciple, Warrior Religion Sitrep

The only law that matters is natural law.

— Barbaric Disciple, Survival in the Warrior Religion

It is here that we get to the heart of the problem; here that we find the unstable foundations upon which all earlier uncertainties were built. This attempt to extrapolate our guiding metaphysical principles out of nature - the physical existence that we already inhabit - is the definition of relativism.

Relativism is the suggestion that there is no absolute, universal Truth that has been revealed to us, but that we can only orient ourselves in relation to the other things that we exist alongside and can directly perceive. It is a fundamentally unsuitable basis for a religion, having no universal reference point.

…the absolute cannot be attained by means of the relative. That is to say, the first principles of any system of knowledge cannot be arrived at through the means of that knowledge itself, but must be given in advance; they are the object, not of scientific demonstration, but of faith.

— Seraphim Rose, Nihilism: the Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age

This reality is the fundamental reason for the failure of the Nietzschean project of the ‘will to power’.

The same problem evidently lurks at the center of Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power. Power in itself is formless. It has no sense without the basis of a given “being,” an internal direction, an essential unity. When that is wanting, everything slides back into chaos. “Here is the greatest strength, but it does not know what it is for. The means exist, but they have no end.”

Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

In order to give the formless doctrine of the will to power substance, Nietzsche actually had to smuggle in absolute value judgements that came from outside the internal logic of the doctrine.

…Nietzsche’s nihilism stops halfway. It sets up a new table of values, including a good and an evil. It presents a new ideal with dogmatic affirmation, whereas in reality this ideal is only one of many that could take shape in “life,” and which is not in fact justified in and of itself, without a particular choice and without faith in it.

Life and transcendence are continually muddled in his philosophy, and of all the consequences of his anti-Christian polemic, this confusion has been one of the worst. He characterizes the values negated by Christian ideals - the ideals of the pariah, the chandala - and which supposedly constitute the opposite, affirmative, anti-nihilistic ideals, as follows: “dignity, distance, great responsibility, exuberance, proud animality, the martial and victorious instincts, the apotheosis of the passions, of revenge, cunning, anger, voluptuousness, the spirit of adventurous knowledge”; then he enumerates among the positive passions “pride, happiness, health, love between the sexes, hostility and war, reverence, beautiful attitudes, good manners, strong will, the discipline of higher intellectuality, the will to power, respect for the earth and for life—all that is rich, which wants to give and to justify life, eternalize it, divinize it.” The muddle is evident; it is a confusion of the sacred and the profane.

Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

Nature cannot provide us with transcendent orientation. Falling back on it as the last source of meaning can only result in nihilism. It is the same world-conception that is shared by the atheists, the materialists, and the Marxists, no matter how much dramatic language you dress it up with.

Vitalism is the product, not of the “freshness” and “life” and “immediacy” its followers so desperately seek (precisely because they lack them), but of the corruption and unbelief that are but the last phase of the dying civilization they hate. One need be no partisan of the Liberalism and Realism against which Vitalism reacted to see that it has “over-reacted,” that its antidote to an undeniable disease is itself a more potent injection of the same Nihilist germ that caused the disease.

— Seraphim Rose, Nihilism: the Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age

In fact, in this regard - Disciple’s doctrine is actively counterproductive, precisely because it attracts the minds with the healthiest instincts. In our fallen age, there is a lack of many of the virtues that he identifies. This is why his writing is so exciting! But it would be disastrous if the product of his work was to attract young men seeking something higher but then to direct them to a false spirituality.

Franz von Stuck, Samson (1891)

We must return to Truth. Submit to it. Fight the spiritual war, and have the courage and the strength to translate that fervor into whatever action is prudent in our fallen world, including war when necessary and just. Pursue Truth first and then steel yourself to do whatever is necessary in defense of that Truth.

I hope Barbaric Disciple finds this path too. It would be a great shame for him to lose contact with the faith of his ancestors that he admires so much; the faith that formed the country that he loves.

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Sic transit imperium,

Johann