And how can man die better
than facing fearful odds,
for the ashes of his fathers,
and the temples of his gods.— Thomas Babington Macaulay, Horatius
Last week a video of a woman explaining why she refused to let her father walk her down the aisle garnered millions of views.
As an independent thinker I’ve decided we’re not going to do every single wedding tradition… It’s the year 2023. Women are not property any more, which is why I decided I will be walking myself down the aisle.
Critical responses centered on her apparent lack of gratitude, her self-centeredness - especially given that her father had offered to pay for the wedding.
But I believe that there is a deeper, largely unidentified reason that her decision attracted such furor: people sensed that this ritual - the father walking the bride down the aisle - is the last stand of a tradition that honors parents as parents. This rite is the only remaining public honoring of The Father.
Understanding the fall of this institution requires confronting the importance of ritual, the imperative of honoring one’s parents, the ancient rites of ancestor worship, and the dissolution of the structures that hold off oikophobia - the hatred of home.
Rituals are important.
The individual that participates in ritual transcends themselves. For a time, they step beyond their individuation into a universal form. They can be referred to not by their name, but by their role in the ritual: the Bride; the Groom; the Father; the Maid of Honor; the Best Man.
The transcendence from individual to archetype results in a deeper and richer potential for communion. In accepting participation in the ritual, one gains access to the full weight of archetypal interaction: the Bride and Groom are no longer in the ill-defined relationship that they have happened into; they are married, with all of the structure and duty and mythology that that entails. Their identities are bound not just to each other, but to everyone that has ever participated in this ritual and assumed these roles.
Attempting to reconfigure the archetypical roles of the ritual inverts these effects. An opportunity for transcendence and communion becomes a reification of narcissism and individuation.
The disappearance of symbols points towards the increasing atomization of society. At the same time, society is becoming increasingly narcissistic. The narcissistic process of internalization develops an aversion to form. Objective forms are avoided in favour of subjective states.
— Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals
Attacking the ritual in this way leads to a sinking deeper into the Self. It makes the event unexceptional: lacking the comfort, depth, and weight of the eternal, it becomes introspective and neurotic. A move from form to formlessness.
In a way, of course, the girl in the video is correct. The form of this ritual - the Father giving away the Daughter - implies a relationship that modern woman rejects. These rituals - unquestioned - have survived far longer than the ideas that underpinned them. But, as the only ancient cultural artifacts left standing, the only remaining frontier for further individuation, they eventually had to fall.
The absence of the honor of the parent in our society is striking. This absence is at the heart of our civilizational collapse. It is no coincidence that the commandment to honor thy father and mother is the first commandment with a promise:
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is just. Honour thy father and thy mother, which is the first commandment with a promise: That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest be long lived upon earth.
Ephesians 6:1-3
Presumably, as we have forsaken this promise, we have lost its reward. How long will it be well with our civilization - and how long will we live upon the earth?
The father's blessing establisheth the houses of the children: but the mother's curse rooteth up the foundation. Glory not in the dishonour of thy father: for his shame is no glory to thee. For the glory of a man is from the honour of his father, and a father without honour is the disgrace of the son.
Sirach 3:9-13
Of what an evil fame is he that forsaketh his father: and he is cursed of God that angereth his mother.
Sirach 3:18
This promise - reverence for the fathers brings goodness - has always underpinned our civilization, stretching far back into the pre-Christian Indo-European peoples. Here we can turn to the work of Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, the great 19th Century French historian, who extrapolated backwards in time from the sacred rites of the Greeks, Romans, and Hindus to discern the ancient shared beliefs from which they derived.
He found two near-universal practices among the Aryan people: the veneration of ancestors, and the worship of the sacred fire that burned in each home, never to be extinguished, fed by each generation in turn.
The dead were held to be sacred beings. To them the ancients applied the most respectful epithets that could be thought of; they called them good, holy, happy. For them they had all the veneration that man can have for the divinity whom he loves or fears. In their thoughts the dead were gods. This sort of apotheosis was not the privilege of great men; no distinction was made among the dead…
— Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City
In this religious system, the rites of worship could only be offered by those bound by blood to the honored dead. Offerings were made and rites were said in secret. No stranger could participate, or even approach a sacred tomb.
The cessation of this worship was believed to have had horrifying consequences. It amounted to spiritual parricide. Unsated, the dead would leave their tombs and wander the night as shades, bringing curses and pestilence. Thus the cessation of worship was the greatest act of impiety, breaking a harmonious and eternal cycle, and causing devastation to both living and dead.
If the rites were upheld, however, the ancestors would fulfil their role as protecting gods.
The living could not do without the dead, nor the dead without the living. Thus a powerful bond was established among all the generations of the same family, which made of it a body forever inseparable.
The implications of such a belief system are profound. The obvious conclusion is that generation is paramount: without new sons to lead the worship of the ancestors to whom they owed their blood, veneration would cease, and all would be condemned to fall from happiness.
This was in accordance with the ancient belief: man did not belong to himself; he belonged to the family. He was one member in a series, and the series must not stop with him. He was not born by chance; he had been introduced into life that he might continue a worship; he must not give up life till he is sure that this worship will be continued after him.
Regardless of one’s metaphysics, it must be recognised that rituals have deep protective value. Han references Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who suggests that, while houses are homes in space, rituals are homes in time. They are familiar, reliable, habitable; we can sink into them, forgetting for a moment our personal vulnerability.
And our immemorial rites are in Time what the dwelling is in Space. For it is well that the years should not seem to wear us away and disperse us like a handful of sand; rather they should fulfill us. It is meet that Time should be a building-up. Thus I go from one feast day to another, from anniversary to anniversary, from harvestide to harvestide as, when a child, I made my way from the Hall of Council to the rest room within my father’s palace, where every footstep had a meaning.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Wisdom of the Sands
As we write ourselves into these rituals, so they write themselves into us. The values that they represent are embodied as we adopt them and act them out. Han describes that “They are written into the body, incorporated, that is, physically internalized. Thus, rituals create a bodily knowledge and memory, an embodied identity, a bodily connection.’
When we interfere with the deep, often hidden values that comprise our key rituals, great discordance can result. Instead of finding peace at our homes-in-time, we find conflict. Instead of losing ourselves in them, we remain self-conscious, narcissistic, and alienated. We become oikophobic.
Oikophobia is the fear or hatred of home (oikos being the ancient Greek word for home and household). Roger Scruton revived the concept, describing it as “the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ours.”
It is the affliction of a late, decadent culture.
Once they have left their mythical past behind and scored successes against neighboring peoples, they become aware of their own power, knowledge, and uniqueness, and begin to analyze these. And self-analysis requires a distancing of the self from itself, in order to view the object of study in its entirety, so that the people becomes more objective toward itself.
Benedict Beckeld, Western Self-Contempt
Oikophobia is a crisis of self-consciousness; an inability to naively inhabit one’s inherited rituals. Deprived of the ability to find their home-in-time, the oikophobe attempts to stand outside their culture, to derive value and status from their alienation by declaring themselves to be superior to the evil people that they have left behind.
But the project is spiritually doomed. Deprived of access to transcendence and communion, only narcissism can be sustained. Their interference with ritual alienates both themselves and those that they should be closest to: their friends, families, and peoples.
All of this is to say that the commandment to honor one’s parents cannot be escaped, and it is safer to allow our ancestors to judge us than to attempt to judge them. So let us honor our father and mother, inhabit their rituals, honor our ancestors, and pray that it may be well with our peoples, and that we mayest be long lived upon earth.
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Sic transit imperium,
Johann
Vatican II, with its wholesale abandonment of centuries of tradition, was the spiritual prototype for the Great Reset. They have to jettison the old before they can bring in the new.
Congratulations on being in the top of Substack's "Philosophy" category!
I have long searched for a Christian "Evola" type author, someone that talks about transendance and spirituality from a christian viewpoint. Being raised as an evangelic christian, all I got was spirituality defined either as an emotional experience, or reduced to moral choices. Nothing about virtues, inner character, transendence and sanctification. I'm glad that God led me to the online DR space, and thank you specifically for your part in bringing back these essential topics to the christian sphere. God bless.