(or, How to Create Rituals That Stand the Test of Time)
4001 words.
We are what we repeat. This includes genetic reproduction, sacred rituals, even how accuracy is maintained in language. If you want to replicate a thought in your mind within the mind of another as accurately as possible, you need to build in redundancies in how it is expressed, to ensure the idea survives intact as it arrives inside the receiver’s mind. Repetition equals permanence, and truth requires replication.
For example, a gene only exists insofar as it reproduces along subsequent generations, and cultures exist insofar as they are repeated by human agents across time. A meme in the technical sense is an idea that replicates itself like a virus across hosts. We recognize there is a point where this meme changes so significantly from its original form that it ceases to be that thing at all, and some inherent realness has disappeared while the replication persists.
This is why how we come to understand soulless reproduction, or an ontological fakeness. The uncanny valley alerts us when we see a replication of a human lacking some inherent realness, and we instinctively detect the divide between the organic and inorganic, including political movements and computer-generated art. Phenomena that by all accounts seems real but lack something approximating a soul.
Across political allegiances and social strata, this same conversation is occurring. We feel this but we struggle to articulate it, or more importantly, establish why it is negative.
We Came To Define And Kill Time
Throughout human history, the aforementioned maintenance of consistency through time was the anchor that allowed our communities of varying sizes to thrive upon an anarchic planet, and this is especially prevalent the further we peer into the ancient world. The history of Rome and pre-Christian Europe provides us fantastic examples of how Indo-Europeans once lived, and while accuracy gets murkier the further back we peer, we nonetheless have a solid understanding of how the traditional domestic cult functioned. Before we had concepts such as class struggle and commoditized ethnic identity, there was bloodline worship.
The act of ancestral worship – familiar to nearly every civilization on Earth – extended beyond genetic reproduction and the concept of blood memory, encompassing an existential foundation of essential rituals. The details of such were outlined in “The Ancient City” by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges. In this comprehensive investigation with Rome as the primary focus, each family kept the fire of the hearth continually burning – an extinguished fire was a dead household – and the extended family, often including slaves and a hierarchy of help, was overseen by the patriarch of the household 1. The ritual of fire maintenance involved precise actions and incantations throughout the day, specific wood would be required, mixed in with worship of the ancestors who were typically buried on the property, weaving their blood into the soil.
This familial hearth was not simply for survival; it was foundational to our very conception of private property. Ownership of land sprung out of the hearth and the tomb: permanent and defendable, the land containing the essence of the family itself. In this epoch, even in debt you could not separate a man from his land. This understanding predated centralized laws as we currently understand them, it was simply understood.
“There are three things which, from the most ancient times, we find founded and solidly established in these Greek and Italian societies: the domestic religion; the family; and the right of property – three things which in the beginning had a manifest relation. […] When they establish the hearth, it is with the thought and hope that it will always remain in the same spot. The god is installed there not for a day, not for the life of one man merely, but for as long a time as this family shall endure, and there remains any one to support its fire by sacrifices.”
– Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City
When building a new settlement in the guts of the hostile unknown, the first thing the founders did was establish tribes (joining of families) from which a city could be grown. The founding of many other great cities follow a similar model: embedding the soil from the homeland of wherever the tribes were from, meaning that area technically remained their ancestral homeland. When Romulus founded the great city of Rome, he carried with him the soil of his fatherland, birthing the vivacious relationship between the people and the land itself. Following this rhythm, we still title settlements after either the founders, or towns from whence they came. In the mythology that undergirds every great civilization, the man who founds the city is heroic and is only ever removed by an invading or migratory force. There is no great civilization without a foundation myth, and this myth can be followed backwards across time.
In the foundation myth of Britain laid out by Geoffrey of Monmouth, the island of Albion was settled by a seafaring army led by its namesake Brutus, who was carrying the torch of the great city of Troy 2. It was the latest step on an unbroken continuum that had to figure out how to adapt and thrive in new circumstances, succeeding to become one of the greatest empires known to mankind. London – originally known as Trinovantum until taken over and renamed by King Lud – was the final resting place of great kings who at various times over a millennia warred against Rome, Ireland, and much of Western Europe. This mythology tells the story of Brutus in exile and directed to the rugged island by the legendary spirit of Diana, as the greatest actualized memories involve divine intervention.
“At this time the land of Britain was called Albion. It was uninhabited except for a few giants. It was, however, most attractive […] and it filled Brutus and his comrades with a great desire to live there. When they had explored the different districts, they drove the giants whom they had discovered into the caves of the mountains. […] Brutus then called the island Britain from his own name, and his companions he called Britons. […] A little later the language of the people, which up to then had been known as Trojan or Crooked Greek, was called British, for the same reason.”
– Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain
The divine mandate or spiritual intervention is essential to all things we endeavor to materialistically replicate. With this in mind, we survey our social landscape and bear witness to an era of soulless clones. We are keenly aware that there is such a thing as perfect replication that nonetheless hollow commodification, just as we recognize the difference between a uniform and a costume. Or if we were to reconstruct Rome, brick for brick, inch by inch, and occupy this snapshot at its peak yet sense a horror lurking beneath.
It is not enough to say something lacks spirit or has been robbed of its soul. As our technical process as reached dizzying heights, the lack of the real becomes more apparent. It is unlikely, however, that if we destroyed the technology we would be able to reclaim our soul with ancient methods. The problem is not with our technics, for there lies another inorganic reproduction, a soulless replication. For our purposes, we must figure out how repetition can be redeemed and not settle for the sorrowful chanting that it has lost its mojo.
Traversing the Hyperreal
Let’s discuss the difference between a “copy” and a “reproduction.” To achieve this we will swing by Marxist theory and discuss the concept of “hyperreality,” which many have likely heard before but few people could summarize. It does not simply describe fakeness, or denote a parody. When we all heard tell of people paying real cash money to see a hologram of a dead musician, the dissident calls out “hyperreal!” For many it means that the division between reality and fiction has been blurred to the point where you cannot tell what is real and what is myth, but it goes much deeper than that. As America’s Rob Zombie, the king of hyperreality, says: it’s more human than human.
Something is hyperreal when it is a reproduction of a fiction that becomes confused as more real than what it was originally referencing. Think of Bruce Springsteen – the intersection of corporate marketing, commoditized Americana, and popular culture – appearing as himself in a Marvel movie and explaining to you, the ticket holder, that America was never about exceptionalism. If you are scowling, you know what something being hyperreal is.
“The simulacrum is never what hides the truth – it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”
– Ecclesiastes
We will find that in the modern world, things we love are rarely destroyed, they’re inverted. Rather than using a ritual to breathe spirit into the material world, we worship the ritual itself conducted by a spirit we no longer feel a connection to. In the early 20th century when we witnessed the phenomenon of organized crime members mirror the speech patterns and behaviors depicted in gangster movies, which itself was a simulacrum of gangster pulled from the real world. Baudrillard, in “Simulacra & Simulation,” claims Disneyland is the real America: something presented as fantasy, to make us think everything else outside of it is real 3. He constructs this concept as a Marxist critique on capitalist sleight-of-hand, positing that Disneyland is an engine of illusion; while immersed in it we behave childishly to affirm everything beyond it is strictly for adults, regardless of how inherently childish that behavior might be. Outside of the Marxist reasoning, this is a very real phenomenon that stands in our way as we attempt to navigate the corn maze of the real, which we must do to differentiate between brainwashing and hymn, between priest and skinwalker.
Childbirth vs. cloning; is there truly a difference? Does the same bolded demarcation exist between them if to former we add eugenics, and the latter we add genetic engineering? ? You are likely instinctually replying there remains difference. We are here to get to the bottom of why that is, and how much of the traditional childbirth process can be infringed upon before it becomes something else entirely, perhaps something inhuman. Stated differently, how much the original replication process can be infringed upon before it ceases to possess that original essence. This is important for the same reason we must necessarily modify our civilization when we replicate it in a new geography and unfamiliar circumstance; to carry ourselves across great times and distances, we deduce how much of our humanity is retained in the specific rituals of replication and what is merely circumstantial.
The worst thing we can do is kneel at the altar of tchotchkes.
“History is our lost referential, that is to say our myth. It is by virtue of this fact that it takes the place of myths on the screen. The illusion would be to congratulate oneself on this “awareness of history on the part of cinema,” as one congratulated oneself on the “entrance of politics into the university.” Same misunderstanding, same mystification. The politics that enter university are those that come from history, a retro politics, emptied of substance and legalized in their superficial exercise, with the air of a game and a field of adventure […] posthumous liberalization.”
– Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
A powerful critique of the modern world is that power produces nothing but its resemblance – an illusory echo – which people demand more and more of as it eludes them. You crave the Norman Rockwell painting more than you desire or even understand the America it was made to represent. You thirst for hallucinations; holidays that have no connection to the event they were created to commemorate. Simulated power seeks to define its existence and legitimacy through its alternative/anti form, so a hyperreal thing can generate an attack on itself to inspire people to defend it, thereby solidifying its relevance. This is frequently used to rile up Conservatives, who will lay down their lives to defend the trademarked image of Santa Claus designed by the Coca Cola corporation.
This is where you end up as a soldier for Disney, and not the European folktales the Disney Corporation built its empire from. In its simulated death through crisis, it forces you to defend and validate its existence. But is it really enough simply to reclaim the folk tales commoditized into hyperreality, or would we still fall victim to the same forces that morphed these tales into a soulless commodity before our very eyes?
In each and every one of us, we possess the capacity to become Disney Corporation.
Standing Outside of the Surfing Self
People who have no interest in mythology lack an essential component to understand humanity. It is this author’s belief that whether or not a myth was ever a direct 1:1 representation of a historical event is immaterial to its effectiveness, especially since account persists as ideological organism carried through time and will most likely inspire real events.
Joscelyn Godwin, in his book “Arktos,” explored Indo-European mythology embraced by European esotericists through the lens of modern myths on Aryan power and the great story of Hyperborea 4. Despite the fantastic nature of the research, he treated the source material seriously and gave a comprehensive overview of distinct Polar myths and their connections to European esoterica of varying merit. Within those pages were accounts of the secret hollow-Earth world of Agartha, and tales of ancient Hyperboreans being composed of eternal energy. One important thing he points out is that Indo-European people are unique in that the return to a golden age sits prominently at the center of their shared psychology.
To put it a different way, a perfect (even paranormally ethereal) state existed in the distant unrecorded past, and we currently exist in a fallen – or devolved – state. In the case of the Hyperborean myth, the claim was not only was there a perfect Northern Eden that is now lost to us, but that our forms were once limitless energy and unbounded consciousness. The first age of man was these godlike beings living in the “imperishable secret land” located around the North Pole, and as we became more corrupted, we migrated Southward into what is now Europe. The description of these earlier forms tends to change depending on who you ask, but what’s common is the permanence in which we find ourselves lost from that perfect world, explicitly due to our own mistakes or schemes. We find a parallel myth to this in the Garden of Eden and mankind’s exile from paradise.
“The first continent of this Manvantara (a period of many millions of years) was the “Imperishable Sacred Land.” Although little can be said of it, it “capped off the whole North Pole like one unbroken crust…” This was the home of the First Race of mankind, which “had neither type nor color, and hardly an objective, though colossal form.” These, our first ancestors, had ethereal, not physical bodies, and could not be injured or destroyed by death. (The parallel with Plato’s deathless and non-breeding race will be noticed.)”
– Joscelyn Godwin, Arktos: The Polar Myth
In these myths, we are on a downward trend. Famed esotericist and historian René Guénon claimed that while in this state, we had different material existences, and the current state is regarded as the Reign of Quantity, meaning defined by materialism and total distance from true spirituality . Many read that as we are just broadly more materialistic and less spiritual than our ancestors, and we find the soul of humanity in that spirituality5. Others (more accurately) put it within the context of Guenon’s corpus and understand that humanity used to be titanic energy monsters living at the North Pole. I leave it to the reader to decide how they wish to use it.
It is much more common in Asian, Middle Eastern, or African cultures to view their world in permanent stasis, or in some stage of an eternally repeating cycle. Even with India’s Kali Yuga (age of decline,) it is merely the last step in an eternal cycle of death and rebirth. The concept of permanent stasis or eternal cycles are not as familiar to the Western world, even with the afterlife there is a permanence within the larger permanence of decline from a purer far-flung past.
This is all relevant to the theme of repetition because Europeans place the concept of decay and decline at the center of our world, and I find this is the common connective tissue between the ancient pagan beliefs as well as Christianity. Europeans do not believe eternity is achievable, and the framework of Christianity is very friendly to this notion in that it does not seek to actualize Heaven on Earth.
The stark difference not only in this distinct spatialization of time but also a very different relationship with historical permanence presents opportunities to those of European extraction and how they color their distant time horizon, which in turn informs their current actions. In the West we do not take for granted that we are simply in the middle of some eternal cycle, and we do not rest assured that, as many Chinese traditionally believe, this is all merely a blip in a multi-million-year reign.
Projecting our existence in the future is an entirely different mental exercise for the mind of European extraction, and it demands more active participation from every agent. While we may bicker on the accuracy of mystical history and the esoteric nature of every people’s mythologies, what we are exploring is how differently the concept of an eternal cycle sits in the minds of the great civilizations, and the implications of its absence. I believe that its absence implies an altogether different relationship with permanence and a constant downward trajectory in the future that must be contended with before time reaches an eternal terminus.
Redeclining the Buoyant Swansong
One of the biggest mistakes we make when creating phenomena with eternity in mind is trawling for permanence in the past. As we have seen, preserving the flame often requires carrying it, transplanting it, and reforming it which requires a surgical modification the rituals themselves. It is the desire total unchanging stasis where we find our demise, which is ontologically what reproduction is. Strict and unwavering focus on the past also blinds us to solutions that could prevent novel catastrophes, and restricts the fluidity required to adapt. This works in both directions, like when we imagine our present state replicated unchanged in the future. By looking out sights on an ideal future as well as an unaltered past, we have placed the walls of the tomb around ourselves.
Nassim Taleb, in laying out his theory regarding what he calls Black Swan events, described how we operate in a world where we refuse to believe huge unpredictable changes can occur. We do this ironically knowing full well our history of experiencing radical changes and unprecedented swings, from revolutions to earth-shattering innovations.
“The managers sat down to brainstorm during these meetings, about, of course, the medium-term future – they wanted to have ‘vision.’ But then an event occurred that was not in the previous five-year plan: the Black Swan of the Russian financial default of 1998 and the accompanying meltdown of the values of Latin American debt markets. It had such an effect on the firm that, although the institution had a sticky employment policy of retaining managers, none of the five was still employed there a month after the sketch of the 1998 five-year plan.”
– Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan
A black swan is an event that exists radically outside of the norm, but also has a huge impact and demands we retroactively make an explanation for why it happened 6. These can be unforeseen crises, but also revolutionary innovations. The biggest tectonic shifts that irrevocably change society are usually never seen coming or are even dismissed early on. World War 2 would be one, the internet would be another, the Titanic would be the most cartoonish. These black swan events, in this sense, define our entire world. Taleb, having a history in finance, principally applied this to the world of economics and its boom-bust cycles, groundbreaking innovations, and claims throughout the 20th century that the system has solved irregularities. Regardless of what we learned from the last unforeseen catastrophe, societies do not crawl, they leap. We spend the majority of our short-term-thinking learning from the last one, and preparing for the next one with the data we have.
Where we come in to understand the modern world amplifies black swan events and makes everything more extreme. This wasn’t something people had to worry about 1000 years ago, although wars of succession and famines were more common. In our current epoch, reality-bending discoveries are much more frequent. The brains we currently possess are no longer fit to process the world we have created. Our globalized society experiences technological acceleration at a rate that seems intent on giving the average person schizophrenia. It appears obvious to many – especially ideological dissidents and political theorists – that the problems confronting their groups or identities are truly unprecedented. We make peace with the unprecedented and many have numbed themselves to it, overwhelmed as we are by narratives of machine gods and extraterrestrial contact.
“a. We focus on preselected segments of the seen and generalize from it to the unseen: the error of confirmation.
b. We fool ourselves with stories that cater to our Platonic thirst for distinct patterns: the narrative fallacy.
c. We behave as if the Black Swan does not exist: human nature is not programmed for Black Swans.”
– Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan
Technology is destined mutate in unimaginable ways, and the mass psychological tools deployed against population across the globe will demand those who wish to participate in the larger game will need to master new tools of control under the knowledge that the elites and organs of the states are above them further still. Strict adherence to tradition and the subconscious belief in cycles fools us into believing the hyperrealities that plague us will just dissipate on their own. That technology will somehow just cycle itself down. That we do not need to adapt to the unforeseeable because we have mastered permanence.
Dissidents and those who live on the fringes of thought and inquiry will seek out anything to cling to, typically something bold from centuries ago. Many still will create ideological chimeras, hijacking elements of a variety of traditional sectors to create something more ideologically lethal. While may be essential in the short term, it will increasingly be revealed to be insufficient. As we can see, our inability to predict outliers in this environment means we cannot expect to predict the course of history, which puts our precious repetitions at risk.
This should not seem to the modern torture as an insurmountable task: it was common enough for the ancient man, they simply understood that the replication required for survival needed to incorporate new realities, which meant that the evolution could be controlled. It relied neither on soulless copying of the past, nor cowardly adherence to whatever new norms emerged.
The task at hand now is not to struggle to predict the catastrophes of the future, but to reassess our values, our paradigms, and indeed our assumed truths to ensure they can exist in the future. Tradition as we know it is not equipped to be a bulwark against this alien dawn. The torch we carry across time will need to find new terrain, new methods of maintenance, and new rituals to maintain it. It is our duty to discern which of our rituals are pure and which are simulacra, and more important still we must reestablish the rituals that allow what we believe is our essence to evolve to meet the oncoming madness.
- 1.de Coulanges NFD. The Ancient City. 1st ed. Imperium Press; 2020. https://www.imperiumpress.org/shop/the-ancient-city/
- 2.of Monmouth G. The History of the Kings of Britain. Penguin; 1977.
- 3.Baudrillard J. Simulacra and Simulation. Published online 1995. doi:10.3998/mpub.9904
- 4.Godwin J. Arktos: The Polar Myth. Adventures Unlimited Press; 1996. https://www.adventuresunlimitedpress.com/proddetail.php?prod=ARK
- 5.Guenon R. The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times. 4th ed. Sophia Perennis; 2004.
- 6.Taleb N. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Penguin; 2008.
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