The Lost Heroic Age: Part Three

While ocean kayaking in my grandmother’s grave, a rare event greatly affected me. A natural mineral deposit was released that attracted the entire food chain. Every square foot of the water was covered in pulsating life and sacrifice. Every trophic level increase had an exponential decrease in numbers — fish, pelicans, otters, sea lions, dolphins, and I am sure much more than was visible from the surface. The ecstatic energy was palpable in the air and more intense than anything I before experienced. All layers of the food chain were feasting on and rejoicing in the sacrifice of life. Everything was so alive, but the requirement of life is death.

God — the underlying life force that animates all things, which the gods are an extension of — sacrificed power and energy to create the continuum of physical reality as the formative realm of the spiritual. The temptation of physical life is the desire to turn the creative forces of meaning into a material Stasis of Forms, forgetting that we stand upon a living chain of existence. The Holy Ghost drives evolution towards the ability to house conscious lifeforms in the image of the horseshoe of creation. When people say all is One, they do not realize that the formative processes are the universals because life requires differentiation. In the zenith of modern inversions, all of mankind is top-down considered one.

Transhumanism and the material void are antithetical to the gift of life and the living chain of existence. We destroy life by clinging to the material world we have made, desiring for it to be all knowable, controllable, and safe for us. Our desire for this illusory Stasis of Forms detaches us from the layers of life we stand on, which are not limited to the ecosystem we have dominion over but also include all past forms of our living essence. A living chain of meaning and self-sacrifice has forged our identities and is integral to our souls.

Like the orcas, the strength of our bonds over generations made us apex, not just intelligence. In-group inclusive fitness, competition within subspecies, and symbiosis with the rest of the layering of the ecosystem are the hallmarks of the apex of all apex predators that the Spartans encompassed. The apex of all layers of life is where the most significant competition occurs, which is embodied in heroic cultures but harmed when the material void tempts isolated individual heroes. Lycurgus understood this fundamental aspect of reality and gave his ethnos the gift of his own life to inspire a heroic culture to be reborn in them. Culture exerts a selective, creative, life-giving pressure or becomes reductive like the anti-culture of materialism.

In Lycurgian Sparta, warring was for the sake of its spiritual gifts, bonding, and preparedness to defend against decadent empires. Spartans were very superstitious and spiritual, with the Weltanschauung of physical reality as a living, interactive layering on a continuum with the spiritual, not separate from it. Their Life Giver bound creative wisdom to his people, not by the written word but by his actions. Spartans lived as true individuated citizens with no abstraction between those who upheld their ethnos and ruled it. This heroic culture of self-sacrifice allowed for bonds even closer than most tribal people or family units in civilization.

Towards the end of the Spartan millennium, they sacrificed to stop Persian expansion into the Hellas because they knew the cost of the Gift of Life. When the Athenians turned on them, they won the Peloponnesian War but lost themselves trying to hold Athens. It was not a foreign enemy, conquering empire, or war that destroyed the Spartans but the insidious cultural rot of decadence. Trying to impose their will on Athenians instead of destroying them broke the last bonds to their Life Giver’s precepts and introduced the consuming void. Holding the decadence of Athens corrupted Spartan culture, ending the Life Giver’s gift.

Alexander the Great completed the fall of the Dorians. It was not that he amassed wealth but that he took the best men from Greece and refused to return them after conquering Persia. Alexander became consumed by hubris, wanting to hold decadent empires. He shamed his men’s desire to return home using the wealth he gave them. Alexander desired a Stasis of Forms by top-down combining people and destroying the organic build-up of identity. Instead of protecting identity and the layering of all life on itself, he became a proto-transhumanist detaching Becoming from all past layerings of Being. Alexander lost the true world hegemony of the Dorian Hellas by using his own people’s life force to build up decadent enemies instead of destroying them. The superficial aspects of mostly Athenian high culture were spread, along with Dorian military ingenuity.

The Dorians were not the only remnant of the dispersed heroic spirit. Briton, Germanic, and Roman lines experienced heroic peripheral ethnogenesis in their founding. The mythical founder of Germanics and Britons was Brutus of Troy through the Dardanian line of Prince Aeneas. Caesar’s line also claimed descent from Venus through Prince Aeneas, another hint of atavism from the lost heroic age and surviving Trojan nobility. There is a hidden pantheon inside of ancient Greek myth lost in the heroic age, and the fall of Trojan Dardanians also split into some ethnogenesis of the Scythians, but that tangent I will leave for future articles. Barbarian groups of the Global North require distinction from primitives since the barbarian holds all creative potential, while the primitive has hit critical mass for formative capacity.

Heroes holding decadence opened a curse that overt conquering by previous empires never could achieve because they could subsume other heroic lines of their barbarian cousins along with themselves. Utilizing the life force of such a creative and potent heroic spirit propelled the mechanization of the meta-zeitgeist of the Iron Age. Ever since, trader civilizations encompassed glory because the hero was also within them, in various forms and times more visible than others — fighting, enslaving, losing, consuming, and running from himself, infecting everything he touched with the temptation of the material void. The trader subsumed the heroic spirit and was cursed to propel the continuing forms of this civilization’s evolution from Rome to the Enlightenment to Western civilization to globalism.

The hero is separate from the mob and decadent elites, which mirror each other and consume more of the heroic spirit into nothingness over time. Faustianism is really the two spirits confused as one of the heroes subsumed in the trader. This curse caused the paradox of patriotism and self-sacrificing heroism defending and upholding trader civilizations that harm them. This catch-22 of nationalism/patriotism is depicted very well in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus or the death of the Brothers Gracchi.

The false dichotomy within this age limited Nietzsche’s criticism of self-sacrifice, but pathological altruism and individual aggrandizement are both products of detachment. Self-sacrifice for bonds is the only opposition to the spreading material void, but becomes a destructive inversion when the hero applies it to those lost in the void. The hero is constantly attacked from above and below within his nation, his gifts consumed outward for expansion and greed in this cursed cycle. As it is evolving to its zenith in globalism, there is no longer a life and death cycle from trader civilization falling back into eugenic barbarism but an insidiously suffocating Stasis of Forms. Reductive mechanization has spread out, triggering a macro devolution of our species (and subspecies) seen by the expansion of primitives incapable of new forms and our festering cultural rot. At the end of the age, the consuming void grows to consume itself.

Exerting a will externally on the world is possible through bonds of self-sacrifice over materialism because the temptation of the material (and to be clear, I do not consider the physical to be the same as the material, but the physical is on a continuum with the spiritual; the material is superfluous excess most seen in extreme forms of entropy outside of the life and death cycle) destroys the will of the person replacing it with the unseen will of the material void or mechanized false objectivity. We can even see this shadow will with inverted Life Giver archetypes of the material void that threaten harm to themselves to manipulate their own people into humanistic vantages of reality, like Gandhi.

It is easier to corrupt and control than build and protect organic identity. We must not look to the methods of our downfall as a means to fight itself because doing so limits our Weltanschauung. The meta-zeitgeist of this age is a consuming and dysgenic force that is anti-creation. We perceive power as wealth, but the superfluous traps and tempts us away from the real strength of bonds. Yes, money can be used to start a foundation, but its lack is often used as an excuse for inaction and defeatism. There is no reason we must wait on a financial elite because they and the mob are inseparable from the consuming meta-zeitgeist. Once we can see outside the system, it can be used in many ways against itself to regain rooted foundations.

Loving self-sacrifice exponentially multiplies itself, so the effort of building a foundation can foster great essence to allow the rebirth of a connected, healthy form of the Life Giver. A heroic culture must break away to lay a foundation for the Life Giver to lead against the trader. The alternative to achieving this inflection point is imploding under the insidious suffocation of globalism, a false golden age that will cause a fall back to a primordial state. All heroic lines in the branches of the Global North — West, Mainland Europe, and Eurasian Russia — are tied together in this potential destiny. We can have the best philosophies, but if there is no self-sacrificing crux to inspire their enaction, people will not regain living identity from logically understanding it is in their interest. Only willingness to self-sacrifice will enable a culture of self-sacrifice to be born and end this age.

Many people champion opposing the consuming void by what seems useful within its zeitgeist, what sways the masses lost to it, or what could inspire a financial elite to espouse the same views. A financial elite will never be able to fund a movement outside its framework, which is the fruit of a poisonous tree. Control found in wealth is not true power but an illusion, yet the material void has so reduced our perception and bonds that it is the only form of power we can now see. If we blind ourselves to real forms of self-sacrificing power, he will be outside of our perceptual awareness and thus invisible to us when he comes. If we continue to look to the immediate past or power systems within this zeitgeist to save us, we will not be able to prepare a foundation to foster the development of a Life Giver, or to which he could give Life.