Theophany The Spirit of Ancient Greek Religion

Theophany is an open and unequivocal confession of pagan piety, a piety that requires no sacred scripture, is non-dogmatic, knows nothing of redemption and resurrection, and is unfamiliar with an omnipotent creator god. Instead, it recognizes a plethora of divine and semi-divine beings. Such a perspective has proven offensive to many. Not only to the early Christians and their theologians, for whom paganism could not be a matter of indifference. So they relegated it to the realm of demonic and magical powers. For Christians, inclusion of pagan piety within their narratives of religious history is rendered impossible, as is evident in the recent phase of Protestant theology and its attempt to demythologize faith. Myth and word are intrinsically united, and not only within the context of the Greek language and religion. The purging of all things mythical from texts and from life deprives modern man in ways that become apparent when we open our eyes to the starkness and lack of imagery in the modern world.

The primary inquiry to be undertaken concerns the relationship between mythology and mythos, that is to say, the scholarly investigation of a domain that has nothing to do with science. The merit of classical studies can solely rest in the faithful and precise reproduction of sources and their interpretation, rather than in interpretations and explanations that originate from entirely different domains, thus necessitating distortions. Neither does an aesthetic appreciation of myth, which divorces it from its foundation, suffice, nor does symbolization, which substitutes meanings for essence. Equally misguided is the naturalization of myth, which eradicates the divine and comprehends it as a natural process and natural force, seeking causal and teleological explanations for it. The hallmark of these endeavors is the reduction of myths to animistic, fetishistic, evolutionary, psychological, and psychoanalytical origins. This includes personification, which is nothing more than a regressive form of depersonalization.

Certain aspects of such interpretations might be astutely designed—acumen increases where sense diminishes—yet they all represent externally imposed constructs. They not only misconceive the myth but work toward its annihilation. They bypass the existence of the Gods, their world, and their sovereignty, from which the Homeric epics, lyric poetry, tragedy, temple architecture, and the sculpted figures of Gods and heroes have emerged.

“The divine,” as Otto states, “can only be experienced.” Experience implies that Gods cannot be invented, conceived, or imagined. Yet, in what kind of experience does the divine manifest? Not every experience suffices for that purpose. Such an experience already contains devotion, without which there could be no encounter. Such a relationship, founded on offerings and gifts, cannot be coerced by willpower or knowledge. There is nothing coercive within it. The Muses approach only the musically inclined individual, the Horae only the one who follows their course and their governance throughout the year, and the Charites bestow their blessings only upon those who can enter into their dance.

Throughout history, only the poetically attuned individual has had a path and access to the Gods. Without rhythm, whose divine origin was certainly known to the Greeks, without its movement, which is festive, everything remains mute. Without rhythm, there is no celebration, without it, all festivity withers.

Friedrich Georg Jünger →
https://olddarkgods.com/p/foreword-on-the-occasion-of-the-one?utm_source=publication-search
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In another book of the same year (Der Geist der Antike und die christliche Welt ) Otto gave a strongly Nietzsche-influenced view of the Jewish and Christian religions in antithesis to the Greek Olympian world. Here, and in a series of articles leading to his main work, the Homeric Gods (1929; English translation, 1954), he supplied a philosophical interpretation of Greek religion, abandoning the philological method that had guided all his previous works. This methodological shift was due to Otto's classicistic conception of the uniqueness of Greek religion compared to any other. He maintained that the Homeric mode of seeing and thinking of the Olympian gods found continual expression within the Greek world "despite all temporal and individual variations, in the representative works of the Greek genius, whether in poetry, plastic art or philosophy" (Otto, 1929/1954, p. 20), being not only the very essence of Greek civilization, but indeed "the religious idea of the European spirit" and "one of humanity's greatest religious ideas" (p. 13). According to Otto, each Olympian god (he dwells on Athene, Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite, and Hermes, not taking into account Zeus) is an Urgestalt des Seins, capable of revealing from its peculiar point of view the totality of reality—worldliness and naturalness—in human shape. Such are, for example, Apollo, the anthropomorphic revelation of spiritual freedom and distance from the mortal's world, and his twin sister Artemis, who represents "freedom of another sort—the feminine," which is "free nature with its brilliance and wildness, with its guiltless purity and its mysterious uncanniness" (p. 102). As Goethe had pointed out, Greek religion should therefore be considered as "theomorphic" and not as "anthropomorphic," with the divine in its human appearance being the model for mankind—and not the opposite.

Otto deepened his idea of the Greek divine as a revelation of "being" in human form in his other major work, Dionysus (1933; English translation, 1965). Relying on this conception, Otto was one of the few scholars of his time maintaining the Greek provenience of Dionysos, long before Michael Ventris and John Chadwick discovered the god's Mycaenean evidence in 1952. Though not belonging to the Olympian deities, this god discloses "a whole world, whose spirit presents itself again and again in new forms, connecting in an eternal unity the sublime with the simple, the human with the animal, the vegetal with the elemental" (Otto, 1933/1965, p. 188). The very essence of Dionysos lies therefore in the opposition between these incompatible poles; hence his madness, visible in his symbols: the mask (incarnating the simultaneity of presence and absence), the music (embodying both noise and silence), and the wine (symbol of the paradoxical unity of pleasure and pain). This madness, in which brightness and obscurity, and joy and horror, coincide, unifies also life and death, concealing in itself the mystery of procreation. For this reason, the Dionysian world is a feminine one, closely connected to women, as is clearly shown by the god's followers, the Maenads, and his spouse Ariadne.

Walter Friedrich Otto →

It would be better to discard the term scientific truth altogether ...

 We must keep in mind that the exactness which the natural sciences have achieved, or are trying to achieve, no matter how far it is carried, refers only to the mechanical exactness of both the process and the subject of perception. Such exactness does not give us certainty beyond the certainty of facts found in repeatable experiences. Exactness in this sense is in fact correctness, but it is not truth, for it is meaningless to talk of truth where merely something mechanically repeatable has been ascertained. Truth is not identical with repeat ability; on the contrary, it is what absolutely cannot be duplicated. Hence truth has no place in any kind of mechanics. The term "scientific truth" is therefore quite equivocal. It is based on experiments, and it is used where some mechanically exact phenomenon has been made intelligible, provable, and capable of being repeated.

But the fact that something can be proved, tested, and repeated is no criterion of truth. If the scientist asserts that this exactness is synonymous simply with truth, or with a higher truth, the assertion shows only that the scientist's terminology itself is inexact. What sense does it make to call the proposition, "Two times two equal four," a proposition memorized by first-year school children, a truth? Truth is not learned; one does not become more truthful by learning and by knowing much. Nor do we become truthful by exact thinking. A mathematical proposition does not become true just because it describes a fact with exactness, not even if it gets repeated a million times. The apodictical certainty of mathematical propositions lies entirely and completely within the field of exactness and correctness; but their content of truth equals zero, like that of any arithmetical proposition.

Scientific truths are not "higher" truths. Where they claim to be, these claims are usurpations by the mechanical exactitude. It would be better to discard the term scientific truth altogether because its validity is merely descriptive.

The striving for exactness characteristic of the natural sciences must here be gauged in a different manner – not with those measuring instruments developed for the purpose, but from a point of vantage entirely beyond all science and scientism. No one will deny that it is needful and legitimate to seek such a point of vantage, unless, of course, we make science our religion, surround it with walls of dogma, and sanctify all its methods. But this would render all investigation and analysis impossible.

We will start from an observation which no one who has ever made it can forget. For to observe our modern civilization means to raise the question: Is there not a direct connection between the increase of knowledge concerning mechanically exact processes and the fact that modern man, in a strange manner, loses his individuality, loses his balance, his grip upon life, feels increasingly endangered and susceptible to attack in the security that is his due? This inner security, of course, means something different from the security which can be bought by any kind of measurable method. For it concerns man's place and role in life and is related to human freedom. No methodical science can ever give to man that kind of security, not even the most systematic kind of exactitude. The trend of our exact sciences is not toward purely intellectual knowledge. On the contrary, it has been sharply opposed to the way Parmenides strove after knowledge; it is typically analytical, inductive, dividing. Thus, causality and, in its train, functionalism push to the fore, and all individuality is lost. Thus too, all things mechanical predominate, and with them that brutal optimism and conceit of civilization which characterize the course of the technological age; until eventually the point is reached where a man is broken by his blind lust for power, is punished, and thereby forced to change his way of thinking.

From: Friedrich Georg Jünger 

The Failure of Technology

His failure to control his automaton with automatic regularity

 At a certain stage of technological progress, the individual begins to become aware that he has entered a danger zone. Gradually the smug satisfaction which the observer derived from the sight of some marvelous piece of machinery gets mingled with a sense of impending danger; fear befalls him. Those weavers who in a burst of blind and thoughtless hatred destroyed the power looms that had deprived them of their livelihood were not yet aware of the real menace. They tried to stop technical progress by brute force a fruitless attempt to save themselves from proletarization. The realization that man has to pay a price for every increase in power the machine gives him, that he must give an equivalent in return, is a realization that had not yet dawned in the early days of technology. In those days boundless economic confidence predominated, an unshakable optimism about the future. It is by no means accidental that the progress of the iron age was accompanied by doctrines in which progress undertook to celebrate itself, doctrines ranging all the way from praise of evolution to praise of brute force. The machine era is revolutionary not only as regards machinery.

As technology approaches perfection, however, the chorus of optimistic voices grows weaker, because experience gradually teaches not only the advantages but also the disadvantages which the new tools bring. Only by experience do we learn that our technological apparatus has its own laws, and that we must be on our guard against getting in conflict with them.

The industrial accident may serve here as an illustration. As mechanization progresses, industrial and traffic accidents increase until they far exceed even the casualties of war. Since even the most ingenious inventions cannot eliminate these accidents, it is clear that they must be due to some basic discrepancy between the operator and the mechanism he operates. The operational accident occurs where man fails to function as a human machine, where he no longer acts in accord with the automatic mechanism he is operating. The operational accident, in other words, occurs precisely where we are human, where we try to assert our independence of the machine, be it by lack of attention, fatigue, sleep, or preoccupation with non-mechanical things. It is in such moments of human weakness that the suppressed elemental forces break loose, get out of control, and wreak their vengeance by destroying both the operator and his machine. The law, now in the service of the technical organization, punishes the negligent operator for his failure to control his automaton with automatic regularity.

The disaster of the Titanic, an event whose symbolic significance is emphasized by the name, was such an operational accident. We can understand the shock it produced if we consider that this accident shattered for a moment faith in the technology which had claimed this ship to be unsinkable. The optimism based on such claims was temporarily dispelled.

The deeper and more lasting impression made upon man's mind by the Lisbon earthquake is, however, related to a change in religious concepts. It undermined the faith in Divine Providence, a shake-up which favored the formation of a causalist ideology opposed to any idea of divine providence.

From: Friedrich Georg Jünger - The Failure of Technology

Automatons

 The invention of the automaton dates from antiquity, as is shown by the dove of Archytas and the robot of Ptolemy Philadelphos. These much admired mechanisms, like the automatons of Albertus Magnus, Bacon, and Regiomantus, were ingenious toys; nothing more serious. They evoked not only wonder, but also fear. The robot of Albertus Magnus, which could open the door and greet the visitor (the fruit of decades of effort), was smashed by the startled Thomas Aquinas with a blow of his stick. The intellectual fascination which machines have held for man from the earliest times is coupled with a presentiment of the uncanny, an almost unaccountable feeling of horror. We sense this in Goethe’s remark on the advance of mechanical factory work, and in the shudder with which E. T. A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe viewed the automatons and mechanical figures of the early nineteenth century, among which the mechanical flute player, the drummer, and Vaucanson's mechanical duck are the most important.

This is the same horror that has of old seized man in the presence of clocks, water mills, wheels – in the presence of any work or contrivance which acts and moves although it has no life of its own. The beholder is not satisfied to study the mechanics; he is not satisfied with the understanding of their operation; he is disquieted by their mechanical action. This motion produces the illusion of life, and this illusion, once he has looked through it, is precisely what is so disturbing. Myths, sagas, and fairy tales recognize no distinction between animate and inanimate nature; they give life even to the lifeless by various personifications. That such a distinction is not recognized is the basis of poetry which voices itself by metaphor, analogy, and image; it is the basis, too, of all epic song. Orpheus, for example, to whom was ascribed the gift of enlivening the very stones, is the arch poet and arch singer. The machine, however, gives the impression that something lifeless penetrates into, and permeates life. This is what the observer senses and what evokes in him ideas of age, coldness, death, akin to the awareness of a lifeless, mechanically self-repeating time such as clockwork measures. It is no accident that the clock was the first automaton to achieve signal success among men. In the philosophical system of Descartes, animals, which are treated as automatons, are nothing but clocks whose movements operate under mechanical laws.

From Georg Jünger - The Failure of Technology

What makes a tale utopian?

 Just what, then, makes a tale utopian? It is the blending of things that cannot blend, the going beyond limitations, the drawing of unjustified conclusions from premises that clash. The rule, A posse ad esse non valet consequentia ("A conclusion from the possible to the actual is not valid") is not respected here. But when we examine such a utopia, a technological novel, for instance, we find that it utopian nature does not lie, as one might think, in the technical theme which the author develops. A writer who tells us of cities with moving streets where every house is a perfect residential mechanism, every roof has an airport, every housewife receives provisions in her kitchen through an unfailing system of tubes; who assures us that these cities are built of a substance which glows gently in the dark, and that the silken garments worn there are made from refuse, or from cottage cheese – that writer is not yet truly utopian. For all this, whether it will be achieved or not, lies within the possibilities of technical organization. We are content to state that such contrivances are possible, and disregard for the time the question of what would be gained if such a state were reached. The tale becomes utopian only when the writer leaves the sphere of technical organization – when, for instance, he tries to make us believe that these cities are inhabited by better and more perfect human beings; that envy, murder, and adultery are unknown; that neither law nor a police force is needed. For in so doing he steps outside the technical scheme within which he is spinning his fantasies, and combines it in a utopian manner with something different and alien which can never be developed out of the scheme itself. This is why Bellamy is more of a utopian than Jules Verne – the latter sticks closer to the technological scheme. A social utopian like Fourier believed in all seriousness that, if only his theories were accepted and applied, the very salt water of the sea would turn into sweet lemonade and the whales would cheerfully harness themselves to the ships. Thus he ascribed to his ideas power mightier than the song of Orpheus, and this even after his model community, La Reunion, had broken down. Such exuberance of the mind is ridiculous, unless one happens to be among those who are ruined by it.

From Friedrich Georg Jünger's The Failure of Technology

The machine organization gives nothing – it organizes need

Why does the contemplation of machines give us such pleasure? Because they manifest the fundamental form of man's intelligence, because before our very eyes this constructive and combining intelligence masters and amasses power, because they win a ceaseless triumph over the elements which they beat down, squeeze, and forge. Let us enter the workshop, then, to see what goes on.

The impression we gain as we observe technical processes of any sort is not at all one of abundance. The sight of abundance and plenty give us joy:

they are the signs of a fruitfulness which we revere as a life-giving force.

Rooting, sprouting, budding, blooming, ripening, and fruition – the exuberance of the motions and forms of life – strengthen and refresh us. The human body and the human mind possess this power of bestowing strength.

Both man and woman have it. But the machine organization gives nothing – it organizes need. The prospect of vineyard, orchard, or a blossoming landscape cheers us, not because these things yield profits, but because of the sensation of fertility, abundance, and gratuitous riches. The industrial scene, however, has lost its fruitfulness; it has become the scene of mechanical production. It conveys, above all, a sense of hungriness, particularly in the industrial cities which, in the metaphorical language of technological progress, are the homes of a flourishing industry. The machine gives a hungry impression. And this sensation of a growing, gnawing hunger, a hunger that becomes unbearable, emanates from everything in our entire technical arsenal.

When we enter a factory, be it a cotton mill, a foundry, a saw mill, or a powerhouse, everywhere we get the same impression. The consuming, devouring, gluttonous motion racing through time restlessly and insatiably, reveals the never stilled and never to be stilled hunger of the machine. So obvious is this hunger that even the impression of concentrated power which we receive in the centers of heavy industry cannot overcome it. In fact, it is strongest in these centers, because precisely here we find the greatest greed for power. And the rational mind which stands behind the machine and keeps watch over its automatic, mechanical motion – it too is hungry, and hunger follows it everywhere. It cannot shake off hunger; it cannot free itself from it; it cannot be stilled, however hard it may try. And how, indeed, could that be possible! This mind itself is consuming, gluttonous, and it has no access to riches; it cannot conjure up abundance. No effort of ingenuity, not all the inventive power that is brought to bear here can do it. For rationalization only sharpens hunger and actually increases consumption. This growing consumption is a sign not of abundance but of poverty; it is bound up with worry, want, and toil.

It is precisely the methodical, disciplined effort leading to the perfection of the technical processes which destroys the basis for the hopes that certain groups place in this perfection. Progress in its present rapid advance creates an optical illusion, deceiving the observer into seeing things which are not there. Technology can be expected to solve all problems which can be mastered by technical means, but we must expect nothing from it which lies beyond technical possibilities. Since even the smallest mechanical process consumes more energy than it produces, how could the sum of all these processes create abundance?2 There can be no talk of riches produced by technology. What really happens is rather a steady, forever growing consumption. It is a ruthless destruction, the like of which the earth has never before seen. A more and more ruthless destruction of resources is the characteristic of our technology. Only by this destruction can it exist and spread. All theories which overlook this fact are lopsided because they disregard the basic conditions which in the modern world govern production and economics.

In every healthy economy the substance with which it works is preserved and used sparingly, so that consumption and destruction do not overstep the limit beyond which the substance itself would be endangered or destroyed.

Since technology presupposes destruction, since its development depends upon destruction, it cannot be fitted into any healthy economic system; one cannot look at it from an economic point of view. The radical consumption of oil, coal, and ore cannot be called economy, however rational the methods of drilling and mining. Underlying strict rationality of technical working methods, we find a way of thinking which cares nothing for the preservation and saving of the substance.

What is euphemistically called production is really consumption. The gigantic technical apparatus, that masterpiece of human ingenuity, could not reach perfection if technological thought were to be contained within an economic scheme, if the destructive power of technical progress were to be arrested. But this progress becomes all the more impetuous, the larger the resources at its disposal, and the more energetically it devours them. This is shown by the concentration of men and machines in the great mining centers where the mechanization of work and the organization of man are most advanced. The rationality of technology, so impressively displayed here, becomes intelligible only when one has understood the conditions on which it depends. Its concomitant is waste and contempt for all rationality in the exploitation of the resources on whose existence technology depends, as the lungs depend on air.

Where wastage begins, there begins desolation, and scenes of such desolation can be found even in the early days of our technology, in the era of the steam engine. These scenes are startling by the extraordinary ugliness and the Cyclopean power which are characteristic of them. The machine invades the landscape with destruction and transformation; it grows factories and whole manufacturing cities overnight, cities grotesquely hideous, where human misery is glaringly revealed; cities which, like Manchester, represent an entire stage of technology and which have become synonymous with hopeless dreariness. Technology darkens the air with smoke, poisons the water, destroys the plants and animals. It brings about a state in which nature has to be "preserved" from rationalized thinking, in which large tracts of land have to be set apart, fenced off, and placed under a taboo, like museum pieces. What all museum-like institutions make evident is that preservation is needed. The extension of protected areas, therefore, is an indication that destructive processes are at work.

Mining centers, in particular, are the focal points of organized pillage, where the riches in the earth are exploited and consumed. Human pauperization begins with the proletarization of the masses, who are indoctrinated to factory work and kept on a low level of existence. The exploitation of the factory worker (about which socialism is indignant only so long as it is in the opposition) is an inevitable symptom of the universal exploitation to which technology subjects the whole earth from end to end.

Man no less than ore deposits belongs to the resources subject to consumption by technology. The ways in which the worker tries to evade this exploitation – associations, labor unions, political parties – are the very methods which tie him forever closer to the progress of technology, mechanical work, and technical organization.

The obverse side of technology is a pillage which becomes constantly better organized; this must not be overlooked when one speaks of technical progress. True, we have made a technical advance if by means of artificial fertilizers we succeed in squeezing uninterrupted crops out of our overburdened plough and pasture land. But this advance itself is at the same time the consequence of a calamitous deficiency, for if we did not have the fertilizer we should no longer be able to feed ourselves at all. Technical progress has deprived us of the free choice of nutriment which our ancestors possessed. A machine which trebles the output of a previous model constitutes a technical advance, for it is the result of a more rational design.

But for this very reason it also possesses a more intense consuming and devouring power. Its hunger is sharper, and it consumes correspondingly more. In this way, the whole realm of the machine is full of a restless, devouring power that cannot be satisfied.

(...)

 If two thousand years hence there should still be archaeologists – which is rather unlikely – who were to undertake excavations, say, in Manchester, Essen, or Pittsburgh, they would find but little. They would discover nothing as enduring as Egyptian burial chambers and classical temples. For the stuff with which the factory system works is not aere perennius (“more lasting than bronze” – Horace). These archaeologists might even be surprised at the paltriness of their discoveries. The earth-spanning power of technology is of an ephemeral kind – a fact easily overlooked by those engrossed in it.

Everywhere it is threatened by decay, given over to decay, and decay follows upon its heels all the more insistently and closely, the faster it marches on towards new triumphs.

The machine does not create new riches. It consumes existing riches through pillage, that is, in a manner which lacks all rationality even though it quickly employs rational methods of work. As technology progresses, it devours the resources on which it depends. It contributes to a constant drain, and thereby again and again comes to a point where it is forced to improve its inventory and to rationalize anew its methods of work. Those who deny this, claiming that it is the wealth of new inventions which made the existing apparatus obsolete, are confusing cause and effect.

from Friedrich Georg Jünger's The Failure of Technology

Friedrich Georg Jünger: The Titans and the Coming of the Titanic Age

Tomislav Sunic:

Below is my translation of several passages from the last two chapters of Friedrich Georg Jünger’s little known book, Die Titanen(The Titans, 1944) (1). Only the subtitles are mine. F. G. Jünger was the younger brother of Ernst Jünger and wrote extensively about ancient Greek mythology. His studies on the meaning of Prometheanism and Titanism are indispensable for a better understanding of the devastating effects of the modern belief in progress and the role of technology in our postmodern societies. Outside the German-speaking countries, F. G. Jünger’s work remains largely unknown, although he had a decisive influence on his renowned brother, Ernst Jünger. Some parts of F. G. Jünger’s other book, Griechische Götter (The Greek Gods, 1943), with a similar topic, and containing also some passages from Die Titanen, were recently translated into French (Les Titans et les dieux, 2013)(2).

In the footsteps of Friedrich Nietzsche and along with hundreds of German philosophers, novelists, poets, and scientists, such as Martin Heidegger, Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, Ludwig Clauss, and Gott-fried Benn, whose work became the object of criminalization by cultural Bolsheviks and the Frankfurt School after World War II, F. G. Jünger can also be tentatively put in the category of “cultural conservative revolutionaries” who characterized the political, spiritual, and cultural climate in Europe between the two world wars.

Ancient European myths, legends, and folk tales are often derided by some scholars, including some Christian theologians who claim to see in them gross re-enactments of European barbarism, superstition, and sexual promiscuity. However, if a reader or a scholar immerses himself in the symbolism of the European myths, let alone if he tries to decipher the allegorical meaning of diverse creatures in the myths, such as the scenes from the Orphic rituals, the hellhole of Tartarus, or the carnage in the Nibelungenlied, or the final divine battle in Ragnarök, then those mythical scenes take on an entirely different meaning. After all, in our modern so-called enlightened and freedom-loving liberal societies, citizens are also entangled in a profusion of bizarre infra-political myths, in a myriad of weird hagiographic tales, especially those dealing with World War II victimhoods, as well as countless multicultural hoaxes enforced under penalty of law. Therefore, understanding the ancient European myths means, first and foremost, reading between the lines and strengthening one’s sense of the metaphor.

There persists a dangerous misunderstanding between White nationalists professing paganism versus White nationalists professing Chris-tian beliefs. The word “paganism” has acquired a pejorative meaning, often associated with childish behavior of some obscure New Age individuals carrying burning torches or reading the entrails of dead animals. This is a fundamentally false conception of the original meaning of paganism. “Pagans,” or better yet polytheists, included scores of thinkers from antiquity, such as Heraclitus, Plato, Seneca, who were not at all like many modern self-styled and self-proclaimed “pagans” worshipping dogs or gazing at the setting sun. Being a “pagan” denotes a methodof conceptualizing the world beyond the dualism of “either-or.” The pagan outlook rejects all dogmas and looks instead at the notion of the political or the historical from diverse and conflicting perspectives. Figuratively speaking, the plurality of gods means also the plurality of different beliefs and different truths. One can be a good Christian but also a good “pagan.” For that matter, even the “pagan” Ernst Jünger, F. G. Jünger’s older brother, converted to Catholicism and had a very Catholic burial in 1998.

When F. G. Jünger published his books on the Titans and the gods in 1943 and in 1944, Germany lay in ruins, thus ominously reflecting F. G. Jünger’s earlier premonitions about the imminent clash of the Titans. With the gods now having departed from our disenchanted and desacralized White Europe and White America, we might do well to have another look at the slumbering Titans who had once successfully fought against Chaos, only to be later forcefully overthrown by their own di-vine progeny.

Are the slumbering Titans our political option today? F. G. Jünger’s book is important insofar as it offers a reader a guide for understanding a likely reawakening of the Titans and for decoding the meaning of the new, fast approaching chaos.

THE TITANS: CUSTODIANS OF LAW AND ORDER

The Titans are not the Gods, even though they generate the Gods and relish divine reverence in the kingdom of Zeus. The world in which the Titans rule is a world without the Gods. Whoever desires to imagine a kosmos atheos, i.e., a godless cosmos, that is, a cosmos not as such as depicted by natural sciences, will find it there. The Titans and the Gods differ, and, given that their differences are visible in their behavior to-ward man and in view of the fact that man himself experiences on his own as to how they rule, man, by virtue of his own experience, is able to make a distinction between them.

Neither are the Titans unrestrained, power hungry beings, nor do they scorn the law; rather, they are the rulers over a legal system whose necessity must never be put in doubt. In an awe-inspiring fashion, it is the flux of primordial elements over which they rule, holding bridle and reins in their hands, as seen in Helios. They are the guardians, custodians, supervisors, and guides of the order. They are the founders unfolding beyond chaos, as pointed out by Homer in his remarks about Atlas, who shoulders the long pillars supporting the heavens and the Earth. Their rule precludes any confusion, any disorderly exertion of power. Rather, they constitute a powerful deterrent against chaos.

The Titans and the Gods match up with each other. Just as Zeus stands in for Cronus, so does Poseidon stand in opposition to Oceanus, or for that matter Hyperion and his son Helios in opposition to Apollo, or Coeus and Phoebe in opposition to Apollo and Artemis, or Selene in opposition to Artemis.

THE TITANS AGAINST THE GODS

What distinguishes the kingdom of Cronus from the kingdom of Zeus? One thing is for certain; the kingdom of Cronus is not a kingdom of the son. The sons are hidden within Cronus, who devoured those he himself had generated, the sons being now hidden in his dominion, whereas Zeus is kept away from Cronus by Rhea, who hides and raises Zeus in the caverns. And given that Cronus comports himself in such a manner, his kingdom will never be a kingdom of the father. Cronus does not want to be a father because fatherhood is equivalent with a constant menace to his rule. To him fatherhood signifies an endeavor and prearrangement aimed at his downfall.

What does Cronus want, anyway? He wants to preserve the cycle of the status quo over which he presides; he wants to keep it unchanged. He wants to toss and turn it within himself from one eon to another eon. Preservation and perseverance were already the hallmark of his father. Although his father

Uranus did not strive toward the Titanic becoming, he did, however, desire to continue his reign in the realm of spacious-ness. Uranus was old, unimaginably old, as old as metal and stones. He was possessed of iron-like strength that ran counter to the process of be-coming. But Cronus is also old. Why is he so old? Can this fluctuation of the Titanic forces take on at the same time traits of the immovable and unchangeable? Yes, of course it can, if one observes it from the perspective of the return, or from the point of view of the return of the same. If one attempts it, one can uncover the mechanical side in this ceaseless flux of movement. The movement unveils itself as a rigid and inviolable law.

THE INFINITE SADNESS OF THE TITANS

How can we describe the sufferings of the Titans? How much do they suffer anyway, and what do they suffer from? The sound of grief uttered by the chained Prometheus induces Hermes to derisive remarks about the same behavior which is unknown to Zeus. Insofar as the Titans are in the process of moving, we must therefore also conceive of them as the objects of removal. Their struggle is onerous; it is filled with anxiety of becoming. And their anxiety means suffering. Grandiose things are being accomplished by the Titans, but grandiose things are being imposed on them too. And because the Titans are closer to chaos than the Gods are, chaotic elements reveal themselves amidst them more saliently. No necessity appears as yet in chaos because chaos has not yet been meas-ured off by any legal system. The necessity springs up only when it can be gauged by virtue of some lawfulness. This is shown in the case of Uranus and Cronus. The necessary keeps increasing insofar as lawful-ness increases; it gets stronger when the lawful movements occur, that is, when the movements start reoccurring over and over again.

Among the Titanesses this sadness is most visible in the grief of Rhea whose motherhood was harmed. It is also visible in the mourning of Mnemosyne who ceaselessly conjures up the past. The suffering of this Titaness carries something of sublime magnificence. In her inaccessible solitude, no solace can be found. Alone, she must muse about herself—a dark image of the sorrows of life. The suffering of the Titans, after their downfall, reveals itself in all its force. The vanquished Titan represents one of the greatest images of suffering. Toppled, thrown down under into the ravines beneath the earth, sentenced to passivity, the Titan knows only how to carry, how to heave, and how to struggle with the burden—similar to the burden borne by the Caryatids.

THE SELF-SUFFICIENT GODS

The Olympian Gods, however, do not suffer like the Titans. They are happy with themselves; they are self-sufficient. They do not ignore the pain and sufferings of man. They in fact conjure up these sufferings, but they also heal them. In Epicurean thought, in the Epicurean world of happiness, we observe the Gods dwelling in between the worlds, divorced from the life of the Earth and separated from the life of men, to a degree that nothing can ever reach out to them and nothing can ever come from them. They enjoy themselves in an eternal halcyon bliss that cannot be conveyed by words.

The idea of the Gods being devoid of destiny is brought out here insofar as it goes well beyond all power and all powerlessness; it is as if the Gods had been placed in a deepest sleep, as if they were not there for us. Man, therefore, has no need to think of them. He must only leave them alone in their blissful slumber. But this is a philosophical thought, alien to the myth.

Under Cronus, man is part of the Titanic order. Man does not yet stand in opposition to the order—an opposition founded in the reign of Zeus. He experiences now the forces of the Titans; he lives alongside them. The fisherman and boatman venturing out on the sea are in their Titanic element. The same happens with the shepherd, the farmer, the hunter in their realm. Hyperion, Helios, and Eos determine their days, Selene regulates their nights. They observe the running Iris, they see the Horae dancing and spinning around throughout the year. They observe the walk of the nymphs Pleiades and Hyades in the skies. They recognize the rule of the great Titanic mothers, Gaia, Rhea, Mnemosyne, and that of Gaia-Themis. Above all of them rules and reigns the ancient Cronus, who keeps a record of what happens in the skies, on the earth, and in the seas.

TITANIC NECESSITY VERSUS DIVINE DESTINY

The course of human life is inextricably linked to the Titanic order. Life makes one whole with it; the course of life cannot be divorced from this order. It is the flow of time, the year’s course, the day’s course. The tides and the stars are on the move. The process resembles a ceaseless flow of the river. Cronus reigns over it and makes sure it keeps return-ing. Everything returns and everything repeats itself—everything is the same. This is the law of the Titans; this is their necessity. In their motion a strict cyclical order manifests itself. In this order there is a regular cy-clical return that no man can escape. Man’s life is a reflection of this cyclic order; it turns around in a Titanic cycle of Cronus.

Man has no destiny here, in contrast to the demigods and the heroes who all have it. The kingdom of Zeus is teeming with the lives and deeds of heroes, offering an inexhaustible material to the songs, to the epics and to the tragedies. In the kingdom of Cronus, however, there are no heroes; there is no Heroic Age. For man, Cronus, and the Titans have no destiny; they are themselves devoid of destiny. Does Helios, does Selene, does Eos have a destiny? Wherever the Titanic necessity rules, there cannot be a destiny. But the Gods are also deprived of destiny wherever divine necessity prevails, wherever man grasps the Gods in a fashion that is not in opposition to them. But a man whom the Gods confront has a destiny. A man whom the Titans confront perishes; he succumbs to a catastrophe.

We can say, however, that whatever happens to man under the rule of the Titans is a lot easier than under the rule of the Gods. The burden imposed on man is much lighter. . . .

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What happens when the Gods turn away from man and when they leave him on his own? Wherever they make themselves unrecognizable to man, wherever their care for man fades away, wherever man’s fate begins and ends without them, there always happens the same thing. The Titanic forces return and they validate their claims to power. Where no Gods are, there are the Titans. This is a relationship of a legal order which no man can escape wherever he may turn. The Titans are immor-tal. They are always there. They always strive to re-establish their old dominion of their foregone might. This is the dream of the Titanic race of the Iapetos, and all the Iapetides who dream about it. The earth is penetrated and filled up with the Titanic forces. The Titans sit in am-bush, on the lookout, ready to break out and break up their chains and restore the empire of Cronus.

TITANIC MAN

What is Titanic about man? The Titanic trait occurs everywhere and can be described in many ways. Titanic is a man who relies completely upon himself and has boundless confidence in his own powers. This confidence absolves him, but at the same time it isolates him in a Promethean fashion. It gives him a feeling of independence, albeit not devoid of arrogance, violence, and defiance. Titanic is a quest for unfettered freedom and independence. However, wherever this quest is to be seen there appears a regulatory factor, a mechanically operating necessity that emerges as a correction to such a quest. This is the end of all the Promethean striving, which is well-known to Zeus only. The new world created by Prometheus is not.

Tomislav Sunic