The Old Worship

On the nature of religion

Carrying on from where we left off previously. I promised fewer "conceptual" or "theoretical" posts on this blog and I am already making an exception, but the conclusions ultimately bear on practical reality of establishing an enduring state.

The old worship was ancestor worship, and the original impulse of this is found in what I ended the post "So You Want to be a Pirate" with; a continuum of existence that stretches back through one's fathers until the dawn of time. The material provisions one has inherited are reflected in spiritual provisions; your ancestors are literally watching over you, and if you satisfy them with ritual and sacrifice, they will continue to protect you from a host of other malign or unconcerned spiritual influences at large in the world. To believe this was to believe in the power and sanctity of the grave. The spiritual power of one's ancestors was tied to their physical remains; to actually have their bones entombed in your direct physical proximity. The gravesite of one's deified ancestor confers spiritual protection to a discrete boundary; the idea of "my land", and to delimit property boundaries by a wall, were originally also religious practices, and though I say "also", there was no proper distinction between the two. It is a spiritual worldview in which a man can say "my fathers, my sons, my land, my cattle, my house, my wife, my god." Today "property rights" seem to have a dry economic valence to them, but the idea of the vampire that cannot enter one's home uninvited is a faded echo of the immense spiritual power inherent within. Of course, having heirs is of the utmost importance, to the point that in Classical Greece it was a crime for a citizen to remain a bachelor. Noncitizens were those who did not have deified ancestors and rites by which to appease them; this was a caste distinction that was party racial and partly religious, for the ancestor worship was the original faith of the Aryan conquerors of Greece. This ancestor worship ends up having a pantheon of mediate gods, but I will get to this later.

Starting from this point of ancestor worship, an inherent postulate is the ur-ancestor. One traces a line of fathers further back than he knows their names, or knows the truth of their lives even if a genealogy is constructed all the way back, but this line must terminate at the "first man". Behind the first man is God; that is to say the "ultimate father". The generation of Man and his worship of ancestors necessarily leads to this conclusion; to enthroning a "principle of fatherhood" as God, and of course if you asked a Bronze Age barbarian if he worshiped a "principle of fatherhood" he would laugh and split your skull with a bronze axe. I am simplifying and speaking in terms a modern can understand and I will continue to do so, because this is the only way you or I can attain this truth. Even if you only believe in evolution, you still believe in an event of human creation. Of course you have no specific date for this, and likely do not believe that one father was fully ape and his son was fully Man. You consider this, and if you have not thought about it, now you are thinking about it, a gradual process in which humanity was slowly attained. Nevertheless, there is still a "first man" in this genealogy; the first man who was fully human, even if this remains murky and admittedly indeterminate. This is the attraction of course of many "caveman" myths; the image of the first fire, the first spear, even maybe 2001, a monolith from space causing the first war. Your conception of the "first man" has a philosophical basis if you bother to examine it; this is not physiognomic but teleological, your "first man" in some way acts like a man rather than an animal, he attains some purpose, some ends-and-means that put him in the category of the human. Maybe you are even highly racist or classist, and claim that most of the talking apes ambling around the earth are not fully human, not even within a superior race; in this case your teleological criteria for "human" are simply stricter, but the overall point stands.

Either way, even the entirely empirical evolutionist believes in an "ur-father". This need not be a God, a spiritual entity possessed of its own will and intent shaping Man, but simply a principle, a teleology that makes one a man rather than an ape. Either way, the throne of the father of the first father is not empty. The most common answer that honest and intelligent people will give is that a man masters his environment, and that is what separates him from the apes. Many other answers are possible; here is one which sums up most relevant points: "Man conspires with other men to control access to women and reproduction so that he can more effectively cooperate in the material and social technologies needed to defeat other groups of men in war for the benefit of himself, his followers, and his descendants". You can niggle with this all you want, I've had many debates on the specifics, but I am just summarizing a very complex body of knowledge. I am also not leaving out the idea that Man has a higher purpose than this either, but this is what Man does on a high level; or at least, this is what men who win the game of history and survive do.

Regardless of any specific contentions with this, the point is to illustrate that this is the font, even if you only believe in evolution, of what has been called "master morality". In the theistic sense, the Ur-father is the literal father and creator of Man, who he created as the highest being in the world, and gave them the telos of mastering it. In the atheistic sense, man was defined via genetic struggle against other men and the environment, and the "winning strategy" that I defined above is the creator and purpose of man. In this worship, this world-orientation, man's duty, joy, and purpose is to war, win, and rule, or at least be a contributing player on the winning team if not the star athlete in the arena mundus.

Necessary to this form of worship is the idea of tragedy; that man has fallen from his divine origins in the theistic, and has insufficiently mastered the world in the atheistic. (Here the two come into contention where they were formerly in harmony.) Either way, the Ur-Father is rather distant and impersonal. I will use the theistic frame for now. The divine ancestors were better than us, and the Ur-Father is not entirely pleased with our actions. Despite Man being the highest being, he can be suddenly struck by lightning, killed by a wild animal, or fall to disease. He can lead himself to ruin through foolishness and incontinence, and is everywhere subject to death. Via degeneration, Man retains only a spark of the Ur-Father, and this spark can be kindled into fire; man is always a god to his descendants, who he knows and loves and cares for, but he can also be a god to many by becoming great and powerful, his self and spirit becoming a reflection of the Ur-Father, the godhead, the principle of kingship over creation and instrumentalization of the world.

This is the essence of tragedy; the tension between the godlike in Man and the inexorable forces which can destroy him. But what I describe is only one form of worship. There is another form of worship, which is by far the more common, and there are really only two when it comes to it. (There is actually a third but we will get to this later).

The second form of worship can be seen as the inverse of what I described, the religion of your fathers from time immemorial. In fact, the duality of these two fundamental forms of worship is so striking it chills my empiricism and rationalism to the bone. I normally hate duality in a philosophical sense, but it seems there are really only two ways that Man relates to the world. This second worship, rather than being the worship of paternity, the sky, and an Ur-Father, is the worship of the earth, maternity, and the Ur-Mother. In this second religion, Man is not a master, not even in the fallen and "tragic" sense of the first, and this is where one can muddle the two "superstitions". In this latter, Man is object and not subject, one animal species in the world among many species of spirits natural and supernatural. There is no paternity and no "line"; humans simply spring forth from the divine feminine that has taken all manner of dubious seed into her, men proliferate like mice or yeast, in terror at the forces of nature and the powerful spirits that sweep over him. It is fatalistic in a different sense; there is no tragic tension between the image of godhood and mastery and the world he attempts to conquer. He is just mere life, desperate to survive, the eternal victim of forces beyond his control, a rat and not a lion. This man has no *heirs*, he has *spawn*, nothing for his sons to inherit and no certainty that any of the whelps birthed by females are his own. These societies tend towards matrilineal descent. The world becomes a host of animal spirits; the leopard in the jungle is to be worshiped and feared, propitiated with rituals so that he does not eat you, and man is reduced to a "little devil" trying to survive in a world of big and hungry devils. This man begs and pleads, that is his relationship to the world, to woman, to the earth which nourishes him, his worship is for the cthonic principle of generation, of senseless life pushing forth out of the earth, worms and maggots and crops. His society is what we call the "longhouse", the community of females and their social norms, the rule of the mamma and granmamma, the execution of the intelligent or capable as witches, which is still done today in Africa.

I have a hard time explaining this to you because I cannot empathize with it, it disgusts me on an instinctual level. The earth-worship always ends in the sacrifice of Man; the communal spilling of blood egged on by the skriking of women in order to nourish the earth and appease its wild spirits, and many, too many, of our modern emotions and sacred things are in fact defined by this primitive worship. The best way to envision this is to understand that lower forms of human life cease to exist outside of social context, which is why they are always playing verbal music or chatting with others on the phone or in person. Imagine a creature that has the spatial IQ of a gorilla with the verbal abilities of a man. These two things, intelligence and verbality, are disconnected and language does not require the former, as can be seen in its inverse, the idiot savant who possesses great and demonstrable intelligence but has limited verbality. The hueman is quite literally like an insect, like an ant colony in which semantic signals take the place of pheromones in dictating role and behavior. A language that evolved to enhance group survival without modifying the ape-like capacity of its host population. All sense of identity or "being" dissolves when the individual member of lower life is separated from its peers and the constant verbality thereof. The human, on the contrary, can use language as a tool; he is its master, though even very smart men can be cucked out of truth by the power of signifiers, he can still struggle with it. He has Imago Dei in this sense, a peership with the Word that is evidence of his descent from the All-Father. But back to the point, the second religion, the "primitive", is the religion of such a parasitic state of hive-existence.

These two modes of humanity have always been at war. I have tried to find examples of the Ur-Father religion cropping up independently, but it seems that the Old Worship has only one source, with the Aryans in "Hyperborea", their very ancient original homeland in what is today north-central Siberia. Even the worship of Shang-Ti in China! They fear to open the tombs of their ancient kings; they fear that they may find certain Y-haplotypes within! Everywhere that these conquerors went, they subjugated and enslaved the adherents of the matriarchal religion and instrumentalized their directionless labor for the purposes of civilization.

Civilization began when warlike pastoralists who adhered to the first religion conquered settled farmers who adhered to the second religion. Into the patriarchal religion, elements of the cthonic were slowly integrated. The divinity of mediate ancestors- the gods Thor, Apollo, and so on, could remain entirely within the scope of the first religion. They filled the role of mediating conflicts between clans of roughly similar heritage who did not share the same ancestors in living memory. These gods are "ancestors" in the proper sense, but thrust backwards into a dimness in history that renders plausible the actual paternal generation of such a god onto two clans that become, under this new worship, distant cousins. This impulse toward polytheism is "civilized" in the sense that it allowed for the cooperation of discrete clans that would, in a system of "pure" ancestor worship, have no basis for cooperation, and in fact could morally kill and despoil each other without transgressing at all. This is not to say that polytheism ended violence between the clans (which became later the aristocracy of a city as the mediate pantheon took primacy and the demands of the city-cult compelled pastoral warlords to at first maintain domiciles close to sacred sites and later to move the entire clan within the city walls). It is to say simply that it became possible.

One can imagine that the koryoi of second sons from divers families that effected the Aryan conquests must have done so under the banner of the all-father, as all endeavors of mutual cooperation during that time necessarily had to be undertaken beneath the protection of a great ancestor, effectively making its participants kin. The extreme gravity and taboos that surrounded the rites of adoption, kinship, and heirdom in Ancient Greece, even after the original religion had ceased to be the primary, suggest that in even more distant history on the steppe, such laws were treated with a true and unyielding fanaticism. We arrive via careful consideration of a breadth and depth of facts at a very simple historiography: "The Aryans conquered in the name of Deus Pater". But the reason for this simplicity is that the conquerors were voluntary associations of warlike and conquest-hungry men who did not necessarily share ancestors; they needed a "general" ancestor beneath which they could be at peace with each other in order to make war, and this fact obscures the very real and significant reality of ancestor worship: the conquests were broadly undertaken so that these second sons could be patriarchs of their own, to be deified ancestors to their own line and not merely secondary branches in a larger family. They set out to become gods, and succeeded; their names are, I am sure, familiar to us as many of the pagan gods of yore.

In the process of religious mediation that brought feuding clans together under the banner of more distant and godlike ancestors, it was perhaps inevitable (especially given the capture of local women as wives) that elements of the cthonic "second religion" would creep into the primary. We can see this even in the exemplar of Aryan solar heroism Apollo, who was merged early in his inception with some indigenous demon of pestilence and disease, to say nothing of indigenous gods of the sea, an element alien to the Aryans, and goddesses of the earth, the senseless generation of grain, which were often fused into Aryan hearth-goddesses of domestic care, marriage, and other proper womanly duties. I confine this brief explication to the Greeks of course, but similar processes took place in nearly every society conquered by the sons of Aryas and nowhere is it more explicit than the war and marriage-truce between the Asa and Vana gods. This mediation with the conquered was inherently political, and further debasements and dilutions of the worship were undertaken as political acts, the results of men vying for mastery and advantage. The gods become no longer real and immediate, their rites no longer a pressing necessity, but merely a tool of social harmony, an artifact of "culture" and mere social utility, as was the attitude in Athens when Socrates was put to death. There was no fear that the wrath of the gods and the ancestors would actually be invoked; rather the crime was upsetting a certain tranquility of shared cultural heritage.

In such times the "third religion" begins to rise, which I promised I would get to. The "third religion" is the asceticism of Buddhism, Stoicism, Islam, and Puritanism, the rejection of the worldly, the attitude of an aged man feeling the pangs of mortality. In this faith the "inner self" becomes chief battleground. Whatever divine force is left to be believed in is shunted into the distance to become remote, and "self-overcoming", foolish notion that it is, is the method of salvation, transcendence, whatever. Of course these three main religious impulses ("love everyone maaan" is the final stage of ascetics, once asceticism fails) are independent of professed doctrine and denomination. Christianity has, in different times and places, been treated as first, second, and third faith by its many different adherents. It is not of course nominal content (the gods do stuff and need to be worshiped) that matters, but the role and orientation of Man toward the divine.

The modern American today has this final-stage religion of humanity, self-overcoming, and tolerance. What does he actually worship but "self-help" and "becoming", a tribalistic assortment of various "expert" witch-doctor scientists and gurus? There is almost zero distance between the American who sees Jesus as chief self-help guru and one who worshiped Fauci, or MLK, or George Floyd, and in modern "paganism" as well this sense is no less prevalent. The only way to actually offend an American is to insult its sense of "equality", "empathy", "humanity", these are their real gods and this worship is not unprecedented. It has strong admixture with the "second" or "primitive" worship of enforcing leveling conformity on the mud-tribe. How many actually feel a great and terrible duty to live up to the divine spark within them, the image of God, and kindle it into a fire? Many on the right see dissident activity as merely a form of ascesis, they are adherents to the exhausted civilizational religion as well but desirous that the ratchet be turned back to stoicism rather than continue in dissolution.

I will not say now that the new state will require one faith or another at its beginnings. The battlefield bonds of brothers and glory of our mission will provide the necessary cooperation in at least the first generation, and unlike the liberal premises of former conquerors in Africa (https://asylummagazine.ca/THE-ART-OF-PIRATING-NO-I), we must preserve honesty about the mission. It is not at all shameful to say that we engage in this for wealth, glory, power, and a titanic number of descendants: all things that our forefathers considered unambiguously good. Re-racination is a higher-order ideal and a secondary effect, not at all the mission to be made pre-eminent. See the first stanza of Beowulf for what makes a good king:

Lo! We spear-Danes in elden-days

Noble kings brimming with valor

Who princelings all remember.

Oft Shield Scheffing, scourge of foes

Who flipped the mead-bench of many folk

This worthy earl, from first he was

friendless foundling. He gan to grow,

to wax under welkin, his wealth then

such that hither and thither,

O’er the whale-road all were made

To give geld. That was a good king!

In saying and feeling that this is unambiguously good we begin to awaken a hint of the old worship within ourselves. Our descendants will venerate us with a near-religious devotion; when I hinted a couple of posts ago to imagine your ancestors and what they think of you, it is possible that with this you can awaken a hint of the old worship, though as I mentioned above many with an "evolutionary" mindset also unknowingly channel the spirit of their forefathers and the same fundamental premises of what is good. No matter the outward forms of faith, this orientation toward the divine is absolutely crucial to preserve. If we can only LARP at it, perhaps fire and blood will instill it in truth.