In my continuing research on fascism within the occult, I have come
across a very well-written treatise advocating such views. The Order of
Nine Angles’ Book of Wyrd, a zine-sized manuscript outlining rituals,
runes, eugenics, and aeonics, with literary expositions on Nietzsche’s
Anti-Christ and the Old Norse Poetic Edda, outlines the philosophy
and methods of what transhumanists sometimes term provolution: the
intentional, or pro-active, application of evolution upon a species.
“Man need not be a passive spectator or a victim of the ‘gods’ or ‘fate’
but by understanding the laws of nature and the cosmos can, through his
Will, be an active agent in the evolutionary process.”^1^ states the
seventh point in their “Articles of Faith”. Within their doctrine of
cosmology, the universe is cyclic – a continual oscillation between
creative and destructive principles yields dialectical historical
stages, the study of which is called aeonics. In this process of
renewal, Nietzsche’s Übermensch is seen as a spiritually individualistic
(i.e. satanic), space-faring transhuman, the next stage in the evolution
of humankind.[
]
In the Book of Wyrd, aeonics and its implications for future human
cultural and biological manifestations are explained by a continuation
of the ideas proposed by German historian and philosopher Oswald
Spengler in The Decline of the West: “…while Spengler predicts the
close of Western Civilization, [Stephen] Brown considers an option which
goes beyond it. Spengler describes Western Civilization as ‘Faustian’.
Its symbol is limitless space. This is reflected in its exploration and
colonization, art, architecture (e.g. the Gothic spire), and a form of
science that seeks to unveil the secrets of nature. Its reach is
infinite. ‘Faustian’ is the ‘race soul’ of the West that makes it
unique. As we’ve seen, while Spengler points to the conclusion of
Western Civilization like others before it, Brown suggests what might
come after it if the opportunities are seized by those few who have a
sense of destiny. And what is this possible destiny? The logical outcome
of the Faustian will: Space Colonization. […]Brown also points out the
potential this would have for cultural variation (and by implication
biological evolution). It would see the creation of a myriad of new,
self-contained cultural laboratories throughout space, and the expansion
of man’s destiny to infinity. Should we grasp the opportunities to build
upon the ruins of the post-Western world, the destiny of mankind will be
to play amongst the stars.” ^2^
The point to which I find this text and its doctrine interesting is its
similar relation to tenets of various individualist anarchisms. These
latter strive to emphasize the hegemony of the individual’s Will over
the presiding external forces of collective groups, society, traditions,
and ideological systems. Individualist anarchism commonly rejects
romantic notions of revolution, which would require social organization
to produce alternative systems, instead it often favors more
evolutionary methods of social experimentation and education. Thus,
fascism and anarchism can be seen to differ only in their means of
producing a new society, not in that end thereof. That is to say,
individualist anarchism and fascism both favor immediate methods of
integrating the new society into the old one, resulting in the
evolutionary displacement and eventual extinction of those who remain
unable to adapt; the only divergence between the two ideologies is that
anarchism retains romantic notions of a return to a fantasized
state-of-nature, whereby improperly fitted individuals are culled by
“natural” processes, and fascism often supports the “ethical necessity”
of eugenics.
In The Order of Nine Angles doctrine, eugenics is seen as a necessary
destructive principle emanating from the principles of aeonics. From an
ecological standpoint, humankind’s speciesism and ecocidical disregard
for biosystems (which, in turn, degrade human quality of life through
rising occurrence of ecological disasters, and pollution, among other
factors) can be regarded as a form of deliberate eugenics already in
practice. It is unnecessary to recount here the numerous reasons why the
term eugenics has negative connotations, what is more pertinent is an
emerging requisite application of ethical philosophy to positive
eugenics, or transhumanist provolution.
In ancient Greek ethical philosophy, there was the concept of
eudaimonia, literally “good spirited,” the ways in which humans should
conduct themselves in order to live happier lives and secure a better
world for future generations. Eudaimonia is often connected to the term
arete, or virtue. Virtue, here, does not carry the weighty and
puritanical Christian connotations of charity, patience, and
uprightness, since it also includes many non-moral individual objectives
such as good health and beauty. It is, in fact, quite similar to the
occult concept of Will. Stoic philosophy is ripe with eudaimonism:
Cleanthes of Assos explained it as “living in agreement with nature”,
while Chrysippus believed it was “living in accordance with experience
of what happens by nature.” ^3^
As future eugenics, concerning the emerging technologies in
nanotechnology, neurobiology, information technology, genetics, and
cognitive science, is no longer a negative practice, that is to say, it
is not concerned with taking away, culling, or cleaning the gene pool,
but with adding to potentialities of individual enhancement, its
corresponding ethics is no longer negative. It becomes a question of
what one should not do, rather than the historical imposing
regulations of authoritarian eugenics pertaining to what one should
do. “[I]f…[the] methods [of genetic engineering] allow children to be
produced with a higher intellectual level, in a democratic state, this
will generate a new eugenic wave. This time, however, the task will be
to help people with a low intellectual coefficient to raise this
coefficient (the task of positive eugenics) in themselves and in their
children rather than to prevent the appearance of children in such
people (the task of negative eugenics).” ^4^As modern thought becomes
increasingly non-dichotomous, the black-and-white of the weary old
nature-versus-nurture argument fades to voluminous greys. Collimately,
humans can no longer rely on a transparent definition of what is
“natural” to define them. Most of us were not raised by wolves in the
Ukraine; we are already the products of positive eugenic systems such as
education and language. The modern human is already an “unnatural”
creature. Environmental philosopher Mark Sagoff argues that the problem
of engineering the human genome “is not so much that it will alienate or
separate us from our human nature – from what is given or contingent –
but that it will increasingly make us responsible for it”. ^5^
Full Text of ONA (The Black Order) - Book of Wyrd
Works Cited
1 The Black Order. The Book of Wyrd. Unknown: Realist Publications,
1993. p. 3. Print.
2 ibid. p. 15
3 Dirk Baltzly (Feb 7, 2008). “Stoicism”. Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/stoicism/.
Retrieved 2010-12-05. “But what is happiness? The Epicureans’ answer was
deceptively straightforward: the happy life is the one which is most
pleasant. (But their account of what the highest pleasure consists in
was not at all straightforward.) Zeno’s answer was “a good flow of life”
(Arius Didymus, 63A) or “living in agreement,” and Cleanthes clarified
that with the formulation that the end was “living in agreement with
nature” (Arius Didymus, 63B). Chrysippus amplified this to (among other
formulations) “living in accordance with experience of what happens by
nature;” later Stoics inadvisably, in response to Academic attacks,
substituted such formulations as “the rational selection of the primary
things according to nature.” The Stoics’ specification of what happiness
consists in cannot be adequately understood apart from their views about
value and human psychology.”
4 Yudin, B. G.“The Creation of a Transhuman.” Herald of the Russian
Academy of Sciences 77.3 (2007): 247-53. Web. 8 Dec 2010.
5 Sagoff, Mark. “Nature and Human Nature”. Is Human Nature Obsolete?:
Genetics, Bioengineering, and the Future of the Human Condition.
Boston, MIT Press, 2005. pp. 89-90.
[]: http://www.patternsinthevoid.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Eugenics_congress_logo.png
Plato wrote about these polyhedra in the dialogue Timaeus c.360
B.C. in which he associated each of the four classical elements with a regular
solid. Earth was associated with the cube, air with the octahedron, water with
the icosahedron, and fire with the tetrahedron. There was intuitive
justification for these associations: the heat of fire feels sharp and
stabbing (like little tetrahedra). Air is made of the octahedron; its
minuscule components are so smooth that one can barely feel it. Water, the
icosahedron, flows out of one’s hand when picked up, as if it is made of tiny
little balls. By contrast, a highly un-spherical solid, the hexahedron (cube)
represents earth. These clumsy little solids cause dirt to crumble and break
when picked up, in stark difference to the smooth flow of water. Moreover, the
solidity of the Earth was believed to be due to the fact that the cube is the
only regular solid that tesselates Euclidean space. The fifth Platonic solid,
the dodecahedron, Plato obscurely remarks, “…the god used for arranging the
constellations on the whole heaven”. Aristotle added a fifth element, aithêr
(aether in Latin, “ether” in English) and postulated that the heavens were
made of this element, but he had no interest in matching it with Plato’s fifth solid.