The contemporary right wing scene has embraced a diverse range of religions from the bizarre (Creativity, Christian Identity) to the outright evil and dangerous (Traditional Satanism). Two of the most important and influential schools of thought for understanding religion from the right are Guénonian Traditionalism and Heideggerian philosophy. In this post, we will take a serious right wing approach to understanding the relationship between religious cult, ethnic culture, and the third estate in society.

In his essay Building, Dwelling, Thinking (pdf), Martin Heidegger links building (German bauen) to dwelling (Old High German buan). In turn, he links dwelling to the existential being of man (Ich bin) and the being-with of communal life as a neighbour (German nachgebur) which means a near-dweller. Heidegger explains that this dwelling on the earth is the basic mode of existence of all mortals, and that one way in which we dwell is to cultivate the earth (Latin colere, cultura). It’s important to understand that these word families are also present in (Old) English and that here we have a revelation of the basis of both agriculture and religion. Heidegger makes this explicit in his poetic description of the “Fourfold” (das Geviert):

“The mortals are the human beings. They are called mortals because they can die. To die means to be capable of death as death. Only man dies, and indeed continually, as long as he remains on the earth, under the sky, before the divinities. When we speak of mortals, we are already thinking of the other three along with them, but we give no thought to the simple oneness of the four. The simple oneness of the four we call the Fourfold. Mortals are in the Fourfold by dwelling.”

Heidegger’s divinities, or gods, are not the same as the God of Christianity or the Good of Plato. Rather, they are genii locorum (territorial spirits), more akin to the Christian angels. Plato’s Good instead forms the basis of the Heideggerian fundamental ontological Seyn (Being-as-such) that is revealed when men gather the Fourfold. When Heidegger speaks of death, this is as a Mysterious way of being similar to but not exactly like Plato’s conception of philosophy as the practice of dying. Alexander Dugin, a Heideggerian philosopher and Traditionalist, links the above fundamental ontological understanding of cultivation of the earth and revelation of Seyn to the relationship between farmers and priests in the Ancient Greek Mysteries:

“During the growing of bread, the farmer experiences the mystery of death and resurrection, seeing the fate of man in the fate of a seed. The work of the farmer is the mystery of Eleusis, and it is important that Demeter’s gift to the people, thanks to which it could transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture (i.e. the gift of the Neolithic revolution) consisted of bread and wine, the ear of grain and the bunch of grapes. The farmer is a Mysterious personality, and economics in its primordial sense was founded on the mysteries of Demeter and Dionysius.”

Here, there is a clear link to the work of René Guénon which saw the most fundamental aspect of religion being the initiations in which man dies to mundane existence and ascends to higher modes of being. It is worth mentioning here that Christianity, which many have suggested is the Tradition that belongs to the West, sees these Mysteries as a prefiguration of the Mysteries of Bread and Wine in the Eucharist. In this mysterious gift from the God(s?), we see the origins of agriculture, cult, culture, economics, and the Traditional first (priests) and third (farmers) functions of Georges Dumézil’s trifunctional hypothesis of Indo-European society, which Guénonian Traditionalism also adopted from its derivative in the Hindu caste system.

So far, we have seen that there is a very tight connection between agriculture and the religious cult. How does culture as a form of “cultivating” link to this? Here, we must establish culture as the “art”, in the sense of “artisan”, related to politics. Building on the work of Guénon’s colleague Mircea Eliade, the Orthodox Christian professor of architecture Augustin Ioan singles out this important quote on the founding of a city from Aristotle’s Politics:

“The place should be such as to have epiphaneia, so as to see goodness fulfilled and strengthened, so that the regions of the polis might come to be.”

This refers to the finding of a place that manifests (epiphaneia) the sacred and this place is most typically a mountain or hill acropolis (upper-city) site around which a city is created. With the coming into being of the regions of the city, we find ourselves returning to the Heideggerian relation of dwelling (Old High German buan) to building (German bauen). Building gathers the Fourfold and, therefore, is a mode of dwelling. Now building is both art and technology and these form two sides of the ancient and medieval conception of the work of the artisan as Orthodox Christian philosopher and artist Jonathan Pageau explains:

“The origin of the word “art” is Latin relating to a form of applied knowledge, a skill, a craft. It is workmanship. In the same manner, its Greek equivalent techne has similar roots. Techne is a form of knowledge of principles that is turned toward doing. In the ancient world, art and craft (or technologies) were not separated the way they are now, but rather techne was a more encompassing notion that was attributed to any form of applied knowledge. As such, it was often opposed to episteme, which is “pure” knowledge.”

Of course, the artisan is also part of the third function of Traditional society. “Those who work” are those who farm and those who create art and technology. Techne, as a revelation of Seyn in truth (aletheuein), comes to be around the sacred centre and axis of the world found in the temple/citadel acropolis of priests and kings which can be identified with the Biblical Mt. Eden, Mt. Sinai, and Mt. Zion. Thus, art is hierarchical as Pageau explains further in part three of his article:

“…the basic structure of center and periphery is so primordial that we often take it for granted. In a traditional world one could even end up overlooking it, for just as the air we breathe, it permeates everything and is one of the very overarching forms of all human space and activity… What does it look like, for example, for a liturgical object to “remember” the center? The answer is easier than one might expect. It remembers the center when its very structure is an exemplification of its relationship to the center. That might seem tautological, but I assure you it is not. The proper liturgical arts appear as centered, as ordered, as hierarchical, as having radiant, balanced compositions. The dome of a church is on top in the center, the nave is below yet still at the center and the vestibule leads to the outside. The proper liturgical arts appear when the peripheral elements of something, whether it is physical shape, composition, ornamentation, coloring, melisma or even melody, show their proper relationship to the liturgical function of that very thing.”

Here we have finally reached the explanation of the relationship of culture to the central sacred point of the meeting of agriculture and cult in the high place of the temple. Around this cult place, the regions of the city appear in the cultural forms of architecture, art, and technology.

This post has gathered together some highly theoretical and abstract ideas. What is their relevance to the reactionary and broader right-wing movement in Australia? The key point to take away is that everything we want – the return to order, the flourishing of our culture, the return to a harmony between our elites and our working estate farmers and artisans – all this depends on and flows from the sacred centre. Religion cannot be a peripheral issue for us. It is the very heart of our existence.