Eranos pt 2 w/ The Kingless Generation (Preview)

A preview of my continuing conversation with Fergal of The Kingless Generation. We dive deeper in to the lore and history of this strange group including its continuing ties to fascism. We discusLudwig Moritz Derleth and his association with the Cosmic Circle. We also introduce the one hero this story has, and a true activist icon, Furio Jesi.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

And there's a there's a big cool looking book about Stefan George and his circle. Uh was he the central figure in the Munich cosmics, maybe? Cosmica? So there's a good looking book on him that is called Secret Germany, a title that comes from one of his phrases, Germania Secreta, a Latin phrase that he wanted to, you know, which is like, you know, the occult Germanic truth. Which, you know, as as I think Furio Yeize argues uh convincingly, is kind of a double of Christian Kabbalah trying to get some of that eastern, eastern dark satanic magic for us here in the West. Yeah, so I would connect that use of the swastika to this satanic orientalism. I think that maybe that's a useful term for what we're looking at here. People look and you can connect that to the Japanese guys that show up at Eranos. I think we might not have time to get into that today. But um D.T. Suzuki, Itshihiko, the Japanese who visit Eranos are very self-consciously playing a kind of Oriental, satanic orientalist ideas. Yeah, which is not necessarily what, you know, and you could have recognition of uh impermanence, you can have, you know, oriental ideas. There is kind of a difference between uh Eastern Eurasian and Western Eurasian thought, arguably. You know, maybe it isn't quite what people usually think it is. Maybe they're more alike than people usually think, even too. I often like to point that out. But those differences are something different from satanic orientalism that you see going quite a ways back. I don't know if it's a satanic fascination exactly in Plato, but even in Plato, there is this idea that the Chaldees, the Chaldeans seem to be this word for Babylonian oriental people who come from the East, uh, which, you know, Mes uh Mesopotamia was the place where people did first start observing the stars and keeping data and naming the constellations. It is true that the Mesopotamian names for the constellations are the Eurasian, pan-Eurasian base names. Even in China, you know, there's a lot of differences in Chinese astrology, but it does derive from Mesopotamian astrology, actually, that went east.

SPEAKER_01 2:38

Yeah, no, and we have such an ingrained uh, you know, I don't think this is a particularly profound statement to make, but we definitely have a very ingrained uh anti-orientalism and you know uh Eastern in general idea that is just built into us in a way where most people don't even recognize it, it it just kind of ambiently exists. And you know, I even think about this is a random example, but like like Eastern medicine, like if you say Eastern medicine here in the US, it's like, oh, you mean fake?

SPEAKER_02 3:16

Like oh, okay, yeah. You know, like uh oh, and with the new rounds of like anti-China um propaganda too, like I bet it's too, yeah. Yeah, I mean that's I would see that as a reflection of the old kind of you know, I've said if there one of the differences, one of the the lines that I see to draw between East and West is um dualism, non-dualism, maybe, and um you know, I and I hate the way that people like the Eranos people use this concept of non-dualism because it is Satanist, right? And it, you know, this is satanic orientalism. You see, uh so one of the lines you can draw is between maybe a non-dual kind of thought in the east and then in the west, you have demonization of part of the pantheon of old Indo-European gods, right, in the Avesta, right? In Zoroastrianism is maybe the first place you see it. And then uh the Hebrew Bible was there's a strong argument that it was produced under Persian sponsorship and would have been influenced by Persian ideas of good and evil, right? And maybe those ideas didn't weren't so strong in earlier layers of uh Judean religion, you know, whatever it was, which is a lot of different things. We know, for example, um Judean people living in Elephantine in Egypt. We can see they mainly worshiped uh a goddess that was like the wife of Yahweh, uh and they had names that were uh Egyptian, named after Egyptian gods. What's what's the name?

SPEAKER_01 5:15

Sophia? Would that be Sophia?

SPEAKER_02 5:16

No, no, that would be probably a later like i interpretation of that. Oh uh well, and the elephantine the elephantina archaeological discoveries weren't made until quite recently. So And also the Aramaic papyri and ostraca in Elephantinae date from the 6th century to the 5th century BCE. So before the Hellenistic period when somebody might have used the word Sophia, right? But what was Lady Yahweh called? Uh Shh. Oh, Asherah. Yeah, his uh, you know, they they have inscriptions to Jehovah and his Asherah in Judea as well, but in Elephantine, they just worship Asherah, the the wife of Jehovah, you know, that who just seems to be and even in the Hellenistic period, you have many people who even quite late in late antiquity still think that you know the Jewish God is just this local god, and we in the Hellenistic world, we worship this uh absolute, you know, cosmic principle, and that's that's actually different, that doesn't originate in Judaism, etc. There's different people have so many different interpretations, and that all gets like turned into something else almost like in modernity.

SPEAKER_01 6:37

I'm not as familiar with a lot of Eastern spiritualism as you are, because a lot of the stuff I know has come filtered through the West. But like, would it be accurate to say like I feel like there's something about our kind of outlook in the West where like the the non-dual or like the non-dualism or the merging of the opposites and stuff almost can be seen as a especially when you look at you know the concept of the will and Satanism and stuff like that, where it almost becomes an excuse for nihilists. Like it becomes oh, there's there's no good and evil, these things are actually equal, they're both just reactions, you know, and it's very easy then to, you know, you should indulge your shadow side as much as your, you know, uh lighter side or whatever, you know, and new age you speak kind of thing. Like and yeah, especially when you read something like I don't know if you've ever read The Book of the Law by Alistair Crowley, but he's really doing like a uh I think the process church probably owes a lot to him ideologically, as far as it's like supposed to be him channeling three different gods. And the first one is uh in we're and we're supposed to, these are all three supposed to be giving us messages we need. And the first one is very kind of uh I would say maybe even like closer to Jesus in Christianity than someone like Yahweh who's a little you know harsher or more ambivalent, and then you get one who's more of like a Yahweh type figure, and then you get the last one, which is like where the quotes like slaves uh you know, obey your masters and talking about like you know, war and death as like positives and the ultimate destruction of the world and stuff. That's like the god that he ends it on, and philosophically, you're just supposed to, you know, uh, and I I don't know like Thank you for bringing me back on topic there.

SPEAKER_02 8:47

That's that's correct. Yeah, that's what I was getting at. That sort of thing.

SPEAKER_01 8:51

Yes, that seems to be like how it's bastardized in the West is just like flanting everything.

SPEAKER_02 8:58

Those ideas of good and evil create this like striated geographical space where like the guys to our east don't believe in good and evil, therefore they're satanic, therefore they're scary, they're also stronger than us, and maybe have older civilizations than us. You know, this is something the Greeks also think. Um, probably quite accurate.

SPEAKER_01 9:23

For sure, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 9:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:27

Um right, guys, that is the end of the preview of that conversation I was having with Fergal. If you want to listen to over an hour or more of it, please head over to the Dust Light Archives Patreon. And for $5 a month, you can get that as well as many more episodes, including a club that I'm going to start soon. So thank you very much, and see you guys later.