Eurasia Press & News
How does the approaching, inevitable end of Europe affect Russia? This is not an easy and idle question, since Russian culture, religion and Russian civilization itself have European, Mediterranean roots. Russia is part of eternal Europe, and we cannot be indifferent to the fate of the Old World, since to a large extent it is also our fate.
Eternal Europe: Three Castes
Modern European civilization is the historical continuation of Mediterranean civilization. This continuity is dominated by the Indo-European component, and the main linguistic and cultural matrix of Europe is the Indo-European tradition.
If we recall the reconstruction of the three-functional system of Georges Dumézil, we will see a sociological map of Europe, in the social structure of which the constantly reproduced principle of the three dominant castes will prevail:
- priests,
- warriors,
- producers.
At the most different historical stages and under different names and names, we are indeed confronted with just such a stratification of European societies.
The classic expression of this order is the earliest epoch of Mediterranean societies, beginning with the period of the Achaean conquests and Homeric Greece. A similar system is characteristic of ancient Greece and Rome, with the exception of periods of decline, when the political positions of the “city dwellers” strengthened, representing a mixture of upper castes with delocalized peasants and providing a new type of merchant, alien to classical Indo-European societies. This type of merchant could be formed along the line of degradation and materialization of the warrior class (which is described by Plato in the Republic as the phenomenon of timocracy), or it could also be formed from below, through a specific deviation of the social type of former peasants or urban artisans. It cannot be ruled out that it was the result of external influences in general in relation to the Indo-European cultural circle – for example, the Phoenician, and more broadly – the Semitic, where trade was a widespread social occupation. “City dwellers”, “citizens”, i.e. “city dwellers”, formed a specific social environment in the city-states of Greece, in which the three classical functions of Indo-European society received their parody expressions. At least, this is how Aristotle imagined things in Politics. The power of the divine priest-kings (sacred monarchy) turned into tyranny. The domination of the warrior aristocracy became the domination of the financial oligarchy, and the organic self-government of ethnically homogeneous and solidary communities (polity) became “democracy,” the rule of an accidental and scattered crowd united only by the urban territory of residence.
Rome in its heyday again returned the proportions of the Indo-European trifunctional hierarchy. However, even in the Roman Empire, periods of decline were characterized by similar phenomena of the rise of an undifferentiated urban majority.
The spread of Christianity, which was not a purely Indo-European cultural phenomenon, but became such in the Greco-Roman cultural context, gave rise to the revival of the Indo-European foundations of culture, culminating in the European Middle Ages.
By the end of the Middle Ages, urban “civil society” again raised its head, the role of the “merchant class” grew, and in the end, the bourgeois Europe of England, Holland and France finally consolidated the normatively democratic social model. It is important that the main figure of this Europe of the Modern Age is the bourgeois (trader, entrepreneur, businessman), who in classical Indo-European societies was either on the periphery or absent at all. A detailed and detailed sociological analysis of the role and function of the bourgeois is given in their programmatic works by the well-known European sociologists Max Weber [1] (in an apologetic vein) and Werner Sombart [2] (in a critical vein).
Thus, according to Dumézil, modern Western European civilization is Indo-European in nature and original structure, which means that it is based on a three-functional model. But the Modern Age introduced into this structure and gradually placed in the center an element that was genetically alien to this Indo-European civilization, conceptually conflicting with its classical matrix.
The decline of Europe according to Spengler, Danilevsky, Sorokin
If the analysis of Dumézil’s three functions shows a significant deviation of modern Europe from the Indo-European paradigm with the emergence of a bourgeois figure alien to Indo-European society, then other authors who used the civilizational approach (Oswald Spengler, Nikolai Danilevsky, Pitirim Sorokin, etc.) agreed that the cycle of European civilization had entered a stage of decline. The Romano-Germanic world (according to Danilevsky) is experiencing an era of old age, losing its vitality, energy, disintegrating in materiality and sensuality. Spengler built his entire theory to substantiate the fact that the Faustian spirit had brought the West to a spiritual catastrophe, that the life of organic culture had faded away and had been replaced by a purely technical and alienated civilization. Pitirim Sorokin, for his part, asserted that Europe in modern times had reached the end of the sensual stage of the development of its socio-cultural system and froze on the edge of the abyss. In total, Sorokin distinguished three types of socio-cultural systems: ideational (purely spiritual), idealistic (balanced) and sensual (materialistic); when the sensual approach comes to an end and decline, it is again swept away by the ideational one, which, according to Sorokin, should happen to Europe in the near future.
All these theories suggest that within the framework of European civilization as a whole (whatever this framework may be in different authors), the modern moment of this civilization is a terminal phase, an era of decrepitude, decline, degradation and agony. This means that the European Logos is in the last third of its cyclical manifestation, on the other side of Europe’s childhood in Greco-Roman antiquity and its maturity in the European Middle Ages.
Desacralization of Europe (Guénon, Evola)
An even more cruel diagnosis of Europe of the Modern Age was made by traditionalists. According to the French traditionalist René Guénon, European modernity has become an expression of anti-civilization, the embodiment of everything that is contrary to the spirit, Tradition, and sacredness. Secularization, humanism, naturalism, mechanism, and rationalism, according to Guénon, are manifestations of the spirit of perversion, which affects all societies, but which only in modern Europe has received such an absolute and complete embodiment, has been elevated to the level of a norm and principle. Traditional societies have also known periods of degradation, but modern Europe has built anti-societies in the full sense of the word, where all normal proportions are violated: the divine transcendental dimension is rejected, religion is pushed to the social periphery, matter and quantity, ephemerality and sensuality, individualism and egoism, on the contrary, are elevated to the highest values.
Guénon asserts that everything that has to do with Tradition in Europe is not properly European and can be found in a much purer and more complete form among the peoples of the East, and that only the fragmentation of Tradition, its distortions and distortions, its reduction to a lower human and rationalistic level, are properly European. Guénon interprets the West literally as a country where the sun of spirituality disappears and the “night of the gods” begins.
The Italian philosopher Julius Evola assesses modern Europe in much the same way, but he believes that the European tradition, which existed in antiquity and the Middle Ages and has its roots in the heroic era, can still be restored and the West can be rescued from the abyss into which modernity has plunged it. The restoration of this heroic spirit of the West was for Evola a matter of life. But with regard to the Europe of the Modern Age, the thinker shared the harshest and most negative assessments, believing that in this period we are dealing with anti-Europe, with its extreme degeneration and self-parody. Evola considered the bourgeoisie to be a decadent class, and democracy, rationalism, scientism and humanism – forms of spiritual and socio-political disease.
Guénon and Evola both stated the complete and deep desacralization of Europe, but Evola hoped for the possibility of resacralization, and Guénon considered this unlikely, predicting a quick and inevitable death for the Old World.
The Question of the Gender Index of Modern Europe
When determining the gender index of modern European civilization, the opinions of different authors differ deeply. On the one hand, according to the logic of the Swiss Johann Bachofen and the German Max Wirth, Europe is built on patriarchy, and as you move away from the ancient matriarchy, these patriarchal tendencies (Apollonism, the dominance of male rationality) only increase. Modern times, in the form of rationalist philosophy and science, at first glance confirm this assessment. Many philosophers of life (from Friedrich Nietzsche to Henri Bergson, Ludwig Klages, Max Scheler, Georg Simmel, Leopold Ziegler, Hermann Keyserling, etc.) proceeded from this analysis, calling for liberation from “paternal domination” in European culture. But on the other hand, Julius Evola and some other thinkers, for example, Otto Weininger, pointed out that the Modern Age gave priority to materialistic, sensual, empirical values, which are more characteristic of the feminine cosmos. Therefore, Evola defended the thesis that we live in the era of Kali Yuga, where the principle of “black femininity”, chaos, mixing and death triumphs, which corresponds to the most negative aspect of the feminine principle. In this sense, Europe is the concentration of such a “black gynecocracy”, the kingdom of the goddess Kali, where, on the contrary, there is no longer a place for the genuinely masculine, heroic principle at all. If the origins of the European tradition, according to Evola, are in the heroic male type, then European modernity is the direct opposite of this type, its antipode.
This is confirmed by the spread of feminism and the widespread legalization of homoerotic relationships and various perversions.
Three Views on the Fate of the West
The initial chord of the Mediterranean civilization predetermined the main proportions of its historical existence to the present day. Therefore, when we speak of the “Decline of Europe”, of the crisis of Western civilization, we consciously or unconsciously have in mind the crisis of the bright Logos, the tragedy of Apollo [3]. This is given quite explicitly in Evola, but something analogous is certainly implied by all other authors who make a fatal diagnosis of Western civilization. Willingly or unwillingly, when we speak of the crisis of the West, we have in mind the crisis of the Apollonian West, the West of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. It is Apollo who is mourned by those who record the catastrophic nature of modern Western culture.
If this is so, then we must consider the “departure of Apollo,” his “departure,” his “disappearance,” his “flight” as the final section of the historical cycle of Mediterranean civilization. In this case, the starting point of the Mediterranean civilization is the radical moment of Apollo’s victory over Cybele, the Great Mother, and the final one, the one in which we find ourselves, is the weakening of Apollo, the fall of Apollo, the end of his reign. Enigmatic myths about the impending end of the reign of Zeus, which are associated, in particular, with the stories of his swallowing of the Titaness Metis and the birth of Athena, can also be directly related to this. The end of Western civilization is the end of the reign of the bright Logos Apollo.
In this case, from the standpoint of the Logos of Apollo himself, this history is a downward movement, from the highest point to the lowest. The top is the beginning of Mediterranean culture, the bottom is the present state of Western civilization. If we present the same scheme more naturalistically, then the first phase (the second millennium B.C.) is the early stage, the childhood of Apollo, from the middle of the first millennium B.C. to the Middle Ages of Europe, the maturity of Apollo (coinciding with the flowering of Platonism), and, finally, the decrepitude, old age and degeneration of the bright Logos in the rationalism of the Modern Age up to the irrational agony of postmodernity.
But if the same trajectory is traced from the perspective of the black Logos of Cybele, the picture is significantly different. The start will be the subordination of the feminine principle to the masculine. But for the Logos of Cybele, this Apollonian start is not actually its beginning. The Logos of Cybele is rooted in the far pre-Indo-European past or in non-Indo-European, but bordering areas, for example, Egyptian or Semitic (if limited to the Mediterranean). Therefore, Cybele sees the invasion of Apollo as an episode, and quite fresh in comparison with the deep and underground time of the Great Mother. Nevertheless, she recognizes in the Hellenic myth the defeat in the Titanomachy and Gigantomachy and mourns her children who fell at the hands of the Olympians. As Apollo’s power weakens, it is gradually released, the wounds of the Titans heal, they slowly begin to make their way to the surface of the Earth.
The first of the Titans to ascend Olympus is Prometheus. The Titan strives to imitate the gods, shares his chthonic wisdom with them, and adopts from them the sacred skills of power. For the Great Mother, time is progress, and this is fully justified, since as the gods weaken, the powers of the Titans grow. The new time is their time. “Progress” can only be understood as the progress of chthonic and hypochthonic forces, the liberation of the ancient powers imprisoned in Tartarus. This is the revenge of Mount Othrys, the counterattack of the army of giants on the Phlegraean Fields. Storming of Olympus. The end of Western civilization and the movement towards this end for chthonic forces is true development, formation, progress and approach to the long-awaited triumph. This is the essence of modern humanism.
On the other hand, the end of progress can be the “kingdom of women” [4]. This coincides with the definition of the present Hindu tradition as Kali Yuga, the realm of the black goddess Kali.
Those for whom there is no crisis of Western civilization simply do not belong to it by and large. This is not the voice of Western civilization, it is the voice of the black Logos. Only a non-European person can be a Euro-optimist today.
United Europe: The Empire of the Gardens of Apollo
Here it is necessary to clarify how Europe can be understood.
We can talk about the existence of Europe from the beginning of the second millennium A.D. and specifically from the era of the invasion and strengthening in the Mediterranean basin of the Indo-European nomadic militant solar-patriarchal peoples, up to the present time of a single pan-European civilization with a number of fundamental characteristics. It is a Mediterranean civilization within its four-thousand-year-old borders.
This civilization as a whole is marked by the decisive dominance of the Apollonian Logos, the vertical hierarchical structure of the world, society and thought, the solar cult and worship of the heavenly gods, the Indo-European trifunctional system of castes, the unequivocal patriarchy and logocentrism. Europe is the land of Apollo, the god with the bow and the lyre, a projection of the Hyperborean North and its primordial (primordial) tradition. The story of the abduction of Europa by Zeus in the form of a bull can be interpreted in this case as the removal of the female matriarchal context from the chthonic environment and its transfer to the celestial area of the male celestial domination (this also includes stories about the transformation of earthly women into a constellation – for example, Ariadne, the wife of Dionysus, who, like Europe itself, originates from Crete, which was considered the center of matriarchal culture). At the historical level, this could be duplicated by the practice of nomadic warrior tribes (primarily Indo-European), traditionally lacking women (due to the difficulties of nomadic life and constant wars waged by male pastoralists), to kidnap brides from sedentary and more matriarchal agrarian societies [5]. In archaic monuments, Apollo himself is depicted as a shepherd carrying a lamb on his shoulders. Hence a whole series of pastoral metaphors: a pastor in the context of this Apollonian culture is a king, a prophet, a patriarch and even God.
United Europe means the unconditional domination of the light Logos of Apollo over the dark Logos of Cybele. The Black Logos of Cybele in European culture is suppressed, moreover, the legitimate right to possess an autonomous Logos of Cybele in this context is deprived of it, being doomed to silence, muteness or dark echolalia of incomprehensible sounds. The Earth is insane in the intelligent Apollonian Universe of the sky. Only Dionysus, being the god of madness, has the key to the thinking of the Great Mother.
This property of the domination of Apollo over Cybele with the firm localization of Dionysus on the side of Olympus is the formula of a united Europe. The feminine principle, stolen by the Olympian gods, is transformed in the solar context into the virgin Pallas Athena, a deity in whom, although the signs of the feminine principle are preserved (weaving, the serpent Erichthonius, who accompanies Athena everywhere), strictly masculine qualities dominate: intelligence and courage, the archetypal virtues of the first and second Indo-European functions. The wisdom of Athena corresponds to the priesthood and sacred kings. Her courage is the valor of the second function. Weaving is a symbol of artisans integrated into the general three-functional system. In such a situation, Europe, as a woman kidnapped and removed from the chthonic context, is a projection of Athena, that is, a country of such femininity, in which everything, in fact, feminine has undergone transmutation into the masculine, solar, Olympian. Athena, being a virgin, not only does not give birth, but she herself was not born in the full sense of the word, since she came out of the head of Zeus, deprived of connection with the earth and woman. Europe is a synonym for the transformation of the feminine principle – nature, matter, matter – into a male structure, into an eidetic world. This is the removal of the lower in the upper, the ascertainment of the heavenly earth, embodied in the image of a garden. The garden is nature transferred into culture. This is the antithesis of forest and wood (that is, matter proper) – just as a sown field is the antithesis of arbitrarily vegetating plants. The field and the garden are the creation of men, the projection of their ordering rational will. This is the lower level of the Olympian cosmos, but Demeter, the goddess of the fields, has structures of transfigured femininity embedded in a brightening and purifying solar masculine context. The cybelic principle, Rhea, Gaia, is filmed in the goddess of cultivated soil, where all attention is focused on the male seed, and not on the material base where it is placed in order to unfold, take place and produce new seeds. It is not the soil in the field that gives birth to ears of cereals, but the seed. Trees in the garden grow not because they are brought into existence by Mother Earth (as in the forest), but because a careful and active gardener planted them and took care of them, in accordance with a preconceived and implemented plan, an eidetic program. Europe is a civilizational space of tamed femininity placed within male boundaries. This is the culture of Cybele, taken out of brackets in its original and wild dimension, Cybele, turned into Demeter (the paradigm of cultivated soil), Hera (the paradigm of the wife), Athena (the paradigm of male femininity), Artemis (the paradigm of innocence).
Such a united Europe can be seen as an eternal structure. “Eternal” in a relative sense, compared to the historical epochs that take place in its context. To measure time, a fixed coordinate system is needed. In order to measure historical time, a fixed system of coordinates is also needed, but this time not of the cosmic, but of the semantic plane. European history makes sense only as a set of epochs unfolding within this fixed system of coordinates, which is “eternal Europe”, its Logos. This is the Logos of the Mediterranean civilization, which is a civilization precisely because all its processes take place in the semantic field of the once and for all victorious Olympus, in the rays of the sun-god. Europe is eternal in the sense in which the sun is eternal. In itself, it is constant in relation to the seasons or seasons of the day. For us, it rises and sets, shines pale in winter or scorches with summer heat. In itself, the Sun is unchangeable – for it there is no day or night, winter and summer. Europe is the land of Apollo. It is always the same, but we, the observers, who always live in the orbit of the European Logos, experience its epochs, are subject to their meanings, and participate in them. European time, the clock of Europe in the structure of its meanings – hence the sundial, gnomon or clepsydra – are calculated according to the proximity or distance from the sun-bright Logos. And just as there is a long annual cycle and a small diurnal cycle, so in European history there are many vortexes, small, medium and large, in the context of which society moves away from its center and returns to it again on a different turn of the semantic spiral. Europe in its philosophical dimension is represented in Hellenic culture by Plato’s philosophy as the culmination of the luminous Logos. Platonism is the victory of the gods over the titans in the realm of thought.
In the same period as the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the concept of a universal empire was born, embodied in Alexander the Great and reaching its apogee in Rome. Apollo’s philosophy and politics (in the form of the theory and practice of empire-building) merge into an empire.
Christianity gradually also became imbued with the Hellenic spirit and, after recognizing it as the official religion of Rome, it supported and strengthened this Platonic-imperial vector, justifying it by turning to a new, this time Christian metaphysics and theology. From the fourth century A.D., the name of a united Europe was Christianity, the Christian ecumene inheriting the Mediterranean civilizational content both in philosophy and in politics. And this state of affairs generally persisted throughout the Middle Ages.
Modern Times as Anti-Europe
Only in modern times, when European history has entered the last stage of its historical existence, do we witness the awakening of the black Logos of Cybele, crawling out from under the weakened Olympian rule. The serpent is uninhibited, freed and begins to prepare for revenge. From a mythological point of view, this is the awakening of the titans, their new attempt to revise the results of a battle that was once lost and constantly lost, eternally lost. The revolt of chthonic forces, the liberated demonism of matter. An attack on Christ, on class society, on the Indo-European way of life, on the sacred tradition, that is, not what made Europe Europe. Thus is born an anti-Europe, as much like true Europe as the Antichrist is like Christ. This anti-Europe is acting on behalf of Europe, which it is gradually taking over from within. The Titans in battle oust the gods from Olympus and begin to rule on their behalf. These are bourgeois revolutions and the advent of the third estate, but no longer of Indo-European farmers, but of the bearers of a different, commercial, Phoenician, thalassocratic, maritime spirit. This is the return of the Atlanteans, calling to where the pillars of Hercules prevented access – nec plus ultra.
Modern times are the death of Europe and its replacement by something completely different. The Mediterranean civilization, while partially preserving its façade, has been fundamentally rebuilt from within, inhabited by radically new tenants who have risen from deep basements, crawled out of underground passages and taken the former legitimate inhabitants hostage.
Moreover, this stage – from the XVI century A.D. to the present time – takes place in the field of urban book culture that developed in the Christian Middle Ages. This is a new battlefield, where the eternal opponents of the gods of Europe managed to achieve hitherto unimaginable successes. Philosophy and politics are becoming a battlefield where anti-Europe has been able to take the lead. Modernity is the return of the Great Mother and her offspring. The serpent Python is revived and launches a counterattack on Apollo. The sanctuary at Delphi is abandoned. This means that Python has regained power.
The twentieth century is the last chord of European drama. In agony, Europe as such gathers its strength to give its last stand against anti-Europe (Martin Heidegger or Julius Evola, Erns Jünger or Oswald Spengler understand this very clearly), but is defeated – militarily, politically, ideologically, philosophically, technologically. In the second half of the twentieth century, the triumph of Modernity and the black Logos becomes so obvious that it has no significant opponents. The resistance was broken, and the rule of the Titans began.
Postmodernism in such a situation is the last seal. In this new model, we see cultural and civilizational proportions that have nothing to do with what can and should be called “Europe” at all. A Europe where Python kills Apollo, and the Titans devour and digest the heart of Dionysus to their delight, and at this point forever forget about the “god they killed”, concentrating on the calm afternoon digestion of what they swallow, cannot be called “Europe”. This is something else.
Anti-Europe and Russia
Russian Orthodoxy, the Russian Empire, the Russian language, Russian culture and the Russian hierarchical society (priests, warriors, workers) are one of the poles of the civilization of Apollo, gardens and fields of the sun. Moreover, Byzantium, whose successors we are, was precisely the direct heir of the Hellenic spirit, its most archaic cultural space, where the original European values – patriarchy, heroism, courage, the Olympian vertical hierarchy, asceticism and sacrifice – were preserved better and longer than others. In the Middle Ages, for example, Platonism penetrated into Western Europe from Byzantium, as, by the way, the heritage of Aristotle, which is more authentic than through the Arabic transmission. Therefore, Russia is part of eternal Europe, and we cannot be indifferent to the fate of the Old World, since to a large extent it is also our fate.
In addition, Russian culture in recent centuries has been deeply affected by anti-Europe, the rebellious titans of democracy, liberalism, materialism and a scientific worldview. It was not only the Bolsheviks or the liberal elites of the 1990s who brought the spirit of material civilization to Russia. We fell under the spell of the devil’s spell of decay much earlier, when we embarked on the path of “modernization.” European modernity is the process of liquidation of the eternal Olympic sacred Europe, its replacement. But in Russia in recent centuries, under the guise of “Europe”, it was these decadent, regressive, titanic and cybelic tendencies that came to Russia. Under the aegis of “Europeanization”, everything that had to do with true Europe was knocked out of the Russians: Christianity, empire, hierarchy, patriarchy, asceticism and orientation towards the spirit, that is, the foundations of ideational and idealistic culture (according to Sorokin). And all this was replaced by materialistic feminoid technocratic garbage, titanic false myths of progress and development. Apollo does not know development and progress, he knows eternity. Europe and progress are mutually exclusive. But in recent centuries, a monstrous substitution has been carried out. Our society is bogged down in anti-Europe.
The brilliant Russian prophet Fyodor Dostoevsky in a series of his programmatic novels showed that all Western ideas brought to Russian soil from anti-Europe fail in our country – capitalism (in “The Adolescent”), socialism (in “Demons”), and individualism (in “Crime and Punishment”). True Europe is in the Third Rome, in Orthodoxy and the tsar, in the peasantry and the Russian tradition, in the soil and folk Slavic customs, in the rites of the ancient Indo-European people.
In the postmodern era, the death of Europe becomes clear. To the extent that we still look, orient ourselves towards the West, imitate it, we participate in the fall of the luminous Logos. We did not start a new cycle of titanomachy, but we actively joined it and even tried to break ahead in the twentieth century. Alas, we continue to move in the same direction, and only the fact that today we are a little behind and somewhat resist gives us one last chance to evade anti-Europe and save what is left of true Europe. This chance is small. The destructive work of recent centuries has done its job. To the extent that modern Russians are “Europeanized,” to the extent that they are “modern,” they are hopelessly and terminally ill.
There is still something flickering in our people that makes them recoil from the abyss called “modern Europe”, “the West”. But the inertia is too great, and the effort required for a genuinely conservative revolution, sunny and truly European, is enormous. It is quite obvious that we will not be able to stay away from the final cycle of Titanomachy, where the Titans managed to take revenge. But… it’s better to lose with God than to win with the devil. At least, this is how the truly heroic Indo-European ethics is formulated. And if we are determined to fight to the bitter end, who knows how things will turn out. Anti-Europe must be destroyed at the root, burned to the ground, sending the rebellious chthonic powers back to the abyss of Tartarus. This is what true Europe demands of us. Our ancient, eternal Europe, the real Europe. The Europe of Christ the Almighty.
[1] Veber M. Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism // Veber M. Selected Works. Moscow, Progress Publ., 1991.[2] Sombart V. Bourgeois. Moscow: Nauka Publishing House, 1994.
[3] Dugin A. G. V poiskakh temnogo Logos [In search of the dark Logos]. Moscow, Akademicheskiy Proekt Publ., 2014.
[4] The Christian Apocalypse describes this as the symbol of the of Babylon, the Purple Woman.
[5] Dugin A. G. Etnosotsiologiya [Ethnosociology]. Moscow, Akademicheskiy proekt Publ., 2011.
