The Logos of Europe: Catastrophe and the Horizons of Another Beginning

From the journal Katehon, no. 2 (2016), pp. 13-27.

Translator: Jafe Arnold

From the journal Katehon, no. 2 (2016), pp. 13-27. 

Europe à la Dumézil

Modern European civilization is the historical continuation of Mediterranean civilization. The Indo-European element is predominant in this continuity, as the Indo-European tradition makes up Europe’s main linguistic and cultural matrix. If we recall Dumézil’s reconstruction of the trifunctional system here, then we immediately obtain a sociological map of Europe, the social structure of which is dominated by a constantly reproduced principle of three prevailing castes: priests, warriors, and producers. Indeed, we encounter none other than this stratification of European societies at the most different historical stages and under different names and titles.

The classic expression of this order was the ancient epoch of Mediterranean societies beginning with the Achaean conquests and Homeric Greece. Such a system was characteristic of Ancient Greece and Rome with the exception of periods of decline distinguished by a strengthening of the political positions of “urban dwellers”, who represented a mixture of higher castes with uprooted peasants that gave birth to a new type of merchant hitherto alien to classical Indo-European societies. This type of merchant could have taken shape through the degradation and materialization of the warrior caste (which Plato describes in his Republic as the phenomenon of timocracy), or from below through a specific deviation from social type on the part of former peasants or urban artisans. It cannot be ruled out that this was the result of influences that were altogether foreign to the Indo-European cultural circle, such as Phoenician or, more broadly, Semitic cultures, for whom trade was a widespread social occupation. In the city-states of Greece, “urban dwellers” and “citizens”, i.e., “townspeople”, formed a specific social milieu in which the three classical functions of Indo-European society found parodical manifestation. In the very least, this is what Aristotle presented in his Politics. The authority of king-priests (the sacred monarchy) transformed into tyranny. The domination of the warrior aristocracy gave way to domination by a financial oligarchy. The organic self-government of ethnically homogeneous and solidary communities (polity) became “democracy”, or the power of the sporadic and disparate crowd unified only by territory of urban residence.

Over the course of its rise, Rome restored the proportions of the Indo-European trifunctional hierarchy. However, periods of decline in the Roman Empire were characterized by similar phenomena of the rise of an undifferentiated urban majority. The spread of Christianity, which in and of itself is not a typically Indo-European cultural phenomenon, but rather bears essential features of the Semitic tradition, nevertheless spurred the rebirth of the Indo-European societies of the Greco-Roman world, the culmination of which became the European Middle Ages.

By the end of the Middle Ages, “civil society” once again raised its head, the role of the “trading caste” grew, and in the end the bourgeois Europe of England, Holland, and France finally set the normative democratic and social model. It is important that the main figure of this Europe of modernity is the bourgeois (the trader, entrepreneur, or businessman), who in classical Indo-European societies was either on the periphery or altogether absent. Detailed sociological analyses of the role and function of the bourgeois have been presented in the programmatic works of the famous European sociologists Max Weber [1] (in an apologetic spirit), and Werner Sombart [2] (from a critical standpoint).

Thus, according to Dumézil, modern Western-European civilization is Indo-European in its nature and initial structure, which means that it harbors at its core the trifunctional model. But modernity introduced into this structure and gradually established at its heart an element that is altogether genetically alien to Indo-European civilization and which conceptually conflicts with its classical matrix.

The decline of Europe à la Spengler, Danilevsky, and Sorokin

If Dumézil’s trifunctional analysis shows the divergence of the Europe of modernity from its Indo-European paradigm, then other authors practicing a civilizational approach – Spengler, Danilevsky, and Sorokin, etc. – are of the opinion that the cycle of European civilization has entered its stage of decline. The Romano-Germanic world, according to Danilevsky, is experiencing its old age, losing its vitality and energy, and is disintegrating into materiality and sensuality. Spengler, meanwhile, constructed his whole theory in order to substantiate the notion that the West’s Faustian spirit has led it to spiritual catastrophe, with the life of its culture fading away and being replaced by a purely technological and alienated civilization. Pitirim Sorokin, for his part, argued that Europe in modernity has reached the end of its sensual stage in the development of its sociocultural system and is on the edge of the abyss.

All of these testimonies suggest that the contemporary moment of European civilization (whatever the scope of such might be for different authors) is its terminal phase, an era of decrepitude, decline, degradation, and agony. This means that the European Logos is in the final third of its cyclical manifestation, on the opposite end from Europe’s childhood in Greco-Roman Antiquity and maturation in the European Middle Ages.

The desacralization of Europe (à la Guénon and Evola)

An even more brutal diagnosis of Europe of modernity was offered by the Traditionalists. According to Guénon, European Modernity has become an anti-civilization, an embodiment of all that is contrary to the spirit, Tradition, and sacrality. Secularization, humanism, naturalism, mechanism, and rationalism, in Guénon’s view, are the essential manifestations of the spirit of perversion which affects all societies, but which only in modern Europe acquired such absolute and complete embodiment and was elevated to the level of a norm and principle. Traditional societies also knew periods of degradation, but modern Europe has built an anti-society in the fullest sense of the word, in which all normal proportions are inverted: the divine, transcendental dimension has been rejected; religion has been pushed to the social periphery, and matter, quantity, ephemerality, sensuality, individualism, and egoism have been elevated as the highest values.

Guénon argues that everything still related to Tradition in Europe is not actually European, and can in more pure and full form be found among the peoples of the East. What is genuinely European is the fragmentation of Tradition, its distortion and perversion, and its reduction to a lower, human, and rational level. Guénon treats the West literally, as the land where the sun of spirituality disappears and where onsets the “night of the gods.” Nearly the same assessment of modern Europe is present in Evola, who nonetheless believed that the European tradition that existed in Antiquity and the Middle Ages with its roots in the heroic era can still be restored, and that the West can be saved from the abyss into which it has been plunged by modernity.

The restoration of this heroic spirit of the West was Evola’s lifelong pursuit. But with regards to the Europe of modernity, Evola professed the most brutal and negative interpretations, believing that in this period we are dealing with an Anti-Europe with its ultimate degeneration and self-parody. Evola considered the bourgeoisie to be a decadent class, and democracy, rationalism, scientism, and humanism to be forms of a spiritual and socio-political disease.

Guénon and Evola both saw a completely and deeply desacralized Europe, but Evola hoped for the opportunity of resacralization, whereas Guénon thought such unlikely, thus predicting for Europe an imminent and inevitable death.

The gender index of modern Europe

Different authors diverge profoundly when it comes to determining the “gender index” of modern European civilization. On the one hand, according to Bachofen and Wirth’s logic, Europe is founded on patriarchy and patriarchal tendencies (Appolonianism, the domination of masculine rationality) which only increase in relation to gravitating away from ancient matriarchy. Modernity, in the form of rationalistic philosophy and science, at first glance confirms this assessment. Indeed, many philosophers of life have proceeded from this analysis (from Friedrich Nietzsche to Henri Bergson, Ludwig Klages, Max Scheler, Georg Simmel, Theobald Ziegler, Hermann Keyserlingi, etc.), thus calling for liberation from “paternal domination” in European culture. On the other hand, Julius Evola and some other thinkers, such as Otto Weininger, have pointed out that modernity elevated to the position of priority precisely such materialistic, sensual, and empirical values which are rather typical of the feminine cosmos. Evola therefore insisted on his thesis that we live in the age of the Kali-Yuga, in which the principles of “black womanhood”, chaos, confusion, and death, which correspond to the most negative aspects of the feminine element, are celebrated.

In this sense, Europe is the focal point of “black gynecocracy”, the kingdom of the goddess Kali where there is no place for the truly masculine and heroic element. If the origins of the European tradition lay, according to Evola, in the heroic masculine type, then European modernity is the direct antipode of this type. On this matter, however, theorists of civilization have expressed the most contradictory opinions.

Euro-optimism

All of these points of view are typical of those authors who tend to consider European civilization as one among multiple civilizations. Even those who define themselves as supporters of modern Europe (such as Toynbee or Huntington) posited that modernity is not simply the antithesis of the classical foundations of European culture, but one of the scenarios of its development. Therefore, they proposed to strengthen and defend Europe and its values in the spirit of moderate Western conservatism.

The vast majority of Europeans understand modernity completely differently, convinced as they are that Europe was the first to go the furthest along the only possible universal path of historical development, that European values are the best and universal, and therefore obligatory, that there is only one civilization – European – and that all the rest are the essence of half-baked-civilization, i.e., veiled barbarism or savagery, and that modernity promises a level of culture, philosophy, knowledge, technology, morality, law, economics, and socio-political development which fundamentally surpasses not only all the historical stages of non-European societies, but also everything that Europe was before. They treat the origins of European civilization itself positively only insofar as they have led to “blessed modernity”, whereas otherwise such are, compared to modernity, something imperfect, naive, or useless long since overcome by modernity, which features all the best and has rejected and overcome all the worse.

For this official worldview of the modern West, appealing to European antiquity or non-European societies makes no sense, insofar as the truth is contained in the present moment of Western (American-European) history that has developed in the vanguard of all of humanity. This truth must necessarily tomorrow become more perfect and complete than it is today. This theory of progress – even though it has been discarded to a considerable extent by the intellectual, philosophical, and humanitarian elite of the West over the past century – remains the dominant myth of Western politics, Western mass culture, Western economics, Western education, and the ordinary worldview of Western man.

The initial structure of the Mediterranean Logos: The radical victory of Apollo

Now let us relate these models of evaluating modern Western-European civilization to the structure of the three Logoi of Noomachy. But first we should consider one important fact. Mediterranean civilization, which modern Western civilization is and believes itself to be the continuation of, had not only a Greco-Roman and not only an Indo-European (if we consider the barbaric tribes of medieval Western Europe) character. Even the Greek Logos initially comprised Semitic-Phoenician influences, and the ethnocultural origin of the Middle Eastern cults of the Great Mother remains an open question. We have seen that Herman Wirth traced matriarchy back to proto-Indo-European roots with their center in the North Atlantic. According to Frobenius, this (thalasso-oceanic) cultural circle, with an emphasis on the number four, the symbolism of space, and matriarchy, represents the antithesis of the Indo-European civilizational style which considers the sun feminine and the month masculine. Spengler (and Frobenius) traced the Indo-European cultural code back to patriarchic Turan, while Evola saw patriarchal heroism as at the origin of European classics. In any case, Semitic influence and matriarchal motives can (contrary to Herman Wirth’s view) be considered a factor foreign to the normative European cultural code. This is indirectly confirmed by the teachings of the Gnostics who identified the “evil demiurge” as the Jewish God of the Old Testament. The followers of the Gnostic Basilides, who called for overcoming the demiurgical prison, said of themselves: “We are not Jews anymore, bot not yet Hellenes.”[3]

The spread of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire, with the incorporation of the Old Testament as the most important theological component of the new religion, undoubtedly increased the impact of Semitic culture on the European context, although the scope and depth of this Semitic element’s influence can be evaluated variously. In the very least, at an early stage in the Christianization of the Roman Empire and in the Middle Ages, this element did not manifest itself so actively and vividly, as the foundation of Christian society came to be formed by Hellenic philosophy and Roman legal culture, which continued the main line of Indo-European civilization.

Overall, we can envision the cycle of the Western Logos as running from the beginning of the second millennium B.C. (the Achaean invasion of the Mediterranean) to the 2000’s A.D., i.e., to our time, which makes up approximately 4,000 years. It is only natural that over this enormous historical period, the Logos of Mediterranean civilization, even in its Indo-European dimension, changed many times. Nonetheless, some parameters have been preserved unchanged, or transformed along the trajectories peculiar to this civilization – Indo-European and Mediterranean on one end, and modern Western (Western-European) on the other.

We can say that here we are dealing with two polar sections of Noomachy: beginning and end. The same can be said about other civilizations, with which we will deal one by one. Here we are interested in Europe from its origins to the present moment.

There is no doubt that the harbingers of the primordial (Achaean) culture and their related Indo-European tribes in the West (Italy) and East (Anatolia) of the Mediterranean were vivid representatives of the trifunctional ideology, the civilization of the heroic type and masculine, patriarchal, sacred, and warrior-like society. It can be said that their Logos was primarily the light Logos, and Apollo (or his prototypes) and Zeus acted as its main personification in myth. This was heavenly Uranic philosophy dominated by the vertical, a series of male symbols, and diaeretic diurnal regime (according to Gilbert Durand). Therefore, we should presume an Apollonian element to be in the foundations and starting accord of Mediterranean civilization. This was not a result of evolution or the product of external influence. The ancestors of the Ancient Greeks who arrived in this area were (according to Guénon and Evola) bearers of the solar Hyperborean cultural circle. At the very least, this solar Logos was the axis of the political and caste elite of Mediterranean civilization, i.e., its two higher castes – priests and warriors. The domination of the light Logos also affected those of the third function who, with Hellenization, absorbed the structures of Olympic-Uranic ideology.

But the Achaeans did not arrive in an empty place. This zone was once inhabited by peoples with a different culture and ideology (the Pelasgians, Minoans, etc.). This culture was most likely arranged in accordance with a matriarchal cultural code, the manifestations of which we meet in the Logos of Cybele and later epochs.

Bachofen, Wirth, and Frobenius’ studies clearly showed that the very same Mediterranean area was once a cultural field dominated by the structures of the Great Mother. Therefore, the Indo-European, Achaean, Apollonian, and patriarchal Logos asserted its dominance in a space with a hitherto matriarchal-structured culture. The resulting collision between these two Logoi – the Logos of the Apollonian newcomers and the Logos of the matriarchal indigenous ones – i.e., this specific episode of Noomachy, concluded with the full and unreserved triumph of the Logos of Apollo. Mediterranean culture, as a matrix of European culture, was first and foremost, in an external sense, originally and fundamentally a culture of the light Logos. It can be said that Pythagoreanism and Platonism were moments of a conservative revolution, when the intellectual elite of the Hellenic world realized the need to systematize, classify, and “encyclopedicize” its fundamental code. But this Apollonian/Platonic cultural code was dominant and prevalent long before Pythagoras and Plato, being as it was the fundamental constant of this whole civilization as such, from the beginning to the end (that is, to its present state).

Mediterranean civilization was thus founded as the institution of the irreversible Olympic victory of the gods over the titans, of Apollo and Zeus over the creatures of the Great Mother, the light Logos over the black Logos, the world of ideas over a tract of space (χώρα).

In this situation, it is crucial to locate the intermediate Logos – the dark Logos of Dionysus. In the radical victory of Apollo over Rhea-Cybele, Apollo over Python, Olympus over Ortiz, and the gods over the titans, Dionysus was comprehended as a figure who stood on the side of the gods. Through him is channeled the communication between the ontological, teleological, cosmological, and gnoseological top and the ontological, teleological, cosmological, and gnoseological bottom – but on the conditions of the top. Apollo’s domination in Mediterranean civilization determined the fate of Dionysus as well. He was conceptualized as a ray of heaven pointing towards earth and hell, as the beloved son of Olympian Zeus, as the sun descending into night. Hence the very choice of this god’s gender. While androgynous by virtue of his intermediate position, he is thought of as a male god, as a Groom and Savior. His trajectory is from there to here; he is the witness of the gods and a god among gods.

The Logos of Dionysus is the matrix of warriors and peasants. Hence his Indian campaign and accompanying vegetable cults. But his war and his agrarian cults are connected not to material efforts and workdays, but with game and holiday. He is the god of the mysteries which serve to raise the earthly, bring it up to the heavenly, and open up for the mortal the path to eternity. Apollo embodies the divine order that does not know chaos. He is the god of kings and priests, a god who does not tolerate impurity or compromise. He is the god of the upper horizon. He does not bring things to order, he is order.

Dionysus descends to chaos, ready to deal with what is imperfect, but he translates chaos into order, perfects the imperfect. His role in the Mediterranean civilization of the light Logos is also bright, although qualitatively darker than Apollo.

Dionysus acts as the guide for the second and even more so for the third caste of Indo-European society, as well as women who find themselves on the periphery of the patriarchal system, but who through the cult of Dionysus are integrated into the entire civilizational fabric.

Such is the initial and fundamental structure of Noomachy for the Mediterranean region (in its Hellenistic, and then Greco-Roman and Western European version). Such is the primary component of the Logos of Mediterranean civilization – it is dominated by Apollo; Cybele is completely subordinate to and suppressed by it; and Dionysus, fulfilling communication between the top and bottom of the noetic and cosmological topography, transmits mostly eidetic rays from heaven to the masses of the earth and the creatures inhabiting it.

Three views on the fate of the West

The starting accord of Mediterranean civilization predetermined the basic proportions of its historical being up to the present time. Therefore, when we speak of the “decline of Europe”, or the crisis of Western civilization, we consciously or unconsciously have in mind the crisis of the light Logos, the tragedy of Apollo. This is altogether explicitly discussed by Julius Evola, but something analogous was undoubtedly had in mind by all those other authors who have given Western civilization such a fatal diagnosis. Whether freely or instinctively, in speaking about the crisis of the West we mean the crisis of the Apollonian West, the West which we know from Antiquity and the Middle Ages. This is Apollo being mourned by those recording the catastrophe of modern Western culture.

If this is so, then the final episode of the historical cycle of Mediterranean civilization should be considered the “departure of Apollo”, his “withdrawal”, “disappearance”, or “flight.” In this case, the starting point of Mediterranean civilization is the radical moment of Apollo’s victory over Cybele, and the final point is the one in which we find ourselves now with the weakening of Apollo, the fall of Apollo, the end of his reign. The enigmatic myths about the impending end of Zeus’ reign, which are related in particular to the tales of his swallowing of the female titan Metis and the birth of Athena, might be directly related to this. The end of Western civilization is the end of the rule of the light Logos of Apollo.

Thus, from the standpoint of the Logos of Apollo itself, this history is one of downward movement with higher and lower points. The high point is the beginning of Mediterranean culture, and the lowest is the current state of Western civilization. If we imagine this scheme more naturalistically, then in the first phase (the second millennium B.C.) we have an earlier stage, that of the childhood of Apollo, from the middle of the first millennium B.C. to the Middle Ages of Europe, where we have the maturity of Apollo (coinciding with the peak of Platonism), and the enfeeblement and degeneration of the light Logos in the rationalism of modernity up to the irrational agony of Postmodernity.

But if we now follow the same trajectory from the standpoint of the black Logos of Cybele, the picture turns out to be entirely different. The starting point is the subordination of the feminine to the masculine, so for the Logos of Cybele this Apollonian start is not really its own. The Logos of Cybele dates back to the distant pre-Indo-European past or to non-Indo-European, adjacent fields, such as the Egyptian or Semitic ones (if we restrict ourselves to the Mediterranean). Therefore, Cybele sees Apollo’s invasion as an episode that is quite recent in comparison to the deep, underground time of the Great Mother. She admits defeat in Titanomachy and Gigantomachy and mourns her children who fell at the hands of the Olympians. As Apollo’s power weakens, she is gradually liberated, the titans’ wounds are healed, and they slowly begin to make their way up to the Earth’s surface.

The first of the titans to rise to Olympus is Prometheus. This titan seeks to imitate the gods, to share his chthonic wisdom with them, and borrow their sacred skills of rule. For the Great Mother, time is progress, and this is wholly justified insofar as the titans’ strength grows in relation to the weakening of the gods. Modernity (“New Time”) is their time. By “progress” can be understood only the progress of chthonic and hypochthonic forces, the liberation of the ancient powers imprisoned in Tartarus. This is the revanche on Mount Othrys, the counterattack of the giants on the Phlegraean fields. This is the humanism of Modernity. The end of Western civilization, and the drift towards this end is, for chthonic forces, true development, becoming, progress, and the nearing of long-awaited triumph.

On the other hand, the finale of such progress might be the “kingdom of the woman.”[4] This coincides with the Hindu tradition’s definition of the present time as the Kali-Yuga, the kingdom of the black goddess Kali. The Sibylline Books [5] contain a prophecy which specifically relates to Western civilization:

And thereupon [6] 

Shall the whole world be governed by the hands

Of a woman

and obedient everywhere.

Then when a widow shall o’er all the world

Gain the rule, and cast in the mighty sea

Both gold and silver, also brass and iron [7]

Of short lived men into the deep shall cast,

Then all the elements shall be bereft

Of order, when the God who dwells on high

Shall roll the heaven, even as a scroll is rolled;

100 And to the mighty earth and sea shall fall

The entire multiform sky; and there shall flow

A tireless cataract of raging fire,

And it shall burn the land, and burn the sea,

And heavenly sky, and night, and day, and melt

Creation itself together and pick out

What is pure. No more laughing spheres of light,

Nor night, nor dawn, nor many days of care,

Nor spring, nor winter, nor the summer-time,

Nor autumn. And then of the mighty God

The judgment midway in a mighty age

Shall come, when all these things shall come to pass. [8] 

Those for whom Western civilization is not in crisis simply do not belong to it by and large. They are not the voice of Western civilization, but the voice of the black Logos. Today only a non-European can be a Euro-optimist.

Now as for Dionysus. How does he see the fate of the West today? Everything is more complicated here. The zone of Dionysus, his kingdom, is located between the light Logos of Dionysus [sic – Apollo? – J.A.] and the black Logos of Cybele. He is identical to himself both in heaven and on earth – he is close to both natures: divine and human. Dionysus understands the logic of both patriarchy and matriarchy. But in Mediterranean culture, as we have seen, Dionysus turns out to be integrated into the model of Apollonian order and is the distributor of this order to the chthonic levels of being. Dionysus is the Savior, the Initiator. His place is in the army of gods. He has his own scores to settle with the titans, who tear him apart. The fate of Dionysus in the West is inseparable from that of Apollo. Therefore, in following this line, he also perceives modernity as “dark times”, and shares the fate of all the other Olympian gods. In this sense, we can speak of a “flight of Dionysus” (this god’s escape appears repeatedly in, for example, the story of Lycurgus, when he plunges into the sea).

However, Dionysus is not so rigidly bound to Apollo. In the Apollonian kingdom, he acts as the Son of the Father, but if we look at him from the other position, then he can be seen as the Son of the Mother. His link to Cybele, who is recovering from madness, opens from the other side. Here we are approaching a very complex and obviously even dangerous topic that can be formulated as “Dionysus and his double.” [9] The dark Logos which brings light to all those areas of the world which Apollo’s sun does not penetrate, can at “twilight” acquire disturbing traits. In these “twilights” (Wagner’s “twilight of the gods”, Nietzsche’s “twilight of the idols”, or Evola’s “twilight of the heroes”), he can be perceived as a “titan.” After all, Heraclitus said in fragment 15: “Hades is the same as Dionysus.”[10] The meaning of the Logos of Dionysus is that it is “not the same.” But the similarity remains…This is related to the “shadows of Dionysus” [11] and the ambiguity of certain decadent “Dionysian” themes which Gilbert Durand distinguishes in Postmodernity as characteristic attributes [12]. Hence Julius Evola’s apprehension regarding the figure of Dionysus and his endowment of Dionysian civilization with decadent traits that lead to the iron age (the Kali-Yuga). Here we can also recall Guénon’s idea of the “great parody” and “opening of the egg of the world from below”, as well as his warnings against the particular danger posed by certain sacred traditions which emphasize the intermediate cosmic level and are capable of discovering their destructive potential in the critical era of the end of the cycle.[13] 

In this sense is important what we have said concerning the field of Dionysus in Mediterranean civilization and his fate. In the Great Mother’s view, this field is up for questioning, as in the case of the “male” half of the female androgynous Agdistis. Or it can change altogether, and instead of Dionysus the Savior can arise the image of the “Savioress” [14]. This is “another Dionysus”, a non-European one, not the one whom we know from the classical era of history. This is an “other Dionysus”, “proto-Dionysus”, or “post-Dionysus.”

If for solar Dionysus the decline of Europe is this civilization’s midnight followed by a new dawn – the “return of Dionysus” – then for his chthonic double it is the attainment of a secret goal, the center of hell, and the aim is to fix time in its infernal climax, thus making hell eternal and everlasting.

In this case, unlike the straightforward and catastrophic view of the light Logos and the progressive titanism of the black Logos, the relationship of the dark Logos of Dionysus to modern Western (Western-European) culture becomes highly ambiguous, as it is based on the complex operation of the “differentiation of Dionysii.”

Footnotes:

[1] Weber, M. Protestanskaiia etika i dukh kapitalizma. Izbrannye proizvedeniia. Moscow: Progress, 1991. 

[2] Sombart, W. Burzhua. Moscow: Nauka, 1994. 

[3] Dugin, A. V poiskakh temnogo Logosa. Moscow: Akademicheskii Proekt, 2013. 

[4] The Christian apocalypse describes this with the symbol of the Babylonian harlot, the  “purple woman.”

[5] Knigi Sivill (Sobranie pesen-prorochestv, napisannykh neizvestnymi avtorami II v. do n.e.-IV v.n.e. Moscow: Engima, 1996.

[6] After the coming of the titan Beliar. 

[7] This is a clear allusion to the four ages of gold, silver, bronze, and iron, which end with the “kingdom of the woman.”

[8] Dugin produces his own translation and reproduces (in this footnote) for comparison the translation by M. Vitkovskaya and V. Vitkovsky found in Knigi Sivill, op. cit., pp. 50.  The English translation provided here is from “The Sybilline Oracles” translated by Milton S. Terry in 1899 and published by sacred-texts.com in December 2001, lines 90-111. 

[9] Dugin, A. Radikalnyi subekt i ego dubl. Moscow: Evraziiskoe Dvizhenie, 2009. 

[10] English Heraclitus translation from heraclitusfragments.com 

[11] Maffessoli, M. L’Ombre de Dionysos, contribution à une sociologie de l’orgie. Paris: Méridiens-Klincksieck, 1985. 

[12] Durand, G., Figures mythiques et visages de l’œuvre . De la mythocritique à la mythanalyse. Paris: Berg International, 1979. 

[13] It is in this sense that Guénon describes the degradation of the Egyptian tradition, some of the currents of which he calls “perverted Hermetism.”

[14] The theory of a “female messiah” can be found in the Jewish sect of Jacob Frank, who influenced a whole number of mystical organizations in Europe in the 18-20th centuries. See Novak, Ch. Jacob Frank: Le faux Messie. Paris: l’Harmattan, 2012. 

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