Mythologizing Modernity
The cosmic tale goes ever on
“Don't the great tales never end?" "No, they never end as tales," said Frodo. "But the people in them come, and go when their part's ended. Our part will end later – or sooner.” - J.R.R. Tolkien
History is dead.
Or, so I was told.
For a long time, I believed it.
Not because I wanted to, but I could see the world around me. It was plain as day that I did not live in the world of my heroes.
Myth and legend had ended, history had marched to its lackluster end, and we were all fated to live out our days in a lethargic, decaying, neo-liberal hellscape.
Consume product. Work for corporation. Vote. Die.
The banal reality of the modern west seems almost designed to crush the very souls of its populace.
We grew up in a world where nothing ever happens and there is nothing left to discover.
But now, it seems things may be starting to happen again. The drums of war are beating in the east, suspicious glances are cast on western elections, and everywhere the masks are coming off as the blatant incompetency and evil of the world’s ruling classes is revealed. Certain questions, once banned, are openly asked again in public forums, and the longhouse-nanny-state is losing its composure in face of it. Old ideas, beliefs, and spirits are resurrected and paraded through our city streets.
History, or myth, may have something left to say.
What brought about this shift? Why does the zeitgeist of the last couple of years, post-COVID, feel so markedly different from the spirit of the previous decades? What happened in 2020?
Other writers have gone over various components of the explanation better than I could and in more detail. There are religious, geo-political, philosophical, economical, and countless other reasons for this cultural shift.
But if we were to comprehensively sum up what has happened to the world in the last two years, what could we say? I think the answer is actually quite simple.
The world has rejected the spirit of materialism and “science”, so long stuffed down our throats, in favor of the return of legend, ritual, and fanaticism.
In short, the world is mythologizing itself once again. In 2020 the world threw off the materialist facade it had been wearing for so long.
You may think that the COVID-era revealed how attached to “The Science”, logic, and reason the West still is. But it did the opposite. COVID revealed that belief in science in the West was not just a simple cultural respect - its a fanatical religious order. All were made to bow down and publicly affirm their submission in the form of masks and vaccine cards.
The most fanatical are still in this religious trance today. You may come across a devotee in an airport or train station, dutifully wearing their mask of submission in fear and awe of their petty gods.
And make no mistake, this IS a religious trance. The responses to COVID, to BLM, to Trump, to Elon Musk and Andrew Tate, countless other things, all religious. No amount of psychoanalysis will explain them. Only one with the eye of a mythologist will see this for what it is- the return of fanatical cults and mass ritual.
We saw this in the BLM riots. They were no mere protests, they were the actions of yet another religious cult that sprang forth in 2020. Of course, the social justice movement had been prepping for this for years. But it was not until the dam broke in 2020 that its true nature was reveled.
Cities burned. Bystanders on the street were accosted and forced to display their faith via hand signals and sacred words, under threat of violence. Millions posted black squares on social media in pathetic compliance to ritual. This cult attempted to make a demigod martyr out of George Floyd. They tried to make him a new Jesus.
George Floyd wasn’t the only one. This cult has tried to make martyrs out of any black person killed for any reason. Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin. A church in New York literally held a Trayvon Martin “communion”. This is not the same agnostic left-wing from the early 2000’s. These people are anything but agnostic. Watch below, if you can stomach it.
We’ve seen whites in the west subject themselves to shame rituals to cleanse themselves of the sin of white privilege. Whites knelt and washed the feet of blacks (literally) for… some reason. Families split over COVID mandates and masks. Teenagers force their elderly grandparents to learn to use “pronouns”. Anthony Fauci was worshipped as a demigod. Mass immigration to the West is justified as a sort of atonement for the sin of colonization.
I’ve watched all this unfold. I’ve watched friends I once respected bend to the threats of these cults. I’ve watched them take vaccines and post little squares, not because they wanted to, but out of fear and a lack of will. Some I’ve watched lose their brains completely in becoming fanatical worshippers of this or that masculinity guru that they think will save them (or at least, get them laid). Others I watched fully join the dark side and participate gleefully in these dark rituals of compliance and shame.
I didn’t know it at the time, but now I know what I was watching. Since 2020 I’ve watched my peers “get religion” via a new, twisted revival. Peers of mine that would laugh in your face if you asked them about God, unwittingly found themselves fanatics.
This year things are heating up even further, the mythic patterns becoming more in-your-face. Perhaps it’s being fueled by the conflict in the Holy Land.
We are seeing the ritual and inherent fanaticism of the age become more blatant.
Black supremacy organizations now openly encourage violence against whites as atonement for “white supremacy”. We have billionaires turning to old sorceries and vampirism, trying to manufacture the fountain of youth. Andrew Tate converted to and promotes Islam. Elon Mush launches his numerological star ships with their 33-rocket engines. The white leftist coastal elite is turning from banal rationalism in favor of the new age revival that we witness at Burning Man (which was incidentally punished by God this year for its pagan degeneracy).
No one is agnostic anymore. The era of the atheist, suburban, middle-class democrat was short lived and is quite plainly over. All people are joining one cult or another.
Do I even need to explain how absolutely unhinged it is that a black history museum conducted a shame ritual against southern Americans by melting down a Robert E. Lee statue? They didn’t just melt it down, no, they ritualized it by filming and photographing it in this way (seen below), making it into a performance, a message. Keep in mind the statue in Charlottesville was taken down back in 2021, kept stashed away to be ritually dismembered at the proper time.
This is disturbing stuff. This shows that the left is not what they claim to be. This betrays a belief in symbol, in meta pattern, archetypes, spiritual demoralization. It shows that they want to destroy you not just politically, but spiritually. This is nothing less than spell-work.
And then we must address how mythical the current Israel/Palestine conflict is. This is not a normal turf war. Israeli leaders, American Neo-cons, and many Bible-Belt Christians are whipped up into a bloody frenzy, calling for the destruction of “Phillistines” and openly hoping to bring about the end of the world and the return of the Messiah (with very different interpretations depending on who you ask). On the other side you have Arab leaders and American leftists call for the obliteration of the Zionist state. This religious war has seen even the western left split down the middle.
The mythic nature of this conflict isn’t new. The existence of the modern state of Israel has since the 40’s been justified through interpretations of ethnic prophecy. End-times criers and the Bible Belt imminent rapture crowd see war in the middle-east as a good thing, as they believe it heralds the arrival of Christ.
But this year is special because we’ve finally seen the masks fall from cultural commentators on both sides of the aisle, as they call for blood and war in the east. Ben Shapiro revealed himself as bloodthirsty and ravenous. Neo-cons have taken to posting Old Testament verses on Twitter as evidence for what the borders of 21st century nation-states should be. The facts-and-logic crowd has been outed as anything but.
It’s all very insane unless you understand that what is happening is mythic and spiritual in nature, not rational.
I pray the conflict ceases. But if I know anything about the patterns of myth and legend (history if you must), this looks to be only getting started.
But it isn’t all bad. As old demons and ancient cults have risen up, so too have old heroes.
Like in any myth, resistance sprang up in defiance of the darkness. These past few years the right-wing experienced a rebirth in the form of internet subcultures like BAPism, “Muscular Christianity”, the Red Pill, the Manosphere, the Solarsphere, Trad posters, Evropa-first movements, primal-health gurus, the DR political sphere, and more. Some of these are better than others, but the point remains the same- to combat the demon cults, those on our side were forced to RETVRN to mythic worldviews and archetypes as well.
Boomer neo-cons were left in the dust. No one watches Fox News anymore. That old dichotomy is dead. The new right is as esoteric as the new left. The new right correctly identified the enemy, for the first time in decades, maybe even centuries. The enemy was not democrats, or leftists, or cultural marxism, or any other boomer scapegoat- no, the new right has identified the enemy as the longhouse, the NWO death cult, Babylon, Lucifer himself.
And this isnt just aesthetics, this is very real. It would be foolish to think aesthetics are only an outward thing- they reflect what is happening underneath, in the background world. That the LONGHOUSECOVIDBLMLGBTQIAMARETARD death cult was challenged by Apollonian reactionaries shows us that those old powers are still very real and very alive. If it were only aesthetics, online movements like the solar-sphere wouldn’t have ever had the impact that they did. Who would have thought that Hyperborean edits and raw milk could do so much?
When you watch Twitter wars between BAP-poasters and COVID-maskers, you are really witnessing the continuation of an ancient conflict. You might laugh at this idea. But you won’t laugh as the conflict continues to slide more and more out of the internet and into your city centre. You may just live to see legions of BAP appreciators bring fire and sword to your local HOA meeting. You just may.
Even Christianity is undergoing this transformation. The lukewarmness of previous decades is dying. Churches are either joining the leftists cults and leaving the faith in all but name, or they are doubling down on tradition.
The factions of the new right that are degenerate or subversive (like the Red Pill) are being discarded and falling into irrelevancy. Only the ones in line with Christianity are proving to have any real legs to stand on. Cultural lines in the sand are being drawn in a way not seen in decades. The right-wing is no longer allowing half-measures. The war against Babylon is all or nothing.
None will stay lukewarm in the years to come. Humanity is taking sides, and we are all being forced to choose our cults. To bow down to Babylon, or to stand against it. It is quickly being shown that there is no third position. Anyone who thinks we really evolved into an age of science and reason is deluded. This is still the age of Pisces, of religious fanaticism and the fulfillment of prophecy, and all our talk of enlightenment is but a mask.
The last few generations of “reason” and an uneasy societal peace have been nothing but the calm before the storm.
I expect that the years to come will be the apex of religious fervor on all sides. We will see mass ritual and death cults and dark prophets on a scale not seen for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Already our culture is infected with old demons, old abominations. The aesthetics may change, but Baal and Moloch remain the same, and they are ravenous.
In the years to come it will be as if a dam has burst and the brewing power of myth and legend and symbol will come rushing out on us. You had best be on solid ground when it does. Only the church will survive this, the church and whichever factions of the right are willing to align themselves with it.
The cycles of history are violent and epic beyond human comprehension. We must do what we can to be aware of the great story we find ourselves in and do our best to act accordingly.
If we have in fact lived through the end of history, it was only to make room for the return of the great mythology that has been playing out since the dawn of time.
God keep us all.
Powerful stuff. This is really, truly excellent writing.
On the Piscean age, there's some debate over exactly when it will end, or ended. However, the labile nature of our time, the fluid property that mythos and spirit have taken on, the dissolving of unifying frameworks into a scintillating myriad of niche ideologies and weird cults, and the blending of science and spirituality ... these are all profoundly Aquarian in character.
Though most disagree about what it means, everyone with any kind of spiritual sense seems to feel deeply in their bones that the atmosphere around us is turbocharged in a cataclysmic way, like the moment when everyone's hair is standing on end just before a powerful lightning strike. Your essay perfectly captures the zeitgeist of this historical moment! We've been in the eye of the hurricane these past few decades, but the tempest has returned.