Decadent Chronicles 7: LARP Against the Modern World
by Christian Chensvold
Christian Chensvold urges men to take up the sword: what computer-bound critics dismiss as another pastime for consumption can, given the right inspiration and spiritual bearings, become a transcendent experience and rekindle the fire of ancestral tradition.
LARP, or Live Action Role Play, is a term used pejoratively in the underworld of the internet by anti-woke dystopian serfs unable to locate within themselves a higher reference point.
There is no barbarian living within them (principle of wild freedom), warrior (controlled agression), hero (transformative quest), or king (principle of lordship). They are not aristocrats of the soul. They are oppressed by the process of civilizational decline, not liberated by it, and any archetypal revolt against the modern world is dismissed as “LARPing.”
But for restless souls seeking a release that seems impossible to fulfill without aggression, you must LARP. You must LARP because you are living through the most extreme moment in the history of your people, and you can’t go through it as a consumer-drone. Only those who actually are consumer-drones can do that, which is not anybody reading this.
Women are already doing it. Look at all the books on witchcraft at your local bookstore, and all the social media channels devoted to it. Women are summoning infernal powers and displaying it before your eyes, covering themselves with demonic tattoos and piercings suggesting mind-possession by the principle of darkness. They are also screaming in groups, menstruating into Mother Earth, and all while filming themselves and uploading it to the Internet. You stand no chance against these elemental matriarchal forces of mass recollectivization of the Kali Yuga. You have no Jason to slay the Hydra, no Perseus to kill the gorgon, and no Van Helsing with occult knowedge of how to fight evil on the immaterial plane. All your archetypes are in the graveyard. In the old days, incidentally, men of European blood could discern the distinction between “cemetery,” which is Latin, and “graveyard,” which is Saxon. The former sounds poetic, the latter is like a Viking blow to your gut.
To begin LARPing your way out of the dystopian matrix, I sugggest you consider the greatest symbol of evil-destroying and civilization-forging: the sword.
When I was two years of age, I terrorized other toddlers who came into “my” sandbox with a wooden spoon. At the age of seven, I watched with fascination the light sabers of Star Wars, and at 18 I took up fencing, eventually becoming a college champion under a Hall of Fame master. Recently I acquired a quality wooden training sword of Spartan design, which I painted bronze and covered with a grip, and it has completely changed the experience of hiking in nature, to the point where it now feels strange to go into the woods without it.
Hiking shirtless with a sword in your hand will pull the latent spirit from your blood. Remember Evola’s teachings: the blood carries the spirit, and the spirit carries the race. Decapitate dried branches as you pass, and the sword will begin to become an extension of you, and ancestral knowledge will teach you how to wield it more efficiently. You’ll discover, for example, that over-extending after contact is a terrible fault, taking your weapon out of line for the next move, like throwing a punch so wildly it pulls you off-balance. You’ll also notice the difference between releasing the arm angle early versus leading with the elbow and extending through the target. In the first instance you will cut the branch and it will merely fall, while in the second, holding the elbow angle a microsecond longer (conservation of angular momentum), the severed branch will fly 20 feet.
You need to LARP like this because the highly organized foreign invaders in Europe are already combat training for the moment when they will be able to claim your homeland as their own. They have a warrior prophet, loyal womenfolk, and a god who demands death to the infidel. You have “representative democracy” and a consumer economy.
My first experience of LARPing an invocation of the old gods came spontaneously in 2017 in Newport, Rhode Island. I dramatized the experience in my book Dark Stars: Heroic Spirituality in the Age of Decadence, from which the following excerpt is taken.
* * *
In order to subdue fear through pure action and claim the right of transformative power, it is necessary to cultivate a spiritual practice, the center of which is the ritual action.
Rites are not simply devotional prayers but sacred actions that confer an otherworldly quality upon the practitioner emanating from the very core of his being, thereby giving him the qualitative distinction to become hero, knight, sage, mage, initiate, or sacred king.
The magic of the ritual action is that it makes the adept illumined, or lit from within. One does not simply believe something — for it is not necessary to believe what one knows to be true — and the rite is the establishing of contact and communion between the adept and his guiding spirits.
In the Age of Iron, establishing contact with the old gods requires transcendent experiences. “One morning,” The Knight explained, “I found myself standing before the waters below the castle ruins. Inclined to bathe but hesitant due to the arctic water, I stood on the shore mulling over every excuse not to go in. But then my mind’s eye opened and I saw inside my imagination, which aligned with the will of the ancient spirits and became active. I saw visions of ancient Greece, and strange energies began activating in the quickening pulse of my blood.”
“Poseidon!”, I shouted into the misty morning, “I challenge you!”
The Knight dove into the water and swam as furiously as if he were racing the God of the Sea himself. By the time he paused to catch his breath, the shoreline was far behind him. He had never before ventured this far into open water. Suddenly the water felt frigid, his limbs rigid, and The Knight felt he had gotten himself into a fatal situation.
But then a voice came from the same place as the ancient images that had appeared in my mind’s eye. “‘Race you back!”, the voice said to me, and all at once I felt as if Poseidon himself were there with me in the water and would never let me drown.
The Knight swam to shore, exited the waters in a state of exhilaration, and spent the rest of the day in an exalted state, stunned that a morning bathe could elevate his spirit to such heights.
“In recollection,” he explained, “I understand what had happened. In summoning the gods, I had made profane life instantly sacred, magically infused with metaphysical meaning and pulsating with power. And the medium through which this took place was the imagination, which I now understand as a faculty not simply for the passive fantasizing of things that don’t really exist but for actively connecting with immaterial things that actually do.”
The gods only turned their backs on humanity when humanity turned its back on them. They still hear the call of heroic seekers of the spirit and watch over those they deem worthy and confer upon them their attributes. But the ancient wisdom contains a doctrine that in order to truly know a thing one must experience it, and in order to do that one must become the thing, shattering the conventional barrier between subject and object, or I and not-I.
In the era of dissolution, when conventional heroic paths are closed, the spirit seeker must invent his own experiences that transport him into archetypal realms of consciousness. The forest and sea, mountain and valley, become training grounds for body and spirit, where the initiate creates physical trials, such as cliff ascents, followed by rites such as reading from sacred books while burning incense, sending words and smoke through the veil separating this realm from the invisible one that envelops it, for the lesser is always contained within the greater.
Over time the invocation of the gods and the power of the rite will begin to infuse every aspect of life. The tradition of heroic spirituality wraps around the initiate like a cloak, permeating his entire being, and he walks through the fallen world lit by a supernatural fire.
* * *
In short, with nothing in modern life for your soul to interact with, you become like Don Quixote, imagining yourself a noble knight from centuries before. The 1965 Hollywood musical The Man of La Mancha includes the song “The Impossible Dream (The Quest).” Consider its lyrics very carefully, and if you wish to hear them sung, I suggest the version by Jack Jones:
To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not goTo right the unrightable wrong
To love pure and chaste from afar
To try when your arms are too weary
To reach the unreachable starThis is my quest
To follow that star
No matter how hopeless
No matter how farTo fight for the right
Without question or pause
To be willing to march into hell
For a heavenly causeAnd I know if I’ll only be true
To this glorious quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm
When I'm laid to my restAnd the world will be better for this
That one man scorned and covered with scars
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable star
This is what LARPing means, and if you don’t feel stirred when you read these words, then you deserve to be decapitated by enemies who are real-life LARPing your demise.
READ MORE of the Decadent Chronicles series:
Boys need to be boys
I feel vindicated that my gym playlist is the CK2 OST