This may sound like much, dear reader, so let us move deeper into the subject of the Titans. Another excerpt from Polemos: The Dawn of Pagan Traditionalism addresses the nature of the Titans:
“The language of myth is inclusive, including the titanic and chthonic and calling it as such, as a dangerous enemy. The language of the titans, in its modern apogee, declares its exclusivity and exceptionality. It says that it is not titanic, for ‘there are no more Gods and titans, those relics of the childhood of mankind.’ It hides itself all the while as it, in its privative system, expresses its element.”
This passage is relevant in the light of Iain McGilchrist’s work on the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Outlining his concepts here would exceed the scope of this writing, but his work is invaluable, departing significantly from normative interpretations of hemispheric function. In summary, the left hemisphere governs survival, competition, and tools. It remains unaware of the right hemisphere’s existence. The right hemisphere remains aware of the left, integrating it within a broader gestalt vantage of reality. The right hemisphere integrates, perceives holistically, receives spiritual meaning, and holds depth beyond the left. Proper utilization of the brain as a conduit enlivened by the soul requires healthy integration of both, allowing life to unfold toward meaning, drawing ever closer to the sacred.
The Titans resemble the hyper-analytical left hemisphere. They conceal the holistic vantage from existence. They operate through ignorance and shadow. All physical form manifests from spiritual reality. The brain mirrors this structure, lower and higher aspects converging into existence and formation of meaning. Prometheus lacks a grasp of the gestalt whole. He appears as an emissary that usurps the master. The unintended consequences are lessons to learn from, the distance from life as apex is what must be corrected. In the correction itself is a deeper meaning than had he never stolen the fire, and from it the possibility of gaining greater complexity in the potential Heroic Age.
Opposition to the Titans or Jotuns through dualistic posture does not destroy them. These forces exist as inherent components of life and creation, requiring continual overcoming rather than denial. We must oppose those that embody them for their own greed and power for its sake, but recognize that those aiming to restore divine order and proper competition should not be opposed. Confrontation must occur from clarity, not reaction, lest the titanic framing dominate. Divine fire is not regained by rejecting all physical fire, once again creating a schism between the physical and spiritual in the world, but by rejecting the Technique of Prometheus which, at its foundation, seeks the comforts of herd animals through consumptive tool use over tools and fire as an extension of, and gift born from, our apex competition.
This regression repeats the same error: a return to the Devouring Mother that conceals, rather than confronts, the titanic. Creationism, as a reaction to materialist evolutionary theory, accepts the dualistic framing of the paradigm it opposes. It reinforces distortion rather than resolving it. True confrontation with the titanic requires reflection, integration, continual overcoming within the spiral of creation itself.
It is not the tool that is titanic, not inherently. It is the shadow of technique in shaping human organization and mechanization. That shadow must be continually overcome, and to do so it must be understood within its own realm. The blurring of Creative Impetus with Competitive Impetus is how each destroys the other in a consuming void. As McGilchrist notes in the division of the left and right hemispheres, the titanic seeks negation of its own existence. Only the divine apprehends both simultaneously, without collapse or confusion. To oppose the titanic in such a manner as to want to destroy it is to fall to it.
Once tools are unleashed, reversal is impossible, and even prior stages of tool use impose technique upon society. Many produced horrific conditions in the past, albeit a lot slower, but more insidious. Opposition to the tool itself achieves nothing, as the titanic is overcome only by overcoming the technique it generates displacing divine order and rule. That technique must be sequestered back into its proper sphere, and consciously limited to its rightful domain. What is required is direct rulership within a hierarchy of men, not passive social shaping by technique, nor tools as subject with man as object, a condition long predating the electro-technological revolution. That revolution only accelerated the process, sharpening the focus of what already existed.
Attempts to reset the Golden Age in its original sense demand total technological erasure, a return to cavemen or worse. This path negates the meaning of the entire cycle, the sacrifice contained in that cycle, and all the gifts of sapience itself. The Devouring Mother is cyclical, not a spiral, and without integration of the titanic, all meaning collapses. The entire cycle of the yugas of sapience is consumed, swallowed without overcoming and integrating it in the image of creation.
As Ellul states in The Technological Society:
“It is true that in all civilizations, technique has existed as tradition - that is by the transmission of inherited processes that slowly ripen and are even more slowly modified... that evolve under the pressure of circumstances along with the body social… that create automatisms that become hereditary and are integrated into each new form of technique. But how can anyone fail to see that none of this holds true today? Technique has become autonomous - it has fashioned an omnivorous world which obeys its own laws and which has renounced all tradition. Technique no longer rests on tradition but rather on previous technical procedures and its evolution is too rapid.”
Before addressing technological acceleration, the hidden technique of earlier stages must be acknowledged. Past societies were shaped by tools as well, and part of those traditions hold titanic elements in their core. The difference was speed, not essence, and the length before collapse or inflection allowed for greater decay. Authentic culture emerges only during barbarian interludes, not the primitive unnatural expansion often confused for it now. These collapses occur between civilizational cycles, as decadence exhausts itself through consumptive mechanisms. Culture is seeded in the barbaric collapse, reaches apex, then that lifeforce is transferred from hero to trader in the rise of a new civilization, and then it decays again.
Spengler was correct in this observation, as all cultures arise from barbarian seeding. Those remnants form the next civilization, which carries the seed of its own destruction. This pattern holds across all ages, without exception for this form of civilization as the trader continually subsumes the heroic. True culture exists at the apex of being, as the dominant warrior or hunting pack in communion with the divine. It exists within the spiral of life, not within the Devouring Mother and her many forms of behavioral sink.
READ MORE:
In Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life — an Arktos classic — Oswald Spengler foresaw that Western man would eventually grow weary of his increasingly artificial lifestyle and begin to hate the civilisation he himself created. There is no way out of this conundrum as the unrelenting progress of technological development cannot be halted. The current high-tech culture of the West is therefore doomed, destined to be consumed from within and destroyed. A time will come, Spengler writes, when our giant cities and skyscrapers have fallen in ruins and lie forgotten ‘just like the palaces of old Memphis and Babylon’. It remains to be seen if this last, and most dire, of Spengler’s prophecies will also come true.
When technology is unleashed without recognition of its ability to shape and distance people from living reality, consumption accelerates beyond comprehension and replaces bonds. Man has become object to his objects, as experiments of consumption multiply with endless confounding variables. Rapid changes in electro-technology’s technique destroys the search for unknown unknowns, and thus our understanding of reality itself. That search was the philosophical origin of science, while scientism is its counterfeit, a cheap acceleration and a destructive shortcut.
We must not reject our tools, but prevent their paradoxical use by binding them to their proper domain and reintegrating their understanding into the creative faculties of wonder and spiritual holism. Rather than unleashing technology in excess for the sake of excessive consumption, with innumerable confounding variables that obscure the harm we cause, we must limit its application to the competitive aspects of life and balance its use by rerooting its teaching to its spiritual origins. Mathematics and the sciences should be taught within their foundational spiritual understanding. The purpose of this is not to replicate the exact spiritual practices of their founders, but to illuminate the process by which innovation is rooted in spiritual creative wonder, so that the former does not become detached from the later.
By regaining control of our tools and structuring human organization into distinct domains of competitive and Creative Impetus, we bind technique and slow the pace at which it alters local living systems. We can then advance our spiritual and scientific understanding of reality more rapidly, because confounding variables of hyper production and consumption are reduced. By teaching STEM through reintegration with their spiritual origin and orientation, we will increase the creative output of new forms of understanding living reality.
The Promethean drive must be bound within its proper place in the Competitive Impetus, prevented from devouring the creative force of life. Without this binding, man does not advance, but retreats, at best into heroic reprieves such as Sparta or the Heroic Age. These sacrifices are temporary, as the Titans continue shaping human organization around us. We are eventually subsumed once again. This cycle must end, and part of the final revolution of technological innovation is that it illuminates the past and presents a choice between living as a herd or as a pack.
The Technological Inflection Point and the Stratocratic Global North
In The Rising NorthandStratocratic Revival, the aim was to structure human organization in a manner that restricts the titanic drive for consumption of the Competitive Impetus by preventing abstractions in which its shadow technique can fester. That drive is confined to stratocratic direct rule, exercised by the warrior estate as apex. Identity grows naturally, rooted in formative processes, later actualized within a stratocratic fraternity of men. Natural forces and natural ways of living need not be placed at odds with our tools, they must instead be balanced in their respective realms. In that structure, the Promethean element is bound tightly enough to prevent insidious technique from running wild and controlling us.
By maintaining less consumptive technological use within localities, authentic culture is allowed to develop with organic variation. Rearing is in wildness, and boys grow into an ordering of men where competition, wonder, and the overcoming of chaos are synergized. The wild heroic spirit is cultivated in youth, actualized in men at their prime, and extended outward through continual confrontation with disorder. Trader impulses are prevented by limiting abstract accumulative systems.
Local folk artistry, trades, and craftsmanship are freed from superfluous complication, as provisioning a stratocracy is not especially time consuming, especially not with some modern tools deployed locally, not in mass industrial systems. More natural living prevents social service systems drainage by fostering healthy people, creating far less inherent need for them. Best of all it frees up the third estate to create beautiful works of art, craftsmanship, and trades once again instead of cheap mass produced goods optimized for mass consumption and global extraction.
Unlike the Heroic Age or post-Lycurgian Sparta, the negative consequences of insidious technique cannot simply be delayed, they must be confronted directly. Retreat into past technical forms is impossible, such retreat if even possible would only rewind into a position that folds back into the present. This is a spiritual matter, the reclaiming of fire not through abandonment into physical darkness with only an inner light. Fire must be reclaimed by intensifying the inner flame with such longing for divine order and direct rule that it reflects outward into the physical world returning divine flame to the hearth. The physical realm is the playing field of the spiritual and this must be where it is taken, and given back to the gods.
The technological revolution presents a potential inflection point for a revival of the Heroic Age across the entire Global North, or a full reset that renders all preceding sacrifice meaningless. Natural local wildness is a powerful foundation for stratocracy, yet it cannot endure in isolation while the surrounding world consumes itself still using the life force of the heroic for the trader. This cycle may not be the first in this world, yet that does not matter, since such cycles arise wherever sapience emerges in any world. At this inflection point Faustian man may be freed, the hero trapped within the trader can overcome and then must seize the Age.
Hyper-production and hyper-consumption draw toward stasis, distance from danger, and the end of becoming attached to being folds back on and consumes itself. The choice is to roll the dice with the gods, or reset within the Devouring Mother who consumes the cycle and collapses the spiral of primordial evolution on this world.
The Heroic Age and post-Lycurgian Sparta are unique to us, as electro-technology is of the European Competitive Impetus alone. Electro-technology was unleashed consumptively, within a period that trade and currency already created the abstraction from which the Competitive Impetus is consumed. A reverse paradox emerged, technology burned through us so harshly that it loosened the bonds of currency technique of this Age by revealing its mechanistic nature to its full conclusion. That burning revealed what within our traditions belonged to the hero, and what belonged to the trader.
Desire to contain mechanization has been kindled within this fire, along with the desire for direct rule, wildness, and for authentic identity. The same technology has prevented the collapse of current civilizations for an arbitrarily long time, making only more visible the function of the barbarian in the micro-cycles, as well as the fact that a macro cycle shift will require an end to using the barbarians’ life force to propel abstract trader forms of civilization. By overcoming this titan and using its tools in their proper domain, integration into Divine Order becomes possible. From the Age that is burning away arises the possibility of something greater coming into being.
The rest of the world must be allowed to fall at the end of the Iron Age of money, while a Stratocracy of the Global North prevents trader civilization from reemerging. Propping up consumption by crossing competitive technology into excessive production for hominid expansion destroys life at its foundation. Their access to technology exists only through our lands, trade, or our aid, reinforcing globalist subjugation through the technique of our abstract legal and financial institutions. Without wild organic localities grounding identity, people remain unformed and uprooted. This process expands and urbanizes other races, harming everyone involved. Failure to reach the inflection point ensures eventual world collapse, a reset that harms life so greatly we lose what could be learned and what could be achieved.
Another Arktos classic:
Decades later, the New Right classic on combining technology and tradition, the Global North bloc, and the rebirth of the heroic spirit remains…
“Today’s contrast — tomorrow’s confrontation — is between North and South. We are already facing Archeofuturist challenges... The notion of the West is disappearing and being replaced by the idea of the Northern World or the North. As in the Middle Ages or Antiquity, the future requires us to envisage the Earth as structured in vast, quasi-imperial units in mutual conflict or cooperation… In a scenario of the economic fracturing of the planet, wide areas and sections of the population within the industrial countries of the North could perfectly well revert to traditional forms of economy with low levels of energy consumption and subsistence farming…”
A ruling stratocracy acting as apex in protection of Divine Order is the only way to oppose the titanic distance and rejection of the life and death cycle. Spiraling evolution can continue into the next cycle. Technology magnified problems already present, technique was always insidious though previously unseen. Only when it becomes recursive to itself can it be fully seen and then bound. It had to show itself in a horrible manner we have had to experience to understand it and contain it. The freedom of the hero is freedom from external imposition, of spiritual self-determination, and continually won on the edge of the food chain.
Now is the moment to win that freedom for our sons, not for the sons of distant lands through illusions of peaceful, productive and consumptive stasis. Artificial stalemate through universal gifting of the tools of Competitive Impetus causes the opposite since in a state of material mimetics nothing is ever enough. This equalizing on a macro scale is only the inversion of what equalizing on a micro scale does, destroying the whole. In real hierarchy there is freedom, freedom of the actualization of one’s nature within the whole as one body. All life requires differentiation, equalization is a stasis of anti-life, an emphasis on peace only expands for the next war at much greater scales.
Only through uniting the descendants of the Heroic Age into a stratocratic order, ending the trader and its technique, can the heroic be freed and multipolar localities arise. Within such a Heroic Age, competition can flourish without external subjugation. The titanic element is bound, no longer growing unseen around us. We must reach the inflection point to continue primordial evolution and birth a Heroic Age that encompasses the entire world with no external Age growing around it.
Arktos Journal survives because readers like you choose to sustain it. Every purchase and subscription goes directly toward taking risks on new authors, translating neglected thinkers, and publishing work that would never make it to you through the spectacle and censorship of institutional and commercial media.
We publish works rooted in archaic values, civilizational memory, and long-form thought, and have been doing so since 2009.
The editors do this out of conviction: a better tomorrow for Europeans is possible. If you value independent intellectual production that is willing to publish what others will not, support our project and make its continuation possible.
If you found Rose Sybil’s discussion of Trader vs. Heroic Ages thought-provoking, be sure to check out Werner Sombart’s classic Traders and Heroes, brought to you in English by Arktos:
