Alfred Rethel, Driving home at night 1847[/caption]“The acceptance of the body and of finitude goes hand in hand with the acceptance of the state of not-knowing: an openness to the mystery of being. And this is the basis of paganism, and of radical Traditionalism.
Modernity is essentially a war against finitude or limitation of any kind. Modern people—openly or tacitly—reject the idea that there should be any limits on the mind’s ability to understand or to improve upon nature, or themselves. They regard the cycles of nature and the cycles of life as something to be overcome. Why shouldn’t youth last forever? Why can’t we overcome death? Why can’t we have babies in our seventies? Why can’t we engineer better tomatoes? Why can’t we spend more than we earn? Why can’t both parents have careers? Why can’t we have stable marriages and sleep with whomever we like? Why can’t money buy happiness? (It might not have in the past, but things have changed, haven’t they?) Why can’t we enjoy all our consumer goods, and still be “green”? Why can’t we have a cohesive society made up of people who share neither culture nor language? Why can’t women be as masculine as men and men be feminine? Why can’t Heather have two mommies?
We reject any suggestion that there may be necessities in life, meaning things that can only be one way, and not another. And we especially deplore the idea of biological necessity—i.e., the idea that the body may limit us. Radical Traditionalism is, at root, a call to return to our ancestors’ acceptance of finitude: their recognition that certain things are unchangeable, and that all attempts to change them lead to disaster. Paganism has the same root. “The gods” show themselves precisely in that which resists us. The gods are the mysterious facticities of life which stop us in our tracks because they are bigger than we are, and we are powerless against them. They are terrible, or beautiful, or both.
But how to return to the gods, or to get them to return to us? This is the question that nags radical Traditionalists and neo-pagans. How can we do this when all cultural forces are arrayed against us, and when we are all—if truth be told—children of modernity? Traditionalism teaches that we are living in the Kali Yuga, the Iron Age, the age of decline. In this time, the old ways seem to have lost their power. We are free to consult the runes and call to Odin. No Christians will burn us. But we do so fourteen floors up, as the air conditioner hums, and the Olestra gurgles in our innards. The earth, the water, the air, and our bodies have been developed, explored, cultivated, irradiated, and, generally, trashed.
In this age, the only honest path open to us is the left hand path: taking that which debases and corrupts lesser mortals and using it as a means to self-transformation. This is Tantra… What does it accomplish, exactly? Empty mind, full heart. The way back is not through mimicking the outer forms of the culture of our ancestors. It is through transforming our consciousness into some semblance of theirs. In other words, through taming the intellect and its tendency to fall into hubris; through silencing the mind and letting the wisdom of the body speak. As I said earlier, we did not spring upon this earth without any means to guide us, until modern rationalism came along. We came equipped with natural sentiments, instincts, and intuitions. It is these that must be recovered, for this is what it means to have a “full heart.” It is from such “empty” minds and full hearts that Traditional culture sprang. Once we have achieved this—if, indeed, we can achieve it—will we reconstitute those same cultural forms? In outline yes, for they are perennial and natural; in detail, no.
This is a path to be followed by individuals, without any assurances at all that they may be laying the ground for a new world, beyond the Kali Yuga. To achieve what I have described is to make of oneself an alien in this world, but a native of the next, or of the one that has passed away. It has nothing to do with “fighting for the future,” for the future focus is one of the traps of modernity: believing that a future ideal state may confer meaning upon life in the present. No, the Tantric path is a leap of faith and a leap into the abyss: a radical embrace of uncertainty, mystery, and finitude—with no guarantees.”
~ Collin Cleary, Summoning the Gods
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