Form: Excerpt

BECOMING OURSELVES ANEW

By Daniel Gurpide

It is impossible to ‘bring back the Greeks,’ i.e., resuscitate the pre-Christian world. A genuine Aryanism can only be neo-pagan and post-Christian, rather than merely pagan or pre-Christian, and revolutionary.

‘Neo-pagan’ because with the ‘death of God,’ the old gods that Christianity maintained indirectly alive as promise and nostalgia of a diverse world, also died. They metamorphosed into a mythical and exemplary return to the origins that make a new beginning possible.

Revolutionary in the proper sense of the word (re-volution, from the Latin revolutus, revolvere: to turn over, to return) because we want to ‘turn over’ the existing system of values, ‘change the world,’ and return to or reproduce a moment that was. Our attitude towards our present world should be similar to the one adopted by the first Christians towards the Greco-Roman world.

Before the development of diachronic linguistics, the Aryans or Indo-Europeans did not exist! The term ‘Indo-European’ may be used to classify fossils or bio-macrophysical remnants, and so doing might be considered appropriate in that history is founded on human biology. Nevertheless, we know that an historical Indo-European entity has never existed: no record has been found of a people calling themselves ‘Indo-European,’ or demonstrating awareness of possessing that identity. This is scarcely surprising: an historical fact finds its reality only at the level of human consciousness. The Indo-European fact does not enter history, does not become historical agent, until it is ‘discovered’: that is, until human consciousness, bound to a determined epochal perspective—a consciousness and a perspective which are ours—conceives it as the past of its own present.

It is no exaggeration to say that the Indo-European fact becomes such only in us and through us. It is the projection of ourselves onto the past; at the same time it is the reinvented myth through which we project ourselves into the future.

Indo-European roots are the source, the past of which we may be future heirs—but only if we dare to become what we are. For us, indeed, an effective response to the challenges of modernity must re-produce, readapt, and reinvent it: the Indo-European adventure. It is for this reason that we project the Indo-European inheritance twice: as re-presentation of the past—and as imagination and re-creation of the future.

The re-appropriation of our deepest roots entails, in itself, the rediscovery, valorisation, and defence of our identity as Europeans. By exclusion we may decide what is ‘originally’ ours—in the sense of being created by us, and in harmony with our own perception of the world, our own psyche—and what does not belong to us, but has been incorporated at a later stage, lacking authenticity and genuineness. If the two inheritances of the European world, Christian-Semitic and Indo-European, reveal themselves as irreconcilable, it is for us—the current heirs—to decide which is our own, original, and originative, and which is not.

Furthermore, in a world which has become planetary—and where Europe, at risk of losing its identity and independence, is condemned to transform its centuries-old ethno-cultural unity into an organic whole—the rediscovery of our common roots, of our affiliation with the Indo-European past, has immense political significance as foundation myth of a community of destiny of European peoples. A synthesis—political, ideological, and philosophical—capable of safeguarding European civilisation—can be articulated only by returning to the primordial source: to the cornerstone of European humankind—the core of our human specificity. There, the archetypes of our psyche can be reactivated anew.

INDO EUROPEAN RELIGION: THE PRIMACY OF MAN

by Daniel Gurpide

What is most striking when studying Indo-European cosmogony is the solemn affirmation, found everywhere, of man’s primacy. Indo-European cosmogony places a ‘cosmic man’ at the ‘beginning’ of the current cycle of the world. It is from him that all things derive: gods, nature, living beings—and man himself as historical being. In the Indian world, the Rig Veda names him Purusha; his name is Ymir in the Edda; and, according to Tacitus, he was called Mannus among continental Germans. For the Vedic Indians, Purusha is the One through whom the universe begins (again). He is ‘naught but this universe, what has passed and what is yet to come.’ In the same fashion, Ymir is the undivided One: and by him the world is first organised. His own birth results from the meeting of fire and ice.

The universe does not derive its existence from something not part of it. It proceeds from the being of cosmic man: his body, his gaze, his word—and his consciousness. There is no opposition between two worlds—between created being and uncreated being. On the contrary, there is incessant conversion and consubstantiality between beings and things, between heaven and earth, between men and gods.

In such a Weltanschauung, the gods are themselves a quarter of the cosmic man. They are superior men in the Nietzschean sense; in a certain way they perpetuate the transfigured and transfiguring memory of the first ‘civilising heroes’: those who brought humankind from its precedent stage—and truly founded, by ordering it into three functions, human society, Indo-European society. These gods do not represent ‘Good’—neither do they represent ‘Evil.’ Insofar as they represent sublimated forms of the good and evil that coexist, as antagonists, within life itself, they are both good and evil. Hence, each presents an ambivalent aspect—a human aspect. This explains why mythical imagination tends to split personality: Mitra-Varuna, Jupiter-Dius Fidius, Odin/Wotan-Tyr, etc. In relation to present humankind, which they have instituted as such, these gods correspond indeed to their mythical ‘ancestors’ and ideal models. Legislators, inventors of social tradition, they remain present, are still active. However, they also remain subject to fatum: destined in a very human way to an ‘end.’

In brief, we are referring not to creating gods, but rather to creatures—human gods who are, nevertheless, organisers-orderers of the world: ancestral gods for current humankind; gods who are great in both good and evil and who place themselves beyond such notions. On Olympus, says Heraclitus, ‘the gods are immortal men, whereas men are mortal gods; our life is their death and our death their life.’

the Proto-Indo-European creation myth.

by Alexander Zavialov

Manu and Yemo travel the cosmos accompanied by a celestial cow. Manu then kills either Yemo or the cow and Pater Dyeus creates the world using their remains. Manu becomes the first priest in the process and establishes the practice of sacrifice. A third man, Trito, comes into existence after the creation of the world and Pater Dyeus presents him with cattle. The cattle is stolen by a three-headed serpent and Trito recovers the cattle, either by himself or with the assistance of Pater Dyeus. Thus, Trito becomes the first warrior and ensures that the reciprocal cycle of mutual giving between gods and humans continues.