Bill White, Radical Traditionalism, (full text)

Radical Traditionalism is the doctrine of the occult and initiatic religious school created by the Italian Baron Julius Evola in the early and mid parts of the 20th Century. Because it is "occult" the doctrines it teaches are "hidden" (occult means hidden). To understand it requires research and study into areas of anthropology, history and religion that are concealed from the mainstream of the population, and which represent lost wisdom. Tradionalism synthesizes the major religions of culture -- the pagan faiths of Central America, Europe and Asia, as well as Stoicism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism and other major Eurasian cultural views. It is a non-Semitic religious tradition, meaning that it does not exist within the context of Judaism-Christianity-Islam, and it holds a generally negative views of those religions*.

What follows is the core "story" of Traditionalism, and its major beliefs. Because it is initiatic, the understanding of one idea in the faith is based upon the understanding of other, lesser ideas. By incrementally increasing one's understanding of this wisdom by degrees, one goes from the common understanding one has of the world to a deeper and more meaningful understand of the "hidden" underlying structure of the world. Because this knowledge is acquired by degrees, if one is exposed to the conclusions of a higher degree before one has understood the lesser ideas that support it, the idea is so divorced from the largely manufactured and artificial concepts of the modern world that it seems strange or ridiculous. Imagine being presented with the Bible stories if you had grown up in a culture without a Semitic religion as the dominant faith! However, as Evola points out, this doctrine was "normal" for all non-barbaric people of the world for millenia after millenia until just recently, where doctrines of the "dark side" -- things like progressive-"ism", liberalism, neo-conservatism, Bolshevism, globalism and the like have begun to destroy the real culture of all people, all over the world.

What follows is a distinctly normal view of the world, deeply rooted in your history and culture, whether you are Irish or Greek, Persian or Japanese, and it only seems so out of place in the context of the highly abnormal situation that has resulted from the convergence of a number of forces that have been developed over the past few centuries. I find the Traditionalist framework to be the best and most consistent context for understanding and explaining history and human social development, and the most useful in making predictive analysis of politics, culture and what makes a society prosper or fail. I don't ask anyone to convert to it, but I think it is important in judging a candidate to have a strong understanding of their underlying world view.

In the beginning, one race of man was civilized, and inhabited an area in the far North and in the Arctic. The other men of the earth were barbarians and animals, and incapable of acts of creation and reason. For reasons unknown -- likely a shift in climate -- the men of the North were forced out of their homeland, and began to settle the rest of the Earth in two cycles. The first cycle came South through the far North of Asia in what is called the Hyperborean cycle. The second came South through a large continent that once existed in the midst of the Atlantic ocean, and is known as the Atlantean cycle.

Approximately 10 millenia before Christ -- circa 10000 BC -- the continent of Atlantis was destroyed in a natural disaster that sunk it beneath the sea. In the time between the beginning of its settlement and its destruction, the people of Atlantis had spread across the earth and had settled North and South America, parts of Europe, Northern Africa, and Southern Asia. The Egyptian civilization in particular always considered itself a colony of Atlantis, and the prehistoric inhabitants of Ireland -- the Tuatha de Danaan -- and Greece -- the Danaans -- were likely offshoot of Atlantean culture. The Incas and the Aztecs, too, considered themselves to have been given culture by a superior sea-faring nation in the far North of the Atlantic.

In competition with the people of Atlantis, were the people of the Hyperborean cycle, who spread across the Earth in waves that included the Celtic, Germanic and Slavic invasions of Europe, the Northern invasions that led to the founding of ancient Greek culture, the Aryan invasion in India, the settlement of the Middle East and Persia, and the founding of Chinese civilization.

All of the major civilizations of world -- the Central American (Mayan), Northern European (Norse-Slavic-Celtic), Southern European (Greco-Roman), North African (Egyptian-Carthaginian), Middle Eastern (Babylonian-Assyrian-Persian), Indian, and Chinese -- thus have their root in one common civilization. That civilization is the civilization of Tradition. When men possessed Tradition, they lived in a state of bliss and perfect harmony with the universe and natural law. As they lost their homeland, and interbred with the lesser people that inhabited the Earth, their culture became diluted and they began to enter into cyclical decline.

Key to the structure of a Traditional civilization is the idea of caste. Caste is not a limiting factor, but it is a system of social organization that is designed to let each man best find a method of expressing who they are. There are four castes in every traditional culture, from the Irish-Celtic-Druidic to the Hindu Brahmans. There is the emperor-king, who is a servant of the divine, and who sits above all caste, and there is a religious caste that serves him. There is a warrior caste that enforces social order. There is a merchant caste that tends to material needs. And there is a worker caste that performs physical labor. These castes each have symbolic representations -- gold for the highest, followed by silver, copper/bronze, and iron/lead/stone.

Similarly, the two races of men -- those within Tradition and those without -- have symbolic representations in other fundamental dichotomies: male/female, light/dark, white/black, good/evil, North/South, sun/moon, sky/earth, and the like. In Hermeticism and alchemy, for instance, this relationship becomes mercury/sulfur, and the "gold" that the Philosopher's Stone is supposed to reveal is the Lost Emperor and Secret King of the Golden People.

Society is declining in cycles of the castes. In the beginning, the golden caste -- the religious caste -- ruled. It's rule was followed by that of the warrior caste. Currently, we are living in a time of the rule of the merchant caste. In time, society will degenerate to the rule of the worker caste, and then society will self-destruct, being consumed in fire in a final battle between the forces of Tradition and the forces of "progress" and anti-Tradition. When the final "progressive" society is destroyed by fire (my guess is nuclear fire, but that's just my guess), from the ashes will arise the Secret King -- the true Emperor that once ruled over the regions of the Arctic -- and he will restore the Earth to the Golden Age. Those familiar with Norse myth can think Ragna Rokkr, Baldur, and the release of spirits from Valhalla.

Each cycle of the caste is characterized by its particular vice. Without an Emperor-King, the religious caste loses its center, and cannot function. Without a religious caste to control it, the warrior caste collapsed society into feudalism and war. The merchant caste used this as an excuse to turn them out, and then plunged civilization into an age of greed. The worker states that emerge will be characterized by an age of slavery.

Given that decline is inevitable, there is no question of reversing history. However, one cannot abandon society to "progress", either. One has to stand up among the ruins of civilization and conduct one's self according to the codes of honor that have been lost, and one must constantly fight against the suicidal destruction that society is hurling itself toward. By standing up and conducting one's self properly according to one's caste, one transcends one's current material form and becomes a spiritual entity that will be reincarnated in the final confrontation and destroyed to restore to the world its original form. By transcending material reality one becomes eternal and immortal. The body becomes an avatar of the universal spirit and the soul becomes unified with the eternal soul. It's a very good state of affairs to be in, because material discomforts -- pain, fear, unhappiness and the like -- cease to exist as a state like Nirvana, Zen, or "Oneness with the Tao" replaces normal existence.