The Happy Kingdom of Siam

According to certain reports in the international media in recent times, the poor people of the Kingdom of Siam – occasionally called ‘Thailand’ – are “suffering” for the lack of democracy. The present author, who has now been travelling through this same Kingdom for over a month, however, must report to the contrary. The overwhelming impression one has of the country and its people is that it is generally prosperous, well-ordered and, on the whole, happy. The only sign of discontent the author has encountered has been an old Siamese gentleman standing at the traffic lights complaining about the proliferation of automobiles and pining for the old days of rickshaws and horse-drawn carts. Otherwise, the people of Siam are unusually peaceful and cheerful in their demeanor. This cannot be universally true, but it is all the same an accurate generalization as any number of the tourists who flock there every year can confirm. Suffering? Hardly. There is some poverty to be seen, especially in rural pockets, but no destitute beggars on the streets such as one finds in many other places, and the general reception one receives from people across the whole spectrum of Siamese society is warm, generous and friendly. You would expect a “suffering” people to be dour, surly, bitter. There is nothing of that.

Some people attribute the warm and felicitous disposition of the Siamese to Boodhism, for the Kingdom of Siam is officially Boodhist with some ninety percent of the population subscribing to the Theravadan mode of Boodhist thought. An acquaintance of the author opines that a long heritage of Theravadan Boodhism has made the Siamese “soft” and “gentle” in their manner. This is possibly so. There is a Boodhist ambiance and wats – temples – in every town. Perhaps it has contributed to the national temperament, and if so it is to be commended for that. But there are surely other factors too, some of which are evident to even a casual visitor and which become more obvious once one knows something of the history and deeper culture of the land. No doubt the Boodhism contributes to the strong sense of social cohesion in Siam, but so too, for certain, does the strength and endurance of the nation’s monarchy. If there are Boodhist temples in every town, there are portraits of the king, and of the royal family, everywhere as well. Every café, every school, every public building, but also every home, is adorned with pictures of the king, King Bhumibol, (his full title is Phra Bat Somdet Phra Paraminthra Maha Bhumibol Adulyadej Mahitalathibet Ramathibodi Chakkrinaruebodin Sayamminthrathirat Borommanatthabophit) who is not only respected but genuinely loved by his people. This is a very strong and healthy monarchy. It is a striking feature of the nation, especially for those of us who come from countries where monarchies have degenerated into mere parodies of what they once were and where, in fact, the very notion of monarchy is treated as an anachronistic embarrassment by the intellectual elites. The Kingdom of Siam, the Boodhist Kingdom of Siam, remains a viable monarchy and the people of the nation are united in their love for the king and the institution of the monarchy. The nation was ruled by absolute monarchs for many centuries. This changed to constitutional monarchy in the early XXth century, but the monarchy has remained strong, an emblem of tradition and continuity.

The practical effect of the monarchy is, as this author has witnessed everywhere he has gone thus far, to bind the people into a single kinship. It is instructive to see a real monarchy in operation. It gives to a society a locus of veneration, but more importantly it universalizes the value of family. For monarchy, finally, is about family. Other societies might be conceived to be social contracts, or be modeled on corporations, or – worse still – be understood to be types of machines (the State as machine, the model of the technocrat), but a monarchy, in theory and practice, concerns the State as family. Monarchy is about kinship. It is not necessarily racial or ethically static – since people from outside can marry into family – but even then citizens are bound into a single family structure at the head of which is the king (and by extension the queen, princes, princesses and the wider royal family and aristocracy.) This is what gives the Kingdom of Siam such a strong sense of social cohesion. The present author is invited into Siamese homes. There, on the wall, invariably, are pictures of the homeowner’s family, their mother and father, and ancestors, and children, but among them – or usually over them – is a picture of the king. He is regarded as the head of the greater family. He is like everybody’s great-grandfather. He is woven into every family structure. Reverence for him is as sincere as reverence for one’s family elders. There can be no question that this permeates Siamese society with such values as respect, dignity, mutuality and makes the Siamese into a people bound not so much by a pompous, confected nationalism such as one finds in modern republics, but by a living, genuine, concrete sense of family unity. The fact that there might be miscreants, criminals and malcontents in Siamese society, as everywhere, does not undermine the more considerable fact of a palpable social cohesion and common purpose. It is a happy kingdom, a place where – contrary to all the cynicism and selfish bitterness typical of Westerners – we can see the real virtues of monarchy still alive and functioning today.

But, but, but… stammer the leftist liberals and so-called ‘democracy activists’ and ‘human rights advocates’. The only ‘but’ is that the Kingdom of Siam does not conform to the narrow expectations of Western elites. People can be charged and jailed for the crime of lese majeste – speaking ill of the king. Is this not an outrage against the god of “free speech”? And, in fact, the country is administered by the army and a National Council of Peace and Order, with the king as a figurehead with merely residual powers. Is this not an affront to ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’? This is where some will claim that the people of the nation are “suffering”. The truth, though, is that they are not, and that – inconceivable as it may seem to Western liberals, left and right – the country is well-run, peaceful, prosperous and orderly even though it is not a liberal democracy. 

The history is instructive. In the 1920s Western-educated intellectuals agitated for “modern democracy” and ended centuries of absolute monarchy. But then, almost immediately, the unity of the nation was shattered and it fell into civil turmoil since “democracy” is, after all, a type of ritualized civil war between contending interests, specifically capital and labour. The country fell apart. At this, the army – the one remaining stable institution, along with the monarchy – stepped in to restore order. And so it has been ever since. Western-educated intellectuals, and their Western backers, agitate for “democracy”. Then the cohesion of the country is broken. Then the army – on behalf of the king - saves it from self-destruction. The demonstrable fact is that it is a nation that functions very well, and enjoys prosperity and peace, under the monarchy, but which quickly falls into disarray under the artificial, imported structures of “democracy”. It seems clear that most Siamese are perfectly happy to be living under the benign care of the National Council and the watchful paternalism of the king. It is only a small, spoilt, vicious, Westernized, urban elite that thinks that “democracy” is the gold standard in constitutions. In this respect, Siam bears the fruit of never having been a European colony. The Kings of Siam were always too canny for the European colonial powers. And consequently, the intellectual life of the nation was never infected with the lasting poison of an anti-colonial independence movement such as one finds in, say, India, which insists on “democracy” as the measure of self-government. There is a destructive pro-democracy movement in Siam, to be sure, but it is not a systemic toxin for all of that. 

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For the present author, these points are of particular interest given his long-held affinity to the philosophy of Plato, which philosophy is, of course, essentially political in nature. Plato is a political philosopher first and foremost. And the good Kingdom of Siam invites several meditations upon Platonic political themes. Most famously, Plato wrote an account of a supposedly ideal state, the Republic, but there is also the dialogue called the Laws, and that called the First Alchibiades, and many others, which bear upon directly political questions. Socrates, wisest and most just, let us recall, was put to death by the Athenian democracy. So the Socratic Plato was no democrat. Indeed, he is the most comprehensive and deepest critic of the democratic system and democratic theory. In a place such as the Kingdom of Siam we can see stark illustrations of his critique, as well as at least bare outlines of the sort of alternatives he proposed based on his analysis of polities. Make no mistake, it is not an “ideal state”, and no one is suggesting so, but neither is it a tyranny under which its people are “suffering” just for a lack of popular elections. Pornography, narcotics and gambling are all illegal, but it is hardly a joyless, puritanical place, as, again, its booming tourist industry attests. The streets are clean, the beer is cheap, the children are polite, the women are petite, the food vendors are full of smiles – not, your average “military dictatorship”. The assumption that liberal democracy is the only possible mode of government under which a people can be content is one of the most infantile falsehoods of our time. Siam is not a democracy but it is assuredly a well-governed state.

Plato’s political theories are complex to say the least and they overlap at every juncture with his metaphysics, psychology and much more, but central to them is the observation that there are three fundamental groupings of forces in both a state and a man: the ‘appetitive’, the ‘emotive’ or 'spiritedness' (thumos) and the ‘rational’ (nous). These may be observed in any society, but specifically the appetitive classes are those concerned with production and consumption, the ‘spirited’ class with the heroic impulse, and so with war and defense, and the rational with contemplation, guidance, rulership. In a modern democracy society is ruled by the appetitive classes, producers and consumers, capital or labour, who compete in elections for the right to govern. This is, as we said above, a type of ritualized civil war which, at best, is prevented from destroying civil society with open conflict by a system of agreed but always precarious checks and balances. It is a fragile thing, as Plato knew, and its weaknesses eventually erode civil purpose and lead to chaos. This is what happened in Siam in the 1920s, and then again with regularity in the 1950s, 1970s, 1990s and so on.

The state of chaos in a degenerative democracy is then an invitation to tyranny. Typically, some strong man from one or other of the warring forces takes control. The modern era is so replete with examples of this terrible outcome we need not list them. Representatives of business – Chile’s Pinochet – or else labour – Castro’s Cuba – seize power and oppress their rivals. Democracy degenerates into class war, and then into dictatorship, left or right. Plato forsees this, and earnestly seeks to avoid it. His politics is not predicated upon a class-war model. He is, above all, confident that the conflicting interests in a polity can be harmonized and that a harmonious unity can be achieved where each of its parts can flourish without it being at the expense of others. But this can only be done by empowering the higher faculties and those that embody them. A rational and virtuous order can be attained, and labour and capital can be restrained from destroying each other, by directing a society towards a higher unity and a common good.

In the Republic – admittedly a theoretical ideal and not a programme for action - this takes the form of a class of reluctant ‘Guardians’ who must surrender their own liberties in order to rule in wisdom and righteousness for the sake of all. At best it is a type of philosophical theocracy. It is rarely to be seen, Socrates says, and more commonly it takes the form of some type of aristocracy, and indeed in practical terms Platonic politics is essentially aristocratic. Thus do Platonists look well upon most manifestations of monarchy, because at very least a monarchy – and its aristocracy – entails a class of people who are trained and dedicated and raised to the task of ruling from birth, and though they may live in an atmosphere of opulence and fine taste (contrary to the more austere Platonic ideal), they are removed from the grubby intrigues of commerce (they are aristocrats, not tycoons!) and live under the quite severe restraints of custom and tradition and duty.

What we see in the Kingdom of Siam is the second order – the ‘emotive’ 'spirited' class, which is to say the army, whose primary virtue is valor and courage – taking control in order to prevent the warring appetitive classes from wrecking the fabric of the nation. But, happily, instead of some army general taking control and appointing himself tyrant – as we saw in, say, Idi Amin, or Colonel Gadaffi, or Sadam Hussein, any number of them! – the junta in this case took a far more Platonic strategy. They were able to do so by drawing upon the continued strength of the age-old monarchy. Certainly, His Highness King Bhumibol, like any modern king, is not the Philosopher-King of Plato’s Republic, but he is a refined man of wide education, virtuous, benevolent and not without wisdom. Moreover, he is a religious figure: the monarchy is thoroughly integrated into the Boodhist tradition of the land. His image stands beside Boodhas, monks, perfected Arhats and holy men in every temple throughout the nation. He is a pious man of transcendent sensibility. In our age it is probably as much as one can hope for.

The whole problem of Platonic politics, let us state plainly, is to find some virtuous authority that is above and beyond the murderous, envy-driven scumbag working class, firstly, and the devious, corrupt, greed-driven and parasitic business class as well, two groups of the appetitive temperament always seeking to tear each other apart; an authority that will allow these two parties to go about their proper purpose unimpeded and that will govern not in the interests or this or that sectional group but in the common good, guided by higher ideals. In the case of Siam, this role has been taken by the National Council for Peace and Order, guardians of the common good on behalf and with the tacit support of His Highness the king. It is not, by any means, an ideal Platonic arrangement, but it is understandable in the framework of Platonic political theory. The army – royalists and patriots – have saved the country from civil war again and again, and have prevented the advent of both degenerative democracy and the inevitable tyranny that is its eventual outcome. Those who clamber for democracy – let us also be clear – are driven by ideological delusions or else by the urge to seize power through the manipulation of the popular will in order to further not the national interest but their own sectional self-interests (dressed up, as usual, as "rights"). That is always the way in democracies, with very rare and brief exceptions. The Kingdom of Siam is an object lesson in these political processes, exactly as described in the dialogues of Plato. 

Long live the King!

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Themes in Nikolai Astrup

“At last, Nikolai Astrup is getting the recognition he deserves!” This was the attitude widely promulgated among the art fraternity when the work of the early XXth century Norwegian painter was shown in London for the first time not long ago. What they meant, of course, was that – at last – the Norwegian master, always acclaimed in his native land and revered by Norwegian nationalists but shamefully ignored everywhere else, was being recognized by important Guardian-reading cosmopolitan sophisticates like themselves. Is there any more loathsome, unctuous group of self-regarding parasites than the modern art establishment? When they “discover” an artist – whom they had previously neglected - it is like the artist is suddenly blessed with amazing good fortune. This is now the fate of poor Astrup. Namedroppers are suddenly dropping his name at every exhibition opening from London to Berlin. This is after nearly a century of him remaining blissfully to one side of mainstream European art, a well-kept secret among discerning outsiders.

What Astrup has always remained outside of is the puerile art orthodoxy that elevated and celebrated the neurotic modernist decadence of Astrup’s fellow Norwegian, Edvard Munch. Astrup despised Munch. The two artists – contemporaries – could hardly have had more opposing interests. Munch was a representative of dreary, expressionist, urban existential angst. Astrup, rather, was a rural conservative, religious, a farmer, a father of eight children to a child bride, an artist on a quest for an authentic, luminous visual language for his nation and his folk heritage. Munch became a modernist icon. Astrup was loved by his countrymen but dismissed as “neo-romantic” beyond Norway’s borders, and as far as the European establishment was concerned he sank into oblivion. They have belatedly “found” him again, and now he is all the rage. “You don’t know Astrup? Oh, please!”

His “discovery” is, all the same, timely. It comes as a new nationalist consciousness is returning to Europe after cracks – or yawning chasms – have appeared in the European Union’s Marxist multicultural project. Faced with the disintegration of their distinctive cultures into an egalitarian sludge, Europeans are reawakening to the value of identity, tradition and heritage. In this context, an artist such as Astrup comes into his own. His work embodies the values of the New Right: family, soil, work, kinship, nation, blood, beauty, cosmic integrity, the mystique and communion of ancient custom. Let us witness some examples:

The primary traditional value celebrated in the works of Astrup is location. Other than a few brief trips abroad, he spent the whole of his short life living on a farm on the shores of a Norwegian lake (Jølstravatnet) and the farm itself, the lake, mountains and scenery thereabouts, along with his family, form almost the entire subject matter of his art. It is an art of rootedness and locale. The picture, above, is the farm where he lived with his wife and eight children. (Note the cold frames in the garden.) 

He often painted the same scene from exactly the same view at different times of the year or day. Again: location. And the cyclic passage of time. The cycle of the year. One of the main concerns of his work is the integration of traditional man with the cosmos. Traditional man is rooted in location, but also in the cycles of time. Modern, decadent man - celebrated in the endorsed modernist art of Munch and co - is essentially non-geographical and a-temporal, a celebration of the spurious "freedom" of being adrift. Astrup's work is the precise opposite. Location is concrete, steady, permanent. It is an art of cosmic integration. This is the metaphysics of his landscapes, which are among the most beautiful and lyrical by any XXth century European painter:

Astrup was not naif; he was fully informed about the movements in modern art. He very deliberately chose to turn his back on them and to remain at Jølstravatnet immersed in a simple rural life with his family. He has a remarkably sure sense of his own style and what he wants to paint. He is, above all, grounded. There is no sense of the erratic, the decadent, the experimental. This is an artist who knows what he loves: his family, his country. It is not an art of rootlessness and inner conflict. 

The heavy lines, solidity and rich colours that Astrup brings to nordic landscapes is strongly reminiscent of the style of Nicholas Roerich.  But whereas Roerich - a Russian painting in Tibet and the Himalayas - looked to Boodhism, Astrup's landscapes are embued with a darker and more primeval magick. Many of his landscapes are haunted with ghostly figures of a former age. These are not secular, sanitized landscapes - they are not about land as property. There is a sense of a dark anima, a spirit of the land, much like the kami of Japan. 

A landscape haunted by the figure of corn stores

The spirituality in Astrup's work is a folk spirituality. Insofar as he is religious, his religion is cosmic, not moral or sentimental. His depictions of pagan festivals are probably his best known works in modern Norway:

Midsummer Night. Astrup painted many depictions of the midsummer bonfire festival, a celebration of ancient Norway's pagan roots. Biographies never fail to mention the fact that his father, a Christian pastor, frowned upon such festivities and forebad his children to attend them. As an adult Astrup took particular delight in them, although often in these paintings there is a lone figure watching the festivities from afar. We see people (folk) engaged in communion with the land and with the haunted spirit of the land. Through these festivals they engage with and become part of the great cycles of land and sky. Fire, the primal human element. 

It is in this landscape that man must live. Much of Astrup's art concerns agriculture, farming and domestic rural life - landscapes with men and women at work. The landscape is not always empty. 

Again, this is a celebration of traditional values: labour, soil, simplicity. And again, Astrup liked to underline the cycle of the seasons - the cosmic integration of rural labour - by painting the same scene, from the same viewpoint, several times:

A personal favourite of the present author. Picking rhubarb.

Then there is family and kinship. These are some of the most deeply conservative and most beautiful of Astrup's paintings. The artist married a young women, barely fifteen years old, and fathered eight children with her. Family, marriage and kinship are the human cosmos within the context of the land and the sky.  

Finally, interior and domestic scenes, and still life. The traditional love of the domestic world and its fruits, domestic economy, is a constant theme in Astrup's work. 

Astrup died quite young, in his late forties, from respiratory disease. But he was a prolific painter. The samples provided on this current page should be enough to demonstrate what a great artist he was and how the neglect to which he has been subject by the wider art establishment must rate as one of the scandals of modern art - and how insulting is his recent "rediscovery". Readers are invited to compare his work to that of Munch. Astrup complained that anything Munch did - any lousy squiggle, any rough sketch - was hailed as a masterpiece, while Astrup himself remained ignored. This injustice was entirely ideological. Munch pandered to the tastes of the liberal art establishment. Astrup, on the other hand, was a conservative whose paintings celebrated deeply conservative themes. His works became loved in traditional Norway, but they were too conservative for the cosmopolitan elites. These same elites, let us note, have of recent times undermined traditional life in Norway, as elsewhere, mainly through the strategy of mass immigration. The tensions unleashed by this strategy were seen in the political killings perpetrated by the nationalist extremist Anders Behring Breivik. Today, Norwegian society is increasingly torn. It is in this context that Astrup is being "rediscovered" and in this context his work and the themes he celebrates takes on a new poignancy and relevance. He emerges as one of the great conservative painters - in theme rather than style - of the modern era. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Volcano of the Revolutionibus

This post, made in response to a request from a reader, celebrates one of the author's most enduring heroes, the eccentric British aristocratic master gardener Alan Chadwick. The author's article concerning the cosmology of Mister Chadwick, entitled 'Volcano of the Revolutioninbus', first appeared on the pages of www.alan-chadwick.org, a very worthwhile site, and can be accessed here.

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Chadwick in action - gardening as ballet

“And suddenly… the revolutionibus enters the entire magic of the matter.”

Over the decade or so of years that Alan Chadwick spent bringing a new organic horticulture to North America he developed a dynamic and admittedly eccentric vocabulary for describing his methods and his philosophy. Anyone who knew Chadwick and attended his lectures or has since read transcripts of his talks will certainly be aware of this; he employs an odd phraseology, is happy to mangle certain terms and often seems to invent new words on the run. His style was unique and to those unaccustomed to it somewhat baffling. The lucidity of his gardens spoke for itself - here was a man of enormous rapport with and insight into the deepest processes of nature, and especially the plant realm. But how does one explain it to others? He often complained of the inadequacy of words and denounced the perverse “verbosity” of the “word-mind” as he called it. The great truths, he believed, as he said in one lecture, “come through the corridor of the mind without words.” Thus he sometimes struggled to find the words he needed. And thus his verbal habits sometimes lurched into an opaque idiosyncrasy.

In the Chadwick lexicon no word is more idiosyncratic and more opaque than the word “revolutionibus”. He picked up this archaic Latinism somewhere on his travels, most likely from the title of Copernicus’ famous tome De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) added it to his collection of strange phrases, and began to use it over and over. It became a regular fixture in his terminology, a feature in his repertoire. Towards the end of his life he used it describe the very centre-piece of his philosophy of nature. Indeed, in the later Chadwick, all is revolutionibus! “Everything in nature is life into death into life. It is revolutionibus!” he says in the talk ‘Nature’s Medicine Chest’. For some people it made a lasting impression. Chadwick was the guy - the kooky genius - who went on about this “revolutionibus” idea. On surviving tapes of his lectures you can sometimes hear, or at least sense, sections of the audience wryly smiling to themselves, “There goes Alan, on about his revolutionibus again...” According to some accounts, the revolutionibus was the abiding theme of the talks he gave from his death bed during his last days at the Buddhist hospice at Green Gulch Farm in 1980.

It must be said, though, that it remains unclear exactly to what the word refers. Chadwick is sometimes hard to follow, and never more so than when he starts to punctuate his performances - because this is what his talks were - with this most pregnant of words. When we look through the transcripts of his talks from various times and venues, we find that the term is applied in a wide range of contexts and with meanings that seem to shift and change. Most often it seems to have an astronomical significance more or less in the Copernicean sense, namely that it refers to the revolving heavens above us. This is the sense he is using it in a passage from a talk entitled ‘The Great Herbaceous Perennial Border’. Referring to vistas of landscape he says:

You perceive these great sweeps leading either to lakes, over hills, over woods, into forests, up mountains, suddenly into the total sky and the stars forever, where everything comes from, the revolutionibus!

Here the revolutionibus is, evidently, the total system, the universe, the cosmos.

Similarly, in a talk on propagation the term refers to cosmic totality:

When the seed forms, an embryonic performance takes place in the flower, from the planet it is governed by, and by the revolutionibus in toto, of course, as well.

Elsewhere when talking about planetary influences upon the vegetative world he uses the word in a similar way. In a talk about the fragaria, the strawberry, he says:

When you go into Origin, you can repeat the birth out of the invisible to identity. It’s obviously coming from the same planet, the planet to influence the revolutionibus.

He would be infuriated by any suggestion that such a statement is at all cryptic, which it is, but it is clear that the revolutionibus is again an astronomical system coloured or influenced in this case by one or other of the planets. Different planetary configurations influence the revolutionibus.

Often, drawing further from Renaissance cosmology, Chadwick makes additional distinctions when he discusses this concept, and points to the “Primum Mobile” and the “Secundus Mobile”, the primary and secondary wheels of the Copernicean model. His interest in this is in the way that, though they are cycles, they never repeat the same configuration twice. The dynamism of this fact is very dear to him and central to his vitalist philosophy. The wheels of the cosmic revolutionibus turn one upon the other, planets and fixed stars, but they do so in such a way that every instant of time is unique in itself, every moment of time is a fresh creation. This is the chief characteristic of Chadwick’s living universe; the revolutionibus imparts uniqueness to every breath and heartbeat of time. Otherwise, the universe would be static and dead. The patterns of the heavens above us are ever changing. As Plato relates in his cosmological work Timaeus, when all the cycles of the heavens are exhausted time is complete and the living universe ends. Chadwick uses revolutionibus in this sense very often. It is a catch-word for the living, pulsing, vital, ever-changing universe within which the gardener practices his art. We need merely look up at the stars in the sky, the operations of the Primum Mobile and the Secundus Mobile wheeling against each other, to appreciate this reality. He states in one talk:

We are always… trying to catch everything and put it in the cage and make it static. And you can’t… No moment ever repeats itself. No day is a repetition of a day… It’s perpetuoso. And there is no time at all. For the revolutionibus is there.

The revolutionibus is alive with potential; the gardener must bring this vital quality to his work and understand that the garden exists under the grand majesty of the living heavens.

In other talks and other contexts, however, the notion of revolutionibus seems less directly celestial and apparently refers to a broader principle, a cosmic dynamic that is active in the terrestrial realm as well. It is a necessary feature of Chadwick’s conception of nature and his entire approach to gardening that everything from the smallest microbe to the greatest galaxy is interconnected and relevant to the gardener’s work. We would say today that he has a ‘holistic’ view of nature - he called it, in his idiosyncratic style, ‘totemism’, a deliberate twist on ‘totalism’. The revolutionibus is the great organism of this totality and not merely the churn of the starry sky. The revolutionibus is not merely above us as a remote astronomy; rather it is everywhere and, in fact, we exist within it. Its dynamism works in all the forces of nature. It is the cosmic process of movement at every level. In the talk Energies and Elements in 1977 he says:

We have talked about fresh water, fresh air, and with it, fresh food, fresh living and fresh thinking. It is movement, of course. Non-static! Revolutionibus!

Freshness is an important quality in the Chadwickean worldview, and it is revolutionibus that keeps the moment ever fresh. Non-static, as he says. That which stops and stands still dies. Yet even in this the revolutionibus creates the cycle of life and death in all its manifestations. One of Chadwick’s favourite formulae expressing the dynamic of the vital cosmos is “life-into-death-into-life”:

All death is life. In the forest, all the great storms of the equinox, falling in love, breaking down the trees in their exuberance. All the boughs, the foliages, the dead animals, the birds, they’re all part of the whole incredible rebirth in the equinox. And everything in Nature is this revolutionibus. There is no waste of anything.

This most fundamental of cycles, the great cycle by which life and death and rebirth alternate and by which the seasons turn - it is all an expression of revolutionibus. To “revolve”, of course, means to turn around and has the same meaning as “cycle”. The revolutionibus governs the great cyclic facts of existence. The gardener must strive to bring the garden into the dynamism of these living cycles. This, indeed, is, for Chadwick, the essence of so-called “biodynamic” horticulture.

There are other contexts, though, where revolutionibus concerns other forces. In a talk given at Covelo in September 1975 with the title ‘Fertility, the Merchant and the Seer’ Chadwick is discussing fruit trees and observes:

You will find that all of the revolutionibus, that is light and air, will interplay equally around every bough...

Plainly, the term is here used differently than the usual astronomical sense. Specifically, it refers to the light and air that “interplays” among the branches of a tree. It is not some abstract astral force far above; its action is in the light and the air. More often still, it is associated with the “gasses” that perpetuate fertility in the soil. In a particularly colourful passage from a lecture on composting and the fertilization of the soil he says:

It is very seldom in the garden that you actually want to make, out of compost heaps, soil… The whole purport about the organic, about the compost heap, is an incredible matter. What you are going there for is warm moist gases. So that when you put the whole secret into the soil, you have created a volcano of revolutionibus.

With the “warm, moist gases” of well-made compost the expert gardener creates a veritable “volcano of revolutionibus”, a profusion of fertility.

But what, one must ask, does this have to do with the revolving stars and the vitality of their endless patterns? This is where the whole matter becomes confusing. We can appreciate the background of the constellations and the holistic gesture that places the garden within a broad cosmic setting; we can understand the idea that, through whatever agency, the heavens ‘influence’ the life of plants, but what do the “warm, moist gases” of the compost heap have to do with the revolutionibus? And how is the “light and air” of an orchard connected to this? It is the transition of viewpoint from the celestial to the aeriform that is hard to fathom. One minute we are among the stars and planets and the next we are among the air of the atmosphere and the gases of the earth.

In an illuminating statement at an urban garden symposium at a Community College in San Jose, California, Chadwick explained many important connections. It is a statement that deserves careful reading:

When one talks now about roots and leaves living upon this, in the French intensive bed, you have to entertain the interplay of the planetary system, which, with its sleeping and waking, inclination and declination, does the matter of feeding through the atmosphere, so that the plant breathes in through the air, and travels down through the roots into the soil. Thus actually feeding the soils. Likewise, in the opposite pulsation, feeding out through the roots, through the soil, up the stems, through the leaves, into the air. This is a procedure, which goes on in opposition, like breathing in and breathing out, and this is the whole essential of the study of biodynamics, introducing the play of the cycles, the work of the revolutionibus.

The unifying idea here is breath. The cycles to which he is referring are not the mechanical turns of an astrolabe but rather the pulsations of a living breath. All of the various cycles that he brings together in this passage are an expression of this breathing. The turnings of the heavens, as much as the expansion and contraction of the seasons, as much as the dynamic growth of plants with their oxygen/carbon cycle, are to be understood as a breathing. This, as Chadwick puts it, “is the whole essential of the study of biodynamics…” This is where the light and air of the orchard and the warm, moist gases of the compost pile come into play: they are part of the breath of life.

The key word in this passage is pulsation. It is revealing that Greg Haynes, who studied under Chadwick in the early, halcyon days at Santa Cruz, reports that this is the word Chadwick used then, before he acquired the term revolutionibus. There was no “revolutionibus” when Chadwick first arrived and crafted his first magic garden on the new campus of UCSC. Rather, he spoke to his apprentices of “pulsation”. The universe is alive with a pulsation, and the living garden must be brought into a vital participation with it so that it - the soil and the plants - pulse with life. This pulsation is the great movement of the heavens, as well as of the seasons - the inclination and declination - as well as the cycles of vegetative growth, and the whole art of gardening is to work with this great pulse of life; this is “the play of the cycles, the work of the revolutionibus.” It is unclear exactly when Chadwick acquired the term “revolutionibus”, using it to replace or expand the idea of “pulsation”, but it seems it was at some time during his residence at the garden project in Round Valley at Covelo. In any case, the term becomes less mystifying and less opaque when we understand it in this context. He chose it as a synonym for “pulsation” and he means the “breathing in and breathing out” of all things in a great cosmic respiration. It is wrong to think of it only in its astronomical sense; he means the great bellows of cosmic existence that animate all things. This explains why in so many of his lectures and talks the revolutionibus is connected with the element of air. Chadwick horticulture is a gardening of air. It is all about air - pneuma, ruah, spiritus. All his techniques concern this. In a talk concerning the central method of his gardening, the raised bed, he says:

But you see, the moment that you have an escalation, you've got flowing air going on, you've got change, you've got the interplay of the revolutionibus.

The raised beds breathe. “You’ve got change,” he says - the dynamics of motion, non-static, the breath and pulse of life.

A further and crucial dimension of this emerges when we consider the very nature of vegetative life. The dynamic of change is not chaotic and random but rhythmic. Not only do plants breathe but there is a dynamic that reveals itself as a ‘pulsation’ over time as the plant grows in successive waves of expansion and contraction, or “tension” and “relaxation” as Chadwick would have it. This, as Greg Haynes relates, is an example that Chadwick would often use during the instruction of his students. Chadwick was deeply indebted to the studies of Goethe and especially Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants. Plant-life doesn’t move in a single continuous gesture; rather it moves from the contracted state of the seed (tension) to the expanded state of leaf growth (relaxation), then back to the contraction of the bud (tension), then to the opening flush of the flower (relaxation), then again to the contraction of the seed and so forth. In his later lectures Chadwick uses a distinctly Goethean vocabulary for this. The seed, he says, is all idée. This is the antithesis of metamorphosis, unfolding. It is all, in any case, another instance of pulsation, a sequential and almost musical expansion and contraction of forms. The revolutionibus is a rhythm, a music, a dance.

* * * 

Two models suggest themselves to further clarify these matters. One is from the east and one from the west, one from the oriental traditions and one from occident. Chadwick himself seems to have re-engaged or reconnected with a boyhood Catholic heritage in his quest to bring clarity, depth and fullness to his teaching. Just as Greg Haynes and the other apprentices at Santa Cruz heard nothing of the “revolutionibus” in their early encounter with the master gardener, neither were they aware of his identification as a Catholic. They report being surprised to find a priest making Catholic rites at his funeral. It seems likely that Chadwick’s reading of Copernicus - a Polish clergyman who dedicated his work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium to Pope Paul III - was part of this spiritual realignment, conceivably in the wake of the trauma of being dismissed from the garden at Santa Cruz and an unhappy sojourn among the Buddhists at Green Gulch Farm. For a time, Chadwick was adrift in counter-culture America and, although it remained a highly personal thing for him, he found some solace in the Church whose liturgy and pomp were consonant with his sense of sacred theatre. In his later interviews with the journalist and biographer Bernard Taper he is emphatic: “I became a Catholic,” he says, “Thank God!” He read, or at least dabbled in, Copernicus and adopted some terminology and ideas from Renaissance cosmology. Had he not been looking back into a Catholic past he might have found a different vocabulary.

In particular, especially in the context of the Californian counter-culture exotica of that era, he might well have reached for the Chinese cosmological coordinates of yin and yang. These are the two cosmic principles of expansion and contraction, darkness and brightness, that, although seeming to be opposites, are in fact complementary and interchangeable. In the manifest realm all tangible dualities - male and female, summer and winter, night and day - are expressions of this primal duality. The two forces balance one another and in this way form a dynamic system that is a close parallel to what Chadwick is describing. The symbol used to depict these primal forces is well known; it is a divided circle with an S-shaped line separating light from dark but with each containing the seed of the other. Technically the symbol is called the Taijitu, the “emblem of the supreme ultimate” in Taoism. It has now entered into Western culture, and is seen often in debased forms such as a tattoo design.

yin yang

Nevertheless, it captures the idea of “revolutionibus” very well. If the European notion of revolutionibus now seems remote and archaic to us, the idea of the revolving interchangeability of yin and yang from Oriental philosophy is perhaps more accessible. The Taijitu is nothing less than an image of the revolutionibus of which Alan Chadwick spoke, with yin and yang forming a pulsation of interchangeable complementarity that is the driving dynamic of the living cosmos.

The parallel is sometimes quite exact in Chadwick’s talks. Here, for example, is a passage from a talk he gave in Covelo in August 1976, transcribed with the title ‘The Garden as the Mirror of Man’. He says:

I go back to the matter of the Earth and its forces, and the marriage that takes place in the atmosphere. In that marriage and that atmosphere, do you realize, there is the issue that remains over, during night, when we would think that there is no light and nothing prevailing? The resemblance that you sometimes find in very early spring day of last fall, and the discoveries in the middle of summer of the awareness of fall being in there. They are all respectably interwoven. Of course we have four named nominalities, which give us a completely false proposition. Therefore, in this atmosphere—which is a marriage—a birth goes on, and that birth is changeable all the time. Not only every moment, particularly every day and connected with seasons is that changeableness acute, in whole areas bunched together. Do you understand? This is very intangible.

Let us decipher this from his somewhat rambling style. He is speaking of the ‘marriage’ of dawn, when the earth and heavens are ‘married’ in the atmosphere of ‘aurora’. It is one of his favorite themes. The old thespian knows and loves Aurora, goddess of dawn, from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. He finds a mystical import in the dawn nuptial of earth and sky. In keeping with his notion of ‘freshness’, Chadwick was a man of the dawn. But, he observes here, we are not dealing with opposites but with complements. In the night we think there is “no light and nothing prevailing”, but we are wrong. Rather, they are “interwoven”, day and night. There is a trace of day left in the night. There are days in spring that seem like, that echo, or mirror, the days of autumn. In the midst of summer is the germ of its opposite. We have “four named nominalities” - he means we give names to four distinct seasons - but that is a false conception. The point he is making is exactly the point illustrated in the abstract schema of the yin and yang symbol. In the midst of yin is the seed of yang. In the midst of yang is the seed of yin. Thus, the revolutionibus. Thus does the wheel turn. Opposites are born out of one another: if not for this fact there would be a static duality and death.

In an amusing interlude during one lecture in Virginia Chadwick casts a question to his students. Why, he asks, do we water the garden beds? The students hesitate, rightly suspecting it to be a trick question. Finally, some brave soul offers the obvious reply, “To make them wet?” “No!” the maestro hollers in full rage. Wrong answer! The right answer is: so that they dry out again. The wet/dry pulsation. Without it there is no life. Chadwick wants his students to think in terms of dynamic opposites. He wants his students to understand and practice a Tao of gardening.

The example of the seasons, whereby each contains the germ of its opposite, and the doctrine of yin and yang whereby an excess of yin yields yang and vice versa, points to our second model, namely the stirring technique described by Rudolf Steiner in his lectures on Agriculture that is now a common part of Biodynamic farming and gardening and specifically the so-called “preparations” used in Biodynamics. Alan Chadwick, let us recall, had the rare privilege of having had Steiner as his personal tutor as a boy, and though it was only for a brief period Steiner left an indelible mark upon the young aristocrat. Some have questioned these connections, but they have since been confirmed by Alan’s brothers and we have no reason to doubt Chadwick’s assertion that Steiner planted “seeds” in him that germinated late in his life. In California, in the 1970s, at any rate, having been tutored by Rudolf Steiner was some claim to fame and there were certainly occasions when Chadwick made the most of it. There are reasons to suppose, however, that Chadwick was an accomplished student of the Austrian polymath and a great exponent of his esoteric horticulture. Some question this because Chadwick never used Steiner’s “preparations”, but there are good reasons to believe that Chadwick had a profound grasp of Steiner’s methods and, in a manner altogether true to his one-time tutor, made them his own.

The most famous of the Biodynamic preparations is so-called “Preparation 500”. This consists of cow manure placed inside a cow’s horn and buried in the earth in the heart of winter. It is then dug up in the spring and stirred in a vat of lukewarm water in a particular manner before being sprayed upon the tilthed soil. It is said to help create soil structure and the formation of humus. Amongst other things, Steiner proposed it as a method of bringing “cosmic forces” into play with the terrestrial. It has been developed to greatest effect in Australia where a Polish-born farmer, Alex Podolinsky, has adapted it to broadacre application and led a movement that has rehabilitated over a million hectares of damaged farmland.

The stirring method for “500” is described by Steiner as follows:

You must set to work and stir. Stir quickly, at the very edge of the pail, so that a crater is formed reaching very nearly to the bottom of the pail, and the entire contents are rapidly rotating. Then quickly reverse the direction, so that it now seethes round in the opposite direction. Do this for an hour and you will get a thorough penetration.

In practice, as Podolinsky and others have perfected the method, the stirring is done outdoors in the presence of air and sunlight and proceeds until a vortex is formed. Then the stirring is suddenly reversed and the vortex is shattered. The water falls into chaos. This continues until a new vortex is formed, then it is shattered in turn, and so on. At the end of an hour, as Steiner intimates in his lectures, the sweet scent of cows which had gone from the manure over-wintered in the horn returns to the water, an indication that it is ready. It is applied to the soil in the late afternoon, just as the carbon/oxygen cycle changes and the earth starts to breathe in and the scent of the evening arrives. Air is the vehicle of the preparation. The stirring forces a huge amount of air into the water until it is silky in texture. Once it is sprayed on the soil the air and water separate and the earth breathes in the “preparation” like a homeopathic potency. The mechanism of this device is very subtle and sophisticated. Predictably, it has invited misuse and outright silliness among mushy spiritualists and those who mistake it for some form of neo-pagan rite. Chadwick, sensibly, said that he avoided it because he didn’t want people to attribute the splendor of his gardens to “potions”.

vortex in water

Anyone who has witnessed the stirring of 500, however, should have no trouble understanding what Chadwick meant by “revolutionibus”. Steiner’s stirring method is the revolutionibus in microcosm. Just as yin gives way to yang, so an excess of one direction precipitates its opposite. It is a rhythmic, pulsating stirring that captures the breath of the cosmos. The whole method imitates the churning of the heavens, the turn of the spiraling galaxies, and links it to the respiration of the earth. The ideal time for applying the preparation to the land is not only at turn of day to night, the magical intersection of Aurora, but at the so-called “earth turn” of spring and autumn when the seasons - the whole earth - changes from inhalation to exhalation. It is obvious that although Chadwick did not use 500 himself, he had a deep acquaintance with the forces and cycles and processes of nature which the preparation seeks to employ. He sums up the whole method and theory of Steiner’s preparation 500 in a single word, “revolutionibus”. If we want to understand what he meant by revolutionibus, we need only watch and appreciate the stirring and application of this biodynamic “horn manure” as it is called.

Those who say that Chadwick didn’t practice biodynamics because he didn’t use 500 are guilty of simplistic thinking. Most likely, they themselves use 500 as a magic nostrum without any insight into its real significance. As we see in Chadwick’s doctrine of the revolutionibus, he had a deep, profound insight into Steiner’s biodynamics, so much so that he found ways to achieve sublime results without the use of the preparations. Someone once quipped that “Alan didn’t need a Steiner preparation. Alan was a Steiner preparation!” It is true. People who knew the man commented on his circadian rhythms. He was like a force of nature. He was linked, in his person, in his bones, to the living cycles of the good earth. For all his eccentricities, he was nearer to the very marrow of the living cosmos than almost any other man of the modern era. It was this that made him the supreme gardener of our time. We need not get tangled up by the “word-mind” about this or that term. The important thing is to know the reality of the thing. Chadwick’s revolutionibus - the cosmology that he placed at the centre of his art - might seem a quaintly old-fashioned idea today, but it is, finally, the right word for the thing to which he wanted to draw our attention as something vital that we have lost.

* * *

Shakespeare had a vast and fluid vocabulary. By comparison, modern English is impoverished and degraded. There are concepts and ideas and subtleties of thought that are impossible to think in the techno-rational new-speak of our age. Steeped in Shakespeare over a lifetime on stage as he was, no one was more acutely aware of this than Alan Chadwick. If he chose to resort to archaic terminology, to bend phrases and invent neologisms, it was because of his deep suspicion of the straight-jacket of modern idiom. He was, in any case, trying to relate ideas - or rather realities - that were self-evident to former ages but which have been buried under the gross abstractions of modernity. The revolutionibus - or the pulsation of life - is the master key of his philosophy, but while it remains a profound reality it is no longer a comfortable fixture of modern experience. It is only when we are confronted by the extraordinary vitality of a Chadwick garden that we are nonplussed by a wonderment that asks, ‘How did he do that?’ and none of our usual categories suffice. There is no secret ingredient, no anthroposophical elixir. The revolutionibus is not some academic construction and even less some doctrine of the occult. It is the very throb of life that animates the living All. One of the most common quotes cited from Chadwick is the following:

We are the living links in a life force that moves and plays around and through us, binding the deepest soils with the farthest stars.

What is this “life force”? It is not some mysterious Factor X or some “etheric” ghost in the cosmic machine. It is not the “vital force” of nineteenth century vitalism or even Bergson’s élan vital. It is revolutionibus. It is the great animating breath that pervades the whole of cosmic totality. That it “binds the deepest soils with the farthest stars” is the clue to its understanding. All of the methodologies of Chadwick horticulture - techne as Chadwick called it, here preferring a Greek term - have but one end; to make the soil and the plants that grow in it breathe along with the respiring cosmos in a quivering, joyous pulsation of life. We might better appreciate this through exotic philosophies of the East or through the esoteric science of Steiner, but it will just remain empty words unless we experience it in ourselves. This is what Chadwick means when he says “we are the living links.” To know the revolutionibus is, finally, an act of being, an act of participation. It is not something we can know intellectually. Intellect can only ever know of it. This is a salient point regarding what survives of Chadwick’s ouvre in his lectures and talks. It might seem strange and baffling, loaded with unfamiliar and funny terms and turns of phrase, but it becomes a lucid testament to those who bother to sink their fingers into the soil and who apply themselves, without guile, to the work of love that is gardening.

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

The Primitive is Not the Primordial

In one of the very few items of writing by the darling of heroic capitalism, Ayn Rand, that the present writer has ever bothered to read – let us stress here that he has not usually the slightest affinity with Mrs Rand and her philosophy – she makes a useful distinction between two dominant cultural tendencies in contemporary Western civilization. She cites the year 1969 as a watershed, and points to two great defining moments in Western culture in the summer of that year: the moonlanding of Apollo 11 in June and the Woodstock Music Festival in August. The moonlanding, she says, was a great moment of cultural optimism and was celebrated by those who look to science, technology and reason as the path forward for humanity. Woodstock, however, was the inverse of this: the hairy hippies who assembled there and wallowed in the mud were, she says, representatives of cultural decline who embraced a regressive, anti-modern, anti-science ideology that celebrates the primitive and the irrational, cowers from the future and retreats into the poverty of the past. In her essay, if not elsewhere, she proposes that the contemporary West is a battleground between these two opposing visions, one characterized by triumphant science and other by a backward-looking back-to-nature flight from reason.

In itself, it seems to this present writer, this is not an inaccurate analysis. Mrs Rand has successfully identified an important cultural polarity, a key tension, that remains to this day in occidental culture – there is, on the one hand, a strong drag towards scientific optimism and the ideology of progress, and against this there is also a strong drift towards what we might characterize as a modern primitivism typical of but not isolated in the so-called ‘counter-culture’. Both tendencies can be observed all about us. They pervade our culture. They are like counter-weights to each other. The present writer, in any case, has always been acutely aware of this polarity because it has appeared to him as an unhappy dilemma, a Scylla and Charybdis, a dichotomy of evils through which one must navigate as best one can.

Mrs Rand, the atheist ‘Objectivist’, of course, was a dedicated, wholehearted proponent of the merits of blind scientism. She was a self-appointed high priestess in the religion of materialist progress. It is not a religion to which the present writer has ever subscribed. At the same time, however, Rand’s critique of the Woodstock generation was certainly not unfounded. There are those who, rejecting scientific optimism and the progress narrative, would rather wallow in mud instead. This takes many forms but always involves an attraction to those phases of history, and pre-history, most remote from modernity. One of the paradoxes of modernity is that it includes a revival of the primitive. At Woodstock we saw a new tribalism. Its personal emblems - nudity, barefootedness, uncut hair - are all a rejection of the marks of civilization. In Australian sociology those that populate this tribalism, which has developed and mutated in several directions since Woodstock, are called “ferals”. They display a comprehensive rejection of civilization and its norms – which they denounce as a mistake from the outset - and typically embrace forms of neo-primitivism instead. It is, indeed, a powerful and widespread movement with many manifestations in fashion, politics, art, music and social relationships. We today find it in diverse forms and fads – the paleolithic diet, the tattoo craze, New Age shamanism, Ayahuasca retreats in the Andes. But it is, as Mrs Rand rightly says, pathological: regressive, defeatist, irrational, self-destructive, decadent, deviant, escapist, vandalistic. 

The problem for this writer, anyway – a problem that has occupied much of his life – has been to escape from this choice of evils and to find another way. In part, this quest was answered by so-called ‘perennialist’ perspectives (or, as he prefers, and more accurately, ‘primordialism’.) In such perspectives the heroic capitalism championed by Mrs Rand, along with its godless Prometheanism, is also deviationist and, finally, luciferic. Modern man has, at his own peril, turned away from a perennial and indeed primordial heritage of wisdom and is drunk on his own pride. Modernity, in this perspective, is recklessly anti-traditional. The great truths of human civilization embodied in traditional orders east and west are being cast aside. Man himself is threatened by his own machines. But the perennialist/primordialist perspective is not, for all of that, a retreat into the irrational, the unintelligent and the primitive. Instead, it is a recapitulation, a re-statement, a re-visiting of, a re-attunement to a metaphysics and wisdom found in such pre-eminent thinkers as Plato, Shankara, Ibn Arabi, Lao Tze, of a spirituality found in the great religious traditions, and patterns of life and cosmology typical of the great, mature, historical (grain-based) civilizations of the world – a mode of civilization shattered by industrialism. It proposes not retreat but continuity, while seeing modernity as a rupture and a betrayal.

Unfortunately, many of those who have identified with or been influenced by perennialist/primordialist perspectives have not always navigated clear of the pitfalls of primitivism in their aversion for modernity. There are those who, turning away from Scylla, have fallen into the embrace of Charbydis. The present writer has witnessed, over his lifetime, the increasing confusion of the primitive with the primordial. It is a confusion and a conflation which is today quite advanced. Largely, if not wholly, it is the product of the life and teachings of the French-Swiss perennialist Frithjof Schuon. Monsieur Schuon began his spiritual career as a student and follower of Rene Guenon and like Guenon found a home in Mohammedan Soofism. In large measure Schuon’s core doctrines are a reworking of the Saracen sage Ibn Arabi. But at a certain point in the 1980s he relocated to the mid-west United States and, pursuing a childhood obsession, engineered a syncretic amalgam of Soofism with the lore of the American Plains Indians. More and more his teachings became imbued with the naturalist pagan perspectives of the Indians until the Soofism gave way to so-called ‘primordial gatherings’ in which his followers would sit sky-clad (naked), or dress in quasi-Indian outfits, participating in quasi-Indian rituals. In his writings Schuon proposed that the pre-literate red man was just as much a spokesman for the ‘sophia perennis’ as Plato or Thomas Aquinas.

Thus did Schuon fuse together the primitive with the traditional. It was a fusion that would never have been entertained by Guenon, and indeed it was not long before many of Monsieur Guenon’s associates and students cut their links with Schuon entirely. Guenon was, arguably, the most astute and vicious critic of modernity in the XXth century. His Reign of Quantity is a devastating account of the ways in which the modern order violates the traditional world-view. But at the same time he was not in any sense an advocate of the primitive. The Guenonian view is starkly different to the Schuonian. Guenon once wrote, for instance:

The sociologists pretend to assimilate [the ancient mentality] to that of the savages, whom they call “primitives” when on the contrary we regard them as degenerates. If the savages had been always in this inferior state that we witness, it would be impossible to explain the multitude of customs they possess (without comprehending them anymore), which cannot be but vestiges of lost civilizations…

For Guenon, here and elsewhere, “savages” and their cultures are “degenerate” forms – he hesitates to call them “primitive” because he does not regard them as “prime” - and it is from “lost civilizations” that they have degenerated. He admits that there is a “multitude of customs” that they possess, which amounts to a residual body of tradition, but they do not comprehend such customs anymore. For Guenon, then, the primitive is residual, not integral. To explain this he invokes the idea of “lost civilizations” such as, say, the traditions of the lost civilization of Atlantis.

We must hasten to add at this point that it is doubtful if the luminous Monsieur Guenon believed in “lost civilizations” in a crude literal sense; his view of history and historical processes – more a heiro-history - is no way literalist and mechanical at any point. But he did subscribe to the traditional view – it is even a Biblical view – that the “primordial” has its roots in an antediluvean order (literal or symbolic) of which tribal groups, ‘primitives’ and ‘savages’, the uncivilized, are “vestiges” or, as Guenon elsewhere puts it, “debris.” What we find in the primitive, then, is the mere traces, the ruins, the dregs, of something once great and vast that came before. This is not a matter for anthropological or archaeological objections either. The point is that this is, indeed, the traditional narrative. It is a view found again and again in traditional sources. Let us be clear about this. The traditional trajectory of history (not a profane history, to be sure, but a sacred history) is this:

1. The world comes into being.
2. Great civilizations come into being.
3. Cataclysm: [Flood] Great civilizations are destroyed.
4. New civilizations emerge.
5. Primitives etc. are the remaining degenerations from the civilizations prior to the cataclysms.

Again: it makes no difference to us if this is or is not a narrative that can be sustained by anthropological or archaeological evidence. It is not a point of science. The question is: what is the traditional view of the lore and customs of primitive peoples? The answer is: it is (or is as if it is) a residue of something that was once whole and integral. 

"Primordial gatherings"

This, assuredly, is very different to the more Rousseaean view propounded in the work of Frithjof Schuon. He elevates the primitive – specifically the red man, but by extension indigenous, tribal and ‘First Nation’ traditions generally – to the first rank of Tradition with an upper-case T. It is among these tribal peoples, he says, that we find the primordial and he accords these traditions with an integrity lost in later traditions. In Islam, to cite the example relevant to Schuon’s own life, there was but one Prophet, Mohammed, but among the Plains Indians, he says – before the arrival of the white man – every man was, as it were, a prophet, such was their dignity. Schuonianism makes much of the ‘Feminine’ and of ‘Nature’ and he regards the primitive man to be nearer to these ideals than not only modern man but civilized man per se. The primitive is elevated in Schuon. In Guenon, and other ‘perennialists’, we find the repositories of Tradition to be rather the great religions and the great civilizations prior to the modern deviation. 

Among Schuonians, the 'feathered sun' of the Plains Indians - not the Aum symbol of the Vedas or any other established symbol of Tradition - became the symbol of "perennialism". 

This innovation in Schuon’s thinking is, in some respects, a perverse outcome of the perennialist critique of evolutionism and its reassertion of the more traditional doctrine of de-evolution. Guenon, Schuon and many of their followers offered a strident attack upon the theory of evolution, both in its biological and social forms. Instead, they drew attention to the fact that in the traditional world-view – such as in the Yuga doctrine of the Hindoos - the qualities of man and the cosmos decline over the ages, the world winds down, it does not get progressively better. The traditional mind-set, found throughout and across the great civilizations, is fundamentally conservative: it cannot conceive of the son being greater than the father. But does this then mean that a headhunter in the New Guinea highlands is spiritually superior to St Francis of Assisi? Some perennialists – convinced that we are in the grip of the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age at the end of a cosmic cycle – have sought the mythic Golden Age in the jungles of the Amazon, the deserts of Australia and the bushlands of Africa. Such identifications are usually guided and informed by the profane ideologies of Marxist anthropology, romantic ecology, feminism and similar, which have all sought to valorize and idealize the primitive for strategic reasons of their own and which form the intellectual edifice of modern neo-primitivism.

What then is the primordial if it is not to be found among “savages”? In large measure the error is a mistake in categories and labels. The pedantic Guenon was perfectly right to insist on a more careful use of the term “primitive”, for it should only be applied to what is truly primary. Let us recall that in the Biblical narrative what comes first is the Garden of Eden. What is primary is Edenic. And this is a cultured garden, an order, and should not in any sense be confused with “wild nature”. The Biblical narrative is very clear on this. Wilderness, like the “savages” that populate it, is a falling away from the pristine and original order. What is primordial, properly speaking, is Edenic, and it is only by confusion of Rousseaean proportions that we can mistake the primitive tribesman to be living in Eden. Tradition, properly speaking, is a golden thread that goes back to the Garden of Eden, not to a group of aborigines in Arnhem Land. Such people may well be “nearer to nature” than modern man, but the primordial, properly speaking, is not concerned with “nature” but with a transcendent Source, and this is a very different thing. Eden bears the imprint of Heaven. Nature, however pristine, is nevertheless a falling away.  It is a crucial distinction.

The New Age is characterized by combinations of eastern spirituality plus either scientism or primitivism (or both). That is, typically, one or both of the two tendencies identified by Ayn Rand are mixed with oriental religion.

Recently, the present author was reading the commentaries on the I Ching by the XVIIIth century Taoist master Liu Yiming. The Master refers to the “primordial” throughout, and in exactly the Edenic sense. The Tao is primordial, and it would be a grotesque miscalculation to suppose that the Tao is nature.

The quality of strength in people is original innate knowledge, the sane primal energy. This is called true yang… This energy is rooted in the primordial, concealed in the temporal. It is not more in sages, not less in ordinary people. At the time of birth, it is neither defiled nor pure, neither born nor extinct, neither material nor void . It is tranquil and unstirring, yet sensitive and effective. In the midst of myriad things, it is not restricted or constrained by myriad things. Fundamentally it creates, develops, and brings about fruition and consummation spontaneously, all this taking place in unminding action, not needing force.

The I Ching, in its primordiality, looks back to a mythic China, not to the primitive China of the anthropologists and archaeologists. The primordial is the Original, the Source, the Beginning, the Root, what is innate from the outset. It is lost and found and lost again and again, as TS Eliot wrote. But it is certainly not the same as the primitive. Who would ever had guessed that the primordialism of which Rene Guenon was such a lucid and sober representative would one day degenerate into middle-class children of Woodstock sitting around naked in “primordial gatherings” – the sorry spectacle of perennialist hippies?

The path through the era in which we live – whether it is the Kali Yuga or not – is assuredly narrow. On the one side is the dehumanizing pitfalls of technology. Millions fall into that pit every day. But on the other side, awaiting those who flee from that, are the degradations of the new primitivism where people think that imitating the imagined lifestyle of the Noble Savage brings them nearer to the primordial and the Real and the True. It is as false a dream as the pursuit of the exotic under the same delusion. Primitivism is not a legitimate response to modernity. It is part of the same disease. Of the two opposing visions identified by Ayn Rand - triumphant science or the flight from reason - which is akin to the perennialist or primordialist perspective? Neither. The real quest is to escape from this false dichotomy altogether. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black