I don’t pretend to be a rebirth of Theseus or Ajax, but if any such man were born today, he’d be fast in a mental asylum or dead.
Note: most of this, even the quotes, are paraphrases, or implications, or shadow-play. The book is excellent and you are a man. If somehow you have not already, buy it and read it.
The book is a collection of short to medium length chapters — often these are a single run-on paragraph — that paint a metaphysics, a system of ethics, a way to exist in the modern world, a modernised Left-Hand Path, & an emphasis on a monumental reading of history. It is, at its base, an ecstatic, orgiastic elegy towards beauty and power, beauty as power, power as beauty.
Bronze Age Pervert’s primary exhortation in his Nietzschean manifesto is the struggle for space. I will assume from here that the reader of this is one who should be reading it. We daydream as a modern man about the envious, ferocious and striving Classical Age, and perhaps what animates our souls so viciously of these tales is their vast adventure. This refers to both their claiming of territory — of unquenchable thirst for expansion over calculable land — and of their growth; the flourishing of organism or the development of ownership of themselves. He qualifies, however, that this is not an aphoristic repeating of what doesn’t kill you. . . — true mastery comes from conquering and then, in Mr. Pervert’s term, flowering. In the Western tradition we can understand this to be fairly synonymous with the Greek concept of happiness, for in their spirit — indeed, in all spirits that are aimed at action — happiness was not the dark cushioned room of comfort, nor a momentary glance away from one’s life in the form of holiday. Happiness, to the Greeks, eudaimonia, can truly be understood as flourishing or even blessedness, so as to mean that happiness has a moral quality to it, that a happy man is one that lives well. In essence, to achieve happiness, one must be ready to strive upwards-facing towards the sun.
In our understanding of the world now, SPACE needs more explanation: the latter — struggling for spiritual growth as the self-regarding of the ego — is emphasised by every advert on TV, every hastily-written song. The insatiable hunger for space, on the other hand, is quite a foreign desire, at least as presented to us. Anything self-deprecating or compromising should rightly be mocked, & a man should in good humour realise his daily needs in his daily life, in the real world, which rather than being determined by physics, permanence and morality, is twisted, fashioned by a blind, retarded, schizophrenic demiurge.
When Heraclitus speaks of all things being one, and all things being fire, he means this: when this actually shows itself to you, there is a demoniac and violent madness underlying things. The real world is similar to the apparent, but uncanny, devilish, disordered for us.
His homoeroticism must be touched on in some way, though I am at risk of demystifying one of his most important revelations. He does draw a perfect and implicit line between that plain, ugly sort of anti-life today known as homosexuality and that of ancient societies, but more importantly, he attempts an explanation as to why so many seemingly normal young boys, sensitive or no, have had their spirits disfigured. He writes, channeling Camille Paglia, that such an artistic boy may have distanced himself from his father, been turned off by the more violent masculinity and roughhousing of boys his age, & in time eroticised the male. But he expands:
It is not the masculinity, the competition for status among men, the physical roughness, that makes him turn away … but the fact that all such play is happening in already owned space. This boy is turned off by the buffoonish, deluded character of modern masculinity: the defeated male, peon and neutered beast.
This also speaks to a concept near-forgotten by our hearts: an urge for authenticity in life, or an authentic life as whole. We go to great lengths to find it in food, in women, in film and music, in travel, & many other more base experiences, but in friendship — in the twinning and the burgeoning of companionship and brotherhood — we seem to shy violently away.
Mr. Pervert ruminates a number of times on the effects of this on man, on the creation of this neutered beast, this YEAST MAN who in every way that matters lives as a slave in a pen — awaiting grain and dreaming of a fat, childless woman. They have grown this way also by pretending that the entity that attempts to crush anything upward-facing is moral in doing so. This totalitarian entity is modern democracy.
Two-thirds the way through the book, he begins to trust the reader to implement some of what they have read: the systems and the justifications that have been in baby steps walking towards a holistic view of the nobler parts of the world lay the groundwork for stories of great Ancient Greeks and Romans — those with power and struggle in their blood, or those who embody the purifying hand of nature. Of Cellini, Epaminondas and Pelopidas, great Periander, Lysander, Brasidas & of course Achilles, along with others. These were men who consciously reflected the great motions of the stars in order to be worshiped as a GOD! It is in this monumental history that we have to build a movement; we emphasise things that are good and rebuke things that are dour, old, sclerotic, ugly, pedantic.
There are many things hidden and magnified within the last quarter of these pages, & it builds again and again to crescendo. I will give away only a little — it really must be read.
If you remain firm as a social movement of peace, of the promotion of natural beauty, healthy living, and healthy nationalism, any attacks on such groups can be made to appear for what they are, the fears of the paranoids and hatreds of the resentful and ugly. Nationalists must present a healthy alternative to the eternal rule of ugliness in our time: promote nature, beauty, physical fitness, the preservation of high traditions of literature and art.
Let us emphasise each of the terms of this last sentence in turn.
We must present a healthy alternative to the gleefully descending, downward-facing world. We must promote NATURE, not only in naturalism and conservationism, but in people’s engagement with it, & seclusion within it. Nature offers us, as Evola recognised, that which is artistic, rare, characteristic. This is not only the deathly heights of Everest, but our Areas of Natural Beauty, indeed anywhere that you can sense what is meant by Mr. Pervert’s repetition of the word space.
We must promote BEAUTY, that of us and others, & of and in the physical and spiritual world; all of this can be implicit, & indeed, in promoting PHYSICAL FITNESS, it will be very clear to some where we stand, but to most we will only seem to be good men, & this is all that has ever been needed. Physical fitness requires the consumption of the breath of life — a conscious diet of fresh, once-breathing ingredients — and also requires one to make the sternest demands of oneself, the movement of steel atop exhausted limbs.
We must preserve our high traditions of LITERATURE and ART — in this we must donate to certain museums and galleries, & patronise them, & encourage all to do the same, & spread our vision of creation and the greatness of OUR history amongst all, & also to engage with these arts ourselves; to splash, to ink, to sculpt, & to put pen and brush to paper. But perhaps most importantly we must read, or listen. As Polybius recommends:
We must use the force of habit, the means by which humans achieve all good things and even more so when it concerns the matters upon which our very safety depends.
Make amelioration a habit, & you will be well on your way to putting Mr. Pervert’s insights into action — after all, we must be concerned with the immanent. And the final section, which beckons, If you wonder how mankind fell. . . . bears even more secrets — a whorl, a convolution, read it!
Noble Youth 