I ever tell you this story? This is Detroit when I was a boy, maybe 5. Sunday, watching golf on TV with my dad, my mom in the kitchen making dinner, my sister tottering around. My dad asked me to go in the bedroom and grab a pillow off the bed so that he’d be more comfortable lying on the floor.
I went into my parent’s bedroom and there at the head of the bed, on either side, stood two large Xs. Best way to describe them. They were hairy, a fine hair, black. Three feet or so tall. They made no sound. The one at my left threw a pillow at me. I was so astonished I ran out with the pillow and gave it to my dad.
Now this happened. That is, I have always remembered it. But the distance between me and five is great. But what happened? One explanation is childhood imagination. That’s comforting, but false. The second explanation, because I lived it, is that it happened.
What were they? I haven’t the slightest idea, now or then. They never came back. But there were other times and other stories, as many of us have.
Christianity insists such episodes are at least possible. Which is to say, the spirit world, the world of the immaterial that can, at times, interact with the material world is real. Angels are real, demons are real. Strange things are real.
These angelic creatures are not abstract objects, set far away in the universe to be dispatched on occasion. They are here, now, everywhere. And active, manifesting themselves in a variety of ways.
The pagans used to know this far better than we do. As I’ve said before, the Egyptian who was sure a chariot was carrying the sun on its daily route across the sky was closer to the truth than we are with our lifeless orbital mechanics. Both make the same prediction, but the Egyptian knew a deeper truth than the scientist is capable of understanding. What is at base is not science, which has no intrinsic base, but Being itself.
Now there are good, theoretical theological and scriptural reasons for making this claim, which I will defer to another time, and which should anyway be obvious to believing Christians (how many times in the Bible did God or an angel talk to us in dreams?). For now, we cast our eyes to the Bronze Age Pervert, who had an essay in American Sun (please read all of it first; and ignore his affection of writing badly to write well).
Passing over the true and often verified Nietzschean lament that Christianity can breed weak men, especially among protesting Christian sects and latterly Jesuits, we come to the well known longing for a restoration of manly men among the dissident right. Some seek this via neopaganism, but, like transgenderism, this often devolves into LARPing. Some try tradcath (as you might have heard it called), yet this is often a strategy not fully implemented.
We look high, or try to, but for most of us, as BAP says, “everything becomes a toothless allegory and symbol.” It’s hard to believe. His approach is different (ellipsis original):
You could call this an innocent apprehension of the hidden demons and gods inside nature and things. Maybe it is the precursor, this feeling, to the artistic revival of paganism, I don’t know. But it is an innate sensation, a natural animism. I tried briefly to discuss it in book. I have had images appear to me in daydreams since I was small boy, that were very vivid and specific. I know others who have had the same. Then also a sensation of spirits inhabiting animals and inanimate objects too, with a reverence for some, and a pity when others are mistreated — Houellebecq mentions his pity for a line of coats. This is not a sensation informed by any rational doxy or theoretical or theological belief. And I’ve always firmly rejected any such interpretations of these events because I found they didn’t fit. So to such sensibility it is very offensive or stupid when people try to actually go to forest and pretend they worship Wotan or Hermes or whoever…nor have I seen those old gods or any other such specifically that I can name. Those gods are dead or asleep. If you want to see what this feeling is like, watch some of David Lynch. I believe that is what this natural, innocent and innate paganism looks like in our time, when presented naively: he simply shows the demons and acknowledges them, doesn’t pretend to know who they are, what they want, or even how to worship or assuage them. And they look terrifying and surreal for us, and not at all like what you’d expect.
I have seen some things like this since I was small boy, and have felt the presence of one in particular. I feel that he will make a great show one day and erupt into the world.
I know what BAP means about this presence.
Now we differ only in our definition of the “gods” are and in how they should be treated. That they are here, here now, we do not differ. If we want a restoration of manly Christianity, we need to grasp and act on the truth that (for lack of a better phrase) the spirit world is real and is more important than the material world. Not in some distant past or in some rare occasion, but everywhere and at all times.
This is not a call to superstition. This is a plea to believe what we believe.