“We say then that the Unmoved Mover is an eternal living being, the best of all, attributing to him continuous and eternal life.”

-Aristotle, Physics, circa 340 B.C.

“Man has always worshipped one thing, himself, and himself only, either in the flesh or in the ghost—that is, in the non-flesh or the objective nothing—till he arrived at the transcendental Man, the superlative, the ideal of Himself.”

-Richard F. Burton, Trieste, 1883

The first of the above definitions is an early deistic notion of God, with the line ‘best of all’ indicating Aristotle’s concept being based on his culture’s highest value, arête, or the virtues of a warrior, an ideal which harkens back to the earliest men.

The second definition is a modern Gnostic view of God as the sublime truth manipulated as masturbatory mind control; in other words the temporal [feminine] hijacking of the transcendental [masculine] notion of the Ideal for gross material gain rather than the expansion of Man’s mind.

We, postmodern persons, generally misread the nature of ancient notions of God, largely because we misunderstand our own notion of God. Apart from the various allegorical god constructs such as Odin, Thor, Hera or Ishtar the actual functional notion of God—hinted at according to these allegorical traditions in their piecemeal way—is best described as the ‘highest cultural ideal.’ This Ideal will have an allegorical face [perhaps many], such as the Hebrew Yahweh, or the Olympian pantheon of the Hellenes. But it is incorrect to imagine, as we do, that what is venerated by the ancient theist—being the Ideal—is merely the same as the lingering artifice left to us.

Modernity brings unparalleled materialism stressing all levels of life, and most of all dragging down transcendent notions into the mire of artifice. A basic example is a god and his idol. The case against the idol is that a suitably degraded person will begin venerating the idol and lose contact with the god; lose touch with the Ideal even as he grasps the material representation.

This is alien to the modern way of thinking. Atheists, for instance, who reject the lingering idols of past allegorical traditions, and adopt a codified ethos of behavior and faith-based denial [a belief that there is no God] of the transcendent, are, in ancient terms, practicing a profound religiosity, that is not much different in ethics and function than the biblical Judaism of Moses. But, obsessed with artifice as he is, the atheist cannot see that his ideology is his Ideal and therefore his God.

An example from the combat arts world might better make the case. The prizefighter practices the art of combat, according to the ideal off effective expression. Once a certain noted combatant achieves hero status a virtual cult will grow up around his expression of the Ideal, and then inevitably, fall into artifice as his fighting life is reduced to mere mechanical curriculum, bereft of life, falling further from the Ideal with every generation of disciples, until finally there is a revolutionary figure who once again expresses the pure Ideal, and the process of heroization, deification, objectification, and eventual dead artifice begins anew.

Those of us who have cared to observe have noted that psychological emasculation of the male human goes hand in hand with modernity. In Jack Donovan’s No Man’s Land, available through his website, the author does a diligent job of enumerating the academic assault on masculinity in the Post WWII period. I highly recommend that book to anyone who would like a better understanding of our current cultural view of men and masculinity.

Based on my research emasculation is as old as agrarian living, meaning the cultivation of the land as opposed to a hunting lifeway. We currently sit at the extreme end of this process, the denatured destination of Mankind, perched on the verge of a genderless society.

Contrast the primitive man with the modern man. The primitive man is made through self sacrifice at or after puberty. Just as nature changes the girl into a woman with the onset of menstruation, the boy changes himself into a man through an ordeal of self sacrifice, ether in collective trials such as wearing mitts full of stinging ants, or through lone vision quests and other austere rites of deprivation.

The epic poems of antiquity from Gilgamesh, to The Iliad, to the Odyssey, and finally Beowulf, make mention of early men being stronger than current men. Today, it can easily be seen that NFL players of the current era pale in terms of grit and toughness [the purity of their masculinity] to earlier players. So is this ancient poetic notion just a reflection of small cultural cycles, or does it hint at a long fall from a masculine Eden?

Might we take this notion of the masculine Ideal reduced to mere artifice—such as a loud voice, big muscles or a waxed mustache—and chart it from Early Modern to Postmodern times?

“The Devil went down to Georgia

looking for a soul to steal.”

-Charlie Daniels

How did Western Man arrive at his current state, having made a Faustian bargain with The State to assume all of his masculine prerogatives, most notably his defense of himself and his family? It is in fact, the current actuality, that the human body is so worshipped, and that material ethics are so infused into our culture, that a man is not expected to protect himself or physically assert his agency in any way, unless this action is first explicitly sanctioned by The State [like being a police officer or soldier], and is even then subject to review. A Man’s physical being is considered too important for him to entertain any risk. Indeed, as a man with no health insurance, I pay an extra tax to The State, a penalty for the privilege of risk. A man’s soul though—his ideal—is no longer of importance according to our current atheistic religious model.

In our Postmodern Atheistic Theocracy the entire world is God’s Artifice, an idol bereft of its Ideal. By what specific process did America arrive at its soulless and genderless destination?

The key is our agrarian roots, which made our ancestors slaves to a fixed material order. The first order of business for colonists in North America was to wage war on the natural world, to kill the forest by ringing the trees, to hunt every animal great and small to extinction in drives intended to deprive the forest savages of their sustenance.

The agricultural ethic, or what Joseph Campbell called ‘The Way of the Seeded Earth’ was in direct opposition to ‘the Way of the Animal Powers’. The final victory of the United States over the Native Americans circa 1990—facilitated by the near extinction of the plains bison—marked the end of a 10,000 year war between these two ideals.

The Way of the Animal Powers is masculine and vested in self sacrifice.

The Way of the Seeded Earth is maternal and vested in third party sacrifice. We see, from the Aztec practice of sacrificing enemy combatants, to Abraham being willing to butcher his son, to Yahweh consenting to the butchery of his divine son in the form of a human Christ, the maternal—and often race-based—ethic of third party sacrifice. Third party sacrifice takes the hero out of the realm of exemplary virtue wherein the hunter thrived, and casts him into the onion fields of oppression where the passive feminine mindset takes root and flourishes until every man becomes a woman at heart, as the ancient epic poems warned.

Permit me to track the process in America, but first we should define the devil’s bargain struck between Man and State in regards to modernity and masculinity.

What does modernity promise in return for emasculation? These things are enabled by material abundance. It is no surprise that material abundance gradually, and eventually totally, submerges the male spiritual Ideal beneath the female material Ideal. Materialism and the maternal Ideal—or Goddess—are inextricably linked.

The promise of modernity are:

1. You will not have to sacrifice as did your ancestors. Such expressive risk-based needs that arise will be suppressed through medication.

2. You will not be held to a code of behavior, as this is a state of ongoing sacrifice, and obviated by the third party sacrifice. Honor-based traditions such as dueling and the bonded word will therefore be abolished and replaced by counseling and contracts.

3. You will have more than your ancestors.

What society would agree to such an obviously unsustainable Devil’s bargain that must collapse under the weight of its own expectations as soon as material abundance stops increasing?

This bargain makes intuitive sense to anyone raised in the Christian tradition, as it is entirely based on the notion of third party sacrifice, in which a life lived in utter undisciplined evil may be redeemed with a deathbed declaration of faith in the authenticity of Jesus’ sacrifice. However, although Christianity has thus far served as the primary vector for the material Ideal, all 'seeded earth' faiths are suitable seedbeds for untrammeled materialism.

By the time this nation was founded circa 1780, its earliest colonists had been heroized, and served as the image of ancestral sacrifice.

A century later the Founding Fathers and their deistic iconography and Masonic cult imagery served as the self sacrificing heroized ancestral generation that justified the current state of ease, plenty, and increasingly risk averse lifeway.

A century later the dominant medium—Hollywood movies—portrayed the ‘Winning of the West’ by that generation of pioneers as the ancestral American sacrifice.

Now, at the End of Masculine Time, every form of media gushes at the ‘Greatest Generation’, heroizing even cooks and noncombatants from WWII, as the last generation of Americans who will ever be called upon to sacrifice. The declaration of ‘The Greatest Generation’ actually sets a time table for the dissolution of the United States, as being three generations removed from a descent into irreversible decline. For unless a declining people discover a new well of heroic figures to renew the cycle of the Ideal based upon the notion of third party sacrifice, cultural decline is assured. Ominously, with the cultural suicide of sterile feminists and denatured men wielding the final emasculatory blade, Western Culture is currently involved in the psychological butchery of its last generation of men, few as they may be.

One might reflect that it is a good thing for the quivering materialistic woman that Western Culture has evolved into through pursuit of the Ideal that some third party has made the last necessary sacrifice for our species, that there is not some other culture on the world stage; perhaps a culture with an ideal of individual warrior sacrifice. For if such a faith were extant on Planet Earth, based as it was on the belief that the warrior sacrifices now for the future of his people, how could our society—based as it is on our ancestors having already sacrificed for our current state of abundance—prevail in the long run?

The world is currently in the grips of a struggle that pits self sacrifice [the Jihadist with his AK-47] against the remaining material gains [U.S. drones and other forms of awesome military hardware and software] resulting from the sacrifice of the West’s ‘Greatest Generation.’

With the nature of the current ethos so infused with feminist ideals it seems that masculine notions will be more likely to survive in opposition to the social order than in support of it, which is hardly a recipe for continued Western hegemony. Fifty years ago this would seem like science-fiction. As this struggle winds up, and on, and finally down, perhaps men in the West might consider reclaiming their ancient ‘Animal Powers’ rather than continuing to hide behind their material God’s oft shat upon altar.