The Auto-Reversion Technique

“The Greeks, during Apollo’s reign as god of art, thus turned art into a mere fossil or record—a record either of human life itself or of the emotions which the vicissitudes of life arouse in the spectator. This notion of art was reflected in their whole civilization. They became singers of songs and weavers of metaphysical webs rather than doers of deeds, and the man who could carve a flower was more honored among them than the man who could grow one. In brief, the began to degenerate and go stale. Great men and great ideas grew few. They were on the downward road

What they needed, of course, was the shock of contact with some barbarous, primitive people—an infusion of good red blood from some race that was still fighting for its daily bread and had had no time to grow contemplative and retrospective and fat. This infusion of red blood came in good time, but instead of coming form without (as it did years afterward in Rome, when the Goths swooped down from the North), it came from within. That is to say, there was no actual invasion of barbarian hordes, but merely an auto-reversion to simpler and more primitive ideas, which fanned the dormant energy of the Greeks into flame and so allowed them to accomplish their own salvation. This came in the form of a sudden craze for a new god—Bacchus Dionysus.

It will be seen that this barbarous invasion of the new god and his minions made a profound change in the whole of Greek culture. Instead of devoting their time to writing epics, praising laws, splitting philosophical hairs and hewing dead marble, the Greeks began to question all things made and ordained and to indulge in riotous and gorgeous orgies, in which hundreds of maidens danced and hundreds of poets chanted songs of love and war, and musicians vied with cooks and vintners to make a grand delirium of joy. The result was the entire outlook of the Greeks, upon history, upon morality and upon human life changed. Once a people of lofty introspection and elegant repose, the became a race of violent activity and strong emotions. They began to devote themselves, not to writing down the praises of existence as they had found it, but to the task of improving life and of widening the scope of present and future human activity and the bounds of possible human happiness.”

-excerpted from Friedrich Nietzsche by H.L. Menken (1913)

As Lothrop Stoddard said a hundred years ago, there are no more ‘white barbarians’ left to save us. If we can’t dig deep into our race-soul and find there the resources necessary to save ourselves, we will perish. In the Greek world, Bacchus was not one of the original Olympians. He was the outsider god, who came from the East to reinvigorate the people.

In our time, this process is playing out in reverse. We were subdued by the outsider god from the Orient in our youth. And now in our old age, we must reach back to our distant past to become virile again. Wotan, the god of fury and storms, is slowly making himself known to our waking conscious again.