Klages On Race And Religion

Seeking and Finding

He who seeks shall find, but only after he has surrendered his being to the guidance of the gods.

Goethe and the Romantics

A living totality stands behind both: In Goethe it is Apollo, the god of individuation and, therefore, the god of materialization; in the Romantics, on the other hand, it is the dream-image of the Wild Hunter, the transcendent, drunken, reeling shade of Wotan.

Mankind And Race

We must draw sharp distinction between the man who sees the world as divided between the “human” and the “non-human,” and the man who is most profoundly struck by the obvious racial groupings of mankind (Nietzsche’s “masters”). The bridge that connects us to the Cosmos does not originate in “man,” but in race.

Christian and Pagan

A pagan can become a Christian in his old age: the living substance disintegrates, and the rotting residue is barely functional. On the other hand, never will a Christian become a pagan.

Christianity And Wakefulness

Even in the garden of olives Christ begged his disciples to remain awake by his side. The saints indicate by their sleeplessness that nothing can harm them. Christianity is the war against sleep and dream, two states for which a reviving elemental life will always be yearning. Against the activity of astral wakefulness, elemental life places consummation and the pagan feeling for fate. True pagans regard sleeplessness as the most monstrous conceivable evil. In addition, the wakefulness of the Christian manifests a slavish impulse: the lurking wariness and prudence of submissive souls. 

Christianity and Self-preservation

Christianity aimed at the preservation of the individual ego; in whose service it preaches “compassion.” Christian compassion is hostile to life, because the laws of life are not the laws of the ego: therefore, Nietzsche was correct in spurning it. Th paganism that he wished to proclaim, on the other hand, was a splendid surrender of the ego and, hence, a phenomenon of life.

The Prophecy of a Jewish Friend

I might easily fill ten pages…with anecdotes concerning the life of Richard Perls. He was born a Jew, but eventually abandoned his religion, a religion that he had come to hate. One year before his death, which occurred, to the best of my recollection, in 1897, he said to me: “Herr Klages, the ancient world was destroyed by Judaism, just as the modern world is about to be!” When I voiced my skepticism as to the accuracy of his prophecy…he merely responded: “Just wait—you will live to see my prophecy fulfilled!”

The Great Deceiver

To the Jew, everything human is a sham. One might even say that the Jewish face is nothing but a mask. The Jew is not a liar: he is the lie himself. From this vantage point, we can say that the Jew is not a man…He lives the pseudo-life of a ghoul whose fortunes are linked to Yahweh-Moloch. He employs deception as the weapon with which he will exterminate mankind. The Jew is the very incarnation of the unearthly power of destruction. 

-excerpted from Cosmogonic Reflections by Ludwig Klages (2021)