A PALIMPSEST
I
The Nietzschean pagan has been on the ascent for years, much to the chagrin of some, and so much so as to become a stereotype. But true to form with stereotypes there is fire there under the smoke.
Often those who advocate for paganism of a Nietzschean stripe encourage us to embrace our inner great man, our untamed Übermensch, and bid adieu to the cucky meekness valorized in Christianity and western neoliberalism alike.
This is indeed a Nietzschean sentiment. Check out this excerpt from The Twilight of the Idols:
In the early years of the Middle Ages, during which the Church was most distinctly and above all a menagerie, the most beautiful examples of the “blond beast” were hunted down in all directions, — the noble Germans, for instance, were “improved.” But what did this “improved” German, who had been lured to the monastery look like after the process? He looked like a caricature of man, like an abortion: he had become a “sinner,” he was caged up, he had been imprisoned behind a host of appalling notions.
The transformation described here did not only occur in the case of the Germans; a quick glance reveals a ubiquity of heroic, beautiful human forms in ancient sculpture in contrast to the sad, wilty, wan figures that were to come in the late Roman and medieval periods.
But does this dichotomy explain our current zeitgeist? While it is true that some moderns are encouraged to be meek, others are given free rein by the system to be as uncompromising and mean as they gotta be, both in their political demands on the street and behind the scenes—all in the service of alien aims, just as in first millennium. So maybe it is a fitting dichotomy after all. History repeats.
Meanwhile, the Nietzschean pagan of today has absented himself to the forest to retain or discover an element of the wild man ethos; sometimes he climbs mountains for no other reason than they’re there; he jumps through fire to celebrate life; he films himself bushcrafting for followers and patronage; whatever his means, he tries to give the slip to the postmodern menagerie that would contain him—but he also, to a certain extent, lets it off the hook.
But is this characterization – or caricature – of the Übermensch all that Neech brings to the pagan feast? Many have wanted to make this great lion-man, like a roast pig, the glazed centerpiece of the movement—a bold move worthy of the man himself.
But any life recognizable as such will be a system not just of a solipsistic sun, but also of its constituent planets orbiting in enantiodromia to mark the passage of time and to lend a sense of nuance and texture.
So perhaps we should visit those other worlds and see what’s there?
It has been argued that this ideal of the transcendent Übermensch is not, strictly speaking, anti-Christian, seeing as the figure of Christ is, for them, the great man par excellence.[i] And yet it is the servile prostration of his worshipers that makes the alleged greatness of the Christ figure counter-propositional to a true Nietzschean paganism. For in his 1874 essay “The Use and Abuse of History for Life,” Nietzsche warns us against the overestimation of the great men of history (Yes: like Nietzsche.) And yes: the herald of the Übermensch also warned us against hailing the Übermensch overmuch.
Acknowledging the past achievements of its heroes is essential for a nation or a people. And, for an individual, the study of great men can inspire. But pagans do not worship at the altar of a man, even one who claims to be a god, and see this practice as the spiritual equivalent of walking around with another man’s name on your football jersey.
And to continue the metaphor: this high reverence for the great man, if taken too far, puts you up in the cheap seats, a mere spectator rather than a full-fledged participant in the game of life. The great spiritual exercise is therefore undertaken by others. How can you call yourself a spiritual actor when you’ve left it up to another, to a redeemer, to do all the work for you, to make up the difference between you and the gods?
A pagan is in no way this kind of bloody-nosed spectator eager for the afterparty. For neither the pale figure of distant metaphysical numina, nor the earthly majesty of the anthropomorphic god-king, elicits the pagans’ collective abasement, prostration, or obsession like a batch of spurned lovers or groveling Wormtongues.
We are never iconoclasts in the strict sense; we consider our artistic renderings of the divine to be emanations therefrom. But we do not raise a great golden colossus to a heroic figure if that monument blots out our sun and thus undermines our own becoming.
III
Another issue that is pressing for us, as it was for Nietzsche, is the question of remembering versus forgetting.
We pagans are often laser focused on remembering—on reviving and reclaiming a lost golden age, a past that was taken from us at sword-point. If we could only have rescued the library of Alexandria things wouldn’t be this hard! We would instantly reincarnate ourselves phoenix-like from the dustbin of history.
But is that all it means to be a pagan–simply cataloguing the doxographical fragments of prior pagans and paganisms, of all we managed to salvage in our ongoing archaeological digs in libraries and in tumuli?
Nietzsche would warn us against these overly “antiquarian” tendencies. Again, we turn to the essay “The Use and Abuse of History for Life,” where, just as rearing too many vast monuments to the greats of the past might enshadow the present, so too the antiquarian impulse, if overly indulged, will keep us fixated on the past at the expense of our future.
While it might represent a labor of love to those inclined to inventory all available data points regarding our ancestors’ worldview, there comes a moment where the spade that digs the barrows of the Bronze Age simultaneously buries us in our own grave in the here and now—buries us under all the accumulated information on ‘how to be a “pagan.”’
To avoid this premature burial, the classical pagans and poets recognized the necessity of “forgetting.” They seemed utterly unconcerned, after all, with exegetical “accuracy:” Hesiod and Homer were free to adapt their subjects as they saw fit and were hardly precious about keeping things consistent with some inherited, codified master narrative; synods were never formed to reconcile disparate mythic texts, to iron out the inconsistencies, say, between a Euripides and an Ovid. Each ancient poet was free to “forget,” to a degree, the myths and cosmogonies that had come before in the service of their new art, their newly reworked incarnation of the gods—in the service, Nietzsche would say, of life.
For paganisms, like poetry and art, are alive in precisely the same way that the beings that created them are alive—finding themselves in the throes of Darwinian evolution: they are uniquely customized by and for the moment of their making.
(Here endeth the first essay in a planned series on “Nietzschean Paganism”)
Deep Guild 