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In Part III of this series, we looked at the Nazi regime in Stoddard’s Into the Darkness. In Part IV, we finally look at a book available from Imperium Press, and go all the way back to the urheimat, to the cradle of Aryan civilization itself.
Fustel de Coulanges: The Ancient City (1864)
Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges is the least known of our authors, but his book was one of the most respected historical works of his time—a time when giants roamed the earth, the golden age of historiography: the mid–late 19th century. And yet it has fallen into obscurity for reasons which are not clear. Nevertheless, in our quest to colonize our bookshelf, even among the three other towering works this one might stand tallest, and might penetrate deepest into the savage heart of modernity.
And yet Coulanges’ masterwork is, on the face of it, not that revolutionary of a book. It is a history of the classical world, tracing it from its earliest times down through its revolutions, and on to its transition from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages. But it is far more. The story has been told many times, and in much greater detail, but never quite like this. The Ancient City is the last great example of traditionalist history. It is a brilliant forerunner to Bertrand de Jouvenel and the neoabsolutist school. It is a long-dead culture come back to life, the most consequential the world has ever seen, a dialect of which is spoken by two in five people alive today.
Historians have offered many explanations for the decline of the classical world. Some of the more specious include economic factors, climate change, abuse of power, and the very pinnacle of modern scholarship, “it’s complicated,” also known as “systemic collapse,” or the convergence of many factors, which is just a thin veil covering a frank admission of perplexity: “I don’t know, a bunch of things I guess?” As though a man dying from a shotgun wound might be said to be undergoing a systemic collapse, with the causal chain reaching back no further than the combination of shock, cardiac arrest, the brain denied a blood supply—you know, it’s complicated.
Some of the more cogent explanations have involved moral decline, reliance upon foreign elements, complexity, and the natural life cycle of civilizations, but what is clear is that nothing is clear. Perhaps we simply do not have the skeleton key. Or perhaps there is none—perhaps it really is complicated. Coulanges’ book enfolds all the more cogent explanations, identifying the engine driving the classical world as… the Aryan domestic cult of the ancestors. At least he is original, no?
This religion bears some explanation, since most people have never heard of it. The first of many lessons in The Ancient City is that the Greeks and Romans were nothing at all like us, at least in terms of their religion. Andrew Breitbart said that politics is downstream of culture. The neoabsolutists tell us that culture is downstream of power. White nationalists say that everything is downstream of biology. For Coulanges, as for Maistre, everything is downstream of theology, and more broadly, of belief. Speaking of the centripetal force needed to bring together people who dwelt in relative isolation, Coulanges writes,
“This power was a belief. Nothing has more power over the soul. A belief is the work of our mind, but we are not on that account free to modify it at will. It is our own creation, but we do not know it. It is human, and we believe it a god. It is the effect of our power, and is stronger than we are. It is in us; it does not quit us: it speaks to us at every moment. If it tells us to obey, we obey; if it traces duties for us, we submit. Man may, indeed, subdue nature, but he is subdued by his own thoughts.”[1]
Have we come full circle, back to the “proposition nation?” Is the sacral center of our society a mere principle? Do we “hold these truths to be self-evident,” whether or not we are free to modify them at will? Hardly. One will not find a George Will among the Aryan and his daughter civilizations. These men were formalists to a degree that seems almost absurd to us. In a discussion of ancient law, Coulanges drops this Scalia-pill:
“These ancient verses were invariable texts. To change a letter of them, to displace a word, to alter the rhythm, was to destroy the law itself by destroying the sacred form under which it was revealed to man. The law was like prayer, which was agreeable to the divinity only on condition that it was recited correctly, and which became impious if a single word in it was changed. In primitive law the exterior, the letter, is everything; there is no need of seeking the sense or spirit of it. The value of the law is not in the moral principle that it contains, but in the words that make up the formula. Its force is in the sacred words that compose it.”[2]
But this extreme rigor makes little sense until we tap into the root of the religion. This is not easy because we have seen a religious revolution relatively recently. We have had our faith for about 1,500 years—the man of Cicero’s time practiced a religion that went back at least 4,000 years, and which was quite unlike ours in almost every way. If we believe at all in the soul today, we believe that it survives death, and that in death the soul and body are parted; the Bronze age Aryan in the Pontic steppe, along with his Greco-Roman descendants, did not think that death would part body and soul. This makes all the difference.
Nietzsche, who had impeccable instincts, speaking through the mouth of his awakened Zarathustra, says “body am I entirely, and nothing more; and soul is only the name of something in the body.”[3] This is not wholly out of keeping with Greco-Roman sensibility. What moves the Homeric heroes is not an airy, immaterial soul, nor even something found in the cosmos, but something in their chests: thumos. It is something quite visceral: lyssa, the wolf’s rage. As for viscera, there is no shortage of it in Iliad. Every page is blood-soaked; one is never very far from a spear-point crashing through someone’s eye socket—one gets the impression that, even if some shadowy soul flits down to Hades, the body is absolutely essential. The last two books of Iliad make no sense without the importance of the body, but this is shown nowhere better than in Sophocles’ Antigone, a play driven by Antigone’s refusal to leave her brother’s body unburied, his funeral rites unperformed. For all our Christian patrimony, something in us simply cannot rest until the body of a loved one is returned to us.
The conjunction of body and soul gave rise to several imperatives at the heart of life for our Aryan. Burial was absolutely essential, as were the rites to be performed. The dead man must be placed in his family’s sepulchre, which was always fixed to the property. Property was inalienable, simply because leaving one’s plot meant turning countless ancestors into hungry ghosts forever—land and property were wholly sacral. The dead man, keeping his bodily form, also kept his bodily needs, and from this came the imperative of propitiation. The dead was buried with the objects dear to him in life, and his family poured wine and placed food on his tomb to feed him; for them to neglect this was a gross impiety. The Aryan gave his dead a funeral repast where all the ancestors came to seat themselves beside him—they were forever and constantly present to him. If he did these things dutifully, they became for him tutelary deities, offering him strength, comfort, and protection; if he did not, they became wandering shades, phantoms, demons (daimon, lit. “departed soul”) who gave him no peace until the obsequies resumed. The symbol of all these things was the family hearth, an altar and center of the Aryan household around which the family gathered to make the sacrifices, propitiate the ancestors, and cook meals, which were always sacred in character. This hearth fire was passed down from generation to generation, and might have burned for thousands of years in a family of unbroken lineage. The family was for our archaic Aryan the ultimate reality, the center of life, and the basic unit of society. Nothing could intrude upon it, nothing could break it.
This makes much in the daughter civilizations clear which is otherwise mysterious. Odysseus is offered a life of pleasure, a royal bride, and even immortality. But he rejects these; he desires above all his hearth fire. The ancient Greek was the oikophile par excellence—there was for him no place like home. Home was where the hearth was, where the ancestors were, and these ancestors were worshiped by him as gods, and he would become one in turn after death. But unlike the worship of Yahweh, or even of Brahma and Zeus, each god could be adored by only one family; religion was purely domestic and exclusive. The stranger was forbidden to approach the hearth, and far from being evangelical, this religion encouraged each family to keep its gods to itself. Why share your source of power with the enemy?
The dead could be propitiated only by their own relatives, specifically by their male heirs. The eldest son alone had the right to take up the patrimony, including the worship. The entire family partook of the rites, but were led by this eldest living son, the House Father. This House Father was a little absolute monarch; the king of his own castle, he was at once high priest and supreme magistrate. He alone could judge his family, and no one could intrude upon his sovereignty. He had ius necis ac vitae, the power of life and death: he could put his own wife, his own son, any family member under his manus (“hand”) to death for any reason at all, or no reason. Spurius Cassius Viscellinus, a grown man—a consul, even—was put to death by his own father for proposing a land bill that displeased him. The Aryan House Father recognized no authority higher than himself, save the ancestors whose rites he dutifully performed day in and day out. Strictly, he was not the sovereign; they were. No external authority could impugn them:
“The pontifex of Rome, or the archon of Athens, might, indeed, ascertain if the father of a family performed all his religious ceremonies; but he had no right to order the least modification of them. Suo quisque ritu sacrificia faciat [“let each man make the sacrifices according to his own rite”]—such was the absolute rule. Every family had its ceremonies which were peculiar to itself, its particular celebrations, its formulas of prayer, its hymns. The father, sole interpreter and sole priest of his religion, alone had the right to teach it, and could teach it only to his son. The rites, the forms of prayer, the chants, which formed an essential part of this domestic religion, were a patrimony, a sacred property, which the family shared with no one, and which they were even forbidden to reveal to strangers.”[4]
This worship, this belief, in Coulanges’ rendering, was the constituent principle of the family. A family was not a voluntary association that could be broken at will, and now we hear echoes of Filmer—or rather, his is a distant echo of this archaic Aryan household. The family was not principally bound even by blood, as a family could adopt a son, even an adult son, as a sort of legal fiction to continue its patrimony. While this arrangement would naturally strengthen the blood tie, the family was above all a religious unit. Hence when the son was born, he was born into a duty, and when the daughter married, she forever left her birth family, no longer welcome at its hearth, unable to propitiate her own ancestors—her ancestors were now those of her husband.
The nature of this worship created a deep tie to the soil. Our archaic Aryan had blut und boden running through his veins. Being bound to the soil, this blood tie bound him to the ancestors and formed an ironclad bond with the past. He was not only the ultimate formalist and the ultimate patriarch, but the ultimate traditionalist. For him, a thing was right simply because it was ancient. Hence the Latin term mos maiorum, usually translated as “tradition,” has connotations this translation misses. Literally it means “way of the elders,” but in the Latin “elder” is synonymous with “greater.” Tradition for him was the way of his betters. How could he think to question it? We have no equivalent, but the closest for a modern bugman would be to question science.
This religion seems to us familiar in some ways, and unfamiliar in others. We see in it the sacrosanct nature of the family, the rites of passage in birth, marriage, and death, and patriarchy, and all of this seems intimately familiar. Yet we also see the worship of the dead, the hearth cult, and the total absence of doctrine (even myth would come later), and a chill alien wind sends a shiver up our spine. One will get none of this in Sunday school.
This picture forms the first three “books” of The Ancient City. The last two are devoted to the history of Greece and Rome, viewing them through the lens of this religion, and we discover that at every turn the ancestor cult was the driving force. The thumbnail sketch goes something like this: the family expanded to where a series of families all gathered around a common hearth, and worshiped common ancestors—we have arrived at the clan. This process continued to where a series of clans formed a tribe, and a series of tribes formed a city. And yet at each stage, men fell outside the sacral order, could not worship at the hearth of the clan, tribe, and city, and became a resentful underclass. These men—plebeians at Rome and thetes in Greece—were then weaponized by disaffected elites against the patricians and eupatrids in a dynamic we have come to know as Jouvenelian.
Readers of Zeroth Position will be familiar with Jouvenel through Chris Bond’s Nemesis, which was reviewed last year on its release. Jouvenel, writing nearly a century after Coulanges, likely picked up on this dynamic from him, as Coulanges lays it out clearly and would have been read by any French historian. The dynamic was mentioned briefly in our review of Filmer, but let us elaborate: the center of the society (official power: kings, government, Moldbug’s Cathedral) allies with peripheral elements (the people: plebeians, often minorities) against intermediary powers (unofficial power: patricians, majority populations, a variety of institutions in the modern world) and weaponizes these peripheral elements against the intermediaries. Each defeat of these unofficial powers results in a greater centralization of power, until such a degree of centralization is achieved that the whole structure topples. This is what happened in the world of classical antiquity, after which Greece and Rome were conquered by peoples they thought of as barbarians, but who were really fairly close ethnic cousins. We should be so lucky.
The Ancient City gives far and away the most plausible account of the decline and fall of the Greco-Roman world, and does so in ways that are instructive even beyond the subject itself (which is hardly a trivial one). First, it stands as a paradigm of traditionalist historiography, which is why it has served as Imperium Press’ inaugural release in the Traditionalist Histories series. Its reliance purely on primary sources, and Coulanges’ masterful command of them, is precisely how traditionalist writing ought to be done in the modern era. By confining himself only to the tradition, only to the sources as they have come down to us from the subject in question, we gain an understanding of the subject according to a logic native to it and avoid errors of eisegesis. We come to understand the Greeks and Romans through their own eyes, or as near as possible. We enter sympathetically, as we did with Stoddard, into the object of our study. When we do this, much that is inexplicable becomes plain, and the vastly superior grasp of the subject that it permits allows us to use our intuition to plausibly fill in gaps where the research man (as Heidegger characterizes the modern “scholar”) must autistically comb through the secondary sources in hopes of maybe being able to cobble together some non-trivial thesis. The criticism that Coulanges ignores the secondary sources is made moot by the fact that they have tended to support him.
More importantly, The Ancient City resurrects the spirit of the Aryans, and revives their praxis. This is Coulanges’ greatest legacy: it reminds us of things we have long ago forgotten. The cult of the ancestors is the ultimate particularist, traditionalist, patriarchal religion. We carry in us the imprint of this archaic religion and cannot escape it. Like looking at the image of a long dead ancestor for the first time, we see family resemblances so deep that they may have even been invisible. We can see the source of our Faustianism: the ancestor cult, along with primogeniture and inalienable property, effectively guaranteed rampant colonialism among the younger branches of the paternal line. This religion is at the root of our modern political categories, such as “tyranny,” a Greek idea whose deep history I have sketched out in an article for The American Sun. The Aryans have even bequeathed to us our notions of class: we have never fully escaped the trifunctionalism (priest/warrior/producer) that Dumézil identified as peculiarly Aryan. After thousands of years this caste structure was obliterated by Christianity, but reared its head again, almost as a sort of inescapable racial memory, in the Three Estates of the medieval world. This religion can even shed light on our Christian past: it is Aryan man’s need for a concrete god, a flesh and blood man, an immanent, reified deity that ensured Christ’s appeal to him where the abstract Yahweh proved alien and remote.
Perhaps most important of all though, this ancient religion bequeathed to us the concept of the individual, and here we can make plain the greatest mystery of all: how right-libertarianism and fascism can be thought of as related apart from in the TDS-damaged mind of the rank-and-file Antifa.
Murray Rothbard wrote that there are no human rights that are not property rights[5], and this underscores the libertarian’s intense concern with property. This is something the Aryan understands very well. In fact, he does one better: for him, property is actually sacred, the sine qua non of his worship, which is to say, of his life. The libertarian is also deeply concerned that the social unit, the individual, be thought of as inviolable, sacrosanct. Here we have a difference with our Aryan, who could not have understood the particular man apart from the family. But put the family in place of our modern individual, and the categories match up hip and thigh, chapter and verse: the family cannot under any circumstances be intruded upon, and has absolute sovereignty within its bounds.[6] Libertarians have an ambiguous relationship to egalitarianism, but certainly place a premium on equality of rights. If we are unequal in certain ways, we are equal in others, such as under the law, or before the eyes of God. At the very least, we can observe that equality arose as a virtue only among Europeans. Our Bronze Age Aryan also observed a sort of egalitarianism, but not one that applied equally to all men, but to all House Fathers, who were effectively the prototype of what is now called the “individual.” The king was not sovereign over the House Father the way the House Father was over his family—the king was primus inter pares, the first among equals. Ricardo Duchesne explains this characteristically Aryan ethic in his introduction to Imperium Press’ edition of Iliad:
“The Iliad grew out of a prototypical Indo-European aristocratic society, Mycenae, in which the king was first among equals. Mycenaeans are the first people in human history to have created a true aristocratic civilization in which “some men,” not just the king, were free to deliberate over major issues affecting the group and free to aspire for heroic greatness. […] To be worthy of an aristocratic status one had to demonstrate one’s capacity for heroic action, one’s ability to differentiate oneself from the others as a fighter and a man of the highest honor. This relentless obsession with their status, with their pride, to be honored by their peers, intensified the natural inclination that men have to become men.”[7]
What we have here in the Pontic steppe—the aristocratic egalitarianism, the sovereign “individual,” the sacralization of property—is liberalism in embryo. But it is not the liberalism of Paine and Locke; it retains archaic elements that stop these natural inclinations of the Indo-European from running off the rails into a sort of heat death of universalism. Caste, the family as formalized religious unit, the sacralization of property, and rigorous traditionalism allow for liberty to the degree that liberty can exist without dissolving the society as a whole. The Aryan household was above all a corporate unit, a body whose members were inseparable, the whole ontologically prior to the part. It is here that it diverges from liberalism and converges with fascism. Fascism can be thought of as making the state the fundamental unit of society, and liberalism the individual as fundamental unit of society. In holding up the family as basic social unit, we reconcile what seem to be opposites, but were originally one: the family as manifested in the individual House Father, and the family as the building block of the state cult. The acquisition of universalism has broken these archaic elements, but we still have the libertas of the House Father running through our veins, except that the natural bulwarks against freedom turning into gray goo have been removed. And so it is that freedom now is not “free” in the sense of an etymological root shared with “friend,” thus inherently social, but is now “free” in the sense of “free to expose himself to children during drag queen story time at the library.”
We still want and need freedom. This is who we are and who we will always be, which is why the National Socialists undermining the traditional family structure and erasing local allegiances was so self-defeating. And yet as seen in their impeccable aesthetics, they had good instincts, and never better than in trying to revive the Aryan spirit through their own Germanic idiom. We can say the same about Filmer in considering the polity as an extension of the family: this is how it worked for millennia for our ancestors, and indeed, is the only way it can work for us. We can say the same about Maistre’s instincts, prizing as he did the unwritten constitution, the altar erected by the work of circumstances, the tradition hallowed by its antiquity, the rites made sacred by the impersonal, imperative utterance of the ancestral deity, the truest expression of fas.
On the surface, all of these things seem radically different, and seem to bear no relation to “the Right” that holds liberty and the individual as self-evident goods in themselves. But scratch the surface, dig deeper—all the way to the root—colonize the deep past, and one finds that what is now many was originally one: we find that the weak, separate rods were once bound into a mighty fascis. The absolutism of Filmer, the traditionalism of Maistre, the radical corporatism of the Third Reich, were once united in the person of the Aryan House Father, standing astride his dominion, exercising his unimpeachable will, and seeing above it none but the line of fathers in his family sepulchre, those fathers who animate his very being, who form the unbreakable chain of which he is but a link, and whom he will one day join in the hereafter. What is now broken was once unbroken, and if any hope remains to us in this world of broken families, splintered religion, and failed states, it will look at least in outline like what has sustained us in some form or another for six millennia from the time when all the now scattered branches of the Aryan family dwelt together in Central Asia.
It is no accident that the snake has figured so significantly in the iconography of Faustian man, especially in the Gadsden flag and Benjamin Franklin’s perfect emblem of fascism, “Join, or Die.” After all, the snake was a cultic figure in the Aryan household. We would not be surprised to find one coiled around a swastika in the Bronze age domus. Perhaps we should not be surprised to find the two entangled today. Let us close with Coulanges’ lucid picture of the Aryan Man, our distant, but ever-present, forefather:
“Let us place ourselves in thought, therefore, in the midst of those ancient generations whose traces have not been entirely effaced, and who delegated their beliefs and their laws to subsequent ages. Each family has its religion, its gods, its priesthood. Religious isolation is a law with it; its ceremonies are secret. In death even, or in the existence that follows it, families do not mingle; each one continues to live apart in the tomb, from which the stranger is excluded. Every family has also its property, that is to say, its lot of land, which is inseparably attached to it by its religion; its gods—Termini—guard the enclosure, and its Manes keep it in their care. Isolation of property is so obligatory that two domains cannot be contiguous, but a band of soil must be left between them which must be neutral ground, and must remain inviolable. Finally, every family has its chief, as a nation would have its king. It has its laws which doubtless are unwritten, but which religious faith engraves in the heart of every man. It has its court of justice, above which there is no other that one can appeal to. Whatever man really needs for his material or moral life the family possesses within itself. It needs nothing from without; it is an organized state, a society that suffices for itself.”[8]
The Colonize Your Bookshelf series will now take a pause. When the series resumes in Part V, we shall leave the steppe and return to Europe, continuing the line of thought on sovereignty—a topic near and dear to the Aryan House Father, but at a remove of some 5,000 years.
<<<Part III Part V>>>
References
- Coulanges, Numa Denis Fustel de (1864; 2020 ed.). The Ancient City. Imperium Press. p. 105.
- Ibid., p. 155.
- Nietzsche, Friedrich (1883; 2015 ed.). Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Hofenberg. p. 25.
- Coulanges, p. 26.
- Rothbard, Murray (1982; 1998 ed.). The Ethics of Liberty. New York University Press. p. 113.
- Qui, Insula (2018). Anarcho-Monarchism. p. 230–7.
- Duchesne, Ricardo (2019). Foreword to Iliad. Imperium Press. p. xiv.
- Coulanges, p. 89.
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