The Time that is Left between Time and its End

The Crooks of Bethel Part 2

I ended the last article on the stump of a hoodwink.

Instead of serving my readers the conspiratorial meat they had expected, I turned the guts of the sausage inside out.

There is a certain unfortunate tendency that began with Downard, one that processes all synchronicity and symbolism on the world stage through the lens of conspiracy and cabals. Every omen and semiotic rhythm that reverberates under the public eye must be the carefully staged workings of organized Qabbalists, Satanists stroking their beards in fraternal lodges and board rooms. It is the result of a peculiar epistemic failure— an overconfidence in causality.

There are several reasons for this failure. The men among us sufficiently weird and neurotic enough to notice the inexplicable, those with the ear for psychodramatic rhymes, tend to suffer the obsessive urge of linking these coincidences to definite actors or agencies. This is unfortunate. It is high time for the synchromystic subculture to be sheared from its conspiratorial cousin.

So why engage in Synchromysticism at all? Why invoke the Library Angel? If you want a rational justification, then I will give you one.

Weird hermeneutics tend to spontaneously produce useful heuristics. To deny this is to deny the historical efficacy of oracles and augurs, and I believe Emperor Julian put this criticism to bed nearly two thousand years ago.

Surfing synchronicities and ascribing meaning to “coincidences” can serve as a remarkable guide to more concrete corners of truth. Scouring history for symbols and sign can lead to anagogic ecstasy and unexplored epistemic breaks. And one way or another, we arrive back at Pseudo Dionysus.

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Donald Trump is a world-historical figure. A protagonist on the global stage. He embodies certain archetypes—certain coatings of metaphysical instinct. When a man stands upon axis mundi, diverse mythological filaments naturally constrict around him. To further complicate matters, Donald Trump has long been a closet for men to hang up their dirty eschatological laundry.

Trump is crystalizing into a mythological figure. Both his supporters and his critics kindle this apotheosis. No head of state has been the source of such messianic hopes and consequent demonization since the days of Hitler and Stalin. But unlike Hitler and Stalin, he does not fit into any clean archetypal molds. He is not a totalitarian head of state, and therefore lacks what Hitler and Stalin possessed— direct aesthetic control of their cult image. And so he is altogether more mysterious. His myth form appears to us more organic in its origin.

Where does it come from? How can we process it?

I propose we analyze a myth through the prism of myth. Screening his moves through a more perennial map.

I will give you two different frameworks to contextualize what I am getting at. One from Evola and one from Agamben.

The first passage comes from Evola’s book on the Holy Grail. Hopefully, you quickly catch where I am going with this. Evola’s “Traditionalist” method for analyzing legends and myths can be just as easily applied to viewing currents in contemporary history.

…generally speaking, in these attempts we detect the so-called euhemeristic tendency, which has been taken up by modern scholars because of their irresistible impulse to reduce the superior to the inferior whenever possible. According to modern scholars, the figures found in myths and legends are merely abstract sublimations of historical figures, which have eventually replaced the latter and become myths and fantastic tales. On the contrary, the opposite is true: there are realities of a superior, archetypal order, which are shadowed in various ways by symbols and myths. It may happen that in the course of history, certain structures or personalities will embody these realities. When this happens, history and superhistory intersect and integrate each other; human fantasy may then instinctively attribute the traits of myth to those characters and structures because reality has somehow become symbolic and symbol has become reality. In these cases, the euhemeristic interpretation totally subverts the true relationships. Here myth constitutes the primary element and should be regarded as the starting point, while the historical figure or datum is only one of the various contingent and conditioned expressions of this superior order of things.

And later in the book:

When considered from the above-mentioned perspective, Arthur's saga appears to be one of the many forms of the general myth of the Emperor or invisible Universal Ruler and of his manifestations. It is a theme that dates back to the most ancient times and that bears a certain relation to the doctrine of the "cyclical manifestations" or avatars, namely, the manifestation, occurring at special times and in various forms, of a single principle, which during intermediate periods exists in an unmanifested state. l Thus every time a king displayed the traits of an incarnation of such a principle, the idea arose in the legend that he has not died but has withdrawn to an inaccessible seat whence one day he will manifest himself, or that he is asleep and will awaken one day. And just as the suprahistorical element in these cases overlaps the historical element, by turning a real figure into a symbolic one, likewise the opposite occurs; that is, the names of these real figures sometimes survive, yet designate something that transcends them. The image of a regality in a state of sleep or apparent death, however, is akin to that of an altered, wounded, paralyzed regality, in regard not to its intangible principle but to its external and historical representatives. Hence the theme of the wounded, mutilated, or weakened king who continues to live in the inaccessible center, in which time and death are suspended.

Now I am not implying that Trump is the archetypal embodiment of the World Ruler. What I am teasing out here, is a method— a hermeneutic.