Alexander Dugin

Author: Alexander Dugin

Translator: Emil Rahimov

From Alexander Dugin, Noomakhia: The Horizons and Civilizations of Eurasia – The Indo-European Legacy and the Traces of the Great Mother (Moscow: Academic Project, 2017)

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We encounter a very similar model of radical Sufism in the writings of the Azerbaijani poet, Imadeddin Nasimi (c. 1369-1417), who also wrote in Turkic (as well as in Farsi and Arabic). Nasimi was a follower and student of Fazlullah Naimi (1339-1401), the founder of a particular trend in Sufism — Hurufism. Hurufism was a current within Sufism, analogous to the Jewish Kabbalah. Fazlullah Naimi was an Iranian poet and Sufi philosopher. He developed the doctrine that the world is made of letters (of the Arabic and Persian alphabets), and that the shape of letters and their combinations are a set of all possible combinations of the Universe. Operations with letters can influence events and serve as a path to spiritual elevation. Fazlullah Naimi considered himself a messenger of God who revealed the truth to the world. First, he decided to spread his teaching and the revelation of his mission among the people of Tabriz in Azerbaijan, which became known among his followers as the “Land of Resurrection” (Sarzamin-i Rastakhiz).

For his views, Naimi was subjected to persecutions and ultimately executed at the hands of the Timurids, who ruled Iran at that time. While in prison, he wrote his main work (Javidan-nama, literally The Book of Eternity), where he expounded the doctrine of sacred letters in its final form. Besides this, he compiled the Book of Dreams (Navm-nama) and other important works in the spirit of extreme Sufism, while also bearing numerous parallels to Ismailism. In the description of one of his dreams in which he met Muhammad, he talks about the practice of observing the seven stars from a certain angle. During this experience, the brightest star penetrates his eye, after which he gains the ability to comprehend the essence of things — the rays of the Logos scattered within them. Naimi considered himself to be an incarnation of Divinity. He interpreted dreams, predicted the future, and claimed to understand the language of birds. But his main mission was to discover the Logos in the world’s every structure — in the universe, man, history, and religion. This is what he called “Resurrection” (Rastakhiz). Again, here we havea direct parallel with the Ismaili concept of “Resurrector” (al-Qa’im) and “Resurrection” (al-Qiyamah).

Imadeddin Nasimi was a follower of Naimi and preached his teachings. At the same time, strictly continuing the line of Persian-Turkic Sufism, he was an ardent adherent of al-Hallaj, considering him to be the bearer of the highest truth of the Sufi doctrine. The doctrine of the identity between man’s inner, “perfect nature” and the Divinity itself is expounded with the utmost transparency by Nasimi. Like Yunus Emre, Nasimi writes some poems from the perspective of this “supreme identity”, the divine I. 

Both worlds can fit within me, but into this world I cannot fit

I amessence, I have no place, into being I cannot fit. 

Everything that was, is and will be, everything is embodied in me,

Don’t ask! Follow me. Into explanations I cannot fit.

The universe is my harbinger, my beginning is your life,

Recognize me by these signs, but into these signs I cannot fit. 

By assumption and doubt, no one has reached the truth,

He who has learned the truth knows, into assumptions I cannot fit. 

Take a deeper look into my image and strive to see the meaning,

I am of body and soul, into a soul with body I cannot fit.

I am a pearl, hidden in a shell. I am a bridge leading to hell and heaven,

Know that with such wealth, into the stalls of the world I cannot fit.

I am the most secret of all treasures, I am the manifestness of all worlds,

I am the source of jewels, into the seas and depths I cannot fit.

Although I am great and boundless, but I am Adam, I am a man,

I am the creation of the universe, but into creation I cannot fit.

I am all times and all ages. The soul and the world are all me!

But does no one find it strange that in these, too, I cannot fit.

I am the horizon, I am all the planets, and I am the Angel of Revelation,

Hold your tongue behind your teeth, into your tongue I cannot fit. 

I am the atom of all things, I am the sun, I am the six sides of your earth.

Now look at my clear face, into this clarity I cannot fit.

I am at once essence and character, I am sugar and rose in half,

I am myself the decision and the justification, into a silent mouth I cannot fit. 

I am a wood in fire, I am a stone that has ascended to heaven,

Admire my flame, into this flame I cannot fit. 

I am a sweet dream, the moon and the sun. The breath, the soul, I give.

But even in the soul and breath, all at once I cannot fit.

Although today I am Nasimi, I am Hashimite and Quraysh,

I am less than my own glory, but into glory I cannot fit. 

In another poem, Nasimi directly (like Rumi and Emra) quotes al-Hallaj:

I have found the truth! I am the Truth! I proclaim.

I am the Truth. The truth is in me, I proclaim the truth.

See how mystically I proclaim these secrets.

I am truthful in my utterances. “Bow down before my truthfulness! ” I proclaim.

In some of his quatrains, Nasimi goes even further:

I am absolute being, my affirmations are absolute.

The truth is the witness. The truth knows that I affirm the truth.

The mystery of “I was a hidden treasure” I affirm in a mystical way.

I extended my finger. The moon has been split, I affirm.

This is the apotheosis of metaphysical power and an achievement of the highest level of the Sufi path — a penetration into the worlds of haqiqat. The formula from the hadiths —”I was a hidden treasure, but I wanted to be known and created a creation”— is the basis of Sufi metaphysics. In Arabic, it sounds like this:

The beginning of the formula is also reproduced in Nasimi’s quatrain. It is important to note here that God expresses the will to be known (‘arif), which refers to the third level of Sufism — ma’rifah. God is the Truth. But this truth is deliberately apophatic (the neo-Platonic, super-existential, and unknowable Hen [ἓν]). In order to be known, Truth makes creation. But the act of knowing is the Logos, which means that the universe is the unfolded Logos. On this basis, the Hurufites identify the world with the sacred text. However, the world itself concentrates its Logos-essence into one pole — man. He is, in the end, the instance in which He who wants to be known is known. The Knower of that which is Unknowable but strives to be known, is extremely close to the object of knowledge. So, man himself becomes the Logos of the universe, penetrates into the essence of things and attains absolute power (the split moon). At the same time, the Logos is conceived by the Hurufite Nasimi as an ordered system of signs, that is, as a script, as scripture. The nature of man (Adam) encompasses everything precisely because man is nothing other than the Logos. Adam is a divine inscription that can read itself, and through this (i.e., everything else), can read the world. This reading of the world constitutes a knowledge of God attained through the “marifat“, that is, His cataphatic unfolding.

 Nasimi writes:

The Priceless diamond in Adam’s vein

“I was a hidden treasure” in Adam’s nature

Although the devil too is in Adam’s blood

The secret of names is in Adam’s soul

Adam-Logos contains all opposites. He is not only good and light, he embraces all versions of manifestation, including its dark sides, integrating them into himself. Hence the Dionysian character of the Sufi Logos of Nasimi. 

The Hurufites’ interpretation of the Logos as an inscription is not typical of the Turks or the nomadic peoples of Turan in general, since their main emphasis was on oral tradition. However, Hurufism probably restored the tradition of sacred signs, known to the most ancient peoples of Turan. The Turkic tamga and Eurasian runes could be prototypes of such generalizing symbolic systems.

In general, Nasimi’s poetic metaphysics represents a complete and coherent Platonism. But we find such Platonism already in Yassavi, and then in the entire tradition of Turkish Sufism. In its structure, it hardly differs from the classical Iranian metaphysics of the Islamic period, where the ancient Indo-European heritage (the Logos of Apollo), Mazdean dualism (the war of light and eschatology), and Hellenic Neoplatonism converge. This is a vivid manifestation of the Iranian Logos. In this case, it is strictly the language that is Turkic. However, it should be noted that the Turkic peoples of Turan had ancient precedents for such a deep perception of the Iranian tradition, since the Logos of Turan itself is, in turn, Indo-European in its origins and roots, and therefore the Turkic Dasein was originally structured along the semantic axis of the Logos of Apollo.

It is significant that the Turk Nasimi died a martyr’s death in Aleppo — the Zahirite mullahs skinned him alive. Sufi legends claim that the executed poet then got up, wrapped himself in his skin like a Sufi cloak (khirka) and calmly left. No one ever saw him again. Thus, Nasimi repeated the martyrdom of Mansur al-Hallaj, Suhrawardi, and his teacher Fazlullah Naimi, the faith in whom Nasimi carried through his life and embodied in the grand monument of his creations. 

Author: Petr Bitsilli

Translators: Jafe Arnold & John Stachelski

Originally published as the ninth chapter of Na putiakh’. Utverzhdenie evraziitsev [Pathways: The Affirmation of the Eurasians] (Moscow/Berlin: Gelikon, 1922).

This translation is featured in Foundations of Eurasianism – Volume II (PRAV Publishing, 2022 [Forthcoming]).

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From time to time, it is beneficial to reconsider our customary historical concepts so that, in employing them, we do not fall into delusions generated by our mind’s tendency to ascribe absolute significance to our notions. It must be remembered that the correctness or falsity of historical notions, like any other scientific concepts, depends on the chosen point of view, that the degree of their correspondence to reality can be greater or lesser in view of which historical moment we apply them to, and that their content constantly changes, at first imperceptibly, gradually and then suddenly. Among the notions most often employed and subjected to the least degree of criticism are the concepts of East and West. The opposition and contrast between East and West has been a formulaic truism since Herodotus. By the East is meant Asia, and by the West, Europe, that is, two “parts of the world”, two “continents”, as grammar school textbooks assure us, or two “cultural worlds” as “philosophers of history” express it. Their “antagonism” is revealed to be a struggle between the “principles” of freedom and despotism, between striving forward (“progress”) and inertia, and so on. Their eternal conflict drags on in diverse forms, the prototype being the clash of the King of Kings and the democracies of Hellas. I am far from criticizing these formulas. From certain points of view, they are fully correct, for they cover a significant part of the content of historical “actuality”, but they do not exhaust it. Finally, they are true only for those who look at the Old World “from Europe” — and yet, who will argue that the historical perspective obtained from such an angle is “the only correct one”? 

Not for the sake of “criticism”, but for a better analysis of these concepts and for establishing them within proper boundaries, I would like to recall the following: (1) The antagonism between East and West in the Old World does not exclusively mean antagonism between Europe and Asia. The West itself has “its East” and “its West” (Romano-Germanic Europe and Byzantium, then Rus’) and the same applies to the East: the opposition between Rome and Tsargrad to some extent corresponds to the opposition between “Iran” and “Turan”, or that between Islam and Buddhism. Finally, the opposition between the Mediterranean region and the steppe world in the Western half of the Old World corresponds in the Far East to the relation between China and the very same steppe world in the center of the Eurasian continent. Only in the latter case East and West change roles: China, being geographically “East” to Mongolia, is culturally “West” for the latter. (2) The history of the Old World, understood as a history of relations between West and East, is not exhausted by the struggle between these two principles: there are too many facts at our disposal that speak to the development of common, rather than antagonistic principles in both West and East. (3) Alongside the image of the history of the Old World which we obtain when we look “from the West”, another, no less “legitimate” and “correct” one can be constructed. The picture of the Old World changes before the observer as he moves from West to East. If one stands in Russia, then all the outlines of the Old Continent emerge more clearly: Europe appears as part of the continent, albeit a very isolated part possessing its own individuality, but no more so than Iran, Hindustan, and China. If Hindustan is naturally separated from the main mass of the continent by the wall of the Himalayas, then the isolation of Europe, Iran, and China stems from their orientation of “facing” the seas. In relation to the center, Europe and China are mostly defensive. The “Chinese Wall” became a symbol of inertia, not any wisdom against the “ignorance of foreigners”, although in fact its point was completely different: China shielded its culture from barbarians; hence this wall fully corresponds to the Roman “frontier” by which the Mediterranean tried to defend itself from the barbarism pressing in from the North and East. The Mongols showed an example of brilliant divination when they saw in Rome and the Roman Empire “greater China”, Ta-Tsin.

Conceiving the history of the Old World as the history of a duel between East and West can be contrasted to conceptualizing the no less constant historical fact of interaction between center and outskirts. This wholly discloses the very same phenomenon that has hitherto been better known in one part of the whole: the problem of Central Asia corresponds to the problem of Central Europe. The concentration of trade routes running from West to East and connecting our “Middle-Earth” with India and China, the involvement of several economic worlds within one system – this trend runs throughout the entire history of the Old World and is found in the policies of the Emperors of Assyria and Babylon, their heirs, the Great Kings of Iran, Alexander the Great, later the Mongol Khans, and finally, the Emperors of All-Russia. This great task loomed in full clarity for the first time at the end of the 6th century, in 568, when Bumin Qaghan of the Turks, who reigned in a state extending from China proper to the Oxus and held all the roads along which Chinese silk was transported, sent his ambassador to Emperor Justin to propose an alliance against the common enemy of the king of Iran, Khosrow I. At the same time, Bumin entered into diplomatic relations with China, and Emperor Wu married a Turk princess. If the Emperor of Western China had accepted Bumin’s proposal, the face of the earth would have been transformed: what in the West people naively took to be a “circle of lands” would have become part of a great whole; the Old World would have been united, and perhaps the Mediterranean centers of antiquity might have been saved, for the main cause of their depletion, constant war with the Persian (and then Persian-Arab) world, would have receded. But Bumin’s idea was not met with support in Byzantium. This example shows just how important familiarity with the political history of the “East” is to understanding the political history of the “West.”

Between the three marginal-coastal “worlds” of the Old World lies the special world of nomadic steppe dwellers, the “Turks” or “Mongols”, fragmented into so many ever-changing, fighting, and splitting units that are not so much tribes as military alliances whose centers of formation are “hordes” (literally, ‘headquarters’) named after warrior leaders (e.g., the Seljuks, Ottomans). This is an elastic mass in which every shock echoes at all points. The blows inflicted upon it at the beginning of our era in the Far East were echoed by the migrations of the Huns, Avars, Hungarians, and Polovtsy to the West. The dynastic clashes that arose in the center after Genghis Khan’s death echoed in the periphery with Batu’s invasion of Rus’, Poland, Silesia, and Hungary. In the midst of this amorphous mass, points of crystallization appear and disappear with incredibly rapidity. Gigantic empires which survive no longer than one generation are created and collapse time and again. Bumin’s genius idea was almost realized on several occasions. Twice it came especially close, for instance, when Genghis Khan united the entire East from the Don to the Yellow Sea, from the Siberian taiga to the Punjab, when merchants and Franciscan monks went all the way from Western to Eastern China within the borders of one state. But this state disintegrated after the death of its founder. In the very same way, with Timur’s death (1405) the pan-Asian state he created also perished. Over the course of this whole period, a certain “completeness” prevailed: Central Asia was constantly in antagonism with the Middle East (including Iran) and sought rapprochement with Rome. Abbasid Iran, the continuation of Sassanid Iran, remained the main enemy. As early as the 11th century, the Turks disassembled the Caliphate, but only to take its place, as they themselves were “Iranianizied” and, infected with Iranian fanaticism and religious exaltation, split from the common Turko-Mongol mass. They continued the policies of the Caliphs and great Kings, that is the policy of expanding West, into Asia Minor, and to the South-West, to Arabia and Egypt. They became the enemies of Central Asia. Möngke Khan repeated Bumin’s attempt, proposing joint operations with Saint Louis against the Middle East and promising to help in the Crusade. Like Justin, the Holy King did not understand anything about this Eastern sovereign’s plan. The negotiations that opened with Louis sending a model of the Parisian Notre Dame and two nuns did not lead to anything, of course. Louis went against the “Babylonian” (Egyptian) Sultan without allies, and the Crusade ended with the Christians’ defeat at Damietta (1265). In the 14th century, we have an analogous situation: at the Battle of Nicopolis, Bayezid destroyed the crusading militia of Emperor Sigismund (1394) only to be captured himself soon after by Timur at Angora (1401). After Timur’s death, the unity of the Turanian world collapsed irrevocably. Instead of one, there were now two centers of Turanian expansion, Western and Eastern, and two Turkeys: the “real” one in Turkestan, and the other “Iranianized” one on the Bosphorus. Expansion proceeded from both centers in parallel and simultaneously. The high point in 1526 saw two battles of world-historic significance: the Battle of Mohács, which brought Hungary into the hands of the Caliph of Constantinople, and the victory at Panipat, which gave Sultan Babur rule over India. At the same time, a new center of expansion was emerging: on the old trade routes through the Volga and the Urals, a new “middle kingdom”, the Muscovite state, until recently a ulus of the Great Khan. This state, which the West saw as Asia in Europe, in the 17th-19th centuries played  the vanguard role in West’s counteroffensive into the East. The “law of synchronism” is still in force now, in the new phase of the Old World’s history. Russia’s penetration into Siberia, Jan Sobieski and Peter the Great’s simultaneous victories at the time of China’s counteroffensive against the Mongols (Kangxi’s reign, 1662-1722), Catherine’s wars, and the beginning of the collapse of the Osmans’ Empire – all of these coincided with the second decisive moment of Chinese expansion: the completion of the formation of present-day China (under the reign of Qianlong, 1736-1796). China’s westward expansion in the 17th and 18th centuries was dictated by the very same motives that guided China in antiquity, when it erected its wall: China’s expansion was purely defensive in character. Russian expansion was of a completely different nature. Russia’s advance into Central Asia, Siberia, and the Amur region, and the laying of the Siberian railroad – all of this, from the 16th century up to our days, constitutes a manifestation of one and the same tendency. Yermak Timofeyevich and von Kaufman or Skobelev, Dezhnev and Khabarov are all successors of the great Mongols, pioneers of the paths connecting West and East, Europe and Asia, Ta-Tsin and China.  

Like political history, the cultural history of the West cannot be divorced from the cultural history of the East. Here too, the transformation of our historical vulgate should not be seen simplistically. The matter is not one of “refutation”, but of something else: of putting forward points of view which reveal new aspects of the history of mankind’s cultural development. The contrast between the cultures of West and East is not a delusion of history; on the contrary, it comes into relief in every possible way. However, first of all, behind this contrast one should not lose sight of similarities; secondly, it is necessary to once again raise the question of the very bearers of these contrasting cultures themselves; thirdly, it is necessary to once and for all put an end to the habit of seeing contrast everywhere and in everything, even where there is none. I will start with the latter and provide a few examples. Until recently, the opinion prevailed that Western European, medieval, Romano-Germanic art was an independent phenomenon. It was accepted as indisputable that the West reworked and developed ancient artistic traditions in its own way, and that this “way” was the contribution of Germanic creative genius. Only in painting for some time did the West depend upon the “dead spirit” of Byzantium, but by the 13th and beginning of the 14th century, the Tuscans were freed from the Greek yoke, and the Renaissance era of fine arts began. Little of these views is left today. It has been proven that the West’s first prototypes of “Germanic” art (the jewelry works of the Frankish and Visigoth burial grounds and treasures) are owed to the East, specifically Persia, and that the prototype of the characteristic “Langobardian” ornament is to be found in Egypt. Both the floral and faunal ornamentation of early miniatures, which until recently were taken in by the eyes of art historians to be testimonies to the specific German “sense of nature”, came from the East. As for the transition from conventionalism to realism in the fresco painting of the 14th century, here we have before us a fact common to both West and East (Byzantium and its culture’s areas of influence, for instance Old Serbia): no matter how the question of precedence is resolved, in any case, the scheme tracing art forms back to Lorenzo Ghiberti and Giorgio Vasari and previously restricted to one corner of Italy, must be abandoned. 

Equally untenable is the oppositional contrast asserted between “Romano-Germanic Europe” and the “Christian East” in another field: philosophical thought. The vulgate narrative depicts the matter as follows: in the West, there was Scholasticism and the “blind pagan Aristotle”, yet still, a scientific language was forged and the dialectical method of thinking was worked out, while in the East only mysticism flourished. The East nurtured itself with the ideas of Neoplatonism, but religio-philosophical thought turned out to be fruitless for “intellectual progress in general”, exhausting itself in childish debates over needlessly subtle concepts, and, entangled in the abstractions it created, did not lend itself to the creation of anything of significance. The facts strongly contradict this vulgate. Platonism was a phenomenon common to all medieval thought, both Western and Eastern, with the difference being that the East managed to make Platonic idealism the foundation of its religious philosophy by virtue of its turn to the primary source of Neoplatonism, Plotinus. The West, meanwhile, knew Plotinus and Plato only second-hand, and often confused them. Moreover, in the West, mysticism was just as significant a fact as Scholasticism; rather, they were one and the same thing. One cannot contrast Scholasticism to mysticism, for the great Scholastic systems of the West were created by none other than mystics and had the aim of preparing a mystical act. Yet, Western mysticism, such as that of St. Bernard and the Victorines, St. Francis and St. Bonaventure, was not inferior to Eastern in the might of its attunement or in its depth. Nevertheless, it was lower than Eastern mysticism as a worldview. This, however, does not diminish its role in Western culture: it was out of the soil of mysticism that Joachimism arose, giving powerful impetus to the new historical understanding and thereby becoming the ideational source of the early Renaissance, the great spiritual movement associated with Dante, Petrarch, and Rienzi in the 15th century. The renaissance of mysticism in Germany was the source of Luther’s Reformation, just as Spanish mysticism was the source of Loyola’s Counter-Reformation. And that is not all. Modern scholarship has put forth the need for comparatively studying Christian philosophy, both Western and Eastern,  Jewish and Muslim, for here we have before us one and the same ideational phenomenon, three branches of one stream. Particularly close to Christian thought is the Muslim religious culture of Iran, where “Islam” has nothing to do with the Islam of the first Caliphs or with Islam as it was understood by the Turks. Just as the Abbasid state was a continuation of the Sassanid state, so did Islam in Iran take on a specifically Iranian coloring, absorbing the ideational content of Mazdeism with its mysticism and grandiose historico-philosophical idea centered around the idea of progress fulfilled in another world beyond. 

We have arrived at the main problem in the history of world culture. We will understand it as soon as we briefly trace its emergence. The historical vulgate began to be overcome with the gradual expansion of historians’ sphere of interests. Here it is necessary to distinguish the 18th century and our own time. Voltaire, Turgo, and de Condorcet’s noble universalism was rooted in  the presumption of the sameness of human nature and, in essence, an absence of genuine historical interest, the absence of a feeling of history. To Western Europeans, who to this day have allowed themselves to be led by their nose, and to the “priests”, Voltaire contrasted the “wise Chinese” who had managed to get rid of “prejudices” long ago. Volney undertook to “refute the truth” of all religions, employing the comparative method in an original manner, namely, by establishing that the “delusions” and “inventions” of the worshippers of all deities were the same. In the 18th century, they imagined “progress” to be something like this: one fine day – here earlier, over there later – people will have their eyes opened, and they will turn from delusions to “Healthy Reason”, “Common Sense”, and “Truth”, which are everywhere and always identical. The main, and essentially the only, difference between this concept and the one created by the “positive” historical science of the 19th century boils down to the fact that now the transition from “delusions” to “truth” (in the 19th century, instead of lumières or saine raison, they spoke of “exact science”) is declared to happen “evolutionarily”, naturally, and logically. The science of the “comparative history of religions” was built on this premise and with the aim of: (1) Understanding the psychology of religious phenomena by drawing on materials gathered from all corners (but only if the compared facts were at the same stages of development); (2) Constructing, so to speak, an ideal history of the development of the human spirit, a history of which individual empirical histories are partial manifestations. The other side of the question – that of the possible interaction of the facts of the development of cultural humanity – was left aside. Meanwhile, the evidence in favor of this assumption was such that it involuntarily drew attention to itself. Modern science halted in the face of a phenomenon of exceptional importance: synchronism in the religio-philosophical development of great cultural worlds. Leaving aside the monotheistic tradition of Israel, we see that after the beginning of the monotheistic reform of Zarathustra in the northwestern corner of Iran, the religious reform of Pythagoras takes place in Hellas in the sixth century, and the activity of the Buddha unfolds in India. To this same period belongs the emergence of Anaxagoras’ rationalistic theism and Heraclitus’ mystical teaching on Logos. Their contemporaries in China were Confucius and Lao Tzu, the latter’s teaching including elements close to the younger contemporaries Heraclitus and Plato. Meanwhile, as the “natural religions” (fetishistic and animistic cults, ancestor cults, etc.) developed anonymously and organically (or is this, perhaps, only an illusion generated by distance?), the “historical” religions were indebted to the creative activity of genius reformers. Religious reform, the transition from “natural” cult to “historical religion”, consists of a conscious rejection of polytheism.

The unity of the history of the Old World’s spiritual development can be traced further. Regarding the reasons for the undisputed similarity of Hellas and China’s intellectual development in the same era, only a few presumptions can be made. It is difficult to say to what extent Hindu theophanistic religious philosophy influenced Middle Eastern gnosis and Plotinus’ theophanism, or in other words, the religious philosophy of Christianity, but this fact cannot possibly be denied. One of the foremost elements of the Christian worldview which left perhaps the greatest mark on all of European thought, its messianism and eschatology, had been inherited  from Iran by Judaism. The unity of this history is also reflected in the spread of the great historical religions. Mithra, the old Aryan god whose cult survived Zarathustra’s reform in Iran, became well known to the whole Roman world through merchants and soldiers just as the preaching of Christianity began. Christianity spread East along the great trade routes, the very same same paths along which Islam and Buddhism were carried. The Christian religion in the form of Nestorianism was also widespread throughout the East all the way up until the mid-13th century, until the careless and clumsy missions of Western missionaries that unfolded after Genghis Khan’s unification of Asia incited a hostile attitude toward Christianity in the East. Starting in the second half of that century, Christianity began to disappear from the East, giving way to Buddhism and Islam. The ease and speed with which the great spiritual currents spread throughout the Old World was largely conditioned by the qualities of the environment, namely, the mental make-up of the population of Central Asia. The highest matters of spirit were alien to the Turanians. What St. Louis and Pope Alexander IV naively mistook to be “the Mongols’ natural inclination towards Christianity” was in fact the result of their religious indifference. Like the Romans, they accepted all kinds of Gods and tolerated all kinds of cults. The Turanians who entered the Caliphate as mercenaries submitted themselves to Islam as if to “yasak”, or the right and tribute of the warlord. At the same time, they are distinguished by their proclivity for external assimilation. Central Asia is a wonderful, neutral environment for transmission. The creative, constructive role in the Old World always belonged to the marginal-coastal worlds of Europe, Hindustan, Iran, and China. For its part, Central Asia, that space extending from the Urals to the Kunlun, from the Arctic Ocean to the Himalayas, was a crossing ground for the “marginal-coastal cultures”, as well as, given its political magnitude, a factor in their spread and an external condition for the development of cultural syncretism. 

Timur’s deeds were more destructive than constructive. Yet, Timur was not the hellish spawn and conscious destroyer of culture the frightened imagination of his enemies made him out to be, namely, the Middle Eastern Turks and the Europeans after them. He destroyed for the sake of creation: his campaigns had a great cultural goal, which was determined by their possible consequences – the unification of the Old World. But he died without completing his work. After his death, Central Asia, exhausted by several centuries of wars, perished. The trade routes thereafter moved from land to sea for a long time to come. The ties between West and East were interrupted. Out of four great centers of culture, one of them, Iran, spiritually and materially wilted, and the other three were isolated from each other. China froze in its religion of social morality, which degenerated into meaningless ritualism. In India, religio-philosophical pessimism, combined with political enslavement, led to spiritual stupor. Western Europe, having been cut off rom the sources of its culture and having lost contact with the centers of excitation and renewal of thought, developed the heritage it inherited in its own way: there was no numbness, no treading on the spot, but a gradual deflation of the great ideas bequeathed by the East, through Comte’s famous “three stages” to agnosticism, to stupid optimism with its base naive faith in the kingdom of God on earth, which will automatically come as the final result of “economic development”, all until the hour of awakening struck, when the whole immensity of spiritual impoverishment was revealed and the spirit reached for anything it could, for neo-Catholicism, “Theosophy”, or Nietzscheanism, in search of lost wealth. Here lies the promise of rebirth. That rebirth is possible and is possible precisely by way of restoring the broken cultural unity of the Old World, as is evidenced by the fact of the rebirth of the East as a result of “Europeanization”, i.e., the assimilation of what the East lacked and what the West was strong in, such as the technical means of culture and everything pertaining to modern civilization. In so doing, however, the East did not lose its individuality. The cultural task of our time ought to be conceived as mutual fertilization and finding paths to cultural synthesis which, however, would manifest itself everywhere in its own way, as unity in diversity. The fashionable idea of “one world religion” is just as bad taste as the idea of an “international language”, a product of the lack of any understanding of the essence of culture, which is always created yet never “made” and is therefore always individual.

What role might Russia have in the rebirth of the Old World? It is necessary to recall the traditional interpretation of the Russian “world mission”: 

We, like obedient slaves,

Held up a shield between two enemy races –

The Tatars and Europe!

This is not new. That Russia has “by its own chest defended European civilization from the thrust of the Asiatic”, and that this is its “service to Europe”, is something we have been hearing for a long time. Such formulas only testify to our dependence on the Western historical vulgate, a dependence which, it turns out, is difficult to dispose of even for those people who have experienced Russian “Eurasianism.” The mission whose symbol is the “shield”, the “wall”, or the “hard stone chest”, seems honorable and at times even brilliant from a point of view which recognizes only European “civilization” to be “real” civilization, only European history to be “real” history. Behind the “wall” there is nothing, no culture, no history, only the “wild Mongol horde.” The shield falls from our hands, and the “cruel Huns” come to “roast the meat of our white brothers.” I would contrast the symbol of the “shield” with the symbol of the “pathway”, or better yet, complement one with the other. Russia does not so much separate as connect Asia and Europe. But Russia has not restricted itself to the role of continuing the historical mission of Genghis Khan and Timur. Russia is not only a mediator in cultural change between individual Asian outskirts. Rather, it is least of all a mere mediator. The synthesis of Eastern and Western cultures happens within it.

Yes, we are Scythians! Yes, we are Asians –

With slanted and greedy eyes!

And further:

As mortal battles rages we’ll watch

With our narrow eyes!

Again, however, one must subject the inspired words of the great poet to “cold” analysis, for such an analysis reveals a curious and very typical confusion of ideas. The essence of this confusion lies in that the entire “East” is taken in one bracket. We have “narrow” or “slanted” eyes – the sign of the Mongol, the Turanian. But why, then, are we “Scythians”? After all, the Scythians were by no means “Mongols” in race or spirit. The fact that this poet, in a flurry of passion, forgot about this, is very typical — he obviously had before him the image of the “Oriental man in general.” It would be more correct to say that we are “Scythians” and “Mongols” together. From the ethnographic point of view, Russia is a region of predominantly Indo-European and Turanian elements. In cultural terms, the atavistic influences of the Turanian element cannot be denied. Or, perhaps,  here the inoculation of Tatarism as the spiritual heritage of the times of Batu and Tokhtamysh simply makes itself felt? In any case, the organization of Bolshevik Russia is all too reminiscent of the “horde.” Just as the Mongols of the 11th century perceived the will of Allah in the Quran to be “yasak”, so is the Communist manifesto “yasak” to us. “Socialismo Asiatico”, as Francesco Nitti has dubbed Bolshevism, is a very wise word. Yet, there is really nothing “Turanian”, nothing “Central Asian”, in the deep religiosity of the Russian people, in its propensity for mysticism and religious exaltation, in its irrationalism, and in its tireless spiritual yearnings and struggles. Here, again, the East makes itself felt, not the Central Asian East, but the other East — Iran or India. In the same way, the exceptional sharpness of artistic insight inherent to the Russian people brings them closer to the East, not the Central Asians who lack artistic independence, of course, but the Chinese and Japanese. “East” is a polysemantic term, and one cannot speak of any single “Eastern” element. The Turanian-Mongol element received and transmitted over centuries was processed, absorbed, and dissolved by the higher elements of Iran, China, India, and Russia. The Turko-Mongols are not at all a “young” people. They have already happened to be in the position of “heirs” many times. They received “inheritances” from everywhere, and each time they acted in the same way: they assimilated everything equally superficially. Russia can carry the highest culture to the trans-Ural spaces, but it gains nothing for itself from contact with the neutral, vapid Turanian element. Russia can fulfill its “Eurasian” mission and realize its essence as the new Eurasian cultural world only along the pathways which it has politically developed thus far: from Central Asia and through Central Asia into the coastal regions of the Old World.

The outline of the new historical scheme which we have expounded here consciously contradicts both the well-known textbooks of the historical vulgate as well as those attempts to reformat it that have surfaced from time to time. At the core of this proposed plan lies recognizing the connectedness of history and geography — in contrast to the vulgate, which at the beginning of its “guide” dismisses “geography” with small outlines of “surface structure” and climate in order to no longer return to such boring things. Unlike Helmolt, who took geographical division as the basis for the distribution of material in his world history, the present author puts forth the need to reckon with genuine geography, not arbitrary textbook geography, and insists on the unity of Asia. This facilitates the way to clarifying the fact of the unity of Asian culture. Thus, we arrive at the need to make some adjustments to the new conception of world history proposed by the German historian Dietrich Schaefer. Schaefer breaks with that vulgate of “world history” which has long since turned into a mechanical collection of individual “histories.” One can speak of “world history”, he argues, only from the moment peoples scattered all over the earth came into contact with each other, i.e., since the beginning of the “new time” (Neuzeit) of the modern era. But from his very exposition of the Weltgeschichte der Neuzeit, it is clear that, from this point of view, “world history” is preceded by the same old “history of Western Europe.” From our point of view: (1) The history of Western Europe is only part of the history of the Old World; (2) The history of the Old World does not proceed like some consistent evolution up to the stage of “world history.” Here the relationship is different and more complex: “world history” began only once the unity of the Old World was violated. That is, there is no rectilinear progress here: history at the same time gains in “extensiveness” and loses in “integrity”.

This proposed model is also corrective of another well-known scheme which depicts world-historical progress as a series of stages at which “cultural values”, embodied in individual “developmental types”, are realized one by one, chronologically replacing one another and stretching out into a progressive chain. There is no need that the ideological sources of this theory go back not only to the violent history “as it actually happened” of Hegel’s metaphysics, or even worse, to the mythological imaginations about “nomad culture” of antiquity and the Middle Ages. The error here lies not in stating fact, but in comprehending fact. The fact that culture does not stay permanently in one and the same place, but that its centers move, as well as the additional fact that culture eternally changes, not only qualitatively but qualitatively, or, to be more accurate, only qualitatively (for culture cannot at all be “measured”, only evaluated), is not subject to dispute. It would be futile to attempt to corral the transformations of culture under a “law” of progress. This is the first point. The second point is that the usual chronological series of individual histories (first Babylon and Egypt, then Hellas, then Rome, etc.) is inapplicable to the history of the Old World as a whole. We have grasped a point of view which reveals the synchronicity and inner unity of the Old World in its totality. In the beginning – and this “beginning” stretches from approximately 1000 B.C. to 1500 A.D. – there was one enormous, unusually powerful and intense movement from several centers at once, centers that were by no means isolated, and during this time, all problems were posed, all thoughts were rethought, and all great and eternal words were said. This “Eurasian” period left us with such riches, beauty and truth that we still live on its legacy. Then followed a period of fragmentation: Europe was separated from Asia, the “center” fell out of Asia itself, leaving only “outskirts”, and spiritual life froze and waned. Since the 16th century, Russia’s latest destinies can be seen as a grandiose attempt at restoring the center and thereby recreating “Eurasia.” The future depends on the outcome of this attempt, still undecided and now darker than ever. 

Author: Alexander Dugin

Translator: Jafe Arnold

Written in October 2020, previously unpublished.

***

The Status of the Cosmos in the Eurasianist Worldview

The Eurasianists were never materialists. On this point they found themselves in opposition to the main trends of modern science. At the same time, however, for them it was of importance to not simply affirm the priority of eternal elements and principles – hence the main Eurasianist thesis on ideocracy, the ruling-idea, the rule of ideas – but to insist that the whole world and all of reality, from politics to economics and from religion to science, be permeated with ideas. Petr Savitsky insisted on the concept of “place-development” or “topogenesis” (mestorazvitie). “Place-development” is the conjunction of physical space and the continuity of historical meanings, semantics, and events. Territory is inextricably linked with history, and history, in turn, is a continuity of ideas revealing a single image of monumental eternity that unfolds through humanity and over its spiritual path through time. 

This defines the Eurasianist understanding of the cosmos. The Eurasianist cosmos is the generalizing territory of the place-development of the spirit. It is the spiritual order that penetrates all levels of reality, both subtle and coarse, soulful and corporeal, social and natural. The Eurasianist cosmos is permeated with subtle trajectories traversed by fiery, eternal ideas and winged meanings. Reading these trajectories, revealing them out of concealment, and extracting complex meanings out of the corporeal plasma of disparate facts and phenomena is the task of humanity. For the Eurasianists, the cosmos is an inner notion. It is revealed not through expansion, but rather, or on the contrary, through immersion deep within it, through concentration on the hidden aspects of the reality given here and now. Cosmic consciousness unfolds not in breadth, but in depth, inside the human subject. It is being within one or another point of the world of the subject that makes this point a “place-development,” “topogenesis.” The very Greek term κόσμος means“order”, “structure”, “organized and ordered whole.” The cosmos is in a state of becoming, development, becoming more and more itself. The world as such, as a simple factuality of surroundings, is not a cosmos. The world only should become a cosmos, and this happens not by and of itself. The world is transformed into a cosmos thanks to the subject, the bearer of mind and spirit. Only then, once thinking presence has been fixed, is this world transformed into a “place-development.” And further, it is only once the two poles, the subjective and the objective, have been established, do they move in an inseverable pair, shaping the special intelligent field of being. 

Let us emphasize again: the Eurasianists categorically do not accept materialism. This means that man is not simply a reflection of the external world. He is not created by nature but, on the contrary, it is the spirit and nature, in tight interaction and at times in dialectical opposition, that jointly constitute the cosmos. The cosmos is impossible without nature, but it is also impossible without man. Man is always essentially bipolar, and these poles are fused together through a complex network of interrelations. This dramatic interconnection unfolds as history – not simply as the history of the subject, but as the history of the subject interacting with the object. The cosmos, thus, is a living being. In some sense, it itself is history – not simply its background or attire, and not the object alone, but the synthesis of subject and object. 

The Russian Cosmos

All other applied aspects of the Eurasianist worldview become clear from such a philosophical analysis. When the Eurasianists insist that Russia is not simply a state, not simply a country, and that the Russians are not simply one among other peripheral European societies, they base themselves precisely on this profound understanding of the cosmic dimension of being. Russians are in essence the subject. Yet this subject is placed not in a void (in reality, no void exists), but in a special, existential territory woven first and foremost out of ideas, meanings, and events, and at times also wrapped in landscape and natural environment. The Russian land as the Russian world constitutes the objective pole of the Russian cosmos, insofar as its essence is precisely ideas. The other pole of the Russian cosmos is Russian man. The Russian cosmos encompasses two poles – if we subtract either of them, we immediately destroy their living, luminous, semantic unity, the unity of holy, sacred Rus. 

The Russian world is the “place-development” of the Russian cosmos. Therefore, it encompasses both space and time, geography and history. It is impossible to divide Russian people from Russian nature, for together they constitute something whole: a single spiritual-corporeal ensemble. 

It is from this position that the Eurasianists considered the main element of their philosophy: Russia-Eurasia is “place-development”, i.e. the direct and fully concrete expression of the “Russian cosmos.” At the same time, the Eurasianists insisted that interpreting this cosmos, studying it, living it, and knowing it, demands none other than the Russian subject. If we study the Russian landscape from the position of a German, Frenchman, Englishman, or more broadly any European, then the very object of study irrevocably changes. Its cosmic constitution disappears. The object is torn away from the subject and we thereby lose its meaning, its significance, its ideational filling. 

The very same happens if foreigners attempt to construct a model of Russian history: they see in it only those events which mean something for their own subjectivity, for the criteria and evaluations of the European cosmos. But for the Eurasianists, like the Slavophiles or Nikolai Danilevsky before them, it was obvious that civilizations or cultural-historical types are diverse forms which cannot be reduced to any one normative model. Hence, they insisted that Russia is a “continent”, a special world, a separate civilization. In other words, the Eurasianists’ worldview is built on the recognition of “cosmic pluralism.” 

On the Difficult Path to the Universe 

At this point a theoretical question might arise. Eurasianism is built on the principle of relativity. But if there exist many cosmoses, then is the matter at hand not a kind of cultural subjectivism? Is striving to affirm one cosmos not that very deep will of humanity towards higher truth?

The following could be said in response to this. Cosmic pluralism by no means excludes a single cosmos. But this cosmos cannot be acquired as a simple sum of “local cosmoses.” Moreover, no single civilization can be taken to be something universal, thereby imposing the experience of one’s own conceptualization of “place-development” upon others. The cosmos is an extremely subtle notion. We approach it on a path leading inwards within us, into the domain of the mind, the soul, and the spirit. There, at the center of subjectivity – which is always a specific one and is always associated with none other than the objective world surrounding it – is kept the key to grasping the whole. This is not an expansion outwards, not a dialogue with other cosmoses, and not a mechanical addition of other local views, but immersion into the luminous core of the Idea – Russia as the Idea, Europe as the Idea, China as the Idea, etc. – that brings us closer towards common truth. If each were to go deep into their own cosmos, they would near the common – hidden, “apophatic” – true subject and object as such. In other words, the Russian becomes an all-human to the extent that he is more and more Russian, and not vice versa, without losing his Russianness in exchange for something formal and externally borrowed from other peoples and cultures. The same can be said of any representative of any other cosmos. But the presence of this supra-cosmic unity cannot be a known given. It must be experienced in practice. One must traverse the whole path. One could hope that at the end of one’s path to themselves in their cosmic roots, a person will reach the common core of humanity, that is the matrix of the cosmos as such, its secret center. But this cannot be claimed in advance. Moreover, it would be a mistake to substitute the concrete experience of one culture with putting it up in advance as something common to all and universal. The Eurasianist approach to the plurality of cosmoses is therefore not one of relativism. It is only a responsible approach, founded on deep respect for the differences of all cultures and societies, on the part of those who strive towards universality but  who traverse this path honestly, openly, and consistently, avoiding taking the desired for the real at all costs. The philosopher Martin Heidegger said: “The question whether there exists one God or not should be left to the gods themselves to decide.” Only those who have reached the heart of their cosmos can issue a weighty, solid judgement regarding the universal. The will towards the all-human is wonderful, but it cannot be realized without the most important, necessary, and preliminary stage of becoming a perfect Russian, an all-Russian human. Moving in any other direction only distances us from our goal. 

Rejecting Nationalism

There is no single cosmos, there are many cosmoses. The Russian cosmos can be known, deciphered, and affirmed only by the Russian subject, of which it is an inalienable part. There is no “nationalism” in this. The Eurasianists recognized “cosmic pluralism” not only in regards to Russians, but also other cultures and civilizations. Moreover, for them the Russian cosmos itself was not a monolith with a strict ethno-cultural dominant. Rather, the specialness of Russia-Eurasia consists in that it encompasses a continental cosmos of numerous particular galaxies, constellations, solar systems, and planetary ensembles. Nikolai Trubetzkoy designated this with the not too successful term “pan-Eurasian nationalism”, which in his interpretation meant the multilevel harmony of the ethnic constellations within the common borders of the unified Eurasian cosmic system. Evoking the political concept of “nation”, based as such is on individual identity and borrowed from the historical experience of the bourgeois Europe of Modernity (“New Time”), distorts Trubetzkoy’s thought, which itself had in mind a harmony of cultural constellations, not a mechanical association of citizens in a political system imposed from above. 

Eurasia is a cosmos of cosmoses. Yet it does not claim universality, for beyond the Eurasian cosmos there exists other cosmoses, other civilizations: the European, Chinese, Islamic, Indian, etc. All of them have their own “place-developments”, their own models, their own outlines of the conjunction of subject and object, of human thought and the surrounding landscape. The majority of human civilizations, even while being convinced of their own universality, de facto admit the other beyond their borders, that is an other world, an other cosmos, one that is more or less known, at times hostile, at times exotically attractive, at times indifferent. Only the Europe of Modernity, having set upon the path of technological progress, atheism, secularism, and materialistic science, violated this pre-Columbian balance of civilizations which might be called the “era of Empires.” It was precisely such Empires that represented the political expressions of that cosmic unity which the Eurasianists taught. The Reformation and the Enlightenment launched war against the very principle of Empire and gradually destroyed these cosmic structures which, more often than not, were united by religious, spiritual, and celestial elements. They destroyed them first in the West itself, then in the East and other parts of the World. Colonization thus became a process of destroying “cosmic pluralism.” In New Time, Europeans began to establish among humanity, by force and deceit, a faith in the notion that only the scientific-materialistic cosmos, the one described and studied by modern Western science, is truth in the final instance. All other views structured differently from, the rational Western philosophy of New Time and its derivative science were “myths”, “delusions”, and “prejudices.” In the New Time of Modernity, the West set out to “disenchant the world” (à la Max Weber), to divide the subject from the object, and hence to destroy the subtle dialectical links of the cosmos, which were collapsed by such an unnatural splitting. Thus, the West – with its science, its politics, its philosophy, its economics, and its technology – became a threat to all of mankind. Wherever the West went, whether as a colonial administration or as an object for imitation in science, politics, social life, culture, and art, the cosmos underwent a splitting (into subject and object) and, consequentially, the cosmos was abolished. There could be no more talk of “Holy Rus” or the “Russian world.” Empire, religion, tradition, and identity became negative categories, and only natural-scientific conceptions reflecting the history, the “place-development” of Modern Western Europe were considered deserving of trust and the criteria of progress. 

The Eurasianists stood against this colonial strategy of the modern West. Not simply the West, but none other than the modern, materialistic, atheistic, secular West, was in their eyes the main challenge and even main enemy. And the worst of all in this enemy was not so much the fact that it rejected the “Russian cosmos” and imposed upon us its own European cosmos – that would be only half the trouble (although in itself no good), but the matter was much harsher: the modern West strove to destroy the cosmos as such, to abolish the very subject-object unity of man and the world, the dialectical harmony of mind and body. And this did not affect Russians alone, being as they have been objects of constant historical pretenses from the West. Modern Western civilization destroyed its own Greco-Roman and later Medieval cosmos as well, and it uprooted the cosmos self-consciousness of all those peoples forcibly or voluntarily ending up under its influence. This idea was consistently presented by Nikolai Trubetzkoy in his programmatic work Europe and Mankind, which marked the starting point of the Eurasianist movement as a whole. The modern West is not simply one civilization among others, but an historical anomaly, the result of spiritual – cosmic – catastrophe. This West is a gnoseological and ontological virus. It alone constructed an anti-natural technological civilization, rejected its own origins, and strove to overthrow the very same in all other peoples. Thus, in order to oppose it, it is not enough to defend only one world, one cosmos, even such a large and multidimensional one as the Russian, Eurasian one, but, as Trubetzkoy believed, it is necessary to form a united front of all traditional civilizations which would in unison defend their own cosmoses, different from each and every other and comprehensible only to their own civilizations, their own cultures, their own peoples, their own religions, against the modern West. 

Thus, since the very moment of its emergence, Eurasianism was not simply an apologia of the Russian cosmos, but a call for a cosmic alliance of peoples and civilizations against the aggressive plague of anti-cosmic Western Modernity. 

Cosmos, but not Cosmism 

This notion of the cosmos lies at the very core of Eurasianist philosophy. This becomes especially obvious if we consider the schism that took place among the first Eurasianists in the late 1920s, when the Paris wing of the movement openly took into its arsenal the philosophy of Russian Cosmism of Nikolai Fedorov. This drew renunciation on the part of the founders and main theoreticians of Eurasianism, namely, Trubetzkoy and Savitsky. Although the disputes between the two factions of the Eurasianist movement largely revolved around political motives and especially attitudes towards the USSR, with which the Parisian Eurasianists strove to unite on the Bolsheviks’ terms, the philosophical background of the pitiable “Clamart schism” is telling. 

Characteristic of “Russian Cosmism” was mixing subject and object, recognizing certain aspects of materialist science, and artificially combining the latter with an idiosyncratic, far from orthodox understanding of Christianity. It is no surprise that many of the Russian Cosmists, such as Andrey Platonov and Marietta Shaginyan, initially sided with the Bolsheviks, seeing nothing anti-natural and unacceptable in materialism, atheism, and progressism. For the profoundly Orthodox intellectuals and philosophers Trubetzkoy, Savitsky, and the first-wave Eurasianists close to them, such an approach was impossible. The Eurasianists’ cosmos, being imbued with meanings and permeated with ideas, was thought of as incommensurable with:

• the calculations of materialistic science, atomism, and technocracy (in the spirit of Fedorov’s dream of administrating natural phenomena);
• the dark dreams of resurrecting the dead with scientific technologies;
• a free, sometimes purely heretical interpretation of Christian dogma;
• an exalted infatuation with nature; 
• apologetics for Bolshevist fanaticism towards society, religion, and nature.

The cosmos of orthodox Eurasianism has nothing in common with that of Cosmism. The Eurasianist cosmos is completely different, it is structured as a language (it is no coincidence that Trubetzkoy was a globally recognized linguist) and manifest in history (the historical line in Eurasianism was developed by the historian George Vernadsky and the philosopher Lev Karsavin). The Eurasianist cosmos represents more of an existential horizon with a pronounced subjective vertical and clear mind based on the Platonic hierarchy of ideas and a fully-fledged orthodox Christian worldview. On this point the Eurasianists were the direct heirs of the Russian Slavophiles. Among them we see no hint of any exalted fixation on “naturalism”, much less technological progress, being as such is an expression of the anti-cosmic strike of Western-European Modernity. The Russian cosmos of the Eurasianists sharply, ontologically differs from that of Russian Cosmism, and the “Clamart schism” only emphasized this more clearly. 

The Cosmos in Neo-Eurasianism: the Fate of the Great Heart 

Now we are left with touching upon the status of the cosmos in neo-Eurasianism. 

Neo-Eurasianism has substantially expanded the philosophical apparatus of Eurasianism in many directions. Here we will examine only those directions which directly concern the Eurasianist understanding of the cosmos. 

First and foremost, Eurasianism has been brought into convergence with Platonism. Directly appealing to Plato, Platonism, and Neo-Platonism, including Christian Platonism in the Western and Eastern Churches, has qualitatively enriched Eurasianist philosophy, lending an ontological foundation to the theory of Eurasian ideocracy. It is sufficient to decipher the typically Eurasianist thesis of the Idea-Ruler in the context of fully-fledged Platonism – that is, undefiled by Western Modernity – to see how such reveals all of its deep potential. This also concerns the thesis of the “Eurasian selection” necessary for the formation of a Eurasianist elite and the vertical organization of society. All of this is a direct application of the principles of Plato’s Republic, at the head of whose state stand philosophers ruling by the light of Ideas. Politics thus assumes the meaning of constructing an analogue of the heavenly state of eternity on Earth, which refers us to Christian eschatology – the descent of the Heavenly Jerusalem and the foundations of the Byzantine theory of the symphony of powers. Power should be sacred. The state should be a reflection of the eternal archetype. The ruling class should consist of idealists and ascetics devoted to their Fatherland and people precisely by virtue of the fact that they, in turn, are the bearers of a sacred mission. 

In Platonism, the cosmos plays an important role as an image of the divine Idea and a living, sacred being. Thus, neo-Eurasianists think of the Russian cosmos as a living image of the Russian Idea, the highest orientation of the Russian subject, Russian politics, and Russian statehood, for profoundly relating to Russian nature and the Russian world as in no way reducible to the pragmatic dimension of natural resources or economic potential. One of the meanings of “cosmos” can be translated as “beauty”, and in this case Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky’s formula “beauty will save the world” can be rephrased as “the Russian cosmos will save the world.”

Yet another feature of neo-Eurasianism is the turn to Traditionalism (à la René Guénon, Julius Evola, Mircea Eliade) as a philosophical substantiation of traditional society and comprehensive critique of European Modernity. Traditionalism introduces the notion of the sacred as the center of the social structure. Sacrality should determine not only religion but politics, the economy, everyday life, and approaches to nature. This also predetermines an interpretation of the cosmos: the cosmos is the domain of sacred elements, powers, and forces. It cannot be interacted with like alienated, soulless material. The cosmos is the territory of the sacred, and it is precisely on this that the approach to Russian land, the state, and nature must be built. 

Finally, the geopolitics of neo-Eurasianism conceives of the geography of Russia as of cosmic chosenness. In geopolitics Russia plays none other than the role of Heartland, that is the main pole of the “civilization of Land” and the “axis of world history” (as according to the founder of geopolitics, Halford Mackinder). Thus, the very notion of Eurasia encompasses the idea of a synthesis of East and West, Europe and Asia, that point where the antagonistic forces of sacred geography can and must find balance. In conjunction with sacred geography and Neo-Platonic topology (in the spirit of Proclus’ commentaries on the story of Atlantis from Plato’s Critias and Republic) geopolitics assigns the “Russian world” and “Russian cosmos” yet another dimension: Russia is not simply one world among others, but is that world which is destined to become the most important space of world history where historical antitheses clash and the fate of humanity reaches its culmination. This is the Russian mission, the fate of the whole “Russian cosmos”, including both its subjects (people, the state, society, culture) and its objects (nature, territory, elements, and the countless ways and forms of life of the abundance of the Russian world). 

Alexander Dugin, The Radical Subject and its Double 

(Moscow: Eurasian Movement, 2009).

Table of Contents: 

I: The (Post-)Situation of Postmodernity

II: Post-Space and Black Miracles

III: The Darkened Enoch

IV: The Radical Subject and its Double: Towards the Ontology of the Antichrist

V: Night and its Rays

VI: Death and its Aspects

VII: Archeomodernity

VIII: Post-Anthropology: The Apocalypse of Carl Jung 

Appendices:

1. The Dimension of the Radical Subject

2. The New Program of Philosophy

3. “Pig Crazy”: An Interview for the Journal “Human” on the “New Program of Philosophy” 

**Excerpt: “The Radical Subject: Alexander Dugin on the Origins of his Philosophy”**

Author: Alexander Dugin

Translator: Jafe Arnold

The following consists of excerpts from two appendices to the volume The Radical Subject and its Double (Moscow: Eurasian Movement, 2009), compiled on the basis of talks delivered at the New University in Moscow, Russia in 2004-2005. 

***

The New Metaphysics in the Situation of Postmodernity

On the Article “The Übermensch”

The New Metaphysics, which describes the ontological situation of extreme despair and the completely God-forsaken world, took shape in my consciousness in the early 1980s under the impression of my grasp of Traditionalist thought (Guénon, Evola, Schuon, etc.) and under the conditions of late Sovietism. Being attracted to the Hermetic tradition, I went to a chemical shop and asked for sulfur, mercury, and salt, to which the clerk replied with scant courtesy that they did not have any of the above, and that everything could only be distributed on approved ration coupons anyway. I didn’t have any coupons, nor any permission. Thus, for the first time, I laid out the approaches to the “New Metaphysics” in an unpublished article written in 1985, Sverkhchelovek (“The Übermensch”). The essential point of this article boiled down to reflecting on the Nietzschean definition of the Übermensch, as described in detail by Evola in his Ride the Tiger.

“The Victor over God and Nothingness” – I interpreted this formula as the essence of a special metaphysical program. “God is dead,” exclaimed the madman in Nietzsche’s work, “and we have killed him, you and I!” Man defeated God, and God retreated. This is desacralization. The sacred left. What is left? Nothing. After all, the sacred was the essence of everything, the center of being. After the death of God (victory over God), nothingness or “modern nihilism” (Nietzsche) was discovered.

The Übermensch is he who takes two steps forward to overcome – to overcome God (as an external absolute) and to overcome nothingness, that is the space of godless, desacralized, void reality which discovered its entropic status after the disposal of being. The Übermensch can take these two steps only by interiorizing the Absolute, by discovering the source of the sacred in himself – and this sacred is not borrowed nor participated in, but is spontaneously and sovereignly established through the experience of total emptiness and by passing through nothingness.

The end of the age of God is the transition from pre-modernity to modernity. The overcoming of traditional society yielded modernity. Afterwards, nothingness was exposed. This nothingness is modernity and its action directed against being as the center of the sacred, for there is no other being. Overcoming nothingness – the second step – gives rise to the Übermensch. The latter is a special quality which is to be found neither in Tradition nor in modernity. From this analysis it follows that the Übermensch is a figure of postmodernity – a key one at that, if we look at postmodernity not through the eyes of postmodernity itself, but through the eyes of Tradition which, albeit powerless, extremely accurately cognizes the meaning of the shifts which take place along the scale of Premodernity-Modernity-Postmodernity.

In essence, the article “Übermensch” was and remains the foundation of my metaphysical program for the past 20 years.

A bit later, in 1986-1987, I decided to develop the main provisions of this article into a more detailed work, Templars of the Other. This book ended up being too condensed, and as a simplified, explanatory introduction to it in 1988 I wrote The Ways of the Absolute, and then as an explanation for Ways of the Absolute and as a projection of various individual provisions applicable to more specific fields, I wrote all my other books, all the way up to my current cycles of political science articles and remarks on Russian pop music (such as on the group Tatu, and so on). All of this was already implicit in my first article, “Übermensch.”

In the book Templars of the Other, the New Metaphysics was described in greater detail, but in a quite cumbersome manner and in a brutally heavy tongue completely devoid of any elegance.

The harsh theses of the article “Übermensch” flowed into a metaphysical picture.

The Content of Templars of the Other in Brief

We live in a world of Confusion which arose because the connections between the Cause and effect have been distorted and perverted. This gives rise to nihilism, the disposal of the Sacred, and de-ontologization. Things, torn from their roots, are distorted beyond recognition. Modernity is the finale of degradation, and there is almost nothing left.

The masculine element – that which generates, preserves, and destroys – has disappeared from reality. The hero is dead. There is only Tragedy in the world.

But how did the Cause allow these consequences to take off? How did God allow himself to be killed? How did the sacred agree to be removed? After all, there is no higher than the highest…Nevertheless, everything is as it appears to be as long as everything is developing as it is.

This mysterious, highest authority, which is higher than the highest itself, issued the decree for the trajectory of desacralization, ordered being to belittle itself, and sacrality to disperse itself. This authority was interested in the depth of being, in which it sought the mysterious, secret pearl. In order to find this, it was necessary to evaporate the sweet waters of life, to extinguish the heat of the ontological rhythm. This is what happened, and this means that a secret, mysterious hand guided from the highest height the world’s whole path towards Confusion, Perversion, and Degeneration. The End of the World was conceived even before it began. In other words, in the very heart of being there is a strange will to create a territory free from itself. This territory, the nothingness of the modern world, has been created. Post-ontological conditions have set in.

Everything was carried away by the flow of entropy into non-being, oblivion. Everything lost its mind. The only thing that has not lost its head was a seed in snow-covered Moscow with a few volumes of Guénon and a few books of Nietzsche, compressed beyond bearable density, not existing, unknown, totally excluded, and with a being no larger than a match head. In this small point kindled a cold guess as to the Übermensch and the New Metaphysics, as to the fact that everything is not so coincidental.

By determining the operative parameters of nothingness, the New Metaphysics began to develop in the opposite direction. The thought of the Radical Subject confidently appeared.

The Awakening of the Radical Subject

The Radical Subject is the actor of the new Metaphysics, its pole. The Radical Subject appears when it is already too late, when all others and all else has disappeared. The Radical Subject cannot appear, because he is not planned. He is awakened by the Post-Sacred Will. The Post-Sacred Will is that something which does not coincide with the sacred, but does not coincide with nothingness. This is the main attribute of the Übermensch. Outside of the sacred, there is only nothingness. This means that there is no Post-Sacred Will. And yet such exists. Only in this mode can it exist.

Post-Sacred Will awakens the Radical Subject, and his awakening creates the Impossible Reality. My book The Knights Templar of the Proletariat described in sufficient detail how this awakening happens, how the Impossible Reality is created, and what moves the Radical Subject is to accomplish. In some ways, the Radical Subject restores the  sacred and returns being, but in some ways does not. All determinations of the New Metaphysics balance on blades. A certain frenzied thought and enraged will are clearly pumped up in such, but cannot be simply seized and deciphered.

Here is not the place to describe nuances. It is not yet time. Perhaps today these basic concepts of the New Metaphysics – the Radical Subject, Post-Sacred Will, and Impossible Reality – should be appended with more impressive, yet equally imprecise concepts, such as the Infinite End (Pan-Eschaton) and the Frantic Kingdom (Ecstatic Empire), which expand the synonymic chain of the Impossible Reality.

The New Metaphysics and Postmodernity

It is obvious, or almost obvious, that the metaphysical description of the situation of postmodernity somehow clearly resonates with the parameters of the New Metaphysics and its basic concepts.

The culture-transmitting cycle ranging from the commentaries attached to the article “Übermensch” through the books Templars of the Other, The Ways of the Absolute, Mysteries of Eurasia, the issues of Sweet Angel and Elements, the books The Metaphysics of the Gospel, The Conservative Revolution, The Foundations of Geopolitics, The Knights Templar of the Proletariat, The Russian Thing, and The Evolution of the Paradigmatic Foundations of Science, up to The Philosophy of Traditionalism and The Philosophy of Politics, has been fundamentally completed, although each of the themes and sub-themes addressed therein might freely be appended with explanatory expositions. In general terms, the Opus is finished, and everything has been based on the radical diagnosis given in the New Metaphysics. For such realities, 20 years is no time at all, mais quand meme…The return to the topic of “Übermensch” is ongoing.

The New Metaphysics resonates precisely with postmodernity. Between the New Metaphysics and postmodernity there is a deep connection. It is clear that such is not a sub-product of postmodernity, just as it is clear that such is no synonym of postmodernity. We can speak about the connection for sure, but the nature of this connection has to be clarified. Some operating modules are clearly available, but the elements of postmodernity demand heightened attention. Until its paradigm is fully clarified, describing and investigating it again and again will not be superfluous.

In so doing, we will come closer to the New Metaphysics, not directly, but spirally, rotating around its axis, whether we call such straight or not. Under the surface, it [the New Metaphysics] has been with us all these years. Evidently, it will be for centuries ahead and has been for centuries before, if not perpendicular to these centuries.

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The “Victor over God and Nothingness” as the Axis of My Philosophy 

Yet Nietzsche says that the “Übermensch is the victor over God and nothingness.” Why does this figure of the Übermensch, who does not at all fit into the Traditionalist context, arise? Tradition reveals the figure of the Savior, the victor over the end times. But this is not the Übermensch, because the ontology of the Savior is undoubtedly transcendent and does not germinate from the “dissipating” subject. This is something other than the subject dissipating in the Kali Yuga…it is something fundamentally different from the main line of development of human history. Human history goes towards nothingness, and nowhere further, ending at this point. So who is this figure of the Superhuman which Nietzsche spoke of?

For 26 years I have been reflecting only on this phrase. I wrote my first programmatic article, “The Übermensch”, about it in French. Then as a commentary to this article the unpublished book Templars of the Other was born, and then as a commentary to this unpublished work appeared the book The Ways of the Absolute; then I thought that everything would be quite clear, and yet everything appeared to be extremely complex. Then I wrote a commentary to each of my previous books. For example, the ironic cultural book Pop-Culture and the Signs of the Times was a commentary to The Foundations of Geopolitics and The Philosophy of Traditionalism, then The Russian Thing (the first half being from The Knights Templar of the Proletariat) was a set of remarks concerning National Bolshevism as an extravagant version of the Conservative Revolution. The book The Conservative Revolution, in turn, illustrated the application of Traditionalist ideas to socio-political ideologies. The Philosophy of Politics systematized The Russian Thing in its political science dimension, while Civics for the Citizens of the New Russia brought all of these ideas to the level of Russian schoolchildren. Conspirology was a step into the realm in which Traditionalism intersects with political conspiracy theory, while The Hyperborean Theory studied the symbolism of Tradition and the theory of the “Nordic origins” shared by Guénon and Evola. The book Mysteries of Eurasia applied the principles of sacred geography to the spaces of Russia, while The Metaphysics of the Gospel clarified how Traditionalist ideas correspond to the Orthodox religion. All of these intersecting, circular commentaries, clarifications, and developments of certain topics and returns on different levels to original intuitions and plots, in one way or another (explicitly or implicitly) center around the topic of the Übermensch and the article of this name authored in my early youth. To this day, I am still streamlining, developing and commenting upon this small text written in French 20 years ago, interpreting it and providing additional testimonies and chains of reasoning…