The Vatican has warned bishops worldwide against “deviant” behaviour by a small traditionalist Austrian movement that promotes devotion to angel…

Formed half a century ago in Austria and close to traditionalists, the Opus Angelorum association claims, among other things, that women who have had abortions are possessed by the devil. Present in Europe, Asia and America, it counts about 140 members, including 80 priests, and is suspected of sectarianism.

The First Annual Catholic Conference on Geocentrism (“the academic belief that the Earth is immobile in the center of the universe”), November 6, South Bend, IN

Scientific evidence available to us within the last 100 years that was not available during Galileo’s confrontation shows that the Church’s position on the immobility of the Earth is not only scientifically supportable, but it is the most stable model of the universe and the one which best answers all the evidence we see in the cosmos.

The connection of Wilde to Coomaraswamy, through Morris and Ruskin, and thus to Guenon, Schuon, and even Evola, should be obvious.

So if we adopt the term “reactionary” without fear, as Evola recommends, we need to have some sort of idea what we are looking back towards. And because many answers are to be found in pre and post Christian Europe, it seems tempting to extend this impulse to pre and post Christian spirituality, represented most prominently by Neopaganism.

Many Americans detest the leftist hegemony we live under, but still want to preserve a toehold on respectability by compromising with modern ideas. Evola rejected the Enlightenment Project lock, stock, and barrel, and had little use for the Renaissance and the Reformation. For Evola those really opposed to the leftist regime, the true Right, are not embarrassed to describe themselves as reactionary and counterrevolutionary. If you are afraid of these words, you do not have the courage to revolt against the modern world.

While people like [Noel] Coward simply wanted to be left alone to drink and smoke, and make their patriotic contribution to the culture of their beloved country, the “gay” agitator will not rest until his “oppressive society” is transformed from top to bottom in Queer Eye fashion, and the White House is smoke-free and painted in a garish rainbow theme.

“In a traditional social order,” or the pre-industrial society, “the languages of the hunt, of harvesting, of various rituals, of the council room, of the kitchen or harem, all [formed] autonomous systems.” The use of language differed per profession and was shaped by the segment of society in which one lived. Nowadays, instead, “it is assumed that all referential uses of language ultimately refer to one coherent world, and can be reduced to a unitary idiom.” The homogenization of language, of culture, is what makes industrialism possible. This is how Gellner understands the notion of “nationalism”. It represents “not the awakening of an old, latent, dormant force” therefore, “though that is how it does indeed present itself.”

[Nationalism] is in reality the consequence of a new form of social organization, based on deeply internalized, education-dependent high cultures, each protected by its own state.

His plan had been to rally traditionalists to his banner in Siberia, overthrow the Marxists and place the Grand Duke Michael on the throne as Tsar of Russia (he did not know the Grand Duke was already dead). That plan was dashed and while on his way to take refuge in Tibet a group of his soldiers mutinied but did not kill him. He was captured by the Soviets whose propaganda had portrayed him as the most vile criminal imaginable and after a show-trial he was executed on September 15, 1921.

The ancient Indian custom of caste has made its way into the modern world of social media: “Surprisingly with urbanization, with education, with more people traveling and getting exposed to other cultures, these divisions have not really gone away. Caste even now — even in urban, educated India — is still an extremely big issue. So therefore it is not surprising given how deeply entrenched caste is in Indian society that it manifests itself online also.”

An excellent review of Zeev Sternhell’s The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition:

And it was not just conservatives such as Carlyle who attacked the dehumanizing effects of modern life. Liberals and socialists such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and William Morris all felt the same way. When such thinkers looked back to a more organic and religious past, it was not because they were enemies of the human spirit, but because they felt that the spirit was starving in modern conditions. Traditionalism is not always the same as authoritarianism.

Sternhell never really engages this critique of the Enlightenment and its legacy. He simply dismisses it out of hand, leaving the reader to wonder why some of the arguments of Burke and Herder sound so reasonable.

Traditionalist, New Right, Conservationist and Integralist Thought

Tradition speaks to each man the language he can comprehend, provided he wishes to listen. The latter proviso is crucial, for tradition, let it be repeated, cannot “become bankrupt”; rather is it of the bankruptcy of man that one should speak, for it is he that has lost all intuition of the supernatural. It is man who has let himself be deceived by the discoveries and inventions of a falsely totalitarian science; that is to say, a science that does not recognize its own proper limits and for that same reason misses whatever lies beyond those limits.

A fascinating essay exploring the ideas of esoteric European rightists Raymond Abellio and Jean Parvulesco.