The Old Gods Return

Wherein I observe that things are getting spicy…

I think we all feel it—even if only a little.

It’s that nagging sense that things are changing…that things are not quite the same as they used to be.

It is, of course, the vague and rather disquieting intuition that the Old Gods are stirring in their long slumber, and that the world is transforming—ever so slightly at first—in anticipation of their triumphant return, after a lengthy and almost dream-like absence.

I think the first intimation that something very different, and very evil, was abroad came with the earliest news of The Covid. The world seemed to respond with a shudder, a cold sweat maybe, and a kind of panicked hysteria that never really seemed proportionate to the magnitude of the threat. The lockdowns and shutdowns and masking and all the other nonsense was a great boon to the opportunists and power-mongers, naturally, but for many others I think it was an instinctive and entirely natural response—one that was born of a feeling of dread.

Because History had finally returned…real history, not the fake and mostly stage-managed history of the last few decades. I think many actually believed all that chiliastic and utopian tripe about liberal-democracy being the last civilization at the end of time, and in retrospect even 9/11 wasn’t really the epochal event most supposed it was; I guess it was just kind of a milestone on the GAE’s ascent to world empery.

No, what I’m talking about is the kind of history that fills you with the awesome fear of the unknown—and makes you look to the future, not with unbridled optimism, but unaccountable dread and terror.

It may have started, for the most part, with the news of an unknown pathogen stalking the land, and one that most thinking people suspected fairly early on was almost certainly cooked up like a bad dish of chow mein in a Chinese lab. But there were earlier hints, of course: Brexit, Trump, the growing popularity of right-wing ideas (unthinkable just a few years before, when a grateful world basked under the glorious and everlasting reigns of Obama, Cameron, and Merkel).

And things have only gotten spicier since then.

First there were the “Summer of Love” BLM riots of 2020, which I think most agree were a brutal show of force by the Regime’s irregular shock troops to contain counter-revolutionary sentiment in the imperial heartland, as well as remind the uppity plebs that all that democracy stuff only goes so far…and not a whit further.

The warning was delivered, and the election was duly “fortified.” But that’s when things got really interesting. First, in the “land of the free and home of the brave,” some brave, free men decided to have a very American party in the Capitol rotunda on January 6, 2021, conforming to a tradition that stretches all the way back to the tax revolts and general unruliness of the Colonial days.

That’s just another way of saying there was much invoking of rights and contemptuous rejection of a patently rigged election.

Unfortunately, these brave, free men seemed to have missed the memo that this ain’t America anymore—something they learned to their great cost. Whether they remain brave is an interesting question, if academic at this point; but one thing’s for sure: they’re certainly not free.

But the whole affair did leave us one very symbolic and evocative image: a bare-chested warrior, bedizened in buffalo hide and horned helm and wielding the Stars and Stripes like a weapon, striding with heroic and manly arrogance amidst the resplendent marble glories of the Capitol Building, and appearing very much as Alaric of old must have upon sacking the Eternal City all those centuries ago.

The “Q Shaman” foresees the future…do you?

Things followed fast. The forced vaccination programs. The mass firings. Afghan jihadis chasing the Americans out of Central Asia. The Canadian trucker convoy (that one put the fear of God in the Regime—more so by far than the J6 shenanigans). Then the war in Ukraine. Bolsonaro’s abortive attempt to retain power amidst his own “fortified” election.

More recently, the weird spectacle of Prigozhin’s mutiny in Russia.

I’m hardly the only one to notice it. The following observation appeared on the “Counter Intelligence Global” Telegram channel:

“The phenomenon of modern Caesarists crossing the Rubicon is increasing and becoming more potent.

Trump’s unintentional January 6th incident.

Bolsonaro’s January 8th incident where he backed down after his supporters genuinely stormed their government buildings.

Imran Khan’s arrest saga where his supporters burned down the homes of corrupt leaders.

And now Prigozhin the mercenary, with his forces turning back after reaching the gates of Moscow just as Napoleon & Hitler had done.

This is becoming the norm.”

It certainly is becoming the norm.

Once upon a time, we were told that we were living at the “end of history.” The last few years seem like anything but. In fact, they’re almost as interesting as anything you’d find in a chronicle of the later Roman Empire, with their catalogues of upstart generals and legionary mutinies; you could even say they’re nearly as fascinating as John Julius Norwich’s histories of the Byzantine Empire, with their endless parade of usurpers, coups, assassinations, blindings, and tongue removals.

Well, perhaps we haven’t quite reached that last stage yet…but it feels like we’re getting there. The only thing we seem to be lacking are the truly hardbitten, audacious men that those times called forth in droves; you know the sort, a Septimius Severus or Aurelian or John Tzimisces who has the guts to try for the throne and not pussy out at the last minute.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that things seem to be getting interesting. The liberal-democratic West—fat, comfortable, complacent, and smugly assured of its status as the world’s first “post-historic” civilization—has experienced a rather rude awakening in recent years.

It’s what Guillaume Faye, French right-wing intellectual and writer of the Nouvelle Droite, called a “convergence of catastrophes.” A generation ago, in the wake of the largely peaceful collapse of the Soviet Empire and the effortless assumption of world hegemony by Globohomo, Faye’s dire prognostications must have seemed altogether fantastic.

Even so, it was almost all there, tucked away in his bizarre visions of the future. The unrestricted, accelerating “immigration” and demographic replacement in the West. The destabilization of liberal-democratic regimes that had seemed nigh omnipotent. The political revolts. The reappearance of a true Right. The spread of deadly GM diseases like coronavirus and its ebbing variants. The cascading failure of the complex systems undergirding our advanced, global civilization. And even—in the emergence of Russia, India, China, and perhaps even Iran as key regional empires—the rise of competing civilizational blocs in a newly multipolar world.

It’s a strange thing to say, but the world does seem to be tending a little more each day toward a curious mélange of the archaic and the futuristic. Russian mercenaries revolt and march on Moscow, like Magnus Maximus in the days of Old Rome, or Herakleios in the days of Old Constantinople; meanwhile, Elon Musk continues to build his Mars rockets, self-driving cars, and globe-circling satellite constellations. Strange and deadly diseases reappear, like the olden times, save that these days they happen to be the product of the unwise tampering of man. The great cities of the world have never been filled with taller, sleeker, or shinier buildings, truly the stuff of science fiction, and conforming to the most outlandish and whimsical design principles; meanwhile, in the shadowy streets below, there has rarely been more savagery and barbarity.

There’s even something archaic-seeming in that latest spectacle to captivate a weary and bewildered world: the saga of the five poor souls on the doomed bathyscaphe. There’s a whiff of the Old Gods here, too, since it reminds me of those old, apocryphal tales of Alexander the Great visiting the undersea kingdoms in a diving sphere, purely to slake his curiosity.

Of course, the outcome was a bit different in the case of the modern explorers—they were simultaneously parboiled by the superheated air of the collapsing chamber, rendered by the water pressure into an undifferentiated gelatinous matrix, and then squirted like toothpaste out of the imploding submersible and into the water column.

Or so the internet tells me.

It’s a fitting offering to Poseidon, I suppose, if an avoidable one; in any case, the whole story has an archaeofuturistic feel, what with advanced technology misapplied, and the encounter of the futuristic doomed vessel with its (relatively) ancient antecessor.

It kind of feels like a metaphor for our civilization and the Regime that (mis)rules us: arrogant and contemptuous of nature, shoddily built, coming apart at the seams, on the verge of imploding at any second from a myriad of external pressures. Still and all, I think the future looks rather bright, for as surely as that jerry-built submersible succumbed to its contradictions, so must someday the Regime.

The Old Gods will return, and they will have their vengeance, and then perhaps—not us, nor our children—but our children’s children will have the opportunity to build the sort of future that we once dreamed for ourselves.

I think it is Rudyard Kipling who summed it all up best in his famous poem “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” (1919):

“As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man

There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.

That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,

And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;


And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins

When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!”