The Use & Abuse of Tradition

Connecting to God in a Tradition-Less World

The Baron Julius Evola wrote in his seminal work, Revolt Against The Modern World, that “To leave the parameters of Tradition [means] to leave the true life. To abandon the rites, alter or violate the laws or mix the castes corresponded to a regression from a structured universe (cosmos) back into chaos.”¹ When we look at the contemporary Western World around us what we see is a world totally loosed from the traditions that it used to be grounded in. Without an ancient sacred reference point to connect us to unchanging ideals, society spins out of control. 

While I hate to put such filth into your mind, my dear reader, this total chaos was made most evident during the “Desmond is Amazing” news cycle from a few years back where a 10-year old White boy was dressed in female clothing and dancing for the sexual gratification of homosexuals of a race-mixed background in New York City. In this instance, several sacred Western ideals were being violated all at once: That of expressing the spiritual essence of the gender one was born with to the maximal degree, sexual self-control as an ennobling aim in itself, defending the innocence of children, and separating higher races from lower so the higher can actualize its full potential and then benevolently subjugate the lower. I won’t post an image of that wretched scene in this article - I would never do that to you, trust me. But the reality of that scene, and the apathy that it was met with by the general public, is seared into my mind as the most vivid imaginable example of the reality that The West has abandoned every single ideal it has ever exalted. The ideals being violated in that instance have been held as sacred by us since long before Christian times, so it represents the dissolution of something much more deep than just the dissolution of Christianity. It’s much worse than that. We live in a time where every honoured bond of loyalty has been broken and every piety cast aside as though it were nothing. What the people doing these grave sins don’t understand is that our moral and spiritual traditions were like a wall keeping legions of diabolical evils from invading our society. Thus, to live in the age of the breakdown of primordial tradition is to live in the time of the ascendancy of malevolent demonic beings.

Wanting to combat this may necessarily impel someone to try to join a religion. But trying to connect to Tradition as a Western Man is far more challenging than simply trying to attend the same church as your grandparents. I see, for example, many spiritually thirsty and politically alienated young white men trying to convert to Catholicism, but this is often highly ill-informed. Though The Latin Church was the primary vanguard of Western Culture & Spirituality for a millenium, the reality is that now it has been thoroughly infiltrated by subversive forces. In that glorious time of spiritual and cultural flourishing erroneously called The Middle Ages, which really ought to be called The Golden Age of Western Christianity, The Roman Church defended the purity of White Europe from the swarthy hordes of Africans and Arabians who sought to invade it, but now it invites them in by the millions, often doing it themselves via Catholic NGO’s. For an institution that Western Europeans have poured so much of their blood, sweat, tears, spirit, and heart into for generations to invite in third world savages who want to kill our children, rape our women, and live off our labour parasitically is an act of spiritual treachery hitherto unthinkable in the whole history of humankind. At least Judas betrayed Christ with a kiss. 

In the past, The Roman Catholic Church taught valiant White Men that if they fought off the Mohammedan hordes their sins would be forgiven and if they died in the attempt they would go to heaven. Now it tells you to invite them into your nation where they will rape and plunder. If you oppose them on this you will find them to be among your greatest opponents. Divine Truth, of course, cannot ever change: It was true in the past that men who defend their homes from savages are loved by God and that death on the battlefield for a righteous cause is a gateway to Paradise and it’s still true now. The idea of Christian Holy Warfare was quite resonant for Europeans who had been warlike Pagans only a few generations before and thus already exalted Warfare as a spiritual path. It was God’s plan to take the warlike people’s of Northern Europe and enlist them in His holy cause against His enemies, and the fact that The Church did not make greater use of such men and recognize more of them as Saints is a neglect of honest piety that borders on blasphemy. Any man who died fighting The Mohammedans should have been regarded by The Church as a saintly intercessor, as is indeed the case regardless of whether the Papalists choose to recognize it or not. It’s an essential spiritual truth that righteous war makes us closer to God, and this idea is true regardless of whether it is dressed in Pagan or Christian garb and terminology. That Holy War brings us to God is an unchanging component of The Dharma.

The contemporary Roman Church also encourages men to get married without telling women that they should be obedient to their husbands, thus failing to teach natural law and salvific truth despite that their scriptures plainly teach this (“Wives, submit unto your own husbands, as unto the LORD” Ephesians 5:22) and it does not sufficiently criticize Feminism. Every Church does this, to be fair, not just the Catholic one. They are all guilty of putting young naive men into a battlefield (because that’s what a modern marriage in a feministic environment is) without giving them the proper framework to make it a good marriage, and thus many wind up divorced or totally dominated by their wives. But the truth that Patriarchy is the natural order between the sexes, the truth that every woman is Divinely intended to have a specific man ruling over her with absolute rights of supremacy over her as a person (her father before she is married, and her husband after) is a truth that can never, could never, and has never changed. In it’s appearances The Latin Church and other Western Churches look patriarchal, but when the men who lead an organization are so effeminate and cowardly what does it matter if they allow female priests or not. A modern man may wish to live out Tradition by getting married, but all Traditional institutions that gave a man real power over a woman are gone. Instead, the government, the religions, and the society are completely allied with the woman against you. This makes living out a Traditional Marriage nigh impossible. But if you are called to this path by all means do it, but don’t expect much support from your religious institutions in this particular endeavor, regardless of which institutions those even are - The Catholics are hardly even the worse about this. 

Then we arrive at the liturgical reforms of Vatican 2. A young white man who seeks spirituality and tradition in his life may wish to connect to the religion of his grandparents by joining The Roman Catholic Church, but the Vatican 2 reforms have essentially made it that nothing about the liturgies or the general atmosphere of The Roman Church is really the same as what it used to be. The Novus Ordo Church is not the religion of your grandparents, it is not the religion under whose aegis white men defended their homes from dusky Islamic men, though it may inhabit its buildings. If you wanted to connect to Tradition by means of Catholicism, you would have a lot more work to do than to merely join your local Catholic Church as I see many naive spiritual seekers in The West doing. Just compare a book on Catholic Spirituality from The Middle Ages or even after to one from after Vatican 2 to notice the sharp differences: The ascetic rationalism coupled with reverential devotionalism of the former compared to the saccharine vagueness of the latter. You will know you are plainly dealing with two different religions. 

I am not saying any of these things to discourage people from joining Roman Catholicism or any other expression of Christianity. Nor am I necessarily saying them to encourage people to join The SSPX or any other organization more in tune with The Tradition of Western Christianity. This is not a Tradcath newsletter. I am also not an E-Pagan, who usually do not understand Nietzsche as well as they think they do. There are plenty of left-wing pagans out there, which goes to show Paganism is as fraught with dangers even aside from the fact that much of the Pre-Christian heritage of Europe has been irretrievably lost. “Wiccans” who want to worship mommy goddess with Quartz vibrator and smoke marijuana, their fat boyfriends with a Mjolnir pendant and a LGBT+ ally shirt. But many Right-Wing Pagans find a sincere connection to the Divine through having a reverential and virile attitude towards Nature, which I support. No, I am not trying to entice you to join either Christianity or Paganism. Take either of those paths you like. I am a Perennialist concerned about the fate of my race, and about the world more broadly, in our dark times. The point that I am aiming at is that choosing to join a millennia-old religion and adopt its outward forms into your life is not enough to fight Modernity. Think about how often the third worldist, vaccine-supporting Pope Francis is surrounded by Catholic Aesthetics and Tradition, for what good it does him, how much it stops him from being just like any other globalist liberal. No, “joining a religion” is not enough to fight Modernity and embrace Tradition in this Age of Chaos, whether it’s Christianity or Paganism. What matters in our time is an inner disposition, which can be accompanied by any number of outward forms. 

Those on the online Dissident Right who have religious and spiritual inclinations are prone to infighting, especially over which religion we ought to support. All of that is useless. The real battle is not “Christianity Vs. Paganism” but a battle between a life of virtue for the sake of an inward transformation and a modern life with a utilitarian view of virtue and shallow understanding of piety. Either of those types of lives can take on the mere appearance of either Christianity or Paganism as has been the case throughout history. God does not care which religion you profess with your mouth, and what religious aesthetic you choose to decorate your online profiles with. He cares about the disposition of your heart which He can see plainly at all times regardless of whether or not you can even see it yourself. Traditionalism is about transforming your life through direct contact with The Divine, not putting on a costume.

Keep that in mind when you are deciding how to fight the darkness of modernity. Indeed, your  own nature might naturally impel you towards a certain type of religion, which is why I do not necessarily encourage or discourage anyone from any particular religion. If you have a Latin heritage I think Catholicism is likely very natural for you, your own particular Dharma, especially if you are meant to fulfill your spiritual journey through the way of Bhakti (Devotion) as is the case with most people in The Kali Yuga, since Christianity is primarily a Bhakti-type religion. Just know to be wary of the fact that the institutions are subverted, so you will have to hearken back to as much ancient expressions of the faith as possible. This is true for any Tradition: The older expressions can still be found in books and old artworks which convey a pre-modern spirit to those receptive to it, so we must seek these, but more importantly seek the transformative spiritual nourishment they are meant to give us. This is more important than following an institution or a particular “religious leader” like Pope Francis in our time. 

Study the scriptures, seek God with an honest heart, and deny your self. Then you will be as close to God as any Saint of yore, even in spite of the fact that the institutions are subverted and the traditions corrupted. This is not surprising: How could The Will of the Omnipotent God ever be trumped by mere institutions and traditions? His Will is to connect with you and nothing can stop Him. What genuinely matters today is the work of those who are able to connect with the One at the Summit of all Realities: God. In His ineffable will He created the various revealed religions as vehicles to guide the peoples to Him, but He is still ever-approachable even if all of the religions are in disarray as in our time due to the ignorance of men, because to connect with Him is essential to who we are ontologically as eternal spirits. If we were ever in a position where we could not connect with Him we would cease to exist altogether, an impossibility. He is ever with us. Put aside all sectarian bickering and religious systems. Simply connect with Him. 

Just because we can still connect with The Divine in spite of the fact that our Traditions are fading away does not mean that they should be abandoned. Every Tradition insofar as it is something begun by God is worth handing down from generation to generation in perpetuity. There have been many Traditions, even divinely revealed ones, that have vanished from this Earth in accordance with His Will, but He is the one who gets to decide when a Tradition must die and be supplanted by a new one. Unless He tells us so explicitly, we should assume that the Traditions in our midst should be recovered, reconstituted, and renewed.

The reality that we are always able to connect with God no matter what does not make Traditions superfluous, as He Wills that there are Traditions and that these be preserved, and we aren’t connecting with Him unless we are doing His Will. Indeed, it is precisely the reality that we are inherently able to commune with God even without Traditions that makes us able to restore them and to connect with Him through them as He Wills. We can only rebuild Traditions through embodying them within our souls, and we can only do this through building divinely-oriented good habits in our day to day lives. After all, what is Tradition but good habits writ large, good habits that are so deeply ingrained in the blood and in the soul that they transcend the mere individual and span countless generations? Traditions are a whole people’s way of expressing their commitment to God, virtue, truth, and beauty across space and time. By being committed to those now you are being Traditional. 

The state of our soul is measured by our commitment to God and to Virtue, and our fidelity to those is measured by the consistency and strength of our good habits. This alone plainly reveals if our commitment to God, to Tradition, is genuine and the extent to which it is. This matters so much more than merely belonging to a religion that the one with a real commitment to these is likely to realize spiritual enlightenment and fulfill the purpose of life even if they do not formally belong to any one particular religious organization. 

One needn’t start a homestead in the middle of nowhere to become anti-modern, and indeed one who doesn’t already have the good habits of a virtuous life and the pious attitude that can sacralize any situation will be unprepared for such an endeavor. No matter who you are or where you are in life, or the extent to which one’s soul is mired with vices, one can always begin to pray. Do not overcomplicate this. Count the blessings in your life, and thank God for them. Remember the challenges in your life and Ask for His Mercy and guidance. Praise Him for His Wonderful Deeds recorded in The Scriptures. Praise Him for His Attributes such as omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, omnipresence and contemplate these. This alone is Traditional. Done continually it necessarily improves over time, and He Himself will guide you to the right way that He has decided from all eternity for you to glorify Him. Perhaps you will be subtly, or even explicitly, guided towards marriage, or monasticism, or to be a valiant martyred warrior against the forces of darkness. Go on a walk with the intention of clearing your mind and hearing His voice. Sit down and meditate then speak to Him and then listen. This is Tradition. This defeats modernity. Such a small act which we can literally do at any time utterly thwarts the demons, and their myriad malevolent machinations to do us and the world harm. All of their diabolical plots just amount to trying to distract us from doing these things every single day until we die. Even joining a religion can be a distraction from doing those things, as can every type of political controversy. Don’t be fooled! Glorify Him and Seek Him in silence, every single day. Earnestly striving to connect with Him every single day in prayer and in meditation is far more Traditional than any outward religious form, since the whole point of there even being outward religious forms at all was just to get us to pray and meditate. 

All of your ancestors participated in prayer and meditation to an extent by attending religious services and following the outward religious forms. But more importantly, doing this is fundamental to who you are, as a soul. You are not a modern man who has spiritual experiences but an eternal spiritual being having the experience of a modern man. Prayer and Meditation is more fundamental to what you are than having a body or concerns about money or asserting your ego. It is as fundamental to you as wetness is to water. You were made to glorify God. 

But that doesn’t mean having a body isn’t important. You were meant to take on the challenges of embodiment. But we have to make sure that our soul controls our body and not the other way around. Taming your appetites for food, sex, intoxication, and comforts is extremely Traditional. Try going for a while without those things to assert dominance over your flesh. Practice fasting from all food for 24 hours, abstain from sexual relations and strive not to lust after one you do not really love, abstain from alcohol and/or drugs, sleep on the floor, take a cold shower. By doing these with the intention of purifying our souls of vices we are being Traditional and fulfilling our purpose in life. That doesn’t mean these pleasures are bad in and of themselves. But we are not meant to be ruled by them, and we were never meant to crave the creation more than The Creator. By thinking about, working for, and being enslaved by materiality we have idolized the things that God made and thus failed to glorify Him. Cease from this! I am sure you have heard of many “self-improvement” gurus tell you to do things like this. What makes what I am saying different from what such “gurus’ peddle is the attitude through which you approach and carry out these deeds. Do you take a cold shower to glorify your ego or to cleanse your soul of vice to bring it closer to God? Do you grow in self-discipline to glorify yourself, or God? This simple attitude change makes all the difference. Perhaps you already do these things but do not have the correct attitude. Merely having a different attitude towards the deed makes it completely different. 

Speaking of things a “self-improvement guru” (which I am not) would advise you to do, Exercise is completely indispensable for the spiritual path. In fact, I think in the modern world more than in any other time it’s indispensable. If someone tells you they are a spiritual guru but they are fat or scrawny and have no physical courage you should dismiss all that they say. The depressive torpor that pervades Modern life is cured by exercise, and exercise too puts us in touch with who we really are, because our eternal spirits that have taken on embodiment now are boundlessly energetic. Moreover, in your past lives you have undoubtedly moved quite a bit because all pre-modern life was very vigorously physical whether that was through farming, fighting, or some other type of activity. So exercising will put you more in touch with the past, as being a sedentary neurotic slug is a uniquely modern existence. The lazy skinnyfat man with hunched over shoulders is a product of the demon’s conditioning and not a creature that glorifies God. It’s important to recognize that the founders of our civilization were warriors first and foremost. They trained themselves for war, conquered lands, and then practiced spirituality. Being at least capable of war is fundamental if we want to be Traditional. When you exercise, remember that the words “exercise” and “exorcise” sound so similar to each other for a reason. Exercise exorcises you and your environment of demons. If you exercise with the intention of glorifying God and combating the demons then that is what you are doing. 

The ancients understood that the outer war against our political foes and the inner war against our demons are so thoroughly interlinked that they must be understood to be the same. When war, and the exercising necessary to prepare ourselves for it, is approached with the right attitude then it is absolutely a way to glorify God and grow in the spiritual path.  

The strength and consistency of our daily commitment to such good habits as daily spiritual practice, controlling our appetites, and exercising is a perfect yardstick for our commitment to Traditional values. By imbibing the virtues of piety and discipline that these habits instill in us we are then able to pass them onto the next generation. Whether or not we were brought up to practice these or to respect God and Virtue does not matter because these are all grounded in eternal truths that do not change. Even if (God forbid!) you were separated from such practices done with the right attitude by several generations by doing them now you are simply picking up the great chain of Tradition from wherever it was dropped and continuing it now. It’s not a matter of reading the right book, subscribing to the right substack, going on a pilgrimage, having enough money to homestead or live in a country with pretty buildings, though all of those things could be good. It’s all about having the right attitude. 

God and all of the good qualities that He naturally emanates like virtue, truth, beauty, wisdom, etc. are Eternal. What does it even mean for something to be Eternal? It means that it has always existed, will always exist, could never not exist. Whatever is Eternal exists now, will always exist in the future no matter what, and has always existed in the past no matter how far back you go. For something to be Eternal it must stretch endlessly into both the future and into the past. 

Eternity is made manifest in this world of perpetual flux in an individual through the faithful repetition of good habits that actualize unchanging truths and is made manifest in an entire civilization through Tradition. Manifesting eternity amidst this world of perpetual becoming is our mission as spiritual beings who serve God. 

As bleak as our times are, there are many righteous souls who are persevering in all of the above, many of them in a much better way than I. Many of these have even started their own homesteads and homeschool their children to ensure that they are sheltered away from the madness of modernity. I often ponder what the fate of these children will be. I am certain that though the connection with primordial Tradition has been more ruptured now than at any other time it is not yet been completely broken, and thus the dark powers who are even now in ascendancy are not completely triumphant, though it may seem so at times. Those faithful few who have embodied and then passed on the pious attitude of reverencing the Divine and striving for Virtue in our time are a remnant, unutterably precious in the Eyes of God. Oh that we may join their ranks! The spiritual earthquake that is Modernity has shaken everything that has ever been regarded as Traditional, but even amidst these tremors there are some things that remain unshaken, most of all our own intuitional aptitude to serve The God of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty because this is our ontological essence. 

From this remnant will come a new Aryan civilization whose heartland will be in North-America, and that new civilization will ultimately be as different from Western Christendom as Western Christendom was from Greco-Romanity. I often think how the Egyptian Tradition lasted for thousands of years before in their midst erupted a new divinely revealed religion that was in some ways a repudiation of their own Tradition and in other ways a reformation of it. So too, amidst the ruins of Western Christendom there will be some who will receive a new revealed religious Tradition from The One True God. That weltanschauung to come will also have certain pros and cons as a part of its character as did both Christianity and Paganism. But though it may have a different outward form and a different inward character, yet it too will ultimately express the same perennial truths that all true revealed religions always have. We prepare ourselves to receive the revelation of the New Aryan Religion of the Future now by practicing Virtue and seeking Him who is the Source of all religions and beyond them all. Being at one with The Deity beyond all Traditions is the most Traditional thing of all. 

May He have Mercy on us and guide us to complete enlightenment. Aum and Amen!

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1. Revolt Against the Modern World (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 1995), p.55 .