Summoning the Gods

176 Pages·2011·1.23 MB·English

by  Collin Cleary

Contents
Editor’s Introduction
Author’s Acknowledgements
1. Knowing the Gods
2. Summoning the Gods
3. Paganism without Gods
4. What God Did Odin Worship?
5. Philosophical Notes on the Runes
6. The Missing Man in Norse Cosmogony
7. Karl Maria Wiligut’s Commandments of Gôt
8. Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner
9. The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky
About the Author
SUMMONING
THE GODS
Essays on Paganism in
a God-Forsaken World
by
Collin Cleary
Edited by Greg Johnson
Counter-Currents Publishing Ltd.

San Francisco

2011
Copyright © 2011 by

Counter-Currents Publishing Ltd.

All rights reserved

Cover image:

Arthur Rackham, “Wotan’s Farewell”

Cover design by

Kevin I. Slaughter

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Hardcover Edition:

ISBN: 978-1-935965-21-3

Paperback Edition:

ISBN: 978-1-935965-22-0

“Larvatus prodeo.”—René Descartes
Editor’s Introduction

Collin Cleary—the enigmatic sage of Sandpoint, Idaho—burst onto the
intellectual scene almost ten years ago, with the publication of the first volume
of the journal TYR. Along with Joshua Buckley and Michael Moynihan, Cleary
was one of the founding editors of TYR, having a hand in all aspects of the first
volume and contributing three substantial articles and several reviews. (Although
he is now no longer involved in editing TYR, he continues to contribute to it.)
Who is Collin Cleary? He could accurately be described as a theologian of neo-
paganism, specifically of the Nordic variety. He is also a Traditionalist with a
capital T, meaning that he falls within the same school of thought as René
Guénon and Julius Evola. He is a Tantrika (no mean feat for a Nordic pagan).
And he is an anti-modern thinker. Cleary is a polymath who has read widely in
philosophy, religion, mysticism, mythology, and literature. His principal
influences are a surprising combination of figures: Martin Heidegger, D. H.
Lawrence, G. W. F. Hegel, Lao Tzu, Evola (but not Guénon, interestingly), the
Indologist Alain Daniélou, and the Nordic pagan theorist Edred Thorsson. All of
Cleary’s interests and influences are on display in the remarkable essays
collected in this volume.
The Leitmotiv of these essays is the hypothesis that our ancestors
possessed a special kind of “openness” which made them aware of the gods—
something that we have now lost. In other words, Cleary does not believe that
our ancestors “invented” their gods; instead, they were literally aware of aspects
of reality now closed to us. Cleary believes that this openness is closely bound
up with openness to the natural world (though they are not, strictly speaking, the
same thing), and that the loss of this state of mind is the root of most of our
modern problems: environmental abuse, the collapse of communities, the
breakdown of relations between the sexes, the folly of social engineering, moral
relativism, scientism, and much else. In Cleary’s view, therefore, the recovery of
this openness would not just be simply a return to belief in the gods, but also an
antidote to modern decadence and dissolution.
How exactly can openness be recovered? This is the difficult problem
Cleary poses for himself. In one way or another, he deals with it in every essay
in this volume. What we find in Cleary’s body of work is not the same ideas
repeated over and over, applied in cookie-cutter fashion to a succession of
issues, but an approach that develops over time. From the first essay (“Knowing
the Gods”) to the last (on the autobiography of Alejandro Jodorowsky), we find
Cleary continually elaborating and refining his answer to how we might recover
the lost openness enjoyed by our ancestors.
“Knowing the Gods” is Cleary’s first major essay, published in the
flagship volume of TYR. The central feature of the piece is an insistence that we
must eschew all attempts to “explain” the gods or our ancestors’ experience of
them. Why? Quite simply because trying to “explain” the gods—trying to say,
for example that “Thor is just x” (or “the experience of Thor is really the
experience of x”)—reflects the standpoint of modern rationalism and scientism.
To approach the gods in such a fashion is therefore to adopt a mindset that
guarantees we will be unable to recover the perspective of our ancestors—who
most certainly did not reflect on what the gods really were (or what the
experience of them really was).
In effect, Cleary proposes a strategy for coming to knowledge of the gods:
assume that the gods are a brute fact and that we have lost our ability to know
them. Then address the issue of reconstructing or restoring the state of mind that
made possible our ancestors’ experience of the gods. He takes this position, in
part, simply because of the gross psychological implausibility of the claim that
our ancestors simply “made up” their gods and then chose to believe in them. As
he makes clear in a subsequent essay, Cleary is not insisting that we should
believe that Thor wields a literal hammer, or that the gods of the Greeks are
literally to be found atop Olympus (a claim the ancients, who had been to the top
of Olympus, all knew to be literally false). But he believes that in speaking of
the gods, our ancestors were speaking of, again, some aspect of reality of which
we seemingly can no longer even conceive. To recover this, Clearly makes a
Heideggerian proposal: that we adopt the standpoint of “openness to being.”
Cleary tells us that openness to the gods begins with openness to the being
of things as such. He argues that the “flight of the gods” begins not specifically
with our disbelieving in them, but in the adoption of a more general attitude—
what Heidegger calls das Gestell (translated into English, rather imperfectly, as
“enframing”). This is the attitude of regarding all that exists as essentially raw
material that waits upon human beings to rework or “perfect” it. This mindset is,
in fact, the essence of modernity.
In a real sense modern people do not regard the things of this world as
possessing any intrinsic being or nature. They are all pure potential, waiting for
us to put our stamp upon them. Trees are potential pencils, a mighty river (to use
Heidegger’s famous example) is a potential power source, and the men of today
are, with proper re-education, the new and improved men of tomorrow. For
modern people, therefore, things have no real nature of their own—their nature
is always something that has yet to emerge, with our assistance. And so
modernity always orients itself toward the future, toward a promise of perfection
to come. For Cleary, what causes the flight of the gods is just this attitude, which
recognizes no limits on human power and rejects the idea of things having any
definite, intrinsic being.
Cleary’s essay “Summoning the Gods” (written for the second volume of
TYR) provides a more expansive answer as to why he thinks this is the case. In
this essay, Cleary argues that the experience of the gods just is an experience of
wonder in the face of the being of things. Thus, openness to the gods
presupposes openness to being-as-such. The experience of a god is man’s
wonder in the face of some aspect of reality he has not created, which awes him
with its beauty, or power, or dreadfulness. We are struck by the sheer facticity of
things; we wonder that certain things should be at all, or be the way that they are.
It is like the Zen experience of satori, in which one is suddenly struck with awe
before the simple fact that the rose bush is, or that the storm is. For Cleary, this
experience is in fact the “intuition” a god. The gods thus might be described (and
Cleary toys with this expression) as “regions of being,” which have been
personified and assigned iconographies and mythologies.
Clearly has not violated the strictures he laid down in “Knowing the
Gods”: the subsequent essay does not attempt to “explain away” the gods at all.
In other words it does not reduce the experience of the gods to something else,
thereby deflating and invalidating it. Like Rudolf Otto, Cleary is attempting a
phenomenological description of divine presence: how the divine shows up to
us; how we become aware of it. Cleary’s ideas about how our ancestors
encountered their gods are based partly upon the study of classical texts and
upon philosophical speculation, guided by a sense of what is psychologically and
culturally plausible. They are also partly inspired by Cleary’s own personal
experience: the result of following the recommendations he lays out in the
original “appendix” to “Knowing the Gods” (published here for the first time).
Though Cleary believes it is impossible to “think” one’s way back into the
mindset of our pagan ancestors, he has drawn certain reasonable theoretical
boundaries around what would constitute a cogent understanding of divine
presence. For instance, Cleary insists, reasonably, that it is condescending and
naïve to think that our ancestors took their myths and the symbolism and
iconography of the gods literally. (Those who think that Cleary’s
phenomenological account of divine presence is, in fact, deflationary are
probably those who have somehow assumed erroneously that a “genuine”
experience of a god would be, for example, actually seeing a tall, one-eyed,