Colonize Your Bookshelf, Part IV

By Edward Maxwell III

In Part III of this series, we looked at the Nazi regime in Stoddard’s Into the Darkness. In Part IV, we finally look at a book available from Imperium Press, and go all the way back to the urheimat, to the cradle of Aryan civilization itself.

Fustel de Coulanges: The Ancient City (1864)

Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges is the least known of our authors, but his book was one of the most respected historical works of his time—a time when giants roamed the earth, the golden age of historiography: the mid–late 19th century. And yet it has fallen into obscurity for reasons which are not clear. Nevertheless, in our quest to colonize our bookshelf, even among the three other towering works this one might stand tallest, and might penetrate deepest into the savage heart of modernity.

And yet Coulanges' masterwork is, on the face of it, not that revolutionary of a book. It is a history of the classical world, tracing it from its earliest times down through its revolutions, and on to its transition from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages. But it is far more. The story has been told many times, and in much greater detail, but never quite like this. The Ancient City is the last great example of traditionalist history. It is a brilliant forerunner to Bertrand de Jouvenel and the neoabsolutist school. It is a long-dead culture come back to life, the most consequential the world has ever seen, a dialect of which is spoken by two in five people alive today.

Historians have offered many explanations for the decline of the classical world. Some of the more specious include economic factors, climate change, abuse of power, and the very pinnacle of modern scholarship, “it's complicated,” also known as “systemic collapse,” or the convergence of many factors, which is just a thin veil covering a frank admission of perplexity: “I don't know, a bunch of things I guess?” As though a man dying from a shotgun wound might be said to be undergoing a systemic collapse, with the causal chain reaching back no further than the combination of shock, cardiac arrest, the brain denied a blood supply—you know, it's complicated.

Some of the more cogent explanations have involved moral decline, reliance upon foreign elements, complexity, and the natural life cycle of civilizations, but what is clear is that nothing is clear. Perhaps we simply do not have the skeleton key. Or perhaps there is none—perhaps it really is complicated. Coulanges' book enfolds all the more cogent explanations, identifying the engine driving the classical world as… the Aryan domestic cult of the ancestors. At least he is original, no?

This religion bears some explanation, since most people never heard of it. The first of many lessons in The Ancient City is that the Greeks and Romans were nothing at all like us, at least in terms of their religion. Andrew Breitbart said that politics is downstream of culture. The neoabsolutists tell us that culture is downstream of power. White nationalists say that everything is downstream of biology. For Coulanges, as for Maistre, everything is downstream of theology, and more broadly, of belief. Speaking of the centripetal force needed to bring together people who dwelt in relative isolation, Coulanges writes,

“This power was a belief. Nothing has more power over the soul. A belief is the work of our mind, but we are not on that account free to modify it at will. It is our own creation, but we do not know it. It is human, and we believe it a god. It is the effect of our power, and is stronger than we are. It is in us; it does not quit us: it speaks to us at every moment. If it tells us to obey, we obey; if it traces duties for us, we submit. Man may, indeed, subdue nature, but he is subdued by his own thoughts.”[1]

Have we come full circle, back to the “proposition nation?” Is the sacral center of our society a mere principle? Do we “hold these truths to be self-evident,” whether or not we are free to modify them at will? Hardly. One will not find a George Will among the Aryan and his daughter civilizations. These men were formalists to a degree that seems almost absurd to us. In a discussion of ancient law, Coulanges drops this Scalia-pill:

“These ancient verses were invariable texts. To change a letter of them, to displace a word, to alter the rhythm, was to destroy the law itself by destroying the sacred form under which it was revealed to man. The law was like prayer, which was agreeable to the divinity only on condition that it was recited correctly, and which became impious if a single word in it was changed. In primitive law the exterior, the letter, is everything; there is no need of seeking the sense or spirit of it. The value of the law is not in the moral principle that it contains, but in the words that make up the formula. Its force is in the sacred words that compose it.”[2]

But this extreme rigor makes little sense until we tap into the root of the religion. This is not easy because we have seen a religious revolution relatively recently. We have had our faith for about 1,500 years—the man of Cicero's time practiced a religion that went back at least 4,000 years, and which was quite unlike ours in almost every way. If we believe at all in the soul today, we believe that it survives death, and that in death the soul and body are parted; the Bronze age Aryan in the Pontic steppe, along with his Greco-Roman descendants, did not think that death would part body and soul. This makes all the difference.

Read the entire article at ZerothPosition.com

References

1. Coulanges, Numa Denis Fustel de (1864; 2020 ed.). The Ancient City. Imperium Press. p. 105.
2. Ibid., p. 155.
3. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1883; 2015 ed.). Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Hofenberg. p. 25.
4. Coulanges, p. 26.
5. Rothbard, Murray (1982; 1998 ed.). The Ethics of Liberty. New York University Press. p. 113.
6. Qui, Insula (2018). Anarcho-Monarchism. p. 230–7.
7. Duchesne, Ricardo (2019). Foreword to Iliad. Imperium Press. p. xiv.
8. Coulanges, p. 89.