The Anabasis to Arete

the European expedition to ascension

This is largely a thought-experiment inspired by this quote shared with me by fellow ‘stacker, James Dowler:

This is our first step on a new journey, the beginning of a crusade. One we will win with our own hands and our own strength. There is a term in ancient Greece: Anabasis—the journey an army takes inland from the sea. The march up-country to new conquests. This is our Anabasis, this is the first chapter in our story; all else has been but prologue.

~ Josh Reynolds "Fulgrim: The Palatine Phoenix” ~

Europeans have been traveling down a certain path for a considerable amount of time - it probably predates our arrival to Europe, although that remains lost in the misty depths of antiquity. This path demands true effectiveness, success, and perfection; this path is the one that requires careful planning, social altruism, and a robust natural philosophy; this path is the “straight and narrow” so often spoken about by the wise sages; this path is dictated to us by ancestral memory encoded into our very genetics, it is a spiritual calling that stretches back to our primordial beginning on the frozen steppe-lands of the Ice Age - it is the spiritual calling that pushes us towards the stars.

Ultimately, this path is the anabasis to arete. In other words, this is the ascension towards the Ubermensch, it is the European “will-to-power”, and it is “riding the tiger” as Evola put it, however silly it may sound. This is the culmination of tens of thousands of years of European evolution and civilization - it is the divine mandate of manifest destiny Christians love so much. This is our purpose, as a species distinct from the other inhabitants on Earth - we alone carry this spiritual torch, we alone have the capacity to achieve spiritual eucatastrophe.

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anabasis - from Ancient Greek ἀνάβασις meaing “a going up, an ascent” originating from the proto-Indo-European root *an- "on, upon, above" connected to *gwa- "to go, come"

Etymonline gives this for possible cognates to “anabasis” and I want to call special attention to the Lithuanian word:

The hypothetical source of/evidence for its existence is provided by: Sanskrit gamati "he goes," Avestan jamaiti "goes," Tocharian kakmu "come," Lithuanian gemu, gimti "to be born," Greek bainein "to go, walk, step," Latin venire "to come," Old English cuman "come, approach," German kommen, Gothic qiman.

arete - from Ancient Greek ἀρετή meaning “excellence, effectiveness, perfection, virtue” originating from the proto-Indo-European root *h₂er- “to join; to prepare” +‎ *-éh₁ti “to think, to reason”

The root “ar” meaning “high, noble, royal” is highlighted in the French usage of arete, which renders the definition into “edge, ridge, crest” or even “the top of a mountain” which goes to show some of the esoteric meanings of this word.

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The point of this article will be to demonstrate that:

1. The European man naturally desires to ascend towards arete.

2. The European man has consistently destroyed his efforts through a Faustian urge to break down boundaries and discover/conquer new things, which landed us in a judaized world.

3. The European must go on an anabasis out of the jewish Sheol and Gehenna, and ascend to the mountaintops of his ancestral youth.

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1. Arete

Europeans have been thinking and reasoning, and joining and comparing these thoughts and reasons, probably since the foundation of our race. This is the mental and spiritual process which leads to arete, for there is no perfection without thoughtful contemplation followed by reasoned action. This ability is often called “pattern-recognition” and it has been highlighted by many on the Right that the other races are sorely lacking in this regard. I don’t really think every other race is actually all that bad at pattern-recognition, I just think we see different patterns. Our minds are geared towards different ends.

Whereas the highest members of other races seek material comfort, physical survival, or spiritual succor, the highest Europeans tend to seek after physical and spiritual perfection. The countless natural philosophies and sciences born from our curious minds proves this, and so do the countless architectural works which required great sums of money, manpower, and effort to create. I believe this is our desire to go on an anabasis, to create eucatastrophe, to be possessed with a eudaimonia, and to achieve arete.

I posit that Europeans have been seeking a certain spiritual order and material perfection that resides deep within our bio-spirit. It occasionally showed its face through our history, with the most recent attempts being with the Enlightenment and the fascist revolutions of the 20th century. Personally, I think we are in the throes of the next appearance of this European instinct, and that men like myself and the many ethno-nationalist Substackers are partaking in this great ancestral journey towards arete. We are the next intellectual elite of the right-wing, for both conservatives and alt-righters are both liberalized and impotent. We alone represent both those ancient ideals and the new concepts born from the European psyche - we are the end result of thousands of years of evolution.

It is evident that deep within our soul lies dormant the desire for arete. It is also evident that there remains this urge to break out and conquer new things. Both of these are tied to the same source, which is the path towards eventual ascension, both temporal and eternal. Look at the stories of Hercules, Achilles, Sigurd, Beowulf, Cuchulainn, Arthur, or even Hitler, and it becomes quite clear that this is a recurring element in our racial story. Like dominoes falling and striking one another, these champions paved the way forward and there will always be new champions to lead the way.

However, it is not enough to know virtue - one must live and actualize virtue. This is a suggestion to everyone in our “movement” especially young men: if you see a need, fill that need - find your niche, and achieve arete in your domain! Do not remain on the sidelines, because nothing ever happens when you don’t play the game. Become the racial champion you are called to become.

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2. Faustian Urge

European nationalists toy around with the idea that the European man is ultimately Faustian in nature, meaning that he breaks boundaries seeking after great rewards. I generally agree with this, just looking at our racial history proves that we have consistently charged forth into the unknown - ranging from the Neolithic farmers colonizing the British Isles, to the later Bell-Beakers, Celts, Romans, Saxons, and Vikings who did the same thing, extending all the way to the intrepid colonists of India, Africa, and the Americas. We have looked to the stars and scraped the surface of the moon, and we take pictures of distant rocks just to satisfy our curiosity. Hel, we are even toying with genetics and biology, all for the benefit of the jew, and this is the most recent bastardization of our energies.

We cannot get rid of this Faustian urge - it is encoded into our very genes. We must embrace it, and utilize it, rather than fight against it or ignore it. This is a skillset in our racial tool bag that we have not consciously utilized to achieve arete.

Fellow Substacker Arthur Powell said this in his recent article, and I thought it was fitting to mention it here so that I can highlight how we can best utilize this urge:

We used to not have to ask ‘why’ when it came to doing odd or eccentric things. Why climb that mountain? Why jump off that cliff into the sea? Why visit the Titanic? One of the attributes of humans, but especially of Europeans, appears to be this curiosity and desire to conquer. It is most prevalent in our people and propelled us forward, ever further. Now we’ve run out of conventional frontiers it has turned to other places. During early jet fighter testing and the space race we lost pilots all the time. Often time they left behind wives and children. If you want a good read Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff is hard to beat - it really was a different time and place. Danger was part of the appeal but our collective stomach for risk and reward was much higher. The longhouse walls had not yet closed in.

Where we once utilized this urge to reach new and glorious heights, we are now allowing this urge to turn us ourselves into broken slaves. We have sold our services to the highest bidder, which will always be jews, our great enemy, and they are stifling and controlling this urge. Faust sold his soul to the devil, but we sold our soul to the jew, and now we create weapons and technologies for him so that he can better control the goyim. We opened our nations and our wombs to foreigners, all for his benefit, and we do all of this convinced that we are progressing to some new height!

I really do think this urge has played a major role in creating our current situation. There have always been the naysayers, the do-gooders, and the busybodies - and there have always been the conquerors, the raiders, the explorers, and the experimenters. This modern society has increased the amount of servants, while capitalizing on the Faustian champions, turning them into war-machines, puppet-politicians, and evil scientists. The jewish shekel now spurns us towards great and secretive acts, such the building of DUMBs, WMDs, and other inventions which just seem like science-fiction-turned-reality, such as the recent mRNA vaccines and the CRISPR gene-editing. None of these technological horrors would be possible without the aid of Europeans, and we are the most suited for this work since we are gifted/cursed with a Faustian urge.

Our unending desire to reach new heights has been subjected to a semitic inversion. We no longer seek the heights of arete - we now seek the lowest abominations and bring them into reality. I know that there are non-Whites doing this as well, but I am also aware of many shabbos goys, liberals, and neo-cons. This is the end result of many powerful Europeans selling their souls for knowledge and power, and gaining nothing but the destruction of the West in return.

This Faustian urge must be controlled and tamed, then turned against our enemies. If we are successful in combining ancient wisdom with modern ingenuity, then we will become something totally new and terrifying to our enemies, and victory will be certain.

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3. Anabasis

“Anabasis” is a book by the famous soldier-philosopher Xenophon, and this partly inspired this article. I have not read the text, but Youtuber historian Kings and Generals has a good video of the military campaign. In that text, Xenophon explains how the exiled Persian Prince Cyrus came to the Greeks seeking a mercenary army to put down a “rebellion” - I will not share too many details of this campaign for it is riveting and deserving of its own article, but suffice to say, the Ten Thousand required a daring expedition back to Greece after failing to put the pretender on the throne of Persia. This expedition almost broke down a dozen times, but due to the piety and virtue of the generals, particularly Xenophon, the army returned home where they passed into legend.

“Retreat of the Ten Thousand at the Battle of Cunaxa” by Jean Adrien Guignet

Similar to the Ten Thousand Greek mercenaries, we have marched deep into enemy territory on false pretenses. Similar to Faust, we have sold our soul to the devil (jews) and we are basically committing racial suicide. We have degenerated and no longer resemble our former selves.

We must go on our own anabasis back to arete.

We must imitate the bison plowing through a snowstorm:

Or certain seabirds flying in the wake of a storm to get more acceleration:

We must go on our anabasis out of the jewish storm, and create new havens for ourselves, lest we perish in the hellish trap. The creation of a Parallel Society will go a long way to produce these new havens, but so will the simple creation of strong virtuous men through active clubs, militias, and political organizations. We must break away from the jewish system, break our old contracts, and make new ones with those men who are worthwhile and trustworthy. We must create something new that incorporates all of the strong folk who have been abused and abandoned by the system.

Fellow Substacker Hexenkartothek recently released this article where he makes poignant points concerning the need for Europeans to find new paths, to find new ways, and not to cling to dead things - he essentially argues for a form of racialist futurism. This isn’t a rebuttal to his article because this is just a thought-experiment on “anabasis” - I really just want to call attention to this one quote. This quote shows some of what I’ve been getting at in this article:

If you truly believe that the current state of our civilization is evil/unnatural/whatever, then it only makes sense to get through it quickly rather than loiter around it. If modernity truly is the “end of history,” then I guess we were all wrong.

This is the end of modernity but not history - the Axial Age philosophies which created modernity are beginning to see a reversal in the face of new philosophies, secular transhumanist and religious traditionalist ones. We are experiencing another turning of the page in our history book, another great event that will shape us for generations to come. Racialist Christianity is forming its own rhetoric and apologetics, folkish pagans are returning from the grave and building new kindreds, even Nietzche is more popular than ever among the non-religious RW. The anabasis starts small, with brave men who are willing to leave the trappings of their modern life and create something new, whether with the pieces of old broken things, or with newly crafted materials.

This brings me to a key point: we do not have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

In a Christian sense, I am saying we must be born anew, not born again. For the pagans, I am saying we need an erdathe, a Ragnarok, a final war and battle between the Gods to settle things once and for all. For the Nietzcheans like Hex, I am arguing that they need to build on the foundations of their forefathers, rather than go totally Faustian.

We must “R3TVRN” as the trads like to say, but not in the way they want, much to their great disappointment - nay, this is not a return to normality, but rather an anabasis towards arete. We do not need to cling to dead things, nor do we need to abandon them - we simply need to embrace the Folk, which is both living and dead, and brave the new future. The Folk are the past, present, and future. Everything else is hubris and folly.

We are the culmination of the efforts of tens of thousands of European generations. It would be absolute folly to leave behind the lessons, wisdom, and inventions our foresires handed down to us - that would be like a sprint-racer cutting off his own feet! In fact, this judaic storm is tearing away and burying all ancient European gifts, and a major part of our weathering of the storm will be the preservation of this history. As I said, we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater - we should embrace the wisdom of our forefathers while we strike out on our own.

We need a new ethno-genesis, and create new household and tribes. This is exactly what our Indo-European forefathers did, so in a way this is a “R3TVRN” just not the way trad-folks generally desire. We have to break out of the mental boxes set down by the jew and our traitorous relatives, and instead create new havens for ourselves where we can better enact our goals.

Our forefathers maintained strong civilizations through connecting with an Axis Mundi, which traditionally used to be the sacred groves and burial mounds set down by our forefathers. When we were Christianized, this Axis Mundi became the Church which served a similar purpose for a time since so many folks were buried in churchyards. Basically, we created our various civilizations through maintaining a deep blood-and-soil connection with our ancestors. This connection is integral, for when I lost all sense of American identity, I regained it through traveling and visiting the cemeteries of my American forefathers - I reconnected with the blood-and-soil.

This created a new man, similar to his forefathers but unlike them in many key ways. Prior to my personal anabasis, I was a cringe anarchistic creationist who had abandoned the conservative upbringing of my youth, but I began to cling to ancient ideas coupled with New Ageism - I was trapped in a mental box created by my Faustian urge to break out of the stifling box of Judeo-Christianity and conservatism.

After my anabasis, I realized that I am simply the next man of my line - I am an American Gael, a Gaidheil Siarach, a patriot and nationalist. I am the culmination of two hundred years of Gaelic, Nordic, German, and Iberian forefathers who lived and died here in America. I rediscovered elements of my identity that modern society stifled, and have since been on a path towards personal arete. By focusing more on my ancestors, my living kin, and my future descendants, I witnessed a total overturning within my life where many old problems simply disappeared, and many new blessings began to pour onto me.

I argue that our new Axis Mundi should be the DNA strand - it should be the very genetics that ties our Folk together across vast distances of time and space. This curious little biological reality is the reason why so many of us are in this pro-White sphere in the first place. It is the reason why we have connections to dead people buried in dozens of countries, and living people who dwell in far away locales. I will probably write more about this hypothetical “Tree of Life” in the near future, for this is truly the chain that binds us together.

Basically, if we wish to create new civilizations which can bring us victory, we must become folkish once more. This is an anachronism which is required for the European spirit, it is not an anachronism that we can throw away thinking it is old and worthless. Tens of thousands of years of human activity created our worldviews, our philosophies, and our inherent instincts - we must honor these by encoding them into law. This is revolutionary and new, for there has never before been a modern society that strictly enforces ancient practices while striking out against modernity to create new practices.

We must balance the old with the present, and create something new. This is what I am doing, and what all folkists are doing - we create new folk art, new folk stories, while maintaining and preserving the older ones. This is a living religion and philosophy, not a dead one, and it is directly tied to the bio-spirit, which means that it activates and excites deep wells of ancestral memory within the soul.

We must call upon our ancestors while continuing to create new things. If everything in our history was just a prologue to us, then let us be worthy of that by creating something compatible with our racial spirit. Any new system we create MUST take into account the Folk, or else it will repeat the same mistakes of modernity.

Ultimately, we have a choice:

Will we continue clinging to dead things such as contracts, charters, and social pacts (conservatives)? Will we let the forces of society erase our ancestral efforts (liberals)? Or, will we create something new (third positionist)?

It is obvious that our deal with the devil (jews) has destroyed this civilization. We cling to dead things as though they were life rafts in a storm, yet these life rafts are not that stable for they are not that old. Conservatives cling to broken ideas. Liberals cling to new ideas. We must cast aside both, and rediscover that ancestral path laid down to us long ago. This is the only route forward. We must strike out on our own and break away from the past two thousand years of jewish influence, but if we do not maintain folkish ties, then we will perish.

Folkism is the route to arete, it is the anabasis of our soul, the eucatastrophe of our race. Tens of thousands of years of human history culminates with us - let us be worthy of this most ancient inheritance, rather than shrug it off due to the mistakes of our recent fathers.

We will become the best Europeans to have ever graced this Earth. Do not succumb to those forces which seek to destroy you - embrace the ancestral body and create a new household.

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Hail victory! Thank you, and good-end. o///