THE SATURNINE PRINCIPLE AND THE BACCHANALIA OF THE MODERN WEST

The Overthrow of the Apollonian Hierarchy

by Alex Fontana

“Carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order: it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal.” [1]

Saturn is the most distant planet that is observable from the Earth with the naked eye. For the ancients the planet and the gods associated with it had special meaning. They considered Saturn – or Kronos, to use his Greek name – as lacking the divine ‘nous’ of spiritual illumination, that is the force associated with the Platonic light of the divine intellect.

The ninth-century Persian astrologer, Abu Ma’shar, identified Saturn as presiding over “avarice, blindness, corruption, hatred, guile and haughtiness.”[2] Saturn was also associated with the melancholic humor – hence the adjective ‘saturnine; which also has an alchemical connection to lead – the basest metal. A further association was with the Goat, as in the astrological sign Capricorn. This connected the planet to the another god, namely Dionysus.

DON'T GO WITH THE FLOW

The Oriental Mysticism at the Heart of our Passivity

by Alex Fontana

"If you describe yourself as 'spiritual but not religious' you might be a Taoist." 

"Here, I would like to make myself absolutely clear: I do not think that the present vague spiritualism, the focus on the openness to Otherness and its unconditional Call, this mode in which Judaism has become almost the hegemonic ethico-spiritual attitude of today’s intellectuals, is in itself the ‘natural’ form of what one can designate, in traditional terms, as Jewish spirituality." – Slavoj Zizek 

"Saving one's soul may be of interest in a system, but in ignorance of that system... your Xtian examination degenerates into mere cerebral onanism." – Ezra Pound 

"All knowledge rests either on authority or reason but that whatever is deduced by reason depends ultimately on a premise derived from authority." – Charles Peirce

When you ask ordinary people about the economy, multiculturalism, or about immigration, they often give vague answers. Rather than identifying a specific historical trajectory that won a military and ideological victory, and is continuously pushed by NGOs, think-tanks, capitalist cabals, ivory tower academics, the mainstream media, and a certain ethnic group, they instead allude to how it is all just the “natural course of events.”