Announcing the New Home of Fenrir: Lux Lycaonis

Announcing the New Home of Fenrir: Lux Lycaonis

As promised, here is the important announcement I recently alluded to: After a great deal of time, energy, and effort – and on the night of the full moon – it is my pleasure to announce the official new home and website of Fenrir: Journal of Satanism and the Sinister!

https://luxlycaonis.com

[Repost from: https://luxlycaonis.com/index.php/2022/03/18/558/]

What follows is some commentary on the choice of the name “Lux Lycaonis,” in addition to the future direction of the site and what purpose it will serve.

A Note on the Name “Lux Lycaonis”

The name “Lux Lycaonis” comes from the Latin “lux,” meaning “light,” and the myth of the impious Greek king of Arcadia and son of Pelasgus, Lycaon.[1] Lycaon, whose name appears to come from the Greek word for wolf (λύκος),[2] “is sometimes considered to be the first werewolf.”[3] While Lycaon’s actions occasionally depict him as a “culture-bringer and pious ruler”[4] – as the founder of Lycosura and having given Zeus the epithet Lycaeus, for example[5] – he is depicted elsewhere in a different light. Some sources report that he “sacrificed a human infant to Zeus Lycaeus.”[6] Other sources, such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, follow the tradition “that Lycaon offended the gods by serving human flesh to them.”[7] In the latter case, Lycaon’s impiety is compounded by entertaining “Zeus … [at] a feast and … [offering him] human flesh to test his divinity.”[8] Thus centering around the theme of the “wickedness of mortals,”[9] the myth of Lycaon is recounted in the following way:

Prometheus had a son, Deucalion, and Epimetheus had a daughter, Pyrrha. Their story … involves a great flood sent by Zeus (Jupiter) to punish mortals for their wickedness. In … [Ovid’s account], Jupiter tells an assembly of the gods how he, a god, became a man to test the truth of the rumors of human wickedness in the age of iron. There follows an account of Jupiter’s anger at the evil of mortals, in particular Lycaon.[10]

Ovid’s account in Metamorphoses thus recounts Zeus’ telling of the story:

Reports of the wickedness of the age had reached my ears; wishing to find them false, I slipped down from high Olympus and I, a god, roamed the earth in the form of a man. Long would be the delay to list the number of evils and where they were found; the iniquitous stories themselves fell short of the truth. I had crossed the mountain Maenalus, bristling with the haunts of animals, and Cyllene, and the forests of cold Lycaeus; from these ridges in Arcadia I entered the realm and inhospitable house of the tyrant Lycaon, as the dusk of evening was leading night on.

I gave signs that a god had come in their midst; the people began to pray but Lycaon first laughed at their piety and then cried: “I shall test whether this man is a god or a mortal, clearly and decisively.” He planned to kill me unawares in the night while I was deep in sleep. This was the test of the truth that suited him best. But he was not content even with this; with a knife he slit the throat of one of the hostages sent to him by the Molossians and, as the limbs were still warm with life, some he boiled until tender and others he roasted over a fire. As soon as he placed them on the table, I with a flame of vengeance brought the home down upon its gods, worthy of such a household and such a master.

Lycaon himself fled in terror, and when he reached the silence of the country he howled as in vain he tried to speak. His mouth acquired a mad ferocity arising from his basic nature, and he turned his accustomed lust for slaughter against the flocks and now took joy in their blood. His clothes were changed to hair; his arms to legs; he became a wolf retaining vestiges of his old form. The silver of the hair and the violent countenance were the same; the eyes glowed in the same way; the image of ferocity was the same.[11]

The name “Lux Lycaonis” was thus selected for this site in light of the following: first, the myth of Lycaon recounted by Ovid is in keeping with the heretical and impious nature of the Order of Nine Angles, both in terms of the two sides of its dialogue (embodied in the relationship between Zeus and Lycaon) and its roots in the ancient Greco-Roman tradition.[12] Secondly, the myth illustrates a tension at the heart of the ONA: that of navigating some of its deliberate trickery and misdirection aimed at imparting something important – something true, sincere, and honest – to the adept through years of difficult discernment. Again, this speaks to the need for Hellenic contemplation or “mindfulness” to inform action, as acting without foresight or proper reflection can prove disastrous (and often has in the ONA). Thirdly, the transformation of Lycaon into a wolf bears an obvious relation to the title of this journal (Fenrir); but the addition of “lux” or “light” also alludes to Fenrir as the Journal of Satanism and the Sinister. This concerns the sense in which, while lycanthropy and werewolves are often associated with lunar aspects of transformation, there is also a hidden solar side. That dynamic has to do with the sense in which these lunar aspects – which are typically “hidden,” “dark,” “absent,” or “unknown” – interact with this solar aspect. While that aspect is typically associated with what is “seen,” “present,” or “illuminated,” it is interestingly hidden from the moon and yet provides the moon with its source of illumination and light. Lycaon’s transformation into a wolf speaks to this dynamic. With respect to Mircea Eliade’s notion that objects and human action are only made real through participating in a reality that transcends them,[13] it also speaks to the importance of the sun in the ONA as the center of the Tree of Wyrd – a center that every other dynamic, process, sphere, and entity on the tree participates in (including the hidden paths, albeit in a complex way). The sphere of the sun is also an important part of the process of dyssolving, involving as it does the essential alchemical process of putrefaction, and thus is an important – and overlooked – part of Satanism and the sinister.

In turn, while this site will remain the official home of Fenrir, I thought it important to leave room for expansion (hence the choice of “Lux Lycaonis” for the name over something like “Fenrir Journal” or the like). Thus, in addition to showcasing the work and talent of the main contributors of the journal, whom I have invited to be a part of this and assist with the Fenrir project, there will remain the possibility of adding other elements to the site to broaden its purpose and horizon. Additionally, while there will indeed be a primary emphasis on contemplation, scholarship, esotericism, and practical magick here, I also hope to incorporate and emphasize music, poetry, and art in the future. Finally, this site will be a lighthearted place to air the thoughts and personal experiences of all involved as we continue our journey through the ONA, in addition to providing news and updates on various related subjects.

Nameless Therein
Scothorn Nexion
Full moon in Libra
March 18, 2022
2775 ab urbe condita

NOTES

[1] Christine L. Albright, “Lycaon,” chap. 3 in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 1st ed. (Oxon: Routledge, 2018), 10.

[2] Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth, eds., “Lycaon,” in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

[3] Albright, “Lycaon,” 14. Albright notes that the phenomenon of lycanthropy is not unique to the myth of Lycaon in ancient Greece. Plato alludes to it in the Republic, where men transform into wolves “after eating human flesh at a human sacrifice on Mt. Lycaeon in Arcadia.” The ancient Greek geographer Pausanias notes how “these men would return to human form after nine years, provided that they abstained from eating human flesh.”

[4] Hornblower and Spawforth, “Lycaon.”

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Albright, “Lycaon,” 14.

[8] Hornblower and Spawforth, “Lycaon.”

[9] Mark P.O. Morford, Robert J. Lenardon, and Michael Sham, Classical Mythology, 11th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 99.

[10] Morford, Lenardon, and Sham, Classical Mythology, 99.

[11] Quoted in Morford, Lenardon, and Sham, Classical Mythology, 100.

[12] The question of piety and impiety has deep roots in ancient Greece. See Plato’s Euthyphro, for example.

[13] Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 34. For Eliade, anything that has reality through its participation in a transcendent reality composed of mythological archetypes is considered sacred. Anything that lacks this reality is profane. This applies to contemplation and equally to action (“an object or act becomes real only insofar as it imitates or repeats an archetype”); though importantly, action without contemplation – without this participation in that transcendent reality and being informed by it – is profane. To use a common term the ONA employs, we might say in light of this that many of the actions and activities associated with the ONA are not only profane but “mundane.”

Vita activa

[Updated repost with some additional commentary can be found here: https://luxlycaonis.com/index.php/2022/03/18/vita-activa/]

Most amusing, Clarice. But let me be clear:

From your reaction and from my writing, many reading the last few posts here may think that I’m some studious, academic bookworm lost in a world of theoretical reflection and abstraction with no grounding in vital experience or action: a “pathetic husk pouring over the dusty tomes of vacuous minds intent on finding solace for their inadequacy-in-the-world,” bound, as you put it, to “the emasculating chains of vain scholarship” in opposition to “putting boots on the ground to carry out definitive action.”

In response, I will say this: those who know me personally – including some of the most powerful Nexions in this tradition – know that my background is steeped in a solemn history of profound sinister/Satanic activity. What I write is not meant to be theoretical. And it is from my history of violent and transformative action that I can even approach the contemplative. My journey along the Seven-Fold Way was prefaced by extreme experiences: I know what it’s like to fight for my life, to be beaten and broken, to approach physical death on more than one occasion; of losing everyone and everything and having to rebuild from a bottom that no longer exists. I know what it’s like to lose my mind, to find my best friend dead in a bathtub after committing suicide, to find myself in the emergency room on multiple occasions, to know and love a woman and then to see her die … My boots aren’t just on the ground: they’re on the earth.

The best among us know what it’s like to be wounded. One cannot approach the ONA or the Seven-Fold Way, let alone expect to succeed, without having had such experiences break down the resistance structures that prevent us from maintaining composure in the face of great adversity. It is precisely from this wounding, from having been the recipient of its necessary violence, that I object to propagating it, whether in language or in deed.

You have misunderstood what was written in my last post: action is not meant to be a substitution for contemplation, but neither is contemplation meant to be a substitution for action. The two must inform each other.

What I wrote was not meant to target any specific person or Nexion. I have engaged in brief dialogue with your parent Nexion, The Black Order, for example – and while I disagree with much of what is written in their literature on some of the grounds explicated in my previous post, I think it is nevertheless important to engage in serious dialogue with them and their ideas for just this reason.

Your response, which I found vulgar and distasteful, seems to indicate just the contrary. And it’s “vita activa,” not “via activa.”

But my brain grew more and more perplexed. At last I jumped out of bed to find the water tap. I wasn’t thirsty, but my head was feverish and I felt instinctively a need for water. When I had had my drink, I went back to bed again and decided that I was going to sleep, by hook or by crook. I closed my eyes and forced myself to be quiet. I lay for several minutes without moving a muscle, began to sweat and felt the blood pulse violently through my veins. Wasn’t it just too funny, though, that he should look for money in the cornet! And he coughed, just once. Is he still walking around down there? Sitting on my bench? … The blue mother-of-pearl … the ships …

– Knut Hamsun, Hunger

Nameless Therein
Scothorn Nexion
March 15, 2022
2775 ab urbe condita

Wonder, Alterity, and the Immemorial as Devotional Candor in the ONA

– Jacopo da Pontormo, Visitation, c. 1528-1529

Wonder, Alterity, and the Immemorial as Devotional Candor in the ONA

[Posted here: https://luxlycaonis.com/index.php/2022/03/18/wonder-alterity-and-the-immemorial-as-devotional-candor-in-the-ona/]

Much like the Order of Nine Angles, the ideas that have shaped the Western tradition are characterized by what Aristotle identified as wonder. This sense of dispositional awe in the face of an incomprehensible mystery – what Rudolf Otto, in one of the most widely read German theological works of the twentieth century,[1] famously characterized as mysterium tremendum et fascinans, “a mystery that inspires dread and fascination simultaneously”[2] ­­– marks an enduring response to the way we inhabit and orient ourselves in the world.

This “solitary and silent ‘residence’ of wonder”[3] finds shelter in a wide history of Western thought. In the Theaetetus, Plato describes wonder (thaumazein) “as the beginning or archê of philosophy.”[4] Aristotle describes this with respect to the way we begin (archontai) by wondering (thaumazein) whether things are as they seem.[5] We find these “beginnings” reiterated powerfully in the Renaissance Platonists, who were “[h]eirs to late ancient and medieval Christianity” and stressed “the epistemological or ontological status of miracles, thus exploring the cognitive side of amazement and the metaphysical side of any sort of spiritual intervention”;[6] in works of the early thirteenth century, such as those of the English nobleman Gervase of Tilbury, who outlined “three categories of wonderful things”;[7] through the exploration of magic in the Middle Ages and early modern period as an “enquiry into the wonderful”;[8] and in many other major Western figures, such as Plotinus, St. Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Pascal, Thomas Hobbes, John Milton, Malebranche, Spinoza, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Kant. In fact, it was Kant who famously remarked how two things fill the mind with wonder: the starry sky above and the moral law within.[9]

All of these explorations of wonder share in common an “attitudinal change which occurred in the European history of ideas,” one in which “a radically new way of approaching reality evolved.”[10] In a similar spirit, we are witnessing a radical new way of approaching reality in terms of the ONA’s evolution. In addition to an attitudinal change in the ideas that have shaped the tradition, one can sense a change in the climate that informs the ONA’s praxis. From the flashpoint of the “noise,”[11] gossip, and interpersonal infighting that have occurred for decades at its outskirts, we now find reflected in its collective exoskeleton what has always remained hidden in its esoteric heart: a relationality or plurality that becomes “visible” when this sense of wonder comports one utterly beyond rational comprehension, one that is acknowledged in our fundamental relation to the other. In the ONA, this relation is embodied in transformative action through empathy; and in such a way that it cannot be reduced to the self or comprehension.[12]

Through wonder and in the face of modernity, the ONA attempts to explore “what was lost in the destruction of our capability to be astonished and perplexed.”[13] As Jacques Taminiaux notes, this wonder or thaumazein is enduring,[14] driving the way the ONA’s philosophy informs its praxis and how this carries over into concrete experience. As one embarks on a journey leading to radical transformation with respect to the incomprehensible alterity or otherness of the world, one discovers what David Myatt, in reference to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, cites as a “wordless-awareness,” which he connects to empathy in the Corpus Hermeticum.[15] Myatt’s point regarding “a mortal apprehension that Being, and certain beings, are not or cannot be subject to, nor explainable, in terms of causality”[16] is analogous to the fact that our fundamental relation to the other through empathy cannot be reduced to comprehension. Rather than comprehended or understood, it is acknowledged or “apprehended” through the practice of simple but difficult primordial experiences leading to transformation. Thus – and this point is sometimes overlooked – in addition to its philosophy, the ONA also requires practice.

As that which directs this wordless-awareness in relation to empathy as a fundamental relation to the other, we find that wonder is not just enduring but what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the immemorial: a kind of excess or overflowing that resists memorialization or being made into a monument. As a vital collective presence spanning a plethora of ancient and modern traditions, the ONA exceeds itself, having neither definitive leadership nor singular authority. In some respects, its enduring wonder “never commemorates”[17] – it is not a monument to the past, nor does it memorialize. And yet, what Nancy says of the immemorial equally applies to the ONA from its past to present day: it is “what is infinitely ancient and thus definitively present.”[18] In its cathartic practice and tragic revelation, the ONA speaks to something timeless and yet concretely present in the world. The mysteries it promises are systematically attainable through practical action. And while they remain intimately hidden and out of reach as an irreducible opacity – something ungraspable, even to the self – they are nevertheless not beyond the world but “present right here.”[19] In the value of what it reveals, in its timeless mystery, and in its solemn yet enduring visitation, the ONA is “what is never to be seen or said, but toward which one does not cease to move – and that is the immemorial.”[20] In much the same way that the immemorial frees itself from memorialization through its own excess, so too does wonder free the ONA from becoming yet another internet relic, one crystalized in history as a blueprint for what could have been, lost to future generations as a curious irrelevance. With the changing seasons and as we look from earth to sky for guidance, I remain optimistic that what Nancy says of the immemorial may serve as a kind of ongoing augury for the future of the ONA: “[that it is] always to come again like the return of a past more ancient than any past, its visitation always reprised in a movement in which the surface itself rises up, billowing and leaping out.”[21] Whether this “billowing and leaping out” will prove to be a hex or a haruspex remains to be seen.

In closing, I would like to note that it is this spirit of wonder that will motivate the upcoming and future editions of Fenrir, the ONA’s journal of Satanism and the Sinister. This article will be published in slightly revised form in the upcoming edition and is meant to serve as an introduction to some of the themes that will be addressed in more detail there – themes such as alterity, empathy, and sinister magick. As editor of the journal, I should also note that I have an important announcement, which will be revealed in the very near future. I would like to conclude with an excerpt from a message I recently wrote to a friend and well-known ONA associate, one that I think will prove timely, relevant, and interesting for our best and brightest:

[…] whether running Fenrir or having a wide influence on the ONA in a public capacity, one cannot let transparent emotions inform the opaque intentions motivating what others say. The ONA is beyond personal affectation or judgment, beyond you and I, beyond even its founders. Over the last decade of involvement with the ONA and the Seven-Fold Way, I have witnessed some of the most painful and transformative experiences of my life shape something radically ineffable, melancholic, cathartic, serene. In that “something,” which is utterly intangible and yet directs everything we do, I found a presence worth dying for; and, more importantly, worth living for – authentically and with integrity. It is my hope that […] you see the value in devotional candor, in submitting to something beyond the self, something absolute and incomprehensible.

– Albrecht Dürer, The Four Witches, 1497

Nameless Therein
Scothorn Nexion
Moon in Gemini, March 9, 2022
2775 ab urbe condita

NOTES

[1] Todd A. Gooch, The Numinous and Modernity: An Interpretation of Rudolf Otto’s Philosophy of Religion (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 1. The text referred to here is Otto’s Das Heilige: Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen (1917), commonly known by its shortened English title, The Idea of the Holy.

[2] Ibid., 2.

[3] David Bollert, “The Wonder of the Philosopher and the Citizen: Plato, Aristotle, and Heidegger” (PhD diss., Boston College, 2005), 2.

[4] Ibid., 3. The reference to wonder in Plato’s Theaetetus occurs at 155c-d.

[5] Ibid., 93. See Aristotle’s Metaphysics, 983a12-13.

[6] Elisabeth Blum and Paul Richard Blum, “Wonder and Wondering in the Renaissance,” in Philosophy Begins in Wonder: An Introduction to Early Modern Philosophy, Theology and Science, ed. by Michael Funk Deckard and Péter Losonczi (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2011), 1.

[7] Koen Vermeir, “Wonder, Magic, and Natural Philosophy: The Disenchantment Thesis Revisited,” in Philosophy Begins in Wonder, 45. These three categories are characterized by “things we consider unheard of,” sometimes through variations in nature, “at which we marvel”; by things whose cause is unknown and thus “inscrutable to us”; and by “customary experiences” that differ from others.

[8] Ibid., 51. Vermeir here lists two philosophers of this period with respect to the relation between magic and wonder: the Protestant philosopher Heinrich Alsted (1588-1638), who wrote that “magic is the art which is concerned with wondrous effects [apotelesmas], commonly known as incredible”; and the Jesuit scholar Gaspar Schott (1608-1666), who defined magic as “whatever is marvellous and goes beyond the sense and comprehension of the common man.”

[9] Dennis J. Schmidt, “Thank Goodness for the Atmosphere: Reflections on the Starry Sky and the Moral Law,” Research in Phenomenology 50 (2020), 370.

[10] Péter Losonczi and Michael Funk Deckard, “Introduction,” in Philosophy Begins in Wonder, xvii.

[11] Despite a few interesting ideas and an appetite for vital experience, I find Crowley’s writings and way of thinking problematic on a number of grounds. That said, something he wrote in Magick without Tears is relevant here: “You ask me what is, at the present time, the greatest obstacle to human progress. I answer in one word: NOISE.” Aleister Crowley, Magick without Tears, ed. Israel Regardie (St. Paul: Llewellyn Publications, 1973), 125. See chapter 14, “Noise.”

[12] Part of the mystery of this esoteric dynamic lies in the twofold sense in which the relation to the other arises from the ONA’s emphasis on the individual as a means to empathy, and how this acknowledgement actualizes itself at the level of transformative experience (which occurs individually but exceeds the individual).

[13] Losonczi and Deckard, “Introduction,” xxv.

[14] Bollert, “The Wonder of the Philosopher,” 3.

[15] David Myatt, “Chapter Two,” in “Classical Paganism and the Christian Ethos,” 2nd ed. (self-pub., 2017). See the section, “An Appreciation of Acausality” in addition to the subsequent section, “A Mortal Wordless-Awareness.” The reference here is specifically to “the activity of theos … [as] a wordless-awareness.” His reference to empathy in connection to this worldless-awareness pertains to tractate VIII of the Corpus Hermeticum.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Jean-Luc Nancy, “Visitation: Of Christian Painting,” chap. 8 in The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 108.

[18] Ibid., 116.

[19] Ibid., 109. On pp. 108-109 Nancy says: “On this side of or beyond the memorial, that is, beyond or on this side of the self and of what can be subjectivized: the hereafter or the other world (death, in that sense), not outside the world but present right here.”

[20] Ibid., 111.

[21] Ibid., 118.