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Title: “Anarchist Religion”?
Author: Peter Lamborn Wilson
Date: 2009
Language: en
Topics: Caribbean, Fifth Estate, Fifth Estate #383, Friedrich Nietzsche, religion, spirituality
Notes: From Fifth Estate #383, Summer 2010

Peter Lamborn Wilson

“Anarchist Religion”?

It’s often said that we anarchists “believe humans are basically good”

(as did the Chinese sage Mencius). Some of us, however, doubt the notion

of inherent goodness and reject the power of other people over us

precisely because we don’t trust the bastards.

It seems unwise to generalize about anarchist “beliefs” since some of us

are atheists or agnostics, while others might even be Catholics. Of

course, a few anarchists love to indulge in the spurious disagreeable

and pointless exercise of ex-communicating the differently-faithed

amongst their comrades.

This tendency of anti-authoritarian groupuscules to denounce and exclude

each other, however, has always struck me as rather

crypto-authoritarian. I’ve always liked the idea of a “plumb-line”

anarchism broad enough to cover almost all variants of dogma in a kind

of acephalous but loosely “united front” (or “union of egoists” as

Stirner put it). This umbrella ought to be wide enough to cover

“spiritual anarchists” as well as the most inflexible materialists.

Nietzsche famously founded his project on “nothing” — but ended up

having hinted at a kind of moralityless, even godless religion

(“Zarathustra,” “overcoming,” “eternal return,” etc.). In his last “Mad

Letters” from Turin, he seems to elect himself (anti-) messiah of this

faith under the signature “Dionysus the Crucified One.”

It turns out that even the axiom “nothing” requires an element of faith,

and may lead toward some kind of spiritual or even mystical experience:

the self-defined heretic is simply proposing a different belief. “The

Death of God” is mysteriously followed by the rebirth of “the gods” —

the pagan deities of polytheism. Thus, Nietzsche proposes the

re-paganization of monotheism when he speaks as Christ-Dionysus — a

project first launched in the Renaissance by such heretics and

neo-pagans as Gemistho Plethon and Giordano Bruno — the latter burned at

the stake by the Vatican in 1600.

This very task — the re-paganization of monotheism — was carried out

brilliantly by the African slaves who created Santería, Voudoun,

Candomblé, and many other religions in which Christian Saints are

identified or syncretized with pagan deities. Chango “is” St. Barbara,

for example; Oggun the war-god is Archangel Michael, and might be

considered the Roman war god Mars, as well. (See M.A. DeLaTorre,

Santería).

The saints are “masks” for the spirits of the oppressed — but they are

not mere disguises. Many santeristas are both Catholic and Pagan at the

same time — which naturally drives The Church crazy!

As my anthropologist friend Jim Wafer said in The Taste of Blood, these

New World faiths are not exactly “opium of the people” (even in the

oddly positive and slightly wistful way Marx used that phrase), but

rather areas of resistance against malign power. In such religions

Dionysus can indeed “be” Jesus — or Obbatala Ayagguna — in a deliberate

delirium of pantheism where nothing depends on mere belief because

actual trance possession by “santos” (Orishas, Loas) allows everyone

present to see, touch and even “be” the gods themselves.

(Wafer was once hit up for drinks in a bar in Recife by a stranger who

turned out to “be” a minor rum-loving deity.) Moreover — another

Nietzschean point — these cults value magic over morality — and believe

in gods even for queers, thieves, witches, gamblers, etc.

Oscar Wilde was first to notice the profound likeness of anarchism and

Taoism which structurally is an acephalous congeries of polytheist

(pagan) sects, with a tendency toward heterodoxy and non-authoritarian

social values.

Obviously some forms of Taoism — or any pagan system — have been quite

complicit with the State; we might call them Orthodoxies, and in this

sense forerunners of monotheism. But the pagan spirit always includes an

anarchic element too — a Paleolithic resistance to the State/Church and

its hierarchies. Paganism simply creates new cults, or takes old ones

underground, cults that are and must be heretical to the ruling

Consensus. (Thus, old European paganism “survived” as medieval

witchcraft, and so on.)

In classical Rome, the oriental Hellenistic mystery cults, magical

syncretisms of Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian and even Indian pantheons and

rituals, threatened the traditional and Imperial order. One of these

cults, a Jewish heresy, actually succeeded in “overthrowing” Classical

paganism.

I suspect that a similar dialectic can be seen at work in 21^(st)

century USA with its “Imperium” complex, its 60 per cent churchgoing

citizenry, its electronic “bread and circuses,” its money-based

consciousness, etc.

A mass of oriental and New Age “mystery cults” continue to proliferate

and morph into new forms, providing (as a whole) a kind of popular

heterodoxy or pagan-like congeries of sects, some of them inherenty

dangerous to central authority and capitalist technopathocracy. Indeed,

various sorts of spiritual anarchism could be mentioned here as part of

the spectrum.

I’m proposing that fascist and fundamentalist cults are not to be

confused with the non-authoritarian spiritual tendencies represented by

authentic neo-shamanism, psychedelic or “entheogenic” spirituality, the

American “religion of Nature” according to anarchists like Thoreau,

sharing many concerns and mythemes with Green Anarchy and Primitivism,

tribalism, ecological resistance, Native American attitudes toward

Nature ... even with Rainbow and Burning Man festivalism.

Here in the Catskills, we’ve had everything from Krishnamurti to the

Dalai Lama, Hasidism to Communism, Buddhism, postindustrial agriculture

and Slow Food, hippy communes of the ‘Sixties — Tim Leary-swami upon

pandit, Wiccan upon druid — sufis and yogis — a landscape ripe for

syncretism and spiritual universalism, ready to become a “burnt-over

district” of mystic enthousiasmos for green revolution, if only some

spark would set off a torch — or so one might dream.

In the context of the belief I’m envisioning I would situate Walter

Benjamin’s notion of the Profane Illumination. How, he asks, can

spiritual experience be guaranteed outside the context of “religion” or

even of “belief?”

Part marxist, part anarchist, part Kabbalist, he carried on the old

German Romantic quest for a re-paganization of monotheism “by any means

necessary,” including heresy, magic, poetry, hashish.... Religion has

stolen and suppressed the “efficacious sacrament” from the elder

shamans, wizards and wisewomen — and the Revolution must restore it.

Recenty, the idea of an historical Romantic and even Occultist Left has

gained wide acceptance and no longer needs to be defended. Bruno’s

statue in the “Flowery Field” where he died remains an icon for the

freethinkers and rebels of Rome, who keep it decked in red flowers. The

alchemist Paracelsus sided with the Peasants in their uprising against

the Lutheran nobility.

An Emersonian reading of German Romanticism (especially Novalis) might

interpret its “first thoughts; best thoughts” as seed and fruit of

Revolution. William Blake is a radical heretical institution unto

himself. Leftwing French Romanticism (and Occultism) give birth to a

Charles Fourier, a Nerval, a Rimbaud. This deep tradition of “Romantic

Revolution” should be added to the consideration of any possible

anarchist spirituality.

The mystics claim that “belief” is delusion; only experience grants

certainty, whereupon mere faith is no longer required. They may even

come to defend mystical or spiritual (self)liberation against the

oppression of organized religion. Blake urges everybody to get a system

of their own and not to be a slave to someone else’s — especially not

“The Church’s.” And, G. de Nerval, who had a pet lobster named Thibault

which he took for walks in the Palais Royal gardens in Paris on the end

of a blue silk ribbon, on being accused of lacking any religion, said,

“What? Me, no religion? Why, I have at least seventeen of them!”

In conclusion: any liberatory belief system, even the most libertarian

(or libertine), can be flipped 180 degrees into a rigid dogma — even

anarchism (as witness the case of the late Murray Bookchin). Conversely,

even within the most religious of religions the natural human desire for

freedom can carve out secret spaces of resistance (as witness the

Brethren of the Free Spirit, or certain dervish sects).

Definitions seem less important in this process than the cultivation of

what Keats called “negative capability,” which here might be glossed as

the ability to ride the wave of liberation no matter what outward form

it might happen to take.

Back in the 1950s, it might have been “Beat Zen” (which sadly seems to

have disappeared); today it might be neo-paganism or Green Hermeticism.

Just as anarchism today needs to overcome and shed its historical

worship of “Progress,” so, too, I think it might benefit by loosening up

on its 19^(th) century atheism and re-considering the possibility

(oxymoronic as it might be) of an “anarchist religion.”

[Note: In memoriam Franklin Rosemont I should add that the kind of

Hermetico-anarchism proposed here characterizes the late Breton, and

later Surrealism in general. I’d also like to invoke the Arab poet

Adonis’s great book on Sufism & Surrealism. And, recommend the Harvard

edition of W. Benjamin’s On Hashish. Sometimes it gets down to that old

deliberate derangement of the senses... Sometimes the opium of the

people is... opium.]

— Peter Lamborn Wilson

St. Nicholas Day ’09