“Shattering crystals”: the role of “dream time” in extreme

right-wing political violence *

*This article is based on a paper written for the conference Fanaticism and
Modern Conflict held at the University of Salford, 14-16 June 2002

To be published in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence (March 2003)

Professor Roger Griffin

Department of History
Oxford Brookes University
Gipsy Lane Campus
Headington Oxford OX3 0BP

This article prepares the conceptual ground for a new heuristic approach to
understanding acts of political violence that consciously incur the risk of death to their
perpetrators. It focuses on the deep-seated human drive to escape the futility and
emptiness induced by clock-time (‘chronos’), and the way a sense of being ‘chosen’
for a mission of destruction can precipitate the experience of being reborn in a new
supra-individual dimension (‘dream time’). At this point the etymological
connotations ‘self-sacrifice’ and ‘fanatic’ acquire a new significance, since the
personal palingenesis experienced by the soldier or terrorist confronting death may
rehearse archetypal patterns of mystic purification and immortality. This ‘chrono-
ethological’ perspective on extreme political violence is elaborated by considering the
devastating impact which Western modernity has had on the access to states of ‘self-
transcendence’ available in traditional religious culture. It is then applied to examples
of inter-war fascist paramilitarism and contemporary ‘lone-wolf’ terrorism.

The Way of the Samurai is found in death.

Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure (The Book of the Samurai) 1716

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 The Blue Fairy is part of the great human flaw, to wish for things that
don’t exist, or of the greatest single human gift: to chase down our
dreams, and that is something no machine has ever done until you.
Steven Spielberg, A.I. 2000

An introduction to ‘chrono-ethology’
Ideologically motivated self-sacrifice as an anthropological conundrum
At the outset of what is, according to the reckoning of post-Christian Eurocentric
humanity, the Third Millennium, much of what motivates human behaviour is still
shrouded in mystery and controversy, especially when questions of deeply-held
beliefs are concerned. There is thus no straight-forward or uncontested explanation for
the most extreme manifestation of faith, namely the readiness, or even determination
of some human beings to give up their lives in a premeditated manner for a ‘higher’
cause. By this is meant a purpose that lacks the immediacy or concreteness of saving
one’s own ‘kind’ from immediate physical danger (though self-sacrifice to such an
end is already in ethological terms an unusual, though not unique trait for an animal
species to be endowed with). What results is an act of self-immolation that can be
seen as heroic ‘martyrdom’ or mad ‘fanaticism’ according to the values of the
observer.
The capacity for self-sacrifice for the sake of purely religious ideals or
political ends is such a remarkable trait of our species that it would doubtless have
excited the curiosity of the sublimely inquisitive extra-terrestrial anthropologists
depicted at the end of Spielberg’s cinematic reworking of the Pinocchio legend,
Artificial Intelligence. These aliens are shown exploring the mysteries of the life-
form responsible for the deep-frozen remains of the planetary civilization found in a
first drowned then ice-locked New York long after the last specimen of homo sapiens
has died. Their only tenuous link with the human race is David, a single surviving
‘Mecca’, a mechanical rather than an organic human being electronically endowed
with the sensibility of a child, and hence the capacity to give and crave love. He is
the product of an ambitious technological experiment undertaken at a future stage of
human society’s simultaneous progress and collapse to create a robot that (who?) can
dream. His ‘creator’ tells him when he has tracked down the laboratory where he was
made.

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 You found a fairy-tale, and inspired by love fuelled by desire you set out
on a journey to make her real and, most remarkable of all, no one taught
you how.[…] Our test was a simple one: where would your self-
motivated reasoning take you, to what logical conclusion.[…]
It is the strength of David’s drive to ‘chase down’ his dream that is the acid test of his
humanity. Spielberg’s imaginary project highlights a quintessentially human faculty
which is treated in this article for heuristic purposes as playing a vital role in
motivating political violence or terroristic acts which run or embrace the risk of self-
destruction, namely the ability to dream, to day-dream, to imagine other realities, to
project more desirable worlds to inhabit. It is the fact that David is finally able to
break out of pre-programmed cognition at the end of the film and fully enter the realm
of creative ‘inwardness’ that signals the completion of his rite de passage from robot
to ‘real boy’. It also betokens the onset of his mortality. The film concludes with the
words: ‘So David went to sleep too. And for the first time in his life he went to that
place where dreams are born.’
The human sciences could be seen as a vast Dream Factory, part collaborative,
part competitive, that operates on a gargantuan scale that eclipses Hollywood. The
salient difference is that its imaginative hypotheses and explanatory fantasies are
supposedly shaped by the rigorous use of empirical data and controlled by the
methodological rules (paradigms) of the particular discipline. It is a rigour that can
create a purblindness, bequeathed from the Enlightenment, to the importance of
dreams to even the most ‘modern’ human beings, and thus have inhibiting effects on
the explanatory power of academic analysis when it comes providing penetrating
insight into the inner motivation of extreme political violence. The logical conclusion
of research blinkered by the assumption that everything deeply ‘irrational’ is probably
pathological are attempts to explain all political fanaticism in terms of behavioural
patterns associated with clinical paranoia.1
At least some specialists are prepared to concede the inadequacy of
conventional academic approaches in this respect, as when Ehud Sprinzak states in an
article on right wing extremism that ‘Psychologists and students of political violence
have so far failed to fully explain the violent personality. We just know that the
evolution and activity of certain violent groups…cannot be reduced to socio-political
factors.’ His very next sentence then unwittingly provides a glimpse of the potentially
more fruitful line of inquiry pursued here when he observed that ‘The heads of such

2
groups just happen to be….more moved by romantic dreams of virility and glorious
violence.’2 In similar vein it is only at the end of a whole book on the origins of
terrorism that has largely avoided focusing on the utopianism of the terrorists
themselves that we are offered the crucial, but tantalizingly unelaborated conclusion:
‘Terrorism is an example and product of human interaction gone awry and is worth
studying and understanding in the human terms that befit it: as conflict, struggle,
passion, drama, myth, history, reality, and, not least, psychology.’3
Certainly such statements point in a heuristically more promising direction
than ‘evolutionary ethics’ when it is used in a crudely behaviourist spirit. One of the
main ‘successes’ claimed by this discipline is to explain the paradox of extreme forms
of apparently idealistic or altruistic behaviour which deliberately cost human beings
their lives as a function of ‘selfish’ evolutionary imperatives.4 However, studies that
focus on the way self-destructive behaviour at an individual level can be traced to
innate genetic programmes designed to maximize the prospects for survival of the
species as a whole run a serious risk of reductionism. It is surely reductionism ad
absurdum, for example, when the geneticist Colin Tudge, author of one of the most
important popularizations of evolutionary ethics, The Engineer in the Garden,5 assures
readers in an issue of The New Scientist that:
Self-sacrifice makes evolutionary sense because the gene that promotes the
behaviour is also contained within other bacteria of the same genotype. All
individuals of a given genotype will produce the toxin and so sacrifice
themselves on behalf of the others. Game theory analysis can show what
proportion will emerge as suicide bombers.6
The same article suggests that such behaviour may also be illuminated by the
hypothesis put forward by Geoffrey Miller in The Mating Mind. This maintains
that all great human exploits have their roots in displays of prowess, and that
extreme violence can be seen as an elaborate form of showing off. After all ‘Some
animals do weird and wonderful things for the opposite sex that are quite useless
or even damaging for survival’.7 Such explanatory strategies surely say more
about the poverty of some social scientific imaginations when confronted with
acts of extreme idealism and physical courage than they do about the phenomenon
itself.

Temporal experience as a conditioning factor of human behaviour

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The conceptual framework of this article might be seen as a fusion of science with
science fiction, and of academic hypothesis with fairy tale, since it is posited on a
deliberately anti-reductionist explanatory strategy to the phenomenon of terrorist
violence which is yet to exist as a formally constituted theory on a par with
‘evolutionary ethics’. If it were ever to be elaborated into one, a possible name for it
might be ‘chrono-ethology’, the study of human behaviour in relation to time. Its
premise is that much can be gleaned about the hidden mainsprings of human action, in
this case ‘our’ propensity for blind devotion to causes at whatever personal cost, by
probing into the (in terrestrial terms) unique capacity of human beings to experience
time in qualitatively different ways, both as a linear procession from past to future and
as a special period when linearity seems suspended and individual time is subsumed
within a supra-personal reality.
By focusing on the ‘chrono-ethological’ strand of what motivates right-wing
violence, the imaginaire of right-wing terrorism, this article sets out at least to point a
dim torch of speculation at an important area of its phenomenology and psychological
causation. The hope is that others equipped with arc-lights and specialist forensic gear
may then go on to investigate in greater depth the psychological processes at work
that I map so tentatively here. The premise behind reconnoitring them is that most
acts of political fanaticism, far from being pathological (‘awry’) in themselves, are
extreme examples of the quintessential human capacity to structure ‘real’ life on the
basis of narrative fictions. Indeed human life may well be literally unliveable without
a shifting kaleidoscope of plans, goals, ideals, myths, fantasies, obsessions, and
utopias that together constitute maps of reality that have more in common with the
phantasmogorical elucubrations of medieval cartographers than the satellite-based
topographies available to modern geographers. In the context the ‘fanatic’ is only an
extreme form of perfectly normal human being. As T. E. Lawrence declared in what
surely is an autobiographical observation:
All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty
recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the
dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream
with open eyes, to make it possible.’8

4
Chrono-ethology as a strategy for explaining extreme political violence
A key component of the argument that unfolds here, however, is that investigations of
the dynamics of terrorism and political violence should not just give due weight to the
human capacity to dream, and especially to day-dream, but to the impact that this
faculty has on the qualitative experience of time. It is one that in extreme
circumstances can turn idealistic, intelligent human beings into smart biological
missiles capable of delivering warheads to their target personally despite the certainty
of dying in the process.
How the human brain first developed self-consciousness, and attained the
reflexive awareness of time and death that is its concomitant, is an issue of awesome
complexity, one which evolutionary science will surely never be able to present as a
seamless, fully coherent biological, psychological, and historical narrative. Nor are
the human sciences ever likely to plumb the depths of the convoluted relationship
which exists between the so-called ‘reality principle’ of (so curiously and ironically
named) homo sapiens and the continual enactment of imagination involved in living.
It is tempting to postulate that at the very heart of the unfolding process of ‘every day
reality’ a continuous operation of counter-factual speculation is taking place
projecting alternative futures and new realities varying distances into the future, so
that dream is woven into the very fabric of the reality principle that is tailored to each
individual’s existence. But this is another story. For our present purposes it is enough
to note that all the highly diverse attempts that have been made to investigate the
complexities of human temporal experience tend to corroborate the thesis that
qualitative distinctions exist within the human perception of time that are absolutely
real experientially (phenomenologically), however slender their empirical basis in
scientific terms.9 Moreover, to a considerable, if largely unacknowledged and
uninvestigated degree, these subjective distinctions condition the way human beings
behave in different, historically shaped, existential situations.
An outstanding pioneer of this ‘chrono-ethology’ was Mircea Eliade, who
spent much of his academic career documenting and analysing the universality of
rituals and beliefs within pre-modern societies. Central to his work was the
experiential distinction between ‘profane’ and ‘sacred’ time which his research
persuaded him constitutes a norm of the human condition. He attributed the
universality of physical and psychic techniques to access sacred time to a deep inner
compulsion to ward off the ‘Terror of History’ induced by the experience of time as

5
nothing but the infinite corridor of undifferentiated rectilinear chronos stretching to
infinity.10 Obviously, his is not the only way of conceptualizing the way humans can
inhabit qualitatively different times. Thus Walter Benjamin contrasts ‘Messianic time’
with ‘empty, homogeneous’ time,11 while in The Sense of an Ending,12 Frank
Kermode investigates the preoccupation of modern literature with kairos, a cosmic
‘quality’ time in which chronos is suspended. Joseph Campbell’s studies of ‘epic
time’13 and Jung’s theory of the ‘archetype’,14 not to mention any number of
explorations of ‘myth’,15 could all produce different conceptual schemes, each with its
own taxonomic nuances and subtleties.
Clearly any dyadic or dichotomous scheme for categorising human time is
bound to be simplistic, as is any equation of ‘higher’ or supra-individual time with the
‘sacred’, since there are seemingly many gradations in the eternal and the numinous.
But for the heuristic purposes of this article I will use the binomial expression
‘ordinary time’/chronos and ‘dream time’. This latter phrase consciously alludes to
the Australian Aboriginal term ‘Dream Time’, the mythic realm of events that occur
in illo tempore, in a primordial time-space of which our world is but an
epiphenomenon. This cosmology meant that ancestral dream time was experienced (at
least before the destruction of Aboriginal culture) as synchronic, ominpresent, and
phenomenologically more substantial than the rectilinear chronos of the personal life-
line, which was surrounded by it like a tiny, ephemeral island set in a vast, eternal
ocean.
Applying Eliade’s perspective, Dream Time belongs to a vast family of mythic
constructs that have provided the cohesion of the myriad societies that are the domain
of cultural anthropology. It ranges from the rich legends of nomadic tribes to the
elaborate cosmologies which once structured entire ancient civilizations such as the
Chinese, the Aztec, the Maya and the Egyptian ‘worlds’. All can be seen as the fruit
of a deep-seated human drive to keep at bay the paralysing sense of futility and
absurdity which would result from the experience of existence deprived of regular
access to the sense of an all-transcendent higher reality and purpose. Lewis Mumford
referred to the grand cultural matrix that shapes an entire civilization as ‘the
megamachine’.16 In terms of an evolutionary ethics informed by chrono-ethology, the
megamachine that built the pyramids in Egypt and Yukatan is only the more
spectacular product of a universal human mind-game played out in countless
permutations whose function is to create a canopy (or templum) of sacred time to

6
demarcate the fragile capsule of human life from the infinity which surrounds it. Far
from ‘pathological’, it is a symbolic activity in which human beings have to engage,
whether passively as part of an inherited culture, or actively as one of its creators, in
order to win symbolic victories over time and not be crushed by the Juggernaut of
chronos. Once this is recognized the mythopoeic speculations and psychotropic (or
rather ‘chronotropic’, or ‘time bending’) activities associated with transforming the
quality of time are as crucial to the survival of the species as language, socialization,
or tool-making, and temporal experience becomes a crucial factor in the explanation
of human behaviour.
Some academics are prepared to recognize that in the modern age too attempts
to change the structure of society involve transforming the collective experience of
time, as the French,17 Russian,18 or Fascist,19 or Nazi20 revolutions demonstrate.21 As
for the question of organized violence, it is significant that Martin van Creveld, a
military historian who resists the temptation to romanticize war, still includes among
the elements that condition the ‘will to fight’ in humans a temporal factor. He notes
that as long as fighting lasts, ‘reality is suspended, abolished, lost. The joy of fighting
consists precisely in that it permits participants and spectators alike to forget
themselves and transcend reality, however incompletely and however momentarily.’22
But it precisely on the subject of terrorism that one expert has come the closest to
expressing the key concept behind this article, albeit in language that reflects the
discourse of post-modernism and the ‘linguistic turn’. Exploring the subject of ‘sacred
terror’ committed in the name of defending the purity of Islam, David Rapaport
argues that modern acts of religious martyrdom are based on ‘projective narratives
that tell a story of the past and map out future actions that can imbue the time with
transcendent collective values’.23
It is but a small step from this insight to the recognition that all senses of
‘mission’, of being ‘sent’ or ‘charged’ to do something by a higher authority, of being
entrusted with a task to be carried out for the sake of a supra-personal ‘cause’ involve
‘projective narratives’. As such they all generate this sense of transcendent time,
whether the context is a traditional religion or a secular ideology. This helps account
for the deep mystic resonance of the world’s many legends that dramatize a ‘sacred’
quest, of which the pagano-Christian Holy Grail is but one variant of a universal
topos.

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The dialectic of chronos and dream time in pre-modern cultures
Heroic sacrifice as an archetype of time-defiance
Comparative anthropology suggests that there are at least two archetypal24 features of
the obsession of pre-modern societies with ‘sacred’ time (i.e. dream time). The first is
the mythic Hero,25 who plays a crucial role in the creation of the world (i.e. in
cosmogony) and in preserving the resulting cosmology from entropy and decay. The
second is the concept of sacrifice26 which involves the ritual destruction of something
valuable or pure, whether to restore the harmony of the divine order, or to ensure the
success of a physically or spiritually important undertaking, such as planting the next
season’s crops, preparing for battle, building a bridge, or launching a ship.27 Within
the Eliadean perspective both the hero myth and rite of sacrifice are to be understood
as components of elaborate psychotropic and chronotropic techniques evolved by the
human mind to suspend chronos. They are deeply bound up with other important
recurrent fruits of human mythopoeia such as the many legends of cosmic creation,
initiation ceremonies, and shamanic practices, as well as the intricate world of ritual,
symbology, religious belief, superstitions, myths, legends, and folklore with which
they are inextricably enmeshed.
The body too has any number of its own techniques to enable the mind to
‘stand outside’ profane time, to achieve ek-stasis, such as in ritual dance and theatre,
yoga, martial arts, simulated combat with mythical demons, liturgical ball-games, or
the ceremonial use of hallucinogens. Both mythopoeia and the body, psyche and
soma, can work in harmony to create a powerful (though from a secular scientific
perspective ultimately illusory) sense of metaphysical home, human scale, and
rootedness in a universe whose infinity, if ever glimpsed by disenchanted eyes, would
numb our senses and crush our spirit. Cosmology and altered states of consciousness
act as a sheltering sky which shields us28 from the boundlessness of space, its
empirical content as ultimately insubstantial as that merciful optical illusion, the thin
stratum of blue that lies between us and the black infinity that surrounds our planet.29
The human imagination is endowed with an extraordinary creative capacity for
decorating and making over the minute existential room to which the body is assigned
in life, and with a seemingly unlimited capacity to syncretize disparate mythic
elements into new compounds. It is thus hardly surprising that the hero myth and the
concept of sacrifice have frequently been fused in the topos of the hero who is
prepared to sacrifice himself or herself in fighting for a holy cause or in defeating the

8
monstrous embodiment of evil and chaos, so achieving a special form of immortality.
This may be the immortality of myth and legend, as in the case of the Perseus and the
Minotaur, or St. George and the Dragon, equivalents of which are universal in
folklore and tales all over the world. It can also take the form of a metaphysical
immortality identified with the fulfilment of a higher duty based on a set of values
associated with a supra-human God or transcendental Good, a notion that informs the
medieval concept of the Knight and its equivalents in so many cultures where the
warrior is the upholder of a social order instituted on the basis of a cosmic principles
(the Japanese Samurai, the Hindu kshaitrya, the Red Indian ‘brave’). Hence the
importance attributed in numerous societies to the ‘warrior priest’.30 The higher plane
of reality may even be associated with a special fate after death reserved to the hero
who dies fighting for a higher cause, as in the case of the Nordic myth of Valhalla, a
sort of heavenly military headquarters or barracks. In what is to the Western outsider
a disarmingly male-chauvinist discourse, the Qur’an promises that the youth who
gives his life for his faith will:
Spend eternity in gardens of tranquillity…
Youths of never-ending bloom will pass round to them decanters,
Beakers full of sparkling wine.
Unheady, inebriating.
And suck fruits as they fancy.
Bird meats that they relish.
And companions with big beautiful eyes
Like pearls within their shells.
We have formed them in a distinctive fashion,
and made them virginal.31
The fusion of hero with the idea of self-sacrifice perhaps finds its most telling
expression in the idea of the ‘holy war’ which occurs in several religious traditions
(e.g. the crusade, the jihad), and invokes a collective ethos in which an entire army or
people are involved in a communal battle with Evil. This calls upon a small elite
within the community to be prepared to sacrifice itself for a cause which transcends
the realm of the human in its significance and thus guarantees immortality of some
sort for all those who lay down their lives in the struggle. The use of the term ‘suicide
bomber’ in this context thus points to a profound category error committed by
uninitiated minds. The type of suicide which Durkheim researched as part of his

9
investigation of anomie, and which is explicitly condemned in all the major religious
traditions, is in many ways diametrically opposed to the act of martyrdom, which is
sanctioned by the very same traditions. For example, a senior member of Hamas
assured a New Scientist journalist, when asked to justify suicide bombings against
Israel, ‘It is not suicide. Suicide is not allowed in Islam. It is the highest form of
martyrdom.’32
It is this categorical difference between suicide and martyrdom that helps
explain why research into the sentiments of Kamikaze pilots just before their last
missions shows that the cult of the Emperor was sufficiently strong for most to be
serene and calm about the prospect of dying (at least in their public persona). As one
pilot put it in a letter, he was willing to die in order to ‘let this beautiful Japan keep
growing’, to be released from the wicked hands of the Americans and the British, and
to build a ‘freed Asia’. Such convictions meant that ‘some young and innocent pilots
died believing they could become happy dying that way.’ One of the letters examined
is from the pilot Isao to his parents on the eve of his mission in Manila. It closes with
the words ‘We are sixteen warriors manning the bombers. May our death be as
sudden and clean as the shattering of crystal: Isao soaring into the sky of the southern
seas. It is our glorious mission to die as the shields of His Majesty. Cherry blossoms
glisten as they open and fall.’33 (Note the way this brief passage conflates images of
purity and supra-personal hardness, of vitalism and death, of spring and autumn,
thereby fusing the military and religious connotations of the pilot’s ‘mission’. In
particular, it is significant that the translucent hardness of crystal is an archetypal
metaphor for transcendent reality and truth,34 and hence for supra-personal time.
Subjectively, then, Isao seems to have experienced his personal chronos merging with
dream time like a river reaching the sea.)
Materialistically inclined historians may well argue that the discourse of Holy
War and martyrdom must be seen as a mystification of the struggles for ideological,
political or economic hegemony which have existed between rival cultures since time
immemorial. Bush Junior’s gaffe of referring to the war against Islamic terrorism in
the aftermath of September 11 as a ‘crusade’ certainly lends credence to such an
interpretation. Meanwhile geneticists may well enrich further our understanding by
focussing on the biochemical roots of martyrdom, such as the toxins produced by the
colicin gene. But as long as the research it encourages is carried out in the spirit of
methodological pluralism, it surely also makes considerable sense in chrono-

10
ethological terms to suggest that the celebration of the self-sacrifice of the warrior for
a higher cause is the exoteric expression of an esoteric notion which lies at the heart
of all mystical traditions. It is the notion, born of surely one of the most extraordinary
time-defying flights of the human imaginaire, that total self-renunciation to the point
of self-annihilation is the precondition to the rebirth in a higher Self.

Death as the prelude to mystic rebirth

According to the Buddhist tradition ‘for a Bodhisattva to surrender life and limbs in
aid of others is the keenest joy.’ Similarly in Zen philosophy the death of the false self
is called the Great Death, after which ‘we give birth to a new self’, while the Islamic
mystic Farid Al-Din’Attar exhorts adepts to ‘Become a bird of the Way to God and
develop your wings and your feathers. Nay, rather, burn your wings and feathers and
destroy yourself by fire, and so will you arrive at the Goal before all others.’ The
Apostle St. John’s declaration that ‘he who hateth his life in this world shall keep it
unto life eternal’ acquires a new resonance within the tradition of universal
mysticism,35 as do St. Paul’s exhortations to the faithful to divest themselves of the
Old Man to allow the New Man to emerge.36
The millennial fascination exerted by such mythic narratives as the Phoenix
legend; the numerous permutations in the world’s treasure-trove of fairy-tales in
which the hero is trapped within the belly of a whale or some other monster as a
prelude to rebirth; the universality of the shamanic rituals of symbolic death and
rebirth; the countless variations on the theme that the path to the gates of rebirth and
eternal life necessarily passes through suffering and spiritual mortification; the
confrontation with ‘evil’ enacted in such allegories of spiritual metamorphosis as the
the Osiris myth; the world’s various alchemical traditions which identify a phase of
total dissolution (in Western alchemy called ‘nigredo’) as the precondition for the
metamorphosis of base metal into gold: all point to some sort of archetypal
predisposition in the human imagination to create poetic narratives which dramatize
the access to a sacred time through a death within profane time, a death which is
mostly symbolic but sometimes absolutely literal.37 The notion of an ‘inward odyssey’
of the soul which involves an elaborate process of ‘self-naughting’ as the prelude to
palingenesis within a higher realm that informs the rites of Australian Aborigines,
Navaho Indians, and Tibetan monks just as much as the classics of world literature
from Mahabarata and the Norse myths to Dante’s Divine Comedy and Shakespeare’s

11
King Lear. It even recurs thinly disguised in some recent (remarkably un-
Hollywoodian) Hollywood movies, such as Groundhog Day, The Game and The
Matrix.
Against this background it would seem reasonable to postulate that some sort
of archetypal matrix38 or ‘great code’39 is inscribed within human mythopoeia in its
response to the destructive onslaught of chronos which has at least as formative a role
in shaping the human impulse to sacrifice and self-sacrifice as any genetic processes,
albeit at another layer of that conflation of inner and outer realities we all inhabit. A
theory of political violence based on such an innate human predisposition would cast
fresh light on the cultural and psychological nexus that exists between the readiness of
the 20th century kamikaze pilot to die for ‘a more beautiful Japan’, like a ‘glistening
blossom’ and a ‘shattering crystal’, and the warrior’s capacity, extolled two hundred
years earlier in The Book of the Samurai (Hagakure), to be ‘completely at one with
his master and serve[d] him as though his own body were already dead’.40 It would
also throw into relief the significance of the fact that the most authoritative modern
commentary on the Samurai ethical system, ‘Introduction to Hagakure’ (Hagakure
Nyumon), was written by none other than Mishima Yukio, the iconic incarnation of
extreme right-wing fanaticism who committed seppuku in 1970 after leading an
abortive attempt to mount a military revolt against a modern Japanese state he
believed had been corrupted to the core by ‘Western’ decadence.41
Occasionally academics probing the psychological mysteries posed by
terrorism have sensed the structural link between the self-appointed mission of
contemporary ‘secular’ terrorists to rid the world of an evil system and the familiar
‘religious’ quest for purity and regeneration. Thus one commentator observes that:

Some sort of ‘complex’ seems to be at work that is common to all terrorists.

Notice how often the terrorist idealizes his excesses: he is a virtuous person
trying to cleanse, purge the world of unclean influences. All this leads me to
think that the most hard-core terrorists are compulsion-driven individuals — a
purification compulsion perhaps. The common themes may be that the world
is a polluted place and he is trying to clean it up by just, sometimes holy,
means. If so the terrorist has much in common with the conventional religious
fanatic.42

12
 At this point, etymology, often a ‘false friend’ of scholars, may actually be
illuminating, steering us away from the psychopathological assumptions that still lurk
in the above quotation in the terms ‘complex’ and ‘compulsion’. It is well known that
‘sacrifice’ derives from the Latin for ‘making holy’, a process which in religious
cultures often involves the destruction of the most precious or the most pure specimen
of a living being in order to appease higher powers or invoke metaphysical forces.
Less well known is the fact that ‘fanaticism’ derives from the Latin for a temple or
sanctuary, ‘fanum’, the root element in the term ‘profane’, meaning literally in front
of and hence outside, excluded from, a desecration of the sacred place. ‘Fanaticus’
originally referred to those possessed by a temple deity such as Cybele, the Great
Goddess of Phrygia, whose cult was orgiastic and associated with ritual violence like
the Dionysus cult itself. According to Greek mythology it was Cybele who was able
to heal and purify Dionysus after he had discovered the sacred vine and been sent mad
by Hera.43 The fanaticism of someone devoted to a cause to the point of self-sacrifice,
therefore, can thus be seen as the expression of a deep-seated matrix within human
psychology which precipitates in human beings the powerful subjective experience of
being able to transcend and abolish a crushing but essentially unreal chronos through
a door in it44 which gives access to a higher, indestructible realm of metaphysical time
and being.45

The crisis of heroic modes of dream time in Western modernity

The modern interpenetration of the sacred and secular
If the matrix of self-sacrifice in the human psyche is one of the symbolic codes which
coexists with (and may even ultimately be conditioned by) the genetic ones which
determine human life, the concrete historical circumstances in which it finds
expression obviously vary enormously. In the countless religion-based societies that
existed in the world before the onset of the globalizing force of secularization and
Westernization, it is possible to infer from the ample documentation provided by
anthropologists and archaeologists a vital common denominator that underlay the
myriad differences between them. A shared cosmology, symbology, and set of
institutionalized metaphysical beliefs, underpinned by deeply rooted ritual and
tradition, ensured that the distinction between the sacred and the profane was
hardwired into the culture which shaped the temporal experience of every member of
the community.

13
It is worth stressing that even in pre-modern societies the distinction between the this-
worldly and the other-worldly is rarely clean cut. In monistic schemes such as
Buddhism, or in animistic cultures which instinctively operated an immanentist sense
of the metaphysical powers which hold together the universe, the profane and the holy
are constantly commingled and interwoven. Even in a dualistic religious system such
as Christianity the secular world is conceived as so intimately bound up with the
divine that human history itself assumes a metaphysical subtext and is penetrated by
the divine in Christ’s incarnation and crucifixion. A sinister thread of theocratic logic
thus leads from the historicization and secularization of the divine in St Augustine’s
image of the Two Cities, Holy and Earthly, whose fates are intertwined, to the
Crusades in which many thousands of Christian knights were ready to give up their
lives to reconsecrate an entire terrestrial country which in their eyes had become
profaned by a pagan occupation and commit unspeakable atrocities against the
‘Infidel’ in the name of ‘their’ God. For them historical time and geographical space
had been transformed into a site where a cosmic metaphysical drama of redemption
was being played out, forging an unholy alliance between the this-worldly and the
next sanctioned by the highest spiritual authority which adumbrates the dark side of
modern politicized religions. It was the Holy See himself who led the recruitment
drive in 1095 for a campaign against the Turks with his pronouncement that Christ
commanded men of all ranks to ‘hasten to exterminate this vile race from the lands of
your Eastern brethren’. He exhorted robbers to become soldiers of Christ and those
mercenaries prepared to fight for a low wage now to fight for the richer reward of
eternal life, promising that any Crusader losing his life in the Holy Land would have
all sins remitted. The spoils of victory would go to those who survived while
‘everlasting glory’ awaited those whose ‘blood gushed out’.46
The projection of metaphysical beliefs onto terrestrial history is so deeply
ingrained in Christianity that the initial secularizing impact of Renaissance humanism
intensified it rather than counteracted it. Thus it was not a matter of an idiosyncratic
conceit or self-aggrandizing delusion but symptomatic of an age of collective faith in
a supra-personal scheme of History if in the 16th century James I of England could
still literally believe that not just his own eternal life but that of all his subjects hung
on his response to Cromwell’s demands and that his execution prevented the nation’s
spiritual purity being defiled. An even more telling adumbration of future modes of
political fanaticism is the fact that as early as the 14th century a curious blend of

14
religion with secular nationalism had already come about in the wake of defeat at the
hands of the Ottomon Turks in a ‘Serbian faith’ in which ‘the memory of the
medieval kingdom was worked into church ritual’ and national heroes became saints.
As a result, the Serb nationalist leader Lazar was canonized by the Orthodox Church
and, according to the tissue of myth woven around his name, had renounced earthly
victory and deliberately accepted death at the hands of the enemy in order to gain
future spiritual redemption and a heavenly kingdom for the Serb people as a whole.47
For centuries Christendom created regular patterns of human behaviour and
generated new ritualized forms of religious political and social life which displayed a
cohesive underlying logic in the attitude it betrayed to profane historical time, one
which remained fundamentally akin to that which informs the relationship to time of
all human societies based on a shared metaphysical cosmology. However the situation
was to change radically under the impact of the nexus of processes associated with the
term modernization, especially secularization and the rise of individualism as the
concomitant of the break down of communal existence. As T. S. Eliot puts it in
Choruses from the Rock:
But it seems something has happened that has never happened before:
though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.
Men have left God not for other gods, they say, but for no god;
and this has never happened before.
Obviously the emergence of a secular, ‘godless’ society, in all probability a unique
event in human history, is a highly complex phenomenon. It involves, not a dramatic
leap from one era to another, but a slow waning similar to the one which allowed
paganism to coexist and commingle with Christianity, and Christianity in its turn to
coexist and merge with the secularizing thrust of the Renaissance and Enlightenment.
Even in the ‘West’, millions of devout believers in Christianity and other religious
faiths still live out large components of ‘pre-modern’ world-views while in other
respects managing to be members of a secular society. Moreover, much secular life
retains echoes of the original religious substrata of Western life, as when the ritualized
materialistic frenzy, family reunions and social parties of the Christmas period
continue to reproduce, no matter how mindlessly, a symbiosis of both Christian and
pagan mythology in which the celebration of a Divine Nativity and the Birth of the
New Year are conjoined.

15
 The sacred and the profane are thus far from being neatly compartmentalized
categories, and the historical process by which modern secular society emerged from
traditional religious society defies the search for neat, symmetrical patterns of
development. However, it is possible to suggest a simplifying narrative fiction of the
rise of secular modernity which identifies the early part of the nineteenth century in
Europe as the point when a significant number of the more metaphysically sensitive
of the Western artistic and intellectual elite became aware of what Heinrich Heine
referred to as ‘the great rip in the fabric of the world’ which was tearing his heart
apart.48 The same feeling that more sensitive minds now register the loss of the
world’s wholeness, and the resulting incompatibility between the soul of any creative
human being and the nature of the modern world, lies at the core of Baudelaire’s Les
Fleurs du Mal published in 1857. It finds explicit expression, for example, in the
poem in which he compares himself to a cracked bell which when rung can only make
a discordant sound.49 In ‘chrono-ethological’ terms the most significant poems in this
collection are those which explore the sense of bottomless ennui at the core of human
existence and depict the poet as helpless to withstand the merciless onrush of chronos
which ‘wins without cheating, every time: it’s the law!’.50
A vast documentary reader could be produced to demonstrate that a defining
aspect of Western modernity is the diffusion to all strata of society of the sense of
fragmentation, break-down of values, proliferation of incompatible world-views and
logics,51 loss of centre,52 of harmony, of connectedness with the age and the world,
the failure of language,53 the capricious irruption of the irrational, whether in sublime
mode from above or demonic guise from below the sphere of an increasingly
besieged, debilitated, and vulnerable reason. All the self-confident, utopian projects of
modernity are dialectically linked to a mood of self-doubt and disorientation.
Conversely the expressions of the darkest nights of the soul, its ‘seasons in hell’54 can
suddenly be transfigured by intimations of an imminent breakthrough to a new realm
of order, certainty and meaning in which the lost logos is restored, albeit in an altered
and even unrecognizable forms.55
For millions of ‘ordinary’ inhabitants of modernity, and not just the
intelligentsia, modernity is the age of both bottomless anomie and the hypertrophy of
ideologies and values, of utter meaninglessness and sudden epiphanies, of
metaphysical nausea and inklings of cosmic futility interleaved with countless
glimpses of irreconcilable certainties and utopian projects. It is an era (or rather a

16
geographically and culturally delimited sensibility which only a deeply engrained
Western ethnocentrism turns into an ultimate and universal reality or ‘the human
condition’) in which the auratic, that in premodern societies is attached by a shared
cosmology and ritual to specific actions and objects has become a ‘free-floating
signifier’ which can assign itself almost at random to anything in the world which
human beings infuse with passion and meaning. The outbreak of brooding, paralysing
Angst induced by the hypertrophy of information and by conflicting portents of
salvation and catastrophe which Dürer encapsulated in his Melanchiolia I has now
become pandemic. ‘Outsiderdom’ and ex-centricity now form a paradoxical part of
normality. For all but the statistical minority with a pachydermal temperamental
robustness that protects them from psychological insecurities engendered by the
steadily encroaching ‘West’, ours is a civilization (if only at a subliminal level) of
existential homelessness,56 of disinherited minds,57 of anxiety,58of ambivalence.59 It is
an age which evokes images of dispossessed aristocrats whose star is dead60 or
ontological orphans61 thrown into the world62 and prey to the ‘restless hungry feeling’
of being just ‘one too many mornings and a thousand miles behind’.63
At the heart of Western modernity there is thus an absence: the absence of a
cosmological centre to which all can turn, the absence of a communal public gate to a
higher realm. It is a situation evoked in the parable of the man from the country
seeking access to the Law in Kafka’s The Trial, but who finds his way barred by an
enormous gate guarded by a gatekeeper. Unable to sacrifice himself, to go through a
process of ‘self-naughting’, he remains outside the gate in an increasingly pitiful
physical and mental state, though with his eyesight dimming he can just make out the
light shining under the gate from the other side.64 The gatekeeper now has no option
but to lock the door when he dies (for it has been unlocked all along), with the words
‘No one else could gain admittance here, for this entrance was meant for you alone. I
will go now and close it.’ In the subliminal logic of the fanatic, the minute aperture or
wormhole in the wall of chronos can only be passed through by a voluntary act of
self-destruction in profane time, an act which makes the individual’s life holy in the
process of offering65 it up to a supra-personal cause.

The randomization of the epiphany

Seen in terms of ‘chrono-ethology’ human beings trapped on board a ship of
modernity cut adrift from reliable metaphysical ports and anchorages may behave as

17
if personal time itself is out of joint, as if a divine watchmaker is needed to wind up
the psychic clock or recharge its battery to put it back in synch with the sacred
rhythms of life. The rivers of sacred time no longer run predictably and manageably
within fixed channels, but constantly threaten suddenly to evaporate or to break their
banks, leaving individuals either high and dry in a world devoid of transcendence, or
vulnerable to drowning in waves of unsustainable religious ‘revelation’.
In such a condition homogeneous, empty time can even be transfigured by
highly secularized modern news and entertainment media, fuelled, like the world-
wide explosion of drug-consumption, by a universal craving to be snatched even
momentarily and self-destructively from the jaws of all-consuming chronos, and lifted
into a dream time, even if it lasts no longer than a world-cup football match or a pop
concert. (Baudelaire aptly described the states of mind created by hallucinogens as an
‘artificial paradise’, a phrase that could be applied to most modern forms of ‘escape’).
Yet, just as modern human beings have retained a physiology adapted to stone age
living, so we still have the metaphysical instincts, the gift for ecstatic experience, and
mythopoeic faculties of the primordial hunter/gatherers of higher meaning who once
constructed Stonehenge, built the vast temple complex of Angkor Wat in Cambodia,
and elaborated the rituals which made Dream Time more real than profane time in all
so-called ‘primitive societies’. Those whose hunger for spiritual manna cannot be
sated by carefully designed, commercialized and mass produced ‘highs’ continue
subliminally to crave a more authentic mystic experience. Peter Shafer’s play Equus
dramatizes the dilemma of an individual, Alan Strang, who, despite being stranded on
one of the inhospitable beaches of modern secular existence well above the tide mark
left by the ebb of a shared cosmology and ritual, subliminally draws on his primordial
myth-making powers to avoid being engulfed by the absurd. This he does by
elaborating his own private religion which endows the horse with a sense of the
numinous, imbuing his private life with meaning through a single drop of the mythic
energies which collectively forged Greek culture, the religious equivalent of
‘idioglossia’, or a private language.
Shafer shows how the contingencies of psychological predisposition and
moment can enable a suburban teenager to create a special ritual in which he
temporarily but regularly metamorphosizes into a Centaur. It also suggests that the
potential lies within all individuals, no matter how inured in secular modernity, to
rediscover within themselves the psychic force which produced the archetypal hero.

18
Rilke’s Duino Elegies, though ostensibly about ‘the human condition’ can be read as a
sustained reflection on the spiritual dilemma of human beings (articulated in the
scrupulously semi-encrypted register of epiphanic obscurantism so typical of
modernism gripped by the crisis of language itself).66 At one point they reflect on how
in the course of growing up the eyes of our species are ‘turned round’ and act as
cognitive ‘traps’ in the perception of reality. As a result, the purity of unselfconscious
experience and unreflecting action is perpetually contaminated by reflexivity,67
denying human beings the timeless experience of the ‘open’ that Rilke attributes to
animals and children:
We, only, see death; the free animal has its death always behind it,
forever, and God before it, and when it moves, it moves already in
eternity, like a fountain. Never for a single day do we have before us
that pure space into which flowers endlessly open.68
Human beings cannot live life ‘to the full’ because our self-awareness causes us to
cling to the ephemeral, to fix time in the routinized consciousness of habit and
familiarity. To use Rilke’s image, we are so preoccupied with enjoying the
blossoming stage of our development that we can never give ourselves totally to the
act of becoming fruit. In contrast ‘the hero’ is unconcerned with permanence and
makes no attempt to prolong the ephemeral: ‘he lives in continual ascent, moving on
into the ever-changing constellation of perpetual danger.’69

The ambivalence of the modern access to dream time

What emerges from such a brief excursion into the realm of modernism is a picture of
contemporary human beings cut off from a regular and reliable source of the
numinous and trapped within an oppressive self-reflexivity, but still endowed with an
innate capacity and thirst for a transcendent experience that has generated the myriad
different ways of experiencing glimpses of dream time that are a feature of the
Western world. It is a situation that can drive some into the most utopian ‘causes’ in
an attempt to break the thrall of ordinary time. However the impulse to break through
into a heroic, chronos-defying, state of being, now that it has become detached from
the traditions, rituals and rigours generated by a shared cosmology has, in this age of
ambivalence, itself taken on a deep ambivalence.
Cultural anthropology and history suggest that the human capacity for self-
transcendence has always had a dual aspect. It can lead to integration in a higher

19
cause which does not involve acts of destruction and self-destruction, a form of
selflessness in which the individual still retains a separate identity. Equally it can
produce the type of total identification with a cause to the point where it abolishes a
critical detachment and sense of self, often leading to a sublimation of the collective
self to which the devotee now belongs and a demonization of the Other now perceived
as its antithesis or enemy.70 However, with the ‘decay of values’71 and the
‘randomization of the sacred’ under the impact of high modernity, any human cause
can potentially be transformed into a source of self-transcendence in an integrative72
or identificatory spirit. Moreover, even the most apparently secular set of values on
closer inspection proves to be given affective coherence and normative power by
being infused with a sacral dimension.
This structural situation gives rise to a basic process at the heart of
modernization the evidence for which is all around. Driven by a subliminal ‘Terror of
History’, a phobia against meaningless, profane, rectilinear time inscribed deep in the
human psyche, the tendency towards secularization and the death of traditional
religious cosmologies and communities generates its own countervailing forces, as
people find activities and causes with which to experience self-transcendence. This
resolves the paradox that the age of secularization has infused all politics with a
religious dimension to the point that even the most apparently secular democracy,
namely that of the USA, turns out on closer examination to be based politically and in
terms of national identity on an extraordinarily elaborate civic religion.73 This also
explains why in times of crisis or conflict so-called liberal democracies instinctively
institute a powerful campaign to sacralize politics and turn the war into a holy cause, a
fact fully borne out by the history of both world wars as well as the post-war conflicts
of the ‘Free World’ with communism and rogue states of all descriptions.
Sanctifying the battle against a demonized enemy may create a deep resonance
with the lives of millions of its citizens whose nationalism all too easily degenerates
into an identificatory form of self-transcendence as long as the subject threat to their
lives prevails.74 However, even when there is no collective sense of crisis, some
individuals are predisposed like Alan Strang in Equus to invest all their idealism and
metaphysical longings into a private cause that endows their lives with meaning it
would otherwise lack, especially when objective social or political conditions make
this seem like ‘the only way out’.

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Extreme right-wing violence in the light of chrono-ethology
The exoteric and the esoteric in the fascist cult of death
I would invite readers to accept in a non-dogmatic, heuristic spirit the main premises
of this chrono-ethological explanatory scheme of the human urge for transcendence
and the rise of modernity, despite their inevitably highly contentious nature. We are
then in a position to apply the explanatory framework that has emerged to two
different manifestations of fanaticism associated with the extreme right in the
twentieth century: the death cult of the organized fascist movement, and the lone act
of ‘black’ terrorism.

Squadrismo
Since it was the crucible of the First World War that did so much to weld ultra-
nationalism and the myth of total regeneration into the new ideological compound that
came to be known as fascism, it is a hardly surprising that the extolling of militaristic
values as the key to overcoming decadence is a central theme of the rhetoric, ritual,
and style of all inter-war fascisms. It would be misleading, however, to cite texts that
celebrate the readiness to sacrifice oneself for one’s nation as the highest form of
courage as evidence of a genuine death cult in the mystical sense we have explored
earlier. In the case of Fascism, for example, the famed ‘menefreghismo’ of the
squadristi was inherited from the Arditi for whom defiance in the face of danger had
never been the sign that death had been put behind them, or the expression of a
genuine will literally to give up their own lives so that their country might be reborn.
Rather it was a vulgarized form of Nietzschean vitalism and the determination to ‘live
dangerously’. Despite the squadrista emblem of a skull with the dagger between its
teeth, a celebration of the values of the Blackshirt called ‘Heroic Rhapsody’ affirmed
that ‘The Fascist loves life’.75 Nor was there anything really sacred about the
‘Sacrarium of the Martyrs’ in the ‘Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista’ in which a
phonograph continually played the Fascist song ‘Giovinezza’ in a cavernous black
room on the ceiling of which every painted star represented a Fascist martyr. At
bottom this was simply an imaginative variation of the cult of the fallen soldier
common to all the combatant powers of the First World War, an integral part of the
quite exoteric process by which the masses were nationalized in the modern age
through a constant flow of chauvinistic state propaganda.76

21
Nazism
The same could be said of the many rituals, theatrical events and films produced by
the Nazis dealing with the theme of martyrdom, blood, and death. It is arguably that
the charismatic power of Hitler was deeply bound up with his capacity to fulfil the
longings for a new age and a new time being experienced by millions of ‘ordinary
Germans’ after 1929 once Weimar collapsed as a credible entity. They were longings
summed up in a brilliant evocation of the psychological portrait of the age as a
yearning in the heart of each citizen for:
a Leader to take him tenderly and lightly by the hand, to set things in
order and show him the way;... the Leader who will build the house
anew that the dead may come to life again; ... the Healer who by his
actions will give meaning to the incomprehensible events of the Age,
so that Time can begin again.77
ic Close analysis will shows that their underlying theme was not the celebration of
death as such, but rather the evocation of the collective palingenesis by which the
Volksgemeinschaft passed through its (Weimar) winter of decay and death to a new
spring in the Third Reich. This was a process of communal salvation through which it
entered a mythic, this-worldly eternity metaphorically, avoiding an existential
confrontation with personal annihilation. Thus the elaborate ritual staged each year in
the centre of Munich to commemorate those who died in the failed putsch of 9
November 1923 symbolized ‘the historical turning point through which the old ended
and something entirely new began’. As one phrase in the liturgy put it, ‘The earth
finished with your death, with your fame our life starts afresh’.78 In the same way, the
killing of a member of the Hitler Youth in the film Hitlerjunge Quex is presented
without morbidity as the rite de passage to the immortality of a reborn Germany.79
Much of Nazism’s elaborate ‘political religion’, including the obsessively repeated
topos of sacrifice and death, salvation and resurrection, is little more than a thinly
disguised travesty of Christian ritual and symbology overlaid with spurious Nordic
mythology. As such mainstream Nazism lacks an authentic esoteric or
‘necrophiliac’80 dimension, and is at bottom a form of theatrical or aestheticized
politics which no more betokens the presence of a death cult than the ceremonial
honouring of the dead of two world wars which takes place annually at the Cenotaph
in London.81

22
 However, it is reasonable to suggest that more lies behind the choice of the
skull and cross bones to adorn the uniform of the SS than a histrionic gesture to instil
terror in their victims. Himmler went to considerable lengths to turn the
Ordensburgen, the academies in which the elite of the Waffen SS were trained, into
the sites of a prolonged rite de passage both physical and metaphysical. The
‘examinations’ could include such bizarre ordeals as fighting savage dogs bare-
handed for twelve minutes, digging a hole to take refuge in within eighty seconds to
avoid being crushed by a relentlessly advancing tank, and deliberately exploding a
hand-grenade placed on a helmet with a brim specially reinforced for the occasion:
any attempt to run away led to the candidate being shot on the spot.82 This went
considerably beyond the scope of conventional military training which aims to turn
out obedient soldiers ready to enter combat without question. It was deliberated
calculated to teach the cadets to ‘receive death’ in the sense of ‘dying to one’s own
self’, thus creating the new man, the ‘god-man’ evoked by Hitler in his conversations
with Rauschning.83
Himmler also poured considerable energy into the project of creating a mystic
fulcrum for the new Nazi Empire in the castle at Wewelsburg in the Teutoburger
Forest. Under the influence of Weisthor, pseudonym of the occultist anti-Semite Karl
Wiligut, he set about transforming the castle, requisitioned by the SS in 1934, into the
temple his neo-pagan cult of National Socialism as the spiritual reawakening of pre-
Judeo-Christian Aryan energies. At the heart of the project was the construction of a
domed, crypt-like room in which the coats-of-arms of dead SS-Obergruppenführer
were to hang and where ceremonies to honour ancestral forces of the Germanic race
were to take place. Clearly Himmler felt called upon to create an esoteric elite to
spearhead Germany’s rebirth under the influence of an occultist cosmology similar to
the one that led the Ariosophist Lanz von Liebenfels to form the Ordo Novi Templi in
1907 and to acquire the Austrian castle of Burg Werfenstein as its headquarters. Here
he and his followers enacted the bizarre rituals rooted in the fantasies of a cosmic
racial war between humans and demons in human form (Jews) in which chivalric
order, the Knights Templars had been the front-line solidiers in the time of the
Crusades.
Weisthor’s most conspicuous impact on mainstream Nazism was as designer
of the SS Totenkopf ring ornamented with a death’s head, a swastika and various
runic symbols worn by all members of the SS. In 1938 Himmler decreed that the rings

23
of all dead SS men were to be kept in a chest at the castle to symbolize their
permanent membership of the order.84 However it is questionable whether any more
than a small minority of the Waffen SS were ever turned into latter day Knights
vowed to die on behalf of their race, despite the sinister mystique that has always
clung to them and the role of warrior priests sometimes ascribed to them by those who
insist that Nazism was a occultist rebellion against Western rationality, science, and
modernity which has been utterly misunderstood by conventional historians.85 In any
case, the vast expansion of the SS in the course of the war ensured that by 1945 it had
degenerated into little more than a conscript army of mass-murderers operating above
any sort of legal or moral constraint, a ghastly travesty of the spiritual and physical
harbingers of a new master race of ‘human gods’ that they were meant to become.
In all likelihood the death cult remained a minor strand in the Third Reich as a
whole, largely restricted to the utopian fantasies of Himmler himself, just as the
ravings of Lanz von Liebenfels in his Ariosophist periodical played a minimal part in
the operational ideology of Hitler, even if they may have been one of the many
influences that helped transform him into an ideological anti-Semite fanatically
committed to national rebirth in the formative years spent in Vienna before the First
World War.86 Though it makes a lot of sense to see Nazism as a political religion bent
on regenerating history through the awakening of mythic and ritual forces,87 this is not
a blank cheque to treat it as a form of esotericism driven at its core by a special
relationship with the occult or death.

The death cult in Spanish and Romanian fascism

A similar situation pertains to the death cult in Franco’s Spain. Mainstream
Franquismo and Falangism did not cultivate death in any esoteric sense, the calls to
sacrifice in the battle for the soul of the nation and the cult of Primo de Rivera as a
Falangist martyr were part of the conventional symbology of militaristic nationalism.
However, something more profound resonated in the main hall of Salamanca
University on 12 October 1936 when General Millán Astray y Terreros, leader of the
Spanish Foreign Legion yelled ‘Down with Intelligence! Long live death!’ (Viva la
muerte!). He was responding to the declaration he had just heard by the famous
humanist philosopher Miguel de Unamuno that ‘At times to be silent is to lie. You
will win because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to
convince you need to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you

24
lack: Reason and Right.’ After Astray’s defiant risposte the ageing philosopher was
driven from the university at gun-point and died of a heart attack a week later.
The General’s cult of death was more than mere rhetoric. He had taken it
upon himself to turn his troops into fanatics who had left their secular lives and
commitments behind them in order to devote themselves utterly to the cause of Spain.
When he learnt that some of his men still had savings in bank accounts he railed: ‘The
legionary must only think of today, not of the past, which is, even more so than for
others, dead. Not of tomorrow because, by enrolling he knows he has placed his own
signature on his death certificate. We live today. We fight today. We die today. To
die: this is your duty. […] Legionaries, go and take out your savings. You have all the
time you need to spend them because I am giving you leave till two o’clock. I am sure
that by tomorrow none of you will still have savings books. Legionaries! Long live
Spain! Long live Franco! Long live death!’88 For Astray at least there was something
more than rhetorical in the Tercio song, Death’s Fiancé with the line ‘I am betrothed
to death and will bind myself with a strong rope to this loyal companion.’ It is perhaps
no coincidence that El Tercio bore the name of the Spanish militia that fought to
preserve the spiritual unity of Catholic Spain in the age of the Riconquista when Spain
was fighting a ‘holy war’ to purge itself of the presence and influence of Islam.
But of all inter-war fascist movements it is the Iron Guard which displays the
least rhetorical and most genuine ‘thanatophilia’, or love of death. Like the Tercio, its
songs celebrated death in such lines as: ‘Death, only death, legionaries, is a joyful
bride for us. Legionaries die singing and sing dying’. However, such sentiments were
not confined to a particular faction but permeated the entire movement. Codreanu’s
incorporation of Romanian orthodox Christianity within what remained at bottom a
deeply secular form of racist nationalism led to an ideological discourse in which the
resurrection of Romania from decadence was evoked in terms strongly reminiscent of
the millennarian89 fantasies of 14th century Serb nationalists in which personal death
became equated with national rebirth. The more fanatical of Codreanu’s followers
took the willingness to die for the higher cause to the point where only self-sacrifice
could guarantee the success of the revolutionary project, at which point the exoteric
language of militarist rhetoric crosses the Rubicon into the realm of a genuine cult of
death. Thus we assured that Ion Mota, Codreanu’s brother-in-law and lieutenant, left
to fight the republicans in Spain, ‘with the firm intent of dying there’, persuaded as he
was that ‘death is a creative and fertile act’.90

25
 The Italian expert on European esotericism, Furio Jesi, suggests that the death
cult in the Iron Guard went further than that of other fascisms because it was rooted in
a deep-seated Balkan tradition which sanctified sacrifice and eroticized death, and is
epitomized in the ballad The Legend of Mastro Manole who immures his wife alive in
order to complete a building. Mircea Eliade saw this legend as one of countless
permutations of the mystic notion that in order to last a major project (the building of
a house, a bridge, but also a spiritual undertaking) must be animated, receive a life
and a soul through a ritual act of ‘transfer’, and that this in turn demands a sacrifice, a
violent death through which the victim accedes to a new life in a metaphysical
dimension. Arguably the combined impact of Romanian orthodoxy and pagan
folklore on Codreanu’s conception of the Iron Guard was to imbue it with a cult of
death which permeated it at every level. It was a component reinforced by the
dedication of the movement to the Archangel Michael whose icon adorned the chapel
of the prison where he was interned in 1926 for his involvement in a plot to
assassinate a deputy who had voted for granting citizenship to Jews. For the Iron
Guard the Archangel symbolized the ‘active principle of good and eternal light
struggling with dark outside us and in us’,91 and the Messianic role which Codreanu
assumed in the fight for his nation involved ‘taking upon himself all the sins of his
race’.92 Furio Jesi, one of the few genuine scholars to have probed into this murky
area which lends itself so readily to sensationalization, suggests that such acts of
martyrdom are only needed in the absence of God:
Where God is present the sword is not drawn: in the presence of Jesus the
sword taken out of its scabbard by Peter is the sign of unnecessary guilt.
Where God has withdrawn into exile within himself and where only sub-
divine entities are the only ones accessible, such as the archangel, the just
must become guilty and must kill: the miles Christi, the athleta Christi, the
knight-crusader, the Templar, the Legionary of the Iron Guard, must choose to
become martyrs since they are guilty.93
The rebirth of Romania is a heroic undertaking which demands sacrificial blood
which the killers must expiate with their own. Consistent with this mystic principle of
sacrifice are some of the phrases found in The Nest Leader’s Handbook. For example,
Codreanu tells his Legionaries that by joining the movement they have entered a
‘school of suffering’ for ‘he who bears suffering will win’, ‘every suffering is a step
towards redemption’, and ‘He who knows how to die will never become a slave’.94

26
Thus for the most fanatical activists of the Iron Guard the emancipation of the
Romanian race was not the exoteric principle of ‘win or die’, but the esoteric concept
of ‘winning by dying’. In contrast to even the most fanatical SS officers, Legionaries
could only justify their violence only when it was expiated, with the result that some
gave themselves up after carrying out an assassination, in some instances remaining
passive as they were mown down by a hail of bullets.95

The role of self-sacrifice in post-war fascism

No matter how much it grew out of a reaction to the black hole which drives the
galaxy of modernity,96 the Legionaries of the Archangel Michael were still able to
operate as a travesty of a medieval order. However, in the post-war era, at least in
Europe and the USA, a nexus of forces has eroded the basis for mass-movements
infused with the charismatic political energies generated by a shared utopia. The
revolutionary right has fragmented just at the time when the progressive decay of
organized religion has made the projection of the auratic and the numinous onto
secular causes more random and idiosyncratic than ever. This is the age, not of mass
assaults on the citadels of liberal decadence led by paramilitary troops in coloured
shirts and sporting sinister emblems, but of leaderless resistance,97 the lone,
uniformless warrior-priest, the political soldier, the Kshatriya, who remains inwardly
loyal to the cause and retains his anonymity in the midst of the pleasure-seeking
crowd. The national phoenix is grounded for the duration. The coming of the new
order is indefinitely postponed.
For the true revolutionary determined not to compromise his ideological purity
by association with electoral populism, this period of history is an interregnum, the
time of withdrawal from the political arena, of ‘apoliteia’.98 His Bible is no longer
Mein Kampf with its programme for building up a political party and an irresistible
mass movement. Instead its ethos is summed up in books like The Turner Diaries
which explains how true Aryans, denied the possibility of belonging to a cohesive
movement such as the NSDAP, should react when the race war breaks out; The
Hunter that tells the story of lone idealist resolved to fight a ‘vigilante’ war against
the Federal State; or Unintended Consequences depicting a terrorist war against civil
society in which leading government officials are picked off one by one.99 Yet the
loss of the historical conditions which bred the fascist mass movement has done
nothing to eradicate the capacity of a handful of human beings to conceive ‘projective

27
narratives’ that compel them to carry out acts of symbolic violence against the state or
society. Thereby they subliminally re-enact in modern guise the archetypal role of the
hero, despite the lack of heavenly rewards for his death. As two experts tell us in their
investigation of the ‘psychopolitics of hatred’
The individual whose world is falling apart is experiencing his own
psychological apocalypse. From this state of ultimate powerlessness and
meaninglessness some create a world of meaning in their mind, a new world in
which they have power and significance. Through this vision they have found
personal redemption.100
What is missing from this statement is recognition that such an individual may find
him or herself in a world which can objectively be seen as falling apart, and that the
key to personal redemption lies in the decision to do something about it at whatever
personal cost. Nor should such an impulse be automatically equated with
‘psychopathology’ or hatred. The psychological template for this is the role played by
Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver who, feeling let down by politicians, decides to fight a
one-man crusade to clean up New York and fight the vice which is corrupting the city,
undergoing in the process a dramatic metamorphosis from lost soul to iron-willed and
-bodied urban vigilante, a walking arsenal complete with Mohican haircut. He tells
Palantine, the election candidate who hires his cab, that the most important thing the
next president should do is ‘to clean up this city here. It’s full of filth and scum; scum
and filth. It’s like an open sewer…We need a President that would clean up this whole
mess. Flush it out.’101 In like manner both Timothy McVeigh (the Oklahoma bomber)
and David Copeland (the London nail-bomber) made the transition from an obsession
with their nation’s decay to a sense of personal mission (dictated by their own
conscience with a moral force that came from beyond them) to ‘do something about
it’.102 An echo of the primordial mystic fantasy of regeneration through sacrifice lurks
in McVeigh’s statement in a letter sent to a newspaper three years before the
Oklahoma bombing. Having catalogued symptoms of the break-down of the American
Dream cataloguing he asked ‘Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system?’
It is no coincidence if the T–shirt he wore when he carried out the attack was inscribed
with a quotation from Jefferson: ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to
time with the blood of patriots and tyrants’.
After his arrest he steadfastly maintained the composure of a captured soldier
and one of his statements made while awaiting execution is revealing: ‘A shrink might

28
look at what I have to say and decide “He’s a psychopath or sociopath. He has no
respect for human life”. Far from that – I have great respect for human life. My
decision to take human life at the Murrah Building –…I did it for the larger good.’103
His expressionless stare into the TV cameras as he succumbed to the lethal injection
points to a powerful subjective sense that he was expiating the blood he had shed in
the fulfilment of his mission, and that he was in a sense already dead.
A feature of David Copeland’s own account of his emotional state during his
bombing campaign in London is his sense of being a robot (a term he uses several
times to describe his state of mind). He was emotionally numbed, incapable of
empathy with his victims. The authors of his biography ascribe this to fact that he was
a ‘classic psychopath, someone who usually appeared quite normal but was also
devoid of feeling and capable of inflicting severe violence.’104 Their assumption was
endorsed by his barrister who declared to the judge at his trial that he was suffering
from ‘serious schizophrenia, delusions and emotional disorders’, and much of the
subsequent proceedings centred on the issue of his sanity. The authors insist he
embarked on his bombing campaign ‘fuelled by a desire to be famous’ and by the
personality disorders of a lonely underachiever.
Instead I would suggest a chrono-ethological explanation of his behaviour.
Once he had found his sense of mission (‘I just had to do it. It was my destiny’),105
Copeland literally left ordinary, personal time, and the whole moral sensibility that
goes with it, behind him: he was beyond. Elsewhere. Certainly, it was a mission which
resolved his own acute sense of impotence, failure, and anomie (‘I had no life
anyway…I’m shot-away – a loner – just weird in the fucking head’).106 However, the
key to its success in doing this lay in the conviction, fed by apocalyptic fantasies of
living at a turning point in history, that his actions would trigger a race war that would
lead to the resurgence of the white race, or at least strike a serious blow against the
decadence of a multicultural and permissive society. It was the possibility his mission
gave him of acting on behalf of a higher cause at whatever personal risk that enabled
him to access a state of identificatory transcendence. This helps explain his personal
use of Biblical references culled from the Christian Identity movement to rationalize
and justify his actions, the implication that he sometimes felt he had been chosen by
God to fulfil his mission on behalf of his race, his willingness to confess, his
incapacity for remorse.

29
 Copeland’s subliminal mythopoeic and palingenetic drive, rationalized and
articulated thanks to the neo-fascist and racist subculture he had frequented, had
enabled him to perform disturbing feat of becoming, not the Buddah of Suburbia, but a
latter day Knight Templar in a base-ball cap and trainers, a modern jihadic warrior
delivered to his enemy not astride a white charger but sitting in the back of a black
London taxi-cab. Though neither McVeigh nor Copeland fall into the category of
suicide bombers as such, both seem to have generated within themselves largely
spontaneously an unshakeable belief that they were called upon to sacrifice the lives of
fellow human beings in order to reverse the process of decay which anaesthetized
them both to the suffering they inflicted on their victims and to the consequences to
their own lives. They had both become heroes, playing the star role in a private
palingenetic drama, displaying a lethal brand of ‘home-brew’ fanaticism. The intense
sense of mission that motivated them would ‘normally’ only be produced either from a
combination of intensive cultural and religious conditioning with extreme socio-
political conditions (as in Palestine) or from ideological indoctrination in the severest
of training regimes (as in the Ordensburgen of the Third Reich). David in A.I. was
conceived as ‘a robot who could dream’. David Copeland used his dreaming faculty to
conjure up such a total sense of mission that he effectively programmed himself to
become a dreamer of the day, and hence a robot dedicated to carrying out orders which
took shape in his head thanks to a virtual community of racial fanatics to which he
belonged.

Tentative inferences for the study of terrorist violence

The conclusions to be drawn from this highly speculative foray into the
extraordinarily complex phenomenon of ‘self-sacrificial’ political violence and
terrorism can be summarized as follows:
1 Lines of enquiry that associate the fanaticism which causes extreme acts of
terrorism with psychopathological states are likely to prove as unproductive,
limited, and misleading as the Frankfurt School’s futile search for the identikit
of the ‘authoritarian personality’ as the key to fascism and Nazism fifty years
ago.
2 No less helpful are attempts to identify the genetic, biochemical, evolutionary
substratum of fanatical devotion to a cause, since they tend to lead to crudely

30
 reductionist positions reminiscent of the behaviourist fallacies of a generation
ago.
3 Rather, a more heuristically fruitful approach is one that applies the principle
of methodological empathy to self-sacrificial forms of political violence, and
which thus gives due weight in the interpretation of human behaviour to the
sphere of cognition, value-formation, and ideals. It thus looks for clues to
extreme act of violence in the uniquely human craving to make fairy-tales real,
‘chase down dreams’, and inject meaning and narrative shape (‘projective
narratives’) into each individual existence. In this article the time aspect has
been given particular emphasis by postulating the existence of a new virtual
discipline, ‘chrono-ethology’.
4 This subjective sphere of human ideation and goal-centred aspirations should
be probed forensically in a spirit of methodological pluralism and empathy,
informed by that sense of complexity, awe and compassion that is at the heart
of all humanistic enquiry. For as Kafka reminds us:
When you stand before me and look at me, what do you know of
the pain that is in me and what do I know of yours. And even if I
were to throw myself down in front of you and weep and pour my
heart out, what would you know about me more than you know
about hell when someone tells you it is hot and terrifying. If only
for this reason we human beings should stand before each other
with the thoughtfulness, with the awe, and with the love we should
feel at the entrance to hell.107
5 Given the complexity of the phenomenon of political and terroristic violence,
and the questionable value of conventional explanatory strategies based on
abnormal psychology or evolutionary ethics, it is worth exploring the heuristic
potential of the thesis that each act of self-sacrificial political extremism, even
the most apparently secular, contains a ‘micro-millennaristic’ dimension. In
other words, it involves a sense of ‘mission’ that by definition carries with it a
chronos-defying bid to access a self-transcending ‘dream time’ that redeems
the loss of individual life in ordinary time which thereby becomes emptied of
significance. At a psycho-dynamic level this involves the experience of
‘dying’ to ‘this’ world in order to be ‘reborn’ in a higher, more substantial
reality.

31
6 Such a hypothesis opens up the prospect of identifying the single pixels of
individual psychology that collectively form the ‘movements’, and sometimes
even ‘mass movements’, of the age of modern ‘democratic’ politics. It
promises to be particularly relevant to understanding movements that are
generated by political and politicized religions whose ideological core
contains the mythic goal of ridding the world of decadence and bringing about
total rebirth. In other words, the ‘charismatic’ dynamism of palingenetic
movements may one day prove to derive from countless individual senses of
personal regeneration, of a sacralization of individual existence raised to a
higher power by the sense of belonging to a revolutionary community destined
to inaugurate a new age. (The modern ‘lone-wolf’ terrorist has to resort to
diagnoses of the present ‘decadence’ that draw a sense of strength from the
very absence of such a mass movement. This feat often involves the
elaboration of a conspiracy theory to explain why the vast majority live like
somnambulists blissfully ignorant of the Truth).
7 It is possible to postulate at least three distinct forms of political fanaticism
exist in the world today which can lead to Kamikaze behaviour:
a) The fanaticism of politicized religions. Traditional, ‘premodern’
religions have survived with millions of orthodox believers into a world
flooded with the forces of modernization, secularization, and
globalization and containing numerous sites of deep political conflict
between rival historical, ethnic or religious communities fomented by
conditions of desperate social deprivation and state oppression. This
tends to generate extreme forms of politicization of religion which in
crises can mass-produce fanaticism, and create a steady supply of
volunteers for potential suicide, (or better martyr) missions in a spirit of
self-sacrifice.
b) The fanaticism of political religions. The twentieth century saw the
emergence of a number of ‘totalitarian’ movements which, driven by
the myth of total rebirth,108 were able to generate manifestations of
self-sacrificial fanaticism, as we have seen in the case of some inter-
war fascist movements. The ideology drawn on to rationalize such acts
derived its ideological coherence from established currents within the
movement or regime, and were linked to a sense of hierarchy and

32
 leadership. However, genuine self-sacrificial devotion was the
exception in behavioural terms within both fascism and communism,
even if the rhetoric of fanaticism and self-sacrifice has been a feature
of all totalitarian and militaristic movements.
c) The fanaticism of ‘the loner’. In contrast to the organized, structured
behaviour of the fanatics associated with the totalitarian movements
and regimes of inter-war Western society, the drive towards self-
transcendence and the re-enchantment of the world has undergone an
extensive process fragmentation and randomization. The culmination
of this process is the lone terrorist, ideologically programmed by an
eclectic mixture of extremist diagnoses of the crisis of the modern
world or of national decline. These will typically have been absorbed
in post-modern fashion from a variety of sources, but welded into a
coherent narrative and sense of mission in a profound rebellion against
the bottomless relativism of the postmodern sensibility. It is a sense of
mission pervaded by a urge to ‘flush out’ the mess of society, and
thereby to purify and sanctify the world on a symbolic level which can
all too easily translate itself into what appear to be random, nihilistic
acts of violence and destruction, but which for the perpetrator are ritual
acts of catharsis. It is a scenario which makes predicting and
counteracting politically motivated fanatical acts extremely difficult in
the contemporary age.

The prognosis for terroristic fanaticism

I am all too conscious of the fact that this article blurs important taxonomic
distinctions that can be made between a) the political violence of movements such as
inter-war fascism and the terrorism of groupuscules or lone wolves; b) the acts of
fanaticism of individuals who have no intention of dying and those in which death is
welcomed as part of a (quasi-)sacred rite de passage; c) political religions (such as
fascism) and politicized religions (such as political Islam). Even in the restricted area
of ‘extreme right terrorism’ one expert, Ehud Sprinzak, found it necessary to
distinguish ‘revolutionary’, ‘reactive’, ‘vigilante’, ‘racist’, ‘millennarian’, and ‘youth
counter-culture’ forms (ideal types) of terrorism and correctly states that ‘the huge
political, historical and cultural variation among right-wing extremist groups makes it

33
difficult to generalize their behavioural dynamics’.109 Superficially the fascist and
black types of terrorism focused on here are close to his categories ‘revolutionary’
and ‘millennarian’. However, I would suggest that the phenomenon of the
‘sacralization of time’ explored here is at least worth exploring heuristically as a
fundamental psychological component of the dynamics of all political fanaticism
however diverse the social, organizational, or ideological constitution of individual
acts of political violence or terrorism at the level of external historical phenomenon.
It is perhaps significant that in a another article in the same issue of TPV,
‘Right-wing violence in North America’, Jeffrey Kaplan levels the criticism at
Sprinzak’s article that it ‘seriously underestimates the religiosity, and thus the
millennarianism and concomitant chiliasm, inherent in the radical right wing in North
America’,110 which is surely an intuitive allusion to the underlying process of
sacralizing time that is the subject of this analysis. It is the historicization of this urge
to access in ‘dream time’ that would explain why, according to Kaplan, ‘the literature
of Odinism, National Socialism and Creativity, no less than that of Christian Identity
are deeply apocalyptic, and foresees a period of tribulation as the necessary birth
pangs of the desired new world’ (and hence of a new time). 111
Finally, the line of interpretation pursued in this article leads to the conclusion
that the prognosis for the continued vitality of fanaticism are disturbingly good. The
world is full of suffering, social injustice, and unresolved economic, ethnic, cultural,
religious, and political tensions. It is entering an unprecedented ecological and
demographic crisis. Meanwhile, the human longing to access transcendent time
remains an integral part of our psyches. It is a structural situation that cannot but
generate myriad causes, holy wars, private epiphanies and missions, and pretexts for
martyrdom. Certainly it is one which makes Fukuyamian rumours of the imminent
death of History a decade ago seem greatly exaggerated. Indeed, it is precisely the
perennially human Terror of History which Eliade identified that guarantees that
History as Fukuyama understands it will survive as long as substantive equality and
social justice in a sustainable economic and ecological system remains a distant
utopia.

Notes on Contributors

34
Roger Griffin is Professor in the History of Ideas at Oxford Brookes University,
where in the last 15 years he has carried out a sustained study of the definition,
heterogeneous morphology, and evolution of generic fascism in the twentieth century.
His particular interest is in the peculiar dynamics of fascism as a political,
sociological, and cultural force imparted by the centrality to its world-view of the
myth of national rebirth (palingenesis), with particular reference to its function as a
‘temporal revolution’. His latest projects are a five volume critical anthology of
secondary sources relating to fascism in the Routledge Critical Concepts series
(2004), and an investigation of the relationship between modernity, modernism and
fascist projects for the renewal of history (Macmillan/Palgrave 2005).

14127 words (without footnotes)

35
Endnotes

1
A good example of this approach is Robert S. Robins, Jerrold M. Post, M.D.,
Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred (New Haven and London;
Yale University Press, 1997) which reduces terrorist movements and state
terror to forms of sociopathology, albeit ones which generally stop short of
actual psychosis.
2
‘Right-wing terrorism in a comparative perspective: The case of split
delegitimation’, Ehud Sprinzak, Terrorism and Political Violence 7/1 (Spring
1995), p.40
3
Walter Reich, The Origins of Terrorism (Washington: Woodrow Wilson,
1990)
4
The classic text which attempts to offer an evolutionary explanation of
altruism is Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1976). An example of more recent attempts to explore this issue is
Elliott Sober, ‘Evolutionary Altruism, Psychological Altruism, and Morality:
Disentangling the Phenotypes’, in M. H. Nitecki and D. V. Nitecki (eds),
Evolutionary Ethics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993). For an excellent brief
introduction to the topic see Michael Byron, ‘Evolutionary Ethics and
Biologically Supportable Morality’, Kent State University, at
http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/TEth/ TEthByro.htm.
5
Colin Tudge, The Engineer in the Garden (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993)
6
Colin Tudge, ‘Natural Born Killers’, New Scientist, 11 May 2002, 174/2342,
p. 36. For an important refutation of this sort of crude ‘behaviourist’
reductionism (published over thirty years ago but still sadly relevant today)
see Arthur Koestler and J. R. Smythies, Beyond Reductionism (London:
Hutchinson, 1969); Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (New York:
Random House, 1982).
7
Ibid, p. 39
8
Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day (New York: Autonomedia, 1999).
9
E.g. Roger Penrose in The Emperor’s New Mind (Vintage London 1990), in
the chapter ‘Cosmology and the Arrow of Time’ comments on the ‘puzzling
discrepancy between our perception of time and what modern physical theory
tells us to believe’ (p. 392).
10
Micrea Eliade’s most sustained treatment of this theme is to be found in The
Myth of the Eternal Return (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971).
See also his The Sacred and the Profane. The Nature of Religion (San Diego:
Harvest, 1959).
11
See Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1970), pp. 252-5.
12
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction,
(London: Oxford University Press: London, 1967)
13
Cf. especially Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton
N.J., Princeton University Press, 1949).
14
For a popular version see C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections,
(recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé) (London: Flamingo/Fontana Paperbacks,
1983).
15
E.g. the pioneering work of G. Creuzer and E. Durkheim and influential books
by such modern experts as L. Lévi-Bruhl, J. J. Bachofen, E. Cassirer, K.
Kerényi, B. Malinowski, E. Cassirer, C. Lévi-Strauss, M. Eliade, and F. Jesi.
16
The ‘megamachine’ concept is expounded in Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the

36
 Machine: Technics and Human Development (London: Secker & Warburg,
1967).
17
E.g. Mona Ouzof, Festivals and the French Revolution (Chicago:
University Press, 1988).
18
R. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams. Utopian Dreams and Experimental Life in the
Russian Revolution (OUP, Oxford, 1992)
19
Mabel Berezin, The Making of the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of
Interwar Italy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997)
20
Eric Michaud, Un art de l’eternité: L’image et le temps du national-
socialisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1996)
21
For a more ‘synoptic’ view of the relationship between the ‘palingenetic’ right
and the temporal engineering that accompanied its attempted revolution in the
inter-war period see Günter Berghaus, ‘The Ritual Core of Fascist Theatre: An
Anthropological Perspective’, in G. Berghaus (ed.), Fascism and Theatre
(Oxford: Berghahn, 1996); Roger Griffin, ‘“I am no longer human. I am a
Titan. A god!” The fascist quest to regenerate time’, Electronic Seminars in
History, History of Political Thought, at http://www.ihrinfo.ac.uk/esh/
quest.html (first published May 1998); Mark Antliff, ‘Fascism, Modernism,
and Modernity’, The Art Bulletin, 84/1 (March 2002).
22
Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York: The Free Press,
1991), p. 166.
23
David C. Rapoport, ‘Sacred Terror: A contemporary example from Islam’, in
Reich (note 3), p. 118.
24
This term is not to be taken as an endorsement of Jung’s idiosyncratic theory
of archetypes (which seem to reside for him in a ‘scientistic’ equivalent of
Aboriginal ‘Dream Time’. My use of the term is to be particularly dissociated
from the way Jung conceived it in the proto-fascist phase of his life, where he
too succumbed to the lure of identificatory self-transcendence and conceived a
suprapersonal mission to help restore the primordial purity of the Aryan race.
See Richard Noll, The Jung Cult (New York: Free Press, 1994) and The Aryan
Christ (New York: Random House, 1997).
25
Cf. especially Campbell (note 13).
26
Despite its pre-academic methodology and conceptual framework, which by
the standards of contemporary anthropology are inevitably extremely flawed,
Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough (12 vols. 1890-1915; Wordsworth Editions
reference version, Hertfordshire, 1993) remains a remarkably panoramic
thesaurus of the myths and rituals of sacrifice and palingenesis which, as he
documented, existed all over the world and informed not only Classical
mythology but ‘pagan’ folklore long after the Christianization of Europe.
27
It may not be generally realized that the custom of smashing a bottle of
champagne at the launching of a ship derives from the custom of breaking a
bottle of red wine as the substitution for the blood of sacrifice.
28
The Germanic ‘sky’ is cognate with the Latin scutum a shield.)
29
The allusion here is, of course, to Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky (London:
Penguin, 2000) and in particular to the following passage (p. 79): ‘You know,
the sky here’s strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it’s a
solid thing up there, protecting us from what’s behind.’ Kit shuddered slightly

37
 as she said: ‘From what’s behind?’ ‘Yes’ ‘But what is behind?’ Her voice was
very small. ‘Nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night’.
30
Not surprisingly, the concept of the ‘warrior priest’ plays an important role in
the alternative philosophy of history offered by Julius Evola in his Il rivolta
contro il mondo moderno (Rome: Edizioni mediterranee, 1976), Ch. 13, where
it symbolizes the values of a ‘Traditional’ society that has not yet succumbed
to decadence. Evola is one of the most influential ideologues of post-war
fascism and the New Right.
31
Quran, 56: 12-37
32
New Scientist 174/2342 (11 May 2002), p. 43.
33
‘The Last Notes of the Kamikaze Pilots and the Japanese View of
Death and Afterlife (anon.)’,
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~liminal/papers/matsuo/kamikaze.html
(01/09/02) Similar conclusions are drawn in the Web article by Mako Sasaki,
‘Who became Kamikaze pilots, and how did they feel about their suicide
mission?, The Concord Review, http://www.tcr.org/kamikaze.html (01/09/02).
34
A parallel metaphor is central to Andrzei Wajda’s 1958 film Ashes and
Diamonds, where the image of ashes refers to the insubstantiality of a human
life that has failed to achieve a self-transcendent purpose.
35
These quotes are taken from Edith Schnapper, The Inward Odyssey (London:
George Allen & Unwin, 1965), pp. 113, 114, 124. Section II of this book is an
excellent introduction to the mystic meanings of self-surrender and self-
sacrifice.
36
E.g. 1 Corinthians 4, 15; Colossians, 3, 10
37
See, for example, the chapter ‘The Belly of the Whale’ in Campbell (note 13);
Frazer, The Golden Bough (note 26), chs 28-46; Piers Vitebsky, The Shaman
(London: Macmillan, 1995)
38
I.e. the scientifistic concept pioneered by C. G. Jung.
39
The metaphor used in Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible as
Literature (Toronto: Academic Press,1982), p. 261.
40
Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakura (The Book of the Samurai) (Tokyo:
Kodansha International, 2000), p. 20. Yamamoto expressed his distilled
wisdom about the vocation of the warrior to a younger samurai in the early
years of the 18th century. By this time he had become a Buddhist priest, having
been forbidden to commit suicide on the death of his own master, another hint
at the subterranean link between warrior and priest.
41
For more on Mishima’s highly sophisticated metapolitical philosophy of
terroristic violence see Rox Starrs, ‘The Road to Violent Action’, Deadly
Dialectics: Yukio Mishima (Folkestone: Curzon Press, 1994)
42
Sean O'Dubhchonna (2000) www.terrorism.com/-trcctforum5/00000078.htm
(01/10/02)
43
There is a description of the worship of Cybele by castrated priests known as
Galli in Lucretius: see http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/lucretius-
reruma.html (01/10/02) One passage reads:
A living progeny. The Galli come:
And hollow cymbals, tight-skinned tambourines
Resound around to bangings of their hands;
The fierce horns threaten with a raucous bray;
The tubed pipe excites their maddened minds

38
 In Phrygian measures; they bear before them knives,
Wild emblems of their frenzy, which have power
The rabble’s ingrate heads and impious hearts
To panic with terror of the goddess’ might.
44
This theme is central to H. G. Well’s short story The Door in the Wall
45
It is perhaps symptomatic of what I referred to earlier as the ‘purblindness’ to
the temporal dimension of the faith that inspires terroristic violence explored
here that Walter Laqueur, one of the greatest experts on contemporary
terrorism, refers to the etymology of ‘fanatic’ given here (The New Terrorism,
London: Phoenix Press, 1999, pp. 97-8), but apparently attaches no
significance to it as a clue to the psychodynamics of the terrorist mind-set. At
least he concedes that ‘one need not conclude that fanaticism itself is
pathological’ (ibid., p. 99).
46
Michael Foss, The People of the First Crusade (New York: Arcade
Publishing, 1997), pp. 37-42.
47
R. Thomas, Serbia under Milosevic: Politics in the 1990s (London: Hurst, C.
and Company, 1999), pp. 12-3.
48
‘Die Stadt Lucca’, in Heinrich Heine Reisebilder (Hamburg: Hoffmann
& Campe, 1966). The passage reads (my translation): ‘Dear reader, if
you want to complain about feeling torn apart, then you would do
better to lament the fact that the world itself has been rent in two. Since
the heart of the poet is the centre point of the world, in the present age
it has been reduced to a pitiful state. Anyone who boasts that his heart
has stayed whole, is only confessing that he has a prosaic heart tucked
away in a corner out of harm’s way. My heart was torn apart by the
great rip in the fabric of the world, and it is precisely for this reason
that the great gods have bestowed their favour on me before many
others, and considered me worthy of the martyrdom of the poet. Once
the world was whole. In classical antiquity and the Middle Ages,
despite all the external conflicts, there was nevertheless a world unity
and there were whole poets. We want to honour these poets and derive
pleasure from their works; but any attempt to imitate their wholeness is
a lie, a lie which can be seen through by every healthy eye and
deserves only scorn.’
49
Charles Baudelaire, ‘La cloche fêlée’, Les Fleurs du Mal (1857): ‘As for me,
my soul is cracked and when in its troubles it wants to populate the cold air of
the night with its songs, it often happens that its weakened voice sounds like
the thick death rattle of a wounded man left to die at the side of a lake of blood
under a huge pile of corpses.’ For the seminal importance of Baudelaire as a
harbinger of the rise of modernity see David Harvey, The Condition of
Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), Ch 2.
50
‘L’horloge’, ‘Au lecteur’, ‘L’irremédiable’, and the four poems called
‘Spleen’.
51
On the proliferation of conflicting ‘logics’ as symptom of modernity see
Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964),
pp. 444-5. Like Musil’s more famous Man without Qualities, this novel, a sort
of anti-Bildungsroman published in German in 1931, is an extraordinary study
of the break-down of cultural homogeneity and meaning under the impact of

39
 modernity and contains a remarkable treatise on the ‘breakdown of values’
interpolated into the narrative.
52
Cf. W. B. Yeats’ famous lines from The Second Coming:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
53
See Richard Sheppard, ‘The Crisis of Language’ in M. Bradbury and James
McFarlane, Modernism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), which is an
excellent introduction to the generalized intellectual and artistic climate I am
evoking here.
54
The allusion is to Rimbaud’s description of a personal episode of loss of self
and figurative palingenesis, A Season in Hell.
55
Yeats’ poem continues with the lines:
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand” only to cancel the revelation with the
image of a
‘rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born’.
56
Cf. Peter Berger (ed.) The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness
(Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1974)
57
Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind: Essays in German Literature and
Consciousness (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961).
58
Sarah Dunant and Roy Porter (eds), The Age of Anxiety (London : Virago,
1996).
59
Zygmunt Bauman, The Age of Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991)
60
The allusion is to Gerard de Nerval’s poem El Desdichado:
Je suis le Ténébreux, - le Veuf, - l’Inconsolé,
Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la Tour abolie :
Ma seule Etoile est morte, - et mon luth constellé
Porte le Soleil noir de la Mélancolie.
Dans la nuit du Tombeau, Toi qui m’as consolé,
Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d’Italie,
La fleur qui plaisait tant à mon coeur désolé,
Et la treille où le Pampre à la Rose s’allie.
Suis-je Amour ou Phébus?... Lusignan ou Biron ?
Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la Reine ;
J'ai rêvé dans la Grotte où nage la sirène...
Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l'Achéron :
Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d'Orphée
Les soupirs de la Sainte et les cris de la Fée.
61
The allusion is to Rowling’s Harry Potter cycle
62
An image used both by Martin Heidegger as a philosophical concept and The
Doors as a song-lyric.
63
Bob Dylan, ‘One too many mornings’, The Times they are A-changing (1964).

40
64
This is a ‘forced’ interpretation of the Kafka’s tale, since, like all his stories,
it is irreducible to a single meaning or unambiguous exegesis, which is why
he has become an emblem of modernism.
65
Offer comes from ‘ob-ferre’, to present for sacrifice, cf. German Opfer,
aufopfern
66
The theme of working at the outer limits of the range of comprehensible
language is also central to the works of Samuel Beckett, another beacon of
modernism.
67
For a brilliant sociological exploration of the profound link between
modernity, ontological insecurity and reflexivity see Anthony Giddens,
Modernity and Self-Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). Long before
him, on the threshold of modernity William Blake railed against the tyranny of
‘single vision’, a grotesque travesty of the four-fold vision which emerged
once the doors of perception were cleansed.
68
The Duino Elegies, The Eighth Elegy. Cf. Hamlet’s famous lines: ‘conscience
doth make cowards of us all; and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied
o’er with the pale cast of thought’. The task of many practices associated with
so-called ‘Eastern philosophy’, such as martial arts and yoga which blend
physical and spiritual self-discipline, can be seen as techniques designed to
free the human mind from the ‘traps’ that Rilke refers to.
69
The Sixth Elegy
70
See Roger Griffin, `Identification and Integration: Conflicting Aspects of the
Human Need for Self-transcendence within Ideological Communities', Journal
for the Study of European Ideas, 18/1 (March 1993), pp. 11-23.
71
The name of the extended excursus on the collapse of the unifying vision of
Christianity and its consequences for the coherence of spiritual life in the West
in Broch (note 50).
72
The Hippy era generated no end of new sources of self-transcendence which
were conceived originally as integrative and laid the basis for myriad ‘New
Age’ beliefs and causes. However, they too had the potential to degenerate
into identificatory ones, as the Manson killings so vividly demonstrated.
73
Emilio Gentile elaborates on these distinctions in Le religioni della politica
(Bari: Laterza, 2001).
74
The zeal with which official nationalism in every combatant country, whatever
the religious orthodoxy or type of political system that promoted it, enlisted its
subjects or citizens in a holy crusade against the enemy in the First World
War, and the millions who responded voluntarily in their readiness to make
the so-called ‘sacrifices’ demanded of them by their ‘sacred duty’ are
unintelligible without this instinctive readiness to sanctify secular reality in
order to imbue it with meaning and legitimacy and the corresponding
willingness of ordinary people to devote oneself to the national community in
circumstances of crisis when it seems threatened. On the transposition of
Christian ideas of resurrection to the cult of the fallen soldier see Ch. 3 of G.
L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
75
The section ‘Gli arditi e la rivoluzione’ in A. Monti and G. Stefanelli (eds),
Rapsodia eroica. ‘Dall’intervento all’impero’ (Milan: Editoriale Patriotica,
1937).
76
See G. L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (New York: Howard
Fertig, 1980).

41
77
Hermann Bloch, The Sleepwalkers (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964),
p. 548
78
See Klaus Vondung: Magie und Manipulation. Ideologischer Kult und
politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1971).
79
Cf. Linda Schulte-Sass, Entertaining the Third Reich (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1996), p. 268, who describes the film as “the story of a
subject who finds his ‘natural’ place in two stages, a bodily stage of fusion
with the uniform and a transcendent stage of death, which is his third and final
stage of ‘rebirth”’. This is presented in the context of Schulte-Sass’s analysis
as no more than an especially intense version of the ‘oceanic feeling’ of
transcending ‘a particular time and space’ imparted through the carefully
contrived aesthetic ‘illusion of wholeness’ that this excellent book
demonstrates to have been a defining feature of all Nazi cinema (see particular
chapter one, ‘Mass spectacle, history, cinema: Embodiments of social
fantasy’).
80
This paper thus disagrees with a curious website entitled ‘Fascism as a
necrophiliac phenomenon’ (hhttp://www.anti-fascism.org/speci…%20as%20-
%20May%2024.hmtl on 10/09/02) which tries to prove the presence of a
‘strong necrophillic (sic) propensity in modern fascist ideology’.
81
Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch, Die politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus
(Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1998).
82
René Alleau, Hitler et les sociétés secrètes (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1969)
83
Louis Pauwels et Jacques Bergier, Le matin des magiciens (Paris: Gallimard,
1960), pp. 446-50.
84
See Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism,
(Northamptonshire: The Aquarian Press, 1985), pp. 186-191.
85
E.g. Bergier and Pauwels (note 82) and the video series Occult Reich
(Edinburgh: Lamancha Productions, 1993, distributed by Columbia Tristar
Home Video, 1993).
86
See the chapter ‘Ariosophy and Adolf Hitler’ in Goodrick-Clarke (note 83).
87
See Michael Burleigh, ‘National Socialism as a Political Religion’,
Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 1/ 2 (2000), pp. 1-26.
88
R. Segala, La Legge del Tercio, La Lettura, 37/ (December 1937), p. 1091,
cited in Furio Jesi, Cultura di destra (Milan: Garzanti, 1979), p. 33.
89
I choose to spell this term etymologically to reflect the meaning ‘thousand
years’ (cf. chiliasm, from chile a thousand), rather than with one ‘n’, which
would suggest it was derived not from the Latin ‘annus’ but from ‘anus’.
90
P. Giraud, ‘Codreanu e la Guardia de Ferro’ in M. Bardèche (ed.) I fascismi
sconosciuti (Milan: le Edizioni del Borghese, 1969), p. 48.
91
C. Papanace, La genesi ed il martirio del movimento legionario romeno
(Rome: Il Cinabro,1959), p. 21
92
Ibid, p. 65.
93
Jesi (note 87), p. 48. Jesi is building on a highly idiosyncratic
theory of the history of religion which, as Eliade suggests in a diary note,
informs his Trattato di storia delle religioni a fascinating and highly ‘modern’
explanation for the extreme forms of religious and mythic behaviour which are
a permanent feature of human history. He postulates that they originate in
attempts to fill the void left by the withdrawal of God from the immanent

42
 source of religious experience accessible to ‘primitive man’ into a
transcendent realm in which he now exists as an idle or hidden God (‘deus
otiosus’ or ‘deus absconditus’). Thus God’s ‘”transcendence” merges and
coincides with his eclipse’, and the ‘aspiration of the religious man towards
“transcendence” reminds him of “the desperate gesture of the orphan left alone
in the world” (see Jesi, note 87, p. 42). (Georg Büchner uses precisely this
image of the orphan as a metaphor for “Man’s” existential abandonment in
Woyzeck written in the 1830s). If Eliade’s theory were right this would require
an extra stage to be added to the scheme of the evolution of modernity from
religion that I have sketched above.
94
Corneliu Codreanu, Legion. The Nest Leader’s Handbook (London: The
Rising Press, 2001), p. 56.
95
This aspect of Legionary behaviour is explored by Eugen Weber in his chapter
on Romania in H. Rogger and E. Weber (eds), The European Right (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965).
96
Astrophysicists have recently discovered that every galaxy contains a black
hole which guarantees its structural and dynamic processes of birth and death
at a micro- and macro-physical level.
97
L. R. Beam ‘Leaderless Resistance”
http://www.mathaba.net/rcm/ercm/leaderless.html (06/06/02)
98
Julius Evola, Gli uomini e le rovine, Volpe, Roma, 1967. See also Roger
Griffin ‘Between metapolitics and apoliteía: the New Right’s strategy for
conserving the fascist vision in the ‘interregnum’, Contemporary French
Studies 8/2 (February 2000) at:
http://www.brookes.ac.uk/schools/humanities/Roger/2457/APOLIT.PT1.htm
99
First two works are by William Pierce, head of the US neo-Nazi National
Alliance, the third by gun-rights advocate John Ross.
100
R. Robins and J. Post, Political Paranoia (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1997), p. 113.
101
Paul Shrader, Taxi Driver (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), p. 28.
102
See Timothy McVeigh’s attack on the collapse of the American dream and
the decline of the USA in L. Michel and D. Herbeck, American Terrorist
(New York: Avon Books, 2001), p. 114-118. Cf. also David Copeland’s
remark: ‘You look at every white country, they’re now in disarray, falling
apart’, cited in Graeme McLagan and Nick Lowles, Mr Evil. The Secret Life of
the Racist Bomber and Killer David Copeland (London: John Blake, 2000), p.
193.
103
Michel and Herbeck (note 101), p. 455.
104
Lowles (note 95), p. 187
105
Ibid., p. 189
106
Ibid., pp. 183-4
107
H. Politzer, Das Kafka Buch (Hamburg: Fischer Verlag, 1965), p. 245
108
See Emilio Gentile, ‘The Sacralisation of Politics: Definitions, Interpretations
and Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism’,
trans. Robert Mallet, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religion,1/1
(2000), pp. 18-55.
109
Sprinzak (note 2), p. 37.
110
Jeffrey Kaplan, ‘Right-wing Violence in North America’, Terrorism and
Political Violence, 7/1, p. 84

43
 111
Ibid., p. 86.

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