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Orbital Operations for 19 January 2025
Warren Ellis
January 19, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 11 minutes
Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. Let me tell you about a book I read this month.
In this letter:
WAR FOR ETERNITY
The News
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LTD
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ORBITAL
WAR FOR ETERNITY
So, I did a short note about this book on LTD, but I decided I wanted to talk about it more, and I think it might be extremely Your Shit.
Teitelbaum is an ethnomusicologist by trade. He got interested in the intersection of music and far-right nationalism. Which makes more sense if you’re European and you lived through Oi and turbofolk and national socialist black metal and knew people who dyed their hair blonde and started giving nazi salutes while chanting TWO FOUR TWO in the Eighties. Anyway, the deeper he got into that whole mess, the more weird stuff he found floating around at the bottom. Like Traditionalism.
It has a capital T because it’s the name of a thing you can kindly call a “philosophy.” It’s a hundred years old and has a relative handful of adherents. Basically a secret society. So, right away. I’m hooked, right? Anyone who knows me or my work knows I have a real weakness for this stuff.
Traditionalism borrows from everywhere: it espouses a strict hierarchical caste society, a world of thousands of culturally different states rather than two hundred countries and federalised entities, lots of racist shit, and then it starts to get really peculiar:
Guénon and his followers believed there once was a religion—the Tradition, the core, or the perennial Tradition—that has been lost, its values and concepts surviving today only in fragments across different faith practices. Like the occurrence of a similar physical trait in separate species, commonalities among different belief systems testify to a common ancestor—namely, the original core religion. And for many Traditionalists, interreligious agreement is most apparent among the so-called Indo-European religions, notably Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and the pre-Christian pagan religions of Europe.
I mean, we’re getting into fantasy territory here, right?
…Evola’s understanding of history: he believed that Aryans were descended from a patriarchal society of ethereal, ghostly beings who lived in the Arctic and whose virtue declined as they migrated south and became incarnate.
And it pinches the Yugas from Hinduism: the notion that we live through four world ages that cycle. Traditionalists hold that we live in the worst and most debased one currently, the Kali Yuga. In the Kali Yuga, any act committed that damages society and structure is de facto a virtuous act, because everything is awful and must be destroyed in order to push us around the circle into the first and nicest Yuga.
Guénon describes one of the signatures of the Kali Yuga as the complete upending of value systems. He described this feature of modernity as “inversion,” and becoming privy to it encourages one to distrust modern officialdom. Everything you think is good is bad. Every change you consider progress is actually regression. Every apparent instance of justice is actually oppression.
Therefore, for certain people, trying to dismantle the US government was an act of sacred devotion intended to help bring about a better world from inside Bizarro World.
I got this book because I wanted to learn more about Aleksandr Dugin, the philosopher and author who has been considered Putin’s ideological advisor - including by Ukraine, who tried to kill him and got his daughter instead. Here, I learned a thing. He once took what was essentially a youth army into South Ossetia to stir some shit, the Eurasian Youth Union, and:
…”the Eurasianists represented themselves with a mysterious icon: a symbol with eight arrows pointing out from a central core.”
This symbol shows up on Dugin’s books, and on books by related figures:
That symbol is known as the Symbol of Chaos or the chaosphere. And it’s generally held to have been invented by Michael Moorcock in the 1960s, in the Elric books.
I drew it on a piece of paper on the kitchen table while thinking over the first Elric stories! Since then people seem to have claimed an ancient ancestry for it just as Deep Purple claimed that Stormbringer was an ancient myth when someone asked them why they'd called their album by that name. ...I drew the eight-arrows first and then I had the single arrow of law later, as I recall. The first person to put the symbol on the shield was Jim Cawthorn, whose early sketches of Elric were superb. The arrows, of course, represent diversity. The single arrow represents the kind of mind who believes there is only one version of the truth.
It was later borrowed as a useful sign by the chaos magicians. Its design has been played with over the decades. The most famous practitioner of chaos magic in comics is of course Grant Morrison, and here’s a bit from the KID ETERNITY book he did with Duncan Fegredo.
And, um:
So, in Traditionalist circles, this symbol, taken from fantasy books and coopted by magicians, now means “thousands of tribes in a strict caste system.” The codeword, which you see alongside the symbol a lot, is “multipolarity.”
Anyway, I’m reading around the edges of this general topic when I come across a new word: archaeofuturism. (1) Using the values of an archaic and ancestral past to plan for a new future following the (expected by archaeofuturists) catastrophes of the early 21st Century. These expected catastrophes appear to largely circle around replacement theory and anyone in the Global South being, you know, alive. They consider it “a concept of order,” and it therefore seems to share a lot of DNA with Traditionalism.
Archaeofuturism! This is all nuts, right?
Dugin, who appears to have had the ear of Putin for many years, is a Traditionalist. Steve Bannon, who had Trump’s ear, is a Traditionalist. Olavo de Carvalho, a Brazilian philosopher and pundit who had the ear of Brasilan far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, was a Traditionalist. And Dugin, Bannon and Olavo all knew each other. They had differences, but they were all pointing in roughly the same direction, and they all had some level of influence on the leaders of three of the biggest countries on Earth. At the same time.
Please allow me to share one last piece of batshittery from my extensive collection of extracts from this book, regarding foundational Traditionalist Guenon:
René Guénon had in lesser-known texts written about centers of satanic influence—of “counter initiation” that could pull souls away from the Tradition. These are the Seven Towers of the Devil, and none can be found in the West. As Olavo explained with apparent delight: “there is one in Sudan, one in Nigeria, one in Syria, one in Iraq, one in Turkestan (inside the former USSR), and—surprise!—there are two in the Urals, well within Russian territory.”
Olavo left out that in later years of his life, Guénon suspected that there was an additional center of evil located in California…
…if one draws a line between these seven centers on a map, you see the outline of Ursa Major, or the Great Bear constellation. A bear—not only a sign of Russia but also a historic symbol for the warrior caste.
Dugin is presumably out of play since the loss of his daughter. Bannon is now just shouting from the sidelines via his online commentary operation. Olavo, a COVID denier who once helped spread the hoax that Pepsi is sweetened with the cells of aborted foetuses, is dead. (Of COVID.)
People who believed in all this got this close to power at the same time. That whole Trump 1/Putin/Bolsonaro moment was even weirder than we thought it was. There was absolutely a whole weird pulp fiction “secret cult takes over” thread running through it all. I recommend this book immensely. It’s a really easy read, clear and light, it rips along like a thriller and it’s remarkably level-headed and empathetic to boot.
Now: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast, DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM. 2025: FELL: FERAL CITY new printing, THE AUTHORITY Compact Edition
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