It\u2019s often said that we anarchists \u201cbelieve humans are basically good\u201d (as did the Chinese sage Mencius). Some of us, however, doubt the notion of inherent goodness and reject the power of other people over us precisely because we don\u2019t trust the bastards.<\/p>\n
It seems unwise to generalize about anarchist \u201cbeliefs\u201d since some of us are atheists or agnostics, while others might even be Catholics. Of course, a few anarchists love to indulge in the spurious disagreeable and pointless exercise of ex-communicating the differently-faithed amongst their comrades.<\/p>\n
This tendency of anti-authoritarian groupuscules to denounce and exclude each other, however, has always struck me as rather crypto-authoritarian. I\u2019ve always liked the idea of a \u201cplumb-line\u201d anarchism broad enough to cover\u00a0almost<\/em>\u00a0all variants of dogma in a kind of acephalous but loosely \u201cunited front\u201d (or \u201cunion of egoists\u201d as Stirner put it). This umbrella ought to be wide enough to cover \u201cspiritual anarchists\u201d as well as the most inflexible materialists.<\/p>\n Nietzsche famously founded his project on \u201cnothing\u201d \u2014 but ended up having hinted at a kind of moralityless, even godless religion (\u201cZarathustra,\u201d \u201covercoming,\u201d \u201ceternal return,\u201d etc.). In his last \u201cMad Letters\u201d from Turin, he seems to elect himself (anti-) messiah of this faith under the signature \u201cDionysus the Crucified One.\u201d<\/p>\n It turns out that even the axiom \u201cnothing\u201d requires an element of faith, and may lead toward some kind of spiritual or even mystical experience: the self-defined heretic is simply proposing a\u00a0different belief<\/em>. \u201cThe Death of God\u201d is mysteriously followed by the rebirth of \u201cthe gods\u201d \u2014 the pagan deities of polytheism. Thus, Nietzsche proposes the re-paganization of monotheism when he speaks as Christ-Dionysus \u2014 a project first launched in the Renaissance by such heretics and neo-pagans as Gemistho Plethon and Giordano Bruno \u2014 the latter burned at the stake by the Vatican in 1600.<\/p>\n This very task \u2014 the re-paganization of monotheism \u2014 was carried out brilliantly by the African slaves who created Santer\u00eda, Voudoun, Candombl\u00e9, and many other religions in which Christian Saints are identified or syncretized with pagan deities. Chango \u201cis\u201d St. Barbara, for example; Oggun the war-god is Archangel Michael, and might be considered the Roman war god Mars, as well. (See M.A. DeLaTorre,\u00a0Santer\u00eda<\/em>).<\/p>\n The saints are \u201cmasks\u201d for the spirits of the oppressed \u2014 but they are not mere disguises. Many santeristas are\u00a0both<\/em>\u00a0Catholic and Pagan at the same time \u2014 which naturally drives The Church crazy!<\/p>\n As my anthropologist friend Jim Wafer said in\u00a0The Taste of Blood<\/em>, these New World faiths are not exactly \u201copium of the people\u201d (even in the oddly positive and slightly wistful way Marx used that phrase), but rather\u00a0areas of resistance<\/em>\u00a0against malign power. In such religions Dionysus can indeed \u201cbe\u201d Jesus \u2014 or Obbatala Ayagguna \u2014 in a deliberate delirium of pantheism where nothing depends on mere belief because actual trance possession by \u201csantos\u201d (Orishas, Loas) allows everyone present to see, touch and even \u201cbe\u201d the gods themselves.<\/p>\n (Wafer was once hit up for drinks in a bar in Recife by a stranger who turned out to \u201cbe\u201d a minor rum-loving deity.) Moreover \u2014 another Nietzschean point \u2014 these cults value magic over morality \u2014 and believe in gods even for queers, thieves, witches, gamblers, etc.<\/p>\n Oscar Wilde was first to notice the profound likeness of anarchism and Taoism which structurally is an acephalous congeries of polytheist (pagan) sects, with a tendency toward heterodoxy and non-authoritarian social values.<\/p>\n Obviously some forms of Taoism \u2014 or any pagan system \u2014 have been quite complicit with the State; we might call them Orthodoxies, and in this sense forerunners of monotheism. But the pagan spirit always includes an anarchic element too \u2014 a Paleolithic resistance to the State\/Church and its hierarchies. Paganism simply creates new cults, or takes old ones underground, cults that are and must be heretical to the ruling Consensus. (Thus, old European paganism \u201csurvived\u201d as medieval witchcraft, and so on.)<\/p>\n In classical Rome, the oriental Hellenistic mystery cults, magical syncretisms of Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian and even Indian pantheons and rituals, threatened the traditional and Imperial order. One of these cults, a Jewish heresy, actually succeeded in \u201coverthrowing\u201d Classical paganism.<\/p>\n I suspect that a similar dialectic can be seen at work in 21st<\/sup>\u00a0century USA with its \u201cImperium\u201d complex, its 60 per cent churchgoing citizenry, its electronic \u201cbread and circuses,\u201d its money-based consciousness, etc.<\/p>\n A mass of oriental and New Age \u201cmystery cults\u201d continue to proliferate and morph into new forms, providing (as a whole) a kind of popular heterodoxy or pagan-like congeries of sects, some of them inherenty dangerous to central authority and capitalist technopathocracy. Indeed, various sorts of spiritual anarchism could be mentioned here as part of the spectrum.<\/p>\n I\u2019m proposing that fascist and fundamentalist cults are not to be confused with the non-authoritarian spiritual tendencies represented by authentic neo-shamanism, psychedelic or \u201centheogenic\u201d spirituality, the American \u201creligion of Nature\u201d according to anarchists like Thoreau, sharing many concerns and mythemes with Green Anarchy and Primitivism, tribalism, ecological resistance, Native American attitudes toward Nature … even with Rainbow and Burning Man festivalism.<\/p>\n Here in the Catskills, we\u2019ve had everything from Krishnamurti to the Dalai Lama, Hasidism to Communism, Buddhism, postindustrial agriculture and Slow Food, hippy communes of the \u2018Sixties \u2014 Tim Leary-swami upon pandit, Wiccan upon druid \u2014 sufis and yogis \u2014 a landscape ripe for syncretism and spiritual universalism, ready to become a \u201cburnt-over district\u201d of mystic\u00a0enthousiasmos<\/em>\u00a0for green revolution, if only some spark would set off a torch \u2014 or so one might dream.<\/p>\n In the context of the\u00a0belief<\/em>\u00a0I\u2019m envisioning I would situate Walter Benjamin\u2019s notion of the\u00a0Profane Illumination<\/em>. How, he asks, can spiritual experience be guaranteed outside the context of \u201creligion\u201d or even of \u201cbelief?\u201d<\/p>\n Part marxist, part anarchist, part Kabbalist, he carried on the old German Romantic quest for a re-paganization of monotheism \u201cby any means necessary,\u201d including heresy, magic, poetry, hashish…. Religion has stolen and suppressed the \u201cefficacious sacrament\u201d from the elder shamans, wizards and wisewomen \u2014 and the Revolution must restore it.<\/p>\n Recenty, the idea of an historical Romantic and even Occultist Left has gained wide acceptance and no longer needs to be defended. Bruno\u2019s statue in the \u201cFlowery Field\u201d where he died remains an icon for the freethinkers and rebels of Rome, who keep it decked in red flowers. The alchemist Paracelsus sided with the Peasants in their uprising against the Lutheran nobility.<\/p>\n An Emersonian reading of German Romanticism (especially Novalis) might interpret its \u201cfirst thoughts; best thoughts\u201d as seed and fruit of Revolution. William Blake is a radical heretical institution unto himself. Leftwing French Romanticism (and Occultism) give birth to a Charles Fourier, a Nerval, a Rimbaud. This deep tradition of \u201cRomantic Revolution\u201d should be added to the consideration of any possible anarchist spirituality.<\/p>\n The mystics claim that \u201cbelief\u201d is delusion; only experience grants certainty, whereupon mere faith is no longer required. They may even come to defend mystical or spiritual (self)liberation against the oppression of\u00a0organized religion<\/em>. Blake urges everybody to get a system of their own and not to be a slave to someone else\u2019s \u2014 especially not \u201cThe Church\u2019s.\u201d And, G. de Nerval, who had a pet lobster named Thibault which he took for walks in the Palais Royal gardens in Paris on the end of a blue silk ribbon, on being accused of lacking any religion, said, \u201cWhat? Me, no religion? Why, I have at least seventeen of them!\u201d<\/p>\n In conclusion: any liberatory belief system, even the most libertarian (or libertine), can be flipped 180 degrees into a rigid dogma \u2014 even anarchism (as witness the case of the late Murray Bookchin). Conversely, even within the most religious of religions the natural human desire for freedom can carve out secret spaces of resistance (as witness the Brethren of the Free Spirit, or certain dervish sects).<\/p>\n