What's up with the Compasses? Are Masonic Symbols Occult?

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If there is one potential problem with the occult that most anyone can agree on, it would be the dyscivic effects of occult groups in positions of power. Not the wacky wiccans so much as the dark symbolism that seems to hover around the global elites. Regardless of your own beliefs, it should be obvious that people of influence bonding around the ritual acquisition of power by any means necessary may not be the best thing for a society. One group that comes up a lot in these discussions are the Freemasons, an 18th century society with medieval roots. They are hard to pin down - opinions range from a fraternal order to the backbone of the Illumnati - but their symbols are well known. Let's look into that compass and square and see what it means. 

From Darkness to Light, 1887, Freemason Print from by the Petibone Bros. MFG. Co. Cincinatti, Fraternity Publishers, Military Band and Society Goods

The compass and square are front and center in this print. Masonic prints like this would be owned by new members, to plot out a symbolic path from initiation as a Master Mason through the ranks.  The spaces recording new ranks are visible.

This is the journey from the darkness of the uninitiated to the light of Masonic illumination.

They appear on Masonic aprons, the most prized of the member's symbolic possessions. Here is a minimalist one and a fancier one. 

Speaking of influence, here's one of George Washington's aprons, courtesy of Mt. Vernon. It is believed to have been a gift from Lafayette.

And a 19th-century print with Brother Washington in his apron and holding trowel. Freemasonry was the norm among the founding Fathers.





















You can see from just these few pictures that Freemasons use a large number of symbols to communicate their ideas. Many of these are quite old, and add to the mystery around this group. The meanings are not secret - Masonic sites include keys to the symbolism. But it is where the symbols come from and what is implied by their use that is worth looking at. 

Slav Nedev, Masonic Landscape 2, 2001, watercolor, 23.6 x 19 x 0.1 cm


















But is it occult?

There are some terms to clear up first. Occult first appears in English in the 16th century to refer to things that are beyond the understanding of ordinary knowledge. At some point this splits into "occult", meaning invoking unknown forces, as in sorcery or devilry, and "esoteric" meaning unknown secrets that you are initiated in. As you can guess form the definitions, there is a lot of room for overlap. This is because when the occult was first defined, the natural and supernatural worlds were not seen as distinct as they are now. So are the Freemasons occult or esoteric? According to an extensively researched piece by one of their own brothers, their hidden knowledge is esoteric, meaning that not supernatural. But the same author acknowledges that outright occultism has been practiced by many influential Masons, including Éliphas Lévi, the occultist who came up with the now-standard image of Baphomet.

Éliphas Lévi, Baphomet, frontispiece to his Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, 1854

Lévi is a great example of what makes Masonry difficult to analyze. He claims that the demon dates back at least to the Medieval Templars, but there is no historical evidence for that at all. The ideas symbolized are old, but it appears that this "ancient" idol is a 19th-century fantasy.

The symbolism of the Baphomet shares some sources with the Freemasons - both involve the search for hidden knowledge - but it is not actually a Masonic symbol. 

See how fuzzy this can be?

So what is it about Masonry that makes it susceptible to legitimate Satanists like Lévi? That brings us back to our compasses.


The Compasses

On the surface level, the compass and the square are easy to explain. These are old symbols of architecture, and the name Freemason is a reference to medieval builders, called masons, who traveled from place to place seeking work. The "free" appears to refer to being outside the control of the city-based craft guilds. 

Exeter Cathedral, 1112-1400, Devon, UK
The idea of architecture as the art of building did not exist in the Middle Ages - builders were builders, and the designers of the great cathedrals were the top of the master mason food chain. At a time when standard measurements were unavailable, "architects" used modular proportions and Euclidean geometry as the bases for their designs. The compass and square make perfect sense for a group looking to connect itself to the history of the mason's art.


But there was a lot more to Medieval architecture than building. A key aspect of Medieval thought - a key aspect of Western civilization actually - was the belief that God's creation is rational. The notion of a consistent, knowable world was the foundation of Western science. Pre-Modern people often illustrated logical relationships geometrically, we see depictions of God holding a compass. 

God as Architect/Builder/Geometer/Craftsman, frontispiece of the Bible moralisée, circa 1220-30, illumination on parchment, 34.4 x 26 cm, Austrian National Library, Codex Vindobonensis 2554, f.1 verso

The use of the compass is clear in this fantastic manuscript.



Here are a few more examples from a website:

Creation Scene from Raoul de Presles' translation of Saint Augustine's De Civitate Dei, circa 1370-80, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS. Français 22913

Here it is again - this time with a book to connect the logic of the compass to the Logos.

Guiard des Moulins, Bible Historiale de Jean de Berry, 1380-90, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS. Français 20090 

This time His other hand makes a gesture of blessing.

Flavius Josèphe, Les Antiquités judaïques, 1410-1420, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Français 247

Here He reaches through the heavens with his compasses to create the earth.









When artists show masons at work in a manuscript like this one...

Masons at work from the Prudentii psychomachia, 1289, manuscript, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS. Latin 15158,  fol. 62r

...the tool is the same.

God and architects create according to their rule. Human geometry is a symbol of the Logos, or rational divine will that orders creation.








This is nothing occultist about this. The creation of man in God's image is part of a rational cosmos.

Creation of Eve, 13th century manuscript from the Musee Marmotten, Paris

This picture captures the idea of creation in God's image my making the faces and hair look alike. Humans therefore create, in "the image" of God's creation. This means following the rule of human reason -geometry - as the image of the divine Logos.

















Grand medieval architecture like the Gothic cathedrals are defined by geometry symbolically and practically. The master masons who could design and build huge vaulted stone structures without steel supports needed some amount of engineering knowledge. A cathedral was a stone skeleton with a balanced design that transfered structural forces onto narrow piers. This allowed for the maximum possible space to be turned into windows. Master masons used geometry (they didn't have calculus) to arrive at workable approximations of the force vectors. 

Amiens Cathedral, vaulted ceilings and windows around crossing, 1220-66

Balancing the pressure of the vaults and buttresses made these cathedrals much more stable than they look. As designs, they are pretty much applied geometry.

Peterborough Cathedral, 1118–1237

It wasn't just structural geometry in Medieval architecture - the designs were based on symbolic geometry as well. This could get really complex, but was based off of some simple starting ratios. (For an in-depth analysis of sacred geometry in the Middle Ages and at one cathedral in particular, click here).

The design as well as the structure are governed by geometric logic, just as creation follows the reason of the Logos. Click for diagram info.

Santa María de León Cathedral, 1205-1301, León, Spain

The cathedral becomes a 3D symbol of rational creation, and the windows that the rational construction made possible represent God's glorious light pouring in. 









Geometry mattered, and master masons used their mastery of sacred geometry to mimic the power of divine creation itself. 

Towards the end of the Middle Ages, evidence of organized fraternal groups, or lodges, of masons appears, with rules and charters for initiation. These texts are known together as the Old Charges or the Gothic Constitutions, and represent the foundation stones of modern Freemasonry. It is not surprising that masons would organize - Medieval trades were guild-based and tightly controlled, and Freemasons had no outside affiliation. Their knowledge was also very specialized and, because of its mathematical basis, arcane by Medieval standards. Masons traveled from site to site, so they already tended to be more cosmopolitan than most people - put it together and some sort of society is inevitable. It's the mythology that's curious.

The early sources tell of fantastical imaginary histories that aren't really coherent other than as lessons. The Stone of Foundation was a magic altar in the form of a perfect cube with a perfect triangle inscribed that Adam brought out of Eden. We are warned:

"it must be distinctly understood that all that is said of this Stone of Foundation in Masonry is to be strictly taken in a mythical or allegorical sense.., as a philosophical myth, conveying a most profound and beautiful symbolism."


That symbolism is perfect, simple geometry. 

Another legend tells of pillars with knowledge of sacred geometry inscribed on them that survived the Biblical Flood. These were discovered and transmitted to the west via Greece by Hermes and Pythagoras - not the actual god and philosopher, but quasi-mythical creations designed to fit with this history of the pillars of knowledge. 

The five smaller columns reflect the distillation of this knowledge in the five orders of Classical architecture. 

The same proportions are found in the divine architecture of the Temple of Solomon. The architecture or geometry makes it an image of the Logos or divine knowledge symbolized by the eye.










It's interesting folklore and historical fiction, but what opens it up to the occult? 

The first problem is with the source of the ancient knowledge. Antediluvian (before the Flood) secrets were so appealing because they came from near creation, purer knowledge from when the world was young. But it was knowledge that got Adam and Eve expelled from Eden in the first place. And there is no credible argument for cubic architectural altars coming with him.  

Thomas Cole, Expulsion Moon and Firelight, circa 1828, oil on canvas, 91.4 x 122 cm, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum

The point of the Fall is that there is no going "back" by human means. The idea of Prelapsarian - before the Fall - knowledge is a fallacy in Christian terms, but it is a mainstay in Utopianism.

Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, The Expulsion from the Garden, 1853, from his The Bible in Pictures set.

Don't take it literally,
 warns the quote above, and we can see why! These two weren't taking anything with them.

But if we take it metaphorically, then it is a general symbol for pure knowledge from the dawn of time. Precisely what the Fall made made impossible. As an idea, it means the fantasy of human perfectibility - something empirically ridiculous, regardless of your religious views. 






If the knowledge is just Antediluvian, then it represents the peak of life before the Flood. A way of life that ended with, well, the Flood. 

John Martin, The Deluge, 1834, oil on canvas, 168.3 x 258.4 cm, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven 


Both these are situations from the Bible that the Bible says end catastrophically. But don't take them literally. It's just happenstance that they chose the best known moments of cataclysmic change in the Old Testament. It must also be happenstance that they change the stories in ways that suggest the originals are wrong in their take on the lessons of the Fall and the Flood, and that the Masonic interpreters know the truth. In other words, they want to draw on the Bible for its authority and recognition, but rewrite God's conclusions. Hmmmm... a Biblical framework, but with the authority of the individual replacing that of God. 

That sounds familiar...

Claiming personal desire as the ultimate authority is something basically all occult systems boil down to and is a reflection of the Satanic - or as they often prefer, Luciferian - self-absorption that they share. This picture is mainly drawing on Crowley, but the Baphomet was created by an occultist Mason and the Egyptian symbolism was shared by both. The Freemasons were one of Crowley's inspirations in founding his Order of the Golden Dawn.










This is not to say that the Masons were or are all closet Satanists, but that there were strange and potentially heretical readings of the Bible coming out of their shadowy Medieval origins that lay out knowledge goals that outstrip human limits. We do know that the modern Freemasonry founded in the early 18th century is not Christian - the God who is cited is the God of the Old Testament, and the notion of mathematical knowledge leading to Him is more Kabbalistic than anything else. But the interpretations are not strictly Jewish either. Instead we have a mess of Renaissance history and occultism that expanded the legends of the Old Charges with new ideas about man and the universe.

Reason and the Wheel of Fortune, 16th-century cartoons and devices for tapestries and stained glass, 1501-1600 MS. Français 24461. 

In the humanist thought of the Renaissance. compass and square go from God's hands to the personification of Reason. This isn't exactly contradictory, but it changes the archetype from the divine to the human. 

Think about that for a moment. 





The next post will look at the transformation of the compass of divine creation into the claim that the human mind can uncover absolute truths on its own. The former recognizes that our experience of the universe is rational. The later is opens the path to arrogant power-seeking that welcomes the occult. 

Everything Changes but Nothing Changed... Lessons for Nationalists in Romantic Art and Thought

If you are new to the Band, please see this post for an introduction and overview of the point of this blog. Older posts are in the archive on the right.


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The last post ended at a well-known transition point in general histories of Western civilization – the move from Enlightenment rationalism to Romanticism emotionalism. 

Eugène Delacroix, The Barque of Dante, 1822, oil on canvas, 189 × 246 cm, Louvre, Paris

The Band slogging through Postmodernism The arrangement is classical but the murky, turbulent background, heightened drama, violent movement, and monstrous creatures are all signs of the shift to Romanticism.







General histories need general narratives, and chroniclers have always pointed out cyclical ups and downs. Nowadays we call these “pendulum swings” while pre-moderns pictured a turning wheel, but the idea of going one way then reversing is the same. Overdoing it, then reacting, then overdoing it again is a more objective model for history than “Progress”, but only if we observe that the pendulum doesn’t swing on the same track each time. And even then, where is the "swing" taking place? Does a change in aesthetics transform economics and imperialism? 

Joseph Gandy, A Vision of Sir John Soane's Design for the Rotunda of the Bank of England as a Ruin, 1798, watercolor, 66 x 102 cm, Sir John Soane's Museum, London

Gandy's vision of the Bank of England as a Romantic ruin was just a picture. Soane's headquarters was pulled down, but replaced with a bigger one.




Historical pendulum swings like this treat trends in philosophy, letters, and the arts as indicative of fundamental changes in human attitudes, when they are little more than fluctuations in elite cultural taste. It is true that Beethoven’s swerve ushered in an era of emotionalism in music, philosophical aesthetics did embrace subjectivity, and the elites did show a preference for the same in the arts. On the level of cultural expression, it is easy to see Enlightenment or Neoclassical “rational” modes and attitudes make way for Romantic sentiment. 

There is overlap between popular politics and cultural expression. Politics are downstream from culture. But politics and culture are controlled by financial power. The Bank of England was founded to raise money for war with France then later introduced the monstrous concept of public debt. Central banks are still burdening the future with impossible commitments that serve only to diminish long term national prosperity. Legislatures continue to pander to financial interests and unelected bureaucracies turn public and private into two sides of the same elite coin. 

Lady Jane Lindsay, Sealing of the Bank of England Charter (1694), 1905, from Alice Archer Houblon, The Houblon Family, vol. 1, 1907

This group looks sort of aristocratic. Almost as if the elites are... interconnected.

Anyone who looks at the web of global corporations, centralized media, deep states, or the way legislators magically get wealthy realizes that the opposition between “public” and “private” interests is a joke. Carlin is still prescient (salty language). 


It actually appears that there is some wisdom to be found in Marx if you look hard enough. He was rightfully savaged in an earlier post for his self-contradictory materialist teleology and confusing a crude generalization about industrial relations with ontology, both of which are inane. But set that aside for a moment, ignore the sociological and historic ignorance behind retarded constructs like the proletariat and bourgeoisie, and look at his base/superstructure idea with more intelligent eyes. 

In this system, since the true level of reality is economic (who controls production) and all else a false consciousness to hide and legitimate this "truth",  the only "morality" is oppression and the only value is power. Everything else that you value is secretly a tool of your oppression and must be destroyed to "free" you. This is absurd on the surface - family structures predate society - but remember, the central fallacy of the Enlightenment was to mistake the situational for the universal. There may be some validity in Marx' observation, even if it falls on its face as a law.

What was Marx’ context? He was writing at the end of the Romantic era – the fake secular transcendence is an echo of Romantic spirits of the age, as is his disillusionment with industrial production. The transition from the Enlightenment was recent history - the totalitarian absolutism, blank slate equalism, and false claims about progress carry the stink of that era’s pretty lies. But the Industrial Revolution transformation of society and concentration of wealth and power in limited hands is a constant. 

Luke Fildes, Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward, 1874, oil on canvas, 137.1 x 243.7 cm, Royal Holloway, University of London

This is the society of Dickins and the Victorian reformers, 






If Enlightenment and Romanticism are opposite ends of a pendulum, the change is at the level of cultural expression. This is influential, but over time, not right away. Think of this as a “superstructure” that can change as fast as fashion. But the elites of the Industrial Revolution world remain the same – same bankers, industrialists, imperialists, proto-globalists, propagandists. If cultural expression changes like fashion, the “substructure” is the web of institutions, organizations, and information flows required for the fashion industry to exist. One changes all the time, the other not so much. 

Eugène Delacroix, Death of Sardanapalus, 1844, oil on canvas, 73.7 × 82.4 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art  

While Romantic decadence eroded the values, sapped the self-confidence, and ultimately degraded the culture of the West... 

Bernhard Gillam, The protectors of our Industries, published by Keppler & Schwarzmann, February 7, 1883, chromolithograph showing Cyrus Field, Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Russell Sage, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC


...the elites piled up money and waged war. 




Marx understood the importance of economic power in the modern world but whiffed mightily on the solution. His conception was too historically limited to be useful, and he misunderstood the nature of that power to corrupt and shift allegiances. Think how amorphous the globalist networks are – how insidiously intertwined compared to the childlike simplicity of Marx’s binary class structure.

Cartoon by Robert Minor St. Louis Post-Dispatch (1911) showing Karl Marx with Wall Street financiers: Morgan partner George Perkins, J.P. Morgan, John Ryan of National City Bank, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. Teddy Roosevelt, leader of the Progressive Party, is in the background.

By their fruits ye shall know them...

International bankers funded the Bolshevik revolution.

The only immediate impact Romanticism had on the economic power substructure was that fake nationalism was sold with appeals to emotion as well as progress and the elite bought different kinds of paintings. The longer-term effects were largely orchestrated - even the Romantic concept of the spirit of history became the foundation of a self-serving Postmodern historiography denying that individuals have influence. That's Whiggish, harrumphed the globalists, as they pushed their Death of the Author and other myths about the generative power of mystical historical forces. All the while the underwriters individually worked for social change by funding propaganda and revolution. Curious.

Ben Garrison, Behind the Social Justice Warrior Bullhorn


Garrison's cartoon is basically a diagram of the modern globalist gaslighting. All that is missing is the lying media and tech elites. 

Thomas Nast, Imperialism, 1885, The World's Plunderers. Germany, England, and Russia grab what they can of Africa and Asia

It's also curious how globalist educators and academics pretend that Imperialism was the result of some mysterious rise in "dangerous" nationalist sentiment, rather than the on-going power games of a globalist elite. Hint: it wasn't "the people" who were grabbing what they could.

It's almost like they want to blame their victims for their sins...

The lesson for today’s nationalists is that victories on the cultural level mean little if the underlying systems of cultural control maintain their dominance. 

The Cultural Level

Philosophically, Kant is the backbone of Romantic subjectivity and the most significant figure in early modern intellectual history for recognizing human conceptual limits in a new way. 

Let's revisit a diagram from a previous post:

Kant argued that our perception of the world is made of sense impressions that we combine into thoughts and ideas in our minds. The phenomenal reality that we see however is just a projection of the noumenal – the true nature of things, ultimate reality, being qua being – that cannot be apprehended directly. 

Other seminal thinkers had acknowledged that ultimate reality was beyond knowing. Aristotle followed the logic of temporal causality to an ultimate source that cannot be characterized in terms of a reality that it extends. Aquinas followed similar reasoning, and concluded that ultimate reality can only be reached by faith. Newton devised what looked like a perpetual motion machine to model cosmic movement but sought for first causes in the Bible. What is original about Kant is that he explicitly located the source of the limits in internal processes of perception and cognition. It is not so much an ontological problem – the impossibility of the finite or temporal “grasping” the infinite or eternal – as a mental one. The way we gather and process information is inherently limited that preclude the possibility of reaching Truth. 

Thomas Cole, The Pilgrim of the Cross at the End of His Journey (study for The Cross and the World series), ca. 1846-48, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC

 To a Christian, this is obvious – we see through a glass darkly in a fallen world. But a culture drunk on Enlightenment of reason had no room to follow Newton or Aquinas on the path of faith. 

What should have spelled the end of fake philosophical absolutisms just saw absolute reason replaced with absolute subjectivity.

Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans, 1775-78, near Chaux, France

Reality is a clock: reason is king!

becomes

John Atkinson Grimshaw, Shipping on the Clyde, 1881, oil on cardboard, 305 x 51 cm, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum

Reality is subjective: feelings are king!

Notice the settings - despite the "shift" from rationalism to Romanticism, Grimshaw's magical painting reveals a century of steady Industrial Revolution economic growth. The underlying power systems continue. 

There is a loose similarity between the Enlightenment/Romanticism relationship and the Modernism/ Postmodernism one. Both pretend to reject absolutisms – rationalism and structuralism respectively – and make the same fallacy doing so. 

Jan Matejko, Astronomer Copernicus, or Conversations with God, 1872, oil on canvas, 221 x 315 cm, Jagiellonian University Museum, Kraków

The only epistemologically legitimate corrective to fake certainty is empiricism – accepting our finitude, recognizing that ultimate reality is beyond apprehension, and carefully building out from what is knowable. 





Exposing the falsehood of rationalism ought to have led to a rethinking of the deep structures built on these dishonest assumptions, or it would if the mouthpieces of Postmodernism or Romanticism were intellectually honest. Instead, both replace fake certainty about reason with fake certainty about subjectivity and feelings while the deep structures roll on. Of course they are not the same, so let's take a closer look at Enlightenment emotionalism.

Romanticism was not a single definable thing like a school of thought or artistic movement. It is best understood as a group of reactions to the Enlightenment that take different shapes, but turn away from the cult of absolute reason. The common thread is a focus on feelings - moods, impressions, inexpressible longings - things left out of Enlightenment thought and culture. The solipsistic endpoint is obvious.

Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781, oil on canvas, 101.6 × 127 cm, Detroit Institute of Arts

Romanticism is reactionary, in that it is not rationalistic or Classical. This painting is a Romantic pioneer, given its early date for it's themes of unconscious fears and dark eroticism. The lack of subject clarity and use of demonic or folkloric imagery also break with Classical conventions.

Francisco Goya, Witches' Flight, 1797-8, oil on canvas, 43.5 × 30.5 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid

This includes the dark, violent eroticism and occultism so beloved of the left. 

Caspar David Friedrich, Cairn in the Snow, 1807, oil on canvas,  61 x 80 cm, National Gallery of Norway

Romantic landscape. The trees and hard weather are German, and the cairn references the prehistory of northern Europe. The misty mysterious background is very different from the clear even light of a Classical landscape.

Johan Christian Dahl, Mother and Child by the Sea, 1830, oil on canvas, 15.9 x 20.6 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Figures in landscapes add to the mood more than tell a clear story.

What was important was feeling, or the irrational - rhetoric over dialectic. Taken to an extreme, the Romantic landscape chased the sublime. The sublime was popular in the aesthetics of the era, and described a feeling too grand or awesome for words. Magnificent scenery and weather with the right drama and light could evoke feelings of awe and reverence that border on the supernatural. This is not a coincidence.

Albert Bierstadt, Sunset In The Rockies, 1866, oil on canvas, 66.04 x 91.44 cm, Private collection


This next point is based on empirical observation rather than logic, and some may disagree, which is fine. The Band believes that humans possess an observable desire for transcendence or the divine. Every culture going back to prehistory has some religious/ spiritual/ mythological traditions, and every religion has a mystical side of some sort. There is even an evolutionary argument – the groups that believed in something greater were willing to sacrifice and accept external structure, giving them a competitive advantage. Whatever your perspective, the evidence tells us that humans are drawn to something greater. Not everyone, but it is a general enough tendency to be considered an innate impulse.

But the legacy of fake rationalism had removed religion from learned culture, blocking a return to faith. Instead, the yearning for transcendence is misdirected into pantheistic absurdities like the sublime, where seeing something cool is supposed to quell metaphysical desire. 

The left love the bait and switch where they give you the same label, but the substance is gone. No God, but have some metaphysically incoherent fake pantheism. See, it looks the same...










We can personify the link between the "sublime" Romantic landscape and Enlightenment idiocy with Rousseau – one of the all-time great assholes in the Western tradition. Since having to read him closely makes you dumber, the Band will limit coverage to his concept that uncultured human nature is inherently good and benevolent, and civilization is the cause of all social ills. In a breathtakingly stupid diatribe, this proto-Marxist opened his screed against private property by actually stating: 

Notice that the parasite omits the fruits of your labor and ingenuity.  

This myth of innate human benevolence has proven destructive beyond words but impossible to get rid of, precisely because it is objectively untrue. An obvious untruth will be dismissed by an empirical thinker out of hand - it can only be accepted on faith, if faith is defined as advocacy of observable falsehood. But like any successful cult, or Postmodernism, the lie is compelling because the adherents so want it to be true, and the Philosopher’s/ leader’s Name gives them the cover to ignore their lying eyes. Committing to something obviously false makes the compulsion to ignore reality all the stronger.

Joseph Wright of Derby, Sir Brooke Boothby, 1781, oil on canvas, 148.6 x 207.6 cm, Tate, London

Sir Brooke published the first edition of Rousseau's Dialogues. This portrait reveals the connection between a benevolent state of nature, a high-trust secure society, and manicured grounds. The homoeroticism is optional.

The left has always believed that words and pictures are reality.



Declaring something objectively false to be an absolute law places Rousseau among his Enlightenment comtemporaries intellectually, but his particular inanity got staying power from the appeal to nature. For self-indulgent Romantic emotionalists, the idea of a fundamentally good primitive man - the Noble Savage to use a well-known oxymoron, fit nicely with images of sublime nature to fuel a critique of industrial modernism. At its extreme, this metastasizes into the "peasant" devastation of the Khmer Rouge. There are plenty of reasons to critique the Industrial Revolution, but the innate goodness of mankind isn’t one of them.

Käthe Kollwitz, Uprising, 1899, etching, drypoint, and aquatint; seventh state of nine, 29.5 x 32.1 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Whether coming from Enlightenment rationalism or Romantic emotionalism, the left-hand path inevitably leads to chaos and slaughter. 

Daughter of Gaia by Kerry Darlington

Rousseau’s legacy of blank slate equalism and fake pantheistic metaphysics are the dueling banjos of the emotional idealist side of the globalist left. His mindless idealism is a major thread in the various back to the land faux curatives for human nature.

If you just emote hard enough, you can speak it into existence. 

Or not. Stock photo from Woodstock, where a group of Boomers went back to the garden and changed everything or something.

Looks like they missed human self-interest.









Time also raised similar feelings of insignificance in the face of profundity. The ancient world was no longer a perpetual beacon of timeless values but a lesson in the awesome power of time to bring the mightiest low. Dust in the wind indeed. 

Wijnand Nuijen, River Landscape with Ruin, 1838, oil on canvas, 99 x 141.5 cm, Rijksmuseum 

Romantic artists loved ruins, and if the landscape seemed sublime, all the better.











Romantic nationalism was a different emotional reaction to a sublime reverence for the land than the false equalism and benevolence of Rousseau, at least until it was coopted into fake patriotism by the elites. This was based on the deep felt connection between a people and their homeland that develops organically over many centuries.  

Caspar David Friedrich, Old Heroes' Graves, 1812, 49.5 × 70.5 cm, Kunsthalle, Hamburg

Time, nature, and a people in one picture. 

In America, Romantic culture and elite substructure team up in the fake national metaphysics of melting pots and Manifest Destinies examined in the next post. 

In Europe, the rise of Romantic nationalism over an elite substructure is informative for nationalists pushing back against globalism today. The change takes place on the symbolic/cultural level, but the economic elites and political institutions remain in control. Organic patriotic sentiment is manipulated into fake national cults to impel cooperation, or at least passivity, in the masses. God, king, and country, the credo went, not God, king, and nation.

Caspar David Friedrich, Winter Landscape with a Church, 1811, oil on canvas, 33 x 45 cm, Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte
Friedrich was the rare Christian Romantic artist, and this painting captures what should have been the Romantic nationalist vision - the sublime landscape, the German trees in the foreground, and the Christian faith, both in the act of folk piety in the foreground and in the magnificent Gothic church adding meaning to the suggestive background.

Gothic brings us back to our architectural journey, which we left off at the end of Enlightenment idealism and the dawning awareness that Classical styles are just subjective choices. And subjectivity means Romanticism. The general historical narrative is that architecture was pushed by nationalistic impulses to reject foreign Classical styles for culturally meaningful ones, bringing on the Gothic Revival. While this is true for the history of high style, we will see once again that reality below the surface was quite different. 

Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Castle by the River, 1824, oil on canvas, 70 x  94 cm, Alte Nationalgalerie

When we last saw Schinkel, he was designing austere Greek Revival buildings for a future German capital. Here, the sublime landscape and Gothic buildings express this nationalist spirit in purely German terms. 

The misdirection of the yearning for transcendence into land, nation, and tradition is obvious.

Caspar David Friedrich, Eldena, circa 1825, oil on canvas, 35 x 49 cm, Alte Nationalgalerie

But tradition is only one pillar of the West. Cut off from faith, the metaphysics of Romantic nationalism were imaginary pantheisms and fake spirits. These proved bloodless and the nationalist sentiment easily corrupted by the elites.

Memorial to the Battle of Minden (1759), 1859, Minden, Germany

Gothic Revival used for a patriotic monument. German people, German architectural heritage, and German sacrifice. 

One of the most perverse crimes of the elites was to channel the love for nation into the Great Power wars of imperialist nation-states.

Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin, Palace of Westminster, 1840-76, London

Pierre Prévost, Palace of Westminster, detail from Panoramic View of London, from the Tower of St. Margaret's Church, Westminster, 1815, roughly 20', watercolour and bodycolour over pencil on multiple sheets of paper laid onto canvas, 85 x 605 cm 

The decision to rebuild the British Parliament in a Gothic style rather than the old Classical one is seen as a sign of this Gothic Revival nationalism.











It is important to remember that this interest in Gothic forms is not driven by a spiritual awakening as much as an effort to evoke cultural heritage.

Arthur Rackham, Brünnhilde, from Richard Wagner's The Rhinegold & the Valkyrie, London: William Heinemann, 1910, p. 102. 

In Germany, the same Romantic nationalist spirit seen in Wagner's use of Germanic mythology... 

Cologne Cathedral, 1248-1473; 1842-1880, Cologne Germany

...drove the completion of Christian monuments like Cologne Cathedral.

Nikolai Leontyevich Benoit, New Peterhof railstation building, 1857, Saint Petersburg

Celebrating the Gothic heritage of Russia with a handsome...


Wait! Russia didn't have a Gothic heritage...






The Gothic Revival goes on to join the other styles in the grab-bag of subjective architectural choices. Style without substance will tend to do that.

Walter Granville, Calcutta High Court, 1872, Kolkata, India 

Nothing says Indian tradition like the Gothic Revival. The easy answer is imperialism, but even that gives it credit for too much meaning. The building was based on a Belgian model, not a English one, meaning it didn't represent British tradition either. 

It's just taste.





Buildings like any of these Gothic Revival examples are showpieces - important projects that were intended to make an impression, and still look impressive today. They reflect the tastes and vision of the elite, and the symbolic message that they wanted to transmit. On this level, Classicism can give way to Gothic as the circumstances require. But we should know by now that the elites are hypocritical and dishonest, and the national mythologies that they create bloodless and fake. 

If high-style showcase architecture is what the elites were "saying" what sort of architecture were they "doing"?

David Bellhouse and William Fairbairn, Brunswick Mill, circa 1840, Manchester

The Industrial Revolution brought industrial architecture - buildings that weren't much to look at but could be built economically, quickly, and to purpose. 

Marshall's Mills, Holbeck, from the Penny Magazine Supplement, December 1843, published in The Story of Leeds by J. S. Fletcher, 1919

Iron framing made for efficient modular construction.

Stock photos of Industrial Revolution housing. 

In a world increasingly run by financiers, would attractive showcase design be the norm, or the cheap utilitarian approach?

Not so Romantic. A bit more significant that an old German church or an Indian court when it comes to the reality of people's lives though.











Even the showcases were industrial fakes. The towers of the British Parliament were iron framed, Structurally, this makes them more like a factory than the old buildings that they masquerade as. Romantic idealists like Ruskin, William Morris, and the Pre-Rephaelite painters and poets dreamed of an authentic neo-Medieval revival as a tonic for the new society of the Industrial revolution. 

They produced some beautiful art...

Sir Edward Burne-Jones, design and figures; William Morris, design and execution, The Attainment: The Vision of the Holy Grail to Sir Galahad, Sir Bors, and Sir Perceval, woven by Morris & Co. 1895-96, wool and silk on cotton warp, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

Lexden Lewis Pocock, The Pond at Merton Abbey or The Pond at William Morris's Works at Merton, after 1881, watercolor, 13.9 x 23.1 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum

Idyllic scene at Morris's Works. Almost back to the garden. Appropriate, since this proved as meaningful as Woodstock in effecting the substructure of economic power.




Why is this a lesson for nationalists? Consider the soaring triumphs of Romantic nationalist feeling. The mysterious ruins, Gothic spires, and sublime homelands. How they must have felt that they were breaking from the shackles of Enlightenment globalism. And what happened?


The next post will cross the Atlantic to America and see the pantomime show in the New World. Early auspices are less than favorable.

Thomas U. Walter, Dome of the Capitol, 1855-66, Washington, DC

America appears to hold fast to the values of it's Neoclassical architecture, but Walter's dome, like the contemporary British Parliament, was iron framed. 

The Classical, like the Gothic, is a pretty shell over an industrial core.








A pretty shell over an industrial core is a good way to leave the so-called change from the Enlightenment into Romanticism. There are some cultural changes, but any force for real change - actual Nationalism rather than the fake nation-state version - is quickly co-opted. Don't believe it? Look inside:

Constantino Brumidi, The Apotheosis of Washington, 1865, dome fresco, 433.3 m2, Capitol Building

What might we find in the dome of a classical temple of industrial nationalism?

An apotheosis. And who is enthroned among the Gods?

Why it's George Washington, the noted mystic and demigod whose heavenly ascent in the year of our...

Not really. It's just the transformation of a historically great man and patriot into the center of a fake national mythology.

And you can't have heaven without Commerce.

You can't make this up.