Pages 3-69

For the purpose of this study of Conspiracy, focused on the ancient with a destination beyond the present, it is useful to include a science-fiction story by the most brilliant fiction/nonfiction mind of the 20th Century. Writing in the 1970s, when Conspiracy as a means of governance came obviously to the forefront to every truly-thinking person, to be denied only by the 95% of humans that occupy the feed herd of bought and sold souls, Ernst Junger, painted a fantasy Nation called Eumeswil. Eumeswil, a minor polity, has for a backdrop an undefined world of modern politics and ideology conjoined with Late Medieval myth, geography and ethnology. It is very much like the Urth, presented only from the viewpoint of Nessus, the City of the Autarch, in Gene Wolfe’s brilliant The Book of the New Sun. We have in these two works, a projection of Late Modernity as Post Modernity Dawns uneasily in the reflective mind of the time. Both of these works were written by distinguished combat infantrymen who had survived the machine wars of mass annihilation of the early and mid 20th Century.

Junger’s book is less a story and more a coded tutorial for the un-machined man seeking to survive Postmodernity. The book is broken into 6 parts and an epilogue. Parts 5, 6 and E will be covered in my 5th summary.

Part 1 introduces Manuel Venator, waiter upon the Tyrant, a ruler named The Condor, who remains a shadowy figure thus deep into the account. Part 1 is titled The Teachers. Manuel, renamed from Martin by his master The Condor, is an academic and a self-described Anarch. Part of the vetting process was to be forced to take powerful drugs and to be questioned while in an altered state.

His teachers are first, Vigo, the historian, whose history is the same as ours up until the early modern era. Secondly is Bruno, the philosopher. Thirdly is Thofern the linguist, who is beside himself over the degradation of language. Among Manuel’s duty’s, is the psychological protection of his brilliant though foolish teacher, Vigo, who proposes so many observations that he draws attackers from the henpecking order of academia.

The Condor seems to want Manuel as his waiter, or steward, responsible for also waiting on guests, due to a desire to be placed in historical context and a need for a counterpart, an attendant that is not vested in the power struggle, in ideology, but rather a servant that sees much more than would be apparent to a yes man or fanatic supporter. The tyrant is wise, knowing he needs an opposite.

Before relating very brief but insightful life experiences, Manuel, who has consented to his Christian name of pagan origin, Martin, after Mars, being altered, presents to the reader his moral, personal and social compass. His self-dictates, as an Anarch number 15, so far as I have gleaned from my second reading of this protagonistic introduction.

One begins on page 3 with a caution that the “will” is not all but part of a life course, that awareness is the prime necessity for the will surviving in the dehumanizing matrix of Modernity.

In part 5, on page 25, the discipline of the anarch begins to be described clearly.

-1. He knows more than he embodies or teaches, keeping perilous knowledge to himself, for his “soliloquies, his nights.”

-2. The anarch, must be, and must behave as, a “general,” facing the perils of a military campaign.

-3. A wise man trying to present truth to the common mind is like a rich man flashing money in a dive bar, unappreciated and in needless peril of violence.

-4. Enthusiasm is held suspect by those in power, especially those stamped with the same ideological brand.

-5. The anarchic is at the base of each human, even if unknown to that person, and can erupt like lava, to kill or liberate him.

-6. “Love is anarchic, marriage is not. The warrior is anarchic, the soldier is not. Manslaughter is anarchic, murder is not. Christ is anarchic, Saint Paul is not… the free human being is anarchic, the antichrist is not.”

[Pay attention dissident patriots.]

-7. “The anarch can lead a lonesome existence; the anarchist is sociable and must get together with peers.”

-8. “The anarchist’s hazy idealism, his goodness without sympathy or else his sympathy without goodness, makes him serviceable in many ways and also useful to the police.”

-9. “The anarchist is dependent, both in his unclear desires and on the powers that be. He trails the powerful man in his shadow…” [Even if he hates him, especially so if he opposes his course, ever the follower.]

-10. “...the monarch wants to rule many, nay, all people; the anarch only himself.”

-11. “I serve the Condor, who is a tyrant—that is his function, just as mine is to be his steward; both of us can retreat to substance; to human nature in its nameless condition.” [Withdrawing inwardly for a reprieve form pure mechanical function in the service of the machine of society, for the monarch or tyrant serve this machine more than thousands of lesser slaves.]

-12. “Although an anarch, I am not anti authoritarian. Quite the opposite: I need authority, although I do not believe in it.” [Rendering unto Caesar is here implied.]

[Some reflections of social life in the hierarchy display the value of the anarch to that system. Whose higher functionaries are myopically obsessed with function and are prone to fail in identification of context.]

-13. Manuel exposes himself as mercenary out of necessity, in order to maintain his inner freedom, to the point of treating affection and familial connection with a “sidestep.” [This reader has experienced this familial disengagement due to my failure to submit to more materially successful family members as a supplicant. Manuel refers to his birth father as his “genitor,” and does not value that blood connection as much as his spiritual connections to a mentor. I have experienced this with my father and my sons. It is not easy. ‘Welcome to the world of pure function as a soul with human compunction,’ whispers Ernst out of the past.]

-14. “As an historian, I am skeptical; as an anarch, I am on my guard. This contributes to my well being, even to my sense of humor.”

[An extensive anecdote concerning police work, corruption and crime in the port city implied as the capital of Eumeswil, a realm formerly run by tribunes of the people and now his boss, is related prior to the conclusion of Martin’s inner compass when operating as Manuel. Eumeswil blooms as a free city alike to a port of The Hansiatic League, but located in Holland, or Italy, or Iberia, somehow surviving into Modernity, to the point of Manuel being unsure if his nation borders on the Atlantic or Middle Sea.]

-15. “… since in Eumeswil we live in a city where nothing seems real anymore and everything seems possible.”

With that passage, the author brings us into any of the thousands of great cities of Western Modernity, its countryside reserved for the visitations of outsider elites, menaced by external Asiatic powers, nettled by misunderstood myths, the rampant or buried ghosts of cast down Faith, and the primal perils of the tropical mind to which rulers of the north and middle latitudes are hypnotically drawn.

This thinly veiled handbook for navigating declining Modernity, in all of its hedonistic hysteria, is of great value to this study on the ongoing Conspiracy against Humanity, conducted from within our bodies politic, economic, and even esoteric. Eumeswil is not an entertaining read, but is not too plodding to keep the reader from further investigation. If it puts you to sleep, try Gene Wolf’s Shadow of the Torturer.