Anarchist Podcasts on Traditionalism and Against the Modern World

“The Empire Never Ended Podcast” has been getting into Traditionalism. Episodes are listed below. The Empire Never Ended describes itself as “a weekly podcast about fascist freaks and Balkan (anti)nationalist history” and is hosted by Boris Mamlëz and Rey Katula. Nothing is known of Mamlëz, which may be a pseudonym, but Katula is an editor of Antipolitika, an anarchist magazine (see here) published in English and “Shtokavian,” a supradialect that functions as a substitute for what used to be called Serbo-Croatian. The podcast is serious but humorous, and membership levels proceed from “Regular OK person” ($5) through “Salaried Antifascist” ($10) and “Western Liberal” (§25) to “German” ($50). But some episodes are free.

The first podcasts were part of the “Kali Yuga Reading Room” series in 2023, starting with René Guénon's The Crisis of the Modern World (#217, here) and proceeding to Julius Evola's Revolt Against the Modern World (#221 and #224, here and here), then Men Among the Ruins (#231, here) and Ride the Tiger (#234, here).

In 2025 came three new podcasts, based on Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: #217 on Guénon (here), #340 on Schuon (here), and #341 (here), returning to Evola.

Enjoy. 

(and thanks to  DV for drawing my attention to these podcasts)

Thought-provoking Piece on Dugin

A thought-provoking piece on Alexander Dugin has appeared in Playing Civilization, a new English-language blog run by Georgy Birger, who describes himself as “a Russian journalist in exile.” It is “The Imaginary West and East of Alexander Dugin,” available here.

Birger argues that “it is [Dugin’s] global connections—not the Slavophile philosophy—that make him valuable to the Kremlin,” and that this is risky for him, as he is “the last of ‘Russian civilization’ fans to support the West in any form [that form being support of the Western Radial Right]. Dugin’s involvement in Western culture marks him as someone who has spent too much time with the enemy.”

Birger also explores what he calls “the imaginary West—a vision of the West Russians have crafted over centuries.” The imaginary West that is currently dominant, created with Dugin’s help, is of “the Western radical right as heroes fighting the tyranny of ‘obsolete’ liberalism.” Dugin’s role in Russia. Birger further argues, is “to observe the West, to understand it, and to explain what is going on to those who cannot be bothered with it while they are making Russia great again.” 

The paradox that  Dugin is a Russian nationalist who likes to lace his speeches and writings with non-Russian terms and names has been pointed out before. Birger's piece takes this line of thought several steps further.

Traditionalism now available in Italian

Mark Sedgwick, Traditionalism: The Radical Project for Restoring Sacred Order (Pelican Books) is now available in Italian, as Tradizionalismo: Verso un nuovo Ordine Mondiale (Rome: Atlantide), €22.

It was the suggestion of Atlantide that the English "sacred order" should become a "new world order" in Italian.

Traditionalism, the myth of Hyperborea, and Masculinity

A new article by Christopher E. Forth traces the development of the myth of Hyperborea and its entanglement with Julius Evola’s views on gender. It is “From the far north to the far right: white masculinity and the myth of Hyperborea,” Journal of Gender Studies online first, https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2025.2576814.

Forth finds the origins of the Hyperborean myth in Pinder, and proceeds from there to Helena Blavatsky and the Traditionalists, particularly Evola, who added a north-south axis to the more standard east-west axis, associating the northern (and thus Hyperborean) with the male and the southern with the female. This pair is then adopted by Alexander Dugin and the far right in general, joining concern at what Guillaume Faye called “devirilization.”

Forth argues that myths such as this are important for understanding the appeal of the far right to many men, and that standard arguments referencing patriarchy and the loss of male white (material) privilege do not fully explain what is going on. He sides with the “growing number of gender scholars who acknowledge that… many males… seek existential or ‘ontological security’… in the semblance of a meaningful and inhabitable future.” Concerns about “the erosion of traditional structures of identity, community, and meaning – structures that necessarily include gender roles and expectations” may be legitimate, even if the responses offered by the far right are not.

The remainder of the article discusses Hyperborean memes and the issue of whether Hyperborea is real or mythical. Here Forth cites Greg Johnson, who welcomes myths because they offer “a concrete vision, a story of who we are and who we wish to become... Myths can inspire collective action to change the world.”

An interesting article. It raises questions about the relationship between Evola’s understanding of gender as primarily spiritual and contemporary understandings that might be described as “biological determinism.” In Revolt Against the Modern World, Evola wrote:

It is not a coincidence for a being to “awaken” to itself in the body of a man or a woman... The physical difference should be viewed as the equivalent of a spiritual difference; hence a being is a man or a woman in a physical way only because a being is either masculine or feminine in a transcendental way; sexual differentiation, far from being an irrelevant factor in relation to the spirit, is the sign that points to a particular vocation and to a distinctive dharma.

Evola’s “particular vocation” and “distinctive dharma” are spiritual, not really what is usually meant today by “gender roles.”

Kathleen Raine, almost a Traditionalist

A new study of the poet Kathleen Raine (1908-2003) has just been published: Jenny Messenger, Kathleen Raine: Classics and Consciousness (Bloomsbury 2025). This supplements the “authorized biography” by Philippa Bernard, No End to Snowdrops: A Biography of Kathleen Raine (Shepheard Walwyn 2012). 

Raine was almost a Traditionalist, and it is interesting to explore how she differed from the Traditionalists on whom this blog focuses. She was a perennialist and worked (in her own words) to “reaffirm the Perennial Philosophy which, like an underground river, has flowed through all civilizations and all ages, and wherever it sends up springs and fountains, Beauty and Wisdom have flowered.” She was well versed in the work of Ananda Coomaraswamy, René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon, and in Messenger’s view built on their work, though it is not explained quite how. She also worked with individual Traditionalists in England. Her Temenos journal (now the Temenos Academy Review) was established with the help of Keith Critchlow, Brian Keeble and Philip Sherrard, all of whom were probably Maryamis. Speakers at her Temenos Academy have included many Traditionalists. Raine also disliked the modern world, and—like many but not all Traditionalists—was a scholar who was somewhat on the margins of the mainstream, since she insisted that the important thing about ancient texts was their meaning for people today, more than their place in the historical context.

Several things make Raine different, however. One is that although she disliked the modern world, she did not systematically attack it or develop a theoretical basis for condemning it. Another is that she admired and studied two (relatively) modern figures, William Blake and W. B. Yeats. Then come her ancient sources: Plato and the Neoplatonists, who the Traditionalists have generally ignored—wrongly, in my view, since the Sufi philosophy that Traditionalists have studied with such attention contains much that is derived from Neoplatonism. As Messenger puts it,

She did not view eastern religions and philosophies as entirely hers, however. Hinduism and Buddhism were not her culture or tradition, she felt. Plato and Plotinus, enfolded within the grand arc of Western civilization, were – despite the fact that the Neoplatonists were not at all ‘western’ and instead were from places like Egypt, Syria and Lebanon.

Finally, Raine was a woman, which—for some reason I have never understand—none of the major figures in the Traditionalist movement have been.