Beauty is Now an Extinct Star
Tage Lindbom
Excerpted from Lucifer
The Myth of Democracy | 1991 (Eerdmans, 1996)
One of the fundamental assumptions of Luciferian rationalism is that the world is a solid, continuous, law-bound unity, and this unity is the object of human knowledge. This is a mathematical and causal conception, formulated by Newton. But already in the last years of the nineteenth century, physicists began to call into question this picture of the material world; and during the first decades of the new century, the "classical" Newtonian interpretation was no longer considered valid.
Modern particle physics and structural investigations into matter provide a description of empirical reality much more like Heracleitus' panta rei. And as this incessant flux does not provide solid local and causal connections, we cannot reach conclusive answers by structural analysis.
It is not in a "downward" direction that man must seek stable and changeless truth, and even among scientists it is sometimes realized that, conceivably, we have to look inward and upward in this quest. More than one of the great physicists of our time have openly declared that we have to reckon with the possibility of a higher, divine order. Lucifer's power begins to waver.
Man can live indefinitely as consumer of the fruits that the Creator has given him, and he can consume these fruits even when he has forgotten whence they come; he even begins to praise himself, as if he were himself the creator of these goods. But in the beginning of our century we are confronted with the bitter harvest of Luciferism.
Let us consider art, where the first indicators are clear and distinct by the turn of the century. In cubism, for example, art is no longer pictorial. Portraits and landscapes are no longer objects for the artist. The aesthetic, creative process is now purely subjective; it must be purified of all external objects and models.
Now the artist really is a "creator," as everything comes from an inner process, from which all outward sense is eliminated - and beauty first and foremost. In his famous letter to Émile Bernard in 1904, Cézanne writes: "We must interpret nature with cylinders, cones and spheres."
Beyond time and space and beyond all aesthetic rules, the artist is now creating "his own" reality as a model or as models, using geometric figures among other things. Man as artist puts himself in the place of God, for he declares that he creates ex nihilo, from nothing and without models external to himself.
Beauty is now an extinct star. Art becomes aesthetic autism, delivered from every rule or norm. The artist and his product are an aesthetic unity; art is a process of creation, going on only inside of the artist. The artist begins from a tabula rasa, a clean slate; there is no model, there are no canons, no aesthetic standards or legitimate attitudes.
The artist tells us that what he is originating is a creation in its most profound meaning, and that his production is therefore real per se; this reality is in itself the aesthetic dimension. The artist, as personality, is apotheosized, according to Guillaume Apollinaire. In this sense the aesthetic product is said to be "pure," untainted by any outside influence. Art is real because it is identical with the artist himself; art is true because it springs from the artist's personality.
The aesthetic revolution - for it is a revolution - broke out at the beginning of the twentieth century. If we accept literally what the leading theorist of this revolution, Guillaume Apollinaire, says in his little book Les Peintres Cubistes, the essential is that Luciferism is pushed to its utmost consequences. But just as Haeckel's work, Das Weltrasel, derives its epitaph from a ruined philosophy of natural science, the same is true for the aesthetic revolution.
In the apparent moment of triumph, the revolution opens the door to Luciferian destruction. Every rule, every norm, every model, all well-rooted criteria are denied. First and foremost, when beauty is not perceived as an emanation from a divine and archetypal model -- when everything is reduced to the dimensions of the sensual world of man, then this world of unfounded and chaotic impressions and fantasy is very soon emptied of all content and meaning.
The process of destruction whereby the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad, have lost their distinction and meaning happens at an accelerating tempo and expands over vast areas.
James Joyce's Ulysses contains eight hundred pages of senseless monologues and dialogues, senseless in content and in aesthetic significance. The essential as regards this novel is that it destroys everything built up in respect of literary form; and in that destruction of form, the shadow figures we meet in the Joyce novel carry on with their equilibrist nonsense.
Let us consider another domain of art, music. Music is a form of art that acoustically turns the senses toward the heart. Nevertheless, in spite of its freedom from every plastic model, music is bound to time by rhythm; and it is bound to space in its architectonic structure, the linear and vertical tone sequences, melody and harmony.
Music formed its major and minor tonality in its meanderings through Europe's cultural life. The musical revolution also occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century with Arnold Schonberg as its first protagonist, but initially it did not entail a break with every form. Atonalism, however, opens the door to the liquidation of what has been traditionally considered Western music. In the ongoing musical revolution, the leap into a world without norms leads to electronic or industrially produced music, which lacks an essential element of traditional music: namely, the overtones.
Another leap forward is in the multifarious "popular" forms of music, wherein we have to listen to an industrial rattle combined with a rhythmic intensification to the extent of sleep producing monotony, even while it is being elevated acoustically to insupportable levels. In this "popular" and "industrial" form, music has the important function of both stimulating and anesthetizing the listener's nerves and of dulling his higher faculties.
What man as a sensual, biological creature has to offer to art is soon exposed. The paucity, the impoverishing effect of secularization becomes increasingly evident, and it becomes urgent to find new forms for sensory stimulation. The ugly, the distorted, the morbid, the malicious are mobilized; representational art becomes anti-art; the novel becomes anti-novel; musical consonance is replaced by dissonance.
The divine source of art, beauty as the heavenly model for all that is beautiful on earth, is denied and forgotten. The beautiful in creation, all that we look on as a reflection of the beauty of heaven, has no place in the "creative process" as it is envisaged by the Luciferian artists.
When the divine is totally denied, the ineluctable consequence is that there is nothing else to take its place but the spirit of negation, the satanic. And this is what we must now face up to. Anti-art, anti-novel, anti-music -- all have sensual stimulation as their aim, the double purpose being to further weaken vitality and to still anxiety.
In these stimuli, in these encounters with the ugly the distorted, the morbid, the satanic is lurking. The cult of sexuality, for example, can be presented as a hymn to life; but we need to be aware that the biological sex function can become an act of aggression and thereby deeply linked with violence.
Moralists the world over lament the explosion of promiscuous sex and violence; but this is more than a moral problem, for the two are interconnected and can easily be engaged as servants of the satanic. "Rock" music, for example, has the dual function of evoking and stilling tensions, and it can simultaneously lead to devil worship.
The Luciferian lies along the road to the satanic. Secularized man proclaims himself as light-bearer; instead, he is prisoner of the Lord of Darkness. Here the Luciferian "progress" loses its sure sign of victory. Science, for example, faces positivistic crisis; it cannot offer the Archimedian point where we can place our foot and move the world.
And in its final stages, culturalism mobilizes a host of functionaries, administrators, and advisors under the banner of UNESCO to legitimize us as cultural beings.
But the muse has departed, for reality speaks another language. When the inward, spiritual Light is denied, man is no longer disposed to a vision of God's revealed beauty as reflected in creation and as constituting the genuine source of all cultural creation.
The Luciferian process has an inner logic. Power is not sought in an upward direction; on the contrary, the road leads downhill, and along this road are many telltale signs. One these is widespread mental disharmonony. The Luciferian promise is to produce a free, happy, strong, and harmonious man. Instead we encounter neurosis as mass phenomena.
Never before has there been so much talk of "healing," never before so many practitioners of the healing arts. How could it be otherwise?
No one affirms more explicitly the downward direction of attention and consciousness in the modern world than the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, who chose a motto for his Die Traurndeutung (published in English as The Interpretation of Dreams) Virgil's sinister Flecrete si nequeo supero acheronta movebo [4] --
