But there is an even greater usurpation: that which religion—in the narrowest and newest sense of the term—accomplishes by securing for itself control and expertise in matters of the “sacred” and of the “divine”.
The sacred and the divine are matters of faith. This is the truth which has been imposed on Europe of late. Our truth is otherwise: it is better to know that we don't know rather than to believe.
In the contemporary mentality, there is a central point at which the attitudes of materialistic science and religion meet: in an identical renunciation, in an identical pessimism, in an identical agnosticism about the spiritual, declared and methodical in one case, veiled in the other.
The premise of materialistic science is basically that science—in the sense of real, positive and empirical knowledge—can only subsist in what is physical; and that in the non-physical there can be no science, so that the scientific method neglects it and abandons it, by lack of authority, to belief, to the dull and arbitrary abstractions of philosophy, or to the “exigencies” of sentiment and morality.
In addition, religion, insofar as it is focused exclusively on faith and does not admit an esoteric initiatory teaching beyond the profane religion imposed on the masses, or a gnosis beyond pious superstition, ends up with the same renunciation. In fact, one believes only when one does not know and thinks one cannot know. Hence, there is again the same agnosticism of the “positivists” with respect to whatever is not material and gross reality.
We, on the contrary—basing ourselves on a tradition much more ancient and real than the one which can be claimed by the “faith” of Western man, on a tradition which is not proved by doctrines, but by deeds and works of power and clairvoyance—affirm instead the possibility and the concrete reality of what we have called “Wisdom”. We thus assert the possibility of a positive, direct, methodical, empirical knowledge in the “metaphysical” field, just as the one science strives to gain in the physical field, and, just like science, it remains above any moral or philosophical belief of men.
Therefore, in the name of this Wisdom and of those who can attest to this Wisdom, we assert that all those who, within the scope of religious superstitions, by mere aspirations of the “soul”, by dogmas, traditions in the narrowest and most sectarian sense, hallucinations, and acts of blind faith, making themselves custodians of the sacred and of the divine, must be divested of authority and ousted. Those who know and who, insofar as they know and are able—just as those god-men known and venerated by all great ancient traditions—must replace those who “believe”—the blind leading the blind.
And it appears, therefore, that to dwell on that which is anti-Europe and anti-democracy in the cognitive field, and on what is Wisdom, in the order of this very work represents anything but a superfluous deviation: regardless, the identification, which we claim, of the two powers—the sacred and the temporal—in a unique intensely individualised hierarchy, could neither be justified nor understood, and instead the most sinister misunderstandings would be possible.
But, inclusive of what has been examined, our declaration that we intransigent imperialists do not know what to do with a religious hierarchy (as opposed to the Gnostic and initiatory one), is confirmed and justified. In truth, it would add nothing to a material organisation to which perhaps it would be added: it would only add an empty outline of empty forms, the fantasies of faith and sentiment, the degradation into contradictory dogmas and into symbols and rites which are not its own and whose sense it has lost. In sum, it would not produce the higher, solar, reality, testifying to it in potency, that we as pagans mean by spirit, but instead an absolute unreality, an anti-Aryan and anti-Roman rhetoric which is expressed in the same ethical field, favouring everything feminine, “romantic”, and escapist that is lurking in the Western soul.
It is necessarily a surpassing of both religious unrealism and materialised realism by a transcendent, virile, Olympian positivism.