Introduction
In the context of “The Solar Warrior” trilogy, this first book “Origins, Rise and Decline” appears as an endeavour that allows us to deepen our knowledge with regard to the historical roots of the Solar Warrior figure, which itself corresponds to an always mysterious entity that is expressed in diverse ways depending of the historical and political particularities of a given age and time. The name “Solar Warrior” corresponds to a term by which I have attempted to better describe such force, which fuses the attribute and virtues of the warrior, in addition to the fact that such warlike fight and combat is directed towards a sacred cause, and this cause is always perfectly expressed symbolically in the form of the Sun.
The symbol of the Sun has been recovered because -as explained in more detail in the second book of the collection “The Eclipse”- the birth of a star necessarily implies a series of phenomena that are referred to as neguentropic, which briefly means that the laws of thermodynamics are employed by a directing cosmic force that favours processes of synthesis and resonance that embrace very wide domains. This force or “vital breath” not only appears in the processes of life and creativity, but is also expressed in the phenomena of civilization and culture formation, where the attributes and heroic virtues of men become the necessary means that implement such genesis.
With regard to the process of cultural or civilization forging we´ll never encounter a definitive answer that can wholly respond to the following question: Why are civilizations and cultures formed? And whoever provides an explanation to such question shall always necessarily end up projecting his/her more intimate values within the answer, such as in the case -just to mention one example- of Karl Marx, who by being a paradigmatic son of his times had to necessarily consider that the needs of production and economic activity were the determining forces of such processes. And yet, the forging process of a culture or civilization shall always remain a mystery, even though we can be assured that if there is something that defines all mysteries of life it is essentially its neguentropic character, where the Sun and stars constitute the most magnificent examples.
The latter necessarily implies that the “Solar Warrior”, this is, the synthetic force or “attractor” that “pulls” specific men or groups of men towards the accomplishment of a quest or mission against the determinisms and anarchic forces of a given time and place shall always remain as an inevitable mystery. And however, this doesn't´mean that because such mystery transcends the human rational categorizations that the individual -today as always- has to become powerless when scrutinizing by himself the deep meaning of the mystery. And as an eternal assistance in this task myth, legend and saga always come --in no case consisting of fantastic, childish or arbitrary stories of supposedly “primitive” cultures of hunters-gatherers that were not “evolved” or literate. Rather myth, legend and saga correspond to the language of destinies; that is, they allow the individual whose life resonates with such forging and emerging civilization/culture processes to intimately comprehend his own specific task and place within such process in the case such neguentropic process takes place once again, allowing him to perceive the menaces that necessarily stalk him through such process, and allowing him to perceive through such quest the signs or symbols he has to learn to recognize. This implies that the essential and existential contents of myth cannot be gained by only resorting to academic instruction or purely intellectual formation, since ultimately, it is the actual life of the individual that allows the deciphering of myth. So if we attempt to deeply understand the direction and meaning of our concepts, myth shall become the symbolic construction that shall always serve us as an adequate orientation in such deciphering… Hence, if we aim toward acknowledge, for instance, which is the finality of modern reductionist science or techno-science regarding its cosmic development, it shall be precisely myth, by resonating with our own lives and experiences, that shall provide us the key to the mystery.
Thus, returning to the origins does not necessarily imply returning to the past, but rather returning to myth. According to the aforementioned, any Celtic legend or myth shall always be much more clarifying regarding the ethics and custom of the Celts than any academic or rational speculation based in empiric archaeological remains. This doesn´t mean of course, that such empiricism must be discarded, but that what´s first is first, and the issue of finalities must always prevail when reordering whatever are the means or empiric proof. And precisely in myth can be found embedded the issue of the aims, which is characterized by a “plasticity” and intrinsic irrationality which converts it into a set of contents that can´t have the same meaning for all individuals, due to the simple reason that the particular lives of individuals are never exactly the same.
Thus myth and legend correspond to the golden thread that allows adequate integration of the contents expressed in the whole of the book “Origins, Rise and Decline”. On the other hand, in the case of the exertion of heroic virtue, one can eventually end up arriving at the pinnacle of myth and legend in its strict Solar Imperial character. And at this point it shall be necessary to clarify in the first place that the term imperial employed in this context has practically nothing to do with “imperialisms” nor nothing to do with those connotations that are referred to in order to express a political totalitarian construction. Actually we are referring here to the imperial attribute as an idea, as a force or entelechy -in the Aristotelian sense- capable of causing the centripetal convergence of all human relativity towards a supreme centre or axis. This is why, in this first book of “The Solar Warrior” trilogy it was firmly decided to recover the term Solar Empire in order to symbolically refer to such idea, and to distinguish it from any other versions or conceptions regarding the word empire. The Solar Empire corresponds to a civilizing force that hasn´t left any mark -or we rather are afraid to say none- within official history and documents. In fact, all civilizations are prone to leave behind countless productions in the most diverse domains (economy, art, politics, etc…) and yet the glowing genesis of the Solar Empires is not described anywhere neither in a descriptive nor methodical way, yet it is mysteriously embedded in legend, myth and saga. This is what occurred for instance with the emerging in the origins of the Sacred Roman Empire, the Ancient Empire of Egypt and the Kingdom of Israel.
In truth, way before the start of the predomination in the West of the Abrahamic religions (Christianism, Judaism and Islam) where the individual tends to surrender to a rigid form of morality that obeys the imperatives of a monotheistic god in order to believe in the possibility of a salvation in the afterlife, there existed nonetheless a conception that was diametrically in opposition with regard to the concept of the divine, where the individual in no way is subjected to a god, but rather participates in the divine power through a quest for freedom, and this freedom was linked to an imperial and solar power. According to this idea, men could eventually incarnate the power of divinity and serve as a bridge between the configuring power of the Solar Empire and the realm of men, as in the case of the Solar Kings and Emperors. This idea of the freedom and power of the man who has attained the divine form of power and that is one with it has always been in correspondence to the symbol of the eagle, a regal bird that, such as the case of the Solar Empire, flies with sovereignty and freedom throughout history, while behaving as well very elusively and with distance with regard to the purely human domain, only approaching such domain whenever very seldom the heroic and noble warrior virtues emerge.
This is why, by founding upon these principles, it shall be the Solar Empire that shall determine the direction of all the contents of this book in particular and those of all the other content of the trilogy in general. In addition, the idea of Solar Empire as a form of State shall also allow us to properly frame the metaphysical concept of Being, which is absolutely vital in order to allow the adequate convergence of all partial domains of experience and human knowledge. In truth, one can´t dissociate the symbol of the Sun and that of the eagle in relation to that of the Sun Empire and Being. Ultimately, Being corresponds to a latent force that exists in all forms of life; a force that predisposes a direction to the heroic virtues and self-sacrifices of the human ego, and which becomes necessarily in alignment with true freedom and the macroscopic constitution of the Solar Empire. In all of this, mythological and academic content, in addition to techniques, sciences, religions and multiple specializations are all particularizations or means of expression of such force in specific conditions.
Therefore, the Solar Empire constitutes the one and only finality of men upon earth. Constitutional monarchies, republics, multinationals, imperialists and technocracies all represent posterior degradations of this idea, where man, by serving such degraded forms of State, don´t thrive towards self-dominion, sovereignty and freedom, but rather towards individualist and egotistic degradation. As an eventual intensifier of such degradation of the light of the Solar Empire idea, all forms of monotheistic religions and all ideologies necessarily emerge, which grant the individual an explanation that allows the acceptance of his conditions of life, no longer as a sovereign and free individual, but rather as an individual integrated within a mass or collective where all individuals follow the same aim, an aim that is no longer an actual and homeostatic aim, but rather an artificial and fantastic construction. This degrading separation with regard to the real world at the expense of a quite arbitrary and artificial world is called dualism, that is, a nefarious predisposition that first corrupted the Ancient Kingdom of Israel and that later spread to the entirety of the West as a virus that became accepted as something natural.
Nevertheless, the dualist infection that began to corrode all memory regarding the Solar Empire hadn´t yet completely infected Europe during the times such “virus”, in historical terms, was causing considerable havoc in Israel during the first millennia before Christ. And the latter survival took place because Europe during those times remained essentially as pagan. This term -pagan- is conceived in “Origins, Rise and Decline” in a way that doesn´t resort to the common opposition between paganism and Christianity, nor does it imply a sort of superstitious and emotive valuing of the natural environments, nor in this book is it linked to the sectarian neopagan organizations that practice -still today- “druidic” rites and things of the sort. In this book paganism is rather conceived in a very simple way as a vital opposition and character trait that is opposed to all forms of rigid dualism; this doesn´t entail that paganism doesn´t accept the existence of a supernatural or metaphysical domain, or even the potential of the Solar Empire, but that it is rather naturally predisposed to gain an experience of the material and biological domains as the first foundation for further quests towards the authentic transcendent domains.
Thus, paganism, conceived in the latter way, implies the foundational ethics from which can eventually arise the Solar Warrior and the likely culmination of the Sun Empire by means of the constant exertion of the heroic virtue. And after almost two millennia of degradation and corruption of the Solar Empire idea due to the dualist “virus”, very suddenly there emerged during the Middle-Ages (from the 10th to the 15th century) a revolution in Europe where once again the flourishing of the Solar Empire in the West became an actual possibility, mainly due to the intrinsic paganism existent within Europe during such times.
However, what was written in the previous paragraph can indeed severely shock many readers, since in history classes and T.V documentaries we were taught that Europe during those times was under the Church´s power, and from this perspective it is then logically stated that Europe was then a Christian continent… And yet it is precisely myth that comes to us here and aids our intuition and sensitivity, by communicating to us meanings almost opposed to those that can be reached by logical deduction, since myth perfectly integrates logic, and yet can´t be dominated by logic itself.
This is what occurs in the case of the Grail legend, and all those legends and sagas that, one way or another, and in their purest versions, in diverse and particularized ways express the challenges and aims of the heroic virtue that aspires to the “triggering” of the Solar Empire in historical given conditions. When this mission corresponds to the ultimate aim of such heroic virtue, then we can assure that precisely the Solar Warriors are the individuals who incarnate very rarely such missions within human societies. In the case of the Middle-Ages, the Solar Warrior became incarnated in the Knights Templar, the Knights of Malta, and many other warrior Orders linked to the feudal structure that even reached to the Middle-East, such as the warrior Order of the Nizaris. The Crusades affirmed exteriorly by rigid Christian dualism in a very aggressive and combatant way along wide territorial domains of Europe, yet in the core itself of the Templar Order elite and at a level of the State the ultimate aims began to come into conflict with the specific form of State existent in those times in the West, which was represented by the Church of Rome and the papacy. Deep down -and as shown in depth in this first book of “The Solar Warrior”- a given ethics and noble warrior attitude succeeded in catalysing within some eminent members of the Templar elite the Solar heroic virtue, which in historical terms had been absent for more than two millennia. This heroic Solar virtue, due to its own metaphysical and transcendent power, inevitably caused a powerful menace against the French monarchy, the Church and its representatives, who finally decided to dismantle the attempt of Solar restoration on the part of the Templar Order by means of incarcerating and sacrificing its more eminent representatives in the bonfire.
This sacrificial act, having its highest apogee in the case of the death of the Great Master of the Templar Order, Jacques de Molay, facing Notre-Dame cathedral in 1314, not only changed the history of the West forever, but due to the fact that it took place at the pinnacle of the State, such event managed to decisively modify the ultimate goals men came to serve from that moment on, first favouring individualism by means of the emergence of the merchant classes, and later by decoupling men from the cosmic forces, which remained free however to allow history to keep on going, advancing and progressing.
From that moment on the idea of the Solar Empire became a cursed and heretic idea that became intensively persecuted through the Inquisition when incarnated in its last representatives. Therefore, the Solar idea remained once again eclipsed in all domains, and men in the West remain alone and orphaned when trying to forge by themselves their own progress and destiny. It was precisely amidst this state of affairs that eventually emerged modern science and rationalism, which very seductively insinuated to men that all metaphysical, sacred and Solar principles were not but pure superstition.
Thus, already unable to observe the sacred light, the men of the West could no longer either shed light upon darkness. And yet this darkness began to become manifested in all its power through the SuperDragon; an irrational configuration of deep energies that has always been present in myth and legend, and that is essentially characterized by stimulating the existential fears of men, forcing him to withstand the fear of death and the requirements of any Solar mission and combat with all kind of surrogates and compensations. These compensations progressively constituted the secular religions that derived from Christianity and Protestantism (Puritanism, Calvinism, etc), modern science, ideologies (capitalism, communism, comfort or happiness, work, etc) which later on all fused together until our days, becoming all expressed in a rather veiled yet powerful way in the religion of hyperconsumption and spectacles. And as one could expect, any of the attributes of the legendary and old Solar Warrior -or as Joseph Campbell would pen “the hero of thousand faces” -would also become a product of consumption and entertainment.
Origins, Rise & Decline. A review by Living Traditions
In this first book of “The Solar Warrior” trilogy are thus described in the most synthetic and brief way as possible the emergence of the dark and irrational forces in the psychological layers of the West, causing important disruptions of a subversive and criminal character, just as were for instance the events that took place in the bloody consequences of the French Revolution. And it was at this historical point that by lacking any sacred principles that could direct and illuminate human destinies, since the 18th and 19th century, there would eventually emerge a new form of State that would progressively surpass the State-nation and that would little by little aim to centralize and coordinate human actions in the predatory and depleting direction that characterizes the subversive power of the SuperDragon. This supra-national power configuration would little by little constitute the Techno-System, which since the 19th century began to virtualize all morals, politics, art and human culture by propitiating in its place a cult of performance, development and efficiency. In the books “The Eclipse”, and “A New Hope” of “The Solar Warrior” trilogy shall be delved into more deeply the character of this new Technocratic state and its laws, pointing out the constant link existent between the SuperDragon and the Techno-System.