Why is the west suicidal? For a thousand years - from Charlemagne to Napolean - the West had a great deal of love for its systems, its hierarchies, and its cultures. Then suddenly, starting in small cracks in France and Germany and widening until the Second World War, a kind of Spirit of Suicide possessed the west, ignighting in the 1960s into a grand suicide of the west up to this very day. This spirit ignighted youths to adopt strange Hindu aesthetics in the 1960s, then rejected the family through the 1970s, and then cracked and spilled as if it was continually stabbing itself over and over again. Why is the west suicidal?
Materialism is hitting a wall, past whence forth it cannot navigate the fields of the real. For those materialists who adhere to race realism, it was easy to assume Europeans were the “better” race when they ruled the earth and her seas. Such thinking stumbles today, given the state of the west. For those materialists of an egalitarian adherence, the presumption of universal innate values struggles to prove itself before the bearded Afghan, laughing as the most recent empire trying to teach him civilization folds in on itself. The egalitarian’s domain from whence he ruled man is revealed as shaking sand as well.
Were behaviors purely derived from genetics, we would be forced to declare the white race is an inherently suicidal one. Were there any universal human comfort zones in power and politics, we would all be eagerly becoming democracies. But, it turns out people groups create systems and behavioral norms appropriate to their interests. How shall we regard communal man’s immaterial characteristics here? And as before, what happens that drives a people so utterly mad as we who are still sane see today?
In other eras, Spirit was a word often used to describe immaterial characteristics of an individual. When they went insane, one would declare them possessed! They would get a priest or a doctor to tend to them until the foreign thinking was expelled and the subject returned to a thinking considered normal to the tribe. At an individual level, it makes a bit more sense. But what shall we call a commonly shared Spirit? Is it tied to the place? Or the person? Perhaps it is a reverse-Legion, if you will; a Spirit that occupies multiple minds rather than multiple spirits occupying a single mind?
@AlexWisnerArt or @DoodlingPiotr, hard to tell who drew this.
In a recent retrospective, The Academic Agent mentioned the term “Biospirit”. I’m not well read enough on Evola to know if that term comes from midcentury esoteric musings, but it works quite aptly to push away the materialist’s constraints and look behind the veil of tangibles, allowing us to avoid materialist pitfalls in race realism and egalitarianism, while also acknowledging the innate nooversity of man and his relationship to the land that produces regional specializations. Similar concepts have also oscillated in and out of scholarly use throughout different generations, and they will also be considered in this essay.
Overview
The ancients were not ignorant of this regional spirit, nor the geotechnic umbilical chords(sic) tying a people to an enchanting song of its dominion. In some meditations, one finds a hint of debates around the theme, which can be summarized with a question:
When a people move, do their gods move with them, or do they acquire the gods of the lands they move unto?
(for the Christian, you can simply replace gods with spirits or demons)
I’ve heard it said, for example, that parts of the world are cursed. You’ve likely heard of the line from The Princes Bride: “Never get involved in Asian land wars”. Or perhaps your racist uncle has told you that Africa is cursed because of the curse of Ham - that no civilization is possible there because the land is cursed!
But, it seems easy to question these low hanging answers. For instance, Rhodesia’s success, albeit brief. The conclusion to draw here isn’t that the African is incapable of advanced civilization because he lives on cursed land. Rather, that the African is incapable of European civilization - just as the European is incapable of African civilization. In a thousand years, Africans will never remake Rhodesia. And in a thousand years, Rhodesians will never make Zimbabwe. What, exactly, the African would produce as his own advanced civilization has yet to be seen due to constant European meddling, but it probably won’t be liberal democracy. Also, I am not saying one is better or worse either. What is universally better is worth questioning given the sudden turn towards suicide in the west, whose Biospirit appears to demand such self harm and humiliation upon the civilizations it presses upon as well. Such a trend cannot go on forever. Eventually, it will be struck down, either by a foreign people our its own.
For any given people, there exists a deep mythos that produces commonly shared values and judgements - a Biospirit. The in-gathering of this heritage into an operation of hierarchy - what we may call government, family, friend and enemy distinctions - is inherently a part of the place said people dwell in. In short, you cannot bomb the Arab’s Biospirit into Europe’s. Biospirits are not ductile materials - they are not materials at all. The materialists of the west fail in understanding here, continually spending their generational treasures on wasteful exercises in madness. Centuries of colonial history reveal to our contemporary gaze a simple conclusion: Biospirits have wrath; things get very worse when one Biospirit attempts to force itself upon another.
Here it is worth noting that individuals pulled from the teet of their tribal mother, stripped of all connection, and born into a vacuum of the other do seem often capable of adapting and conforming to a foreign Biospirit. However, we are not talking about individuals. We are talking about a conglomerate that is tied to the very land that it works. At the scale of whole people groups, it is essentially a kind of Biospiritual rape. And while individuals can switch biospirits, this appears the exceptions more than the rule. Mind you, some hybridization and exchanges are possible, but the offspring is often an aggressive minority that, like all youths, becomes violent to discover its limits and where it fits in. Also, the trauma that must be inflicted to strip large groups of people from their origins is plainly cruel and unusual. It is unlikely any western idealist would be willing to pull each of the 400,000,000 children of Africa into a cultural vacuum for individualized conformity - and besides, there’s simply not enough Europeans to do that.
Regardless, we can start to create parameters to define a Biospirit. Returning to the thematic question of “When a people move…” we have to start with a premise. We know people influence their lands, so it is a safe bet that land influences a people. Therefore, Biospirits are likely a product of these exchanges. While I lean more so that a people must inevitably abandon the Biospirit of their homeland and remake it in the new lands, I cannot say this happens every time. There are invasive Biospirits just as there are invasive animals. There are enduring Biospirits just as there are enduring species that have barely changed for eons. For instance, when the Dutch Boer settled Rhodesia, it is very clear they were not African. The Lowland Biospirit came with them - that Spirit which had terraformed the lowlands with massive engineering projects and spurred new technologies to build new land. Yet when Rohdesia ended and the Boer scattered, they were clearly no longer just Europeans as well. That Dutch lowland character was either gone, or significantly deformed into something new. Most of the Boer found South Africa and Australia more familiar than their ancestrial Dutch lowlands, unsurprisingly. Some kind of emergent characteristic forms when Dutchmen live in Savanah climates - A Rhodesian Biospirit, which still lingers on in scattered communities to this day. Perhaps one day, to re-emerge.
How shall we consider this? We must conclude that something alltogether alien was forged when Dutchmen began feeling at home on the African plains, and that in their abscense, that entity ceases to be. It cannot be said that there is a material substance we can hold in our hands and declare “This is Rhodesia!”. It’s a spiritual presence that all Rhodesians hold. Therefore, a Biospirit is neither born in the hearts of men in isolate, nor in the intimate material of a land, but in the cohabitation of the two. In working the Earth, the Biospirit is manifested as if it were a generator pumping out volts from its engine’s work on fuel. Humans embellish every color, smell, taste, and experience with some conscious element that is wholly unique due to the people that experience it, and the place where they experience it. The Biospirit is the interaction and embodiment of a place by a people. Remove either, and that Biospirit will cease. A thousand years can pass by, and neither Kenyans nor Rhodesians will be capable of producing each other’s civilization, even if they inhabit the same lands. At best, you may forge a creole people that will be neither, and often hate both.
If you are Christian, consider this also: When Peter doubted Jesus on the waters, he did not immediately sink into the sea. Rather, he slowly started sinking. The Spirit that bound Peter above the waters - the very Spirit of God Himself - did not immediately evaporate when Peter doubted. It lingered, for a little while. A spirit can dwell in a place and continue to have power, even if the person to whom that Spirit was given starts doubting it. It takes time for a Spirit to leave, even when the people do. The same can be said with a Biospirit. Even if a whole people should doubt their identity, that spirit can linger for a bit more. And perchance, find a new home.
You can also consider the many diasporas of the Jews. Their Biospirit seems particularly endearing, but certainly the years they spent in Egypt, or in Babylon, influenced them. There is no archeological evidence of polytheism after the return from Babylon, for example.
This is the wall Materialism cannot get past, stuck in obsession with flags and anthems, missing the spiritual.
Political Disorientation
If you wish to read this as anti-colonization, or anti-imperialism, by all means I’m fine if you do. But do bear in mind that history has also produced many forms of colonization and imperialism that are aware of this Biospirit principle and worked alongside these rules rather than trying to violate them as our contemporary elite do. Carthage is perhaps an ideal case study in this. When the Levantine colonials first reached the shores of what would become Carthage from their homes in Palestine, they made it a principal in their efforts that the cities they built were for the Levantine people. They would help the native Africans built cities if they pleased, but those cities would be for the Africans, and Carthage for the Levantines.
The Carthaginians wanted to preserve their own Biospirit in these foreign lands, while also permitting the foreign Biospirit to co-exist in their own right. Under this model, plantation-like infrastructure was common - what the later Romans called latifundia, which roughly translates to “Broad space”, but perhaps better translated as “breathing room”. The Carthaginians believed that these African estates should be strongly segregated from the Semitic cities, but not closed off to one another. An individual was allowed to pick one Biospirit, but not multiple ones. Thus, the Biospirits of rural Africans and urban Levantines was clearly demarcated, but not secluded. King Mago, a great monarch of Carthage, described this formal legal structure on the management of Biospirits as follows:
The man who acquires a latifundia must sell his domum , lest he prefer to live in the town rather than in the country. Anyone who prefers to live in a town has no need of a latifundia in the country. One who has bought land should sell his town domum, so that he will have no desire to worship the household gods of the city rather than those of the country; the man who takes greater delight in his city residence will have no need of a country latifundia
This careful management constitutes something of a reservation system, though it also applied to the Carthaginians as much as the subjugated vassals - Carthaginians understood they had responsibilities maintaining where their Biospirit could and could not graze. They understood that if they allowed theirs to mingle with others, something of both would be lost, and whatever came out of it may not have the same interests as they. This was the basis of Carthaginian power and made Carthage a “patchwork empire”. As the empire grew, it applied similar rules to Iberia, Sardinia, and elsewhere it held sway.
You may lean into calling this a Biospirit zoo of sorts, but this would not be quite correct. Zoos have zookeepers, but the Carthaginians did not want to be the zookeepers. It would be better to call this a carefully constructed Biospirit ecosystem, which possessed an assortment of natural hierarchies. At the top were two shophetim, a Semitic word for Judges. Not quite kings, and primarily responsible with maintaining the law among the elite. Below these sophs were the patriarchs of various people groups, the Hadirim, or “Great Ones”. One may call these patriarchs the voice of their Biospirit, often playing something of a priestly role. From them were selected 30 of the greatest to form an inner council where they could regulate various affairs of the empire. Coalitions of these patriarchs could also form “Pentarchies”, or groups of 5 who would compete for managerial roles in the affaird of state and various bureaucratic offices. It’s also worth noting there were no laws against bribes. Carthaginians believed thaat if your Biospirit was a snake, you should act like a snake, and so so freely.
This highly regulated devolution of patchworks can be summed up by D Hoyos, author of Truceless War:
The picture is tolerably clear: a republic directed by a flexible ruling élite, in which distinguished ancestry was important so long as it was matched by financial resources, while as the other side of the coin newly-made riches could take a man to the top in power and repute.
Under this model, the mixing of Biospirits was considered a threat - akin to putting a lion and a lamb in the same zoo cage. But as there was a strong emphasize on allowing flexible natural hierarchies to govern the zoo, the result is surprising: When all Biospirits feel like they can freely compete, all the members of this empire could spend less on protecting themselves, and more on bettering themselves.
In the span of 230 years, this uniquely decentralized patchwork went from a town of a few thousand colonists, to a regional superpower fighting Greek city states over control of territories. By the era of the Punic Wars - some centuries later - Carthage was a greater Empire than Rome, albeit only briefly.
Let me mention here the power that this model of governance has. Today, if you look at the city of Rome, nearly nothing remains of the Republic-era city. A few sewers, one small temple the size of a chapel, and part of an old senate house. That is all that dates to the Republic era of urban Rome while it fought Carthage. Nearly all of Rome’s ruins are from the Imperial Era. Carthage, on the other hand, built one of the most impressive metropolises of the pre-Roman world, and all its coastal ruins are from that period, notably it’s main naval base:
This port was one of the most advanced naval docking mechanisms at the time, able to host hundreds of ships from the various members of the empire and supply them quickly in a central armament hub.
The scale and complexity of the city is fairly lost to modern eyes. Ancient Rome in the imperial era - its height centuries after Carthage was burned - was stretched across 3.5 km of land within the Aurelian walls. Carthage stretched beyond that distance nearly 300 years earlier. Understand the scale of that.
This is the kind of power that a well-organized patchwork can motivate. Patchwork Empires work because they give everyone an identity and a homeland, as well as a family to be part of within the Empire. But, there’s a weakness: It took Rome just 80 years of war and genocide to slowly pick that apart piece by piece. Nearly nothing remains of Carthage in regard to cultural influence.
If you wish to read this as a segregationist argument now, instead of an anti-colonialist one, I won’t stop you there either. Because it doesn’t actually matter which way you want read this, you’d be going down the materialist interpretation and would be concluding matters incorrectly due to its flawed world view.
Given that civilization has been around in some shape or form for over ten thousand years, and the materialist has been trying to out-perform these classical models for nearly 400 years, it is worth asking if there even is an improvement on the past here. One would imagine, by now, it would have been found and we all would have submitted to it joyfully. These failed utopian and egalitarian extremes trying to produce a one-size-fits-all set of civilizational structures for humanity are ultimately doomed because they are trying to manage something that is unmanageable: The Human Spirit - or rather, its many Biospirits. The race realist cannot account for the suicidal spirit possessing the west today, and no midcentury German inspired tactics will alter that suicide, because the midcentury German solutions were material ones. By his own logic, he must bow to some other group like the Chinese as his superior for their spectacular stability, or cope that some steppe tribe can maintain traditional society better than he. likewise, the egalitarian liberal cannot comprehend why only his tribe can produce a democracy - albeit barely functional - yet no one else can. No matter how generously he spends on NGO activities and charities, how many terrorists he bombs, how many rebel groups he funds - his fellow man under a different Biospirit will always abandon him and return to an historic means. They cannot produce nor maintain what he views as a gift of an ideal state, but what all his fellow men view as mad oppression. He grows in frustration, with occasional pseudo-colonial outbursts of interventionalism. “Surely this time will be different” he mutters under his bated breath. “Surely this time, they will see the value of democracy!” Such a man always dies in depression, atop a mountain of bodies he labeled as exceptions to his egalitarian goals. Their failures give hint that if there is an actual universal rule here, it is to let communities make their own rule. This rule exists at least partially beyond the materialist’s scope, in the spiritual. Modern man ignores this realm. Famed poet Nicolás Gómez Dávila was apt to describe this struggle-session by those who ignore this:
Civilizations are the summer noise of insects between two winters. Ideas tyrannize the man who has but few. It is not just that human trash accumulates in cities, it is that cities turn what accumulates in them into trash.
Make no mistake, the Biospirit of our contemporary cities of the west are actively producing trash. Civilizations are funny like that. A wisp of a foul or fair spirit can turn a castle into either a dungeon or a palace without changing a single material detail. The materialist cannot comprehend this - which may explain their poor aesthetic tastes.
Nomenclature
If we were to attempt to create something of a science of the immaterial, we would likely be performing an exercise in madness. Others have tried. Carl Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae was one of the first zoological texts produced in the 18th century. Later editions were quite firmly scientific and dealt with materialist understandings alone, but if one peruses some of the first copies, one will find the curious category of Animalia Paradoxa. This category was primarily reserved for unclear species of possible mythical or spiritual origin. Ultimately dropped, it is in many ways a victim of the pure materialist takeover of the sciences. Nonetheless, the category of Paradoxa provides something of a conceptualization, or echo, of late medieval thinking
The use of Animalia Paradoxa includes many creatures that various holy books regarded as symbolic of empires and coalitions, and while the author may have lived too late in time to realize this, it provides an interesting alternative to trying to scientifically categorized types of ghosts. A zoology of Biospirits need not be formal, but rather, behavioral. Because the animalistic approach appears to be the most common in history, I prefer to use this zoological toolkit. You may prefer another, and by all means feel free to construct your own toolkits.
Words for these Biospirits which animate and haunt the structure of communal man’s collective life come and go for every age whose observant come to notice it. If we were to attempt to fill the category of Animalia Paradoxa, a good start would be to borrow the biblical Daniel’s use of animals to describe the Biospirits of varying empires rising and falling in history. It is easy for the uneducated to take a very literal approach here, imagining a literal four-winged leopard ruling a land. But it’s not hard to see how the four wings represent Alexander’s four kingdoms that formed from his leopard-like dash to conquer the world. Here, rather than formal, the animals embody a behavioral quality.
Animals provide keen insight into the behavior typologies of Biospirits. I’ve heard it said that the unique feature humans developed with their nature, is the ability to mimic the nature of things around them. Rather than play the game of natural selection, we simply copy, mix, and remix what we observe. Conscious thought appears to have been a useful tool to place our perspectives into the experiences of other beings, namely the simple-minded beasts around us. We can embellish their behaviors with greater meaning. Thus, the behaviors of various people groups tend to mimic the ecosystem they were derived from: The West African drum triggers a sensual passion, because it was developed on the jungles that excite those passions, but Bushmen have much more brush-like music from their experiences listening to animals brush against the thick. The meditative long-tones of Europe’s Northmen come from many a contemplation through long and hardy winters. So on and so forth. Dances, food, and many other elements also mimic in similar ways. It can be said that for any given people, something of a web of memories and experiences is collected from the ecosystem to form the Biospirit. Some go so far as to say, particularly catchy songs and dances can lead to a leakage of one Biospirit into another people. Especially noteworthy, Daniel often envisioned chimera beasts when empires were built from multiple members, such as the winged leopard of Alexander’s Empire. Animals provide an easily recognizable sorting system for the behavioral typologies of Biospirits.
Early Christians began resurrecting Daniel’s imagery for use in their own geopolitical self-conceptualization. Take, for instance, the little-known Epistle of Barnabas (Do not confuse it with the Gospel of Barnabas, a medieval Gnostic fiction). In this text, Barnabas goes through Moses’ dietary laws and attempts to translate those laws into a zoological index of Biospirits, beating Carl Linnaeus by nearly 1600 years. some choice excerpts from the text:
And thou shalt not eat the lamprey nor polypus nor cuttle fish .
Moses means, become like unto such men, who are desperately wicked, and are already condemned to death, just as these fishes alone are accursed and swim in the depths, not swimming on the surface like the rest, but dwell on the ground beneath the deep sea.
Moreover thou shalt not eat the hare.
Why so? You shall not be found a corrupter of boys, nor should you become like such persons; for the hare gains one passage in the body every year; for according to the number of years it lives it has just so many orifices.
Accordingly he mentioned the swine with this intent. Thou shalt not cleave, he says, to such men who are like unto swine; that is, when they are in luxury they forget the Lord, but when they are in want they recognize the Lord, just as the swine when it eats knows not his lord, but when it is hungry it cries out, and when it has received food again it is silent.
Of course, take note here that Barnabas describes the Biospirit as a behavioral typology for individuals rather than an ethnic or tribal affiliations. This is important.
In the Biblical tradition, stemming from Genesis 10 & 11 , there are 70 partitions that God divided mankind into at the tower of Babel. 70 languages, given to the 70 offspring of Noah at the time of the tower. This concept is known as The Table of Nations, and is the origin of this essay’s title. For some traditions, when God sentenced these 70 patriarchs to babbling confusion, he also gave them over to 70 fallen angels as well. These would be 70 Biospirits which define the behavioral typology of mankind. While it may be easy to assign each one to a specific ethnic group, the Bible does not say these Biospirits are locked into specific groups. Indeed, they define behavioral typologies, not ethnic identities. And behaviors can leak into other ethnicities from their original habitat, just as it were that a demon may decide to possess someone new after they become bored. Here, one may read something akin to reactionary critiques that Ameria is “Spiritually African”. That is, the Biospirit of its slave underclass has leaked into the general population, such that the African Biospirit brought over with the slaves can now be said to inhabit a majority of the general population, regardless of ethnicity. Likewise, that original Anglo-Saxon Biospirit that dwelt among the founders has more or less either gone extinct or become isolated to the fringes. Perhaps the glaringly obvious evidence of this is Nimrod within Genesis 10, who is not included as the 70 mentioned, but none-the-less was host to a Biospirit entirely his own. Nimrod had no children, yet his possessed a Biospirit common to all degenerate elite throughout time. More on him soon.
There is also the matter when Jesus commissioned his first preachers. He chose 70, which has been thought by some to indicate each preacher was chosen for one of the 70 generations of Noah. A way of saying “Preach to all the nations”. Though by this time there were many more nations than in Noah’s day. One may instead read that as “Preach to every Biospirit”. This is pretty heavy evidence that Jesus Christ never intended his message to be a singular monolithic church, but rather a patchwork family of 70 churches that would adapt to each of the 70 unique behavioral typologies of man.
(Although, some have it at 72. But whatever)
The leakage factor has also been seen elsewhere in history. Rome, after all, was a form of early globalism. Immigration, exchange of ideas and trade, and the general mixing of things was normal. Thus, behaviors fell away from tribal markers and towards individual identities - similar to the way many of us have an idea of a plumber, or an electrician, or a librarian which is not connected to a specific ethnic identity, but certainly is still a stereotype.
Take, for instance, the Chaldeans. In the ancient city state era of the fertile crescent, their entire people group were associated with scholarship of the stars and chemicals. But, in later imperial eras of the Babylonian and Persian conquests, this stereotype passed on to the specific Magi priesthood rather than the Chaldean people themselves. Magi were nearly always Chaldeans, but all stereotypes about the Chaldeans appear to become subsumed into the Magi priesthood over time. This may be related to how global a civilization is. When globalism reaches its peak, tribal affiliation begins to dissolve, and professional identity rises up. When globalism eases into splendid isolation, tribal identity becomes more pronounced, and the professional stereotype begins to dissolve as communities form conforming norms. This may be the means by which leakage occurs, and how a Biospirit can change a host people. The Franks are perhaps an early example of this, ultimately becoming more Roman than the Romans themselves who eventually became very Germanized. This is but a theory, but perhaps relevant in our current era for how to regard Biospirit - that being, we exist at the end of a globalism cycle, and the start of an isolationist cycle. We get to see the transition first-hand.
Regardless of either approach, both offer some more technical categories through behavior rather than form. Some Christians simplify the 70 into just 3 Biospirits, one for each son of Noah. Among the Greeks and Romans, there was said to be a Chthonic Spirit that emanated from the Earth of a people. That there was some immutable connection between earth and tribe. Though this appears to have died out by the Christian era. Druids and Germanics understood that tribes were connected to sacred springs and trees which a people were tied to as well. For these pagan beliefs, it seems clear this is a relic system from before the Indo-European pantheon. One may recall that the Olympian gods overthrew earlier gods, the titans. Some scholarship has understood this to mean the spirits and deities of the earlier peoples before the Indo-Europeans were overthrown by the Indo-Europeans. Thus we can say, to some degree, that there were 12 Biospirits of the ancient Europeans, supplanted by 12 new Biospirits incarnated as the Olympian deities. Today, neopagans often reduce this to two biospirits: Apollonian, and Dionysusian - primarily from Nietzsche’s works.
Returning to the Christian tradition, Genesis 10 offers an interesting overlap with Daniel’s animistic categorization: There is always an apex predator. In Genesis 10, this predatory Biospirit is possessed by Nimrod:
Nimrod, who became a mighty warrior on the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord; that is why it is said, “Like Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the Lord.” The first centers of his kingdom were Babylon, Uruk, Akkad and Kalneh, in Shinar. From that land he went to Assyria, where he built Nineveh, Rehoboth Ir, Calah and Resen, which is between Nineveh and Calah—which is the great city.
Note the phrase “a mighty hunter”. This has been said to mean hunters of men by some rabbi, indicating Nimrod was either the first slave catcher, or military recruiter, or both - along with being the first post-flood city builder. The predatory Biospirit which Nimrod possessed is followed up in the story of the Tower of Babel where it is specifically stated “They used brick instead of stone”. This is important. Bricks are all the same, while stones are each unique. Bricks do not take intelligence to build. Stones require careful thinking as how best to arrange them together. Stones are patchwork structures, while Bricks are monolithic ones. The people of Babel, speaking the same language and making the same bricks, possessed a queer Biospirit: One which demanded conformity, like the urban bugmen of today. Also do note, Nimrod has no children of his own. Varying traditions say Nimrod is the same person as Gilgamesh, and that these are two names of the same. He believed he was part god - that he would live forever. So why have kids?
It can be said that the Nimrod Biospirit, one obsessed with progress, development, making more and more “line go up”, and conformity, is one which is downright parasitic rather than predatory. I’d say both, but it tends to latches unto a great people and bides they serve the Biospirit rather than participate in it. This parasitic or predatory Biospirit always results in the same madness: The suicidal destruction of a people in exchange for temporary hegemony over the world:
Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
This Biospirit may very well be the same one possessing much of the west today.
Finally, it is worth reviewing Rabbinical views. Hebrew, as a word, means wanderer. It means a people not tied to the land, wandering too and fro throughout the Earth. Cain could be said to be the first Hebrew in some sense - cursed to wander the Earth. Who knows if perhaps the Hebrews have some Cainish blood in them. But as the Rabbi were aware of their amputation from a homeland (and some orthodox go so far as to reject Israel as the current Jewish homeland, if you weren’t aware - at least until their messiah comes), the Rabbi do not believe the children of Shem have a Biospirit like the other two sons of Noah. Indeed, Israel itself was taken from the Canaanites and its Biospirit murdered, and its people scattered:
Later the Canaanite clans scattered and the place of Canaan reached from Sidon toward Gerar as far as Gaza, and then toward Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboyim, as far as Lasha.
-Genesis 10
It may be pertinent to mention Noah’s prophecies to his sons:
“Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers. Praise be to the Lord, the God of Shem! May Canaan be the slave of Shem. May God extend Japheth’s territory; may Japheth live in the tents of Shem, and may Canaan be the slave of Japheth.”
Note here, that it is incorrect to call this the Curse of Ham. Ham was never cursed, his child was. But also note the prophecy of Japeth, the father of Europeans. He would dwell in the camps of Shem. In other words, the White Man will have a longing desire to abandon his Biospirit and seek the Holy Spirit of God. Curious how accurate that played out in the long run.
As the Rabbis viewed land as the greater factor than people, they believed Biospirits were locked to their lands as drawn by God himself. If a people moved, they acquired a different Biospirit entirely. Thus, they grouped all Biospirits into 6 clades (yes, just like the star of David), with Jerusalem in the center as a purified 7th. In total, there were 24 Biospirits in the world, inhabiting each of the 6 wings in unequal division. Most name them after regional place names. Places with more Biospirits were prone to great wars. Places with fewer Biospirits were prone to greater unification - and greater oppressions. A general outline is given in the Middle Ages by scholars such as Gaon, Josippon, and Abarbanel, rendered as such:
Seven Biospirits of Japheth
Africa
Germania
Media
Macedonia
Bithynia
Moesia
Thrace
Two Biospirits of Gomer
Asia
Parthia
Four Biospirits of Javan
Elis
Tasus
Achaia
Dardania
Four Biospirits of Han
Arabia
Egypt
Eloheruq
Canaan
Five Biospirits of Kus
Sinirae
Hindiqi
Samarae
Lubae
Zingae
Two Biospirits of Mauretinos
Zemargad
Mezag
Or, if you prefer the graphical display:
At some point in time, I’d like to sit down and attempt to assign animal behaviors to each of these, but Daniel’s visions give you at least a few.
Modern Interpretations
Other eras approached the topic in other ways. Some from the perspective of Cartesian winds whose vapors guide the spirits of men in each corner of the map. You can find relics of this perspective with the many anthropomorphic clouds blowing in the corner of maps in the late medieval era. Still others approached the concept of a Biospirit as a throne whose dominating presence over the minds of the people change for each new ruler who wears a crown that can be said to be part of that throne. In some instances, it is thought that a throne had a possessing spirit that would twist the mind of whoever sat upon it. One could not simply elect a new leader, nor hope on the heir to the throne. One had to exorcise the throne itself of its spiritual ruler - something of an early incarnation of “Clear them out”. Such a view moved into typographical hats worn by an anthropomorphic being, which gave rise to a cornucopia of headgear. Hence the saying among Germans and Greeks who often found themselves siding with the Turks: “Better a Turban than a Tiara”. Read such words as “Better their Biospirit than ours”.
In the 1950s, a somewhat well-known science fiction work, “The Final Encyclopedia”, attempted to tackle the topic once again. This work of science fiction took place in the future, where the long distances between the worlds had started affecting humanity at a genetic level. Social Scientists began to conceptualize the idea of a “Racial animal”, that was as unaware of its components as a dog is unaware of its cells. This racial animal was thought to be developing “organs” as the various elements of humanity on each of these worlds. But, as humanity began to embrace the diversification of itself, some began to wonder: who was the brain? This leads to a conspiracy that the evolution of humanity across these worlds may not necessarily be an entirely natural selection. The concept of the “Others” began to spread, which the book treats akin to the illuminati. That is until, a member of the Others is met by the protagonist. And the realization that, indeed, they had been manipulating the racial beast of humanity to their ends. An exciting realization comes, when the Others are exposed not as the brain of the Racial beast, but as a cancer that thinks it is a brain. A cancer that must be cleared out:
What made the Others a racial experiment, he understood now, was their need to take over and control all the rest of the race. In that need lay the way to an answer to why the racial animal should have birthed them in the first place. Bleys had answered it himself, in this cell. Whatever else was true about the Others, two things were undeniable. They were human, with all ordinary hungers and wants, including that of always wanting more than they had; and they were very much aware that they were too few to risk the rest of humanity realizing how their sheer lack of numbers made them vulnerable. It was a vulnerability that nothing less than total control of the rest of the race could ever remove; and such control could only be achieved by the establishment of a single unvarying uniform culture. Only such a culture in which all things were permanently fixed and unchanging could release them from the need to stand on guard against those they dominated and turn them loose at last to enjoy their advantage of a natural superiority over the majority of humanity. And the only way for them to obtain both ends was to first achieve a situation of complete stasis, an end to the long, instinctive upward development of civilization. History must be brought to a halt. To do that they must remove or render harmless to them those other humans who could never accept an end to that development, those who would have no choice but to oppose the Others' building of that stasis. The strengths of the Others would be first, in their charismatic skills, and secondly, in the fact that individually they were the equals in minds and bodies of the best that could be brought against them. Finally, those strengths would total in that they would be able to marshal most of the total populations of ten worlds to act on their orders. On the other side of their ledger lay their lack of ability to value the future.
The book is well worth a read to conceptualize how a Biospirit works!
Here, I will differentiate two views: For materialists, the closest conceptualization of Biospirit is an emergent property of individuals that label themselves as kin. For the non-materialists, these Biospirits are semi-sentient beings that possesses something of a will - desire, goal, aspiration, etc. For Christians, any spirit is either an angel or a demon that can nudge the conglomerate consciousness of kin. A reader well-versed may see a bit of a reverse-Legion in this. Instead of many demons inhabiting one mind, this would be one demon inhabiting many minds. But this is quite well established in Daniel especially, where the Biospirits of empires rise and fall.
It appears the means by which kin relations are established are through the sharing of behavioral information, and the speed this information can be transferred between kin to sustain a conglomerate amalgamation of conscious wills is the lifeblood by which a Biospirit can manifest itself in this world. Thus, long distances will inevitably force the creation of a new Biospirit, or the resurrection of an old one. This beast is as unaware of its members as you are of your cells, and when elites of any empire fool themselves into thinking they are the zookeeper and not but another beast in the zoo, take it as a premonition that the true zookeeper is about to tranquilize that beast.
Conclusions
I hope this brief write-up gives you some thoughts on what a Biospirit is, and how it has been conceptualized in the past. Eventually, I very much would like to assign some animal behaviors to embody the Rabbinical list of 24 Biospirits (+ the Nimrodian predatory Biospirit if it isn’t one of them). It would be good to have a set of lenses with which to compare the behavior of a group of people to that of the Biospirit, so we can abide by Barnabas’ advice on how to react to said behavior. I invite you to read through some of the sources presented in this essay to refine your own conceptualization of Biospirit, and how you may be subject to its influences - or how your lacking of a sense of home may be tormenting your innate hunter-gatherer mind.
Cheers!
Where does Japan fall into all of this? I ask as they are remarkably different in attitude, tastes and in many ways from the Chinese/Koreans, or the South-Asians, or from the Mongolians? I'm not sure grouping all of Asia together fully works.
There is also some measure of difference between Scandinavians, the French and the Germans I have noticed, what of those?
I ask not to doubt but to clarify, this was a brilliant article.