The following excerpts summarizing Alfred Rosenberg’s ideas about the Race Soul are from his great book, The Myth of the Twentieth Century: An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual Confrontations of Our Age.
Rosenberg believes that there is a spiritual as well as a biological side to race. It must be noted that he does not deny the existence of the individual person and the individual soul, but that these are connected to the race and race soul and that some important characteristics of people are shared by the race to which that person belongs.
We on our side do not deny very diverse influences: landscape and climate and political tradition; but all this is outweighed by blood and the blood linked character. Things evolve around the reconquest of this order of rank. To re-establish the ingeniousness of healthy blood, is perhaps the greatest task upon which man can set himself today. At the same time, this affirmation gives evidence of the sad situation of the body and the spirit, that such a deed has become a vital necessity. A contribution to this great coming act of liberation of the 20th century is what the present book intends to be. Not only the shaking up of many awakening men, but also of opponents, is the desired result.
Today one of those epochs is beginning in which world history must be written anew. The old images of the human past have faded, the outlines of leading personalities are distorted, their inner driving forces falsely interpreted, their whole nature for the most part totally misjudged. A youthful life force – which also knows itself to be age old – is impelled toward form; an ideology, a world view, has been born and, strong of will, begins to contend with old forms, ancient sacred practices, and outworn standards. This means no longer historically but fundamentally; not in a few special domains but everywhere; not only upon the heights but also at the roots. And this sign of our times is reflected in a turning away from absolute values, that is to say, in a retreat from values held to be beyond all organic experience, which the isolated ego once devised to create, by peaceful or violent means, a universal spiritual community. Once, such an ultimate aim was the Christianising of the world and its redemption through the second coming of Christ. Another goal was represented by the humanist dream of mankind. Both ideals have been buried in the bloody chaos of the Great War, and in the subsequent rebirth out of this calamity, despite the fact that now one, and now the other, still find increasingly fanatical adherents and a venerable priesthood. These are processes of petrifaction and no longer of living tissue: a belief which has died in the soul cannot be raised from the dead.
Humanity, the universal church, or the sovereign ego, divorced from the bonds of blood, are no longer absolute values for us. They are dubious, even moribund, dogmas which lack polarity and which represent the ousting of nature in favour of abstractions. The emergence in the nineteenth century of Darwinism and positivism constituted the first powerful, though still wholly materialistic, protest against the lifeless and suffocating ideas which had come from Syria and Asia Minor and had brought about spiritual degeneracy. Christianity, with its vacuous creed of ecumenicalism and its ideal of HUMANITAS, disregarded the current of red-blooded vitality which flows through the veins of all peoples of true worth and genuine culture. Blood was reduced to a mere chemical formula and explained in that way. But today an entire generation is beginning to have a presentiment that values are only created and preserved where the law of blood still determines the ideas and actions of men, whether consciously or unconsciously. At the subconscious level, whether in cult or in life, man obeys the commands of the blood, as if in dreams or, according to natural insight, as a happy expression describes this harmony between nature and culture. But culture, with the growth of all subconscious activity and of expanding consciousness and knowledge, becomes more and more intellectual, and ultimately engenders not creative tension but, in fact, discord. In this way, reason and understanding are divorced from race and nature and released from the bonds of blood. The ensuing generation falls victim to the individualistic system of intellectual absolutes, and separates itself more and more from its natural environment, mixing itself with alien blood. It is through this desecration of the blood that personality, people, race and culture perish. None who have disregarded the religion of the blood have escaped this nemesis – neither the Indians nor the Persians, neither the Greeks nor the Romans. Nor will Nordic Europe escape if it does not call a halt, turning away from bloodless absolutes and spiritually empty delusions, and begin to hearken trustingly once again to the subtle welling up of the ancient sap of life and values. Once we recognize the awesome conflict between blood and environment and between blood and blood as the ultimate phenomenon beyond which we are not permitted to probe, a new and, in every respect, richly coloured picture of human history becomes manifest. This recognition at once brings with it the knowledge that the struggle of the blood and the intuitive awareness of life's mystique are simply two aspects of the same thing. Race is the image of soul. The entire racial property is an intrinsic value without relationship to material worshipers who apprehend only discrete events in time and space, without experiencing these events as the greatest and most profound of all secrets. Racial history is therefore simultaneously natural history and soul mystique. The history of the religion of the blood, however, is conversely the great world story of the rise and fall of peoples, their heroes and thinkers, their inventors and artists.
„This unity also holds for German history, for its men, its values, for the very old and new Myth, and for the supporting ideas of German folkhood. One form of Odin is dead, that is, the Odin who was the highest of the many gods who appeared as the embodiment of a generation still given up to natural symbolism. But Odin as the eternal mirrored image of the primal spiritual powers of Nordic man lives today just as he did over 5,000 years ago. Hermann Wirth finds traces of decline also in the ancient world of gods and influences of the Eskimo race. This may be so, but does not influence what is actually Germanic. He embodies himself in honour and heroism, in the creation of song and or art, in the protection of law and in the eternal search for wisdom. Odin learned that through the guilt of the gods, through the breaking of the bond to the builders of Valhalla, the race of the gods must perish. Despite this decline, he nevertheless commanded Heimdall to summon the Aesir with his horn for the final decisive battle. Dissatisfied, eternally searching, the god wandered through the universe to try to fathom his destiny and the nature of his being. He sacrificed an eye so that he might participate in the deepest wisdom. As an eternal wanderer he is a symbol of the eternally searching and becoming Nordic soul which cannot withdraw self-confidently back to Jehovah and his representatives. The headstrong activity of the will, which, at first, drives so roughly through the Nordic lands in the battle songs about Thor, showed directly at their first appearance the innate, striving, wisdom seeking, metaphysical side in Odin the Wanderer. But the same spirit is revealed once again with the great, free Ostrogoths and the devout Ulfilas. It is also revealed, in accordance with the times, in the strengthened Knights Order and in the great Nordic western mystics as seen in their greatest spirit, Meister Eckhart. When, in Frederick's Prussia, the soul which once gave birth to Odin was revived at Hohenfriedberg and Leuthen, it was also reborn in the soul of the Thomas church cantor, Bach, and in Goethe. From this viewpoint our assertion will appear deeply justified, that a heroic Nordic saga, a Prussian march, a composition by Bach, a sermon by Eckhart, and a monologue by Faust, are only varied experiences of one and the same soul. They are creations of the same will. They are eternal powers which were first united under the name Odin and which later gained form in Frederick the Great and Bismarck. As long as these powers are operative, as long as Nordic blood mixes with a Nordic soul and will, Nordic man will be active and work in mystic union. This is the prerequisite of every true to type creation.“
„The racially linked soul is the measure of all our ideas, our striving will and actions, the final measuring rod of our values.“
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