ENDING THE COSMIC WAR

MNEMOHISTORIOGRAPHY IT'S A WORD

Today I want to talk about a really useful concept. It is one of those concepts that we use a lot without thinking about. Once we have a name for it, it becomes even more useful. Don’t get put off by the word. The word is not the concept; you will understand the concept even if you don’t like the word.

Kia Ora Tatou and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War, by Karen Effie.

The mnemo- part of the word means memory, like a mnemonic is trick for remembering things. The historiography part of the word is the name for the study of how history as a discipline is made. When you study history, you study events and people, say, and facts about the same. Historiography takes a step back and studies how history is studied. It looks at such things as how much we can really know, how we know what we know, what facts do we privilege and why. Is history as a discipline just the facts, or is it ideas about facts? If we find our ideas about the facts creeping into our study, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Can we be entirely free of bias? These are historiographical problems. Mnemohistoriography studies history but in terms of how that history affects later events and ideas. In short, it is about how we remember history.

If you are my age or older, you may have read “1066 and All That: A Memorable History of England, Comprising All the Parts You Can Remember, Including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates” by WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman. It was written in 1930, and it is about – well, what the title says. The point is that history is not what happened, it is what is memorable. The book is thought to be an early post-modernist text, but its date of publication is important too. It came out between the world wars, that difficult time when empires were crumbling and World War One had shattered many illusions about the order of things. It satirized the kind of history I was taught, which was all kings and wars. This is called “Great Man” history, the idea that there is progress, that societies have evolved, that larger and more complex societies are superior to small, simpler ones, that conquest is legitimate and a sign of superiority, and that it is all thanks to Great Men, literally men in most cases. At the end of each chapter of “1066 and All That” there were pretend exams, with instructions like “Do not attempt to write on both sides of the paper at once”. I was lucky as a child, to be read to at night well into middle school age, by my father. He read 1066 to me, and I remember sitting in bed laughing and laughing. An almost direct successor is the wonderful Philomena Cunk; if you don’t know her oeuvre, try the recent documentary “Cunk on Life”.

So, there is the history of facts and events, and then there is mnemohistory, what we remember, what we think is important, how we read history, and how that reading itself becomes part of history. When I wrote earlier about the far right and their view of the Crusades, that is mnemohistory. It is not just that the facts aren’t the facts, it is that the believers in these facts have acted as if they are true. I think most mnemohistory is not nearly so cynical. History writers are mostly genuine about their agendas. Their influence can be great. Great Man history probably kept the British Empire going way past its due date, while everyone else gets a chapter at the end of the book.

The Story of the Cosmic War is full of mnemohistory. My best example is the thought of Alexsandr Dugin, Russian traditionalist, mystic, and far right influencer. You have to start with an idea of Russia, as a founding myth. Not just Russia the county but the Russian soul, Damp Mother Russia, and the deep sense that there is a way of living and thinking and spiritualizing that is endemically Russian, and that Russia is big, it is really Eurasia, all of the Slavic and Tartaric lands, set up in a natural union against the equally mythic lands of Western Europe and the USA. Russian thinkers have toggled between looking west, to superior technology and liberalism, vs looking inwards, to what is uniquely Russian, for centuries. For Dugin, who rejects modernity, the decision is easy. You can be spiritually Eurasian as, for Evola, you can be spiritually White. Dugin has a view of history which is quite consciously about memory, about conscious mythmaking. It is also a view of history illumined by a long study of the occult, which is common among traditionalists. Here is a well-known quote by Dugin, which illustrates how he does the Cosmic War to the max. It is from Wikipedia, I’m afraid, from a Russian source I don’t know.

"It is impossible to do without the mobilization of the Russian people, without explaining to them its historical mission, without awakening its deepest beginning, without these words "brothers and sisters". Get up, Russian people, wake up, you are called to accomplish great deeds... All your ancestors, all generations were moving towards this moment, towards this clash with our ontological enemy... We are fighting absolute Evil, embodied in Western civilization, its liberal-totalitarian hegemony, in Ukrainian Nazism. We were created for this mission. That's what is needed now - a call is needed."

Something a bit like mnemohistory happens with myth, lore, and the juicier parts of Biblical scripture. A good example is the Books of Enoch. The Books of Enoch are not part of the Bible. They are a kind of fan fiction. Enoch is such a fabulous character. When you read about him in the Hebrew Bible, it says that Enoch “walked with God, and then he was no more, for God took him” (Gen 5:21-24). Wow. What does that mean? You need to know more; it definitely feels like Enoch has not been given his due as a character. So people wrote the Books of Enoch, as fan fic. When the Bible was put together, the theologians of the time rejected the Books of Enoch (too weird, too inconsistent with everything else), but this has not stopped Enoch becoming an important part of apocalyptic literature. Nowadays, some conservative evangelical Christians refer to Enoch as if it was scripture. They incorporate the books into prophecy and their views on the impending end times. There is Enoch, and then there is the subsequent history of what happened to the books of Enoch.

The most popular story in Enoch 1 is the story of the Nephilim. In Genesis 6 in the actual Hebrew Bible, the sons of God came down to earth and had sex with the daughters of men. Their offspring were assumed to be the Nephilim. Now in Enoch, the fan fic begins. The Nephilim were giants. They taught humans evil skills, such as metalwork and cosmetics. They encouraged humans to be unnatural, to be above themselves. God punished the Nephilim.

Now we leave Enoch and enter the world of evangelical Christian YouTube.

Somehow the Nephilim survived the Flood and their offspring survive today in the form of anything or anyone who might be a giant or a monster. Bigfoot is a Nephilim (somehow the singular of Nephilim is Nephilim). Any especially big person is part Nephilim. Aliens are Nephilim. Dead Nephilim are demons. These demonic forces are ubiquitous. They cause all the evils in the world including anything unnatural or occult. They are behind all the conspiracies such as the Illuminati and the Freemasons. They want humans to be godlike. Becoming godlike is the greatest insult to God. The only escape from the machinations of the Nephilim is to give yourself to Jesus, so your eyes can be opened to this enormous web of conspiracy and evil. Then you can be saved when he returns, which of course will be very soon.

I know far more about the Nephilim than I want to, because I studied them last year when I did a university paper on conspiracy theories. What is interesting for the purpose of this article is how we move from the Hebrew Bible, to Enoch, to subsequent material. The Christians who propagate this material on YouTube and in their books, such as Tom Horn and Steve Quayle, do not distinguish. For them, it is all the Bible, inerrant, univocal, eternal. I think this is a kind of mnemohistory, because the proponents of Nephilim theory have an interpretation that passes through several iterations of memory and interpretation, before it gets to them. They situate themselves right square in the field of conservative Christianity, as if this is how it has always been.

I would not like to have a beer with Steve Quayle or Tom Horn, after watching them for hours and reading their books, but they are perfectly sincere. Even less would I have a beer with the author of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. This is a Zionist tract which purports to be the notes of a meeting held by Jewish elders plotting to take over the world. It was plagiarized from earlier works of racist fiction. Published in 1903, in Russia, it has been shown to be the worst kind of hoax. It has had a massive influence, on Nazi Germany, and subsequent fascist thinking. Even now, if you look at common far right conspiracies, they are often about how weak liberals support the rights of Black people, who are not intelligent enough to fight for their own rights, and rely on a hidden conspiracy of Jewish intellectuals who manipulate everyone. That’s the Protocols still echoing down the ages. The publication of the Protocols has had its effects in mnemohistory, what people remember and assume about the past.

Mnemohistorical narratives often have great power to influence real historical events. It is not the point whether or not they are true, it is that they are widely believed, or believed by influential people, who push the narrative forward. Meanwhile, other strands of narrative are forgotten.

All of the examples I have given relate to the Cosmic War. Aleksandr Dugin and the Nephilim enthusiasts are explicit about this. Fascist support of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” has also driven the kind of meta-othering that occurs when absolute good fights absolute evil to the point of extinction. The Cosmic War abounds in mnemohistory. So often I am talking not about what happened, but about what people believe happened. And sometimes just what they conveniently say they believe happened. It is the mnemohistory that drives actual history. Looking back at real events only sometimes helps us do better.

If you got this far, thank you, and I hope you come back. Ma te wa.

Further exploration:

- You can read a free PDF of “1066 and All That online”. And Philomena Cunk videos are on YouTube.

- https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/05/12/dugin-russia-ukraine-putin/ is a semi OK article about Dugin, from back when WaPo was something.

- Teitelbaum, Benjamin R. War for Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right has some interesting material on Dugin and Steve Bannon.

- If you have several hours, watch Steve Quayle “Prophecy Watchers” videos on YouTube. Or don’t.