Seven Interviews With A Modern Heretic

Preface

Introduction

Some Questions for David Myatt, July 2024

An Interview On A Summer Solstice Eve, 2024

A May Day Interview, 2024

An Uncertitude Of Knowing: Four Interviews, March 2022-March 2023

Developing The Numinous Way Of Pathei-Mathos

°°° ° °°°
 Preface

Between March 2022 and July 2024 the modern heretic David Myatt gave seven interviews. Together these primary
sources provide a reasonably detailed understanding of Myatt himself; of his individualistic and apolitical post-2011
philosophy of pathei-mathos; of his peregrinations as a political and religious extremist; and why he rejected
extremism.

The Introduction, An Anti-Establishment Heretic, explains why he is considered a modern heretic.

* Introduction
* Some Questions for David Myatt, July 2024
* An Interview On A Summer Solstice Eve, 2024
* A May Day Interview, 2024
* An Uncertitude Of Knowing: Four Interviews, March 2022-March 2023
* Developing The Numinous Way Of Pathei-Mathos

The An Uncertitude Of Knowing: Four Interviews also includes the June 2022 text Misunderstanding Denotata In Myatt's
Philosophy Of Pathei-Mathos which provides an overview of his philosophy, and Myatt's 2012 text Analysing National
Socialism where he explains why his post-2011 philosophy is contrary to and incompatible with National Socialism.

The text Developing The Numinous Way Of Pathei-Mathos: Impersonal Abstractions, The Modern World, And The
Axioms Of Empathy And Pathei-Mathos is by Myatt, published in 2024, in which he writes that

"my contention is that my personal 'numinous way of pathei-mathos', or at least the foundations of that Way,
which are personal empathy and pathei-mathos, could possibly be the basis for other individuals to develope
their own numinous weltanschauung free from the influence of the manufactured impersonal causal
abstractions that shaped the ancient world, some of which still influence the modern world, and the more
recent impersonal causal abstractions which since the Second World War are prevalent and now authoritative
in the modern world because supported by many if not most governments and Institutions in the Western
world, and often now used by governments as the basis for criminal laws."
 Introduction
An Anti-Establishment Heretic

Antinomianism

Antinomian, as used here, implies a passive rejection of the customs, the beliefs, the authority of the modern nation-
State with its idées fixes which include the idea that the nation-State through its government, its institutions, and its
laws is the ultimate authority and judge of what is 'right' and 'wrong', not the judgment of the individual, and which
supra-personal authority can and should be enforced by the nation-State through a police force or a law-enforcement
agency, through the Courts, and if necessary through its armed forces all of which operate through a hierarchical
chain-of-command. This antinomianism is expressed, for example, by those who seek places where they or their family
can live 'off-grid' or in a rural location; by those those who withdraw from society to live a more spiritual way of life;
and in general by those who seek to live in a more harmonious way with Nature.

Myatt's antinomianism is expressed: (i) by his philosophy of pathei-mathos which in many ways is revolutionary with its
individualism, its emphasis on empathy and personal honour, and its dissection of the causal abstractions, the
denotata, and which abstractions {1} not only inform and now motivate the governments of the modern West but also,
because of their embedded dialectic of opposites, perpetuate the cycle of suffering; {2} (ii) by what is arguably the
new paganism that can be developed from Myatt's works; {3} and (iii) by his renaissance of the roots of Western
culture which are Greco-Roman, Hellenistic, paganism and not the Hebraistic culture - based around the Old and New
Testaments - which formed the basis for the Christianity that for over a thousand years dominated Western culture.

David Myatt's antinomian reputation, currently for a few and possibly in the future for a rational and scholarly minority,
is in his philosophy of pathei-mathos; {4} in prose such as, to give just two examples, One Tree Among Many {5} and
Memories Of Manual Labour {6}; in works such as Classical Paganism And The Christian Ethos, and Tua Est Diaboli
Ianua; {7} and in his translations of and extensive commentaries on tractates of the Corpus Hermeticum. {8}

Overview

Myatt's philosophy, based as it is on empathy and personal honour, leads us away from the Judeo-Christian illusion of
causal abstractions (a naming) and a dialectic of opposites based on such naming with the inevitable apocalyptic
eschatology; with his philosophy presenting a modern and rational paganism based on Greco-Roman values.

His Good, Evil, Honour, and God, his 29 page monograph included in his book Religion, Empathy, and Pathei-Mathos
{9} is a relevant example of his writings about his philosophy of pathei-mathos, and in which monograph he compares
the ontologies of Christianity, Islam, and the modern nation-state with the ontology he proposes for his own philosophy.

For example, after discussing the ontologies of Christianity, Islam, and the modern nation-state, he presents in Parts
Four and Five his argument in favour of a personal ontology deriving from pathei mathos, as well as presenting his
conclusions regarding the need to lead a tolerant, compassionate, honourable, way of life.

Thus in Part Four he writes that the aim is:

"to be in balance, in harmony, with Life; the balance that is love, compassion, humility, empathy, honour,
tolerance, kindness, and wu-wei.

This, by its nature, is a personal answer and a personal choice; an alternative way that compliments and is
respectful of other answers, other choices, and of other ways of dealing with issues such as the suffering that
afflicts others, the harm that humans do so often inflict and have for so long inflicted upon others […]

[There is] no need for dogma or too many words; no need for comparisons; no 'just cause' to excuse our
behaviour. No mechanisms and no techniques to enable us to progress toward some-thing because there is
no need or requirement to progress toward what is not there to be attained. There is only a personal living in
such a way that we try to be compassionate, empathic, loving, honourable, kind, tolerant, gentle, and
humble. And this is essentially the wisdom, the insight, the way of living – sans denotatum – that thousands
upon thousands of people over millennia have contributed to the culture of pathei-mathos, as well as the
essence of the message which many if not all spiritual ways and religions, in their genesis, perhaps saught to
reveal: the message of the health of love and of our need, as fallible beings often inclined toward the
unbalance of hubris, for humility." {9}

Interestingly, and in reference to Christianity, in his The Way Of Jesus of Nazareth: A Question Of Hermeneutics? he
writes that what he has found when translating the Gospel of John

"is rather reminiscent of what individuals such as Julian of Norwich, George Fox, and William Penn wrote and
 said about Jesus and the spiritual way that the Gospels in particular revealed.

This is the way of humility, of forgiveness, of love, of a personal appreciation of the divine, of the numinous;
and a spiritual, interior, way somewhat different from supra-personal moralistic interpretations based on
inflexible notions of 'sin' and thus on what is considered 'good' and what is considered 'evil'. A difference
evident in many passages from the Gospel of John." {10}

In Part Five of Questions of Good, Evil, Honour, and God he explains the origins of his philosophy:

"Twenty years ago, someone whom I loved who loved me died, too young and having harmed no one. Died,
leaving me bereft, if only for a while. For too soon my return to those hubriatic, selfish, suffering-causing, and
extremist, ways of my pasts. As if, despite the grief, the pain of loss, I personally had learned nothing, except
in such moments of such remembering that did not, unfortunately, impact too much upon my practicalities of
life; at least until another bereavement, thirteen years later, came to shock, shake, betake me far from my
arrogant presumptions about myself, about life, to thus lead, to so slowly lead, to me on a clear cold day yet
again interiorly dwelling on what, if anything, is our human purpose of being here and why such
bereavements, such early deaths, just seem so unjust, unfair."{9}

Another relevant example is his In Reply To Some Questions (2012) in which he explains in greater detail the intent of
his writings about extremism and about his philosophy of πάθει μάθος – the 'numinous way' – and that those writings

"have been written as expressions of my own feelings, experiences, and philosophical reflexions, with no
particular audience in mind, save in many instance for a few personal friends. In effect, they document my
interior struggles, my attempts to find solutions to certain philosophical problems, and my desire to
understand the how and the why of my hubris, of my extremist decades, and thus to understand and
acknowledge the mistakes of my past – to understand and acknowledge the suffering I caused – and
understand the error of extremism itself […]

What I hope to achieve by such writings is to communicate – or to attempt to communicate – some of my

insights, some of my experiences, some of my solutions, and some of my conclusions, such as they are, and
as personal and as fallible as they are, and dealing as they do with extremism, with an extremist life, and
with the personal life of the hubriatic man I was […]

My concern – and therefore that of the philosophy of πάθει μάθος – is with spiritual (numinous) and personal
matters. With our own individual interior change and reformation; with the perspective and insight that
empathy and pathei-mathos provide: which is of personal virtues such as compassion, love, humility,
empathy, πάθει μάθος, honour, and wu-wei, and thus with treating human beings as individuals […]

My writings over the past few years have been personal, 'mystical', and philosophical, with the latter
documenting the development and refinement of my 'numinous way' culminating in my moral philosophy of
pathei-mathos which is concerned with individuals and how individuals might discover and learn to
appreciate ἁρμονίη and δίκη and so move toward wisdom. So, what I wanted – rather, what I felt compelled
to do following a personal tragedy – was to try and understand myself, my suffering-causing past; to try and
discover what undermined ἁρμονίη and δίκη, and what ὕβρις was and what it caused and why." {11}

A Modern Pagan Philosophy

One other reason why Myatt's mystical philosophy of pathei-mathos may be antinomian and unappreciated today is
that his philosophy is, for many of those who have studied it, a modern pagan philosophy in the tradition of Greco-
Roman philosophy.

In his 2019 autobiographical essay An Indebtedness To Ancient Greek And Greco-Roman Culture he explained that he
uses some non-English terms mostly from Ancient Greek but occasionally from Latin,

"in the hope that such terms would not only be able to convey my meaning better than some easily mis-
understood English term but also might be assimilated into the English language as philosophical terms
either in their transliterated English form or in their Greek and Latin form.

Such terms might also reveal my indebtedness to Ancient Greek and Greco-Roman culture and how and why
the philosophy of pathei-mathos is both a transition from mythoi and anthropomorphic deities (theos and
theoi) to an appreciation of the numinous sans denotatum and sans religion and thus a return to individual
insight and understanding over impersonal abstractions/ideations, over denotatum, and over religious and
political dogma, with the Latin denotatum – used as an Anglicized term and which thus can be used to
describe both singular and plural instances of denoting and naming – a useful example of my somewhat
idiosyncratic methodology.

Thus and for example I used and use σοφόν instead of σοφός when the sense implied is not the usual
"skilled", or "learned" or "wise" but rather what lies beyond and what was/is the genesis of what is presenced
in a person as skill, or learning, or wisdom. I used and use σωφρονεῖν in preference to σωφροσύνη
(sophrosyne) to suggest a fair and balanced personal judgement rather than the fairly modern English
interpretation of sophrosyne as soundness of mind, moderation." {12}

In that essay he asks then answers a rhetorical question about using such Greek and Anglicized terms:
 "Does my idiosyncratic use of Ancient Greek and Latin terms make this philosophy confusing, difficult to
understand and difficult to appreciate? Perhaps. But since philosophia – ϕιλοσοϕία – is, at least according to
my fallible understanding, becoming a friend of σοφόν, and since such a personal friendship involves seeking
to understand Being, beings, and Time, and since part of the ethos of the culture of the West – heir to
Ancient Greek and Greco-Roman culture – is or at least was a personal and rational quest for understanding
and knowledge, then perhaps some effort, as befits those of noble physis who appreciate and who may seek
to presence καλὸς κἀγαθός, is only to be expected."

In his 2017 monograph Classical Paganism And The Christian Ethos he explains the context and meaning of the term
καλὸς κἀγαθός, writing that

"we are, ontologically, emanations of and presence Being, and are a connexion to the cosmos – to other
presencings of Being – through, in terms of epistemology, not only reason (λόγος), perceiverance (νοῦς) and
wordless-awareness (συμπάθεια, empathy) but also through τὸ ἀγαθὸν, τὸ καλὸν, and ἀρετὴ, through the
beautiful and the well-balanced, the valourous and honourable, and those who possess arête, all of which are
combined in one Greek phrase: καλὸς κἀγαθός, which means those who conduct themselves in a
gentlemanly or lady-like manner and who thus manifest – because of their innate physis or through pathei-
mathos or through a certain type of education or learning – nobility of character. Which Greek phrase
expresses the ethics, the high personal standards, of the ancient paganus weltanschauung we have been
discussing." {13}

In his Classical Paganism And The Christian Ethos and in his other 2017 monograph Tu Es Diaboli Ianua {14} he writes
of the difference between classical paganism and revealed religions such as Christianity. That there is, in his view, a
fundamental

"difference between a religious apprehension of the numinous – based on received and venerated texts, on
exegesis – and the paganus apprehension of the numinous as manifest in Greco-Roman culture, based as it is
on an individual, and an intuitive, empathic and thus wordless, apprehension of the numinous." {15}

This "empathic apprehension of the numinous" is at the core of Myatt's philosophy of pathei-mathos. In his Numinous
Way of Pathei-Mathos he writes that empathy is a means by which we can

"understand both φύσις and Πόλεμος, and thus apprehend Being as Being, and the nature of beings – and in
particular the nature of our being, as mortals. For empathy reveals to us the acausality of Being and thus
how the process of abstraction, involving as it does an imposition of causality and separation upon beings
(and the ideation) implicit on opposites and dialectic, is a covering-up of Being." {16}

In Tu Es Diaboli Ianua, he writes that

"Greco-Roman culture is inextricably bound to the culture of the West and formed the basis for the European
Renaissance that emerged in the 14th century, one aspect of which was a widespread appreciation of
classical Art, of classical literature, and of texts such as the Corpus Hermeticum."

Which why his translations of eight tractates of the Corpus Hermeticum, and of other Greek texts,

"when studied together enable us to appreciate and understand the classical, pagan, ethos and thence the
ethos of the West itself […] What Myatt does in his translations [of the Corpus Hermeticum] is paint a picture
of classical – and of Hellenic – culture and especially of Hellenic mysticism; a culture and a mysticism which
is pagan and based on individuals, on tangible things such as honesty, and not on moralistic and religious
and impersonal abstractions. That is, he reveals the Greco-Roman ethos – the pagan ethos – underlying the
hermetic texts and which is in contrast to that of Christianity with its later, medieval and Puritanical,
impersonal moralizing." {17}

Which understanding of the ethos of the West, sans Christianity, the politically orientated individuals and organizations
who are vociferous critics of Myatt most probably view as heresy, as evidence that Myatt's philosophy of pathei-mathos
undermines the Judeo-Christian culture and tradition that still forms the basis of many Western nation-states, and
evidence also of how Myatt's philosophy may aid those who champion a particular and pagan interpretation of Western
culture.

As one commentator noted, Western culture is

"exemplified according to Myatt by καλὸς κἀγαθός. That is, by those who "conduct themselves in a
gentlemanly or lady-like manner and who thus manifest – because of their innate physis or through pathei-
mathos or through a certain type of education or learning – nobility of character,"{17}

and which nobility of character is manifest in "the virtues of personal honour and manners." {18} As Myatt noted in his
Questions of Good, Evil, Honour, and God,

"My own and only fallible answer to the question of how to deal with the suffering that blights this world
therefore seems to be the answer of a personal honour. That is, for each of us to gently try to carry that
necessary harmony, that balance, of δίκη, wordlessly within; to thus restrain ourselves from causing harm
while being able, prepared, in the immediacy of the moment, to personally, physically, restrain – prevent –
others when we chance upon such harm being done. This, to me, is Life in its wholesome natural fullness – as
 lived, presenced, by the brief, mortal, consciously aware, emanations we are; mortal emanations capable of
restraint, reason, culture, and reforming change; of learning from our pathei-mathos and that of others. My
personal answer to personal questions, perplexion, and to grief and doubt. The answer which is to live in
hope – even need – of a personal loyal love; to live with empathy, gentleness, humility, compassion, and yet
with strength enough to do what should be done when, within the purvue of our personal space, we meet
with one or many causing suffering and harm, no thought then for the fragility of our own mortal life or even
for personal consequences beyond the ἁρμονίη we, in such honourable moments, are."{9}

In an essay written in September 2014 he explained that

"personal honour – which presences the virtues of fairness, tolerance, compassion, humility, and εὐταξία –
[is] (i) a natural intuitive (wordless) expression of the numinous ('the good', δίκη, συμπάθεια) and (ii) of both
what the culture of pathei-mathos and the acausal-knowing of empathy reveal we should do (or incline us
toward doing) in the immediacy of the personal moment when personally confronted by what is unfair,
unjust, and extreme.

Of how such honour – by its and our φύσις – is and can only ever be personal, and thus cannot be extracted
out from the 'living moment' and our participation in the moment." {19}

According to Myatt's philosophy, empathy and personal honour {20} replace the Judeo-Christian illusion of causal
abstractions (a naming) and a dialectic of opposites based on such naming with the inevitable apocalyptic eschatology
which engenders a real-world struggle or a war between a posited and a supra-personal, abstract, 'good' and 'evil'.

Myatt's philosophy leads us away from such abstractions, back toward the pagan insight of Greeks such as Heraclitus:

"Although this naming and expression [which I explain] exists, human beings tend to ignore it, both before
and after they have become aware of it. Yet even though, regarding such naming and expression, I have
revealed details of how Physis has been cleaved asunder, some human beings are inexperienced concerning
it, fumbling about with words and deeds, just as other human beings, be they interested or just forgetful, are
unaware of what they have done." {21}

In chapter three of his The Numinous Way of Pathei-Mathos Myatt provides not only the Greek text of two other
fragments by or attributed to Heraclitus but also his own translations:

"Polemos our genesis, governing us all to bring forth some gods, some mortal beings with some unfettered
yet others kept bound." Fragment 53

"All by genesis is appropriately apportioned [separated into portions] with beings bound together again by
enantiodromia." Diogenes Laërtius, ix. 7.

In that chapter he writes that

"Empathy also reveals why the assumption that abstracted, ideated, opposites apply to or should apply to
living beings – and that they thus can supply us with knowledge and understanding of living being – disrupts
the natural balance, resulting in a loss of ἁρμονίη [harmony] and συμπάθεια and is therefore a manifestation
of the error of ὕβρις."

In place of such abstracted, ideated, Judeo-Christian conflicting opposites there is in both Greco-Roman paganism, and
in Myatt's philosophy, Summum Bonum. As Myatt notes in his Tu Es Diaboli Ianua, quoting the Roman philosopher
Seneca,

"What is injurious to such a [pagan] harmonious balance is what is dishonourable, with τὸ ἀγαθὸν –
Summum Bonum – thus understood as honestum, as what is honourable, noble: summum bonum est quod
honestum est; et quod magis admireris: unum bonum est, quod honestum est, cetera falsa et adulterina
bona sunt. Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, LXXI, 4.

the greatest good is that which is honourable. Also – and you may wonder at this – only that which is honourable is good,
with all other 'goods' simply false and deceitful.

For honestum is how hubris can be avoided and balance maintained, and is the essence of καλὸς κἀγαθός
which presences the numinous, the divine, in and among mortals." {14}

This rational pagan understanding is worlds away from the abstractions that dominate the modern nation-state and
marks him as a modern heretic.

Rufus Malisius
2024
v.1.03

°°°

{1} https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/2024/08/04/developing-the-numinous-way-of-pathei-mathos/

{2} qv. Myatt's Reflections On Conflict And Suffering, https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06

/conflict-and-suffering-dwmyatt.pdf
{3} Refer to Western Paganism And Hermeticism: Myatt And The Renaissance of Western Culture, https://archive.org
/download/myatt-and-paganism-v3b/myatt-and-paganism-v3b.pdf

{4} For an overview of Myatt's philosophy, see https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2021/09/myatt-philosophy-third-

edition.pdf

{5} https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/2023/06/06/one-tree-among-many/

{6} https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2022/10/dwm-memories-manual-labour.pdf

{7} (a) Classical Paganism And The Christian Ethos, https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/classical-

paganism-v2-print.pdf (b) Tua Est Diaboli Ianua, https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/tua-es-diaboli-
ianua.pdf

{8} Corpus Hermeticum: Eight Tractates, (a) Gratis pdf: https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/eight-

tractates-v2-print.pdf (b) Printed version: ISBN 978-1976452369

{9} https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/religion-and-empathy.pdf

{10} https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/2017/09/30/the-way-of-jesus-of-nazareth/

His translation of and extensive commentary on chapters 1-5 of the Gospel of John is available at
https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/gospel-john-chapters1-5.pdf

{11} In Reply To Some Questions (2012), https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/questions-for-dwm-2012/

{12} https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/2019/04/23/an-indebtedness-to-ancient-greek-and-greco-roman-culture/

{13} Classical Paganism And The Christian Ethos, https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/classical-paganism-

v2-print.pdf

{14} Tu Es Diaboli Ianua, https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/tua-es-diaboli-ianua.pdf

{15} Tu Es Diaboli Ianua, op.cit.

{16} https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2022/10/numinous-way-pathei-mathos-v7.pdf

{17} Western Paganism And Hermeticism: Myatt And The Renaissance of Western Culture,
https://concerningmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2022/09/myatt-paganism.pdf

Myatt's translation of and commentary on tracts from the Corpus Hermeticum is available at
https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/eight-tractates-v2-print.pdf

{18} See, for example the chapter Honour In The Philosophy Of Pathei-Mathos in The Mystic Philosophy Of David
Myatt, op.cit.

{19} The Way Of Pathei-Mathos – A Précis. The essay is included in One Vagabond In Exile From The Gods: Some
Personal and Metaphysical Musings. https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/dwmyatt-sarigthersa-v7.pdf

{20} In regard to the European – the Western – tradition of personal honour see, for example, William Segar, Booke of
Honor & Armes, published in 1590. The book is available at https://books.google.com/books?id=LlI_AQAAMAAJ

{21} The translation of fragment 1 is by Myatt who in his Questions of Good, Evil, Honour, and God provides the Greek
text:

τοῦ δὲ λόγου τοῦδ᾽ ἐόντος ἀεὶ ἀξύνετοι γίνονται ἄνθρωποι καὶ πρόσθεν ἢ ἀκοῦσαι καὶ ἀκούσαντες τὸ
πρῶτον· γινομένων γὰρ πάντων κατὰ τὸν λόγον τόνδε ἀπείροισιν ἐοίκασι, πειρώμενοι καὶ ἐπέων καὶ ἔργων
τοιούτων, ὁκοίων ἐγὼ διηγεῦμαι κατὰ φύσιν διαιρέων ἕκαστον καὶ φράζων ὅκως ἔχει· τοὺς δὲ ἄλλους
ἀνθρώπους λανθάνει ὁκόσα ἐγερθέντες ποιοῦσιν, ὅκωσπερ ὁκόσα εὕδοντες ἐπιλανθάνονται

This item is in the Public Domain

 Some Questions for David Myatt
July 2024
T.C.D.

ΞΞΞ

What is the ethos of the Martial Art of Physis, what was the idea behind it and do you still view it as an applicable
practice?

The ethos was implied in the term physis (φύσις) which I then understood not simply as the conventional English
translations of 'Nature, or as the 'nature' or 'character' of a person, but rather in the Aristotelian sense of a 'meson'
(μέσον) which is the balance, the median, existing between the being which-was and the being which-can-be, as in my
later translation of his Metaphysics 9.1051a,

ἐκ δὴ τῶν εἰρημένων ἡ πρώτη φύσις καὶ κυρίως λεγομένη ἐστὶν ἡ οὐσία ἡ τῶν ἐχόντων ἀρχὴν κινήσεως ἐν
αὑτοῖς ᾗ αὐτά: ἡ γὰρ ὕλη τῷ ταύτης δεκτικὴ εἶναι λέγεται φύσις, καὶ αἱ γενέσεις καὶ τὸ φύεσθαι τῷ ἀπὸ
ταύτης εἶναι κινήσεις. καὶ ἡ ἀρχὴ τῆς κινήσεως τῶν φύσει ὄντων αὕτη ἐστίν, ἐνυπάρχουσά πως ἢ δυνάμει ἢ
ἐντελεχείᾳ.

"Given the foregoing, then principally – and to be exact – physis denotes the quidditas of beings having
changement inherent within them; for substantia has been denoted by physis because it embodies this, as
have the becoming that is a coming-into-being, and a burgeoning, because they are changements predicated
on it. For physis is inherent changement either manifesting the potentiality of a being or as what a being,
complete of itself, is." 1

That style of defence, for it was a style rather than an Art, was only demonstrated, rather than taught, to one person
who went on to write about it and in the process somewhat divorced it from its source which was the Confucian 'Hsing'
which I learned about while living in Singapore and which word, so I was informed, was also used by Taoists, with the
Confucian sense suggesting to me what the Greek φύσις did.

ΞΞΞ

From my understanding you would have lived geographically close to the "Magick Shop" called The Sorcerer's
Apprentice back in the 70's. Were you active in that scene, did you ever come into contact with Chris Bray, Austin
Osman Spare, Peter J. Carroll, and/or Ray Sherwin, and if so, what was the discourse and atmosphere like?

No, I never visited that shop while living in Leeds nor met the individuals you mention. My contact with Mr Bray, such
as it was, was by means of postal letters and formed part of what turned out to be a misguided and in hindsight a
reprehensible attempt to form an 'underground' neo-nazi honeytrap. As I endeavoured to explain in my 2012 essay A
Matter Of Honour, in response to claims made by Jacob Senholt,

"Finally, the omitted facts and circumstances that do not support Senholt's claims and conclusions include:
(1) My publicly stated admission, made in the 1990's in correspondence with Professor Kaplan and others -
and publicly repeated by me many times in the past ten and more years - that my occult involvement, such
as it was in the 1970's and later, was for the singular purpose of subversion and infiltration in the cause of
National-Socialism, with part of this being to spread racist ideas and denial of the holocaust. Thus one such
occult group I associated with was a honeytrap, and the whole intent was political, revolutionary, not occult
and not to with 'satanism'. It was a matter of using, or trying to use, such occult groups for a specific neo-
nazi purpose without any interest in or personal involvement with the occult..."

Not long after the formation of this honeytrap a good political friend of mine, who at the time was briefly associated
with the National Front, took charge of the small group and in subsequent years would occasionally ask me for a
favour, one of which was writing, in the early 1980s an article titled Witch of the Welsh Marches which was
subsequently published in Mr Bray's Lamp of Thoth magazine with the title mistakenly corrected by him to 'Witch of
the Welsh Marshes." I also sent to Mr Bray a 1970s article of mine titled The Approach Of The Dark Gods which, if my
ageing memory is correct, was also published in that magazine.

The first article simply recounted my meeting with an elderly woman when I was living in Shropshire, with the second
article similarly recounting old pagan traditions one person who had joined that honeytrap in the 1970s had spoken
about.

I did mention doing a favour for that friend of mine in a 1998 taped interview, with an inquinatious person of the anti-
fascist variety, 2 and refused to name this friend. A refusal because I had personally given that person my word of
honour not to do so. A few years earlier I had mentioned this friend, again without naming him, in a letter dated 20
June 1996 to Professor Kaplan who wrote, in the book Nation and Race: The Developing Euro-American Racist
Subculture published in 1998, that my "interaction with England's occult underground was undertaken in a clandestine
effort to influence [some] to adopt National Socialist beliefs" and that my relationship with the occult is also based on
personal friendship and an agreement to agree to disagree on many things.
 ΞΞΞ

Was there any particularly important event that occurred for you and your associates in 1997?

Yes, it was the arrest of Charlie Sargent and Chris Castle and their subsequent conviction for murder. I had given
Charlie and Steve Sargent a personal pledge of loyalty and so stayed loyal, accepting his version of events and
believing not only that it was Browning who stole the missing money but also that Browning had betrayed the Cause
by giving evidence in a Court of Law for the Prosecution. I had also been informed that Browning and his gang were the
ones spreading malicious, unproven, rumours that Charlie was a Police informer whereas it was Browning himself who
was co-operating with the Police; hence his turn as a witness for the Prosecution and the fanciful, scripted, tale he told
in Court.

As I wrote at the time,

"there was some feuding within C18 itself, with Browning challenging Charlie for the leadership and accusing
him - on the basis of ZOG disinformation - of all sorts of things, such as stealing some funds. As for Charlie,
he was convinced that Browning had stolen the missing C18 funds [...]

Instead of doing the honourable thing - closing ranks against the State - Browning went to the Police and
agreed to give evidence in a ZOG Court against Charlie. Since we all were supposed to regard the Police, the
Courts and the whole system of so-called justice run by our government as our sworn enemies, this to me at
least amounted to treachery of the worst kind, and so I challenged Browning, in public, to a duel. I did this
not once, but twice." 3

Apropos Browning, another inquinatious person of the anti-fascist variety, in his book, Homeland: Into a World of Hate,
made several accusations about me without providing any evidence from primary sources, as well as published some
rumours about me again without providing any evidence or providing my side of the story. For instance, he claimed
that "when Myatt later falls out with Will Browning, he insists on a duel... I'm told he backed down when The Beast
claims the right to use baseball bats as weapon."

The truth is that, impersonally through a contact (Kevin Watmough) and via e-mail, I learned that apparently Browning
did suggest such a weapon, and in a reply to Watmough stated that the only weapons which could be honourably used
were deadly weapons, such as swords or pistols. I included with my reply a copy of the Rules of Duelling, and re-
affirmed my challenge to fight a duel using such deadly weapons. I received no reply from Watmough and was not
contacted in any way by either Browning or any his supporters despite the fact that Browning and his gang knew
where I lived, with my then wife and family in a detached house in a village near Malvern from which house I produced
my The National-Socialist newsletter in support of the NSM and where I would be arrested, as part of Operation
Periphery, by Special Branch officers based at Scotland Yard during a dawn raid in February 1998.

ΞΞΞ

Have you ever visited Test Valley, and if so, how did it make you feel?

Not that I recall. In fact, the only place in Hampshire I can recall visiting is Winchester, to stay with a comrade from
Column 88 and to tour the Cathedral.

ΞΞΞ

What happened before the summer of 1998 that caused you to abandon everything you were working on and convert
to Islam? Was it an international attempt to explore another culture for personal insight? What was that experience like
for you? Did you take away any profound gnosis?

As I endeavoured to explain in a Summer 2022 interview,

"In 1998 I turned away from National-Socialism to Islam because during a decade (1988-1998) of foreign
travels the culture, the Muslims, of the Muslim lands - and especially of Egypt - slowly, almost imperceptibly,
impressed me as did, and perhaps more so, travels alone in the Sahara Desert where I wordlessly felt
intimations of Being, of The Acausal, of The-Unity, of The One-The Only (τὸ ἓν), of The Monas (μονάς) which
'acausal' Being Muslims called Allah and Christians called God." 4

One of these journeys into the desert involved me in cycling from Cairo to the oasis of Daklah laden with fifteen litres
of water in three plastic containers; one atop the rear rack and one each in the panniers on either side, sufficient
according to my calculations to last until the first stop at Bahariya oasis, with the terrain hammada, flat rock-strewn,
desert with some wind-blown sand, rather than archetypal sand-dunes. On that first and the subsequent stop at Farafra
I encountered, during my brief overnight stays, the Adhan as I had in Cairo. But there, in those at the time still rather
isolated places, hedged in by desert, the Adhan somehow seemed more relevant, more numinous, as if in some way it
embodied those wordless intimations of Being, of θειότης, of divinity-presenced.

"The numinous is θειότης, divinity-presenced, as in tractate XI v. 11 of the Corpus Hermeticum, θειότητα

μίαν, and as in Plutarch, De Pythiae Oraculis, 407a, 398a-f. The numinous is essentially what is, or what
manifests or can manifest or remind us of (what can reveal) that which is felt, experienced, or understood as
 sacred, numinal, sublime, divine, awe-inspiring, beautiful, and beyond our ability, as mortals, to control or
meaningfully express through the medium of words. For Christians, it is considered to be God; for Muslims,
Allah; for the Romans, divinitas; for others ancient and modern, it was and is considered to be expressible, or
intimated, by mythoi and presenced in ὁ θεὸς, the deity, and/or by θεοί, the gods." 5

I could not help contrasting this experience with my violent, propaganda-strewn, decades as a fanatical hateful
National-Socialist, and it was such feelings, such experiences, such intimations, that culminated in me, on my return to
Cairo, buying a copy of The Quran with Arabic text and an English translation, and, on my return to England, beginning
to study Islam, followed by a visit to the nearest Mosque.

ΞΞΞ

In the article Witch of the Welsh Marches that you wrote for Lamp of Thoth you mention happening across a Cunning
Woman with some interesting abilities. Could disclose more information on this event and the individual?

Having just re-read that old item perhaps the only relevant remembering is how she was accepted by the few local,
rural-dwelling, people who knew her with the terms 'witch' and 'witchcraft' and 'cunning woman' never used by them in
reference to her. My use of the terms 'witch' and 'cunning woman' were thus assumptions which I naively and wrongly
applied to her.

ΞΞΞ

You are certainly a man that has a passionate interest in ancient mythology, but I'm curious what you know about the
mythos of King Arthur?

While living in rural Shropshire from the late 1970s to the late 1980s I did hear some old folk tales about King Arthur
and connections to that county and jotted some of them down, which scribblings I subsequently lost although I did
send some of them to an artistic friend I made during the latter part of that period. The person in question apparently
became so enamoured of rural South Shropshire, and such mythoi, that he subsequently settled, for a while at least, in
that area.

One such tale recounted that Arthur was buried in a mound in what later became Shrewsbury town; that the Nyneve of
Le Morte D’Arthur dwelt in a Shropshire lake; and that Arthur and his Knights fought a battle near the Camlad river.

ΞΞΞ

You have mentioned that cycling is the most civilised form of transport. Could you expand on your reasoning and how
it plays into your ethos and philosophy?

An interesting question and such an expression seems to be that something I might have written although I cannot
now recall when and in what particular missive among the thousands.

Certainly, musing on cycling mostly in Britain and often in rural areas from the late 1960s to past the year 2010, it felt
and still feels very civilized to me involving some physical effort to produce motion, a direct connection with one's
surroundings and with the weather of the moment; and producing no noise. There was a lovely feeling in the freedom
to just being able to cycle somewhere. I also enjoyed the 'race of truth' - cycling time trials - at both local club level
and those organized by what seemed to me the very British amateur-run Road Time Trials Council. Not that I ever won
any club or RTTC time trials or even came close to winning. I also failed to break the hour for a 25 mile time trial
although I twice was within a few minutes with the joke among my club being that I might have succeeded had I
shaved off my beard. However, I did, one year, win my club's Best All Rounder trophy for the most consistent rider over
a season.

The only connection I can make between such experiences and feelings, and my ethos (whatever that might be) and
my philosophy, is pathei-mathos; a personal learning; of being in and with Nature through a certain physical effort, and
of silently discovering new horizons as in cycling in the Sahara Desert and as in cycling English lanes, tracks, and roads
as that almost year in the 1980s cycling every working day from Shrewsbury town to my place of rural employment
near Bishop's Castle and then back again the same day and how, that Winter, the road was one day only kept open by
a Snow Plough with several feet of ploughed snow lining the verges for over a week. Despite or possibly because of the
effort - there was a steepish hill leading toward Bishop's Castle - and the cold there was a beauty breeding a calmness
within.

ΞΞΞ

During your time in the north of England did you ever visit Stanton Moor, and if so, were there any memorable
locations?

No, the nearest I ever was to that particular place was over a decade later while cycling in one day from Shropshire to
Fulwood near Sheffield via Buxton, Miller's Dale and Hathersage. An enjoyable if at times testing bicycle ride
particularly as I had chosen to ride what cyclists of my era called a 'fixed wheel' cycle with a medium (42x16) gear,
whose saving graces were the Mercian 531 frame and forks and a broken-in Brooks Professional leather saddle.

Which for some reason returns us to your question about cycling and whether it may be connected to my, as yet still -
at least to me - unknown, ethos.

David Myatt
July 29th 2024

1. qv. Appendix Two, Notes on Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book 5, 1015α, in Physis And Jesus Of Nazareth,
https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/dwmyatt-physis-and-jesus.pdf

2. Inquinatious because of the unproven allegations and assumptions made and propagated in the media, a few
examples of which are that Myatt "lies through his teeth" - made to journalist Justin Ling in an item published in March
2022 - and that I am still a neo-nazi, with my philosophy of pathei-mathos and rejection of extremism a deception with
such post-2011 writings thus not to be taken seriously. Thus he, and similar inquinatious persons of the anti-fascist
variety, placed and place lies and propaganda on behalf of their beliefs before veracity, honour, and decency.

3. https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t45466/?postcount=1#post287751

4. Interview, Summer 2022, included in An Uncertitude Of Knowing: Four Interviews, 2023, ISBN 978-8394746575

5. Empathy And Pathei-Mathos As A Guide, in Notes On War, Suffering, And Personal Judgement,
https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/dwmyatt-notes-war-suffering.pdf

Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 4.0 license

 An Interview With David Myatt On A Summer Solstice Eve

RS: Three recent and connected articles {1} written in response to an academic article about you {2} raise several
interesting questions, for example about Vindex as archetype, and especially, as described in the Vindex, Homo Hubris,
And Authenticity article, about

"how the ideas and mythos were developed, evolved, {by you] over many years away from severe
ideological, impersonal, and moralistic generalizations toward an emphasis on personal change through an
authentic, first-hand, appreciation of virtues such as reason, restraint, and an empathy with all living things
wrought through a rural living,"

and what if anything is left of those ideas and that mythos in your philosophy of pathei-mathos, and if nothing of them
remain then who not?

DM: The authors of those 'three connected articles' were correct regarding how I during my former extremist years
understood the term 'authentic', as "original; of one who does something for themselves, or of the 'principle' one or
thing or {of a] being." That is, not in the sense used by Clive Henry in his article about me.

Hence I formerly regarded 'race' then 'the folk' and then a type of rural community as authentic; latterly as causal
manifestations of the numinous understood then, and I quote, as

"Something is numinous if it has beauty and awe. Something which is divinely-inspired or divinely-
representative is numinous. What is numinous is generally what is revered, or regarded as sacred - as
spiritual or divine. Nature herself is numinous - a wonderful, awe-inspiring mystery. The numinous is an
expression of the acausal - of the Unity behind causal, temporal, appearance." {3}

As for what is now left of those ideas and that mythos: absolutely nothing since in my weltanschauung of pathei-
mathos the emphasis is on the individual, their empathy, their pathei-mathos, and therefore on the wordless-knowing
that they reveal. Hence, what is authentic is that individual revealing and not some mythos, not some idea by
someone else or by anything posited by some ideology, political or religious or social. As I wrote in 2022 in Denotata,
Empathy, And The Hermetic Tradition:

"as a personal human faculty empathy has a personal horizon and thus cannot be extrapolated from such a
personal knowing into some-thing supra-personal be this some-thing denotata, including an ἰδέᾳ/εἶδος, or an
axiom (ἀρχή) or a source (αἴτιος) for some 'revelation' or ideology or similar manifestations constructed by
and dependent on appellation. In the case of a 'revelation' the source is often named as God or a god/the
god (θεὸς, ὁ θεὸς) who or which are often described by a myth or mythoi." {4}

Furthermore, my disputable understanding now is that the numinous is

"what manifests or can manifest or remind us of (what can reveal) the natural balance of ψυχή; a balance
which ὕβρις upsets. This natural balance - our being as human beings - is or can be manifest to us in or by
what is harmonious, or what reminds us of what is harmonious and beautiful. In a practical way, it is what
predisposes us not to commit ὕβρις, and thus what we regard or come to appreciate as 'sacred' and
dignified; what expresses our developed humanity and thus places us, as individuals, in our correct relation
to ψυχή, and which relation is that we are but one mortal emanation of ψυχή." (5}

"in terms of numinosity, empathy presents or can present to us in the immediacy of the personal moment an
individual intimation or wordless knowing of the numinous, which intimation or knowing places our mortal
life, and all we connect with it or is connected to it, into a supra-personal perspective which is a-causal and
of Being itself, the source of beings and all being; of which Being we as a mortal are one finite deathful
emanation. Which perspective brings with it or can bring with it the wordless knowing of the unwisdom of
words." {6}

Thus, we can know the numinous wordlessly through personal empathy and through our personal pathei-mathos.

RS: Isn't that idealistic and not therefore realistic or applicable to most humans today around the world who are forced
to struggle and endure suffering in order to just survive, or who live in poverty?

DM: Unfortunately, that is so. Personally, I have no answers to how to alleviate suffering, en masse, or how to alleviate
poverty, en masse. Or how to solve the many other problems that exist in our modern world as they did in the past. All
I have is my own fallible learning from experience which included forty years as an extremist who caused or who
incited suffering.

But it is not enough, on the short time-scale of decades. Yet I nurture the probably naive hope that such a learning
might influence a few people who personally and in the longer perspective might affect some change and thus be the
genesis of something positive in regard to such suffering and such poverty.

My admittedly precarious understanding is that attempts by modern governments, well-intentioned as they may be,
are or often seem to be offset by the suffering some of their other polices, internal and external, cause or have caused
based as those polices are on supra-personal abstractions, and sometimes also by the abrogation of policies by the
government that succeeds them.

RS: Returning now to your extremist past, do you regret composing and publishing your National Socialist writings?

DM: Yes.

RS: That said, are you concerned they are still available?

DM: Yes, and No. No, because they document, for others, both my extremism and the extremism of a particular
ideology, where by extremism I mean:

"to be harsh, so that my understanding of an extremist is a person who tends toward harshness, or who is
harsh, or who supports/incites harshness, in pursuit of some objective, usually of a political or a religious
nature. Here, harsh is: rough, severe, a tendency to be unfeeling, unempathic. Hence extremism is
considered to be: (i) the result of such harshness, and (ii) the principles, the causes, the characteristics, that
promote, incite, or describe the harsh action of extremists. In addition, a fanatic is considered to be someone
with a surfeit of zeal or whose enthusiasm for some objective, or for some cause, is intemperate. In the
philosophical terms of my weltanschauung, an extremist is someone who commits the error of hubris." {7}

A further no, because they are a reminder of my past errors and fanaticism and of the need for a personal expiation.
Part of which expiation I believe, correctly or mistakenly, is being honest about my past extremism and another part of
which is, again correctly or mistakenly, my weltanschauung of pathei-mathos and my other, personal, writings since
2012 such as Almost Mid-Summer, {8} and Pathei-Mathos: Genesis of My Unknowing. {9}

Yes, I am concerned since others may be inspired and possibly were inspired by them; although I have the perhaps
naive hope that my writings since 2012 may somewhat offset that.

RS: In some of those NS writings such as Why We Must Return To The Land you eulogized the English rural life and
manual labour as in these two extracts from your Letters From An English Farm {10} which were quoted in the
aforementioned Vindex, Homo Hubris, And Authenticity article:

"Another warm beautiful Spring day in the English fields of the kind that reminds how wonderful and simple
life can and should be: there seem to be no problems here, by this small stream, and I sit on the now longish,
greening grass beside it beneath a sky of variegated blue with only the sounds of birds for company. No
breeze to stir the trees of the overgrown copse behind.

There, three yards away, a bare grass-free patch where animals have come to drink, leaving prints in the
now dried mud: two deer, a fox. There is no human-made war here; no rockets, missiles, bombs; and I am left
again to wonder with sadness why our species never learns. Once, many times, anger at such injustice would
have roused me, all but controlled me, and I would have sallied forth to try and make things better. But now:
now, I feel only the centuries of longing that have brought some of our species to that perspective, that
compassion, that empathy that has grown within me as grass grows with each warming Spring. Such a gift,
this soil." {10}

"I have learned that one of the most harmful things is an ideology, of whatever kind, political, religious,
social: a belief we have the answers, and that some law, some government, some abstract idea, some
political or social policy, or religious belief, can and will change things for the better, even though - as it
almost always does - such a thing involves some suffering, some deaths, some people being deprived of
their liberty, their freedom, and some individuals using whatever arts of manipulation they can to convince
others of the correctness of such a thing, which is always supra-personal, and as such always involves some
people, or some government, having some dishonourable 'authority' over others, on pain of punishment.

The simple way of reason, of restraint, of empathy with all living things, of symbiosis with Nature does
involve us changing ourselves but such change involves only a free, conscious, individual, choice. Can we
accept some of the hardships, the frugality, that such a life brings because we know that this is how we can
and should live and that by so living we are not only not harming others, but aiding ourselves, our family, or
locality, Nature and the Cosmos? All else seems, now, inauthentic, unnecessary, a turning away from the
knowledge, the understanding, we have achieved - and especially a turning away from that empathy, that
consciousness, that awareness of the matrix, of us as a connexion, a living nexus, which I have begun to feel
is the essence of our humanity." {10}

My question is: does your philosophy of pathei-mathos retain anything of that idealism or personal experience?

DM: No it does not, which is perhaps remiss of me since such a rural way of life was instrumental in me re-connecting
with Nature in a numinous way sans words, ideas, ideology and abstractions, and which re-connection placed my own
life into a supra-personal perspective and began the process, before the death of Francis in 2006, of the re-evaluation
of myself and of extremism that years later resulted in my weltanschauung of pathei-mathos.

So therefore I perhaps should write something about how an individual, or a family, can presence the numinous in a
wordless way through such a rural living.
RS: Is that something you have hinted at in writings such as One Tree Among Many and The Hour Before Dawn, and It
Is Dawn which I have collected here as Appendix I?

DM: Yes, hinted at, so perhaps such very personal experiences are all that needs to be written, for to write anything
else, more than briefly recounting such personal experiences, now seems to me just waffling and making unnecessary
supra-personal generalizations.

RS: You have written many recent items about Christianity, such as JS Bach: BWV 118 {11} which apparently indicate
a sympathy with that religion, or more particularly with Roman Catholicism - and I'm thinking of your items such as A
Sacramental Link?, {12} and about TS Eliot, {13} and your vignette Yuletide 2023 {14} - so would it be right to say
that you're now a Christian, again?

DM: Although I respect many aspects of that weltanschauung and especially how Roman Catholicism presenced and in
some way still presences the numinous - as in pre-Gregorian chant and Gregorian chant such as that of Hildegard von
Bingen; as in the mysterium that is Latin Tridentine Mass and the sacrament of Confession; and as in the allegory of
the life of Jesus of Nazareth, the message of The Beatitudes as I, possibly heretically, have translated them, {15} and
as in his betrayal, his the suffering death - my feeling (and as often I use that word advisedly) is that I am now only my,
possibly somewhat paganus, personal weltanschauung of pathei-mathos.

In The Johannine Weltanschauung {16} written this year I expressed my concerns, past and present, regarding the
acceptance by Christians of the Old Testament and of the interpretation of particular Hellenistic (κοινὴ) Greek words in
translations of the New Testament. Which is why I would not now describe myself as a Christian.

RS: In 2020, and during the Covid 'lock-down' in Britain, you wrote: "Is this understanding – this intuition – the essence
of a modern paganism? Personally I believe that it is." {17} Is that still valid?

DM: Yes, although, since we are mortal fallible beings, one never knows what events and experiences may occur to be
the genesis of some future inner change.

The interview was conducted, via the medium of e-mail, on the eve of the Summer Solstice of 2024 CE, by RS who
compiled the exchanges into the text that was converted to a pdf document; who also corrected some typos, added
some punctuation for readability, and provided URL's for some of the references mentioned in the exchanges.

°°°
URL's correct as of June 2024

{1} The three articles are:

(i) Vindex, Homo Hubris, And Authenticity In The National Socialist Writings Of David Myatt,
https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/davidmyatt-vindex-homo-hubris.pdf
(ii) the two-part The Imagined Emotionology Of Mr Henry, https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads
/2024/06/imagined-motionology-dmyatt-parts1-and-2.pdf

{2} The academic article is David Myatt’s Imagined Emotionology, his Striving for Authentic Aryan Emotional
Communities, and the Dishonourable Wulstan Tedder, by Clive Henry, https://doi.org/10.1080/14631180.2024.2319484

{3} Appendix II of the third edition of The Meaning of National-Socialism, 115yf {2004] in respect of which date qv.
footnotes {1} and {2} of Vindex, Homo Hubris, And Authenticity, op. cit.

{4} Denotata, Empathy, And The Hermetic Tradition, https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03

/dwm-denotata-empathy-v1b.pdf

{5} Appendix VII of The Numinous Way Of Pathei-Mathos, https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads

/2022/10/numinous-way-pathei-mathos-v7.pdf

{6} Empathy, The Hermetic Tradition, And Our Human Physis, in Denotata, Empathy, And The Hermetic Tradition, op.
cit.

{7} Understanding and Rejecting Extremism, https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/david-

myatt-rejecting-extremism.pdf

{8} Almost Mid-Summer, https://web.archive.org/web/20230606194010/https://www.davidmyatt.info/almost-

midsummer.html
{9} Pathei-Mathos: Genesis of My Unknowing, Appendix II of Extremism And Reformation,
https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/reformation-extremism-v3b.pdf

{10} Letters From An English Farm, https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/davidmyatt-farm-

letters.pdf

{11} JS Bach: BWV118, https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/dwmyatt-bwv118.pdf

{12} A Sacramental Link, https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/sacremental-link-1.pdf

{13} Poetry, Weltschmerz, And A learning From Experience, https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads

/2024/04/dwm-one-discovery.pdf

{14} Yule 2023, https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/dm-2023-yule.pdf

{15} Gospel According To Matthew, Chapter Five, vv.1–10, A Translation And Commentary,
https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/the-beatitudes-v1.pdf

{16} The Johannine Weltanschauung, https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/dwmyatt-

johannine-gospel.pdf

{17} qv. In Middle Of The Month Of April in Appendix I.

Appendix I

It Is Dawn

It is Dawn, breaking, in June in England as I, now an old man with three feet to guide him on his walks, {1] look out
from an open window to hear the Blackbird beginning its song when the modern clock-time is around four o’clock in
the morning. A song whose beginning varies as measured by such a modern human-manufactured time but whose
genesis is the natural, unmeasured, rhythm of Nature. For only a month or so it was a clock-measured hour later at five
o’clock.

The Dawn, here in a county of England, is a natural Dawn, when we remaining few, now or in memory, go or used to go
out in all weathers, to contain the milk that our Cows, on farms, produced and which milk so many consumers in towns
and cities still seemed to need or enjoy.

There was, or seemed and even now seems to me to be, a natural rhythm there, in such personal manual outdoor toil.
A somewhat calmer and slower way of living that apparently has no or little place in the modern world that has evolved
around us. But perhaps this is just nostalgia from a now geriatric man remembering former joys, which though
sometimes forged in trying times, became for him at least the genesis of a supra-personal perspective.

David Myatt
June 15th 2024

{1] Who with "his foliage drying up and no stronger than a child, with three feet to guide him on his travels, wanders –
appearing a shadow in the light of day." τό θ᾽ ὑπέργηρων φυλλάδος ἤδη κατακαρφομένης τρίποδας μὲν ὁδοὺς στείχει,
παιδὸς δ᾽ οὐδὲν ἀρείων ὄναρ ἡμερόφαντον ἀλαίνει. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 79-82. My translation.

One Tree Among Many

Beside the stone wall that marks one of the boundaries of what has for several years been my home is an evergreen
Oak; almost a dome of spreading branches and so tall it might well be an hundred or so years in age. The tallest tree
around from near where several other and various and tallish specimens of arboreal life provide perches for those
whose Dawn Chorus becomes, was, is, a hymnal to such natural Life as has for centuries pleased us.

Two months ago, the Oak was sad; with leaves dry and dying and infested. But now, as clouds break to reveal sky-blue,
bringer of early Summer warmth: the tree has that light green of leaf rebirth, and catkins heralds of acorns an English
season hence. So there is joy within as this aged man "his foliage drying up and no stronger than a child, with three
feet to guide him on his travels, wanders – appearing a shadow in the light of day." {1]

Would that he might hear one more Dawn Chorus to so remember those, these, simple natural beauties of life which he
as so many others so easily forgot enwrapped as he, they, were in believed in, in felt, selfish concerns which all will,
must, die with us while the Sun again warms each year as it warms and life-sprouting rain seeds rebirth without any
interference from us at all.

So I sit, windows of sky and trees to enlighten again my life, listening to a heartbreaking, suspended moment in my
measured out so very limited timespan of causal life: the 12th century Cistercian Répons de Matines pour la fête de
sant Bernard.

DW Myatt
6th June 2023

{1] τό θ᾽ ὑπέργηρων φυλλάδος ἤδη κατακαρφομένης τρίποδας μὲν ὁδοὺς στείχει, παιδὸς δ᾽ οὐδὲν ἀρείων ὄναρ
ἡμερόφαντον ἀλαίνει. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 79-82. My translation.

The Hour Before Dawn

It is the hour before Dawn on the Spring Equinox, dark outside, with the Blackbird in the tree at the edge of the garden
already singing. No other sounds, as yet, and there arises within me questions I have felt several times in the past few
years.

Which are: is what we in a land such as this – a modern Western land such as England as Spring dawns even within,
upon, urban conurbations – have acquired, developed, manufactured over the past few hundred years worth the
suffering that has been inflicted upon other human beings, upon our forebears, and upon Nature? Is that suffering the
price of such societies as we have developed and now seek to maintain?

Numerous overseas conflicts; two World Wars with millions upon millions dead, injured, traumatized, and cities, towns,
Nature, destroyed. Numerous invasions and wars since then. Poverty, homelessness, injustice, inequality, crime, still
within our lands. Has anything in terms of our humanity, of we being self-controlled, rational, honest and honourable –
of ourselves as causes and vectors of suffering – really changed?

It is not as if I am exempt from having caused suffering. My past decades long suffering-causing deeds are my burden
and will be until I die.

My personal, fallible, answers born of my pathei-mathos, is that unfortunately we as individuals have not as yet en
masse changed sufficiently so as to cease to be a cause and a vector of suffering. Tethered as we still apparently are to
causal abstractions, to -isms and -ologies, and thus to denotata and the dialectic of opposites, to the conflict that such
denotata is the genesis of.

Perhaps we need another hundred, two hundred, or more years. Our perhaps we will continue, en masse, are we
mostly now are, the eventual extinction of our sometimes stable causal societies of human beings acausally inevitable,
fated; until the planet we call Earth finally meets its Cosmic end as all planets do, with we human beings never making
real the visionary dream of a few to venture forth and colonize the stars. And even if we did somehow realize that
dream, would we venture forth as the still savage, dishonourable, war-mongering species we still are?

Yet all I have in answer, in expiation for my own past suffering-causing deeds, is my weltanschauung of pathei-mathos;
{1] so insufficient in so many ways.

David Myatt
March 2023 CE

{1] The Numinous Way of Pathei-Mathos, https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/numinous-

way-pathei-mathos-v7.pdf

In Middle Of The Month Of April

In the now still warm air of an approaching English dusk, in middle of the month of April, I can hear the birdsong of a
Thrush while I sit, outdoors, near a blossoming Cherry tree.

Nearby, the garden of an Inn – a Tavern, a Pub – is eerily silent because deserted. At this time of year there should be,
there was for decades, the laughter, the bustling, the joy, of human beings.

Such human silence is, for me, unprecedented. Making me aware of how transient we as a terran species are on this
planet we have named as Earth. Were we all to die – from some future pandemic or other – would Nature, presenced in
such life as birds and trees, endure? Possibly. Probably.

Were we as a species to survive some future pandemic or other would we humans as a species learn from such a
pathei-mathos and change our Nature-destroying, our unemphatic, ways? Are we capable of learning from such a
pandemic as currently affects our human species?

Somehow, I doubt that we in our majority would – or even could – change our ways. Yet – and at least in my experience
– there is a minority who would, who could, learn, and an even smaller minority, a pioneering few, who already if only
intuitively foresaw such a Nature-born human calamity as now affects us, our societies. Foresaw, and changed their
ways of life accordingly.
Perhaps, as I myself intuitively feel – listening as I now do in the burgeoning twilight to the birdsong of a Thrush near a
blossoming Cherry tree – those pioneering few are or should be our future. For they are those who, with families or
alone, mostly live, often in rural or wilderness areas, "off grid" and thus disconnected from modern means of
communication and striving to be self-sufficient in terms of food and other essentials.

For such pioneering few there are no ideologies; no politics; no interfering desire – political or religious – to change
what-is into what others passionately believe should-be. Instead, there is only their family or an individual desire to live
in a more natural, a more intuitive, way with Nature, with the Cosmos. Only an awareness of how we – as individuals,
as a family – are a nexion to Nature, to Earth, to the Cosmos and thus an awareness of how what we do or we do not
do affects or can affect Nature, Earth, the Cosmos.

Is this understanding – this intuition – the essence of a modern paganism? Personally I believe that it is.

David Myatt
April 2020

Source: https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com

Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 4.0 license

 A May Day Interview With David Myatt
2024

Question: Based on your wrydful life [1] how would you now describe our human condition?

Answer: Forty years of personal and practical experiences in the real world led me to conclude that we as a species do
not seem to have learned from what I have termed our thousands of years old human culture of pathei-mathos which:
(i) is described in memoirs, aural stories, and historical accounts such as With The Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa
by Eugene Sledge;
(ii) has inspired particular works of literature or poetry or drama, e.g. Σοφοκλέους Οἰδίπους Τύραννος;
(iii) is expressed via non-verbal mediums such as Art and music, e.g. John Dunstable: Preco preheminencie; and
(iv) is manifest in more recent times by 'art-forms' including certain films and certain documentaries such as Monsieur
Lazhar and Salt Of The Earth by Juliano Ribeiro Salgado.

However, even now, in what is the 21st century of a certain calender, politicians and others continue to try and justify
war and supra-personal armed conflict in the name of this or that manufactured causal abstraction, where there is
always 'the-other' and 'we, the justified, the righteous', as is so evident in the current conflicts between Ukraine and
Russia and what has happened and is happening in Gaza in which conflicts America and most NATO countries support
and arm one side against the other. Which conflicts are just two current examples among so many around the world.

Moving on from such generalizations, a relevant real-life personal example is the 2008 case of Brianna Denison in Reno
Nevada, with the coward responsible, rightly - in my opinion, based on my belief in personal honour [2] - sentenced to
death, using the legal system to keep himself alive for over a decade. Furthermore, and insofar as I know, such
personal violence happens almost every day in almost every land, in every designated modern nation, on planet Earth.
Hence my assessment, in the 2023 missive Nearly A Decade Ago [3] that an observing alien from an extraterrestrial
world would conclude that we are an aggressive, still rather primitive and very violent, species best avoided until such
time as we might outwardly demonstrate otherwise".

In addition, as I wrote in that missive, "I was and am painfully aware of my own, decades-long, past of violence,
extremism, conflict, intolerance, hatred, incitement, and selfishness," asking "whether my own fallible learning from
experience and attempt at expiation, as manifest in my individualistic weltanschauung of pathei-mathos" has any
meaning or relevance external to myself. [4]

It does not seem so, with even the answers of long-established religions and ways of life, such as Christianity,
Buddhism, and Taoism, while having helped over millennia to reduce suffering through individual awareness of the
numinous not having prevented individuals and nations from perpetuating, year after year, decade after decade, the
cycle of human-inflicted suffering.

Why not prevented? Partly because of the vexatious problem of exegesis since all politics and most established
religions and religious ways of life depend on denotata and thus on causal abstractions and on how such denotata are
interpreted. Which interpretations can and do vary from political faction to political faction, from one political party to
another, from one manifesto to another. While in the matter of religion, on interpretation of texts from decade to
decade, from century to century, and which variations and disputations often led to conflict, schisms, persecution, and
accusations of heresy as "in the case of the Alexandrian priest Arius (born c.250, died 336 AD) who voiced an
interpretation of the difference between the denotatum θεὸς and the denotatum ὁ θεὸς in, for instance the Gospel of
John, leading to that interpretation being denounced as heretical." [5]

Q: How, then, do you understand our future?

A: As a necessary and personal disengagement from denotata, from causal abstractions and from exegesis, to the very
personal perceiveration that empathy provides. For,

"The numinous way - the philosophy - of pathei-mathos is based on four principles: (i) that it is empathy and
pathei-mathos which can wordlessly reveal the ontological reality both of our own physis and of how we, as
sentient beings, relate to other living beings and to Being itself; (ii) that it is [denotata] – and thus the
abstractions deriving therefrom – which, in respect of human beings, can and often do obscure our physis
and our relation to other living beings and to Being; (iii) that [denotata] and abstractions imply a dialectic of
contradictory opposites and thus for we human beings a separation-of-otherness; and (iv) that this dialectic
of opposites is, has been, and can be a cause of suffering for both ourselves, as sentient beings, and – as a
causal human presenced effect – for the other life with which we share the planet named in English as
Earth." [6]

Which disengagement will probably be very slow and over centuries, if it occurs at all on the scale necessary to reform,
evolve, our human physis. For such disengagement is the lesson of our thousands of year old human culture of pathei-
mathos.

For the learning has been and is that empathy and pathei-mathos are always directly personal perceiverations and
experiences, and thus have a 'personal horizon' meaning that they cannot be extrapolated from such a personal
knowing into some-thing supra-personal be this some-thing denotata, including an ἰδέᾳ/εἶδος, or an axiom (ἀρχή) or a
source (αἴτιος) for some 'revelation' or ideology or similar manifestations constructed by and dependent on
appellation.

But it seems that our current societies, at least in the West, incline so many from necessity or personal choice to not
have the time, the means, the inclination to disengage from the temporal modern world to thus either spend months
alone or with a loved one or with their family in some wilderness or remote rural area for weeks, months, on end, or to
begin a new life in such areas.

Q: So you are pessimistic about the future?

A: I am neither pessimistic nor optimistic. It is what it is and what it may well be. As TS Eliot beautifully expressed it in
his Ash Wednesday poem:

Because I know that time is always time

And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessed face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice
And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

For me, now, that 'God' of his and of others is Being, ὁ θεὸς, The Ineffable, The Unknowing and Unknowable, The
Acausal, The-Unity, The One-The Only (τὸ ἓν), The Monas (μονάς) and which 'acausal' Being Muslims called Allah and
Christians called God.

This Being is also, as described in the Corpus Hermeticum, both male-and-female:

Theos, the perceiveration, male-and-female [ἀρρενόθηλυς] being Life and phaos, whose logos brought forth
another perceiveration, an artisan, who - theos of Fire and pnuema - fashioned seven viziers to surround the
perceptible cosmic order in spheres and whose administration is described as fate.

ὁ δὲ Νοῦς ὁ θεός, ἀρρενόθηλυς ὤν, ζωὴ καὶ φῶς ὑπάρχων, ἀπεκύησε λόγωι ἕτερον Νοῦν δημιουργόν, ὃς
θεὸς τοῦ πυρὸς καὶ πνεύματος ὤν, ἐδημιούργησε διοικητάς τινας ἑπτά, ἐν κύκλοις περιέχοντας τὸν
αἰσθητὸν κόσμον, καὶ ἡ διοίκησις αὐτῶν εἱμαρμένη καλεῖται. [7]

Q: What then do you understand by 'pray' since TS Eliot's phrase

And pray that I may forget

These matters that with myself I too much discuss

seems appropriate to describe what you wrote in 2014:

 "My writings, post-2011, were and are really dialogues: interiorly with myself and externally with a few
friends or the occasional person who has contacted me and expressed an interest." [8]

A: I understand prayer now in a contemplative way, sans words spoken aloud or unvoiced or read. Through, for
instance, a listening to such music as provides a personal awareness of the numinous as for me in the 12th century
Cistercian Répons de Matines pour la fête de sant Bernard; [9] in Dunstable's Preco preheminencie, in the Super
Flumina Babylonis of Phillipe de Monte, in JS Bach's Aria Ich habe genug BWV 82, and many other pieces of 'classical'
music.

But especially and primarily in a contemplation of Nature through for instance solitary silent manual outdoor work
where there is a wordless awareness; or where one, again alone, is still and silent, and senses, feels, one's rural
surroundings in a manner I attempted to describe in some letters I once wrote from which letters these are two
extracts:

"There is a lovely, simple, pleasure here in this field. Spring is most certainly here: in the meadow fields,
seedlings of the late Spring flowers push up through the tufts of grass whose frost-bitten ends are joined by
shoots of new growth. Already some flowers bloom in the grass: there, a Dandelion; there: almost two circles
of Daisies. And, to compliment the calls and songs of other birds, the loud repeating call of the Parus major.

It is good to be here, with an unobstructed view of the sky, and I watch the clouds, borne as they are on a
still cool breeze that begins to chill my hands, a little. But there is Sun, warm, when the altocumulus breaks.
On the horizon in the North, beyond the tall old Oak, small Cumulus clouds drift toward the hills, ten miles
distant.

Thus am I again - for these moments - at peace with myself, this world, listening as I do to a large flock of
Starlings who chatter among themselves in the trees across from the drainage ditch, there by the copse of
Ash, Oak, and a few young Beech [...]

Work, yes there must be work: toil enough to keep that balance. And work with these my hands, outdoors
where lives the silence that I love as I feel the weather, changing, bringing thus an empathic living for me, in
me, and for this life that lives around, emanating as it does in this grass, those trees, the clouds, the soil, the
water, those flowers, the very sky itself." [10]

"A glorious warm day of full, hot, Sun and I after work lying in the warm still growing greening grass by the
edge of one field at the back of the Farm - sometimes asleep - for what is probably an hour [...]

Beneath and around the old tall Oak, acorns have fallen, eaten or stored, or both, by Squirrels, for I can find
and see only the top which once held them on the tree. The small pond with its incumbent still living
branches, is smaller, greener now, home to algae and slime, and the large Dragonfly hovers above the
greenish water, to fly around to return to hover. A fly - or something, for I cannot quite see from here - passes
it by and the Dragonfly darts around, chasing it away from the water. It is a chase, for I see this happen
twice, three times. Then the Dragonfly is gone, toward the bushes, the branches. In the field, a single tall
Cornflower amid the yellow buttercups, the purple Clover, the Vetchling and Hawksbeard. Field-walking, I can
see the Church in the two-mile distant village whose bell I can hear, here, come Sunday morning. And now,
at last, I am here in the neglected one-acre strip whose fruit-giving, flowering hedges have been untrimmed
for years [...]

I have no land, no field or fields, to call my own where I can tend and care as life, field-grown, field-sown,
field-fare, should be tended with care born from dwelling, feeling, there. I only work, toiling, for another, to
keep me fed, housed, clothed, tired and, sometimes, content, as now where two small brown butterflies
spiral and dance around the greening growing grass where I have sat to sit crossed legged writing this,
chewing on a sweet stalk of grass. So warm the Sun I can forget what should-be in the what-is of warmth: in
the gentle music of leaves, breeze-brought. A few small cumulus clouds drift West to East over the nearby
wooded hill, and I know, sense, feel, that here in this field, under this Sun, is Paradise." [10]

Q: But what then can be done for others in your land and in other lands to make their lives better?

A: My fallible conclusion now is that it can only be individual, through personal example, personal honour, and/or by
what we feel we can or perhaps need to express by adding to our human culture of pathei-mathos through some
medium such as poetry, music, Art, autobiographical writings, drama, scholarly research, and so on.

Q: Finally, in an interview in August of 2022 you were asked the following question: "[since] your many vociferous
politically motivated opponents have not accepted that you have rejected extremism with many still considering you a
neo-nazi. Does that bother you?"

To which you replied:

"No. For judging by their deeds and words they live in a different world from the one I now inhabit or rather
that I now perceive. My perceiveration is a very local and personal one; of my locality, of Nature and its local
emanations; of my relatives and friends and my interactions with and concern for them. That other world
beyond - or should that be those other worlds beyond - this local personal world no longer concern me given
 my plenitude of past mistakes, my past hubriatic suffering-causing interference, and my recently discovered
Uncertitude Of Knowing.

They, those opponents, in comparison seem to have that Certitude Of Knowing that I for many decades had,
breeding as it did and does prejudice, intolerance, hatred, and discouraging as it did and does empathy,
forgiveness, and a personal Uncertitude Of Knowing." [11]

My question now is whether you have anything to add.

A: Only that, and to paraphrase what someone wrote in March 2024, it does not surprise me how many individuals in
our modern world:

§ seem to lack the ability to use logical reasoning when writing about or discussing a subject;
§ do not research a subject for themselves using scholarly methodology and primary sources;
§ commit fallacies of reasoning such as appeal to authority and ad populum;
§ use an Internet resource such as 'wikipedia' as a source of information about a subject even though it is a
tertiary source and thus is based on interpretive secondary sources. [12]

Perhaps if they had received in their youth a 'classical education', a learning of Ancient Greek, Latin, and a study of
works such as Hermeneutica Analytica Elenctica and Euclid's Στοιχεῖα, they would not commit such errors. Personally, I
well remember the joy I had as a schoolboy in reading the set text The Elements of Euclid For The Use of Schools and
Colleges, and in solving the geometrical problems we were given based on that text.

°°°

v. 1. 04. The interview was conducted via the medium of e-mail by Rachael Stirling and has been slightly edited for publication.

°°°

[1] The 46-page monograph The Peregrinations Of David Myatt: National Socialist Ideologist provides an overview.
https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/2021/12/11/a-national-socialist-ideologue/

[2] An extract from Honour, The Numinous Balance is included in Appendix I.

[3] Included as Appendix II.

[4] Note by DM: Personally, I have a great respect for other religions and spiritual ways, and aware of how they each in
their own manner, express, have expressed, or are intimations of, the numinous. For instance, I have come to
appreciate, more and more over the past few years, the numinosity of the sacred music of the Christian Church
(especially Catholicism), from before Gregorian chant to Gregorian chant to composers such as Byrd, Dowland, Lassus,
to Palestrina, to Phillipe de Monte, and beyond.

Thus such sacred music has become, for me, redolent of the beautiful, of humility, of tragedy, of a sacred supra-
personal joy, of what is or can be divined through contemplative prayer. A remarkable treasure of culture, of pathei-
mathos.

[5] Exegesis And Pathei-Mathos, https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/exegesis-pathei-

mathos-v1.pdf

[6] Physis And Being in The Numinous Way Of Pathei-Mathos, https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads

/2022/10/numinous-way-pathei-mathos-v7.pdf

[7] Poemandres, v.9; qv. A Note On The Term Noesis In Tractate XIII, included in Hermetica And Alchemy,
https://perceiverations.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/hermetica-alchemy-dwmyatt.pdf

[8] Some Questions For DWM 2014, https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/dwm-2014-

questions.pdf

[9] qv. One Tree Among Many, included as Appendix IV.

[10] Letters From A Farm, https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/dwmyatt-farm-letters.pdf

[11] The interview is included in An Uncertitude Of Knowing: Four Interviews, ISBN 9798394746574

[12] Some Signs Of Our Era, https://archive.org/download/signs-of-modern-era/signs-of-modern-era.pdf

°°°
Image Credit:
NASA – Earth and Moon as seen from the departing Voyager 1 interplanetary spacecraft

Appendix I

Honour – The Numinous Balance

The personal virtue of honour, and the cultivation of wu-wei, are – together – a practical, a living, manifestation of our
understanding and appreciation of the numinous; of how to live, to behave, as empathy intimates we can or should in
order to avoid committing the folly, the error, of ὕβρις, in order not to cause suffering, and in order to re-present, to
acquire, ἁρμονίη.

For personal honour is essentially a presencing, a grounding, of ψυχή – of Life, of our φύσις – occurring when the insight
(the knowing) of a developed empathy inclines us toward a compassion that is, of necessity, balanced by σωφρονεῖν
and in accord with δίκη.

This balancing of compassion – of the need not to cause suffering – by σωφρονεῖν and δίκη is perhaps most obvious on
that particular occasion when it may be judged necessary to cause suffering to another human being. That is, in
honourable self-defence. For it is natural – part of our reasoned, fair, just, human nature – to defend ourselves when
attacked and (in the immediacy of the personal moment) to valorously, with chivalry, act in defence of someone close-
by who is unfairly attacked or dishonourably threatened or is being bullied by others, and to thus employ, if our
personal judgement of the circumstances deem it necessary, lethal force.

This use of force is, importantly, crucially, restricted – by the individual nature of our judgement, and by the individual
nature of our authority – to such personal situations of immediate self-defence and of valorous defence of others, and
cannot be extended beyond that, for to so extend it, or attempt to extend it beyond the immediacy of the personal
moment of an existing physical threat, is an arrogant presumption – an act of ὕβρις – which negates the fair, the
human, presumption of innocence of those we do not personally know, we have no empathic knowledge of, and who
present no direct, immediate, personal, threat to us or to others nearby us.

Such personal self-defence and such valorous defence of another in a personal situation are in effect a means to
restore the natural balance which the unfair, the dishonourable, behaviour of others upsets. That is, such defence
fairly, justly, and naturally in the immediacy of the moment corrects their error of ὕβρις resulting from their bad (their
rotten) φύσις; a rotten character evident in their lack of the virtue, the skill, of σωφρονεῖν. For had they possessed that
virtue, and if their character was not bad, they would not have undertaken such a dishonourable attack.

Extract from
The Numinous Balance of Honour,
https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/numinous-way-pathei-mathos-v7.pdf
 Appendix II

Nearly A Decade Ago

Nearly a decade ago I considered a particular question: what opinion would a hypothetical visiting alien from another
star-system form about us? [1] My answer was that the alien would consider us an aggressive, still rather primitive and
very violent, species best avoided until such time as we might outwardly demonstrate otherwise.

Subsequent to that I pondered four related questions. First, is there any land on planet Earth, any of what are now
called countries and nations, that over the past three thousand years that has not been fought over or subject to the
clash of opposed armed violent groups of mostly men? Second, how many countries or lands now, for whatever reason
or because of whatever excuse or whatever supra-personal causal abstraction, are not the subject of some armed
conflict domestic or foreign? Third, how many countries are still plagued by homicides, robbery, theft, fraud, rape,
domestic violence, subsuming hatred, poverty, dishonesty, and corruption political or otherwise? Fourth, have we as a
supposedly consciously-aware species capable of reason and of honour [2] learnt anything from thousands upon
thousands of years of such conflict, hatred, and such violence personal and impersonal?

In seeking answers to such questions I was and am painfully aware of my own, decades-long, past of violence,
extremism, conflict, intolerance, hatred, incitement, and selfishness. Of whether my own fallible ‘learning from
experience’ and attempt at expiation, as manifest in my weltanschauung of pathei-mathos, [3] has any meaning or
relevance external to myself.

But that weltanschauung is all I have in answer. The answer of a personal, a non-interfering, empathy, compassion,
humility, and of a personal honour in the immediacy of a living moment. [4]

Will we, can we, as a species change? Evolve away from the violence, the mistakes, the hatreds, the dishonours, of our
past and of our present?

David Myatt
July 2023

[1] Included as Appendix III..

[2] Sophocles, Antigone, v. 334 & vv. 365-366:

πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλε […]

σοφόν τι τὸ μηχανόεν τέχνας ὑπὲρ ἐλπίδ᾽ ἔχων
τοτὲ μὲν κακόν, ἄλλοτ᾽ ἐπ᾽ ἐσθλὸν ἕρπει

There exists much that is strange, yet nothing

Has more strangeness than a human being […]
Beyond his own hopes, his cunning
In inventive arts – he who arrives
Now with dishonour, then with chivalry

[3] https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/numinous-way-pathei-mathos-v7.pdf

[4] An extract from Honour, The Numinous Balance is included in Appendix I.

Appendix III

A Non-Terrestrial View Of Planet Earth

Several times, in the last decade or so, I have – when considering certain current events, and social change, and the
activities, policies, and speeches, of certain politicians – often asked myself a particular question: What impression or
what conclusions would a non-terran (a hypothetical visiting alien from another star-system) have of or draw from
those events, such social change, and those politicians? And what, therefore, would be the conclusions that such a
non-terran would make regarding our nature, our human character, as a species?

Which answers seemed to me to depend on what criteria – ethical, experiential, ontological, and otherwise – such a
non-terran might employ. Would, for instance, the home-world of such a non-terran be a place of relative peace and
prosperity which, having endured millennia of conflict and war, had evolved beyond conflict and war and had also
ended poverty? Would, for instance, such a non-terran view matters dispassionately, having evolved such that they are
always able to control – or have developed beyond – such strong personal emotions as now, as for all of our human
history, so often still seem to overwhelm we humans leading us and having led us to be selfish, to lie, to cheat, to
manipulate, to use violence – and sometimes kill – in order to fulfil a personal desire?

The criteria I now (post-2011) apply to this hypothetical scenario are those derived from my own experience, and from
reflecting over several years upon that experience, which criteria are of course subjective, personal, and it is thus no
coincidence that they now are reflected in my philosophy of pathei-mathos. Thus the ethics I assume such an
interstellar space-faring sentient non-terran might adhere to are based on honour and the apprehension of suffering
and hubris that empathy provides; just as the ontology derives from a numinous awareness of how causal and fallible
and transient every sentient life is in respect of the vastness of the cosmos (spatially and in terms of aeons of causal
time), with such ethics and ontology a natural consequence of such a culture whose genesis is that pathei-mathos –
ancestral, individual, societal – that derives from millennia of suffering, conflict, war, poverty, corruption, and
oppression.

Furthermore, my reflexion on the past fifty years of human space exploration leads me to further conclude that we as a
species – and perhaps every sentient species – can only venture forth, en masse, to explore and colonize new worlds
when certain social and political conditions exist: when we, when perhaps every sentient species, have matured
sufficiently to be able to, as individuals, control ourselves (without any internal or external coercion deriving from laws
or from some belief be such belief ideological, political, or religious) and thus when we use reason and empathy as our
raison d’etre and not our emotions, our desires, our egoism or some -ism or some -ology or some faith that we accept
or believe in or need. For despite the technology making such space exploration and colonization now feasible for us (if
only currently within our solar system) we lack the political will, the social desire, the trans-national cooperation, the
vision, to realize it even given that our own habitable planet is slowly undergoing a transformation for the worse
wrought by ourselves. All we have – decades after the landings on the Moon – are a few individuals inhabiting and only
for a while just one Earth-orbiting space station and a few small-scale, theorized, human landings on Mars a decade or
more in the future. For instead of such a vision of a new frontier which frontier a multitude of families can settle and
which can be the genesis of new cultures and new human societies, all we have had in the past fifty years is more of
the same: regional wars and armed conflicts; invasions, violent coups and revolutions; violent protests, the killing and
imprisonment and torture of protestors and dissenters; political propaganda for this political cause or that; exploitation
of resources and of other humans; terrorism, murder, rape, theft, and greed.

How then would my hypothetical space-faring alien judge us as a species, and how would such a non-terran view such
squabbles – political, social, ideological, religious, and be they violent or non-violent – and such poverty, inequality, and
oppression, as still seem to so bedevil almost all societies currently existing on planet Earth?

In addition, how would we as individuals – and how would our governments – interact with, and treat, such an alien
were such an alien, visiting Earth incognito, to be discovered? Would we treat such an alien with respect, with honour:

as a non-threatening ambassador from another world? Would any current government on Earth willingly and openly
and world-wide acknowledge the existence of such extra-terrestrial life and allow Earth ambassadors from any country,
and scientists, and the media, full and open access to such an alien sentient being? I have my own personal intuition
regarding answers to such questions.

But, remaining undiscovered, what would our visiting alien observer report regarding Earth and ourselves on their
return to their own planet? Again, I have my own personal intuition regarding answers to such questions. Which
answers could well be that we are an aggressive, still rather primitive and very violent, species best avoided until such
time as we might outwardly demonstrate – through perhaps having numerous peaceful, cooperating, colonies on other
worlds – that we have culturally and personally, in moral terms, advanced.

Which rather – to me at least – places certain current events, social change by -isms, by -ologies, through disruption
and violence and via revolution, and the activities, policies, and speeches, of certain politicians, and armed conflicts,
into what I intuit is a necessary cosmic, non-terran, perspective. Which perspective is of us as a species still evolving;
as having the potential and now the means to further and to consciously, and as individuals, to so evolve.

Will we do this? And how? Again, my answer – fallible as it is, repeated by me as it hereby is, and born as it is from my
own pathei-mathos – is that it could well begin with us as individuals consciously deciding to change through
cultivating empathy and viewing ourselves and our world in the perspective of the cosmos. Which perspective is of our
smallness, our fallibility, our mortality, and of our appreciation of the numinous and thus of the need to avoid the error
of hubris; an error which we mortals, millennia following millennia, have always made and which even now – even with
our ancestral world-wide culture of pathei-mathos – we still commit day after day, year after year, and century after
century, enshrined as such hubris seems to be in so many politicians; in -isms and -ologies; in disruptive and violent
social change and revolutions; in armed conflicts, and in our very physis as human individuals: an apparently
unchanged physis which so motivates so many of us to still be egoistic, to lie, to cheat, to steal, to murder, to
manipulate, to be violent, and to often be motived by avarice, pride, jealousy, and a selfish sexual desire.

As someone, over one and half-thousand years ago, wrote regarding human beings:

τοῖς δὲ ἀνοήτοις καὶ κακοῖς καὶ πονηροῖς καὶ φθονεροῖς καὶ πλεονέκταις καὶ φονεῦσι καὶ ἀσεβέσι πόρρωθέν
εἰμι͵ τῷ τιμωρῷ ἐκχωρήσας δαίμονι͵ ὅστις τὴν ὀξύτητα τοῦ πυρὸς προσβάλλων θρώσκει αὐτὸν αἰσθητικῶς
καὶ μᾶλλον ἐπὶ τὰς ἀνομίας αὐτὸν ὁπλίζει͵ ἵνα τύχῃ πλείονος τιμωρίας͵ καὶ οὐ παύεται ἐπ΄ ὀρέξεις ἀπλέ
τους τὴν ἐπιθυμίαν ἔχων͵ ἀκορέστως σκοτομαχῶν͵ καὶ τοῦ τον βασανίζει͵ καὶ ἐπ΄ αὐτὸν πῦρ ἐπὶ τὸ πλεῖον
αὐξάνει

"I keep myself distant from the unreasonable, the rotten, the malicious, the jealous, the greedy, the
bloodthirsty, the hubriatic, instead, giving them up to the avenging daemon, who assigns to them the
sharpness of fire, who visibly assails them, and who equips them for more lawlessness so that they happen
upon even more vengeance. For they cannot control their excessive yearnings, are always in the darkness –
 which tests them – and thus increase that fire even more." [1]

Which is basically the same understanding that Aeschylus revealed in his Oresteia trilogy many centuries before: the
wisdom of pathei-mathos and the numinous pagan allegory of Μοῖραι τρίμορφοι μνήμονές τ᾽ Ἐρινύες [2], and which
wisdom was also described by Milton over a millennia later by means of another allegory:

The infernal Serpent; he it was, whose guile,

Stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived
The mother of mankind.

David Myatt
2015

Extract from a letter to a personal correspondent

°°°

[1] Poemandres, 23. Translated by DWM in Corpus Hermeticum: Eight Tractates, 2017. Included in Alchemy And The
Hermetic Tradition, https://perceiverations.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/hermetica-alchemy-
dwmyatt.pdf

[2] Aeschylus (attributed), Prometheus Bound, 515-6, Translated by DM.

τίς οὖν ἀνάγκης ἐστὶν οἰακοστρόφος.

Μοῖραι τρίμορφοι μνήμονές τ᾽ Ἐρινύες

Who then compels to steer us?

Trimorphed Moirai with their ever-heedful Furies!

Appendix IV

One Tree Among Many

Beside the stone wall that marks one of the boundaries of what has for several years been my home is an evergreen
Oak; almost a dome of spreading branches and so tall it might well be an hundred or so years in age. The tallest tree
around from near where several other and various and tallish specimens of arboreal life provide perches for those
whose Dawn Chorus becomes, was, is, a hymnal to such natural Life as has for centuries pleased us.

Two months ago, the Oak was sad; with leaves dry and dying and infested. But now, as clouds break to reveal sky-blue,
bringer of early Summer warmth: the tree has that light green of leaf rebirth, and catkins heralds of acorns an English
season hence. So there is joy within as this aged man “his foliage drying up and no stronger than a child, with three
feet to guide him on his travels, wanders – appearing a shadow in the light of day.” [1]

Would that he might hear one more Dawn Chorus to so remember those, these, simple natural beauties of life which he
as so many others so easily forgot enwrapped as he, they, were in believed in, in felt, selfish concerns which all will,
must, die with us while the Sun again warms each year as it warms and life-sprouting rain seeds rebirth without any
interference from us at all.

So I sit, windows of sky and trees to enlighten again my life, listening to a heartbreaking, suspended moment in my
measured out so very limited timespan of causal life: the 12th century Cistercian Répons de Matines pour la fête de
sant Bernard.

DW Myatt
6th June 2023

[1] τό θ᾽ ὑπέργηρων φυλλάδος ἤδη κατακαρφομένης τρίποδας μὲν ὁδοὺς στείχει, παιδὸς δ᾽ οὐδὲν ἀρείων ὄναρ
ἡμερόφαντον ἀλαίνει. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 79-82. My translation.

Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 4.0 license

 David Myatt: An Uncertitude Of Knowing

° Some Questions For DWM

° Myatt's Uncertitude Of Knowing
° David Myatt And The Pinch of Destiny
° Addendum: Misunderstanding Denotata In Myatt's Philosophy Of Pathei-Mathos
° Australian Interview
° Addendum: Analysing National Socialism

Between March 2022 and March 2023 David Myatt gave four interviews each one of which was informative about his
philosophy of pathei mathos, his life experiences, about extremism, and about his current views. Together they provide
a fairly comprehensive understanding of not only Myatt himself but also of his philosophy, or weltanschauung as he
prefers to call it.

In addition to these interviews we include (i) the June 2022 text Misunderstanding Denotata In Myatt's Philosophy Of
Pathei-Mathos which provides an insightful overview of his philosophy, and (ii) Myatt's 2012 text Analysing National
Socialism where he explains why his post-2010 philosophy is contrary to and incompatible with National Socialism.

Some Questions For DWM

Spring 2022

In the Numinous Expiation chapter of your Religion, Empathy, and Pathei-Mathos [1] you wrote that

"One of the many problems regarding my own past which troubles me - and has troubled me for a while - is how can a person make
reparation for suffering caused, inflicted, and/or dishonourable deeds done,"

and that you did not "know the answer to the question how to so numinously make reparation, propitiation."

Since that was written twenty years ago are you still troubled and have your views changed in regard to personally not seeking propitiation
through a religion such as Christianity?

Yes, I am still troubled, burdened, by my extremist past and the suffering I caused by believing in, agitating for and
propagandizing on behalf of the ideology of National Socialism and a particular interpretation of Islam.

For me, the source of such a burden is two-fold: how can I, and perhaps others, not cause suffering; and for me at least
there is not and probably never can be any expiation, any reparation made.

The only answer I have now, as then, is an attempt to live in "a certain gentle, quiet, way so as not to intentionally
cause suffering, so as not to upset the natural balance of Life."

Have I succeeded? I cannot presume to answer.

Which brings me to my next question. Some of your former political opponents do not believe what one socialist called your "change of heart". [2]

Hence they claim you are still a neo-nazi; that what you write and have written since 2010 such as your autobiography should be treated with
suspicion and not taken seriously; that unless you come out in public to attend some sort of 'media circus' and directly answer their questions,
they will never believe you; and that you are so concerned about your reputation that you continually search 'social media' sites and anonymously
try to not only engage with them but try to cover-up your past.

How do you react to such claims?

φημὶ ἐγώ, Μαθεῖν θέλω τὰ ὄντα καὶ νοῆσαι τὴν τούτων φύσιν καὶ γνῶναι τὸν θεόν· [3]

Such a seeking to apprehend such things is what now and for the past twenty or so years has occupied me.

As for trying to cover-up my past almost everything I wrote during my neo-nazi decades and my decade as a Muslim is
archived somewhere. In the case of my neo-nazi decades by what used to be called 'Special Branch' as I learned
following my arrest by them in 1998, and also archived on the 'world-wide web'. In the case of my decade as a Muslim
an archive of my Muslim writings also exists on the 'worldwide web'. [4]

Therefore, any attempt by me or by anyone to 'cover-up' my past would be pointless. In addition, I have no desire
whatsoever to do so since what exists documents my mistakes, failings, extremism, and arrogance which I want those
who may be interested to know, and which acknowledgment of my past by me led to that 'change of heart'. One
person has used such archives to document my extremism and the weltanschauung I developed after my rejection of
that extremism. [5]

As for what they or others claim or believe about me now and the past, it is their burden howsoever brought-into-
being, howsoever nurtured and howsoever it might be described by them or by others.

Occupied by the aforementioned seeking, I am now too near death, too wearied by my own hubris and
acknowledgment of it, too saddened by how so much suffering is still caused despite our human culture of pathei-
mathos, to be concerned about what others claim or believe about me let alone try to change anyone's beliefs or
attitudes by engaging with them in whatever way.

In a compilation published in 2019 containing some earlier essays of yours about race and extremism and which compilation complemented your
2013 book Understanding and Rejecting Extremism [6] you wrote:

"the personal fault of extremists seems to be that of being unable and/or unwilling to view, to consider, the good that exists in people,
in society, and/or of ignoring the potential for good, or change toward the good, which is within people, within society, within what-is.
To prefer the dream in their head to reality; and/or to prefer the struggle, the strife, the conflict, to stability and peace; and/or to need
or to desire repeated stimulation/excitement. One cause of such things could, in my view - from my experience - be the inability or the
unwillingness of a person, an extremist, to develope and use their own individual judgement, as well as the inability or the
unwillingness to take individual, moral, responsibility for their actions and for the effects those actions personally have upon people."
[7]

Is that and what follows about 'the good of society' and about what you term The Uncertitude of Knowing a reasonable summary of your
understanding of extremism and of your past, and are you dismayed that such personal reflections are ignored?

That essay and my Understanding and Rejecting Extremism are indeed a reasonable summary, and which
understanding was the genesis of my weltanschauung of pathei-mathos.

But as I wrote in Understanding and Rejecting Extremism,

"My conclusions regarding extremism resulted from some years of moral, personal, and philosophical
questioning and reflexion; a questioning whose genesis was a personal tragedy in 2006, and which
questioning led me a few years later to reject all forms of extremism and develope my own weltanschauung -
the philosophy of pathei-mathos - based on the virtues of empathy, compassion, and humility.

I make no claim concerning the originality, or concerning the correctness or the value or the importance of
my conclusions about extremism. They are just my personal, and fallible, conclusions which - given my
extremist past - may interest, or be of some use to, some people; and, being such personal conclusions, they
are neither presented in an academic way nor are comparisons made with the work and the conclusions
(academic or otherwise) of others about extremism."

Similarly, my weltanschauung is just my weltanschauung; representing my attempt to apprehend the physis of human
beings; to understand the causes of suffering and how suffering can be alleviated; and understand the nature of the
numinous and what it means and meant, and thus whether the numinous is embodied in theos, however understood,
or in human virtues such as compassion, empathy and honour which thus might obviate the need for a belief in
something supra-personal be that theos or some -ism or some -ology.

One of the causes of suffering is of course what is now termed 'extremism' be it personal, of one's character, or
ideological or religious or political or social.

As for such writings being ignored, no, I am not dismayed only sadly resigned as an old man to what appears to me to
be the current reality of the unchanged perhaps unchangeable physis of some human beings "despite our thousands of
years old human culture of pathei-mathos". Yet, and perhaps naively, I still nurture a slight hope that we mortals here
on Earth can change in sufficient numbers toward being compassionate, empathic, and honourable and thus reduce
the suffering we cause to other beings, human and otherwise.

In a 2017 monograph you wrote about καλὸς κἀγαθός in a manner which some readers found controversial given you seemed not only to be
suggesting some sort of new aristocracy but also some kind of new European style paganism. One striking passage is:

"[W]e are, ontologically, emanations of and presence Being, and are a connexion to the cosmos - to other presencings of Being -
through, in terms of epistemology, not only reason (λόγος), perceiverance (νοῦς) and wordless-awareness (συμπάθεια, empathy) but
also through τὸ ἀγαθὸν, τὸ καλὸν, and ἀρετὴ, through the beautiful and the well-balanced, the valourous and honourable, and those
who possess arête, all of which are combined in one Greek phrase: καλὸς κἀγαθός, which means those who conduct themselves in a
gentlemanly or lady-like manner and who thus manifest - because of their innate physis or through pathei-mathos or through a certain
type of education or learning - nobility of character." [8]

Were you suggesting a new aristocracy and a new pagan religion?

I was suggesting, evidently not very well, that "the sophia, the sapientia, of theos is presenced not in the 'word of God'
(scriptures) but in the personal Greek virtues of τὸ ἀγαθὸν, τὸ καλὸν, and ἀρετὴ, and in the metaphysical principle
denoted by the term αἰών," [9] and thus that those who conduct themselves in an old-fashioned gentlemanly or lady-
like manner manifest an aspect of the numinous that was anciently described as "the sophia, the sapientia, of theos"
[10] and that combined with empathy - manifest as empathy is in compassion and tolerance - that this could lead to a
new non-theological awareness of, and a respect for, the numinous. One which being personal is non-doctrinal but akin
to some ancient pagan weltanschauungen that existed for millennia in some Western lands as well as in other places
around the world.
I summarized this non-theological awareness as

"we human beings having a connexion to other living beings, a connexion to the cosmos beyond, and a
connexion to the source of our existence, the source of the cosmos, and the source - the origin, the genesis -
of all living beings. Which source we cannot correctly describe in words, by any denotata, or define as some
male 'god', or even as a collection of deities whether male or female, but which we can apprehend through
the emanations of Being: through what is living, what is born, what unfolds in a natural manner, what is
ordered and harmonious, what changes, and what physically - in its own species of Time - dies."

In another monograph I also suggested that

"an aspect of the paganus, Greco-Roman, apprehension of the numinous, of καλὸς κἀγαθός, is a [Ciceronian]
awareness and acceptance of one's civic duties and responsibilities undertaken not because of any personal
benefit (omni utilitate) that may result or be expected, and not because an omnipotent deity has, via some
written texts, commanded it and will punish a refusal, but because it is the noble, the honourable - the
gentlemanly, the lady-like, the human - thing to do." [11]

What are these civic duties and responsibilities? To a State, or nation, or as in Greece to a πόλις or as in Rome to a
Caesar?

This is a subject I really should have written about in that monograph and it was remiss of me not to have done so. My
mistaken assumption at the time was that readers would be aware of my previous writings about how my
weltanschauung dealt with what I termed supra-personal abstractions or 'forms' such as the State and the nation. As in
Parts Two, Three and Four of Religion, Empathy, and Pathei-Mathos. [1]

In Part Three of that work I wrote that

"[i]n the case of the culture of pathei-mathos, it not only provides, as does the modern State, a perspective
(and a teleology) unrelated to the judgement of a supreme deity and the promise of an after-life, but also
points us toward answers rather different from those provided by proponents of the State, of liberal
democracy, and of a jurisprudence concerned with international law and codifying and criminalizing what
politicians, and/or some political theory, ideology, dogma, or agenda, deem to be bad.

For what that culture provides is an understanding of how all forms - be they considered political, or codified
ideologically or in the form of a dogmatic hierarchical religion - have caused suffering, or do cause suffering
sooner or later, because they are judgemental, supra-personal; and that such suffering is unjustified because
it is individual human beings and indeed the other life with which we share this planet who and which are
important; and that to alleviate and to prevent and remove the causes of suffering is necessary because a
manifestation of what is good; that is, a manifestation of reasoned, balanced, compassionate, personal
judgement, and of that learning, that knowledge, the insights, that personal experience of conflict, war,
disaster, tragedy, havoc, violence, hatred, and pain, have taught and revealed to individuals for some three
thousand years."

In Part Four I compared the answers of conventional religions and proponents of The State, writing that

"[i]n respect of the culture of pathei-mathos, I find within it an alternative to these two influential, but in
many ways quite similar, ontologies with their powerful entities, their guidance, their punishments and
rewards, and the progression of individuals toward some-thing which the powerful entity asserts or promises
it can provide.

This alternative is the ontology of us - we human beings - as a transient affective and effective connexion to
other living beings, an emanation of the flux of Life, of ψυχή. That is, of the separation-of-otherness - of I and
of 'them', the others - being the result of a causal-only perception, and of denotatum: of our propensity to
give names to, or to describe by means of terms, that which we observe to be or that which we assume to be
is different to and separate from us, whereas, as empathy reveals, 'we' are part of, an aspect, of 'them' since
'they' are also finite, transient, emanations of ψυχή.

There is no abstract 'good' and 'evil' here; no division or cleaving asunder of φύσις (physis). There is only us
in harmony, in balance, with our nature, our φύσις, or us not in harmony with our nature as an affecting and
effecting, finite, transient, mortal, aspect of Life. If we are harmony - in balance with Life, with other life - we
do not cause or contribute to or are not the genesis of suffering: we do not affect Life in a harmful way, and
as I have intimated elsewhere love, compassion, humility, empathy, and honour, are a possible means
whereby we, in harmony with our φύσις, can avoid harming Life and its emanations, be such life our fellow
human beings or the other life with which we share this planet."

I went on to write that this

"alternative ontology, derived from the culture of pathei-mathos, suggests that the answer to the question
regarding the meaning of our existence is simply to be that which we are. To be in balance, in harmony, with
Life; the balance that is love, compassion, humility, empathy, honour, tolerance, kindness, and wu-wei,"

with wu-wei a Taoist term

 "used in my philosophy of pathei-mathos to refer to a personal 'letting-be' - a non-interference - deriving
from humility and from a feeling, a knowing, that an essential part of wisdom is cultivation of an interior
personal balance and which cultivation requires acceptance that one must work with, or employ, things
according to their nature, their φύσις, for to do otherwise is incorrect, and inclines us toward, or is, being
excessive – that is, toward the error, the unbalance, that is hubris, an error often manifest in personal
arrogance, excessive personal pride, and insolence - that is, a disrespect for the numinous."

All of which implies, with one important exception, non-violence. The exception being the matter of personal honour in
the immediacy of the moment when an individual is confronted with someone or some many who are intent on
harming or bullying that individual or someone or some others nearby. The person of honour would defend themselves,
with force if necessary, as they would when defending those being harmed or bullied.

Your writings about your philosophy have been described as making "inscrutably dense arguments." Is there a work of yours you would
recommended for those interested in your philosophy of pathei-mathos? Finally what is your opinion of the book titled The Mystic Philosophy Of
David Myatt, a third edition of which was published in 2021?

A short introduction is my 2019 essay Physis and Being [12] with my 2022 text Numinosity, Denotata, Empathy, And
The Hermetic Tradition providing a more detailed perspective. [13] The third edition of The Mystic Philosophy Of David
Myatt [14] is a reasonably comprehensive overview.

May 2022

[1] Religion, Empathy, and Pathei-Mathos. 2013. Gratis Open Access pdf: https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com
/2018/03/religion-and-empathy.pdf

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20121214002444/http://hurryupharry.org/2012/12/11/david-myatt-has-a-change-of-
heart/

[3] Poemandres, 3. "I answered that I seek to learn what is real, to apprehend the physis of beings, and to have
knowledge of theos." Myatt, Corpus Hermeticum: Eight Tractates. Gratis Open Access pdf:
https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/eight-tractates-v2-print.pdf

[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20101111104858/http://www.davidmyatt.info/

[5] https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/2021/12/11/a-national-socialist-ideologue/

[6] Understanding and Rejecting Extremism. 2013. Gratis Open Access pdf: https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com
/2022/10/david-myatt-rejecting-extremism.pdf

[7] Some Notes on The Politics and Ideology of Hate in Extremism And Reformation. 2019. Third Edition. Gratis Open
Access pdf: https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/reformation-extremism-v3b.pdf

[8] Classical Paganism And The Christian Ethos. 2017. Gratis Open Access pdf: https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com
/2018/03/classical-paganism-v2-print.pdf

[9] Chapter Three, Classical Paganism And The Christian Ethos. Op.cit.

[10] The MSS of Tractate XI:3, Corpus Hermeticum, reads:

Ἡ δὲ τοῦ θεοῦ σοφία τί ἔστι;

Τὸ ἀγαθὸν καὶ τὸ καλὸν καὶ εὐδαιμονία καὶ ἡ πᾶσα ἀρετὴ καὶ ὁ αἰών.

But the Sophia of theos is what?

The noble, the beautiful, good fortune, arête, and Aion.

[11] Tu Es Diaboli Ianua: Christianity, The Johannine Weltanschauung, And Presencing The Numinous. 2017. Gratis
Open Access pdf: https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/tua-es-diaboli-ianua.pdf

[12] https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/collected-works-2/physis-and-being/

[13] https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2022/03/dwm-denotata-empathy-v1b.pdf

[14] https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2021/08/myatt-philosophy-third-edition.pdf
 Myatt's Uncertitude Of Knowing

Summer 2022

A transcription of an interview conducted and recorded by Rachael Stirling in England in early August 2022.

°°°

Rachael Stirling: We have been perusing an archive of your writings as a Muslim {1} which in retrospect make
fascinating reading because you presented Islam in a way it is not often presented in English in the societies of the
modern West. Are you embarrassed that those writings are still so easily accessible given that you have moved on?

DM: No, since they document an interesting and in terms of pathei-mathos an important ten years of my life.

RS: Our three part question is in relation to exegesis and what you wrote about it in Exegesis and Translation: Some
Personal Reflexions {2} and what you wrote years earlier, as a Muslim, in The Difference Between Eemaan and Kufr,

"in Islam, we have the best example of a human being - the Prophet, Muhammad (salla Allahu 'alayhi wa
sallam) - to strive to emulate and follow, and which human example, when followed, produces in us a most
noble, a most civilized, individual character. This best example, this noble and human way, is evident to us in
Seerah, in Ahadith: in the Sunnah of the Prophet, Muhammad (salla Allahu 'alayhi wa sallam) [...]

The simple but profound truth about Al-Islam is that this Way of Life, this Deen, works: for Al-Quran and the
Sunnah, when followed, produce, and have produced, noble, honourable, civilized human beings, and they,
and the guidance of Shariah, produce, and have produced, the most noble, the most civilized, communities
in human history.

In essence, Al-Islam is the simple way of - the discovery of, the return to - Tawheed, which is to know, to feel,
to remember, our correct relationship with and to Allah, our Creator and thus to know Allah as Allah
Subhanahu wa Ta'ala is. This knowing of The Unity, The Oneness, of Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala is expressed
in Kalimaah Tayyibah - La ilaaha illallaahu Muhammadur rasoolullaah - which itself forms the basis for
Kalimaah Shahadah, the declaration that makes one a Muslim, and which re-affirms one's Islam: that simple
submission to submit to and to only obey Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala and that knowing that Muhammad (salla
Allahu 'alayhi wa sallam) is the Prophet and Messenger of Allah, whose message, whose Allah-given
revelation (Al-Quran) and whose life (Sunnah) are the guidelines, the means, by which we can return to, and
know, Tawheed.

This knowing of, this remembrance of, this feeling of, Tawheed is the basis for Eemaan, for that simple and
total reliance on, and belief in and trust of, Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala."

Would it be correct to suggest: i) that in many ways this echoes, with its mention of noble, civilized communities and
its belief in trusting a person, what you wrote during your National Socialist years regarding Hitler and National
Socialism; and (ii) that you believed you had discovered in Islam a means to creating a noble way of life as you
formerly did in National Socialism; and (iii) that it was "the difficult question of exegesis" that began or at least
contributed to your doubts about Islam?

DM: To some extent, yes that is correct, since it was practical experience over many years of the human reality,
manifest in those who adhered to, or believed in, or supported such weltanschauungen, that caused me to begin to
reflect upon not only questions of various interpretations of texts and words but also on questions in regard to
denotata, the fallible nature of humans in general, and how if not immediately then over causal Time most if not all
denotata were the genesis of an opposite and thus of a dialectic.

Thus, in regard to National Socialism my experience was of how my believed in version based on honour, loyalty and
duty and thus as a manifestation of the numinous, was not the reality of perhaps a majority of persons who described
themselves as National Socialists, and that even in the days of the Third Reich it had been so, mirroring as this seemed
to do our propensity as human beings to in our majority so easily be or revert to being egoistical or materialistic when
and if it suited us.

With Islam, I initially apprehended it as different, as a better manifestation of the numinous, just as I did in regard to
Catholicism when I became a Christian monk. But suffice to say that my Muslim adventures over a period of almost a
decade not only disillusioned me but forced me to confront my own flawed character and lack of understanding.

For it was not just that as an adult I was naively idealistic but also I did not understand the reality of what honour
meant resulting in me both as a National Socialist and as a Muslim supporting and doing dishonourable deeds.

Which realization and awareness of my own flawed character was not due to anything I did or due to the
aforementioned intellectual questioning, but due to a personal circumstance which was both tragic and beyond my
comprehension: the suicide in 2006 of my then fiancée.

In the months following that tragedy such intellectual questioning became one of several means by which I saught to
understand myself, the numinous, and honour, and thus that tragedy.
RS: In relation to not understanding "the reality of what honour meant." In many of your Islamic writings you
mentioned honour and in Honour Is From Allah Alone quoted a verse from the Koran: "Those who seek dignity and
honour should know that they derive from Allah (alone)," 35:10. In the same article you quoted a Hadith from Sahih al-
Bukhari (8: 56b) which translates as "the best among you are those who have the best manners and character."

In your An Open Letter To Nick Griffin of the BNP - dated July 17th 2004 - you described honour as "a respect for
others; a striving to be reasonable. Honour sets ethical limits to our behaviour - and prejudice, of whatever kind, is
surely a negation of honour."

How after that tragedy did you arrive, if indeed you did arrive, at what honour thereafter meant to you?

DM: My fallible conclusion, some three years after that tragedy, was that I had previously, both as a National Socialist
and as a Muslim, not considered honour as a denotatum; as a naming of some personal quality or personal virtue, such
as dignity, grace, of good repute, which themselves are open to interpretation. In my National Socialist years I defined
it by a written or aural code of personal behaviour such as described in the sixteenth century Booke of Honor and
Armes. or by the modern one I included in my The Meaning of National-Socialism. {3} As a Muslim i considered it a gift
from Allah and manifest in the life of the Prophet Muhammed as described in the Sunnah.

What I very slowly came to appreciate was that every denotatum has implicit in it or developes - is by virtue of its
physis the genesis of - a named opposite, another denotatum, resulting in a dialectic and thus has the potential for
discord; a discord evident in exegesis but more often than not evident in conflict, verbal and physical, between
individuals and groups of individuals. The result is as Heraclitus expressed it a cleaving of physis with Enantiodromia a
bringing-back-together of what has been cleaved apart:

τοῦ δὲ λόγου τοῦδ᾽ ἐόντος ἀεὶ ἀξύνετοι γίνονται ἄνθρωποι καὶ πρόσθεν ἢ ἀκοῦσαι καὶ ἀκούσαντες τὸ
πρῶτον· γινομένων γὰρ πάντων κατὰ τὸν λόγον τόνδε ἀπείροισιν ἐοίκασι, πειρώμενοι καὶ ἐπέων καὶ ἔργων
τοιούτων, ὁκοίων ἐγὼ διηγεῦμαι κατὰ φύσιν διαιρέων ἕκαστον καὶ φράζων ὅκως ἔχει· τοὺς δὲ ἄλλους
ἀνθρώπους λανθάνει ὁκόσα ἐγερθέντες ποιοῦσιν, ὅκωσπερ ὁκόσα εὕδοντες ἐπιλανθάνονται (Fragment 1,
Diels-Krantz)

πάντα δὲ γίνεσθαι καθ᾽ εἱμαρμένην καὶ διὰ τῆς ἐναντιοδρομίας ἡρμόσθαι τὰ ὄντα (Diogenes Laërtius, ix.7)
{4}

My understanding came to be that Enantiodromia was, or rather should be understood and appreciated as, empathy;
the wordless-knowing of empathy by which we could perceive the physis of beings, their wholeness, without the need
for denotata and the discord that denotata was the genesis of.

Given the personal horizon of empathy, the personal nature of empathy, {5} I considered that honour could not be
understood by some supra-personal code or by reference to someone else be the reference to their life, their deeds, or
their words. That it could not

"be extrapolated from such a personal knowing into some-thing supra-personal be this some-thing denotata,
including an ἰδέᾳ/εἶδος, or an axiom (ἀρχή) or a source (αἴτιος) for some 'revelation' or ideology or similar
manifestations constructed by and dependent on appellation." {6}

That is, I discovered that empathy is or can be the geniture of our Uncertitude Of Knowing as human beings and thus
of that personal humility which during my Muslim years I had felt, through such things as Namaz, was a manifestation
of the numinous.

Honour thus became, for me, a personal matter: of being fair, reasonable, well-mannered, and aware of the numinous
and thus of my own fallibility.

RS:

Hence your rejection of all extremism?

DM: Yes.

RS: Yet your many vociferous politically motivated opponents have not accepted that you have rejected extremism
with many still considering you a neo-nazi. Does that bother you?

DM: No. For judging by their deeds and words they live in a different world from the one I now inhabit or rather that I
now perceive. My perceiveration is a very local and personal one; of my locality, of Nature and its local emanations; of
my relatives and friends and my interactions with and concern for them. That other world beyond - or should that be
those other worlds beyond - this local personal world no longer concern me given my plenitude of past mistakes, my
past hubriatic suffering-causing interference, and my recently discovered Uncertitude Of Knowing.

They, those opponents, in comparison seem to have that Certitude Of Knowing that I for many decades had, breeding
as it did and does prejudice, intolerance, hatred, and discouraging as it did and does empathy, forgiveness, and a
personal Uncertitude Of Knowing.

RS: One of your politically motivated opponents recently claimed that "nothing in Myatt's sanitized autobiography
[Myngath] should be taken too seriously," {7} while a few years ago another stated that he knew what was in the
original draft of Myngath and knew what was removed in the published, 2013, version, stating that you thereby had
tried to hide something.

Would you care to comment?

DM: The opinion or claim of someone - politically motivated or otherwise - is just their personal opinion or claim at a
particular moment. The passing of causal Time - decades, centuries - often places such personal opinions and claims
into context often because of some information having become revealed through scholarly research or otherwise, or
because of the collapse of the society in which such a personal opinion or claim was propagated and believed by
others.

As for drafts of Myngath, so far as I remember the first drafts were made around 2010 while I was still in thrall to some
causal abstractions and several years before I as a result of further personal and philosophical insights reformed my
'Numinous Way' into my weltanschauung of pathei-mathos. For such drafts were just drafts, and thus subject to
revision. Furthermore, those early drafts are still publicly available through the medium of the Internet, so there is not
and was not any hiding of anything.

RS: In a ten page overview of your life, which overview contained some inaccuracies, {8} an academic last year wrote
that you were "driven by a search for meaning and purpose, as well as an intellectual desire to find and create the all-
encompassing and perfect political philosophy."

Would you agree?

DM: No, because during my National-Socialist decades I was driven by a somewhat fanatical desire to not only
propagate what I then believed National-Socialism to be - an honourable, noble, way of life, a practical presencing of
the numinous - but also to recruit people to that cause in the hope of creating a National-Socialist society in the land of
my ancestors. Over those years I developed what I termed "ethical National-Socialism" and thus moved away from
some of the policies and principles of the Third Reich such as the belief in the superiority of the Aryan race and the
concepts of "eternal struggle" and of the "survival of the fittest" regarding them as incompatible with acting
honourably.

During my years as a Muslim I nurtured a similar desire to propagate what I then believed the Muslim way of life to be:
which again was an honourable, noble, way of life, and a practical presencing of the numinous.

There was thus no search for "meaning and purpose" because I foolishly believed I had already found a meaning and a
purpose: for thirty years in National-Socialism and then for ten years in Islam. In 1998 I turned away from National-
Socialism to Islam because during a decade (1988-1998) of foreign travels the culture, the Muslims, of the Muslim
lands - and especially of Egypt - slowly, almost imperceptibly, impressed me as did, and perhaps more so, travels alone
in the Sahara Desert where I wordlessly felt intimations of Being, of The Acausal, of The-Unity, of The One-The Only (τὸ
ἓν), of The Monas (μονάς) which 'acausal' Being Muslims called Allah and Christians called God.

As for a "perfect political philosophy", I never believed my ethical National-Socialism - my development of Hitler's
National Socialism - was perfect, and as a Muslim rejected the very notion of politics, writing in The Knowledge of
Islam,

"Siyasah is defined as the application of the Quran and Sunnah in the world: the means whereby Muslims can
live in a community according to the command of Allah [...]

It must be understood that siyasah neither means nor implies 'politics'. Politics is a kaffir term which
expresses or manifests the concealment of The Unity, which Unity is the essence of Islam. To understand
Islam, and the Islamic apprehension - and in particular how Islam can be applied in the world - is to consider
Islam in Islamic terms only. To apply something like 'politics' to Islam and speak and write about 'Islamic
politics' is a fundamental mistake which constitutes imitation of the kuffar. Why? Because such words and
terms, of the kuffar, are always referred back to kaffir ideas and concepts - just as 'politics' is referred back to
the polis of Ancient Greece, and 'State' to Aristotle, Plato, Marx and others. This is, in effect, causal -
historical - reductionism which is completely at odds with the acausal revelation of Islam. It is also a making
profane that which is sacred: divorcing the Divinity from the practical application of Islam. It is exchanging
knowledge for Jahiliyyah [...]

In effect, siyasah is sacred: it belongs to, and manifests, what is sacred, divine. This is in complete and utter
contrast to the temporal, profane - and lower - nature of kaffir politics."

It could be argued that since that personal tragedy in 2006 I have been 'driven' by a desire to understand both my
extremist past and extremism, as well as by a desire to apprehend the numinous and how, sans denotata, it is and has
been and can be presenced to we human beings.

RS: Do you intend to write anything else about your life or your philosophy of pathei-mathos?

DM: Answering a similar question almost ten years ago I replied in the negative and yet went on to write an awful lot
more. The honest answer is that currently I do not intend to, but one never knows what circumstances may conspire to
bring about a perhaps vainglorious desire to pontificate some more.

RS: What is your view of Islam now?

DM: As explained in several of my post-2012 writings, I still consider Islam and Christianity as manifesting both now
and in the past aspects of the numinous especially in relation to expiation and such awareness of the numinous as can
bring and nurture a necessary personal humility.

But since both rely on revelation through words, chiefly written but sometimes aural, and both have sometimes been
interpreted by some or by many in such a harsh way as has caused and contributed to the suffering of other human
beings, then I as a result of my pathei-mathos and of a study of what I have termed the human culture of pathei-
mathos, cannot and do not personally believe in or support them. For given such a reliance on words, on denotata,
they can and possibly will be interpreted in a harsh way in the future by others.

RS: Is your own answer, your philosophy of pathei-mathos, suitable to or applicable to others?

DM: No, for it is not a supra-personal philosophy nor a way of life which might be suitable for others but only the fallible
conclusions I have derived from striving to understand and admit my many mistakes and from the learning that,
sometimes against my will, I acquired or believe I have acquired from diverse, sometimes extreme, experiences.

RS: How would you summarize what you have learned?

DM: As an appreciation of empathy, honour, humility, and compassion as personal virtues which we as individuals
strive to live by; as an understanding of the need to not interfere in non-personal matters; and as being non-violent
with the one and the only exception that necessitated by personal honour when we personally or our family or
someone nearby are confronted in the immediacy of the moment by someone or by some others intent on doing harm
or demanding we submit to their demands.

In such circumstances personal honour means that we without hesitation oppose them and fight and if circumstances
require it use lethal force.

RS: Which surely means that you and perhaps your family are trained to defend yourselves with lethal force if
necessary?

DM: Yes indeed.

RS: Which all seems to me to be a very pagan way of living. Would you agree?

DM: Depending on how one defines 'pagan' of course!

RS: I mean concern for and prepared to and trained to defend one's kith and kin, and having a local, a community,
perspective as in olden times in England of one's village and the small personally known community dwelling there and
on nearby land.

DM: In that sense, yes it is somewhat pagan. Which pagan weltanschauungen seems to me to have over causal Time
been replaced by many and various other weltanschauungen derived from and reliant on denotata. In the form of, for
example, the idea of some supra-local entity - a region, then a "nation", ruled by some usually male potentate whose
governance was enforced by coercion, threat of imprisonment, and ultimately violence; and then in the form of the
idea of a religion - in the Isles of Britain, Christianity, whose representatives were often in league with that regional or
national potentate, hence inscriptions such as Dei Gratia Rex Angliæ on coinage.

RS: How do you view the current situation not only in England, the land of your ancestors, but worldwide and does your
weltanschauung of pathei-mathos inform your view?

DM: My view is somewhat coloured by - perhaps I should have said informed by - my decades of rural living and
working outdoors on farms and as a gardener, rather than by anything philosophical.

Perhaps a poem - one of my many "manically-depressed", "self-indulgent" poems, as one of my many political
opponents once described them some years ago - may better express what such living and working have meant to me:

So this is Peace:
As the Sun of warm November
Warms and the grass grows with such mildness.

No strife, here;
No place beyond this place
As Farm meets meadow field
And I upon some hessian sack sit, write
To hear some distant calls from hedged-in sheep:

No breeze
To stir the fallen leaves
That lie among the seeds, there
Where the old Oak towers, shading fence
From Sun
And the pond is hazed with midges.

So this is peace, found

Where dew persists,
 Flies feed to preen to rest
And two Robins call from among that tangled brambled
Bush
Whose berries – unplucked, ripened – rot,
While the Fox-worn trail wobbles
Snaking
Through three fields.

So, the silent Buzzard soars

To shade me briefly:
No haste, worry, nor Hubris, here
Where there is much sadness, leaving
As the damp field-mists of morning
Have given way
To Sun

A way of life, rural places, changed and changing: and for what and why? In some ways my weltanschauung of pathei-
mathos is my answer: a way to live without the hubris of human-manufactured urban-centric supra-personal causal
abstractions; a way where the natural balance that is presenced through empathy and honour is an intimation of the
numinous; and where there is an ancestral peace found, wordlessly treasured, and passed-on to the next generation.

RS: You expressed such sentiments in a letter - more of a missive - that you sent to me over a decade ago when you
left that farm having had to seek work elsewhere. Which reading of that letter might be, if you agree, a fitting end to
this interview.

DM: Agreed. But it will most probably be described as one of my "manically-depressed", "self-indulgent", missives!

RS:

"Work, in a small industrial concern; manual work with days spent indoors where the only light is from a
multitude of bright fluorescent tubes and where the tedium of long hours is relieved only by a short morning
break and one half unpaid hour for lunch when I sit, hedged-in by walls, in the small back yard on an old box
upon broken concrete surrounded by broken glass; by old, smashed bricks; by patches of oil, and the detritus
of such an urban place. Some sky - but not much - is visible over and above the roof and walls and vents, and
nothing natural lives or even exists here: no tree, no bush, no flowers, not any weeds. No sound of birds -
only noise, from the unceasing machines; from the lorries and vans which arrive and depart nearby,
disgorging and receiving their goods. No peace; certainly no Numen of Nature.

There is only the incessant unnatural rhythm of industrial life, of factory toil - a card to be stamped by a
clock: in, out, even for lunch. And, at days end, I - tired as the others - slope off and out into the nearby
street where no one, passing, says "hello!" or greets me as almost always they did in those small villages of
England where I have mostly lived. No, no greeting here; not even any eye-contact, held. For this is urban life
where humans are shunted to shuffle encased in their worries, their inner worlds, and where traffic gluts
streets. Nowhere here the calm, measured, quiet of that life, rural, where Time is what it is. Instead, there is
abstraction, measuring out our lives as the clear water from a leaking tank seeps out, to the dirty ground,
drop by drop by drop; drip drip dripping away, clean water to dirty ground... So I am once again adrift; not
lost but far, far from home and measuring out my days until, sufficient money saved, I can return to the
source of my belonging: there, where such dreams in such quiet places as may bring the Numen back to me.

Yet here, in this place of work, people rush to compete as if such swift toil was a badge of pride; thus do they
scamper, to complete abstractly-imposed tasks; for profits, and ego, must be made, saved. Thus do we toil -
so many slaves, en-slaved, needing but not-needing the pittance to live such a life as lives among the urban
clutter, the smallness, the meanness and the sprawl. But I, I have seen the sky and hold here in my being
such visions as bring the Earth to earth - dust to dust, and life to Life: one world, one planet, one dimension,
among so many. Nowhere for so many in day or night that sigh when we close our eyes to feel the oboe
d'amore of one slow movement of one piece by JS Bach, bringing thus such quiet tears of empathy as
connect us, one human life, to other human lives beyond the-words the-abstractions - and thus take us out,
out, out into the being, the Numen, of Nature. There is then in such a moment that sacred precious meaning
which cramped urban living, and traffic, has, these days, defiled.

No beauty, here, no song to the sanctity of Life - except, perhaps, fleetingly glimpsed in her eyes, face, as
she, the young blonde-haired Polish worker, smiles. Four, five times - more - this week we have looked into
each other's eyes as she, I, smiled, touched-but-not-touched, in wordless greeting. Then, such humanity
over, we return to our tasks - I, to lift, move, heavy laden objects; she, to her machine. But she is there, in
the background, as she works with her sister - quietly, stoically, both toiling as they toil: hard, grafting, as if
inured to such a way of life. So they keep their own company - with few words between them; few for others,
for they have "little english" and at lunch sit together beside the machine that steals their day, gazing ahead
while they eat their meagre food perhaps enwrapped in dreams which are their dreams, bringing perchance
some glimmer of hope among the stark noisey brightly-lit bleakness.

This life is grim, grim grim, only saved by such an intimation. No insects, outside, as I sit here, scribbling -
except: a few ants, and I gasp-in lungfulls of the cleaner outside air; only a few ants, dithering, backwards,
 forwards, over the detritus, as if lost. Toiling, grafting, working - untouched, it seems, by that knowing of Life
which a knowing of death may bring.

Such are we here, slaves of a modern life - sure, such toil could bring me the security of some settled home;
warmth enough, from fire, to ease the pains that seep now into olding flesh and bones; food enough to keep
me well; walls and roof enough to keep clothes dry from rain and turn a chilling wind, away; perhaps another
companion-bestfriend-wife... But such a price, to pay: too high a price, it seems, for freedom, Numen, lost.

No time, here - then - to watch the Sun rise on a clear day; no time here - then - to catch the growing Dawn
Chorus as it grows, week by week from early to late and later Spring. Nowhere to wander watching clouds
form and shade to move as they are moved. No stream to watch as sunlight filters and fractures and water
ripples, singing a wordless song. No sounds of an English Summer - flies, darting aimless and aimed; bees,
seeking; birds, warning, calling, sparring; no wind breezing as it breezes among tree, hedge, reed, grass and
Autumn's late leaf-litter... No natural Time to stand dreaming or sitting as the day passes in moments of
memory. No natural Time, of Nature - only that unsettling abstract time of clocking-in-clocks, measuring out
the seconds to our death. No, no natural Time, here: only the unnatural unnecessary one of which adds one
hour to herald so-called "Summer time" - for even when I, toiling hard during years on Farms, planted, in
Spring, or harvested in Autumn - weather-permitting - such "government time" made no difference: work
began with Sunrise, to finish, weather-permitting, as the Sun began to set, for thus we followed there in that,
our almost vanished world, a different Time to the time of some rootless traffic-fume-filled city.

Yes, freedom is hard, while savings dry and boots are worn as one walks, alone, with that walking that tries to
measure out the now almost forgotten pace of a rural life and a rural way of living, bringing back as such
slow rhythm and quietness does that connexion to presence the Numen without and within. Yes, freedom is
hard while too much toil for another, in the wrong place, lasts." {9}

°°°

{1} The archive is at https://web.archive.org/web/20101111104858/http://www.davidmyatt.info/ [Accessed August

2022]

{2} Myatt wrote:

"The original message of a revelation or of a spiritual way often seems to become obscured or somehow gets
lost over centuries. A loss or obscuration party due to the reliance on revealed or given texts; partly due to
divergent interpretations of such texts, with some interpretations accepted or rejected by those assuming or
vested with a religious authority; and partly due to a reliance, by many of the faithful, on translations of such
texts." https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/exegesis-and-translation-partsone-two.pdf

{3} Included in Selected National Socialist Writings Of David Myatt, https://archive.org/download/myatt-selected-ns-

writings1/myatt-selected-ns-writings1.pdf

{4} Myatt's somewhat idiosyncratic translations of these fragments of Heraclitus are: (a) Fragment 1:

"Although this naming and expression [which I explain] exists, human beings tend to ignore it, both before
and after they have become aware of it. Yet even though, regarding such naming and expression, I have
revealed details of how Physis has been cleaved asunder, some human beings are inexperienced concerning
it, fumbling about with words and deeds, just as other human beings, be they interested or just forgetful, are
unaware of what they have done."

Text, translation and commentary: https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/heraclitus-fragment-1/

(b) Diogenes Laërtius ix. 7 in context:

ἐκ πυρὸς τὰ πάντα συνεστάναι εἰς τοῦτο ἀναλύεσθαι πάντα δὲ γίνεσθαι καθ᾽ εἱμαρμένην καὶ διὰ τῆς
ἐναντιοδρομίας ἡρμόσθαι τὰ ὄντα καὶ πάντα ψυχῶν εἶναι καὶ δαιμόνων πλήρη

"The foundation/base/essence of all beings [ 'things' ] is πυρὸς [pyros] to which they return, with all [of them]
by genesis appropriately apportioned [separated into portions] to be bound together again by enantiodromia,
and all filled/suffused/vivified with/by ψυχή and Dæmons."

Text, translation and commentary: https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/heraclitus-and-enantiodromia/

{5} In his 2015 essay Personal Reflexions On Some Metaphysical Questions, Myatt wrote:

"The 'local horizon of empathy' is a natural consequence of my understanding of empathy as a

human faculty, albeit a faculty that is still quite underdeveloped. For what empathy provides - or
can provide - is a very personal wordless knowing in the immediacy-of-the-living-moment. Thus
empathy inclines us as individuals to appreciate that what is beyond the purveu of our empathy -
beyond our personal empathic knowing of others, beyond our knowledge and our experience,
beyond the limited (local) range of our empathy and that personal (local) knowledge of ourselves
which pathei-mathos reveals - is something we rationally, we humbly, accept we do not know and
so cannot judge or form a reasonable, a fair, a balanced, opinion about. For empathy, like pathei-
mathos, lives within us; manifesting, as both empathy and pathei-mathos do, the always limited
 nature, the horizon, of our own knowledge and understanding."

The essay is included in Sarigthersa, https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/dwmyatt-sarigthersa-v7.pdf

[Accessed August 2022]

{6} Numinosity, Denotata, Empathy, And The Hermetic Tradition, https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/2022/03

/17/numinosity-denotata-empathy-and-the-hermetic-tradition/ [Accessed August 2022]

{7} For those of a rational disposition who are inclined to judge matters and individuals for themselves, Myatt's
autobiography Myngath is available at: https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/david-myatt-myngath.pdf
[Accessed August 2022]

{8} Koehler, Daniel. From Traitor to Zealot: Exploring the Phenomenon of Side-Switching in Extremism and Terrorism.
Cambridge University Press, 2021. pp.153-163.

One inaccuracy among several is that Koehler (p.161) confuses Myatt's fiancée Fran - who committed suicide in 2006 -
with Myatt's second wife, Sue, who died of cancer in 1993. Some years after Sue's death Myatt re-married and lived
with his third wife near Malvern - in a detached village house, where he was filmed nearby by BBC Panorama in 2000 -
until he left that village some months after that filming to move alone to Shropshire to live on a farm. He met Fran
several years after that move to Shropshire where he had previously lived from the late 1970s to 1994.

{9} I have retained, at his request, Myatt's idiosyncratic punctuation and spelling.

Myatt's use of the term 'numen' deserves some explanation. He uses it several times in his translations of tracts from
the Corpus Hermeticum, particularly in tract III, Ιερός Λόγος, were he writes in his commentary:

"the meaning of 'numen' here being expressed by what follows: 'numinal and of numinal physis', where by
numinal - in this ἱερός λόγος - is meant divine not in the specific sense of a monotheistic and Biblical (a
masculous) God but in the more general sense of pertaining to a deity or deities, male or female, as in a
paganus (and not necessarily patriarchal) polytheism." Corpus Hermeticum: Eight Tractates,
https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/eight-tractates-v2-print.pdf

In his scholarly essay A Note Concerning θειότης - https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/2018/03/28/a-note-concerning-

θειότης/ - he places numen in relation to θεῖος and the Greek text of Romans, 1.20.

David Myatt And The Pinch of Destiny

The interview was conducted, through an intermediary, via the medium of e-mail in 2022 with an anonymous American
academic who used the moniker Nameless Therein.

The interview highlights the difference between the contemporary academic approach and Myatt's philosophy of
pathei-mathos, based as the former is on extensive quotations from others, and founded as Myatt's philosophy is on
pathei-mathos (a learning from personal often hard experiences) and a scholarly appreciation of Greco-Roman culture.
Thus, to many detailed questions Myatt responds by referencing such foundations:

"I do not situate my weltanschauung anywhere in terms defined or believed or discussed by others, ancient
or modern, because it is just my weltanschauung, born from various experiences and the loss of loved ones,
and nurtured by working and living on a farm in England, by solitary walks along a sea-shore and in the hills
and deciduous woods of English Shires."

"I have no answer to [your] question What is the Meaning of Myatt? because all I seem to be is one fallible
mortal among so many billions past and present and one who wil die soon having already outlived his three
score and ten. Someone who has and perhaps vainly tried in some way in the past ten years or so, and in
various poems, to record his feelings, his fallible understanding of himself and the world he has passed
through and the events and the people he has, or so he believes, learned from. In those past ten or so years
my references are usually only the classical authors; or occasionally a poet such as TS Eliot or a composer
such as JS Bach because for those years my world, my influences, have been the outdoor world of Nature,
my pathei-mathos, the women I have loved and lost, with my only constant companions those classical
authors, my memories, and such a poet and such a composer."

°°°°°

Nameless Therein: You have stated that your philosophy of pathei-mathos is expiative. {1 As expressions of that
expiation, you mention that your writings and reclusiveness "do little to offset the deep sadness felt, except in fleeting
moments." {2 In your "desire for a numinous non-religious expiation," {3 your life may be said to resemble a kind of
secular restoration of the Fall.

Insofar as your non-religious expiation resembles what Wilfred Cantwell Smith describes as faith, involving "man's
capacity to perceive, to symbolize, and to live loyally and richly in terms of a transcendent dimension to his and her
life," {4 the "deep sadness felt" about your past is perhaps offset less by what you have learned and more so by who
you have become. In this – in the way your own pathei-mathos has shaped you – one can sense sincere atonement.
Could you comment on how pathei-mathos can help one "live loyally and richly in terms of a transcendent dimension
to his … [or] her life"?

David Myatt: I admit I do not presume to know – I do not even now understand – "how pathei-mathos can help one live
loyally and richly in terms of a transcendent dimension to someone's life".

Al I do know is what I wrote over a decade ago about something which somehow in some ineffable way seemed to
personally work for me:

"the so beautiful sound of birdsong in English woods and fields in early May; or perhaps the sight of small
cumulus clouds slowly passing beneath the sky of blue in Summer when Sun so warms us that we stop to
wipe away the sweat upon our brow; or, perhaps, that so special scent of a meadow field in middle June after
rain when Sun, re-emerging from passing stormfull cloud, dries us and our so fragile land, and we are moved
– so moved, so still, amid the country silence – that we lie down awhile beside the Hawthorn hedge to feel
again this simple English paradise of field, farm, life, and burgeoning birth." {5

But this, such a heritage, such a still so very numinous place, is not an option for so very many around the world that I
can only and so fallibly suggest it might possibly be such a Nature in such a place as still exists, and a personal loyal
love of partners and of family bound together through personal honour.

NT: On the subject of faith, Wilfred Cantwell Smith notes that "faith is that quality of or available to humankind by
which we are characterized as transcending, or are enabled to transcend, the natural order." {6

This points to an interesting disparity you previously highlighted regarding the activities of your extremist decades,
which were marked by a desire to "bring-into-being some-thing that … [you now recognize] would not and could not, in
centennial terms (let alone in millennial or cosmic terms) endure." {7

In the desire to "stop or somehow try to control, to shape, the natural flux of change … [and] to preserve, whatever the
cost, what we or others after us might bring-into-being," you noted the underlying belief that you and your associates
"would or could do what no one in human history had been able to do: make our presencings immortal, or at least
immune to the natural cycle of birth-life-decay-death."8 Having since rejected those beliefs, in addition to the activities
and writings of your extremist decades, how would you now reconcile the desire to create enduring works capable of
transcending the natural order with a rejection of politics, religion, and violent social activism? {9

DM: Again I have no abstractive, generalized, ideological supra-personal answers. All I have is my feeling, my intuition,
my fallible learning that it is a personal loyal love and a very personal honour in the immediacy of the moment which
matter.

NT: Could you comment on how to reconcile the tension between the universal application of pathei-mathos to our
species across thousands of years of human history on the one hand and the recognition of our own mortality as a
human species on the other? In other words, how is pathei-mathos meant to endure according to what you call the
"Cosmic Perspective" {10 in light of our own mortality, and particularly without a "religious" dimension that transcends
the natural order?

Might pathei-mathos' endurance be immanent rather than transcendent, presenced in our mortality rather than
beyond it? And how might this relate to Aeschylus' original sense of πάθει μάθος (pathei-mathos) with respect to "[the
immortal Zeus] guiding mortals to reason"? {11

DM: Is there or should there ever be anything which is or which is suggested as a 'universal' or a religious or an
'ideological' supra-personal application or causal abstraction? Something believed or hoped to be enduring?

My own fallible experience is that there is not and perhaps should never be again, since all supra-personal suggestions
or applications or abstractions however denoted in my experience and in respect of my classical learning immediately
or sooner later are the genesis of hubris and suffering.

Thus and yet again I am returned to a personal loyal love between two people and/or their family and to a very
personal honour in the immediacy of the moment.

NT: William James said that religion is "'the individual pinch of destiny' as the individual feels it." {12 James'
characterization of religion was largely a response to the question, "What is the character of this universe in which we
dwell?" {13 In order to address this question, he noted that one "must go behind the foreground of existence and
reach down to that curious sense of the whole residual cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or alien, terrible or
amusing, lovable or odious, which in some degree everyone possesses." {14

In "[t]his sense of the world's presence," we become either "strenuous or careless, devout or blasphemous, gloomy or
exultant, about life at large." {15 And our reaction, he says, which is "involuntary and inarticulate and often half
unconscious," is the "completest of all our answers" to the above question. {16

In making cosmic meaningful tragedy from the individual to the broader context of our species, it seems that this
"pinch" has been present throughout your life and your philosophy despite your "desire for a numinous non-religious
expiation" {17 and your view that mainstream religions no longer provide "a satisfactory answer to the question of
suffering … [or of] what may be required for us to consciously change ourselves for the better." {18 In reaching down
to "that curious sense of the whole residual cosmos as an everlasting presence," how would you describe your reaction
to that "sense of the world's presence," and how has that changed over the course of your life?

DM: We human beings especially of the male genus and often because of centuries of so-called "thinking" make
matters of existence, Being, and morality seem complicated, and offer our own suggestions as to how matters could or
perhaps should be.

But over the course of my life I seem to have learned that the suffering such suggestions cause and the hubris of
humans continues. The invention of causal abstractions continues, century after century. And the Cosmos with its
billions of galaxies and its perhaps billions of life-habitable planets continues. So, we humans here on Terra Firma are
what? Some transient fallible persons sallying forth – and killing, causing suffering – on behalf of some ancient or
modern abstraction such as some religious faith or some nation-State or on behalf of some personal instinct we
seemingly cannot control?

Simply expressed: there should no longer be an aspiration for a broader supra-personal meaning.

NT: William James' description of religion seems oddly in keeping with what, in paraphrasing Cicero, you have
described as the essence of ancient European paganism. {19

Additionally, your characterization of the ancient sense of pathei-mathos as wisdom arising from personal suffering
{20 also seems in keeping with the Pyrrhonian sense of ataraxia (ἀταραξία) or "freedom from worry," {21 which is
reached by raising "oneself above a condition of misery and despair" through self-mastery and fortitude. {22 With
respect to the ancient question, "How can we keep from suffering?" {23 your life and writings seem to fluctuate
between resilience and renunciation. In this, there seems to be an almost Stoic undertone with respect to how the
ideas that have shaped your worldview do not resemble "an interesting pastime or even a particular body of
knowledge, but … a way of life." {24 You have mentioned the influence of Marcus Aurelius on your thinking, which may
explain that undertone. {25 Looking back, how do you view the Stoic notion of elevating sorrow rather than abolishing
it {26 in order to overcome and then meaningful y reshape it in our lives? Does this resilience in the face of tragic
renunciation have any bearing on the overarching theme of honor throughout your life?

DM: As ever these days, I am wary of a general term – in this case Stoicism – being applied to describe what a person
or some persons wrote be such writings ancient or otherwise.

In this matter before answering a specific question I would have to read critical editions of Seneca, Marcus Aurelius,
and the necessary others, and then undertake my own translations and commentaries with particular attention to what
words such as tempus and πένθος and εὐδαιμονία in their work may have meant and implied to those writers and their
contemporaries and not what is meant or assumed now by such terms as 'time' and 'grief' and 'good
fortune'/'happiness'. Such a task would occupy me for perhaps a year if not more. One of many comparisons of interest
might be between Seneca's De Consolatio ad Marciam and how Antigone is portrayed by Sophocles and Klytemnestra
by Aeschylus.

But from previous readings of Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and some of the necessary others I would in regard to honour
answer in the negative given how I now understand honour as an individual feeling related to the numinous which
cannot be abstracted out from a personal moment in the form of some written or aural code, ethical or otherwise, or
become a basis for or a part of some -ism or some -ology.

NT: On the subject of religion and the previous question on Stoicism, I am reminded of the Romanian nihilist Emil
Cioran's vitriolic but insightful words from his little-known article, "A Bouquet of Heads." Remarking on Christianity and
Stoicism in the ancient world, he says the following:

The Greco-Roman twilight deserved a better enemy, a better promise, a better religion. How can you believe
even in the shadow of progress when you remember that those Christian fables, with no trouble at all ,
smothered Stoicism! If Stoicism had been able to grow and spread, to seize hold of the world, man would
have come through, or almost. Resignation, made obligatory, would have taught us to endure our suffering
with dignity, to silence our voices, to face our Nothingness coldly…. To accuse no one, to stoop neither to
sadness, nor joy, nor regret, to reduce our connection with the world to a harmonious play of defeat, to live
condemned and serene, never imploring the deity but rather putting him on notice…. That was not possible.
Stoicism, overrun from all sides and faithful to its principles, had the elegance to die without a struggle. A
religion founds itself on the ruins of wisdom, but the tactics used by religion are scarcely appropriate to
wisdom. {27

Many would agree that you have endured suffering with dignity over the course of your life. But rather than founding
your legacy on the ruins of wisdom, you appear to have forged an existential crucible from which many now draw
inspiration. How would you like to see that inspiration embodied in the lives of those who look up to you? And if those
ruins were a monument to the past, what virtues and activities would you like to see take their place?
DM: My answer can possibly be deduced from my previous one. Just as my fallible understanding is that honour cannot
be abstracted from a personal moment to become some sort of principle or guide, so my similar fallible understanding
is that a person who learns by means of pathei-mathos cannot be or rather should not become such a guide or even an
example and certainly should not assume any sort of guiding

NT: In a 2017 interview, you noted that both the Numinous Way and the philosophy of pathei-mathos now seem to you
"a rather wordy and a rather egoistic, vainful, attempt to present what I (rightly or wrongly) believed I had learned
about myself and the world as a result of various experiences." {28 You add that, in your solitude and now
concentrating on your translations, you live "each day as it passes … unconcerned about what my being – and my
relation to Being – is now or perhaps should be." {29 In some respects, your withdrawal into solitude resembles Mother
Teresa's confession of feeling a "deep loneliness," having previously confessed that her "own soul … [remained] in
deep darkness [and] desolation" as she began to doubt her faith. {30 In this, there may be an element of truth in what
Emil Cioran says of solitude:

"Solitude is not a gift, it is a mission: to rise to it, to take it upon oneself, is to renounce that portion of
baseness needed to guarantee the success of any enterprise whatever, religious or otherwise."31 On the
other hand, C. S. Lewis' point that "[e]very mode of being in the whole universe contributes to … [man]; he is
a cross-section of being"32 carries some weight. These two tensions additional y seem to resolve in the
words of Gregory the Great (540-604), who said that "because man has existence (esse) in common with
stones, life with trees, and understanding (discernere) with angels, he is rightly cal ed by the name of the
world." {33

The sentiments expressed by all of these figures point to an important concern: In your solitude and your lack of
concern with what your being and your relation to Being is now or should be, one senses the danger of also losing
concern for your relation to other beings, and specifically to other human beings. In the shadow of commonality you
share with those who take inspiration from your work, what do you hope to wager in the eclipse between how they see
your life and how they speak your name – perhaps not as the name of the world, but certainly as a name of theirs?

DM: The question of possibly "losing concern for your relation to other beings, and specifically to other human beings"
has bothered me and does bother me and the only answer I have is again that of honour in the immediacy of the living
moment which seems to me the only numinous exception to 'not interfering in the world' however good one believes
one's interference to be.

Al this means seems to me to amount to doing what is honourable when personally, in the immediacy of the moment,
confronted with someone or some many doing what is dishonourable in relation to another person or persons or to
another living being. My intuition is that a person of honour either instinctively knows what is dishonourable or has
learned so from personal experience.

NT: In a letter to his brother Henry James during the completion of his great work on the Principles of Psychology,
William James said, "I have to forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts." {34 In contrast to
European science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Alfred North Whitehead notes that James was alluding to
a "new tinge to modern minds … [as] a vehement and passionate interest in the relation of general principles to
irreducible and stubborn facts." {35 Whitehead elaborates on this, noting that: Al the world over and at all times there
have been practical men, absorbed in "irreducible and stubborn facts": all the world over and at all times there have
been men of philosophic temperament who have been absorbed in the weaving of general principles. It is this union of
passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty in our
present society. Previously it had appeared sporadically and as if by chance. This balance of mind has now become
part of the tradition which infects cultivated thought. It is the salt which keeps life sweet.

The main business of universities is to transmit this tradition as a widespread inheritance from generation to
generation. {36

Whitehead's observance that the wedding of particular facts with abstract generalizations marks a distinct shift from
the "disruption of Western Christianity and the rise of modern science" in the sixteenth century {37 to a "new
colouring of ways of thought … [which] had been proceeding slowly for many ages in the European peoples." {38 The
new mentality this gave way to "altered the metaphysical presuppositions and the imaginative contents of our minds;
so that now the old stimuli provoke a new response," which Whitehead notes was "more important even than the new
science and the new technology." {39

Given that this wedding of particular facts with abstraction was in large part responsible for a new way of thinking that
shaped the whole of Europe, do you find it problematic that much of your writing has a tendency to be interpreted as
pulling this wedding apart or even declaiming a divorce (two examples being the emphasis on individual or particular
experience and the negative sense of "causal abstraction")?

DM: A marriage and a puling apart of or a conflict between what? An idea, an ideal? Another idea? A generalization
termed 'Europe', a generalization termed Western Christianity; another one named modern science? Another termed
our present society? And so on.

My focus in the past ten or so years has been on the personal and interactions between individuals such as personal
love based on a loyalty between individuals and the families that two such individuals can bring-into-being biological y
or otherwise. Such persons, such interactions, can and do sometimes cause suffering; but is this and has this been on
the scale of that caused by ideologies, ideas, ideals, and entities such as codified religions, nations, States, Empires?
Do the achievements of some such nations, States, Empires, of some ideas, ideals, and what has been termed
'science' and 'technology' balance out what suffering they may have caused?

For in my experience it is or it should be a question of balance; of accepting there are limits; of accepting
responsibility; of accepting that the personal and such things as love, empathy, compassion, and honour are the
essential aspects of that necessary balance, with extremism of whatever type or form the result of the harshness of
personal imbalance when love, empathy, compassion, and honour are ignored or rejected or never personal y known
because some -ism or -ology or some manufactured entity or hatred of some perceived enemy have priority in the life
of an individual with our human culture of pathei-mathos also ignored or rejected or never personally known.

Have we as a species in the past experienced in some way and in some place a part of the necessary balance?
Possibly, for a while. Do we have a part of such a balance now in any society in the world? Possibly, although some
may disagree. Are we as a species learning from our human culture of pathei-mathos with its documentation by means
of music, memoirs, poetry, and other arts, of human suffering, human love, tragedy, and loss?

NT: Two-part question. Question one. You have noted that certain forms of abstraction tend to be associated with the
masculous and can take on a kind of violence toward muliebral virtues like empathy, compassion, and humility. {40
This can occur, for example, in the masculous "favouring of abstractions and the notion of an idealized duty over
empathy and compassion and the muliebral virtues in general," {41 which can lead to forms of extremism.

However, this push against abstraction has resulted in a tendency by many of your readers to identify abstraction with
an erroneous or even harmful way of thinking. That identification seems dangerously close to a kind of nominalism or
rejection of all universals and abstract objects, {42 which itself may germinate a species of extremism.

I suspect part of this tension may have been influenced by Aristotle and his account of physis (φύσις) or nature, where,
in contrast to Plato's Timaeus, "nature is not an abstract, impersonal, 'all-pervading demiurgic force'," {43 but rather
an "inner driving force we reference when saying of a natural being: 'That is its nature.'" {44 I am also reminded of the
medieval problem of universals, {45 which highlights a debate that spans the work of the Neo-Platonists, pagans such
as Plotinus and Porphyry, and medieval Christians such as Augustine and Boethius. {46

With respect to your work, one could argue that the muliebral virtues at the heart of the philosophy of pathei-mathos
require a grounding in some sense of abstraction, whether in the transition from individual pathei-mathos to the
broader context of collective and sustainable millennial change, in the universal application of pathei-mathos to the
human condition, or in the way individual experience is related to other forms of life. Part of the confusion regarding
your use of the term "abstraction" may rest on your characterization of the difference between personal knowledge of
an individual and reifying that individual according to some ideology or cause. {47 Given that many readers seem to
miss the broader context of this distinction, would you mind clarifying what forms of abstraction you view as negative,
detrimental, or harmful and what forms you view as productive or even necessary for the cultivation of the muliebral
virtues you have described?

Question two. In an interview with you from 2014, {48 your work Understanding and Rejecting Extremism: A Very
Strange Peregrination is cited with respect to what you identify as the inflexible and often excessive masculous
character that goes with extremism.49 In your view, are there non-extremist contexts where the masculous can find
positive, non-violent applications? In what cases might a masculous character compliment "the muliebral virtues of
empathy, sensitivity, humility, gentleness, forgiveness, compassion, and the desire to love and be loved" rather than
work against them? {50

Conversely, are there cases, however exceptional, where these muliebral virtues could become vices? Though such
cases may be few and far between, your description of the difference between personal love and empathy comes to
mind, where you noted that "the emotion gendered by personal love can also cause suffering both of the person who
loves and in regard to the one loved, especially if there is not a mutual, loyal, equality of love." {51

Do you think there is a danger in this personal asymmetry carrying over to the collective level, as in the case of certain
religious ideologies? And much like the important wedding of the particular with the abstract described by Whitehead
in the previous question, how might we wed the masculous and the muliebral without inciting these forms of harm?

DM: In relation to masculous and muliebral I understand them as descriptors of personal behaviour and attitudes and
how it seems to me that the numinous and thus the honourable tend to be and have tended to be manifest in the
world and in our lives. Created abstractions tend toward the supra-personal and tend to cause suffering sooner or later.

An operative expression here is 'tend to be'. Do empathy, compassion, humility, and honour tend toward us not
causing suffering? Do ideologies and codified religions tend to – over durations of causal time – cause suffering, harm,
and schisms resulting from exegesis?

Does what is often described as the masculous virtue of heroism tend toward suffering by making a or the hero an
ideal to be admired and fol owed, or should it be more correctly described as a balance of both masculous and
muliebral if it is understood in the personal sense as the actions of one honourable person?

For another operative expression in my attempts at explanation is 'personal behaviour and attitudes' which being
variable and subject to change can perhaps only and sometimes point us toward a certain intuition that might be an
uncovering of a possible answer to the question quid est veritas. That what is uncovered is only a personal, causally-
dependant, experience and a knowing but always dies and yet can return to be rediscovered yet again by others.
Given my hubriatic past and the suffering I have personally caused by championing this or that ideology or this or that
religion or this or that abstraction I am all too fallible, all too prone to making mistakes so perhaps I could be wrong
regarding this and other matters.

NT: In addition to expiation and remorse, much of your work conveys an overtone of regret. In your recent writings, this
can be sensed acutely in the opening sections of "A Vagabond in Exile from the Gods," to cite one example. How have
you come to terms with what you now view as mistakes of the past in terms of your legacy to the future and its
influence on the world? Additional y, in contrast to the overtones of regret, the desire for forgiveness seems to be a
recurrent undertone throughout your writing. Against the sullied public and the lies that your opponents continue to
spread about you, wil you find the courage to forgive yourself? In reconciling the pain of the past with its shadow of
regret, what do you hope to see in the dawning of the future, and what enduring works do you hope to leave for future
generations in the brave valence of tomorrow?

DM: In regard to regret for having caused suffering to others through both selfishness and adherence to various -isms
or -ologies, the personal lamentation derived and derives from acknowledging my suffering-causing mistakes and from
what I hope is an understanding of our human physis and an understanding of the harshness of extremism. As for
forgiveness, who or what can forgive those who have caused suffering? In many cultural traditions it was of course the
person or persons who were directly harmed or their relatives. In Christian, Islamic and Judaic tradition it is God/Allah.

But the impersonal nature of many suffering-causing extremist deeds and of many criminal justice systems often
means there are no living victims or relatives to directly offer forgiveness even should they desire to do so, which
would probably be unlikely given the harshness, intractability, the fanatical hatred, of so many extremists.

While there are expiative means in the Christian, Islamic and Judaic traditions, if one does not or no longer believes in
God/Allah then there can be no forgiveness. Thus, for me as mentioned in some of my essays, my weltanschauung of
pathei-mathos, such answers as these, my many autobiographical effusions, are my attempts at expiation.

NT: Before one can derive wisdom from meaningful suffering it seems that one must first constitute the world
meaningful y. Deriving meaning from the world and constituting it in turn both rest on the way we interpret the world
and the framework of interpretation we have at our disposal. I think many individuals today are unaware of the
disparity between the framework of interpretation we had at our disposal in ages past and the framework of
interpretation that distinctly characterizes modernity. In some respects, the Hellenic vitality of your philosophy risks
becoming lost in the "transliteration" from the individual to modernity when interpreted without this frame of
reference. In an attempt to sustain that vitality, I think the fol owing summary by Thomas Howard regarding what he
calls "The Old Myth and the New" frames this well:

There were some ages in Western history that have occasionally been called Dark. They were dark, it is said,
because in them learning declined, and progress paused, and men labored under the pall of belief. A cause-
effect relationship is frequently felt to exist between the pause and the belief. Men believed in things like the
Last Judgment and fiery torment. They believed that demented people had devils in them, and that disease
was a plague from heaven. They believed that they had souls, and that what they did in this life had some
bearing on the way in which they would final y experience reality.

They believed in portents and charms and talismans. And they believed that God was in heaven and
Beelzebub in hell and that the Holy Ghost had impregnated the Virgin Mary and that the earth and sky were
full of angelic and demonic conflict. Altogether, life was very weighty, and there was no telling what might lie
behind things. The ages were, as I say, dark.

Then the light came. It was the light that has lighted us men into a new age. Charms, angels, devils, plagues,
and parthenogenesis have fled from the glare into the crannies of memory. In their place have come coal
mining and E = mc2 and plastic and group dynamics and napalm and urban renewal and rapid transit. Men
were freed from the fear of the Last Judgment; it was felt to be more bracing to face Nothing than to face the
Tribunal. They were freed from worry about getting their souls into God's heaven by the discovery that they
had no souls and that God had no heaven. They were freed from the terror of devils and plagues by the
knowledge that the thing that was making them scream and foam was not an imp but only their own inability
to cope, and that the thing that was clawing out their entrails was not divine wrath but only cancer.
Altogether, life became much more livable since it was clear that in fact nothing lay behind things. The age
was called enlightened.

The myth sovereign in the old age was that everything means everything. The myth sovereign in the new is
that nothing means anything. {52

With respect to Howard's description of "the myth sovereign in the old age" and "the myth sovereign in the new,"
where do you situate your own "paganus weltanschauung" and how do you reconcile it against the modern view that
"nothing means anything"?

DM: I do not situate my weltanschauung anywhere in terms defined or believed or discussed by others, ancient or
modern, because it is just my weltanschauung, born from various experiences and the loss of loved ones, and nurtured
by working and living on a farm in England, by solitary walks along a sea-shore and in the hills and deciduous woods of
English Shires.

NT: In another article, I have cited Pope Benedict XVI's comments regarding the topic of violent religious conversion.
Recalling a dialogue between "the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the
subject of Christianity and Islam," {53 the Pope recounts how:

The emperor, after having expressed himself so forceful y, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why
spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable.

Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God," he says, "is not pleased by
blood – and not acting reasonably (σὺν λόγω) is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the
body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without
violence and threats. . To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any
kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death…" {54

Having long-since rejected Muslim extremism and having had a first-hand account of it for ten years as a radical
Muslim, I think the Pope's framing of the aforesaid dialogue finds an acute expression in your current views on the
issue. In "Understanding and Countering Muslim Extremism," you describe two aims that typically motivate Muslim
extremism – a supra-personal one and a personal one – which you note are "inextricably entwined." {55

You additional y note that "one effective way to counter Muslim extremism is for Muslims themselves to, using Quran
and Sunnah, counter the harsh interpretation of Islam by the extremists," thereby pointing to "the humanity that is at
the heart of Islam; a humanity so evident in the millions of Muslims … world-wide." {56

Speaking to that humanity – and more specifically to the humility you cite {57 – how do you now view the spreading of
faith through violence with respect to its incompatibility with the nature of God and the nature of the soul described by
emperor Manuel II Paleologus? Additionally, if the supra-personal and personal aims that motivate this form of
extremism are intertwined, how might we ward against them in their many variations within society and within our own
lives?

DM: It seems to me that there are difficult and long-standing questions in relation to religions which wholly or in part
rely on texts as the Christian, Islamic, Judaic and Buddhist traditions have done. Questions of exegesis and the
different interpretations which often result.

Thus, even if as I wrote in the essay you refer to that one way – not the only way – in regard to events such as 9/11 and
7/7 is for Muslims themselves using Quran and Sunnah to counter the harsh interpretation of Islam by others, that may
not prevent such harsh interpretations now or in the future given the reliance on texts with their inevitable exegesis.

In another essay I compared the Shia and the Sunna traditions noting that the Shia tradition of Taqlid seemed to me to
preclude exegesis by those scholarly unqualified to do so. I suggested that this might explain why the Shia tradition
has:

"no such thing as modern independent extremist Shia groups who indiscriminately target and kill the kuffar
('infidels') in Western lands or elsewhere, or who fly aeroplanes into buildings or who blow themselves up in
order to kill 'infidels'. For Shia mujtahidun have given rulings in respect of such things." {58

This should lead to difficult questions for not only groups such as ad-Dawlah al-Islamiyah (commonly known as Islamic
State) and their followers who regularly target and kill Shia Muslims but also for Western allies of Saudi Arabia who
have for decades imposed sanctions on Iran and who support a conflict in Yemen in which Shia Muslims have been
killed in their thousands and Shia children starved to death.

How many in the West even know what these difficult questions are? Not only in relation to Shia Muslims but in relation
to exegesis of Christian texts such as The Gospels? To in some minor way draw attention to such questions I began a
translation of and writing a commentary on The Gospel According To John and have so far for various personal reasons
only managed to make public chapters one to five, available at https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/gospel-
of-john-1-5.pdf

NT: In your autobiography, Myngath, you mention an interest in chess in your youth. In fact, you mention being one of
the only competitors to have drawn against a visiting Grandmaster in a simultaneous display at the Singapore
Polytechnic as a young man. {59 As a chess player, I would be remiss not to ask: do you still have the recorded chess
notation for that match? Additional y, do you still play chess? And did you find anything applicable or of value with
respect to the lessons you learned in your study of the game and your subsequent study of martial arts?

DM: In regard to the Chess game in Singapore, I do not any longer have the 'descriptive' notation of the game, but the
results of the tournament were briefly together with my surname mentioned in a local newspaper – it may have been
The Straits Times – and I hunched over a Chess board fleeting appeared in a local TV newsreel of the event.

I lost interest in Chess when, living in Blighty in 1968, I first met Colin Jordan and became a National-Socialist activist in
his newly formed British Movement.

NT: In one of your early relationships as a young man, you mention that you and your female companion once spent
hours listening to jazz at a small club, noting that "she was a Jazz aficionado and very knowledgeable about that
genre." {60 Do you recall what artists or songs you two enjoyed listening to at the time, and do you enjoy the genre?
Additionally, are there other genres, artists, or songs of special significance for you that you would care to mention?
You have noted that classical music has played an important role in your life, and I am curious to hear more about your
musical influences.
DM: Being a young man in love with a lady who was Jazz aficionado I did for a while try to share her interest in and
enthusiasm for such music but failed, given my interest in and love of classical music. Which interest began when as a
young boy in a private – Whites-only – school in Africa our music teacher played our class a Long Playing record of
music by JS Bach performed by Segovia. It was transformative.

NT: I doubt I am alone in feeling that your poetry reveals something deeply moving about the way you and your
worldview have transformed over the course of your life. I find the poems in One Exquisite Silence particularly moving.
Would you care to provide any additional background regarding the circumstances that led to the composition of any of
these poems? I am especial y interested in "Travelling," which affects me intensely at this stage of my life.

DM: The poem One Exquisite Silence was composed not long after I met and fell in love with a lady who worked on a
commercial (wholesale) plant nursery; while the Travelling poem was composed not long after I left Leeds (and my
violent National-Socialist activism) in 1974 to wander the English countryside for a while as a vagabond, as was the
poem Summer Days Walking Roads. The poem titled Relict was composed during a visit to a rather neglected
cemetery when in 1976 I was travelling around and staying in various monasteries in the United Kingdom with a view
to becoming a Catholic monk. The poem titled Wine was composed in Spain in the early 1970's, before I moved to
Leeds, during another period when I was wandering around wondering what to do with my life.

NT: Martin Heidegger revived one of the most important questions in the Western philosophical tradition: what is the
meaning of Being? This question set the philosophical tradition in motion all the way back to the ancient Greeks. At
one level, the question points to the fact that we general y operate through an unclarified pre-comprehension of what
we mean by "exist," or what we mean by "this is" versus "this is not," where for the ancient Greeks Being was equated
with ongoing or constant presence. At a deeper level, it points to an important interpretive dynamic regarding how we
are to understand the type of being we are, the one who asks the question and for whom the question is an issue.

Much like Heidegger's question, there are many theories regarding how to interpret the meaning of your life. Sadly, all
of these have a tendency to reduce the ideas and ideals that motivated your life's narrative to deeds that you have
long-since denounced and atoned for.

Put another way, many are concerned with the details of your life without being equipped to take seriously the ideas
that have shaped it. Given that your philosophy is not just a collection of ideas but a mode of living, this presents two
problems. The first concerns the philosophy of pathei-mathos, where the way one interprets his or her experiences
through the lens of that philosophy is cal ed into question when one is not equipped to address or interpret the
meaning of the philosophy itself. In that case, there is often an asymmetry between the vital experience needed to
understand the philosophy and the framework needed to interpret those experiences, where the two eventual y
disconnect or fail to connect at all. The second problem concerns the attempt by others to interpret your life without
first being equipped to interpret their own. We have seen this time and time again with respect to your opponents, in
the media, and even among those who take inspiration from your life and work. I would thus like to conclude with one
final question, returning us, as is so often the case, to where we began: what is the meaning of David Myatt?

DM: I have no answer to the question "What is the Meaning of Myatt?" because all I seem to be is one fallible mortal
among so many billions past and present and one who will die soon having already outlived his three score and ten.
Someone who has and perhaps vainly tried in some way in the past ten years or so, and in various poems, to record his
feelings, his fallible understanding of himself and the world he has passed through and the events and the people he
has, or so he believes, learned from.

In those past ten or so years my references are usually only the classical authors; or occasionally a poet such as TS
Eliot or a composer such as JS Bach because for those years my world, my influences, have been the outdoor world of
Nature, my pathei-mathos, the women I have loved and lost, with my only constant companions those classical
authors, my memories, and such a poet and such a composer.

27.iv.22

Notes

1 David Myatt, "Some Questions for DWM (March 2014)," David Myatt – Πάθει Μάθος, May 2014,
https://www.davidmyatt.info/dwm-questions-may2014.html.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Faith and Belief: The Difference Between Them (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1998), 141.

5 https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/2010/05/02/rain-following-weeks-of-warmful-april-sun/

6 Smith, Faith and Belief, 142.

7 Myatt, "Some Questions (March 2014)."

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.

11 David Myatt, "I. Pathei-Mathos as Authority and Way," in The Numinous Way of Pathei-Mathos, 5th ed. (CreateSpace,
2018), https://www.davidmyatt.info/numinous-way-pathei-mathos.pdf.

12 Clifford Geertz, "The Pinch of Destiny: Religion as Experience, Meaning, Identity, Power," chap. 8 in Available Light:
Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 167. See William
James, Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902; New
York: Routledge, 2002), 386. Citations refer to the Routledge edition.

13 James, Varieties, 33.

14 Ibid., 32.

15 Ibid., 32-33.

16 Ibid., 33.

17 Myatt, "Some Questions (March 2014)."

18 David Myatt, "Some Questions for DWM, 2017," David Myatt: Learning from Adversity; a Rejection of Extremism,
2017, https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/dwm-questions-2017-v1b.pdf.

19 See Myatt, "Some Questions, 2017": "an apprehension of the complete unity (a cosmic order, κόσμος, mundus)
beyond the apparent parts of that unity, together with the perceiveration that we mortals – albeit a mere and fal ible
part of the unity – have been gifted with our existence so that we may perceive and understand this unity, and, having
so perceived, may ourselves seek to be whole, and thus become as balanced (perfectus), as harmonious, as the unity
itself."

20 Myatt, "Authority and Way."

21 Richard Bett, "Pyrrho," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, updated October 23, 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu
/entries/pyrrho/.

22 Pascal Massie, "Ataraxia: Tranquility at the End," in A Companion to Ancient Philosophy, eds. Sean D. Kirkland and
Eric Sanday (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018), 246.

23 Emil Cioran, "A Bouquet of Heads," The Hudson Review 15, no. 4 (Winter 1962-1963): 492.

24 Dirk Baltzly, "Stoicism," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, updated April 10, 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu
/entries/stoicism/.

25 Myatt, "Some Questions, 2017."

26 Massie, "Ataraxia," 251.

27 Cioran, "Bouquet," 495-96.

28 Myatt, "Some Questions, 2017."

29 Ibid.

30 Mother Teresa, "My Own Soul Remains in Deep Darkness," in Mother Teresa, Come Be My Light: The Private Writings
of the Saint of Calcutta, ed. Brian Kolodiejchuk (New York: Doubleday, 2007).

31 Cioran, "Bouquet," 496.

32 C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1964), 153.

33 Quoted in Lewis, Discarded Image, 153.

34 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Pelican Mentor Books, 1948), 2-3.

35 Whitehead, Modern World, 3.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid., 1.

38 Ibid., 2.

39 Ibid.

40 Myatt, "Some Questions (March 2014)."

41 Ibid.

42 Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra, "Nominalism in Metaphysics," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, updated April 1,

2015, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nominalism-metaphysics/.

43 Marjolein Oele, "Aristotle on Physis: Analyzing the Inner Ambiguities and Transgression of Nature," in A Companion
to Ancient Philosophy, eds. Sean D. Kirkland and Eric Sanday (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018), 162.

44 Oele, "Aristotle on Physis," 162.

45 Gyula Klima, "The Medieval Problem of Universals," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, updated February 27,
2022, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/universals-medieval/.

46 Ibid.

47 See, for example, David Myatt, "Understanding and Countering Muslim Extremism," David Myatt – Πάθει Μάθος,
2015, https://www.davidmyatt.info/muslim-extremism.html.

48 Myatt, "Some Questions (March 2014)."

49 See David Myatt, "The Masculous Extremist," in Understanding and Rejecting Extremism: A Very Strange
Peregrination (CreateSpace, 2013), https://www.davidmyatt.info/muslim-extremism.html.

50 Ibid.

51 Myatt, "Some Questions, 2017."

52 Thomas Howard, "The Old Myth and the New," chap. 1 in Chance or the Dance? A Critique of Modern Secularism
(1969; repr., San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001).

53 Pope Benedict XVI, "Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections" (speech, Aula Magna of the
University of Regensburg, Bavaria, Germany, September 12, 2006). The speech can be accessed here:
https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-
xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg.html.

54 Ibid.

55 Myatt, "Countering Muslim Extremism."

56 Ibid.

57 Ibid.

58 https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/dwm-questions-2015.pdf 59 David Myatt, "Far East," in Myngath:

Some Recollections of a Wyrdful and Extremist Life (CreateSpace, 2013), https://www.davidmyatt.info/david-myatt-
myngath.pdf.

60 Myatt, "Toward First Love," in Myngath.

Addendum

Misunderstanding Denotata In Myatt's Philosophy Of Pathei-Mathos

A Particular Perceiveration

A certain misunderstanding of David Myatt's weltanschauung of Pathei-Mathos seems to have arisen based on Myatt's
use of terms such as acausal, abstractions, and denotatum {1} which does not seem to take into account matters such
as the following:

1. That Myatt's weltanschauung was developed and refined over a period of some years (c.2011-2017) and was based
primarily on his outré experiences over some four decades, which refinement led him to write in 2022 that

"my weltanschauung is just my weltanschauung; representing my attempt to apprehend the physis of human
beings; to understand the causes of suffering and how suffering can be alleviated; and understand the
nature of the numinous and what it means and meant, and thus whether the numinous is embodied in theos,
however understood, or in human virtues such as compassion, empathy and honour which thus might
obviate the need for a belief in something supra-personal be that theos or some -ism or some -ology." {2}

In effect, his weltanschauung of Pathei-Mathos is a mystical perceiveration and not an academic philosophy. {3}

2. That his classification of his insights using terminology such as ontology, epistemology, and ethics - as in for
example his statement that "the ontology of beings [...] is often obscured by denotatum and by abstractions, both of
which conceal physis" {4} - is only a temporary guide for readers since his focus is primarily on empathy and pathei-
mathos as a means to knowing, both of which are personal, of the immediate moment, and which knowing, as he
writes many times, cannot be extracted out from that personal experiencing to form the basis for anything supra-
personal be it a denotata or some -ism or some -ology. {5}

That is, ontology itself is an abstraction, a denotatum, which empathy and pathei-mathos take us beyond. In this
respect a simile might be Wittgenstein's 'ladder'.

3. That what applies to terminology such as ontology applies to his use of the acausal and his division of our physis,
following his understanding of the Corpus Hermeticum, into masculous and muliebral. That they are also useful
denotata to explain what is as it now is and has been but are ultimately discarded by the wordless knowing of empathy
and pathei-mathos.

4. That his comparisons and examples derived from ancient Greek texts and philosophy - most of which he cites in
Greek and provides his own translations - are of the insights of some others with which he finds some correlation with
his own insights, eschewing as he does in his iconoclasm and resonance with Greco-Roman culture the modern
practice in academia of citing works by philosophers of the past few centuries and more recent texts by academics.

The Mysticism Of Mr Myatt

The statement by Myatt, quoted above, that his weltanschauung is his

"attempt to apprehend the physis of human beings; to understand the causes of suffering and how suffering
can be alleviated; and understand the nature of the numinous and what it means and meant, and thus
whether the numinous is embodied in theos, however understood, or in human virtues such as compassion,
empathy and honour which thus might obviate the need for a belief in something supra-personal be that
theos or some -ism or some -ology," {2}

is a succinct description of his mysticism; that is, of his personal perceiveration of what is conventionally termed
'Reality', of Being and of beings. Which perceiveration is of the numinous capable of apprehension, sans denotata, by
means of empathy and pathei-mathos, obviating the need for theos (a supreme divinity) and for theoi (the divinities of
various ancient religions, pagan and otherwise) and obviating the need for not only ideologies of whatever kind but for
religions such as Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism which rely on the interpretation, the exegesis, of some text
or texts. {6}

For Myatt, this apprehension of the numinous is manifest in the personal behaviour of individuals through the
compassion, humility, and tolerance born of empathy and through the fairness, the reasonableness, of personal
honour.

As noted in Conspectus of The Philosophy of Pathei-Mathos, empathy:

"inclines a person toward certain virtues; toward a particular type of personal character; and disinclines them
toward doing what is bad, what is unfair; what is harsh and unfeeling; what intentionally causes or
contributes to suffering. For empathy enables us to directly perceive, to sense, the φύσις (the physis, the
nature or character) of human beings and other living beings, involving as empathy does a translocation of
ourselves and thus a knowing-of another living-being as that living-being is, without presumptions and sans
all ideations, all projections." [My emphasis] {7}

Furthermore, empathy is inextricably linked to pathei-mathos {8} and that there is what Myatt terms a 'local horizon'
to empathy:

"The 'local horizon of empathy' is a natural consequence of my understanding of empathy as a human

faculty, albeit a faculty that is still quite underdeveloped. For what empathy provides - or can provide - is a
very personal wordless knowing in the immediacy-of-the-living-moment. Thus empathy inclines us as
individuals to appreciate that what is beyond the purveu {9} of our empathy - beyond our personal empathic
knowing of others, beyond our knowledge and our experience, beyond the limited (local) range of our
empathy and that personal (local) knowledge of ourselves which pathei-mathos reveals - is something we
rationally, we humbly, accept we do not know and so cannot judge or form a reasonable, a fair, a balanced,
opinion about. For empathy, like pathei-mathos, lives within us; manifesting, as both empathy and pathei-
mathos do, the always limited nature, the horizon, of our own knowledge and understanding." {10}

"[a]s a personal human faculty empathy has a personal horizon and thus cannot be extrapolated from such a
personal knowing into some-thing supra-personal be this some-thing denotata, including an ἰδέᾳ/εἶδος, or an
axiom (ἀρχή) or a source (αἴτιος) for some 'revelation' or ideology or similar manifestations constructed by
and dependent on appellation." {11}

In regard to the numinous Myatt writes:

"In contrast to Otto et al, my understanding of the numinous is that it is primarily a perceiveration, not a
personal emotion or feeling, not a mysterium, and not an idea in the sense of Plato's εἶδος and thus is not
similar to Kant's concept of a priori. As a perceiveration, while it includes an apprehension of what is often
referred to as 'the divine', 'the holy' - and sometimes thus is an apprehension of theos or theoi - it is not
limited to such apprehensions, since as in the past it is often an intimation of, an intuition concerning, the
natural balance of ψυχή; a balance which ὕβρις upsets. This natural balance – our being as human beings – is
 or can be manifest to us in or by what is harmonious, or what reminds us of what is harmonious and
beautiful." {12}

Which brings us to what seems to be a neglected aspect of his weltanschauung: the natural balance, harmony,
ἁρμονίη, for which he often uses the Taoist-derived term wu-wei which he defines as being "used in my philosophy of
pathei-mathos to refer to a personal 'letting-be' - a non-interference - deriving from humility." {13} That is, from the
humility revealed by empathy.

His 2018 essay Towards Understanding Ancestral Culture elaborates on this notion of balance where he provides an
example not only from Ancient Greece but from Tractate IV:2 of the Corpus Hermeticum, and from Ficini's De Vita
Coelitus Comparanda, written in Latin and published in 1489,

"Correctly understood, Δίκη - and δίκη in general - represents the natural and the necessary balance
manifest in ἁρμονίη (harmony) and thus not only in τὸ καλόν (the beautiful) but also in the Cosmic Order,
κόσμος, with ourselves as human beings (at least when unaffected by hubris) a microcosmic re-presentation
of such balance, κόσμον δὲ θείου σώματος κατέπεμψε τὸν ἄνθρωπον. A sentiment re-expressed centuries
later by Marsilii Ficini: Quomodo per inferiora superioribus exposita deducantur superiora, et per mundanas
materias mundana potissimum dona, 'How, when what is lower is touched by what is higher, the higher is
cosmically presenced therein and thus gifted because cosmically aligned'.

This understanding and appreciation of ἁρμονίη and of κόσμος and of ourselves as a microcosm is perhaps
most evident in the Greek phrase καλὸς κἀγαθός, describing as it does those who are balanced within
themselves, who - manifesting τὸ καλόν and τὸ ἀγαθὸν - comport themselves in a gentlemanly or lady-like
manner." {14}

Which ancient notion of καλὸς κἀγαθός he mentions in his two 2017 monographs Classical Paganism And The Christian
Ethos and Tu Es Diaboli Ianua {15} and which comportment succinctly describes how his weltanschauung could be
manifest in the world.

Gentlemanly And Lady-like Behaviour

As described earlier, Myatt's mystical apprehension of the numinous is manifest in the personal behaviour of
individuals and this behaviour amounts to an individual comporting themselves in a gentlemanly or lady-like manner; a
comportment which has a long history in European culture from the idealized medieval chivalry of Morte Arthure to
fictional Regency characters such as Mr Darcy, Elizabeth Bennet, Colonel Brandon, and Elinor Dashwood, to the 1940s
Clive Wynne-Candy and Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff.

In his 2014 essay The Consolation Of A Viator, Myatt indirectly references the character of Mr Darcy:

"For most of my life – and to paraphrase what someone once wrote – I have been a selfish being, prideful and
conceited, and would still be so were it not for the suicide of a woman I loved." {16}

In the final paragraph of his autobiography Myngath he concludes that "a shared, a loyal, love between two people is
the most beautiful, the most numinous, the most valuable thing of all." {17}

Such personal sentiments ground, and in my view express the essence of, his weltanschauung and have apparently
been somewhat neglected in discussions of Myatt's 'philosophy' of pathei-mathos. For it is not an academic philosophy
divorced from the realities of human life but the life-experience of someone who, learning from both diverse
experiences and decades of scholarly study, has distilled that learning into the understanding that in order to presence
the numinous we do not need religions or any -ism or -ology or abstractions but have only to behave in a certain
cultured way: with manners, fairness, honour, humility, and compassion.

Which attributes of personal character are, to use Myatt's term, descriptors not abstractions:

"A descriptor is a word, a term, used to describe some-thing which exists and which is personally observed,
or is discovered, by means of our senses (including the faculty of empathy)." {13}

Hence why Myatt aptly describes his 'philosophy' as a "mystical individualistic numinous way," and as "the way of
striving to cultivate, striving to live by, the virtues of humility, empathy, compassion, honour, non-interference, and
self-restraint. A very individual way..." {18}

Morena Kapiris
June 2022

°°°°°°°

{1} It should be noted that in many of his writings Myatt often idiosyncratically uses denotatum as an Anglicized term
for both singular and plural instances. However, I shall use denotata for the plural and denotatum for the singular.

{2} Some Questions For DWM, 2022, https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2022/05/dwm-questions-may-22.pdf

{3} We have appropriated the term 'perceiveration' from Myatt's translations of and commentaries on tractates of the
Corpus Hermeticum where he explains that he uses it to translate the Greek term νοῦς in place of the conventional
translation 'mind', explaining his reasons in his article Concerning ἀγαθός and νοῦς in the Corpus Hermeticum -
https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/2017/03/24/concerning-ἀγαθός-and-νοῦς-in-the-corpus-hermeticum/ - and in his
commentary on v.2 of the Poemandres tractate where he describes perceiverance as:

"a particular type of astute awareness, as of one's surroundings, of one's self, and as in understanding
('reading') a situation often in an instinctive way. Thus, what is not meant is some-thing termed 'mind' (or
some faculty thereof), distinguished as this abstract 'thing' termed 'mind' has often been from another entity
termed the body." https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/eight-tractates-v2-print.pdf

{4} Towards Understanding Physis. Included as an appendix in The Numinous Way of Pathei-Mathos, fifth edition,
2018, https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/numinous-way-v5c-print.pdf

{5} See for example Some Questions For DWM 2014, included in One Vagabond In Exile From The Gods, 2014,
https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/one-vagabond-pathei-mathos.pdf

{6} In many of his writings Myatt has explained that the need for and practice of exegesis leads to suffering through
reliance on a particular interpretation and through the conflict of competing interpretations which can lead to
accusations of 'heresy'. See for example (i) the 2017 text The Way Of Jesus of Nazareth: A Question Of Hermeneutics?
https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/2017/09/30/the-way-of-jesus-of-nazareth/ and (ii) the 2019 text Two Metaphysical
Contradictions Of The Modern West which is included in his text In Defence Of The Roman Catholic Church,
https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/in-defence-rc-1.pdf In his 2018 essay From Mythoi To Empathy -
included as an appendix in The Numinous Way of Pathei-Mathos, fifth edition - he wrote that the local horizon of
empathy

"and the fact that empathy is a human faculty mean that the apprehension is wordless and personal and
cannot be extrapolated beyond, or abstracted out from, the individual without losing some or all of its
numinosity since the process of denotatum - of abstraction - devolves around the meanings assigned to
words, terms, and names, and which meanings can and do vary over causal time and may be
(mis)interpreted by others often on the basis of some idea, or theory, or on some comparative exegesis. It
therefore follows that the numinous cannot be codified and that numinosity cannot be adequately, fully,
presenced by anything doctrinal or which is organized beyond a small, a localized, and thus personal level;
and that all such a supra-local organization can ever hope to do at best is provide a fallible intimation of the
numinous, or perhaps some practical means to help others toward individually apprehending the numinous
for themselves." https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/numinous-way-v5c-print.pdf

{7} included in The Numinous Way of Pathei-Mathos, fifth edition, op.cit.

{8} The Mystic Philosophy Of David Myatt, third edition, 2021, p.5. https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2021/09
/myatt-philosophy-third-edition.pdf

In his Some Questions For DWM, 2022, Myatt writes that the third edition of The Mystic Philosophy provides "a
reasonably comprehensive overview" of his weltanschauung.

{9} As often, Myatt uses an alternative spelling: here purveu (from Middle English) instead of the now conventional
'purview'. See On Idiosyncratic Capitalization and Spelling, https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/on-idiosyncratic-
capitalization-and-spelling/

{10} Included in Sarigthersa, https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/dwmyatt-sarigthersa-v7.pdf

{11} Numinosity, Denotata, Empathy, And The Hermetic Tradition, 2022, https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/2022/03

/17/numinosity-denotata-empathy-and-the-hermetic-tradition/

{12} From Mythoi To Empathy, 2018. Included as an appendix in The Numinous Way of Pathei-Mathos, fifth edition,
2018, https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/numinous-way-v5c-print.pdf

{13} Vocabulary of the Philosophy of Pathei-Mathos, in The Numinous Way of Pathei-Mathos, op.cit.

{14} The essay is included as an appendix in The Numinous Way of Pathei-Mathos, op.cit. Myatt translates the
quotation from Tractate IV:2 of the Corpus Hermeticum as "A cosmos of the divine body sent down as human beings,"
writing in his commentary:

"That is, human beings re-present, presence, the 'divine body' and are, of themselves, a reflection of the
cosmic order itself. This, and the preceding line, express a fundamental part of ancient and Renaissance
hermeticism: human beings as a microcosm of the cosmic order and the divine." Corpus Hermeticum: Eight
Tractates, https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/eight-tractates-v2-print.pdf

{15} (i) Classical Paganism And The Christian Ethos, https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/classical-

paganism-v2-print.pdf (ii) Tu Es Diaboli Ianua, https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/tua-es-diaboli-ianua.pdf

{16} The essay is included in One Vagabond In Exile From The Gods, https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2014/10
/one-vagabond-pathei-mathos.pdf

{17} Myngath, 2013, https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/david-myatt-myngath.pdf

{18} In Defence Of The Roman Catholic Church, https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/in-defence-rc-1.pdf
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons

David Myatt, Australian Interview, 2023

The interview was with an Australian-based investigative journalist of Serbian descent known by his moniker
'Interzone' who was also a former convert to Islam. We include as a relevant addendum Myatt's text Analysing National
Socialism where he writes:

"There is thus, based on applying the moral criteria of The Numinous Way, a complete rejection by me of
National-Socialism – of whatever kind – and an understanding of Hitler as a flawed individual who caused
great suffering and whose actions and policies where dishonourable and immoral."

°°°°°°°

Part One

§ I know you supported the Taliban, and I wish to ask where did you go? Who did you meet? How long where
you there? If vague answers must be made for security reasons I understand.

Yes I did support the Taliban during my Muslim years, with one of my writings in support of them - The Significance of
the Taliban for the Muslim Ummah - apparently found by the CIA in the possession of Osama bin Laden following his
killing by US Navy Seals in the Abbottabad compound in 2011. [1]

My travels in Muslim lands following my reversion in 1998 were briefly mentioned by Mark Weitzmann in a 2010 NATO
publication [2] with one such travel summarized in my somewhat heretical text Reflections on Islamic Travels dated 2
Jumaada Al-Thaani 1424. Other than this I have as you anticipated no further comment to make.

§ It would not surprise me if you have had to quieten yourself by pressure from MI6, or use foreign
intelligence agency's in the past.

My only overt contact with such agencies was following my arrest by Special Branch (SO12 as it then was, now part of
SO15) in 1998 during one of several amiable meetings and conversations with an SO12 officer at which meeting
another somewhat enigmatic person was present who I assumed was either MI5 or MI6. My assumption is and was that
such agencies had me - have me? - under covert surveillance from at least 1997 during my involvement with Combat
18.

§ I wish to know your perspective of the current Taliban, as for the most part they consist of many original
Taliban members.

My now "above Time" perspective is mostly the one I wrote about in that aforementioned writing but modified with the
riders 'may be' and 'on balance': that, for Muslims, they may represent, on balance, the spiritual principle of Zuhd in
dunya (zuhd ad-dunya) which principle of detachment from or a concern with material things is it seems alien to some
in the modern materialistic West although kept alive by others in various spiritual forms and perhaps even in those
who espouse certain environmental concerns about what the modern West has done and is doing in respect of Nature.
In regard to spiritual forms I am reminded, in respect of Christianity, of Julian of Norwich, George Fox, and William Penn.

With "on balance" for (i) it seems that sometimes - but not always - there may be or may have been an excess of zeal
by some and (ii) there is the question of Ijma regarding their interpretation of Quran and Sunnah, which consensus,
according to my understanding, they did not and currently do not have possibly because they did not have time to
develope and most certainly now, post-occupation, cannot yet develop an Emirate.

§ I know this is not confirmed: that you have "renounced Islam and all forms of Extremism".

What is or would be acceptable as confirmation? For myself, I can only suggest a reading of my post-2012 writings,
such as Understanding And Rejecting Extremism, [3] and what I endeavoured to express in my three 2022 interviews.
[4]

°°°

Part Two

§ Regarding Combat 18. When you left, especially becoming more deeply involved in Islam, where there ever
any reprisals towards you?

No. Possibly because of two things. I kept certain channels of communication open particularly concerning Reichsfolk,
and, in anticipation of a forthcoming criminal trial following my arrest in 1998 by SO12, I was preparing a defence since
their criminal investigation was ongoing only ending in the Summer of 2001 when I released from my bail after it was
found that there was "insufficient evidence" to bring me to trial.

This preparation included having some of my National-Socialist writings re-issued, one of which was the essay Why
National-Socialism is Not Racist, and another The Theology Of National-Socialism: An Examination of National-
Socialism, Christianity and Islam, in which I had written,

Honour demands that we treat people, regardless of their race, their culture, their religion, their 'political
views' with fairness and respect. That is, honour demands that we have manners and are polite: that we
strive to act with nobility of character; that we judge people by their deeds and in particular by how they act
toward us [...] It really is about time that we who uphold the noble way of life which is National-Socialism
lived according to our own ethics and began to explain, openly and in clear words, the noble reality of
National-Socialism. No matter how dire our situation may be, or appears to be, and no matter how many non-
Aryans may live in what were once our own nations, we must hold fast to our own ethics and not allow
ourselves be tricked into accepting the Zionist version of 'National Socialism' with its hate-filled, irrational,
Hollywood 'nazis'. [5]

It was during this time that I wrote The Question of National-Socialism, Racism and Tolerance [6] which led me later
that year (2001) to conceive a practical plan to try and bring National-Socialists and Muslims together in order to
combat, in various ways, what I considered were our mutual enemies. In furtherance of which I wrote tracts such as the
multipart The National-Socialist Guide to Understanding Islam, in which I broached the subject of 'martyrdom
operations' by Muslims, the last edition of which 'guide' was published in 1424 AH. [6]

§ It seems that you and the O9A have been targeted as the "connection" between all these Neo-Nazi terrorist
groups. It seems they have decided to choose you along with the O9A as the main driving force of these
organisations. Allowing governments to use the O9A like they are trying to do in Australia, to by proxy drag in
tens of Neo-Nazi and far-right groups into being designated as terrorist organisations. Do you feel this is the
case?

This is an interesting question which I believe deserves a detailed reply especially as it links to one of the themes you
are researching.

My personal perception is that 'the Establishment', of which anti-fascist groups such as 'Hope Not Hate' are now part
of, have for several years been concerned about how the perception of National-Socialism is changing among sections
of the Caucasian peoples of Europe and elsewhere. Changing away from the Establishment orthodoxy maintained since
1945 through an unprecedented propaganda campaign toward a historical revisionist understanding. That is, toward
what is in practice now a heresy.

This concerns them as heresy always seems to concern religious and ideological cliqués when they acquire power and
influence with their response always seeming to be repression and, latterly, since the Middle Ages, censorship which in
our modern societies involves a 'cancel culture' and introducing laws based on some manufactured abstraction such as
"holocaust denial" which criminalizes the public expression of opinions about a particular matter which the
Establishment does not approve of, just as zealotical Protestants in England centuries ago criminalized the public
expression of Catholic views and the performance of the Catholic Mass, and just as zealotical 'revolutionaries' in 18th
century France condemned and guillotined Catholic priests and nuns for being "anti-revolutionary" one of which acts
was memorialised over a hundred and sixty years later by composer Francis Poulenc in his Dialogues des Carmélites.

A quite minor part of this new understanding, this new heresy, may have been what one antifascist described over two
decades ago as my 'revisionist' version of National-Socialism with its emphasis on honour and what that implied in real
life for modern National-Socialists. Hence my 1997 essay The Disease of Suspicion in which I wrote:

"There is a blight spreading on our noble Cause, a blight spread by our enemies. This blight, this spreading
infection, is Suspicion.

This most usual and visible form which this infectious blight takes is: 'He/she is an agent/informer for the
Police/the Government...' Sometimes, however, Suspicion is simply a rumour about a person's past or their
personal character.

Our enemies have deliberately bred this infection of Suspicion to weaken us, to divide us among ourselves.
They have found it be a powerful weapon in their fight against us, for many who are supposed to on our side
in the war of freedom we are fighting have become infected with Suspicion, and go around infecting others
with this blight, this poison. There is now almost a state of paranoia on our side, with people spreading
rumours and allegations, and wondering whether a certain Comrade is really a government agent or an
informer.

We must understand this - Suspicion is behaviour unbecoming a warrior. What is unbecoming for a warrior is
what is dishonourable and unfair. It is dishonourable conduct and thus contemptible.

It is a betrayal of everything we stand for and believe in, as warriors. It is a betrayal of our noble ideal of
loyalty, of comradeship. To spread Suspicion, to believe in rumours and allegations about individuals -
however well-supported or 'documented' such rumours and allegations seem - is undignified, the sign of a
weak character. It is a betrayal of our noble standards of personal conduct - a descent down toward the level
 of the uncivilized people we despise and are fighting.

Suspicion is un-warrior like because a true warrior only and ever makes a personal judgement about any
individual after having personally met that individual on a number of occasions because this is the
honourable, the fair, thing to do. They have thus spent some time with that person and so therefore can
make their own personal and direct assessment of the character of that individual. The warrior thing to do -
not having met an individual and not having spent time with that individual - is to reserve one's judgement,
and make no personal comment at all about the individual's character, motives or anything else.

Furthermore, any person who says or writes anything which calls into question the honour of any individual,
must be prepared to face that individual and repeat the allegations, rumours or suspicion directly to that
individual, and be prepared to fight that individual in a fair fight or a duel if the individual whose honour is
brought into question desires to so defend his honour. This is the warrior thing to do, this is the honourable
thing to do. Thus, anyone who raises doubts about a person, who spreads any rumour about them, or who is
suspicious about the motives or the character of a person, must repeat any and all allegations to that
person, face-to-face, and give that person a chance to defend themselves. Anything less is un-warrior like
and cowardly.

To destroy this infection of Suspicion, this blight upon our Cause which is harming us and our fight for
freedom, we have to do the honourable thing. The honourable thing to do is to maintain a dignified silence."
[7]

This was at the time when former Combat 18 member Wilf Browning and his supporters were spreading rumours about
Charlie Sargent, the founder of Combat 18. I had given Charlie and his brother Steve a personal pledge of loyalty, on
my honour, so I naturally supported him. The crises led to Charlie's close friend Martin Cross killing a Browning
supporter with both Martin and Charlie arrested for murder.

Browning then co-operated with the Police and testified against them at their criminal trial, leading me to publicly
challenge him to a duel with deadly weapons. He dishonourably ignored the challenge and made jokes about it.
Browning would later be lauded in book written by an anti-fascist and described as "a fearless fighter", as "revered in
Europe" and as "loyal" when the exact opposite was true.

Such widely-read writings of mine, expounded in various essays and then in later editions of my The National-Socialist
newsletter published in support of the National-Socialist Movement, quite naturally annoyed certain anti-fascists far
more than I had annoyed them in the past by my 1970s street activism and by having my Vindex - Destiny of the West
published in America in 1984 which was widely distributed around the world. [8]

An annoyance which seemed to me to have become a hatred because of my profuse 1990s writings concerning honour
which rationally countered the Establishment version of 'nazism' which they had spent decades assiduously
propagating; and because of my support of Combat 18 and of Charlie against Browning.

One anti-fascist in particular appeared to have a particular hatred of me resulting in a concerted campaign to publicly
discredit me; someone now part of the Establishment having been awarded an MBE in 2016 by the then British
government and appointed by them to be part of their Commission for Countering Extremism. Perhaps unsurprisingly
this person was the author of the book that praised Browning.

This concerted smear campaign began with a special edition of the anti-fascist Searchlight magazine in 1998 headlined
The Most Evil Nazi In Britain and included what one essayist termed The Infamous Post Box Interview. [9] As I wrote in
A Reply To Allegations,

<quote> "For over twenty years, journalists, those opposed to National-Socialism, and dishonourable, egotistical weak-
willed rumour-mongers among the so-called racial-nationalist 'Movement', have been circulating rumours and making
allegations about my personal involvement with Occultism and Satanism. This is despite the fact that I have denied
and do deny ever having been a 'Satanist', and despite the fact that I have stated many times that I regard Satanism
as decadent and morally wrong. These rumours and allegations were started by, and are still circulated by, my
enemies for one simple reason - to try and discredit me personally. For, if I can be discredited in such a way, people will
not take seriously what I have written about National-Socialism and what I have done for this most noble of Causes.
When I write or say that National-Socialism and the Occult are incompatible, I mean it. When I condemn Satanism as
un-Aryan, as morally wrong, I mean it." [10] [11] </quote>

§ I am going into Combat 18 because this involvement during that period created the mythology of you.
Inadvertently this mythologic view of you has been more influential than anything you have written. I see
Combat 18 and the mess of the late 90s after the nail bombings as been the focal point that turned you from
the person into the Idea. Does it feel that this Idea of you of which you have no control over is something you
are trying to regain control?

The concepts of me as 'myth' and Idea are new to me and not something I agree with or am comfortable with. In 2021,
when asked if I agreed with what one academic wrote, which was that I was "driven by a search for meaning and
purpose, as well as an intellectual desire to find and create the all-encompassing and perfect political philosophy", I
said I did not agree because

"during my National-Socialist decades I was driven by a somewhat fanatical desire to not only propagate
what I then believed National-Socialism to be - an honourable, noble, way of life, a practical presencing of the
 numinous - but also to recruit people to that cause in the hope of creating a National-Socialist society in the
land of my ancestors [...] During my years as a Muslim I nurtured a similar desire to propagate what I then
believed the Muslim way of life to be: which again was an honourable, noble, way of life, and a practical
presencing of the numinous.

There was thus no search for 'meaning and purpose' because I foolishly believed I had already found a
meaning and a purpose: for thirty years in National-Socialism and then for ten years in Islam. In 1998 I
turned away from National- Socialism to Islam because during a decade (1988-1998) of foreign travels the
culture, the Muslims, of the Muslim lands - and especially of Egypt - slowly, almost imperceptibly, impressed
me as did, and perhaps more so, travels alone in the Sahara Desert where I wordlessly felt intimations of
Being, of The Acausal, of The-Unity, of The One-The Only (τὸ ἓν), of The Monas (μονάς) which 'acausal' Being
Muslims called Allah and Christians called God." [12]

As I noted in Myngath, [13] "In a literal way, Islam taught me humility, something I aspired to during my time as a
monk but which my then prideful nature rebelled against."

In essence, therefore, as I sought to explain in Myngath, I was an opinionated, selfish often fanatical person who from
youth and for some thirty years arrogantly believed he could and should "make a difference" and who caused suffering
to others but who, mostly against his will, slowly, very slowly seemed to learn from his experiential life in the process
acquiring a certain humility and perhaps an understanding of himself leading to the formulation of a
weltanschauungen based on empathy and honour.

Therefore trying to control such a myth and Idea is, for me, irrelevant.

§ The connections to the occult, Julius Evola and hermeticism seeming to be the most influential, along with
old Greek and European pagan systems of honour. To put it simply [they] seem to be your main connection to
the occult. I do not believe you are Anton Long, Some claim you infiltrated occult groups like the O9A to
move them towards National Socialism. But the question I ask is has the Idea of you I keep mentioning that
was seemingly created in the late 90s taken over again?

My interest in ancient Greek literature began as a schoolboy in the Far East but waned when I arrived in Blighty in the
1960s and became involved in practical politics, specifically Colin Jordan's British Movement. It returned when I was a
monk and began learning what was then termed New Testament Greek. Discussions with two other monks led me to
begin a scholarly study of the Greek text of the Corpus Hermeticum which I was familiar with from my reading of Jung
and the few alchemical texts I could obtain while in prison in 1975 and which intuitively inspired the creation of my
Star Game during that holiday at Her Majesty's Pleasure.

As for honour, what initially inspired me in the late 1960s were the actions of Otto Ernst Remer, a recipient of the
Knights Cross with Oak Leaves, in July 1944. Some years later Remer presented me with a photograph of him taken
after the battle of Kharkov in 1943.

In 2012, then over three score years old, I finally had leisure enough to begin translating and writing commentaries on
the tractates of the Corpus Hermeticum that most interested me.

What others may infer and have inferred from all this, they have and do. As for influence, I can only quote what TS Eliot
wrote in Little Gidding:

If you came this way,

Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.

°°°

Part Three

§ Today I had an Ethiopian Muslim Uber driver, we talked about Islam; by the time I arrived at my
appointment for the first time since disconnecting myself from Islam in 2020 during my divorce I was at a
point where I wanted to run to the nearest Masjid, Prey and revert once more back into being a Muslim. I
bring this up because this made me think of you and this was not only unexpected but an extreme longing to
cast all aside and dedicate it all to Islam once more. Has this happened to you since you left Islam?

Yes, several times, in the year I publicly made known my own disconnection from the Muslim way of life. I missed daily
Namaz, especially Jummah Namaz and the feeling of belonging and humility it had engendered in me. Suffice to say
the Muslim way of life had a profound and positive, and in hindsight morally necessary, effect on me. But
remembrance of the life and especially the deaths of Frances and Sue caused me to continue to seek answers to
questions regarding exegesis of certain sacred texts, of the dialectic particular interpretations seemed to imply
because they were founded on denotata, and the nature of empathy and honour which I felt had a personal horizon not
a supra-personal one codified by a religion or by a particular interpretation of some text.

§ During your time as a Muslim, many perceive that period as being some kind of O9A Insight role. I
happened to believe you where sincere, given your writings, your obvious extensive knowledge of Islam and
your assimilation into Muslim communities. Only a seasoned Foreign Intelligence Officer could do what you
have done if you where not sincere. I understand this as I have travelled and lived in Islamic countries and
communities overseas and they would have known very quickly if I was not sincere. In fact, it could have
gotten me killed in some places. I want the above to be known as an example of your sincerity and how
dangerous your travels less known could be. Reflecting about that period do you regret it?

What others believe or allege about my peregrinations as a Muslim, my rejection of all extremisms, and indeed about
involvement with a particular Occult movement, is their belief or their allegation howsoever such a belief or allegation
came-into-being and persists within them, and no longer concerns me.

My concern is, and has been for over a decade, seeking to not cause suffering through deeds or words, and finding
something expiative for the suffering I caused because of my past extremism and selfishness.

All I have found in respect of expiation in the past decade or so is to develop and make known the weltanschauung
derived from what believe I have learned since the death of Frances in 2006; to publicly express my regret regarding
my extremist past, and my fallible understanding of such matters as extremism.

What others believe or allege about such a making-known, such a weltanschauung, such an understanding, is what
they believe or allege. Thus, in reference to sincerity, as Seneca wrote: Quia pars honesti non potest esse nisi
honestum, nec summum bonum habebit sinceritatem suam, si aliquid in se viderit dissimile meliori. [14] Which returns
me to what I wrote in 2012: "quite simply it is matter of honour. Of personal knowing," and that since 1975

"only four people, on hearing or learning about such rumours and allegations, have had the decency to ask
me, in person, 'for my side of the story'. The first was Colin Jordan, the second was John Tyndall, the third was
Steve Sargent, and the fourth was a Muslim whom I came to greatly admire and to whom I gave a personal
pledge of loyalty." [15]

All those individuals took the trouble to get to know me personally over a period of time, and it was that personal
pledge of loyalty to a Muslim living overseas that made my interior struggle about formulating my own
weltanschauung longer and more difficult than it might otherwise have been.

§ Leaving Islam can be dangerous, you and I are both apostates from Islam, of which in most schools of Sunni
Islamic jurisprudence carries the death penalty. As I asked regarding Combat 18 and NS movements possibly
taking reprisals, of which you illuminated me on the situation. I must ask has there been any reprisals
attempted towards you by Islamic groups or individuals because of been seen as an apostate?

Not so far. As Sophocles wrote: ὡς πεπρωμένης οὐκ ἔστι θνητοῖς συμφορᾶς ἀπαλλαγή. [16]

§ Regarding extremism, for most people who become radical from various movements, most do not move
from theory into practice of views western society perceives as extreme. You however took that extra step,
and despite not agreeing on certain things, I do respect that you went all in putting forth your convictions
publicly given the risks involved. Knowing the stakes, you where not typical regarding the movements you
where involved with. Regarding acting on beliefs (not necessarily extremism but any counter establishment
ideology) do you believe that one must act on there convictions as you did, or is the personal suffering it
causes to themselves and others as you reflected on too great to risk?

A relevant question. During my extremist decades I did believe it was necessary to act in practical ways based on one's
often fanatical commitment to some ideology or some supra-personal religious or social Cause and which commitment
meant that the goal of some ideology or Cause was considered more important than the suffering caused.

But my experiences, and especially outdoor labour on a farm, gradually over years, brought the realization that this
was immoral and that no ideology, no -ism, no Cause, no religion, nothing supra-personal - whatever the rhetoric or
written or interior excuse - justified causing suffering and thus perpetuating the cycle of suffering, millennia after
millennia. That what was moral was, could be, known through empathy and honour with their local personal horizon;
and could not be, should not be, codified in any supra-personal way such as in a principle such as Jus Ad Bellum. I
attempted to explain all this in my 2013 text Questions of Good, Evil, Honour, and God [17] and later works.

§ Regarding Reichsfolk and the changing of National Socialist Ideology during the mid-1990s to the 2000s.
You and a few other figures quite heretically moved from Neo-Nazi orthodoxy. Especially changing the
perspective regarding Islam. Utilizing a historical precedent of Islamic collusion with the Nazi party before
and during the war and the Islamic SS units, the Bosnian SS been an example you used. How did people
within the NS movement react to this, as despite the historical precedent Islam has been a focal point of
attack by Neo-Nazi organisations for decades, Combat 18 in Australia focused almost entirely on fighting
Islam. What was the reaction?

The reaction of some people, especially in Finland, Sweden, and Germany, was positive while there was a negative
reaction in places such as America and Britain. As for Combat 18 in Britain it had effectively, in terms of street action,
ceased to exist mostly due to Charlie's conviction for murder and Browning's betrayal by being a witness for the
Prosecution at his trial; but partly because so many seemed to dishonourably believe the disinformation, the lies, about
Charlie spread by Browning and his supporters, and by anti-fascists such as in a World in Action television programme
whose anti-fascist Associate Producer would later be fêted by the British government who awarded him an MBE. The
programme, as some newspaper articles did, spread the disinformation that Charlie was a informer for the Police and
for MI5.

Apropos Islam, I went on, during my campaign to bring National-Socialists and Muslims together, to write tracts such as
the multi-part The National-Socialist Guide to Understanding Islam. Which again were well-received in some quarters
but disliked in others.

§ Continuing on from Reichsfolk, you and figures like Varg Vikernes during that period of the late 1990s,
changed perspectives on Slavic races, Russians and Serbians being a good example as they are hated by
orthodox Nazìs given Hitlers writings on them in Mein Kampf. What changed your mind on ethnic Slavs? For
bringing Slavs into NS movements has changed things dramatically. Being from a Serb background and
having friends who joined Combat 18 and other NS movements, I was a cause of much argument between
Neo-Nazis, this was the late 2000s. Most where very orthodox but some like yourself had or developed
different perspectives. Unlike with Islam there is less of a historical precedent regarding Russians and Serbs,
but I know there was some especially during the end of the war. But I wont go into that; my point is, I know
things have changed regarding Slavs in some movements, so how or what caused your perspective to
change?

Apropos Slavs, the reason was my understanding of National-Socialism as applicable to all ethnicities, not just to
Northern Europeans; a matter I wrote about many times including in Esoteric Hitlerism: Idealism, the Third Reich and
the Essence of National-Socialism.

Apropos Islam, there were two reasons. The first was my travels in Egypt and the Muslim world between 1988 and
1998 which began my admiration for the Muslim way of life. The second was being introduced to National Socialists
such as Leon Degrelle and Otto Ernst Remer. Remer, for example, lived for a while after the war in Egypt and became
adviser to Gamal Abdel Nasser, was acquainted with Yasser Arafat and a comrade of Omar Amin, a Waffen-SS officer
living in Egypt who had converted to Islam.

§ Regarding the occult, I am satisfied with your answer, the old Greek translations, your background
regarding Christianity, interest in Hermeticism it all makes sense. To me it seems people involved in the O9A
have incorporated your work into their material. I do not believe you are the person the media and
misdirected Niners think you are. As you said Satanism is Decadent, and you are right, I talk about it a lot
especially regarding the French late 1800s decedent literary movement with books like Là-Bas by Joris-Karl
Huysmans. It does not fit in with your NS or Islamic work. Am I correct on this perspective?

Indeed. But that will not of course change the opinion of those who for whatever reason and from whatever motive
believe otherwise. I have expressed my views regarding the Occult and alleged involvement with a certain Occult
movement many times since the 1990s, including in the tract Occultism and National-Socialism first published in New
Zealand in 1997, in my A Reply To Allegations which I quoted from in a previous answer, in a 1998 recorded interview
with the aforementioned antifascist fêted by the British government, and in my 2012 A Matter Of Honour. [15]

But, as I have mentioned before in other writings, they and their perception are of this era, and in the perspective of
millennia the perception of a person by others often changes or more often perhaps the person will be forgotten,
whatever efforts those of this or any era may go to in the belief that their particular perception will last 'forever'.

§ To quote you in a difficult question: "The concepts of me as 'myth' and Idea are new to me and not
something I agree with or am comfortable with." I find your reaction to the concept I put forth of you
becoming a myth very interesting. But because of the media attention people on many sides have this
absolutely bizarre perspective of you. Many thinking you're a secret O9A founder who is also Anton Long and
doing Insight roles since the 60s. I have met people who believe this and admire you because of this belief.
Then the mainstream media perspective is essentially the same, like it or not, but I hope to bring this back to
reality with this interview. Is there any statement you may like to make?

Being now past my three score years and ten I have lost interest in how or why I am now perceived as I am by some
people or may be perceived after my death. But, such is the nature of some older folk, to reminisce about one's past,
and to pontificate in general, often is or becomes a minor pleasure.

Yet, as it often is, the final verdict on a person will be centuries from the era in which they lived, if they are
remembered at all for whatever reason and, if they are remembered, in the intervening period the verdict may change
from century to century.

But this is all dependant on whether and for how long we as a species survive and whether or not in a hundred or a
thousand years there are stable communities where knowledge and reason and scholarship are valued and taught to a
new generation.

David Myatt
March 2023 CE

°°°
Footnotes

URL's valid as of March 2023

[1] CIA archive: https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound. The original text is at http://tinyurl.com/22zb4389

The original is at: https://web.archive.org/web/20080611081331/http://www.davidmyatt.info/significance_taliban.html

[2] Mark Weitzmann, Anti-Semitism and Terrorism, in Dienel, Hans-Liudger (ed), Terrorism and the Internet: Threats,
Target Groups, Deradicalisation Strategies. NATO Science for Peace and Security Series, vol. 67. IOS Press, 2010.
pp.16-17.

[3] https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2022/10/david-myatt-rejecting-extremism.pdf

[4] https://www.davidmyatt.info/dm-three-interviews.pdf

[5] Selected National Socialist Writings Of David Myatt, https://archive.org/download/myatt-ns-writings/myatt-ns-

writings.pdf

[6] The article is available in National-Socialism and Islam: The Case for Co-Operation,
https://cosmicreich.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/ns-islam.pdf

[7] The article is quoted in Rachael Stirling's 2021 monograph The Peregrinations Of David Myatt: National Socialist
Ideologist, https://archive.org/download/myatt-peregrinations-ideologist/dm-ns-ideologue-second-edition.pdf

[8] Vindex - Destiny of the West, a facsimile at https://archive.org/download/myatt-vindex-destiny-west/myatt-vindex-

destiny-west.pdf

[9] The item is from Part Two of Modern Tale Of An Antifascist Propagandist,
https://concerningmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2022/09/a-modern-tale.pdf

[10] The essay A Reply to Allegations is included in Selected National Socialist Writings Of David Myatt,
https://archive.org/download/myatt-ns-writings/myatt-ns-writings.pdf

[11] See also the 1997 essay Occultism and National-Socialism, https://archive.org/download/myatt-occult-ns_202303
/myatt-occult-ns.pdf

[12] Three Interviews, https://www.davidmyatt.info/dm-three-interviews.pdf

[13] https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/david-myatt-myngath.pdf

[14] De Vita Beata, 7.15.1

[15] https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/a-matter-of-honour.pdf

[16] Antigone, 1337-8, "mortals cannot be delivered from the misfortunes of their fate."

[17] Included in Religion, Empathy, and Pathei-Mathos, https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/religion-and-

empathy.pdf

°°°°°°°

Addendum

David Myatt: Analysing National Socialism

Two essays - both written in January 2012 and titled Some Philosophical and Moral Problems of National-Socialism and
Hitler, National-Socialism, and Politics: A Personal Reappraisal - are relevant for those interested in Myatt's rejection of
extremism and in his current views regarding Hitler and nazism.

As he noted in 2014, his

"writings, post-2011, were and are really dialogues: interiorly with myself and externally with a few friends or
the occasional person who has contacted me and expressed an interest." [2]

In his Letter To My Undiscovered Self, published in 2012, he wrote:

"That it took me four decades, and the tragic death of two loved ones, to discover [such] simple truths surely
 reveals something about the person I was and about the extremisms I championed and fought for. Now, I -
with Sappho - not only say that, I love delicate softness:

For me, love has brought the brightness

And the beauty of the Sun....

but also that a personal, mutual, love between two human beings is the most beautiful, the most sacred, the
most important, the most human, thing in the world; and that the peace that most of us hope for, desire in
our hearts, only requires us to be, to become, loving, kind, fair, empathic, compassionate, human beings."
[3]

Myatt ends by writing:

"There is thus, based on applying the moral criteria of The Numinous Way, a complete rejection by me of
National-Socialism – of whatever kind – and an understanding of Hitler as a flawed individual who caused
great suffering and whose actions and policies where dishonourable and immoral"

The source of the two texts is https://web.archive.org/web/20221102053427/https://www.davidmyatt.info/dwm-

problems-ns.pdf

°°°

[1] Dated, because many of the texts referenced in these old essays are to Myatt's pre-2012 'numinous way' and which
texts are now only available in archived versions of his website and weblog, such as at
(i) https://web.archive.org/web/20130602171008/http://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/ and
(ii) https://web.archive.org/web/20130704131205/http://www.davidmyatt.info/

[2] Some Questions For DWM 2014, https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/questions-for-dwm-2014/

[3] The letter was included in his Understanding and Rejecting Extremism: A Very Strange Peregrination,
https://davidmyatt.files.wordpress.com/2022/10/david-myatt-rejecting-extremism.pdf

The translation of part of a fragment of a poem by Sappho is by Myatt, with the Greek text (P. Oxyrhynchus. XV (1922)
number 1787, fr. 1 and 2) being ἔγω δὲ φίλημμ ̓ ἀβροσύναν [...] τοῦτο καί μοι τὸ λάμπρον ἔρως ἀελίω καὶ τὸ κάλον
λέλογχε

°°°

Some Philosophical and Moral Problems of National-Socialism

Introduction

This essay is a brief analysis of the National-Socialist weltanschauung, as manifested in National-Socialist Germany,
and according to the philosophical and ethical criteria of my Numinous Way, and which criteria derive from the
principles of empathy, compassion, and personal honour.

Empathy, as understood by my philosophy of The Numen [1], establishes a particular ontology and epistemology;
Being, the source of beings, as both causal and acausal, and of an acausal knowing distinct from the causal knowing of
conventional philosophy and empirical science [2]. The ethical criteria are manifest in both compassion and honour [3],
so that:

"the morality of The Numinous Way is therefore defined by a personal honour, a personal compassion, and
the personal virtue of justice. For justice is not some abstract concept, but rather a personal virtue, as
εὐταξία is a personal virtue. For justice is the personal virtue of fairness; the quality of balance." War and
Violence in the Philosophy of The Numinous Way

The National-Socialism evident in NS Germany was a way of life centred around concepts such as duty, kampf, nation,
and race. Thus, the individual was judged by, and expected to judge others by, the criteria of race, with particular
races assigned a certain value (high or low), as individuals were judged by how well they adhered to the duty they
were expected to do in respect of their nation (their land, their people) and the race they were said to belong to or
believed they belonged to. In addition, kampf between individuals, races, and nations was considered healthy and
necessary, with such struggle revealing the worth of individuals and thus those considered fit to lead and assume
positions of authority.

Collectivism, Nationalism, and Race

The National-Socialist way of life was – given such concepts as kampf, nation and race – a collective one, with one of
the highest virtues being the willingness of individuals, if necessary, to sacrifice their own happiness and welfare, and
even their lives, for the good of their people, their land, their race. The necessity of this virtue was explained, in part,
by the belief that the German volk had an historic mission, a particular destiny, so that – coupled with the ideas of race
and kampf - the individual was expected to define themselves, to understand themselves, as Germans and as having
particular duties and obligations; in effect, to replace their own self-identity with the collective identity of the volk.

In order to establish, maintain, and expand this collectivism, certain measures were regarded as necessary, as morally
correct, with such measures including military conscription, laws designed to criminalize certain activities, both
political and personal, and harsh punishment of those contravening such laws.

In addition, the führerprinzip was applied to most aspects of life, with individuals expected to accept and obey the
authority so established, since such authority was considered to manifest the will, the ethos, of the volk. Hence the
loyalty individuals gave, as an expression of their recognized duty as Germans, was personal; not to 'the State' nor
even to 'the nation', and certainly not to some government, but rather to individuals who were regarded as embodying
the will, the identity, of the volk. In practice, this meant Adolf Hitler and those appointed by him or by his
representatives, and it was this collectivism, this binding of the volk by the führerprinzip, that Heidegger tried to
philosophically express in his now controversial remarks regarding the Volksgemeinschaft and by quoting some words
attributed to Aeschylus [4].

There are thus six elements that, from the philosophical and ethical viewpoint of The Numinous Way, may be said to
define the National-Socialism of Adolf Hitler. These are:

(i) a collective identity and its acceptance;

(ii) authority and its acceptance manifest in specific individuals and expected obedience to such authority;
(iii) mandatory enforceable punishment of those contravening or not accepting such authority and the laws
made by such authority;
(iv) the use of particular abstractions (for example nation and race) as a criteria for judgement and for
evaluating individual worth;
(v) the use of particular abstractions as a criteria for identity; and
(vi) the use and acceptance of a particular abstraction – kampf – as an embodiment and expression of human
nature.

Contra The National-Socialism of Adolf Hitler

In purely practical terms, the acceptance and use of the principle of kampf together with the acceptance of Hitler as
embodying the collective will of the volk, inevitably led to the military defeat of NS Germany. For all mortals are fallible
and military defeat is always inevitable, given time and even if such a defeat has internal, not external, causes. For
tyrants and monarchs die, are overthrown, or are killed; Empires flourish for a while – a few centuries perhaps, at most
– and then invariably decline and fade away; oligarchies come and go with monotonous regularity, lasting a decade or
perhaps somewhat longer; rebellions and revolutions will break out, given sufficient time, and will often succeed given
even more time – decades, centuries – and even following repeated and brutal repression.

Thus, philosophically, the general error here by Hitler and his followers was the obvious one of ὕβρις. A lack of
understanding, an unknowing, of the natural balance – of δίκη - as well as a lack of empathy, manifest as this
unknowing, this lack, was in the arrogant belief of a personal and a volkish 'destiny' combined with a belief in kampf as
a natural and necessary expression of human nature. And ὕβρις φυτεύει τύραννον - that is, ὕβρις plants, is the seed of,
the τύραννον. Thus, symbolically, we might justifiably say that the Ἐρινύες took their revenge, for Hitler and his
followers had forgotten, scorned, or never known the wisdom, the truth, that their fallible mortal lives are subject to,
guided by, Μοῖραι τρίμορφοι μνήμονές τ᾽ Ἐρινύες [5].

Thus their fate was destined, a fate that Sophocles expressed so well in respect of Oedipus, tyrannus:

ὦ πάτρας Θήβης ἔνοικοι, λεύσσετ᾽, Οἰδίπους ὅδε,

ὃς τὰ κλείν᾽ αἰνίγματ᾽ ᾔδει καὶ κράτιστος ἦν ἀνήρ,
οὗ τίς οὐ ζήλῳ πολιτῶν ἦν τύχαις ἐπιβλέπων,
εἰς ὅσον κλύδωνα δεινῆς συμφορᾶς ἐλήλυθεν.
ὥστε θνητὸν ὄντα κείνην τὴν τελευταίαν ἰδεῖν
ἡμέραν ἐπισκοποῦντα μηδέν᾽ ὀλβίζειν, πρὶν ἂν
τέρμα τοῦ βίου περάσῃ μηδὲν ἀλγεινὸν παθών. [6]

In effect, therefore, and in general terms, the National-Socialism of Adolf Hitler was un-wise; based on a mis-
understanding of human nature, and he himself shown, despite his remarkable achievement of gaining power, as
lacking a reasoned, a well-balanced, judgement [σωφρονεῖν] – since such a balanced judgement would, as Aeschylus
explained in the Oresteia, reveal that πόλεμος [7] always accompanies ὕβρις and that only by acceptance of the
numinous authority of πάθει μάθος (the new law presented to mortals by immortal Zeus) could the tragic cycle of ἔρις
be ended.

A Numinous View of The National-Socialism of Adolf Hitler

Let us now consider the six points enumerated above, in respect of the philosophical and ethical viewpoint of The
Numinous Way. As mentioned in my essay A Brief Numinous View of Religion, Politics, and The State:

"The essence of the numinous view – of the ethical way posited by the Philosophy of The Numen – is
empathy and thus the acausal (the affective and effecting) connexion we, as individuals, are to all life,
sentient and otherwise, with empathy being the foundation of our conscious humanity.
 The practical criteria which empathy implies is essentially two-fold: the criteria of the cessation of suffering,
and the criteria of the individual, personal, judgement in the immediacy of the moment. For the Philosophy of
The Numen, these two criteria manifest the natural character of rational, conscious, empathic, human beings
and thus express the nature of our humanity and of human culture, and which nature is manifest in a
practical way in compassion and in personal honour.

Hence these two criteria are used, by The Numinous Way – by the Philosophy of The Numen – to judge our
actions, our personal behaviour, and also all the abstractions we manufacture or may manufacture and
which thus affect us, as individuals."

(i) A collective identity and its acceptance.

Empathy, as a natural if still under-used and under-developed human faculty, is only and ever individual and of the
immediacy of the living moment. [8] It is always personal, individual, and cannot cannot be abstracted out from an
individual living being – that is, it cannot have any causal ideation or be represented by or expressed by someone else.

There is the personal, individual, freedom that the knowing that empathy uniquely presents to the individual, and
therefore no need of, no sense of, belonging to other than one's immediate surroundings, and no sense of identity
beyond the personally known, for all human beings encountered are encountered and empathically known as they
uniquely are: as individuals with their own lives, feelings, hopes, and with their own potential and their own past.

Which in essence means The Numinous Way is the way of individuals, and an individual manner of living to be
accepted or rejected according to the individual. Thus such a collective identity – and a desire for and acceptance of
such an identity – is contrary to this very individual numinous way.

What matters for The Numinous Way is the individual; their empathy, their honour; their personal judgement. What
does not matter are supra-personal manufactured abstractions such as a 'nation'. Consequently, the empathic,
honourable, individual only has a duty to themselves, to their immediate kin, and to those personally given a pledge of
loyalty: not a duty or obligations to some manufactured collective identity however such identity be expressed.

(ii) Authority and its acceptance manifest in specific individuals and expected obedience to such authority.

As I wrote in Authority and Legitimacy in the Philosophy of The Numinous Way:

"For The Numinous Way, it is the exercise of the judgement of the individual – arising from the use of
empathy and the guidance that is personal honour – that is paramount, and which expresses our human
nature.

That is, it is honour, the understanding that empathy provides, and the judgement of the individual, that are
legitimate, moral, numinous, and thence the basis for authority. This means that authority resides in and
extends only to individuals – by virtue of their honour, their empathy, and manifest in their own personal
judgement, and therefore this always personal individual authority cannot be abstracted out from such
personal judgement of individuals. In practical terms, this is a new type of authority – that of the individual
whose concern is not power over others but over themselves, and which type of power is manifest in a living
by honour, and thence in their self-responsibility and in how they interact with others."

Thus, such non-individual authority, acceptance of and obedience to such authority, is contrary to The Numinous Way.

(iii) Mandatory enforceable punishment of those contravening or not accepting such authority and the laws made by
such authority.

Given that, for The Numinous Way, authority and justice are individual and manifest in individual judgement and
through personal honour, such mandatory punishment by some abstract authority is quite contrary to The Numinous
Way.

(iv) The use of particular abstractions (for example nation and race) as a criteria for judgement and for evaluating
individual worth.

According to both empathy and honour, such a judgement of others, such prejudice, on the basis of some abstraction
such as perceived race or 'nationality' is immoral [9]. The only moral, honourable, criteria is to judge individuals as
individuals, sans all abstractions, on the basis of a personal knowing of them extending over a duration of causal Time.
To judge en masse, without such a direct, personal, extended, personal knowing of each and every individual is
reprehensible.

In addition, it is immoral – unempathic, uncompasionate, dishonourable – to treat people on the basis of their assumed
or alleged race or nationality. Thus, the enforced herding of people into 'concentration camps' on the basis of alleged,
assumed, race or nationality is quite unjustifiable, inhuman.

(v) The use of particular abstractions as a criteria for identity.

Such abstractions included 'blood' and nationality, so that identity became a matter of individuals being classified – by
themselves, others, and by the State – according to certain chosen abstract criteria based on 'race' and heritage. Thus
there were distinct notions, distinct levels, of separateness.
Empathy, however, presents us with an acausal-knowing of life, human and otherwise, and this knowing is of ourselves
as but one fallible, biologically fragile, mortal, microcosmic nexion, and thus of how our self, our perceived and singular
separate self-identity, is appearance and not an expression of the true nature of our being [10], which nature is one of
connexions, between living emanations, not one of separations.

Such a revealing of our nature reveals that we should act with empathy and honour in the knowledge that our actions
affect others or can affect others, directly, indirectly, emotionally, and acausally. That their joy, their pain, their
suffering, their fate is ours by virtue of us as a connexion to them – as a connexion to all life; as one emanation of ψυχή
[11].

What abstractions do is that they conceal our true empathic, compassionate, honourable nature and, ultimately, sever
the connexion we are to ψυχή, to The Numen.

As mentioned in On The Nature of Abstractions:

"The error of abstractionism – of using existing abstractions and manufacturing other abstractions and using
these as the source of ethics, of judgement, and so ascribing a value to them – is the error of ὕβρις (hubris).
That is, the error of unbalance: of neglecting or being unaware of empathy, and of neglecting or being
unaware of or profaning the numinous. In the personal and social sense, ὕβρις is revealed in a lack of
compassion, a lack of balanced reasoning, and not only ascribing to one's self (or some other abstraction,
such as a nation-State) what is assumed to be the perfection of right and of good (or the best current
approximation of it) but also acting on that presumption to the detriment, the harm, of others.

This is unethical – as all abstractions are inherently unethical – because what is ethical is determined by
empathy, and thus cannot be abstracted out of that direct, immediate, and personal knowing which
presences empathy in us, as human beings."

(vi) The use and acceptance of a particular abstraction – kampf – as an embodiment and expression of human nature.

As mentioned previously, in the Contra The National-Socialism of Adolf Hitler section, kampf as principle, as
abstraction, is a manifestation of the error of ὕβρις and of a lack of empathy.

For empathy, and the cultivation of σωφρονεῖν, incline us toward – or should incline us, as individuals, toward – a
letting-be; to wu-wei; to a living in the immediacy-of-the-moment. To being compassionate and honourable human
beings, concerned only with our own affairs, that of our family, and that of our immediate locality where we dwell,
work, and have-our-being.

In addition:

"In The Numinous Way, a distinction is made between war and combat in that combat refers to gewin –
similar to the old Germanic werra, as distinct from the modern krieg. That is, combat refers to a more
personal armed quarrel between much smaller factions (and often between just two adversaries – as in
single combat, and trial by combat) when there is, among those fighting, some personal matter at stake or
some personal interest involved, with most if not all of those fighting doing so under the leadership of
someone they personally know and respect and with the quarrel usually occurring in the locality or localities
where the combatants live.

Thus, war is contrary to The Numinous Way – to the Cosmic Ethic – not only because of the impersonal
suffering it causes, but also because it is inseparably bound up with individuals having to relinquish their own
judgement, with them pursuing some lifeless un-numinous abstraction by violent means, and with the
development of supra-personal abstract and thus un-numinous notions of 'justice' and law.

Hence, there is, for The Numinous Way, no such thing as a 'just war' – for war is inherently unjust and un-
numinous. What is just and lawful are honourable individuals and their actions, and such combat as such
individuals may honourably and personally undertake, and such violence as they may honourably and of
necessity employ in pursuit of being fair and ensuring fairness." War and Violence in the Philosophy of The
Numinous Way

Conclusion

It should thus be quite clear why The Numinous Way is contrary to and incompatible with the National-Socialism of
Adolf Hitler that was manifest in National-Socialist Germany.

January 2012
Revised JD2455956.107

Notes

[1] Refer, for example, to Introduction to The Philosophy of The Numen and also The Natural Balance of Honour –
Honour, Empathy, and Compassion in the Philosophy of The Numinous Way, from which this is a quote:

"As used and defined by The Numinous Way, empathy – ἐμπάθεια – is a natural human faculty: that is, a
noble intuition about another human being or another living being. When empathy is developed and used, as
 envisaged by The Numinous Way, it is a specific and extended type of συμπάθεια. That is, it is a type of and a
means to knowing and understanding another human being and/or other living beings – and thus differs in
nature from compassion."

[2] See: (i) An Introduction To The Ontology of Being; (ii) Some Notes Concerning Causality, Ethics, and Acausal
Knowing; (iii) Acausality, Phainómenon, and The Appearance of Causality.

[3] qv. The Natural Balance of Honour.

[4] In his 1933 speech at the University of Freiburg, where he quoted the following verse (v.514) from Prometheus
Bound [my translation] –

τέχνη δ᾽ ἀνάγκης ἀσθενεστέρα μακρῷ.

How so very feeble Craft is before Compulsion!

[5]

τίς οὖν ἀνάγκης ἐστὶν οἰακοστρόφος.

Μοῖραι τρίμορφοι μνήμονές τ᾽ Ἐρινύες

Who then compels to steer us?

Trimorphed Moirai with their ever-heedful Furies!

Aeschylus (attributed), Prometheus Bound, 515-6 [My translation]

[6]

You natives of Thebes: Observe – here is Oedipus, He who understood that famous enigma and was a strong
man: What clansman did not behold that fortune without envy? But what a tide of problems have come over
him! Therefore, look toward that ending which is for us mortals, To observe that particular day – calling no
one lucky until, Without the pain of injury, they are conveyed beyond life's ending.

Oedipus Tyrannus, vv. 1524-1530 [My translation]

[7] In respect of πόλεμος see my The Abstraction of Change as Opposites and Dialectic where I suggest that as used by
Heraclitus it implies neither kampf nor conflict, but rather – as a quote from Diogenes Laërtius suggests – what lies
behind or beyond Phainómenon; that is, non-temporal, non-causal, Being. πόλεμος is thus that which is or becomes the
genesis of beings from Being, and also that which manifests as δίκη and accompanies ἔρις because it is the nature of
Πόλεμος that beings, born because of and by ἔρις, can be returned to Being (become bound together – be whole –
again) by enantiodromia.

[8] Refer, for example, to Introduction to The Philosophy of The Numen

[9] See Empathy and The Immoral Abstraction of Race and also On The Nature of Abstractions.

[10] Refer for example to Acausality, Phainómenon, and The Appearance of Causality and also An Introduction To The
Ontology of Being.

[11] Correctly understood – and as evident by the usage of Homer, Aeschylus, Aristotle, et al – ψυχή implies Life qua
being.

°°°

Hitler, National-Socialism, and Politics

A Personal Reappraisal

Introduction – A Moral Perspective

Almost exactly a year ago, I perhaps somewhat presumptuously, temerariously, penned a rather long essay entitled
The Uncertitude of Knowing in reply to questions asked of me in relation to National-Socialism, Hitler, and my
philosophy of The Numinous Way; and which essay itself was an attempt to elucidate another essay, the year before
that, concerning Reichsfolk and a Muslim Khilafah. As I wrote at the beginning of my reply in The Uncertitude of
Knowing:

"There are interesting, important and rather complex philosophical and ethical issues here, that require
detailed, serious, and above all, rational, consideration. To explain, in a satisfactory manner, these issues and
offer satisfactory answers would perhaps require a philosophical treatise of length equal to a book, and I
have to admit that I currently possess no desire to write such a book, partly because I am aware that I may
not have all or even many of the answers required, and that such answers as I do have, or some of them,
might be erroneous and that therefore may need to be amended. Therefore, all I can do here is try in a rather
unsatisfactory way to summarize such answers, such views, of mine."
In The Uncertitude, the title itself reflecting my concern and approach, I continued to emphasize that my replies were
tentative and I – as a result of πάθει μάθος, of acknowledging my ὕβρις of decades – was open to correction and to
further learning.

Over the past year I have continued to study, research, and reflect upon these 'complex philosophical and ethical
issues' and have had cause, as I anticipated, to amend my conclusions, especially those in respect of National-
Socialism, Hitler, and Reichsfolk, some of which new conclusions I have briefly mentioned in my essay, published this
month, Some Philosophical and Moral Problems of National-Socialism, and which new conclusions led me to withdraw
The Uncertitude of Knowing.

This further study and research, perhaps wyrdfully, included getting to know people who shared their personal and
familial experiences of National-Socialist Germany with me, with these experiences being of those who were the
subject of the Nürnberger Gesetze and who thus traumatically endured the consequences of those laws and the
prejudice and hatred they codified. These direct experiences of the personal and moral effects of National-Socialism
were those of individuals that I, through a personal knowing of them, considered to be honourable and which personal
experiences thus served to place into perspective, into a moral – a numinous – perspective, the accounts given to me,
decades earlier, of some German National-Socialists I had met who fought for and gave their loyalty to Adolf Hitler and
which accounts had been formative of what became my decades-long dedication to the cause of National-Socialism, a
dedication broken only by my personal experiences of Islam and by the πάθει μάθος that was the genesis of my
philosophy of The Numinous Way.

As I mentioned in The Uncertitude of Knowing:

"All I know – all I say and write – derives from my own diverse personal experiences and my reflexion upon
such experiences; from my experience of diverse ways of life, diverse religions, and by my interaction with
individuals…"

Suffice therefore to say that my new encounter and interaction with particular people, my reflexion on those
experiences, and my further study and research, has led me to a new personal learning, and to a better understanding
of both the ethics of The Numinous Way and of the personal, the moral, implications of those ethics.

However, it is to be expected that some people will not like – nor others understand – where this new learning and my
thinking have led me and may be leading me. But as TS Eliot beautifully expressed it in his poem Little Gidding:

And what you thought you came for

Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment.

Ethical Consequences

Empathy – as outlined in various essays including Introduction to The Philosophy of The Numen and The Natural
Balance of Honour – is the basis for the ethics of The Numinous Way, with compassion and a personal honour being
how we can, personally as individuals, be ethical in accord with the knowing, the understanding, the insight, that
empathy reveals. This empathic revealing is of our affective and effecting connexion to other life, including human
beings.

The immediacy of empathy in the living moment means a living-in, a dwelling-in, the moment, inclining us toward to
wu-wei and, "to being compassionate and honourable human beings, concerned only with our own affairs, that of our
family, and that of our immediate locality where we dwell, work, and have-our-being." Some Philosophical and Moral
Problems of National-Socialism

There therefore cannot be, as mentioned in A Brief Numinous View of Religion, Politics, and The State, any desire for
involvement with politics, since

"the goals, objectives and aims of politics are, by their very nature, based on human-manufactured divisions
and categories deriving from a causal separation of beings: that is, which involve denoting individuals on the
basis of some principle of inclusion/exclusion, and which principle of inclusion/exclusion (of separation of
human beings) is immoral because un-numinous."

What is thus important, moral, numinous, are individuals who – feeling, knowing, suffering and its causes – live and
who act with personal compassion and personal honour, with the boundary, the horizon, of such acts being, by the
nature of empathy, of the nexion they are, and only and ever of the personal, immediate, local kind. In practical terms,
there are and cannot be any supra-personal causes, agendas, aims, goals, for such things take us toward abstractions
and beyond the bounds of empathy and of how The Numen is or becomes presenced in and through the personal
experiencing of, an interaction with, other living beings: human, of Nature, of the Cosmos; and a personal experiencing
which is direct, unfettered, undistorted, by any abstraction, by any prejudice, by any division – conscious or
unconscious – into 'us' and 'the separate others'.

A consequence of this is that we can only – without causing more suffering or contributing to suffering – alleviate
suffering, try to ameliorate what is wrong, by means of personal, direct, compassionate, honourable, acts when we
personally encounter suffering, dishonour. No cause, no movement, whether deemed political, social, or religious –
nothing supra-personal involving us surrendering our individual judgement of empathy, our individual authority, and
our personal honour - can alleviate suffering or ameliorate what is wrong, dishonourable, for such supra-personal
things are among the causes of suffering or contribute to or will contribute to suffering, given our past and current
human nature.

Hence the only moral change, the only revolution, that is possible – numinous, good – is that of ourselves; within and
personal; and this is a reformation of ourselves and then our living of a moral, of an empathic, compassionate,
honourable, life.

This precludes the possibility of such a moral individual supporting some cause, some group, some movement, some
person, in the belief that such a cause, group, movement, or 'leader', can 'make a difference' or can or might in some
way move us toward some future where there is less suffering.

Thus it is morally wrong – from the perspective of The Numinous Way – to suggest, as for example I previously did in
The Uncertitude of Knowing, that a group such as Reichsfolk or a way such as Ahlus Sunnah wal-Jammah might be
alternatives "capable of guiding honourable individuals to do what is honourable", and thus have "the ability to
alleviate at least some of the suffering which blights this world." And wrong not only because such groups, such ways,
are based on immoral abstractions – on principles of inclusion/exclusion – but also because their very nature, their very
being, as groups and such ways are incompatible with The Numen, and so cannot and do not in any way presence the
numinous or express the numinous since such numinosity only lives, dwells, is manifest – in the personal sense – by
individuals leading or inclining toward leading an empathic, compassionate, honourable, life.

In brief, it is personal virtues such as εὐταξία – and their cultivation by individuals – which are important, required,
moral, not some group, some organization, some 'leader', or some political aims and goals.

Adolf Hitler and National-Socialism

For a long time, I regarded Adolf Hitler as a good man, an honourable man, and National-Socialism – especially my
'revised version' of National-Socialism manifest in Reichsfolk – as either an intimation of the numinous or as an
expression of what is noble and honourable.

Now, in respect of Hitler, I ask two questions: (1) 'what is good' and my answer, manifest in The Numinous Way, is that
what is good is what is compassionate; what alleviates suffering; what does not cause or contribute to suffering; what
manifests love, empathy; and (2) 'what is honourable' and my answer is what is dignified, what manifests self-control,
fairness; a balanced judgement.

How then does Hitler fare according to these criteria? Do his actions – manifest for example in the Nürnberger Gesetze
and their consequences, in his use of krieg in pursuit of some supra-personal aim, and in the use of the abstractions of
race and nation – reveal a man of compassion, of balanced judgement, of fairness? Someone who feels and
understands the error that is ὕβρις and is therefore circumspect, in touch with and respectful of the numinous? Who
knows the limits of appropriate human behaviour? No.

For example, there is nothing honourable in the Nürnberger Gesetze and their consequences; in the personal suffering,
the deaths, they caused, in the prejudice and the hatred they engendered and codified. Nothing good in the use of
krieg in pursuit of some supra-personal aim; in the suffering and the deaths caused. Nothing good or honourable in the
demand for obedience and in the manipulation of people's emotions by rhetoric and propaganda; nothing good or
honourable in the punishment of those who were inclined, as is morally right and justified, not to surrender their
individual judgement and who thus refused to be obedient in such supra-personal matters, especially in relation to
certain 'political' abstractions, such as 'race', nation, and the führerprinzip.

As someone once wrote: "Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende
Menschen."

In respect of National-Socialism – new or old – I now ask similar questions to the ones asked in respect of Hitler. That is,
can The Numen, the good, what is honourable, empathic, compassionate – what is moral – be manifest in, be
presenced by, such a weltanschauung as National-Socialism? No.

No, for two simple reasons.

(i) Because such a weltanschauung has its very being in immoral abstractions, be they termed 'race', nation, volk,
ethnicity, folk, or whatever; and is defined by the principle of inclusion/exclusion, by the separation and prejudgement
of human beings by abstract criteria.
(ii) Because such a weltanschauung by its very nature is supra-personal, organized, authoritative, dogmatic, and
numinosity only lives, dwells, is manifest – in the personal sense – by individuals leading or inclining toward leading an
empathic, compassionate, honourable, life where there is no need of any authority, any judgement, any criteria, other
than their own, deriving from their empathy and their unique πάθει μάθος.

There is thus, based on applying the moral criteria of The Numinous Way, a complete rejection by me of National-
Socialism – of whatever kind – and an understanding of Hitler as a flawed individual who caused great suffering and
whose actions and policies where dishonourable and immoral.
Conclusion

The Numinous Way is, and can only ever be, an individual way; a non-political, non-religious, choice of individuals
desirous of developing and using empathy and hopeful of leading honourable lives that do not cause or contribute to
the suffering of living beings. Lives where one of the greatest virtues – a manifestation of our humanity – is considered
to be a loyal and personal love between two human beings, regardless of the perceived or assumed ethnicity,
nationality, social status, or 'sexual orientation', of the individuals concerned. As Sappho wrote, over two and half
thousand years ago:

μνάσασθαί τινά φαιμι [καὶ ἕτερον] ἀμμέων… στᾶθι [κἄντα] φίλος καὶ τὰν ἐπ' ὄσσοισ' ὀμπέτασον χάριν [1]

As for me, my journey of learning, of self-discovery, of making mistakes, of trying to acknowledge and correct my
errors, of interior change via πάθει μάθος, does not yet seem to be ended.

January 30th 2012 ce

[1] Sappho, Fragments 147/138 [Lobel and Page].

My translation is:

Believe me, in the future someone

Will remember us …
Because you love me
Stand with me face to face
And unveil the softness in your eyes …

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 Developing The Numinous Way Of Pathei-Mathos

Impersonal Abstractions, The Modern World, And The Axioms Of Empathy And Pathei-Mathos

ΞΞΞ

Précis

It is my contention that my personal 'numinous way of pathei-mathos', [1] or at least the foundations of that Way,
which are personal empathy and pathei-mathos, could possibly be the basis for other individuals to develope their own
numinous weltanschauung free from the influence of the manufactured impersonal causal abstractions that shaped the
ancient world, some of which still influence the modern world, and the more recent impersonal causal abstractions
which since the Second World War are prevalent and now authoritative in the modern world because supported by
many if not most governments and Institutions in the Western world, and often now used by governments as the basis
for criminal laws.

Defining Causal Abstractions

As described in the Numinous Way of Pathei-Mathos, an abstraction is

"a manufactured generalization, a hypothesis, a posited thing, an assumption or assumptions about, an

extrapolation of or from some-thing, or some assumed or extrapolated ideal 'form' of some-thing.
Sometimes, abstractions are generalization based on some sample(s), or on some median (average) value or
sets of values, observed, sampled, or assumed.

Abstractions can be of some-thing past, in the present, or described as a goal or an ideal which it is assumed
could be attained or achieved in the future.

All abstractions involve a causal perception, based as they are on the presumption of a linear cause-and-
effect (and/or a dialectic) and on a posited or an assumed category or classification which differs in some
way from some other assumed or posited categories/classifications, past, present or future. When applied to
or used to describe/classify/distinguish/motivate living beings, abstractions involve a causal separation-of-
otherness; and when worth/value/identity (and exclusion/inclusion) is or are assigned to such a causal
separation-of-otherness then there is or there arises hubris.

Abstractions are often assumed to provide some 'knowledge' or some 'understanding' of some-thing
assigned to or described by a particular abstraction. For example, in respect of the abstraction of 'race'
applied to human beings, and which categorization of human beings describes a median set of values said or
assumed to exist 'now' or in some recent historical past." [1]

In philosophical terms, a causal abstraction is an ideation, an idea (ἰδέᾳ/εἶδος), which is explained and/or defined by
words and terms (denotata) and which invariably is used to form or describe a particular category of 'things'. [2] Thus
a particular living tree is assigned to the category Oak, or a sub-category thereof, such as a Holm Oak, and which
category is believed to be a means to 'know' and 'understand' that particular living being. Hence, that particular living
tree is not considered to be an individual, separate, living entity with its own 'being' but is instead treated as one of a
'particular kind' and thus judged and treated according to what, at a particular time, is considered to be appropriate for
the particular category it has been assigned to. This, in effect, is a stereotyping of a living, individual entity; and a
stereotyping almost completely ignored in modern societies abrogating as those societies do certain ancestral, and
world-wide, ancestral traditions where such a living entity was considered, even respected, as a living, individual
entity; as for example in the ancient tradition in certain Britannic lands of venerating a particular Oak or a particular
woodland.

In both ancient and modern times causal abstractions and the categories developed from them have been and are
used to categorize human beings, as for example in regard to the supra-personal abstraction, the entity, termed 'the
nation-State' where individual human beings and families are considered to be, or not to be, 'citizens' of that entity and
often treated accordingly, with citizens having certain privileges and freedoms often denied to non-citizens.

More recently, causal abstractions and the categories developed from them have been deployed to describe individual
human beings and their behaviour both personal and social. Thus, a human being categorized, and judged, by
whomsoever for whatever reason, as 'depressive' is treated as the society of the time requires such a category to be
treated, which is often by means of pharmaceutical medication and/or by a prescribed regime of therapy.

In another, perhaps more relevant example which I personally have some practical experience of, human beings are
often categorized, and judged, by the political beliefs they publicly adhere to, or may be alleged to adhere to, at a
particular time of their lives, especially if their political views do not align with, or contradict, the zeitgeist of the
society of their time. Thus, in my own case, the judgement is "once a nazi always a nazi" and that such nazis should
"never be forgiven" and treated according to whatever persecutional and dehumanizing treatment the judgemental
ones deem such "nazis" deserve.

For such dehumanizing, or more precisely such hubriatic, impersonal, judgment and consequential treatment, is
implicit in applying abstract, causal, abstractions to individual living beings, human and otherwise.

That this is not understood in the societies of our time, except by a few, is in my opinion somewhat indicative of how
prevalent hubris still is among us.

Hence, despite our thousands of years old culture of pathei-mathos [3] we do not seem to have learned from what
others tried to explain to us:

σὺ δ᾽ ἄκουε δίκης, μηδ᾽ ὕβριν ὄφελλε:

ὕβρις γάρ τε κακὴ δειλῷ βροτῷ: οὐδὲ μὲν ἐσθλὸς
ῥηιδίως φερέμεν δύναται, βαρύθει δέ θ᾽ ὑπ᾽ αὐτῆς
ἐγκύρσας ἄτῃσιν: ὁδὸς δ᾽ ἑτέρηφι παρελθεῖν
κρείσσων ἐς τὰ δίκαια: Δίκη δ᾽ ὑπὲρ Ὕβριος ἴσχει
ἐς τέλος ἐξελθοῦσα: παθὼν δέ τε νήπιος ἔγνω

You should listen to [the goddess] Fairness and not oblige Hubris
Since Hubris harms unfortunate mortals while even the more fortunate
Are not equal to carrying that heavy a burden, meeting as they do with Mischief.
The best path to take is the opposite one: that of honour
For, in the end, Fairness is above Hubris
Which is something the young come to learn from adversity. [4]

The Axioms Of Empathy And Pathei-Mathos

The axioms are:

(i) That human beings possess a still mostly latent perceptive faculty, the faculty of empathy - ἐμπάθεια - which when
used, or when developed and used, can provide us with a particular type of knowing, a particular type of knowledge,
and especially a certain wordless knowledge concerning or awareness of the φύσις (the physis, the nature or
character) of human beings and other living beings.

This type of knowing, this perception, is different from and supplementary to that acquired by means of the Aristotelian
essentials of conventional philosophy and experimental science [5], and thus enables us to better understand
Phainómenon, ourselves, and other living beings.

ii) That πάθει μάθος, a personal learning from adversity, from difficult, or harsh, or life threatening experiences,
provides us or can provide us, like empathy, with a particular wordless knowledge concerning, or an awareness of, the
φύσις (physis) of ourselves, of other human beings and of other living beings.

Thus, according to the numinous way of pathei-mathos it is personal empathy and pathei-mathos which enable us to
circumvent causal abstractions because what is

"beyond our personal empathic knowing of others, beyond our knowledge and our experience [our pathei-
mathos], beyond the limited (local) range of our empathy and that personal (local) knowledge of ourselves
which pathei-mathos reveals – is something we rationally, we humbly, accept we do not know and so cannot
judge or form a reasonable, a fair, a balanced, opinion about. For empathy, like pathei-mathos, lives within
us; manifesting, as both empathy and pathei-mathos do, the always limited nature, the horizon, of our own
knowledge and understanding." [6]

For a weltanschauung such as the numinous way of pathei-mathos betakes us or can betake us as individuals beyond
the acceptance of a supra-personal authority, and thus beyond the demand by some supra-personal authority that we
individuals accept or have to accepted such a supra-personal authority, and which authority, in the Western world was
described in the Christian writings of Augustine (b.354 CE, d.430 CE), as for example in his De Civitate Dei contra
Paganos where in Book XIX, chapter xiii, he wrote of the necessity of a hierarchy in which God is the supreme
authority, with peace between human beings and God requiring obedience to that authority; and with peace between
human beings, and civil peace, also of necessity requiring obedience to an order in which each person has their
allotted place, Ordo est parium dispariumque rerum sua cuique loca tribuens dispositio.

Modern nation-States have simply replaced God as the supreme authority with Prime Ministers, Presidents, and those
who are described as elected "representatives of the people", or in case of some nation-States with some individual or
individuals or some unelected representatives who or which have assumed authority by means such as a coup d'état
or similar means, but all of whom expect the people they rule to obey whatever decisions or laws or diktats they make.
Both types if necessary enforce their authority by means such as Courts of Law or through the use of civil or military
organizations such as the Police and the armed forces, all of who or all of which accept and indeed are based upon a
supra-personal chain-of-command with statuary laws made by some government (past and present) or imposed by
some assumed authority regarded as necessary for what they deem to be the 'correct' functioning of society.
Furthermore, in practical terms a weltanschauung such as the numinous way of pathei-mathos

"means trying to cultivate within ourselves the virtues mentioned by Cicero – self-restraint, dignity, fairness,
honesty – and implies we have no concern for or we seek to cultivate no concern for supra-personal
hierarchies and supra-personal authority – whether political, religious, or otherwise – and thus move away
from, try to distance ourselves from, the consequences of such supra-personal hierarchies and supra-
personal authority manifest as the consequences are and have been, throughout our [human] history, in war,
prejudice, intolerance, unfairness, extremism, and persecution in the name of some ideology, some religion,
or because someone has commanded us to persecute those that they and others have declared are 'our'
enemies, and which war and persecutions are often, especially in modern times, accompanied by
propaganda and lies." [7]

Developing The Numinous Way Of Pathei-Mathos

Since the numinous way of pathei-mathos is based on personal empathy and personal pathei-mathos which develope
an appreciation of the limitation, the infortunity, of words, and of the categories derived from them, and thus
engenders in an individual a knowing of the limited nature of their understanding and of their fallibility, the numinous
way of pathei-mathos is apolitical since politics is derived from and dependant on words, spoken and written, and on
supra-personal often ideological categories as well as on supra-personal organizations or movements with a particular
agenda or particular aims.

For an appreciation of the infortunity of words is a wordless-knowing, born of empathy and pathei-mathos, of the cycle
of suffering; of how we humans continue to repeat the errors of the past caused as such errors often are by some
suffering-causing causal abstractions championed by some supra-personal authority such as government or some
President or Prime Minister or Caesar or Emperor or King or some tyrant or some religious potentate or preacher or
political demagogue or political organization, urging us as individuals to go to war or partake in some invasion or
crusade or armed conflict, or some campaign, or revolution, or whatever.

Thus it seems logical to suggest that if other individuals develope their own numinous weltanschauung it would be a
personal and thus non-political one and, similar to the numinous way of pathei-mathos, involve a mystical living, a life-
style choice, involving the individual and/or their partner or family if they have one; where the appellation 'mystical'
suggests a personal intuitive insight about and a personal awareness of the nature of Reality, with Reality wordlessly
known through their empathy and pathei-mathos.

There is also in the numinous way of pathei-mathos an appreciation of the fact that the nature of - the causality
inherent in - denotata results in eris (ἔρις), and thus in a discord of opposites: for every denotatum has or developes
an opposite and thus can cleave physis, as Heraclitus enigmatically expressed:

τοῦ δὲ λόγου τοῦδ᾽ ἐόντος ἀεὶ ἀξύνετοι γίνονται ἄνθρωποι καὶ πρόσθεν ἢ ἀκοῦσαι καὶ ἀκούσαντες τὸ
πρῶτον· γινομένων γὰρ πάντων κατὰ τὸν λόγον τόνδε ἀπείροισιν ἐοίκασι, πειρώμενοι καὶ ἐπέων καὶ ἔργων
τοιούτων, ὁκοίων ἐγὼ διηγεῦμαι κατὰ φύσιν διαιρέων ἕκαστον καὶ φράζων ὅκως ἔχει· τοὺς δὲ ἄλλους
ἀνθρώπους λανθάνει ὁκόσα ἐγερθέντες ποιοῦσιν, ὅκωσπερ ὁκόσα εὕδοντες ἐπιλανθάνονται. [8]

Although this naming and expression [which I explain] exists, human beings tend to ignore it, both before
and after they have become aware of it. Yet even though, regarding such naming and expression, I have
revealed details of how Physis has been cleaved asunder, some human beings are inexperienced concerning
it, fumbling about with words and deeds, just as other human beings, be they interested or just forgetful, are
unaware of what they have done. [9]

εἰδέναι δὲ χρὴ τὸν πόλεμον ἐόντα ξυνόν, καὶ δίκην ἔριν, καὶ γινόμενα πάντα κατ ́ ἔριν καὶ χρεώμενα
<χρεών> [10]

One should be aware that Polemos pervades, with discord δίκη, and that beings are naturally born by
discord.

In addition,

"the meaning of the appellations inherent in causal abstraction can and does change over periods causal
time through common usage and through the changes of interpretation (exegesis) wrought through political
ideology, social change, and religious dogma and reforms. The interpretation of an appellation, a denotatum,
in another language can also vary or distort the original meaning, a classic example being Hellenistic Greek
words, occurring the Corpus Hermeticum, such as λόγος and νοῦς conventionally interpreted as 'word' and
'intellect/mind' neither of which interpretations are satisfactory.

What is important about all this is that empathy and pathei-mathos are directly personal and wordless
perceiverations and experiences and therefore are not dependant on denotata, on any ἰδέᾳ/εἶδος, and by the
nature of empathy and pathei-mathos cannot be extrapolated beyond such a personal experiencing." [11]

David Myatt
August 2024
 ΞΞΞ

[1] https://perceiverations.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/numinous-way-pathei-mathos-v7.pdf

[2] Philosophically, 'a thing' is an entity which exists independently of another 'thing', and which is a particular object
of human perception. It is also or can be distinguishable from the word or the idea which attempts to describe it; that
is, it is the actual 'being' behind or beyond such a causal apprehension or appellation.

[3] The culture of pathei-mathos is the accumulated pathei-mathos of individuals, world-wide, over thousands of years,
as may be (i) described in memoirs, aural stories, and historical accounts; as may have (ii) have inspired particular
works of literature or poetry or drama; as (iii) expressed via non-verbal mediums such as music and Art, and as (iv)
may be manifest in more recent times by 'art-forms such as certain films and documentaries.

This thus includes not only traditional accounts of, or accounts inspired by, personal pathei-mathos, old and modern –
such as With The Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by Eugene Sledge, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and the poetry of people as diverse as Sappho and Sylvia Plath; and also works or art-forms
inspired by such pathei-mathos, whether personal or otherwise, and whether factually presented or fictionalized.
Hence films such as Monsieur Lazhar and Etz Limon may poignantly express something about our φύσις as human
beings and thus form part of the culture of pathei-mathos.

[4] Hesiod,Ἔργα καὶ Ἡμέραι [Works and Days], vv 213-218.

Notes on my translation:

a. δίκη. The goddess of Fairness/Justice/Judgement, and – importantly – of Tradition (Ancestral Custom). In Ἔργα καὶ
Ἡμέραι, as in Θεογονία (Theogony), Hesiod is recounting and explaining part of that tradition, one important aspect of
which tradition is understanding the relation between the gods and mortals. Given both the antiquity of the text and
the context, 'Fairness' – as the name of the goddess – is, in my view, more appropriate than the now common
appellation 'Justice', considering the modern (oft times impersonal) connotations of the word 'justice'.

b. Mischief. The sense of ἄτῃσιν here is not of 'delusion' nor of 'calamities', per se, but rather of encountering that
which or those whom (such as the goddess of mischief, Ἄτη) can bring mischief or misfortune into the 'fortunate life' of
a 'fortunate mortal', and which encounters are, according to classical tradition, considered as having been instigated
by the gods. Hence, of course, why Sophocles [Antigone, 1337-8] wrote ὡς πεπρωμένης οὐκ ἔστι θνητοῖς συμφορᾶς
ἀπαλλαγή (mortals cannot be delivered from the misfortunes of their fate).

c. δίκαιος. Honour expresses the sense that is meant: of being fair; capable of doing the decent thing; of dutifully
observing ancestral customs. A reasonable alternative for 'honour' would thus be 'decency', both preferable to words
such as 'just' and 'justice' which are not only too impersonal but have too many inappropriate modern connotations.

d. νήπιος. Literal – 'young', 'uncultured' (i.e. un-schooled, un-educated in the ways of ancestral custom) – rather than
metaphorical ('foolish', ignorant).

[5] The essentials which Aristotle enumerated are:

i) Reality (existence) exists independently of us and our consciousness, and thus independent of our senses;
(ii) our limited understanding of this independent 'external world' depends for the most part upon our senses, our
faculties – that is, on what we can see, hear or touch; on what we can observe or come to know via our senses;
(iii) logical argument, or reason, is perhaps the most important means to knowledge and understanding of and about
this 'external world';
(iv) the cosmos (existence) is, of itself, a reasoned order subject to rational laws.

In addition such essentials now include Isaac Newton's first Rules of Reasoning which is that

"We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their
appearances. To this purpose the philosophers say that Nature does nothing in vain, and more is in vain
when less will serve; for Nature is pleased with simplicity, and aspects not the pomp of superfluous causes."

Hence why it is often considered that there are five Aristotelian Essentials. Experimental science seeks to explain the
natural world – the phenomenal world – by means of direct, personal observation of it, and by making deductions, and
formulating hypothesis, based on such direct observation.

[6] Personal Reflexions On Some Metaphysical Questions, 2015. https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads

/2015/03/dwm-some-metaphysical-questions-v5b.pdf

[7] Persecution And War, 2018. https://archive.org/download/persecution-and-war/Persecution_And_War.pdf

[8] Fragment 1, Diels-Krantz.

[9] A short commentary on my translation is available at https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/heraclitus-fragment-1/

[10] Fragment B80.

[11] Reflections On Conflict And Suffering, https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/conflict-

and-suffering-dwmyatt.pdf

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