It is often the case that the most mysterious things are those that are seemingly the most mundane. Let us take words as an example. We use words every day to communicate with other people, and yet few stop to consider the nature of words themselves. What is a word? What may immediately come to mind is the sound of a word or the pattern of letters that spells it on a page; however, these are only the outer body of the word. In its interiority, a word is a pure meaning, an entirely mental, spiritual, and transcendental phenomenon, completely irreducible to crude matter. In its function of essaying a message, a word is angelic.
Today, I want to communicate a vision of a future Australia in the word Asgard, drawing from the inspired words of our ancestors to see what we could yet become.
The greatest philosopher of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger, believed that the deepest connection between man and being could be found in primordial thinking. Because of this, he sought to trace the etymologies of words to uncover profound yet concealed meanings that had been covered by the everyday usage of a word by the average everyman who is always completely lost in inauthentic existence. Even these most lost souls, however, may still feel the true power of words in the fascination of myth. For many men of the right, they will have found this fascination, perhaps for the first time, in Tolkien’s story, The Lord of the Rings. To go further and deeper into the mystery his myth, we can turn to a seed of Tolkien’s thought which he found in the Old English poem Crist I:
éala éarendel engla beorhtast / ofer middangeard monnum sended
Hail Earendel, brightest of angels, over Middle-Earth to men sent
For the ancient Anglo-Saxons, Earendel was the morning star, and with the coming of Christianity this was interpreted within the matrix of Scripture. Etymologically, the name means “the dawn wanderer”, but in its usage it always had a theological meaning as the Anglo-Saxons, like most peoples, lived in the “enchanted world” of pre-modernity and associated the visible heavenly bodies with spiritual beings. In Revelation 22:16, though, it is Christ who takes the title of Morning Star:
“I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.” (KJV)
Thus, it seems to me that the line from the Crist I poem refers to the coming of Christ, the Old Testament Angel of the Lord, born into the world to save mankind and redeem creation. What is important in both this and other Old English poetry such as The Dream of the Rood or Beowulf, is that Anglo-Saxon culture is not Judaised or cut from its roots with the incorporation of the Christian message but is sanctified so as to be expressed in its fullest and most authentic sense. Christ is sent into Midgard so that it may become Asgard. Both the words Midgard and Asgard contain our modern word “yard” meaning place, while the “As” of Asgard refers to the gods. Thus, Christ’s mission is for men to become gods in a heavenly city.
As I have written about before, this is the mission of civilisational deification, or the full realisation of the Church as the City of God. What is important about this is that the spreading of the Church should not result in the destruction of the nations but in their redemption and transfiguration by the divine light of God, the light given to men by the Morning Star. There is no need for me to express myself in the words of the Hebrews or the Greeks for my own language is a rich treasury of meaning leading up to the Word who contains all meanings. Heidegger is completely right in suggesting that men dwell upon the Earth poetically within the relational matrix of the four crossing interconnections of sky – earth and gods – mortals.
Nonetheless, no society can remain completely cut off from God and Holy Tradition. What is lacking in an authentic initiatory form can still appear in confused intimations of true religion or some diluted forms of Christianity. Desire for the transcendent has always appeared. For instance, in the cases of the 2GB (Giordano Bruno) radio station, or in the religion of Alfred Deakin, it took the form of Theosophy. Deakin always felt that Australia’s Federation was something guided by divine purpose. As he wrote in the retrospect to his work The Federal Story:
Regarded as whole, it is safe to say that if ever anything ought to be styled providential it is the extraordinary combination of circumstances, persons and their most intricate interrelations of which the Commonwealth is about to become the crown. Any one of a thousand minor incidents might have deferred it for years or generations. To those who watched its inner workings, followed its fortunes as if their own, and lived a life of devotion to it day by day, its actual accomplishment must always appear to have been secured by a series of miracles.
Even putting aside these more unorthodox expressions of religion in Australia though, we must never forget that what makes this country Australia is the Australian people. We are a great union of Anglo-Celts represented on our flag by the crosses of our patron saints St Andrew, St George, and St Patrick. We may have been born in the profane age of the modern world, but we come from the same Anglo-Saxon and Celtic stock that created the golden age of art and religion that we see in the Insular or Hiberno-Saxon period of Christian art. Our whole task will be to navigate the complex relationship between the Orthodox Christian Platonism of Saint Dionysios the Areopagite and the radical metaphysical suggestions of Heidegger’s “interconnecting four” to establish a New Beginning flowing from both the heights and abyssal depths where God is hidden yet revealed.
It is because the Anglo-Celtic blood of our ancestors flows through our veins and our language is grown from many of the same roots that we Australians should look to the Insular period and the later periods of Beowulf and Crist I for a vision of our own civilisational deification and a hint of the directions we must travel in search of a new cultural synthesis.
We must carefully read the words of our ancestors in order to understand how it was that they dwelt upon the earth, and hear their call, especially that of the saints who act as angels.
Theirs is a call from the past that beckons us into a glorious future where men and gods once more may walk together in the temple of paradise before the face of God. A call to enter into an Australian Asgard.
Written by Elias Priestly, you can find all his previous articles on the Australian Natives Association website and find more of his content on 𝕏 @Aussie_EliasP.
This article originally appeared on The National Observer and is republished by The Noticer with permission.
