You mention a certain intelligence asset and "that he has moved in Traditionalist circles surrounding the late Martin Lings." Martin Lings (Abu Bakr Siraj al-Din) was an initiate and leader in the Maryamiyyah, the Sufi order established by Frithjof Schuon (Isa Nur al-Din Ahmad, d. 1998).
Martin Lings was also reputedly an MI6 agent:
Due to his skills and vast connections, some ex-Maryamiyyah members even contend that Martin
Lings himself may have been a life-long operative of the British SIS/MI6.
source: N Wahid Azal "Shills, Spooks, and Sufis in the service of Empire: The Case of the
Maryamiyyah" 2016
Also criminally underreported is that Lings' initiatic brother in the Maryamiyyah , Marco Pallis, was MI6:
One of those shepherding him through the British government and establishment was the well-
known author and Himalayan ethnographer Marco Pallis, who also served his government as an
intelligence agent. For some years he had been in contact with Gyalo, advising him that the British
government could help Tibet and that he should seek aid from London exclusively. Accordingly he
arranged a meeting for Gyalo with the chief of MI-6, the external intelligence service whose agents
had been keeping an eye on affairs in Tibet for the past century.
source: Kraus, John Kenneth "Beyond Shangri-La America and
Tibet's Move into the Twenty-First Century" Durham &
Going to give this book a look, more than one person has mentioned that the appearance of Lings in this twisted story is worth exploring further. Thank you so much!
Thanks! A good place to start is Mark Sedgwick's "Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century" (Oxford University Press, 2004). Guenon, Evola, Schuon, and Dugin are the stalwarts, but Lings also gets some coverage. No mention of any links to British Intelligence, though. Wahid Azal's "Shills, Spooks, and Sufis in the service of Empire: The Case of the Maryamiyyah", originally published by CounterPunch (but that's another story!), mentions Lings' alleged MI6 status but doesn't state that his spiritual brother, Marco Pallis, was MI6. That I only found in the Krauss -- himself an ex-CIA operative -- book. There's also a link between
Dugin and the Maryamiyyah through Seyyed Hossein Nasr, another of Schuon's successors. But I get ahead of myself. Best wishes!
The less fun Reza online. He spent the whole Floyd Uprising shitting his pants. Somehow we both had the 'we live in a Nazi simulation' and I was trying to figure out if he was like 'and I think thats great'
Loved this article, knew of Jorjani as an alt right guy didn't know of his paranormal side until the youtube channel think anomalous named dropped him as a parapsychology did i realize how big was in the paranormal world.
Which Think Anomalous video is that if you don't mind my asking? Luckily I think most of the time the paranormal crowd is unaware of what kind of ideology he's slipping into his work, but I'm sure some of them know.
I'm not sure anymore like i went to their website to look at the transcripts but couldn't find anything, but it was off i thought bc they let a guest about needing a more inclusive ufology. so maybe they dont know.
I really enjoyed reading this. Thanks for writing it.
If it's of interest, my dissertation on Jorjani is about to become publicly accessible. It's called "Confronting Fascism in Contemporary Esotericism: Jason Reza Jorjani's Spectral Philosophy." Here's the abstract:
"This dissertation seeks to establish the foundation for a sustainable anti-fascism through a critical examination of constructivism. Defined by the philosopher Alain Badiou as an orientation of thought which reduces truth to linguistic constructs, this dissertation argues that constructivism reinforces identitarian logics that bolster fascism. After tracing constructivism’s evolution through Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger, this study turns to scrutinize the work of the contemporary philosopher, esotericist, and co-founder of the Alt-Right: Jason Reza Jorjani.
Jorjani seeks to transcend constructivism and its concomitant identitarian logic through his concept of “the spectral”— a form of negative universality aimed at delineating a generic conception of the human in excess of identitarian logics. In his attempt to formulate a universalism decoupled from closure, Jorjani embraces a form of metaphysical voluntarism. This commitment not only undergirds Jorjani’s embrace of the esoteric elements of Nazism but also fuels his fascistic, techno-accelerationist ideology that he refers to as Prometheism. By dissecting Jorjani’s failed attempt to overcome constructivism, this dissertation clarifies the deep structure of fascism and illuminates a pathway toward a genuinely inclusive and open universalism."
Nathan, thank you for the kind words. I would love to read your dissertation if it's available! Sounds like the more philosophically-oriented critique that this kind of belief system warrants.
I'm happy to send a copy over once it is searchable on ProQuest. That should be in the next few weeks.
Yeah, I wanted to pursue a more philosophical critique of his work. I think Jorjani is interesting precisely because he situates his political framework so explicitly as the consequence of a metaphysical program. For what it's worth, I also see his work on the paranormal as a form of "empirical" inquiry through which he bolsters his metaphysical program. Although, as you point out, the paranormal is not quite empirical because Jorjani sees such phenomena as a manifestation of the collapse of the subjective and objective domains. Thus paranormal phenomena mark a fundamental break with our modern scientific worldview, and for Jorjani, it's only a matter of time before science as we know it implodes. Anyway, I think Jorjani's work - precisely because his political conclusions are inextricable from his metaphysics - invites a deliberation about the relation of these two domains, which I think this is really important. Even if we disagree with Jorjani's metaphysical and political conclusions (I do), it requires that any alternative account of political life formulate itself in terms of its own metaphysical grounding.
There's also the question of identitarianism in Jorjani. He's slippery here and perhaps intentionally devious. On the one hand, I see his metaphysical program as an attempt to propose a form of universalism that relativizes all categories of identity. The irony is that he tries to overcome identitarian politics precisely by appealing to an essentialist notion of the identity of "Indo-Europeans," which he seems to view as a form of identity that deconstructs itself. Jorjani uses Deleuze to this effect:
"Deleuze speaks of “European man whose privilege it is to constantly ‘Europeanize,’ as the Greeks ‘Greekized,’ that is to say to go beyond the limits of other cultures that are preserved as psychosocial types” — which implies that Hellenization is occurring through ideas or archetypes that are not merely psychological types of one particular society— namely, those of Prometheus and Atlas" (Prometheus and Atlas, 149).
At the end of the day, I do think Jorjani is an identitiarian. But his identitarianism seems to be at odds with other far-right identitarians, including white nationalists like Richard Spencer and Greg Johnson, and the Russian nationalist Alexander Dugin. This, I think, complicates claims about his racism (and to be clear, I do think he is a racist). It often appears that he affirms racial or national rootedness as an intermediate stage in a more encompassing undertaking, namely Prometheism. And as you observed, it's basically a techno-accelerationism-cum-fascism.
Very interested after reading that abstract. I think he's using a very theosophically driven kind of racism, one which may not on its face smack of white nationalism but certainly isn't always averse to it under certain circumstances. And this same theosophy influence I think is the beating heart of Prometheism, the sort of ascension it's looking for updated to the times. I have been reading up more on Yockey and was struck by the similarities in their rhetorically strategies--I think Yockey's Imperium is likely a key influence on him. An excerpt that Coogan noted in Dreamer of the Day:
--If someone says that to admit the fact that Life is fulfilled in Death is pessimism, he shows something about himself. He shows his own cowardly fear of death, his entire lack of heroism, of respect for the mysteries of Being and Becoming, his shallow materialism ... This is their valuation of life: The longest life is the best. To this mentality, a short and heroic life is sad, not inspiring. Heroism generally is thus merely foolish since indefinitely prolonged life is the aim of "Progress." ...
The great ethical imperative of this age is individual truth-to-self, both for the Civilization and its leading persons. To this imperative, an unfavorable situation could never bring about an adaptation of one's self to the demands of the outsider, merely in order to live in slavish peace. One asserts himself, determined on personal victory, against whatever odds exist. The promise of success is with the man who is determined to die proudly if it is no longer possible to live proudly.--
I read that and immediately think of Prometheism or his closing words in Closer Encounters. He believes in that there are a few special individuals who change the course of history (perhaps maybe even appear on currency) and the rest of humanity is a waste of space or detrimental to the cause of ascending to civilizational epochs. At the same time, I feel like when he's threading the needle, his can be an intentionally opaque philosophy, hence why it's been seen as attractive to those interested in metaphysics or the paranormal even when those same people would reject his politically charged viewpoints.
Not all of that was relevant to your points but it got me thinking! Give me a shout whenever your dissertation is available and thank you for doing such work.
This is very interesting. I’m not familiar with Yockey, so thanks for bringing him to my attention. I concur that Prometheism gives a great deal of emphasis to individual heroism, which yields a kind of “great man” view of history. Prometheists are those who can dominate cosmic chaos and wrestle from it a form of order. Jorjani talks about this as the highest form of aesthetic creation, and it seems, to me, his gloss on Nietzsche’s “transvaluation” of values.
Jorjani predicates Prometheism on the idea that nothing is natural, that there are no givens. Consequently, for the Prometheist, there is nothing that cannot be technologically augmented or alchemically transformed. Thus why Jorjani supports trans rights: he views the technological transformation of biology as an expression of will-to-power. (There’s more to say here, as surely this isn’t the only way to understand trans discourse, or trans desire.)
Jorjani is so enraptured by the idea of domination—he explicitly talks of history as a “struggle” between forms of life and intimates that politics is simply war by other means—that he fails to see that he NATURALIZES domination. And this highlights what is to my mind a fundamental problem of Prometheism. In saying that everything can be alchemically transformed, he treats the imperative to dominate as a given. He never once, as far as I can tell, considers what it might mean to *dominate domination.* Put differently, he never asks whether one might will to stop willing.
Consequently, the Prometheist individual has a compulsive relationship to its power. Insofar as anyone is in a compulsive relationship to anything, one lacks freedom or autonomy. It is in this sense that I think Prometheism produces individuals who are profoundly unfree, because they cannot resist their impulse to dominate. In my view, this is a manifestation of Jorjani’s embrace of irrationalism. It leaves the Prometheist looking a bit like a oppugnant toddler with a loaded gun.
Hey it's no difficulty to respond to thoughtful comments on a piece that was important to me! I think your reading of his philosophy is on point, I am admittedly a little less philosophically-inclined (I've never felt compelled to read much Heidegger for instance) so that angle is a little difficult for me to critique. But it's clear that you have a solid understanding of his philosophical bent/the traditions he's pulling from and I think your work unpacking Prometheism and its inherent problems/contradictions will be important for future readers. I really appreciate your thoughts!
You mention a certain intelligence asset and "that he has moved in Traditionalist circles surrounding the late Martin Lings." Martin Lings (Abu Bakr Siraj al-Din) was an initiate and leader in the Maryamiyyah, the Sufi order established by Frithjof Schuon (Isa Nur al-Din Ahmad, d. 1998).
Martin Lings was also reputedly an MI6 agent:
Due to his skills and vast connections, some ex-Maryamiyyah members even contend that Martin
Lings himself may have been a life-long operative of the British SIS/MI6.
source: N Wahid Azal "Shills, Spooks, and Sufis in the service of Empire: The Case of the
Maryamiyyah" 2016
Also criminally underreported is that Lings' initiatic brother in the Maryamiyyah , Marco Pallis, was MI6:
One of those shepherding him through the British government and establishment was the well-
known author and Himalayan ethnographer Marco Pallis, who also served his government as an
intelligence agent. For some years he had been in contact with Gyalo, advising him that the British
government could help Tibet and that he should seek aid from London exclusively. Accordingly he
arranged a meeting for Gyalo with the chief of MI-6, the external intelligence service whose agents
had been keeping an eye on affairs in Tibet for the past century.
source: Kraus, John Kenneth "Beyond Shangri-La America and
Tibet's Move into the Twenty-First Century" Durham &
London: Duke University Press, 2012.
Just an interesting note to an excellent article!
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Going to give this book a look, more than one person has mentioned that the appearance of Lings in this twisted story is worth exploring further. Thank you so much!
Thanks! A good place to start is Mark Sedgwick's "Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century" (Oxford University Press, 2004). Guenon, Evola, Schuon, and Dugin are the stalwarts, but Lings also gets some coverage. No mention of any links to British Intelligence, though. Wahid Azal's "Shills, Spooks, and Sufis in the service of Empire: The Case of the Maryamiyyah", originally published by CounterPunch (but that's another story!), mentions Lings' alleged MI6 status but doesn't state that his spiritual brother, Marco Pallis, was MI6. That I only found in the Krauss -- himself an ex-CIA operative -- book. There's also a link between
Dugin and the Maryamiyyah through Seyyed Hossein Nasr, another of Schuon's successors. But I get ahead of myself. Best wishes!
Another source confirms Marco Pallis (d. 1989) was MI6:
I reached my own conclusions about the British scholar Marco Pallis,
who had travelled inside Tibet as an explorer, pilgrim, and scholar and
was so deeply immersed in the study of Tibet and its Buddhist religion
that he dressed in the traditional chuba. Sometime in the early 1960's,
Pallis took me to meet the director of MI6 in London to solicit the help
of British intelligence. The director soon disbused me of any notion of
getting anything from the British and told me not to believe those
fellows who thought that England might help. "We have already with-
drawn from everywhere east of the Suez," he told me. He suggested I
talk to the Americans instead.
source: The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong: The Untold Story of My
Struggle for Tibet. Gyalo Thondup & Anne F Thurston (Public
Affairs, 2015) (Incidentally, Gyalo Thondup is the Dalai Lama's
brother. Speaking of the Dalai Lama, see Stuart Lachs "Not the
Tibetan Way: The Dalai Lama's Realpolitik Concerning Abusive
Teachers" (April 18, 2021)
The less fun Reza online. He spent the whole Floyd Uprising shitting his pants. Somehow we both had the 'we live in a Nazi simulation' and I was trying to figure out if he was like 'and I think thats great'
Loved this article, knew of Jorjani as an alt right guy didn't know of his paranormal side until the youtube channel think anomalous named dropped him as a parapsychology did i realize how big was in the paranormal world.
Which Think Anomalous video is that if you don't mind my asking? Luckily I think most of the time the paranormal crowd is unaware of what kind of ideology he's slipping into his work, but I'm sure some of them know.
I'm not sure anymore like i went to their website to look at the transcripts but couldn't find anything, but it was off i thought bc they let a guest about needing a more inclusive ufology. so maybe they dont know.
I really enjoyed reading this. Thanks for writing it.
If it's of interest, my dissertation on Jorjani is about to become publicly accessible. It's called "Confronting Fascism in Contemporary Esotericism: Jason Reza Jorjani's Spectral Philosophy." Here's the abstract:
"This dissertation seeks to establish the foundation for a sustainable anti-fascism through a critical examination of constructivism. Defined by the philosopher Alain Badiou as an orientation of thought which reduces truth to linguistic constructs, this dissertation argues that constructivism reinforces identitarian logics that bolster fascism. After tracing constructivism’s evolution through Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger, this study turns to scrutinize the work of the contemporary philosopher, esotericist, and co-founder of the Alt-Right: Jason Reza Jorjani.
Jorjani seeks to transcend constructivism and its concomitant identitarian logic through his concept of “the spectral”— a form of negative universality aimed at delineating a generic conception of the human in excess of identitarian logics. In his attempt to formulate a universalism decoupled from closure, Jorjani embraces a form of metaphysical voluntarism. This commitment not only undergirds Jorjani’s embrace of the esoteric elements of Nazism but also fuels his fascistic, techno-accelerationist ideology that he refers to as Prometheism. By dissecting Jorjani’s failed attempt to overcome constructivism, this dissertation clarifies the deep structure of fascism and illuminates a pathway toward a genuinely inclusive and open universalism."
Thanks again. Keep up the good work.
Nathan, thank you for the kind words. I would love to read your dissertation if it's available! Sounds like the more philosophically-oriented critique that this kind of belief system warrants.
I'm happy to send a copy over once it is searchable on ProQuest. That should be in the next few weeks.
Yeah, I wanted to pursue a more philosophical critique of his work. I think Jorjani is interesting precisely because he situates his political framework so explicitly as the consequence of a metaphysical program. For what it's worth, I also see his work on the paranormal as a form of "empirical" inquiry through which he bolsters his metaphysical program. Although, as you point out, the paranormal is not quite empirical because Jorjani sees such phenomena as a manifestation of the collapse of the subjective and objective domains. Thus paranormal phenomena mark a fundamental break with our modern scientific worldview, and for Jorjani, it's only a matter of time before science as we know it implodes. Anyway, I think Jorjani's work - precisely because his political conclusions are inextricable from his metaphysics - invites a deliberation about the relation of these two domains, which I think this is really important. Even if we disagree with Jorjani's metaphysical and political conclusions (I do), it requires that any alternative account of political life formulate itself in terms of its own metaphysical grounding.
There's also the question of identitarianism in Jorjani. He's slippery here and perhaps intentionally devious. On the one hand, I see his metaphysical program as an attempt to propose a form of universalism that relativizes all categories of identity. The irony is that he tries to overcome identitarian politics precisely by appealing to an essentialist notion of the identity of "Indo-Europeans," which he seems to view as a form of identity that deconstructs itself. Jorjani uses Deleuze to this effect:
"Deleuze speaks of “European man whose privilege it is to constantly ‘Europeanize,’ as the Greeks ‘Greekized,’ that is to say to go beyond the limits of other cultures that are preserved as psychosocial types” — which implies that Hellenization is occurring through ideas or archetypes that are not merely psychological types of one particular society— namely, those of Prometheus and Atlas" (Prometheus and Atlas, 149).
At the end of the day, I do think Jorjani is an identitiarian. But his identitarianism seems to be at odds with other far-right identitarians, including white nationalists like Richard Spencer and Greg Johnson, and the Russian nationalist Alexander Dugin. This, I think, complicates claims about his racism (and to be clear, I do think he is a racist). It often appears that he affirms racial or national rootedness as an intermediate stage in a more encompassing undertaking, namely Prometheism. And as you observed, it's basically a techno-accelerationism-cum-fascism.
Very interested after reading that abstract. I think he's using a very theosophically driven kind of racism, one which may not on its face smack of white nationalism but certainly isn't always averse to it under certain circumstances. And this same theosophy influence I think is the beating heart of Prometheism, the sort of ascension it's looking for updated to the times. I have been reading up more on Yockey and was struck by the similarities in their rhetorically strategies--I think Yockey's Imperium is likely a key influence on him. An excerpt that Coogan noted in Dreamer of the Day:
--If someone says that to admit the fact that Life is fulfilled in Death is pessimism, he shows something about himself. He shows his own cowardly fear of death, his entire lack of heroism, of respect for the mysteries of Being and Becoming, his shallow materialism ... This is their valuation of life: The longest life is the best. To this mentality, a short and heroic life is sad, not inspiring. Heroism generally is thus merely foolish since indefinitely prolonged life is the aim of "Progress." ...
The great ethical imperative of this age is individual truth-to-self, both for the Civilization and its leading persons. To this imperative, an unfavorable situation could never bring about an adaptation of one's self to the demands of the outsider, merely in order to live in slavish peace. One asserts himself, determined on personal victory, against whatever odds exist. The promise of success is with the man who is determined to die proudly if it is no longer possible to live proudly.--
I read that and immediately think of Prometheism or his closing words in Closer Encounters. He believes in that there are a few special individuals who change the course of history (perhaps maybe even appear on currency) and the rest of humanity is a waste of space or detrimental to the cause of ascending to civilizational epochs. At the same time, I feel like when he's threading the needle, his can be an intentionally opaque philosophy, hence why it's been seen as attractive to those interested in metaphysics or the paranormal even when those same people would reject his politically charged viewpoints.
Not all of that was relevant to your points but it got me thinking! Give me a shout whenever your dissertation is available and thank you for doing such work.
This is very interesting. I’m not familiar with Yockey, so thanks for bringing him to my attention. I concur that Prometheism gives a great deal of emphasis to individual heroism, which yields a kind of “great man” view of history. Prometheists are those who can dominate cosmic chaos and wrestle from it a form of order. Jorjani talks about this as the highest form of aesthetic creation, and it seems, to me, his gloss on Nietzsche’s “transvaluation” of values.
Jorjani predicates Prometheism on the idea that nothing is natural, that there are no givens. Consequently, for the Prometheist, there is nothing that cannot be technologically augmented or alchemically transformed. Thus why Jorjani supports trans rights: he views the technological transformation of biology as an expression of will-to-power. (There’s more to say here, as surely this isn’t the only way to understand trans discourse, or trans desire.)
Jorjani is so enraptured by the idea of domination—he explicitly talks of history as a “struggle” between forms of life and intimates that politics is simply war by other means—that he fails to see that he NATURALIZES domination. And this highlights what is to my mind a fundamental problem of Prometheism. In saying that everything can be alchemically transformed, he treats the imperative to dominate as a given. He never once, as far as I can tell, considers what it might mean to *dominate domination.* Put differently, he never asks whether one might will to stop willing.
Consequently, the Prometheist individual has a compulsive relationship to its power. Insofar as anyone is in a compulsive relationship to anything, one lacks freedom or autonomy. It is in this sense that I think Prometheism produces individuals who are profoundly unfree, because they cannot resist their impulse to dominate. In my view, this is a manifestation of Jorjani’s embrace of irrationalism. It leaves the Prometheist looking a bit like a oppugnant toddler with a loaded gun.
Also, I just wanted to say, please don’t feel compelled to respond at length to my
comment. I know it takes time and energy. I’ve appreciated the interaction either way. I’ll shoot you a message when the dissertation is released.
Hey it's no difficulty to respond to thoughtful comments on a piece that was important to me! I think your reading of his philosophy is on point, I am admittedly a little less philosophically-inclined (I've never felt compelled to read much Heidegger for instance) so that angle is a little difficult for me to critique. But it's clear that you have a solid understanding of his philosophical bent/the traditions he's pulling from and I think your work unpacking Prometheism and its inherent problems/contradictions will be important for future readers. I really appreciate your thoughts!
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