Hinduism is one of the most theologically complex systems humanity has produced. It is the root of Dharmic civilisation, the origin point of concepts, reincarnation foremost among them, that have radiated as far as East Asia, Southeast Asia, and arguably into the mystical strands of Abrahamic tradition. The sages, the philosophers, the vast literature: none of this coheres with the dismissal now fashionable in certain quarters, that Hinduism is simply a colonial administrative category, a British label slapped onto undifferentiated paganism.

This is the Pakistani foundational ideology speaking. It must deny Hindu civilisational continuity, because acknowledging it makes Temple destruction look like what it was: a pattern, not a series of unrelated incidents. It must deny that India had a civilisation, because if India had one, then the last pre-British colonisers of South Asia were Muslim; and that sits uncomfortably with postcolonial victimhood framing. The logic is circular and self-serving, but it is internally consistent. One cannot claim the mantle of the oppressed while being the penultimate oppressor.

The Dravidian

This does not suppress the Dravidian question. South India has a genuinely distinct cultural substrate; older in some respects, differently inflected, not simply a variant of the Gangetic norm. If there was an Aryan migration (and the genetic evidence increasingly suggests there was), it introduced power asymmetries: Brahmanisation, Sanskritisation, processes that unfolded over centuries as economic and cultural accretion rather than overnight conquest. The complexity is real. Acknowledging it does not undermine Hindu civilisational claims; it enriches them.

The Punjabi Muslim case is the sharpest illustration of the pathology under discussion. There is a tweet circulating, pointed and accurate, noting that Punjabi Pakistani Muslims so thoroughly disown the Punjabi label that they reach instead for Peshawari chappals and Kashmiri bangles, despite both being manufactured in Punjab. The denial of the Punjabi self in favour of a constructed Arabised or Persianised alternative identity is not cultural evolution. It is cultural self-erasure. Iranians have no such ambivalence: the average Persian owns the Achaemenids, the Sassanids, and Lord Zoroaster with a pride that is entirely unselfconscious. Pakistani Muslims have no equivalent relationship with their pre-Islamic past, because the Pakistani foundational ideology requires that past to be a void.

The Mughal Apartheid

The Mughal precedent is instructive. Even within the Muslim world of South Asia, there was a hierarchy: foreign Muslim over native Muslim, Turkic over local, an internal apartheid that the Mughal court institutionalised. Indian Muslims and Turkic Muslims are not the same civilisational product. Pakistan’s ideological founders, QeA-Jinnah & Allam Iqbal, both of proud Hindu convert stock; drew their intellectual energy from the UP Persianate tradition, not from Punjabi soil. The irony is that the state they created is demographically Punjabi but ideologically alien to Punjabi roots.

Sunni Shield

Both nations are now moving in divergent directions, and this may ultimately be clarifying. Pakistan is orienting toward the Sunni bloc and Iran; Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and now Islamabad joining a broader Persianate-Islamic geopolitical axis. India is becoming Asian in the fullest sense: economic growth paralleling China’s, a civilisational confidence returning after decades of apologetics. The trajectories are no longer mirror images. They are genuinely separate.

What remains to be said about Bombay Badshah, and about the right-wing Hindu tendency he represents, is this: when they lose their composure, they lose the argument. Their Muslim interlocutors, whatever one thinks of the substance of their positions, have internalised the grammar of liberal discourse. They know the rules of the room. The Hindu nationalist tendency, by contrast, has not yet learned that you cannot out-compete someone at a game they wrote. The slickness of Dhurandhar as a film, whatever its propaganda problems, is evidence that India can produce that polish. The comment threads show that individual hotheads can still undo it in a paragraph.

The post-BB vacuum is not a victory for nuance. It is an invitation for a different kind of distortion. This site exists to resist both.

In this talk, Shubham Arora introduces a long and often misunderstood intellectual tradition from South Asia devoted to thinking about pleasure. Beginning with the world-renowned Kāmasūtra and continuing into the modern period, this tradition did far more than describe sexual practices. It treated pleasure as a subject worthy of reflection, analysis, and debate. Like other fields of knowledge in premodern South Asia—such as law, medicine, or aesthetics—these works developed ways of classifying desire, discussing relationships, and reflecting on how pleasure fits into a well-lived life. The authors of these texts were asking questions about intimacy, emotion, social roles, and human fulfillment. Yet in modern times, these texts, especially the Kāmasūtra, have often been reduced to exotic curiosities. Shaped by colonial fantasies and later commercial reinventions, they have been marketed globally as manuals of sexual practices, while at the same time facing censorship and controversy within South Asia itself. By revisiting these works in their historical context, this talk offers an as-yet unexplored perspective: understanding erotics as a thoughtful and evolving tradition concerned with how principles, possibilities, and practices of pleasure changed.

This post was inspired by an earlier post of X.T.M where he mentioned that this question generates a lot of traffic for BP.

If we consider the literal definition of Paganism, the question becomes quite simple. Historically, the term “Paganism” was not used to describe religious beliefs prior to the 20th century. It first emerged in the context of Early Christianity, serving as a pejorative for the folk religions still practiced in the rural regions of the Roman Empire. By this definition, it’s clear that Hinduism does not fit the label of Pagan.

However, in contemporary usage, many Neo-pagans view Paganism as a neutral descriptive term, applicable to all cultures that are philosophically incompatible with the three Abrahamic faiths. The question whether Hinduism can be considered Pagan in this broader sense is not so simple since most Hindus assert belief in a singular God or multiple manifestations of one God (30 percent and 60 percent, according to PEW surveys).

To start answering this question, we need to pinpoint the philosophical foundation of Hinduism. Thankfully, this isn’t too complicated, as several Vedic verses touch on this theme (e.g. Brihadaranyaka 4.4.18 and 4.4.22), all leading to the same conclusion. These verses indicate that the essence of all spiritual paths in ancient India revolves around Adhyatma (the doctrine of enlightened self). The central concept of Adhyatma is Atman—an ancient, observer consciousness believed to be deeply embedded within each of us. The ultimate aim is to attain Moksha, i.e. to awaken and realize this concealed enlightened self. Now, if we were to bring the God of Abraham and Atman together on a talk show, asking them to explain their doctrines to the audience, it might go like this:

God : I am the all powerful God. 
Atman : I am your peaceful inner self.

God : I am the true creator of everything that you perceive.
Atman : I am the true experiencer of all that you perceive.

God : Submit to me unconditionally and obey all my commands.
Atman : Become one with me and be liberated.

God : If you are loyal to me I will take to heaven after you die.
Atman : Whenever you see yourself as me, the Earth looks like heaven.

God : Initiate force against others if they oppose your faith.
Atman : Mix with others if they oppose initiation of force.

Even in these highly simplified versions one can clearly see that the Atman doctrine is Pagan if we apply the more inclusive definition of Paganism. It can also be viewed as a branch of Pantheism. In Adhyatma the analogue of impersonal supreme God is Brahman, the entire universe seen from an enlightened perspective. Since experiencing Brahman is same as experiencing one’s Atman, many experience oriented spiritual traditions use them as interchangeable terms. So when Hindus talk about one God, the are referring to the impersonal God, not the God of Abraham.

For two and a half millennia, scholars have argued that Pāṇini’s grammar, the first true computational system for language, contains a flaw. His treatise gives a compact system for generating correct Sanskrit forms. But in cases where two rules seem to apply at the same time, most readers assumed the system breaks. Textbooks describe this as a “conflict problem.” Generations of commentators tried to patch it with exceptions, hierarchies, or interpretive workarounds.

The new book, Pāṇini’s Perfect Rule (December 2025), argues that the flaw was never there. The author, Rishi Rajpopat, claims the system already contains a rule for solving the conflict. According to him, Pāṇini didn’t leave a hole; modern readers simply looked in the wrong place. If his reading is right, the entire architecture of the grammar becomes visible as a single machine; elegant, compact, and self-consistent.

There are two parts to this story.

First, the technical claim: Rajpopat proposes a modern, cleaner interpretation of how rules are applied. He says the conflict is resolved by the grammar itself, not by external patches. If correct, this restores the system’s internal logic and closes a long-running debate.

Second, the personal angle: he solved the puzzle as a PhD student at Cambridge, coming from economics and mathematics, not from traditional Sanskrit scholarship. His approach, reading the text with fresh eyes, without inherited habits, led him to the solution.

The book also describes the reaction inside the field. Some accept the new reading as an overdue correction; others resist it on methodological grounds. There is, by all accounts, real disagreement.

The publicist asked whether BP would be interested in interviewing him. Given that we’ve covered Indian linguistics before, and given that this discovery sits at the intersection of language, logic, and early computational thought, it merits exploration. I’m scheduling a conversation with him. Questions for him welcome in the comments.

Originally Published: February 03, 2025

Part 1.2

The philosophy of Land and the idea of God

The nirīśvaravādi ādi-accelerationists no doubt consider our usage of the word ‘God’ and countless references to ancient myths and texts a serious breach of the philosophy and a perversion of its ideas. Though we are not interested in soothing their fears, the objections they will raise must nevertheless be wrestled with, as Landian Accelerationism portrays itself a purely materialist philosophical system, which, although not often talked about at present, is properly referred to as ‘libidinal materialism’. Thus, we must descend into the ‘sublime basement’ of Land’s philosophy before we may return once more to the heady poetics of Meltdown. His system of thought is most comprehensively laid out in the opus The Thirst for Annihilation (Land, 1992b), which makes it clear that his philosophy follows in the wake of the Nietzschean ‘death of God’, something he explicitly states when he assembles a theoretical machine linking Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, and, most importantly, Bataille to himself. As Mackay and Brassier put it in the ‘Editors’ Introduction’ of Fanged Noumena (Land, 2012): “Land allied himself to a line of renegade thinkers – Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bataille – who mocked and disparaged academicism and wielded philosophy as an implement for exacerbating enigma, disrupting orthodoxy, and transforming existence” (p. 2-3).

The deepest groundwork of Land’s philosophy is, however, that of Immanuel Kant and his transcendental idealism. According to the entry for this thinker on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

“Transcendental idealism is a theory about the relation between the mind and its objects. Three fundamental theses make up this theory: first, there is a distinction between appearances (things as they appear) and things as they are in themselves. Second, space and time are a priori, subjective conditions on the possibility of experience, and hence they pertain only to appearances, not to things in themselves. Third, we can have determinate cognition of only of things that can be experienced, hence only of appearances, not things in themselves.

A quick remark on the term “transcendental idealism” is in order. Kant typically uses the term “transcendental” when he wants to emphasize that something is a condition on the possibility of experience. So for instance, the chapter titled “Transcendental Analytic of Concepts” deals with the concepts without which cognition of an object would be impossible. Kant uses the term “idealism” to indicate that the objects of experience are mind-dependent (although the precise sense of this mind-dependence is controversial; see 2d2 below). Hence, transcendental idealism is the theory that it is a condition on the possibility of experience that the objects of experience be in some sense mind-dependent.” (Jankowiak)

In the ‘Editors’ Introduction’ of Fanged Noumena (Land, 2012), Mackay and Brassier state that:

“At the core of Land’s thought are the works of Immanuel Kant. Land is a brilliant reader of Kant and several of the texts gathered here evince his rare gift for isolating the essential components of Kant’s labyrinthine philosophical machinery. Moreover, Land uncovers the source of their conceptual power by demonstrating their productive inte­gration with, and purchase upon, the extra-philosophical.” (p. 6)

In addition to these ‘pūrvācāryas’ (‘previous teachers’) the philosophy of the libidinal materialist sampradāya (‘philosophical line of succession’) is also thrown back in time to ancient Greece, linking with the materialism of the pre-Socratic, Anaximander, thus constructing an eternal ‘doctrine’ of “the textual return of that which is most intolerable to mankind” (p. xxi).

Libidinal materialism is a philosophy with four core tenets:

1) The complete dehumanization or impersonalization of nature

2) Ruthless fatalism

3) The absence of moralizing

4) Contempt for common evaluations

Although these four principles provide us with a useful starting point to conduct our inquiry into the philosophy of libidinal materialism, and thus, the oeuvre of Land, they are still quite complex. We will have to come back to them at a later point, after we have unpacked the foundations of the classical accelerationist worldview, and discuss the implications for Hindus.

Therefore, let us first attempt to understand what libidinal materialism is not, so that we may more accurately identify what Land thought. Simply stated, despite its name, libidinal materialism is not merely another form of physicalist naturalism. What does this mean?

The Cathedral of physicalism

While naturalism is considered a fairly vague term in contemporary philosophy, it could be summarized as the idea that all of reality is contained within nature which precludes the existence of anything supernatural (Papineau, 2020). By the mid-Twentieth Century, it seems that the debate was settled and naturalism came to be accepted as the standard metaphysical position among a great many philosophers (Papineau, 2020). That being said, despite the proliferation of naturalist ideas, it appears to be less a singular system of thought than a spectrum, with some thinkers who have looser ideas of what nature means on one end, while those with stricter definitions, possibly influenced by closer contact with the natural sciences, on the other (Papineau, 2020). Naturalism can generally be considered to have two fundamental aspects: 1) the ontological, or the hypothesis that there are no supernatural substances in nature — which constitutes the sum total of reality; and 2) the methodological, or acceptance of the authority of the scientific method for the investigation of reality (Papineau, 2020). Physicalism, on the other hand, can be briefly defined as the idea that everything which exists is physical (Stolijar, 2021). Although there are more details one could delve into regarding either of these positions, the summaries provided should suffice for our purposes here.

Land (1992b) refers to the thermodynamic theories of Ludwig Boltzmann, which argue that the production of the observable material universe is explainable through probability. The cosmogony of libidinal materialism is fundamentally predicated on the twin concepts of entropy and negentropy. Entropy — disorder — is a term derived from the study of heat and thermic engines and refers to the base state of a system in conformity with the chance distribution of its elements. To Land, the concept of entropy completely upends older understandings of the clockwork universe by rendering all the mechanisms of natural processes subordinate to the motors that drive them, namely “thermic difference, energy flux, reservoir, and sump” (p. 37). Negentropy — negative entropy or negative disorder — is order, which Land (1992b) says is an “evanescent chance, a deviation from disorder, a disequilibrium” and equivalent to power, which is an “aberration” (p. 37). This is what he refers to as the “mega-motor” of Nietzsche, Freud, and Bataille’s ideas of desire.

For Land (1992b), the greatest problem with physicalism is the fact that it contents itself with replicating a secularized version of the same prejudices or assumptions maintained by its predecessor, the (Catholic) Church — what Moldbug would refer to as the Moldbuggian ‘Cathedral’ of its time. Land scoffs at the fact that the supposedly scientific and materialist orthodoxy of Western intellectuals still hews to the frame built by their Christian ancestors despite the death of God, as well as their reduction of matter into a purely inert and passive element:

“The basic problem with physicalistic thinking is easy to formulate; it remains implicitly theological. Regression to a first cause is an inescapable consequence of the physicalistic position, which thus remains bound to the old theological matrix, even after the throne has been evacuated by a tremulous deicide. The physicalistic contention is that matter receives its impulsion or determination from without; through the combination of an essential lawfulness that transcends the particular entity and the influence of external bodies or forces. Any ‘intrinsic’ process (such as decay) results from the expression of natural laws, whilst all extrinsic process results from the passive communication of an original cosmic fatality (probabilistic physics makes no essential difference here, since the mathematical—hence formal and extrinsic—determination of probability is no less rigorous than that of causal necessity). Physical matter is therefore unambiguously passive, exhausted by the dual characteristics of transmitting alien forces and decaying according to the universally legislated exigencies of its composition.” (p. 37-38, emphasis added)

A protestant materialism

In his project to uncover the secrets of desire, Land works to unravel every thread that makes up the fabric of Western civilization between modernity and antiquity. This is ‘deconstruction’ with an aim towards zero — a howling hunger that leaves nothing of human hands in its wake, be it sacred or secular.

Indeed, it is precisely zero itself which would come to stand for the annihilating fury of Land’s revolt against the academy. One of the greatest points of conflict between Land and the academic consensus was on the meaning of numbers themselves and the related matter of number practices. By the reckoning of Mackay and Brassier in the ‘Editors’ Introduction’ of Fanged Noumena (2012), Land’s zero was the most important munition he could bring to bear in his war against the intellectual establishment. Land’s path was marked by the breaking-down of logic (logos) and the building-up of numbering (nomos) into a sort of ‘schizonumerics’, thus ‘breaking past’ (Gr. skhízō, ‘to split’) the stratifications of the system, based on D&G’s ‘stratoanalysis’, the study of the differences between the potential and the actual (p. 21-23). According to this field of study, “All ‘real form’ proceeds from a differential stratification, in which a stratum selects only a subset of its substratum.” (p. 23). Landian numbering also tries to break away from the day-to-day, ‘domesticated’, mathematical understanding of numbers. This understanding, Land argues, is stratified along the grounds of place-value. As Mackay and Brassier put it:

“Where literacy, logos, which must be handed down from above, is synonymous with patrilinearity and law, numeracy, according to Land, belongs to a spontane­ ous cultural intelligence, to ‘socially distributed ordinal competences’, which open up humans to an outside of logos. Following Deleuze’s inventive reinterpretation of the Timaeus in Difference and Repetition, ‘Mechanomics’ reiterates how the procedures of selection that ‘split’ number and render it over to mathematics, beginning with that which forms ordinal (sequencing) numbers into ‘equal’ cardinal units, leave a ‘problematic’ remainder which is relayed to a ‘higher’ number type or scale. Thus is achieved a local neutralisation of difference through sequestration and deferral, and the problematic ‘energy’ of number is constricted and rendered into the safe hands of a specialised discipline at the same time as popular numerical practices are relegated to the realm of naive trivia. Land argues that place-value formalises this dissociation of different scales that is constitutive of stratification, creating redundancy, and using zero as its marker. Place-value zero corresponds to a stratification: a negative feedback understood as the pleasure principle, or principle of maintained identity, which registers and relays traumatic force through the indexes of interiority and threats to the maintenance of identity.” (p. 24)

Land’s (1992b) libidinal materialism is a complete rejection of the academy and places him in opposition to the ideas which had come to dominate the philosophical establishment of his day. To Land, the physicalism which came to occupy the void left by the ‘death of God’ in Western society, despite its scientific pretensions nevertheless followed along the tracks laid down by the theological system that preceded it (the original ‘Cathedral’, if you will) by seeking to reduce the great variety of material phenomena into a singular physical substance. In contrast to (what Land sees as) the continuation of the anthropocentric trajectory of Christian civilization which has only nominally moved past a geocentric orientation, libidinal materialism can be understood as a heliocentric, “sun ridden”(Hickman, 2012), vitalist theory of truly cosmic proportions. In the ‘Editors’ Introduction’ of Fanged Noumena (2012) Mackay and Brassier explain that “Land’s con­tempt for orthodoxy was no disingenuous pose struck whilst ruthlessly pursuing advancement. With a complete absence of academic ambition, he willingly paid the price for his provocations, both personally and professionally.” (p.3)

Land (1992b) expands on Bataille’s ideas (see Introduction) surrounding the concept of the solar and its relationship with death, sacrifice, waste, and excess, spinning that web of ideas into a theory of the energetic processes which drive the world. In this worldview, production is identified with death and seen as a means to manage the excess of energy received from the sun, thereby linking Bataille’s ideas of ritual sacrifice with the autonomous processes of capital:

“Bataille tells us that the universe is energetic, and the fate inherent to energy is utter waste. Energy from the sun is discharged unilaterally and without design. That fraction of solar radiation which strikes the earth resources all terrestrial endeavour, provoking the feverish obscenity we call ‘life’.

Life appears as a pause on the energy path; as a precarious stabilization and complication of solar decay. It is most basically comprehensible as the general solution to the problem of consumption. Such a solar- or general-economic perspective exhibits production as an illusion; the hypostatization of a digression in consumption. To produce is to partially manage the release of energy into its loss, and nothing more.

Death, wastage, or expenditure is the only end, the only definitive terminus.” (p. xii)

In contrast to this overarching drive towards waste, is posited the concept of utility, which has “no sense short of an expenditure which escapes it utterly” (p. xii), thereby rendering it ‘relative’; Land sees the fundamental error of Western history as the continuous drift of the meaning of utility away from the sense of relative utility towards a paradoxical absolutism steadily “colonized” by a “slave morality” which orients utility towards service to humanity, thus redefining the ‘good’ using this standard. Derived from this concept is the Landian reformulation of the Kantian terms ‘immanence’— here used with a meaning synonymous to ‘base matter’ (a Bataillean term) or ‘flows’ (a Deleuzoguattarian term)— and ‘transcendence’— redefined as a localized resistance inhibiting dissolution separated from the whole solar energy flow.

Land’s libidinal materialism is not merely a rejection of the academic consensus of his day, however. Rather, he ruptures the very fabric of the Western tradition and seeks to make a clean break from the burden of its inherited beliefs and assumptions, no matter which form they have taken. As a result, he is not content to simply rail against his fellow academics on what seems to him to be the rather superficial differences in their thinking, but like the Nith-hewing Snake flying back on corpse-laden dark wings to the new world tree after the Twilight of the Gods, seeks to strike at the very roots of this established order by examining how it sprouts from the devastated trunk of Western Christianity.

Nowhere is this aim more obvious than when Land (1992b) levies the rather grave accusation of being “theological” against the physicalist establishment in the academy. One of Land’s major points of departure from their consensus is at the definition of matter:

“Libidinal matter is that which resists a relation of reciprocal transcendence against time, and departs from the rigorous passivity of physical substance without recourse to dualistic, idealistic, or theistic conceptuality. It implies a process of mutation which is simultaneously devoid of agency and irreducible to the causal chain.” (p. 41)

Land (1992b) says that Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, and Lacan would call this process ‘drive’, which serves to explain rather than presuppose causality. Libidinal energetics is thus not a transformation of theories of desire as lack (theology), but a transformation of thermodynamics, the sense of ‘energy’. As we saw earlier, the opposition to a construction of desire as lack is something Land inherits from D&G and drives his antipathy for the physicalist cathedral. Given this definition of theology, Land’s distaste for it makes sense. Throughout his writing, Land (1992b) regularly contrasts theology with religion; the latter tends to be described as a more ‘vital’ phenomenon in which action — sacrifice — is central, while the former is akin to a crystalization or intellectualization of the other, more concerned with word games, logic, and rationalization

More recently, Land has even taken aim at the sciences themselves. He reconceptualizes the natural sciences as being fundamentally linked with capitalism; furthermore, both processes are posited as actually being opposed to their own immanent drivers, namely scientists and capitalists, respectively:

“I think that natural sciences and capitalism are different aspects of the same thing. Both are an effective self-propelling mechanism that gives the Outside a selective function in a domain considered, that domain being perpetually expanding, depending on how much autonomy you’re seeing. In that sense to be on the side of the natural sciences is to be on the side of the Outside.…Science is orientated against scientists, capitalism is oriented against businesses. These are processes that are in a relation of subjecting the elements within their domain to aggressive destructive criticism with some kind of selective criteria, which means they push things in a particular self-propelling direction.” (Bauer & Tomažin, 2017).

Though more concerned with the failings of the modern academic establishment, Land (1992b) nevertheless takes the time to excoriate its overtly religious antecedents — with special focus on Protestant Christianity. In fact, he singles it out as one of the biggest exceptions to the traditional ‘wasteful’ pattern of traditional societies (including Catholic Christianity):

“…(the projection of) the most extreme possible refusal of expenditure. Bataille accepts Weber’s conclusions concerning the relationship between the evolution of capital accumulation and the development of Protestantism, seeing the Reformation critique of Catholicism as essentially a critique of religion insofar as it ‘functions’ as a means of economic consumption, or as a drain for the excess of social production. The Protestant repudiation of indulgences—as well as its rejection of lavish cathedral building and the entire socio-economic apparatus allied to the doctrine of salvation through ‘works’—is the cultural precondition for the economy closing upon itself and taking its modern form. Bourgeois society is thus the first civilization to totally exclude expenditure in principle, opposed to the conspicuous extravagance of aristocracy and church, and replacing both with the rational or reproductive consumption of commodities.” (p. 57)

Protestant Christianity is seen as wholly complicit with the bourgeois and capitalist logic of accumulation over expenditure for Land (1992b):

“In The Accursed Share Bataille outlines a number of social responses to the unsublatable wave of senseless wastage welling up beneath human endeavour, which he draws from a variety of cultures and epochs. …Reform Christianity alone – attuned to the emergent bourgeois order – is based upon a relentless refusal of sumptuary consumption. It is with Protestantism that theology accomplishes itself in the thoroughgoing rationalization of religion, marking the ideological triumph of the good, and propelling humanity into unprecedented extremities of affluence and catastrophe. It is also with Protestantism that the transgressive outlets of society are de-ritualized and exposed to effective condemnation…” (p. 65-66)

In the fourth chapter of TFA, titled ‘Easter’, Land (1992b) makes it very clear what he feels about Christianity as a whole:

“There is only one sane and healthy relation to Christianity; perfect indifference. Mine is not of that kind. My detestation for the Christian faith exhausts my being, and more. I long for its God to exist in order to slake myself as violence upon him. If there are torments coming to me I want them, all of them; God experimenting in cruelty upon me. I want no lethargy in Hell, rather vigour and imagination. Oh yes, it is all very wretched, and if I am grateful to Christianity it is for one thing alone; it has taught me how to hate.” (p. 78)

Land’s ‘protestantism’ should not be seen as a reformation or attempt to purify an extant system or doctrine that has fallen into obsolence or decadence, but a pure and utter nihilistic ‘atheology’. His theses are not an effort to redeem the Cathedral upon whose doors they were nailed but a sabotage maneuver executed to throw open the airlock of the academy and expose its protected environs to the incomprehensible harshness of the Void. It is closer to a complete Gnostic revolution in philosophy than it is a return to Dharma.

We ought to be even more cautious when adapting and adopting ideas from Land, despite their similarities to certain aspects of Hindu teachings. As he remarks about the nature of Bataille’s work, the same could be said to hold true about his:

“The illimitable criminality driving Bataille’s writing’s provokes no hint of repentence within it, but that does not make him a pagan, which is to say juridically: unfit to plead. Lacking the slightest interest in justification, innocence is not an aspiration he nourishes. He is closer to Satan than to Pan, propelled by a defiant culpability. Bataille is altogether too morbid to be a pagan, and yet, despite what is in part a reactive relation to Christianity, the thought of necessary crime is an interpretation of the tragic, and of hubris. Tragic fate is the necessity that the forbidden happen, and happen as the forbidden.” (Land, 1992b, p. 63, emphasis added)

There are those among our kindred in the diaspora who have truly converted to some sect of Cathedralist Urianism in order to ascend the status hierarchies of their new homes and lord over its natives. As a result, they have drawn a great deal of ire towards our community as a whole for the way they speak of and treat the natives of the West. It does not take a seer to know that if the ‘Cathars’ they have been suppressing manage to seize real power, it will not bode well for any of us caught in their sights. We will be tarred with the same brush, whether it be due to tacit agreement, general arrogance, or utter incomprehension. One need only recall the various ways we have been attacked, slandered, and humiliated by various online actors (some of whom should ostensibly be our allies) in the past year. And the provocations of the Cathedral, especially in the spheres of education and the news media are too numerous to list¹.

Our line of flight out from this order cannot be found by identifying ourselves with any of the factions involved in this internecine struggle. Their father is not our Father and they are not our brethren. Our only concern is for the wellbeing of Hindus — and that too as a means to the end of sacrificing everything in the world to the Gods. That which falls outside of this intentionally narrow perspective is only to be taken note of as a help or a hinderance to this end.

^{1. See Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism (Malhotra, 2011) and Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America (Ramaswamy, De Nicolás, & Banerjee, 2007) for a more in-depth exploration of this topic.↩}

Where are the Radhakrishnans of our time?

President Trump, the unknown unknowns..


Is Islam the rock on which the liberal order breaks?

Trump’s rise, elite’s fall, liberal order 


Only people who are NOT Cis, White or Male can understand and express the real truth of oppressive society. IF this is true, there is no point in struggling within the US system (or even within the US) because more people ARE Cis, White or male. This will always be a minority effort, doomed to fail. IF it is not true, then it is pointless and self-defeating posturing.






My child, how can there be illusion and non illusion, shadow and lack of shadow? 
All this is one Truth, all this is of the nature of space and without taint.

I am neither a scholar of the Vedas, nor a learned Hindu, so this is not an expert view or an insider’s view. These are impressions; I mean to learn, not to teach. Perhaps we can learn some things together, so please add comments, criticisms and links to articles.

The Vedas are among the oldest extant books in the world and there are four of them. The Rig Veda is the oldest of the four and can be said to be the most important (the other three are in some ways derivative, consisting in large part of rearrangements, commentaries and instructions regarding the proper interpretation and usage of the Rig Veda). It was composed (at least in its final form) in the Northwest of India in the region known as Sapta Sindhu, the land of the seven rivers (for the most part, what is now Pakistani and Indian Punjab) but it almost certainly includes older layers that refer to  events, experiences, beliefs and Gods that date from times and places before the Indo-European migrants arrived in India.

One of the earliest Indo-European sacred books has been preserved with great care and fidelity and remains available to us today. This book is the Rig Veda (there are 3 other Vedas which are more or less derivatives or appendages of the Rig Veda). The original Sanskrit text is available to us today, but is of course not accessible for me. I have to rely on translations; translations have been made into several European languages, beginning in the 19th century (Schopenhauer thought the availability of a window into these ancient texts to Europeans should count as the greatest advantage of the 19th century over past centuries!). An English translation by British Indologist Ralph Griffith (who lived most of his life in India, was the principal of Benares college in the Hindu holy city of Benares, and is buried in South India) is available online in its entirety at this site:  http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/rigveda/index.htmand . A more recent and scholarly translation is now available but is very expensive. I read a more or less random selection of these hymns. My initial impressions follow. I look forward to reading more, and to suggestions for the same.

The Rig Veda consists of 10 books or Mandalas, of varying length. These hymns give us a window (and probably the most complete and most ancient window we have) into the Indo-European world that played such a huge role in the creation of the present cultures of much of Eurasia..their heroic age, so to speak.

In the original Sanskrit, the hymns are arranged in stanzas and follow particular rules of rhyme and meter (hear a sample at the end of this review). They are meant to be sung in particular religious rituals, mostly sacrifices to the Gods. The ten books were not all composed at the same time, or by the same authors and there are differences in style and subject. The tenth book in particular is different from the others and is more didactic and philosophical and is thought to be the last to be composed (and was composed by persons well acquainted with the earlier books). There are three hymns about creation in the tenth book and one of them has a certain skeptical and questioning tone that has made it the best known piece from the Rig Veda, frequently anthologized and quoted. I am reproducing it in full here, but also adding the two others that follow it, to give a more complete flavor of the original context:

HYMN CXXIX. Creation

THEN was not non-existent nor existent: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it.
What covered in, and where? and what gave shelter? Was water there, unfathomed depth of water?
2 Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal: no sign was there, the day’s and night’s divider.
That One Thing, breathless, breathed by its own nature: apart from it was nothing whatsoever.
3 Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness this All was indiscriminated chaos.
All that existed then was void and form less: by the great power of Warmth was born that Unit.
4 Thereafter rose Desire in the beginning, Desire, the primal seed and germ of Spirit.
Sages who searched with their heart’s thought discovered the existent’s kinship in the non-existent.
5 Transversely was their severing line extended: what was above it then, and what below it?
There were begetters, there were mighty forces, free action here and energy up yonder
6 Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation?
The Gods are later than this world’s production. Who knows then whence it first came into being?
7 He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it,
Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not.

HYMN CXXX. Creation.

 THE sacrifice drawn out with threads on every side, stretched by a hundred sacred ministers and one,
This do these Fathers weave who hitherward are come: they sit beside the warp and cry, Weave forth, weave back.
2 The Man extends it and the Man unbinds it: even to this vault of heaven hath he outspun, it.
These pegs are fastened to the seat of worship: they made the Sāma-hymns their weaving shuttles.
3 What were the rule, the order and the model? What were the wooden fender and the butter?
What were the hymn, the chant, the recitation, when to the God all Deities paid worship?
4 Closely was Gāyatrī conjoined with Agni, and closely Savitar combined with Usnih.
Brilliant with Ukthas, Soma joined Anustup: Bṛhaspati’s voice by Brhati was aided.
5 Virāj adhered to Varuṇa and Mitra: here Triṣṭup day by day was Indra’s portion.
Jagatī entered all the Gods together: so by this knowledge men were raised to Ṛṣis.
6 So by this knowledge men were raised to Ṛṣis, when ancient sacrifice sprang up, our Fathers.
With the mind’s eye I think that I behold them who first performed this sacrificial worship.
7 They who were versed in ritual and metre, in hymns and rules, were the Seven Godlike Ṛṣis.
Viewing the path of those of old, the sages have taken up the reins like chariot-drivers.

HYMN CXC. Creation.

 FROM Fervour kindled to its height Eternal Law and Truth were born:
Thence was the Night produced, and thence the billowy flood of sea arose.
2 From that same billowy flood of sea the Year was afterwards produced,
Ordainer of the days nights, Lord over all who close the eye.
3 Dhātar, the great Creator, then formed in due order Sun and Moon.
He formed in order Heaven and Earth, the regions of the air, and light.

The hymns of the ten books (as long in total as the poems of Homer) tell of a people who worship many Gods, with a few being mentioned very frequently, including Agni, Indra, Varuna and Soma. The hymns speak repeatedly of great warriors, with “beauteous horses and of kine, In thousands”, who indulge in lots of soma drinking and fort-breaking.. These warriors hoped to win ” wealth, renowned and ample, in brave sons, troops of slaves, far-famed for horses”. They also had priests who wanted the warriors to be generous with gifts (including mead). And they gambled, and got into trouble because of it:
The following hymn is fascinating, but also a rarity in being unusually didactic:

HYMN XXXIV. Dice, Etc.

“1. SPRUNG from tall trees on windy heights, these rollers transport me as they turn upon the table.
Dearer to me the die that never slumbers than the deep draught of Mujavan’s own Soma.
2 She never vexed me nor was angry with me, but to my friends and me was ever gracious.
For the die’s sake, whose single point is final, mine own devoted wife I alienated.
3 My wife holds me aloof, her mother hates me: the wretched man finds none to give him comfort.
As of a costly horse grown old and feeble, I find not any profit of the gamester.
4 Others caress the wife of him whose riches the die hath coveted, that rapid courser:
Of him speak father, mother, brothers saying, We know him not: bind him and take him with you.
5 When I resolve to play with these no longer, my friends depart from me and leave me lonely.
When the brown dice, thrown on the board, have rattled, like a fond girl I seek the place of meeting.
6 The gamester seeks the gambling-house, and wonders, his body all afire, Shall I be lucky?
Still do the dice extend his eager longing, staking his gains against his adversary.
7 Dice, verily, are armed with goads and driving-hooks, deceiving and tormenting, causing grievous woe.
They give frail gifts and then destroy the man who wins, thickly anointed with the player’s fairest good.
8 Merrily sports their troop, the three-and-fifty, like Savitar the God whose ways are faithful.
They bend not even to the mighty’s anger: the King himself pays homage and reveres them.
9 Downward they roll, and then spring quickly upward, and, handless, force the man with hands to serve them.
Cast on the board, like lumps of magic charcoal, though cold themselves they burn the heart to ashes.
10 The gambler’s wife is left forlorn and wretched: the mother mourns the son who wanders homeless.
In constant fear, in debt, and seeking riches, he goes by night unto the home of others.
11 Sad is the gambler when he sees a matron, another’s wife, and his well-ordered dwelling.
He yokes the brown steeds in the early morning, and when the fire is cold sinks down an outcast.
12 To the great captain of your mighty army, who hath become the host’s imperial leader,
To him I show my ten extended fingers: I speak the truth. No wealth am I withholding.
13 Play not with dice: no, cultivate thy corn-land. Enjoy the gain, and deem that wealth sufficient.
There are thy cattle there thy wife, O gambler. So this good Savitar himself hath told me.
14 Make me your friend: show us some little mercy. Assail us not with your terrific fierceness.
Appeased be your malignity and anger, and let the brown dice snare some other captive.”

There are also occasionally names of rivers, astronomical observations, names of animals and plants that may point to where the composers were living and what was going on around them. …One thing is clear, a lot of fighting was going on. So naturally, there are hymns to weapons, including this one which not only mentions bows and arrows, but also the coiled arm-guard that would protect an archer from the friction of the bowstring:

From Book 6  HYMN LXXV. Weapons of War

He lays his blows upon their backs, he deals his blows upon their thighs.
Thou, Whip, who urgest horses, drive sagacious horses in the fray.
14 It compasses the arm with serpent windings, fending away the friction of the bowstring:
So may the Brace, well-skilled in all its duties, guard manfully the man from every quarter.
15 Now to the Shaft with venom smeared, tipped with deer-horn, with iron mouth,
Celestial, of Parjanya’s seed, be this great adoration paid.
16 Loosed from the Bowstring fly away, thou Arrow, sharpened by our prayer.
Go to the foemen, strike them home, and let not one be left alive.
17 There where the flights of Arrows fall like boys whose locks are yet unshorn.
Even there may Brahmaṇaspati, and Aditi protect us well, protect us well through all our days.
18 Thy vital parts I cover with thine Armour: with immortality King Soma clothe thee.
Varuṇa give thee what is more than ample, and in thy triumph may the Gods be joyful.
19 Whoso would kill us, whether he be a strange foe or one of us,

Book 9 is unique in being entirely devoted one diety: Soma. The identity of Soma remains disputed to this day, but it was clearly the juice of a plant and was much admired for its ability to give vigor in battle and clarity in thought. The following extracts give a flavor of these hymns:

HYMN XXIII. Soma Pavamana.

1. SWIFT Soma drops have been effused in streams of meath, the gladdening drink,
For sacred lore of every kind.
2 Hither to newer. resting-place the ancient Living Ones are come.
They made the Sun that he might shine.
3 O Pavamana, bring to us the unsacrificing foeman’s wealth,
And give us food with progeny.
4 The living Somas being cleansed diffuse exhilarating drink,
Turned to the vat which drips with meath.
5 Soma gows on intelligent, possessing sap and mighty strength,
Brave Hero who repels the curse.
6 For Indra, Soma! thou art cleansed, a feast-companion for the Gods:
1ndu, thou fain wilt win us strength
7 When he had drunken draughts of this, Indra smote down resistless foes:
Yea, smote them, and shall smite them still.

From HYMN XXX. Soma Pavamana.
 Pour on us, Soma, with thy stream manconquering might which many crave,
Accompanied with hero sons.
4 Hither hath Pavamana flowed, Soma flowed hither in a stream,
To settle in the vats of wood.
5 To waters with the stones they drive thee tawny-hued, most rich in sweets,
O Indu, to be Indra’s drink.
6 For Indra, for the Thunderer press the Soma very rich in sweets,
Lovely, inspiriting, for strength.

With a little effort, you can imagine an HBO series about these people (and it would be worth watching).

The underlying philosophy is pagan and heroic and may not strike many of us as particularly deep, though I guess that someone like Christopher Beckwith (who writes about central Asian history with great feeling) would say this IS a deep philosophy, even an attractive one.

And of course these are, after all, hymns that are meant to be recited. Their very sound is supposed to have quasi-magical properties. Their addressees are higher beings who can bestow favors or withdraw them. This level of usefulness is meaningless to a modern secular person, but even a modern secularized Hindu may feel the recitation creates a psychological connection to his or her people, to their language and sounds, and to their traditions and community values. .. Just like reciting the Quran and hearing it being recited provides some psychosocial connection/rootedness/whatever to an Arab (or a wannabe Arab for that matter) and (magical or placebo) benefits to the true believer.

All of which is not without consequences.

It seems to me that Shinto and Japanese cultural traditions may be a good example of what a successful and relatively intact pagan religion of this type might look like today. Modern Hinduism may be too much of a “wounded civilization” to be a good model of what the original Indo-European religion could have evolved into…the ways of the ancients are now buried under centuries of dust, reinvention, editing, myth-making, mixing and plain old monotheist beating-down. But who knows, those wandering warrior pagans may have their day again..

And looks like when written (which was actively discouraged for a very long time; it was supposed to be recited and memorized, not written down)

1. LET US with tuneful skill proclaim these generations of the Gods,
That one may see them when these hymns are chanted in a future age.
2 These Brahmaṇaspati produced with blast and smelting, like a Smith,
Existence, in an earlier age of Gods, from Non-existence sprang.
3 Existence, in the earliest age of Gods, from Non-existence sprang.
Thereafter were the regions born. This sprang from the Productive Power.
4 Earth sprang from the Productive Power the regions from the earth were born.
Dakṣa was born of Aditi, and Aditi was Dakṣa’s Child.
5 For Aditi, O Dakṣa, she who is thy Daughter, was brought forth.
After her were the blessed Gods born sharers of immortal life.
6 When ye, O Gods, in yonder deep closeclasping one another stood,
Thence, as of dancers, from your feet a thickening cloud of dust arose.
7 When, O ye Gods, like Yatis, ye caused all existing things to grow,
Then ye brought Sūrya forward who was lying hidden in the sea.
8 Eight are the Sons of Adid who from her body sprang to life.
With seven she went to meet the Gods she cast Martanda far away.
9 So with her Seven Sons Aditi went forth to meet the earlier age.
She brought Martanda thitherward to spring to life and die again.

Doniger version

Two Articles On Tribalism

We can divide the different belief structures by three traits, openness to exploration of ideas, attitudes to internal differences, attitude towards external entities . And  we can trace the evolution of different belief structures and how they influenced the world and have been influenced by the world.