The Guardians of Renewal: Musings on a Transrevolutionary Archetype Craig Chalquist As an old order ruptures and teeters before breaking down, seeds of renewal germinate in the thick square shadows of trembling towers about to fall. The old order might be an ailing body, a moribund government, an ossified religion, a corrupt corporation, even an entire movement, society, or age past its prime: at any rate, something once-vital but now headed down the entropic drainpipe of history, where Nemesis waits to disassemble and recycle whatever fails to adapt. The seeds sprout in the ruins. That’s when the Guardians appear. Meet the Guardians Actually, you already have. The three Wise Men who show up for the birth of Jesus; the Twelve who follow him. King Arthur’s Round Table Knights. The Fianna, those elite foresters who protected the High King of Ireland. The Shambhala Warriors. The Oathbound Spirits. The Bogatyri. The Lokapala who guard the Four Directions; the Four Heavenly Kings (Feng Tiao Yu Shun). In Greek mythology, the armed Kouretes on Mount Aigaion grouped around baby Zeus. When his cries threatened to alert Cronus, who sought to swallow him, the Kouretes danced around him in full armor while clashing their shields together. They protected the pick of Gaia until he grew old enough to overthrow the Titans and establish a new order. Apollo’s children the Korybantes clustered around the goddess Cybele, the Phrygian counterpart to Rhea. They also tended ecstatic visions and initiated boys into manhood. King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. From BNF 112, a manuscript of the prose Lancelot attributed to Walter Map (Gaultier Moap) or Michel Gantelet. Evrard d’Espinques. 1470. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 2 Immanence Journal Vol. 1 No. 2 Spring 2017 immanencejournal.com 3 The Gnostics referred to their Guardians as the Children of Light: the introverted offspring of Seth, first Gnostic and son of celestial Adam. In them lived the divine spark bestowed by Sophia against the day the Children would return this precious possession to the Treasury of Light in the Pleroma (“Fullness”), their version of Heaven. Eschewing open rebellion, the Children of Light conducted disciplines and studies designed to see through and bypass the Authorities of Darkness who ruled the subcelestial realms. What makes us free is the gnosis of who we were of what we have become of where we were of wherein we have been cast of whereto we are hastening of what we are being freed of what birth really is of what rebirth really is. The Journey of the Three Kings by Leopold Kupelwiese. 1825. —Excerpta de Theodoto (Hoeller 10) Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. We see the Guardians’ crested silhouette in fiction and fantasy too: in the 2. Gathering: individuals emotionally resonant with this great new birth Fellowship of the Ring, the Jedi Order, the Fedaykin and Fish Speakers of Dune, find each other and form a group to protect and serve that which is being Asimov’s Second Foundation, Smith’s Lensmen, the Priory of Sion. Guardians too born from the thrashings of a dying order. Their primary mood is shaped one-sidedly good (hidden power drive!) or insufficiently reflective risk seduction by by the daimon Elpis: Hope. archontic Authorities and subsequent regression into shadow forms: ninja and sulsa, Fascist elites and terror bands like ISIL, Sith Lords and the Knights of Ren, all of whom 3. Apotheosis: their aspirations and deeds add threads to the legend woven serve Death instead of Life, degeneration and not rebirth. around the new birth by storytellers of the society transformed by it. Unlike such shadowy Guardians of Degeneration, those of Renewal are not threshold guardians in Campbell’s sense: beings who test whether the Hero is worthy of Once the god or order is born, Guardians stay vital in service to it, his great adventure (59). Rather, our Guardians gather around and safeguard some grand transform into its officiants (the Stilgar syndrome), die protecting it (Galahad, new possibility emerging into actuality. The archetype they express unfolds like this: Boromir), or retire (Oisin). They leave behind tales of the beloved community they helped found. 1. Theogenesis: a god is being born or reborn. Examples of this: birth Always the Guardians seem linked somehow to the natural world, operating of an actual deity; a new order of things emerges from the ruins of the deep within it or sanctioned by its sacred presences. In The Idylls of the King, old; an enchanted realm (“the Kingdom of Heaven”) infiltrates a moribund Guinevere’s father beholds the land’s response to the king and queen commissioning empire; a complex system begins organizing around a rising new attractor; the Round Table: a constellating archetype activates ever-larger circles of sensitive people. 4 Immanence Journal Vol. 1 No. 2 Spring 2017 immanencejournal.com 5 The individual expression of transrevolution is the epiphany. Degraded in All down the lonely coast of Lyonnesse, modern use to “realizing something,” the word originally meant a life-changing Each with a beacon-star upon his head, sacred encounter. The Magi appear, and things change forever after. Epiphany is And with a wild sea-light about his feet, ignited by theophany: the appearance of a god. A transrevolution is a collective He saw them - headland after headland flame epiphany, a great awakening, with permanent transmutative consequences. As such Far on into the rich heart of the west: it transcends politics and is incompatible with violence. And in the light the white mermaiden swam, The transrevolutionary pattern stood out for me one day as I donned the lenses And strong man-breasted things stood from the sea, of depth psychology, systems/complexity theory, and my notion of eradigmatics— And sent a deep sea-voice thro' all the land, the study of how rising archetypes shape entire eras—to search back through history To which the little elves of chasm and cleft for signs of genuinely deep and lasting change. Transrevolution seems to unfold in Made answer, sounding like a distant horn. twelve overlapping phases: ...For all the land was full of life. (Tennyson 451) 1. Recognition: Nonmaterial forms organize complex systems. Every dynamic What might the Guardians look like in human aspect today? system is the material expression of its pattern of organization. Systems large and small are ultimately shaped not by fixed roles or plans, but by invisible, intangible Guardians as Transrevolutionaries patterns (archetypes, motifs, meanings, images). It’s useful to distinguish between revolution and transrevolution. Revolutions replace one power group or ruling party with another. The new 2. Systemic problems are not correctable without structural change. Ongoing authorities always end up resembling those they replace, as when the American problems like wars, political corruption, racism, sexism, and ecocrisis cannot be Revolution traded in white British rulers for white colonial elites. After violently repaired because they are systemic (Donella Meadows). An initial step toward deep protesting taxation without representation, the Americans inaugurated their new change is facing the fact that old systems incapable of adaptive self-reorganization wealthy president in a bank. New leaders and new proclamations, then, but with cannot be reformed and must be remade. old social structures left in place. Systems theorists call this first order change. As revolutions revolve around a sudden power vacuum, freedom fighters become 3. In outworn systems a new core image/myth/vision emerges from rupture and secret police, radical intellectuals apologists, and rebels the new aristocrats. chaos. As the old system wears out, a new organizing attractor—a new myth—emerges Transrevolutions demonstratesecond order change by restructuring the system that carries the seeds of future social structure and culture-making. Sensitive people from the ground up. For that reason they are rarer than revolutions. Inspired by who can stay inwardly transparent to the new myth resonate with it and find ways to a numinous vision of grand new possibility, a new collective consciousness rises protect and develop it. As Systems theorists observe, changing the ruling paradigm from the remains of the old. New religions begin as transrevolutions. So did the changes every key interaction in a system. Women’s Movement and the Civil Rights Movement. They not only transformed values, attitudes, and actions, they transmuted them: melted down the old into 4. Living the core emblems and principles of this new image/myth/vision plants the newer, stronger alloys. seeds of new culture. As Guardians of Renewal, spokespeople for the new myth form Some transrevolutions give birth to physical institutions: the House of Wisdom groups of likeminded kindred and converse (via heartsteads) to start living the core in Baghdad, the Alexandrian Library, the Jixia Academy in Shandong, the Florentine attractor/new myth of future culture now. These new transrevolutionary explorations Platonic Academy, the Oracle of the Pythoness at Delphi, the ancient city of Ife in limit themselves to a modest number of self-replicating evolutionary principles, Western Nigeria. images, and guidelines to form the core around which new kinds of culture grow. 6 Immanence Journal Vol. 1 No. 2 Spring 2017 immanencejournal.com 7 causality, and bounded rationality. Leaders tend patterns, directions, interactions, 5. New energies and meanings multiply fractally along critical connections rather qualities, feel, pace, mood, inspiration, creativity, and rhythm. Creative autopoesis: than from mere critical mass. The transrevolutionary network expands via smart new combinations and wisdom groups always beat simply adding new elements. networking: redundant central hubs connected to reality labs on the periphery to tend what emerges. The new vision/myth/attractor depends on reinforcing loops 10. The new system and its evolving subsystems self-organize as a rite of passage. that feed and spread it.