Persephone

AS traditionalists we tend to understand, more than many others, the important role played by racial differences in determining a differential pattern of human behaviour. And yet, how much do we take for granted when we focus exclusively on the surface, empirical aspects of racial differences such as psychometrics or athletic prowess whilst ignoring those metaphysical concerns which appear as self-evident as the air we breathe but which are only revealed as obvious when we employ our intuition?

It was during a recent period of enforced convalescence that I took to reading some of John Buchan’s short stories. Buchan has always been a problem for the modernist but it was not until I came across one particular story that I realised just how much of a problem! He is too great a writer, too accomplished a man to be ignored or lightly dismissed. Apart from his popularity as a thriller writer, of which The Thirty-Nine Steps is probably the most famous, he excelled in many different fields, eventually serving as Governor-General of Canada from 1935 until his death in 1940. However, what may be an embarrassment to our dissipated modernist becomes a source of inspiration and encouragement to ourselves.

In 1910 Buchan wrote a story called The Grove of Astaroth, through which the main protagonist is drawn by his Jewish blood into a self-destructive worship of the ancient goddess Astaroth. The setting is in Africa, where two travellers, the part-Jewish Lawson, together with our narrator, happen upon an ancient temple set amidst a grove of tall, slender trees. Our narrator is able to surmise through his archaeological knowledge that the temple is devoted to the Old Testament goddess, Astaroth, who had a devastating effect upon the Jew and who was eventually driven away by the prophet Elijah. Lawson, whose Jewish grandfather was said to sell antiques in a Brighton back-street, is strangely fascinated by the place and decides to build his home by the temple. One is somewhat reminded of Jack London’s book, The Call of the Wild, where a dog, half-husky and half-wolf, returns to its wolf pack in the wilderness.

Three years later our narrator revisits the spot to find the home completed but Lawson in an unaccountable state of physical and moral decline. It transpires that Lawson has been compelled by some dark force to visit the shrine regularly every night and thence to lacerate himself in a self-destructive frenzy.

Now the interesting thing about the story is that while Astaroth has a deleterious effect on the part-Semitic Lawson, she has precisely the opposite effect on our Gentile narrator. Astaroth was the Jewish equivalent of the goddess Persephone who, as a goddess of fertility, cast a beneficent influence upon the Aryan peoples of Ancient Greece.

Nevertheless, against his finer feelings, our narrator decides to save his friend by felling and burning the trees, breaking down the temple and ploughing the whole lot back into the soil. As he does so he hears a gentle voice pleading, a voice too fine for the sensual ear but touching the inner clouds of the spirit. He is aware that he is destroying the last shelter of a lost lady who brought nothing but goodness unrepaid into the World. He also reasons that the spell which to Semitic blood holds the mystery of evil is to him, of a different race, only delicate, rare and beautiful. He knows that he has ‘driven something lovely and adorable from its last refuge on earth.’

Naturally this story, written as it was in 1910, opens up more questions than can easily be answered. Its strength is that such questions go to the heart of our thinking. For instance, how much of her own soul did Britain plough back into the soil as a direct consequence of saving the interests of Organised Jewry against its German ‘enemy’ in the Second World War? The more discerning amongst us can see how the true enemies of European values have manipulated the consequences of the German defeat to foster an all-pervading cult of ugliness, deaf to the gentle pleading of our inner selves. So, we might ask, has this only been made possible by ‘something lovely and adorable being driven from its last refuge on earth’? In which case, as traditionalists, how do we reawaken our racial soul to entice her back?

Michael Woodbridge is a British National Party activist and member of the Henry Williamson Society