Many of you may have seen photos or videos of me conducting rituals and may have wondered what exactly I am doing or trying to accomplish. In this article, I share my vision and rationale.
My book Fire in the Dark gestures at an answer to Nietzsche, who asked, “What festivals, what sacred games shall we have to devise?” in the absence of God.
Before you jump to conclusions, let me say that I do not call myself an atheist.
Technically, I could be called an atheist, if we translate the Greek roots to mean “without god.” I don’t believe in any one god or claim to know—for certain—that any particular god exists. So, I am “without god.”
But that’s not what people mean when they say, “atheist.” Atheists are, in practice and common parlance, people who claim to know the unknowable. They claim to know—for certain—that no entity that could be called a god exists. Further, atheists tend to be against religion.
Or, as they often say, they are against “organized religion.” Which seems to suggest that they believe that religion is fine as long as it is “disorganized.”
I am pro-human, as I believe every human should be. However, I cannot call myself a “humanist,” because—while it sounds right—humanism is, in practice, more or less a philosophy organized around atheism, rationalism, and a seething hatred for organized religion. Humanists “trust the science” and the events of 2020 revealed how irrational and religious these rational atheists can, in practice, sometimes be.
I don’t believe it is necessary for me to make the claim that I know—for certain—that no entity that could be called a god exists. I can allow mystery to remain in the universe. In fact, I don’t believe I have a choice.
It is precisely because I am pro-human that I am not against religion per se, be it organized or disorganized. Humans are religious animals. And in the absence of God, as Voltaire suggested, humans do always seem to create something like a god to revere. What James Lindsay identified as the “dialectical faith of wokism” serves as a cautionary example.
Like any man, I prefer to think of myself as being both rational and reasonable. But rational-ism, as an “ism,” is not the philosophy of rational and reasonable fellows like Plato, Socrates, or Aristotle so much as it is, in practice, the philosophy of Nietzsche’s Last Man—the “mid” NPC who believes himself to be clever and “knows all that has happened.” This rationalist atheist Last Man or “bug man” believes that everyone before his age “of reason” and “enlightenment” was crazy.
I don’t believe that the ancient Greeks or Romans were “crazy.” A billion Hindus are not “crazy.” Yesterday, I saw a man in my neighborhood get out of his car and pray to Mecca, because I guess it was that time of day. I’m not going to say he’s any “crazier” than someone who believes the mainstream media. And while I do not believe that Christianity is literally true and I find it aesthetically and philosophically repulsive, I cannot honestly say that Christians are any more “delusional” than anyone else. And, in my experience, there are an equal number of saints and scoundrels among them.
Elsewhere, I’ve made the case for a Zoological Humanism that breaks with rationalist/atheist humanism and draws inspiration from the list of “human universals.” And on that list of cultural phenomena common to every known human society, we find things like “ritual,” “rites of passage,” “religion,” and “magic.”
Humans are religious animals and denying this is more deluded than becoming religious could ever be. Religion provides an ordered worldview, a shared identity, a rich complex of shared stories and practices, and a shared experience.
Organized and Disorganized Religion
When people say that they don’t like “organized religion,” they may believe the old canard that organized religions have caused all the violence and suffering in the world. The many examples of slaughters, wars, famines and genocides perpetrated by atheistic communist regimes make this an absurd position.
But for the most part, when people say that they don’t like “organized religion,” they are rejecting dogmatism. They disagree with some assertions made by a given religion or dislike certain behaviors of its adherents, which may or may not be related to those assertions.
Dogmatism is interesting and paradoxical because it is the strength of any religion, but it also turns people off and can cause the religion to become demonized or irrelevant. Religion provides a fixed worldview and narrative, as well as a fixed system of meaning and value. It answers questions about how to figure out what is right and wrong or good and evil, as well as questions about where we came from and where we are going.
As I have often joked, being a philosopher is at least a part time job, and the pay usually isn’t great. Most people don’t want to “do the math” of carefully working out their own ethical system. And to be fair, it is an inefficient use of human energy and attention for everyone to be doing that math on their own all the time.
Religion provides a “good enough” guideline for moral decision-making. Its assertions have to be firm, or they will be unconvincing and have no power. However, if the OODA loop of a religion never takes in new information and never adapts to changes in the environment, it runs the risk of becoming irrelevant and losing its usefulness and appeal.
There is also the problem of travel, which forces religions to compete with each other for the coveted prize of capital-”T” Truth. This brings us to the problem that I have called The Hliðskjálf Dilemma. Accepting a Truth-package is easy when everyone in your community also accepts it as Truth, that Truth is part of your collective and personal identity, and very few of you travel to compare notes about competing Truths. If questioning that Truth has a high social cost within your tribal group, you may still find it easiest to ignore competing Truths.
But, if you were not raised with a religion or abandoned your tribe’s Truth at some point, we live in an age where we can see—as if from Odin’s High Seat—ALL of the competing Truths. We can see how obviously one flows or flowed into another, how the many Truths influenced one another over time. We can challenge each Truth as outsiders and make little charts of pros and cons, accuracies, and inaccuracies. There are many religions, they all have pros and cons, and every religion is kind of ridiculous if you really think about it. They all make wild claims. They’re all easy to make fun of.
So this leads to what we might call “disorganized religion” where one chases religious feeling and sensation without committing to any one religion. One weekend, you’re throwing up at an Ayahuasca ritual, and the next weekend, you’re doing some bastardized form of yoga from another continent. Then you chug some lesbian’s cacao and chant “OHM” and a Navajo flute plays in the distance.
The result of disorganized religion is that you’ve promiscuously enjoyed a sample platter of various ritual or religious experiences without accepting an organized worldview or moral system. You are still unmoored and your worldview lacks structure and certainty.
A Question of Integrity
The desire for structure and certainty leads many to accept political ideologies as a replacement for religious ideologies and identities. Some people end up effectively worshiping parties and states instead of gods and goddesses.
But there is something “dry” about philosophies and ideologies that aren’t accompanied by mythic narratives, ritual, and ecstatic communal experience. Something is missing from the human experience without the magic that religious rituals bring to our lives.
This is why so many people go to these “spiritual” retreats to be guided through a mismatched selection of “experiences.” They want to “feel” something more timeless than their reactions to passing news stories. They want to experience the feeling of community, even if it only lasts for a weekend. And these kinds of retreats only appeal to certain kinds of men—free spirits and wandering, artistic souls.
To escape the hopeless confusion and emptiness of disordered postmodernism, many men yearn for a more ordered worldview. They know something is missing from their lives, and they seek out the structure that organized religion provides—whether it is some form of organized paganism, Islam, or Christianity. Organized religion offers a firm sense of identity and community that disorganized religion lacks.
However, for the man of today—now, with AI tools at his fingertips, which didn’t exist when I wrote Fire in the Dark just a few years ago—the “high seat” creates a question of integrity.
Most organized religions demand a buy-in. To join the club, claim the identity, and share the experience—to get that meaning and structure in your life—you have to accept their narrative as literal Truth.
Or, even if literal belief isn’t necessary—as with many reconstructed paganisms—you have to accept the mythic frame of a particular people at a particular time that is probably long past and very poorly understood.
For my take on Germanic paganism, which I practiced at the level of priesthood for several years, watch my YouTube video on the subject.
Integrity is important to me. I’m not going to say that I believe something is literally true unless I actually believe it IS literally true.
So many men will adopt an identity and “say the words” for a sense of belonging and certainty. They want to pick a team to fight for. They want to put a god in their pocket to give authority to things they already believe. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen men “say the words” to save their marriages or to lock down a good girl from a religious family. I’m absolutely certain that many sociopathic politicians say whatever prayers the people want to hear to advance their careers.
Some men will argue apologetics for their religion endlessly, and sometimes it becomes clear that they are trying to convince themselves and hypnotize themselves into believing more than they are trying to convince anyone else. They have to assert their Truth over and over again until it “might as well be true” and everyone around them nods in agreement, like the people who insisted that men can have babies and women can have penises. If you say it enough times to enough people, you can create a kind of consensus reality.
I am not saying that sincere belief in the Truth of an organized religion is impossible.
I believe that many men, especially those raised in functional religious households, truly are sincere. But of many others, especially those men who seem to be seeking belonging, certainty, and sometimes even financial gain, I am skeptical.
So, for the many men like me, who see the value in the order, structure, and ritual of organized religion but who can’t bring themselves to “say the words” that they do not believe to be true—men of integrity—I developed an alternative. You could call it an experiment.
Can men today organize a religion with a clear structure, a set of values, a sense of identity and community, and reproduce the religious experience—without engaging in self-deceit?
I cannot prove whether or not this is possible for anyone. I can only prove whether or not I can do this as a leader or visionary. It’s an ambitious project that requires many skills and resources.
Men are always trying to “find” meaning, but I believe that meaning is something men create. Men created every religion, crafted every myth, designed every ritual.
Even if you believe that YOUR capital “T” Truth was divinely inspired, then surely men “made up” those other religions, right?
Men create structured value systems, meaning, myth, and ritual because they serve purpose and they make human life better.
Men today are no different than the men who came before them.
If we want meaning and structure, if we want “stories to live by,” if we want ritual—if we want religion and religious experience—it is up to us to create it.
This is my solution to the “death of God” and the postmodern “collapse of all metanarratives.”
You can just do things…
The Order of Fire - Structure
In 2022, I founded a movement named The Order of Fire and a group called The First Men, based on the philosophy of Solar Idealism I described in Fire in the Dark.
We have collectively developed a sense of shared values called Holy Positives. They are not commandments written on tablets, but “best practices” drawn from philosophy and Human Universals.
Here are the rough criteria that I have used to develop our list of Holy Positives.
Would this positive value or statement of truth have seemed self-evident to the majority of virile men in history?
Is this positive value or statement of truth so obviously linked to the survival and prosperity of our species that one could essentially call it a human universal?
Would this positive value or statement of truth be positive or true even if you, as an individual, could never achieve or embody this value or truth for some reason? (For example, can you admit that beauty is still better even if you are ugly, or that health is better even if you are sickly?)
Using these criteria we have developed a list of Holy Positives. It is an incomplete list. There are many more that could be added, and we will explore these over time. But these “positives” give us a working ideal and seemed important to highlight at this point in history.
The Holy Positives
Order is better than chaos
Integrity is better than corruption
Health and Vitality are better than sickness
Beauty is better than ugliness
Strength is better than weakness
Courage is better than fear
Competence is better than incompetence
Fortitude is better than fragility
Emotional Control is better than hysteria
Self-Determination is better than servility
You will recognize several of these positives as Tactical Virtues from The Way of Men. Strength, courage, and competence (or mastery) are virtues that men have always believed that men should embody.
Over the years I have asked many men what they are looking for when they say they are missing a “spiritual” component to their lives. The word “spiritual” by itself is essentially meaningless. When pressed further, many such men said that they wanted to feel connected to “something bigger than themselves” but that they were turned off by many things labeled this way because they seemed passive, effeminate, air-headed, dominated by females, etc. They often say this about mainstream Christianity as well as new age and pagan groups.
So, in The Order of Fire, we begin from a distinctly masculine perspective. Because we have a “Zoological Humanist” perspective, we believe that men and women have different natures…like almost all of the humans in history who came before us. This fact and the Holy Positives lead to a loose political perspective. Or, at the very least, certain political worldviews will necessarily be excluded. Most of the First Men recognized their own perspectives in my recent essay “Libertarian-ish.”
This is another ordering and structuring feature of The Order of Fire. The new-agey and therapeutic men’s groups value “inclusivity” over exclusivity. This is a good business strategy, but we believe that something that can mean anything ultimately means nothing. We have boundaries, and we are not for everyone. You either believe what we believe, or you don’t. I have actually had to turn away several applicants because it was obvious that they sincerely were or wanted to be Christians.
Integrity is better than corruption, and we don’t want men to lie to us, or to themselves.
Religious Numinism
Let’s take a moment to look at the word religious. In America, to most people, that is going to require a supernatural being. But it doesn’t—or didn’t—necessarily mean that at all. Scholars attribute “religion” via the Latin “religio” to one of two roots:
religare (re- "again" + ligare "to bind, tie")
relegere (re- "again" + legere "to read, gather, choose")
So religion is either something that binds people together, or something you read or choose over and over again.
Both seem to fit our purposes and neither technically requires a divinity. We are men bound together by beliefs about the same things. We read the same books and gather together over and over again.
But we can’t rely on etymology alone. Today, the word carries more with it. “Religion” and “religious” conjure up visions of priests and cathedrals and the pious men and women praying together inside them. Many may also have positive or negative associations with Sunday Schools, Bible camps and the like. In the West, those will be the most dominant associations. But religion is also broadly applied to many more exotic or historical religions. This includes religions like Zen Buddhism, which, like Solar Idealism, is not particularly concerned with the supernatural.
But religions are more than just clubs that share a collective identity and belief system. What distinguishes what we think of as a religious experience?
I think we could call it numinism, or the experience of awe, wonder, and mystery. That sense of “something bigger.” Its roots may come from a word that means “a nod of the head.”
We can facilitate this with architecture, with music, with chanting, with fire.
We can experience numinism in the natural world. People climb mountains and visit the Grand Canyon to experience an awe of nature. Part of the magic of impressive landscapes is their scale, but also a sense of time. Almost any mountain you summit has been there for longer than our species has existed.
In The Order of Fire, we ritually aim to create a religious, numenistic experience by invoking ideas and ideals which are eternal within the scale of time that is meaningful to our species.
Solar Idealism is not concerned with the superhuman or supernatural. Solar Idealism is concerned with what is most human and most natural. We are concerned with the universe as it relates to us.
The sun, fire, things that men have always done, values that men have always shared.
A Founding Myth That Is Essentially True
The Founding myth of The Order of Fire is the story of The First Men as it was told in Fire in the Dark.
It is a story of men who lived in an unknown place at an unknown time that could be any place or any time. The men leave the place they came from and they cannot return, for reasons which are unknown and irrelevant. They wander out into the wilderness together, pick a spot to camp, and build a fire. As the sun goes down, the fire replaces the sun and becomes the center of their world. It creates light and warmth. Everything within its perimeter of light and safety is visible and known and therefore in some sense, ordered. Everything beyond the light is unknown, obscured, mysterious, and, in some sense, chaotic. The men take turns keeping watch, and in the morning, the sun rises again. Perhaps they move on, or perhaps they begin to shape the world around them to make a permanent camp, and then a village, then a city, and perhaps even a nation.
This myth is essentially true. It’s happened millions of times on every continent. The details change, but the story is basically the same. It could be the camp of Romulus and Remus and their band. It could be the story of the founding of an American pioneer town. It could be the story of the first men on Mars, with some adjustments. This story is eternal, at the scale of mankind.
The Myth of the First Men symbolizes the way in which men create order in a chaotic universe. This is what men do and what they want. It’s what men want for themselves and their families and their businesses.
And I think it’s a beautiful story. It’s one of the oldest stories. We don’t need cuneiform tablets to tell it, because we know it to be true.
God-Archetypes
In Solar Idealism, we don’t have gods, but rather syncretic god-archetypes that represent some of the different roles of men in their most ideal forms. I’m not going to go into great detail about them here—they’re covered at length in Fire in the Dark—but they each contend with a different kind of chaos.
The Father contends with conceptual chaos. He makes rules and draws lines.
The Striker contends with physical chaos. He is the warrior who fights monsters and other men.
The Lord of the Earth contends with material or natural chaos and perpetuates order. He keeps things going. He is the craftsman, the famer, the trader, the builder.
These god-archetypes are represented in myths across many cultures. Fathers in the sky, heroes, men of the people…
We consider all of these stories part of our cannon.
People could mistake this for polytheism or paganism. However, we don’t revere these archetypes as living gods, but rather as composite ideals. They represent different spirits and excellences in men, providing exemplars to strive toward.
“Pagan” comes from an urban Christian slur in Latin for country people and hillbillies who worshipped non-Christian gods. So it has nothing to do with what we do in The Order of Fire. It seems like a strange word to use to identify oneself anyway, as it is essentially an insult. Re-appropriated insults always come covered with a greasy film of ressentiment.
What Festivals, What Sacred Games Shall We Have to Devise?
Ritual seems mystical—and it’s supposed to. But it is also a form of human technology. There are things that work, and things that don’t, and things that work only under certain conditions. There are practices that “feel” ritualistic that humans seem to set aside for religious experiences, though they are also employed in theater and musical performances and even sporting events.
For instance, in his book “How Religion Evolved,” Robin Dunbar mentions the concept of “synchrony” in his investigation of the neuropsychology of ritual. When people act in unison, whether it is dancing, rowing, singing, shouting, or chanting with purpose they feel more bonded to one another and experience increased endorphin output. On some level, churches, sports teams, and the military all know the power of moving in unison. And from my years of conducting and participating in various rituals, I can say that men shouting together in unison always creates some ENERGY. It’s powerful, and it feels right. It makes everyone feel connected, and I would add—part of something bigger than themselves.
Dunbar noted that shared suffering also produces a similar effect. Yukio Mishima expressed this sensation of shared pain, effort, and action eloquently in Sun and Steel when he wrote about observing young men carrying a Shinto shrine and singing in unison.
At the moment when I first realized that the use of strength and the ensuing fatigue, the sweat and the blood, could reveal to my eyes that sacred, ever-swaying blue sky that the shrine bearers gazed on together, and could confer the glorious sense of being the same as others, I already had a foresight, perhaps, of that as yet distant day when I should step beyond the realm of individuality into which I had been driven by words and awaken to the meaning of the group.
He then elaborated on his own experiences running in groups of men during military exercises.
Self-awareness by now was as remote as the distant rumor of the town. I belonged to them, they belonged to me; the two formed an unmistakable "us." To belong—what more intense form of existence could there be? Our small circle of oneness was a means to a vision of that vast, dimly gleaming circle of oneness.
Synchrony and shared suffering are two elements that can make ritual experiences profound and unifying. There are, of course, many more. Mircea Eliade had much to say about sacred time and the repetition of mythic actions in his book, The Sacred and the Profane, which influenced my understanding of ritual substantially.
For the Order of Fire, I designed a ritual which we call The Fire Ritual to be our primary ritual to initiate members and to create and affirm both a new collective identity and a new axis of meaning and value to help structure our lives. One could almost call it a “meta” ritual, because in some sense it is a ritual about ritual. Its stated purpose and its functional purpose are one and the same. And it acquires depth of meaning as we continue to perform the ritual, and we continue to add elements based on a process of trial and evaluation as well as discussions that occur within the group about what we believe and what we want the ritual to symbolize and accomplish.
I will explain the ritual as it is currently performed in greater depth in the forthcoming second edition of our journal, PH2T3R: A Journal of Solar Culture Vol. 02.
However, I will give you a brief outline here.
In the fullest form of the ritual, we re-enact the myth of The First Men as I described it above.
We hike together out into the wilderness and choose a spot to build a sacred fire. The Fire Priest draws a solar cross on the ground, and we build a rock circle together as a group. Then we set up a camp, and prepare for golden hour. Each man finds and makes his own torch, which symbolizes what he brings to the fire.
When sunset approaches, each man’s forehead is marked with the symbol of our Order in red ochre. The men take their places round the stone circle, and the priest gives a poetic but rousing speech about creating order in a chaotic world, and replacing the light of the sun at night with a light of man’s own creation. There is a call and response, and eventually the men light the fire together. As the fire burns, the priest asks the men to imagine previous fires in their lives and fires like the one in front of them, made by other men through time. The fire is given a name through synchronized chanting, and the priest talks about the meaning of the fire and the values of the group—the Holy Positives mentioned above. After that, one of the other members of the group speaks briefly about one of the three god-archetypes or another subject of relevance.
Following a brief period of meditation, we then perform what we call The Holy Round, a toasting ritual in which each member of the group says something important that he wants the other men to hear. During this process, new initiates are given sacred names according to a recently established protocol. After the last man has spoken, the priest ends the ritual, and the men leave the sacred fire to eat and engage in conversation at a smaller, “profane” fire. The men create a watch schedule, so that someone is present to watch over the fire and keep it going all night. In the morning, a brief dousing ritual is performed, and ash is collected. We save the ash and add some to each new fire to create a sense of continuity.
There is, of course, a lot more detail and symbolism involved, drawing from shared readings and our growing internal culture. Some of the men have been present since the beginning, and the sense of meaning and depth becomes more powerful over time.
One of our members has told me that, in his words, what we do in the Order “fills the spot for religion” in his life, which was and is exactly my intent.
So, without saying anything that we don’t believe or saying that we know things which are unknowable, we have been successfully using the human technology of ritual to create a new religious culture and identity grounded in masculine virtue.
I have been careful not to create anything arbitrarily, and my aim is to continue to develop this culture and add elements to our Fire Ritual as well as new rituals organically as the need for them arises. He have already had men craft Solar Idealist wedding vows and incorporate them into a ceremony. As we expand, we will find ways to include wives and children into our culture.
We like to think of The Order of Fire as being something like The Freemasons—an organized fraternal Order with a shared set of rituals, beliefs, and common values.
In the absence of meaning and collective identity, we have chosen to create it.
Stay Solar ऋत
To find out more about The Order of Fire and apply to join our Order, visit:
