“Apollo Has Saved Us!”

Sovereign is he who is a god—or can be made to appear as one.Apollo stands without rival among the murals adorning the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Royal blue backgrounds offset the ivory skin of the muscled youthful figure and his golden hair, armament, clothing, chariot, and lyre. One mural depicts Apollo astride a quadriga attended by a company of lithe young men, the Hours, aloft in the air around him. Another exhibits Apollo, characteristic lyre in hand, with a ring of maidens, the Muses, dancing around him. Designed by John Singer Sargent, the murals stand as testament to the aesthetic, masculine, and racial commitments of interwar American elites.1Classical masculinities perpetually tempt.2 Our radical contemporaries are not immune to desires to contest their meaning and appropriate their prestige—although rarely, as analyzed here, in religion.3 Sargent's neo-classical Apollo appears prominently on the masthead of the Apollonian Transmission, website of the pseudonymous mythographer Mark Brahmin, a leading religious thinker in the alt-right, the most prominent radical right movement in twenty-first-century America.4 Although ideologically in flux, the alt-right fuses together twentieth-century American white nationalism—including an occluded tradition of American Aryanism—and European New Right (ENR) thought with a contemporary gender politics designed to appeal especially to young white men.5 For Brahmin, a figure representative of broader religious debates and developments on the radical right, the Greco-Roman god Apollo shines forth as a racial and masculine exemplar for young "Aryan" men, an august guide to global ambition and metapolitical warfare.6Religion the American radical right has long found fraught.7 Many clung to Christianity.8 Others rejected that path and sought revivals of Norse and Germanic religion.9 We find scions of both trends on the alt-right, but neo-pagan revivalism appears ascendant. Influenced by ENR thought, the alt-right sees a void at the heart of Western civilization, a void recognized since Nietzsche: the Christian god declined and died—or was killed. How does one deity replace another? How has a classical Greco-Roman god like Apollo come to signify religious aspirations in a twenty-first-century radical movement in America?Brahmin lionizes Greco-Roman religion, a marked shift for the radical right.10 Despite the ostentatious classical aesthetics of interwar fascist movements and regimes, attempts to reforge lived forms of Greco-Roman religion are exceedingly rare—and even rarer among neo-fascists, who tend to possess far less classical awareness than did interwar rightwing elites and intellectuals.11 It must be admitted that Brahmin values classical religion only insofar as it inspires new religious forms synthesizing Aryan racism, metapolitics, and, above all, masculinity. This masculinist religious turn must be understood in light of the gender politics inaugurated by the alt-right: a resolute focus on men and masculinity, openly named and contested, as key sites of contemporary political struggle.12 In terms of Western masculinities, for which the first rule of masculinity has long been not to talk about masculinity, one cannot overstate the magnitude of this shift.13 But what does it bode for radical religion?The present enquiry considers Apolloism, Brahmin's name for his religion, as a racial and gendered phenomenon revealing key shifts in contemporary radicalism. Apolloism represents a palingenetic ultramasculinism concerned with regenerating not individual nation-states—as in the palingenetic ultranationalism often seen among fascists—but the spheres of the male body, elite masculinities, and global cyberspaces like the manosphere.14 At the core of the religion, Brahmin erects a Greco-Roman figure of Apollo as racial and masculine archetype, a privileged signifier: the perpetual youth, patron of young men and the forces of renewal they embody. Adherents to this religion are meant to forge religious Männerbünde: elite male groups of cultural critics and creators, metapolitical warriors. Their goal? The overthrow of "Saturn"—representative of perceived dysgenic, anti-Aryan forces in religion, politics, and society—followed by the establishment of a Nordicist "eugenic cult" and the erection of Apollonian temples and idols "in every Aryan land, current or future, from Iceland, to the Republic of Congo, to China, to the remotest extraterrestrial planetary colonies."15Tempting it is to discount a figure like Brahmin and to consider his work simply an outré appropriation of classical religion. But for several years Brahmin closely collaborated with Richard Spencer, ostensible founder of the alt-right.16 Brahmin's writings and videos appear under the banner of the National Policy Institute (NPI) and Radix journal, whereas Washington Summit Publishers look to publish his work in book form; Spencer heads all three. Although his thought is often abstruse, Brahmin, like many alt-right figures, consistently relates his ideas to crises central to global populism, oft-perceived as the most likely vector for radical right ideas to go mainstream.17 Such concerns are sharpened into perceived crises for young white men in particular, a phenomenon seen also in Europe.18 Even in calling for a Greco-Roman religious revival and lionizing Aryan men, Brahmin is not alone: the rise of "Bronze Age Pervert" (BAP), a prominent cyberspace figure and self-published author who has come to the attention of more mainstream conservative thinkers, is a telling parallel.19 Such figures and their online epigones celebrate Apollo in several of his aspects—archaic to late antique, from eternal ephebe to sun god—latest in a long line of modern engagements with Apollo, some stridently racial.20 We will consider such parallels in the conclusion. Intervening sections have other foci. What does Brahmin mean by religion? By masculinity? What scholarly tools help make sense of this religious turn in the radical right? In the end, how are we to understand the spaces, the spheres, of radical religion: where does it develop—and what new spaces may it yet constitute?21Given that contemporary radical religion is, in the case of Apolloism, so heavily focused on masculinity and so markedly political, it can be analyzed utilizing leading methodologies in the study of gender and political thought. In analyzing gender, I work primarily in the critical discipline of masculinity studies which conceptualizes masculinity as a field encompassing almost innumerable masculinities, imagined or lived, which highly differ across cultures and within a culture over time.22 In analyzing Brahmin as a thinker, I utilize the contextual methodology of intellectual historians J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner: in effect, writing a history of contemporary radical right thought.23 The two methodologies work productively when linked. With an eye towards masculinity, contextual methods reveal how gendered thought and discourse are to be understood as taking place within complex fields of meaning in which masculinity is constituted and contested. In contextualist analysis, earlier thinkers, discourses, practices, and organizational modes help make sense of the targets Brahmin has in sight—in terms of both opposition and cooption—and thereby the political change he seeks to effect. In short, I analyze Apolloism as a self-conscious intervention in preexisting spheres (racial, gendered, and religious).24As we will see, one challenge facing analysts of the contemporary radical right springs from its metapolitical nature. What is metapolitics? Scholars correctly characterize it as "cultural battle."25 But what counts as culture? For guidance, I turn to the theory of Peter Sloterdijk, which, it can be argued, is the most ambitious and innovative culture-philosophical methodology available at the present time.26 The goal is to enable analytical work at several levels, including how radical religion functions as culture and how radical metapolitics aim to influence culture in the future. How is radical religion a form of cultural combat? Apolloism differs markedly from earlier radical right religions in that cyberspace is its primary site of activity: the whole point of the religion is the metapolitical contestation of culture, and cyberspace is a—perhaps the—key cultural space today. Since at least the 1990s, racist religions had used online mediums to distribute newsletters, acquire and share hard-to-access information, organize nononline activities, and exchange messages of solidarity (even mutual care).27 But shaping cyberspace was not (and never imagined as someday being) the point of their religions. And although this shift may partly be due to generational turnover—as younger "digital natives" take on greater roles within the radical right—the emphasis here is upon Brahmin's metapolitical strategy to contest cyberspace as a key cultural realm, a strategic intention he shares with figures like BAP.28Sloterdijk's spatial, "sphereological" method helps make sense of three features of radical religion, each considered in the following sections. First, radical religion takes shape in identifiable spaces: online cyberspaces, for instance, especially the uniquely gendered—and tellingly spheric—spaces of the manosphere, a realm roiled by discourses of crisis for men and masculinity. Sloterdijk terms such discursive spheres "phonotopes." Apolloism is both a religion incubated in the manosphere and one centrally concerned with what Sloterdijk terms "media-theoretic" power. Apolloism consists of neither rite nor worship but of cultural contestation and creation—a religion concerned with several gods, but one in particular: Apollo, lord of the lyre, poetry, and the Muses. A media-theoretic god, even the lord of cyberspace? Second, as conceptualized by Brahmin, Apolloism responds to the perceived catastrophic decline of the Aryan race across the globe: having fallen from the heights of global empire to demographic displacement in the European homelands, spheres once thought untouchable. Imperial pasts haunt the present. Predecessors call forth in judgment, demanding vindication—Sloterdijk sees such forces as key to "theotopes," the spheres of gods, ancestors, and icons. Third, studied contextually, Apolloism is meant to function through Männerbünde: elite male groups, bound by practices like initiation, which relentlessly pursue specific cultural and political goals under dangerous conditions and high degrees of stress; Sloterdijk terms them, in a notably gendered formulation, "phallotopes." Apolloism aspires not only to reverse the fortunes of the Aryan race but to launch its conquest of the globe—a conquest meant to surpass that of the European and American empires, taking in hand even China—and its colonization of spheres beyond Earth.The present enquiry flags a crucial development on the contemporary radical right: if palingenetic ultranationalism has been considered a root of previous fascist phenomena, what will be the impact of an increased focus upon palingenetic ultramasculinism? Although still a regenerative project responsive to perceptions of decline and crisis, the spaces of rebirth shift significantly.29 The present work introduces a threefold set of interlinked methods—gendered, contextual, and spatial—useful for future analysis of this shift. The following sections parallel the intersections between Sloterdijk's thought and radical religion outlined above. After a preliminary section on the manosphere, the following three analyze the dual religious mission of Apolloism. On the one hand, Apolloism shifts radical masculinities toward religious metapolitics. On the other, it refocuses religion itself upon masculine icons—classical gods and racial ancestors—and masculine institutions like the Männerbund: a radical racial and masculinist religion.The first rule of masculinity is not to talk about masculinity. Among young men today, this is changing. A key incubator for masculinity-focused discourses is the manosphere, a cyberspace collective, mostly anonymous, ranging from blogs and podcasts to video livestreams and social media. Scholars have rightly understood the manosphere as a highly racialized cyberspace in which whiteness is normatively centered; as a site for Men's Rights Movement (MRM) and Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) communities; and as a source of "e-bile" directed at feminism and women.31 The present enquiry draws attention to both discursive and non-discursive features of the manosphere. Along with recognizing how it stands in the history of masculinity, scholars need to analyze the manosphere as a space—a spheric one at that. Such approaches lay the groundwork for understanding the manosphere as a site of radical religion. Apolloism is conditioned by, and in turn conditions, its milieu.What are the main contours of the manosphere? Analyzing the manosphere spatially, we find it is not one sphere but several—a kind of foam.32 The manosphere operates like a hot froth, bubbling over with multiple, distinct but interlocking and mutually constituting, spheres. Foams can be highly generative.33 Of course, the manosphere consists of spheres in no way connected with the radical right. But the manosphere is a key realm of the right's contemporary development, the foam from which new figures emerge. The manosphere and the contemporary radical right share a significant commonality: each expends immense effort cocooning members in shared perceptions of crisis. Sloterdijk characterizes such spheres as phonotopes continually—and highly repetitively—suffused with perceptions about the state of the community itself.34 The state of men today, as the state of the radical right, is perceived as low, beset by anxieties. Within the manosphere, anxieties include those of the men's rights and antifeminism movements, of course, but also less overtly ideological anxieties. For example, some spaces revolve around concerns about "hypergamy," the belief that women are in a highly dominant position in the sexual marketplace and deny sex to all but the most desirable men—now easily accessed and assessed through online dating platforms—resulting in 20 percent of men receiving the sexual attentions of 80 percent of women. The remaining 80 percent of men are left deeply frustrated. As a response to hypergamy, one finds figures like the "pick-up artist" (PUA), the man who masterfully convinces women to become his sexual partners through an elaborate, but codifiable and repeatable, "pick-up artistry" which proponents sell to their followers. Into this froth of shared perceptions and anxieties enters a figure like Brahmin.As indicated by the passage which begins this section, Brahmin sees sexual reproduction, in particular the competition for genetically desirable partners, as the sine qua non of art and religion. Brahmin claims to reveal a Semitic "Bride Gathering Cult," at work over several millennia, designed to undermine the Aryan race by demonizing Aryan men and stealing their women. How to convince women to reproduce with the "right" men—a radicalization of pick-up artistry? How to recognize and contest an undesirable distribution of reproductive partners—a radicalization of hypergamy anxieties? We begin to approach how the manosphere serves as a space for radical religion. Scholars have critiqued the "blue balls" theory of sexual frustration as explanatory of terrorism waged by young men outside the West.35 Within the West, however, Brahmin and some alt-right leaders openly affirm such a model: young white men today, including perhaps themselves, suffer a form of blue balls. How are such anxieties radicalized? How, in spatial terms, are related manospheres impregnated by the radical right?Brahmin constructs a religious space constituted, like a bubble in the midst of foam, by interaction with surrounding spheres. As contextualism emphasizes, audience shapes meaning. By interacting with several manospheres, Brahmin gives clues to intended audiences for his religion. Apolloism intersects with white-nationalist and alt-right spheres. Brahmin titles his first post, "Why Apolloism is 3.0"—twentieth-century white nationalism being the "1.0" movement, the alt-right itself a "2.0" version now deemed in need of a further upgrade through Brahmin's own "3.0" thinking.36 He signals engagement with other spheres in the opening of his first post: "The first obvious question is: why this LARPing? Apollo? Get real." The opening is framed in the online argot of young male "gamers," a demographic key to the alt-right—and invokes spaces incubating yet more anxieties around gender.37 Consistently derided in the alt-right as ineffective and unappealing play-acting, the term LARP (Live Action Role Playing) connotes a lack of manliness, a pitiable attempt to reenact popular role-playing games in political life. Brahmin seeks to counter concerns his project will itself be mere LARPing—the province of fantasists, escapists, and geeks. Whereas gaming spheres serve as sites for recruiting young men, the nature of certain gaming activities prompts masculine anxiety and shame. Norms arising from dominant masculinities constrain radical religion even as it challenges others.In terms of the broader political landscape, the manosphere—again, in its phonotopic functioning as a medium for communicating shared perceptions of the community and its well- or ill-being—also articulates anxieties shared by populism writ large: globalization, deindustrialization and outsourcing, declining standards of living, health crises and opiate addiction, elite malfeasance, interventionist wars—the list is long.38 In the manosphere, populist anxieties are rendered in a gendered key. Unlike much of populism and the manosphere, both of relatively recent vintage, the alt-right draws from longstanding traditions of radical right thought and practice. Its white-nationalist elements filter manosphere and populist anxieties through a racial lens. Whites face an increasingly future. is Such claims are in white nationalism and they stand as the of a mainstream tradition of that in the first of the in the work of and key figures in the and telling of spheric the manosphere as the for the is a more man who his has sexual with man in the even it and from serves as one of the most terms in the manosphere. As a term of it invokes a right to to his body, in particular as the of his or to his body, a man of the of it itself easily to racialized A his whole the of of all, from a white-nationalist of The term and in the manosphere and the popular culture more even taking on for instance, one now finds on and who their and for a is the who He and even and in racial Brahmin's of as a form of that of Richard in Spencer a on a from with the first is for It is that in the also the of the which was to other more and desirable author of the highly significant work for and for the broader masculine of the he and sought to a in American We the of Our the American that some may be of the by new counter such Brahmin his does Brahmin mean by religion? will a race of he By which may a he primarily metapolitical in In terms of Brahmin most closely European radical and who to metapolitics in strategic response to political the of radical right political engagement and or or engagement had also been articulates cultural is the of a culture, politics is the of in the of ENR thinker It is by some as a a cultural by the right. On the contemporary alt-right, the manosphere represents key for metapolitical to Brahmin, however, on both elite and popular primarily in In to with European and from and to and by who has a in is as the of the American New is not only if by we mean on of an movement following ENR thinker metapolitics a and and of course, certain But at popular and populist audiences are more across radical right National by a on the crises of the white and of by and The Right by stridently racist and the to the the radical right a of metapolitical Although from populist radical right metapolitics through race and religion, Brahmin this his on a Greco-Roman masculinist religion, with of from the populist conceptualizes religion as or Brahmin who although also to other modern of from through the consists in or each through a set of and Brahmin claims to a new a method for in a and of the method of the of so as to Semitic or from Aryan Brahmin to how the race as a whole is or through religion. metapolitics are not to be but through a be an no of or are In they are Apollo, in to and the gods that are from including is a of and we find the Apollo of the young in racial and the project Brahmin considers to be a to a classical sense of It in a new metapolitical a new the fields of analysis, art analysis and studies is a of In a they are In a Brahmin white-nationalist religious racial as a of an Brahmin's elite is to culture, for culture shapes the and reproductive of most women and men and has fallen into Such is seen in popular culture, including and but also in and even religions like that of he Brahmin's metapolitical are to launch a the groundwork for perhaps metapolitical of contemporary white masculinity is and men find in crisis they have the most of contemporary media. aim at that attempt to religion, and art as Brahmin contemporary white men for of or understanding of that to analyze example, as white or a once made by Brahmin considers all attempts to for racial to be is a "Bride Gathering for anti-Aryan Many of Brahmin's closely the Christian religious of his an Aryan as he challenges and like and He a threefold of contemporary white First, they are to its meaning and and to the methods by which it Second, they work in as without to a community of effort shared Third, they are about the state of culture and their place within like other of the radical right, in an men to their as one of by who through a of religion, and men have been by a of which and especially the sense of the as racial demanding and through Such was seen in for instance, a religion deemed highly masculine by some and that had appeal among In Brahmin was a and form of masculinity for Aryan targets not only religions but also European religions. He white by Norse to it as yet designed to was by as most to a rival to Apollo, and he to Brahmin He Brahmin all European including have been and the the of Apollo is distinct from this and other religions have and must through religion as But contemporary Brahmin does not as having a place in the present. Brahmin's elite are not but and he not to but to like and J. who their Christian of a He in the future considered in the of radical thought, Brahmin several earlier radical Whereas like with the conservative and upon Germanic and modern as seen at in his own in On a is the of religion,