Small and White, Clean and Bright
November 21, 2008 
10 Comments
We think the edelweiss flower is an ideal symbol for our race and the various movements seeking to protect it. The word edelweiss is German for “noble-white,” and the lovely, medicinal flower that bears its name grows high in the Alps. Like our race, the flower is beautiful, delicate, and exceedingly rare. In fact, it is illegal to pick the flower in about a dozen countries. Surely, if there are laws to protect flowers, laws to protect our race should also be reinstated. As our Lord said, we are worth more than the flowers (Luke 12:28).
It could even be argued that the legend of the Ice Queen has particular relevance.
The Ice Queen lived high in the Alps, so the story goes. Her face was white as snow and hauntingly beautiful. Her melodious song lured many shepherds when they heard it in the mountains. But the queen had a heart of ice, and when she tired of the hapless shepherds, the gnomes who served her tossed the men off the cliff to their deaths. Thus she endured through the long ages until a shepherd, lured by her voice, came to love her, and she to love him, though there was nothing especially noteworthy about him. He sat beside her throne for days on end, in awe of her song.
The gnomes grew jealous, fearing that the queen would marry the shepherd, and conspiring against him, threw him headlong into the valley below, where his heart burst asunder. Seeing this, for the first and last time, the eyes of the Ice Queen warmed. Her heart melted a little and a single teardrop fell from her eternally beautiful, eternally sad cheek. Her tear became the edelweiss, the most beautiful flower of the Alps.
Perhaps one way of understanding this story is that the queen represents the great mass of our people, now in whoredom but with dreams of becoming chaste. The gnomes are hook-nosed parasites who ensure that the queen will never know love. The false shepherds are businessmen and politicians and charismatic clergymen who come to woo her. The true shepherd is a “racist” who calls her his sister and his bride, and unshackles her before succumbing to the treachery of those who are damned by God and men. The flower is all that remains of the tragedy, and it is a bittersweet reminder of our greatest hopes and fears.
It is a very interesting detail that there was nothing especially noteworthy about the true shepherd. A couple of weeks ago, I had a fascinating conversation with Yggdrasil about the great painters of Christendom and how they chose quite ordinary-looking girls for their portraits. The subjects are very often nude and hold children in their arms, which illustrates what sets woman above every other creature. As all art seeks to think God’s thoughts after Him and depicts, in some sense, the intersection of heaven and earth, this was a way of praising God for blessing woman with the holiest of all vocations. As we know, all of this has been lost to us. Our children are cut off from their roots, woman is cut off from the lordship of man, man is alienated from his fathers, and we are all lost in the dark, and ashamed to show our faces in the light, because we have rejected God’s holy law, our only hope for abundant life, as something profane.
I think Tolkien had the edelweiss in mind when he wrote of the simbelmynë that grows on the tombs of the kings of Rohan. Simbelmynë, the “bright eyes in the grass,” must grow “where dead men rest,” as Gandalf said, because the flower symbolizes longevity and succession: life from the dead. (The word simbelmynë is translated “evermind.”) This fits nicely with the broader racial and Christian subtext of The Lord of the Rings.
It should be obvious that self-loathing race-mixers bereft of identity will never bind themselves to Christ. As John Calvin said, knowledge of self is a necessary prerequisite for knowledge of Christ. Europeans trusted in Christ because they first knew who they were. The Resurrection confirmed every dream they had for themselves and their children. As our friend from Cambria puts it, theirs was an Hebraic relationship to Christ, who was both their King and their kin. But as nations fall under judgment and mix themselves with those who could not identify their own fathers in a line-up, the genetic memory that Lincoln said strikes mystic chords is lost. Faith is lost because it is abstracted to death. The purpose of life is then to kill or be killed. There is no pilgrimage to the Celestial City. No art, theology, science, or law. There is only death.
The thesis of Calvin to which you refer is the starting point of his Institutes. To quote: “Nearly all the wisdom we possess…consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But, while joined by many bonds, which one precedes and brings forth the other is not easy to discern. In the first place, no one can look upon himself without immediately turning his thoughts to the contemplation of God, in whom he ‘lives and moves’ [Acts 17:28].” In the following paragraph, Calvin reiterates, “Again, it is certain that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God’s face, and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinize himself.” So, I think your synopsis of Calvin is a bit misstated. He did not really assert that knowledge of self is a “prerequisite” of achieving knowledge of God. More accurately, he asserted that knowledge of self and knowledge of God are involved in one another. But, he came more nearly to state the opposite of what you have said, as he said that, “man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God’s face…” Your overall point, of course, has a lot of merit. After all, Paul said that God separated the nations by boundaries so that they might grope for Him and find Him. However, as Creator and therefore Determiner of all reality, He must have first place in everything. So, it overstates the case, I think, to conclude that, “Europeans trusted in Christ because they first knew who they were.” It would come nearer to what Calvin was trying to say if we were to exactly reverse that statement.
We stand corrected, Scott, and thanks for your always helpful input. It was not wise to use the word “prerequisite.” We think the idea that Calvin tried to convey on page one of book one of his masterpiece was a chicken-and-egg relationship between knowledge of God and knowledge of self.
Calvin’s heading: “Without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God.” That sounds like a prerequisite, but he then writes, “as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other.”
Calvin focuses mainly on the knowledge of self in its negative aspect, that “we cannot aspire to Him in earnest until we have begun to be displeased with ourselves.” This is certainly true, but it seems that more could be said about how the gift of faith resonates with our natural affections. In other words, those who are entirely given over to depravity, such as Aztecs who sacrifice their own children, are unlikely to ever trust in Christ because they are even more depraved than animals. Then you have the Japanese, who do possess natural affections (reverence for ancestors and posterity) but do not believe. Then you have the ancient Hebrews, who possessed both the covenant and natural affections, and still fell away. “He came to His own and His own did not receive Him.” So it’s understandable that Calvin would focus on the fact that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.”
Beautiful tale and race; ugly flower.
Well, it grows in very harsh conditions (unlike us), so it has to be a tough little thing. It could never be as pretty as a rose, but we should aspire to be far more hardy than the delicate rose. There is too much pestilence in the garden.
As for our salvation not being dependent on the flesh, circumcision came to mind. As is also true of baptism, circumcision signifies being born into the covenant, not attaining to it by any human means. As Rushdoony taught, it also signifies that the parents “cut off” all hope that natural generation can save the child. He is to be saved by regeneration, an act of God.
Quoted from a quote. Carrel. Man the Unknown.
Someone recently recommended that article, and so it was fresh in my mind.
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So we don’t want to become too hardy if our delicate nature is our strength (inclining us towards discipline perhaps).
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But yea, we’ve grown soft. We need to become aware of the ever present dangers of this world to our people, and to our souls – though Jewish paranoia isn’t quite what I mean :p
Interesting analogy!
You f—- retard people. Grow up. Race doesn’t exist! There is no genetic, cellular or blood foundations for human diversity. Race exists only as a concept… on the minds of small and idiot people,
Don’t ever equate anything Tolkien did with your bull. He had the anemone in mind. English flower. Tolkien was a linguist and lover of all cultures! Direct quote: “I should regret giving any colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine.”
I’d gladly give up “unscientific race-doctrine” if I could, in exchange, have Tolkien’s keen hatred of contemporary, egalitarian society.
Point of fact: no educated racial-nationalist today (that I know of) holds to the old scientific racialism of the Madison Grant sort. Their ideals have grown along with the complexities of popular evolutionary myths.
So, your association of this blog with Tolkien’s “pernicious and unscientific race-doctrines” is what we educated Europeans call a: “straw-man caricature.”
The heart of S/W/B and the heart of Tolkien are closely aligned.
Your ilk, on the other-hand, (if I’m in right in suspecting you to be an outraged modernist) are closer to the men of the South who betrayed their oaths to Gondor.
I couldn’t have said it better myself, Shotgun.