Imperium was not only the source and the attribute of the military command in Rome, but an axial prerogative, like the sword, the fasces and the sceptre, which, as such, represented the Axis of the world. It was originally connected to Lictorian fasces in ancient Roman monarchy, when, to take the kingship meant especially to be Rex et Pontifex, and so to act as a bridge between the visible ad the invisible, and especially as a firm pole.
Who took the Imperium held a numinous power that, like Mario Polia summing Julius Evola says “allows things and events to pass from the sphere of possibility to the one of existence, whether of victory in war or fertility, health or the ordered succession of seasons”.
The Auctoritas descended from the Imperium. They are closely related to the concept and function of the augere verb (augeo, es, auxi, auctum, augere) that means “to increase” (wealth, health, fertility, etc.), from which the word Augustus comes from, as Octavian proclaimed himself. Historiography considers Octavian as the founder of the Empire.
Augustus was in fact originally an adjective and it was written “Augusto Augurio Roma Condita”.
In what we would have defined as the foundation of the Empire, Augustus performed a sublime act by binding the traditions of the Urbs with the need to assume universal centrality. Almost inspired by the double-faced Janus, the adopted son of Julius Caesar was able to weld together indissolubly two different needs both looking for a centre. With the Consulate reform, which formally remained in force throughout all the age of the empire, and with the establishment of the figure of a Princeps, who was primarily a Tribune with expanded powers, he fulfilled Roman expectations. Meanwhile universal expectations were satisfied making this Princeps the Divus that ensured the sacred union of a world that was at the same time united
and diversified, in which all costumes, every god and even all laws enjoyed full freedom, provided they did not contradict the Ius.
Note, by the way, that Ius binds to the verb iubere (iubeo, es, Iussi, iussum iubere) that compared to imperare, indicates another meaning of commanding, to order, to dispose. This is the legislative wisdom that comes from the Imperium.
These are the peculiarities of the Roman Empire, of the attributes that historically precede it, as they were also present both in the Monarchy and in the Republic, and that distinguish it from all subsequent forms that were thereafter inspired even in the attributions of titles (i.e. Kaiser and Czar both come from Caesar). These are the characteristics that differentiate it totally from colonialism and imperialism, that have both the pretence to standardize everything, whereas the Empire, on the opposite, provides, protects and enhances peculiarities.
It does so from a religious, cultural, moral and even social point of view, as in the very fundament of the Empire there is the concept of Caesarism (or Augustan Tribunat), which is based on the relationship between the tribunitian Leader, the Emperor, and the People and on the defence of the weakling.
Let us start from this point to respond to two needs of our time, an outer need and an inner one.
The exterior need is to find an “historical” way out of the current crisis of civilization and identity.
For “historical way out”, we mean that such a way out must necessarily be identified in the flow of our era and of its needs. Current involved dynamics are prevailing, what can be expressed with respect to them is certainly not a passive resistance or a nostalgic reminder of what was and is no more, but it is a urge for action to force a change of sign and meaning to events, if we believe that these do not go the right way.
The era of Globalization, of Globalism, of confusion, of the melting pot, of the transnational and the supra-national, is certainly destined to be the era of imperialism (or of those imperialisms that are connected to each other in relations of unity and mutual spin-off), sweeping away all types of freedom, all identities and all differences, and maybe, all of this in the name of the exaltation of differences that, however, are endorsing each other in an ideal building made of a gelatinous moral conformism, both in the sense of mores, costumes, and in the stiffness of ethics, from ethos, behaviour.
The only alternative? The Empire.
When we say Empire, we are not necessarily talking about a definite and precise political form, but of the retrieval of Imperial Axiality with all of its original prerogatives, without exception.
There is no other way to set an alternative to the technocratic and bureaucratic monster, of levelling federalism outside of a founding and law-creating thrust, which, in the name of Auctoritas and Imperium, may answer to the inexorable demands, imposed by the advent of the era of continental dimensions, of the air satellite Nomos, of the time zero, however, ensuring and enhancing all specificities.
How?
We are not necessarily suggesting the establishment of a proclaimed Empire, with an Emperor to be in charge of all of us, but rather the need to follow a guideline that may allow us to make our own Foundation, that is to say, to trace a Mundus and to set an Order.
To begin this venture, we must reconnect ourselves to the karst river that flows since 476 AD. That year, the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustus, gave the throne to Odoacer, known as King of the Heruli, but who was in fact the head of the Germanic tribe that held the secret of the runes, of which Odoacer was the Odowahkr, translated more or less as the grand master. Since then, and, the Imperium discreetly continued from that legacy, in what would have later become the Ghibelline Axis. This inextricably linked Rome and its protohistoric ancestor
Germany, with each other, assuming all the Imperial valences that, from Constantinople to St. Petersburg, from Vienna to Berlin, passing by the Napoleon’s Paris, would have been expressed through the centuries, in a new way, less boisterous but nevertheless very solid.
Therefore, rising the imperial Axis means to know and to recognize the prehistoric and historical links between the poles of Europe, so that they can develop at the same time in conjunction and separately.
From such knowledge and such recognition comes the ability to unfailingly taking position, rejecting the particularistic quarrels of recurring small-minded chauvinisms who do the good of all sorts of imperialisms but not of our own power, our unity, our autonomy and our freedom.
An imperial and not imperialistic vision of Europe implies the willingness to pursue its power and to imagine its development in the east and in the south, without thereby loosing meaning. If it starts from the real awareness of the origins and roots in Myth, this concept also defines the limits of identity and affinity, it recognizes the contours of empathy and of antipathy, which cannot be determined arbitrarily by the individual tastes of the atomized ego, but only by what it is, and that should be.
Starting from here, you can define and develop solutions for the escape from the contemporary crisis. This is not the place for the proposals – which we have advanced several times in detail and of which we never get tired of updating – but it is suitable to focus on fundamentals.
Thinking from an imperial point of view, means being focused on an inner axiality, which must always be present in us, and, therefore, animated by the idea of heroic transcendence, and not only heroic, of our individual identities that merge without melting, as Meister Eckhart would say. They do this at the top, but from above, in turn, form us, making us men and not consuming individuals. If this is the premise, and I honestly do not see other premises who do not remain prisoners of Chaos, we also know that imperial perspective means, autonomy,
freedom and corpus.
Qualities indicate the qualis, the “what”, the substance. All identities, social, cultural, anthropological, clanic, tribal, regional, national, express themselves in qualities or prerogatives. An imperial logic, for its own nature contrary to levelling, guarantees the protection of all individual qualities, not only it guarantees but exalts them. So both nationalism and regionalism, at this level, become compatible in addition to being protected. They do not survive in the most widespread connotation of today, which is to say the defence of economic privileges of one
respect another, neither in an escape, back into history for the fear of flying. They confirm themselves regenerated in the winning mentality of those who are selfconfident, confident in their own Lari and in their becoming, in a future that they harmoniously write with others while remaining themselves.
The imperial vision is on the other hand the only one that can guarantee national unity in a time in which the nation-state is dead, because it makes this national unity today adrift, something that, being rooted rather than institutionalized, does not need to be held together with glue or rebuilt as a golem with “Codes of citizenship”. Incidentally, in the post-Jacobin era, even regions, we mean those with a past and with qualities and not the mere administrative districts, can safely live with the idea of nation without feeling denied and without having to forcibly deny it. The map of Völkische Europa designed during the last century, because of a vision based on the essence and awareness even before the set of rules and regulations, now suddenly becomes compatible with the defence of nationality and with the pride of belonging. In imperial consciousness, each can be represented and recognized at different levels, neither cancelling, nor opposing each other. Regional, national and imperial are different sizes that complement each other, even within every one of us.
An inner axiality keeps connected all the rods of the fasces. At this level of awareness and of discipline there is no longer need of the proliferation of codes, regulations, prohibitions that constantly repeat themselves in the impossible attempt to hold together the atomized parts of a civilization in crisis of meaning.
The logic that keeps together the single parts is the same that unites the cives of the Empire: “maximum freedom, maximum responsibility”. Which invariably guarantees autonomy.
Autonomy means, literally, to give oneself one’s own law, something that would be harmful and ruinous, destined to fall in anarchy, in the absence of a strong cement and a precise awareness of the principles and of the values, of ethics, of value and spiritual hierarchies that those laws dictate in the proper manner.
Yet today, paradoxically, without autonomy, moral anarchy and injustice at all levels are inevitable.
In an era of conformism, when rules do not come more from the Ius, and they do not primarily aim at the law, but have been transformed into regulatory acts, which tend to uniformity, it is clear that they often threaten identities, freedoms, economies and properties, thereby only a way of being together that is precarious, artificial, neurotic and anxious. There are only two ways to respond: going gradually and inexorably towards ruin or organizing yourself, locally, as a class, as a social category. The imperial idea, not only conceptually but also historically, has favoured and can only encourage the autonomies provided with all their individual characteristics: autonomies that imperialism – raping the very name – rather means only as uniform cells, replicating a whole. The imperial idea dictates in fact the lines that permit local organizations and unions to grow in an organic and harmonious way, not atomized and atrophied as in Globalization. Also in this branch, we have a number of detailed proposals which were addressed elsewhere.
Finally, the Corpus. The organic society, which the imperial ideal is closely related to, is not made up of individuals and masses, or mass-individuals, nor formless piled-up social classes that draw their strength only by brute elements that evoke with negative spirit. It is made by the propension-to and the ability-at creating a Corpus, a “body”, from which the words corporation and corporatism, whose exact meaning is the opposite of what is commonly understood, as imposed as such by its opponents.
Everyone should not to be a self-built hypothesis – as suggested by the gender theory and that of the codes of citizenship – but an individual personality, closely linked to its heritage, and to its rightful role; not interpreted in purely functional sense, but as parts of a cosmic harmony. This is the alternative to all forms of materialistic commercialism existing or possible.
The imperial ideal cannot be articulated by joining the Imperium, the Auctoritas, the Quality and Autonomy, to the capacity of forming a social body, in the literal sense of Societas – set of allies – and participants to a Community of Organic Destiny. From top to bottom, from power to economy, from the territorial to the national, to the mainland, the imperial ideal exhibits, offers and wants to impose an accomplished and absolute alternative.
Shaping a political and law-making program based on these premises is not enough, because we live in the era of dis-association, of post-democracy and of the intertwining of powers and forms of anarchy.
It is no longer the time of the conquest of the State from which, with finally acquired powers, change society. Today is the era of confused and diffuse power and, of atomized areas, of social individualism, which extends to geographical particularities, of economic and lobby-type egoisms that confront themselves with the “strong powers”, bypassing formal powers. In addition, for those who do not play any role in society, that is to say the majority of people, the only possibility left is welfare and consumers forms of association.
To act in this reality we cannot possibly wait to conclude any sort of electoral ascent but we must do it in everyday life, without hesitation. It should always be acted, anywhere, at any level, to order it and organize it, in order to create an autonomous power, that is always centred, able to withstand the all-levelling freedom-destroying powers. This can be done only imagining and acting as Imperial Units.
If the imperial idea will be successfully acquired and metabolised, the Invisible Empire will be our backbone and our guiding star and will allow us to act everywhere.
Tracing the furrow and defending it with the sword.
This leads us to the second need of our age: our inner-self.
The era of planetary levelling, damages, denies and suppresses freedom. It does so in the name of liberty, indeed of “the liberties”. Sexual and gender freedom, to which we should add genetic freedom, despite the declared intentions, tend to standardize and moralize transgressions that, however, become codified instead of being free. In the meantime, by denying even genetic identities and opening the field to endless possibilities, their mentors intend to sever all ties with any root to the profound, this both from the side of the individual and of the entire community. The sons of liberal progressivism that had started with the “forbidden to forbid” motto are rather forbidding everything that has always been (from eros to smoking, from drinking alcohol to eating pork) to impose in its place a sort of mutant project.
From the fundamental point of view, this is the revolt of Utopia against Myth, from the point of view of symbols and of reference, this it is shapeless Tellurism that seeks its revenge against Olympic Virility. A real clash of civilizations – the only true one – of which we need to be aware.
The Empire is the axis of Myth and of Olympic Virility.
“The Myth – reminds us Ernst Jünger in the “Treaty of the Rebel” –is not past history it is a timeless reality that repeats itself in history”. Hence, we must start from here to change the sign of history.
However, we must be aware that we live under dictatorship, because it could not be otherwise, when the dances are led by those, who are utopically striving to deny the laws of the Cosmos.
“The majority – continues Jünger – can simultaneously act within the law and produce lawlessness. (…) The abuse may become more and more fiercer, and turn to real crimes against certain groups”.
On the other hand, this alleged normality, that today is called political correctness, cannot stand up if it does not identify “minorities, the non-conforming, to persecute: it goes without saying that anyone really standing out for hereditary qualities, on the one hand and talent on the other, is not exempt from this risk”.
Who fights for the norm, for justice and for truth, cannot therefore be unaware of being engaged in an unequal struggle against those who do not only dictates the rules of the game, but is constantly cheating.
And at this gaming table he can only loose. He can make quick, fleeting and effective raids but, cannot stand long. If he does so he must know that he will lose the stake, as in Kipling’s “If” he shall have to “start again at beginnings – And never breathe a word about the loss”.
The first freedom and the first autonomy, the first power and the first might, remain in not playing the game. Do not depend, morally, economically or psychologically, from the needs induced by the Leviathan and do not to be mesmerized by his induced fears. This is the only, inevitable, premise for a liberating act of re-foundation.
The only chance that the Imperial Rebel has to prevail, lies primarily in his ability to remain untouched by all forms of flattery and by all threats, not to get lost when he engages in confrontations, not to feel attracted in speaking the language or making gestures of those who are not like him. He must, Augustinianly, know how to be in this world but, without being of this world.
As Jünger suggests, he has to “pass to the forest” or, more precisely, and still further, be able to be himself the woods in the middle of the city.
However, you cannot go to the woods, and even less, be the woods themselves, if you have not recovered the proudness within yourself, if the roots that allow the stem to stand up straight have not been rediscovered yet.
Imperium – which is interior axiality before anything else – is precisely what allows this to happen.
This is the reason why the imperial answer, which will be popular and common, shall be born as an elitist answer, but coming from an open elite, generous, and self-giving.
Again Jünger: “There will be then elites that will battle for a new freedom – the battle that demands great sacrifices and demands an interpretation that must not be less of their dignity.’
They should in particular be aware that “there is no turning back towards the Myth; the Myth is met again when the very foundations of time waver from the ground, under the threat of an extreme danger.”
Imperium, Hic et Nunc: per assicurare l’avvenire alla nostra gente, alle nostre nazioni, alle nostre regioni, alla nostra Europa e per essere liberi, come gli uomini della foresta e i cavalieri erranti.
Ernst Jünger also calls us to be always active and present “The motto of the Rebel is “Hic et Nunc” – being the Rebel a man of free and independent action.”
Hic et Nunc, here and now. These two words mean Imperium and guarantee, if we live up to them, our freedom. Although if being free, now, is no longer a right but a difficult task, more and more less accepted by people, but it is a commitment that we must take on our shoulders, if only this should be for loyalty to our ancestors and to our descendants, to whom we have to return both freedom as well as the dignity.
Imperium, Hic et Nunc: to ensure the future of our people, our nations, our regions, our Europe and to be free, like the men of the forest and knights errant.
Gabriele Adinolfi