Vortex of Steel: Ernst Jünger’s ‘The Worker’ and Wyndham Lewis’s ‘A Battery Shelled’

A Battery Shelled and Der Arbeiter drew upon their creators’ wartime experiences, Jünger having served in the 73rd Hanoverian Regiment, Lewis with the Royal Garrison Artillery. Their existential outlooks were originally as polarised as their military loyalties, Jünger emphasising modern warfare’s regenerative, adventurous, almost mystical elements (earning himself a reputation as the ‘anti-Remarque’) while Lewis’s tongue was firmly in his cheek when he observed there was ‘nothing so romantic as war’. A neo-Classicist and ‘not a romantic’, Lewis took romance to be ‘the enemy of beauty’, claiming it to be ‘most unfortunate’ that, for the majority of men, ‘that hag, War, carries it every time over Helen of Troy’.[3] Quite unlike the steel- cold prose of The Worker, Lewis’s own post war reflections in Blasting and Bombardiering were derided by Anthony Burgess as reading like a ‘gor-blimied police report’ with the strange yoking of the ‘Allo-allo-allo-what’s-all-this-‘ere to the intellectual and the exquisite painter’ making for such exasperating reading.[4] Such a jibe could not be made of A Battery Shelled: as Colin Wilson said, while Lewis wrote with the technique of Daumier, he painted like Blake or Henri Rousseau.[5]

Lewis’s role as Bombardier (bomb aimer) was well suited to his detached painterly sensibility, although he was not quite a Jüngerian “aesthetician of carnage”, witnessing the slaughter as if ‘in the loge of a theatre’6— in fact, to Lewis, war looked like nothing so much as bad art. He wrote to Ezra Pound: ‘I stumbled into one (of two) with his head blown off so that his neck, level with the collar of his tunic, reminded you of sheep in butchers’ shops, or a French salon painting of a Moroccan headsman’.[7] For Lewis, war demanded a new art lest the ‘harsh dream that the soldier has dreamed – the barbaric nightmare’ be effaced by ‘some sort of cosy sun tinting the edges of decorous lives’.[8] He felt art had a duty to confront this apocalyptic technological acceleration which could either transform life and consciousness for the better or, alternatively, beget a second mechanised slaughter and render Britain a dehumanised dystopia (a ‘methodist’s version of Russia’). German art met this challenge through Otto Dix’s Neue Sachlichkeit, but British art duly turned to its prodigal son: Vorticism.

The Vorticist movement, Lewis said, was ‘discipline preliminary to the complete abandonment of the naturalism we inherited from the Greeks’, combining machine- derived metallic hues and abrupt angularities with rigid geometries inspired by Byzantine, Primitive and Assyrian art.[9] For a painter who stressed the ‘deadness [of nature]’ as ‘essential’ to successful art, and having previously tried ‘totally to eliminate… all reference to nature’ from his work, we may be surprised to find A Battery Shelled in fact ‘conceded Nature’ and shunned Vorticism’s ‘vexing diagrams’, aiming ‘to do with a pencil and brush’ what ‘Tchekov or Stendahl did in their books’.[10] But this was no Romantic lamentation of war’s perversion of nature, rather, A Battery Shelled posits that modern warfare has uncovered or unleashed Nature’s latent elementary forces.

Emphasising this point was Lewis’s referencing of Ogata Korin’s Waves around Matushima (he had long believed that the example set by Classical Orient art could save the West from the naturalistic mistakes of the Greeks).[11] The ‘scalloped plumes’ of the shelled battery unit supplant Matushima’s clouds, islands of rock become outcrops of corrugated iron, and Lewis himself described the heavy guns as being ‘of exactly the same importance, and in exact the same category, as a wave on a screen by Korin…’.[12] Lewis’s painterly inversion matches Jünger’s linguistic one: artillery barrages become a ‘storm of iron’ (Eisenhagel), exploding shells a ‘hurricane of fire’ (Feuerorkan), and airplanes drop bombs like a ‘vulture’ (Aasvogel) over enemy troops resembling a ‘swarm of bees’(Bienenschwarm).[13][14]

This metamorphosis of romantic space into the elemental drew a ‘broad, red final line’ under the epoch of classical battles, those ‘primitive combats’ where, in Lewis’s words, ‘individual intelligence, valour and endurance [still] played a more conspicuous part in the result’.[15] Jünger spoke of the newly mechanised soldier as a ‘raging storm, the tossing sea, and the roaring thunder… he has melted into everything’, just as Lewis presents his background figures as all-too-seamlessly integrated with technologised nature, barely contrasting to Korin’s unpopulated screen. There appears to be something almost comic about these figures enveloped by Jünger’s ‘battles of materiel (Materialschlachten), and indeed for Lewis the ‘root of the Comic’ was found in the sensations resulting from the observation of a ‘thing’ (that is, persons) behaving as though they were alive (his theory was the reverse of Bergon’s that laughter arose from persons behaving as though they were things, Bergson seemingly not having the courage of his own philosophical position).[16][17] As for the figures’ ritualistic “dance”, Lewis is showing that, paradoxically, the more savage one is, the more one is dominated by mechanism. He suggests the danger with modern technology is that in its ‘vulgarised, industrially applied variety’ it dominates the globe as it did the battlefield, imposing a deterministic, mechanistic “progress” that renders man ‘the changed’ but ‘not enough the changers’.[18]

A response, to paraphrase Evola’s summary of Jünger’s Der Arbeiter, is that as the individual soldier was incapable of mastering these forces a new human type had to be forged, one capable of mastering the machine ‘spiritually as well as physically’.[19] This figure is none other than the Worker. The Worker developed out of the Solider between the world wars, and the intensification of automation toward the depths of A Battery Shelled’s canvas foreshadows this trajectory. Whereas the Soldier was the passive object of technology’s dominion (Lewis notes his foreground figures only ‘hint at metal’),20 the Worker is an ‘active principle’ deployed in an effort to ‘pervade and master the universe in a new manner… to command forces that none have ever before unleashed’.[21] If the Soldier was a ‘sacrificial victim’ to the Great War’s ‘vast wastelands of fire’,[22] then the Worker would wield this very earth-fire to establish what Evola termed a ‘heroic sense of reality’ supplanting hedonism and the pursuit of happiness as the chief driving forces of life.[23]

The Worker’s goal is neither economic nor political, then, but quasi-mythic: Jünger declared the epoch of gods to be over, and that we were entering the age of the titans.[24] The transformation of Europe’s warring industrial nations into volcanic forces, the most striking sign of the dawn of the age of labor (Arbeitszeitalter), meant that there would soon be ‘no movement—be it that of the homeworker at her sewing machine—without at least indirect use for the battlefield’. A Battery Shelled’s liquified geometric landscape visualises this sacrificing of the earth to ‘Faustian thinking in energies’, what Spengler termed the ‘working earth’.[25] Heidegger, who praised Jünger as the only genuine continuer of Nietzsche, likewise observed that the Worker carried “active nihilism” to a global scale, utilising technology as a centrifuge to drive the Will to Power into every reach of life to reshape the decadent, materialistic “bourgeois” Zivilisation which had hitherto rendered the Modern embrace of the machine one of “passive nihilism”. Through the figure of the Worker, Jünger recognised that the machine could be incorporated Nietzsche’s attack on Darwinism, that life is ‘not only a merciless struggle for survival’ but possesses ‘a will to higher and deeper goals’.[26]

The bottom left figure in the painting indicates Lewis’s renunciation of this logic, turning away from the battlefield and out of frame with a look that recalls T.S. Eliot’s line ‘after such knowledge, what forgiveness?’. Contra Jünger, Lewis took Darwin as just the ‘generalising research-student’, with Nietzsche being the ‘philosopher of Darwinism’ whose assault on the materialistic ‘struggle for existence’ simply substituted the ‘struggle for power’ in its place.[27] The surplus energy the machine wrests from Darwin’s evolutionary struggle is not therefore reinvested in a ‘will to invention, to beauty, significance and so forth’, as Lewis felt it should be,[28] but instead gets recycled into the very struggle it outstrips, into one indiscriminate system of‘power-mindedness’. Lewis felt any criticism of Nietzsche must rest on this point: that of his ‘suggested employment and utilisation of this superfluous energy to go on doing the same things that we should be doing without it’.[29] Thus, the spectre of relegated art haunts A Battery Shelled— not only Korin’s screen, but also Piero della Francesca’s Allegory with the Flagellation, where three figures dominate the foreground, markedly removed from the canonical scene. Although he never commented directly on A Battery Shelled, Jünger significantly noted that Lewis’s The Surrender of Barcelona appeared to suggest a world having ‘little to do with art; it seems, rather, that the field of art has been abandoned, or is even in danger’.[30]

For Heidegger (who saw Jünger’s “Nietzschean project” as the final realisation of the Will to Power) this was in fact the danger of dangers. Like Lewis, Heidegger judged the Worker’s ‘total mobilisation’ of life to be a circular ‘empowering of power’ that recognised nothing outside itself, an assessment bound up with his critique of the ‘enframing’ aspect of modern technology as disrupting technology’s ancient harmony with art. Rather than being a bringing-forth in the sense of poiesis or creative cultivation (as in the ancient Greek understanding of techne) modern technology is a challenging-forth, a revealing which conceals the poetic or saving mode of revealing, as the hydroelectric dam on the Rhine overrides the river’s meaning from that of Holderlin’s poem and turns it into an energy reserve. The extension of this logic is that by constructing a man-made satellite environment around the planet man has abolished nature and converted it into something to be programmed, establishing a planetary totality at the expense of psychic and collective individuation. Instead, then, of a Faustian striving toward infinite progress, the Worker’s acceleration of the techno-scientific drive (a process which began, according to Mailer, when Christ forgave the sons for the sins of the father, encouraging men to experiment with nature without fear of punishment)[31] has quite literally ‘enframed’ nature and humanity in a structurally entropic system. To quote Harlot (the CIA Chief in Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost): ‘[the Devil] loves circular, obsessive activity. Entropy is his meat. When the world becomes a pendulum, he will inhabit the throne’.[32]

Heidegger traced the roots of this nihilistic trajectory beyond the embryonic hours of Christianity, back to the dawn of Philosophy when the Greeks split Being and thought, placing ideas between man and Being and then defining truth as that which corresponded between them. The essence of technology, based on a relationship between technology and the world, is an expression of this nihilism and modern technology its pinnacle.[33] McLuhan reasons that Lewis’s work becomes ever more valuable the farther along this apocalyptic trajectory we tread, for he alone had the courage to push this unworldly mind-body dualism to the ‘logical point of the extinction of humanism and personality’.[34] For Heidegger philosophy had utterly failed to confront such an eventuality, it too having been taken over by the sciences,[35] and he consequently declared ‘only a god can save us’.[36]

After the war, Jünger arrived at a similar conclusion, recognising that ‘all rationalism leads to mechanism, and every mechanism to torture as its logical consequence’.[37] Although he did not abandon the Worker as a collective figure, Jünger now personally advocated the aristocratic anarchism of the Anarch to protect one’s autonomy against the expansion of technocratic totalitarianisms which his earlier works had prefigured. This turning began with 1939’s On the Marble Cliffs, a story about two brothers whose contemplative life in a hermitage atop the marble cliffs is encroached upon by an unscrupulous demagogue named the Chief Ranger (a thinly veiled critique of the Third Reich). Jünger was influenced by his own brother, Friedrich George Jünger, whose treatise “The Failure Of Technology” analysed the ‘demoniacal’ destiny of the machine, sensing that rather than being antagonistic to bourgeois values, the machine was (as Lewis put it) on the side of the “thing”, not a ’differentiator’, like art, but an ‘identifier’ merging man into a ‘mutually devouring mass’. Jünger wrote that ‘only a miracle can save us from such whirlpools’, but stressed that a reprieve could be wrested at the eleventh hour from the ‘bowels of[the] great machine’ should man step out of the ‘lifeless numbers’ to extend a helping hand to others and thereby reveal his ‘native nobility’, enabling him to emerge from these ‘titanic realms’ adorned with the ‘jewels of a new freedom’.[38]

Jünger’s ‘magic nadir’ was presaged, centre right, in A Battery Shelled.[39] At the precise moment when ‘mechanism reveals its menacing nature’, at the ‘midpoint of the nihilistic process, the rock-bottom of the maelstrom’, we observe the little figures carefully bearing a wounded comrade into a dugout under the supervision of their officer.[40] The figures in this mini-scene transcend the mechanisation the painting’s convention otherwise imposes on them, and Heidegger designates a special term, Ereignis – the ‘event’ – to describe this sudden return of Being that flashes-forth (blitzen) at the moment of most ‘nothingness’. We could even speculate here upon what light, exactly, illuminates the face of the figure gazing in the direction of the automatons in question…

This mini-scene recalls Holderin’s ‘But where danger is, grows / The saving power also’, and Heidegger’s addendum that the saving power must be of a ‘higher essence than what is endangered’, though at the same time ‘kindred to it’.[41] The response to the nihilism that led to world war is not, therefore, to dominate or dispose of the machine but, as Jünger now proposes, to ‘integrate them into new orders of meaning’.[42] Even Lewis, who cautioned against the formlessness of life infiltrating art, nevertheless felt that conversely art had a role to play in transforming life and science for the better, to build in a creatively revolutionary manner a ‘new world of Reason’ that proceeds beyond ‘Abstract Man’ and seeks to make way for ‘higher human classifications which, owing to scientific method, men could ‘now attempt’. This dovetails with Heidegger’s premise that modernity could be redeemed by the original saving power of the Greek techne as a redemptive alternative to enframing, and he notes that the verb “to save” means more: “to save” is to fetch something home into its essence. Rather than seeking to dominate or exorcise the “demonic spirit” of technicity, the task, as Jorjani argues in Prometheism, is to consciously redirect the Promethean spectre animating this techno-scientific acceleration toward a more ‘constructive and empowering possession’.[43]

Heidegger believed that only in the same place where the modern technological world originated could we prepare for such a conversion (Umkehr) of it. He is not speaking of ‘Eastern experiences of the world’ but a new appropriation of the European tradition. This resonates with Lewis’s assessment that ‘Western science is all [the European] has to boast of’— having no ‘sacred books or mastery in religion’ he attempted through positive science to ‘reach the same heaven as the Asiatic did on other roads’, but this ‘great attempt of the European genius’ to rise ‘in its science to maturity and spiritual power’ was ‘interrupted by the financier[s]’ and terminated in the “nature” of World War One and the mechanised culture that followed. To overcome capitalism’s perversion, or inversion, of science, Lewis echoes Heidegger’s insinuation of a returning pagan god by urging an adoption of ‘deeper and more compelling emblems’ than so-called “Western” religion to represent our cause. Having confessed, prior to World War One, to being ‘one of the chief offenders in the matter of ‘all this horrible “inhuman” modernity’, Lewis now looks to retrieve the earliest European traditions predating natural science, to draw upon the spring of imagination pouring everywhere from the valleys of the Celtic Fringe:

It is not Nature, but they [The Moloch of Modern Ideas and its hierophants] that [are] our enemy. Nature is indeed our friend. . . We worship, if we worship, still the virgin-goddess, the stars on the ocean, the break-of-day: the natural magic that inspired our earliest beliefs.[44]

What Lewis is envisaging is a productive harmony between the pagan and artist sensibilities, both being ‘on the side of life’ (secular, externalised, spatializing) in contrast to the ‘religion of science’ (temporal, inward, and intoxicated with romantic destruction).[45] This is not a retreat into proto-mysticism, identified by Spengler as a final stage of cultural decline, but an entreatment for the future man-of-science to become a ‘transformed magician’ who creates a civilised substitute for magic, analogous to the power of art. This aligns with Colin Wilson’s prophecy that ‘magic was not the “science” of the past. It is the science of the future’[46] and with Henry Miller’s assertion that through the art of the future the ‘worship, investigation and subjugation of the machine’ would give way to the ‘lure of all that is truly occult’.[47]

Lewis’s 1942 painting Homage to Etty – a Lewisian ‘heaven of exterior forms’ – encapsulates this post-materialistic conception of technology, symbolising as it does a biomorphic Vorticism uniting the irreconcilable opposites of romanticism and anti-romanticism (the bathers were initially sketched as mechanistic figures, onto which Lewis grafted his newly-flowing lines). Nature is no less tamed than in A Battery Shelled, but whereas there it was a mechanical force, here it holds a more benign, even creative connotation.[48] Lewis always believed that nature only produces the ‘raw material of art’, rather than being art itself, so this volcanic tree is interpretable as the revived spirit of techne, where the European striving toward the spiritual finally flourishes through embracing the interdependency between artistic creation and natural process. Imagination has triumphed over imitation, and Lewis’s ‘European genius’ no longer undercuts itself by substituting technologically for nature, or imposing what the Cosmist Sergei Bulgakov termed a ‘shadowy, satanic world’ alongside the ‘given, created one’[49] (a phenomena encompassing everything from the mechanised warfare of A Battery Shelled to post-WWII Big Science institutions and impending developments such as artificial wombs). The painting thus reflects Schelling’s prescription for man’s future undertakings, including scientific ones:

A tree that draws strength, life, and substance into itself from the earth may hope to drive its topmost branches hanging with blossom right up to heaven. However, the thoughts of those who think from the beginning that they can separate themselves from nature, even when they are truly spiritually and mentally gifted, are only like those delicate threads that float in the air in late summer and that are as incapable of touching heaven as they are of being pulled to the ground by their own weight.[50]

Lewis finds the starkest manifestation of these themes in the field of architectonics: ‘projecting his tortuous, not yet oppressive, geometry, out upon the chaotic superstructures, being methodic where he can, in the teeth of natural disorder, man is seen at his best. He then produces something of intellectual as well as emotional value, which the unadulterated stark geometry of the Machine-Age precludes’.51 One thinks here of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, the epitome of “organic architecture”, which transmutes Homage to Etty’s themes into concrete, suggesting that the Heideggerian divorce between poiesis and modern technology could be overcome and modern technology function as an evolutionary supplement of nature rather than its enemy.[52] ‘Art is the science of the outside of things’, Lewis wrote, and these exemplars of a new techne aim to galvanise individual initiative and foment creativity, not impose ‘awestruck amazement’ as Hitler vowed when laying the foundation stone of Nuremberg’s Congress Hall. [53] They stand as embryonic templates for archeofuturistic societies, immersing themselves in the elemental qualities of ancient architecture not to mimic but, as Ralph Adams Cram said, to ‘achieve an adequate point of departure’. By contrast, the Nazi’s aping of Babylon, Karnak and of Rome, and Speer’s theory of Ruin Value, lead straight back to the entropy Harlot warned of, lured by the monumental grandeur of past cultures which ‘marked time… they were perfect examples of the obsessional… the Devil, you must never forget, is the most beautiful creature God ever made’.[54]

In the sequel to Der Arbeiter, 1959’s At the Time Wall, Jünger also predicted a less nihilistic and negentropic future for technology, defining it as ‘the form and beginning of a new spiritualisation of the earth in the closing stage of historical time’. Like Lewis’s allusion to the ‘Celtic Fringe’, Jünger believed the mythical would be ‘encountered again… in the presence of extreme danger’, and he describes modern man as standing in the opposite position to Herodotus when he ‘looked back from the dawn of history into the night of the myth, when the radiant light fell even upon the gods’. Our time, by contrast, is ‘history at midnight… the last hour has come: we are looking into a darkness in which the things to come show their counters… it is an hour of death but also of birth’.[55] As Gaia once induced the Titans to do battle with Olympian gods, so man is now involved in similar upheaval of the earth asserting itself: ‘the meaning of the earth is beginning to change… the geological structure is also changing, a change which man brings about as agent (subject) as well as instrument (object)’. In the era of A Battery Shelled and Der Arbeiter, the earth was a godless ground, elemental energies having been unleashed within which the Worker laboured frantically without direction. But now, as akin to Lewis’s architectural visions, Jünger foresees a post-historical order being established where the Worker creatively controls these chthonic forces.[56] Hence Jünger states we cannot even guess the ‘royal capitals, the cosmic metropolises in which the Worker will erect its thrones’.

This turning from the politics of Der Arbeiter to the metaphysics of At the Time Wall reflects a more, not less, radical shift in Jünger’s thought: rather than accelerating the technological drive, the Worker’ will now transform it. Evola, however, argued that such metaphysics were ‘whims’ and, in any case, the emergence of non-physical forces was still a ‘daemonic’ rather than ‘metaphysical’ event, thus without an actual ‘mutation’ — referring to the bioengineering of a new species — the future Worker would remain indistinguishable from the Marxian variety in ‘materialist and collectivist terms’.[57] Prefiguring transhumanism, Evola saw that the alarming conditions necessary for the Worker’s affirmation would no longer exist externally, as

in A Battery Shelled, but ‘in the form of internal acts of destruction and elementary forces in revolt against the current order’. Jünger had indeed foreseen that leaving the age of history would be ‘more fateful’ than departing the age of myth and possibly entail the sacrifice of ‘humanity itself’.[58] But for Jünger this passage had the potential to be a rebirth rather than a devolution, the ultimate transformation of Enlightenment “progressivism” from quantity to quality. Rather than begetting a hive- mind society of robots, this transition could, for example, involve the reengineering of man’s biology and psychology to endure long distance space voyages, in which case, the Worker’s task would align more with Promethean Russian Cosmism than the materialistic collectivism Evola alludes to.

Nikolai Fyodorov once stated (in a line that could have come from Der Arbeiter) that ‘the purpose of humanity is to change all that is natural, a free gift of nature, into what is created by work’ but added, significantly, that ‘outer space, expansion beyond the limits of the planet, demands precisely such radical change’.[59] Jünger states: ‘exploration of the cosmos is eminently the domain of the “Arbeiter”’, with space travel evidencing that the Worker has ‘attained to lordly rank… it is among his pleasure, similar to the nobleman’s indulging in the hunt, the king’s manner of making war or involving himself in architecture’.[60] Fyodorov provocatively envisaged a future where astronomy forms the union of all sciences, and architecture the union of all the arts, and he asked whether architecture would, in such a circumstance, be definable as the ‘application of a knowledge that is produced by astronomy’. [61] Enacting this task would be an epochal step in the gestalt of the Worker, wherein the poetic ability of art to project new worlds and define yet unrealised possibilities would not be concealed by his revolutionising of the earth (or cosmos) but in fact be validated by and function within it.[62]

This is an appropriate point on which to conclude, reconciling as it does Lewis’s ‘will to invention, beauty and significance’ with the now visionary realism of the Worker, who ‘connects and weaves’ this new techne on a cosmic scale ‘according to the way of an artist of craftsman’. It is a hard-won vision forged out of the mechanistic destruction of two world wars, but it is a vision which as yet only exists in embryo beyond the ‘time wall’. At this juncture, one recalls Spengler’s prognostication of a historic necessity to be accomplished ‘with the individual or against him’. To master technological progress and consciously steer it toward a society of ‘transformed magic’ and individual initiative rather than allowing the religion of science-for- science’s sake to run amok should not be seen as a merely defensive concern for the Lewisian artist or Jüngerian anarch. It should, instead, be viewed as an evolutionary opportunity. For, as Lewis himself said, what is genius but an excess of individuality?

Citations

1 Scruton, R. Music as an Art. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018.

2 Lewis, W. Blasting & Bombardiering, Oakland, University of California Press, 1937: 114.

3 Lewis, W. Blasting & Bombardiering. Oakland, University of California Press, 1937: 114.

4 Burgess, B. The Novel Now: A Student’s Guide to Contemporary Fiction. London: Faber, 1967.

5 Wilson, C. Existentially Speaking: Essays on the Philosophy and Literature. San Bernardino: Borgo Press, 1989.

6 Ernst Jünger, In Stahlgewittern. Stuttgart, 1960: 126
7 Materer, T, Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. New York: New Directions,

1985: 105

8 Lewis, W. The Men who will Paint Hell’, in Wyndham Lewis on Art. London, Thames and Hudson, 1969: 108.

9 Lewis, W. Wyndham Lewis the Artist from ‘Blast’ to Burlington House. London, Laidlaw and Laidlaw, 1939: 64.

10 Lewis, W. The Men who will Paint Hell’, in Wyndham Lewis on Art. London, Thames and Hudson, 1969: 105.

11 Edwards, P. ‘A Dark Insect Swarming’: Wyndham Lewis and Nature, 2015.
12 Lewis, W. The Caliph’s Design Architects! Where is Your Vortex?, ed. Paul Edwards. Santa Barbara: Black

Sparrow Press, 1986: 57.
13 Jünger, E. Storm of Steel (1929). London: Penguin.

14 Ohana, D. “Nietzsche and Ernst Jünger: From nihilism to totalitarianism”. History of European Ideas, 11(1-6), 1989: 51-758.

15 Lewis, W. Time and Western Man. London: Chatto & Windus, 1927: 255
16 Lewis, W. The Wild Body: A Soldier of Humour and Other Stories. London: Penguin Modern Classics,

2004: 157

17 McLuhan, M. ’Nihilism Exposed’, Renascence 8.2., 1955: 97-99

18 Lewis, W. ‘Editorial’, The Enemy 2, 1927: xxxiii-xxxiv

19 Evola, J. The Path of Cinnabar: An Intellectual Autobiography, Budapest: Arktos Media, 2009: 217

20 Newton, N. “Wyndham Lewis” in C. Handley-Read, The Art of Wyndham Lewis, 1951: 21

21 Jünger, E. The Forest Passage & Eumeswil. Wewelsburg Archives, 2020: 31

22 Ibid, 31

23 Evola, J. The Path of Cinnabar: An Intellectual Autobiography, Budapest: Arktos Media, 2009: 217-8

24 Alain de Benoist, A. D. Soldier, Worker, Rebel, Anarch: An Introduction to Ernst Jünger (2008)

25 Oswald Spengler The Decline of the West (New York: Random Shack Publishing, 2016), 1041
Page 15 of 17

26 Jünger, E. Feuer und Blut. Magdeburg: Stahlhelm-Verlag, 1925: 81

27 Lewis, W. Anglosaxony: A league that works. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1941: 41

28 Lewis, L. “The Machine.” Modernism/modernity 4(2). 1997: 173

29 Whittier-Ferguson, J Reading Late Wyndham Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

30 Jünger, E. Approaches: Drugs And Ecstatic Intoxication. 1970. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/ ApproachesDrugsAndEcstaticIntoxicationErnstJunger1

31 Mailer, N. The Prisoner Of Sex. New York: Plume Books, 1985.

32 Mailer, N. Harlot’s Ghost: A Novel. New York: Random House, 2007.

33 Dugin, A. The Fourth Political Theory. Budapest: Arktos, 2012.

34 McLuhan, M. ’Nihilism Exposed’, Renascence 8.2., 1955: 97-99

35 A case also argued by Lewis in Time & Western Man, which Yeats claimed one ‘defied the doctors’ by reading.

36 Heidegger, M. Heidegger. Oxford: Routledge, 2017: 45-68.

37 Jünger, E. The Forest Passage & Eumeswil. Wewelsburg Archives, 2020: 71

38 Ibid: 74

39 Jünger, E. Das abenteuerliche Herz. Berlin: Frundsberg-Verlag, 1929: 237, 156, 189.

40 Jünger, E. The Forest Passage & Eumeswil. Wewelsburg Archives, 2020: 71

41 Heidegger, M. Heidegger. Oxford: Routledge, 2017: 45-68.

42 Jünger, E. The Forest Passage & Eumeswil. Wewelsburg Archives, 2020: 37

43 Jorjani, J. R. “The Prometheist Manifesto”. 2020. Retrieved from: https://prometheism.com/f/the- prometheist-manifesto

44 Lewis, W. Time and Western Man, ed. Paul Edwards. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press 1993), 132 45 Ibid, 187

46 Wilson, C. The Occult, The Ultimate Guide for Those Who Would Walk with the Gods. London: Watkins Media Limited, 2015.

47 Miller, H. The Henry Miller Reader, ed. Lawrence Durrell. New York: New Directions. 48 Edwards, P. ‘A Dark Insect Swarming’: Wyndham Lewis and Nature, 2015.

49 Bulkagov, S, Philosophy of Economy: The World as Household, trans. and ed Catherine Evtuhov. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 200: 72.

50 Schelling, F.W.J.V. Clara: Or, On Nature’s Connection to the Spirit World. New York: SUNY Press, 2002. 51 Lewis, L. “The Machine.” Modernism/modernity 4(2). 1997: 173

52 David, R. ”Technology and modernity: Spengler, Jünger, Heidegger, Cassirer.” Thesis Eleven 111(1), 2012: 19-35.

53 Griffin, R. “Building the Visible Immortality of the Nation: The Centrality of ‘Rooted Modernism’ to the Third Reich’s Architectural New Order”. Fascism, 7(1), 2018: 9-44.

54 Mailer, N. Harlot’s Ghost: A Novel. New York: Random House, 2007.
55 Ernst Jünger. An der Zeitmauer. Stuttgart: Klett, 1959: 481
56 Loose, G. Ernst Jünger. New Hampshire: Irvington Publishers., 1974: 114

Page 16 of 17

57 Evola, J. The Path of Cinnabar: An Intellectual Autobiography, Budapest: Arktos Media, 2009: 220 58 Ernst Jünger. An der Zeitmauer. Stuttgart: Klett, 1959: 490

59 Fyodorov, N. What Was Man Created For?: The Philosophy of the Common Task. London: Honeyglen, 1990: 96

60 Ernst Jünger. An der Zeitmauer. Stuttgart: Klett, 1959: 546
61 Fyodorov, N. “Astronomy and Architecture,” in Russian Cosmism ed. B. Groys trans. Ian Dreiblatt.

Cambridge, MA: EFlux-MIT Press, 2018: 55
62 Marcuse, H. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon, 1964: 239