10. The races of the Spirit - The solar race - the demetric race
Our science of races of the third degree will limit its investigations primarily on the sphere of influence of a certain race of the spirit, its primordial tradition and its development, its mutations (paravariations), and additionally its attitudes in its corresponding cycle, in which the influences of foreign races and new conditions of environment take effect.
Once the investigation is demarcated in this fashion, we reach a tighter definition of race, which relates to different parts of the primary elements of a cycle like this.
In this case it follows naturally that we cannot think of an atomistic autonomy of the different “races of the spirit”: the dissimilarity does not reach so far that relations not only of descent but also of social rank would be excluded.
The science of the spiritual races harkens back to the origins and develops itself on the foundation of a morphology of transmissions, symbols and myths of the primordial time.
To limit oneself to the modern world and to seek to orient oneself within it, would in this matter be a hopeless undertaking.
In the modern world and culture there exist only faint reflections, uncertain remains, long derivations of the races of the spirit. On the plane of races of the soul, it is still possible to awaken a certain consciousness and immediate experience: it suffices to relate to traits of character, on direct ways of inner reaction, on manners, on talents, which are neither learned or constructed, but given with birth and connected with blood and, as we say, even with something deeper than with the blood.
The race of the soul expresses itself in relations to the environment and to other people; where it exists, but dormant, one can force it to emerge in typical cases, in trials and crises, and thereby one can recognise in every human its face and its force.
In the area of the race of the spirit, the task is severely more difficult.
What today, and already since many centuries, passes for spirit, has preciously little relation with our understanding of spirit.
Today we find us confronted with the reality of a thoroughly standardised and spineless world, where one could only find with great difficulty that, which could be an instinct on a higher plane.
In the area of recognition all modern knowledge has a rationalistic-experimental basis, in which form and knowing is deduced from abilities, which are more or less the same in all human beings, and such knowledge is, following popular notion, insofar expedient, “positive” and “scientific”, in that it is acquired, accepted and able to be employed by every human, regardless of his race or calling.
Roughly the same happens in the area of religion. The predominant faith is universalistic and in principle available to each human, regardless of race or creed.
In the area of culture as art and thinking, the whole of it all exhausts itself in more or less subjective attitudes, in “creations”, which often resemble fireworks: they are as blinding in their lyric and critical-dialectical pliability, as they are barren of deeper meaning. In a world and culture, which hence has almost completely lost the connection with transcendent reality, it would prove to be most difficult to continue  a research endeavour which would have to investigate the “style” of experience of the transcendent and the “form” of the possible human attitudes towards it, which would mean the research of the “races of the spirit”.
Hence, we must fall back on that world where the true spirituality and the metaphysical reality were truly the central creative forces of culture in all areas, from the mythologic-religious to the judicial-social.
Hence, we need to hark back to the world of pre-modern and “traditional” cultures. Once we have reached guideposts on this way, we can cross over to the present world in order to follow the different influences which as a faint echo emerge from one or the other race of the spirit in this weakened world and in this fundamentally “humanistic”, that is from the merely human element determined, culture.
Here, the typology of the races will be only superficially touched upon, primarily with recourse on everything which we have shown about the primordial traditions in our book “Revolt against the modern world”, Part II.
In an old greek text it is written: “There are races, which, standing between the godly and human, oscillate between the two.”
One of the two have their center in the first element, the godly, the others in the second, the human. The first case determines the “solar race” of the spirit, also called “olympic”, which is superior and prior to all others in the concerned cultural area and correlates to the hyperboreic blood and Tradition.
To this race, the element which is more than human seems as natural as the merely human to the others. Hence, it is marked by a way of “natural supernaturalness”: in its relations to the godly there lacks the feeling of strangeness and transcendence.
The human element seems rather far and away to it. Spirit and power, dominating silence and readiness to precise and absolute deed, a feeling of centeredness and steadfastness, this virtue, which the old ones connected with the numinous property, that is as outer consequence of a superiority, which imposes itself immediately and irresistibly, which inspires fear and adoration at once - these are attributes of this “race of the spirit”, which predetermines it naturally to authority and in borderline cases to the regal function.
Ice and Fire unite in it as seen in the vague Symbols of the nordic homeland of the cycle, where this race primarily and originally appeared. Ice as transcendence and unapproachableness; Fire as intrinsically solar, radiating attribute of beings, which arouse life and bring light, but always in sovereign distance and without involvement, resembling reverberation and not due to inclination or human empathy.
The old symbolism of gold always had a certain relation to this form of spirituality. In the original idea of the state, it formed the foundation for the holy and godly kingship, that is for the unity of the two powers, the regal and priestly, where the latter is to be understood in a higher, in the following passage to be explicated, sense.
The symbolic terms of “godly” or “heavenly” races for this lineage are to be related to the lack of a dualistic feeling towards supernatural reality, which however is to be differentiated from everything that today is understood in the modern sense as the doctrine of immanence (Immanenzlehre) or promethean arrogance: this is not about humans who deem themselves gods, but about beings who in a natural way, through a not-yet overshadowed memory or the origins and thanks to special dispositions of the soul and body, which do not yet neutralise these memories, have the perception of not properly belonging to the earthly race, such that they only accidentally, from “ignorance” or “sleep” believe to be human.

The expressions vîdya and avîdya of the old indoaryan teaching, which “awareness” (of the highest identity) or “non-awareness” (through which one is lead to the identification of one of the forms or ways of being of the conditioned world), are to be understood in exactly this context.

When they are ascribed to other human conditions or other races of the spirit or made into “philosophical” terms, then they loose every sense and give space to all too many misunderstandings.


Additionally, one can notice the repeated allusions in classical lore to a “being together with the gods”, a “watching the gods and being watched by them”, which are, as was correctly emphasised by Kerenyi, not only to be understood as pure mythology, but as pictorial expression and as symbol of a condition, which in turn is related to the “solar race”.



Concerning the aryan-roman tradition especially, we already have recognised the echo of the same spirit in the words of Plutarch about the roman senate, as in those, which Caesar spoke about his lineage.
The flame of Dialis, which in its style and its stance mirrors “the living statue of the olympian god” could be an additional testament thereof.

The further “races of spirit of the cycle, to which our ancestors belong, too, have the division of the elements “Spirituality” and “Manliness” as also “Transcendence” and “Humanity” as precondition, which find themselves united in the solar race. As a first, we mention the lunar or demetric race.


While under this analogy the solar element as centre of a given planetary system carries in itself the principle of its own light and being , the lunar element on the other hand receives its light and principle from a source outside of itself. With the lunar race, the feeling of spiritual center-ness has been lost, either through miscegenation (the moon as dead sun), or through passive admixture with races of the telluric type from other cultural circles which have degraded their original solar dispositions.
Bachofen emphasizes that the moon was called “the heavenly earth” by the old ones. Hence, we have to think of a sublimation of the earthly law, of fate, which shows itself in the form of cosmic harmony and natural law; the lunar human does not feel himself anymore as the active center of spiritual reality, he is not himself this reality, but rather is the one who watches, who feels out the foundation of its laws, who through this looking can surpass material action and “tellurism”, but does not reach spiritual action. The term “demetric”, which we can also apply to this race, relates to a spirituality lacking a center and form, which is pantheistic, which has fewer compelling traits, as it is interfused by the feeling of cosmic-naturalistic laws and a significantly female sign of holiness: a spirituality, which was particular to the old diametric cults.
Such in a certain way, the priestly man is lunar in comparison with the regal, who acts towards divinity as the normal woman towards the man, that is with devotion, submissiveness and humility.

Furthermore, it is interesting that the old traditions relate the intellectual, as it is understood today, with the moon, while higher forms of awareness are traced back to the sun.
Lunarly determined is in addition the “intellectual”, the passively reflecting human, who - as the word implies - only moves between reflections, between shadows of thoughts and things.
Thus, the lunar race has manifold aspects. On the political level the lunar spirit predominates everywhere, where a split appears between temporal and spiritual authority: the sovereign is lunarly determined when he receives the highest blessing of his power by a non-regal priestly caste.
Generally, the lunar human carries spiritually female traits. He lacks the feeling of center-ness. As counterpart to the races of the body, we can find the traits of the demetric race in ethnicities, which we have called atlantic-western, in their prehistorical form, which for example lead us to pelasgic, minoic- mykenic and etruscan culture and to those reanimations thereof, under which we have to count Pytagorism. The lunar race already in the atlantic period signifies a disfigurement of hyperborean spirituality, which had a host of other modifications as direct of indirect consequence.
Lunar traits are to be found in those races which certain racial scientists call alpine (ostisch) - the Claussian science of race and soul calls this race a race of the man of supersession (Enthebungsmenschen), which means one aspect of the lunar man. On a social level, matriarchy is a consequence of the lunarly determined spirit, while patriarchy is predominantly to be found in the solar races.