The Figure of the Wolf in the Tradition of Europe

Igor Garkavenko, a well-known revolutionary poet, publicist “philosophizing with a hammer” and a former prisoner of conscience, opened the concert of M8L8TH with a half-hour lecture on the topic “The Figure of the Wolf in the Tradition of Europe”. For those who could not attend this landmark event, we publish the full video and transcript of the lecture. After Igor’s performance, torchbearers lined up near the stage, and a fragment from Richard Strauss’s symphonic poem “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” was played in the hall, which became the beginning of the performance of the militant black metal band M8L8TH.

No matter how many times we look into history – where lies the Source of this or that people, this or that Empire, which left a rather specific memory of itself, special, sometimes rude, sometimes destructive, but sometimes a very creative, beautiful and powerful memory; in the Source of this civilization, this culture, this people, nation – we find the figure of the Wolf.

Of course, these are Romulus and Remus, two boys who were washed ashore in Italy and suckled by a she-wolf. After that, it was the She-Wolf who became the symbol of the Empire, which all the empires of the world are trying to resemble. And no one succeeds in doing this in the way that the Patriarch of the Roman type, the Great Rome itself, managed to do.

When we look at the wolf, we ask ourselves: why exactly it, why not some other archetype from the world of Nature, from the world of Myths, from the world of the Divine… Why did the Wolf win this right? We do not need to delve into mythology very persistently, encyclopedically memorize primordial texts, we just need to look inside ourselves and ask: what do I see in the image of the Wolf? What do I see in that video or that photo that shows a wolf or a wolf pack? And it will become clear to us that we perceive this beast in two completely polar opposite hypostases, poles. And no more Archetypes are capable of this, neither from the world of Nature, nor from the world of Myths.

First, we look at the Wolf and rely on him – as an image of ourselves, an image of who we want to be like when we can only resist as ourselves; when we lose friends, when we lose our Nation, Culture, Civilization, when we are betrayed, we understand laconic works from the field of poetry, music, etc. which no more and no less sound like a “hardened wolf”. We rely on a cold loner who will fight to the end. This is what a Wolf is in the form of a loner.

But in the case when we are an organization, when we are a structure, and when we are a structure headed by informal leaders, and in ourselves we are an informal organization, an informal structure based on absolute authority, on organic values, on the absolute power, on the absolute of friendship, on the absolute of devotion – we look at the Wolf from a completely different side of him – we accept him as a Pack. Like the existence of the Pack.

And so, if one wonders why the Indo-European peoples in particular, not to mention other peoples, adopted the figure of the wolf as their absolute primary incarnation, one must remember these two poles:

– about a loner who will fight no matter what, after Ragnarok, after the Death of the Gods, after everything in the world, he will fight with his teeth clenched and looking at his enemies with the eyes of the Baltic Sea, whom he will kill and only then possibly be killed,

– and in the existence of a pack, when he has friends, when he has a group, there is an organization, he has a partisan detachment. Only through this we can understand why it was adopted by Europe.

For in the person of the Wolf we understand that Source, that core, from which every state is woven. The state as such, because it is woven from the realm of the informal, from the realm of the unofficial, illegal and criminal; from where the law is written, written in blood, written in the will, written in breath, written in friendship, but it is not yet called a constitution and it is much higher than any constitution that is a pen, ink and text, and he has the power to abolish it. This is what every state as such is woven from. That’s what a wolf is.

In order to understand this or that phenomenon, especially this or that archetype, we should compare it with its antagonist, because very often it is paired with its antagonist. The antagonist of the wolf, of course, is the dog.

The dog is a former wolf. When you see a dog, you should know that it is a former wolf, nothing more and nothing less. There is an absolute difference between them. The wolf contains in itself such a principle as centripetal – it is attached to the center, it is around the center, it serves the center, and centrifugal – it betrays the center, it leaves it, it is sometimes able to return and tear off bloody pieces from it; and these are the reasons why the wolf once becomes a centripetal phenomenon, and in which it becomes a centrifugal phenomenon and is able to tear, tear out of what it once served, these bloody pieces… This is served by one simple evolution, when its leader – becomes the chairman when his flock becomes a bureaucracy, when he is no longer the first among equals, but when he is or wants to encroach on his being – just a lackey, just a servant, for whom a wooden box is built, just those who deserve a piece of meat from any hands, without the possibility of looking and evaluating in what moral, moral, existential, sacred correspondence these hands in general and the person giving are located.

Dog, it’s the complete opposite. The dog is always centripetal. The main thing for you to win the services of a dog is to feed him, and he will serve you, whoever you are. The wolf is not. Of course, you have heard the phrase, since childhood, – “no matter how much you feed the wolf, he looks into the forest.” This phrase should be tied to the state, the cold monster – the state, as Friedrich Nietzsche said. Because it is the state and the cold bureaucracy, the administration, where everything is built on some kind of nepotism, where people are no less than screws, nuts and other trash, which you throw away and they will die, because they are used to living in in accordance with a certain whole and directly occupy their position; the wolf will never die, because he has a second pole – this is the pole of a seasoned loner;

This phase was created by the cold monster state.

When the laws collapse, when the elements are rampant, the formal order, the law, the constitution, the criminal code cease to exist – the direct Nature of each of us is exposed, it is visible, and it immediately becomes clear which Archetype each of you serves, even in secret from yourself, what Archetype he is attached to, a wolf, a dog, or someone else. As my friends used to say in those places where I spent all my youth: “It was wonderful in such and such a prison, it was scary, it was hard, but everyone was visible, everyone was visible at once, in their essence, in their being.”

And that’s when the order collapsed on the territory of our country, when everything that is called the law, the constitution, the norms – collapsed. When law enforcement officials left the capital and we did not even know where they were. And those of them who remained, they could only endure the slaps of people in balaclavas who passed by them, and gave them bream. They just stood there because they lost. Because they understood that the system, that the “norm”, that the laws, that the formal law – it lost, but the informal won. Blood defeated paper, so they must stand and endure. And at that moment, Nature itself was exposed, it was clear who was who. There was one very interesting precedent, it happened in the southeast and many might not notice it, and those who noticed it could simply write it off as the cruelty of the crowd, the cruelty of war, the cruelty of natural disasters, etc.

But for me, it spoke about very serious nuances, revealed the nature of the parties that came together. There, in the spring, in my opinion April-May, when everything was just beginning, a couple of people who were for the Ukrainian side, they were taken prisoner, there was even some kind of video with them, and there was a photo. Their corpses were then shown, their hearts were cut out, it was a couple of people … Their hearts were torn out and tattoos with rune emblems were cut off alive. And for some it seemed that this was the usual relationship between the warring parties, who are not subject to military law, who fall under the so-called “guerrilla war”, where there are no rules at all, where it is better not to be captured.

I looked a little further, and I realized that if the dogs take captive the Wolf, which is determined only by itself. The wolf is always a volunteer in the hypostasis of war, the wolf calls himself to his war. If the name of the dog is always in the hands of its owner, and it is precisely this sound that is the most important sound in his life, then you will never beg for his name from the Wolf for any bone in his life. He will not tell you it, and if he does, in his wolf dialect, then only by digging into your throat. The wolf only knows his own name, at most, his leader and his pack know. So, when a Volunteer, when a Warrior, when a Partisan, when a Feudal lord – all these incarnations are those in world history who call themselves to their war Themselves, and they themselves know when to end it. No overlord has the right to tell them when to stop it. When they capture the Dog, the most important thing that interests them is his mobile phone, this is a notebook in his pocket to find out where the thread comes from, where the “control panel” is – the Kremlin, the Pentagon, what money comes in, what orders are given.

But in the case when the Dogs capture the Wolf, they ask the same question, as in one Soviet children’s film (where they made such a robot in human form, “Electronic”) there the mafia that pursued this Electronic called their own invader, killer, they constantly called him and said – Uri, where is his button? This is the very question that the Dogs ask when they take a living Wolf in their hands – Where is his button?

Because the mobile phone does not say anything, the notepad does not say anything, and there are no bank accounts either, because the Wolf is a partisan, the Wolf is a volunteer, the Wolf is a feudal lord, the Wolf is the one who calls himself to his war and he himself gives an account of when to end it. The wolf is the one over whom only a leader is possible, but a chairman, general secretary or director is never possible. And when his leader tries to encroach on these incarnations, which I mentioned, the wolf leaves him, and sometimes not only leaves, but also kills, because the existence of a wolf is a pack.

Vseslav of Polotsk (Vseslav the Sorcerer)… I knew absolutely nothing about him… Of course, I knew about the eminent princes who were in Kyiv, on the throne, in Stolny Grad, who won, those about whom the official history says. First of all, these are Svyatoslav, Yaroslav, Monomakh, and others … And when I was already in Belarus, the person to whom I came to Belarus, he told me, we walked around the city: “Do you know that we have there was a knyaz (duke)… he was very cool, he was a werewolf, as chronicles write about him – he turned into a wolf … as these same chronicles also report – he was born from a sorcerer, from an ancient Rus pagan who remembered the traditions of the pre-Christian tradition of Rus!”

I thought: “Well, wow, I hear this from a person with whom I’m just walking here, for the first time I hear such things, although I always boasted of my knowledge of history”; so I immediately got into all these wikipedias and so on and so forth …

I found out about him, yes, it turned out to be Vseslav the Sorcerer. It turned out to be the duke of Polotsk, who, by virtue of his expansion, his military campaigns – he claimed (and tried to achieve this) that his Polotsk, his city, was the third center of ancient Rus. Kyiv was the center then, there was Novgorod, and he wanted to ensure that Polotsk, his native city, was on an equal footing with these two cities.

And after I read his entire biography, everything connected with him, I was visited by a certain tragedy. I thought, “Damn it! He didn’t succeed! The city was burned down. Other cities, they somehow remained more noticeable in history, they were raised to a high level, we know about them – the Novgorod Republic, which ceased to exist only in the 15th century, Moscow, which is still … (which, I hope, we will turn over this page of history and go much further), but this Polotsk is this third center, the third Rus` center, the third cultural center, the third civilizational center, the third national, primordial center, which could be founded by a prince-sorcerer, a werewolf prince, a werewolf prince, a heathen wolf prince – did not take place. I thought: “What an extravagant, extraordinary, elegant and beautiful facet of Rus` civilization could turn out to be in history, and what could it be capable of in this hypostasis?” I was visited by tragedy, I thought: “Well, wow, it didn’t happen! As usual, the most interesting did not take place!

And a little later, a very poetic and beautiful intuition visited me, and she told me: “The prince-sorcerer … the prince-volkhv … the prince-wizard … the werewolf prince … the prince that prowls like a wolf in the forest” … The prince, whom one day the triumvirate of other princes called for negotiations, and there, fraudulently, treacherously, they took him prisoner, and built the prison right around him… it was a prison of a special structure – first they imprisoned him, and then they built a cut around him, and he sat there for a very long time – more than a year, until the people of Kyev released him. Prisoner prince…

Or maybe he could not have founded anything?.. And should not have founded any civilization in the official mode, in the legal mode, in the legitimate (even) mode, in the mode manifested..?

And then I realized that, friends, only those Civilizations, those Cultures, in which the wolf, no matter how much you feed him, continue to look into the forest, survive. As long as the wolf, fed by the leader intending to become the chairman, looks into the forest, this means that this civilization still orders (in the correct sense of the word) – to live long, and it will live long and win.

And the temple of Vseslav the Sorcerer, the temple of the wolf prince, the temple of the prince Werewolf, the temple of the wizard prince and the sorcerer and his third kingdom, to paraphrase Ernst Nikisch, who wrote about the third imperial figure that would save Germany in the 30s, I can say – “and the third imperial center of civilization” – it is not located where the capital lies, and not where the main highways and civilization centers are…

No, the capital of the werewolf prince is located on the edge of each of our forests, it is located on the top of each Carpathian mountain, its capital is located in every valley of the Carpathian mountains and on the shore of each lake. If you like – its capital is located in the solitary confinement of Lukyanovsky, and not only the Lukyanovsky pre-trial detention center – this is where the capital of the prince-Werwolf, is located; and if one day Culture, Civilization, Nation is faced with such circumstances when it must part, retreat, and then close up and destroy the enemy, if it must leave its capital, leave its civilization, cultural centers – then it is forced to go into solitary confinement, to the peaks Carpathian mountains, to the valleys of the Carpathians and to the lakes of the Carpathians!

She must go to the caches, and draw, scratch on the sand, and not aesthetically and beautifully, as is now customary, ancient runic symbols – then she finds herself in the area of the Third Kingdom, the kingdom of Vseslav the Sorcerer. Third imperial kingdom.

And the last thing I want to tell you is that we are now standing on the threshold of this kingdom, with which I congratulate you! Because, gentlemen, this is wonderful! It is a symbol of absolute Youth, a symbol of absolute Victory, a symbol of our Tradition.

Long live Vseslav the Sorcerer! Glory to Ukraine! Glory to Rus`!