In the post-apocalyptic genre in novels and films, the landscape typically tends to be futuristic. This is because we think the broken world of the apocalypse hasn’t yet occurred and thus must necessarily belong to some far-flung future age. The idea that the end of the world has already come—perhaps a number of times—is a rare thought. But it is one perhaps more familiar to Christians who have carefully read the biblical book of Revelation (or Apocalypse)—not simply as a prediction of some far-off day but as a chronicle of the ravages of the anti-Christ throughout human history. The trans-historical, mythical nature of St. John’s Apocalypse allows us to see what becomes of all who aim to extinguish those who worship the true God along the way and remake the world in their own image. The English writer Paul Kingsnorth—former deputy editor of The Ecologist and a co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project—elaborated on these themes in a recent conversation with this publication.
The Norman Conquest of William the Conqueror in 1066 represented a kind of apocalypse. The Norman French overtook the English, dramatically changing the way of life present on the island, at least for those they left alive. Paul Kingsnorth’s first novel, The Wake, provides a fascinating psychodrama, depicting the growing madness of a man who, though rightfully seeking to defend his country, by delving deep into Nordic paganism and consorting with a spirit calling himself Weland, gradually becomes willing to perpetrate truly horrific violence. The Wake’s narrator, Buccmaster, a socman (“a free tenant farmer” rather than a serf) loses his wife, his property, and his sons to the Norman invaders, and rather than submit to those who murdered his loved ones and razed his land, becomes a ‘greenman,’ guiding a small group of men to kill as many Frenchman as they can. His goal is to extirpate and scare the ‘ingenga,’ the word used for foreigner in the ‘shadow-tongue’ that Kingsnorth developed for the novel, a fascinating mix of Old English and current English. Though it takes some time to adapt to Buccmaster’s speech, the language is consistent and a fascinating part of the experience of reading the novel.
Progressing through the novel entails becoming more aware that, for Buccmaster, love of one’s own includes not only his land, wife, and children, but also the “eald gods” whom he sees as properly “anglisc,” namely Odin, Thor, and Ing, rather than the Christ he sees as belonging to the French and therefore an ingenga. The careful reader, must, of course, be aware of the irony that these anglisc gods are of Norse provenance.
Given Kingsnorth’s religious journey from Buddhism and Wicca to Orthodox Christianity, I was curious to ask him about Buccmaster and his religion. Though the novel itself seems to undercut its narrator, how did its creator—ten years after the novel’s publication and now a follower of Christ himself—view Buccmaster and his tale?
The Wake was your first novel. Can you tell me about how you started writing this novel and, in particular, how the “shadow-tongue” and Buccmaster’s character developed?
The novel developed after I came across a book called The English Resistance by the English historian Peter Rex. It details the long campaign of guerrilla warfare that the Anglo-Saxons carried out after the Norman Conquest. I had no idea this had happened, and I wanted to tell the story.
Buccmaster’s voice arrived with me early on and began to dominate all my other plans for the book. Eventually he took it over, and it just became his story.
The novel made me feel sympathy with Buccmaster, but then, as he became increasngly pagan, and more explicitly anti-Christian, I felt a strange ambivalence—where, on the one hand, I was repulsed by this but was also drawn to his love for his own, even though as a Christian I could see how corrupted it had become. Did you initially see the character as a kind of villain—or did he become so in the writing process? Do you see the devolution of his soul as having something to teach neo-pagan nationalists today—or even those of us who support our nations and local communities against globalists and ‘the Machine,’ a major topic of your essays?
No, I didn’t have any of this in mind. I started writing this novel in 2009, when none of today’s political debates were really happening, or at least were nothing like as fierce. Of course, the novel reflects my own obsessions and interests, so much of it is about connection to nature and land, rootedness, tradition, earth-based spirituality—and all the many contradictions and complexities and dangers sometimes of all that. But I wasn’t trying to push a ‘line.’ I was following the character where he led me. As it happens, I had no idea he would lead me into a book which had a strong pagan-vs.-Christian core. That was never part of my plan when I began it.
In the novel, Buccmaster derives his pagan devotion to the “eald gods” from his grandfather, but his father, sister, and the whole community he grows up in are Christian. Today, many of us are in the opposite situation—where young people are more often than not growing up in secular communities. Buccmaster, like many young people attracted to traditional religion, is in fact constructing his own way of life even though his appeal is to the “eald way.” How should people attracted to traditional Christianity today seek to dwell in the truth without it simply becoming another ‘lifestyle option’?
Well, I can’t speak for anyone else, but I have been baptized into the Orthodox Church, which to my mind is the original Christian church, and I’m going to follow that path as best I can. Orthodoxy, unlike much Western Christianity, has not bent with the times, so the tradition and its transmission are still strong. But of course, here in the West it is not our tradition, and so we have to build communities, even in our own homes, and try to hold to those values. It’s hard. Building communities with others will be the key. But Christians now in the West are like those in the early centuries: we are minorities in a ‘secular’ world. We have to live as such.
When writers like yourself speak of ‘the Machine,’ many mistakenly think that it is a distinctly contemporary problem. But Henry Adams famously contrasted two forces that he observed moving civilizations throughout history: the Virgin—emblematic of contemplation and true leisure—and the Dynamo—emblematic of machine productivity and man’s sense of having conquered nature. Is the Machine present in some way in The Wake? Is it a spiritual force perennially present in mankind but today, in our time, taking a glossy aluminum and steel form? Should we speak of “spirits of the cloud” and “a demonology of the internet”—or how would you suggest we think of the impact of the Machine in Christian terms?
Fundamentally, Buccmaster’s devotion to his ‘eald gods’ drives him essentially mad in the end. The same thing is certainly going to happen with our devotion to technology. Our machines are really just manifestations of our rebellion against God.
You’ve discussed your conversion to Orthodox Christianity, and particularly to the Romanian Orthodox Church. But as you have noted, you’re not Romanian by heritage. Although Eastern Churches (whether Catholic or Orthodox) tend to have a particular ethnic heritage attached to them, they have a universal calling. You have said that you think Buccmaster, whose fate is left indeterminate at the end of The Wake, might—in a future novel you might never write—end up as part of a pagan guard in Constantinople, a real historical possibility. How do you understand the relationship between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches and nationality, and how might Christians appeal to pagans like Buccmaster or the sort of online alt-right manosphere types?
As I mentioned above, one appeal of Orthodoxy is its transmission of relatively unchanged tradition. Orthodox Christianity has not changed any of its fundamental teachings since the Seventh Ecumenical Council. Unlike the Catholic Church it has not invented new doctrines and dogmas, or held new councils, and neither does it have a Bishop with the power to change the liturgy or muck around with its worldview. Nothing is added and nothing taken away from the Christian faith and in a world in which the faith is becoming so diluted that is enormously appealing.
The kind of online manosphere stuff you’re talking about appeals to a lot of young men who feel—often rightly—that modern Western culture basically hates them. At its best, Orthodoxy can offer them a true and ancient spiritual tradition which has at its heart something that young men like, which is warfare. But the warfare of course is spiritual rather than physical. Nonetheless, Orthodox asceticism is hard work. While many Western Christians still practice fasting and asceticism, of course, the Western churches themselves have watered down the communal requirements to almost nothing in comparison with their Eastern brethren. The Eastern church still offers young men—and not just men, of course—a serious spiritual challenge.
Back in March 2024, the people of Ireland, much to everyone’s surprise, voted down two progressive, anti-nature, and anti-Christian changes to their Constitution. Is there hope for Ireland, a country (at least in the musical imagination it has bequeathed to its American descendants in exile) so associated with its green fields and beautiful hills to be able to turn away from the logic of the Machine?
Something interesting is happening in Ireland. There is currently a widespread rebellion against massive refugee/immigrant resettlement too, and contrary to the media story, it is not a movement of ‘far right agitators’ but mostly ordinary families and communities who have had enough of a Dublin establishment that is ignoring them. I think the referenda rejection was part of the same thing. Populism has finally arrived here. Ireland’s globalist modern carapace is a fairly new thing so who knows what will happen. On the other hand, the Catholic church has damaged itself so badly here, with its sexual corruption, that it’s hard to see a turning back to it. The Irish love consumer modernity as much as anyone.
The question as to how orthodox, sacramental Christianity relates to art and literature has led to a great deal of writing in the U.S. (In fact, there’s been a biennial Catholic Imagination Conference for almost a decade now.) Considering the novels you’ve written so far and the storytelling you’ve been working on recently, how do you see your Orthodox faith connecting with your own art?
I actually don’t know where all this will lead. I need to just get writing and see what emerges. I don’t think I want to write ‘Christian literature’—but since my worldview has shifted irrevocably, I imagine my fiction will too, if I write any again.
This essay appears in the Winter 2024 issue of The European Conservative, Number 33:57-59.
