The Way of the Sword

Tighten Up, America

[post too long for email]

Have you ever wondered why so few people train with a sword anymore? Conventional thinking, to the degree that anyone thinks about it at all, suggests that once the gun came into common use the sword was obsolete. Others might say, the sword is a tool of violence and those who know how to use it would cause much violence in society, therefore we should not teach it. But the sword is part of the regular practice of many martial arts, many hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of Americans practice a martial art, and yet the vast majority of day to day violence is not perpetrated by people who have been trained how to fight. In fact the point of modern martial arts, and to much the same extent, the way of the sword, is to learn how not to have to fight, but to be able to if you have no choice.

Some might look at the recent phenomenon of the Game of Thrones, the books and the popularized version on HBO, the depiction of a society ruled by the sword, to suggest why it is not advisable to teach people how to use a sword.

The more handsome than hulking Ser Arthur Dayne, Sword of the Morning, wielding two European long swords against half a dozen opponents notwithstanding physics, plus his ignominious end, plus the ridiculous amount of carnage in this short scene, one might think, swords are good for watching on TV. But then, despite the near cartoonish violence of this video, would it still not be better for society to be full of people who are healthy, strong, well practiced, well trained in the martial arts, ready to defend society, family, community (compared to the state of chronically ill America?) But that is what our law enforcement and military is for? But wouldn’t they be better, healthier and stronger, more confident (and perhaps more thoughtful), training with a sword regularly?

But this post is about the Way of the Sword, not about martial sword training necessarily.

To get at that, I would like to talk briefly about the symbolism of the sword, and for that I will start with the tarot. The minor cards of the tarot are divided into four suits: cups, wands, coins and swords. Swords represent Air (earth, air, fire, water), which in this context is synonymous with mind, with thinking, and specifically reason and logic, wielded like a sword to cut through to the truth of things. Air as mind is synonymous with ideas and intellect, in relation to the sword, think of phrases like, “his mind is sharp,” “words can cut like a knife,” or “writing is more powerful than the sword.” If the sword is akin to ideas, think of how quickly and decisively DIE (Diversity, Inclusion, Equity) and ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) cut through America’s institutions, and how it has been used to cut those who question such thinking out of the Institutional body. Or the way covid or now war propaganda along with social media censorship is being used to cut down dissidence, the questioning of official policy/narrative.

The ace of swords in the tarot is like the middle pillar of the Tree of Life, extending from the base, sephiroth Malkuth at the feet, Yesod at the groin/solar plexus, Tippareth at the heart/chest, Daath at the throat, through the spine to Kether, the crown. There is a curious phenomenon in the dissident community to refer to the evil we are seeing in our globalist elite, as occult, as if the occult is by definition evil, when it is better defined as the science of the unseen. That is like looking at them wielding swords against us and claiming the sword is evil, rather than picking up the proverbial or real sword and learning how to use it strategically.

Think of good and evil in the context of ethics. Ethics can be considered like a sword, to remove corruption from the body politic, or from one’s own behavior. But in that sense the sword is not inherently moral, it is merely a tool, and so even ethics can be wielded by the unethical, as in the case of Christine Grady, wife to Anthony Fauci, in charge of medical ethics for the National Institute of Health (NIH), which oversaw NIAID, of which Fauci was Director.

The law too, could be seen as a kind of sword, as the sword in a sense is like justice, but the law is now corrupted, weaponized, not unlike what we see in the Game of Thrones, where there is so very little justice, where there is much that is the opposite of justice.

One might begin to ask, are we not taught the sword either martially or symbolically, that the proverbial sword can be so easily and effectively used against us? Speaking of ideas that cut like a knife, and the emasculation of American men:

The great “Kensei”, warrior saint of Japan, Miyamoto Musashi called his way of the sword, the way of strategy. He had killed 60 men in single combat by the time he was thirty, probably thousands in war, but he still did not understand strategy.

When I reached thirty I looked back on my past. The previous victories were not due to my having mastered strategy. Perhaps it was natural ability, or the order of heaven, or that other schools’ strategy was inferior. After that I studied morning and evening searching for the principle, and came to realize the Way of strategy when I was fifty.

Since then I have lived without following any particular way. Thus with the virtue of strategy I practice many arts and abilities - all things with no teacher…I take up my brush to explain the true spirit…as it is mirrored in the Way of heaven and Kwannon.¹

He was besides the greatest swordsman to ever walk Japan, a skilled painter, sculptor in wood and metal, and calligrapher.

When the United States made Japan a satellite state, the sword and the samurai way were essentially outlawed, in 1876, with the Haito Edict. Japan would be moving into industrial modernity and rule by the managerial State, with no more need for the ordering effect of samurai based feudalism. Which managerialism has since become, all across the West and the “international rules-based order,” it’s own kind of tyranny, a kind of bureaucratic despotism, in dissident freedom terms, rule by midwits, or the revenge of the insignificant.

There is a paradox in martial training, the building of a warrior class that then begins to justify itself by endless warmongering. The classical scholar James Redfield, in his study of the Iliad, put it this way:

As a community’s need of warriors generates a social organization, it generates also a paradox. War is initially an unhappy necessity, the precondition of protected community. But as the warriors become a class or caste, the advantages - and more important the prestige - of the warrior becomes themselves desirable….

And so it happens that the community’s need for security and defensive warfare generates a warrior ethic, which then gives rise to aggressive warfare, which is a threat to security.²

An extreme example would be the Spartans, who took the martial ethic so seriously they failed to breed themselves sufficient to sustain the culture. We have a different kind of extreme here in America, the decidedly un-warrior like class of weapons contractors helping to justify eternal growth in military spending, risking WWIII in the process. We now have the specter of the flabby, gay, rumored pederast Senator Lindsay Graham preening about all over the media left and right, in response to the dubious potential false flag goings-on in Israel, to utterly destroy the oil infrastructure of the fertile crescent (Iran) (unwittingly sounding like a green zealot desirous of throwing global oil markets into chaos with the forced end of the use of fossil fuels, while absolutely sounding worse than the worst of Hamas.) Or the dumb, tone deaf media show pony Shawn Hannity, berating presidential candidate Vivek Ramiswammy for daring to question war hawk wannabe Margaret Thatcher, Presidential candidate Nikki Haley, for making millions of dollars prostituting herself for the eternal-war weapons industry. (While curiously, Spartan-like, this global-police empire is failing to breed sustainably, while the federal government utterly fails to protect it’s own citizenry from a cartel-driven invasion of the southern border.) Meanwhile those once prey to the Final Solution keep using the word “extermination” to describe their retaliation for the recent attack by Hamas they are referring to as “genocide.” It is all backwards, upside down and increasingly insane, with no end in sight that does not look like ever increasing escalation, destruction, the martial paradox taken to it’s furthest most pathological extreme. Here in America the woke are revealing themselves as the potential terrorists they are constantly accusing MAGA of.

I lived in Minneapolis when lefty marxists and their collectivist antifa kin, made parts of Lake street look like a bombed out Syria or Palestine

The martial paradox in antiquity was attempted to be dealt with by generating a warrior aristocratic code.

Just as it was necessary to find a way to contain the powers of the berserkir frenzy, so it was necessary for aristocratic warriors to develop and demonstrate their powers in a way which did not destroy society or decimate their own ranks…call[ing] each warrior “to be best (aristos) always”, as Achilles father had admonished him before he left for Troy. It turned the warrior code into a contest [as opposed to mere prowess in killing in the bronze age.]³

Achilles is remembered as the greatest of all Greek warriors. But with the death of his friend Patrocles, Achilles went berserk, slashing through the ranks of Troy taking no prisoners until the “black earth ran with blood”, killing Hector, dragging his body behind a chariot around the walls of Troy, and the funeral pyre of Patrocles, refusing to return the body to Troy and Hector’s father Priam. Priam in his despair visited Achilles secretly, begging for Hectors body. Achilles felt his pain, releasing Hector’s body to Priam. In a sense he regained his humanity, but the damage was done, Achilles had sacrificed all to his desire to be the world’s greatest warrior, he died in the final siege in a most inglorious way, and then according to Homer, Odysseus later found him in Hades, lamenting that it would be “better to break sod as a farm hand for some poor country man than to lord it over all the exhausted dead.”⁴

In the East, in the late Tokugawa period of Japan, as in China, the way of the sword was transformed from an art into a way, “the arts of peace on the left and war on the right: both must be mastered.” Kenjitsu, the art of the sword, evolved into Kendo, the way of the sword, or according to Musashi, the way of strategy. The New Shade school taught there is the death dealing sword and the life giving sword, the death dealing sword used by the warrior to prove his prowess, which could cause much misery, while the death dealing sword in the new school could only be used for good, according to the sword master Yagyu Muneyoshi, in his Family-Transmitted Book on Swordsmanship, “at times, because of one man’s evil, thousands of people suffer. So you kill that one man in order to let thousands live.”⁵

Samurai were no longer required to serve a master unto death, they could no longer fight amongst their own ranks, any fights of vengeance or mastery had to be approved by the shogunate, while all Samurai began to be taught from youth in administrative arts for times of peace, while not beginning to study martial arts until years later than they had previously.

Increasingly the way of the sword became about perfecting the self, influenced by Zen, to rid the mind of the ““six diseases”: the desire for victory, the desire to psychologically overwhelm the opponent, the desire to rely on technique and cunning, the desire to show off, the desire to remain passive to await for an opening, and finally, the desire to be free of these diseases.”⁶

That said, while fighting amongst Samurai was radically reduced, and war generally decreased, peasants were in no way protected from the mortal wrath of Samurai, for as little as perceived disrespect, so we should not overly idealize the Samurai way.

Enlightenment by way of the sword was possibly never more truly realized than among the Taoists of China, who have a reputation for peace, for mysticism, for a seeming lack of violent impulse, but with a long tradition in the way of the sword, not a few practitioners of whom have been women. When queried by the King of Yueh, a woman who became known as the Lady of Yueh said, in typically taoist mystical form, saying so very much while saying so very little:

I grew up in a deep forest, in the wilderness away from men. I have not studied properly and I am unknown to the feudal lords. However, I am fond of swordsmanship and I practiced incessantly. I did not receive it from anybody. I just suddenly got it….the way of swordsmanship is very subtle yet easy, it’s meaning obscure and profound; it involves the principle of yin and yang; a good swordsman should appear calm like a fine lady, but capable of quick action like a surprised tiger.” The king implored her to train his troops. ⁷

Johann Kurtz has written a couple of interesting pieces recently about not watching sports but rather playing them, and cultivating the heroic spirit. The first piece clearly tapped into a latent desire, while the follow-up piece was very much less well received. I absolutely agree, much of the crisis of masculinity in America has to do with our passive consuming of sportsball, from the couch. At the same time the most favored sport played by everyday folks in America is a bastardized form of tennis and ping pong, pickleball. While I apreciate much of the second piece on the heroic spirit, there is something a little too austere about it, a little too much Achilles, Alexander and Aquinas, for this mystic who resonates more like the Tao than classical western antiquity, more magician and artist than logical, aristocratic warrior for God. No one wants to trade the current aristocracy for another that looks and acts like the aristocracy of antiquity.

As to the need for playing sports and the transcendent in competition, however, though Kurtz never mentions it, I think sword training could fill that need very well.

There are some out there having fun with it. This is a good deal more like dancing, than fighting, well choreographed.

This young woman is remarkable.

Ms Ortiz, too. Though, I’m sure she is quite deadly with that blade, the whole spinning thing is mostly theater, more for learning how to handle the blade safely, for intimidating your opponent, or looking cool, but serving little purpose in actual battle, and too, one too preoccupied with such flashy technique would be cut down easily by a true master.

When the Librarian of Calaeno talks about micro schools, I see a kind of Jeffersonian vision for America, a great many such micro schools, bringing back classical study, each school or network of schools with it’s own Bravossi Syrio Forel, the study of the way of strategy and water dancing as important as reading, writing and math.

On Teaching: Part II

I can imagine a Way of Strategy society/caste, who are also like green wizards in the tradition of the Picatrix, keepers of Western traditions and knowledge who help guide Americans through the tumult of the decline of the West, collapse of modernity and the GAE, globohomo empire. I believe a new, wholly American civilization will rise sometime in the far future, and such a caste could be the genesis of that.

I am not in any way advocating for violence, except maybe for you to be trained and prepared to face it to the best of your ability. Mainly I am looking for ways to inspire people to be better, stronger, more healthy and happy. I think the sword could be a tool for rejuvenating American youth particularly boys and young men, and the American spirit, helping us to strategize as to how to free ourselves from the various cartels from medical to banking to martial spawned by the GAE empire.

All that said, the following is the genesis of this post. I am not talking about you taking up the way of the strategy, just because I think it is a good idea.

Many years ago on a whim, I made a pair of short pine swords. Everything changed after that, and I have been dancing with them, and others I have made, and deer horns I harvested, ever since. This is NOT any martial technique of any traditional school. This is me turning on some music and moving with the sound. Not bad for a 50year-old, I think, though I could be stronger, I could be quicker, more cardiovascular…

Tighten up, America (yeah, I’m talkin’ to myself too…)

1. A Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi; Overlook Press, Translation by Victor Harris, 1974. Pg 35

2. The Code of the Warrior, Rick Fields; Harper Perennial, 1991. Pg 68

3. ibid pg 68

4. ibid pg 73

5. ibid pg 186

6. ibid pg 187

7. ibid pg 128