“If you do not want power to target you, do not try to confront power. If you do not want power to use you, do not try to use power.”
Curtis Yarvin, “A Speech Code for Dissidents” The Gray Mirror (Feb. 20, 2021)
Sauron is the Lord of the rings, but he is not lord of the One Ring, the Ring of Power, The Ring of Power has no lord. The overriding moral of Tolkien’s tale is that any creature who uses the Ring of Power is instead used by the Ring of Power, because the Ring of Power is a most treacherous tool.
Gandalf describes the treachery of the Ring in one of Tolkien’s early drafts. The setting is the counsel of the princes of the West, after their victory in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. Gandalf has just quenched their joy by explaining that their true enemy, Sauron, remains, however great the army of replaceable minions the princes have just destroyed. In answer to Prince Imrahil’s question whether use of the Ring of Power would bring them ultimate victory, Gandalf says:
“‘It would not do so all in a day . . . . But were it to come to the hand of some one of power [or] royalty . . . then he being the Ringlord would wax ever in power and the desire of power; and all minds he would cow or dominate so that they would blindly do his will. And he would not be slain. More: the deepest secrets of the mind and heart of Sauron would become plain to him, so that the Dark Lord could do nothing unforeseen. The Ringlord would suck the very power and thought from him, so that all would forsake his allegiance and follow the Ringlord, and they would serve him and worship him as a God. And so Sauron would be overthrown utterly and fade into oblivion; but behold, there would be Sauron still . . . . but upon the other side.”*
In the beginning, Sauron made the Ring. In the end, the Ring made Sauron. And if Sauron failed to serve the Ring, the Ring would find another “Ringlord” to enslave.
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The recent death of Henry Kissinger recalled to mind his oft-quoted quip that “power is the greatest aphrodisiac.” I have never had much power, aphrodisiacal or otherwise, but the quip is half-true at best. It seems that female lust is often roused by the mere though of a powerful man, but that love dies in hearts that “wax ever in power and the desire of power.”
I am sure there are psychological explanations for why this is so, but there are better explanations in myth.
It does not require great imagination to picture Henry Kissinger as Alberich, the hideous dwarf who forged the Ring of the Nibelungen in Richard Wagner’s opera. Alberich forged this ring from the Rhinegold that he stole from the Rhinemaidens, water nixes who sported and sang in the thunderous cauldron at the foot of the great falls of the Rhine. Having crept to the brink of that pool through a crack that ran down to the dwarves’ kingdom of Nibelheim, Alberich is momentarily enchanted by the nymphs. But he soon recovers himself and seizes their gold.
As Alberich worms his way back into the crack to descends to Nibelheim, Rhinegold in tow, the Rhinemaidens lay on the gold a two-part curse. One nymph says:
“‘Know, Alberich, you hideous dwarf, that he who obtains this store, and fashions out of it a ring, will obtain mastery over the whole world.’ And another said: ‘Oh, love-smitten elf, know that none can win the store but he who has utterly foresworn love!’”
Foreswearing love, Alberich fashions the ring, and the Ring of the Nibelungen indeed proves a ring of power. But all who wear and wield it suffer the Rhinemaidens’ curse. They exercise “mastery over the whole world,” but neither do they love nor are they loved. And what is more, the curse spreads out from these loveless and lovelorn ringlords to abolish the love in their families, their companies, their land. As Alberich explains after he has himself lost the ring:
“Whoso wins it, whoso holds it—the doom lies upon him. It will divide kindred, it will turn hearts, it will deaden love, it will breed hate, it will inspire suspicion. There is no escape from the doom.”
Like Henry Kissinger in his quip about the aphrodisiacal power of power, Alberich is in these lines only half correct. To escape the curse of the Ring of the Nibelungen, one must only cast it away. Or, more particularly, cast it back to the Rhinemaidens who will hide it on the bed of the Rhine. So the nymphs tell Siegfried when he was the cursed ring lord.
“‘Siegfried! they cried, ‘beware how you retain the ring. A curse lies on it, a curse that brings all to destruction who wear it. Give us the ring and the curse no longer will rest on you . . . . Siegfried! Siegfried! put not our warning from you. If you keep the ring made out of the gold of the Rhine, which was treacherously taken from us, it will bring on you a fate as tragic as that which befell Fafner who held it. Give us the ring, we will sink it in the depths of the river, and then you will no more have dark fate hovering over you; the sky will be clear.”†
Alas, Siegfried put the Rhinemaidens’ warning from him and so suffered the fate of Fafner, a giant transformed into a dragon, which was death.
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In my epigraph, Curtis Yarvin tells his readers to take the path of detachment, neither opposing nor wielding power. His view is that power is subject to a cycle, and that men groaning under the heel of a regnant power can only wait, exercising due reticence and discretion, for that regnant power to wane. If they oppose power, they will be destroyed from the outside. If they seize power, they will be destroyed from the insider. As Gandalf told the princes of the West after the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, anyone who attempts to use the treacherous tool of Sauron becomes Sauron.
As the Rhinemaidens told the greedy gnome Alberich, the price of mastery is a loss of love.
The Rhinemaidens, Hans Makart (1883)
*) J. R. R. Tolkien, The History of the Lord of the Rings, part 3: The War of the Ring, ed. Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), p. 401.
**) Sabine Baring-Gould, Siegfried (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1904), p. 42.
***) Baring-Gould, Siegfried, p. 169.
†) Baring-Gould, Siegfried, pp. 326-327.
The Orthosphere 