The Herostratic Tradition
‘In one year's time, I'll be three times as famous as you,’ Breivik told the TV star. Even though reality TV elevated many ordinary people to celebrity status every year, the question remained: how would Breivik become famous? By writing to the newspapers? Breivik described himself to like-minded people online as a ‘cultural conservative’ intellectual, the opposite of ‘cultural Marxists’ writing opinion pieces for the papers. As a former paperboy, Breivik had worked out that newspaper carts could be used for mobile advertising. He also knew that a household deity turned up on the doormats of Oslo's West End every morning, and that god was called Aftenposten. People who got their names into Aftenposten were guaranteed attention at breakfast tables from Solli Plass all the way up to Holmenkollen. The only problem was that it was difficult to get in: 90 per cent of contributions were rejected at any one time.
Could he make a lot of money? That was difficult too. Be extremely handsome? Even after a load of operations, most of us still have some way to go there. Sport? You need talent. Blogging and social media? Some people managed. The extreme right-wing intellectual Fjordman, for example: a Norwegian man with a decent command of English who called Stoltenberg's government ‘the most dhimmi […] of all Western governments’. Fjordman made a name for himself not only in Norway but throughout Europe. ‘Our own Fjordman is about to come in at third place among the most recognized/influential European anti-Jihad/anti-multiculti/anti-Marxist intellectuals/bloggers,’ Breivik wrote enthusiastically in November 2009. ‘I know it's hard to be a prophet in your own land but this is beyond all expectations. Congratulations Fjordman!;)’16
Fjordman was not to everybody's liking. He and those of the same opinion had been to some extent ridiculed in what Breivik called ‘the mainstream media’, but, within his niche, Fjordman was a big name. Fjordman was proof that culturally conservative intellectuals could find success outside Aftenposten. He was one of Breivik's great role models and, without knowing it, a kind of godfather for Justiciar Knight Andrew Berwick, Knights Templar Europe. It was a matter of finding your own niche. But Fjordman also had some kind of talent. What about those who did not?
The Fjordman phenomenon arose, according to himself, as a reaction to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. It would become the decade of terrorism, and so-called warblogs sprang up online like mushrooms. The shockwaves from 9/11 led to the faces of Osama bin Laden and Mohammed Atta being broadcast across the world. Europeans and Americans alike saw Islam in a new light. At the monitor in his bedroom, Breivik read Inspire, the English-language magazine of al-Qaeda, and watched videos of the terrorist network's bloodstained exploits.
There were many sides to the destruction of the twin towers, in terms of religion, society, politics and the media. The philosopher André Glucksmann also saw in the events in Manhattan an echo of Herostratus’ ancient crime.17 Behind the crime lay the criminals’ desire to be seen, remembered and forever feared.
According to ancient tradition, Herostratus was an unknown citizen of Ephesus in Asia Minor. He was obsessed with his desire to be seen and remembered, but he had no gifts or talents. As a result, in the year 356 bc, he burnt down the city's Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Herostratus was arrested, tortured and executed. The city of Ephesus made his memory taboo. His name would not be uttered or remembered: Herostratus would be punished not only by death but by being forgotten. Nevertheless, even the writers of the time overlooked the Ephesian ban, meaning that the expression Herostratic fame is a term that we still use.
Ancient writers saw two motives behind such meaningless destruction: the craving for eternal fame and the envy of mediocrity. The destruction was also a kind of art in itself, the expression of a pitch-black, negative aesthetic: burning the most beautiful thing on earth was awful, meaningless and astonishing at the same time. In the centuries and millennia since, many have followed in Herostratus’ footsteps, professing the aesthetic of destruction, and many of them have also defined themselves, or been defined, as terrorists. Breivik's compendium was a veritable catalogue of expressions, methods and tales from the history of terrorism, and many Herostratic terrorists were not entirely unlike the man who boasted at the Palace Grill.
A few years after US incendiaries had obliterated Tokyo and the atomic bombs had struck Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan's most important religious building, Kinkaku-ji, Kyoto's Temple of the Golden Pavilion, also burnt down. The temple caught fire on 2 July 1950, and within a few hours the wooden building had been reduced to ashes. It was not the occupying US forces that had destroyed the shrine. The police arrested a twenty-two-year-old monk from the temple, Hayashi Yoken, who immediately admitted to the crime. A few months earlier, he had boasted to a prostitute in Kyoto that he ‘might be in the newspapers soon’. Hayashi was known as a stubborn recluse, and during the court case it emerged that he felt that the other monks maligned and ridiculed him. He said that he was jealous of the beautiful temple and decided to destroy it in order ‘to do something big’. The forensic psychiatrists established that he was paranoid and schizophrenic (the diagnosis was based, among other things, on the absurdity of Hayashi's crime). Nevertheless, Hayashi was sent to prison and to confinement in a psychiatric facility, where he died a few years later.
The best-known account of this incident is Yukio Mishima's documentary novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, the first draft of which bore the title ‘Jealous of Beauty’. In Mishima's novel, the young monk is ugly, sickly and has a stammer. He is an outsider from early childhood. ‘As can easily be imagined, a youth like myself came to entertain two opposing forms of power wishes,’ Mishima's monk says. ‘On the one hand I enjoyed imagining how one by one I would wreak punishment on my teachers and schoolmates who daily tormented me; on the other hand, I fancied myself as a great artist, endowed with the clearest vision – a veritable sovereign of the inner world.’18
The monk grows up in the shadow of the temple and eventually begins to hate it. ‘Beautiful things […] are now my most deadly enemies,’ he says, before finally burning down the temple.19 For Mishima, the fire is not only an expression of the stuttering monk's self-hate, his hatred towards beauty and his fantasies of power. On one level, the fire was a way of freeing himself from earthly beauty by destroying it, a kind of mystical and violent liberation related to suicide. But Mishima's fire is also connected to self-hate in occupied Japan, which in the early post-war period was indeed a burnt-out ruin. The burning temple was the ultimate gesture of powerlessness, the gospel of defeat.
Herostratus' successors throughout history have not been satisfied merely with destruction. Ancient writers pointed to a connection between destroying an iconic building and killing a prominent leader: both crimes are motivated by the perpetrator's desire to acquire the victim's fame. A number of assassins of recent times belong to the Herostratic tradition, and many of them have had similar psychiatric diagnoses to Hayashi. Some of them did also become celebrities themselves by killing or attempting to kill another celebrity, and are therefore celebrity killers in two senses. Some of the best-known cases are from the USA.