Abstract The text proposes a structural narrative reading of José Antonio Primo de Rivera’s falangist discourse and shows how its thinking is based on spatial and dynamic imagination and a particularly strong sacrificial nationalist motif. It further suggests that the symbolic dimension in its nationalism constitutes a driving emotional force to be found in all nationalisms. Falangism was a religious version of fascism, famous for becoming the official ideology of Francoist Spain; but it shared with all militant national political forms of thinking the emotionally compelling mystique : the feeling of a spiritual essence and force emanating from a beloved land and conveying existential identity and value to its subjects, thus justifying and calling for committed violent and sacrificial acts that override ordinary systems of lawful behavior.