PROLOGUE
Palmyra, c. AD 385
‘There is no crime for those who have Christ.’
—St. Shenoute
The destroyers came from out of the desert. Palmyra must have been expecting them: for years, marauding bands of bearded, black-robed zealots, armed with little more than stones, iron bars and an iron sense of righteousness had been terrorizing the east of the Roman Empire.
Their attacks were primitive, thuggish, and very effective. These men moved in packs— later in swarms of as many as five hundred—and when they descended utter destruction followed. Their targets were the temples and the attacks could be astonishingly swift. Great stone columns that had stood for centuries collapsed in an afternoon; statues that had stood for half a millennium had their faces mutilated in a moment; temples that had seen the rise of the Roman Empire fell in a single day.
This was violent work, but it was by no means solemn. The zealots roared with laughter as they smashed the ‘evil’, ‘idolatrous’ statues; the faithful jeered as they tore down temples, stripped roofs and defaced tombs. Chants appeared, immortalizing these glorious moments. ‘Those shameful things,’ sang pilgrims, proudly; the ‘demons and idols… our good Saviour trampled down all together.’ Zealotry rarely makes for good poetry.
In this atmosphere, Palmyra’s temple of Athena was an obvious target. The handsome building was an unapologetic celebration of all the believers loathed: a monumental rebuke to monotheism. Go through its great doors and it would have taken your eyes a moment, after the brightness of a Syrian sun, to adjust to the cool gloom within. As they did, you might have noticed that the air was heavy with the smoky tang of incense, or perhaps that what little light there was came from a scatter of lamps left by the faithful. Look up and, in their flickering glow, you would have seen the great figure of Athena herself.
The handsome, haughty profile of this statue might be far from Athena’s native Athens, but it was instantly recognizable, with its straight Grecian nose, its translucent marble skin and the plump, slightly sulky mouth. The statue’s size—it was far taller than any man—might also have impressed. Though perhaps even more admirable than the physical scale was the scale of the imperial infrastructure and ambition that had brought this object here. The statue echoed others that stood on the Athenian Acropolis, well over a thousand miles away; this particular version had been made in a workshop hundreds of miles from Palmyra, then transported here at considerable difficulty and expense to create a little island of Greco-Roman culture by the sands of the Syrian desert.
Did they notice this, the destroyers, as they entered? Were they, even fleetingly, impressed by the sophistication of an empire that could quarry, sculpt then transport marble over such vast distances? Did they, even for a moment, admire the skill that could make a kissably soft-looking mouth out of hard marble? Did they, even for a second, wonder at its beauty?
It seems not. Because when the men entered the temple they took a weapon and smashed the back of Athena’s head with a single blow so hard that it decapitated the goddess. The head fell to the floor, slicing off that nose, crushing the once smooth cheeks. Athena’s eyes, untouched, looked out over a now-disfigured face.
Mere decapitation wasn’t enough. More blows fell, scalping Athena, striking the helmet from the goddess’s head, smashing it into pieces. Further blows followed. The statue fell from its pedestal, then the arms and shoulders were chopped off. The body was left on its front in the dirt; the nearby altar was sliced off just above its base.
Only then does it seem that these men—these Christians—felt satisfied that their work was done. They-melted out once again into the desert. Behind them the temple fell silent. The votive lamps, no longer tended, went out. On the floor, the head of Athena slowly started to be covered by the sands of the Syrian desert.
The ‘triumph’ of Christianity had begun.
9 replies on “Darkening Age, 1”
Christianity and Islam are ultimately the two sides of the post-Temple coin: An attempt to appropriate the Torah and transform it into a mission to transform the world. Both nihilistic.
Ellul makes it a basic point of human psychology that in every society all over the world there are always sacred things, and that whenever an external force destroys the sacred, that destroying force becomes the new sacred thing. In this case, Christianity was the destroyer of the old sacred, which was based in Nature. Christianity, with its pathological hatred and suspicion of Nature as the primordial den of iniquity and sin, the realm of Satan, in turn and not coincidentally has given rise to the technological system, which is now in the process — nearly complete — of desacralizing everything, certainly including Nature, but also including Christianity itself. In turn, the technological system is becoming, or in most ways already has become, the new sacred thing. As Kaczynski, now lodged in Supermax prison, could tell you, nothing shocks the modern mind and arouses its anger more than opposition to the technological system. In a way, this may have been Manson’s real offense too. To keep his civilizational project going, the white man is fully prepared to sacrifice himself, his culture, and all his traditions. As Heisman apparently perceived, the civilization project is actually a suicide project. You could say that by his actions he either pointed the way, or meant to issue a warning.
Not true in my personal experience.
Why else punish both men so severely? In the USA, the average sentence served for murder is less than 6 years. Manson spent the rest of his life in prison, almost 50 years. Kaczynski is serving eight life terms without the possibility of parole. Of course, so long as your opposition to the technological system is harmless and only theoretical, it doesn’t take you seriously. For example, Ellul was just ignored.
Gary Lee Yarbrough, who died recently at jail for even lesser ‘crimes’, was not opposed to tech and, as his wife said recently in this site, the System made him suffer until his last days.
Advocating the white race’s preservation opposes the technological system indirectly. This is why “racism” is the worst sin possible in the opinion of America’s Christian culture, and why even Jeffrey Dahmer made it a point to insist that, while he might be a cannibal, at least he wasn’t a racist. Hence the existence of race-based “hate crimes”, which punish racially-motivated crime more severely. Another example: Matt Hale, who was sentenced on trumped up conspiracy charges to 40 years, and won’t be released until 2037.
I also wouldn’t say his so-called crimes were lesser, since typically the way the law works in America is that you can be charged with murder even if you didn’t actually do the killing yourself. This is what happened in Manson’s case too. He didn’t kill anybody, but was convicted of murder nevertheless. The Order killed people, and if Gary Lee Yarbrough wasn’t formally charged with murder, it’s only because they realized they didn’t need that charge to keep him in prison for life.
If tech worship and not Xtian ethics was the cause of those draconian sentences, the developed & technological Asians would also have anti-racist legislation out of hate.
I don’t know why you think that every detail is going to be the same in every society. For one thing, China and Japan don’t have a problem with niggers and kikes because they don’t have them in anywhere near the numbers the West does. They also have no history of race-based slavery, or much Christianity. They also aren’t the originators of the technological system and aren’t at its center. They’re imitators, epigones who have been sucked into the system on its periphery.. Finally, and most importantly, they’re not white. This very non-whiteness may suit them better than white people to the anti-human system being created. Whites don’t like to live like ants. The Chinese and Japanese don’t seem to mind, so from the system’s point of view that’s a valuable characteristic, a genetic and cultural resource. Unlike white racists, the system can work with them.
Gary Yarbrough was imprisoned in the same prison as the Unabomber, the most secure prison in the USA. There seems to have been quite a few good, or at least interesting men, locked away in the US prison system, quite emblematic of society destroying the lives of some of its best men and defaming them rather than lauding them for the heroes they were. Of course there is absolute scum in US prisons as well, hell most of the population is coloured and third world.
I’d say Charles Manson was locked up his whole life for many reasons of which his opposition to the Industrial Revolution was just one of many. He annoyed a lot of people and was generally not ‘wanted’ by society his entire life. He was screwed from birth being the child of a 15 year old prostitute who never saw his father. In the 1960’s Manson was initially against the white capitalist, industrial consumer society which was destroying the environment for profit. He predicted these white pigs would be killed by the militant Blacks in a race war. But by the 1970’s his anti-industrial/pro-Nature stance was tied in with National Socialism as evidenced by the Swastika he carved into his forehead then later had tattooed on. As he said of the whites in America, they are “dead in the Jews money.” American society is a den of filth in which the Jew, the purveyor of immorality (who portrays himself as the most moral, God’s chosen-the children of the devil are bound to lie like the “Father of lies”) provides the money and the lies for the gullible Gentile slaves to consume, both parasite and host existing together in one unholy mess.