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Author: C .T.

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Hans F. K. Günther Racial right

Günther’s father

Hans F. K. Günther’s essay ‘The dissolution of Germanic racial care by medieval Christianity’ is now available here.

As I have said countless times, German National Socialism was in every way superior to the American white nationalism we suffer from today. It is striking how this essay by a Nordicist who flourished in the Third Reich is still far more relevant than what, on this Monday before Christmas Eve, we can see in any racialist webzine today, for the Aryans of the time had not degenerated.

I have been watching and listening to some of my favourite pieces by Modest Mussorgsky and Richard Wagner on YouTube. I was impressed to find several non-white musicians in a performance of the Berlin Philharmonic playing Wagner. A Polish orchestra, on the other hand, was composed only of young white musicians. At least in both orchestras, people continue to dress as orchestral musicians of the last century did: as Günther dressed above, whose father was a musician, by the way.

What the contemporary racial right ignores is that we must transvalue all values, including musical values and dress, to how we were in the past. Racial realism awareness, and JQ awareness, are just a couple of decent facets among many other decent facets of cultural preservation. Alas, as long as, because of their ersatz Christianity, whites continue to behave like that crazy ascetic I saw in Ripley’s Believe It or Not the day I fled San Francisco—mea culpa! mea culpa! mea culpa! mea culpa!—they will be unable to save their race from the extinction still underway.

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Goths Hans F. K. Günther Miscegenation

The dissolution

of Germanic racial care by medieval Christianity (5)

by Hans F. K. Günther

Jan Luyken’s 1698 engraving of the quintessential subversive Jew, Paul, dictating his famous Letter to the Romans to his scribe.

Baher also saw the price of poverty, which must have seemed to the hard-working German peasant the price of inability to work at a time when there was still enough free land to clear and cultivate. For him, poverty was the appropriate fate of the incapable, not the state in which a person was closer to the Kingdom of God. Baher is the price of the weak and sick, the suspicion found in appearance as a sign of spiritual contamination (see p. 377). In the Epistle to the Romans (12:16) Paul warns: Do not aim at high things, but lower yourselves to the lowly – this was the negation of Indo-Germanic values such as pride, the drive for power, the joy of owning land, of competing with all the forces of the region. The medieval pious person was led away from these Indo-Germanic values to values of courage, i.e. according to the root of the word (serve): of being a servile person, of being homeless, celibate and without possessions.

This transformation of values through the ecclesiastical teachings of the Middle Ages was characterized by one of the best experts on pagan Germanic culture, Andreas Heusler:

It is deeply unscriptural that one openly and joyfully admits to pride and the drive for power. Anyone who has what it takes should want to be the first in their region. The sentence that he who humbles himself finds no place in these hearts. The will to power has the affection of the narrator and the listener. With compassion one follows the self-confident man who is bowed down by fate. Something new in the Christian stories is the look of satisfaction that touches the fall of the powerful. To the extent that bias and malicious joy prevail in the sagas, it is directed less against the tyrant and oppressor than against the coward and the quiet, even against the upstart.

The teachings of the medieval church thus dissolved the Germanic focus on a human image of spiritual perfection and a noble lifestyle, and instead taught the characteristics of those who had been described by the Germanic people as litilmenn, as people with small souls. The new doctrine thus eliminated the original model of the volatile, noble and beautiful person. This had to have an effect over the centuries and, together with other historical forces, resulted in us Germans being racially and genetically different from the Germanic peoples.

The racial history of the Germanic people as such ends with the conversion of the Germanic people to Christianity. It begins with the period between the 9th and 11th centuries when the barrier between the free and the unfree, here earlier, there later, at the latest in Lower Saxony and in Scandinavia, there only completely in the 14th century, the mass history of the individual Germanic-speaking tribes, in Germany the racial history of the German people, fell. The German people of the later Middle Ages and the modern era already presents itself as a selection result of those centuries in which the racial breeding of the Germanic people, which had returned to Indo-Germanic roots of the Neolithic period, had been dissolved.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s 2 ¢

As far as the last paragraph is concerned, since I have Spanish ancestry it came to my attention in William Pierce’s Who We Are and Arthur Kemp’s March of the Titans that the Visigoths of ancient Hispania only began to interbreed after the introduction of Christianity. A century before the Moors invaded the peninsula, these pure Aryans had terrible punishments for the mixed couple who dared to procreate a mongrel baby. Why are these historical facts that Hans Günther and others talked about not mentioned in the forums of the American racial right?

I think we already know the answer…

Categories
Quotable quotes

Adolf quote

‘It is always more difficult to fight
against faith than against knowledge’.

—Hitler

Categories
Hans F. K. Günther Metaphysics of race / sex Women

The dissolution

of Germanic racial care by medieval Christianity (4)

by Hans F. K. Günther

 
For the racial cultivation of the Germanic peoples, the medieval church teachings not only abolished the barrier of oppression between free and unfree, but above all degraded marriage, which had represented something particularly venerable within the divine order of Indo-European culture. According to Paul (1 Corinthians 7:2), marriage was there to help avoid the souring of people; but more sacred than married life was celibacy and mortification of the senses (1 Corinthians 7:1). This degradation of marriage can be traced from the early medieval church fathers through the entire Middle Ages. The rites of monks and nuns were considered the highest morality, and a doctrine of the ‘immaculate conception’ – even if this doctrine was not as easy to interpret as the layman thought it would be – could mean nothing other than that, conversely, every conception by a woman of his people was to be regarded as tainted. An exception in the evaluation of marriage is Clement of Alexandria (died around 220), who, for the first time after the spread of Christianity, again established marriage as a duty towards the people and state, as it was among the peoples of the Indo-European language, and who even saw the purpose of marriage as the procreation of well-behaved children, the euteknia. But here, and partly in Tertullian’s views on marriage, Indo-European thought still comes to the fore in an indirect and weakened form, the Hellenic and Hellenistic spirit of the Stoa and the writings of the Hellenic Plutarch, who was still essentially Indo-European in his views.

The degradation of marriage was logically linked to the degradation of women. It has often been claimed in the past that Christianity was the first to teach the Germanic peoples respect for women. In 1913, the church historian Boehmer attributed things to the Germanic peoples such as various kinds of fornication, respect and enslavement of the female sex and other shameful acts – all of which were traits of human behavior that were demonstrably only introduced into Germania from the south and east. An expert on the Germanic world such as Neckel was right to reject such opinions as untenable in his work Love and Marriage among the Pre-Christian Germanic Peoples (1934). In fact, medieval Christianity caused a wave of denigration of the female sex, while the woman as mistress of the house (déspoina, domina, matrona) had occupied a low position among all Indo-Europeans, as long as the Nordic racial soul was dominant in their peoples, in the reality of everyday life a much more respected position than the various legal records of the peoples of the Indo-European language would suggest. Among the Germanic peoples there was also the view that women had ‘something sacred and prescient’ (Tacitus: aliquid sanctum et providum). ‘They do not disdain their nature and pay attention to their answers,’ is how Tacilus (Germania, 8) describes the respect that Germanic men had for women.

In church doctrine, this is opposed by the mulier tacent in eeclessin (1 Corinthians 14:34/35) and the duty of women to cover their heads during church services, because otherwise they could arouse lust (1 Corinthians 11:5 and 6). For both church fathers, woman, to whom Paul (1 Timothy 2:14) had ascribed the origin of sin, appears as a templum aedificatum super oloacum, as the ‘mother of sin’ and ‘source of sin’, and the Council of Macon, which was held in the 7th century under the Merovingian Frankish kings, discussed whether woman should be regarded as a human being at all. How much abomination the counterhammer, judging according to medieval church doctrine, ascribes to the female sex can be read in this legal document.

The innate veneration of women by the descendants of the Germanic tribes of the early Middle Ages was able to have an impact in the High Middle Ages in the veneration of the Virgin Mary, and from such expressions of the veneration of women it found its way into lovemaking and into that dolce stil nuovo, of which Dante’s poem Vita Nuova may be the finest example. Here the blonde Dante sang of the blonde Beatrice out of a characteristically Nordic feeling of love. The veneration of women that broke through again could now hardly be expressed as simply and grandly as it had been among the Germanic tribes, but rather took on a more or less affected character or experienced a certain romantic exaggeration; but above all: this veneration of women was on the edge of an abyss, the aroused feeling of sin, the fear of the air of the flesh, which for church teachings constituted the essential aspect of the relationship between the sexes. Hence, among the minnesingers, who in their youth had sung of the joy of ‘this world’ and of love between the sexes, so often in all of them the fearful change to the rejection of ‘Lady World’. In church art, ‘Lady World’ was represented as a woman, alluring from the front, tempting to sin, and full of noble animals behind. When the world (for the Germanic people Midgard, the cultivated homeland, the field of all the nurturing industriousness of man and of all the national struggle with the god against Utgard, the epitome of everything anti-divine) as the world understood by the Germanic people as Midgard, was represented by the church as this ‘Lady World’, when Luther also saw in nature only a devilish power that seduces and mocks man, a ‘woman of honor who may bark against her god’, the source of that feeling of life from which the Germanic racial cultivation had sprung.

The Jewish-Christian world of faith thus attempted to separate the Germanic people from the context of the world order and relegated them to an afterlife in comparison to which ancestral ‘earthly values’ lost their meaning. Little by little, the whole attitude to life of the medieval West was thus reduced precisely in those who were capable of absorbing spiritual values and were willing to live according to these values. The coarser-minded people lived without deeper struggles of conscience in the various compromises between church doctrine and inherited nature that were possible and tolerated by the church. However, a decline in the overall attitude to life in the Middle Ages is undetectable and continues until, in the humanism of the Renaissance, the best of the Western peoples sensed the ancient Indo-European attitude to life again through the testimonies of Hellenic and Roman intellectual life, and until later, in the era of Winckelmann, Goethe, Schiller and Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Indo-European spirit was once again ignited by the great testimonies of the past, and until finally, with the Romantic era, native Germanic culture was rediscovered. But at the time of the revival, the Indo-Germanic and Germanic sense of what is humanly noble was no longer valid in the West, as a result of church teachings, no longer the focus on the noble, the will to improve life, to cultivate all growth values, but rather a tendency towards a stunted life prevailed in all spiritual expressions, precisely because a stunted life was a better preparation for the afterlife in this world of afflictions. According to such teachings, people should not feel at all secure in this world.

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Deranged altruism Film Literature Videos

Turning the other cheek

In the excellent Russian film I saw based on this Dostoevsky novel, what stuck with me most was the slap given to the idiot prince (watch it here).

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Energy / peak oil Kali Yuga

Happy fat people

I would like to add something to what I said the day before yesterday about North Korea. I have continued to watch propaganda videos of Americans against this country that practices harsh totalitarianism against its citizens. Yesterday, for example, I was watching this interview of an American with a North Korean woman who escaped from her country as a child and wrote a book that became a bestseller in the US. I abruptly interrupted the interview when the American interviewer confessed that he had a mixed-race daughter with his Asian wife. As old visitors to The West’s Darkest Hour know, we call that the sin against the holy spirit of life: an unforgivable sin that requires the punishment the Visigoths of Hispania meted out to the couple who dared to miscegenate.

In my post the day before yesterday, ‘Synchronicity?’, I linked to an article by Kerry Bolton, who uses slightly different terminology than I did (hard/soft totalitarianism). He talks about totalitarianism that controls its citizens through pain (like North Korea) in contrast to the totalitarian system that controls us through pleasure (like the US). In that post, and I now use the terminology of Yockey’s admirer, I said that a totalitarianism that controls us through pleasure is more effective than the one that controls us through pain, in that its citizens don’t even realise that they are inside a Matrix in the sense that every totalitarian regime imposes a false worldview on its subjects. In North Korea, on the other hand, as the common citizenry suffers from starvation, they surreptitiously watch pirated videos of American films. The aforementioned Korean woman, for example, tells the anecdote that the first foreign film she illegally watched was Titanic.

In other words, North Koreans who suffer and begin to rebel know that there is a society very different from their own, with very different values, and that some of their acquaintances have tried to escape from this totalitarian prison by crossing the border into China. The ordinary westerner, on the other hand, is unaware that he too is in a totalitarian prison: he is as utterly controlled by pleasure as a fish surrounded by water.

Even the white nationalists ignore that they are in a Huxley-like ‘brave new world’. Had they known they would have rebelled not only against their Christian religion that gave rise to it, but against democracy, the Constitution of their founding fathers, so-called human rights (i.e., neochristianity) and what we are taught in the universities, the MSM and social media. They would also have rebelled against this culture of pleasure and would have as their paradigm to emulate Sparta, Republican Rome before Julius Caesar, and of course Hitler’s Germany. Paraphrasing Eduardo Velasco, the contemporary westerner knows no pain, no honour, no blood, no war, no sacrifice, no camaraderie, no respect or combat; and thus he doesn’t know the ancient and gentle Goddesses known as Gloria or Victoria.

And the saddest thing of all is that even racialists won’t begin to wake up until the music stops; that is, until the consequences of the dollar collapse converge with an amplifying energy devolution that will kill proportionately as many humans as North Koreans starve to death under the regime of fat Kim Jong Un.

This guy, by the way, seems to be the only one in that country who overfeeds, as many Americans currently overfeed. (The first time I visited the US the average American was lean; now there is an epidemic of obesity in the culture that controls them through pleasure: not only an excess of available food but porn, promiscuous sex, degenerate cellphones, etc.)

I will not link again to Bolton’s long article, in which he mentions controlling virtually one hundred per cent of the population through pleasure. Serious readers of this site should have already read it.

Categories
Christendom Hans F. K. Günther

The dissolution

of Germanic racial care by medieval Christianity (3)

by Hans F. K. Günther

 

The most popular book of the Middle Ages. Note the devils behind the naked women and remember Nietzsche’s aphorism: ‘Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to Vice’.

The church’s devaluation of all earthly life extends to all parts of the meaningful order. Sexual life was desecrated because it now belonged to the respected ‘flesh’. The woman, the mistress of the house as guardian of the racial heritage, became an object that could ignite carnal desires. This dissolved the order of procreation described above. Those who had become circumcised for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven were considered particularly pious (Matthew 19:127). Origen, the great teacher of the Church, had castrated himself. The degradation of the body, which was so contrary to the Indo-European veneration of the body, went so far that Athanastus (born around 297 in Alexandria) praised the Egyptian Antonius, a saint, because he no longer washed his feet, and Saint Agnes (in the 4th century) so disrespected her body for the sake of her soul striving for the afterlife that she no longer took a bath. The Indo-Europeans had always valued physical and mental health as a great asset. Wholeness, health and joy of life were wished for in the greeting: Heil (in English whole, entirely ‘vale’ or ‘chaire’). Saint Steronymus (340-420) taught: ‘One should conquer the flesh! A face radiant with health is the sign of a defiled soul. Health should be a danger to the soul, physical beauty, an expression of refined nature, a work of the devil to incite the flesh to fornication’.

Of course, such teachings never took hold of the entire Germanic people, as they were too deeply rooted in the aristocratic peasant nature and the everyday life of the peasant warrior. Only a few people completely fell for the church teachings, which always proclaimed a monastic life rather than a truly Christian life. But these teachings did dissolve the high-minded and ultimately ignoble beliefs of the Germanic people, so that some of the Germanic customs could only continue to exist as a tolerated secular tradition, while this customs before the conversion were actually an expression of Germanic piety. Nowadays, much of the tradition was considered ‘pagan and reprehensible’ and gradually dissolved in the course of the medieval centuries or became a class tradition of the nobility alone, which increasingly lost its original, biological meaning based on the laws of life.

The Midgard concept, which included the order of procreation that was so significant in terms of life law and race, and all the noble peasant values described by Neckel, was bound to be quickly disintegrated by the church teachings; the security of the world was bound to dissolve. This disintegration extended to the value of home, which was at the core of the Midgard idea. In his book Usketische Heimatlosigkeit (1930), Campenhaufen described the church value of xeniteia, the turning away from home and the holy emigration to foreign lands, which was opposed to the idea of home, the peregrinatio, as this turning away from home was called in the West. The value of homelessness as a means of healing the soul emerged above all in Irish-Anglo-Saxon Christianity. In the rest of the West this teaching later faded into the background, but peregrinatio was still practiced and practiced as a particularly sanctifying form of feudal conduct in the High Middle Ages. But the church’s devaluation of the homeland struck the heart of the Midgard concept. The monk Otfried von Weisenburg (in Elfass) wrote his Gbangelienbuch in 868, in which he explains (I, 18) that our homeland is paradise, that we humans live on this earth like outcasts in a foreign land because of our sins, and that only through repentance and turning away from the world can we regain our true homeland.

This was the exact opposite of Germanic belief – aversion to home and clan had become a sign of the greatest piety. For the Germanic people, maintaining clan ties was the safeguarding of peace that created prosperity. The word peace originally meant the prosperity of all growth in clan settlements through clan order. The most sinister thing for the Germanic people was clan division. Grönbech has convincingly demonstrated this. Therefore, even with the most appropriate interpretation, a word from Jesus such as that recorded in Matthew 10:35 must have seemed outrageous to the Germanic people, who still thought in terms of clanship: I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be his own household. For the church, such a word was confirmation of the spiritual value of turning away from the world. However, such a turning away from the world also meant a turning away from the idea of ancestry and clan care.

The idea of descent from noble peasant ancestors of one’s own tribe was further opposed as church teaching by the idea of a connection, at least of the souls, to the ancestors of the Jewish people. In Paul’s letter to the Galatians (3:27) it was taught: ‘But if you are Christ’s, you are Abraham’s seed. The Jews were now to be regarded as the chosen people from whom salvation comes’ (John 4:22), as the people chosen by God, because Old Testament terms such as Elohim or Jahn (ehoba), terms for the special god of the Hebrew tribes, were translated by the Holy Scripture, the Bulgata, as dominus or deus, as ‘lord’ or ‘god’, thus no longer with the designation as a special god, but as a one and only god and all-god who encompasses all peoples and obliges all to his commandments. It is precisely in this tacit equation of Hebrew names for gods with names for the all-god himself that the ‘great deception’ that was disastrous in the history of faith and to which Delitzsch has pointed out emphatically is touched upon.

Categories
Americanism Autobiography London

Synchronicity?

After midnight I watched some videos about North Korea. I was very impressed that it is a society that has implemented some measures that, I am absolutely convinced, must be implemented in a subjugated Europe to throw off the shackles of Americanism. I am talking about banning Western films or TV programmes in North Korea (remember that not long ago I made a list of the very few that could be seen), degenerate music, the internet, jeans, hair dyeing and something magnificent: banning Bibles too!

Currently, North Korea allows Westerners to visit under controlled tour guides, unless the tourist is an American citizen, who is not permitted to enter the country.

It is laughable that some American vloggers talk about the propaganda with which North Korea’s totalitarian system indoctrinates its citizens because they only see the speck in the other’s eye. Western propaganda is equally totalitarian. But it is not the hard kind of totalitarianism: it is the kind of soft totalitarianism that Aldous Huxley explained to George Orwell not long before the latter died.

No one is more a slave than he who thinks he is free, and the propaganda that every Westerner has suffered for decades about Hitler, the Third Reich and National Socialism is akin to the Two Minutes Hate of 1984. At least in North Korea boys are boys and girls are girls. There is no mutilation of these creatures’ genitals on the altar of ‘diversity’. In fact, I think Andrew Anglin is right to say that this kind of American opprobrium is even worse than that suffered by nations under harsh totalitarianism: just what Huxley tried to tell Orwell, insofar as American totalitarianism is a more subtle, insidious and effective form of mind control.

Alongside these videos about North Korea, there are other YouTube videos about homeless and street junkies in Pennsylvania, or the streets of downtown San Francisco where all the businesses have closed because the mayor has taken neochristian ethics to its ultimate consequences: allowing business robberies as long as they don’t exceed nine hundred dollars.

It reminds me of the first night I spent outside the country of my birth. That was in March 1981, when I only endured a single day in a youth hostel in San Francisco. I was so repulsed by the Sin City that I fled to a privileged area in Los Angeles (Westwood near UCLA).

One of the things I mention in my autobiography is what Jung called synchronicity, or meaningful coincidences. As a sceptic of the paranormal, I shouldn’t believe in that Jungian theory, but sometimes things have happened to me that seem to be very meaningful.

One of them happened on that one-day trip to San Francisco. When I got off the Greyhound the first thing I did was to slip, along with two educated Spanish speakers I met on the bus, into a Ripley’s Believe It or Not street exhibit close to the bus station.

The small exhibition was about very weird things. In particular, the huge image of an Aryan male, a sort of monk in the sense of extreme asceticism, stuck in my memory. He was so astronomically burdened with Christian guilt that he had wrapped himself in heavy chains, and even a huge mallet hung from the chains to mortify his sinful body.

‘That is America’, so terminally loaded with false guilt, wanted to tell me the collective unconscious by way of a meaningful coincidence the first day I spent outside my native country! Although in 1981 masochistic self-mortification wasn’t as ubiquitous in the West, the seeds of self-hatred were already sown and had germinated in the American psyche. Perceptive Americans who were still alive in that year, such as Revilo Oliver and William Pierce, saw it that way.

I haven’t been able to find via Google the image I saw more than forty years ago, but I recently included this other image of flagellants in Oliver’s anti-Christian essay. So synchronistic was the 1981 image of Ripley’s Believe It or Not in my first trip to the US that, today, if a Hindu tourist were to try to communicate to an Aryan American that, according to his religion, it is a sin for this Aryan to mix with coloureds, the San Fran American might view the Indian who wants to save him with hatred, insofar as his moral mandate is self-flagellation until his race disappears.

Huxley was right: soft totalitarianism is far worse than hard totalitarianism. See Kerry Bolton’s ‘A contemporary assessment of Francis Parker Yockey’ (pages 47-70 of this PDF) for further discussion.

One might ask me what it was that so horrified me in San Francisco that I barely spent a night and hastily fled to another American city. The answer is that something similar would happen to me in London the following year, the first time I visited Europe’s largest city.

In 1982 I saw London as such an incredibly nefarious place, even at a time when the vast majority in that city were white, that I immediately fled to Paris. Sensitive people like Dostoyevsky and Gustave Doré suffered identical impressions when visiting London: even in the 19th century it was already hell (see e.g., Doré’s 250 pen and ink drawings, often with dramatic chiaroscuro, about London). I believe that only artists understand these realities intuitively, which completely escape the man without an artistic spirit.

Categories
Hans F. K. Günther Miscegenation Racial studies

The dissolution

of Germanic racial care by medieval Christianity (2)

by Hans F. K. Günther

 
In many areas of Sweden and Norway the racial barrier between free and unfree fell much later than in southern Germania, because Christianity penetrated there much later. In Sweden there were many unfree servants who had been imported from Finland, from areas of predominantly non-Nordic race. Sweden seems to have had the largest number of unfree people around 1200, although by then many people had already been freed under southern Christian influence. But there were still many unfree people in Sweden up until the 14th century, most of them probably in Uppland, the region opposite the Finnish coast, where the need for servants was greater due to the seat of the kingdom and the estates of the powerful large farmers. In some areas of Uppland there are today relatively many short-headed people with broad faces, pronounced cheekbones and features of the Baltic race, which are more common in Finland. When the serfs in Sweden became free around 1200 and later, these people moved to the undeveloped and inhospitable areas, as there was still enough cultivated land. In many cases, the names of settlements and villages indicate that such places were cleared and founded by freedmen. But in these areas, the people are mostly darker in skin, hair and eyes than other Swedes, and at the same time more shy, simple, distrustful and religious in their souls, and not as open and frank as other Swedes. Thus, according to research by Rihtén, despite some later mixing of the populations, there is still a racial difference between the descendants of former freemen and those of former serfs.

Another abolition of the idea of ancestry and ethnic origin was brought about by the idea of redemption – this idea itself was such a characteristic idea of the Near Eastern racial soul that Claus combined the spiritual traits of the people of the Near Eastern race to form the image of the ‘redemptive man’. The redemption taught by the church should, however – and this is the essential difference compared to the traditional racial cultivation of Germanic culture – at the same time bring about a liberation and rejection of species, tribe, language and people, which here appeared as something restrictive and degrading. The ‘Revelation of John’ (5:9) taught that God had redeemed people through his blood from every tribe, every language and every people (ex omni tribu et lingua et populo et natione).

John of Patmos called to write the so-called Book of Revelation. Note how the Christian artist paints both the god of the Jews (or is he an angel?) and Johnny as pure Aryans.

A Jew of the Hellenistic-Roman era could, under certain circumstances, see his nationality as something repulsive and something to be discarded. There were many at that time who detested the Jewish people; there were also some Jews who saw their people as inferior to the Hellenes and Romans. Josephus, for example, the Jewish historian on the side of the Romans besieging Jerusalem, felt this way as a citizen of the world with a Hellenistic education. But now the Germanic peoples were supposed to see their tribe, their language and their way of life as something from which they had to be redeemed. Through priestly instruction, the spirit of the East now influenced the West.

In my work Piety of a Nordic Kind (1934) I tried to show why the idea of redemption in all its interpretations and effects must have seemed completely alien to Germanic culture at first: redemption from what evil and to what other life? Midgard, the world of sensible order, the cultivated homeland, was his evil, was in fact something divine, and Utgard, the power of the anti-divine, was to be fought on the side of the god. There could not be a better life than the combative life on this earth and in friendship with God. It was precisely as a pious person that the Germanic people possessed the security described above and, as a nobleman and descendant of select aristocratic peasant families, the certainty of good nature. Now Midgard was to become for him a scene of original sin and frailty in need of redemption, his very nature bound to the disgusting ‘flesh’ that leads to sin, something sinful from which a soul separated from the body must strive for an afterlife. All human nature was corrupted in its infancy, ‘evil from birth’ (Genesis 8:2) and created from ‘sinful seed’ (Pyalm 51:7). According to this doctrine, it was no longer possible, as it seemed to the Indo-Europeans, that something divine could manifest itself in human races; rather, everything human was inherited, unworthy before God and therefore dependent on redemption, redemption through a blood-stained head.

For the reasons stated above, no evidence has survived of the effect such teachings had on the Germanic mind. This mind probably opposed them with a similar resistance to that felt by Goethe, who rebelled against the doctrine of original sin and wanted to see certain phenomena recognized as an ‘inherited virtue.’ We also know of Goethe’s indignation at Kant’s idea of ’radical evil’ in man – Goethe was certainly too good a connoisseur of reality to overlook the fact that the majority of his contemporaries could probably provide examples of something ‘radical evil.’ but he refused, out of what one might call an Indo-European feeling, to understand this ‘sad evil’ as something necessary and essential to the human species and to all types of people, and believed that Kant had introduced this view into his teachings in order to attract Christians to his philosophy as well, as he wrote in his letter to Herder on June 7, 1793.

The Germanic peoples may have felt something like this in relation to the medieval church teachings. An idea such as that expressed by Luther in his baptismal book (1526), that the child before baptism is possessed by the devil and a child of the devil; further an idea such as that expressed by the Augsburg Confession (Confessio Augustana) and the Formula of Concordia (Formula Concordiae), the obligatory foundations of the Germanic Church, that a person conceived and born of the devil cannot have a true faith in God by nature; that there is nothing found and uncorrupted in the body and soul of man and that he is therefore not only unwilling but completely incapable of doing good and that his whole nature, person and being is completely corrupted by original sin. Such ideas, in contrast to Germanic-Indo-Germanic thinking, can only have entered the minds of the descendants of converted Germanic peoples after centuries of appropriate interpretation. Individual Germanic tribes have certainly tried to interpret the church teachings in a native sense; one such attempt, which may have seemed strange enough to most Germanic tribes of the time, is represented by the Old Saxon Geltand-Bichtung of the 9th century. The sober-minded among the Germanic noble farmers – and sober thinking was always widespread among the farmers of predominantly Nordic origins – may have initially perceived the church teachings somewhat in the same way as Frederick the Great did according to his living will of 1768.

Categories
Quotable quotes

Adolf quote

‘I use emotion for the many
and reserve reason for the few’.

—Hitler