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Category: Ancient Greece

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Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Psychohistory

Caligula, 3

Marble portrait bust of the emperor Gaius, known as Caligula, A.D. 37–41.

The West’s Darkest Hour isn’t a news site. But it is still difficult not to say at least a word about what has happened in the last few hours regarding Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny in Russia. Media misinformation is such that it is as difficult to know exactly what is happening this very day as it is to make a reliable biography of Caligula: both sources, some from the 1st century and some from the 21st century, are compromised by propaganda.

But back to our topic these days. José Manuel Roldán received his doctorate in 1968 and a few years later obtained the Chair of Ancient History at the University of Granada, and later that of Salamanca. His work has focused on the history of Rome. Despite his credentials, the Spanish historian is a normie. Unlike what William Pierce wrote in Who We Are, much of what we read in Calígula isn’t useful to us. Nevertheless, the book allows me to explain some very important issues.

If the conquest of Germania up to the Elbe was regarded by Caligula as an un-renounceable family legacy (his father wanted to avenge Rome for the defeat of Hermann), the positive image I had of him, after reading that sentence by Eduardo Velasco quoted in the first instalment of this series, immediately collapses. I confess that on this site I stopped quoting Gore Vidal’s novel Julian when I came across the pages in which Julian the Apostate fought against the Germans. (If we recall Who We Are, as quoted in The Fair Race, the pure Aryans were the Germans, not the 4th-century Romans.)

Calígula is reminding me of what Tom Holland said in Dominion: that, although he was an absolute fan of the Greco-Roman world, when he began to study it he noticed some barbaric customs. Pages 40-41 of Calígula for example describe the essential triumphal ceremony in Rome, where white bulls whose horns were gilded and entwined with garlands were then immolated. Caligula himself, at the age of five, went to one of these ceremonies in the triumphal chariot when his father Germanicus was honoured in Rome. But even as emperor the number of animal victims sacrificed during the first three months of his reign has been calculated at one hundred and sixty thousand (page 139 of Calígula).

Regarding humans, an anecdote collected by Tacitus alarmed me. When Tiberius punished the remaining sons of the traitor Sejanus, an innocent daughter of Sejanus repeatedly asked for what crime she was being dragged off for. Historians of the time say that being a virgin she couldn’t suffer capital punishment, so the executioner raped her and then he could legally strangle her! Furthermore, influenced by the histories of William Pierce and Arthur Kemp, I have always sided with Republican Rome and against Imperial Rome. But on pages 178-179 of Calígula we are informed that gladiatorial combats, of Etruscan origin, had been introduced in the middle of the 3rd century b.c.e. And by the end of the 2nd century b.c.e. they had become so popular that the Senate found it necessary to admit them among the public spectacles!

This is not to say that I am, like Holland, making concessions to Christian morality insofar as what we, in Day of Wrath, have called psychogenic emergence is a development of empathy that evolved without the need for Semitic religions. But it’s clear that both Eduardo Velasco, who blogged in his webzine Evropa Soberana, and William Pierce, were wrong to believe that Sparta was the model for the Aryan man when the obvious choice was none other than Hitler’s Third Reich. See what I wrote on pages 481-482 of The Fair Race about the Vikings and the extreme Yang exemplified in Sparta (exactly the same could be said about the ancient Romans).

This prompted me this day to publish a new page, ‘The Sacred Words’ which can be read in red letters at the very top of this site, as well as changing the subtitle once again to The West’s Darkest Hour (the site of the priest of the sacred words).

Precisely because I am a priest of those words, Roldán’s Calígula is having a very different impact on me than I imagined when I bought it (funnily enough, it was the last copy they had at Amazon Books, so I had no choice but to buy it). If anyone has already assimilated my version of Psychohistory in Day of Wrath, he will understand my repudiation of much of classical culture in favour of Hitler’s Third Reich. It is obvious that recent advances in psychogenesis have determined me, and this reminds me of the seminal essay ‘The Red Giant’ (collected in my anthology On Exterminationism), in which a Swede said that some values had to be transvalued to Greco-Roman values and other values to more recent times (say, to Jane Austen’s world).

Like Tom Holland, familiarity with the dark side of the classical world makes me see things about it that I find disturbing and unacceptable. But unlike Holland, I reiterate, I do so not because of Christian morality but because of what we in Day of Wrath call psychogenesis.

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Ancient Greece Beauty

European beauty

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Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Constantine Heinrich Himmler Hitler's Religion (book) Richard Weikart Sexual degeneracy

Some reflections

I would like to say something about the seventh chapter of Hitler’s Religion; not just what I quoted here, but the entire chapter. My reading of this book continues to confirm my premise: The most influential NS men, and those who inspired them, were just one step away from reaching the other side of the psychological Rubicon, but didn’t reach solid ground. (N.b.: I cannot link to the article ‘My stepping stones’ on the psychological Rubicon for the moment, as a technician is just about to see if it is possible to upload the WordPress-censored entries here. If this new incarnation of WDH doesn’t appear for a few moments, don’t be alarmed: we’re reconfiguring it.)

From this follows the need to create a new religious movement to take this last step, a movement I call the priesthood of the sacred words. And in doing so I must confess that I find myself somewhat closer to Himmler than to Hitler on this point.

On pages 189-90 of Hitler’s Religion Weikart informs us that, although Hitler criticised Gothic cathedrals and medieval mysticism for their somberness, he didn’t believe that NS was a religious cult for holding mystical ceremonies. In fact, his 1938 Nuremberg Rally speech was an open rebuke to Himmler, Rosenberg and other neo-pagans in the movement. Rosenberg himself in his major work recalled that Hitler had disapproved of Himmler’s plans to reintroduce the cult of Wotan and Thor. Hitler was even suspicious of Rosenberg’s studies of Germanic prehistory because he preferred the cultures of Greece and Rome.

Recall from The Fair Race that the original cultures of Greece and Rome were founded by Norsemen, and that only in their more decadent stages did they undergo interbreeding. I can well understand Hitler on this point and what he said about Wotan in one of his after-dinner talks. But Himmler’s idea was the right one: for a movement to be successful, it is necessary for believers to feel the mysterium tremendum, what Jung and others call the numinous.

And that can only be inspired by a semi-religious movement. I understand Hitler because there were occult and parapsychological aspects in some high-ranking National Socialists that had to be rejected. But an ideal compromise would have been, as Manu Rodríguez rightly said in one of our books, to use the rebuilt Greco-Roman temples (starting e.g., by destroying the Vatican and putting in its place a huge temple to Zeus) to teach languages, history and literature of the peoples with Nordic blood (peoples that obviously include Greece and Rome in their origins).

The other reflection I wanted to communicate this day is due to the recent article ‘What is a Woman?’ by Spencer Quinn, who tells us: ‘It began in the 1960s, when we pretended that blacks were the intellectual equals of whites’.

That is not true. While Quinn is correct in saying that Matt Walsh (pic above), who produced the amazing documentary What is a Woman?, didn’t dare to name the influential Jews in gender ideology, the ideology of equality began in the writings of a much older Jew, St Paul. Constantine brought to Constantinople the inversion of Greco-Roman values we read in that famous verse in the Epistle to the Galatians, inducing, with all the power of the Roman Empire, a melting pot of races in the so-called second Rome. There began the Aryan decline big time. While the ancient Greeks and Romans with Nordic blood were racists, Christianity broke down the barriers—not something as recent as the 1960s.

Once I finish reviewing Weikart’s book on Hitler’s religion, we will continue translating Karlheinz Deschner’s history of Christianity.

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Albert Speer Alfred Rosenberg Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Catholic Church Constantine Destruction of Greco-Roman world Emperor Julian Heinrich Himmler Hitler's Religion (book) Jesus Joseph Goebbels Michelangelo Old Testament Protestantism Richard Weikart Schutzstaffel (SS) St Paul

Hitler’s Religion: Chapter 4

(excerpts)

by Richard Weikart

Many Christian leaders in the 1930s and 1940s, both within and outside Germany, recognized Hitler was no friend to their religion. In 1936, Karl Spiecker, a German Catholic living in exile in France, detailed the Nazi fight against Christianity in his book Hitler gegen Christus (Hitler against Christ). The Swedish Lutheran bishop Nathan Soderblom, a leading figure in the early twentieth-century ecumenical movement, was not so ecumenical that he included Hitler in the ranks of Christianity. After meeting with Hitler sometime in the mid-1930s, he stated, “As far as Christianity is concerned, this man is chemically pure from it.”

Many Germans, however, had quite a different image of their Führer. Aside from those who saw him as a Messiah worthy of veneration and maybe even worship, many regarded him as a faithful Christian. Rumors circulated widely in Nazi Germany that Hitler carried a New Testament in his vest pocket, or that he read daily a Protestant devotional booklet. Though these rumors were false, at the time many Germans believed them…

Most historians today agree that Hitler was not a Christian in any meaningful sense. Neil Gregor, for instance, warns that Hitler’s “superficial deployment of elements of Christian discourse” should not mislead people to think that Hitler shared the views of “established religion.” Michael Burleigh argues that Nazism was anticlerical and despised Christianity. He recognizes that Hitler was not an atheist, but “Hitler’s God was not the Christian God, as conventionally understood.” In his withering but sober analysis of the complicity of the Christian churches in Nazi Germany, Robert Ericksen depicts Hitler as duplicitous when he presented himself publicly as a Christian…

However, when we turn to Hitler’s view of Jesus, we find a remarkable consistency from his earliest speeches to his latest Table Talks. He expressed admiration for Jesus publicly and privately, without once directly criticizing Him. But his vision of Jesus was radically different from the teachings of the Catholic Church he grew up in. For him, Jesus was not a Jew, but a fellow Aryan. He only rarely stated this explicitly, though he frequently implied it by portraying Jesus as an anti-Semite. However, in April 1921, he told a crowd in Rosenheim that he could not imagine Christ as anything other than blond-haired and blue-eyed, making clear that he considered Jesus an Aryan. In an interview with a journalist in November 1922, he actually claimed Jesus was Germanic…

While Hitler appreciated Jesus because he considered him a valiant anti-materialistic anti-Semite, I have never found any evidence that Hitler believed in the deity of Jesus. Richard Steigmann-Gall bases his mistaken claim that Hitler believed in Jesus as God on a mistranslation of Hitler’s April 22, 1922 speech (some of which we discussed earlier in this chapter). According to the Norman Baynes’ edition of The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, during that speech Hitler stated about Jesus, “It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to the fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as sufferer but as fighter.” The term that is translated “God’s truth!” is wahrhaftiger Gott, a common German interjection that is rendered in some German-English dictionaries as “good God!” or “good heavens!” In the original German edition, wahrhaftiger Gott is set off in commas, indicating that it is indeed an interjection… Steigmann-Gall uses this mistranslation to argue that Hitler believed in the deity of Jesus. Apparently, he did not understand the colloquial expression used…

While Hitler’s positive attitude toward Jesus—at least the Jesus of his imagination—did not seem to change over his career, his position vis-a-vis Christianity is much more complex. Many scholars doubt that as an adult he was ever personally committed to any form of Christianity. They interpret his pro-Christian utterances as nothing more than the cynical ploy of a crafty politician. Almost all historians, including Steigmann-Gall, admit that Hitler was anti-Christian in the last several years of his life…

Even when he publicly announced his Christian faith in 1922 or at other times, Hitler never professed commitment to Catholicism. Further, despite his public stance upholding Christianity before 1924, he provided a clue in one of his earliest speeches that he was already antagonistic toward Christianity. In August 1920, Hitler viciously attacked the Jews in his speech, “Why Are We Anti-Semites?” One accusation he leveled was that the Jews had used Christianity to destroy the Roman Empire. He then claimed Christianity was spread primarily by Jews. Since Hitler was a radical anti-Semite, his characterization of Christianity as a Jewish plot was about as harsh an indictment as he could bring against Christianity. Hitler was also a great admirer of the ancient Greeks and Romans, whom he considered fellow Aryans. Blaming Christianity for ruining the Roman Empire thus expressed considerable anti-Christian animus. Hitler often discussed both themes—Christianity as Jewish, and Christianity as the cause of Rome’s downfall—later in life.

Hitler’s anti-Christian outlook remained largely submerged before 1924, because—as Hitler himself explained in Mein Kampf—he did not want to offend possible supporters…

But by the time Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in 1924-25, he was walking a tightrope. His political ally, General Ludendorff, was increasingly hostile to the Catholic Church, as were many on the radical Right in Weimar Germany. Hitler did not want to follow them into political oblivion—and indeed Ludendorff did end up politically isolated, perhaps in part because of his antireligious crusade. But Hitler was also sensitive to the anticlerical thrust within and outside his party. Thus, after warning his followers in the first volume of Mein Kampf against offending people’s religious tastes, he threw caution to the wind in the second volume by sharply criticizing Christianity. In one passage, he complained that both Christian churches in Germany were contributing to the decline of the German people, because they supported a system that allowed those with hereditary diseases to procreate. The problem, he thought, was that the churches focused on the spirit and neglected the physical basis of a healthy life. Hitler immediately followed up this critique by blasting the churches for carrying out mission work among black Africans, who are “healthy, though primitive and inferior, human beings,” whom the missionaries turn into “a rotten brood of bastards.” In this passage, Hitler harshly castigated Christianity for not supporting his eugenics and racial ideology.

Worse yet, he actually threatened to obliterate Christianity later in the second volume. After calling Christianity fanatically intolerant for destroying other religions, Hitler explained that Nazism would have to be just as intolerant to supplant Christianity:

A philosophy filled with infernal intolerance will only be broken by a new idea, driven forward by the same spirit, championed by the same mighty will, and at the same time pure and absolutely genuine in itself. The individual may establish with pain today that with the appearance of Christianity the first spiritual terror entered in to the far freer ancient world, but he will not be able to contest the fact that since then the world has been afflicted and dominated by this coercion, and that coercion is broken only by coercion, and terror only by terror. Only then can a new state of affairs be constructively created.

Hitler’s anti-Christian sentiment shines through clearly here, as he called Christianity a “spiritual terror” that has “afflicted” the world. Earlier in the passage, he also argued Christian intolerance was a manifestation of a Jewish mentality, once again connecting Christianity with the people he most hated. Even more ominously, he called his fellow Nazis to embrace an intolerant worldview so they could throw off the shackles of Christianity. He literally promised to visit terror on Christianity. Even though several times later in life, especially before 1934, Hitler would try to portray himself as a pious Christian, he had already blown his cover.

Hitler’s tirade against Christianity in Mein Kampf, including the threat to demolish it, diverged remarkably from his normal public persona… In January 1937, Goebbels was with Hitler during an internecine debate on religion and reported, “The Führer thinks Christianity is ripe for destruction. That may still take a long time, but it is coming.”

In reading through Goebbels’ Diaries, Hitler’s monologues, and Rosenberg’s Diaries, it is rather amazing how often Hitler discussed religion with his entourage, especially during World War II. He was clearly obsessed with the topic. On December 13, 1941, for example, just two days after declaring war on the United States, he told his Gauleiter (district leaders) that he was going to annihilate the Jews, but he was postponing his campaign against the church until after the war, when he would deal with them. According to Rosenberg, both on that day and the following, Hitler’s monologues were primarily about the “problem of Christianity.” In a letter to a friend in July 1941, Hitler’s secretary Christa Schroeder claimed that in Hitler’s evening discussions at the headquarters, “the church plays a large role.” She added that she found Hitler’s religious comments very illuminating, as he exposed the deception and hypocrisy of Christianity. Hitler’s own monologues confirm Schroeder’s impression…

When Hitler told his Gauleiter in December 1941 that the regime would wait until after the war to solve the church problem, he was probably trying to restrain some of the hotheads in his party. But he also promised the day of reckoning would eventually come. He told them, “There is an insoluble contradiction between the Christian and a Germanic-heroic worldview. However, this contradiction cannot be resolved during the war, but after the war we must step up to solve this contradiction. I see a possible solution only in the further consolidation of the National Socialist worldview”…

At a cabinet meeting in 1937, Hitler commented, “I know that my un-Christian Germanic SS units with their general non-denominational belief in God can grasp their duty for their people (Volk) more clearly than those other soldiers who have been made stupid through the catechism.” Hitler’s contempt for Christianity could hardly have been more palpable.

Hitler’s press chief, Otto Dietrich, confirmed Frank’s impression. In private, according to Dietrich, Hitler was uniformly antagonistic to Christianity. Dietrich wrote in his memoirs:

…Primitive Christianity, he declared, was the “first Jewish-Communistic cell”…

Dietrich stated, “Hitler was convinced that Christianity was outmoded and dying. He thought he could speed its death by systematic education of German youth. Christianity would be replaced, he thought, by a new heroic, racial ideal of God.” This confirms the point Goebbels made in his diary—that Hitler hoped ultimately to replace Christianity with a Germanic worldview through indoctrination of children…

[Albert] Speer recalled a conversation in which Hitler was told that if Muslims had won the Battle of Tours, Germans would be Muslim. Hitler responded by lamenting Germany’s fate to have become Christian: “You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?” As this conversation reveals, Hitler saw religion not as an expression of truth, but rather as a means or tool to achieve other ends—namely, the preservation and advancement of the German people or Nordic race. In April 1942, Hitler again compared Christianity unfavorably with Islam and Japanese religion. In the case of Japan, their religion had protected them from the “poison of Christianity,” he opined…

In fact, Hitler contemptuously called Christianity a poison and a bacillus and openly mocked its teachings… After scoffing at doctrines such as the Fall, the Virgin Birth, and redemption through the death of Jesus, Hitler stated, “Christianity is the most insane thing that a human brain in its delusion has ever brought forth, a mockery of everything divine.” He followed this up with a hard right jab to any believing Catholic, claiming that a “Negro with his fetish” is far superior to someone who believes in transubstantiation. Hitler… believed black Africans were subhumans intellectually closer to apes than to Europeans, so to him, this was a spectacular insult to Catholics… Then, according to Hitler, when others did not accept these strange teachings, the church tortured them into submission…

Another theme that surfaced frequently in Hitler’s monologues of 1941-42 was that the sneaky first-century rabbi Paul was responsible for repackaging the Jewish worldview in the guise of Christianity, thereby causing the downfall of the Roman Empire. In December 1941, Hitler stated that although Christ was an Aryan, “Paul used his teachings to mobilize the underworld and organize a proto-Bolshevism. With its emergence the beautiful clarity of the ancient world was lost.” In fact, since Christianity was tainted from the very start, Hitler sometimes referred to it as “Jew-Christianity”… He denigrated the “Jew-Christians” of the fourth century for destroying Roman temples and even called the destruction of the Alexandrian library a “Jewish-Christian deed.” Hitler thus construed the contest between Christianity and the ancient pagan world as part of the racial struggle between Jews and Aryans.

In November 1944, Hitler described in greater detail how Paul had corrupted the teachings of Jesus…

Hitler’s preference for the allegedly Aryan Greco-Roman world over the Christian epoch shines through clearly in Goebbels’s diary entry for April 8, 1941… “The Führer is a person entirely oriented toward antiquity. He hates Christianity, because it has deformed all noble humanity.” Goebbels even noted that Hitler preferred the “wise smiling Zeus to a pain-contorted crucified Christ,” and believed “the ancient people’s view of God is more noble and humane than the Christian view.” Rosenberg recorded the same conversation, adding that Hitler considered classical antiquity more free and cheerful than Christianity with its Inquisition and burning of witches and heretics. He loved the monumental architecture of the Romans, but hated Gothic architecture. The Age of Augustus was, for Hitler, “the highpoint of history.”

From Hitler’s perspective, Christianity had ruined a good thing. In July 1941 he stated, “The greatest blow to strike humanity is Christianity,” which is “a monstrosity of the Jews. Through Christianity the conscious lie has come into the world in questions of religion.” Six months later, he blamed Christianity for bringing about the collapse of Rome. He then contrasted two fourth-century Roman emperors: Constantine, also known as Constantine the Great, and Julian, nicknamed Julian the Apostate by subsequent Christian writers because he fought against Christianity and tried to return Rome to its pre-Christian pagan worship. Hitler thought the monikers should be reversed, since in his view Constantine was a traitor and Julian’s writings were “pure wisdom.” Hitler also expressed his appreciation for Julian the Apostate in October 1941 after reading Der Scheiterhaufen: Worte grosser Ketzer (Burned at the Stake: Words of Great Heretics) by SS officer Kurt Egger. This book contained anti-Christian sayings by prominent anticlerical writers, including Julian, Frederick the Great, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Lagarde, and others. It was a shame, Hitler said, that after so many clear-sighted “heretics,” Germany was not further along in its religious development… A few days later, Hitler recommended that Eggers’s book should be distributed to millions because it showed the good judgment that the ancient world (meaning Julian) and the eighteenth century (i.e., Enlightenment thinkers) had about the church.

This notion that Christianity was a Jewish plot to destroy the Roman world was a theme Hitler touched on throughout his career, from his 1920 speech “Why Are We Anti-Semites?” to the end of his life. It made a brief appearance in his major speech to the Nuremberg Party Rally in 1929, and reappeared in a February 1933 speech to military leaders. In a small private meeting with his highest military leaders and his Foreign Minister in November 1937, Hitler told them that Rome fell because of “the disintegrating effect of Christianity.” From the way that Hitler bashed a generic “Christianity” as a Jewish-Bolshevik scheme, it seems clear that he was targeting all existing forms of Christianity…

During a monologue on December 14, 1941, Hitler divulged a decisive distaste for Protestantism. That day, Hitler learned Hanns Kerrl, a Protestant who was his minister for church affairs, had passed away. Hitler remarked, “With the best intentions Minister Kerrl wanted to produce a synthesis of National Socialism and Christianity. I do not believe that is possible.” Hitler explained that the form of Christianity with which he most sympathized was that which prevailed during the times of papal decay. Regardless of whether the pope was a criminal, if he produced beauty, he is “more sympathetic to me than a Protestant pastor, who returns to the primitive condition of Christianity,” Hitler declared. “Pure Christianity, the so-called primitive Christianity… leads to the destruction of humanity; it is unadulterated Bolshevism in a metaphysical framework.” In other words, Hitler preferred Leo X, the great Renaissance patron of the arts who excommunicated Luther, to the Wittenberg monk who called the church back to primitive, Pauline Christianity. According to Rosenberg’s account of this same conversation, Hitler specifically mentioned the corrupt Renaissance Pope Julius II, Leo X’s predecessor, as being “less dangerous than primitive Christianity”…


(Note of the Editor: Left, The monument of Julius II, with Michelangelo’s statues of Moses, with Rachel and Leah). Many anti-Semites in early twentieth-century Germany despised the Old Testament as the product of the Jewish spirit, and Hitler was no exception. He saw the Old Testament as the antithesis of everything he stood for. In his view, it taught materialism, greed, and deception. Further, it promoted racial purity for the Jews, since it taught them to avoid mingling with other races…

Moreover, Hitler lamented that the Bible had been translated into German, because this made Jewish doctrines readily available to the German people. It would have been better, he stated, if the Bible had remained only in Latin, rather than causing mental disorders and delusions…

Many SS members followed Himmler’s example and encouragement to withdraw from the churches, and Hitler lauded them for their anti-church attitude. Hitler once advised Mussolini to try to wean the Italian people away from the Catholic Church, lest he encounter problems in the future. When Mussolini asked how to do this, Hitler turned to his military adjutant and asked him how many men in Hitler’s entourage attended church. The adjutant replied, “None”…

In the end… he [Hitler] had utter contempt for the Jesus who told His followers to love their enemies and turn the other cheek. He also did not believe that Jesus’s death had any significance other than showing the perfidy of the Jews, nor did he believe in Jesus’s resurrection.

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3-eyed crow Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Chess Sponsor

Formalising the study

These days the World Chess Championship is being played between the world champion Magnus Carlsen (Norway) and the challenger Ian Nepomniachtchi (Russia), organised by FIDE (International Chess Federation). In the picture we see a red-haired chess Grandmaster commenting on the game played today, with pictures of the old Soviet-era world champions. Note that the USSR flag doesn’t bother the fans. As I have already said, the idol of my adolescence was Alexander Alekhine who had to flee, even as world champion, to Portugal after the defeat of Germany (Alekhine played several tournaments under the auspices of the Third Reich). We can already imagine a Nazi flag, with Alekhine’s picture, in a retrospective account of chess in the 1930s commented by the same red-haired master…

In The Human Side of Chess I said that I might play another FIDE tournament after sixteen years of not playing tournaments endorsed by the FIDE. But chess is no easy matter: one has to keep up to date, during preparation, with books on the latest opening analyses, where the authors often make use of computers. And it is true that I bought some books since I translated The Human Side of Chess into English. But those are not books that can be read like a novel. Rather, they resemble the maths books we had in junior and high school, when one had to do lots of exercises to assimilate mathematical concepts.

It seems to me a crime to spend so much time in chess when I should be acting as a priest of the fourteen words. I don’t mean I’m going to abandon the project of playing next year, but in an ideal world one would have to relegate the study of chess to a minimum. And this made me fantasize this morning what I would do if I had a special sponsor who would send me, for about a decade, enough money to order books to honour the sacred words.

My mind flew to the Open University of the UK (OU) books on the history degree, or rather, the classical studies degree. On this site I have translated the texts of a Spaniard on Sparta and Republican Rome. But formal study requires not only the basics of a BA (I wouldn’t have to formally subscribe to the OU, just order their books), but more specific studies about Sparta and Republican Rome.

Largely, studying chess is nothing more than a lack of funds, since one spends tons of time digesting a single chess book; it’s cheap to study this game at the amateur level. On the other hand, studying history is more expensive. Unlike the metaphor I have been using on this site, that of the three-eyed raven who in an inhospitable cave on the other side of the Wall can see the past paranormally, in the real world one needs not only the money to have a good collection of the Loeb Classical Library, but the time to read them, the security of sustenance and a roof over our heads. That is the only way to ponder what the Aryan race really was in the pre-Christian world.

There is something else. Recently I was thinking that, given that Christianity and secular neochristianity are axiologically the same, a neologism should be coined to encompass these two concepts in one. Upon reflection, I remembered the term ‘Jew obeyer’ which I first used on this site in 2018.

Indeed: Christians obey the precepts of the Jews who wrote the New Testament, and atheists indirectly obey them, albeit wrapped in the ideology born with the French Revolution (‘human rights’, etc.—cf. what Savitri said on anthropocentrism in today’s other post).

The only way for the priest of the 14 words to prove definitively that Christian ethics and the ethics of Western atheists are two sides of the same coin, is to steep himself in classical culture. In an ideal world I would inherit the fortune of a relatively wealthy man. With the proper funds it would no longer make sense to study, even a little, chess as long as I could ‘see’ the past through my classical studies.

After a few years of studying the classics, the question of whether there was anything like these ‘Jew obeyers’ among the Aryans of pre-Christian Europe would begin to dawn on me.

Presently, it seems to me that there was not: that there was nothing so much as an egalitarian hysteria where the last (the poor, the blacks, the trans) will be first and the first (the proud Aryans) will be last. My working hypothesis is that all this madness that has metastasised in our secular world today had, as its first cancerous cell, Mark’s gospel as we have been saying on this site when talking about Richard Carrier’s book. But we would have to be as sure of that as Carrier is now about Mediterranean religion in the first centuries of our era.

If I can’t do that formal study, it would be great if someone else could do it in the future. The premise that the ‘ethical’ system that is killing the Aryan originated from the mental virus of Christianity can be formally addressed by studying pre-Christian Europe.

I would like to use this post to thank a sponsor who sends me a fixed amount per month. If I had more such sponsors I could surely abandon the couple of chess books I am reading for a better cause.

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3-eyed crow Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Philosophy of history Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Tree

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 25

Perhaps the notion of the irrevocable ‘existence’ of the past is of little consolation to those tormented by nostalgia for happy times, lived or imagined. Time refuses to suspend its flight at the plea of the poet enamoured of fleeting beauty—whether it be an hour of silent communion with the beloved woman (and, through her, and beyond her, with the harmony of the spheres), or an hour of glory, i.e. communion, in the glare of fanfares or the thunder of arms, or the roar of frenzied crowds, with the soul of a whole people and, through it and beyond it, again and again, with the Divine: another aspect of the Divine.

It is possible, sometimes, and usually without any special effort of memory, to relive, as if in a flash, a moment of one’s own past and with incredible intensity, as if one’s self-consciousness were suddenly hallucinated without the senses being the least bit affected. A small thing—a taste, very present, like that of the petite Madeleine cited by Proust in his famous analysis of reliving; a furtive odour, once breathed in; a melody that one had thought forgotten, a simple sound like that of water falling drop by drop—is enough to put, for an instant, the consciousness in a state that it ‘knows’ to be the same as the one it knew, years and sometimes decades, more than half a century earlier; a state of euphoria or anxiety, or even anguish, depending on the moment that has miraculously re-emerged from the mist of the past: a moment that had not ceased to ‘exist’ in the manner of things past, but which suddenly takes on the sharpness and relief of the present, as if a mysterious spotlight directed the daylight of the living actuality.

But these experiences are rare. And if it is possible to evoke them, they do not last long, even in very capable people of evoking their memories. Moreover, they only concern—except in very exceptional cases—the personal past of the person who ‘revives’ such a state or such an episode, not the historical past.

Yet there are people who are much more interested in the history of their people—or even that of other people—than in their own past. And although scholars, whose job it is to do so, succeed in reconstructing as best they can, from relics and documents, what at first sight appears to be the ‘essentials’ of history, and although some scholars sometimes astonish their readers or listeners by the number and thoroughness of the details they know about the habits of a particular character, the intrigues of a particular chancellery, or the daily life of such and such a vanished people, it is no less certain that the past of the civilised world—the easiest to grasp, however, since it has left visible traces—escapes us.

We know it indirectly and in bits and pieces, that our investigators try to put together, like a game of patience in which half or three-quarters of the puzzle are missing. And even if we possessed all the elements, we would still not know it, because to know is to live, or re-live, and no individual subjected to the category of Time can live history. What this individual can, at most, know directly, that is to say, live, and what he can then remember, sometimes with incredible clarity, is the history of his time insofar as he himself has contributed to making it; in other words, his own history, situated in a whole that exceeds it and often crushes it.

This is undoubtedly a truer story than the one that scholars will one day reconstruct. For what appears to be the ‘essence’ of an epoch, studied through documents and remains, is not. What is essential is the atmosphere of an epoch, or a moment within it: the atmosphere that can only be grasped through the direct experience of someone who lived it: one whose personal history is steeped in it. Guy Sajer, in his admirable book The Forgotten Soldier, has given us the essence of the Russian campaign from 1941 to 1945.

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Editor’s Note: This is absolutely true. One of the reasons why I prefer lucid essays like the one by Evropa Soberana on the Judean war against Rome (the masthead of this site) to the scholarly book that Karlheinz Deschner wrote about that epoch, is that Soberana transports us to that world—as in another literary genre Gore Vidal’s Julian has transported us to 4th-century Rome. Academic books are extremely misleading in that they don’t transport us back in time. We desperately need the visuals of what happened. That’s why I like the metaphor of the last greenseer, Bloodraven: the man fused to a tree that could see the past.
 

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He was able to put in his pages such a force of suggestion, precisely because, along with thousands of others in this campaign of Russia in the ranks of the Wehrmacht, then in the elite Grossdeutschland Division, it represents a slice of his own life.

When, three thousand years from now, historians want to have an idea of what the Second World War was like on this particular front, they will get a much better idea by reading Sajer’s book (which deserves to survive) than by trying to reconstruct, with the help of sporadic impersonal documents, the advance and retreat of the Reich’s armies. But, I repeat, they will acquire an idea of it, not a knowledge, much in the way we have one today of the decline of Egypt on the international scene at the end of the 20th Dynasty, through what remains of the juicy report of Wenamon, special envoy of Ramses XI (or rather of the high priest Herihor) to Zakarbaal, king of Gebal, or Gubla, which the Greeks call Byblos, in 1117 BC.

Nothing gives us a more intense experience of what I have called in other writings the ‘bondage of Time’ than this impossibility of letting our ‘self’ travel in the historical past that we have not lived, and of which we cannot therefore ‘remember’. Nothing makes us feel our isolation within our own epoch like our inability to live directly, at will, in some other time, in some other country; to travel in time as we travel in space.

We can visit the whole earth as it is today, but not see it as it once was. We cannot, for instance, actually immerse ourselves in the atmosphere of the temple of Karnak—or even only one street in Thebes—under Themose III; to find ourselves in Babylon at the time of Hammurabi, or with the Aryas before they left the old Arctic homeland; or among the artists painting the frescoes in the caves of Lascaux or Altamira, as we have somewhere in the world in our own epoch, having travelled there on foot or by car, by train, by boat or by plane.

And this impression of a definitive barrier—which lets us divine some outlines but prohibits us forever a more precise vision—is all the more painful, perhaps, because the civilisation we would like to know directly is chronologically closer to us, while being qualitatively more different from the one in whose midst we are forced to remain.

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Editor’s Note: In my fantasy that such a thing as the Wall existed, and have the last greenseer as our tutor, I imagine that I would spend an inordinate amount of time visiting ancient Sparta, and other cities where the Norse race remained unpolluted for centuries. I would visit all the temples of classical religion not only in Greece but in Rome, trying to capture through their art the Aryan spirit in its noblest expression.

But above all I would pay close attention to the human physiognomy of living characters before they mixed their blood with mudbloods.

Only he who actually sees the past as it was, has a good grasp of History.

The saddest thing of all is that pure Nordids still exist, but the current System is doing everything possible to exterminate them (as in Song of Ice and Fire the children of the forest was a species on the verge of extinction).

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History has always fascinated me: the history of the whole world, in all its richness. But it is particularly painful for me to know that I’ll never be able to know pre-Columbian America directly… by going to live there for a while; that it will never again be possible to see Tenochtitlan, or Cuzco, as the Spaniards first saw them, four hundred and fifty years ago, or less, that is to say yesterday. As a teenager, I cursed the conquerors who changed the face of the New World. I wished that no one had discovered it so that it would remain intact. Then we could have known it without going back in time; we could have known it as it was on the eve of the conquest, or rather as a natural evolution would have modified it little by little over four or five centuries, without destroying its characteristic traits.

But it goes without saying that my real torment, since the disaster of 1945, has been the knowledge that it is now impossible for me to have any direct experience of the atmosphere of the German Third Reich, in which I did not, alas, live.

Believing that it was to last indefinitely—that there would be no war or that, if there were, Hitlerian Germany would emerge victorious—I had the false impression that there was no hurry to return to Europe and that, moreover, I was useful to the Aryan cause where I was.

Now that it is all over, I think with bitterness that only thirty years ago[1] one could immerse oneself immediately, without the intermediary of texts, pictures, records, or comrades’ stories, in that atmosphere of fervour and order, of power and manly beauty, that of Hitlerian civilisation. Thirty years! It is not ‘yesterday’, it is today: a few minutes ago. And I have the feeling that I have missed very closely both the life and the death—the glorious death, in the service of our Führer—that should have been mine.

But one cannot ‘go back’ five minutes, let alone 1500 years or 500 million years, into the unalterable past, now transformed into ‘eternity’—timeless existence. And it is as impossible to attend the National Socialist Party Congress of September 1935 today as it is to walk the earth at the time when it seemed to have become forever the domain of the dinosaurs… except for one of those very few sages who have, through asceticism and the transposition of consciousness, freed themselves from the bonds of time.
 

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Editor’s Note: ‘I saw your birth, and that of your lord father before you. I saw your first step, heard your first word, was part of your first dream. I was watching when you fell. And now you are come to me at last, Brandon Stark, though the hour is late’…

‘Time is different for a tree than for a man. Sun and soil and water, these are the things a weirwood understands, not days and years and centuries. For men, time is a river. We are trapped in its flow, hurtling from past to present, always in the same direction. The lives of trees are different. They root and grow and die in one place, and that river does not move them. The oak is the acorn, the acorn is the oak’ (Boodraven to his pupil in George R.R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons).

[1] This was written in 1969 or 1970.

Categories
Ancient Greece Feminism Game of Thrones Homer Iliad (epic book) Rape of the Sabine Women Real men

The Iliad, book I

As we saw in the essay on Sparta in The Fair Race, around 1200 b.c.e. the Achaeans besieged and conquered Troy in a crusade that united the Hellenes in a common endeavour, so prone to war with each other. In The Iliad Homer describes them as a gang of barbarians with the mentality and appearance of Vikings who sweep the refined and civilised Troy.

The first book of The Iliad begins already after nine years of war between Achaeans and Trojans, when a plague breaks out on the Achaean camp. The soothsayer Calchas, consulted about it, predicts that the plague will not cease until the girl Chryseis, who Agamemnon had kidnapped, was returned to her father Chryses of Troy. Achilles’ wrath stems from the affront inflicted on him by Agamemnon, who, by yielding Chryseis to her father because of the threat of the soothsayer, now snatches from Achilles’ share of the spoils the young priestess Briseis. (In our times of feminised western males that feel no wrath when seeing a Negro with an English rose, how I wish the return of this blond beast of yore…!)

After all this, Achilles retires from the battle and ensures that he will only return when the Trojan fire reaches his own ships. He asks his mother Thetis to convince Zeus to help the Trojans and Zeus accepts.

More than once I have said that what must be studied are the phenomena that has captured, in a massive way, the popular imagination of the white man. In modern times, those who complain only about Jews look to, say, the Frankfurt School. But to understand the soul of the white man they should pay more attention to what whites have read voraciously; for example, the literary phenomena that marked recent centuries. I mean the gigantic bestsellers of the past that portray the suicidal infatuation of English speakers about Jews (for example Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur) or about blacks (e.g., Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin).

In our century, white madness is also noted in their delusional empowerment of women. As I have also said on this site, it is alarming that almost no one tore his garments at the most nefarious presentation of the ‘girl power’ ideology in Game of Thrones, exemplified in Arya Stark. Game of Thrones fans are such an alienated and degenerate folk that they disowned the grand finale, which is a masterpiece, and instead liked the empowerment of the girl Arya in previous seasons. Such feminism even reached a now-deceased neonazi novelist who wanted to create an Aryan republic in his state, as we saw in Daybreak’s ‘Freedom’s daughters’.

As a child I enjoyed Ivanhoe and Ben-Hur although never watched Uncle Tom’s Cabin that I saw advertised in the newspaper. I was ten years old then. Nowadays, from the current bestsellers of George Martin I would only rescue how the author portrayed Bran Stark.

But back to The Iliad, the monumental bestseller of the Greco-Roman world, although recited in private rather than read. Going into the details of the first book is important because it takes us back to the gods of the Homeric Greeks, so different from the meek Jesus. The first thing that strikes the attention in The Iliad compared to our meek times is that it represents the most absolute antithesis of the ethno-suicidal feminism that most westerners now accept, represented in Game of Thrones and in a myriad of other television series.

For example, in this first book of The Iliad the abducted girls Chryseis and Briseis have no voice or vote before their abductors: it is the men who fight for them and who complain, either the father of the kidnapped girl or the god Apollo who listened to such complaints; as well as Agamemnon and Achilles, the alpha males who can enjoy the spoils of war: young and pretty girls. Briseis, Achilles’ sex slave that Agamemnon later snatches from him, is called ‘the fair-cheeked one’ and ‘the one with a cute waist’.

Also notable in this first book of The Iliad is that the Homeric Greeks were very white people. Five times Hera is called ‘white-armed Hera’. Also ‘light-eyed Athena’ grabs Achilles ‘by his blond hair.’ Eos is ‘the one with the rosy fingers’, and ‘silver-footed Thetis’ is the mother of the main character of Homer’s tale.

With women like that it really makes you want to abduct one of them and breed…

Categories
Ancient Greece Christian art Homer Iliad (epic book) Indo-European heritage

Homer

A few decades ago I heard non-Christian Octavio Paz (1914-1998) assert on television that Dante was the quintessential poet of the West. Something rebelled in me when I listened to Paz, my then hero of the Cervantes language, but only until now can I answer such an aberration.

Like many other intellectuals, historians, and writers, Paz confused Western Christian civilisation with European civilisation. But Christendom is not the West. Christianity was the psychotic breakdown that the West has suffered since Constantine began to impose the god of the Jews on a race that has been non-Christian for much longer than Christian. What Albus said on this site when commenting on the sacred music of Johann Sebastian Bach we could apply equally to Dante’s great poem:

As a former Catholic I have stopped visiting any church building for all my life. Never again a famous cathedral will impress me, especially not out of an interest in art. It took me major efforts to recognise that Christian representations in art and ‘sacred music’ are without exception infectious material, propaganda means of subjugation, the original degenerate art for Aryans. One should shrink from letting any such product enter into perception as one would shrink from the sight of the mutilated corpses of children. Aryan Weltanschauung demands logical consistency and gravitas wherever we go.

That is very true, and we could also shrink from Dante’s Commedia. The white race won’t be cured of its ethno-suicidal drive until it dares to repudiate an alien religion. Dante is not the poet of the West as the Nobel Prize winner of literature said, but Homer. And if we want to reconnect with the world prior to the religious drift that now has reached a florid psychosis (see the psychological articles in my recently published Daybreak), we have to rescue our real European roots.

Before the traitorous Roman emperors imposed a Semitic cult on the white man, the Iliad was considered something like the Bible of the Greco-Roman world: which makes perfect sense as, unlike the Bible in which all heroes are Jews, in the Iliad all heroes are Aryans.

No wonder that much of the content in the Library of Alexandria that our ancient enemies burned was commentary on the Iliad. (Just as, after the destruction of the Aryan world, our treacherous libraries have contained a myriad of books commenting on biblical passages.)

I recently said that after my new book was published the character of The West’s Darkest Hour would change, and that I was going to follow Manu Rodríguez’s advice about creating a new ecclesia. To do this we have to build more centres like the Parthenon in Centennial Park, the large-scale replica of the original Parthenon in Athens. But the difference is that these new temples, very small at the beginning, would be run by priests of the fourteen words and used to preach to the fair race. For example, instead of television and movies produced by our enemies, a song of the Homeric poem would have to be memorised and recited as it used to be performed and as Homer himself did without customs, sets or props but in a modest room, where even the children liked it.

How many have seen, performed live and from memory, at least one of the twenty-four songs of the Iliad as it used to be performed since Homer? The translated text that we can buy in bookstores is a dead letter. By contrast, in the ancient world Homer’s poem was represented by a single man who recited it with emotion. Compare such a bare performance with the mass-consumption poison that non-Gentiles make us see and hear thanks to billions of American dollars.

It is estimated that Homer could have lived in the 8th century b.c.e. in Ionia. To visualise the epic narrated by a single man you have to forget all the neoclassical paintings because the Homeric Hellenes were blond. See the articles in The Fair Race that prove it. Alas, after the Aryan apocalypse, also narrated in that same book that I compiled, Ionia, present-day Turkey, became a land of mudbloods…

Those who could really appreciate the Iliad would be those Aryans who wanted to re-conquer those lands for their race (e.g., the National Socialists), as the Iliad is circumscribed in the genre of the epic of the conquest of the peninsula and its islands by the blond beast of the north.

Categories
Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Homosexuality Pederasty

Hubbard’s book

As I promised Patrick on this thread, I started reading Thomas Hubbard’s, Homosexuality in Greece and Rome, available online.

After reading at least the introduction my opinion remains the same. The only type of homosexuality tolerated in a Fourth Reich should be that of two adolescents beautiful enough not to cause revulsion in a heterosexual who sees them together.

Below I reproduce some excerpts from the introduction to Hubbard’s book, omitting the bibliographical references. As can be seen, homoeroticism was not always accepted in Greece and Rome:

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In Wasps, Aristophanes assures his audience that his tastes are not pederastic, and comedy generally ridicules those who seem exclusively or excessively devoted to boys or men, as if to imply that their preferences were not the norm, but they were nevertheless a recognizable group in ancient Athens. Roman satirical texts from authors such as Petronius, Martial, and Juvenal recognize that some men were genuinely incapable of sex with women…

Artistic evidence also suggests that the symposium, or drinking party, was a locus of homosexual admiration, courtship, and even sexual acts.The tragedian Sophocles ogled cute serving boys, and in myth Ganymede was brought to Olympus to be the cupbearer of the gods and Zeus’ favorite. As figure 23 shows, serving boys would often tend to their duties naked. That Plato and Xenophon both set dialogues on love at such gatherings is significant. Most male homoerotic lyric poetry was probably intended for delivery in such a setting. 1.85, 1.88, and 1.89 are skolia (drinking songs) that may have been meant for recitation at banquets as an expression of homosocial values common to men of the upper class…

One should not necessarily assume from the number of references that such behavior was more common in Rome than it was in Greece: it may be that sexual passivity on the part of free citizen males was even more offensive to Roman sensibilities (for which it was not acceptable even in free youths) and hence became a potent satirical topos for moral disorder and inversion of values, as is suggested by the uniformly hostile tone of the sources.

Greek and Latin shared a term for such men: kinaidos/cinaedus. It may have been used as early as Archilochus. Its first certain attestations in Aristophanes are not distinctively sexual; it just appears as one of many terms of abuse for rascality. But by the fourth century its meaning is more specific: the orator Aeschines abuses Demosthenes as one, and Plato has Socrates refer to their life as “terrible and shameful and to be pitied”…

It therefore seems unwise to limit the term kinaidos/cinaedus to the sexually passive: its range seems potentially to include anyone who is perceived as sexually excessive or deviant. I have therefore adopted the somewhat unsatisfactory translation “pervert” in numerous passages throughout this volume, inasmuch as that English word combines the same vagueness of reference with an equally strong element of censure and disapproval. The cinaedi as a group are too often mentioned to be merely imaginary projections, however embroidered with fiction each individual story may be.Antiquity, like our own society, had its share of sexual dissidents and nonconformists.

 
Varieties of moral judgment

Just as sexual behavior in Greece and Rome was irreducible to any single paradigm, moral judgments concerning the various species of same-gender interaction were far from uniform. The widespread notion that a “general acceptance” of homosexuality prevailed is an oversimplification of a complex mélange of viewpoints about a range of different practices, as is the dogma that a detailed regimen of protocols and conventions distinguished “acceptable” from “unacceptable” homosexual behaviors.

There was, in fact, no more consensus about homosexuality in ancient Greece and Rome than there is today. In these heavily discourse-oriented cultures, as in our own, sexual dissidence was a flash point of ideological contention…

Although there is no question that comic invective holds the greatest scorn for effeminates and/or sexual passives, adult effeminacy was merely seen as the most extreme and visible manifestation of an institution (pederasty) that, even when practiced in a “normative” way, effeminized, prostituted, and corrupted adolescents who were one day destined to become the city’s leaders…

The sum of this evidence, together with the association of pederasty with upper-class venues like the symposium and wrestling school, suggests that it was primarily an upper-class phenomenon, at least in Athens; only men with a certain amount of wealth, leisure, and education were in a position to provide boys with the attention and courtship gifts they might expect, whether tangible or intangible. The majority of Greek men lived close to the subsistence level and had neither the time nor the wherewithal for such pursuits.

Even within elite intellectual circles there were many Greeks who had their doubts about any physically consummated form of pederasty. Xenophon’s Memorabilia presents a Socrates who cautions his young followers against pederastic involvements; and Xenophon’s Symposium seems to place a higher valuation on heterosexuality at the end. “Platonic love,” as articulated in Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, attempts to rehabilitate pederastic desire by sublimating it into a higher, spiritual pursuit of Beauty in which the sexual appetite is ultimately transcended. The idea of a chaste pederasty gained currency in other fourth-century authors, and may have some precedent in Spartan customs, but Plato’s last work, the Laws, appears to abandon it and present an entirely negative view. Even in the Phaedrus, Lysias’ speech and Socrates’ first speech flesh out serious and specific reflections on the harm that the wrong kind of pederasty could do a boy, suggesting that the concept of Platonic love was developed as a response to widespread censure. Texts such as the comic fragment 3.29 show that even in Plato’s own day, some were skeptical whether such a chaste pederasty could exist in reality; later satirical texts take it for granted that these philosophical pretensions were fraudulent covers.

Censure of same-gender relations in Roman culture was differently motivated: class considerations played less of a role, and the inappropriateness of sexual passivity for a Roman male, even during his youth, is the central theme of many texts. Some texts go further and condemn active forms of pederasty, even when practiced with a slave or foreigner: this preference is either impugned as Greek and un-Roman or singled out as a sign of luxury and self-indulgence. Roman oratory, like its earlier Greek counterpart, assumes an audience that is generally hostile to all forms of homosexuality, whether active or passive. Despite the libertarian utterances of some early Stoics (5.21–22), Stoic philosophy of the Roman period was profoundly negative concerning any form of sex that could be considered “against Nature”, a philosophical objection some sources advanced even during the Greek period.

 
Power dynamics

To the extent that literary texts display a power differential, it is rather to emphasize the powerlessness and even emotional helplessness of the lover and a privileged position of control occupied by the beloved youth: this configuration permeates Greek lyric texts from the archaic to the Hellenistic period. Even poems in which a lover congratulates himself on becoming free of a youth’s tyranny or admonishes the youth to beware of the future reflect a sense of desperation on the part of an unsuccessful lover. These protestations should not be dismissed as merely hollow convention.

Whatever advantage an older lover might have in experience, social connections, or verbal charm, the youth had the countervailing power of Beauty on his side, which was a rarer commodity. Simple demographic reckoning tells us that eligible youths in that short-lived, but most desirable, window of efflorescence (from about fourteen to eighteen) were far fewer in number than the adult lovers who might pursue them (Greek men typically did not marry until their thirties). And even among the demographically eligible, many boys would either not be interested or would be closely guarded by their fathers or pedagogues (slave attendants); others would prefer the company of youths closer to their own age (as implied by Socrates’ proverb “youth delights youth”). It was emphatically a seller’s market. Vases seldom show more boys than wooers, but often the reverse; vases often show boys rejecting advances or acting noncommittal. Boys like Lysis and Charmides are surrounded by a mob of admirers in Plato’s dialogues, and even the hypothetical boy addressed in Lysias’ and Socrates’ discourses in the Phaedrus is assumed to have his choice among several lovers and non-lovers (the latter being a less emotionally heated version of the former)…

The most desirable boys were precisely those from elite families, like Alcibiades or Timarchus, and the goal of a pedagogical mentorship was not to objectify and subordinate them, but to advance their socialization into the elite male world of the symposium and athletics, and eventually politics and the life of the mind…

If the Greeks’ principal interest in pederasty were as an institutionalized phallic confirmation of the sociopolitical supremacy of adult citizen males, one would expect far more attention to pederastic relationships with slaves, as in Rome, or with lower-class boys. But as we have seen, it was boys of the best families who were most likely to attract admirers.

 
Origin and chronological development

Most previous discussions of Greek and Roman homosexuality, although distinguishing between the two cultures, tend to treat each culture synchronically, as if attitudes and practices were relatively uniform over time.However, reflection on the various social practices of homosexuality and swings in public attitudes toward it in Western societies just in the second half of the twentieth century should caution us against such static assumptions in the case of ancient societies, which bore witness to many equally wrenching social and political transformations. One advantage of gathering texts together in the format this volume provides is that it allows detailed consideration of significant chronological developments within both Greece and Rome.

The origin of institutionalized homosexual practices in Greece has been a matter of considerable speculation and controversy, with some scholars tracing it back to Indo-European or Minoan origins.Ancient texts variously credit the Spartans or Cretans with a special role as early practitioners, particularly in what may be initiatory contexts. Some lyric texts and the Thera graffiti may support an initiatory interpretation.The earliest artistic evidence is Cretan and suggests a partnership of younger and older warriors. Aristotle connects the introduction of the practice with overpopulation and the desire for a lower birthrate, possibly through delayed marriage. Our earliest textual evidence is from the early seventh century, although Plutarch relates an incident that, if historical, must have occurred around 735–730 b.c.e. There is no clear evidence for homosexuality in the epic poetry of Homer and Hesiod,which could support a thesis of seventh-century origins, possibly in response to population issues.

The evidence is far more substantial for the fifth century and later, when one can note a progressive diminution in the status of pederasty at Athens, apparently in conjunction with the growth and radicalization of the democracy. In the earliest decades of the fifth century stands the legend of the tyrannicides Aristogeiton and Harmodius, who are credited (falsely) with a decisive role in overthrowing the Peisistratid dynasty and inaugurating democratic self-governance. Their legend should be seen as an attempt to situate the practice of upper-class pederasty within the emergent democratic ideology. Art historians have noted that scenes of uninhibited pederastic courtship and sex are common on Athenian vases until about 460, parallel to the celebration of pederastic love in the lyric poets; afterward, however, such representations (and, indeed, even explicit heterosexual scenes) virtually disappear in favor of much more coded arrangements, as in figs. 23–24.This movement away from a libertine and hedonistic artistic style toward more prudish and “family-oriented” modalities seems to parallel the sexual conservatism and enforcement of moral norms evident in comedy and oratory of the late fifth and early fourth centuries, which, as we have seen, appeal emphatically to popular tastes and democratic values. Indeed, Thucydides’ demythologizing critique of the Aristogeiton and Harmodius legend should be interpreted in the same light. The ethics of self-restraint in regard to boys that is praised by Xenophon also attests a growing moral problematization of pederasty in this period. It may not be incorrect to read the evolution of “Platonic love” in fourth-century texts as an attempt to rehabilitate pederasty by imagining a more modest and ethically acceptable form of the institution within a social environment that increasingly marginalized traditional pederasty as both nondemocratic (i.e., upper-class) and corrupting (i.e., teaching venality).

In Rome attitudes toward homosexuality experienced equally significant chronological developments…

During the second century b.c.e., a number of moralistic texts and utterances reject male love altogether, even involving slaves, or worry about the effeminization of Roman manliness under the growing influence of Greek cultural mores. This contrast between Greek and Roman, together with the perception, which may or may not have been historically accurate, that pederasty was imported into Rome from Greece, also becomes a leitmotif in late republican discourse. Cicero feels free to use any association with homosexuality against his rhetorical opponents. It should not surprise us that sexuality became problematized at a time when Rome’s national identity and political system were undergoing such profound transformations: indeed, the poet Catullus uses metaphors of sexual domination to express the loss of political liberty with the demise of the Republic.

By the Augustan period, however, Rome’s political destiny appeared settled and Greek cultural influence was taken for granted. Even if pederasty in the Greek style was still not fully assimilated, it appears to have been considered less of a threat. In moral and satirical texts of the first century c.e. and later, same-gender relations are often the focus of critical comment, but Greek influence is no longer the issue so much as the morally debilitating effects of wealth, power, and appetitive excess, all tendencies observable at the acme of the Roman Empire and embodied in the personae of the emperors. More detailed discussion of these developments in both Greek and Roman moral attitudes is better left to the introductions to the individual chapters.

Categories
Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Death in Venice (movie) Film Homosexuality Pederasty Third Reich United States

Puritanical degeneracy

The first minute of this speech by a rabbi is unusual, as he tells the truth about how Hitler healed a Berlin that looked like Sodom and Gomorrah. The rabbi says that the first action Hitler took to heal degenerate Weimar Germany was to ban pornography and out-the-closet homosexuality. Which editor of the main webzines of white nationalism is currently proposing to emulate the Führer with such salubrious measures, repressing everything related to LGBT?

I have often said, even personally with some relatives, that the colourful LGBT flag lacks precisely the colour that was relatively accepted in the Greco-Roman world. Since in that world neither the Greeks nor the Romans had been miscegenated to the point of becoming the creatures we see today in Greece and Italy, Federico Fellini was right to choose two English actors for the roles of Encolpius and Giton in his surreal adaptation of Petronius’ Satyricon (the Roman author of that novel lived in 27-66 of the Common Era).

As we can see in this Satyricon clip, it’s about a man in his twenties and an androgynous teenager. Such sort of ‘pederasty’ was the only accepted form of homosexuality in the Greco-Roman world, and seeing the clip doesn’t cause revulsion in the straight viewer as the adolescent Giton, before becoming a fully-developed man, really looks like a girl.

The LGBT Sodom movement will be able to add more colours to its flag now that the genres are surrealistically multiplying. But it will never add to it the only colour accepted in the time of Pericles, or Nero when Petronius flourished (remember that in a revised reading of history, which removes Christian propaganda, Nero was not a villain).

Why do I say that those of the LGBT, who must be swept away as the first cleansing action of the Fourth Reich, will not okay the only homo colour accepted in the ancient Aryan world? A single anecdote will illustrate my point.

A book that can be read online, Thomas Hubbard’s Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents was published in 2003 and can be downloaded for free: here. The following editorial review also appears on that site:

The most important primary texts on homosexuality in ancient Greece and Rome are translated into modern, explicit English and collected together for the first time in this comprehensive sourcebook. Covering an extensive period―from the earliest Greek texts in the late seventh century b.c.e. to Greco-Roman texts of the third and fourth centuries c.e.―the volume includes well-known writings by Plato, Sappho, Aeschines, Catullus, and Juvenal, as well as less well known but highly relevant and intriguing texts such as graffiti, comic fragments, magical papyri, medical treatises, and selected artistic evidence.

These fluently translated texts, together with Thomas K. Hubbard’s valuable introductions, clearly show that there was in fact no more consensus about homosexuality in ancient Greece and Rome than there is today… This unique anthology gives an essential perspective on homosexuality in classical antiquity.

Scandalised by this professor’s academic work on pederasty, half a year ago antifa vandalised his house, as can be read in this article. (You have to be very careful with this journalistic note. It was written by a Latina, and those who protested and vandalised the professor’s house were predominantly feminist women.)

Personally, I don’t think the Fourth Reich should promote pederasty, but it should promote what I quoted recently: ‘We need a regime that bans pornography and erects statues of gorgeous naked nymphs and ephebes in every public square and crossroads’.

However, it is very clear to me that what we see in the above image, and the filth that fortunately Hitler prohibited as soon as he came to power, are two kind of animals not only different but opposed from an aesthetic point of view. But regarding same-sex unions Americans are apparently unable to distinguish between the sublime and the grotesque (the Gomorrah that the Third Reich rightly annihilated).

The United States was once brilliantly described by Richard Spencer saying that it was a mix of Christian Puritanism and sexual degeneracy—both side by side and at the same time! Too bad they recently deleted his YouTube channel and I can’t link to it, but if I remember correctly, that video dates back to the times of the Kavanaugh hearing.

No wonder that a nation suffering from such schizophrenia is absolutely incapable of recreating visually the Greco-Roman world as it really was. Hollywood Rome is not Rome, and although the Jews and the decadent Americans are very good in recreating degeneracy, they’re unable to recreate the healthy pederasty of ancient times. They couldn’t even bring a movie like Death in Venice to the screen. Only an Italian was able to do it with the proper aesthetics, and without any sexual contact in the film (a truly platonic love).

What I said in my entry ‘The transvaluation explained’ can be exemplified by that American chimera between gross sexual degeneration and Puritanism. As long as the Americans don’t dare to see Hitler as the best man in history, and Constantine the worst, they will be unable to bring to the screen the ethos of Greco-Roman antiquity, the truly Aryan world. As to the visual arts on the television and cinema, they will continue to be neochristian in sexual matters.

Our roots are Greece and Rome—not Jerusalem. Keep in mind what Savitri Devi said and the Nazis she quotes in my other post today.