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Category: Ancient Greece

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The Aryan problem

Dear César:

Not all Spaniards think like that. The causes of our decline in the past after the Christianization, and in the present, are due to ourselves. I refer to excerpts published in one of my posts last year:

__________________

 
periander_vat2Already in pre-Socratic times we can see this disregard for a fundamental part of our culture: in the whimsical and superfluous theogonies and cosmogonies of Epicharmus and Pherecydes, which rivaled the traditions collected and transmitted by Homer and Hesiod and confused the people through pseudo-Orphic and Pythagorean preaching about individual souls and religious proposals of “personal” salvation: individualists and universalists. They divided the people and ended up influencing Plato and some philosophers (Xenophanes). Finally, in post-Socratic times, coinciding with the Alexandrian period—culturally chaotic, cosmopolitan—, philosophical ethics circulated from Cynics, Stoics and Epicureans, already fully individualistic and universalist (transnational, stateless doctrines for “all men”) and consistent with the cultural decay of the time. I think that this was a big mistake; this contempt by the Hellenic “intelligentsia” as Nietzsche said. The Greek people lost their right to their autochthonous gods. This “intelligentsia” should have taken care of the native and ancestral legacy.

This attitude just ended up weakening the strength and security that the people had in their own cultural traditions. These traditions, these “worlds” were part of the ancestral collective memory of our people that was devastated, made it like a desert, annihilated by our own philosophers and thinkers. They were in some way responsible for this great loss, for that debacle, for that alienation which resulted in the loss of our cultures when Christianization took over. They neglected their duty, not only the education of the people, but the care and defense of our traditions (our worlds) before the Other. Our people lost their cultural property, or watched it sullied, undervalued, or ridiculed by their own kind.

The thing did not improve in Roman times when the schools of Stoics and Epicureans dominated everywhere in the Empire, and the words of Cato or Cicero could not avoid the dissolution, this disintegration of the cultural symbolic (colectivas) of Greeks and Romans.

The entry of Jewish, Chaldean, Egyptian and Persian sects found a disoriented people; neglected, abandoned, without guidance and their traditions scorned by the “enlightened” classes. They preyed upon the preachers of these sects. It was not only Plato or Christianity. Centuries of neglect and scorn put our people in the hands of these preachers of foreign divinities.

We can do the same reasoning with the traditions of Germans, Celts, Slavs and others. They seemed to be infected by the general attitude that Greeks and Romans had regarding their own cultures, not valued at all. The values, it seems, were elsewhere: in the economic and the military power, or in religions of “personal” salvation coming from the outside, which denoted disintegration and a previous decomposition of these peoples.

Nothing forced the Goths, Lombards, Burgundians and Franks to be Christianized but their greed for power and willingness to take over the remains of the Empire without reflection or discussion of its “ideological” bases, fully Christianized by the 5th century (the century of the Germanic expansions). This was not the case of forced Christianization, centuries later, of the Saxons and Frisians (by Charlemagne), or the politics from the top (the monarchs) as done by the Norwegians (Olaf “The Holy”) and the Slavs (Vladimir, also “The Holy”). The Germans could have been the liberators of Europe, but they put their arms in the service of a foreign faith and an ecclesia (priestly community). This attitude says very clearly how they were indifferent to their own traditions.

It was a betrayal. Our history would have been different if they had remained faithful to the cultural legacy of their ancestors.

Breaking the sacred bonds wrought what it wrought. And from the ominous Christianization of our people we have been suffering this cultural and spiritual alienation that affects us so much; this drift, this going astray, this wandering…

The post-mortem world of the Indo-European cultures has to do with the collective memory of the people. It is a “space” that houses the gods, but also the Fathers, all the ancestors without distinction. This can be seen in the Hittite or Aryan-Vedic world (with Yama, Manu’s brother, and the first mortal); in the Celtic world (remember the original Halloween), or in the Roman world (the Manes). Keeping memory and even worship of the absent, the departed, was part of the education and morals of our ancestors, and was a sign of distinction and nobility against other peoples. The Patricians were those who had Fathers, who kept memory of the Fathers, in the sense already said. Let’s say that this memory was part of the “being” for our Indo-European ancestors.

Forgetfulness or loss of these “spaces” had (and has) bad consequences. Precisely the Christian or Muslim preachers noticed such loss or damaged being; this symbolic amputation among the peoples, and therefore preached (and still preach) their values. The loss or decline or forgetting of these spaces leaves people orphaned and incomplete. This was the picture that the Christian apostles (Jews) found in the area of the Roman Empire: stranded peoples abandoned to their lot; incomplete, empty. They found the right spot to spread their worlds. They found people without “being,” without memory, without identity and already acculturated—by their own kind. Christian acculturation, or later Muslim acculturation, allowed these people to complete their symbolic being—at least spuriously in the outside.

What I’m writing down has a counterpart, a repetition in our contemporary European and Western world. Both are similar circumstances that repeat the cultural deterioration and we see a return to the same religious-cultural “offers”—the everlasting impostors, the usurpers. Not only Christians and the “people of god” (the Hebrew god) lacking a homeland (but with Israel as sacred land), but the “umma”, the stateless Muslim “nation” (though based in Mecca). And also the politicians and the intellectuals: from democratic universalism to proletarian internationalism (Marx’s “workers or proletarians have no fatherland”) to sociologists such as the cosmopolitan Adorno or Marcuse, or Derrida who preaches the philosophy of the philosopher as cosmopolitan and stateless.

It’s the same song again, the same charm, the same lure, the same trap.

__________________

 
You can find similar reasoning in my blogging of the last year (there are 68 pages) and the posts published this year. I would like you to read, at least, those entries.

The subject requires a great deal of debating with the participation of all Aryan nations: a process of self-gnosis that revisits at least our last two millennia, although in my opinion we should start with the cultural deterioration that has its beginning in the pre-Socratic times and reached its climax in imperial Rome (from Caesar on).

Well, César, I don’t take more of your time.

Regards,

Manu

Categories
Ancient Greece Homer Miscegenation Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Who We Are, 9

The following is my abridgement of chapter 9 of William Pierce’s history of the white race, Who We Are:

Indo-European Invasions Led to Aegean, Greek Civilizations
Hellenic, Pelasgian Spirits Clashed
Greek Myths Hint at Ancient Race War in Mediterranean Area

 

From the far north they came, the xanthoi, the golden-haired ones: tall, blue-eyed and grey-eyed giants, on horseback and on foot, carrying their battleaxes and their spears, bringing their women and their wagons and their cattle. Warrior-farmers, craftsmen and traders, they worshipped the shining Sky Father and spoke an Indo-European language. They were the Greeks.

The Greeks—or Hellenes, as they later called themselves—crashed down upon the Mediterranean world in a long sequence of waves. The first wave, a relatively weak one—and more properly described merely as Indo-European rather than as specifically Greek—hit about 5,100 years ago, and it apparently took a roundabout course, passing first from the north into western Asia Minor, and thence, by way of the Cyclades and other islands of the southern Aegean, westward into Crete and Greece.

Bronze Age. That first wave introduced metal tools and weapons to the Neolithic culture existing at that time in Crete and on the Greek mainland and laid the basis for the later rise of the Bronze Age Minoan-Mycenaean civilization. It was one of the far-flung arms of the last, great wave of Indo-European migration into central and western Europe from the ancient Indo-European heartland north and east of the Black Sea.

The invaders made a decisive cultural impact on the Aegean world. The archaeological evidence from that period shows a marked break between the nearly static Neolithic tradition which had existed prior to the first Indo-European arrivals and the subsequent Bronze Age cultures.

These later cultures—called Early Cycladic, Early Minoan, and Early Helladic in the Cyclades, Crete, and the Greek mainland respectively—arose rather abruptly about 5,100 years ago and underwent rapid developments in technology, craftsmanship, and social organization.

Blue-eyed Cycladeans. In the Cyclades this first, thin wave of Indo Europeans had a racial as well as a cultural impact. Small marble figurines from the Early Cycladic period still show traces of the pigments with which they were colored, indicating they were made by a red-headed, blue-eyed race.

On Crete and the Greek mainland, however, the Nordic newcomers soon were completely absorbed into the Mediterranean population. The Minoan art of later periods depicts brunet Mediterranean types only.

The bulk of the Indo-Europeans in those early invasions from beyond the Black Sea settled in the relatively empty spaces of the far north, along the shores of the Baltic Sea and the North Sea, in Germany, the Baltic states, and Scandinavia, where they established a new Nordic heartland. A thousand years later they began boiling out of this new heartland in wave after wave, heading south. The Romans—themselves the descendants of one of these waves—would later refer to the German-Scandinavian area as vagina gentium, the womb of nations.

But the Greeks came first, through the Cyclades again into Crete about 4,100 years ago, and overland from the north 100-200 years later. The wave which struck Crete provided the impetus for the building of the great Minoan civilization on the basis which had been laid a thousand years earlier by the first Indo-Europeans to reach that part of the world.

The Minoan civilization was in its essence, however, much more a Mediterranean than a Nordic civilization. The Greeks did not bring civilization to Crete; they brought only the tendency toward civilization and the capacity for building it inherent in the higher human type which they represented.

They brought an innovative spirit and the Nordic will to order, and they imposed that will on the essentially passive and egalitarian Mediterranean society they found, reorganizing it along hierarchical lines. Thus, they established the stratified social basis necessary for the emergence of civilization, and they also provided the ruling stratum.

But inevitably racial mixing occurred, sometimes soon and sometimes later. The Nordics would disappear into the mass, and the civilization they had created would lose its vital spark, stagnating and eventually retrogressing, although it might coast for centuries on its momentum after the disappearance of the Nordic element before retrogression set in. (Racemixing and retrogression were avoided only when the Nordics exterminated the non-Nordic natives of an area instead of merely conquering them. But then there was left no large serf-class for the maintenance of a culturally innovative aristocracy.)

The strongest center of Greek influence on the mainland was Mycenae, and on this center a new civilization arose in the 16th century B.C. Despite the lack of any real literature, it reached greater cultural heights than any previously achieved by man.

In social organization, in architecture, in sculpture and metalwork and ceramics, and in the other arts of civilization the Mycenaean Greeks totally eclipsed the Cretans. The artistic treasures unearthed from the ruins of Mycenae by German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in the 19th century astounded the world.

Conquest of Crete and Troy. Early in the 14th century B.C. the Mycenaeans also eclipsed Crete politically, invading that island and subduing it.

A little over a century later—around 1250 B.C.—the Mycenaeans also subdued Troy, in northwestern Asia Minor. The conflict between Mycenae and Troy is the subject of Homer’s great epic, the Iliad.

Mykonos_vaseThe earliest known
depiction
of the Trojan Horse
from the Mykonos vase
ca. 670 BC

Troy itself was, at that time, also a Greek city, and had been for 700 years. An earlier city on the same site, essentially Mediterranean and Minoan in character, had been conquered and rebuilt by Greek invaders in part of the same wave that entered the Greek mainland just after 2000 B.C.

It is still possible to analyze the religion of the Greeks of the historical period into Hellenic and non-Hellenic components. When the Hellenes first came to Greece, they brought with them an Olympian pantheon created in their own image, both physically and psychically. Their gods, with one notable exception (Poseidon, the black-haired sea god), were described by Homer as golden-haired and ivory-skinned.

And Zeus, in his relations with his family of gods and goddesses, perfectly reflected the essentially masculine spirit and the patriarchal structure of all natural and healthy Indo-European societies.

Pelasgian religion was, on the contrary, chthonic (embedded in the earth) in its orientation, feminine in its spirit, matriarchal in its structure. The gods and goddesses of the Pelasgians were mysterious, subterranean creatures, headed by the Earth Mother, who has homologues in the religions of most other Mediterranean peoples.

The Pelasgians’ deities were concerned, above all else, with sexual reproduction, and they were worshipped in orgiastic rites and with much sexual symbolism. Snakes and bulls, for example, the former both phallic and chthonic, the latter a symbol of reproductive potency, played a major role in Minoan religion.

In Greek tradition Zeus overthrew an older group of gods, the children of Gaia, the Earth Mother, before securing his own role as Sky Father and supreme deity. Just as in the case of the Scandinavians it is very tempting to see in this tradition a mythologized reference to the ancient conflict between invading Indo-Europeans and conquered Mediterraneans.

Because the Mediterraneans were only conquered and not exterminated; because they formed the bulk of the economic base on which Greek society rested; because the lifestyle of Hellenes themselves changed, becoming more dependent on agriculture than before; and because race mixture inevitably followed conquest, it is not surprising that the religion of the conquerors underwent a change and assimilated many elements from the religion of the conquered natives.

A people’s religion generally reflects the essential elements of the race-soul of that people, but it is only under completely natural conditions, free from extraneous cultural and racial intrusions, that the reflection is perfect. Whenever a mixing of diverse peoples occurs, the mirror of the soul is clouded; likewise, when a religion of alien origin is imposed on a people, even without racial mixture.

In the latter case the genetic spiritual predispositions remain unchanged and will eventually reassert themselves. Often this reassertion may take many centuries, because the magnet of the soul’s compass is not as strong as we might wish; a long period is required for it to settle down and find its true direction again after it is jarred.

Categories
Ancient Greece Athens Ethnic cleansing Homer Iliad (epic book) Indo-European heritage Miscegenation Pericles Philosophy of history Racial studies Sparta (Lacedaemon) Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Lethal mixing of bloods

Most of present-day Greeks are mongrels, not peoples of pure “Indo-European” (whites for short) origin. According to William Pierce, the only way that the ancient Greeks could have survived as pure whites would have been to eliminate the entire indigenous population, either through expulsion or extermination:


Mycenaaeans

To avoid replication of texts within this site, I moved the rest of this entry: here

Categories
Ancient Greece Athens Ethnic cleansing Homer Miscegenation Pericles Sparta (Lacedaemon) Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Who We Are, 10

The following is my abridgement of chapter 10 of William Pierce’s history of the white race, Who We Are:

Last Nordic Invasion of Greece
Precedes Rise of Classical Civilization
Dorians Brought Iron, New Blood to Greece
Athenian Democracy Led to Downfall

 

Greece was invaded by Greek-speaking Northerners several times during prehistory. Those who arrived in the period 2,100-1,900 B.C. founded the great Mycenaean civilization, which flourished from the end of the 16th century until about 1,200 B.C.

Homer, whose Iliad and Odyssey describe Mycenaean Greece, refers to the Greeks, or Hellenes, inclusively as “Achaeans.” In fact, however, the Achaeans were only one of the Hellenic tribes which were in Greece in Mycenaean times.

In addition to the Achaeans, who occupied most of the Peloponnesus (the southern peninsula of Greece, in which Mycenae was located), there were the Aeolians and the Ionians, who occupied other portions of the mainland, many of the Aegean islands, and the west coast of Asia Minor. The Ionians, in particular, settled in Attica and were the founders of Athens.

These tribal divisions apparently predate the arrival of the first Hellenes in Greece, and it seems likely that the Achaeans, Aeolians, and Ionians invaded the Aegean region separately, over a period of several centuries.

And there were also the non-Greek Pelasgians, the Mediterranean aborigines, who occupied the lowest stratum of Greek society and substantially outnumbered the Hellenes in Mycenaean times. As pointed out in the last installment, the Mycenaean Greeks were influenced culturally by these Mediterraneans—and, as time passed, racially as well.

In the late 14th and early 13th centuries B.C. more Greek-speaking Indo-Europeans arrived, coming westward across the Aegean in ships. They were Homer’s “divine born” heroes, the fathers and grandfathers of the warriors who sacked Troy about 1,250 B.C.: golden-haired Achilles, the sons of Atreus, and the other princes and kings of the Iliad. They settled in Greece, founded dynasties, and lived in a manner remarkably like that of northern Europe’s feudal lords more than twenty centuries later.

A couple of generations after the fall of Troy—exactly eighty years afterward, according to Greek tradition—a new group of divine-born warriors swept down on Greece, this time from the north. They were the Heraclidae, the supposed descendants of the blond demigod Hercules, and with them came the Dorians, the last of the major Hellenic tribes to reach the Aegean region.

The Dorians, who had settled in central Greece a few years earlier, proceeded to conquer the Achaeans, occupy the Peloponnesus, and extinguish Mycenaean civilization. But, in so doing, they prepared the way for the rise of a new civilization which would greatly surpass the old one. Displaced Achaeans, Aeolians, and Ionians migrated to new areas, sometimes displacing those people already there and sometimes amalgamating with them.

The Dorians were blonder than the Achaeans they conquered, but that is only because the Achaeans had been mixing with the Mediterranean aborigines for several centuries before the Dorians arrived; originally the two tribes had been of the same racial composition.

But the Achaeans were certainly more civilized than the rude, new arrivals from the north, and it was 400 years before Greece recovered from the cultural shock of the Dorian invasion.
 

Historians’ bias

The four centuries between the Dorian invasion and the flowering of the literate Classical civilization are referred to by most historians as “the Dark Age,” for much the same reasons that the period between the fall of Rome, more than fifteen centuries later, and the flowering of Mediaeval civilization is also called “the Dark Ages.”

In both cases a people of an older civilization, who had begun to succumb to racial mixing and decadence, was overwhelmed by a more vigorous and racially healthier but culturally less advanced people from the north. And in both cases a period of gestation took place over a dozen generations or so, during which a synthesis of old and new elements, racial and cultural, occurred, before a new and different civilization arose from the ruins of the old.

Unfortunately, most historians tacitly assume that the records of political and cultural activity which have come down to us from periods of civilized literacy provide all the data needed to yield an understanding of the historical process. The state of development and degree of organization and complexity of city life are taken as a yardstick by which to evaluate the significance or historical importance of a particular period. And if one’s standards of value are geared to such things as the volume of commerce, the gross national product, or even the intensity of scientific, literary, and artistic activity, such a yardstick may seem, at first glance, to be proper.

But there are other standards of value, such as those of the National Alliance, which differ somewhat from the customary ones. For it is not in the external forms of organization and activity of a people that we see the most important criteria for making a judgment as to the significance of a particular period, but rather in the actual racial constitution of a people and in the dynamic processes which, for better or worse, are influencing that racial constitution.

Although the basic racial constitution of a people is always intimately related to that people’s achievements in commerce, science, industry, art, politics, and warfare, still the two sets of criteria can lead to fundamentally different evaluations of a given historical period. This is a consequence of the fact that race building and decay are usually strongly out of phase with civilization building and decay.

Thus, the long ages between the periods of maximum civil activity—ages which the historian customarily ignores as being of only slight importance—may very well be periods of the greatest interest from a standpoint of racial dynamics.

It is, of course, true that the periods of maximum civil activity are precisely those which yield a maximum of written records, artifacts, and the other raw materials from which the historian builds his tale. But relative abundance of evidence should not be interpreted as equivalent to relative historical significance, regardless of the historian’s value criteria.

The record of the rise and fall of pure races constitutes the primary history of mankind, and the rise and fall of civilizations occupy a place of secondary importance. This statement may seem self-evident to those already accustomed to looking at history from a racial viewpoint, but it is by no means generally accepted by historians today. Until it is, much historical writing will continue to be flawed in a fundamental way.
 

Sparta

The Dorians of Laconia organized the Peloponnesian population in a three-layered hierarchy. At the top were the citizens of Sparta, the Spartiates, all of pure Dorian blood, ruled by their kings.

At the bottom of the social structure were the Helots, or serfs, consisting of the aboriginal Mediterranean elements as well as many of the conquered Achaeans of mixed blood. No Spartiate could engage in trade or practice a craft. The Perioeci handled all their commerce, and the Helots provided all their other needs.

Sparta thus had the only full-time, professional army in the Aegean world, and this fact gave her an influence vastly disproportionate to her numbers. So thoroughly did Sparta dominate all her neighbors, and so thoroughly feared and respected by all other Greeks for their military prowess were the Spartiates, that for more than 800 years the city had no need of walls or an acropolis, in marked contrast to every other Greek city of those times.

For another thing, the Spartiates gave an emphasis to racial fitness which went far beyond the needs of a strong and efficient army. Their eugenics program placed a premium on physical beauty—on aesthetic qualities, not just on raw strength or robustness. Spartan women, for example, were a far cry from the muscle-bound behemoths one sees on Soviet women’s Olympic teams these days; instead, they were judged by other Greeks to be among the most beautiful and graceful, as well as the fairest, of Hellenic women, rivaled in beauty only by the women of Thebes.

Another Spartan practice which suggests that racial rather than imperialistic motives may have been uppermost in the minds of their leaders was the regular thinning out of the Helot population, in what was known as the crypteia. This admirable institution sent teams of young Spartiates out into the countryside with daggers to dispatch Helots by the hundreds—an undertaking hardly consonant with a desire for as many subjects as possible, which is the norm for imperialists.

It is easy to imagine the Spartiates, upon their arrival in Laconia, surveying the moral decadence and the racemixing which had made the Achaeans such an easy conquest for the Dorians, and then instituting a carefully designed program to safeguard themselves from a similar fate. For a time this program succeeded; the moral character and the racial quality of the Spartiates remained famously high. But ultimately it failed in both regards.

As with other ruling classes at other times, the Spartiates did not produce enough children to make up for their losses in war. Even heavy penalties for celibacy and late marriage, and exemption from taxes for those Spartan families with four or more children, did not solve the problem.

At the beginning of the fifth century B.C. the Spartiates were able to field an army of 8,000 men against the Persians, but after the costly Spartan victory over Athens and her allies in the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) Spartan numbers declined rapidly. When the Spartiates marched against Thebes in 371 B.C., there were too few of them to prevail. After their decisive defeat by the Thebans at Leuctra, the Spartan army numbered only 2,000 warriors. A century and a half later there were only 700 of them, and they passed from the pages of history.

The Spartiates never succumbed to racemixing, but they did succumb to their own lifestyle. They would have been well advised to eliminate the Helots of the Peloponnesus and the Mediterranean population of Crete altogether and to establish a purely Dorian peasant class in those areas. Then they may well have been able to practice a successful eugenics program, maintain their moral health, and have a stable population too. But, of course, they did not have the advantage which hindsight gives us.

The other Hellenic tribes did succumb to racemixing. Their populations did not suffer the decline in numbers which the Spartiates did, but they suffered a decline in racial quality which resulted in their extermination, perhaps more slowly but just as surely—and less cleanly.
 

Athens

Athens was Sparta’s great political rival during much of the Classical Age. Athenian society came to be organized along quite different lines from Spartan society, but at the dawn of Greek history the similarities outweighed the differences.

The earliest Athenians were, like the other Hellenes, predominantly Nordic in blood and culture. Their social structure was aristocratic, and they were ruled originally by hereditary kings, just as in the case of the Spartiates.

In the seventh century there were two principal differences, from a racial viewpoint, between Sparta and Athens. The first difference, in favor of Sparta, was a culturally and racially more homogeneous class of citizens in Sparta than in Athens. The second was that Athens had a free citizen-peasantry—a decided plus for her.

By the beginning of the sixth century, however, the Athenian peasants were in danger of losing their freedom, many of them having already been sold into slavery and others being effectively chained by indebtedness.

The social unrest resulting from this situation led the Athenians to give absolute power to Solon, a nobleman, in the hope that he could improve things. Solon gave Athens a constitution which wrought a number of changes with long-lasting effects, some good and some bad. On the positive side, he outlawed the practice of enslavement for indebtedness. But he also took the decisive step of transferring the power of the Athenian state from the hands of the aristocracy into the hands of a plutocracy.

Although this latter change was only de jure at first, since the aristocrats were also the plutocrats, it shifted the ultimate criterion of fitness to rule from blood to gold. Henceforth, any sufficiently wealthy speculator who had acquired enough land to yield the specified amount of agricultural produce could theoretically qualify for the highest office in the state and for membership in the Council of the Areopagus: the highest judicial body in Athens, made up of nobles who had formerly held the office of archon, or ruler.

Race-Based Citizenry. Even after Solon, however, democracy did not devour the Athenians all at once. Solon and the tyrants who gained power shortly after his administration, the Peisistratids, governed an Athens in which citizenship was still a racial matter, being based on membership in one of the kinship groups, or clans, which made up the Hellenic tribes of Attica.

In 509 B.C., 85 years after the beginning of Solon’s administration, another “reformer,” Cleisthenes, took office, and he undertook a program of gerrymandering which laid the basis for changing citizenship from a racial to a geographic affair. From this point it was downhill all the way for Athens, racially speaking.

Half a century later the last remnants of power were transferred from the Areopagus to a popular council. All the abuses of mass party politics with which Americans are all too familiar were thenceforth the lot of the Athenians.

Law of Pericles. As the prosperity of Athens grew, more and more foreigners crowded into Attica, with intermarriage inevitably occurring. A temporary halt to the pollution of the Athenian citizenry by the offspring of aliens came in 451 B.C., when the great Pericles pushed through a law restricting citizenship to those born of an Athenian father and an Athenian mother. Only four decades later, however, in order to make up the enormous losses suffered in the Peloponnesian War, Athens bestowed citizenship on tens of thousands of foreigners.

And in the fourth century, although the citizenship law of Pericles remained on the books, every variety of Levantine mongrel was claiming Athenian citizenship. The banking industry of Athens, for example, was entirely in the hands of Semites, who had taken Greek names and were awarded citizenship for “service to the state,” much in the way Jews and Negroes have been elevated to the British “nobility” by the score in recent decades.

Darkening of Hellas. Intermarriage was rife, and the darkening of the Hellenes of Athens was well under way. Racial, moral, and cultural decline went hand in hand. The second-century historian Polybius described his countrymen as “degenerate, pleasure-seeking beggars, without loyalty or belief, and without hope for a better future.”

A century later, in the reign of Augustus, the Roman writer Manilius reckoned the Hellenes among the dark nations (coloratae genies). And so the Athenians, like the Spartiates, passed from the pages of history.
 

Extermination or expulsion

If it is difficult to believe that as great a state as Athens could pass from Nordic genius and glory to mongrelized squalor in a few centuries, just think for a moment of the racial transformation of America which has taken place in a single century. And imagine what America will be like two or three centuries hence (barring a White revolution), when Whites are a minority, outnumbered by both Blacks and Chicanos. America’s technology and industry may coast along for a century or two on the momentum acquired from earlier generations, as Athens’ culture did, but the American people—the real Americans—will have passed from the pages of history.

The passing of the Hellenes must be regarded as one of the greatest tragedies of our race. A great-hearted and noble people, filled with genius and energy, they seized upon the resources in labor, material, and land which their conquest of the conservative Mediterranean world offered, and they wrought one of the most progressive civilizations this earth has yet seen. Indeed, many of their creations remain unsurpassed to this day.

This catastrophic mixing of bloods has occurred over and over again in the history and prehistory of our race, and each time it has been lethal. The knowledge of this has been with us a long time, but it has always failed us in the end. The Hellenes of Sparta and Athens both strove to keep their blood pure, but both ultimately perished. The only way they could have survived would have been to eliminate the entire indigenous population, either through expulsion or extermination, from the areas of the Mediterranean world in which they settled.

The Hellenes always possessed a certain feeling of racial unity, distinguishing themselves sharply from all those not of their blood, but this racial feeling was, unfortunately, usually overshadowed by intraracial conflicts. The rivalries between Hellenic city-states were so fierce and so pervasive, that the Mediterranean natives were more often looked upon as a resource to be used against other Hellenes than as a biological menace to be eliminated.

Categories
Alexander the Great Ancient Greece Miscegenation Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Who We Are, 12

The following is my abridgement of chapter 12 of William Pierce’s history of the white race, Who We Are:

Macedonian and Roman Empires Were Built by Nordics
Latin Founders of Rome Came from Central Europe

 

The last five installments in this series have dealt with the migrations of Nordic, Indo-European-speaking tribes from their homeland in southern Russia, beginning more than 6,000 years ago and continuing into early historic times. In installment 11 we traced the fate of those Nordics who invaded Asia, conquering races which differed substantially from them and eventually being absorbed by those races, despite strong measures for self-preservation.

Only those Nordics who migrated westward, into Europe rather than into Asia, have left a significant genetic heritage. And only those who went northwestward predominated genetically in the long run. Along the shores of the Mediterranean the population density of non-Nordic natives was too high, and racial mixing eventually overwhelmed the invaders. We have already seen what happened to the Greeks.

Balkan Nordics. To the north and northeast of Greece, from the head of the Aegean Sea to the eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea, other Nordic peoples from beyond the Black Sea settled. Among these peoples were the Illyrians, the Dacians, the Thracians, and the Macedonians. Very roughly, the Illyrians occupied the territory comprising much of present-day Yugoslavia and Albania; the Dacians occupied the loop of the lower Danube, in what is now Romania; the Thracians occupied Bulgaria and European Turkey; and the Macedonians occupied the territory between Albania and Bulgaria, comprising the Macedonian provinces of Yugoslavia and Greece. This was a greatly varied territory, and consequently the Nordic inhabitants, though closely related in blood and culture, experienced varied fates.

As we noted in earlier installments, this territory was the site of the Mediterranean Neolithic culture known as Old Europe, which arose about 8,000 years ago and lasted until the first Nordic invasions, which came during the late fifth and early fourth millennia B.C. The early invasions were numerically thin, however, and resulted, in many parts of this Balkan area, in a situation with which we are already familiar: a Nordic warrior elite ruling masses of indigenous Mediterranean farmers and craftsmen.

Blending, Disunity. This situation led to a great deal of racial and cultural blending. The languages of the Nordics prevailed everywhere, but their blood and their religion became mixed with those of the Mediterraneans. For example, even as late as historic times, when further invasions had greatly reinforced the Nordic racial element in the area, the Thracian religion remained a strongly interwoven blend of Mediterranean Earth Mother elements and Nordic Sky Father elements. In the case of the Greeks the Nordic elements had prevailed, but in the case of the Thracians the Mediterranean elements, with their serpent-phallic symbolism and orgiastic rites, played a much larger role.

Both geography and the inhomogeneous racial pattern of the area worked against political unity, and the Balkan region, in ancient times just as in recent times, remained balkanized. Only in Macedonia did a strong enough central authority arise and maintain itself long enough to have a major impact on the world beyond this corner of Europe.

Rise of Macedonia. Ancient Macedonia consisted principally of an inland, mountain-and-plateau region (Upper Macedonia); and a grassy plain at the head of the Thermaic Gulf (Gulf of Salonika), spanning the valleys of the lower Haliacmon (Vistritsa) and Axius (Vardar) Rivers. The Macedonian plain provided ideal conditions for the Nordic horsemen from the steppe of southern Russia.

In the middle of the 12th century B.C. the Dorian invasion swept through Macedonia on its southward course, and a large contingent of Dorians remained in the Macedonian plain, pushing much of the earlier population of Greeks, Thracians, and Illyrians into Upper Macedonia.

After a half-millennium of consolidation, the Macedonian kingdom was born. The first Macedonian king, Perdiccas I, unified the Dorians and the other tribes of the plain and brought them under his control around 640 B.C. Three centuries later King Philip II brought Upper Macedonia into the kingdom as well.

The Macedonians in the fourth century B.C. still had the vigor which decadence had drained from the Greeks of the south, and Philip was able to establish Macedonian hegemony over the greater portion of the Balkan peninsula. In 338 B.C., in the battle of Chaeronea, he crushed the Greek armies, and Macedonia became a world power.

Alexander the Great. But it was Philip’s son. Alexander, who used this power base to launch a new and vastly greater wave of Nordic conquest. In 336, at the age of 20, he succeeded his father as king of Macedonia. Within a decade he had conquered most of the ancient world.

Alexander’s principal conquests lay in the Middle East, however, in the area treated in the previous installment: Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Iran, Afghanistan, and the Aryan realm of northwest India. The greater portion of this territory had already been conquered by the Persians, under Cyrus the Great, two centuries earlier. By bringing it under common rule with Greece and Macedonia, Alexander created the greatest empire the world had yet seen.

Unfortunately, despite his military and organizational genius, Alexander did not understand the racial basis of civilization. He dreamed of a unified world-empire, with all its diverse races expressing a single culture and ordered by a single rule. At a great feast of reconciliation between Greeks and Persians at Opis, on the Tigris River some 40 miles above Baghdad, in 324, when his conquests were complete, he stated his dream explicitly.

Forced Racemixing. And throughout his brief but uniquely dynamic career of empire-building, Alexander acted consistently with this dream. He adopted Asiatic customs and dress, blending them with the Macedonian lifestyle and requiring many of his officers to do the same. He left in power many of the native satraps of the conquered regions, after receiving their oaths of loyalty. And it was not Macedonian Pella, but Semitic Babylon which he chose as the capital of his empire.

Alexander preached racemixing, and he practiced it. During the conquest of Sogdiana (comprising the modern Uzbek and Tadzhik Republics of the U.S.S.R.) he took to wife the daughter, Roxane, of a local baron. Four years later, at Susa, in 324, he also married the daughter of the defeated Persian king, Darius II. On that occasion he bade his officers and men to imitate him; nearly a hundred of the former and 10,000 of the latter took native brides in a mass marriage.

Alexander’s brides, and presumably those of his officers as well, were of noble Persian blood, which, even as late as the fourth century B.C., meant most of them were White—Nordic, in fact. But certainly most of the 10,000 brides of his soldiers were not; they were Asiatics: Semites and the bastard offspring of Semites and Aryans and a dozen other races.

Short-lived Empire. On June 13, 323 B.C., at Babylon, Alexander, not yet 33 years ears old, died of a fever—and with him died the unnatural dream of a mixed-race universal empire. Most of his Macedonian troops at once repudiated their Asiatic wives. His satraps began revolting. The various plans he had set in motion for homogenizing the culture and government of his vast realm became sidetracked.

Elements of Alexander’s empire survived long after his death. In Egypt, for example, the Macedonian Ptolemaic dynasty lasted three centuries; Queen Cleopatra was not an Egyptian by blood, but a Macedonian. And in the east, after the breakup of the empire, local rulers claimed descent from Alexander, even as late as modern times.

But the far-flung empire itself had no natural unity, no unity of blood or spirit; and even if Alexander had lived long enough to impose an artificial unity of coinage and dress and language and custom, it would still have required the strength of his unique personality to hold it together. And it is well that the empire died with him; otherwise it might have sucked the best blood out of Europe for centuries, in a vain effort to maintain it.

Lost Opportunity. The attractions of the vast and rich Orient for one Nordic conqueror after another are obvious. What is unfortunate is that none made racial considerations the basis of his program of conquest—and it could have been done.

Alexander, for example, could have laid the foundations for a Nordic empire which could have stood against the rest of the world—including Rome—forever. The Macedonians and the Greeks shared common blood and had similar languages (ancient Macedonian was an altogether different language from modern Macedonian, which has its roots in the sixth century A.D. conquest of Macedonia by Slavic tribes). If, before invading Asia and defeating the Asian armies, Alexander had devoted his energies to forging just these two peoples into a unified population base, casting out all the alien elements which had accumulated in Greece by the latter part of the fourth century B.C.; and if, while conquering Asia, he had carried out a policy of total extermination—then he could have colonized Asia with Nordic settlements from the Indus to the Nile, and they could have multiplied freely and expanded into the empty lands without danger of racial mixing.

But Alexander did not cleanse Greece of its Semitic merchants and moneylenders and its accumulated rabble of half-breeds, and he chose to base his Asiatic empire on the indigenous populations instead of on colonists. And so the Greco-Macedonian world, despite its uninterrupted prosperity and its maintenance of the appearance of might after Alexander’s death, continued its imperceptible downward slide toward oblivion.

The focus of history shifted to the west, to the Italian peninsula.

Categories
Ancient Greece Homosexuality Marriage Pederasty Pride & Prejudice Tacitus

Homo debate continues

After James O’Meara told me at The Occidental Observer that “Only the Jews have demonized all forms of male affection” I responded:

HomoNegro
 
So what’s your model society?

Yesterday I watched Pride and Prejudice (the 1995 TV series) and experienced great emotion at the very end during the double marriage of Elizabeth Bennet with Mr Darcy and Jane Bennet with Mr Bingley.

That’s the world I would aspire to live in after the vindictive Day of the Rope and a brief interregnum of Lycanthropes chasing over the naughty feminists turned now into Sabine women in order to found large families. Once the violence is all over after the racial wars the Austen world makes sense in a future ethnostate, except that instead of Christianity we might have something like Nazi Aryanism as the cement for holy heterosexual marriage (as holy as the Austen series I saw yesterday; yes, traditional family values).

You propose the Athens model of Pericles? Not Spartans, who unlike the Athenians did not commit the mortal sin of mongrelization? What do you propose exactly? (The Burroughs novel you use in your blog depicts an altogether violent and degenerate, non-Athenian homo world that would be easy prey for the enemies of the white ethnostate.)

While posting this entry I’m still awaiting a response to the above. Meanwhile, this is what I responded to Lew at VNN Forum about a month ago:

I said…

I agree that the level of some criticism in this thread is 7th grade. However, why doesn’t Greg Johnson allow at Counter Currents a much more discrete criticism of the homo agenda he’s promoting by publishing James’ book? Why doesn’t he say a real word, not the evasive way he dismissed my point (“strawman”), about the problems presented in my linked article, “On classic pederasty”?

Lew said…

If a particular white male homosexual is not interested in pushing the modern gay agenda, supports traditional man / woman marriage as the societal ideal, and is willing to work for society and the collective good, what possible harm could he cause?

I said…

But there’s the rub. James O’Meara doesn’t seem to support traditional marriage (he recently published an article at Counter Currents critical of 1950s family values). Instead, he theorizes that real western families must be a kind of pagan homophiliacs.

Greg Johnson said…

James O’Meara’s startling thesis is that the male groups that create and sustain civilization have been destroyed not just with the hammer of feminism but also on the anvil of “homophobia.” For today, any all-male group is stigmatized as “homoerotic” (usually by the same people who want to normalize homosexuality). Thus, to exorcise the specter of homosexuality, male groups have been pressured to accept female members. Merely excluding actual homosexuals is not enough, because the problem is the mere possibility of homosexuality in groups of men who live, work, and fight together. Thus O’Meara points to the conclusion that the only way to maintain all-male institutions is to de-stigmatize homosexuality.

Of course this is a non-starter for the conservatives who posture as defenders of Western civilization, because there is something they want to conserve even more: Judeo-Christian “family values,” including homophobia. Thus O’Meara argues that the homophobic conservative “family values” agenda actually undermines the foundations of Western civilization. As an alternative, O’Meara urges us to look to the other West, the real West, the West before it was conquered by a Near Eastern religion, namely the pagan West, for a model of civilization that managed to integrate all-male institutions with family life, due in part to more fluid conceptions of sexual identity and tolerant attitudes toward same-sex attractions.

I said…

The above sentence demonstrates that Greg was wrong when claiming that my piece [“Gitone’s magic”] was “so off the mark, such a straw man argument” because it’s James himself who’s placing “the pagan West”, i.e., the Greco-Roman world, as a “model” of civilization: precisely the claim that I debunked in my article, insofar as classic homosexuality was mainly pederasty—not the transvestite behavior that James provocatively and unabashedly boasts visually in his blog, even in the “About me” page.

As I said in my article on classic pederasty, I read a couple of Latin-Spanish translations of the first long novel in the western world. And although Petronius depicts the Roman provinces in altogether decadent times—perhaps under the reign of Caligula—, the main character, Encolpius, and his epheboy Gitone are described as feeling a great deal of revulsion towards a queerfag who tried to seduce them (during the banquet of Trimalchio if I remember correctly). If The Satyricon is a window to the past we can conclude that, even in those degenerate times, when vomitoriums were introduced in the Roman homes as depicted in Petronius’ novel, the lovers of the story—a 25-year-old young man and a 16 year-old teen—still felt incredible revulsion for obvious queers.

It’s James the one who makes use of the classic world as his pivotal argument for his hypothesis. Thus, if I could demonstrate that he was arguing from a false analogy, I reasoned out when writing my essay, his hypothesis would be falsified by History itself.

Something similar could be said of how the pre-Christian Germanics handled the fags (say, like those who made Encolpius and Gitone almost throw up). Tacitus wrote, “Traitors and deserters are hanged; cowards and those guilty of unnatural practices are suffocated in mud under a hurdle.”

Categories
Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Demography Egypt Emigration / immigration Indo-European heritage Miscegenation Philosophy of history Racial studies Slavery

“March of the Titans” – prologue

This post has been moved: here.

Categories
Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Homosexuality Infanticide Pederasty Plato Psychohistory Zeus

On classic pederasty

This article has been edited in September 2017.
For a longer version of this article see: here

 
Julian Jaynes argued in The Breakdown of The Bicameral Mind that Homeric Greeks were, psychologically, vastly different from historical Greeks. Semitic cultures were even more different. In the online edition of my Day of Wrath I refrained to reproduce this image for the simple reason that it would have meant retro-projection.

In the image we see women, presumably the mothers, trying to rescue their children from a propitiatory child sacrifice to Moloch Baal. The disturbing truth is that, in real life, the parents themselves handed over their crying children to the assistants of the priest, hence the inflammatory sentence with which I ended one of my books (“In the final book of this work I’ll go back to my autobiography, and we shall see if after such grim findings mankind has the right to exist”).

In Hollywood such sort of retroprojections are ubiquitous in movies about the historical past. For instance, Australia, a pro-aboriginals film set before the Second World War, had an upset Nicole Kidman telling another white person, “No mother would leave her child!” when in real life, as recounted in Day of Wrath, quite a few Australian abbos not only abandoned some of their babies, but killed and ate them (for scholarly references supporting this claim see Day of Wrath).
 
Psycho-classes

By “retroprojection” I mean projecting one’s own morals and frame of mind onto the Radical Other, insofar as most people are unaware of the existence of “psychoclasses.”

Westerners, and incredibly, child abuse researchers included, have not awakened to the fact that there have been very dissimilar psychoclasses or ways of childrearing in the world; and that this has had enormous implications for the mental health of a people, primitive or modern. For example, in my Day of Wrath I said that Rhea hid Zeus and presented a stone wrapped in strips, which Cronus took as a swaddled baby and ate it. Cronus represents the pre-Homeric Greeks, the archaic Hellas. After the breakdown of the bicameral, or schizoid mind, historical Greeks considered barbarous the practice of child sacrifice, symbolized in Zeus’ successful rebellion against his filicidal father. Though they still practiced the exposure of unwanted babies, the historical Greeks at least stopped sacrificing them in horrible ways: a practice that their neighbors continued. Nonetheless, if films on both Homeric and post-Homeric Greeks were historically accurate, the exposure of babies, which was practiced even in Roman times, would be visually depicted.

Recently I saw two films that I had not watched for a long time. In the 1959 Hollywood interpretation of Ben-Hur starring Charlton Heston, Tiberius’ Rome and Jerusalem are idealized far beyond what those cities looked like in the times of Jesus. Think of how, to impress the audience with the grandeur of the Roman circus in a Hollywoodesque Palestine, for the chariot race sequence the director made it look as large as Constantinople’s circus! Conversely, in Fellini’s 1969 Satyricon, freely based on Petronius’ classic, the Roman Empire is oneirically caricaturized to the point that the film’s extreme grotesqueries bear no visual relationship whatsoever to the empire of historical time. Both extreme idealization and oneiric caricature constitute artistic ways to understand the soul of Rome. One may think that an Aristotelian golden mean may lie somewhere between Ben-Hur and Fellini-Satyricon, but not even in HBO’s Rome, a purportedly realistic TV series that claimed paying more attention to historical women, dared to show that such women abandoned their babies who died on the hills, roads and the next day were found under the frozen streets: a custom approved even by Plato and Aristotle.

Growing in a “late infanticidal” culture, to use Lloyd deMause’s term, makes members of that psychoclass greatly different compared to our modern western psychoclass. (One could easily imagine what a shock for the modern mind would represent the spectacle of white babies dying on the streets of Vermont, Bonn or Florence with nobody bothering to rescue them.) So different that I believe that the hostile takeover I do of deMause’s Psychohistory to deliver it to the nationalist community will revolutionize the understanding of history once it is properly digested and understood.

In my Day of Wrath I quoted psychohistorian Henry Ebel (no ellipsis added between unquoted sentences):

DeMause’s argument had a breathtaking sweep and grandeur such as we associate with the work of Hegel, Darwin and Marx. Moreover, it seemed to be a valid response and interpretation of a series of gruesome facts that had been consistently understated or suppressed by conventional historians. “The Evolution of Childhood” has proved a morsel too large, too complete, too assertive, and in many ways too grim for the historical profession to digest. Since adult styles and roles, including the academic and professional, are mainly denial-systems erected against those early needs and terrors, the academic consideration of deMause’s argument has been, understandably enough, of less than earthshaking intelligence.

Once we integrate Psychohistory to our view of history, it is easy to notice that when Greg Johnson talks of Greco-Roman homosexuality he does it retroprojectively, as if it was similar to the mores of today’s world: consenting sex between adults. But if Jaynes and deMause are right, the peoples of the classical world inhabited an altogether distinct psychic universe, especially before Solon. So different that sometimes I even wonder if Francis Parker Yockey has a valid point when he wrote that the Italian Renaissance is sold as a link between two cultures that, according to him, have nothing in common.
 
The real Greco-Roman homosexuality: pederasty

A splendid example of such discontinuity is what André Gide called normal pederasty, the ancients’ infatuation for adolescents. Keep in mind that Gide did not condemn such customs. On the contrary, he considered his Corydon, published in 1924 and which received widespread condemnation, his most important work. However, since I can only understand the geist of a culture through the visual arts, before quoting Gide let me convey visually what “homo”-sexuality signified for the classical world through a couple of scenes of the Italian movie Satyricon (YouTube clip: here).

Cinematic experiences aside, what are scholars saying about what I call pseudo-homosexuality: pederasty (which must never be confused with pedophilia)? In the introduction to On Homosexuality: Lysis, Phaedrus, and Symposium, published by Prometheus Books, Eugene O’Connor wrote (again, no ellipsis added):

Benjamin Jowett’s introduction to his translation of Plato’s Symposium expresses prevalent Victorian, Edwardian, and even later attitudes, particularly in England and America, toward Greek homosexuality. Some excerpts from the introduction will illustrate this “clash of cultures.” Since Jowett’s day much has been done to counter and correct this willful distortion of ancient sexuality. We may now consult, for example, the more sober appraisals of K.J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (1978), and Saara Lilja, Homosexuality in Republican and Augustan Rome (1983) to help us redress the oversights of earlier scholarship.

The composition of [Plato’s] Symposium owes much to the Greek tradition of “banquet literature,” often a collection of informal discussions (in prose or verse) on various topics, including the power of love and the delights of young men and boys. Indeed, a whole body of homoerotic literature grew up around the themes of male beauty and how one ought to woo and win a boy.

The customary social pattern was this: a boy in his teens or, at any rate, a younger man (called an eromenos, or “beloved”) was sought out by an older male (called an erastes or “lover”), who might be already married. Women in classical Athens were kept in virtual seclusion from everyone but their immediate families and their domestic activities were relegated to certain “female” parts of the house. As a consequence, boys and young men—partly by virtue of their being seen, whether in the gymnasium, in the streets, or at a sacrifice (as in the Lysis)—became natural love-objects.

Strict rules of conduct bound both parties: adult males could face prosecution for seducing free-born youths, while Athenian boys and young men could be censured for soliciting sexual favors for money. That would make them in effect equal to courtesans, who were hired companions and lacked citizen status.

This erastes-eromenos (lover-beloved) relationship, although it was sexual and in many ways comparable to typical, male-female relations, with the man assuming the dominant role, was meant ideally to be an educative one. The older man instilled in the younger—in essence, “made him pregnant with”—a respect for the requisite masculine virtues of courage and honor.

Socrates in the Phaedrus describes how the soul of the pederast (literally, “a lover of youths”) who is blessed with philosophy will grow wings after a certain cycle of reincarnations. In recent centuries, the word “pederast” has come to be viewed with opprobrium, fit only to describe child molesters. But in ancient Greece the word carried no such negative connotation, and was employed in a very different context.

Surrounded as he often was by the brightest young men of Athens, Socrates jokingly compared himself, in Xenophon’s Symposium, to a pander or procurer. These are witty, humorous characterizations of Socrates to be sure; yet, in the end, Socrates was the best erastes of all; the loving adult male teacher who sought to lead his aristocratic eromenoi (male beloveds) on the road to virtue.

I have read Xenophon’s Symposium and on chapter VIII it does look like Socrates and others had intense crushes with the eromenoi.

In his Corydon Gide shares the Platonic view that what he calls “normal pederasty” (to distinguish it from child molestation) is a propitious state of the mind to shed light on truth and beauty. In the last pages of his slim book Gide concludes: “I believe that such a lover will jealously watch over him, protect him, and himself exalted, purified by this love, will guide him toward those radiant heights which are not reached without love.” In the very final page Gide adds that “From thirteen to twenty-two (to take the age suggested by La Bruyere) is for the Greeks the age of loving friendship, of shared exaltation, of the noblest emulation,” and that only after this age the youth “wants to be a man”: marrying a woman.

But not only I need visuals to properly understand a culture. Narrative is fundamental too as a way to get into the unfathomed deeps of a bygone world. Below, a tale recounted by an old poet, Eumolpus in the first long novel that Western literature knows, Petronius’ Satyricon:

I relocated the hilarious, though rather long, quotation of the Satyricon as an isolated quote in another of my blogs: here

However, the erastes-eromenos relationship was not always as hilariously picaresque as Petronius depicts it. In my previous response to Johnson, when I added the image of a terracotta statuette of Zeus carrying off Ganymede, I included no references. Here I’ll add a couple of them. In the academic work that O’Connor mentioned above, Greek Homosexuality, K.J. Dover writes:

Ephoros, writing in the mid-fourth century, gives a remarkable account (F149) of ritualised homosexual rape in Crete. The erastes gave notice of his intention, and the family and friends of the eromenos did not attempt to hide the boy away, for that would have been admission that he was not worthy of the honour offered him by the erastes. If they believed that the erastes was unworthy, they prevented the rape by force; otherwise they put a good-humoured and half-hearted resistance, which ended with the erastes carrying off the eromenos to a hide-out for two months.

At the end of that period the two of them returned to the city (the eromenos was known, during the relationship, as parastatheis, ‘posted beside…’ or ‘brought over to the side of…’) and the erastes gave the eromenos expensive presents, including clothing which would thereafter testify to the achievement of the eromenos in being chosen; he was kleinos, ‘celebrated’, thanks to his philetor, ‘lover’. [p. 189]

John Boswell, a homosexual professor at YaleUniversity who died at forty-seven of complications from AIDS, specialized in the relationship between homosexuality and Christianity. For this reason alone it is interesting to compare his claims with James O’Meara’s on exactly the same subject. Boswell abstains to mention the word “rape” which Dover unabashedly used in his treatise published by Harvard University. But in Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe Boswell describes in less academic, and more colorful language, the legal arrangements regarding such abductions:

Apart from the abduction aspect, this practice has all the elements of European marriage tradition: witness, gifts, religious sacrifice, a public banquet, a chalice, a ritual change of clothing for one partner, a change of status for both, even a honeymoon.

The abduction is less remarkable, by the standards of the times, that it seems. The ruler of the gods, Zeus, mandated a permanent relationship with a beautiful Trojan prince, Ganymede, after abducting him and carrying him off to heaven; they were the most famous same-sex couple of the ancient world, familiar to all its educated residents. Zeus even gave Ganymede’s father a gift—the equivalent of a dower or “morning gift”. The inhabitants of Chalcis honored what they believed to be the very spot of Ganymede’s abduction, called Harpagion (“Place of Abduction”). Moreover, as late as Boccaccio (Decameron, Day 5, Tale 1) an abduction marriage that takes place seems to find its most natural home in Crete.

Heterosexual abduction marriage was also extremely common in the ancient world—especially in the neighboring state of Sparta, with which Crete shared its constitution and much of its social organization, where it was the normal mode of heterosexual marriage. It remained frequent well into modern times, and even under Christian influence men who abducted women were often only constrained to marry them, and not punished in any other way. In a society where women were regarded as property and their sexuality their major asset, by the time an abducted woman was returned most of her value was gone, and the more public attention was focused on the matter the less likely it was she would ever find a husband. And in a moral universe where the abduction of Helen (and of the Sabine women) provided the foundation myths of the greatest contemporary political entities, such an act was as likely to seem heroic as disreputable. The Erotic Discourses attributed to Plutarch begin with stories of abduction for love, both heterosexual and homosexual. [pp. 91-93]

This last sentence about the foundation myths of both the ancient Hellas and Rome is absolutely central to understand their moral universe. However, Boswell omits to say that Zeus would be considered a bisexual god with strong heterosexual preferences—Hera and many other consorts—according to current standards, in no way a “gay” god.

Furthermore, unlike the same-sex unions of today, the erastes-eromenos relationship wasn’t meant to be permanent. The continuance of an erotic relationship was disapproved. In dramatic contrast to contemporary “gay marriages” and the myth promulgated by James O’Meara at Counter-Currents, romantic relationships between adult coevals were disrespected. In fact, the former eromenos might well become an erastes himself with a younger youth when he got older. Boswell, who strove to use classic scholarship to support the so-called “gay marriage” of our times, overstates his case in other passages of Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe. What struck me the most of his study was that on page 66 he misled the readers by claiming that the Satyricon protagonists, Encolpius and Gitone, are simply a same-sex couple. I have read a couple of translations of the Satyricon and it is all too clear that Boswell omitted two fundamental facts: Gitone’s age, an underage teen for today’s standards, and another lover of Gitone, Ascyltus (who also appears in my embedded YouTube clip way above).
 
Discussion

Classic pederasty did not resemble what currently is called the “gay movement,” let alone O’Meara’s preposterous claim that homosexuals have represented a sort of Western elite, in some ways superior to the bourgeoisie of the Christian world. The causes of pederasty are to be found not only in what O’Connor said above: women being kept in seclusion and men transferring their affections to younger boys. More serious was something that neither O’Connor nor Dover or Boswell dared to say: Infanticidal Greece and Rome produced a surplus of males as a result of the exposure of babies, especially baby girls. As I said in my Day of Wrath, it was not until 374 AD that the emperor Valentinian I, a Christian, mandated to rear all children. What apologists of homosexuality fail to understand is that that was a psychoclass distinct from our own, since for modern westerners it is unthinkable to expose baby girls.

In a nutshell, the Greco-Roman erastes-eromenos institution was not “gay” in the modern sense of the word.

Categories
Alexander the Great Ancient Greece Axiology Ethnic cleansing Racial studies Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Lost Opportunity

Excerpted from the 12th article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:


The attractions of the vast and rich Orient for one Nordic conqueror after another are obvious. What is unfortunate is that none made racial considerations the basis of his program of conquest—and it could have been done.

Alexander, for example, could have laid the foundations for a Nordic empire which could have stood against the rest of the world—including Rome—forever. The Macedonians and the Greeks shared common blood and had similar languages (ancient Macedonian was an altogether different language from modern Macedonian, which has its roots in the sixth century A.D. conquest of Macedonia by Slavic tribes). If, before invading Asia and defeating the Asian armies, Alexander had devoted his energies to forging just these two peoples into a unified population base, casting out all the alien elements which had accumulated in Greece by the latter part of the fourth century B.C.; and if, while conquering Asia, he had carried out a policy of total extermination—then he could have colonized Asia with Nordic settlements from the Indus to the Nile, and they could have multiplied freely and expanded into the empty lands without danger of racial mixing.

But Alexander did not cleanse Greece of its Semitic merchants and moneylenders and its accumulated rabble of half-breeds, and he chose to base his Asiatic empire on the indigenous populations instead of on colonists. And so the Greco-Macedonian world, despite its uninterrupted prosperity and its maintenance of the appearance of might after Alexander’s death, continued its imperceptible downward slide toward oblivion.

Categories
Alexander the Great Ancient Greece Demography Indo-European heritage Miscegenation Racial studies Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Alexander the “Great”

This text has been merged within another entry (here)