After the fifth instalment of selected quotes from Benjamin’s book, I had planned to comment on Brendan Simms’ biography about Hitler. That way, I would be interspersing a post about the four words—which includes stopping abusing children—with another post about the fourteen words.
But since I am also a victim of abusive parents and a psychiatrist my mother hired to finish destroying me, reading Consumption makes me dwell on my past, especially since these days I have been suffering from what I wrote on the first day of the month in “Selfish heirs.” In many ways, my past was as handicapping as Benjamin’s. For example, it is unclear what will become of me when I run out of money from the sale of my parents’ house, divided among six heirs.
On the one hand, it is true that someone like “Bran the Broken”, whom (in my appropriation, not in the novel) his beloved father threw off the tower and who, with his broken spine, can no longer lead a normal life, can see his biographical past and even History from a paranormal perspective that normies, who lack that retrocognitive gift, can’t.
But on the other hand, material needs remain imperative. Even in the HBO adaptation of Martin’s novels—directed by a couple of Jews who in many ways betray the author—it can be seen that Bran enters the mind of his pet wolf to have the illusion of eating when, in reality, he is not feeding himself. These astral journeys can be harmful in that, in real life, Bran must feed himself, as his travelling companion Jojen warns him. The novel is even more sinister than the HBO series because it seems to suggest that, already in the cave and learning the magic of the three-eyed raven, Jojen allowed himself to be sacrificed so that Bran could eat a paste that was made from his body thanks to the culinary arts of the children of the forest…
I can say something similar about my countless journeys into inner space. Like Van Gogh and the painters of his time, I have sacrificed the most basic aspects of physical survival in pursuit of enlightenment about what happened in my early life. The difference, of course, is that in the real world there are no children of the forest to help me, even with their black magic. I have survived to the age at which Cézanne died, but it is unclear how I will survive when I reach my seventies. It really sucks that, if my literary work has any value (I am referring to the trilogy), I have to die to be recognised. And that’s if you’re lucky! (the work of Aristarchus of Samos, for example, was lost forever when the Christians destroyed the Library of Alexandria).
I will end this post with an image of the very copy that I used to look at with my parents when I was a child, around five or six years old: a book that inspired me greatly to understand the great painters. I am referring to an image of the first painter reviewed in the book, Cézanne:
In 1999, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. She had been suffering from a chest infection, and though the usual treatments of antibiotics had been administered, her condition did not improve. […]
This was of no consequence to my bullies, though. By that age I was living between lessons in a dormitory, the pupils separated into independent ‘houses’ that competed with one another in sport and singing competitions […]
Naturally, free from adult condemnation or reprimand, they continued to mock her to my face, telling me that “it would be funny if she died” and reminding me as if in sincerity and the vulgar slang of the day that she was “still fit though” and thus “shaggable.” The worst culprits for this were Chris and Tim. Their horrible words left me shaken to my core and weary, damaged, appalled that they would be so weak and so feral as to, in effect, pass above me to insult my mother long distance, a sadly all too common line of child-on-child abuse that I have always considered extremely below the belt. […]
“Hello there! I’m Ben’s mum; I’m a fat, ugly Irish c**t!” My mother was still in her acute phase of healing in real life at this point, having just left the London hospital following her two-week window and in recuperation in Chelmsford’s Broomfield. It was not the worst insult I had heard from one of them over the cruel months, but it was enough. Something I had never felt before welled up in me, a piercing column of dark flame and red-hot rage filling my consciousness.
I slammed out of my desk and stared at him with pure hatred, not saying a word. Never before had I tackled a bully, but I knew my body was stronger, and I was now well over six feet tall, and besides, I was angry. Without a second passing, I reached out, grabbing him by the throat with my right hand and squeezing, and picked him up a little by the neck, pinning him to the wall of the cubicle. My fingers squeezed tight around his windpipe, feeling the warm flesh in my hand, that physical connection, his stiff surprise, and all the pounding intensity of full on contact aggression. Then, pushing him to one side, him yelping, his eyes wide in shock, spluttering and choking, I glanced over at the first-floor window, motioning that I was going to throw him out of it. “What the hell did you say!” I shouted at him, gritting my teeth, snarling in inchoate rage, “You’re the f**king c**t!!” and his struggling face writhed in panic, in total surprise and fear. Only then did I let go and heard him immediately say, and in fluster, “I’m sorry, Ben! I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry!” I had no more trouble with him on the matter after that.
By now, my anger had faded, still more melancholic by nature than aggressive enough to be able to defend myself adequately in the long run, a painful consequence of the years of torment and sorrow before. I felt awful that I had felt compelled to use swear words, especially words of that calibre, and, despite the circumstances of the incident, I remember taking what I had said to Confession with me at Our Lady Immaculate and what I had done, re-wording it to the priest a little to downplay Tim’s words, and the context of our fight, embarrassed and torn, feeling myself morally culpable, despite being in defence of my mother. […]
Knowing of this incident, the other boys ignored me instead of directly confronting me with their mockery and put-downs. They were never really my friends, and I knew then that I was never well liked, not even by the quieter, less popular pupils who could tolerate my company. I had shown them something in me that they had never seen before, and, perhaps unfairly, they distrusted me for it and considered me above all “really weird”, if not “a psychopath”, words of ignorance and judgement which have always hurt me. I never again had the personal necessity to physically engage a pupil at that school with my newfound rage. However, I was no better in confidence despite my defensive act, too used still to my long years of passively suffering violent attacks before that, and a sad, shy boy.
Time paced on slowly, and I moved on in my emptied, silent spaces, always lonely, watching happiness from the sidelines, already missing a world I had never been privy to. I just did my work when I could and slipped away, looking to the sky and the woods and the fields and pacing out alone down the bleak countryside tracks to the side of the river a mile off to lie by the soft banks of the water and cry, returning in the twilight, with no expression on my face.
______ 卐 ______
Editor’s Note:
In the first instalment of this series, I mentioned that a mudblood migrant raped Benjamin when he was six years old, the age at which he appears in this photograph. In that instalment, I didn’t include the photo because I posted another one: the location of the rape, which Benjamin visited many years later as part of his introspection and self-therapy.
On the 27th of last month, I moved from Yautepec to the neighbourhood where I spent the best years of my childhood and early adolescence and, alas, also my middle teens: when my parents began to treat me psychotically. My intention to return here was also self-therapeutic. In the photograph on the right I appear during the last year when I was very happy: the overt abuse at home hadn’t yet begun…
“The stars are not for man” —Karellen in the novel Childhood’s End.
As I said in the comments section of my previous post today, it is foolish to be a cosmologist when your race is being actively destroyed. This is not the time to fantasise about space travel, but rather to travel into inner space; that is, to fulfil the mandate of the Oracle of Delphi. A quote already cited in this blog (and on a page of my Day of Wrath) sheds light on the subject:
Only a ripe artist, one thoroughly acquainted with the workings of the mind, can be successful here. This is why psychological self-portraiture has appeared so late among the arts, belonging exclusively to our own days and those yet to come. Man had to discover continents, to fathom his seas, to learn his language, before he could turn his gaze inward to explore the universe of his soul.
We are commanded to know the universe of our own soul! I iterate: it is madness to start planning interstellar travel without first knowing oneself, knowledge that implies knowing what causes the darkest hour of the West. That is why it is worth quoting some passages from Benjamin’s book, Consumption, whose blurb I quoted a couple of days ago.
The key to understanding psychosis is what Colin Ross calls the problem of attachment with the perp, a concept explained in my Day of Wrath. Well into the book, Benjamin wrote:
I love my father. It is the deepest, most intrinsic love and one I could never shift or diminish, even if I wanted to. It brings me to tears as I think about it… But then I remember (and how could I forget?) these terrible childhood tortures on my father’s part…
One of the things Neanderthals don’t want to understand is that the mind is like the body: it has a breaking point. Primitive people, whom we revile as “Neanderthals”, seem to be saying—so alienated are they by their work ethic—that despite all mistreatment the human mind is infinitely resilient. The truth is that, just as it is not the same for the body to fall from one metre, three metres or from an aeroplane, the same is true of the mind: there are orders of magnitude in which the self can, literally, break.
In Benjamin’s life, and I am not only referring to his first trauma with his father when he was just five years old (the “apple episode” that I won’t recount here), there was also trauma at school. I am referring not only to bullying but also to the rape by a traitorous government that imported non-whites, including teenagers, due to the self-hatred that the English have suffered since 1945: a madness, alas, shared by the entire West.
I would like to quote a passage from Consumption after the rape of a mudblood that the author experienced at the age of six:
…I cannot remember as she [his mother] drove down the long evening lanes, the sun reddening in a haze over the yellow fields, and I sat way down in the seat, the seatbelt pulled down over my stomach, my legs curled up tight in the lock of my forearms, foggy, and faint in mind, with soreness all over, and with nothing I could have been able, or, tragically, allowed to say.
I never mentioned this incident to my parents afterwards, not once, for at least twenty-eight years, though I knew of it the while, even when they were, in some way, aware that I had had bad times at school. They still have no real clue, and I was brushed aside with an “Oh, that’s terrible. Oh, did that happen to you? How awful!” of polite disbelief when I did mention it to my mother, crying and raging down the phone, her reception the same as if it were a coffee morning anecdote in passing, or a fanciful tale for inadvertent amusement, as narrated by my aunt in one of her drunken outbreaks of hysteria. Each new time I tried, periodically over years, I’d hear an “Oh? Really? That’s not good to hear” from her, as if her memory too was missing over the occurrences, and she was instead hearing for the first time, and, dogmatically, she has always been known to tell others that “his early life was good” and “no, nothing ever happened to him, he had a good life with us” and words to that effect, all a further torture for me, as if she was honest, and as if it were her place (and her place alone) to say…
The gulley where I was molested
I did not blame my mother at the time for not helping me, and was unsure even how she could have. I could not register the pain myself and, bizarrely, forgot soon enough as times moved on, relegating it to a small corner pocket of an otherwise full and engaged mind, but as an adult, I raged mercilessly at her for her disbelief and was more than wounded.
This is where the soul murder only begins, plunging the child into a spiral of amplifying abuse until his mind collapses. When parents without empathy don’t understand, or do not want to understand, why their child no longer wants to get along with their schoolmates, instead of blaming the environment they blame the child: courtesy of biological psychiatry, although there are still professionals who realise that the fault did not lie with the child. Benjamin tells us:
Indeed, my thorough lack of interest in football was one of the prime reasons that my parents, in some heightened suspicion of me, took me at this age [seven years old] down to the village surgery to request an autism evaluation…
…given that I was used to being heavily bullied, “he dislikes noisy groups of children.” Though the GP listened to their unfounded complaints, did a few simple tests on me, and gave me the all-clear almost immediately, telling them quite bluntly to go away and stop speculating, I was left upset by this lack of faith on their parts, and the initial zeal of their incorrect sentiment offended me a little, acknowledging to myself that, for some frustrating reason, they had been swift to pathologise my innocuous – and totally normal – childhood behaviours, and still somehow, despite capitulating outwardly, could not entirely take the doctor’s firm “no” for an answer, confident in thinking themselves equipped to know my health better.
In the coming days I will continue reading Consumption. For now, the above quote provides a clear idea not only of the literary genre that Benjamin and I want to inaugurate, but also of why studying inner space is infinitely more important than studying outer space. The first may save the white race from its ongoing self-destruction; the second may not.
One more word about what I wrote the first day of the month.
Returning to the zone of my childhood and early adolescence, when I hadn’t yet been abused by my parents, doesn’t solve my future but makes me think…
First, it irritates me that people don’t write about their existential pains. If they did it would be much easier to save the Aryan man from the ongoing extinction, as I told Dale Jansen yesterday.
Transvaluing our values doesn’t mean accepting the legacy of the Enlightenment and thus being considered apostate. For example, the neo-normie Voltaire wrote in his Philosophical Dictionary that “it is natural that the children honour their parents”, a mandate taken directly from the Judeo-Christian decalogue (visitors who haven’t read the all too important Neo-Christianity PDF should read it now).
As Nietzsche knew, true apostasy lies in the transvaluation of all values. That includes replacing such a Judaeo-Christian command with the “Know thyself!” of Delphi. An insightful Aryan is already able to save his breed from extinction because he has identified the enemy: the Semitic malware with which the Aryan man has been infected for millennia. And when you know yourself the most natural thing is to keep a public blog, or personal diary, about your spiritual odyssey.
So back to autobiography. The zone where I lived happily many decades ago has horribly fallen due to the geometric reproduction of those whom I call Neanderthals. To boot, there are millions more cars in the capital and, worse, they have torn down many cosy houses to build soulless buildings.
A couple of days ago I went to a central intersection of avenues where I sat in a two-chair stall of a shoe boiler (my very dirty shoes had land that dated from my stay in Yautepec). The gentleman who was next to me, talking with the shoe polisher, commented that the palm trees (which I loved), that for decades were on the dividing strip of the avenues of the neighbourhood, were removed because the leftist government cut the budget and the palm trees weren’t irrigated… and died. So there are not only millions of Neanderthals, cars and soulless buildings in the streets of my most beloved memories, but the living beings that I loved died from negligence.
Yesterday I went to visit the friends of the park where I started playing chess fifty years ago. One of those old friends I met yesterday. I learned that another, much younger than us, rents a place in front of the coffee shop where we were that sells… meat! When he left I learned that this young man, who apparently has zero Indian blood (like the other friend), hasn’t procreated after four years of marriage. His wife recently went to Japan to vacation without his husband: something inconceivable for the values of my grandmas.
So I changed the naïve Indian people of Yautepec, where I lived for a few months, for the big city with this type of extremely decadent Westerner (yesterday, by the way, I had a passionate discussion with some of these chess players, including this young man, about these issues)! Even so, I don’t regret having left Yautepec because there it was impossible to go out for my daily walks due to the merciless sun (due to its great height above sea level, the capital is fairly tempered). The same young man who rents a carnivorous shop and allows his wife to travel alone told me the great truth about the neighbourhood where I now return: “the streets are very walkable”.
Why do the editors of the racialist webzines not saturate their articles with autobiographical vignettes such as these? To do so, accompanied by writing books about our most painful memories—that is, to comply with the religion of Delphi—would result in abandoning the monocausal POV of people like Nick Fuentes, who like me also has some Indian blood.
I finally have internet service after a few days without it due to moving from Yautepec, in the state of Morelos, to Mexico City.
After living alone in the house in Tlalpan my parents left behind, so large it had three pianos in various locations, my siblings decided to sell it. Since the money from the sale was divided among six heirs, the modest sum I received was only enough to rent a tiny place in the neighbourhood of Mexico City where I lived as a child and teenager.
Before my move from Yautepec, a town where the only white person was my dentist, where I had gone after the selling of my parents’ house in search of cheap rent, I had been talking on this site with Benjamin. We both have in common not just the fourteen words, but the four words (never, ever torment animals or children, which I summarise under the motto “Eliminate all unnecessary suffering”).
It’s curious how those who—unlike the distorted image Hollywood deceives us with—have been tormented by their parents to the point of psychic breakdown can, in their lucid states, see things that normies are incapable of seeing.
For example, when looking for an apartment in the capital, I had to pay for hotels because my brother, who inherited the family business, only let me stay in his apartment for one day, even though there was one room empty since his only son moved out. On the other hand, my old friend Marco, whom I’ve talked about on this site in several posts to illustrate what many YouTubers call “narcissism”, a condition that sometimes borders on psychosis, allowed my beloved family furniture into his home until his death. If it weren’t for Marco, I would have been dealt a terrible blow: the furniture that reminds me of the time when my parents hadn’t yet abused me would have been lost (Marco also offered me a room in his house to live in for a few days while I sorted out my affairs, although I declined his generous offer).
That’s the world! No one among the heirs of the Tort family after my parents passed is aware of what happened (my sister Corina died suddenly in 2016, and by law, her share of the inheritance went to her son, who now lives in Barcelona). Due to the torment my parents inflicted on me I was left unable to pursue a career, and wages in Mexico are so low that I couldn’t work either. If my siblings had been aware of what had happened, they would have left me the house so that I, who turns 67 next month, could live there for the rest of my days.
But they wanted money and now my future has become precarious…
My late sister Corina was fully aware that our parents murdered our souls, but no one who inherited the house has any conscience, and the same could be said of the family’s relatives and acquaintances. I am writing this entry because I owe the moral support, or the storage of my furniture, to people who have suffered psychotic breakdowns. Those I know who haven’t had these breakdowns don’t sympathise with me, nor with the new generations of children whose souls are being murdered at home; or with the animals being tortured in slaughterhouses and other sinister places.
I will use the little money I had left from the inheritance to translate into English my books where I narrate the tragedy that befell my family: a tragedy that not only destroyed the lives of Corina and me, but is repeated by millions of other abusive parents, with the difference that unlike me the victims do not write their autobiographies.
The topic is relevant even for racialists. A few years ago, one of them contacted me because he had serious mental health issues, and in my anti-psychiatric writings he found an oasis in a desert of incomprehension. And there’s a well-known racialist who has a website that he started even before The West’s Darkest Hour appeared. Many years ago he had such severe mental health issues that he was once labelled schizophrenic, if I remember his testimony correctly.
The topic of how abusive parents murder the souls of their children is fundamental, although it remains taboo in our societies. If Alice Miller weren’t anti-Nazi I would recommend her book, Breaking Down the Wall of Silence.
Here I am, gazing at the Brandenburg Gate a dozen days ago. I’ve just returned home after a trip to several countries in continental Europe, including Germany. In the coming days, I’ll be writing a series of articles, hopefully with an incendiary tone, about what I saw…
Finally, I decided to title my essay ‘Augustine and other influential “giants” of the Christian Era’, which was published on this site from 30 March to 7 this month. Yesterday and today I edited it, and its PDF version can be read here. It is an important essay because it begins to give an idea of the literary genre I want to inaugurate with my trilogy.
My output as a writer is divided into two: books written in my mother tongue and what I post on The West’s Darkest Hour. The importance of essays like this is that, at last, it begins to become apparent why subjects as seemingly dissimilar as self-knowledge and white decline are connected.
To see the connection it is essential to put out of our minds the inane autobiographies that appear on the market for mass consumption—prolefeed for the proles—such as those written by film stars for example, and realise that we are talking about something astronomically different.
Knowing oneself, in the sense of the Delphic Oracle’s commandment (how different from the Judeo-Christian commandment to honour one’s parents!), is vital to save the Aryan from the process of self-destruction he is undergoing.
Recently, I have had to make intensive use of my mobile phone against my will because I need to use the said device for banking operations. Having prostituted my soul in such a way; having to use hours of my time to familiarise myself with the wretched ‘applications’ of the phone, leads me to say a few things.
One of my sponsors is correct, at least in part, to blame technology for Aryan decline. I became aware of this a few years ago when, far from the cities and their mundane noise, I had a moment of halcyonic rapport in the countryside, touching a tree.
The communion with nature made me realise what an incredible level of degradation it is to live in a metropolis, or even a modern town (recently I was complaining about the noise of the air conditioner in the village where I live). I even plan to unplug the refrigerator so as not to listen to the damn engine while meditating, and to get into the habit of buying my groceries daily so that I don’t need to refrigerate food.
I read the Confessions almost a quarter of a century ago during a two-week voyage on a cargo ship bound for Europe. It was a time when I wanted to find an Englishwoman to marry. It is worth noting what I wrote then in the Atlantic Ocean:
2 October 1991
I’ve been dreading staying goof off: finishing the two books I have halfway through the trip.
I need to reconcile myself with Augustine and New Spain (Paz’s book). That would be, indirectly, a reconciliation with dad, since he is both.
BOOK VII: He begins to read the epistles of St Paul
Augustine begins this chapter by saying that he no longer conceived of the deity in the form of a human body, and then goes on to say something which again shows that all this talk of his later conversion is false, since he was already, in his youthful way, a good Christian:
My heart adhered firmly to the faith in your Christ… My soul was not willing to abandon it; rather every day it was more and more steeped in it.
And four pages ahead:
My faith believed also in Christ, our Son and Lord… These beliefs were already intact and firmly rooted in my soul.
It is not surprising that at this point Augustine’s extreme theological rationalisations had already begun. First he dispatches the problem of evil, and then he reconciles the irreconcilable: the Torah with Paul.
It was with great eagerness that I picked up the venerable Scriptures inspired by your Spirit, particularly those of your apostle Paul.
As I said in the first entry, Augustine was a man of his time. He followed, to its ultimate consequences, the misguided steps of the Caucasoid Christians of his time: something that speaks volumes about imperial Rome in the 4th century.
The next chapter is the most famous of his Confessions. The whole book shows how dead the Aryan soul was then, as it is dead now. If it hadn’t been dead it would have prevented the Judeo-Christian flourishing. Already in this chapter Augustine uses so many metaphors taken from the Bible that a reader unfamiliar with it would find himself without understanding much.
To understand the next chapter we have to imagine Augustine in a terrible struggle with himself à la Gollum in The Lord of the Rings: a titanic struggle in which the maternal introjects won out (remember Nietzsche’s aphorism: ‘Christianity gave Eros poison to drink. He didn’t die but degenerated into a vice’).
BOOK VIII: ‘Conversion’ in the garden of his house
I will now tell how you freed me from the bonds of my carnal desires.
Augustine recounts how an African named Ponticianus saw Paul’s epistles on Augustine’s desk and began to speak about Antony, the Egyptian monk. Remember the passage in Deschner’s book about this monk:
Athanasius did not just adorn his Vita Antonii (St Anthony or Antony was a monk who played an important role in the conversion of Augustine; was the archetype of the lives of Greek and Latin saints, and for centuries inspired the monastic life of the East and the West) with increasingly crazy miracles, but he also falsified documents in the worst of styles.
When Ponticianus left, Augustine rationalised this visit of the African as follows: ‘You brought me once more face to face with myself, forcing me to look myself in the eye so that I might see my iniquity and abhor it’. He was already thirty-two years old and, comparing his erotic conduct with that of the Egyptian monk, he confessed:
In my inner house a great strife was being waged… I turned to Alypius saying loudly: ‘We, on the other hand, wallow in flesh and blood’.
He, stunned, stared at me in silence…
The house where we were staying had a small garden. So I withdrew to the garden and Alypius followed in my footsteps.
Augustine realised that ‘there are, therefore, two wills in us’. In psychoanalytic language, we could say that it was a struggle between the super-ego instilled by his mother (Thou shalt not fornicate, etc.) and his natural call to Eros, which in the pagan world wasn’t that sinful. ‘As I was deliberating whether to consecrate myself to the service of the Lord…’ That is, feeling the call to follow in the footsteps of a monk would mean no marriage, a life condemned to celibacy.
And from this moment it would no longer be licit for me to do this or that? What was it, my God, that I was suggesting with those words ‘this and that’? What sordid things! What indecencies!
But Augustine doesn’t get graphic. He fails to confess what exactly it was. Let us remember that he had already said: ‘To love and be loved was the sweetest thing for me, especially if I got to enjoy the beloved´s body…’ Gollum continues:
Do you intend to live without these things?… ‘Shut your ears to the filthy whisperings of your members, and you will be mortified. They speak to you of delights, but not according to the law of the Lord your God’.
This struggle within my heart was nothing other than the struggle of myself against myself. Alypius was still beside me, silently awaiting the outcome of this new agitation in me.
I got up and he stood stunned in the place where we were sitting. I threw myself, as best I could, under a fig tree and gave free rein to the tears, which flowed like two rivers from my eyes, an acceptable sacrifice to you, Lord.
The Conversion of St Augustine by Fra Angelico.
I hurriedly retraced my steps to the place where Alypius was sitting, for I had left the book of the Epistles of St Paul when I got up from there. I picked it up, opened it, and silently read the first passage that fell before my eyes. It said: No gluttony and drunkenness; no lust and wantonness; no rivalry and envy. Rather put on the Lord Jesus Christ and do not concern yourself with the flesh to gratify its lusts.
I didn’t want to read any more, nor was it necessary. In an instant—no sooner had I finished reading the sentence—all the darkness of my doubts vanished, as if a light of assurance had taken possession of my heart.
Then we went to see my mother.
We told her everything, with great joy on her part. And as we told her the story of what had happened, she, jubilant and leaping for joy, blessed and glorified you… For she saw that you had granted her much more than she used to ask of you with her tearful and pitiful moans. In such a way you converted me to you that I no longer desired a wife nor harboured any hope in this world. I was firm in that rule of faith which many years before you had shown her that I would embrace. It was thus that you turned her weeping into joy [Ps 30:11], far more fulfilled than she had wished. A sweeter and more chaste joy than she had expected to find in the grandchildren born of my flesh.
In Augustine’s mind, the inversion of Greco-Roman values was now complete.
Like Cervantes and Goethe, Dante (1265-1321) was a ‘man of his time’, so much so that he was prior of Florence, i.e. one of its senators. So to understand the poet we must contextualise him in the Middle Ages.
In the century in which Dante was born, another Italian who would greatly influence Western civilisation, St Francis, whom my father taught me to admire in my adolescence, had founded an order of mendicant friars. On one occasion, speaking of the saint of Assisi, my father mentioned that in one town he had cast out demons. There are still people who believe that. My mother told an anecdote about some nuns in Coyoacán who said to her that the devil made noises in the convent, but that they laughed because they knew he wasn’t going to tempt them. My mother said this not as the nuns’ hallucination: she accepted their demonological interpretation of the noises.
Francis exorcises the demons at Arezzo, fresco by Giotto.
When Francis died, Thomas Aquinas was born, the Italian who fixed the doctrine of the Catholic Church to the extent that one pope called his theological legacy aeternis patris. We can already imagine Voltaire’s mockery of Aquinas in his Philosophical Dictionary. But from the point of view of the priest of the sacred words—a fancy way of referring to a contemporary National Socialist—Voltairean sarcasm is of little use if the Enlightenment bequeathed us the universal declaration of human rights: neochristianity. But let’s take it one step at a time.
In my article on Cervantes, I asked what was the point of the Golden Age of Castilian letters if the Church didn’t allow them to write freely. In Dante’s time there was already the University of Bologna, but what happened when someone wanted to philosophise free of the theological yoke? When Francis was alive, in Paris in 1210, several readers of Aristotle had concluded that there was no life after death. We can imagine how such ‘heresy’ would affect the control of the European population through the spiritual terror—fear of damnation—with which the Church controlled them. The reaction of the bishop of the city was not long in coming. Ten of the freethinkers were burned at the stake: a ‘hard totalitarianism’ compared to the ‘soft totalitarianism’ of today. (Nowadays they no longer burn the heretic, they only imprison him. Recall that two men who have commented on this site, Tyrone Joseph Walsh and Christopher Gibbons, are serving years in the UK for thoughtcrimes).
By Dante’s time, however, banking and the power of emperors were beginning to emerge, acting as counterweights to the once all-powerful Church, although Pope Boniface VIII tried to bring down that counterweight in Italy. Florence in particular felt the renaissance of the age: its arts were revived in that city with its characteristic tower houses, such as the one in the illustration above (even the tourist of our century can still appreciate something of the medieval air in some Florentine quarters).
Let us recall, in our abridgement of Karlheinz Deschner’s book, how the Church acted as the lobotomist of the Greco-Roman man since Constantine. Here we will only focus on one more example. Due to the translations of Aristotle and Galen, ancient medicine was already becoming accessible. But when, at the end of Dante’s life, a certain Mondino de Liuzzi began to dissect corpses, he came up against ecclesiastical authority. Pietro d’Abano, an illustrious physician, was even persecuted by the Inquisition and, after his death, his body was burned at the stake.
Fides (Faith) by Giotto. In the Middle Ages, Faith had the Aryan mind chained.
And the ‘men against their time’? In a world of hard totalitarianism they simply couldn’t flourish, although we must mention the English Franciscan Roger Bacon (1214-1292), who despite being persecuted attributed a new meaning to natural science and mathematics, which in centuries to come would become the foundation of experimental research. Nor should we fail to mention the Scotsman Duns Scotus (1263-1308), the only intellectual to question the doctrine of eternal damnation in a thousand years of Christendom! But this was the same century in which the Dominican order was founded: an order of learned theologians who were trained to fight the doctrines that the Newspeak of the time called ‘heretical’ (the term for social ostracism which in medieval times was equivalent to the ‘racist’ of our days). From this order came some of the greatest exponents of medieval thought, such as Aquinas.
The Militant Church and the Triumph of the Dominicans, fresco by Andrea Bonaiuti in Florence.
Parallel to this orthodoxy that forced an iron faith on the white man, a ‘little renaissance’ emerged at the time when Dante flourished. The liberal arts such as grammar and rhetoric, or geometry, music and astronomy (or rather astrology) were following their course. Secular music in particular, including troubadour music, moved away from Gregorian chant while retaining a liturgical stamp. Frederick II of Swabia encouraged intense cultural activity.
Compared to our ‘Empire of the yin’ in the 21st century West, the Aryan psyche, specifically the Italian one, was extremely quarrelsome. In paintings we can see crenellated city walls with men at arms. The clashing of swords was an almost daily occurrence in the tumultuous life of the communes. This balance between Yang and yin, militia and arts, also existed in Hitler’s Germany but unlike medieval society was on the verge of breaking with the Christian Era (and would have broken with it for the good had it not been for Anglo-American intervention).
Beatrice
Con Beatrice m’era m’suso in cielo (With Beatrice I was enclosed in heaven).
Dante first met Beatrice in 1274, but it was not until 1283 that he received his first greeting from the lady, who died in 1290, the year Giotto painted the Cross of Santa Maria Novella. A quarter of a century after the death of his platonic love he began the Inferno, although he wrote the Divine Comedy in many different places during his troubled life. At the age of fifty-six, Dante died poor in Ravenna, but his poem was a spectacular success after his death. Only Renaissance ideals and the new tastes they brought would cause Dante’s fame to eclipse. The 19th century, despite its infatuation with the Middle Ages, was heir to this contempt for scholasticism and its theology.
The Comedy transports us, first, to an underground journey, then to the ascent of the mountain where sins are being purged, and finally to an interplanetary flight. Many years ago a friend I knew in a chess park gave me, in three volumes, the best translation of the Comedy into our native language. I lent the first volume, the one on hell, to a girlfriend of my brother’s who was studying Italian but she never returned it to me. I have only a few scraps left of the book of the Purgatorio and only the one on Paradiso I keep in its entirety.
The opening lines of the first song, which can be seen in this codex, are still the most famous: ‘Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark / For the straightforward pathway had been lost’. In my books I have used them to describe how I was for decades after the tragedy of my adolescence which left me without a career, without a job and—for reasons confessed in those books—without a partner. Being lost in a dark forest is a splendid metaphor for how I was before a Beatrice rescued me: the books of Alice Miller on parental abuse, with whom I got to correspond before she died.
Before a Beatrice appeared in my life, at least on an intellectual level, I had tried to get out of the forest through neochristianity, specifically, a religious movement (‘Eschatology’) that emerged in the previous century, inspired by the New Testament: a movement I have already discussed on pages 11-26 of Daybreak. The medieval universe in which my father lived is evident in an anecdote from the early 1980s.
We were having a Sunday lunch at home with Uncle Beto when, for some reason, Eschatology came into the conversation. To scold me publicly my father, a traditional Catholic, alluded to a passage in the Inferno in which Dante had put heretics (Eschatology was schismatic, outside the Catholic Church) in a place where they were quartered. My father imitated with his hands a sort of scythe wielded by a devil to dismember them, in the belief that these heretics had ‘dismembered the Church’. There are many other symbolic passages in the Inferno, such as the twisted landscape and the twisted bodies in the jungle of the suicides (admirably recreated by Doré centuries later).
With apologies to the vox populi, it is a mistake to read the Inferno and stop there. For Salvatore Battaglia, ‘among the three cantigas of the Poem, this one of Purgatorio represents the most truthful presentation of the human condition’. The middle book is flanked by the books of the damned and the blessed. Purgatorio is the realm of poetry, and in my opinion, given that publishing a book in the vernacular language questioning the existence of hell was impossible in the Middle Ages, beauty was the most direct form of therapy against the fear of damnation, while the poet sublimates it in art and the dogma is no longer felt as it was before: it is ‘weathered’ with sublime lyricism (for example, each of the three books ends with the word stelle, stars). As a counterpoint, on 30 December 1995 I made a note in my copy:
I have barely read the summary and I think that the whole Dantean Comedy is bullshit. Why on earth build a beautiful cathedral on false principles? In other words, even supposing it is true what Octavio Paz says, that Dante is the poet of our Age, that is beside the point: what pisses me off is that the poet believed the Christian worldview. A contemporary of his, Duns Scotus, questioned the most psychotic doctrine of the universe; so there is no excuse ‘that at that time it couldn´t be broken’.
The Comedy is a triptych. In the final book, with Beatrice and Dante flying from planet to planet, the traveller enters from heaven to heaven, passing through the sky of Mars and then Saturn. There are very old paintings reflecting these Dantean passages. At the end he arrives at the empyrean, in the centre of which the poet looks face to face with the greatest of mysteries. In reality, this deity is ultimately the god of the Jews and what I wrote thirty years ago still holds: the freethinker cannot bear to be enraptured by the worldview of the Dark Ages.
Avete il Novo e ‘l Vecchio Testamento e ‘l pastor della Chiesa che vi guida: questo vi basti a vostro salvamento.
You have the New, the Old Testament
And the pastor of the Church is your guide:
This is enough to your salvation.
And even worse:
ond’ei credette in quella, e non sofferse da indi il puzzo più del paganesmo; e riprendíene le genti perverse.
that’s why he believed in her, and didn’t suffer from
the pestilence of paganism,
and reproved the wicked people.
This last passage appears in the song to the Heaven VI, where Dante speaks to those he considers to be righteous spirits. Obviously, the apologists of Christian doctrine had to reside in Dantean heaven.
Sometimes coffee conversations with friends are more profound than the musings of scholars. Many years ago the poet Carlos Mongar remarked to me that, much better than having written the Comedy, Dante would have had Beatrice in his arms and, in sexual intercourse, subject her ‘to the ultimate desecration’ implying that the lady would have been delighted to be possessed / desecrated by a Dante who would never have felt the need to become a poet.
Let us remember what happened to so many Werthers in real life. How many Christian prose and poetry would the white man have been spared if so many young men hadn’t been prevented by circumstances from marrying and procreating as the Gods command?
In the article on Goethe I also quoted an Austrian biographer who said that the most profound level of literary art is autobiography in which the artist betrays himself by daring to confess the truth about his life. Let us betray ourselves a little and confess that, precisely because the tragedy of my adolescence affected me to the extent that I was never able to hold a real Beatrice in my arms, I idealised the eternal feminine and that is what moves me to write.
