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.
If Cervantes seems to be the central figure of Spanish literature, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe appears to be the central figure of German literature.
Goethe’s most famous work is Faust, one of the great works of world literature. Its plot reminds us of Satan’s wager with the god of the Jews in the Book of Job. In Goethe’s novel, Mephistopheles makes a pact with God: he says he can divert God’s favourite human being (Faust), striving to learn everything that can be known, away from moral purposes. It also reminds me of the plot of Wagner’s Tannhauser. I have already said on this site that when I first saw the opera I was disappointed because it put Christianity triumphing over paganism (the Virgin Mary over the Goddess Venus). Cervantes and Shakespeare didn’t play into the hands of the Church, and neither did Goethe. But it is clear that like Wagner they never escaped Christian mythology.
I would not like to focus on Goethe’s masterpiece but on what was, at the time, the most popular: The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers): a semi-autobiographical epistolary novel. Considered the book that initiated Romanticism, it brought the young Goethe worldwide fame.
The main character of the novel, Werther, is a sensitive and passionate young man who falls madly in love with Charlotte. In real life, Goethe had fallen in love with a young woman named Charlotte (and in real life, in Manchester, I myself fell in love with a Charlotte who never returned my love!).
So influential was that novel, which Goethe had written in his early twenties, that towards the end of his life travelling to Weimar and visiting the master of German literature was a ritual. In one of his writings Goethe himself mentioned that his youthful suffering was partly the inspiration for the creation of the novel, although unlike the novelist Werther takes his own life at the moment when the midnight bells ring in Wahlheim. Most of the visitors he had in his old age had only read this book and only knew the writer from this novel among all those he wrote! It was very clear what a great impact The Sorrows of Young Werther had on young people in love and depressed.
I wonder what subliminal clues Werther had that a whole generation of young Europeans caught that fever to the point of dressing like the character: with a yellow vest, blue jacket and brown boots. Even some two thousand young Europeans took their own lives! ‘The bullet had entered above the right eye, blowing out the brains’ I read on the penultimate page of the copy of the novel I own. So much did the novel in the form of an epistle catch fire to Europe, that the small town where the fictional events took place became a sort of place of pilgrimage. Napoleon himself carried a copy of Werther in his field backpack!
Already in the 20th century my mother confessed to me that in her early teens this book had made a great impression on her. In my previous article I said that almost all the literary content of the Spanish writers of the Golden Age tasted rancid to me. It is curious to mention what I wrote some years ago on the inside back cover of my copy of Werther (my translation):
Wow!
I barely read the first few words of the book and couldn’t continue. I’d have to see a German film of the novel—if there is one. What matters is that they were committing suicide because ‘In those days parents didn´t listen to their children’, [the words of] Mom.
She didn’t tell me that in relation to Werther, but to a bitter experience she had when she was taken as a child to see The Blue Bird on the big screen: the only occasion, in her entire life, when an indirect criticism of either of her parents came out.
To be frank, I don’t think a teenager who has been treated well by his parents would be capable of committing suicide just because of a love setback. There must something wrong in the lad’s psyche, but to find out we have to dynamite the taboos of the age whose Judeo-Christian commandment to honour the parent has deeply permeated the secular world (Alice Miller has written on this secularization in The Body Never Lies).
That’s why this kind of old literature tastes rancid. Unlike not only the times of Goethe, but the times of my mother (who must have been a little girl when the translated The Blue Bird was released in the country), in this era it is already possible to speak crudely about how we were mistreated at home. So, if the least direct criticism of her parents never came out of my mother’s mouth except for the above quote (which came out indirectly when she was already an old woman), we can imagine on whom she unloaded her pent-up anger. All this has to do with Werther precisely because of the literary genre that I would like people like Benjamin Power and myself to inaugurate.
The following seven paragraphs I had already posted on this site in January 2015 under the heading ‘New Literary Genre’, but they are worth quoting again:
Stefan Zweig wrote in Adepts in Self-Portraiture that when Western literature began with Hesiod and Heraclitus it was still poetry, and of the inevitability of a decline in the mythopoetic talent of Greece when a more Aristotelian thought evolved. As compensation for this loss, says Zweig, modern man obtained with the novel an approach to a science of the mind. But the novel genre doesn’t represent the ultimate degree of self-knowledge:
Autobiography is the hardest of all forms of literary art. Why, then, do new aspirants, generation after generation, try to solve this almost insoluble problem?
[For a] honest autobiography […] he must have a combination of qualities which will hardly be found once in a million instances. To expect perfect sincerity on self-portraiture would be as absurd as to expect absolute justice, freedom, and perfection here on earth. No doubt the pseudo-confession, as Goethe called it, confession under the rose, in the diaphanous veil of novel or poem, is much easier, and is often far more convincing from the artistic point of view, than an account with no assumption of reserve. Autobiography, precisely because it requires not truth alone, but naked truth, demands from the artist an act of peculiar heroism; for the autobiographer must play the traitor to himself.
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. Classical antiquity had as yet no inkling of these mysterious paths. Caesar and Plutarch, the ancients who describe themselves, are content to deal with facts, with circumstantial happenings, and never dream of showing more than the surface of their hearts.
Zweig then devotes a long paragraph to St Augustine’s Confessions, the thinker I abhor the most of all Western tradition and whose theology about Hell caused massive psychological damage in my own life (see Hojas Susurrantes). Then he wrote:
Many centuries were to pass before Rousseau (that remarkable man who was a pioneer in so many fields) was to draw a self-portrait for its own sake, and was to be amazed and startled at the novelty of his enterprise. Stendhal, Hebbel, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Amiel, the intrepid Hans Jaeger, have disclosed unsuspected realms of self-knowledge by self-portraiture. Their successors, provided with more delicate implements of research, will be able to penetrate stratum by stratum, room by room, farther and yet farther into our new universe, into the depths of the human mind.
This quote explains why I decided to devise a hybrid genre between the self-portraiture that betrays the author and thus penetrates beyond the strata pondered by Romantic autobiographers. And it is precisely because of this that, if we have tried to reach this level, the previous stages of confessional literature already seem rancid to us, Werther included: they don’t get to the heart of the matter.
That said, there are a few biographical vignettes about Goethe that I wouldn’t want to overlook. For example, he dearly loved his sister Cornelia, the only surviving of his siblings (I will allude to this below in the context of Goethe’s own children).
Johann Kaspar, Goethe’s father had been a well-to-do scholar, and the letters of Katharina Elizabeth, his mother are quite readable. Goethe studied in Leipzig in enviable times when machine noises weren’t yet audible (I write this over the intolerable sound of air conditioning given the temperature outside my study):
A similar image could be added about Weimar, where Goethe took up residence after the publication of Werther. It was in the old Weimar court theatre that the first Goethean dramas, that he directed for a quarter of a century, were presented.
The trip to beautiful Italy had been pivotal in Goethe’s education. In the image above we see Goethe at the window of his home in Rome, a drawing by Tischbein. It was a time when St. Peter’s stood as the tallest building in the city. As I have said, it is impossible for a ‘man of his time’ not to be influenced by these architectural realities. And Goethe was, like Dante, Cervantes and Shakespeare, a man of his time. Only Nietzsche would rebel against the Christian era, but this is another matter altogether.
Goethe even visited Sicily. I, who like Nietzsche am a premature birth of a future not yet verified, when I travel to Europe I notice the purity of the Aryan in the faces (let’s say: the difference between the Italian near Switzerland and the Sicilian). As a man of his time Goethe noticed other things. On January 25, 1788 he wrote to a duke: ‘The great scenes of nature opened my mind and took away my wrinkles; I created for myself an opinion on the value of landscape painting, and saw Claude Lorrain and Poussin with different eyes; with Hackert, who came to Rome, I spent fourteen days in Tivoli’.
I am intrigued that Goethe’s wife Christiane, whom he had married in 1806, had five children with him of whom only the first survived. It reminds me of what Lloyd deMause wrote in several of his books: at that time babies died mainly from maternal neglect.
The surviving August not only had to live in his father’s shadow, but he died two years before Goethe did! I wonder how he was treated by his father: a kind of question that conventional biographers would never ask. From my point of view, that of the new literary genre, that question is more vital than, say, writing about the friendship between Goethe and the poet Schiller (when the latter died, Goethe felt deprived of the one person to whom he had recognised equal intellectual value). I would prefer to know, of the four children who died of undetermined causes a few days after their births, which reminds me of Goethe’s missing siblings, how were those babies treated?
Another fact that reflects that I am not a man of my time is that one of Goethe’s late inspirational women was the nineteen-year-old Ulrike, who was so afraid of sexual intercourse that she would become canonical: something unthinkable in the Aryan state I imagine, where women will have as much obligation to procreate as men to fight ethnocidal wars (like Hitler’s Master Plan East).
Incidentally, it was some words from Faust that inspired me in a phrase that in years past I have posted on this site: Only the eternal feminine leads to the Absolute.
I am writing this paragraph on Monday, March 17, when I still have no Internet service, although the technician installing an antenna will come this week. On the outskirts of the village where I now live there is still no landline service. Even the window of this studio already has a nice view of the open countryside. What a contrast to the noisy metropolis where, until last week, I lived!
The house I moved into is modest but decent. The bad thing is that there is not a single white man around it. Yesterday, as therapy in the face of that insulting milieu, I watched some scenes from The Sound of Music, although sometimes I turned the volume all the way down on the songs. (I’ve seen the movie many times; its tunes can be sticky, but I will listen to Edelweiss today when I resume the movie after I put it on pause.)
Let’s ignore the anti-Nazi message well into the film. What matters is that all the actors are beautiful Aryans, so much so that they could have been models for Maxfield Parrish’s paintings (ten of framed Parrish paintings will adorn my studio walls now that the handyman comes with his drill and dowels). Yesterday, the pleasant faces of the actors and children, including the captain’s eldest daughter—she had the most beautiful eyes in the world!—worked wonders for me as therapy after seeing so many brown-skinned people. Also, not to feel like I’m in the country where I reside, a great relief was to see in the film so many picturesque shots of Salzburg evoking the time when Hitler was at the height of his power.
Beautiful times! But even if I were rich enough to buy a cosy little house in Salzburg, I couldn’t blog there because of the draconian anti-Nazi laws (recall what happened to David Irving in Austria…).
I still have a lot of unpacking to do but only at the weekend will the handyman come to set up my closet, install the air conditioning (unlike the temperate capital it is hot here), and screw some shelves on the wall for the books that are still in their boxes.
When we are done, I will continue my regular activities for The West’s Darkest Hour…
There is something I would like to say about a commenter on this last day of the year.
Exactly four years ago Irrelevant Nobody (I.N.) posted a comment that impressed me so much that I later cited it as an important entry. On 31 December the following year I.N. did the same: a comment also promoted as a special entry. He was one of the commenters to whom I dedicated in this now-dying year an entry in ‘On commenters of WDH’, where I mentioned that I.N. had sent me an email telling me that he was planning to commit suicide.
Sometime later he sent me another email telling me that he hadn’t committed suicide yet but had postponed that plan, and I have not received any more emails from this European, although I confess I haven’t written to him either.
It is not the first or the last time I have noticed that those who say the most lucid things have had mental health problems. It reminds me of what I wrote about my sister Corina in my books on my family, which I have promised myself I will start translating tomorrow. The chiaroscuros of the only honourable member of my family (may she rest in peace) were striking: enormous psychic insight and then dense darkness!
But in fairness to my sister and to commenters who have struggled with mental issues, we must concede that the entire West is in a state of madness at present. As far as the country that since 1945 has captained the West is concerned, on Saturday I mentioned some horrible murders. And yesterday I saw another YouTube video of an American who had decapitated his mother, and put her head in a bag which he left in a stranger’s truck.
I am convinced that to understand the folie en masse suffered by the West, it is imperative to understand the trauma model of mental disorders (which is why tomorrow, the first day of 2025, I will begin the formal translation of my trilogy). This is a model that is never taught in universities because Big Pharma dominates not only the psychiatric profession, but ideologically wields considerable influence in the faculties where clinical psychology is taught. The power of corporations today is such that we can only understand it if we compare it to the power that the Church wielded in the Middle Ages.
The last of my three autobiographical books, which I finished this year.
I hope that I.N. has survived his suicidal depression. I advised him to write his own trilogy (which made me see the light) and that he will return to his habit of commenting here on the last day of each year…
After midnight I watched some videos about North Korea. I was very impressed that it is a society that has implemented some measures that, I am absolutely convinced, must be implemented in a subjugated Europe to throw off the shackles of Americanism. I am talking about banning Western films or TV programmes in North Korea (remember that not long ago I made a list of the very few that could be seen), degenerate music, the internet, jeans, hair dyeing and something magnificent: banning Bibles too!
Currently, North Korea allows Westerners to visit under controlled tour guides, unless the tourist is an American citizen, who is not permitted to enter the country.
It is laughable that some American vloggers talk about the propaganda with which North Korea’s totalitarian system indoctrinates its citizens because they only see the speck in the other’s eye. Western propaganda is equally totalitarian. But it is not the hard kind of totalitarianism: it is the kind of soft totalitarianism that Aldous Huxley explained to George Orwell not long before the latter died.
No one is more a slave than he who thinks he is free, and the propaganda that every Westerner has suffered for decades about Hitler, the Third Reich and National Socialism is akin to the Two Minutes Hate of 1984. At least in North Korea boys are boys and girls are girls. There is no mutilation of these creatures’ genitals on the altar of ‘diversity’. In fact, I think Andrew Anglin is right to say that this kind of American opprobrium is even worse than that suffered by nations under harsh totalitarianism: just what Huxley tried to tell Orwell, insofar as American totalitarianism is a more subtle, insidious and effective form of mind control.
Alongside these videos about North Korea, there are other YouTube videos about homeless and street junkies in Pennsylvania, or the streets of downtown San Francisco where all the businesses have closed because the mayor has taken neochristian ethics to its ultimate consequences: allowing business robberies as long as they don’t exceed nine hundred dollars.
It reminds me of the first night I spent outside the country of my birth. That was in March 1981, when I only endured a single day in a youth hostel in San Francisco. I was so repulsed by the Sin City that I fled to a privileged area in Los Angeles (Westwood near UCLA).
One of the things I mention in my autobiography is what Jung called synchronicity, or meaningful coincidences. As a sceptic of the paranormal, I shouldn’t believe in that Jungian theory, but sometimes things have happened to me that seem to be very meaningful.
One of them happened on that one-day trip to San Francisco. When I got off the Greyhound the first thing I did was to slip, along with two educated Spanish speakers I met on the bus, into a Ripley’s Believe It or Not street exhibit close to the bus station.
The small exhibition was about very weird things. In particular, the huge image of an Aryan male, a sort of monk in the sense of extreme asceticism, stuck in my memory. He was so astronomically burdened with Christian guilt that he had wrapped himself in heavy chains, and even a huge mallet hung from the chains to mortify his sinful body.
‘That is America’, so terminally loaded with false guilt, wanted to tell me the collective unconscious by way of a meaningful coincidence the first day I spent outside my native country! Although in 1981 masochistic self-mortification wasn’t as ubiquitous in the West, the seeds of self-hatred were already sown and had germinated in the American psyche. Perceptive Americans who were still alive in that year, such as Revilo Oliver and William Pierce, saw it that way.
I haven’t been able to find via Google the image I saw more than forty years ago, but I recently included this other image of flagellants in Oliver’s anti-Christian essay. So synchronistic was the 1981 image of Ripley’s Believe It or Not in my first trip to the US that, today, if a Hindu tourist were to try to communicate to an Aryan American that, according to his religion, it is a sin for this Aryan to mix with coloureds, the San Fran American might view the Indian who wants to save him with hatred, insofar as his moral mandate is self-flagellation until his race disappears.
Huxley was right: soft totalitarianism is far worse than hard totalitarianism. See Kerry Bolton’s ‘A contemporary assessment of Francis Parker Yockey’ (pages 47-70 of this PDF) for further discussion.
One might ask me what it was that so horrified me in San Francisco that I barely spent a night and hastily fled to another American city. The answer is that something similar would happen to me in London the following year, the first time I visited Europe’s largest city.
In 1982 I saw London as such an incredibly nefarious place, even at a time when the vast majority in that city were white, that I immediately fled to Paris. Sensitive people like Dostoyevsky and Gustave Doré suffered identical impressions when visiting London: even in the 19th century it was already hell (see e.g., Doré’s 250 pen and ink drawings, often with dramatic chiaroscuro, about London). I believe that only artists understand these realities intuitively, which completely escape the man without an artistic spirit.
‘But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!’ —The Picture of Dorian Gray
Those who think like that are immature men. Yesterday I had to delete some passages from the third book of my trilogy where I confessed things that I now rephrase and translate into English.
In those deleted pages I confessed that I had had a recurring fantasy at my very mature age: that if it were possible to travel back in time I would be infinitely happy visiting my grandmothers’ homes. ‘What would I give…!’ — I have told myself countless times now that I can no longer see them — ‘to be able to go and visit them as I did as a child and pubescent!’
Their homes were far from the disturbances of my parents’ house, where I lived. Only beautiful and wholesome memories come from those places where many of our grandmothers lived. It is easier for parents to project their psychoses onto their offspring than for mature grandmothers to do so, even if they failed to understand our future parents or treat them well when they were young. With age, the unhealthy projections evaporate.
‘That fantasy I can even have right now, to the extent of perceiving that with their deaths parts of my being have been mutilated’, I said in my diary, where I added that ‘any satisfaction I might have in the present is a pale substitute for the times when I could go to see them when my “I” was whole’. I wrote in red ink that there would have been no folie en famille at home if any of them had seen our family dynamics. This is even more elementary than the Hitler Youth because some unsupervised parents (i.e., without grandmothers or godmothers) can drive a child mad and destroy him before the pubescent child can be recruited into the Hitler Youth.
Today’s Gray cult of individualism and eternal youth is folly in an age that doesn’t understand that senescence is a fundamental part of an extended family (in contrast to the nuclear family). The youth we are to pursue is not the youth of this modern world so blinded by its individualistic obsessions of a healthy body. ‘Man is mortal by his fears, and immortal by his desires’, said Pythagoras. And if we only grow old when we abandon our ideals, it means I’ll never grow old (though I will probably die of old age).
Of course: these thoughts are decontextualised in a mere blog post rather than in an intelligible autobiography. Except for Benjamin, I know that not many are interested in my work on the psychological trauma caused by parental betrayal. But if anyone has questions, although I don’t have the space I have in a trilogy of more than 1,800 pages, I will try to answer them.
______ 卐 ______
Update of 10:30 a.m.
Since I wrote the above post yesterday almost at midnight, I forgot to say the essential.
The fact is that the aberrant custom of the modern world of sending our grandmas to the nursing home results in their grandchildren not having what Alice Miller called ‘helping witnesses’, that is, a friendly ear for the child in families where the parents begin to assault one of them.
The balance that a granny represents in an extended family is fundamental for the mental health of the offspring, and that is cancelled out in the nuclear family that believes in nursing homes.
It is only just becoming fashionable to talk about Family Systems, but it seems clear to me that we should also study the so-called Blue Zones. (People in Blue Zones areas have a diet that is 95% plant-based. Fruits, vegetables, beans, tofu, lentils, nuts, and seeds are rich with disease-fighting nutrients and are the cornerstone of their diets.)
These people live longer, and some even reach centenarians, because they live as extended families where, feeling important, grandmas don’t become as senile as in the West, as they help raise the new generations.
Everything is interrelated: healthy diet and healthy—rural—lifestyles, plus a healthy extended family of the same ethnic group: the exact opposite of Dorian Gray’s lifestyle (I read Oscar Wilde’s novel in 1995, when I was much younger).
None of this, which is vital, I said yesterday because I repeat I wrote it tired at midnight.
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.
