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Category: Bible

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Bible Might is right (book)

Might is right, 5

Whatsoever a people believeth shall make it free, enslave it, or corrode its very marrow in strict accordance with natural order.
 

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Editor’s interpolated note: This reminds me of what Savitri says about true religions (such as Indo-Aryan religion or National Socialism) and false ones (such as those derived from Semitic thought, especially for Aryan consumption).
 

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Consequently if a people place implicit faith in what philosophers teach them, they are liable to be duped. If many nations are so duped, their deception is a menace to the liberty of the world.

Freemen should never regulate their conduct by the suggestions or dicta of others, for when they do so, they are no longer free. No man ought to obey any contract, written or implied, except he himself has given his personal and formal adherence thereto, when in a state of mental maturity and unrestrained liberty. It is only slaves that are born into contracts, signed and sealed by their progenitors. The freeman is born free, lives free, and dies free. He is (even though living in an artificial civilisation) above all laws, all constitutions, all theories of right and wrong. He supports and defends them of course, as long as they suit his own end, but if they don’t, then he annihilates them by the easiest and most direct method.

There is no obligation upon any man to passive obedience, when his life, his liberty and his property are threatened by footpad, assassin or statesman.

One of Columbus’s lieutenants in the West Indies captured a Carib chief by means of a subtle stratagem. The chief was invited to a feast and when there, persuaded with honeyed words to don (on horseback) a set of brightly polished steel manacles; it being cunningly represented to him, that the irons were the regalia of sovereignty. He foolishly believed his astute flatterer, and when the chains were firmly clasped around his limbs, he was led away, to die of vermin, turning a mill in a Spanish dungeon.

What those glittering manacles were to the Indian chieftain, constitutions, laws, moral codes, and Hebrew dominated civilisations, are to the nations of the earth. Indeed, under the name of Progress and Social Evolution, mankind has been lured into foæted dungeons, where it labours unceasingly and for naught, in darkness, despair and shame. Like that Spanish lieutenant the masters of the earth first flatter their dupes, in order to more easily enchain them. Who talks nowadays of the ‘sovereign people’, without a laugh of derision? And yet it was once thought to be a term full of significance. Their ‘sovereignty’ is now acknowledged sham, and their freedom a dream. The sovereign people be—damned.

It is clear, therefore, that the man or nation that would retain liberty, or be really safe, must accept no formula as final—must trust in nothing written or unwritten, living or dead—must believe neither in special Jehovahs, nor weeping Saviours—neither in raging devils, nor in devilish philosophies—neither in ghosts, nor in idols, nor in laws—nor in woman, nor in man.

O threats of hell, and hopes of paradise,
One thing at least is certain—this life flies;
One thing is certain and all the rest is—lies,
The flower that once has bloomed forever dies.

Categories
Ancient Greece Autobiography Bible Catholic Church

Mental regression!

In his most recent statement, Gaedhal says the following:

I mentioned Thucydides, because, as Otto English points out in Fake History a distinction is drawn—although largely artificially—between Herodotus and Thucydides.

In my view, the Old Testament takes a Herodotian method. In Genesis, there are three competing and contradictory accounts regarding who pimped his wife to whom. Did Abraham pimp his wife to Pharaoh, or Abimelech or was it his son, Isaac?

Two competing and contradictory accounts of the creation and the flood are given. Two contradictory versions of the binding of Isaac, the Flood, and the Joseph story are poorly woven together and given.

In the main, Herodotus would recount everything he heard, whereas, in the main, Thucydides would critique his sources, and only give the version of events that he found most probable. In the main, Thucydides was willing to throw unreliable stories into the waste-paper basket.

However, as English points out: Herodotus often acts in a Thucydidean way, and Thucydides often acts in a Herodotian way.

Thucydides was an excellent Ancient Historian… however, even the best ancient historian is woefully bad when compared to modern standards. One could not publish Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War as a scholarly monograph and have it pass peer review.

I also agree with Pine Creek Doug that if God is the ultimate author of the Gospels, then we should hold him to the same standards that we would hold a modern PhD historian to. We should be able to publish the four gospels as scholarly monographs and have them pass peer review. We are not able to do this. Thus, God is a poorer historian than any modern human historian who can pass peer review. Do not lower your standards for God!

The first thing that is scraped away by Thucydides’ razor into the waste-paper can is accounts of miracles.

As I said before: Christianity was never in date. The Bible is Herodotian in what it relates, and not Thucydidean. Thucydides essentially discovered how to do modern history in the 400s BCE. One of the things that the Christian Dark Ages reversed was Thucydidean historiography. A continent that had known Thucydides, thanks to Christianity, was soon swamped with Herodotian martyr tales, i.e. unevidenced religious fantasies.

I was listening to Book 1 of History of the Peloponnesian War, last night, by Thucydides. Homer says that an impossible number of Achaeans—essentially the entire population of Ancient Achaia—went off to fight in Troy. Thucydides therefore rejects Homer’s legendary number of Achaean fighters. Similarly, in the Pentateuch, an impossible number of Israelites—essentially the entire population of Ancient Egypt—left Egypt during the Exodus.

If Europe had still been in a Thucydidean mindset, then the stupid Jewish fairytale that is the Exodus would never have been accepted by this continent’s people. Lamentably, it has really only been in relatively modern times that Thucydidean criticism has been applied to the Bible. Spinoza, Valla, Thomas Paine et al. got the ball rolling. However, the Thucydidean ball should never have been stopped. What stopped it? Christianity.

This is why I am of the opinion that the Conflict Thesis—‘systematised academic knowledge’ (i.e. ‘science’ sensu lato) and revealed religion are diametrically opposed to one another—is correct, and also that the Dark Ages were real.

In ancient times, Homer was no less divine than Moses. Indeed, like Jesus Christ, in some legends Homer was born of a virgin. And yet Thucydides contradicted this divine oracle. Lamentably, nobody contradicted Moses until the Renaissance.

The staggering regression that the white man suffered with the imposition of Christianity in the Middle Ages reminds me of what I was saying this year about the friend I knew when I was a teenager and, after decades of not treating him, found him in a state of psychosis: a regression like treating an eighteen-month-old infant! (cf. my series on malignant narcissism: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5 and #6).

A sage from ancient India might say something similar if he had been long enough to see Rome before and after the imposition of Christianity by Constantine. What Gaedhal says seems to me very true, and we could even illustrate it with the subject that is my forte: the analysis of my family.

Unlike Protestantism, in Catholicism the Church of Rome claims to have proof of divine intervention through miracles. Psychically, I grew up under my father’s sky where the miracles of the Virgin of Lourdes—the French virgin of the 19th-century Tort family—were taken as absolute fact. The same can be said of my late father’s claims about the 20th-century miracles attributed to the Virgin of Fatima in Portugal. Although after two years of my life studying the Shroud of Turin I ended up sceptical of the supernatural hypothesis, my father continued to believe up to the present century that this Catholic relic proved the resurrection of Jesus. (I studied the literature on the shroud from 1988 to 1990 because I was still struggling with parental introjects—cf. my autobiography.)

When at Easter some of the American white nationalist sites post entries commemorating the day, they have no idea that believing this Jewish fairytale is as dramatic a psychogenic regression as that of the friend whom I knew sane and, after a few decades, I found him with a psychic structure reminiscent of that of a small infant.

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Bible Gaedhal (commenter) Tom Holland

Slave cult for Goyim

by Gaedhal

I have laboured under the delusion that ‘Sieg Heil!’, in German, meant ‘praise victory!’ I thought that ‘Heil’ was an imperative verb. Aber nein! (But no!) Heil is a noun. Thus, what ‘Sieg Heil’ actually means is: ‘Victory [in this life is] Salvation!’ And this is an extremely antichristian sentiment. In Christianity, it is God who avenges. When Job said:

‘For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth’ (Job 19:25 KJV).

He could very easily be saying: ‘I know that my avenger liveth’, as the Hebrew word: ‘goʔel’ can mean both: ‘avenger’ and ‘redeemer’. ‘Redemption’ and ‘vengeance’ are similar concepts.

Anyhow, in Christianity, it is victory in the life to come that is salvation.

However, the Jews have the correct idea: ‘salvation’ or in Hebrew: ‘shewangah’ is simply: ‘the ability to live in an ethnostate in one’s ancestral homeland’. The Jews care not for post-mortem paradises in the skies. Neither do Nazis. Nazis want their own homogenous ethnostate in their ancestral homelands.

‘No pride, no honour!’—Aron Ra (a leftist).

Indeed! Pride is tabooed by Christianity. However, what was the slogan of the SS?

‘Meine Ehre heisst Treue’ (‘My honour is called loyalty’).

In Nazism, pride is a good thing, whereas in Christianity, it is the worst of sins. Indeed, ‘Ehrmann’, the name of a prestigious American Bible scholar—although, the final ‘n’ is truncated from how he spells it—means: ‘honourable man’.

This is why I think that saint Paul equivocates when he says:

‘For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part has happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in. And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob’ (Romans 11:25 KJV).

In my view, what he is saying is that by ‘saving’ the Goyim, by converting them to an auxiliary slave cult that promises a mythical post-mortem paradise, then the Jews will be saved in the sense that Jews understand it, i.e., they will have a homogenous ethnostate in their ancestral homeland of Palestine.

Thanks, largely to Christianity, the Jews were indeed ‘saved’ in the sense that they understand it, in 1947 with the creation of the state of Israel.

The reason why the Jews are bombing the living daylights out of the luckless Palestinians is because they are perfecting their salvation. There still exist filthy Goyim dogs in both Judea and Samaria, and Gaza. The Jews will not consider themselves fully saved, until the Goyim are either exterminated or evicted from the West Bank and Gaza.

Who lets the Jews get away with this? The Christians. Biden is a Zionist Catholic. Catholicism is the largest sect of Christianity. Michael Johnson will not countenance calls for an Israeli ceasefire. Thus, it is not sufficient for antitheists just to criticise Christianity and Islam. The root of this rotten Abrahamic tree, i.e. Judaism, must also be strenuously criticised.

In short, I think that Tom Holland is largely correct. Nazism was a repudiation of Christian moral axiology. Christianity is otherworldly. Nazism, like Judaism, want Sieg or Shewangah in this life! Christianity sees humanity as fallen and incapable of good. Nazism says: you can act, even without the grace of a Jewish desert god, with faithfulness and honour. Thus, Nazism is Pelagian i.e. it posits that man has no need of the gods to act in a virtuous way. Christianity says Pride is a Sin. Nazism says: My Pride is called Faithfulness.

The slave cult for Goyim, in both Romans and in the Petrine epistles demands passivity in the face of government tyranny. Nazism starts revolutions in beerhalls. When the Nazis had an uprising or Putsch then they were directly disobeying Romans 13. This is a point that Andrew Seidel brings up concerning the American Revolution in The Founding Myth. When the American Revolutionaries rebelled, they defied Romans 13. Thus, Seidel argues, that the American Revolution was also antichristian in spirit.

Funnily enough, both the American Revolution and the German Revolution seemed to begin in beer halls. In America, seemingly, it was the Green Dragon Tavern. It is a talking point on the left that the American Revolution, and its subsequent westward expansion inspired the Nazis.

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Bible Gaedhal (commenter)

The Bible

by Gaedhal

Marcus Eli Ravage, a Jew himself, points this out in A Real Case Against the Jews. Why, he asks, do you Antisemitic Christians accuse us, the Jews, of writing The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion—most likely written by an Orthodox monk in collaboration with the Russian Secret police, the Okhrana—when it is provably true that we wrote the Bible!

And what sort of world does the Bible envisage? Well Yeshangyahu—or Anglicised to “Isaiah”—tells us. The goyim shall bow down to the Jew and lick the dust off the soles of his feet. The leaders of the Goyim shall keep the feast of Booths in Jerusalem. Incidentally, when we see our leaders cringing at Yad Vashem and Auschwitz, and when we see our leaders visiting the Wailing Wall, this, in my view, is the beginning of the self-fulfilment of Isaiah’s “prophecy”. In my view, the Holocaust is simply another holiday, like Purim or Channukah, that was added to the religious calendar. The leaders of the Goyim are already keeping Jewish holidays by observing “Holocaust Remembrance Day” and visiting the Wailing Wall. Indeed, the term Holocaust comes from the Greek Old Testament, and means: ‘A whole burnt offering to Yahweh’.

As the Psalms say: ‘Why do the Goyim rage and imagine a vain thing?’ The ‘vain thing’ referred to here is the temerity to imagine a life free from Jewish domination. As the acolytes of Karl Marx would put it: Revolution is inevitable. Or as Star Trek puts it: “Resistance is futile: you will be assimilated”.

The New Testament is no better. Rabbi Jesus shall be the “Messiah” or anointed king ruling a worldwide empire from Jerusalem. Any resistance to His rule shall be met with lethal force. Jesus treads the winepresses—filled to the brim with goyim blood. The Protestants in Northern Ireland, sing of being knee-deep in Fenian—i.e. Catholic—blood. Well, the Jewish soldiers and Jewish horses in Revelation shall be bridle-deep in Goyim’s blood. Jesus wears a tunic dipped in Goyim blood. Jesus kills the children of Heretical sects of Judaism, after first subjecting their founders to a gangbang.

‘Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols. And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not. Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds. And I will kill her children with death; and all the churches shall know that I am he which searcheth the reins and hearts: and I will give unto every one of you according to your works.’ (Revelation 2:20-23)

The Bukkake being concluded, Jesus will strike the children spawned by such a coupling with death. Revilo P. Oliver called Revelation ‘a hymn of hate’, whereas Steve Wells, of The Skeptics’ Annotated Bible calls it the worst book in the Bible. John, in his fever dream, dreams up more and more inventive ways to murder his religious and ethnic enemies.

Ravage was amazed that Christians would accuse Jews of writing the Protocols, when it is provably true that they wrote the Bible, and that the Bible has much the same ends. I never read the Protocols, myself, so I don’t know.

However, accusing Jews of writing the Protocols requires no epistemic humility. However, admitting that you and all of your ancestors for more than a thousand years have been duped by the Jewish long-con of Christianity does require epistemic humility.

Some people are congenital atheists. Aron Ra, Alex, and Christopher Hitchens never bought the Christian swindle, even though they were brought up Christian. With me, it was not so. I was well and thoroughly duped and gulled by Christianity for about 30 years. However, I have the epistemic humility to admit this.

As Mark Twain put it: it is far easier to dupe people than to get them to admit that they have been duped.

Categories
Bible

The enemy

Categories
Bible Christendom Franks Judaism Kevin MacDonald Merovingian dynasty Old Testament

The Holy Hook, 1

 
Editor’s note: With the subtitle of ‘Yahweh’s Trojan Horse into the Gentile City’, this essay by Laurent Guyénot was published, complete, on May 8, 2019, in The Unz Review.
 

Is the Church the whore of Yahweh?

I concluded an earlier article [‘Zionism, Crypto-Judaism, and the Biblical Hoax’ —Ed.] by what I regard as the most important ‘revelation’ of modern biblical scholarship, one that has the potential to free the Western world from a two-thousand-year-old psychopathic bond: the jealous Yahweh was originally just the national god of Israel, repackaged into ‘the God of Heaven and Earth’ during the Babylonian Exile, as part of a public relations campaign aimed at Persians, then Greeks and ultimately Romans. The resulting biblical notion that the universal Creator became Israel’s national god at the time of Moses, is thus exposed as a fictitious inversion of the historical process: in reality, it is the national god of Israel who, so to speak, impersonated the universal Creator at the time of Ezra—while remaining intensely ethnocentric.

The Book of Joshua is a good eye-opener to the biblical hoax, because its pre-exilic author never refers to Yahweh simply as ‘God,’ and never implies that he is anything but ‘the god of Israel,’ that is, ‘our god’ for the Israelites, and ‘your god’ for their enemies (25 times). Yahweh shows no interest in converting Canaanite peoples, whom he regards as worthless than their livestock. He doesn’t instruct Joshua to even try to convert them, but simply to exterminate them, in keeping with the war code he gave Moses in Deuteronomy 20.

However, we find in the Book of Joshua one isolated statement by a Canaanite woman that ‘Yahweh your god is God both in Heaven above and on Earth beneath’ (2:11). Rahab, a prostitute in Jericho, makes that statement to two Israeli spies who spend the night with her, and whom she hides in exchange for being spared, together with her family, when the Israelites will take over the city and slaughter everyone, ‘men and women, young and old’ (6:21). Rahab’s ‘profession of faith’ is probably a post-exilic insertion, because it doesn’t fit well with her other claim that she is motivated by fear, not by faith: ‘we are afraid of you and everyone living in this country has been seized with terror at your approach’ (2:9). Nevertheless, the combination of fear and faith is consistent with Yahweh’s ways.

The French Catholic Bible de Jérusalem—a scholarly translation by the Dominicans of the École Biblique, which served as guideline for the English Jerusalem Bible—adds a following footnote to Rahab’s ‘profession of faith to the God of Israel’, saying it ‘made Rahab, in the eyes of more than one Church Father, a figure of the Gentile Church, saved by her faith.’

I find this footnote emblematic of the role of Christianity in propagating among Gentiles the Israelites’ outrageous metaphysical claim, that great deception that has remained, to this day, a source of tremendous symbolic power. By recognizing her own image in the prostitute of Jericho, the Church claims for herself the role that is exactly hers in history, while radically misleading Christians about the historical significance of that role. It is indeed the Church who, having acknowledged the god of Israel as the universal God, introduced the Jews into the heart of the Gentile city and, over the centuries, allowed them to seize power over Christendom. [Red emphasis by Ed.]

This thesis, which I am going to develop here, may seem fanciful, because we have been taught that Christianity was strongly Judeophobic from the start. And that’s true. For example, John Chrysostom, perhaps the most influential Greek theologian of the crucial 4th century, wrote several homilies ‘Against the Jews’. But what he is concerned about, precisely, is the nefarious influence of the Jews over Christians. Many Christians, he complains, ‘join the Jews in keeping their feasts and observing their fasts’ and even believe that ‘they think as we do’ (First homily, I,5).

‘Is it not strange that those who worship the Crucified keep common festival with those who crucified him? Is it not a sign of folly and the worst madness?… For when they see that you, who worship the Christ whom they crucified, are reverently following their rituals, how can they fail to think that the rites they have performed are the best and that our ceremonies are worthless?’ (First Homily, V,1-7).

To John’s horror, some Christians even get circumcised. ‘Do not tell me,’ he warns them, ‘that circumcision is just a single command; it is that very command which imposes on you the entire yoke of the Law’ (Second Homily, II,4). And so, with all its Judeophobia (anachronistically renamed ‘anti-Semitism’ today), John Chrysostom’s homilies are a testimony to the strong influence that Jews have exerted on Gentile Christians in the early days of the triumphant, imperial Church. And no matter how much the Greek and Latin Fathers have tried to protect their flock from the influence of Jews, it has persisted as the Church expanded. It can even be argued that the history of Christianity is the history of its Judaization, from Constantinople to Rome, then from Rome to Amsterdam and to the New World.

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Note of the Editor: This is exactly what apologists of Christianity, like the secular Kevin MacDonald, fail to understand (see e.g., how he misunderstands John Chrysostom in his preface to Giles Corey’s The Sword of Christ).
 

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We commonly admit that the Church has always oppressed the Jews and prevented their integration unless they convert. Were they not expelled from one Christian kingdom after another in the Middle Ages? Again, this is true, but we must distinguish between the cause and the effect. Each of these expulsions has been a reaction to a situation unknown in pre-Christian Antiquity: Jewish communities gaining inordinate economic power, under the protection of a royal administration (Jews served as the kings’ tax collectors and moneylenders, and were particularly indispensable in times of war), until this economic power, yielding political power, reaches a point of saturation, causes pogroms and forces the king into taking measures.

Let us consider for example the influence of the Jews in Western Europe under the Carolingians. It reaches a climax under Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious. The bishop of Lyon Agobard (c. 769-840) left us five letters or treatises written to protest against the power granted to the Jews at the detriment of Christians. In On the insolence of the Jews, addressed to Louis the Pious in 826, Agobard complains that the Jews produce ‘signed ordinances of your name with golden seals’ guaranteeing them outrageous advantages, and that the envoys of the Emperor are ‘terrible towards Christians and gentle towards Jews.’ Agobard even complains of an imperial edict imposing Sunday rather than Saturday as market day, in order to please the Jews. In another letter, he complains of an edict forbidding anyone to baptize the slaves of the Jews without the permission of their masters.[1]

Louis the Pious was said to be under the influence of his wife, Queen Judith—a name that simply means ‘Jewess’. She was so friendly to Jews that the Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz hypothesizes that she was a secret Jewess, in the manner of the biblical Esther. Graetz describes the reign of Louis and Judith (and ‘the treasurer Bernhard, the real ruler of the kingdom’ according to him) as a golden age for the Jews, and points out that in the emperor’s court, many regarded Judaism as the true religion. This is illustrated by the resounding conversion of Louis’ confessor, Bishop Bodo, who took the name of Eleazar, had himself circumcised, and married a Jewess. ‘Cultured Christians,’ writes Graetz, ‘refreshed themselves with the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus and the Jewish philosopher Philo, and read their works in preference to those of the apostles.’[2]

The Judaization of the Roman Church at this time is appropriately symbolized by the adoption of unleavened bread for communion, with no justification in the Gospel. I say ‘the Roman Church’, but perhaps it should be called the Frankish Church because, from the time of Charlemagne, it was taken over by ethnic Franks with geopolitical designs on Byzantium, as Orthodox theologian John Romanides has convincingly argued.[3]

The Old Testament was especially influential in the Frankish spheres of power. Popular piety focused on the Gospel narratives (canonical gospels, but also apocryphal ones like the immensely popular Gospel of Nicodemus), the worship of Mary, and the ubiquitous cults of the saints, but kings and popes relied on a political theology drawn from the Tanakh.

The Hebrew Bible had been a major part of Frankish propaganda from the late sixth century. Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks, the primary—and mostly legendary—source for Merovingian history, is framed on the providential ideology of the Books of Kings: the good kings are those who support the Catholic Church, and the bad kings those who resist the growth of its power. Under Louis the Pious, the rite of anointment of the Frankish kings was designed after the model of the prophet Samuel’s anointment of King David in 1 Samuel 16.

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[1] Adrien Bressolles, ‘La question juive au temps de Louis le Pieux,’ in Revue d’histoire de l’Église de France, tome 28, n°113, 1942. pp. 51-64, on https://www.persee.fr

[2] Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1891 (archive.org), vol. III, ch. VI, p. 162.

[3] John Romanides, Franks, Romans, Feudalism, and Doctrine: An Interplay Between Theology and Society, Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1981.

Categories
Bible Final solution Judaism Philosophy of history Racial right Who We Are (book)

How Yahweh conquered Rome, 3

Jews in Rome before the Jewish Wars

Long before it was repackaged for the Gentiles, the Big Lie was a Jewish self-delusion. As I have detailed at the end of my long article ‘Zionism, Crypto-Judaism and the Biblical Hoax,’ in the sixth and the fifth century BC in Babylon, a priestly elite from Jerusalem decided that Yahweh, the national god of Israel, although apparently vanquished, was in fact the only real god, and, by way of consequence, the Creator of Heaven and Earth. A laughable claim, but when the Persians conquered Babylon, those Jews, who found themselves in a favourable position after helping the Persians, set out to pretend that their theoclastic monotheism, based on the exclusion of all other gods, was identical to the tolerant monotheism of the Persians; in other words, that their tribal god Yahweh was Ahura Mazda, the God of Heaven. I have shown that the deception is clearly apparent in the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah, where only Persians are portrayed as believing that Yahweh is ‘the God of Heaven,’ while for the Israelites he is just ‘the god of Israel.’

What the priestly Jews achieved in Babylon in the fifth century BC was a preliminary stage for what another generation of the same priestly cast would start planning in the first century AD in Rome, after having been brought there in similar conditions of captivity. While Yahweh seemed again vanquished, he set out to conquer his victor from within. The conspiracy of Babylon’s Jews to fool the Persians with their phony monotheism was the blueprint for the more sophisticated conspiracy of Rome’s Jews to fool the Romans with Christianity.

Between those two stages, Jews seem to have convinced a portion of the Roman aristocracy that they were the first true monotheists, the worshipers of the true God. For Greeks and Romans, the supreme Creator was a philosophical concept, while religious cults were polytheistic by definition. That’s why, around 315 BC, the Aristotelian Theophrastus of Eresus thought of the Jews as ‘philosophers by birth,’ although he was troubled by their primitive holocausts. Some Jewish writers (Aristobulus of Paneas, Artapanos of Alexandria, or even Philo of Alexandria) had even succeeded in bluffing some Greeks with the wild claim that Homer, Hesiod, Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato had been inspired by Moses.[8]

Jews are mentioned in Rome as early as the second century BC. It has been surmised that they were mostly converted Phoenicians. Martin Bernal defends that thesis in Jews and Phoenicians, with the argument that ‘there is no evidence of Jews in the West Mediterranean before the destruction of Carthage [146 BC],’ but ‘after that date, they were widely reported there,’ while Phoenicians faded from the pages of history.

Phoenicians and Jews’ languages and cultures were virtually identical.[9] Peter Myers brings additional light in his well-sourced article ‘Carthaginians, Phoenicians & Berbers became Jews’, arguing that, ‘After the destruction of Carthage by Rome, many Carthaginians and Phoenicians converted to Judaism, because Jerusalem was the only remaining centre of West Semitic civilization.’

The Encyclopedia Judaica’s article on Carthage, quoted by Myers, supports that hypothesis, adding that the Phoenicians, by converting to Judaism after their political decline, ‘preserved their Semitic identity and were not assimilated by the Roman-Hellenistic culture which they hated.’ This theory, which also explains the mysterious origin of the Sephardim in Spain—a Carthaginian colony—, is of obvious importance to comprehend the attitude of Jews towards the Roman Empire, destroyer of the Phoenician civilization.

(Left, Flavius Josephus highlights the ancient affinity between Phoenicians and Jews.) In 63 BC, Rome’s Jewish community was enlarged with thousands of captives brought back from Judea by Pompey, and progressively freed (Philo of Alexandria, Legatio ad Caium, 156). It is believed that Julius Cesar introduced legislation to guarantee their religious liberty, and that the law was confirmed by Augustus, who also exempted them from military service. Emperor Claudius (41-54 AD) is said to have expelled the Jews from Rome (Suetonius, Claudius xv, 4; Acts 18:2), or at least forbidden them to congregate (Cassius Dio lx, 6). But they seem to have known favourable times under Nero (54-68), whose wife Poppaea Sabina is regarded as an Esther-type secret Jewess in Jewish tradition, because Jewish historian Flavius Josephus calls her ‘a God-worshipper’ (Antiquities of the Jews, xx, 195) and mentions her support for the release of Jewish priests prosecuted in Rome (Vita 16).[10]
 

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Editor’s note: When Greg Johnson criticised William Pierce’s Who We Are years ago, he argued that Pierce, with his suggestion that the ancient Aryans should have exterminated the non-Aryans, was saying something monstrous. Johnson even called ‘whites’ those mudblood Cauacsoids whom we now assume had Semitic, though not Jewish, blood.

White nationalism would be greatly enriched by admitting that the Judean war against Rome has been in reality a psychological war of the Semites (including non-Jews, such as the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians who survived the Third Punic War) against the Aryans. It is a great pathology that infects even white nationalism not want to see the macro-dynamics of the clash between Semites and Aryans that has been going on for millennia.

I blame Christian ethics for that. (Recall, for example, that a dozen years ago Johnson delivered homilies at his church in San Francisco. He has since abandoned Christianity and is now a pious neochristian—just read his The White Nationalist Manifesto.) If Christian ethics is to blame, for transvaluing Semitic values Pierce’s book should be the textbook of American racialists. But I understand that the copyright holders, the National Alliance, haven’t yet published it.

Or am I wrong?

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[8] Joseph Mélèze Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt, From Rameses II to Emperor Hadrian, Princeton University Press, 1995, pp. 48-49, 66.

[9] Martin Bernal, Geography of a Life, chap. 45, ‘Jews and Phoenicians,’ pp. 386-394.

[10] Nahum Goldmann, Le Paradoxe juif. Conversations en français avec Léon Abramowicz, Stock, 1976, p. 36; Heinrich Graetz, Histoire des Juifs, A. Lévy, 1882 (on fr.wikisource.org), tome I, p. 413-428.

Categories
Bible Friedrich Nietzsche Jesus Judaism New Testament

The Jesus Hoax, 1

Editor’s note: This Monday I begin quoting excerpts from The Jesus Hoax by American professor David Skrbina. As his book is six chapters long, unless something unforeseen comes up I will finish quoting these excerpts from his book on Saturday.

 

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CHAPTER 1: SETTING THE STAGE

There are about 2.1 billion Christians on Earth today, roughly 1/3 of the planet, making Christianity the #1 religion globally. The United States is strongly Christian; about 77% of Americans call themselves Christians.

But some historians and researchers have made a startling claim: that Jesus, the Son of God, never existed. They say that Jesus Christ was a pure myth. Is that even possible? Surely not, we reply. This most-influential founder of the most-influential religion of Christianity surely had to exist. And he surely had to be the miracle-working Son of God that is proclaimed in the Bible. How could it be otherwise? we ask. How could a venerable, two thousand-year-old religion, with billions of followers throughout history, be based on someone who never existed? Impossible! Or so we say.

If that were the case, if Jesus never existed, imagine the consequences: an entire religion, and the active beliefs of billions of people, all in vain. All of Christianity based on a myth, a fable, even—as I will argue—a lie. Why, that would be catastrophic…

Note that it’s very important to distinguish between the two conceptions of ‘Jesus.’ If someone asks, “Did Jesus exist?” we need to know if they mean (a) the divine, miracle-working, resurrected Son of God (sometimes called the biblical Jesus), or (b) the ordinary man and Jewish preacher who died a mortal death (sometimes called the historical Jesus). Christianity requires a biblical Jesus, but the skeptics argue either for simply an historical Jesus—which would mean the end of Christianity—or worse, no Jesus at all.

I will, however, accept the historical Jesus…
 

Another Jesus Skeptic?

So, why this book? Why do we need yet another Jesus skeptic?

To answer this question, let me give a brief overview of some of the prominent skeptics and their views. I will argue that their ideas, though on the right track, are woefully short of the truth. They lack the courage or the will to look hard at the evidence, and to envision a more likely conclusion: that Jesus was a deliberately constructed myth, by a specific group of people, with a specific end in mind. None of the Christ mythicists or atheist writers have, to my knowledge, articulated the view that I defend here.

But first a quick recap of the background and context for the idea of a mythological Jesus. The earliest modern critic was German scholar Hermann Reimarus, who published a multi-part work, Fragments, in the late 1770s. Strikingly, his view is one of the closest to my own thesis of any skeptic. For Reimarus, Jesus was the militant leader of a group of Jewish rebels who were fighting against oppressive Roman rule. Eventually he got himself crucified. His followers then constructed a miraculous religion-story around Jesus, in order to carry on his cause. They lied about his miracles, and they stole his body from the grave so that they could claim a bodily resurrection. This is quite close to what I will call the ‘Antagonism thesis’—that a group of Jews constructed a false Jesus story, based on a real man, in order to undermine Roman rule. But there is much more to the story, far beyond that which Reimarus himself was able to articulate.

In the 1820s and 30s, Ferdinand Baur published a number of works that emphasized the conflict between the early Jewish-Christians—significantly, all the early Christians were Jews—and the somewhat later Gentile-Christians. This again is a key part of the story, but we need to know the details; we need to know why the conflict arose, and what were its ends.

In 1835, David Strauss published the two-volume work Das Leben Jesu—“The Life of Jesus.” He was the first to argue, correctly, that none of the gospel writers knew Jesus personally. He disavowed all claims of miracles, and argued that the Gospel of John was, in essence, an outright lie with no basis in reality.

German philosopher Bruno Bauer wrote a number of important books, including Criticism of the Gospel History (1841), The Jewish Question (1843), Criticism of the Gospels (1851), Criticism of the Pauline Epistles (1852), and Christ and the Caesars (1877). Bauer held that there was no historical Jesus and that the entire New Testament was a literary construction, utterly devoid of historical content. Shortly thereafter, James Frazer published The Golden Bough (1890), arguing for a connection between all religion—Christianity included—and ancient mythological concepts.

It was about at this time that another famous Christian skeptic emerged: Friedrich Nietzsche. In his books Daybreak (1881), On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), and Antichrist (1888) he provides a potent critique of Christianity and Christian morality. Nietzsche always accepted the historical Jesus, and even had good things to say about him.

 

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Editor’s note: I think I am a better scholar of Nietzsche than Skrbina. In one of his excellent translations of Nietzsche’s books, the Spaniard Andrés Sánchez Pascual quoted a passage in which Nietzsche said that Jesus was an idiot. Seven years ago I quoted Nietzsche’s posthumous fragment here.

I first read that fragment from the isolated manuscripts left by Nietzsche in one of the books published in Spain by Alianza Editorial, but I haven’t heard of English speakers quoting it. I refer to page 132 of El Anticristo, which I read in 1976, where Sánchez Pascual speaks of Nietzsche’s criticism of Renan regarding Jesus’ alleged ‘genius’ and ‘heroism’. Skrbina continues:

 

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But he was devastating in his attack on Paul and the later writers of the New Testament. He viewed Christian morality as a lowly, life-denying form of slave morality, attributed not to Jesus but to the actions of Paul and the other Jewish followers. Along with Reimarus, Nietzsche provides the most inspiration for my own analysis.

Into the 20th century, we find such books as The Christ Myth (1909) and The Denial of the Historicity of Jesus (1926), both by Arthur Drews, and The Enigma of Jesus (1923) by Paul-Louis Chouchoud. All these continued to attack the literal truth claimed of the Bible.

More recently, we have critics such as the historian George Wells and his book Did Jesus Exist? (1975). Here he assembles an impressive amount of evidence against an historical Jesus. Bart Ehrman has called Wells “the best-known mythicist of modern times,” though in later years Wells softened his stance somewhat; he accepted that there may have been an historical Jesus, although we know almost nothing about him. Wells died in 2017 at the age of 90.

Similar arguments were offered by philosopher Michael Martin in his 1991 book, The Case against Christianity. Though a wide-ranging critique, he dedicated one chapter to the idea that Jesus never existed. Martin died in 2015.

Among living critics, we have such men as Thomas Thompson, who wrote The Messiah Myth (2005); he is agnostic about an historical Jesus, but argues against historical truth in the Bible. By contrast, Earl Doherty (The Jesus Puzzle, 1999), Tom Harpur (The Pagan Christ, 2004), and Thomas Brodie (Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus, 2012) all deny that any such Jesus of Nazareth ever existed. Richard Carrier, in his book On the Historicity of Jesus (2014), finds it highly unlikely that any historical Jesus lived.

Perhaps the most vociferous and prolific Jesus skeptic today is Robert Price, a man with two doctorates in theology and a deep knowledge of the Bible. Price’s central points can be summarized as follows:

1) The miracle stories have no independent verification from unbiased contemporaries.

2) The characteristics of Jesus are all drawn from much older mythologies and other pagan sources.

3) The earliest documents, the letters of Paul, point to an esoteric, abstract, ethereal Jesus—a “mythic hero archetype”—not an actual man who died on a cross.

4) The later documents, the Gospels, turned the Jesus-concept into an actual man, a literal Son of God, who died and was risen…

With the exception of Nietzsche, all of the above individuals exhibit a glaring weakness: they are loathe to criticize anyone. No one comes in for condemnation, no one is guilty, no one is to blame for anything. For the earliest writers, I think this is due primarily to an insecurity about their ideas and a general lack of clarity about what likely occurred. For the more recent individuals, it’s probably attributable to an in-bred political correctness, to a weakness of moral backbone, or to sheer self-interest. In recent years, academics in particular are highly reticent to affix blame on individuals, even those long-dead. This is somehow seen as a violation of academic neutrality or professional integrity. But when the facts line up against someone or some group, then we must be honest with ourselves. There are truly guilty parties all throughout history, and when we come upon them, they must be called out…

For now I simply note that none of our brave critics, our Jesus mythicists, seem willing to pinpoint anyone: not Paul, not his Jewish colleagues, not the early Christian fathers —no one. A colossal story has been laid out about the Son of God come to Earth, performing miracles, and being risen from the dead, and yet—no one lied? Really? Can we believe that? Was it all just a big misunderstanding? Honest errors? No thinking person could accept this. Someone, somewhere in the past, constructed a gigantic lie and then passed it around the ancient world as a cosmic truth. The guilty parties need to be exposed. Only then can we truly understand this ancient religion, and begin to move forward.

Categories
Bible Day of Wrath (book) Human sacrifice Judaism Psychohistory Racial right

On blood libel

One of the problems I see in white nationalist forums, something that can also be said of the literature for the German people that came out of the printing presses of the Third Reich, is that by focusing on Jewry the historical perspective is lost: a perspective that only appears when Hitler was talking to people he trusted; only then did he also blame Christianity (remember Hitler’s Religion).

The difference between American white nationalism and German National Socialism is that, in the absence of a Führer, there is no canon of writings to follow, only a diversity of views (‘Let a thousand flowers bloom’, a white nationalist, Trainspotter, once said). Worse, after the deaths of Revilo Oliver in 1994 and William Pierce in 2002, it could be said that the historical perspective is over and we are left with provincialisms in which only Jewry is discussed in these forums.

That provincialism distinguishes me from the American racialists of today, in that it seems obvious to me that only minds like Hitler’s, or Pierce’s on this side of the Atlantic, could provide the historical perspective to understand what is going on. From this angle, I would like to respond to Gaedhal’s interesting letter to us today:

I am not at my desktop. I don’t want to trawl through hours of stuff. However, this guy [YouTube interview: here], an atheist Jewish Rabbi, makes the same points that Bible Skeptic did. There are clues in the text of the Book of Genesis as we have it today that there was an earlier source in which Abraham went ahead with sacrificing Isaac to Yahweh.

During the time of the Babylonian exile, attitudes to human sacrifice changed. This is why in the Book of Ezekiel, Yahweh essentially apologises to the Jews for giving them ‘evil laws’ which included child sacrifice. Perhaps in the time of the exile, the story of Abraham and Isaac was altered such that Abraham no longer went through with the sacrifice.

In an earlier mail Gaedhal had said:

There is a reason why these people have been accused of ‘blood libel’ for 3,000 years… Yahweh, the Jewish god, in the Old Testament says that he will make people eat their own children. In my view, there is nothing libellous about ‘blood libel’.

There is a lot to talk about here! But as I said, it requires a historical perspective. It is a pity that at the moment not all the PDFs of our books are linked in the current featured post. As you know, although I am reviewing the books, my mother tongue isn’t English. I’m using a program that allows me to change the syntax I used when writing some of them to a syntax that sounds less strange to the native reader (the same program I’m using to write this very post). The problem is that it’s very time-consuming, and at the moment even The Fair Race, the only book linked in the featured post, isn’t syntax-checked with this program in the translated articles written by a Spaniard.

However, to answer Gaedhal you should read pages 183-192 of my Day of Wrath (provisional PDF, before the syntax check: here). Once you read those pages, it becomes clear how the historical perspective makes us understand much better the sacrificial practice of the early Hebrews before the Torah was edited right down to the ‘emasculated’ text, so to speak, that came down to us in the Bibles.

The key word is perspective. In Mexico where I live, for example, the learned indigenistas get very angry when a foreigner tells them about sacrifices—including ritual child sacrifice—in the pre-Hispanic world. It doesn’t occur to them that the simplest thing to do would be to point out that other cultures also sacrificed their children. I don’t like to defend Mexican indigenistas from such accusations, nor the Jews Gaedhal is talking about. But I insist: the historical perspective says it all, as I tried to show in the central part of Day of Wrath.

Regarding Jewry, it is clear that there was a change after the Babylonian exile: captivity at the hands of gentiles civilised them somewhat. But once the story of Abraham was modified so that the angel prevented him from sacrificing Isaac, my guess is that they abandoned those practices. Here in Mexico, the same thing happened with the ‘captivity’, so to speak, that the Mesoamerican Amerindians suffered at the hands of Europeans from 1521 to 1821, when the mestizos gained independence from the crown of Spain. Once independent, not even the Indians returned to their sacrificial practices (the sons of bitches do continue to ritually sacrifice animals, which is why I still hate them).

But my point is clear, and only those who have read Day of Wrath could get it. Historically, there are quantum leaps in psychogenesis, in the sense that there is more empathy now towards children than in the remote historical past. Infant sacrifice in Judaism is a thing of the past. Despite what many white nationalists believe, there is no forensic evidence that rituals such as the one represented by the oil painting at the top of this entry continue into our century.

Categories
Arthur de Gobineau Bible Deranged altruism Eugenics Heinrich Himmler Hitler's Religion (book) Jesus Mein Kampf (book) Miscegenation Racial studies Richard Weikart

Hitler’s Religion: Chapter 7

Editor’s note: Here are some excerpts from the seventh chapter of Richard Weikart’s book.
 

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Under the leadership of Madame Blavatsky, theosophy had tried to blend a mystical racism with a scientific view of an evolutionary hierarchy of races. Despite professing the brotherhood of all humanity, theosophy taught racial inequality, and Blavatsky even endorsed the extermination of inferior races. Lanz also drew inspiration from non-mystical, non-occult sources, such as the physician and racial theorist Ludwig Woltmann. Before founding his own journal, Lanz wrote an extended review of Woltmann’s book, Die politische Anthropologie, for a freethinking journal and waxed enthusiastic about Woltmann’s racist doctrine of Nordic superiority. Woltmann’s book had been written for a prize competition for the best work on the political and social implications of Darwinian theory. He synthesized Darwin’s theory of natural selection with Arthur Gobineau’s theory of the racial superiority of the Nordic race.

[Left, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882), a French aristocrat.] Woltmann was a biological and racial determinist, believing that not only physical characteristics, but also mental and moral traits, are hereditary. Thus, one’s destiny is predetermined in one’s biological makeup. Race, according to Woltmann, is the key to historical development, because some races—the fair-skinned Nordic one especially—were superior. The Nordic race, he stated, is “the highest product of organic evolution,” and they were the founders of civilization. Further, he believed that races arose through an ongoing racial struggle for existence, and, like Gobineau, he thought that racial mixing was deleterious, leading to racial decline.

Though Lanz used the term Aryan rather than Nordic, many of his ideas about race were similar to those of Woltmann and other Nordic racists. Lanz believed that “race is the driving force behind all deeds,” determining the destiny of all peoples, or Völker. Racial wisdom was thus the paramount value, motivating him to establish a religion of race. Lanz warned that the Aryan race was threatened with decline, and his religion aimed at rescuing and preserving this endangered, but valuable, race. The key peril confronting Aryans was racial mixture. One of the more bizarre claims that Lanz made—based on his mystical interpretation of the Bible—was that the Fall happened when Eve copulated with an animal, producing progeny who were half-ape and half-human. These “ape-people” that Eve bore were the ancestors of the inferior races around the globe, such as black Africans, and their animal blood tainted all inferior races. This Fall involved racial mixture with a vengeance, and it dehumanized all non-Aryans, who supposedly had admixtures of animal blood coursing through their veins.

Unlike Hitler, who despised the Hebrew Bible as the effluvium of the Jewish mind, Lanz claimed that Moses was a Darwinist who—if interpreted in the proper mystical sense—taught Aryans how to triumph in the racial struggle through conscious racial selection. Lanz maintained that the Jews had succeeded historically despite their inferiority because they had appropriated the biblical wisdom that was really intended for Aryans. Aryans should embrace the Bible, including the Old Testament, “as the hard, racially proud and racially conscious book, which proclaims death and extermination to the inferior and world domination to the superior (Hochwertigen).” Unfortunately, Lanz continued, a false kind of love had been incorporated into the Bible by some misguided souls.

Elsewhere, Lanz elaborated that the kind of neighborly love and compassion that most people equated with Christianity, and which appeared in the Bible, was based on a misinterpretation hypocritically taught by the inferior races, the so-called “ape-people.” The word “neighbor” in the Old Testament really meant, he assured his fellow Aryan racists, one’s racial comrade. Thus the command to love our neighbor really “means that we only have to love our racial comrades, thus those who stand closest to our kind and our race.” In a 1907 issue of Ostara, he warned his fellow Aryans that they were committing race suicide by extending generosity to those of inferior races. Rather, they should always discriminate racially in their charitable giving. (Apparently, Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan meant nothing to Lanz—or to Hitler.) Ominously, Lanz compared racially inferior people to weeds needing to be pulled. A major theme in this pamphlet and many others was the need to introduce eugenics measures to improve the race.

Many of Lanz’s doctrines became core tenets of Hitler’s worldview: the primacy of race in determining historical developments, Aryan superiority (with the Aryans being the sole creators of culture), the Darwinian racial struggle, the need for eugenics policies, and the evils of racial mixing. Hitler also shared Lanz’s view that Aryans had developed an ancient civilization in the mythical Atlantis. In a passage of Mein Kampf that decries racial mixing in a manner reminiscent of Lanz’s writings, Hitler admonished the state to elevate the status of marriage, which under the present system was supposedly contributing to biological decline. By hindering the marriages of those he dubbed inferior, he hoped marriages could “produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape.” By claiming that racial mixture could result in human-ape hybrids, Hitler was pulling a page out of Lanz’s repertoire. No wonder [Wilfried] Daim was struck by the similarities between Lanz and Hitler and supposed that Hitler’s ideology hailed largely from Lanz’s writings. Given all these parallels, most historians acknowledge the likelihood that Lanz’s Ariosophy influenced Hitler’s ideology, either directly or indirectly.

But another like-minded Ariosophist in Vienna, Guido von List, was probably even more influential among early twentieth-century Pan-German nationalists than his colleague Lanz. He introduced the swastika symbol into Aryan racist circles before Lanz, and his ideas were widely discussed in the Pan-German press in Vienna. List and Lanz propagated similar occult racial ideologies, and they belonged to each other’s organizations. Before becoming entranced with occult thinking, List wrote for Pan-German publications. He carried this intense nationalist and racist heritage with him into his occult Aryan religion.

Like Lanz, he claimed he was recovering ancient Germanic wisdom that had been lost, and he wanted to replace Catholicism with his mystical faith. He preached Aryan supremacy, the need to engage in the struggle for existence against other races, and eugenics measures to improve the vitality of the Aryan race. In 1908, he explained the core of his message: “The high meaning of this custom [of ancient Aryans] lay in the intention of a planned, widespread breeding of a noble race, which through strict sexual laws would also remain racially pure.” List wanted to reconstitute an ancient Germanic priesthood with esoteric knowledge that could elevate the racially purified and ennobled Aryans to dominate the globe.

We do not know if Hitler had any direct contact with List or the List Society when he lived in Vienna. Brigitte Hamann, however, believes that Hitler’s racial ideology had more in common with List than with Lanz. List, for example, taught that the Aryans evolved into a superior race during the Ice Age. They were steeled in body and mind by the harsh conditions, and they had to wage a bitter battle against the elements. Natural selection eliminated the weak, sickly, and less cooperative, leaving the robust, healthy, and more moral members to propagate their superior biological traits. Hitler narrated a similar tale of Aryan origins in his 1920 speech, “Why Are We Anti-Semites?” List also viewed nature as the source of divine power, and according to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, he reduced all morality to just one ethical precept: “Live in accordance with Nature.” Hitler’s ethical views also stressed conformity to nature and its laws…

In August 1918, shortly before the end of the war, he [Rudolf von Sebottendorff] founded the Thule Society in Munich as an organization to foster German nationalism and Aryan racism. The Thule Society adopted the swastika as its symbol and “Heil” as its greeting, thus contributing to later Nazi practices.

In June 1918, Sebottendorff acquired the Münchner Beobachter as the mouthpiece for the Thule Society. In order to attract young Germans to his movement, he featured sports articles in this newspaper. However, its real purpose was to advance his racist and ultranationalist views, so he also published articles on these themes. One early article he wrote was “Keep Your Blood Pure,” which sounds remarkably similar to Hitler’s racial philosophy in Mein Kampf. In this essay, Sebottendorff asserted that race is the key to understanding history. He was incensed that Christianity had led some Germans to embrace racial equality. He wrote,

Encouraged by Christianity they propagated the doctrine of the equality of humans. Gypsies, Hottentots, Brazilian natives, and Germans are supposedly completely equal in value. Too bad the great teacher, nature, teaches otherwise. It teaches: This equality is nonsense. It is the greatest lie that humanity has ever been talked into. To the destruction of us Germans. There are higher and lower races! If one values the racial mish-mash, the “Tschandalen” [this was Lanz’s term for inferior human races that had resulted from a human-ape hybrid] the same as the Aryans—the noble humans—then one commits a crime against humanity… Wherever one looks in the past, the bearers of Germanic blood have always been the bearers and creators of culture.

The affinities with Hitler’s worldview are obvious: racial inequality, the role of nature in confirming racial inequality, and the Aryans as the sole creators of culture. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Sebottendorff boasted that he had laid the intellectual foundation for Nazism.

Sebottendorff’s view of Christianity was similar to Hitler’s, too. He criticized many of its features, especially its tendency to promote human equality. While appreciating Luther’s anti-Semitism, he noted that it was nonetheless deficient, because it was based on religious, not racial, considerations. He also dismissed the notion that people should turn the other cheek. Rather, he proclaimed, they should strike back until their opponent remained on the ground. Strangely, Sebottendorff thought Jesus approved of this pugnacity, for he continued, “That was also the opinion of our Savior: He came to bring the sword”…

A different movement, neo-paganism, also held sway over some leading Nazis, especially Himmler and Rosenberg. Neo-paganism, the attempt to resurrect the old Germanic gods and goddesses, sometimes overlapped with occultism, though some neo-paganists were staunch opponents of it. Both schools of thought were anti-Christian in their orientation. The occultist Sebottendorff, for example, tried to resurrect the worship of Wotan and other ancient Germanic gods. Himmler and Rosenberg saw neo-paganism as a way to bring Germans back to their original pre-Christian religion. Neo-paganism countered the universalizing tendencies of Christianity and emphasized the distinctiveness of the Aryan race, even in their religion.

Despite all these historical connections between Hitler and occultists, the popular idea that Hitler was an occultist—or at least powerfully influenced by occultism—faces serious objections…