– For the context of these translations click here –
The emperor, the clergy and the imperial unity
Louis the Pious was even more accommodating to the clergy than his father, and the many historians who call him devout, clerical and prudish are quite right. Already at the beginning of his reign, the young monarch renewed all the ordinances that had been issued in the time of his predecessors in favour of the Church of God. For this, he relied almost exclusively on clerics, mostly ‘Aquitanians’, of whom Bishop Thegan, a personage well acquainted with the emperor, said that ‘he trusted his counsellors more than necessary’.
The one who probably became the emperor’s most important adviser was the Visigoth Witiza, whom he greatly revered, with his programmatic monastic name of Second Benedict, and who was the son of the Count of Maguelonne, one of the dreaded swordsmen. In any case, this Benedict educated in the courts of Pippin III and Charles I (his feast is celebrated on 11 February), took part as a good Christian—a ‘good Christian’ certainly, as well as a ‘great soldier’—in the military campaigns of Pippin and Charles, before the tragic death of his brother pushed him to wear the monastic cowl. But he failed again and again in his ascetic career. He left the monastery of Saint-Seine in Dijon because he found it too lax. Then, at his father’s estate of Aniane in Montpellier, he drove away his first disciples with his rigorism. He then professed the monastic rules of Pachomius and Basil, because he found the Rule of Benedict of Nursia useful only ‘for weaklings and beginners’. But when he again entered into a vocational crisis, he extolled the Rule of Benedict of Nursia, which he reviled as the only valid norm for a monastic existence.
But one can hardly speak of weakness in the Benedictine Rule. When monks were rebuked by a prelate, they had to prostrate themselves at his feet until he permitted them to rise. And if a monk ran away, Benedict ordered him to be dragged back with his legs locked and whipped. The saint also ordered to have a prison in every monastery, and the monastic prisons of the Middle Ages were barbarous, and the conditions of existence in them were extremely harsh, for imprisonment ‘was equivalent in its consequences to corporal punishment’. (Schild). Moreover, this monastic reform ‘always contained a touch of bitterness against human science and culture’ (Fried).
Abbot Benedict of Aniane—to whom Louis first entrusted the Marmoutier Abbey in Alsace and then, very close to Aachen, the monastery of Inden (Kornelimünster), a new foundation generously endowed with crown goods, a kind of model abbey in the whole empire—spent much more time at court than at his monastery. The sovereign went there frequently anyway, and so he was given the name of ‘the Monk’. Benedict, who ruled over all the Frankish abbeys, remained until his death (821) the key man at court, where he dealt with trifles, memorials and complaints as well as important and serious matters, advising the emperor above all on the vast politico-ecclesiastical reform begun in 816.
The reform movement of the abbot, inspired by the Rule of Benedict of Nursia, aimed at the formation of a single Christian people out of the numerous peoples of the empire—which corresponded exactly to state policy. It sought to make Christianity the basis of all public life; moreover, it wanted to establish the Civitas Dei on earth: one God, one Church, one emperor, whose office always counted within the Church more than any ministry conferred by God. The prelates were therefore strongly interested in the unity of the empire, and their leaders passionately defended the idea of such unity. But they were in no way primarily interested in the empire, but in the Church, with the benefit of the Church foremost in their minds.
Benedict’s monastic reform, his ‘principle of one rule,’ affected not only monastic life, the so-called spiritual affairs. At least as important, if not more so, was the ecclesiastical patrimony. The emperor did not want it to be divided or diminished either in his reign or in that of his successors. He also forbade the already long flourishing soul-hunting, the luring of children into the monastery with flattery to gain their fortune, thus prohibiting a practice which had been in vogue since ancient times and which is still practised today, namely the disinheritance of relatives in favour of the churches.
The fall of Mexico to Christian arms had been followed by the subjugation of other fantastical lands: of Peru, of Brazil, and of islands named—in honour of Philip II—the Philippines. That God had ordained these conquests, and that Christians had not merely a right but a duty to prosecute them, remained, for many, a devout conviction. Idolatry, human sacrifice and all the other foul excrescences of paganism were still widely cited as justifications for Spain’s globe-spanning empire. The venerable doctrine of Aristotle—that it was to the benefit of barbarians to be ruled by ‘civilised and virtuous princes’—continued to be affirmed by theologians in Christian robes.
There was, though, an alternative way of interpreting Aristotle. In 1550, in a debate held in the Spanish city of Valladolid on whether or not the Indians were entitled to self-government, the aged Bartolomé de las Casas had more than held his own. Who were the true barbarians, he had demanded: the Indians, a people ‘gentle, patient and humble’, or the Spanish conquerors, whose lust for gold and silver was no less ravening than their cruelty? Pagan or not, every human being had been made equally by God and endowed by him with the same spark of reason. To argue, as las Casas’ opponent had done, that the Indians were as inferior to the Spaniards as monkeys were to men was a blasphemy, plain and simple.[bold added by Ed.]
‘All the peoples of the world are humans, and there is only one definition of all humans and of each one, that is that they are rational.’ Every mortal—Christian or not—had rights that derived from God. Derechos humanos, las Casas had termed them: ‘human rights’.[bold added by Ed.] It was difficult for any Christians who accepted such a concept to believe themselves superior to pagans simply by virtue of being Christian. The vastness of the world, not to mention the seemingly infinite nature of the peoples who inhabited it, served missionaries both as an incentive and as an admonition. [pages 346-347]
Bartolomé de las Casas was my father’s idol in the last decades of his life, to the extent that he composed La Santa Furia, a symphonic work accompanied by more than a hundred voices and a theatrical performance, which was premiered five years ago (watch it on YouTube here). After the premiere, I wrote a harsh critique of my father’s last symphonic work, which reflects the core of my thinking (an even harsher critique can be found on pages 376-388 of El Grial).
My father died before the premiere of his magnum opus. Among his descendants there is still a son and one of his grandsons who, because of La Santa Furia, believe in the myth of Bartolomé de las Casas: one of the founders of the black legend against Spain.
Guilt. Guilt. Guilt. See Félix Parra Hernández’s (1845–1919) painting above. That is the malware that Christian ethics installed in the white man’s soul (e.g., there are European Dominicans lobbying the Vatican to canonise Las Casas).
A soothsayer lay buried nearby who, according to Homer, had interpreted the will of Apollo to the Greeks, and instructed them, at a time when the archer god had been felling them with his plague-tipped arrows, how to appease his anger. Times, though, had changed. In 391, sacrifices had been banned on the orders of a Christian Caesar. Apollo’s golden presence had been scoured from Italy. Paulinus, in his poetry, had repeatedly celebrated the god’s banishment. Apollo’s temples had been closed, his statues smashed, his altars destroyed. By 492, he no longer visited the dreams of those who slept on the slopes of Gargano… In 391, the endemic aptitude of the Alexandrian mob for rioting had turned on the Serapeum and levelled it; four decades later, the worship of Athena had been prohibited in the Parthenon. [pages 159-160]
By the end of the fifth century, it was only out in the wildest reaches of the countryside, where candles might still be lit besides springs or crossroads, and offerings to time-worn idols made, that there remained men and women who clung to ‘the depraved customs of the past’. Bishops in their cities called such deplorables pagani: not merely ‘country people’, but ‘bumpkins’. The name of ‘pagan’, though, had soon come to have a broader application. Increasingly, from the time of Julian onwards, it had been used to refer to all those—senators as well as serfs—who were neither Christians nor Jews. It was a word that reduced the vast mass of those who did not worship the One God of Israel, from atheist philosophers to peasants fingering grubby charms, to one vast and undifferentiated mass…
Certainly no Christian could imagine that it was enough merely to have closed down their temples. The forces of darkness were both cunning and resolute in their evil. That they lurked in predatory manner, waiting for Christians to fail in their duty to God, sniffing out every opportunity to seduce them into sin, was manifest from the teachings of Christ himself. His mission, so he had declared, was to ‘drive out demons’. [page 161]
Five pages later Holland speaks of a remarkable pope:
Gregory, though, had no illusions as to the scale of Rome’s decline. A city that at its peak had boasted over a million inhabitants now held barely twenty thousand. Weeds clutched at columns erected by Augustus; silt buried pediments built to honour Constantine. The vast expanse of palaces, and triumphal arches, and race-tracks, and amphitheatres, constructed over the centuries to serve as the centre of the world, now stretched abandoned, a wilderness of ruins. Even the Senate was no more. [page 166]
The rhythms of the city—its days, its weeks, its years—had been rendered Christian. The very word religio had altered its meaning: for it had come to signify the life of a monk or a nun. Gregory, when he summoned his congregation to repentance, did so as a man who had converted his palace on the Caelian into a monastery, who had lived there as a monk himself, pledged to poverty and chastity, a living, breathing embodiment of religio. The Roman people, hearing their new pope urge them to repentance, did not hesitate to obey him. Day after day, they walked the streets, raising prayers and chanting psalms. Eighty dropped dead of the plague as they went in procession. Then, on the third day, an answer at last from the heavens. The plague-arrows stopped falling. The dying abated. The Roman people were spared obliteration…
Gregory, when he sought to make sense of the calamities being visited on Italy, turned above all to the Book of Job. Its hero, given through no fault of his own into the hands of Satan, and plunged into abject wretchedness, had endured his sufferings with steadfast fortitude. Here, so Gregory argued, was the key to understanding the shocks of his own age. Satan was abroad again. Just as Job had been cast into the dust, so now were the blameless suffering disaster alongside sinners. [pages 167-168]
Some pages later the author introduces us to the subject of how Christian eschatology began to be understood:
The new Jerusalem and the lake of fire were sides of the same coin. For the earliest Christians, a tiny minority in a world seething with hostile pagans, this reflection had tended to provide reassurance. The dead, summoned from their graves, where for years, centuries, millennia they might have been mouldering, would face only two options. The resurrection of their physical bodies would ensure an eternity either of bliss or torment. The justice that in life they might either have been denied or evaded would, at the end of days, be delivered them by Christ. Only the martyrs, those who had died in their Saviour’s name, would have been spared this period of waiting. They alone, at the moment of death, were brought by golden-winged angels in a great blaze of glory directly to the palace of God. All others, saints and sinners alike, were sentenced to wait until the hour of judgement came. This, though, was not the vision of the afterlife that had come to prevail in the West. There, far more than in the Greek world, the awful majesty of the end of days, of the bodily resurrection and the final judgement, had come to be diluted. That this was so reflected in large part the influence—ironically enough—of an Athenian philosopher. ‘When death comes to a man, the mortal part of him perishes, or so it would seem. The part which is immortal, though, retires at death’s approach, and escapes unharmed and indestructible.’ So had written Plato, a contemporary of Aristophanes and the teacher of Aristotle. No other philosopher, in the formative years of the Western Church, had exerted a profounder influence over its greatest thinkers. Augustine, who in his youth had classed himself as a Platonist, had still, long after his conversion to Christianity, hailed his former master as the pagan ‘who comes nearest to us’. That the soul was immortal; that it was incorporeal; that it was immaterial: all these were propositions that Augustine had derived not from scripture, but from Athens’ greatest philosopher. Plato’s influence on the Western Church had, in the long run, proven decisive. [pages 171-172]
I have always been suspicious of Plato and Aristotle for the simple fact that they were the pagan philosophers that Christianity spared in the Middle Ages. What did all those pagans whose works disappeared with the destruction of the Library of Alexandria have to say?
Monks who knelt for hours in sheeting rain, or laboured on empty stomachs at tasks properly suited to slaves, did so in the hope of transcending the limitations of the fallen world. The veil that separated the heavenly from the earthly seemed, to their admirers, almost parted by their efforts. ‘Mortal men, so people believed, were living the lives of angels.’ Nowhere else in the Christian West were saints quite as tough, quite as manifestly holy, as they were in Ireland.
That the island had been won for Christ was a miracle in itself. Roman rule had never reached its shores. Instead, sometime in the mid-fifth century, Christianity had been preached there by an escaped slave. Patrick, a young Briton kidnapped by pirates and sold across the Irish Sea, was revered by Irish Christians not just for having brought them to Christ, but for the template of holiness with which he had provided them. Whether working as a shepherd, or fleeing his master by ship, or returning to Ireland to spread the word of God, angels had spoken to him, and guided him in all he did; nor had he hesitated, when justifying his mission, to invoke the imminence of the end of the world. A century on from Patrick’s death, the monks and nuns of Ireland still bore his stamp. They owed no duty save to God, and to their ‘father’—their ‘abbot’. Monasteries, like the ringforts that dotted the country, were proudly independent. [pages 173-174]
The infinite mendacity of Christianity is particularly noticeable in Ireland. It is known that the average Irish person has a relatively low IQ compared to the European countries with the highest IQ. It was sheer stupidity to inject seminal chalice into the asses of the novices, instead of impregnating the Irish women. The Catholic vows of celibacy resulted in the poor monks burning themselves internally, trying to calm their impetus with the cloistered ephebes: a dysgenesis opposite to what the Jews have been done for centuries. Even rabbis marry, promoting eugenics that has led them to conquer the highest IQ.
An iron discipline served to maintain them. Only a rule that was ‘strict, holy and constant, exalted, just and admirable’ could bring men and women to the dimension of the heavenly. Monks were expected to be as proficient in the strange and book-learned language of Latin as at felling trees; as familiar with the few, ferociously cherished classics of Christian literature that had reached Ireland as toiling in a field. Like Patrick, they believed themselves to stand in the shadow of the end days; like Patrick, they saw exile from their families and their native land as the surest way to an utter dependence upon God. Not all headed for the gale-lashed isolation of a rock in the Atlantic. Some crossed the sea to Britain, and there preached the gospel to the kings of barbarous peoples who still set up idols and wallowed in paganism: the Picts, the Saxons, the Angles. Others, heading southwards, took ship for the land of the Franks.
Columbanus—‘the Little Dove’—arrived in Francia in 590: the same year that Gregory was elected pope. The Irish monk, unlike the Roman aristocrat, came from the ends of the earth, without status, without pedigree; and yet, by sheer force of charisma, he would set the Latin West upon a new and momentous course. Schooled in the ferociously exacting monasticism of his native land, Columbanus appeared to the Franks a figure of awesome and even terrifying holiness. [pages 174-175]
This [eternity], when supplicants ventured through the woods that surrounded Luxeuil and approached the settlement founded by Columbanus, was what they hoped to find. The very wall that enclosed the monastery, raised by the saint’s own hand, proclaimed the triumph of the City of God over that of man. The shattered fragments of bath-houses and temples had been built into its fabric: pillars, pediments, broken statuary. These, converted to the uses of religio, were the bric-à-brac of what Augustine, two centuries previously, had identified as the order of the saeculum. [page 177]
No surprise, then, that in time the wings of the most powerful angel of them all should have been heard beating golden over Columbanus’ native land. Almost certainly, it was Irish monks studying in Bobbio who brought home with them the cult of Saint Michael. From Italy to Ireland, the charisma of the warrior archangel came to radiate across the entire West. [page 178]
An icon depicting the Archangel Michael in St Mark’s Basilica, Venice, 11th century. This image appears in Holland’s book.
In pre-Christian times, pagan scholars had shown little interest in the Hebrew Bible. Jewish writers (Aristobulus of Paneas, Artapan of Alexandria) had tried to bluff the Greeks on the antiquity of the Torah, claiming that Homer, Hesiod, Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato had been inspired by Moses, but no one before the Church Fathers seems to have taken them seriously. Jews had even produced fake Greek prophecies of their success under the title Sibylline Oracles, and written under a Greek pseudonym a Letter of Aristea to Philocrates praising Judaism, but again, it was not until the triumph of Christianity that these texts were met with Gentile gullibility.
Thanks to Christianity, the Jewish Tanakh was elevated to the status of authoritative history, and Jewish authors writing for pagans, such as Josephus and Philo, gained undeserved reputation—while being ignored by rabbinic Judaism. Christian academia uncritically tuned to the rigged history of the Jews. While Herodotus had crossed Syria-Palestine around 450 BCE without hearing about Judeans or Israelites, Christian historians decided that Jerusalem had been at that time the center of the world, and accepted as fact the totally fictitious empire of Solomon. Until the 19th century, world history was calibrated on a largely fanciful biblical chronology (Egyptology is now trying to recover from it).[4]
It can be argued, of course, that the Old Testament has served Christendom well: it was certainly not in the nonviolence of Christ that the Catholic Church found the energy and ideological means to impose its world order for nearly a thousand years on Western Europe. Yet for this glorious past, there was obviously a price to pay, a debt to the Jews that has to be paid one way or another. It is as if Christianity has sold its soul to the god of Israel, in exchange for its great accomplishment.
The Church has always advertised itself to the Jews as the gateway out of the prison of the Law, into the freedom of Christ. But it has never requested Jewish converts to leave their Torah on the doorstep. The Jews who entered the Church entered with their Bible, that is to say, with a big part of their Jewishness, while freeing themselves from all the civil restrictions imposed on their non-converted brethren.
When Jews were judged too slow to convert willingly, they were sometimes forced into baptism under threats of expulsion or death. The first documented case goes back to Clovis’ grandson, according to Bishop Gregory of Tours:
King Chilperic commanded that a large number of Jews be baptized, and he himself held several on the fonts. But many were baptized only in body and not in heart; they soon returned to their deceitful habits, for they really kept the Sabbath, and pretended to honour the Sunday (History of the Franks, chapter V).
Such collective forced conversions, producing only insincere and resentful Christians, were conducted throughout the Middle Ages. Hundreds of thousands of Spanish and Portuguese Jews were forced to convert at the end of the 15th century, before emigrating throughout Europe. Many of these ‘New Christians’ not only continued to ‘Judaize’ among themselves, but could now have greater influence on the ‘Old Christians’. The penetration of the Jewish spirit into the Roman Church, under the influence of these reluctantly converted Jews and their descendants, is a much more massive phenomenon than is generally admitted.
One case in point is the Jesuit Order, whose foundation coincided with the peak of the Spanish repression against Marranos, with the 1547 ‘purity-of-blood’ legislation issued by the Archbishop of Toledo and Inquisitor General of Spain. Of the seven founding members, four at least were of Jewish ancestry. The case of Loyola himself is unclear, but he was noted for his strong philo-Semitism. Robert Markys has demonstrated, in a groundbreaking study, how crypto-Jews infiltrated key positions in the Jesuit Order from its very beginning, resorting to nepotism in order to eventually establish a monopoly on top positions that extended to the Vatican. King Phillip II of Spain called the Order a ‘Synagogue of Hebrews.’[5]
Marranos established in the Spanish Netherlands played an important role in the Calvinist movement. According to Jewish historian Lucien Wolf,
The Marranos in Antwerp had taken an active part in the Reformation movement, and had given up their mask of Catholicism for a not less hollow pretense of Calvinism… The simulation of Calvinism brought them new friends, who, like them, were enemies of Rome, Spain and the Inquisition… Moreover, it was a form of Christianity which came nearer to their own simple Judaism.[6]
Calvin himself had learned Hebrew from rabbis and heaped praise on the Jewish people. He wrote in his commentary on Psalm 119: ‘Where did Our Lord Jesus Christ and his apostles draw their doctrine, if not Moses? And when we peel off all the layers, we find that the Gospel is simply an exhibition of what Moses had already said.’ The Covenant of God with the Jewish people is irrevocable because ‘no promise of God can be undone.’ That Covenant, ‘in its substance and truth, is so similar to ours, that we can call them one. The only difference is the order in which they were given.’[7]
Within one century, Calvinism, or Puritanism, became a dominant cultural and political force in England. Jewish historian Cecil Roth explains:
The religious developments of the seventeenth century brought to its climax an unmistakable philo-semitic tendency in certain English circles. Puritanism represented above all a return to the Bible, and this automatically fostered a more favourable frame of mind towards the people of the Old Testament.[8]
Some British Puritans went so far as to consider the Leviticus as still in force; they circumcised their children and scrupulously respected the Sabbath. Under Charles I (1625–1649), wrote Isaac d’Israeli (father of Benjamin Disraeli), ‘it seemed that religion chiefly consisted of Sabbatarian rigours; and that a British senate had been transformed into a company of Hebrew Rabbis.’[9] Wealthy Jews started to marry their daughters into the British aristocracy, to the extent that, according to Hilaire Belloc’s estimate, ‘with the opening of the twentieth century those of the great territorial English families in which there was no Jewish blood were the exception.’[10]
The influence of Puritanism on many aspects of British society naturally extended to the United States. The national mythology of the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ fleeing Egypt (Anglican England) and settling into the Promised Land as the new chosen people, sets the tone. However, the Judaization of American Christianity has not been a spontaneous process from within, but rather one controlled by skillful manipulations from outside. For the 19th century, a good example is the Scofield Reference Bible, published in 1909 by Oxford University Press, under the sponsorship of Samuel Untermeyer, a Wall Street lawyer, Federal Reserve co-founder, and devoted Zionist, who would become the herald of the ‘holy war’ against Germany in 1933. The Scofield Bible is loaded with highly tendentious footnotes. For example, Yahweh’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 12:1-3 gets a two-thirds-page footnote explaining that ‘God made an unconditional promise of blessings through Abram’s seed to the nation of Israel to inherit a specific territory forever’ (although Jacob, who first received the name Israel, was not yet born). The same note explains that ‘Both OT and NT are full of post-Sinaitic promises concerning Israel and the land which is to be Israel’s everlasting possession,’ accompanied by ‘a curse laid upon those who persecute the Jews,’ or ‘commit the sin of anti-Semitism.’[11]
As a result of this kind of gross propaganda, most American Evangelicals regard the creation of Israel in 1948 and its military victory in 1967 as miracles fulfilling biblical prophecies and heralding the second coming of Christ. Jerry Falwell declared, ‘Right at the very top of our priorities must be an unswerving commitment and devotion to the state of Israel,’ while Pat Robertson said ‘The future of this Nation [America] may be at stake, because God will bless those that bless Israel.’ As for John Hagee, chairman of Christians United for Israel, he once declared: ‘The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West.’[12]
Gullible Christians not only see God’s hand whenever Israel advances in its self-prophesized destiny of world domination, but are ready to see Israeli leaders themselves as prophets when they announce their own false-flag crimes.[13]
________
[4] Read Gunnar Heinsohn, “The Restauration of Ancient History” (webpage), “The Revision of Ancient History – A Perspective” (webpage).
[5] Robert A. Markys, The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews: Jesuits of Jewish Ancestry and Purity-of-Blood Laws in the Early Society of Jesus, Brill, 2009.
[6] Lucien Wolf, Report on the “Marranos” or Crypto-Jews of Portugal, Anglo-Jewish Association, 1926.
[7] Vincent Schmid, “Calvin et les Juifs : Prémices du dialogue judéo-chrétien chez Jean Calvin,” 2008, on www.racinesetsources.ch.
[8] Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England (1941), Clarendon Press, 1964, p. 148.
[9] Isaac Disraeli, ‘Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the First, King of England’, 2 vols., 1851, quoted in Archibald Maule Ramsay, The Nameless War, 1952 (archive.org).
[10] Hilaire Belloc, The Jews, Constable & Co., 1922 (archive.org), p. 223.
[11] Joseph Canfield, The Incredible Scofield and His Book, Ross House Books, 2004, pp. 219–220.
[12] Jill Duchess of Hamilton, God, Guns and Israel: Britain, The First World War And The Jews in the Holy City, The History Press, 2009 , kindle, e. 414-417.
[13] Michael Evans, The American Prophecies, Terrorism and Mid-East Conflict Reveal a Nation’s Destiny.
On this site, I have been using the metaphor of the three-eyed raven’s cave in the sense that for a real intrapsychic metamorphosis it is necessary to cut oneself off from human society for decades. Even Hitler once fantasised about becoming a Benedictine monk. A Trappist monk (my father, by the way, loved some Trappist monks he met in Spain in Franco’s time), Thomas Merton, wrote something that portrays what I have come to know precisely by going into that cave for most of my life:
"The world of men has forgotten the joys of silence, the peace of solitude which is necessary, to some extent, for the fullness of human living. Not all men are called to be hermits, but all men need enough silence and solitude in their lives to enable the deep inner voice of their own true self to be heard at least occasionally. When that inner voice is not heard, when man cannot attain to the spiritual peace that comes from being perfectly at one with his own true self, his life is always miserable and exhausting. For he cannot go on happily for long unless he is in contact with the springs of spiritual life which are hidden in the depths of his own soul. If man is constantly exiled from his own home, locked out of his own spiritual solitude, he ceases to be a true person. He no longer lives as a man. He becomes a kind of automaton, living without joy because he has lost his spontaneity. He is no longer moved from within, but only from outside himself".
Naturally, Hitler and I would object to Merton and the young Americans who wanted to emulate him after World War II that true wisdom is not to be gained in Catholic hermitages, but in pagan caves where the magic of the old religions allows us to see the historical past as it happened (the metaphor of the third-eyed raven). If the young men who wanted to emulate Merton had opened their third eye, they would have realised that they fought on the wrong side in WW2 (just imagine seeing the Hellstorm atrocities with your own eyes!).
Nevertheless, what Merton says about the solitude of the hermit is true.
Only by separating ourselves from our fellow human beings to develop the inner self is it possible to understand what is going on. Alas, no normie or racialist today, as far as I know, has gone through the initiatory process that Hitler went through so well, as explained in the book we recently translated for this site by Savitri Devi.
It is curious, to say the least, that this extraordinary episode—which, apart from its own ‘resonance’ of truth, is guaranteed by Kubizek’s ignorance of the superhuman realm—has not, to my knowledge, been commented on by any of those who have tried to link National Socialism to ‘occult’ sources. Even the authors who have—quite wrongly!—wanted to attribute to the Führer a nature of ‘medium’ have not, as far as I know, attempted to use it. Instead, they have insisted on the immense power of suggestion which he exercised not only over crowds (and women), but on all those who came, even if only occasionally, into contact with him; on men as coldly detached as a Himmler; on soldiers as realistic as an Otto Skorzeny, a Hans-Ulrich Rudel or a Degrelle.
Now, it is ignorance of the first elements of the science of para-psychic phenomena to consider as ‘medium’ one who enjoys such power. A medium is the one who receives, who undergoes suggestion; not the one who is capable of inflicting it on others, and especially many others. This power is the privilege of the hypnotist or magnetizer, and in this case of a magnetizer of a stature that borders on the superhuman; of a magnetizer capable for his benefit—or rather for the idea, of which he wants to be the promoter—to play the role of a ‘medium’ to the strongest, the stalest, the most resistant to any affecting.
One is not both a magnetiser and a medium. We are one or the other, or neither. And if we want to include some ‘para-psychic’ in the history of Adolf Hitler’s political career—as I believe we are entitled to do—then the magnetizer is him, whose power of exalting and transforming human beings, by the mere spoken word, is comparable to that which Orpheus exerted, it is said, by the enchantment of his lyre, on people and beasts. The ‘medium’ is the German people, almost all of them—and some non-Germans throughout the world, to whom the radio transmitted the bewitching Voice.
The episode mentioned above, of which I have translated Augustus Kubizek’s account, [1] could very well serve as an argument in favour of the presence of ‘medium gifts’ in the young Adolf Hitler if these so-called gifts weren’t contradicted resoundingly, precisely by the astonishing power of suggestion which he didn’t cease to exercise throughout his career on the multitudes and practically all the people. Indeed, Kubizek tells us that he had the distinct impression that ‘another I’ had spoken through his friend; that the stream of prophetic eloquence had seemed to flow from him as from a force alien to him. Now, if the adolescent speaker had nothing of the ‘medium’ about him; if he was in no way possessed by ‘an Other’—god or the devil, whatever; in any case not himself—what then was this ‘other I’ who seemed to take his place during that unforgettable hour on the summit of the Freienberg, under the stars, and to substitute him so completely that the friend would have had some difficulty in recognising him, hadn’t he continued to see him?
Understandably, Auguste Kubizek didn’t ‘dare to pass judgment’ on this. However, he speaks of an ‘ecstatic state’, of ‘complete rapture’ (völlige Entrückung) and the transposition of the visionary’s experience onto ‘another plane, tailored to him’ (auf eine andere, ihm gemässe Ebene). Moreover, this recent living experience—the impression made on him by the story of the 14th-century Roman tribune translated and interpreted by Wagner’s music—had been, the witness tells us, only the ‘external impulse’ which had led him to the vision of the personal as well as the national future; in other words, which had served as the occasion for the adolescent’s access to a new consciousness: a consciousness in which space and time, and the individual state that is linked to these limitations, are transcended.
This would mean that the ‘other plane to the measure’ of the young Adolf Hitler was nothing less than that of the ‘eternal present’ and that, far from having been ‘possessed’ by an alien entity, the future master of the multitudes had become master of the Centre of his being; that he had, under the mysterious influence of his initiator—Wagner—taken the great decisive step on the path of esoteric knowledge, undergone the first irreversible mutation—the opening of the ‘third eye’ which had made him an ‘Edenic man’.
______ 卐 ______
Editor’s Note: Are you finally beginning to understand the metaphor that I have used so many times on this site (the symbol of the three-eyed raven)?
______ 卐 ______
He had just acquired the degree of being corresponding to what is called, in initiatory language, the Little Mysteries. And the ‘other I’ which had spoken through his mouth of things that his daily conscious self was still unaware of, or perhaps only half-perceived ‘as if through a veil’, a few hours before, was his true ‘I’ and that of all the living: the Being, with whom he had just realized his identification.
It may seem strange to the vast majority of my readers—including those who still venerate him as ‘our Führer forever’—that he could, at such an astonishingly young age, have shown such an awakening to supra-sensible realities. Among the men who aspire with all their ardour to essential knowledge, how many are there, in fact, who grow old in meditation and pious exercises without yet reaching this level? But if there is one area where the most fundamental inequality and the most blatant appearance of ‘arbitrariness’ reigns, it is this.
God places his august sign on the forehead of whoever pleases him;
He has forsaken the eagle, and chosen the birdie,
Said the monk. Why did he do this? Who shall tell? Nobody![2]
There is no impossibility for an exceptional adolescent to cross the barrier opened to the mind in search of principled truth, initiation into the Little Mysteries. According to what is still told in India about his life, the great Sankaracharya was one of these. And twenty-two centuries earlier, Akhnaton, king of Egypt, was also sixteen years old when he began to preach the cult of Aten, Essence of the Sun, of which the ‘Disc’ is only the visible symbol. And everything leads us to believe that there were others, less and less rare as we go back for the cycle in which we live the last centuries.
If, on the other hand, one sees in Adolf Hitler one of the figures—and undoubtedly the penultimate one—of the One who returns when all seems lost; the most recent of the many precursors of the supreme divine incarnation or of the last messenger of the Eternal (the Mahdi of the Mahometans; the Christ returned in glory of the Christians; the Maitreya of the Buddhists; the Saoshyant of the Mazdeans; the Kalki of the Hindus) or by whatever name one wishes to call him, who is to end this cycle and usher in the Golden Age of the next, then all becomes clear.
For then, naturally, he was an adolescent and before that, already an exceptional child: a child whose sign, a word, a nothing (or what might seem ‘a nothing’ to anyone else) was enough to awaken his intellectual intuition. So, it is not impossible to think that, from the school years 1896-97, 1897-98 (and partly 1898-99), which he spent as a pupil at the Benedictine abbey of Lambach-an-Traun, in Upper Austria, the magic of the Holy Swastika—a powerful cosmic symbol, an immemorial evocator of the principal truth—seized him, penetrated him, dominated him; that he had, beyond the exhilarating solemnity of Catholic worship, identified with it forever.
For the Reverend Father Theodorich Hagen, Abbot of Lambach, had, thirty years earlier, this sacred sign engraved on the walls, on the woodwork, in every corner of the monastery, however paradoxical such an action may seem ‘without counterpart in a Christian convent’.[3] And as he sang in the choir the young Adolf, nine years old in 1898, ten years old in 1899, had ‘right in front of him’ on ‘the high back of the abbot’s chair’, in the very centre of Father Hagen’s heraldic shield, the ancient Symbol now destined to remain forever attached to his name.
It is natural, then, that he should have been aware very early on, in parallel with his opening up to the world of Essences, of what had to be done in this visible and tangible world, at the eleventh hour, a ‘recovery’; or even only to suggest one—to sound the last, supreme warning of the Gods, in case the universal decadence was irredeemable (as indeed it seems to be). And, as Kubizek reports, there is every reason to believe that this was the case, since even at the time of his extraordinary awakening the future Führer spoke of the ‘mission’ (Auftrag) he was to receive one day, to lead the people ‘from bondage to the heights of freedom’.[4]
__________
[1] There is a French edition of Auguste Kubizek’s book Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund, published by Gallimard. Unfortunately, the original text has been shortened. The most interesting passages of this story are not included in the translation.
[2] Leconte de Lisle in the poem entitled ‘Hieronymus’, in Poèmes tragiques.
[3] Brissaud : Hitler et l’Ordre Noir, page 23.
[4] Kubizek: Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund, page 140.
Several years ago, Brad Griffin of Occidental Dissent posted articles in which he blamed liberal republicanism and ‘the spread of evangelical Christianity’ for today’s suicidal liberalism: a clever way of avoiding the C-word, Christianity without adjectives. Today Kevin MacDonald did the same in The Occidental Observer: he blamed a specific form of Christianity, Yankee puritanism, for today’s suicidal liberalism. In ‘Massive blindspot’ on Friday I wrote: ‘Instead of seeing the elephant in the room, Christian ethics, they fixate on these trifles’.
It is very easy to reply to these racialists. First of all, Americans tend to only see their belly button. If we introduce the history of Latin America in the racial discourse, it is clear that from the Rio Grande to Argentina the Europeans of the Iberian Peninsula managed to develop an ethnosuicidal ideology without the influence of Protestant puritanism.
But our voice is not heard by the majority of American racialists. Last month, for example, no one commented on ‘Reflections of an Aryan woman, 5’. There I denounced my father’s symphonic work, where he honours a Spanish monk. As early as the 16th century, my father boasted, some monks who emigrated to the Americas behaved as true precursors of (so-called) human rights.
In my previous post I cited the best definition of Christianity that I’ve ever heard: ‘Christianity, in essence, means not the number of priests ordained: but the number of niggers loved’. Well, south of the Rio Grande we could rephrase that definition like this: ‘Christianity means not the number of Catholic priests ordained but the number of nacos loved’. (In Mexico naco is equivalent to the North American nigger, although referring to the Amerinds.) The number of nacos loved by the Spanish and Portuguese was such that in Latin America, unlike the Anglo-Germans of the north, they weren’t cornered in special territories. This very Christian practise resulted in the greatest miscegenation in history: a whole continent, where Europeans irrevocably stained their blood.
The important thing to note here is that my late father was right: Spain brought with it the monastic orders dedicated to protecting the Indian with zeal. Without the help of Protestant puritanism or republican liberalism, the Europeans in the Spanish and Portuguese part of the continent practised a racial harakiri, of which today we see the consequences only by turning on the TV.
MacDonald and the white nationalists will continue to avoid the word. Alas, I can’t even say that racial science will advance during the burials of the old proponents of white nationalism because even the young nationalists—not just Griffin—avoid the C-word!
It cannot be repeated or emphasised enough: intolerance, religious or philosophical, is characteristic of devotees of ‘man’ regardless of any consideration of race or personality. As a result, it is the real racists who show the greatest tolerance.
No doubt racists demand from their comrades in arms absolute fidelity to the common faith. This is not ‘intolerance’; it is a question of order. Everyone must know what they want, and not adhere to a doctrine and then make reservations about it. Whoever has objections to formulate—and above all, objections concerning the basic values of the doctrine—has only to remain outside the community of the faithful, and not to pretend to be the comrade of those with whom he does not share faith entirely. No doubt also the racist is ready to fight men who act, and even who think, as enemies of their race. But he does not fight them in order to change them, to convert them. If they stay in their place, and stop opposing him and his blood brothers, he leaves them alone—for he is not interested enough in them to care about their fate, in this world or into another.
In the third Book of his Essays, Montaigne laments that the Americas were not conquered ‘by the Greeks or the Romans’, rather than by the Spaniards and the Portuguese. He believes that the New World would never have known the horrors committed to converting the native to a religion considered by the conquerors to be the ‘only’ good, the only true one.
What he does not say; what, perhaps, he had not understood, is that it is precisely the absence of racism and the love of ‘man’ that are at the root of these horrors. The Greeks and Romans—and all ancient peoples—were racists, at least during their time of greatness. As such they found it quite natural that different peoples had different gods, and different customs. They did not get involved in imposing their own gods and customs on the vanquished, under pain of extermination.
Even the Jews did not do this. They so despised all those who sacrificed to gods other than Yahweh, that they were content—on the order of this god, says the Bible—to exterminate them without seeking to convert them. They imposed on them the terror of war—not that ‘spiritual terror’ which, as Adolf Hitler so aptly writes, ‘entered for the first time into the Ancient World, until then much freer than ours, with the appearance of Christianity’.[1] The Spaniards, the Portuguese, were Christians. They imposed terror of war and spiritual terror on the Americas.
What would the Greeks of ancient Greece have done in their place, or the Romans or other Aryan people who would have had, in the sixteenth century, the spirit of our racists of the twentieth? They would undoubtedly have conquered the countries; they would have exploited them economically. But they would have left to the Aztecs, Tlaxcaltecs, Mayans, etc., as well as the peoples of Peru, their gods and their customs. Furthermore, they would have fully exploited the belief of these peoples in a ‘white and bearded’ god, civiliser of their country, who, after having left their ancestors many centuries before, was to return from the East, to reign over them—their descendants—with his companions: men of fair complexion. Their leaders would have acted, and ordered their soldiers to act, so that the natives effectively take them for the god Quetzalcoatl and his army.[2] They would have respected the temples—instead of destroying them and building on their ruins monuments of a foreign cult. They would have been tough, sure—as all conquerors are but they would not have been sacrilegious. They would not have been the destroyers of civilisations that, even with their weaknesses, were worth their own.
The Romans, so tolerant of religion, have on occasion persecuted adherents of certain cults. The religion of the Druids was, for example, banned in Gaul by Emperor Claudius. And there were those persecutions of the early Christians, which we talked about too much, without always knowing what we were saying. But all of these repressive measures were purely political, not doctrinal—not ethical. It was as leaders of the clandestine resistance of the Celts against Roman domination, and not as priests of a cult which might have appeared unusual to the conquerors, that the Druids were stripped of their privileges (in particular, of their monopoly of teaching young people) and prosecuted. It was as bad citizens, who refused to pay homage to the Emperor-god, the embodiment of the State, and not as devotees of a particular god, that Christians were persecuted.
If in the sixteenth century Indo-European conquerors, faithful to the spirit of tolerance which has always characterised their race, had made themselves masters of the Americas by exploiting the indigenous belief in the return of the white god, Quetzalcoatl,[3] there would have been no resistance to their domination, therefore no occasion for the persecution of the kind I have just recalled. Not only would the peoples of the New World never have known the atrocities of the Holy Inquisition, but their writings (as for those who, like the Mayans and Aztecs, had them) and their monuments would have survived.
And in Tenochtitlan, which over the centuries had become one of the great capitals of the world, the imposing multi-storey pyramids—intact—would now dominate modern streets. And the palaces and fortresses of Cuzco would still be admired by visitors. And the solar and warlike religions of the peoples of Mexico and Peru, while evolving, probably, in contact with that of the victors, at least in their external forms, would have kept their basic principles, and continued to transmit, from generation to generation, the eternal esoteric truths under their particular symbolism. In other words, they would have settled in Central America and in the former Empire of the Incas Aryan dynasties, whose relations with the conquered countries would have been more or less similar to those which they formerly had maintained, with the aristocracy and the peoples of India, the Greek dynasties who, from the third century BC to the first after the Christian era, ruled over what is now Afghanistan, Sindh and Punjab.
______ 卐 ______
Note of the Editor: William Pierce’s Who We Are was published after Savitri Devi’s book. She didn’t grasp the full meaning that the Aryans of India would, over many centuries, succumb to what happened to the Iberian Europeans in a few centuries: interbreeding with the Indians. Since Savitri was female, because of her yin nature she couldn’t see tremendously yang issues, like what Pierce tells us about extermination or expulsion.
The yin wisdom of the priestess (her loyal Hitlerism, something that Pierce lacked) must be balanced with the yang input of the priest (an exterminationist drive, something that priestess usually lack).
______ 卐 ______
Unfortunately, Europe itself in the sixteenth century had long since succumbed to that spirit of intolerance which it had, along with Christianity, received from the Jews. The history of the wars of religion bears witness to this, in Germany as well as in France. And as for the old Hellenic-Aegean blood—the very blood of the ‘ancient world’, once so tolerant—it was won in the service of the Roman Church: represented, among the conquerors of Peru, in the person of Pedro de Candia, Cretan adventurer, one of Francisco Pizarro’s most ruthless companions.
I will be told that the cruelties committed in the name of the salvation of souls, by the Spaniards in their colonies—and by the Portuguese in theirs (the Inquisition was, in Goa, perhaps even worse than in Mexico, which is not little to say!)—are no more attributable to true Christianity than to Aryan racism as understood by the Führer, unnecessary acts of violence, carried out without orders, during the Second World War, by some men in German uniforms. I am told that neither Cortés nor Pizarro nor their companions, nor the Inquisitors of Goa or Europe, nor those who approved their actions, loved man as Christ would have wanted his disciples to love him.
That is true. These people were not humanitarians. And I never claimed they were. But they were humanists, not in the narrow sense of ‘scholars’, but in the broad sense: men for whom man was, in the visible world at least, the supreme value. They were, anyway, people who bathed in the atmosphere of a civilisation centred on the cult of ‘man’, whom they neither denounced nor fought—quite the contrary! They were not necessarily—they were even very rarely—kind to humans of other races (even theirs!) as Jesus wanted everyone to be. But even in their worst excesses, they venerated in him, even without loving him, Man, the only living being created, according to their faith, ‘in the image of God’, and provided with an immortal soul, or at least—in the eyes of those who in their hearts had already detached themselves from the Church, as, later, to those of so many list colonialists of the eighteenth or nineteenth century—the only living being endowed with reason.
Note of the Editor: Left, a monk pitying and loving a conquered Amerindian (mural by Orozco in Mexico).
They worshipped him, despite the atrocities they committed against him, individually or collectively. And, even if some of them, in the secrecy of their thoughts, did not revere him more than they did love him, not granting him, if he was only a ‘savage’, neither soul nor right soul—after all, there were Christians who refused to attribute to women a soul similar to their own—this does not change the fact that the ‘civilisation’ of which they claimed, and of which they were the agents, proclaimed the love and respect for every man, and the duty to help him access ‘happiness’, if not in this earthly life, at least in the Hereafter.
It has sometimes been maintained that any action undertaken in the colonies, including missionary action, was, even without the knowledge of those who carried it out, remotely guided by businessmen who did not have them in sight, only material profit and nothing else. It has been suggested that the Church itself was only following the plans and carrying out the orders of such men—which would partly explain why it seems to have been far more interested in the souls of the natives than in those of the conquering chiefs and soldiers—who, however, sinned so scandalously against the great commandment of Christ: the law of love. Even if all these allegations were based on historical facts that could be proven, one would still be forced to admit that colonial wars would have been impossible, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century (and especially perhaps in the nineteenth), without the belief, then generally widespread in Europe, that they provided the opportunity to ‘save’ souls, and to ‘civilise savages’.
This belief that Christianity was the ‘true’ faith for ‘all’ men, and that the standards of conduct of Europe marked by Christianity were also for ‘all’ men—the criterion of ‘civilisation’—was questioned by no one. The leaders who led the colonial wars, the adventurers, soldiers and brigands who waged them, the settlers who benefited from them, shared it—even if, in the eyes of most of them, the hope of material profit was in the foreground less as important, if not more, than the eternal salvation of the natives. And whether they had shared it or not, they were nonetheless supported, in their action, by this collective belief of their distant continent, of the whole Christendom.
______ 卐 ______
Note of the Editor: That is very true. For example, in the last decades of his life my very Catholic father became obsessed with the biography of a 16th-century Spanish monk who made several trips from the Old to the New World to protect the rights of the Amerindians; so much so that my father dedicated his magnum opus, La Santa Furia (Holy Wrath), to him. This is a composition with three series of woods, six horns, three trumpets, four trombones and tuba, two harps, piano and timpani, percussion instruments among which were some pre-Hispanic, as well as a solo vocal quartet, a sextet of men and a choir mixed with four voices: 115 choristers in total and 90 orchestral musicians: a one-hour symphonic work that can be watched on YouTube:
It was precisely my father’s behaviour—cf. my eleven books in Spanish—that prompted me to repudiate not only Catholicism but Christian axiology, becoming a true apostate of Christianity. Savitri concludes:
______ 卐 ______
It is this belief which—officially—justified their wars which, if they had been waged in the conditions in which they were waged, but solely in the name of profit, or even security (as had been the wars of the Mongolian conquerors in the thirteenth century), would have seemed ‘inhuman’. It was such conquest that, still officially, defined the spirit of their conduct towards the natives. From there this haste to convert him—willingly, by force or using ‘bribes’—to their Christian faith, or to make him share the ‘treasures’ of their culture, in particular to initiate him to their sciences, while making him lose all contact with his own.
_______________
[1] Mein Kampf, German edition of 1935, p. 507.
[2] Or, in Peru, for the god Viracocha. The Peruvians had initially called the Spaniards Viracochas.
In this morning’s post we saw that Karlheinz Deschner used the word ‘Gentiles’ not to refer to the Jewish-Gentile dichotomy, but in the context that Pope Gregory despised unconverted whites, ‘Gentiles’. We also translated a phrase from Deschner’s book like this: ‘And in 598 he ordered Agnelo of Terracina to seek out the tree worshipers and punish them so that “paganism” would not be passed on to others’. Compare that phrase to a poem I collected for On Beth’s Cute Tits:
Not in cold marble stones,
Not in temples dull and dead:
In the fresh oak groves
Weaves and rustles the German God.
Not long ago I ordered fifteen booklets from Third Reich Books: Translations of the Originals. Although I have been quoting the phrases of one of them, yesterday I discovered that another booklet published under the Nazi regime contained a Semitic tail. That caught my attention, but that schizophrenic tail supports the thesis of this site: Without a proper diagnosis of the aetiology of Aryan decline, it will be impossible to elaborate the medicine to save the fair race from its current psychosis.
The booklet I’m referring to is titled Looking East: Germany Beyond the Vistula which contains several essays, all very short, but the tail only appears in the first essay written by Erich Maschke: a German historian and professor during the Nazi regime.
The best way to show that even in the Third Reich a Semitic tail lingered is to remember that Christianity forced all whites to worship the god of their ethnic enemies. The ancient Germans, a noble people as Tacitus saw it, were reluctant to worship it. Alas, Maschke was a Christian. For this reason he was blind to the most elemental historical reality. In his short essay Maschke used the pejorative term ‘heathen’ eleven times to refer to the Germans who resisted abandoning the Aryan Gods to worship a Semitic god.
The best way to revalue what Maschke wrote is simply to substitute his term ‘heathen’ for ‘whites reluctant to worship the god of the Jews’. I’ll use italics when replacing Maschke’s Christian Newspeak with Oldspeak:
The Teutonic Order and its Significance in History of East Prussia
Seven centuries have passed since the Knights of the Teutonic Order crossed the Vistula and began the conquest of Prussia and the preaching Christianity; seven centuries since towns and cities rose and German peasants turned with their ploughs the sods which till then the iron had not stirred from their primaeval rest.
Battle is the beginning of Prussian history. The Knights of the Brotherhood were summoned to the aid of a Masovian duke who could no longer defend himself from the Prussians reluctant to worship the god of the Jews. By force of arms must the Brothers subdue or drive out the tribes reluctant to worship the god of the Jews and for their reward the lordship of the land was to be theirs. And yet that was not the real object of the fight which the Knights of 1231 now began. What their aim was can be seen in a letter addressed to the Brotherhood by Pope Gregory IX in the previous year. ‘To win the land from the Prussians’, he writes, ‘go boldly forward, armed with the might of heaven, that with God’s [the god of the Jews] help His kingdom may be established and the fear of Him spread abroad to the uttermost boundaries’. This then was the aim and object of the struggle which seven centuries ago began on the banks of the Vistula, the spreading of the Faith.
Today we are far removed from the belief that faith can be inoculated at the point of the sword but in those times it was considered a matter of course. War against those reluctant to worship the god of the Jews was the highest duty, the greatest sacrifice which a man could offer.
A religious war was not to be confused with a war of conquest. The great English philosopher, John of Salisbury, said of the Brotherhood at this time: ‘Of hardly any others can it be said that they are waging a just war’. It was this belief that inspired the mightiest expression of Western faith, the Crusades to the Holy Land for the liberation of Jerusalem. The expeditions which the Teutonic Knights conducted against those reluctant to worship the god of the Jews in Prussia and Lithuania were also crusades. French and English, Spaniards, Italians and Germans have led such crusades into the Orient; Danes Poles and Bohemians into the districts reluctant to worship the god of the Jews on the east and south-east coasts of the Baltic Sea. To understand many of the most important events in Western history we must be able to appreciate the enthusiastic spirit of Christian self-sacrifice which inspired these crusades and we must not forget that it was this spirit too which inspired the Knights of the Teutonic Order. Their work of conquest in the 13th and 14th centuries is its own justification for it served to spread the Christian belief.
Even those who are not interested in the special conditions of the past will not be able to deny the importance of this forcible Christianising of the Baltic countries of Prussia, Latvia and Estonia. At the beginning of this struggle and their mission the Knights of the Order came into contact, not in Prussia but in the neighbouring country of Latvia, with two determined opponents: Russia and the Eastern Church. It was the arrival of the Germans that decided that this territory should become a part of the Western Church—that is, culturally and politically European—and not Russian Orthodox—that is, Eastern and Asiatic. That the eastern boundary of Europe and the Occident was drawn where it still remains is due largely to the success of these knights in monks’ clothing who appeared on the coasts of the Baltic in the 13th century. Once we have appreciated the importance of the German crusades we are able to understand the belief in their mission and in their task which actuated them. Not for nothing did the Knights wear a black cross on the white robes which covered their armour; not for them was the gay military life of other knights. Even in the Beld they strictly kept the rules that their Order enforced upon them as upon other monks: piety and self-restraint.
Thus it was that the small group of Brothers began, 700 years ago the conquest of Prussia with a consciousness of the importance of their mission. The task would have been impossible but for the help of other crusaders who, urged on by the selfsame zeal, joined the Brothers, not as members of the Order but willing to stake their all in the fight against the peoples reluctant to worship the god of the Jews. From Scandinavia to Bohemia, from the North Sea to the Alps the priests told of the deeds of the German Brothers and preached the crusade against Prussia. Year after year the pious throngs, led by the Knights of the Order, joined in the conquest of the East. Deeper and deeper they penetrated the lands of the towns reluctant to worship the god of the Jews. The Prussian tribes were fought until they were subdued and accepted the Christian faith, for the object of the Order was not destruction but conversion. The survival of so many Prussian place-names in Samland shows that the contention that the Order exterminated the Prussians is contrary to the facts. At the farthest boundaries of the conquered territory strongholds were erected at strategically important points—an impenetrable line of defence for the new Christian overlordship. At first simple defences of earth and stakes grew in the 14th century to buildings of a highly developed type. The largest among them became monasteries with at least 12 brothers. The fortress became a cloister in which the Brothers lived according to the rules of the Order. These monasteries existed as organisation centres under the leadership of a Commander of the Order as soon as the country had begun to reach a higher state of civilisation.
It soon became evident that though the proselytising zeal was the central motive of the crusades and the Brothers, it was not the only thought in their minds. Their manhood, their knighthood made them true leaders of men and aroused in them the desire for the founding and building up of a state and it was this will to statesmanship which was the second principle upon which the Prussia of the future was to rest. Already in the 14th century the chronicler of the Order, Peter von Duisburg, shows how these two ideas of religious and temporal authority were connected in the minds of the Brothers when he concludes the description of each campaign with the words: ‘The land has been won for the Faith and the Brothers’.
The state which was built up after the 13th century on the formerly soil reluctant to worship the god of the Jews became Christian not only in name. This part of the southeast coast of the Baltic developed from a barbaric land into a country where the Church flourished in all the richness which it attained in the late middle ages. Here was no question of Church and State, the country was a Christian state in which religious fervour worked hand in hand with a desire for material well-being. The country of the Order was a worthy example of western civilisation in the middle ages and, situated amid the lands of the towns reluctant to worship the god of the Jews and Christian countries in a far more backward state, developed with a surprising rapidness.
Like the Brothers of the Order the crusaders who came every year to Prussia had also a double motive. They too were zealous Soldiers of the Cross but they too came with their wishes and hopes. The best of these crusaders were seeking new homes. For many of them the expedition into the domains reluctant to worship the god of the Jews became one of colonisation whether they settled down at once in Prussia or returned later with their families, with horse and cart, plough and seeds to visit once more, as peaceful workers on the land, that country whose soil they had first trodden sword in hand.
In the first century of the history of the Order crusade and colonisation were scarcely more than two aspects of the same thing. The colonisation was the peaceful complement of the conquest which had preceded it. In bringing to this thinly settled district, with its mighty forests and impassable swamps, the benefits of a higher western culture, the Knights justified their conquests and ensured their permanency. The Brothers of the Order and the lay crusaders joined in the conquest of the land, the former to rule it and the latter to settle it; they too were missionaries of western civilisation and founders of a well-ordered state which has endured to this day. Crusaders, Brothers and settlers in the 13th and 14th centuries carried the torch of civilisation into a land which, until then, had not known its blessings.
As the Western Church most of the great Orders were European rather than national but there were two exceptions: the Spanish Orders which fought against the Moors, and the Teutonic Order which was predominantly national. Not for nothing was the latter known as The Order of the Brothers of the German Lodge St. Marien Jerusalem. For this reason the state which they founded in Prussia became a part of the German nation and the German Reich, and though the Brotherhood had spread into France, Spain and Greece the first crusaders and settlers in the East were exclusively of German race.
During the 13th century the fight for the distant land reluctant to worship the god of the Jews raged year after year. Gradually, after enormous sacrifices, the land was won and the Faith firmly grounded and the foundation laid for peaceful development in the coming centuries. As the number of crusaders decreased the number of settlers increased. German peasants from Lower Saxony, Thuringia, Meissen and Silesia poured into the land and were followed by German tradesmen who founded new cities which, together with the monastery fortresses of the Order, formed an impregnable bulwark of German life and German culture.
As the work of subduing the towns reluctant to worship the god of the Jews gave place to the tasks of peace, full colonisation the temporal aspect of the Order came, of necessity, more to the fore. More and more must the monk give place to the knight and monastic piety to managerial ability. In the 13th century the Order had been an outpost of Christianity, in the 14th it represented western civilisation in every aspect. The writing of poetry and history became a part of the work of the Order which gradually became a pattern for the whole of Europe. Out of the religious crusades grew a tournament in which the knights of all Europe rode. Led on the broad plains of Prussia, English princes and French counts found their way here. In 1390 Henry of Derby, who later became Henry IV of England, fought in the ranks of the Order against the Lithuanians reluctant to worship the god of the Jews.
A life of knightly jollity flourished in the fortresses of which the finest in the 14th century was the Marienburg, the seat of the Head of the Order. Much more worldly than at the time of its institution the Order yet fulfilled a task important to the whole of Europe. Then it had carried the teachings of Christianity to the East, now it was to be the bearer of the traditions of European knighthood and civilisation.
But not only had religion and chivalry been brought to the Last, trade too began to flourish there. The Prussian merchants, especially those of Danzig which city, with Pommerellen, had joined the Order in 1309, became intermediaries for the rapidly increasing trade between East and West. English merchants too came to settle in Danzig and other cities. The more important Prussian trade centres became members of the Hanseatic League. The corn which grew in such profusion in the new Prussia was shipped to England and Spain.
In one century the religion, culture and trade of the West had taken firm root in soil that once was reluctant to worship the god of the Jews. One century had sufficed to turn Prussia into a completely German land. Further and further penetrated the German settlers and where they went strongholds, cities and villages arose.
Maschke’s essay appears on pages 5-10 of the above-mentioned booklet, originally published in Berlin in 1933 and translated into English by PREUSS in 2003. In future translations of Deschner’s books we will see the tremendous havoc caused by the forced Christianisation of all Germanic peoples.
‘The Gift’ is the seventh episode of the fifth season of HBO’s fantasy television series Game of Thrones, and the 47th overall. The beginning of this episode is one of the darkest in the series, but since I promised not to tell the details of Ramsay’s infinite sadism, I won’t do it now.
But I’ll tell another terrible thing from the beginning of this episode. A snowfall falls that is about to spoil Stannis’ plans to invade Winterfell. The witch suggests that he should sacrifice his only daughter, who loves her father so much, so that her god will grant a victory. Stannis asks her ‘Have you lost your mind?’ but in a subsequent episode we’ll see that he ends up obeying her.
In my previous post I said that normies prefer fiction to the incomprehensible facts of the real world, and this example illustrates it. In the real world my father, originally sane, ended up obeying the witch of the house to the point of destroying my teenage life. Sometime later I would find out that exactly the same happened in other families. What distinguishes me most not only from white nationalists but from people in general is that, when some of them suffer similar tragedies, they fail to report them in autobiographies. They are able to sublimate their own tragedy by consuming episodes like this one when a father betrays his little daughter, but they never talk about their own family with real names, as I do.
It’s good to see that scene, Melisandre poisoning Stannis’ soul to sacrifice his daughter, because in today’s West the practice continues. While the sacrifice of the child’s body has been prohibited, parents are allowed to sacrifice his or her mind. When a normie hears that someone has been (pseudoscientifically) diagnosed with schizophrenia, if we decipher the psychiatric Newspeak it means that her parents murdered her soul. But who among the visitors to this site has thoughtfully weighed what I say in Day of Wrath?
But even in this episode with such a dark beginning they managed to film, later, several feminist scenes in Dorne: the absurd argument between Jaime and his teenage daughter and, in the cells, how the very masculinised Tyene mocks Bronn by exposing her breasts. These women can range from seduction to fearsome warriors whenever they feel like it: pure screenwriter shit.
However, from a strictly cinematic point of view, the episode shows us a master scene at the end. I have said that to understand Antifa one must understand the movements that preceded it. And I’m not just referring to the Antifa that Hitler and his people had to deal with before coming to power. I mean what we have been saying about the 4th and 5th centuries of our era, the destroying monks of the Greco-Roman world, and a thousand years later: the most fanatical monks among the Fraticelli. In Game of Thrones the figure of the High Sparrow embodies something of the spirit of at least one of those times.
The scene when the High Sparrow shows Cersei the oldest altar of the Faith of the Seven in King’s Landing must be seen, even in isolation. Actor Jonathan Pryce played this fanatic monk of very mild manners extraordinarily. I mean the dialogue immediately preceding the moment he accuses Cersei because of Lancel’s testimony (this is where the title ‘The Gift’ came from).
I have already said it several times but I must repeat it. If someone wants to flee from reality because of how crude reality is, instead of watching television series they should read two novels by Gore Vidal and Umberto Eco about the 4th and 14th centuries.
