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Autobiography Literature

No pain no gain!

Have any visitors to this site heard of an autobiographer, of our times or times past, who has written a philosophical autobiography, in several books, about how his or her parents and other adults destroyed the life of the autobiographer in question?

What distinguishes The West’s Darkest Hour from other racialist sites is that here we preach an open and blatant exterminationist ideology (see, for example, ‘Dies Irae’, the first article in my Day of Wrath compilation). What is not clear to the ordinary visitor, unless someone has read my trilogy, is that such exterminationism originated precisely after what several crazed adults did to me in my adolescence.

The mind changes dramatically after experiences like the one I suffered. It usually changes producing, in the already adult victim, a mental disorder: either psychoses such as so-called schizophrenia or suicidal depression, or neuroses such as addictions (alcoholism, drug addictions—even legal psychotropics, etc.). In the most serious cases, the victim of maddening parents feels compelled to commit serial murder. This is not said by ordinary psychiatrists, who subscribe to the medical model of mental disorders (a bio-reductionist ideology), but by dissident psychiatrists: those who try to create a trauma model of mental disorders.

Some proponents of the trauma model know that those who had schizogenic (i.e., maddening) parents entered, to paraphrase the gospel, through the ‘wide door’. Sadly, 99.99 per cent of those with schizogenic parents enter through the wide door. What these professionals ignore is that there is another door, ‘the narrow door’, which circumvents psychosis. I am talking about spending decades of your life telling your story, at least to yourself, with an emphasis on the most painful episodes.

These days, for example, I have been reviewing my second volume. It has been so disturbing to relive my early experiences, and what my mother used to do to me, that I have had to make an enormous effort, plus countless pauses, to resume over and over again both rereading and revising (i.e. adding or rewriting many sentences and even paragraphs). To tell yourself your own story, through a good deal of re-reading of what has already been written, and to improve the text in further revisions to leave the original charcoal in diamond prose after so many decades, is what heals the mortally wounded soul.

Someone might reproach me that the mere fact of elaborating an exterminationist ideology after my experiences is, in itself, a psychopathological symptom. I believe that the opposite is true: those who don’t subscribe to such an ideology contribute to what we could call ‘Hell Planet’—our present Earth. This is because without the spirit of Kalki the evil of the earthlings will continue unchallenged, producing endless unnecessary suffering. (Those who want to delve deeper into the matter will have to familiarise themselves with the philosophy of Savitri Devi, who in the darkest hour of the West invokes the exterminationist archetype of the Hindu religion: Kalki.)

One of the things that so-called mental health professionals ignore is that they shouldn’t put the exterminationism of, say, a philosopher like Arthur Schopenhauer in the same basket as, say, a serial killer like Jeffrey Dahmer. They are not only different things, but Schopenhauer himself may have a moral code infinitely superior not only to that of Dahmer but also to that of the so-called mental health professional. This is something that the pseudo-scientists working in the mental health sector will never acknowledge: that philosophers like Schopenhauer could be… saner than them! Above I spoke of the first essay in my book Day of Wrath. To understand what I have in mind see now the third essay, ‘Unfalsifiability in Psychiatry’ (pages 21-30).

So for the next days and weeks, I will keep revising my second autobiographical book until I feel that the textual coal has turned into more lyrical prose. My thoughts must be hardened until they are as hard as diamonds. The saying ‘No pain, no gain!’ applies perfectly to the spiritual realm. Without the agony of constantly confronting my past, I would be as our friend Joseph Walsh is: in jail and before that, in a psychiatric ward (Walsh also had a schizogenic mother). Those who don’t process their pain through writing their very painful memoirs, and throughout the decades correcting the syntax of that original charcoal until the diamond prose is formed, will never heal.

No one among the racialist forums editors comes from where I come from: a sort of Bran the Broken seeing Westeros’ past because his dad (not Jaime) threw him off the tower, breaking his spine. As I was saying, the mind changes radically after decades of being in the cave retrocognitively seeing the past, what your dad did to you. Those broken lads who fail to reach Bran’s cave change for the worse (schizophrenia, etc.). But I changed for the better because I found it.

And it was precisely because of that change that I became interested in the real history of Europe in the century in which I was born; specifically, the real history of the Third Reich. By seeing my past as it happened, which has nothing to do with the distorted version my crazy mother told, I developed the knack of seeing, now, the historical past of the West as it happened, not as the Jewish media told it to us.

One way to begin to familiarise oneself with the most notable characters of the Third Reich is to read David Irving’s books. So, in parallel with my posts citing Brendan Simms’ and Savitri Devi’s books on Hitler, I think I will resume reading True Himmler which I had neglected since last year.

Anyone who wants to read my previous True Himmler entries can do so here, here, here and here.

Categories
Literature William Shakespeare

Hamlet revisited

Before I continue commenting on the film where Reinhard Heydrich, the ‘iron-hearted man’, is our hero, I would like to clarify what I recently said about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Yesterday in the comments section, I said:

I put a painting of Goethe because I mentioned him in my previous post about Heydrich. But the abject slavery of the greatest writers to Christianity is more evident in Dante, for obvious reasons; and Cervantes, who considered his masterpiece not Don Quixote but Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, where Nordic princes travel around various places in the world to end up arriving in Rome, the seat of the Vatican, and get married.

I started the discussion about Goethe because he is mentioned in the film to the detriment of the SS. But if Nietzsche had respect for him, it is precisely because Goethe represents what I called ‘Bridges’ in January, in the context of Wagner’s musical dramas taking us away from Johann Sebastian Bach’s resounding Christianity. In other words, despite the mixture of his pagan The Ring of the Nibelung with the Christian Parsifal, Wagner takes a few steps towards our side of the psychological Rubicon, even if neither Goethe nor Wagner crossed it (indeed, even Nietzsche himself didn’t fully cross it, having failed to read Gobineau).

So I can be charitable with Goethe as long as we place him as a man of his time. He indeed took a few baby steps on the Rubicon although he had a long way to reach the other shore. From this angle, I have nothing against him or Wagner, and those who want to delve deeper into the subject could reread my article ‘Bridges’.

Goethe is considered the greatest figure of German letters, but what motivated me to write this entry is that, if I mentioned the most famous writer in the Spanish language, Cervantes, and the most influential in Italian Christendom, Dante, what could I say about the greatest figure of English letters, Shakespeare?

Just as on Saturday I mentioned Faust as Goethe’s most popular drama, Hamlet is Shakespeare’s most popular play, so I must say a few words about the latter.

In Crusade against the Cross I said that my purpose was to detect and expose the vestiges of Christianity that still inhabited figures considered stellar in the Western tradition, and I pointed out that there were even those residues in the metaphysics that Nietzsche himself had wanted to elaborate. If Nietzsche had followed the command of the Delphic oracle he would have understood these residues and, perhaps, wouldn’t have become psychotic by the end of his life.

Though fictional, Hamlet is a character who, asking himself a thousand questions as he wanders the vast halls of the Danish castle, he also struggles with mental illness. In my article ‘Hamlet’ last year, I implied that the Greek tragedians knew the human soul better than the great writers of Christendom for the simple reason that the latter have lived under the sky of the fourth commandment, honour our parents, and that this prevented them from seeing that some parents drive their children mad. This is so true that I commented in that article that even Voltaire hadn’t broken with that Christian commandment (it was not until the 20th and 21st centuries that a Swiss writer, Alice Miller, repudiated such a toxic commandment).

But in this entry I didn’t want to talk about the trauma model of mental disorders. I want to put Shakespeare on par with Goethe in the sense that their most famous works, Faust and Hamlet, contain strong Christian residues.

Like Goethe, Shakespeare needs to be contextualised.

What could a continental freethinker do in the mid-16th century during the wars between Catholics and Protestants? Become a recluse. A sceptic of Christianity, Montaigne, did exactly that: something that evokes that many contemporary racialists are now recluses because of social ostracism if they dare to come down from their towers. Montaigne impresses me because he was the true representative of the intellectual side of the Renaissance, in sharp contrast to Erasmus who still lived in the thickest medieval darkness (cf. what I wrote about Erasmus in Daybreak).

England was then freer than Montaigne’s France, and that is the background to understanding William Shakespeare. We know that Shakespeare read Florio’s translations of Montaigne and that he was very impressed by him. Kenneth Clark said that Shakespeare was the first great poet of Christendom without religious beliefs.

(Left, Hamlet by William Morris Hunt, a 19th century painter.) However, like Goethe with his Faust, this is not entirely accurate. Shakespeare’s Hamlet has to be placed within the matrix of Elizabethan England: a time when Christian doctrine was still taken very seriously, both in its Anglican and Papist versions. Hamlet suffered a schizogenic struggle. He struggled internally with the command of his father’s ghost, from purgatory, to avenge him; but Hamlet couldn’t condemn himself, should he commit the mortal sin of murdering his uncle if he was, after all, innocent: a dilemma with which he struggles internally throughout the play.

So despite being influenced by the free-thinking ideas of his time, like Goethe Shakespeare was playing with Christian post-mortem doctrine. Nonetheless, from the viewpoint of my autobiographical trilogy, which tries to fulfil Delphi’s mandate, Hamlet certainly represents a breakthrough in insight: it is the first foray into what we may call the true self (as opposed to the false self: the internal struggles we read in Augustine’s Confessions).

What gives Hamlet such evocative power is that the tragedy doesn’t take place on stage but within Hamlet’s soul. The whole play is a soliloquy, and since I have finished my trilogy these days with a postscript to my own tragedy with my father, I would like to quote a few words from Hamlet’s second scene:

Would I had met my dearest foe in heaven
Or ever I had seen that day, Horatio!
My father!—methinks I see my father.

A couple of minutes of the 1948 film interpretation from this point onwards portrays Hamlet’s inward-spiralling soliloquies very well. Incidentally, I saw that film with my father in 1975: time when he had already mistreated me.

Categories
Axiology Literature Might is right (book)

Might is right, 2

I stand forth to challenge the wisdom of the world; to interrogate the ‘laws’ of man and of ‘God.’ I request reasons for your Golden Rule and ask the why and wherefore of your Ten Commands. Before none of your printed idols do I bend in acquiescence and he who saith ‘thou shalt’ to me is my mortal foe.

I demand proof over all things, and accept (with reservations) even that which is true. I dip my forefinger in the watery blood of your impotent mad-redeemer (your Divine Democrat—your Hebrew Madman) and write over his thorn-torn brow, ‘The true prince of Evil—the king of the Slaves!’

No hoary falsehood shall be a truth to me—no cult or dogma shall encramp my pen. I break away from all conventions. Alone, untrammeled. I raise up in stern invasion the standard of Strong.

I gaze into the glassy eye of your fearsome Jehovah, and pluck him by the beard—I uplift a broad-axe and split open his worm-eaten skull. I blast out the ghastly contents of philosophic whited sepulchres and laugh with sardonic wrath. Then reaching up the festering and varnished facades of your haughtiest moral dogmas, I write thereon in letters of blazing scorn: —‘Lo and behold, all this is fraud!’

I deny all things! I question all things! And yet! And yet!—Gather around me O! ye death-defiant, and the earth itself shall be thine, to have and to hold.

What is your ‘civilisation and progress’ if its only outcome is hysteria and downgoing? What is ‘government and law’ if their ripened harvests are men without sap? What are ‘religions and literatures’ if their grandest productions are hordes of faithful slaves? What is ‘evolution and culture’ if their noxious blossoms are sterilized women? What is ‘education and enlightenment’ if their dead-sea-fruit is a caitiff race, with rottenness in its bones?

Categories
Literature

Quote

Oh how then could I not lust for eternity and for the nuptial ring of rings – the ring of recurrence!

Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wanted children, unless it were this woman whom I love: for I love you, oh eternity!

For I love you, oh eternity!

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, last words of the last chapter of the third part.

Categories
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn Literature

Sifting through a river

It’s amazing how the knowledge I’ve been posting on this site makes me see things very differently than I thought before 2009. Currently, it is difficult for me to read normie authors that I previously loved and, as far as the racialists are concerned, well: as we have seen in my previous entries, they are pretenders of the fourteen words; not true priests of them.

I have also said that I have recently been boxing up some books from my father’s library that will go to a dead archive (inactive files), on a family property. One of the books that I didn’t know about and that I started reading today is a deluxe edition of Arenas Movedizas (Quicksands) by Octavio Paz.

Paz’s work is vast and versatile, but when talking about his literary production, very little is said about the stories that he wrote in 1949 and that he grouped under the name Arenas Movedizas. These are ten short stories that many critics have considered to be fantastic and that expose themes such as absurdity, imagination and the feelings of humans. Two years after writing them, in 1951, they were published in Paz’s ¿Águila o sol? and ten years ago the deluxe edition that we see below appeared, published in Mexico City: the edition I have in front of me.

Today I read the first of the ten stories and I remembered that to the most insightful writer that I have known regarding literature, José Luis Vargas Moreno, who died almost a year ago and whom I nicknamed ‘El Santa’ (he looked like a dark-skinned Santa Claus!), the story bothered him because Paz apparently showed off his blue eyes. Unlike Vargas Moreno, the tale didn’t bother me but rather I was fascinated by a passage from that story, ‘El Ramo Azul’ (The Blue Bouquet):

I raised my face: the stars had also set up camp above. I thought the universe was a vast system of signals, a conversation between immense beings. My actions, the saw of the cricket, the blinking of the star, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases of that dialogue. What would be that word of which I was a syllable? [1]

It is curious how the poet sometimes comes to intuit what cosmologists who dabble in metaphysics now say, especially those who begin to intuit that consciousness plays a hidden role in the very structure of the universe.

But I couldn’t bear to read the rest of the Pacian stories. Although there was a poetic phrase from the second story that I identified with, “nuestro pequeño sistema de vida, hecho de erizadas negaciones, muralla circular que defiende dos o tres certidumbres” (our little system of life, made of bristling denials, a circular wall that defends two or three certainties), the rest of the story seemed terribly boring to me.

‘So much for so little’ said Octavio Paz in 1983 in a television program when talking about the poet Góngora of the Spanish golden age, in the sense that it was the best possible use of Spanish (as Shakespeare was of Elizabethan English) but that the message was empty. Of Paz’s second story, I would say ‘so much for nothing’. It was just the vain use of diamond language that pisses me off so much. Why?

Because even before my racial awakening I couldn’t stand those poets who revel in the form of language regardless of the content. Paz wrote his stories when the Hellstorm Holocaust was still being perpetrated in a Europe that Paz loved, but which he never knew about because he was, like every Latin American poet and writer, stuck in the form of language.

Solzhenitsyn had already made fun of this matter in his Archipelago by mentioning Proust. He called Proust’s readers foolish because by reading the famous Frenchman and ignoring reality, they failed to see the holocaust perpetrated in Russia by the communists. I cannot agree more with Solzhenitsyn (those who haven’t watched Gonzalo Lira’s video about the Russian writer should watch it now).

Despite the wise quotes above, I will put Arenas Movedizas in the boxes that will go to the dead files. Most of the book lacks these types of phrases. It’s not worth reading it. It’s like sifting through a river of mud to find a few nuggets of gold.

_____________

[1] Alcé la cara: arriba también habían establecido campamento las estrellas. Pensé que el universo era un vasto sistema de señales, una conversación entre seres inmensos. Mis actos, el serrucho del grillo, el parpadeo de la estrella, no eran sino pausas y sílabas, frases dispersas de aquel diálogo. ¿Cuál sería esa palabra de la cual yo era una sílaba?

Categories
Americanism Literature

Dusting off books

I’ve been boxing up the library my father left behind to send to the cellar of the school he founded decades ago. Incidentally, the short article I wrote last week about John Milton was written thanks to the book I took out from that library (remembering that I had read it, I appropriated it and it will no longer go to the cellar).

Today I was going to post a new entry quoting from Simms’ book. But as I went for a walk to warm up my body this winter morning I decided I’d better talk a bit about a new decision I’ve made: to read old books. Looking through the splendid hardback edition of the book on Milton published in Madrid in 1971, I felt it was a crime to alienate myself so much on the internet instead of using more traditional avenues of information.

For example, in the Tucker interview with Putin that I was talking about yesterday, I omitted that the American’s interruptions, when Putin was telling him the history of his people from the 9th century to the present day, were interruptions caused by someone living in the superficiality of the moment. To have a profound knowledge of something, Aristotle said, it is necessary to know the past. And the same can be said of a person’s biography. The symbol of pop culture that I appropriated in the featured post is precisely that of a fictional character who spends his time looking at the historical and biographical past of Westeros to understand his own culture better and better.

This, of course, is of necessity lost in forums where writers merely comment on the news of the present without proper historical background. Even as much as Andrew Anglin admires Putin, he didn’t understand why he summarised Russian history in less than half an hour (see the repost of Anglin’s article in The Unz Review). As far as my site is concerned, blaming Christianity for the anti-white psychosis of our day implies a deep knowledge of Western history. I don’t mean a normie reading of history, but a reading that could be gleaned from William Pierce’s historical book that I linked yesterday in the comments section (a POV which could also be gleaned from some of Hitler’s after-dinner talks).

In other words, it is a crime to become addicted to the internet when the thing to do is to dust off our parents’ and grandparents’ old books and read (or re-read) them. On Saturday last week, we hired two workers to help me dust off, one by one, the books from my father’s library. The depth of understanding the Aryan decline of someone who knows the past from books, by which I mean not just history books but the literature of the people—literature is the soul of a people!—is so fundamental that even Tucker, after the interview, confessed from his hotel room that it would take him a year to assimilate the historical information Putin tried to convey to him.

An American who lives in the epidermis of the psyche won’t understand the soul of either the Russian people or his own. And here I am not so much referring to Putin as to the interview Mike Wallace did with Solzhenitsyn for 60 Minutes a long time ago (Wallace misunderstood the Russian). In 2020 I mentioned on this site a meeting between American writers and a Russian in which the Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz, a white Mexican, took part. The latter commented that ‘Bentham’s children’ were on completely different wavelengths from the Russian poet. As I see it, the gap cannot be closed unless Americans follow in William Pierce’s footsteps: that their history didn’t begin as recently as the founding of the US, but in the last millennia of white history.

Categories
Homer Literature New Testament

Resistance to NT criticism

See the video uploaded today interviewing Richard C. Miller here.

Mimesis criticism is a method of interpreting texts in relation to their literary or cultural models. Mimesis, or imitation (imitatio), was a widely used rhetorical tool in antiquity. Mimesis criticism looks to identify intertextual relationships between two texts that go beyond simple echoes, allusions, citations or redactions. The effects of imitation are usually manifested in the later text by means of distinct characterisation, motifs, and/or plot structure.

As a critical method, mimesis criticism has been pioneered by Dennis MacDonald, especially in relation to the New Testament and other early Christian narratives imitating the ‘canonical’ works of Classical Greek literature.

Categories
Cicero Judea v. Rome Literature

Krauze and the JQ

Last Friday I added a short piece on Spinoza in Mexico Park: a book by the Mexican-Jewish Enrique Krauze that I had just bought. Now that I’ve been reading it, I couldn’t resist the urge to write a critical review of it for The Occidental Observer (TOO). My book review has just been published in that webzine for JQ connoisseurs—click: here!

The following is a passage (my translation) of Spinoza in Mexico Park that I could have quoted in my TOO article:

José María Lassalle: In our last conversation we had covered a decade in your intellectual life: that of your integration into Mexican culture as a historian and as editorial secretary of the magazine Vuelta… The one you described in the first conversation with great detail and love: your culture of origin, Jewish culture. I was very surprised by everything you said. I didn’t know that this root was so deep. It almost covered everything… I understand that you wanted to belong to Mexico and to the Hispanic world, and all your life you have worked to achieve it. But secretly you were driven by that initial impulse, by that root. That root is Judaism: the tree grew in Mexico, in Mexican soil, and bore Mexican fruit, but the root and the trunk were Jewish.

Enrique Krauze: What I did was to build that Jewish compound in Amsterdam [obliquely, Krauze is referring to Spinoza, who was born in Amsterdam]… And I began to build a library of Jewish subjects from all eras. A library, above all, of characters and ideas. [pages 419-420]

Latin Americans idolise their intellectuals and writers, so there are a couple of things I’d like to add to what I wrote in the TOO review.

Besides having enormous fame in the Spanish-speaking world, Krauze is one of those serene-speaking ethnic Jews with subtle but toxic messages for the white world. For example, he hasn’t only translated Susan Sontag for the cultural magazines in Spanish he has edited (I have read Krauze since 1990). In Spinoza in Mexico Park, where he talks a lot about WW2, the historian Krauze doesn’t mention David Irving once. Moreover, Krauze writes ‘Holocaust’ in a capital letter and ‘gulag’ in a lowercase in spite of the fact that far more Gentiles died in the Gulag than Jews in the so-called holocaust!

In the TOO piece I only mentioned a few names of the Jewish authors that influenced Krauze, but Spinoza in Mexico Park is replete with other names of historical Jews, from cover to cover. (There is no notable writer in the Spanish-speaking world to point these things out. That’s why I have been calling Latin America the ‘blue pill’ subcontinent.)

On the dilemma that plagues every Westerner—Athens or Jerusalem?—Krauze wrote the following (my translation) about the Greco-Roman world, in the context of Jewish writers of antiquity, such as Josephus and Philo:

[Jewish historian Arnaldo] Momigliano argues that Jerusalem resisted Athens because of the radical religious obstinacy of the people. The Jewish people remained faithful to the priests, the guardians of orthodoxy. For them, Greek culture was synonymous with idolatry, vain pleasures, frivolous comedies, and pagan myths… The Alexandrian Jews tried to persuade the Greek world of the goodness of their faith… One text points to the excesses of a certain Flaccus, the Roman governor in Egypt, who unleashed a veritable pogrom in that city. Even then, this persecution took on the dramatic forms and dimensions that were to be seen many centuries later in the Middle Ages. The profile he [the Jew Momigliano] draws of the delirious Caligula is a jewel worthy of Suetonius [Spinoza in Mexico Park, pages 430-431].

Regular visitors to The West’s Darkest Hour know that this site has a masthead, a guide that allows us to navigate the seas of history. Compare Krauze’s Jewish POV quoted above with the Aryan POV of our ‘masthead’ (pages 33-123 of The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour, linked in our featured post):

In 62-61 b.c.e., the proconsul Lucius Valerius Flaccus (son of the consul of the same name and brother of the consul Gaius Valerius Flaccus) confiscated the tribute of ‘sacred money’ that the Jews sent to the Temple of Jerusalem. The Jews of Rome raised the populace against Flaccus. The well-known Roman patriot Cicero defended Flaccus against the accuser Laelius (a tribune of the plebs who would later support Pompey against Julius Caesar) and referred to the Jews of Rome in a few sentences of 59 b.c.e., which were reflected in his In Defence of Flaccus, XVIII:

‘The next thing is that charge about the Jewish gold… I will speak in a low voice, just so as to let the judges hear me. For men are not wanting who would be glad to excite those people against me and against every eminent man, and I will not assist them and enable them to do so more easily. As gold, under the pretence of being given to the Jews, was accustomed every year to be exported out of Italy and all the provinces to Jerusalem, Flaccus issued an edict establishing a law that…’

From these phrases, we can deduce that already in the 1st century b.c.e., the Jews had great political power in Rome itself and that they had an important capacity for social mobilization against their political opponents, who lowered their voices out of fear: the pressure of the lobbies.

Thus spake Cicero (brown letters) before the senate. The story of the Flaccus family doesn’t end there. In the masthead we then see what happened to another Flaccus[1] in the section about Caligula: another historical figure maligned by Jews and Christians, including the historian Krauze.

Incidentally, I’m in the final proofreading of the November 2022 edition of On Exterminationism, so I won’t be adding more entries here while I work on it. But I’ll answer any questions I am asked about Krauze, whom I met personally—even shook hands with him in 1993!—when he and Octavio Paz published a book by Cuban dissident Guillermo Cabrera Infante.

________

[1] Aulus Avilius Flaccus was appointed praefectus of Roman Egypt from 33 to 38 c.e.

Categories
Literature New Testament Richard Carrier Romulus St Paul

How Yahweh conquered Rome, 5

by Laurent Guyénot

 

The Jesus question: How fake is the Good News?

I regard Barbiero’s book as a fruitful attempt to solve the mystery of how the Jews created Christianity and made it the Roman religion. But it certainly doesn’t give the full story. Much happened in the next three centuries that needs to be clarified. One important context, which is seldom considered, is the ‘Crisis of the Third Century’ (235-284), during which ‘the Roman Empire nearly collapsed under the combined pressures of barbarian invasions and migrations into the Roman territory, civil wars, peasant rebellions, political instability’ (Wikipedia), but also cataclysmic events and widespread diseases such as the Plague of Cyprian (c. 249-262), that was said to kill up to 5,000 people a day in Rome.[22] In such a context, the apocalyptic flavor of early Christianity must have been a key factor of its success. Interestingly, the apocalyptic Book of Revelation, the latest included into the Christian canon, is considered by some scholars to be a Christianized edition of a Jewish apocalypse, because, except for its prologue and epilogue (from 4:1 to 22:15), it contains no recognizable Christian motif.[23]

There are also two important building blocks of Christianity that Barbiero’s focus on Roman Mithraism leaves out: the Gospels’ life of Jesus, and Paul’s mystical Christ. How did they originate, and how were they integrated? The connection between them is one of the most difficult problems concerning the birth of Christianity. For, as Earl Doherty writes in The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity begin with a mythical Christ? (1999), a book that has sent a shockwave in Jesus scholarship (here quoted from this 600-page pdf): ‘Not once does Paul or any other first century epistle writer identify their divine Christ Jesus with the recent historical man known from the Gospels. Nor do they attribute the ethical teachings they put forward to such a man.’ Christ is simply for Paul a celestial deity who has endured an ordeal of incarnation, death, burial and resurrection, and who communicates to his devotees through dreams, visions and prophecies. Such gnostic Christology has roots in mystery religions long predating Jesus. It is difficult to explain how a human Jesus could be transformed into such a divine Christ in a few decades, during the lifetime of those who knew him.

The first difficulty is that the vast majority of the earliest Christians were, of course, Jews. ‘God is One,’ says the most fundamental of Jewish theological tenets. Moreover, the Jewish mind had an obsession against associating anything human with God. He could not be represented by even the suggestion of a human image, and Jews in their thousands had bared their necks before Pilate’s swords simply to protest against the mounting of military standards bearing Caesar’s image within sight of the Temple. The idea that a man was a literal part of God would have been met by any Jew with horror and apoplexy.

And yet we are to believe that Jews were immediately led to elevate Jesus of Nazareth to divine levels unprecedented in the entire history of human religion. We are to believe not only that they identified a crucified criminal with the ancient God of Abraham, but that they went about the empire and practically overnight converted huge numbers of other Jews to the same outrageous—and thoroughly blasphemous—proposition. Within a handful of years of Jesus’ supposed death, we know of Christian communities in many major cities of the empire, all presumably having accepted that a man they had never met, crucified as a political rebel on a hill outside Jerusalem, had risen from the dead and was in fact the pre-existent Son of God, creator, sustainer, and redeemer of the world. Since many of the Christian communities Paul worked in existed before he got there, and since Paul’s letters do not support the picture Acts paints of intense missionary activity on the part of the Jerusalem group around Peter and James, history does not record who performed this astounding feat.[24]

The simplest way to overcome this difficulty is to assume that the transformation of the human Jesus into the cosmic Christ (or the other way round, as Doherty suggests) didn’t happen spontaneously, but was engineered by connecting several elements, with the aim of fabricating a Judeo-Hellenistic syncretic religion.

Paul’s letters were first collected in the first half of the second century by Marcion of Sinope who also included in his canon a short evangelion (he was the first to use the term), but rejected the Jewish Tanakh. Around 208, Tertullian, a Carthaginian of probable Jewish origin, complained that ‘the heretical tradition of Marcion filled the universe’ (Against Marcion v, 19). He also tells us that, during the time of Marcion, another Gnostic teacher named Valentinus almost became bishop of Rome. In the third century AD appeared the Persian Mani, who called himself ‘apostle of Jesus Christ,’ but rejected any Jewish influence. Manicheans became the label pinned by the Catholic Church on all the Gnostic movements that came from the East, such as the Paulicians from Anatolia in the eighth century, or the Bogomils from Bulgaria in the ninth century, the ancestors of the Cathars who were eradicated from the south of France in the early thirteenth century. All these movements, which can be seen as successive waves of the same movement, venerated Paul and rejected the Torah, whose god they regarded either as an evil demiurge, a deceptive demon, or a malicious fiction.

In the fourth century, Gnostic Christianity was still alive and flourishing. The monastic library of the Egyptian Brotherhood of Saint Pachomius, the first known Christian monastery, contained a great wealth of Gnostic literature (including the Gospel of Thomas), amid Platonic, Hermetic, and Zoroastrian books. As New Testament scholar Robert Price tells in his fascinating book Deconstructing Jesus (2000):

Apparently when the monks received the Easter Letter from Athanasius in 367 C.E., which contains the first known listing of the canonical twenty-seven New Testament books, warning the faithful to read no others, the brethren must have decided to hide their cherished ‘heretical’ gospels, lest they fall into the hands of the ecclesiastical book burners.[25]

All these codices were hidden in a graveyard at Nag Hammadi, where they were discovered in 1945, revolutionizing our image of early Christianity. Scholars have since started to question the traditional view of Gnostics as dissenters who broke away from the Orthodox Church; rather, the Gnostics who never ceased claiming that Roman Catholics were corrupting the Gospel under Jewish influence, may have been right all along.

As I started delving into these questions, I discovered that a new school of New Testament exegesis, pioneered by Earl Doherty’s Jesus Puzzle, claims that Christianity was born in myth, not in history. I had always assumed that Jesus’ biography was too historically plausible to be a fiction. In my thirties, I had become fascinated by the quest for the historical Jesus and wrote a book on the ‘legendary’ relationship between Jesus and John the Baptist, which argued that the Gospel writers falsified the genuine prophecies of John, and forged spurious praises of Jesus by John, and that much of the sayings attributed to Jesus (from the hypothetical Q document) were originally attributed to John.[26] Nevertheless, I didn’t doubt the historicity of Jesus. But my recent journey into the ‘Christ Myth’ theory has convinced me that the historical Jesus is more elusive than I thought. The Gospels, for one thing, are not as old as generally admitted (between the 70s and the 90s), for, as Doherty points out:

Only in Justin Martyr, writing in the 150s, do we find the first identifiable quotations from some of the Gospels, though he calls them simply ‘memoirs of the Apostles,’ with no names. And those quotations usually do not agree with the texts of the canonical versions we now have, showing that such documents were still undergoing evolution and revision.[27]

A late second-century date for the first narrative about Jesus is consistent with the hypothesis—that goes contrary to Barbiero’s theory—that Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews originally contained a reference to John the Baptist and one to James the Just, but no reference to Jesus, who was later inserted between the two so that John could be presented as Jesus’ precursor and James as his brother and heir. There is much evidence that James, like John the Baptist before him, was a famous figure in his own right. According to biblical scholar Robert Eisenman, author of James, the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls, James is identical to ‘the Teacher of Righteousness’ mentioned in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which have been dated too early. Strangely,

The person of James is almost diametrically opposed to the Jesus of Scripture and our ordinary understanding of him. Whereas the Jesus of Scripture is anti-nationalist, cosmopolitan, antinomian—that is, against the direct application of Jewish Law—and accepting foreigners and other persons of perceived impurities, the Historical James will turn out to be zealous for the Law, and rejecting of foreigners and polluted persons generally.

His death by stoning in 62 ‘was connected in popular imagination with the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE in a way that Jesus’ death some four decades before could not have been.’

Variant manuscripts of the works of Josephus, reported by Church fathers like Origen, Eusebius and Jerome, all of whom at one time or another spent time in Palestine, contain materials associating the fall of Jerusalem with the death of James—not with the death of Jesus. Their shrill protests, particularly Origen’s and Eusebius’, have probably not a little to do with the disappearance of this passage from all manuscripts of the Jewish War that have come down to us.[28]

Jesus scholars of the ‘mythicist’ school—by opposition to ‘historicist’—refrain from expressing their conclusion in conspiratorial terms. In his book On the Historicity of Jesus, Why We Might Have Reason For Doubt, Richard Carrier writes: ‘the Jesus we know originated as a mythical character,’ and only ‘later, this myth was mistaken for history (or deliberately repackaged that way).’ But I find ‘mistaken’ very unlikely, and ‘deliberately repackaged’ much more probable. Carrier actually suggests that the fundamental structure of the narrative was borrowed from a well-established Roman mythical pattern:

In Plutarch’s biography of Romulus, the founder of Rome, we are told he was the son of god, born of a lowly shepherd; then as a man he becomes beloved by the people, hailed as king, and killed by the conniving elite; then he rises from the dead, appears to a friend to tell the good news to his people, and ascends to heaven to rule from on high. Just like Jesus.

Plutarch also tells us about annual public ceremonies that were still being performed, which celebrated the day Romulus ascended to heaven. The sacred story told at this event went basically as follows: at the end of his life, amid rumors he was murdered by a conspiracy of the Senate (just as Jesus was ‘murdered’ by a conspiracy of the Jews—in fact by the Sanhedrin, the Jewish equivalent of the Senate), the sun went dark (just as it did when Jesus died), and Romulus’s body vanished (just as Jesus’ did). The people wanted to search for him but the Senate told them not to, ‘for he had risen to join the gods’ (much as a mysterious young man tells the women in Mark’s Gospel). Most went away happy, hoping for good things from their new god, but ‘some doubted’ (just as all later Gospels say of Jesus: Mt 28.17; Lk 24.11; Jn 20.24-25; even Mk 16.8 implies this). Soon after, Proculus, a close friend of Romulus, reported that he met Romulus ‘on the road’ between Rome and a nearby town and asked him, ‘Why have you abandoned us?’, to which Romulus replied that he had been a god all along but had come down to earth and become incarnate to establish a great kingdom, and now had to return to his home in heaven (pretty much as happens to Cleopas in Lk 24.13-32). Then Romulus told his friend to tell the Romans that if they are virtuous they will have all worldly power.

Livy’s account [History 1.16], just like Mark’s, emphasizes that ‘fear and bereavement’ kept the people ‘silent for a long time’, and only later did they proclaim Romulus ‘God, Son of God, King, and Father’, thus matching Mark’s ‘they said nothing to anyone’, yet obviously assuming that somehow word got out.

It certainly seems as if Mark is fashioning Jesus into the new Romulus, with a new, superior message, establishing a new, superior kingdom. This Romulan tale looks a lot like a skeletal model for the passion narrative: a great man, founder of a great kingdom, despite coming from lowly origins and of suspect parentage, is actually an incarnated son of god, but dies as a result of a conspiracy of the ruling council, then a darkness covers the land at his death and his body vanishes, at which those who followed him flee in fear (just like the Gospel women, Mk 16.8; and men, Mk 14.50-52), and like them, too, we look for his body but are told he is not here, he has risen; and some doubt, but then the risen god ‘appears’ to select followers to deliver his gospel.

There are many differences in the two stories, surely. But the similarities are too numerous to be a coincidence—and the differences are likely deliberate. For instance, Romulus’s material kingdom favoring the mighty is transformed into a spiritual one favoring the humble. It certainly looks like the Christian passion narrative is an intentional transvaluation of the Roman Empire’s ceremony of their own founding savior’s incarnation, death and resurrection. Other elements have been added to the Gospels—the story heavily Judaized, and many other symbols and motifs pulled in to transform it—and the narrative has been modified, in structure and content, to suit the Christians’ own moral and spiritual agenda. But the basic structure is not original.[29]

Other scholars have long identified strong parallels between the life of Jesus and the legendary lives of holy men such as Pythagoras or Appolonius of Tyana. In the later, for example, we find that Appolonius, after a lifetime of doing miracles, healing the sick, casting out demons, and raising the dead, was delivered by his enemies to the Roman authorities. ‘Still,’ according to Bart D. Ehrman’s summary, ‘after he left this world, he returned to meet his followers in order to convince them that he was not really dead but lived on in the heavenly realm.’[30]

Robert Price has pointed another likely source for the Gospel narratives: Greek novels such as Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe, Xenophon’s Ephesian Tale, Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon, Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Story, Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, The Story of Apollonius, King of Tyre, Iamblichus’ Babylonian Story, and Petronius’ Satyricon.

Three major plot devices recur like clockwork in the ancient novels, which were usually about the adventures of star-crossed lovers, somewhat like modern soap operas. First, the heroine, a princess, collapses into a coma and is taken for dead. Prematurely buried, she awakens later in the darkness of the tomb. Ironically, she is discovered in the nick of time by grave robbers who have broken into the opulent mausoleum, looking for rich funerary tokens […]. The crooks save her life but also kidnap her, since they can’t afford to leave a witness behind. When her fiancé or husband comes to the tomb to mourn, he is stunned to find the tomb empty and first guesses that his beloved has been taken up to heaven because the gods envied her beauty. In one tale, the man sees the shroud left behind, just as in John 20:6-7.

The second stock plot device is that the hero, finally realizing what has happened, goes in search of the heroine and eventually runs afoul of a governor or king who wants her and, to get him out of the way, has the hero crucified. Of course, the hero always manages to get a last-minute pardon, even once affixed to the cross, or he survives crucifixion by some stroke of luck. Sometimes the heroine, too, appears to have been killed but winds up alive after all.

Third, we eventually have a joyous reunion of the two lovers, each of whom has despaired of ever seeing the other again. They at first cannot believe they are not seeing a ghost come to comfort them. Finally, disbelieving for joy, they are convinced that their loved one has survived in the flesh.

As I have noted in my article ‘The Crucifixion of the Goddess,’ the love romance pattern is still apparent in the Gospel, where the risen Jesus appears first to his longtime follower Mary Magdalene, who, perhaps for that reason, was regarded as Jesus’ soul mate by many Gnostics.[31]

Price quotes the following passage from Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe, where Chaereas discovers the empty tomb of his beloved:

When he reached the tomb, he found that the stones had been moved and the entrance was open. [Cf. John 20:1] He was astonished at the sight and overcome by fearful perplexity at what had happened. [Cf. Mark 16:5] Rumor—a swift messenger—told the Syracusans this amazing news. They all quickly crowded round the tomb, but no one dared go inside until Hermocrates gave an order to do so. [Cf. John 20:4-6] The man who went in reported the whole situation accurately. [Cf. John 19:35; 21:24] It seemed incredible that even the corpse was not lying there. Then Chaereas himself determined to go in, in his desire to see Callirhoe again even dead; but though he hunted through the tomb, he could find nothing. Many people could not believe it and went in after him. They were all seized by helplessness. One of those standing there said, ‘The funeral offerings have been carried off [Cartlidge’s translation reads: ‘The shroud has been stripped off’—cf. John 20:6-7]—it is tomb robbers who have done that; but what about the corpse—where is it?’ Many different suggestions circulated in the crowd. Chaereas looked towards the heavens, stretched up his arms, and cried: ‘Which of the gods is it, then, who has become my rival in love and carried off Callirhoe and is now keeping her with him…?’

Later on, Callirhoe, reflecting on her vicissitudes, says, ‘I have died and come to life again.’ Later still, she laments, ‘I have died and been buried; I have been stolen from my tomb.’ In the meantime, poor Chaereas is condemned to the cross, which he has to carry himself. But in the last minute, just before being nailed, his sentence is commuted, and he is taken down from the cross. Here, then, comments Price, is a hero who went to the cross for his beloved and returned alive. In the same story, a villain is likewise crucified, though since he is gaining his just deserts, he is not reprieved. This is Theron, the pirate who carried poor Callirhoe into slavery. He was crucified in front of Callirhoe’s tomb.

Did some Jews, by some concerted and persistent Hasbara, brainwash the Romans with an unbelievable Jewish tale plagiarized from Greek novels, Roman myths, and Mithraic cult? Surely there are other ways to look at Christianity than as a Jewish trick. But I find the hypothesis worth considering. I hear on this webzine [Editor's Note: The Unz Review] a lot of complaint against Jewish cultural colonization. I am merely suggesting that it didn’t start yesterday.

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[22] Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, Princeton UP, 2017.

[23] See for example James Charlesworth, Jesus within Judaism, SPCK, 1989.

[24] Earl Doherty, The Jesus Puzzle: Was There no Historical Jesus? on this 600-page pdf, pp. 33 and 16.

[25] Robert Price, Deconstructing Jesus, Prometheus Book, 2000, archive.org, pp. 44-45.

[26] Recent scholars arguing along those lines include Karl H. Kraeling, John the Baptist, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951; Charles H. H. Scobie, John the Baptist, Fortress Press, 1964; W. Barnes Tatum, John the Baptist and Jesus: A Report of the Jesus Seminar, Polebridge Press, 1994; Joan Taylor, The Immerser: John the Baptist within Second Temple Judaism, Wm B. Eerdmans, 1996; Robert L. Webb, John the Baptizer and Prophet: A Socio-Historical Study, Sheffield Academic Press, 1991; Walter Wink, John the Baptist in the Gospel Tradition, Cambridge UP, 1968.

[27] Earl Doherty, The Jesus Puzzle, op. cit., p. 52 .

[28] Robert Eisenman, James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls, Viking Penguin, 1996.

[29] Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus, Why We Might Have Reason For Doubt, Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014, p. 56.

[30] Bart D. Ehrman Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth, HarperCollins, USA. 2012, p. 208, quoted from Wikipedia.

[31] Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979.

Categories
Literature

Perfect Christmas present!

The sixth part of the translation of Ferdinand Bardamu’s essay on why Europeans should abandon Christianity can now be read in the German section of this site.

Bardamu’s entire essay can be the perfect Christmas present for those racialists who are still unaware that the Jewish question and the Christian question are two sides of the same coin.

Here are the links to the entire essay: in English and in German.