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Category: Richard Wagner

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Friedrich Nietzsche Music Richard Wagner

Crusade

against the Cross, 5

A student philological organization in Leipzig. Nietzsche stands third from left facing Ernst Windisch, who is looking down.

The 19th century represented an awakening of a sector of the population in German-speaking countries to the Jewish question. As a man in tune with his times, Nietzsche would even write to his mother that he had finally found a brewery ‘where you don’t have to swallow melted butter and Jewish facades’. With his typical aristocratic tendency, the young Nietzsche considered all commerce unworthy, not just Jewish commerce. The proletariat was alien to him. He always believed that an uprising of the working class would destroy the world, so it had to be opposed.

For, having studied classical philology, Nietzsche had read directly the Greek writers of the ancient world, who weren’t infected by secular cross-worship in the sense of worshipping the crucified in turn. It was precisely the century in which Nietzsche lived that Doré, Dostoyevsky and Marx saw the horrors to which the Industrial Revolution had brought London and Manchester, times when ‘the crucified’ par excellence was the worker.

The decade before the photograph above, Count Gobineau had published his essay on the inequality of the human races, and Darwin on the origin of species. Those books written in French and English respectively ought to have been the best influences for the young philologist who knew so well the Greco-Roman classics and thus the scale of values before the advent of Judeo-Christianity. But Nietzsche would be impressed by what was then fashionable in German.

He read David Friedrich Strauss’ Life of Jesus. I have complained a lot on this site that much of the racial right is ignorant of the textual criticism that Germans have been making of the New Testament since the Enlightenment. The special edition of Strauss’ book that Nietzsche bought had been precisely the one that had appeared in German bookstores at a reasonable price for freethinkers of limited means. Nietzsche made the mistake of wanting to convey to a silly woman, Elizabeth, the reasons for his recent apostasy, now endorsed by the book in vogue at the time, while his sister replied to his letter confused and saddened by this typical turn of a 19th-century freethinking.

But Strauss wasn’t the most important influence on Nietzsche. In an antiquarian bookshop, he found Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation and began to leaf through it. He bought it and took it home to read. Later he would read Parerga and Paralipomena.

Except for Kant, Schopenhauer rejected the philosophers of classic German idealism, and showed Nietzsche what criticism of a nation’s culture is: university philosophy serves the State and the Church since it is from them that the philosopher receives his livelihood (Schopenhauer is somewhat hypocritical in this matter, since The World as Will and Representation begins with a very dull two hundred Kantian pages that could also fall under such category). The young Nietzsche had found an educator, but more than Schopenhauer’s doctrine, what was decisive was the attitude of the philosopher who not only opposed Hegel and company but presented himself to the world as a pessimistic and solitary hero.

That Nietzsche’s group worshipped the rebellious philosopher is evident from the fact that every year a group of Schopenhauerians celebrated his birth by drinking to the memory of their late master at a bacchanalian dinner. These were years in which the subject of Richard Wagner was also the order of the day, the talk of Leipzig. Werner Ross tells us: ‘The approach to Wagner is the most important event in Nietzsche’s entire biography. It surpasses in intensity and scope even his appointment as professor at the University of Basel’.

Wagner belonged to the section of Europeans aware of the Jewish problem and had written a book on the subject, but he needed fighters for his musical cause. Sophie Ritschl, the sister of Nietzsche’s teacher, took advantage of a whirlwind visit by Wagner to Leipzig to arrange an interview between Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche—a great honour for the latter. Everything seemed calculated to recruit the young genius to the Wagnerian cause!

On 8 November 1868 Nietzsche met Wagner, to whose music he was fully converted. He would never forget those days in which he felt himself treated as an equal of the greatest genius of the age.

But we must take into consideration the time we are talking about. When I saw Wagner’s first masterpiece, Tannhäuser, I was shocked that the Goddess Venus was defeated by invoking the voice of the Virgin Mary. While it is true that Wagner played with pre-Christian myths, he never broke with his Lutheran origins as drastically as Nietzsche would over the years. Nonetheless, when Nietzsche attended concerts playing the overtures to Tristan and The Master-Singers of Nuremberg, he wrote to his friend Rohde: ‘I cannot keep calm before this music: every fibre, every nerve stirs in me, and it is a long time since I have had such a feeling of rapture as when listening to the above overture’. (The same could be said of the impressions that the lad I was decades ago had!)

On 13 February 1869, the University of Basel appointed Nietzsche professor of classical philology: an astonishing case, for he was not even a doctor. This was mainly due to the influence of his teacher Ritschl, now indirectly involved in recruiting his pupil to the Wagnerian cause. On 23 March the University of Leipzig awarded Nietzsche a doctor’s degree, without examination or thesis, based on papers published in Ritschl’s Rheinisches Museum. On 13 April Nietzsche abandoned his German (Prussian) citizenship and became Swiss.

Wagner invited Nietzsche to ‘talk about music and philosophy’ and the young man naturally accepted. On 17 May he visited Wagner for the first time in Tribschen and was captivated. Wagner was ‘a fabulously lively and fiery man, who speaks very fast, is very witty and brings joy to a meeting’.

On 28 May Nietzsche gave the inaugural address of his professorship: Homer and Classical Philology and met the Renaissance scholar Jacob Burckhardt. In 1870 he continued his classes, lectures and philological studies, and in April he was appointed full professor: the year in which The Valkyrie was premiered in Munich. On 8 August he asked the university for permission to take part in the Franco-Prussian war, which was granted, but only as a nurse. Ironically, Nietzsche became seriously ill with dysentery. In October, he returned to Basel and began his important friendship with the theologian Franz Overbeck.

In 1871 Nietzsche began to write The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music: a plea for Wagner or proclamation that, through his music, the glorious days of ancient Greek values would return. (In this Nietzsche wasn’t wrong, as the next century Hitler would intuit; and the dream would have crystallised had he won the war.)

Early in 1872, The Birth of Tragedy was published, the book with which Nietzsche first introduced himself to the public at large. It was well received by his friends, but poorly received by the philologists in the profession. For this reason, Nietzsche even entertained the idea of leaving his chair in Basel to carry Wagner’s gospel as an itinerant preacher. The young philologist had become enchanted by the man who had been born in the same year as his father and, as Nietzsche himself would much later reveal in one of his letters of madness, also by Cosima Wagner.

In April Wagner left Tribschen, and on 22 May Nietzsche attended the laying of the foundation stone of the Wagnerian theatre in Bayreuth. These were the times of his greatest interest in Wagner, and he met Malwilda von Meysenburg through Wagnerian circles. At this time Nietzsche also composed the Manfried Meditation for piano four hands.

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Der Antichrist (book) Friedrich Nietzsche Richard Wagner

Year 100 P.C.

I read ‘Nietzsche’s Der Antichrist: Looking Back From the Year 100’ in late 1993, in a hard copy issued in the winter of 1988/1989: one of the back copies of Free Inquiry that arrived in the mail when I discovered that organisation of freethinkers.

I met the author, Robert Sheaffer, at the 1994 CSICOP conference. If memory serves, he wore sandals, was dressed casually and had a beard. Last year I exchanged some correspondence with him.

Sheaffer is anything but a Hitlerite. However, the article that I abridge below is perfect for understanding a central part of esoteric Hitlerism. I mean that Uncle Adolf’s anti-Christianity, which wasn’t revealed to the masses of Germans (hence the epithet ‘esoteric’), already had antecedents in Germany.

Sheaffer’s complete article can be read here. Red emphasis is mine:

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Secular humanists have not infrequently criticized the beliefs and practices of the Christian religion, and its harmful effects on civilization and culture. Unfortunately, their voice is seldom heard. The proponents of the Christian world-view vastly outnumber secularists both in number and in activity. While humanists wonder what they they can do to more effectively convey their criticisms of religion, most of them have never read, and indeed have barely even heard of, a book written exactly a century ago containing the most devastating and complete philosophical attack on Christian psychology, Christian beliefs and Christian values ever written: Nietzsche’s Der Antichrist.

1888 was the final productive year of the life of Friedrich Nietzsche, but it was a year of incredible activity. He wrote five books during a six-month period in the latter part of that year. After that, he wrote nothing. Nietzsche’s works of 1888 have not received enough attention, especially given the inclination of many to concentrate primarily on the flamboyant and somewhat confusing Also Spracht Zarathustra, a book of intricate allegories and parables which requires that one already understand the principal elements of Nietzschean thought in order to decipher its hidden relationships and meanings. Zarathustra will be clearer if it is read at the end of a course of study of Nietzsche, not at the beginning.

The first book of 1888 was The Case of Wagner, in which Nietzsche set forth his aesthetic and philosophical objections to the music and the writings of his former close friend Richard Wagner… Next came The Twilight of the Idols (in German, Die Gotzen-dammerung, an obvious parody of Wagner’s Die Gotterdammerung, “The Twilight of the Gods”), in which he criticizes romanticism, Schopenhauer’s pessimism, German culture, Socrates’ acceptance of death as a “healing” of the disease of life, Christianity, and a good many other things. Then, in September of 1888, Nietzsche wrote Der Antichrist.

Unlike Zarathustra, there can be no mistaking the language or the intention of Der Antichrist, a work of exceedingly clear prose and seldom-equalled polemics. Even today, the depth of Nietzsche’s contempt for everything Christianity represents will surprise and shock many people, and not only devout Christians. Unlike other critics of religion, Nietzsche’s attack extends beyond religious theology to Christian-derived concepts that have spread out far beyond their ecclesiastical origins, to the very core of the value-system of Western, Christianized society.

Der Antichrist begins with a warning that “This book belongs to the very few,” perhaps to no one yet living. Nietzsche hints that only those who have already mastered the obscure symbolism of his Zarathustra could appreciate this work. Warnings aside, he begins by sketching the idea of declining vs. ascending life and culture. An animal, a species, or an individual is “depraved” or “decadent” when it loses its instincts for that which sustains its life, and “prefers what is harmful to it.” Life itself presupposes an instinct for growth, for sustinence, for “the will to power”, the striving for some degree of control and mastery of one’s surroundings. Christianity sets itself up in opposition to those instincts, and hence Christianity is an expression of decadence, a negation of the will to life [Antichrist, section 6].

“Pity”, says Nietzsche, is “practical nihilism”, the contagion of suffering. By elevating pity to a value—indeed, the highest value—its depressive effects thwart those instincts which preserve life, establishing the deformed or the sick as the standard of value. [A 7] To Nietzsche, the rejection of pity did not proscribe generosity, magnanimity, or benevolence—indeed, the latter are mandated for “higher” types—; what is rejected is to allow the ill-constituted to define what is good. Nietzsche was not hostile to the sick—Zarathustra bids the sick to “become convalescents”, and expresses sympathetic understanding of their unhappy frame of mind [Z I 3]—but what he opposed was the use of the existence of sickness and other afflications to thereby claim “life is refuted” [Z I 9].

No doubt Nietzsche’s attack on “pity” was triggered in part by his revulsion against Wagner’s blatantly irrational opera Parsifal, in which the formerly irreligious Wagner returned once again to pious Christian themes. In Parsifal, a series of calamities occur because a once-holy knight succumbs to “sins of the flesh,” and it is prophesied that the situation cannot be remedied by any act of self-directed effort, but only by one “through pity made wise, a pure fool.” Nietzsche’s contempt for the limp Christianity in Parsifal and for “the pure fool” knew no bounds. The already-strained bond between the two men, who were once extremely close, was irreparably broken.

Nietzsche explains that the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer is, like Chrisitanity, decadent. Schopenhauer taught that since it is impossible to satisfy the desires of the will, one must ceaselessly renounce striving for what one wants, and become resigned to unhappiness. In the late 19th century Schopenhauer’s doctrines were extremely popular, especially among the Wagnerians. Wagner’s monumental Tristan and Isolde is an expression of Schopenhauerian nihilism, as the lovers sing of the impossibility of earthly happiness, and of their expected mystical union in the realm of “night” after their death. The opera closes with Isolde’s famous liebestod, or “love-death”, as she sings of a vision of her dead lover gloriously and mystically transfigured in the nether-regions, then dies to join him. Schopenhauer was hostile to life, says Nietzsche, “therefore pity became for him a virtue.” [A 7]

Nietzsche charges that Christianity denigrates the world around us as mere “appearance”, a position grounded in the philosophy of Plato and Kant, and hence invents a “completely fabricated” world of pure spirit. However, “pure spirit is pure lie,” and hence the theologian requires one to see the world falsely in order to remain a member in good standing in the religion. The Christian outlook was, he says, immensely bolstered against the attacks of the Enlightenment by Immanuel Kant, whose philosophy renders reality unknowable. (For Kant a virtue is something harmful to one’s life, a view Nietzsche could never accept. If you want to do something, Kant would say your action cannot possibly be virtuous; any action which contains an element of self-interest is by definition not virtuous.) Nietzsche summarizes, “anti-nature as instinct, German decadence as philosophy—that is Kant.” [A 8-11]

Nietzsche praises the skeptic (or “free spirit”) who rejects the priestly inversion of “true” and “untrue”. He says we skeptics no longer think of human life as having its origins in “spirit” or in “divinity”, but recognize the human race as a natural part of the animal kingdom… [A 12-14].

Returning to the theme of Christian doctrine as misrepresentation, Nietzsche charges that “in Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.” The religion deals with imaginary causes (such as God, soul, spirit) and imaginary effects (sin, grace, etc.), and the relationships between imaginary beings (God, souls, angels, etc.). It also has its own imaginary natural science (wholly anthropormorphic and non-naturalistic), an imaginary human psychology (based on repentance, temptation, etc.), as well as an imaginary teleology (apocalypse, the kingdom of God, etc.). Nietzsche concludes that this “entire fictional world has its roots in the hatred of the natural” world, a hatred which reveals its origin. For “who alone has reason to lie himself out of actuality? He who suffers from it” [A 15]. Here is the proof which convinced Nietzsche that Christianity is not only decadent in its origins, but rotten to its very core: no one reasonably satisfied with his own mind and abilities would wish to see the real world replaced with a lie.

Comparing religions, Nietzsche came to the conclusion that in a healthy society, its gods represent the highest ideals, aspirations, and sense of competence of that people. For example, Zeus and Apollo were obviously powerful ideals for Greek society, an image of the mightiest mortals projected into the heavens. Such gods are fully human, and display human strengths and weaknesses alike. The Christian God, however, shows none of the normal human attributes and appetites. It is unthinkable for this God to desire sex, food, or even openly display revengefulness (as did the Greek gods). Such a God is clearly emaciated, sick, castrated, a reflection of the people who invented him. If a god symbolizes a people’s perceived sense of impotence, he will degenerate into being merely “good” (an idealized image of the kind master, as desired by all slaves), void of all genuinely human attributes. The Christian God represents the “divinity of decadence,” the reduction of the divine into a God who is the contradiction of life. Those impotent people who created such a God in their own image do not wish to call themselves “the weak,” so they call themselves “the good.” [A 16-19].

Nietzsche next compares Christianity to Buddhism. Both, he says, are religions of decadence, but Buddhism is a hundred times wiser and more realistic. Buddha does not demand prayer or aesceticism, demanding instead ideas which produce repose or cheerfulness. Buddhism, he says, is most at home in the higher and learned classes, while Christianity represents the revengeful instincts of the subjugated and the oppressed. Buddhism promotes hygiene, while Christianity repudiates hygiene as sensuality. Buddhism is a religion for mature, older cultures, for persons grown kindly and gentle—Europe is not nearly ripe for Buddhism. Christianity, however, tamed uncivilized barbarians, needing to subjugate wild “beasts of prey,” who cannot control their own “will to power.” The way it did so was to make them sick, making them thereby too weak to follow their destructive instincts. Thus Buddhism is a religion suited to the decadence and fatigue of an ancient civilization, while Christianity was useful in taming barbarians, where no civilization had existed at all. [A 20-22].

Nietzsche next emphasises Christianity’s origin in Judaism, and its continuity with Jewish theology. He was fond of pointing out the essential Jewishness of Christianity as a foil to the anti-Semites he so despised, effectively taunting them, “you who hate the Jews so, why did you adopt their religion?”. It was the Jews, he asserts, who first falsified the inner and outer world with a metaphysically complete anti-world, one in which natural causality plays no role. (One might of course object that such a concept considerably predates Old Testament times.) The Jews did this, however, not out of hatred or decadence, but for a good reason: to survive. The Jews’ will for survival is, he asserts, the most powerful “vital energy” in history, and Nietzsche admired those who struggle mightily to survive and prevail. As captives and slaves of more powerful civilizations—the Babylonians and the Egyptians—the Jews shrewdly allied themselves with every “decadence” movement, with everything that weakens a society, not because they were decadent themselves, but in order to weaken their oppressors. Thus, Nietzsche views the Jews as shrewdly inculcating guilt, resentment, and other values hostile to life among their oppressors as a form of ideological germ warfare, taking care not to become fully infected themselves. This technique was ultimately successful in defeating stronger parties—Babylonians, Egyptians, and Romans—by in essence making them “sick,” and hence less powerful. (The Romans, of course, succumbed to the Christian form of Judaism, in this view.) This parallels St. Augustine’s comment, quoting Seneca, that the Jews “have imposed their customs on their conquerors.” [A 23-26; De Civitate Dei VI 11]

“On a soil falsified in this way, where all nature, all natural value, all reality had the profoundest instincts of the ruling class against it, there arose Christianity, a form of mortal hostility to reality as yet unsurpassed.” The revolt led by Jesus was not primarily religious, says Nietzsche, but was instead a secular revolt against the power of the Jewish religious authorities. The very dregs of Jewish society rose up in “revolt against ‘the good and the just’, against ‘the saints of Israel’.” This was the political crime of Jesus, a crime of which he was surely guilty, and for which he was crucified. Nietzsche examines the psychology of Jesus, as is best possible from the Biblical accounts, and detects a profound sense of withdrawl: resist not evil, the kingdom of God is within you, etc. He sees parallels in the psychology of Christ not with some hero, but with Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. (Dostoyevsky is not mentioned here by name, but we know from other sources that this is the “idiot” Nietzsche had in mind.)

Nietzsche deduces that the earliest Christians sought to retreat into a state of extreme withdrawl from “the world”, undisturbed by reality of any kind. They rejected all strong feelings, favorable or otherwise. Their fear of pain, even in infinitely small amounts, “cannot end otherwise than in a religion of love.” Thus Nietzsche sees early Christianity as promoting an extremely dysfunctional state resembling autism, a defense mechanism for those who cannot deal with reality. Noting Christianity’s claims to deny the world, and its stand in opposition to every active virtue, Nietzsche asks how can any person of dignity and accomplishment not feel ashamed to be called a Christian? [A 27-30; 38]…

By placing the center of life outside of life, in “the beyond”, Nietzsche says we deprive life of any focus or center whatsoever. The invention of the immortal soul automatically levels all rank in society: “‘immortality’ conceded to every Peter and Paul has so far been greatest, the most malignant attempt to assassinate noble humanity”. Thus “little prigs and three-quarter madmen may have the conceit that the laws of nature are constantly broken for their sakes,” thereby obiliterating all distinctions grounded in merit, knowledge or accomplishment. Christianity owes its success to this flattering of the vanity of “all the failures, all the rebellious-minded, all the less favored, the whole scum and refuse of humanity who were thus won over to it.” For Christianity is “a revolt of everything that crawls upon the ground directed against that which is elevated: the gospel of the ‘lowly’ makes low.” Here we clearly see Nietzsche’s repudiation of Christianity’s attitudes as well as its theology: as he pointedly noted in Ecce Homo, “no one hitherto has felt Christian morality beneath him”. All others saw it as an unattainable ideal. [A 43; EH 4 (“Why I Am a Fatality”) 8] Pre-Christian thinkers did not, of course, see poverty as suggestive of virtue, but rather of its absence. One point Nietzsche was unable to either forgive or forget was that the enemies of the early Christians were “the intelligent ones”, persons far more civilized, erudite, and accomplished than themselves, people who Nietzsche felt more fit to rule than the Christians.

Nietzsche sees the Gospels as proof that corruption of Christ’s ideals had already occurred in those early Christian communities. They say “Judge Not!”, then send to Hell anyone who stands in their way. Arrogance poses as modesty. He explains how the Gospel typifies the morality of ressentiment ( a French term Nietzsche used in his German texts), a spirit of vindictiveness and covert revengefulness common among those who are seething with a sense of their own impotence, and hence must hide their desire for vengeance. “Paul was the greatest of all apostles of revenge,” writes Nietzsche [A 44-45]…

At this point, Nietzsche advises the reader to “put on gloves” when reading the New Testament, because one is in proximity to “so much uncleanliness.” It is impossible, he says, to read the New Testament without feeling a partiality for everything it attacks. The Scribes and the Pharisees must have had considerable merit, to have been attacked by the rabble in such a manner. Everything the first Christians hate has value, for theirs is the unthinking hatred of the rabble for everyone who is not a wretched failure like themselves. Nietzsche sees Christianity’s origins in what Marxists would call “class warfare,” and sides with those possessing learning and self-discipline against those having neither. [A 46].

He next turns to a point essential for the understanding of Nietzschean thought: the inevitability of a “warfare” between Christianity and science. Because Christianity is a religion which has no contact with reality at any point, it “must naturally be a mortal enemy of ‘the wisdom of the world,’ that is to say, of science.” Here “science” is not to be understood as merely the physical sciences, but as any rigorous and disciplined field of human knowledge, all of which are potentially threats to Christian dogma. Hence Christianity must calumniate the “disciplining of the intellect” and intellectual freedom, bringing all organized secular knowledge into disrepute; for “Paul understood the need for the lie, for faith.” Nietzsche refers to the Genesis fable of Eve’s temptation, asking whether its significance has really been understood: “God’s mortal terror of science”? The priest perceives only one great danger: the human intellect unfettered. Continuing the metaphor of science as eating from the tree of knowledge:

Science makes godlike—it is all over with priests and gods when man becomes scientific. Moral: science is the forbidden as such—it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, the original sin. This alone is morality “Thou shalt not know”—the rest follows.

The priest invents and encourages every kind of suffering and distress so that man may not have the opportunity to become scientific, which requires a considerable degree of free time, health, and an outlook of confident positivism. Thus, the religious authorities work hard to make and keep people feeling sinful, unworthy, and unhappy. [A 47-49]

In previous works, Nietzsche had emphasised the necessity of struggling hard to uncover truth, of preferring an unpleasant truth to an agreeable delusion. [The Gay Science 344; Beyond Good and Evil 39] Consequently, he sees another reason for being suspicious of Christianity in its notion that “faith makes blessed,” that is, creates a state of pleasure in harmony with God. He re-iterates that whether or not a doctrine is comforting tells us nothing about its truth. Nor does the willingness of martyrs to suffer and die for a belief constitute any proof of veracity, suggesting that a visit to a madhouse will suffice to demonstrate the fallaciousness of such arguments. Martyrdoms have, in fact, been a great misfortune throughout history because “they have seduced” us into questionable doctrines. “Blood is the worst witness of truth”. [A 50-51, 53]

Christianity, says Nietzsche, needs sickness as much as Hellenism needed health. (To understand this point, compare a Greek statue of a tall, handsome, naked God with a Christian religious image of an unhygenic, slovenly figure suffering greatly.) One does not “convert” to Christianity, but rather one must be made “sick enough” for it. The Christian movement was, from its beginning, “a collective movement of outcast and refuse elements of every kind,” seeking to come to power through it. “In hoc signo decadence conquered.” Christianity also stands in opposition to intellectual, as well as physical, health. To doubt becomes sin. Nietzsche defines faith as “not wanting to know what is true,” a description which strikes me as stunning, and quite exact. [A 51-52]…

Nietzsche now turns to consider why the lie is told. Once again, Christian teachings are compared to those of another religion, that of Manu, “an incomparably spiritual and superior work.” Unlike the Bible, the Law-Book of Manu is a means for the “noble orders” to keep the mob under control. Here, human love, sensuality, and procreation are treated not with revulsion, but with reverence and respect. After a people acquires a certain experience and success in life, its most “enlightened,” most “reflective and far-sighted class” sets down a law summarizing its formula for success in life, which is represented as a revelation from a deity, for it to be accepted unquestioningly. Such a set of rules is a formula for obtaining “happiness, beauty, benevolence on earth.” This aristocratic group considers “the hard task a privilege… life becomes harder and harder as it approaches the heights—the coldness increases, the responsibility increases.” All ugly manners and pessimism are below such leaders: “indignation is the privilege of the Chandala” (Indian untouchable). What is bad? “Everything that proceeds from weakness, from revengefulness.” [A 57]

Thus Nietzsche holds that the purpose for the lie of “faith” makes a great difference in the effect it will have on society. Do the priests lie in order to preserve (as in the book of Manu, and presumably Greek myth), or to destroy (as in Christianity)? Thus Christians and socialist Anarchists are identical in their instincts: both seek solely to destroy. The Roman civilization was a magnificent edifice for the prosperity and advancement of life, “the most magnificent form of organization under difficult circumstances which has yet been achieved”, which Christianity sought to destroy because life prospered within it. These “holy anarchists” made it a religious duty to “destroy the world”, which actually meant, “destroy the Roman Empire”. They weakened the Empire so much that even “Teutons and other louts” could conquer it. Christianity was the “vampire” of the Roman Empire. These “stealthy vermin,” shrouded in night and fog, crept up and “sucked out” from everyone “the seriousness for true things and any instinct for reality.” Christianity moved truth into “the beyond”, and “with the beyond one kills life.”

Before charging Nietzsche with possibly irresponsible invective, compare the above with Gibbon’s summary of the role of Christianity in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of a military spirit were buried in the cloister: a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers’ pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity.

On the positive side, Gibbon notes that even though Christianity clearly hastened the demise of Rome, it “mollified the ferocious temper of the conquerors”. This would seem to parallel Nietzsche’s view that Christianity seeks to control the uncivilized not by teaching them the self-discipline needed to control their own impulses, but by making them too “sick” to do a great deal of harm. [A 58; Gibbon, Chapter 38 ]

“The whole labor of the Ancient World in vain!”: thus does Nietzsche overstate the magnitude of the calamity. (Our civilization’s heritage from classical antiquity is obviously far from nothing!). Nonetheless, no one who prefers civilization to barbarism can be indifferent to the point here raised. Nietzsche emphasises that the foundations for a scholarly culture, for science, medicine, philosophy, and art, had all been magnificently laid in antiquity, only to be destroyed by the advent of Christianity. Today, he says, we have certainly made great progress, but each of us still retains bad Christian habits and instincts which we must work hard to overcome. Two thousand years ago, we had acquired that clear eye for reality, patience, attention to detail, seriousness in even small matters—and it was not obtained by “drill” or from habit, but flowed naturally from a civilized instinct. All this was lost! And it was not lost to some natural disaster or destroyed by “Teutons and other buffalos” (Nietzsche’s contempt for German nationalism and militarism knew no bounds!) but it was “ruined by cunning, stealthy, invisible, anemic vampires. Not vanquished-merely drained. Hidden vengefulness, petty envy become master.” Everything that was miserable and filled with bad feelings about itself came to the top at once. [A 59]…

The meaning and significance of the Renaissance is considered in this next-to-last section of Der Antichrist. “The Germans have cheated Europe out of the last great cultural harvest which Europe could still have brought home—that of the Renaissance.” Nietzsche views the Renaissance as “the revaluation of Christian values,” that is, the repudiation of life-denying Christian values and their replacement with secular values which emphasise art, culture, learning, and so on. With the Renaissance in Italy, Christianity was being repudiated at its very seat. “Christianity no longer sat on the Papal throne! Life sat there instead!”

Nietzsche envisions the immortal roar of laughter that would have risen up from the gods on Mount Olympus had Cesare Borgia actually succeeded in his ruthless quest to become Pope. (The notorious murderer and poisoner Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, spread his power ruthlessly across Italy. Father and son appointed or poisoned Cardinals as needed to position the son for election as the next Pope. However, the plan went awry when they accidentally tasted some wine that had been “prepared” to rid themselves of a wealthy cardinal! The father died, and the son became gravely ill, and was hence in no position to coerce the selection of his father’s successor.)

Nietzsche laments that this great world-historical event—life returning to Western culture—was ultimately undone by the work of “a German monk,” Martin Luther, who harbored the vengeful instincts of “a failed priest.” Through Luther’s Reformation, and Catholicism’s answer to it, the Counter-Reformation, Christianity was restored. [A 60] One might be tempted to dismiss Nietzsche’s dramatic interpretation of the Renaissance, except that his view meshes with that of Jacob Burckhardt, the single most influential historian of Renaissance civilization who ever lived. Burckhardt’s monumental work, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), has influenced the study of that period as much as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall did that of ancient Rome. Neitzsche and Burckhardt were colleagues at the University of Basle, and friends as well. In the first section of his Civilization, Burchkardt writes that the greatest danger ever faced by the Papacy was its secularization during the Renaissance.

The danger that came from within, from the Popes themselves and their nipoti (relativies, “nepotism”), was set aside for centuries by the German Reformation… The moral salvation of the papacy was due to its mortal enemies… Without the Reformation—if indeed it is possible to think it away—the whole ecclesiastical state would have passed into secular hands long ago.

Pope Julius II, powerfully anti-Borgia, was “the savior of the Papacy,” who put an end to the practice of the buying and selling of Church positions. However, the Counter-Reformation “annihlated the higher spiritual life of the people,” according to Burckhardt. Nietzsche would have said this was because they had become Christian once again.

The final section of Der Antichrist contains “the most terrible charge” against the Christian Church that “any prosecutor has ever uttered… I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty—I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind.” Nietzsche suggests that instead of calculating time from the “unlucky day” on which this “fatality” arose, time should be measured instead from its last day: “from today.” [A 62].

Needless to say, Nietzsche’s Der Antichrist did not prove to be the dagger in the heart of Christianity he hoped it would. After finishing this work (which was not actually published until 1895), Nietzsche wrote Ecce Homo, a philosophical autobiography, in which we first see signs of the self-aggrandizing delusions which were to characterize his incipient mental collapse. The final major work of 1888 was Nietzsche Contra Wagner, containing more polemics against the “decadence” and anti-Semetism of Wagner’s followers, much of which was taken from his earlier published works. Nietzsche’s philosophical writings end there, in the closing weeks of 1888. No doubt the breakdown which followed was hastened by the frantic pace of work during that period. Living in Turin, Italy, alone as was his habit, he continued to send letters to his family and friends.

Early in January, 1889, Nietzsche collapsed on the street in Turin. Some local people helped him back to his room, and he was soon alone again. On January 6 he sent letters to Burckhardt and to Franz Overbeck, another friend and colleague at the University of Basle, displaying obvious signs of insanity. Burckhardt, quite concerned, consulted Overbeck, who was soon on a train headed for Turin to assist his friend. Overbeck brought Nietzsche back to his mother in Germany. He was placed in an institution for a few months, and was then released to the care of his family, where he lived another eleven years as an invalid. Nietzsche actually died twice: his mind died in 1889, while his body lived on helplessly until 1900…

If Nietzsche’s polemically effective suggestion had been adopted—to begin counting time from the start of Christianity’s presumed demise, the writing of Der Antichrist—then I would now be writing these words in the year 100 P.C., the hundredth year of the post-Christian era. It would obviously be premature to expect such a calendar to gain widespread acceptance today! Yet the failure of Nietzsche’s impossibly high expectations should not cause us to overlook the significance of this monumental work, with its searing insights into the psychology of Christian belief. All those who wish not to renounce life but to affirm it, all who seek to proclaim a triumphant “yes” to human prosperity, knowledge, and happiness, will find in Der Antichrist invaluable insights on how those goals can be achieved—and on what stands on the way of them.
 

Notes:

There are two excellent English translations of Der Antichrist readily available, one by R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Classics, 1968), the other by Walter Kaufmann (in Kaufmann’s The Portable Nietzsche, Penguin Books, 1978).

Categories
Friedrich Nietzsche Richard Wagner

Dialectic synthesis

On the eleventh of this month, I said that what moved me to present the story of Richard Wagner’s tetralogy was to try to elucidate a little more of Savitri Devi’s point of view, insofar as I consider her book, together with my footnotes, to be a kind of manifesto of The West’s Darkest Hour.

I’m still four entries short of completing the tetralogy’s story (the penultimate, which deals with Siegfried’s death, will be the longest in the series) according to the Argentine publisher who summarised the story when I was a child. I’ve already taken several images from those illustrated booklets, as can be seen here, here, here and here. But I would like, at once, to put down in writing some of my conclusions even before I finish translating the series.

I have just reviewed my thick biographical volumes on Friedrich Nietzsche, written by two German scholars. Nietzsche apparently lost his sanity on the last day of 1888. It is fascinating to note that his last essay before losing his mind was ‘Nietzsche contra Wagner’. Recall that, years before, Wagner and Nietzsche had been great friends. These are my conclusions:

Wagner was absolutely right to consider Jewry a parasite; and the later Nietzsche, i.e. the Nietzsche of the last months of 1888, was absolutely wrong to hate anti-Semites. But Wagner was completely wrong in believing that it was enough to baptise the Jews to make them good. For example, when for his last opera, Parsifal, he was assigned a Jewish conductor, Wagner rebelled and said that he would only accept him if he was first baptised. Such a stance reminds me of the American E. Michael Jones, although Jones is a Catholic and Wagner was a Protestant.

On the other hand, Nietzsche was right to condemn Judeo-Christianity as the key factor in the decline of Aryan culture, as we can see in this quote written before his upheaval. Precisely because of this, Nietzsche began to distance himself from Wagner when he began to see that the composer was making concessions to Christian morality.

The dialectic synthesis, so to speak, between the grave rights and grave wrongs of both Wagner and Nietzsche, provides a picture in which the contradictions of both are resolved. Resolving the contradictions of both positions is what I attempt on this site: unlike the latter Nietzsche we must be aware of the JQ, but, also, unlike Wagner we must be aware of the CQ.

All this has to do with Savitri’s book because, if our understanding of the cause of the dark hour isn’t perfect (Savitri wasn’t as anti-Christian as Nietzsche), we won’t be able to save the Aryan man. We will end up deceived by unscrupulous rascals like those who deceived Siegfried and eventually killed him. There is more I would like to say about the Wagnerian tetralogy but for tonight the above is enough.

(Incidentally, this image also appears in one of the booklets I used to leaf through as a child, which I still have in my library after so many decades of leafing through them for the first time.)

Categories
Der Ring des Nibelungen Richard Wagner

Wagner

In announcing the abridged translation of Savitri Devi’s Souvenirs et réflexions d’une Aryenne, I wrote:

There are many things I’d like to comment on now that, by editing it severely to make it more readable (the French sentences Savitri uses were too long and the thread of discussion was lost), I came to grasp her philosophy.

The first thing that occurs to me, in addition to the preface I added to this translation, is to complement her philosophy by translating (1) an essay originally published in the webzine Evropa Soberana on what Hinduism says about the darkest hour of the Abendland (the West), and (2) a simplified version of the text of Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung. That will round off a bit the content of this splendid book by Savitri which, as I say in the ‘Editor’s Preface’, helps us to finish crossing the Rubicon (instead of getting stuck inside the river, as those on the racial right are stuck today).

The first clause has already been fulfilled here, here and here.

Now I’ll fulfil the second: to present the general idea of Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung to fill in the questions left open in Savitri’s philosophy. I do this because I have noticed that neo-Nazis use swastikas and other Nazi paraphernalia but are generally ignorant of the art that the Führer loved.

On the internet, I haven’t found an English abbreviation of The Ring of the Nibelung at a level that a Wagner neophyte could understand. So in the next entry, I will start translating Wagner’s story from an illustrated collection I used to leaf through when I was a child. This abridged translation of Wagner’s tetralogy was published in Fabulandia: something analogous to an illustrated edition of Grimms’ Fairy Tales in collectable instalments, published by Editorial Codex of Argentina in the 1960s.

Although I watched with interest the complete tetralogy on the small screen, it is too long and complex and requires a literary abridgement, such as this one undertaken by the Argentines of the last century, for the neophyte to understand Wagner’s magnum opus.

While I translate the first fascicle of the tetralogy the visitor could read our 2011 post, ‘Wagner’s wisdom’. It should be remembered that the author of that essay, a German who published articles in Kevin MacDonald’s webzine under the pseudonym Michael Colhaze, eventually asked MacDonald to delete all his articles presumably because he could be targeted by German thoughtpolice. Fortunately I saved his article, which I re-titled ‘Wagner’s wisdom’, in the old incarnation of The West’s Darkest Hour.

Categories
Richard Wagner

The Master-Singers of Nuremberg

Wow, I have just listened, complete, in four nights as it lasts over four hours, The Master-Singers of Nuremberg (original title, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg): an opera in three acts with music and libretto in German by Richard Wagner. I didn’t plan to post anything after I finished watching it but Hans Sachs’ final speech at the end of Act III—in fact, the culmination of the opera—made a huge impression on me:

Beware! Evil tricks threaten us; if the German people and kingdom should one day decay under a false, foreign rule, soon no prince would understand his people; and foreign mists with foreign vanities they would plant in our German land; what is German and true none would know, if it did not live in the honour of German masters. Therefore I say to you: honour your German masters, then you will conjure up good spirits! And if you favour their endeavours, even if the Holy Roman Empire should dissolve in mist, for us there would yet remain holy German Art!

After WWII the words I italicised above (‘if the German people and kingdom should one day decay under a false, foreign rule, soon no prince would understand his people’) became prophetic. But if Wagner’s poetry is right, as long as the German people do not break contact with the soul of their race,[1] they can still be saved.

A small piece of advice for those who want to be introduced to Wagner’s art.

Watching his operas on YouTube is not recommended: art loses most of its numinousness. You have to go to the fancy opera house with all the ritual that goes with it and see the characters in their live costumes. I had to watch it on YouTube because I hadn’t seen Die Meistersinger and could not afford the trip to Bayreuth. (Besides, in recent years those in charge of Wagner’s legacy have betrayed the theatrical staging.)

I would suggest that the initiate simply listen, repeatedly, the majestic overture to Die Meistersinger and the long, elegiac prelude to Act III that shows a pensive Sachs in the privacy of his home.

If this truly Aryan music has been assimilated, you could watch the final half-hour of the interpretation I watched tonight, where Sachs delivers his speech to his beloved people of Nuremberg. The problem is that the subtitles of this interpretation are in French and Spanish. I could understand the plot, but not everyone knows those languages.

__________

[1] Speaking of saving the German spirit from the foreign forces of occupation, Savitri’s book, which I am proofreading, will not be ready until February.

Categories
Alfred Rosenberg Arthur de Gobineau Arthur Schopenhauer Friedrich Nietzsche Hitler's Religion (book) Richard Wagner Richard Weikart St Paul

Hitler’s Religion: Chapter 2

(excerpts)

by Richard Weikart

Who influenced Hitler’s religion? Even as allied bombers reduced German cities to rubble in 1944, Hitler fantasized about his post-war architectural exploits. One of his most grandiose schemes was to transform his hometown of Linz, Austria, into the cultural capital of the Third Reich. A secretary of his remembered this as one of Hitler’s favorite topics of conversation. On May 19, 1944, Hitler regaled his entourage with his plans for Linz, which included a huge library. Inside a large hall of the library, he planned to display the busts of “our greatest thinkers,” whom he considered vastly superior to any English, French, or Americans intellectuals…

Hitler enthused about Nietzsche, however, asserting: “Nietzsche is the more realistic and more consistent one. He certainly sees the grief of the world and the human race, but he deduces from it the demand of the Superman (Übermensch), the demand for an elevated and intensified life. Thus Nietzsche is naturally much closer to our viewpoint than Schopenhauer, even though we may appreciate Schopenhauer in some matters”…

In this chapter, I highlight several of the most important thinkers who impacted his perspective: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Julius Friedrich Lehmann… He [Hitler] advised that all German young people should read the works of Goethe, Schiller, and Schopenhauer…

Rosenberg jotted down in his diary that Hitler once cited Schopenhauer as the source of the saying that “antiquity did not know two evils: Christianity and syphilis.” (Rosenberg, a Schopenhauer adept, apparently was not sure if this was really a Schopenhauer quote, for he placed a question mark by it.) Goebbels recorded the same conversation in his diary, but he remembered Hitler saying, “According to Schopenhauer, Christianity and syphilis made humanity unhappy and unfree.” Either way, Hitler saw Schopenhauer as an opponent of Christianity and was agreeing with his anti-Christian outlook.

Then there was Nietzsche…

According to Max Whyte, “For many intellectuals in the Third Reich, Nietzsche provided not merely the decorative furnishing of National Socialism, but its core ideology.” The official Nazi newspaper published articles honoring Nietzsche, and they “applauded Nietzsche’s ‘battle against Christianity.’” In his 1936 speech to the Nazi Party Congress, the party ideologist, Rosenberg, identified Nietzsche as one of three major forerunners of Nazism. The following year, Heinrich Härtle published Nietzsche und der Nationalsozialismus (Nietzsche and National Socialism) with the official Nazi publishing house. He admitted that some of Nietzsche’s political perspectives were problematic from a Nazi standpoint, but his final verdict was that Nietzsche was an important forerunner of Nazism…

On his visit to the Nietzsche Archive in October 1934, he brought along his architect friend, Albert Speer, and commissioned the building of a memorial hall, where conferences and workshops could be held to promote Nietzschean philosophy. The project cost Hitler 50,000 marks from his private funds and was almost completed by the end of World War II. During that same visit, Hitler’s personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, took a photo that circulated widely of Hitler gazing on the bust of Nietzsche.

On Mussolini’s sixtieth birthday in 1943, Hitler presented him a special edition of Nietzsche’s works… Hitler’s friend, Ernst Hanfstaengl, claimed that when he heard Hitler give his March 21, 1933, speech in Potsdam, he detected a shift in Hitler’s thought. Hanfstaengl wrote,

I pulled myself together with a start. What was this? Where had I read that before? This was not Schopenhauer, who had been Hitler’s philosophical god in the old Dietrich Eckart days. No, this was new. It was Nietzsche… From that day at Potsdam the Nietzschean catch-phrases began to appear more frequently—the will to power of the Herrenvolk [master people], slave morality, the fight for the heroic life, against reactionary education, Christian philosophy and ethics based on compassion.

At the 1933 Nuremberg Party Congress, Hitler endorsed the Nietzschean transvaluation of values, i.e., Nietzsche’s rejection and inversion of traditional Judeo-Christian morality…

While never endorsing the “death of God,” Hitler expressed agreement with Nietzsche’s rejection of Christianity. In January 1941, Goebbels recorded in his diary that Hitler was riled up against scholars, including philosophers, but he made an exception for Nietzsche, who, he asserted, “proved in detail the absurdity of Christianity. In two hundred years it [i.e., Christianity] will only remain a grotesque memory.” Thus, Hitler approved of Nietzsche’s anti-Christian stance and predicted the ultimate demise of Christianity.

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were also potent influences on Richard Wagner, Hitler’s favorite composer. In fact, Hitler’s enthusiasm for Wagner was well known. The Führer regularly attended the Bayreuth Festival and forged personal connections with the Wagner family and the Bayreuth Circle, who were powerful influences on the racist and anti-Semitic scene in early twentieth-century Germany…

Wagner did not believe that Jesus rose from the dead… In 1881 he read Gobineau and adopted his racist theory at once, calling him “one of the cleverest men of our day.” He embraced Gobineau’s view that race was the guiding factor behind historical development. Further, the key problem with humanity—the primary sin—was that the white race, the Aryans, had mixed with other races, contaminating their blood. Gobineau’s theory would have a powerful impact on German racial thought by the early twentieth century and would help shape Hitler’s worldview, possibly through Wagner or the Bayreuth Circle, but likely also through other racist writers.

Another Schopenhauer devotee and Wagner’s son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, was an important precursor of Nazi racial ideology. When Hitler was in Bayreuth for a speaking engagement, he requested an appointment with Chamberlain, so they met for the first time on September 30 and October 1, 1923. A few days after that first meeting, Chamberlain wrote excitedly to his new acquaintance, expressing his great admiration for Hitler. Until his death in January 1927, Chamberlain remained his devoted supporter. A few days after attending Chamberlain’s funeral, Hitler told a Nazi Party assembly that Chamberlain was a “great thinker.” Many Nazi speakers and publications, including the Völkischer Beobachter, feted Chamberlain as the preeminent racial thinker…

The parallels between some of Chamberlain’s and Hitler’s ideas are patently obvious, such as Germanic racial supremacy, anti-Semitism, and the constant struggle between races. Both men believed that Indo-Germanic people were the sole creators of higher culture. However, these ideas were circulating widely in Germany independently of Chamberlain…

According to Rosenberg’s diary entry, Hitler agreed with Rosenberg that Chamberlain was mistaken to defend Paul’s teachings. To be sure, Chamberlain thought Paul’s writings were riddled with contradictions, and he spurned Paul’s Epistle to the Romans because he viewed it as a continuation of the Jewish conception of a God who “creates, commands, forbids, becomes angry, punishes, and rewards.” Nonetheless, Chamberlain insisted that many passages in Paul evince a more refreshing, mystical approach to God. Hitler, on the other hand, rejected Paul altogether, as the account of the same conversation recorded in Hitler’s monologues made clear.

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Editor’s comment:

At the 1933 Nuremberg Party Congress, Hitler endorsed the Nietzschean transvaluation of values, i.e., Nietzsche’s rejection and inversion of traditional Judeo-Christian morality…

Since the author of this book is a Christian, his prose doesn’t reveal the truth.

It was Christianity, a Semitic ideology, that inverted Greco-Roman values. Nietzsche and Hitler’s NS only wanted European values to return to their Aryan roots.

Categories
Degenerate art Music Richard Wagner

Wagner’s Lohengrin

The last three days I watched Lohengrin on YouTube, one act each night, corroborating what I think of opera.

If a good film loses ten or twenty per cent of its art when seen on the small screen, opera easily loses ninety-nine per cent. It is art made to be seen live, with the flesh and blood characters in front of our seats, and with all the ritual of spending our meagre savings, as the adolescent Hitler did when he discovered Wagner; dressing up in our best clothes, and going to a palace (like this one in Mexico City: the only one where I have enjoyed an opera, inviting a lady of course, to accompany me).

Opera really misses almost one hundred per cent of its magic. It seems an outrage that in the next few days I will continue to use this medium to see other Wagnerian operas. But in the palace of the town where I live, operas by the Führer’s favourite composer are very rarely performed. And even in the single opera I have seen there, the subtitles in my native language were essential to understanding the songs and the plot.

It is impossible to understand National Socialism without enjoying the art of its background. And it is impossible to grasp Wagner’s art in all its glory without having the funds to go to Vienna or Bayreuth in Germany, where some of his operas are performed every year. But even if you have the money, say, to go to the opera theatre in the Judaized US, in recent times modern choreography has bastardised the German composer’s original vision, courtesy of the Jews (see for example these quotations of an article that was later deleted in The Occidental Observer).

In the performance I saw yesterday, embedded below, Lohengrin is not the blond Aryan that Europeans used to see in more accurate performances. While the singer I heard yesterday has a magnificent voice, we will have to wait for the Fourth Reich before we can, once again, enjoy Wagner’s works as they were seen by those born in much less obscure times than ours…

Categories
Currency crash Lord of the Rings Racial right Richard Wagner Rudolf Hess Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Ukraine

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 80

It is impossible to say to what extent the Thüle Gesellschaft [a German occultist and Völkisch group] was in possession of this priceless heritage, coming from the depths of the ages. Certainly some of its members were—Dietrich Eckart, Rudolf Hess, and the Führer himself had it. One of the traits of the initiate would be the ability to feign anger, madness, imbecility, or any other human state whenever he deemed it appropriate for his purposes. The Führer forced himself, as he said,[1] to ‘appear tough’.

And his all-too-famous fits of rage—the existence of which the enemy pounced on with delight, as if they were a source of ridicule, exploitable ad infinitum—were, according to Rauschning, ‘carefully premeditated’ and ‘intended to disconcert those around him and force them to capitulate’.[2] Hermann Rauschning, who at the time of writing his book hated his former master, had no reason to destroy, as he does, with the stroke of a pen, the legend that aimed to discredit him in the eyes of more than one well-meaning man. Or rather, if he had a reason, it could only be, despite everything, a remnant of intellectual honesty.

As for Rudolf Hess, the comedy of ‘amnesia’ that he played so masterfully at the Nuremberg trial has fooled the most experienced psychiatrists. And the ‘normal’, sometimes even playful, tone of his letters to his wife and son[3]—tone that disconcerts the reader, in a man who was captive for more than thirty years—would be enough to prove his superhumanity. Only an initiate can write, after three decades in a cell, in the light-hearted and detached manner of a husband and father on holiday from his family for three weeks.

The Führer apparently outgrew his masters in the Thule Society (or elsewhere), and escaped the influence that some of them—one will never be clear which ones—would have wanted to have on him. He had to do it, being sovereign, being one of the visages of the One Who Returns.

And if, suddenly, the war took a wrong turn; if, to say the least, the point of no return was Stalingrad, which according to some, was the very site of the ancient Asgard, the fortress of the Germanic Gods, it is undoubtedly because, for some hidden reason, it had to be so. And hadn’t the young Adolf Hitler had that revelation under the night sky, on the summit of Freienberg, at the gates of his beloved city of Linz, at the age of sixteen?

The immediate material cause, or rather the occasion of the fatal turn, must have been not a strategic error on the part of the Führer—it is acknowledged that he never made a mistake in this area—but some sudden and unfortunate stiffening in his attitude towards the adversary. Siegfried, the superman, once showed pride of the same magnitude by refusing, so as not to appear to give in to the threat, and therefore to fear, to return to the Daughters of the Rhine the Ring which was theirs by right.

This gesture would have saved Asgard and the gods. The hero’s refusal precipitated its downfall. The new Siegfried, undoubtedly, also not to appear ‘weak’, although no challenge had been thrown at him, refused to exploit, as he certainly could, the goodwill of these people of Ukraine—anti-communists, aspiring to their autonomy—who had initially received his soldiers as liberators.

(March in Ukraine, historical; SS-Volunteer Division.) Did he do so knowingly, realising that the loss of the war, inscribed in the stars from all eternity, was a necessary catastrophe for Germany and the entire Aryan world, which only the trial by fire could one day purify? Only the gods know. The speed with which Germany, in the first years after the war, took the bait of material prosperity without any ideals, shows how much, despite the enthusiasm of the great National Socialist rallies, it was only incompletely freed from its comfortable humanitarian moralism, and only superficially armed against the Jewish influence, both ‘political’ and profound—that is, in the field of values.
 

______ 卐 ______

 

Editor’s note: This is central.

A few years ago, I used to say that the primary cause of the Aryan decline was that they succumbed to the One Ring, obviously referring to Wagner’s magnum opus, his Tetralogy (see for example: here).

And last year, when I promised myself that I would learn German and started to study it hard, I gave up when I discovered, just by reading the German grammar book I was reading, that the Germans betrayed themselves horrendously after the Second World War. What is the point of learning the language of the Nazis if German speakers are now anti-Nazis?

On this site I have been saying some very harsh things about the Americans. But however flawed their patriotic racialism may be (like what I recently said about Jared Taylor), they at least represent a firm step over the psychological Rubicon in the sense that American white nationalists are no longer in Normieland. They just need to finish crossing it, and The West’s Darkest Hour provides the stepping stones to do so.

What have the Germans done after their Fuhrer lost the war? The traitors donned one of the surrogate rings of the One Ring and have now become wraiths of what they were! I have already said it but it bears repeating:

In Tolkien’s universe, the Ringwraiths, the nine fallen kings or black riders, became the dreaded ring-servants of the Dark Lord Sauron. These Ringwraiths are Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, the other Nordic countries, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. All of these wimp countries of the American Empire consider the anti-white wars that occurred in the 1860s and the 1940s to be good.

The fiat currencies of the Ringwraiths are pegged to the dollar. When the One Ring is destroyed—when the US dollar crashes—, like Sauron, the kings of these reigns will also lose their power. Mordor’s power comes from the One Ring, from the privilege that its banknotes have become the world’s reserve currency. Since the ring will fall into the Mount Doom lavas in the not-too-distant future, such a milestone will mark the beginning of the fall not only of Mordor, but of the nine Ringwraiths.

If after such a catastrophe the Aryan race manages to survive, it is not clear which Indo-European language will be adopted by the survivors.

________

[1] Rauschning, Hitler m’a dit, page 34.

[2] Ibid., page 84

[3] Frau Ilse Hess published two collections of letters of her captive husband: London, Nuremberg, Spandau and Prisoner of Peace.

Categories
Buddhism Degenerate art Richard Wagner Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book)

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 69

It is known that at one point Beatrice steps aside before St. Bernard to guide Dante in the final stages of his ascent to the summit of the successive paradises.[1] One wonders who, after Stephanie, helped Adolf to climb the highest rungs of secret knowledge and when he climbed them. Was he still living in Vienna? Or in Munich? Or shortly after his decision, upon the announcement of Germany’s surrender in 1918, to ‘become a politician’?—as was the case with at least one other world-changing initiate, namely Christ himself, around the age of thirty? Or earlier? Or later? It is almost impossible to answer this question with any certainty.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s Note: For a priestess of the sacred words (or priest) to use honorific titles like ‘Christ’ for a fictitious character from the pen of a resentful Semite just after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, is a mistake. It is as if a follower of the 14 words were to call the Semite Muhammad ‘The Prophet’: a mistake that many esotericists often make. Note that although I consider myself a priest of the same religion as Savitri, I am not an esotericist but belong to another generation of the same priesthood.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Two things, however, are beyond doubt. The first is that throughout his life the Führer continued to bathe in the spiritual atmosphere of Wagner—even more so than that of Nietzsche—and to draw inspiration from it. ‘I know all of Wagner’s thoughts inside out. At the various stages of my life I always return to him’[2] he once told Hermann Rauschning while he found that, in Nietzsche, although this thinker had ‘already glimpsed the overman as a new biological variety, everything is still floating’.[3] I repeat: Wagner, himself initiated to the highest degree—his work is proof of this—was, through this work, the true spiritual master of Adolf Hitler.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s note: One of the things I have noticed about today’s neo-Nazis is that they are completely insensitive to Wagner’s greatness: it is an art they simply do not understand because many, including some European racialists, have degenerated musically.

To understand Hitler one has to (1) be repulsed by all degenerate music and (2) feel Wagner. That task is virtually impossible in the West today, as the degenerate milieu surrounds the white man like a fish in water. But it is possible if someone crosses the Wall and undergoes an initiation of years inside the cave of the three-eyed raven.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
The second certainty is that, either directly through the Thulegesellschaft or before his first contacts with it—in Vienna perhaps—with those having the same concerns, dreams and above all knowledge of the same order, Adolf Hitler knew the old hyperborean tradition: according to Guénon, the source of all others within which he received his supreme initiation. For the fact that he was one of the ‘descents’ on earth (in Sanskrit: avatara) of the One who returns, in every age of tragic decadence, to fight against the tide of Time and attempt ‘a recovery’, didn’t exempt him from the secret teaching of the masters of a particular form of the eternal tradition. Regarding these masters, from whose tutelage he could easily escape as André Brissaud suggests,[4] it wasn’t for granted that he would never enter into conflict; they had their part to play in his awakening. Other very great figures of the past, who have left their mark on history—among others, the Buddha himself, considered in Hinduism as an incarnation of Vishnu—have had masters even if they quickly surpassed them.

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s Note: Savitri is wrong again. We could say the same thing about ‘Buddha’ as we said about ‘Christ’ and ‘The Prophet’ because universalist Buddhism was ethnosuicide for the remaining Aryans in India, as Revilo Oliver knew.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
One would have to have been a member of the Thule Society to be able to say exactly what distinguished its teaching from that of other initiatory organisations or those claiming to be such. This is not so important if, as Brissaud seems to think, Hitler very quickly freed himself from the influence of any master or masters he might have had (apart, of course, from that of Wagner, whose music, both epic and initiatory, underpinned his entire life and even accompanied him beyond death).[5] What is important is to realise that he did indeed—it is not clear when, but certainly before the takeover—receive the supreme initiation that placed him above the contingencies of this world and above good and evil. In other words, he ‘awakened’ completely and definitively to what he was from all eternity and remains absolutely.
___________

[1] René Guénon: L’ésotérisme de Dante.
[2] Rauschnmg: Hitler m’a dit, page 257.
[3] Ibid., page 273.
[4] Brissaud: Hitler et l’Ordre Noir, page 109.
[5] After the announcement of the Führer’s tragic death in 1945, German radio played the last part of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung.

Categories
August Kubizek Richard Wagner Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book)

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 65

Despite the polemics that the name of the Führer still unleashes, more than a quarter of a century after the disappearance of his physical person, his initiation into a powerful esoteric group, in direct connection with the primordial Tradition, is no longer in doubt.

Certainly, his detractors—and there are many!—have tried to present him as a man driven to all kinds of excesses, having been driven by his ‘hubris’ to betray the spirit of his spiritual masters. Or they saw in him a master of error, a disciple of ‘black magicians’, himself the soul and instrument of subversion (in the metaphysical sense) at its most tragic. But their clarity is suspect only because they all take the ‘moral’ point of view—and a false morality, since it is supposedly ‘the same for all men’.

What repels them, and prevents them a priori from recognising the truth of Hitlerism, is the total absence of anthropocentrism, and the enormity of the ‘war crimes’ and ‘crimes against humanity’, to which he is historically linked. In other words, they reproach him with being at odds with ‘universal consciousness’.
 

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Editor’s note: What Aryans don’t understand is that one has to reject theism and embrace pantheism to save one’s race (see my last comment in another thread).
 

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But the all-too-famous ‘universal conscience’ doesn’t exist; it has never existed. It is, at most, only the set of prejudices common to people of the same civilisation, insofar as they don’t feel or think for themselves, which means that it is not ‘universal’ in any way. Furthermore, spiritual development is not a matter of morality but of knowledge; of direct insight into the eternal Laws of being and non-being.

It is written in those ancient Laws of Manu, whose spirit is so close to that of the most enlightened followers of the Führer, that ‘a Brahmin possessing the entire Rig Veda’ (which doesn’t mean knowing by heart the 1009 hymns which compose it but the supreme knowledge), the initiation (which would imply the perfect understanding of the symbols hidden therein under the words and images they evoke) it is written, I say, that such a Brahman ‘would be stained with no crime, even if he had slain all the inhabitants of the three worlds, and accepted food from the vilest man’.[1]

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Editor’s note: This reminds me of ‘Dies irae’, the first essay in my Day of Wrath. The error of Christians and secular neochristians—virtually all whites—is that they think through New Testament value codes; not like the Star-Child.
 

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Certainly, such a man, having transcended all individuality, could only act dispassionately and, like the sage spoken of in the Bhagawad-Gîta, ‘in the interest of the universe’. But it doesn’t follow that his action would correspond to a ‘man-centred’ morality. There is even reason to believe that it could, if need be, deviate from this. For nothing proves that the ‘interest of the Universe’—the agreement of the action with the deep requirements of a moment of history, which the initiate grasps from the angle of the ‘eternal Present’— sometimes doesn’t require the sacrifice of millions of men, even the best.

Much has been made of Adolf Hitler’s membership (as well as that of several very influential figures of the Third Reich, including Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, Dietrich Eckart) in the mysterious society founded in 1912 by Rudolf von Sebottendorf. Much has also been said about the decisive influence on him of readings of a very particular esoteric and messianic character, among others the writings of the former Cistercian monk Adolf Josef Lanz, known as Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, founder (in 1900) and Grand Master of the ‘Order of the New Temple’, and his journal, Ostara (founded in 1905). We did not fail to recall his close connection with the geopolitician Karl Haushofer, member of the Société du Vril, versed in the knowledge of secret doctrines, which would have been revealed to him in India, Tibet and Japan, and very aware of the immense ‘magic power’ of the Swastika.[2]

Finally, the particular role of initiator played by at least Dietrich Eckart—if not Eckart and Rudolf Hess, although both have always presented themselves in public life as his faithful disciples and collaborators—has been emphasized. Eckart is said to have declared, in December 1923, on his deathbed, before some of his brothers of the Thule Society, that the masters of the said Society, including himself, would have given Adolf Hitler ‘the means of communicating with them’, that is, with the ‘higher unknowns’ or ‘intelligences outside of humanity’, and that he, in particular, would have ‘influenced history more than any other German’.[3]

It should not be forgotten that, whatever the initiatory training he underwent later on, it seems certain that the future Führer was already ‘between the ages of twelve and fourteen’ and perhaps even earlier, in possession of the fundamental directives of his historical ‘self’; that he had already shown his love for art in general, and especially for architecture and music; that he had already shown interest in German history (and history in general); that he was an ardent patriot; that he was hostile to the Jews (whom he felt to be the absolute antithesis of the Germans); and finally, his boundless admiration for all of Richard Wagner’s work.

It seems certain, from the account of his life up to the age of nineteen given by his teenage friend August Kubizek, that his great, true ‘initiator’—the one who really awakened in him a more than a human vision of things before any affiliation with any esoteric teaching group—was Wagner, and Wagner alone. Adolf Hitler retained all his life the enthusiastic veneration he had, barely out of childhood, devoted to the Master of Bayreuth. No one has ever understood or felt the cosmic significance of Wagnerian themes as he did—no one, not even Nietzsche who had undoubtedly gone some way towards knowing the First Principles. The creation of Parsifal remained an enigma for the philosopher of the ‘superman’, who only grasped the Christian envelope. The Führer, on the other hand, knew how to rise above the apparent opposition of opposites—including that which seems to exist between the ‘Good Friday Enchantment’ and the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’. He saw further ahead.
 

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Editor’s Note: We’ve talked a lot about Parsifal on this site, and I’ve also read what Nietzsche says about that opera (he loved the Prelude). If we take into account what I and others have been saying about Bach’s music, we see that Parsifal was a step forward in that syncretism of the Christian with the Pagan: something that Hitler understood perfectly, although the ultimate goal was pan-Germanic Paganism stripped of Christian influence. The Wagnerian Richard Strauss, who premiered works during the Third Reich, could have continued crossing that bridge but the Allies took it upon themselves to cut off neopagan culture and impose consumer capitalism, or communism, on both sides of the Berlin Wall.

Above I mentioned my ‘Dies irae’. To understand Richard Strauss better, remember what I say there about a symphonic poem I listened to countless times in my bedroom as a teenager: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Strauss’s opus 30.
 

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Behind the ‘poetic setting of Wagnerian drama’, Hitler welcomed ‘the practical teaching of the obstinate struggle for selection and renewal’[4] and in the Grail, the source of eternal life, the very symbol of ‘pure blood’. And he praised the Master for having been able to give his prophetic message both through Parsifal and the pagan form of the Tetralogy. Wagner’s music had the gift of evoking in him the vision not only of previous worlds, but of scenes of history in the making; in other words, of opening the gates of the eternal Present—and this, apparently, from adolescence, if we are to believe the admirable scene reported by Auguste Kubizek which would have taken place following a performance of Wagner’s Rienzi at the Linz Opera House, when the future Führer was sixteen. The scene is too beautiful not to take the liberty of quoting it in full.
 

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Editor’s note: Wagner’s opera is about the life of Cola di Rienzi, a papal notary turned political leader, who lived in medieval Italy and succeeded in overthrowing the noble classes in Rome and giving power to the people. Magnanimous at first, he had to quell a revolt by the nobles to regain their privileges. In time, popular opinion changed, and the Church, which at first was in his favour, turned against him. At the end of the opera the people burned the Capitol in which Rienzi and a few followers met their fate.
 

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On leaving the theatre in Linz, where they had just seen a performance of Richard Wagner’s Rienzi, the two young men, Adolf and Augustus, instead of going home took, even though it was already past midnight, ‘the path leading to the top of the Freienberg’. They liked this deserted place because they had spent many a beautiful Sunday afternoon there alone in the middle of nature.

Now it was young Adolf who, visibly upset after the show, had insisted that they return there, despite the late hour or perhaps because of it. ‘He (Adolf) walked on’, writes Augustus, ‘without saying a word, without taking my presence into account. I had never seen him so strange, so pale. The higher we climbed, the more the fog dissipated…’

I wanted to ask my friend where he wanted to go like that, but the fierce and closed expression on his face prevented me from asking him the question… When we reached the top, the fog in which the city was still immersed disappeared. Above our heads the stars were shining brightly in a perfectly clear sky. Adolf then turned to me and took both my hands and clasped them tightly between his own. It was a gesture I had never seen him do before. I could feel how moved he was. His eyes shone with animation. The words did not come out of his mouth with ease, as usual, but in a choppy way. His voice was hoarse, and betrayed his upset.

Gradually he began to speak more freely. Words poured out of his mouth. Never before had I heard him speak, and never again was I to hear him speak as he did when alone, standing under the stars, we seemed to be the only creatures on earth. It is impossible for me to relate in detail the words my friend spoke in that hour before me.

Something quite remarkable, which I had never noticed when he had previously spoken struck me then: it was as if another ‘I’ was speaking through him: an Other, in contact with whom he was himself as upset as I was. It was impossible to believe that he was a speaker who was intoxicated by his own words. Quite the contrary! I rather had the impression that he himself experienced with astonishment, I would even say with bewilderment, what was flowing out of him with the elemental violence of a force of nature.

I dare not pass judgment on this observation. But it was a state of rapture in which he transposed into a grandiose vision, on another plane, his own—without direct reference to this example and model, and not merely as a repetition of this experience—what he had just experienced in connection with Rienzi. The impression made on him by this opera had, rather, been the external impulse that had compelled him to speak. Like the mass of water, hitherto held back by a dam, rushes forward, irresistible, if the dam is broken, so the torrent of eloquence poured out of him, in sublime images, with an invincible power of suggestion, he unfolded before me his own future and that of the German people…
 

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Editor’s Note: For decades I have called this phenomenon ‘the language of the Self’. (Alas, in Neanderthal land where I live, I never had a chance to use it on a mortal; only in my soliloquies.)

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Then there was silence. We went back down to the city. The clocks in the church towers struck three in the morning. We parted in front of my parents’ house. Adolf shook my hand. Stunned, I saw that he was not going home but back up the hill. ‘Where do you want to go again?’, I asked him, puzzled. He answered laconically: ‘I want to be alone’. I followed him for a long time with my eyes, while he went up the empty street in the night, wrapped in his dark coat.[5]

‘And’, Kubizek adds, ‘many years were to pass before I understood what that hour under the stars, during which he had been lifted above all earthly things, had meant for my friend’. And he reports a little later on the very words that Adolf Hitler pronounced, much later, after having recounted to Frau Wagner the scene that I have just recalled, unforgettable words: ‘It was then that everything began’. That was when the future master of Germany was, I repeat, sixteen years old.

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[1] Laws of Manu, Book Eleven, verse 261.

[2] Brissaud: Hitler et l’Ordre Noir (op. cit.), page 53.

[3] Ibid., pages 61-62.

[4] Rauschning: Hitler m’a dit (op. cit.), page 257.

[5] Auguste Kubizek, Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund, 1953 edition, pages 139-141.