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Friedrich Nietzsche Stefan Zweig

Crusade

against the Cross, 14

Heinrich Köselitz (‘Peter Gast’)

While it is true that Nietzsche was unable to detect the Jewish subversion that many in the 19th century could already detect, he was able to see, like no other, the subversion that had come from Judaism through Christianity. As Stefan Zweig wrote in the most lyrical essay ever written on the plummeting of the anguished eagle:

Nietzsche came to see that the malevolent thing was Christianity with its belief in a life beyond the tomb; that this was the principle which cast a shadow upon the modern world. ‘Evil-smelling Judaism, a compost of rabbinism and superstition’, had ruined and supressed the sensuality and merriment of the world. For fifty generations it had served to dope and demoralise mankind, to paralyse all that had previously constituted the vital force of the universe. But now (and suddenly he sees the mission of his life) a crusade against the Cross must begin to reconquer the holy places of man’s realm and existence upon this earth.

By embarking on a crusade, Nietzsche underwent the most radical change of his life from 1880 onwards. The previous year he had turned thirty-five, and he had always had the superstition that he would go into a mental tailspin just as his father had gone at the age of thirty-six.

Nietzsche was a little-known author: a marginal figure considered talented, but too eccentric for German speakers. But he discovered that it was precisely in the most painful periods of his existence that his philosophical productivity increased: what we now call a psychological defence mechanism. By way of super-compensation for what was happening to him, he began to believe that he needed to leave for posterity an epoch-making legacy now that the Judeo-Christian god was dead.

These were the times when Cosima had decided that Nietzsche had committed a sin against the Holy Ghost, i.e. that he couldn’t be forgiven, and when Peter Gast wrote from Venice that he had to guide his friend Nietzsche through the streets like a blind man. Headaches continued to ravage him. Nietzsche himself wrote: ‘On five occasions I pleaded, as a doctor, for death’.

He sought refuge in the high mountains. He had to search long and hard before he found a suitable place: Sils im Engadin/Segl, also known as Sils-Maria, in the Swiss canton of Graubünden: whose name will henceforth be inseparably linked to his own because of the time he spent there, despite the terrible fatigue that such a journey entailed for a half-blind. At 1,830 metres above sea level, Sils-Maria was sometimes snowy and cold even in the middle of summer, and Nietzsche had to endure something that he found fatal: many storms. It is curious that he later he researched in Genoa where there might be an ideal place without clouds and storms—Nietzsche couldn’t bear an eternally cloudy sky—and even entertained the idea of moving to Oaxaca in Mexico for its clear, cloudless skies and the sun he longed for.

To his only apostle at this point, Peter Gast, Nietzsche wrote: ‘There is nothing that can make up for the loss, in recent years, of Wagner’s sympathy for me. How often I dream of him, and always in our comforting meetings!’ He had been abandoned by all his friends, who could no longer tolerate the freedom of his thought, the new viewpoint of the eagle who looked down on Europe from on high. Only the faithful Peter Gast was left to him.

As I have said, Nietzsche was a man against his time: a fact he could never digest and he spewed it out in his somatic attacks. That was why, like a wayward defence mechanism, with open arms he accepted the pain and sang his hymn of saying ‘yes’ to life. If he discovered that his illness served as a sting to his philosophising and that it was thanks to it that he left Basel, then the disease with its birth pains freed him so that his Zarathustra could be born. ‘Only pain gives knowledge’, he intones in poetic prose. ‘Only pain liberates the spirit, only pain forces us to descend into the depths of our being’.

A martyr by contraries, he was not put to the torture because of a faith which had already become established in his mind. No, it was out of torment, it was when he was upon the rack, that he formulated his creed… Thus he ran over and over again to the fiery whirlwind of pain and submits to the torments so as to recapture ‘the enchanting sensation of good health’.

No sooner had he grasped the meaning of his illness and enjoyed the voluptuous delight of health than he wished to transform it into an apostolate… He desired further and more agonizing martyrdom… and in the excess of his enthusiasm… he goes out raising that flag without realising that it is the one that, at the same time, draws the bow that is going to shoot him the deadly arrow.

But the philosophy of Amor fati was deceptive magic for an eagle that sees everything! I have already said so on this site when trying to communicate with a racialist whom I treated one week in London (a young man who had previously been committed to a mental institution and is now serving a prison sentence).

If we look at Nietzsche’s life not as today’s bio-reductionists want to see it, but as the all-too-human human he was, we will see that with the fall that really happened to him—though not in his 36th year but in his 44th—we come upon a fact. With madness his ills disappeared, so I deduce that they were psychosomatic. Nietzsche himself had used, in speaking of himself, the metaphor of a machine that was about to explode: something that undoubtedly referred to his future insanity.

Werner Ross tells us in his biography: ‘Insanity, therefore, is no longer an organic disease’. It was something almost premeditated in pursuit of a posthumous resurrection I would dare to add, so that the man against his time would miraculously become, after the psychotic outbreak, a man of his time.

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1st World War Michael O'Meara Stefan Zweig War!

Mass formation!

‘The West has developed a toxic brew of essentially anti-civilization mind viruses, which have acquired cultural hegemony, and which all outside cultures & polities would be very well-advised to firewall themselves from’. —Anatoly Karlin

Lately I have seen the term ‘mass formation’ used to describe what, in my vocabulary, I call folie en mass or madness shared by all westerners.

And madness it is, indeed. Fox News’ Sean Hannity ready to start World War III? A seizure of Russian sovereign assets with no precedent in post-war history? US Senator Lindsey Graham calling for President Putin’s assassination? A Russian store in Germany vandalised? Restaurants in Prague that say Russian citizens have to apologise before being allowed to enter? Russians out of chess tournaments just for being Russian? I mean: if globalists can steal a yacht of a Russian oligarch with no due process, they can easily steal your home and your savings account (cf. Trudeau’s Canada). The cause of all this has been explained by Raiden today on Twitter (to whom I sent the link to the masthead on this site):

Culture is a shared intellectual software that helps people navigate through life. If the software is good—if one is operating from correct first principles—he will find a solidity and constancy to his ideas, continually adding to and refining them.

The problem with the Western mind is this to some extent has been the issue with our civilization as a whole, ever since the traumatic destruction of classical antiquity, in which we were sundered from our spiritual traditions.

Because of the above tweet I sent him the masthead.

Today westerners are spiritual orphans.

They lack intellectual and spiritual solidity, and thus wander from ideology to ideology.

From Christianity to Marxism to anti-white woke ideology. And just as Fox News when push comes to shove is no better than CNN, in racialist forums something similar is happening.

Today for example I deleted my Sunday post, linking to a Pat Buchanan article on The Occidental Observer, and put in its place my mantra post about the word racism. The reason is that, while I had liked Buchanan’s first piece on the Observer, in his article today in the same webzine, ‘Is Putin Considering Using Nukes on NATO?’, the patriotard has joined the mass formation by saying that NATO should secure the independence of Ukraine, effect the removal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory and that Finland and Sweden should be invited into NATO (today Fox News’ Jesse Watters just said something similar). Even Richard Spencer recently said that, as a good patriot[ard] he is, he’s siding his country and NATO.

I still believe what I said in ‘Putin’s show’: that since the US is the spearhead in the war against the Aryan, anything that weakens it should be welcome. That doesn’t mean that I’ve suddenly rejected everything I’ve written on this site about Solzhenitsyn, but that this war has broken the US monopoly on who gets to do the violence in the international arena. If the gringos no longer have that monopoly, and that is why they are all hysterical (including Hannity and Buchanan), thanks to Putin’s war there is a better chance that they will wake up and we may save the Aryan DNA that still exists in America.

The only racialist blogger who has good preservation instincts these days is Andrew Anglin, who in his post today said that Russia now has a quarter of Ukraine under control and that this is a lot faster than the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When will Americans understand the obvious? To save Aryan DNA north of the Rio Grande you need to hate your state. If your race is your nation, the state is the enemy of your nation: the original stock that founded your country. Or haven’t you read American Michael O’Meara’s 2004 article about why the US has been the greatest threat to the white race?

In times of mass psychosis, the healthiest thing to do is to cancel your cable news subscription, never use your cellphone (I bought one just because the bank needed a cellphone number, but I always have it turned off in a drawer and don’t have any plan or contract with the company that sold me it), and read a printed book that sheds light on what mass formations have been.

(Holding the copy of The World of Yesterday that I read when I lived in Houston, Texas.) I would suggest reading Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday about the days before the First World War. It describes how all Europeans began to beat the war drums with no idea about what was going to happen…

If the visitor to this site has a warm room where he can enjoy traditional literature, he might be able to insulate himself against the mind software—a massive formation—Anatoly Karlin and Raiden were talking about that is literally driving all Westerners mad through TV, the internet, mobile phones and woke friends and relatives.

Categories
Liberalism Stefan Zweig

Courage vs. groupthink

As I have said recently in the series ‘Veritas odium parit’, the mestizos and the Mediterraneans are easy to understand. They are simply self-conscious before the Aryans and they deceive themselves because they are incapable of dealing with their inferiority complex.

The Jews are somewhat more difficult to understand, but after reading the trilogy of Kevin MacDonald, especially the first of his books, their group surviving strategy is understandable.

It is the whites, especially their suicidal passion today, who represent a challenge for me; and the only thing I can say here is that Christianity modified whites as no religion has modified other races.

But Christianity is not the only factor we must consider in white decline. For more than a year I have been thinking about the tragedy that the groupthink has represented for the white race, and we can illustrate it with a passage of the biographer Stefan Zweig about Stendhal. In short, we are influenced by the environment as much as the air gets into our lungs:

The natural reflection of the individual is not his own opinion, but his adaptation to the opinion of the time. It requires special energies every time, a foolproof value—and how few possess it!—in order to oppose a spiritual pressure of millions of atmospheres, which signify great energies. An individual must meet very rare and very tested forces so that he can subsist in his uniqueness. He must possess an exact knowledge of the world, a sovereign contempt for all herd, an arrogant and enormous disregard toward them and above all courage, three times courage, courage so firmly grounded that it seconds his own conviction.

Much of what happens to contemporary whites is encompassed in the quote above, as it is very rare that an ordinary man is not psychically crushed by the millions of atmospheres of politically-correct propaganda that for more than seventy years has been over us.

As I said recently on this site, I rarely have contact with pure Aryans or Jews. But I know the soul of Mediterranean people and mestizos very well. Yesterday I watched some videos of the most intelligent Mexican intellectual of the 20th century. In this old video for example, Octavio Paz, of whom I have already spoken, appears with other Spanish-speaking intellectuals: Mario Vargas Llosa, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Juan Goytisolo, Jorge Semprún and Fernando Savater.

Something that has bothered me about all the Spanish-speaking intellectuals is that since the 19th century they have been crushed by those millions of atmospheres that Zweig talked about. There are simply no paradigm dissenters among them as yours truly, who really has a sovereign contempt for all herd and an arrogant and huge disregard for their worldviews!

All these intellectuals mentioned above, which include two Nobel prizes in literature, subscribed in the most abject way the secular, liberal, egalitarian, universalist and deranged altruist groupthink that kills whites today. Personally it mystifies me that, despite the high intelligence of Octavio Paz, he never questioned the dogmas of his time.

Since, like Zweig, I am very interested in the biographies of notable men, yesterday I watched some videos about the biography of Paz, who as I have said died very close to where I used to live.

I didn’t need many videos to realise that Paz was always an extraordinarily gregarious man; that he had many friends among the Spanish refugees of the Franco regime, and that he himself travelled to Spain as a young man in times of the Spanish Civil War. Later Paz would criticise the most rancid Left in Latin America. That caused him many hatreds in a Mexico dominated by troglodytes in the cultural sphere, who had Fidel Castro as their patron saint. But in the videos that I have been seeing about his biography, it seemed to me extraordinarily clear that an individual who is so tuned with the milieu will be unable to completely break with the Zeitgeist, per Zweig’s quote.

Only isolated individuals can break with the groupthink. The problem is that solitude at such level can involve personal annihilation: what happened to poor Nietzsche. It is, therefore, very understandable that less courageous minds subscribe the current paradigm in order to avoid being expelled to an emotional Siberia by their pals.

The Internet provides a means by which a radical break is possible and not suffer maddening loneliness like that suffered by Nietzsche. At least in the racist forums we can share our views with isolated dissidents: akin souls that may be posting even in other continents.

Groupthink is killing whites, victims of mass propaganda after the Second World War. That is why I will not cease in my courage, three times courage, courage so firmly grounded that it will second my own conviction.

Categories
Exterminationism Final solution Miscegenation Stefan Zweig William Pierce

What’s wrong with exterminationism?

In this blog I have cited two Jews, Marcus Eli Savage and Mitchell Heisman, who admitted that Christianity was nothing but a psyop devised by their tribe to control the blond beast.

Before I woke up to the Jewish question I used to read the books of another Jew, Stefan Zweig (perhaps the only Jew whose libretto for an opera by Richard Strauss was accepted at the time of the Third Reich). Zweig begins his biography of Mary Baker Eddy with a very deep idea, ‘The most mysterious moment of a man is when he becomes aware of his intimate personality; the most mysterious moment in the history of mankind is the birth of their religions’. That is why I have placed so much emphasis on this site when analysing Paul and Mark the Evangelist: the literary authors (Jesus did not exist) of a religion that would eventually castrate all Aryans around the globe.

So castrated actually that, recently, in the comments section of a well-known blog of southern nationalists in the US, a commenter who detests me explained his reasons for why he hates me: because I criticise Christianity almost full time in this blog and also, because I promote an exterminationist ideology.

Only modern emasculated whites, what I call Jew-obeyers, can complain about that. We can already imagine the ancient Greeks or the Romans being frightened of a fellow citizen who criticised a Jewish sect called Christianity (remember the quotations of ancient Greeks and Romans about Jews and Christians in the ‘masthead’ of this site). If during the siege of Jerusalem in the year 70—when Mark wrote his gospel!—a Roman would tell Titus that an exterminationist ideology would have to be implemented, no one would have been frightened. At most, they would have told the exterminationist that it was better to enslave the survivors and sell them in the Mediterranean market for economic gain, what they actually did.

Had the ancient Romans benefited from the hindsight of the modern era—that the miscegenation that they were already beginning to practice in the 1st century would result in the collapse of the Empire—, they would have accepted the arguments of the exterminationist philosopher.

So what’s wrong with exterminationism? Not for nothing in this site have I called miscegenation ‘the sin against the holy spirit’, in the sense that it is so unforgivable sin that, once consummated, only the gradual decline and the eventual fall of an Aryan empire can take place. Those white nationalists or Southerners who have not yet learned the role that miscegenation played in ancient Rome would do well to read ‘The Race Problem of the Roman Empire’ by the Swedish philologist Martin P. Nilsson. Only after that it will be somewhat more digestible to understand what William Pierce wanted to tell us in a chapter, ‘Extermination or Expulsion’, from his only non-fiction book.

Food for thought:
Martin P. Nilsson’s text.
William L. Pierce’s text.

Categories
Aztecs Day of Wrath (book) Isaac Newton Pre-Columbian America Pseudoscience Psychiatry Psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud Stefan Zweig

Day of Wrath, 17

A critique of Lloyd deMause


Henry Ebel said that in psychohistory Lloyd deMause stands out among his epigones as a locomotive single-handedly tugging those who publish in his journal: all of them moving only thanks to a motor that is not theirs. Ebel had left the congresses of psychohistory even before I knew of their existence. However, no sooner I initiated my study of deMause’s texts I realized that both Ebel and deMause were human. All too human…
 
A string of nonsensical claims
One of the most cockeyed theories of deMause is that the warfare fantasies of political leaders and the media in times of war reflect childbirth traumas. Even Alice Miller has criticized this specific theory.
Glenn Davis was one of the first disciples of deMause: a young man that committed suicide. When Davis was doing his oral examination for his doctoral thesis, Stanley Renshon, a member of the committee, fired a question at Davis about something he had written following deMause’s theories: “It says in your book, ‘Groups go to war in order to overcome the helplessness and terror of being trapped in a birth canal’.” People laughed all around the table. What I find it fascinating is that, decades after Davis’ suicide, deMause still does not perceive the bad reputation that this sort of theories that he originated cause in his most serious readers.
In the issue of Spring of 2007 the Journal of Psychohistory published “The Conquistador and the Virgin Mary” by Madeleine Gómez. The article is an authentic string of nonsensical claims. According to this psychohistorian, in the Spanish conquest of the empires Mexica and Inca “the birth trauma was reenacted with few variations,” and on the next page she adds that the endeavor to conquer the seas in each exploration voyage is but “attempts to surmount the birth trauma.” After putting Cortés and the rest of the Spaniards as the villains of the story, Madeleine informs us that in the war for Tenochtitlan “the drumbeats in the air” can “easily be associated to the fetal heartbeat.” And writing on the denunciation by Francisco de Aguilar about the Indian sacrifices, she interprets that “it was easier to project upon the other…” That is, if the chronicler is shocked of the sacrifices, that only conceals the projections of his own European wickedness. Summarizing her interpretation of the Conquest, Madeleine writes: “There was arduous time spent in a womb-like mothership, with subsequent rebirth upon reaching shore.” These analytic interpretations remind me the worst nonsense of Freud recounted in my second book. The psychohistorian concludes that the Spaniards were “abusive, devaluing of women and children” without mentioning in the slightest the sacrifices of women and children in Mesoamerica.
Something similar can be said of deMause’s own views about the human placenta, a theory that he calls “The fetal origins of history.” Such importance he gives to this theory that he devoted the cover illustration of his book Foundations of Psychohistory to it. In an email I asked deMause what did he mean with the eight-headed dragon that appears on the cover. DeMause informed me that there were seven heads (the drawing is ambiguous), “a placental beast” that he relates with terrifying unconscious motivations.
 
Satanic Ritual Abuse
The confusion of my feelings about deMause—lucubration such as those are psychobabble but deMause’s discoveries potentially could be a great lighthouse for the humanities—moved me to annotate each cognitive error I encountered in his legacy.
In 1994 deMause devoted more than a whole issue of his journal to one of the scandals originated in his country that destroyed the reputation of many innocent adults: claims of multiple victims, multiple perpetrators during occult rites in daycare centers for children, known as “Satanic Ritual Abuse” or SRA. I was so intrigued by the subject that, when I read deMause’s article “Why Cults Terrorize and Kill Children” I devoted a few months of my life to research the subject by reading, printing and discussing in the internet (texts that would fill up the thickest ring-binder that I possess). I also purchased a copy of a book on SRA published by Princeton University. My objective was to ascertain whether the man whom I had been taking as a sort of mentor had gone astray. My suspicions turned out to be justified, and even worse: by inviting the foremost believers of SRA to publish in his journal, deMause directly contributed to the creation of an urban myth.
The collective hysteria known as SRA originated with the publication of a 1980 sensationalist book, Michelle Remembers. Michelle claimed that Satan himself appeared to her and wounded her body, but that an archangel healed it. In the mentioned article deMause wrote credulous passages about other fantastic claims by Michelle, and added that the people who ran certain daycare centers in the 1980s put the children in boxes and cages “as symbolic wombs.” DeMause then speculated that “they hang them upside down, the position of fetuses” and that “they drink victim’s blood as fetuses ‘drink’ placental blood,” in addition to force children to “drink urine” and “eat feces as some do during birth.” DeMause also referred to secret tunnels that, he wrote, existed beneath the daycare centers: “They often hold their rituals in actual tunnels.” In fact, those tunnels never existed. In Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Ritual Abuse in History, published in 2006, professor David Frankfurter wrote about deMause’s article: “In this way a contemporary writer can assemble a theory of ritual power to explain rituals that have no forensic evidence.”
This is the sort of thing that, in Wikipedia’s talk page about psychohistory, culminates with rants like the one that I rescued before another editor deleted it: “Don’t ever listen to this lunatic!” (deMause). It is true that Colin Ross is another gullible believer of SRA, as seen in a book that includes an afterword where Elizabeth Loftus disagrees with him. But since the mid-1990s the SRA phenomenon was discredited to such degree that sociologists, criminologists and police officials recognized what it was: a witch-hunt that led to prison and ruined the lives of many innocent adults. The movie Indictment: The McMartin Trial, sponsored by Oliver Stone and based on the most notorious of these hunts, sums up what I mean. Using invasive techniques for adults in the interrogation of little kids, the therapists of the McMartin case and other kindergartens obtained confessions full of fantasies: that the children had been abducted and taken through a network of tunnels to a hidden cave under the school; that they flew in the air and saw giraffes, lions and the killing of a rabbit to be returned to their unsuspecting parents in the daycare center. Kyle Zirpolo was one of the McMartin children. At twenty-nine in 2005, several years after the trial, Zirpolo confessed to reporters that as a child he had been pressured to lie:

Anytime I would give them an answer that they didn’t like, they would ask again and encourage me to give them the answer they were looking for. It was really obvious what they wanted… I felt uncomfortable and a little ashamed that I was being dishonest. But at the same time, being the type of person I was, whatever my parents wanted me to do, I would do.

In its heyday in the 1980s and early 90s, and in some ways similar to the Salem witch trials of 1692, SRA allegations reached grotesque levels. Proponents argued that an intergenerational group of families raised and kidnapped babies and children in an international conspiracy that had infiltrated the police and the professions of lawyers and doctors. Conspiracy theorists claimed that the FBI and the CIA were involved to discredit the veracity of the phenomenon. The allegations ranged from brainwashing and necrophilia, kidnapping, sexual abuse and child pornography, to black masses and ritual killings of animals and thousands of people every year. In the McMartin case they talked about children washed away when the perpetrator pulled the toilet chain taking them to hidden rooms where they would be molested; orgies in carwash business, and even flying witches. Needless to say, no forensic evidence was found to support such claims.
After the legal catastrophe that McMartin and several other cases represented, small children have not been questioned with the aggressive techniques that led them to fantasize so wildly. Nowadays there is no witch-hunting going on in the US, Britain or Australia caused by coercive techniques of fanatics that induce either false memories or outright lies (like Zirpolo’s) to please therapist and parent. However, despite the consensus in sociology and criminology of the new century—that the SRA was a case of moral panic from which there is no forensic evidence—deMause did not change his mind. The work that describes his thinking more broadly, The Emotional Life of Nations, published in 2002 and translated to German, contains a brief passage where he still regards SRA as something real.
 
Revisiting Zweig
I do not regret having compared deMause with Newton in a previous chapter. In the days when deMause disappointed me I watched the film The New World starring Colin Farrell and Christopher Plummer. It bothered me greatly the myth of the noble savage when Farrell’s voice in off says the following about an idyllic village of American Indians:

They are gentle, loving, faithful, lacking in all guile and trickery. The words denoting lying, deceit, greed, envy, slander, and forgiveness have never been heard. They have no jealousy, no sense of possession. Real, what I thought a dream.

At that moment Farrell plays with a few naked, happy Indian children outdoors. Of course, the historic reality was not so bucolic. Remember the photo of the little Indian boy swaddled by their parents in this book? This was a very common practice among those tribes. I felt Hollywood’s falsifying of reality so insulting that I left the theatre. Psychohistory also made me reconcile with Spain after almost a lifetime of hating her because of the conservative culture of my family which had hurt me so much as a boy. I owe much to deMause for having awakened me to the fact that the earlier Amerindian culture was incomparably more brutal, both for children and for adults.
Isaac Newton is the paradigm par excellence of scientific genius. He invented calculus, discovered the law of gravity, enumerated the laws of motion and showed that light is a mixture of colors. His findings not only revolutionized physics but also finally cracked down the pedestal on which Europe had Aristotle. Europe discovered her genius in Newton: a psychoclass comparable to that of the best Greek minds began to evolve in the 17th century.
The self-esteem that the European scientific mind recovered after Newton is difficult to overestimate. But very few know that after his third year of life Isaac’s mother abandoned him to the house of the grandmother: something that borders on what deMause calls the “abandoning mode” of childrearing. Newton’s biographers know that the child suffered this betrayal greatly. In order to burn his agony, in his early twenties he turned his mind into science. At twenty-six Newton had already discovered all of the mentioned above and even more. However, since at that time there were no survivor forums to vent the anger he felt for his mother and stepfather, Newton suffered a severe depression.
When he recovered he lost his mind: he dedicated the rest of his life to alchemy and fundamentalist theology. His manuscripts on these topics sum millions of words: incomparably more than the Principia Mathematica that Newton had written in his youth. He collected a hundred and fifty books on alchemy and tried to turn metal into gold. Newton “always believed in a personal God—nothing like the God of Spinoza—; in the literal narrative of Adam and Eve, the existence of the devil and in hell.” From this fundamentalist point of view Newton estimated the age of the world in some 3,500 years before his age and invested a huge amount of time to interpret the books of Daniel and the Revelation of John. He thought he had cracked the cipher of both books just as he had deciphered the laws of planetary motion. “It is sad,” writes Martin Gardner, “to envision the discoveries in mathematics and physics Newton might have made if his great intellect had not been diverted by such bizarre speculations.” When Newton died, it was found in his body large amounts of mercury: a poisoning resulting from his alchemical experiments.
However, the difference between Newton and deMause is considerable. Unlike Newton, deMause blended his brilliant Principia to his lunatic Alchimia under the same covers. DeMause’s major works where he did not collaborate with other authors, Foundations of Psychohistory, The Emotional Life of Nations and The Origins of War in Child Abuse are a mixture of historical science with pseudoscience; unprecedented discoveries about the history of the human soul with gross lunacies. Like Newton, deMause was terribly abused as a child. On page 136 of his journal, in the Fall 2007 issue he confesses that when his father beat him with a razor strap, as a way to escape he hallucinated that he floated to the ceiling. And on the first page of Foundations deMause writes: “I, like Hitler, have been a beaten, frightened child and a resentful youth. I recognize him in myself, and with some courage can feel in my own guts the terrors he felt…” The key phrase in this passage is “some courage,” not the full courage that I now discharge across my books. After that line of Foundations deMause’s soul disappears and his theories à la Newton appear: his brilliant insights eye to eye with his string of nonsensical claims.
From the point of view of the psychogenesis that he himself discovered, deMause’s main error is the error of psychoanalysts. Losing his mind was due to the fact that he failed to delve deeper into the wounds of his inner self. DeMause’s work, inspired by political sociology and analytical treatises, worships the intellect at the expense of autobiographical insight. One objective of this work [Hojas Susurrantes] is to break away from this intellectual limitation and unconfessional, academic literature.
Half a century before the publication of Julian Jayne’s book, Stefan Zweig wrote in Adepts in Self-Portraiture that when Western literature began with Hesiod and Heraclitus it was still poetry, and of the inevitability of a decline in the mythopoetic talent of Greece when a more Aristotelian thought evolved. As compensation for this loss, says Zweig, modern man obtained with the novel an approach to a science of the mind. But the novel genre does not represent the ultimate degree of self-knowledge:

Autobiography is the hardest of all forms of literary art. Why, then, do new aspirants, generation after generation, try to solve this almost insoluble problem?
[For a] honest autobiography […] he must have a combination of qualities which will hardly be found once in a million instances. To expect perfect sincerity in self-portraiture would be as absurd as to expect absolute justice, freedom, and perfection here on earth. No doubt the pseudo-confession, as Goethe called it, confession under the rose, in the diaphanous veil of novel or poem, is much easier, and is often far more convincing from the artistic point of view, than an account with no assumption of reserve. Autobiography, precisely because it requires, not truth alone, but naked truth, demands from the artist an act of peculiar heroism; for the autobiographer must play the traitor to himself.
Only a ripe artist, one thoroughly acquainted with the workings of the mind, can be successful here. This is why psychological self-portraiture has appeared so late among the arts, belonging exclusively to our own days and those yet to come. Man had to discover continents, to fathom his seas, to learn his language, before he could turn his gaze inward to explore the universe of his soul. Classical antiquity had as yet no inkling of these mysterious paths. Caesar and Plutarch, the ancients who describe themselves, are content to deal with facts, with circumstantial happenings, and never dream of showing more than the surface of their hearts.[…]
Many centuries were to pass before Rousseau (that remarkable man who was a pioneer in so many fields) was to draw a self-portrait for its own sake, and was to be amazed and startled at the novelty of his enterprise. Stendhal, Hebbel, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Amiel, the intrepid Hans Jaeger, have disclosed unsuspected realms of self-knowledge by self-portraiture. Their successors, provided with more delicate implements of research, will be able to penetrate stratum by stratum, room by room, farther and yet farther into our new universe, into the depths of the human mind.

This long quote explains why I decided to devise a hybrid genre between the self-portraiture that betrays the author and penetrates beyond the strata pondered by Romantic autobiographers, while, at the same time, presents a unified field for the findings of Alice Miller and Lloyd deMause.
 
Playing the fool
So far I have focused my criticism on the crank aspects of Lloyd’s legacy. In the remainder of the chapter I will discuss, in addition to the psychohistorians’ crackpot ideas, their moral faults.
It is not apparent that Lloyd has read Tom Szasz or other very well known critics of Sigmund Freud. This is fundamental for a true psychohistory. As we saw in the discussion of Ark, there are two camps in depth psychology: the deniers of the after-effects of psychological trauma who can be traced back to Freud, and those who recognize it, led by Alice Miller.
Unlike Ark, deMause never broke completely away from his psychoanalytic roots. The logo of his website has the symbol of a globe on an analyst’s couch, and the written presentation of the International Psychohistorical Association mentions the pioneering work of Freud, Reich and Fromm, informing us that psychohistorians come from many fields, including psychoanalysis and psychiatry. It is true that deMause is anything but an orthodox psychoanalyst, but it is extremely annoying that he mentions Freud while ignoring the amount of criticism that has been written about him. As we have seen [I refer to a chapter in Hojas Susurrantes], Freud took sides with the parents against their children, while deMause presents himself to his readers as a defender of children.
The lack of the most basic knowledge about the critics of Freudism makes deMause write about claims that have been abandoned. For example, Freud’s vision of Leonardo da Vinci has been refuted decades ago. On page 173 of Foundations of Psychohistory deMause candidly mentions the Freudian study of da Vinci as if the ongoing refutations had never been published. It is important to mention that when deMause was going to graduate, in his youthful infatuation with psychoanalysis he wanted to insert Freudian ideas in his doctorate of political science. It is understandable that his tutors at Columbia University prevented it. DeMause never obtained his doctorate. Many years later, in the article “The Universality of Incest” deMause even sided Freud against Alice Miller and the most articulate critic of Freud, Jeffrey Masson. Since after 1897 Freud dismissed his original discovery, that some parents sexually abused their daughters, deMause’s position is contradictory.
DeMause’s moral errors are even more worrying when we see his stance on contemporary child psychiatry. How appropriate to quote the key passages of my correspondence with him. In one of my e-mails of March 2006, I wrote:

In your country the psychiatrists hired by the parents are abusing millions of children and teenagers. Even before the advent of drugs in the 20th-century psychiatry had routinely tortured children on behalf of their parents. My quest for your back issues [of the Journal of Psychohistory] has to do with something that very much puzzles me. Have you or the journal contributors exposed this kind of traumatogenic mode of childrearing [i.e., child psychiatry]?

DeMause, who over the years has answered almost all of my e-mails, did not answer this one. Three days later I wrote him again:

I don’t want to press you on a point that you seem reluctant to discuss. I just want to thank you for your work, which I believe will prove to be the most significant in the study of history.

Playing the fool, deMause replied:

I just don’t know anything about what psychiatrists do to patients. I’m not a psychiatrist. Sorry.

“Patients” is Newspeak for sane children in conflict with their parents. I gathered from deMause’s response that no article about the crimes committed by psychiatry with children and adolescents had been published in his journal [the sort of crimes reported in my second book of Hojas Susurrantes].
The funny thing is that we could easily use deMause’s statements against him. He wrote: “Every childrearing practice in traditional societies around the globe betrays a profound lack of empathy toward one’s children,” and a couple of pages later he gives an example: “The use of opium on infants goes back to ancient Egypt, where the Ebers papyrus tells parents: ‘It acts at once’.” But this is precisely what psychotropic drugs like Ritalin do to children not in the distant and exotic Egypt, but in the city where deMause lives!
When I realized that deMause was not going to read the literature on the psychiatric abuse of children that I recommended in another of my e-mails, I knew that sooner or later I would have to publish a critique. And incidentally: the page 166 of The Emotional Life deMause swallows the pseudoscientific propaganda that depression is due to a lack of serotonin. Similarly, the psychohistorian Robert Godwin wrote in one of his articles that some people need to ingest psychoactive drugs; and Henry Ebel commended Melanie Klein, the notorious analyst who blamed infants for projections from their parents, as Jeffrey Masson and Alice Miller have so cogently argued.
 
At the left of Chomsky
In Foundations of Psychohistory deMause wrote:

Our conclusion is that Jimmy Carter—for reasons rooted both in his own personality and in the powerful emotional demands of American fantasy—is very likely to lead us into a new war by 1979.

This is a pretty crazy statement. Foundations was published in 1982. Having had the opportunity to mature the lesson given to him by history, deMause did not retract when his prophecy about Carter, who left the White House in 1981 behaving like a dove before the Iranian crisis, was not fulfilled. What is this: publishing in all seriousness a prophecy refuted by history? It exposes a man completely trapped in his own theory. Also, in The Emotional Life of Nations deMause blinded himself before the threat that Cuba and the Soviet Union represented during the missile crisis. Without taking seriously the threat of nuclear annihilation that these missiles posed to his own country, deMause psychoanalyzed Kennedy’s actions as a case that he unraveled: a psychological reductionism as kooky as what his disciple Madeleine wrote about Cortés.
DeMause went back to his old ways in his latest book, The Origins of War in Child Abuse, first published in his journal, where he psychoanalyzes the 1835-1836 war that his country waged against Mexico to annex the territory of Texas. He also interprets with his bizarre theories the US intervention in the two world wars and continues to speculate on those lines about the wars in Korea and Vietnam. But his followers surpass him. But his followers surpass him. The Fall 2007 issue of the Journal of Psychohistory published an article by Robert McFarland in which the author endorses the most lunatic theories that the US government orchestrated the attacks of September 11, and in the Spring 2008 issue Matt Everett uses quite a few pages of the journal to continue to promote the conspiratorial paranoia. This continued in the Journal of Psychohistory of Spring 2009 and in a book review of the Fall issue of that year. His journal is located at the left of Noam Chomsky, who at least has had enough sanity to dismiss conspiracy theories such as 9/11. In short, deMause reduces all international politics to fantastic speculations. No wonder that after the initial success of the one of his books free of nonsense—The History of Childhood, published in 1974, that sold thousands of copies in several languages—, the wrong turn deMause and his followers took has disappointed the vast majority of his readers, so much so that in a 2010 audio interview deMause acknowledges: “I dropped from 6,000 to 800 subscribers of my journal.” But of deMause’s colleagues among whom, I suppose, many are Jews, there is something much more sinister than all that.
 
The psychohistorians and the hatred of the West
It is striking that, except the articles by deMause himself, many articles in the Journal of Psychohistory have little if anything to do with the original psychohistory. As I said, the original psychohistory tells us that non-Western cultures are more barbarous than ours. Conversely, the Journal of Psychohistory of Winter of 2009 contains an article by Arno Gruen praising the Pawnee Indians without mentioning how they treat children (Gruen even talks of “the white invasion”). The Summer 2009 issue of the journal published a much worse article, “The European-American psychosis” by Frederick Hickling: a diatribe against the West and the white people. From the perspective called transcultural psychiatry, Hickling calls the war of Cortés in Mexico as “delusion of genocidal eradication” ignoring that extermination was never the intention of the Spanish, proof that pure whites are now a tiny minority in Mexico. (Hickling misspells the name of the conqueror, a very common error in those ignorant of the topic, as “Cortez.”) But he does quote Bartolomé de Las Casas accepting the blackest interpretation of the Black Legend: that the Spanish murdered millions of Indians on purpose. Hickling thus minimizes the real cause of the diminution of the native population in the 16th century: the epidemics upon which the natives had no antibodies. The Europe of that century was called “the racist European formation,” and using inflammatory rhetoric Hickling writes of “the European ruthless viciousness to indigenous people in the Americas and in Polynesia,” and calls the European wars in the New World in the 17th century “the delusion of White Supremacy.” And he says something similar about the wars of the 18th and 19th centuries, with expressions like “colossal theft of Africa by Europe.” Writing about contemporary Islamic terrorists, Hickling puts quotation marks to the word “terrorists,” and he quotes Marxist revolutionary Frantz Fanon as he writes of “freedom fighters.” Hickling, a professor of psychiatry in Jamaica, goes so far as to suggest that it is possible to apply the concept of delusion “to a race or civilization” as a whole, referring to the white race and Western civilization.
Hickling is not alone. The same 2009 issue of Journal of Psychohistory contains the article “Some Thoughts on Psychoclasses and Zeitgeist.” Christian Lackner, one of the two authors of the article, translated into German deMause’s The Emotional Life of Nations. Following the most progressive political trends the article by Lackner and Juha Siltala welcome the European Union and praise the profile of the new European psychoclass of males as “androgynes” (sic) for whom war is old history. The gem of the article is that it ends by conceding that “the demographic picture” with such androgynous males must result in that “the population of Europe will eventually die out” without having it for something bad, or a demographic suicide against which we must fight.
DeMause and his little journal have reached their nadir with this issue: pure evil. These pair of articles are not the only of their kind. Other issues of the Journal of Psychohistory idealize the black Obama, and what is worse, the journal does not say a word about the dangers that the growing Islamization of Europe represent for what they themselves, the psychohistorians, call the “helping mode of childrearing.” Alarmed, when I was living in Europe, I sent deMause an e-mail asking what he thought of the Islamization of Scandinavia. He answered me once more by playing the imbecile, saying that Nordics “are helping their children.”
 
The sin against the holy ghost
The migration of Muslims into Europe in recent decades illustrates what is an encounter of psychoclasses. Instead of the chosen example—the encounter between Europeans and Amerindians—, the ongoing clash of psychoclasses with the millions of immigrants could have been the paradigm of this book.
But the Islamization of Europe in the 21st century is only the most conspicuous tip of the iceberg. The current group fantasy among westerners is genocidal self-hatred. Demography is destiny. But the West has lost its appetite for life, as seen in the ever-shrinking birthrates of whites. At this rate there will be no replacement for the white people in the coming generations. Westerners do not believe anymore in they ethnicity; in heterosexual marriage, or in their civilization as they still believed when my parents were young. An overreaction against the two great wars appears to have metamorphosed them into pods, as in the movie of the 1950s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Their most unforgivable sin has been their handing over their lands to millions of non-Caucasian immigrants.
Massive Third World migration into the United States, Europe and Australia, promoted by Western governments, is the highest betrayal to one’s own people ever perpetrated in history. While the scenario might remind us the hostile takeover of Rome by a Levantine cult, it is infinitely worse. Constantine may have surrendered the empire to the bishops, dragging it straight into the Middle Ages, but no explicit anti-white exterminationist program was implemented by him and his successors; the program was implicit. In contrast, in the West of today massive numbers of non-whites are being imported at the same time with the demographic decline of the native population: an explicit, anti-white exterminationist program.
This is the most important issue of anything we can imagine: even more important than the child advocacy understood in terms of all races, the theme of this book. If Hyperboreans disappeared, my thirst to fight in the resulting mongrelized culture would die out. It would be a Neanderthalesque regression from my most cherished ideals. Think of the most beautiful female specimens of the Aryan race, for example the painting Lady Violet on the cover of The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour. What whites are doing to themselves is the real sin against the holy spirit of life: placing the very crown of evolution on the path to extinction.
Just as in the past the infanticidal psychoclass sacrificed their children in times of great prosperity, a phenomenon that deMause has called “growth panic,” a mad generation—including deMause’s—, indoctrinated in anti-white racism, sacrifices the future of their children; their grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren… Large numbers of abortions and intercourse with condoms or pills—and mixing their blood with non-whites!—can only mean that an ethnic group is committing suicide. Westerners have decided to erase their history, culture, identity and what is most valuable: their genetic capital.
Such self-destruct ethos reminds me the determined campaign of destruction that, in my family, my mother led when she fell sized with panic before her thriving teenager. Like my parents with me in our beloved home of Palenque [the subject of my other books], reaching the height of its prosperity the West succumbs to unconscious forces turned into a monster which etiology nobody seems to know, not even the readers of Alice Miller, let alone the psychohistorians.
 
___________
The objective of Day of Wrath is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering. If life allows, next month I will reproduce another chapter. Day of Wrath is available: here.

Categories
Americanism Axiology James Mason Kevin MacDonald Stefan Zweig

Kindergarten racists

American white advocates are now discussing what they call ‘optics’ as PR for the movement (two of the most recent pieces by Hunter Wallace and Andrew Anglin: here and here).
Incredibly, Wallace who a few years ago sided mainstreamers against Greg Johnson, is now tolerant of fashy optics in the rallies while Anglin, whose site with acid sarcasm on Jews often uses Nazi imaginary, is now claiming that the movement needs electoral politics and Americanism!
Just compare this with what James Mason said in Siege (this morning I just added one more of the chapters of Siege as a post for this site). But Mason himself has his own problems. He was stuck in the religion of our parents and abandoned revolutionary politics: a religion I’m now debunking with my translations of Deschner’s Criminal History of Christianity.
Wallace seems to have a better grasp of reality than Anglin, but generally speaking their movement is a failure. And it is a failure because all of them are unable to give up Christian ethics. Apropos of the fact that Kevin MacDonald is now accepting Jewish contributors for The Occidental Observer, I responded to Franklin Ryckaert today:

The real issue here is my claim that whites do indeed have a loose screw. Our central intellectual figure in understanding the JQ cannot fathom à la Hitler that no Jew ought to be platformed, especially in a Jew-wise forum.
You can imagine an ‘Anti-Semites Watch’ periodical run by Jews admitting a Nazi contributor! Recently someone said that many white nationalists support Israel because they believe that Jews should have a home of their own, but that Jews don’t reciprocate the favour: they don’t support a home nation for whites anywhere in the world. That was an excellent point!
Christian-problem The Aryan problem does encompass the Jewish Problem. If even secular white nationalists subscribe the Christian commandment to love our enemies, we have a huge problem at home.
I will continue to promote MacDonald’s trilogy as fundamental reading to understand the JP but not only I’ve now removed The Occidental Observer from my blogroll list: I’m more confident than ever that NS should replace WN/Alt-Right (cf. my comment on Strauss/Zweig below), and that the ongoing discussion among them on optics is for Kindergarten racists who have no clue about the history of Christianity.

I was referring to this comment on mine about Richard Strauss and Stefan Zweig in Nazi Germany.

Categories
Autobiography Hojas Susurrantes (book) Literature Oracle of Delphi Psychology Stefan Zweig

New literary genre

“Know thyself” (gnōthi seafton)
Delphic maxim in the Temple of Apollo

 

I started Hojas Susurrantes (HS) in 1988 and added the last touchups last year. It is neither a novel nor an essay; nor memoirs in the traditional sense nor a pamphlet or poetry. It is difficult to define this non-fictional genre in few words. My first reader, Andreas Wirsén, a Swede lover of literature, wrote in an online forum that I am “a pioneer developing a new sport.”

As stated in Day of Wrath which contains a Spanish-English translation of the longest chapter of HS, Stefan Zweig wrote in Adepts in Self-Portraiture that when Western literature began with Hesiod and Heraclitus it was still poetry, and of the inevitability of a decline in the mythopoetic talent of Greece when a more Aristotelian thought evolved. As compensation for this loss, says Zweig, modern man obtained with the novel an approach to a science of the mind. But the novel genre does not represent the ultimate degree of self-knowledge:

Autobiography is the hardest of all forms of literary art. Why, then, do new aspirants, generation after generation, try to solve this almost insoluble problem?

[For a] honest autobiography […] he must have a combination of qualities which will hardly be found once in a million instances. To expect perfect sincerity on self-portraiture would be as absurd as to expect absolute justice, freedom, and perfection here on earth. No doubt the pseudo-confession, as Goethe called it, confession under the rose, in the diaphanous veil of novel or poem, is much easier, and is often far more convincing from the artistic point of view, than an account with no assumption of reserve. Autobiography, precisely because it requires, not truth alone, but naked truth, demands from the artist an act of peculiar heroism; for the autobiographer must play the traitor to himself.

Gnothi_seautonOnly a ripe artist, one thoroughly acquainted with the workings of the mind, can be successful here. This is why psychological self-portraiture has appeared so late among the arts, belonging exclusively to our own days and those yet to come. Man had to discover continents, to fathom his seas, to learn his language, before he could turn his gaze inward to explore the universe of his soul. Classical antiquity had as yet no inkling of these mysterious paths. Caesar and Plutarch, the ancients who describe themselves, are content to deal with facts, with circumstantial happenings, and never dream of showing more than the surface of their hearts.

Zweig then devotes a long paragraph to St Augustine’s Confessions, the thinker I abhor the most of all Western tradition and whose theology about Hell caused massive psychological damage in my own life (also recounted in HS). Then Zweig wrote:

Many centuries were to pass before Rousseau (that remarkable man who was a pioneer in so many fields) was to draw a self-portrait for its own sake, and was to be amazed and startled at the novelty of his enterprise. Stendhal, Hebbel, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Amiel, the intrepid Hans Jaeger, have disclosed unsuspected realms of self-knowledge by self-portraiture. Their successors, provided with more delicate implements of research, will be able to penetrate stratum by stratum, room by room, farther and yet farther into our new universe, into the depths of the human mind.

This quote explains why I decided to devise a hybrid genre between the self-portraiture that betrays the author and thus penetrates beyond the strata pondered by Romantic autobiographers. Over the boards anti-Nazis have been making fun about my experiences in London last year. They have no idea what I am trying to say because they completely lack context. Together with the Zweig quote my December 31 entry, “Etiology,” provides a bit of the context of what I’m trying to say in the book I’m presently writing.

Categories
Friedrich Nietzsche Philosophy Psychology Stefan Zweig

The Struggle with the Daimon


der_kampf_mit_dem_daemon

For an easy reading,
you can read all of my excerpts
of Zweig’s essay on Nietzsche
at Ex libris (here).

Categories
Friedrich Nietzsche Stefan Zweig

The teacher of freedom

der_kampf_mit_dem_daemon

“After the next European war, people will understand me.” Such is the prophetic utterance that shines conspicuously forth from among Nietzsche’s last writings. In very truth, the real significance, the historical necessity of this seer is made plain to us only in relation to the tensed, unstable, and dangerous condition of our world at the turn of the century.

In this sensitive, who transformed every atmospheric convulsion from nerve to spirit, from intimation into word, there occurred a foreboding discharge of all the tensions of the morally obtuse Europe. There was a cataclysm in Nietzsche’s mind as a presage of the most terrible cataclysm in human history. His “far-thinking” vision glimpsed the crisis while others were comfortably warming their heads before the agreeable fires of well-turned phrases. He discerned the causes of what was about to happen: “The national cardiac pruritus and the blood-poisoning thanks to which, throughout Europe, nation shuts itself off from nation as if they were quarantining against one another’s plagues.” He saw the “nationalism as of horned cattle.”

Wrathfully he predicts catastrophe in view of the convulsive endeavours “to eternalize particularism throughout Europe” and to defend a morality established upon egoistic interests and upon business. In letters of fire upon the wall he wrote: “This absurd state of affairs must speedily be brought to an end.” No one heard more plainly than did Nietzsche the ominous cracking in the edifice of European society; no one, in a time of unwarranted optimism and self-satisfaction, sounded so loudly as he the summons to fight. A new and mighty order was about to begin. Now at length we know it, as he knew it decades ago. Such agonizing foresight was his greatness and his heroism; and there is a spiritual truth underlying the belief of simple souls that before wars and crises comets pursue their erratic course athwart the sky. He alone recognized how frightful a hurricane was about to disturb our civilisation.

But it is the perennial tragedy of the spirit that what it perceives in its higher, more luminous spheres can never be communicated to those who dwell in the heavier atmosphere upon the lower levels; that the present never grasps what is impending, is never able to read the message of the skies. Even the most translucent genius of the nineteenth century could not speak plainly enough to enable his contemporaries to understand him. No more was vouchsafed to him than the cry of warning which was incompressible to his contemporaries. Then his mind gave way.

“There are no heroic ages, but solely heroic persons.” It is the individual who achieves independence within the world, and for himself alone. Nietzsche’s independence did not therefore transmit, as scholastics declare, a doctrine, but, rather, an atmosphere—the limpid and passionate atmosphere of a daimonic nature.

Just as, in the domain of natural forces, there is need at times for whirlwinds wherein the excess of energy rises in revolt against stability, so likewise, now and again, in the realm of mind there is need for a daimonic being whose transcendent powers shall make him the spearhead of a revolt against the triviality of habitual thought and the monotonousness of conventional morality. There is need of a man who will embody the forces of destruction and who will destroy himself likewise.

____________

After a few more words, Zweig’s essay on Nietzsche ends.
In all of these entries I only typed those paragraphs
which struck me the most.

Categories
Art Friedrich Nietzsche Music Stefan Zweig

Dance over the abyss

der_kampf_mit_dem_daemon

If you look into an abyss, the
abyss, likewise, looks into you.



This self-addressed pæan of intoxicated happiness is, I know, regarded by modern physicians as a morbid euphoria, as the last pleasure in a decaying brain, as the stigma of that megalomania which is characteristic of the early stage of paralytic dementia. But Nietzsche talks clearly and incisively amid the ardours of intoxication. No other mortal, perhaps, has ever in full awareness and without a trace of giddiness leaned so far and seen so clearly over the edge of the precipice of lunacy.

No doubt the light that sparkles here is a perilous one. It has the phantasmal and morbid luminosity of a midnight sun glowing red above icebergs; it is a northern light of the soul whose unique splendour makes us shudder. It does not warm us, it terrifies us. It does not dazzle, but it slays. He is not carried away as was Hölderlin by an obscure rhythm of feeling, is not overwhelmed by the onrush of melancholy. He is scorched by his own ardours, is sunstruck by his own rays, is affected by a white-hot and intolerable cheerfulness. Nietzsche’s collapse was a sort of carbonization in his own flames.

He commanded the German emperor to go to Rome in order to be shot; he summoned the European powers to take united military action against Germany, to encircle his fatherland in a ring of iron. Never did apocalyptic wrath shout more savagely into vacancy, never did so glorious presumption scourge a mind beyond earthly bounds. His words issued like hammer-blows striving to demolish the edifice of established civilisation. The Christian era was to cease with the publication of his Antichrist, and a new numbering of the years was to begin.

“No one has written, felt, suffered in such a manner before; the sufferings of a god, a Dionysius.” These words, penned when his mental disorder had already begun, are painfully true. The little room of the fourth floor, and the hermitage of Sils-Maria, not only sheltered the man Friedrich Nietzsche whose nerves were breaking under the strain, but also served as the places from which were issued a marvellous message to the dying century. The Creative Spirit had taken refuge beneath the attic roof heated by the southern sun, and was bestowing its entire wealth upon a timid, neglected, and lonely being, bestowing far more than any isolated person could sustain.

Within those narrow walls, wrestling with infinities, the poor mortal senses were stumbling and groping amid the lightening-flashes of revelation. Like Hölderlin, he felt that a god was revealing himself, a fiery god whose radiance the eyes could not bear and whose proximity was scorching. Again and again the cowering wrench raised his head and attempted to look upon the countenance of this deity, his thoughts running riot the while.

Was not he who felt and wrote and suffered such unthinkable things, was not he himself God? Had not a god reanimated the world after he, Nietzsche, had slain the old god? Who was he? Who was Nietzsche? Was Nietzsche the Crucified; the dead god or the living one; the god of his youth, Dionysius; or both Dionysus and the Crucified—the crucified Dionysius?

More and more confused grew his thoughts; the current roared too loud beneath the superfluity of light. Was it still light? Had it not become music? The narrow room on the fourth floor in the Via Carlo Alberto began to intone; the shining spheres made music; all heaven was aglow. What wonderful music! Tears tricked down his face, warm tears. What sublime tenderness, what auspicious happiness! And now, what lucidity! In the street, everyone smiled at him in friendly fashion; they stood up to greet him; they made obeisance to him, the slayer of gods; they were all so delighted to see him. Why? Why?

He knew. Antichrist had appeared upon earth, and men acclaimed him with hosannas. The world hummed with jubilation, was full of music. Then suddenly the tumult was stilled. Something, someone fell down. It is he, himself, in the street, in front of the house where he lodged. He was picked up. He found himself back in his room.

Had he been asleep for a long time? It seemed very dark. There was the piano. Music! Music! Then, unexpectedly, people appeared in the room. Surely one of them must be Overbeck. But Overbeck is in Basel; and where is he, Nietzsche? He no longer remembers. Why does the company look at him so strangely, so anxiously? He is in a train, rattling along the rails, and the wheels are singing; yes, they are singing the “Gondolier’s Chanty,” and he joins in, signs in an interminable darkness.

He is in a strange room, and always it is dark. No more sunshine, no light at all, either within or without. People talk in the room. A woman among them, surely it is his sister? He had thought she was travelling. She reads aloud to him, now from one book, now from another. Books? “Was not I once a writer of books?” Comes a gentle answer, but he cannot understand. One in whose soul such a hurricane has raged grows deaf to ordinary speech. One who has gazed so intently into the eyes of the daimon is henceforth blinded.