THE WEST'S DARKEST HOUR

It is the deep connection of Christianity (and, in particular, the ‘holy Sacrifice of the Mass’) with the ancient mysteries that has ensured its survival to the present day. And it was a stroke of (political) genius in Paul of Tarsus to have given such an interpretation to the most ancient myths of the Mediterranean world that he thereby assured his own people, over this world and over all the peoples he was destined to influence over the centuries, an indefinite spiritual domination.

It was a stroke of genius (also political) of the Emperor Constantine to have chosen the spread of the religion which, by spreading most rapidly, would give the ethnic chaos which the Roman world then represented the only unity to which it could still aspire.

Editor’s Note: Once again, Savitri was ignorant of the history of the House of Constantine. But we can’t blame her. In English, the real history of Christianity only reached public opinion decades later, with books like Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (see our quotations of Nixey: here).

And it was, in the case of the Germanic leader Clodwig, known as Clovis in the history of France, another stroke of genius (political, too), to have felt that nothing would ensure him permanent domination over his rivals, other Germanic leaders, as much as his own adherence—and that of his warriors—to Christianity, in a world that was already three-quarters Christian, where the bishops represented a power to be sought as an ally.

Editor’s Note: Nixey’s book is just a book. Karlheinz Deschner’s ten-volume Christianity’s Criminal History is almost an encyclopaedia, and unlike Nixey he did write about Clovis (see our translation: here).

Political genius, not religious; still less philosophical—for in all cases it was a question of power, personal or national; of material stability and success, not of truth in the full sense of the word, i.e., of agreement with the eternal. Those were ambitions on the human plane, not thirsts for knowledge of the Laws of Being, or thirsts for union with the Essence of all things, the Soul, both transcendent and immanent, of the Cosmos.

If it had been otherwise, there would have been no reason why the religion of the Nazarene should have triumphed for so many centuries: its rivals were equal to it. It had only one practical advantage over them: its fanaticism, its childish intolerance inherited from the Jews: an intolerance which could make the Roman or the cultured Greek of the early days of the Church smile, and which the German, nurtured in his beautiful religion which was both cosmic and warlike, could rightly find absurd; but which was going to give to Christianity a militant character, which it alone possessed since orthodox Judaism remained—and was to remain—the faith of a people.

Editor’s Note: Compare this with what Manu Rodríguez wrote for this site:

Nothing forced the Goths, Lombards, Burgundians and Franks to be Christianised but their greed for power and willingness to take over the remains of the Empire without reflection or discussion of its ‘ideological’ bases, fully Christianised by the 5th century (the century of the Germanic expansions). This was not the case of forced Christianisation, centuries later, of the Saxons and Frisians (by Charlemagne), or the politics from the top (the monarchs) as done by the Norwegians (Olaf ‘The Holy’) and the Slavs (Vladimir, also ‘The Holy’). The Germans could have been the liberators of Europe, but they put their arms in the service of a foreign faith and an ecclesia (priestly community). This attitude says very clearly how they were indifferent to their own traditions.

It was a betrayal. Our history would have been different if they had remained faithful to the cultural legacy of their ancestors.

Savitri continues:

Christianity could now only be fought by another religion that claimed to be as universal and as intolerant. And it is a fact that, up to now, it has only retreated on a large scale from Islam and, in our days, from the false religion of Communism.

Islam also was linked to the Old Testament of the Jews. It had, like it, come out of the desert, but was stripped of all the symbolism which links the cult of Christ to the old Mediterranean myths, Egyptian, Chaldean, etc., of the death and resurrection of the Saviour Wheat, and to the prehistoric rites which made them tangible to the faithful. (For the Mohammedan, Jesus-Issa is ‘a prophet’, not a God, and certainly not ‘God’). Syria, Egypt and the whole of North Africa, which had been Christian for three or four centuries, were Islamised overnight. Europe would have been conquered, had it not been for the war that Charles Martel and his Franks were victorious between Tours and Poitiers in 732 (and of course, hadn’t it resisted for centuries as Spain did).

Certainly, an Arab victory, followed by the conquest of the whole of Europe according to the plan conceived twenty years earlier by the brilliant Musa al-Kabir, would have been, from the racial point of view, a catastrophe of the first magnitude. The Aryan race would have lost, throughout the continent, the purity it still retained in the eighth century. At most, there would have remained here and there islands of predominantly Aryan population, just as there are still regions in North Africa populated mainly by Berbers, or as there are still places in Spain where the (northern) Visigoth type has left more traces than elsewhere. On the whole, Europe would have become, as regards blood, less pure even than it is today, which is not an understatement. But from the strict point of view of the evolution of the ideas and morals of each of its peoples, and more particularly of its religious psychology, its history would perhaps not have been very different.

It is true that Arabic would probably have supplanted Latin, and that there would probably not have been a ‘Renaissance’ in the tenth century of the Hegira. Or would the Greek scholars of Constantinople (themselves Islamized?) have emigrated to the West when the Turks approached, to courts very similar to those of the Moorish capitals of Spain, and would they have awakened a nostalgia for classical antiquity there, despite everything? Let us not forget that Aristou (Aristotle) and Aflatoun (Plato) were known and admired by Arab scholars.

There would certainly have been no painting or sculpture reproducing the human form: this is contrary to the laws of Islam. The artists of Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, the Leonards, the Michelangelos, the Dürer and the Rembrandts, would have been born. Enough Aryan blood would have remained for them to be born. And they would have given their genius an expression that was just as strong and probably just as beautiful, but different. But there are two features of the Christian civilisation of Europe which would have remained tragically the same: anthropocentrism, and intolerance—intolerance on all levels, a normal continuation of religious intolerance and its consequence, what I have called the superstition of ‘man’.

The spirit of controversy, inherited from decadent Hellenism, would not have failed to give rise to sects. The spirit of exclusiveness, inherited from the Jews, the mania that each one must believe, with his brothers in faith, the sole holder of the secrets of the Unknowable, would have made of these sects parties hating each other, and militating savagely against each other, for it was and is still the temperament of the European to fight savagely, as soon as he has accepted the combat.

There would undoubtedly have been wars of religion, and a Holy Inquisition which, in terms of horror, would have left nothing to be desired of the one that now exists. The Americas would have been discovered and conquered, and exploited. The caravels would have carried the faith of the victorious Prophet instead of that of the crucified Jesus, and the standard of the Khalifs would have replaced that of the very Catholic kings.

But the conquest, exploitation and proselytising would have been just as ruthless. The old cults would have been rigorously abolished, as had been, twenty-five centuries earlier, the worship of the Baalim and the Mother Goddesses, wherever the ‘good’ Jewish kings had extended their domination. The Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan would also have been razed to the ground. It did not matter that mosques had sprung up on their foundations instead of Christian cathedrals! From the point of view of Quautemoc and Atahuallpa, and of the populations of Mexico and Peru, this would have meant the same thing: the choice between conversion or death.

It is true that the Jews of antiquity had not even given this choice to the worshippers of Baal and Astarte, and that in North America the Aryans, morally could not be more Jewish (giving enormous importance to the Old Testament), were hardly going to leave it to the Indians, whom they had to decimate, almost to the point of complete extinction, by alcohol, not even granting them the honour of dying for their Gods, with weapons in their hands.

The Spaniards—and the Portuguese—apparently cared more about the fate of the immortal souls of ‘all men’. They were closer to the Jews, followers of Jesus, and especially of Paul of Tarsus, than they were to the Jews who were comrades-in-arms of Joshua, son of Nunn, or of King David or of Jehu. Nevertheless, they were, in any case, what all good Christians are or should be, according to Pope Pius XI: ‘spiritual Semites’, and religious intolerance is a Jewish product, the Jewish product par excellence.