Oil on canvas by John Collier
Herbert Art Gallery and Museum.
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Categories
Dominion, 18
Or:
How the Woke monster originated
In 1516, any lingering hopes that Ferdinand might prove to be the last emperor were put to rest by his death. He had not led a great crusade to reconquer Jerusalem; Islam had not been destroyed. Nevertheless, the achievements of Ferdinand’s reign had been formidable. His grandson, Charles, succeeded to the rule of the most powerful kingdom in Christendom, and to a sway more authentically globe-spanning than that of the Caesars. Spaniards felt no sense of inferiority when they compared their swelling empire to Rome’s. Quite the contrary. From lands unknown to the ancients came news of feats that would have done credit to Alexander: the toppling against all the odds of mighty kingdoms; the winning of dazzling fortunes; men who had come from nowhere to live like kings.
Yet there lay over the brilliance of these achievements a pall of anxiety. No people in antiquity would ever have succeeded in winning an empire for themselves had they doubted their licence to slaughter and enslave the vanquished; but Christians could not so readily be innocent in their cruelty. When scholars in Europe sought to justify the Spanish conquest of the New World, they reached not for the Church Fathers, but for Aristotle. ‘As the Philosopher says, it is clear that some men are slaves by nature and others free by nature.’ Even in the Indies, though, there were Spaniards who worried whether this was truly so. ‘Tell me,’ a Dominican demanded of his fellow settlers, eight years before Cortés took the road to Tenochtitlan, ‘by what right or justice do you keep these Indians in such a cruel and horrible servitude? On what authority have you waged a detestable war against these people, who dwelt quietly and peacefully in their own land?’
The Dominican Tom Holland alluded to above was Antonio de Montesinos, a Spanish missionary and friar. Together with the first community of Dominicans in the American continent, led by the vicar Fray Pedro de Córdoba, he distinguished himself in the defence of the Indians from the Spanish colonisers. He caused the conversion of Bartolomé de las Casas to the defence of the Indians, about whom I have written on this site more than one article.
When I considered myself a white nationalist and wrestled inwardly over which was the ultimate cause of Aryan decline, Judaism or Christianity, one of the factors that tipped the balance towards the latter was my father’s ideology. I wondered what caused him to go astray: the television he watched or his Catholic upbringing, which led to an exacerbated admiration for these Spanish friars. Eventually, I realised that it was the Christian religion that was the underlying factor in my father’s embrace of the Black Legend created by these friars.
Anyone interested in the details of this psychological analysis of my father and his admired friars can read El Grial. Holland continues:
Most of the friar’s congregation, too angered to reflect on his questions, contented themselves with issuing voluble complaints to the local governor, and agitating for his removal; but there were some colonists who did find their consciences pricked. Increasingly, adventurers in the New World had to reckon with condemnation of their exploits as cruelty, oppression, greed. Some, on occasion, might even come to this realisation themselves. The most dramatic example occurred in 1514, when a colonist in the West Indies had his life upended by a sudden, heart-stopping insight: that his enslavement of Indians was a mortal sin.
As always, the latent threat of eternal damnation is behind the great pathologies of the West.
Like Paul on the road to Damascus, like Augustine in the garden, Bartolomé de las Casas found himself born again. Freeing his slaves, he devoted himself from that moment on to defending the Indians from tyranny. Only the cause of bringing them to God, he argued, could possibly justify Spain’s rule of the New World; and only by means of persuasion might they legitimately be brought to God. ‘For they are our brothers, and Christ gave his life for them.’
Las Casas, whether on one side of the Atlantic, pleading his case at the royal court, or on the other, in straw-thatched colonial settlements, never doubted that his convictions derived from the mainstream of Christian teaching. [pages 307-308]
Oil on canvas by John Collier
(Atkinson Art Gallery Collection)
Categories
Dominion, 17
Or:
How the Woke monster originated
In 1453, Constantinople had finally fallen to the Turks. The great bulwark of Christendom had become the capital of a Muslim empire. The Ottomans, prompted by their conquest of the Second Rome to recall prophecies spoken by Muhammad, foretelling the fall to Islam of Rome itself, had pressed on westwards. In 1480, they had captured Otranto, on the heel of Italy. The news of it had prompted panic in papal circles—and not even the expulsion of the Turks the following year had entirely settled nerves. Terrible reports had emerged from Otranto: of how the city’s archbishop had been beheaded in his own cathedral, and some eight hundred others martyred for Christ.
Across Christendom, then, dread of what the future might hold continued to be joined with hope: of the dawning of a new age, when all of humanity would be gathered under the wings of the Spirit, that holy dove which, at Jesus’ baptism, had descended upon him from heaven. The same sense of standing on the edge of time that in Bohemia had led the Taborites to espouse communism elsewhere prompted Christians to anticipate that all the world would soon be brought to Christ. In Spain, where war against Muslim potentates had been a way of life for more than seven hundred years, this optimism was particularly strong. Men spoke of El Encubierto, the Hidden One: the last Christian emperor of all. At the end of time, he would emerge from concealment to unify the various kingdoms of Spain, to destroy Islam for good, to conquer Jerusalem, to subdue ‘brutal kings and bestial races’ everywhere, and to rule the world. [pages 301-302]
On the next page Holland continues:
Ferdinand was certainly free now to look to broader horizons. Among the cheering crowds watching the royal entry into Granada was a Genoese seafarer by the name of Christopher Columbus…
Three years later, during the course of a voyage blighted by storms, hostile natives and a year spent marooned on Jamaica, Columbus’ mission was confirmed for him directly by a voice from heaven. Speaking gently, it chided him for his despair, and hailed him as a new Moses. Just as the Promised Land had been granted to the Children of Israel, so had the New World been granted to Spain. Writing to Ferdinand and Isabella about this startling development, Columbus insisted reassuringly that it had all been prophesied by Joachim of Fiore. Not for nothing did his own name mean ‘the dove’, that emblem of the Holy Spirit. The news of Christ would be brought to the New World, and its treasure used to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem…
In 1519, more than a decade after Columbus’ death, a Spanish adventurer named Hernán Cortés disembarked with five hundred men on the shore of an immense landmass that was already coming to be called America. Informed that there lay inland the capital of a great empire, Cortés took the staggeringly bold decision to head for it. He and his men were stupefied by what they found: a fantastical vision of lakes and towering temples, radiating ‘flashes of light like quetzal plumes’, immensely vaster than any city in Spain. Canals bustled with canoes; flowers hung over the waterways. Tenochtitlan, wealthy and beautiful, was a monument to the formidable prowess of the conquerors who had built it: the Mexica… [pages 303-305]
The bubbles on this statue represent lumpy fat
deposits of flayed human skin. Xipe Totec, worshipped
in central America as the Flayed One, appeared to
the Christian conquerors of the Mexica
not a god but a demon.
The above image and footnote text appears in Holland’s book. Just compare the art of these Amerindians with that of my last post in the ‘European beauty’ series! (Pallas Athena in the Austrian parliament).
Without sacrifice, so the Mexica believed, the gods would weaken, chaos descend, and the sun start to fade. Only chalchiuatl, the ‘precious water’ pumped out by a still-beating heart, could serve to feed it. Only blood, in the final reckoning, could prevent the universe from winding down.
To the Spaniards, the spectacle of dried gore on the steps of Tenochtitlan’s pyramids, of skulls grinning out from racks, was literally hellish. Once Cortés, in a feat of unparalleled audacity and aggression, had succeeded in making himself the master of the great city, its temples were razed to the ground. So Charlemagne, smashing with his mailed horsemen through dripping forests, had trampled down the shrines of Woden and Thunor. The Mexica, who had neither horses nor steel, let alone cannon, found themselves as powerless as the Saxons had once been to withstand Christian arms…
A decade before the conquest of Granada, Ferdinand had proclaimed it his intention ‘to dedicate Spain to the service of God’. In 1478, he had secured permission from the pope to establish, as the one institution common to both Aragon and Castile, an inquisition directly under royal control. 1492, the year of Granada’s fall and of Columbus’ first voyage, had witnessed another fateful step in the preparation of Spain for its mission to bring the gospel to the world. The Jews, whose conversion was destined to presage Christ’s return, had been given the choice of becoming Christian or going into exile. Many had opted to leave Spain; more, including the chief rabbi of Castile himself, had accepted baptism. [pages 305-306]
It was the National Socialists, not the Christians, who realised for the first time in history that this was a grave mistake: that the yardstick for discrimination is not faith but genes. But how many American racialist forums will pay homage to Uncle Adolf next week…?
Parliament Building in Greek and Roman style with
Pallas Athena statue and fountain in the front, Austria.
Categories
Dominion, 16
Or:
How the Woke monster originated
One might think that the egalitarian follies of our time are a modern phenomenon. But militant, even very violent egalitarianism has ancient Christian roots.
The term Hussites or Hussite Church refers to a reform and revolutionary movement that arose in Bohemia in the 15th century. The name comes from the Bohemian theologian Jan Hus, who had been burnt in the stake. The movement later joined the Reformation.
A town was founded in 1420 by a group of the most radical wing of the Hussites, who gave it the biblical name of ‘Tabor’: the mountain where, according to the gospels, the transfiguration of Jesus took place. The members of this radical wing soon became known as Taborites and the word Tabor has come to mean in Czech ‘camp’.
The radical Hussites established a communal society in Tabor in which private property didn’t exist and any religious hierarchy was rejected. The egalitarian experiment lasted only one year, for in 1421 a moderate Hussite faction overran the Taborite fiefdom.
The town was rebuilt in the 16th century. In the chapter ‘Apocalypse, 1420: Tabor’ Tom Holland says:
The most popular preachers were those who condemned the wealth of monasteries adorned with gold and sumptuous tapestries, and demanded a return to the stern simplicity of the early days of the Church. The Christian people, they warned, had taken a desperately wrong turn. The reforms of Gregory VII, far from serving to redeem the Church, had set it instead upon a path to corruption. The papacy, seduced by the temptations of earthly glory, had forgotten that the Gospels spoke most loudly to the poor, to the humble, to the suffering. ‘The cross of Jesus Christ and the name of the crucified Jesus are now brought into disrepute and made as it were alien and void among Christians.’ Only Antichrist could have wrought such a fateful, such a hellish abomination. And so it was, in the streets of Prague, that it had become a common thing to paint the pope as the beast foretold by Saint John, and to show him wearing the papal crown, but with the feet of a monstrous bird. [page 295]
A couple of pages later Holland writes:
In the wake of Hus’ execution, denunciations of the papacy as Antichrist had begun to be made openly across Prague. Of Sigismund as well—for it was presumed that it was by his treachery that Hus had been delivered up to the flames…
The Taborites were hardly the first Christians to believe themselves living in the shadow of Apocalypse. The novelty lay rather in the scale of the crisis that had prompted their imaginings: one in which all the traditional underpinnings of society, all the established frameworks of authority, appeared fatally compromised. Confronted by a church that was the swollen body of Antichrist, and an emperor guilty of the most blatant treachery, the Taborites had pledged themselves to revolution. But it was not enough merely to return to the ideals of the early church: to live equally as brothers and sisters; to share everything in common. The filth of the world beyond Tabor, where those who had not fled to the mountains still wallowed in corruption, had to be swept away too. Its entire order was rotten. ‘All kings, princes and prelates of the church will cease to be.’ This manifesto, against the backdrop of Sigismund’s determination to break the Hussites, and the papacy’s declaration of a crusade against them, was one calculated to steel the Taborites for the looming struggle. Yet it was not only emperors and popes whom they aspired to eliminate. All those who had rejected the summons to Tabor, to redeem themselves from the fallen world, were sinners. ‘Each of the faithful ought to wash his hands in the blood of Christ’s foes.’
Many Hussites, confronted by this unsparing refusal to turn the other cheek, were appalled. ‘Heresy and tyrannical cruelty,’ one of them termed it. Others muttered darkly about a rebirth of Donatism. The summer of 1420, though, was no time for the moderates to be standing on their principles. The peril was too great. In May, at the head of a great army of crusaders summoned from across Christendom, Sigismund advanced on Prague. Ruin of the kind visited on Béziers two centuries earlier now directly threatened the city. Moderates and radicals alike accepted that they had no choice but to make common cause. The Taborites, leaving behind only a skeleton garrison, duly marched to the relief of Babylon. At their head rode a general of genius. Jan Žižka, one-eyed and sixty years old, was to prove the military saviour that the Albigensians had never found. That July, looking to break the besiegers’ attempt to starve Prague into submission, he launched a surprise attack so devastating that Sigismund was left with no choice but to withdraw. Further victories quickly followed. Žižka proved irresistible. Not even the loss late in 1421 of his remaining eye to an arrow served to handicap him. Crusaders, imperial garrisons, rival Hussite factions: he routed them all. Innovative and brutal in equal measure, Žižka was the living embodiment of the Taborite revolution. Noblemen on their chargers he met with rings of armoured wagons, hauled from muddy farmyards and manned by peasants equipped with muskets; monks he would order burnt at the stake, or else personally club to death. Never once did the grim old man meet with defeat. By 1424, when he finally fell sick and died, all of Bohemia had been brought under Taborite rule…
Readying Prague for their Lord’s arrival, they had systematically targeted symbols of privilege. Monasteries were levelled; the bushy moustaches much favoured by the Bohemian elite forcibly shaved off wherever they were spotted; the skull of a recently deceased king dug up and crowned with straw. As the months and then the years passed, however, and still Christ failed to appear, so the radicalism of the Taborites had begun to fade. They had elected a bishop; negotiated to secure a king; charged the most extreme in their ranks with heresy and expelled them from Tabor. Žižka, displaying a brusque lack of concern for legal process that no inquisitor would ever have contemplated emulating, had rounded up fifty of them and burnt the lot.[1] Well before the abrupt and crushing defeat of the Taborites by a force of more moderate Hussites in 1434, the flame of their movement had been guttering. Christ had not returned. The world had not been purged of kings. Tabor had not, after all, been crowned the New Jerusalem. In 1436, when Hussite ambassadors— achieving a startling first for a supposedly heretical sect—succeeded in negotiating a concordat directly with the papacy, the Taborites had little choice but to accept it. There would be time enough, at the end of days, to defy the order of the world. But until it came, until Christ returned in glory, what option was there except to compromise? [pages 297-300]
Jan Žižka is now a Czech national hero. Above, a statue by J. Strachovský, 1884 in his honor in the town square of Tabor, also called Žižka Square.
____________
[1] Only one man was spared, to provide an account of his sect’s beliefs.
Categories
Fire
‘Men like us need to devise our own mental tricks to not go nuts like Nietzsche. We carry the Sacred Fire, and we must be very careful who we show it to. In dissident circles this is called “hiding your power level”.’
Categories
Dominion, 15
Or:
How the Woke monster originated
Giovanni di Paolo, The Mystic
Marriage of St Catherine of Siena.
On one occasion, when Christ appeared to Catherine of Siena, he did so accompanied by Mary Magdalene. Catherine, weeping with an excess of love, remembered how Mary, kneeling before the feet of her Lord, had once wet his feet with her own tears, and then wiped them with her hair, and kissed them, and anointed them with perfume. ‘Sweetest daughter,’ Christ told her, ‘for your comfort I give you Mary Magdalene for your mother.’ Gratefully, Catherine accepted the offer. ‘And from that moment on,’ so her confessor reported, ‘she felt entirely at one with the Magdalene.’
To be paired with the woman who had first beheld the risen Christ was, of course, a rare mark of divine favour. From childhood, Catherine had taken the Magdalene as a particular role model. Far from betraying complacency, though, this had borne witness to the opposite: Catherine’s own gnawing sense of sin. As reported by Luke, the woman who wept before Jesus, and anointed his feet, had ‘lived a sinful life’. Although she was never named, the identification of her with the Magdalene was one that had enjoyed wide currency ever since Gregory the Great, back in 591, had first made it in a sermon. Over time—and despite the lack of any actual evidence for it in the gospels—the precise character of her ‘sinful life’ had become part of the fabric of common knowledge. Kneeling before Jesus, seeking his forgiveness, she had done so as a penitent whore. Catherine, by accepting the Magdalene as her mother, was embracing the full startling radicalism of a warning given by Christ: that prostitutes would enter the kingdom of God before priests. [pages 285-286]
My book Daybreak (pages 132-135) contains an article with a splendid quote from Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose, where a wise Franciscan tells his pupil that the radicalism of St Francis was about empowering all sorts of ‘lepers’—the radical message of the gospel—as opposed to giving them simple alms. Those who haven’t read that article, which I entitled ‘On empowering carcass-eating birds’, should read it now. Using an article of The Occidental Observer it illuminates our understanding of how, in the secular phase of Christianity, the metastasis of gospel ethics has reached our day with the transgender movement: the new ‘leper’ to be empowered just as prostitutes would enter the Kingdom before priests! However, Christians, even medieval Christians, have always been contradicting themselves. Tom Holland continues:
In Paris, as the great cathedral of Notre Dame was being built, the offer from a collective of prostitutes to pay for one of its windows, and dedicate it to the Virgin, had been rejected by a committee of the university’s leading theologians. Two decades later, in 1213, one of the same scholars, following his appointment as papal legate, had ordered that all woman convicted of prostitution be expelled from the city—just as though they were lepers…
Yet always, lurking at the back of even the sternest preacher’s mind, was the example of Christ himself. In John’s gospel, it was recorded that a woman taken in adultery had been brought before him by the Pharisees. Looking to trap him, they had asked if, in accordance with the Law of Moses, she should be stoned. Jesus had responded by bending down and writing in the dust with his finger; but then, when the Pharisees persisted in questioning him, he had straightened up again. ‘If any of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.’ The crowd, shamed by these words, had hesitated—and then melted away. Finally, only the woman had been left. ‘Has no one condemned you?’ Jesus had asked. ‘No one, Sir,’ she had answered. ‘Then neither do I condemn you. Go now and leave your life of sin.’ [pages 286-287]
In the video I embedded on Thursday St Francis, dressed in rags, in front of the pope on his throne with the cardinals, bishops and abbots of the papal court, recites some of the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount praising ultimate poverty as a protest that the teachings of Christ are totally opposed to Rome’s obsession with wealth. The struggle between the purist monks that follow the gospel message and the more practical Roman curia has always existed. But it is something the American racial right is unwilling to acknowledge: obsessed as they are with blaming only contemporary Jewry for the subversion of the Church when the revolutionary message of the last being first came directly from the New Testament—a NT written by Jews!
Innocent III, that most formidable of heresy’s foes, never forgot that his Saviour had kept company with the lowest of the low: tax-collectors and whores. Endowing a hospital in Rome, he specified that it offer a refuge to sex-workers from walking the streets. To marry one, he preached, was a work of the sublimest piety… Prostitutes themselves, perfectly aware of the example offered them by the Magdalene, veered between tearful displays of repentance and the conviction that God loved them just as much as any other sinner. Catherine, certainly, whenever she met with a sex-worker, would never fail to assure her of Christ’s mercy. ‘Turn to the Virgin. She will lead you straight into the presence of her son.’
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Resurrection myth
by Duke Mertz
The rediscovery of the mythical Jesus was an unintended consequence of biblical research carried out by devout Christians. Near the end of the Enlightenment, theologians began studying the oldest versions of New Testament books to make certain that translations from the original Greek were as accurate as possible. During this process, they noticed a distinct difference between the Gospels and the Epistles. The biographies of Jesus contained quotations from the Old Testament and allusions to Jewish traditions. The letters never referred to the Hebrew books, and on those rare occasions when Jesus or Jewish topics were mentioned, they seemed to be afterthoughts. Comparative analysis of the oldest existing texts of the Epistles indicated that some of the anomalies were the work of later editors.
This discovery prompted a more in-depth analysis of the Gospels, which also uncovered editorial additions. Some were revealed by changes in verb tense or point of view, but the majority were simply conflicting versions of the same incident. For example, there are two resurrection scenes at the end of Mark (16:1–8 and 16:9–20). Whenever it is impossible to determine which version of an event is true, neither can be relied upon. This fact is amplified by a comparative analysis of the five different resurrection scenes in the Gospels (all biblical quotations are from The New English Bible):
(Read the whole article, ‘The Quest for the Mythical Jesus’, here.)
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Reply
A commenter just told me:
Hi Cesar, you had written before, “Something that bothers me about my blogging career is that the more philosophically mature I get, the fewer visits I receive.” As Donald Hoffman argues in The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth From Our Eyes, humans are evolved to maximize their reproductive chances, which has little to do with the pursuit of truth; indeed, focusing on truth as an end goal lowers these chances.
What the vast majority of people care about is increasing their relative social status so they make more money, are better liked in their communities, and have greater reproductive odds. And as Thomas Ligotti concludes in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, “If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else”…
Just my two cents.
If you want to live and reproduce, you’d better believe the myths of your time (the king is not naked). Woe betide you if you point out that the king is naked (only children like the one in the story, drunks and madmen tell the truth).
Nevertheless, we cannot compare a healthy age, with healthy myths—let’s say Greco-Roman before they interbred—with Christendom. One reflects a healthy archetype and the other an incredibly malignant one. There is nothing wrong with believing in the gods of Olympus or their Germanic equivalent, the gods of Valhalla, if those archetypes are attuned to the eternal truths for the Aryan peoples (cf. the early chapters of Savitri’s book). On the other hand, failing to repudiate a New Testament written by Jews for Gentile consumption is infinitely perverse.
What you say is true but only because whites today are fucking degenerate shits who only deserve Kalki to come and exterminate them. (You should read Savitri’s book, linked in ‘Our Books’, to understand this point.)
As for me being left alone preaching in the wilderness, that’s also true. But have you reflected about these words I recently wrote about Wagner and Nietzsche?
If there is one thing that emerges from all these biographies that I have read and conscientiously weighed up, it is the revelation that Christianity condemned Nietzsche, to use the poet-philosopher’s words, to a seventh solitude: absolute solitude that over the years annihilated him psychologically. That’s the tremendous asymmetry I was talking about, compared to the much famed and incredibly beloved Wagner by Europeans in general and Germans in particular…
One German gets all the glory and the other is condemned to the extent that nobody wants to listen to him, to the point of losing his mind. And it all has to do, of course, with the fact that the Aryans were Christians in the 19th century. And even in the 21st century the racial right loves those who echo Wagner’s anti-Semitism, but those who also blame Christianity are ignored.