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Tag: Christian problem (CP)

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Axiology Correspondence

César,

I was worried about you, there, but it turns out that you had taken a trip to the Vaterland.

Here is an interesting short from woke atheist, Rebecca Watson.

‘When I lost belief in God, I didn’t loose belief in anything else.’

I.e. the Christian axiology.

She says, further, that as soon as she lost belief in God she immediately became a humanist. As Revilo P. Oliver points out: humanism is merely atheistic Christianity.

When someone believes in the Christian god, their equalitarianism is anchored to the mores of the 1st-century C.E. Their equalitarianism is tethered to the conservative Jewish culture that gave us Saul and Jesus. However, when one stops believing in the Judeo-Christian god, “but not anything else”, then this equalitarianism remains and goes hyper. It is no longer tethered to the Conservative Jewish society that spawned Saul and Jesus. It thus goes hyper. Your “red-giant” analogy is brilliant. Woke atheism is merely a godless Christianity that has lost its supernatural core. In the same way that a red giant goes hyper, so does Neo-Christianty. The equalitarianism of Christianity slips away from its 1st-century Jewish moorings, and becomes a monster, or red giant, or red ogre, perhaps!

Sincerely,

Gaedhal

Categories
Christendom Monarchy

Zero

Lebenskraft ! (5)

Budapest

27th and 28th April

Before arriving in Budapest the bus made a stop where I got off and touched the trunks of three beautiful trees with the palm of my hand. I felt like I was in paradise with that vegetation. I said to myself that I belonged in these latitudes: far away from the ‘Neanderthalesque’ tropical vegetation of the village where I now live.

The architectural beauty of Budapest impressed me much more than that of Prague, especially the views on both sides of the Danube on a cruise I took at night, from where I could see all the illuminated buildings and palaces, and where I had a glass of red wine. I had never seen so much architectural beauty except many years ago when I visited Venice. But as I explained in my previous post, we are not here to talk about the good things in Europe but the bad things, so I won’t add as many pictures of the beautiful capital of Hungary as I did of the Czech capital.

I stayed in a hotel on the Pest side of the Danube, and then toured its boulevards, Opera House, Parliament, Synagogue and St Stephen’s Basilica. In the afternoon I went to the Buda side of the city, and climbed Castle Hill with its magnificent views. But let’s take it one step at a time.

Arriving in Budapest I was surprised not to see any street posters of niggers on the streets, which I had seen in Germany and the Czech Republic (not to mention my previous trips to English-speaking countries!). Hungarians may be Christian, but it is atheistic hyper-Christianity that accelerates the Aryan self-hatred. As I arrived late in the evening, I went to the outskirts of the big city to a restaurant in the middle of the forest where they served traditional Hungarian food.

The next day, the first thing I visited was one of the most important places in the city, Heroes’ Square.

I was struck by the fourth king if we count the kings from the left. He was the father of St Elizabeth, a woman whose compassion for the dispossessed was a Christian preamble to the out-group neochristian altruism that the West suffers from today. St Elisabeth of Hungary is also venerated in German-speaking countries. The sculpture of the father of this woman revered by Hungarians, Austrians and Germans holds in his hands a document, the Golden Bull, which was the nation’s first written constitution (the one on the right was another king who also had another ‘saintly’ daughter).

The first sculpture depicts Stephen I of Hungary (997-1038), who brought Christian infection to this land, a religion whose Apostle didn’t distinguish between Aryan, Jew and sandnigger.

On this trip, which included the people of Budapest, I corroborated much of what I said about white trash from Himmler’s and my POV. The Nordic race is the paradigm of the Aryan. In other words, architectural art may be the frame of the West, but pure Nordic or English DNA is its canvas. A splendid frame with a bad canvas may have artistic value, but it doesn’t move us to sacrifice our lives for the cause.

Here we see the coronation of Franz Joseph. In a world where the Aryan, not the Jewish archetype reigned, no king would be seen kneeling before a Judeo-Christian bishop.

The Danube, which divides Budapest in twain, is one of the most important rivers in Europe. It flows through ten countries, including Germany, and empties into the Black Sea. Churchill urinated in the Danube in 1945. If the good guys had won the war, these days it wouldn’t be the Russians celebrating victory but the Germans. But the pungent smell of Churchill’s urine still permeates the masses of white trash I have seen on this trip. So trashy are today’s whites that they made a monument, beside the Danube, to the Jews shot not by the Nazis but by the JQ-conscious Hungarians.

It is said that there were twenty thousand, but when they ran out of bullets they started using ropes to kill the first Jew and throw him into the then freezing Danube to drag the others tied up. The monument is called the ‘shoe zone’.

I even heard one of the many tour guides use the word ‘holocaust’ when referring to the event.

This Christ appears outside St Stephen’s Basilica in Budapest. I repeat: to cure the white man of his false guilt, his Judeo-Christian monuments must be torn down. That will be Kalki’s revenge for what the Christians did to the Greco-Roman temples.

This monument I visited, ‘Liberators of Budapest’, which honours the Soviet soldiers in the 1945 battle, is in front of the American embassy and shows how, despite Hungarians commemorating the patriots of 1956, the anti-Nazi narrative is never questioned. No, Viktor Orbán is not one of us. Look at this other monument he had built, not far from the one the Soviets put up:

Orbán’s monument is dedicated to the ‘victims of the German invasion’, when in fact the government gladly collaborated with the Nazis. The eagle represents the Third Reich and, the archangel below, Hungary: a falsification of history because, as I have just said, it was the JQ-conscious Hungarians who perpetrated their little holocaust.

Here, below Orbán’s monument, we see the Jewish victims. When I took this picture I was no longer by the Danube but in the park near the American embassy.

Originally the Hungarians refused to be Christianised. Gerard of Csanád was the first bishop to preach in the city. Like the Jews who almost a millennium later were thrown into the Danube, those aware of the CQ put Gerard in a barrel and threw him into the Danube in 1046. This was a time when the aforementioned Stephen I wanted to convert his people to the worship of the Jewish god. Now the Hungarians worship St Gerard and a hill beside the Danube in Budapest is named after him.

As always, if the Aryan is to be saved, all these ‘holy place’ names will have to be changed. In fact, throwing the first bishop of Budapest into the Danube in a barrel would now have to be done with the new bishop of Rome, who belongs to the most progressive wing of the Vatican, if we want to preserve the DNA of pure Aryanism. See for example this aberration I saw inside the church at the corner of the hotel where I was staying: a mongrel recreation of the best-known painting of St Francis of Assisi.

It is the command to love the enemy, a la St Francis, that is screwing the minds of these Catholics. When Bela IV reigned there were only a handful of survivors left after the Khan’s invasion. But the city doesn’t preach hatred of the Mongols. They should hate them and also the Allies who bombed Budapest in WW2. It is worth mentioning that on that day I also passed by the elegant mansion where Orbán has his residence. Curiously, the word ‘Karmelita’ appears there after the order of the Discalced Carmelite nuns.

Categories
Kali Yuga Kalki

Zero

Lebenskraft ! (2)

Dresden
25 April

One would think that, if political correctness reigns in Berlin, at least in Dresden, the archetypal object of the fury of the Hellstorm Holocaust where whole families of Germans were incinerated, the locals would be more conscious. But in my brief stay in the city the diametrically opposite was true…

Arriving in the former capital of Saxony, on the banks of the Elbe River, the capital of Germanic culture and considered the most beautiful city in eastern Germany, the bells of the huge Lutheran church, now completely rebuilt, were ringing. I was annoyed that the Germans had rebuilt the Frauenkirche between 1994 and 2005 because it was precisely this reforming monk, Luther, who had introduced the Old Testament into the Aryan collective unconscious.

What struck me about the central square was a great secular contrast to the church of the former Augustinian monk: the Semper Opera House, partially destroyed in 1945 until it was painstakingly rebuilt in 1986. (Before its destruction, some of Germany’s greatest operas had been performed here, three by Richard Wagner and most of Richard Strauss.) I was struck by the bronze statue above the portico depicting Dionysus and Ariadne on a chariot of panthers—pre-Christian culture! Next to the entrance we can make out the sculptures of Goethe and Schiller in this photo I took:

There were several tours in the central square. The one I followed was led by a native German with a Scandinavian name, Björn, who spoke good Spanish, having married a Galician. As I recall, we started from the equestrian sculpture in the centre of the square.

I said above that the opposite of what I expected happened to me, in the sense that one would expect a resident of Dresden to have, at least, some awareness of Allied evil during the Hellstorm fire.

When, together with the tour group, I brought up the recent Israeli bombing of Gaza and compared it to Dresden in 1945, Björn blushed greatly! So much so that he felt compelled to launch into a little pious speech pointing out that, after the Holocaust, the German government was very sensitive about the Jewish issue. His behaviour reminded me of those who equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. Björn merely repeated the talking points of his country’s political correctness instead of answering what I said: that in 1945 Dresden was left as Gaza was recently (actually much worse, given the number of German civilians holocausted by the bombings).

It is worth analysing why Björn got so freaked out by such a seemingly innocent remark.

In my recent essay on Augustine, Goethe and others, I talked about how Augustine’s devouring mother instilled in her adolescent son an evil introject that made him feel tremendously guilty about his nascent erotic impulses. Well, well… An evil introject can also be instilled by the persistent propaganda of a powerful state, especially if the propaganda is repeated over several generations. For the Greeks and Romans sexuality wasn’t sinful. That changed after the reigns of Constantine and the Christian emperors. Remember Nietzsche, Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die but degenerated into vice.

Similarly, for eighty years Western governments and the Jewish media apparatus (including Hollywood) have made us see the Third Reich as the new Satan, and almost all of us in the West internalised the propaganda, to some extent, at some point in our lives. But in Germany the hammering of such propaganda has been as insidious as Monica’s constant haranguing of young Augustine to become a champion of Constantine’s religion. In my essay I called this an ‘ogre of the superego’.

Our guide in Dresden, Björn, also suffers from an ogre of the superego, which in Christendom is equivalent to Augustine’s ogre of the superego about Eros. And yet Björn told us a story of incredible betrayal by the German government: the relatively recent theft from a museum we visited of pieces worth millions of euros. The sandniggers who stole them will soon go free—and rich! (they only returned half of what they stole).

This anecdote that the poor devil Björn told us, his Aryan pride crushed by an ogre of the superego, reflects the anti-Nazi Germany of our times: we must love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. Good neochristians! The unconscious ogre that inhabits Björn was also noted in the fact that some sources on the attack on Dresden put the death toll between three and four hundred thousand. Björn, an ethnic German living in the city, said that only 25,000 had died and that the rest was ‘Nazi propaganda’.

At the end of his tour of Dresden’s now reconstructed buildings, I asked Björn what had haunted me in Berlin: If there is an equivalent of pubs in Germany, where I could approach perfect strangers in Dresden—native Germans—to talk to them about important matters. His answer, or rather non-answer, surprised me a lot!

He simply told me that he had to give another tour and that he had no more time. But answering such a simple question—remember what the woman in the hotel lobby in Berlin told me—wouldn’t have taken more than a few seconds. So I was left wanting to talk to Aryan men in the second German city I visited after an answer that wasn’t an answer at all.

In a sense I understand Björn. One can imagine asking a question about the Gulag to a Russian tour guide in Brezhnev’s time. But in his case I got the strong impression that Björn had internalised with extraordinary ferocity the narrative the government tells its citizens (as Augustine fiercely internalised the anti-erotic injunctions of his ultra-Christian mother).

After Björn said goodbye it was a little chilly and I took refuge in a café with large shop windows to watch the passers-by. Although many were tourists visiting Dresden, I guess there were also Germans among them. It seemed to me that these white people were shabby, like in spaghetti westerns where you don’t get good-looking actors like Hollywood actors. They were very different from the 1930s Berlin video I linked in my previous post, and I was also surprised to see that many of them were walking around eating ice cream. For about an hour I watched them from the vantage point of my cafe with the large display cases (I wasn’t wearing a jacket for the cold because the weather in Berlin had been warmer).

The saddest thing of all is that, to save the Aryan from his current psychosis—being utterly possessed by the Jewish collective unconscious—it will be necessary for someone like Kalki to destroy the rebuilt Frauenkirche again…

Categories
Berlin Kali Yuga Miscegenation

Zero

Lebenskraft ! (1)

So disturbing was what I saw in Europe on my recent trip that I will radicalise my already radical POV even more. On 22 April I left for Germany and on 4 May I returned to my home country. The cities I visited were:

  • Berlin
  • Dresden
  • Prague
  • Bratislava
  • Budapest
  • Vienna
  • Hallstatt
  • Salzburg
  • Munich
  • Dachau and
  • Frankfurt

I chose some beautiful towns and the former imperial cities, when the Aryan had not lost his manhood.
 

Berlin

When I arrived at my hotel in Berlin at night, I was ecstatic with soliloquies as if I were in a mythical city: the city that had been Hitler’s seat of power, that was to rule Europe in a new Germania. But already from the outskirts of my hotel, as I looked for a restaurant to dine in, I was greatly surprised by the masses of non-whites. In fact, I was so disappointed by this area that I locked myself in the hotel from 9 pm onwards and didn’t want to go out.

The next day the first thing I visited was the Berlin Wall and the Brandenburg Gate. All the photos in this series were taken with my mobile phone. The following picture could have been taken in Berlin in which Hitler would have been victorious, but I had to turn the camera up so that the non-whites wouldn’t dirty the image.

Travelling by bus, I passed the avenues where the offices of the Third Reich had been: the Parliament and the Reichstag. Then I would visit Potsdamer Platz, Alexanderplatz and Kurfusterdamn Avenue: all crowded with non-whites, though it was impossible to tell who were residents and who were tourists. Also, from the bus, I saw the cement-block sculpture space considered a memorial to the Jewish holocaust—but of the Hellstorm Holocaust, committed on the German people, there is absolutely nothing! Also inside the bus I saw the headquarters of the anti-white government that currently rules the brainwashed Germans. (If I moved to Berlin, they would soon trace my IP and break down the door of my house to arrest me, as the thoughtpolice did to our friend Tyrone Joseph Walsh in London.)

It is worth noting that, of the Third Reich offices, because of the Allied bombing only the Luftwaffe building remained (which after the war the new regime converted into the offices of the treasury to collect taxes). You can still see corners of other buildings bearing the scars of the virulent battle of Berlin in 1945, when the Red Army arrived:

Or this close-up:

In a capital that aspired to be Judenfrei in the last century, I couldn’t resist visiting the Jewish Quarter. It was there that I began to realise that anti-Nazi propaganda is still running amok eighty years after 1945, and will apparently continue until the last Aryan is extinct (that seems to be the Zeitgeist in Germany today). Indeed, this trip to continental Europe wasn’t a journey of pleasure but a journey of sorrow. My shock is appreciated by the sight of a healthy Berlin in this remastered video from the 1930s. In the Jewish Quarter I saw a sculpture depicting several women who were deported during the Third Reich.

What’s worse: Berlin started the practice of putting golden plaques in the concrete of the streets near the houses of Jews deported to extermination camps. The practice then spread to other countries, always commemorating the names of the disappeared Jews. Here we see some of them under my feet:

It seems as if the central commandment in 21st century Germany is something like ‘You shall love your fellow Jew and the sandniggers who have invaded your Fatherland, but never your own kind’. Look for example at this synagogue whose photo I took and compare it with the times when Berlin’s synagogues were destroyed.

When I was at the famous square not far from the Lutheran Cathedral, where places to eat both inside restaurants and outdoors swarm, I searched in vain for something similar to pubs to talk to perfect strangers and educate them. It was only in the evening that a German woman in the hotel lobby explained to me that Germany is not like England: you need to belong to a club to approach strangers. My very strong desire to talk to Aryan males and reveal that their government has been lying to them by omission (the Hellstorm Holocaust) was frustrated, and it was in that square that I photographed this aberration:

I must say that, unlike the white nationalists, I don’t just blame the Jews. Before my flight to Europe I spent a night at the Hilton in Mexico City airport. It was there that I learned about the death of Pope Francis I. On TV I saw a commentator speaking in Spanish, who confessed that what he liked most about his pontificate was that Francis I had promoted open doors to mass migration in Italy.

That is worse than the Jewish-controlled media because the Vatican is a Western institution. The betrayal goes centuries before Vatican II (think of the continent-wide mixed marriages that a pope sanctioned from the 1530s for the Iberian-conquered New World). That was a preamble to what we now see all over Europe, and the more ‘white nationalists’ stubbornly refuse to see something so obvious, the more difficult it will be to rework a salvific NS ideology that differs from 20th century NS in its full awareness of the Christian Question (CQ).

Back at the hotel, around 3 am, I took a diazepam pill! It had been about two decades since I had taken one of those tablets to help me sleep. My experience in Berlin—I had seen some mixed couples in the Führer’s former capital—had left me shaken and I woke up at about that time.

So disheartening was my experience that, when I was in the vicinity of the great Lutheran cathedral, I didn’t even feel like going into the museums. And yet my father had bequeathed us dozens of large illustrated books on the great European painters, which I had known since I was a child. Remember what I said about Tyrone in my essay on St Augustine and other influential writers, who refused to accompany me to Shakespeare’s Globe for the same reasons.

What is the point of high culture if the race that created that art is in a terminal phase, a phase of zero Lebenskraft or ethnosuicidal nihilism? And the same thing happened to me when, travelling on the bus, I spotted the Berlin Philharmonic. I didn’t feel like visiting it, even though a few LPs still survive from the large number of classical records my father had, some recorded by the Berlin Philharmonic (incidentally, Karajan was my favourite conductor).

Categories
Christendom Revilo Oliver

Christianity

and the survival of the West, 1

by Revilo Oliver (1973)

Contents

The Religion of the West
The Orient
Christianity Today
The Predictable Future
The Consequences
Succedaneous Religion
Postscript

The mission of this generation is the most difficult that has ever faced a Western generation. It must break the terror by which it is held in silence, it must look ahead, it must believe when there is apparently no hope, it must obey even if it means death, it must fight to the end rather than submit… The men of this generation must fight for the continued existence of the West.

—Francis Parker Yockey (1948)

 

Chapter One: THE RELIGION OF THE WEST

YOU, WHO ARE NOW reading these lines, and I are strangers. I have no means of knowing whether you are a Christian or an atheist. That, however, will not matter, so long as we talk about facts and not wishes.

The observed and verifiable facts of the world about us are not affected by religious faith or the lack of faith. Christians and atheists must find themselves in perfect agreement when they affirm that lead is more malleable than steel, that the earth is an oblate spheroid rotating on its axis, that whales are mammals, that Germany was defeated and devastated by the many nations allied against her in 1945, and that the Chinese are Mongolians. About such matters there can be no dispute among Western men, who instinctively accept the reality of the world about us and cannot believe, as do many Orientals, that it is merely an illusion in the mind of a dreamer.

If we would salvage and restore our civilization—the Occidental culture that is peculiarly our own and that now seems to be disintegrating and rotting before our very eyes—we must do so as Western men, by observing reality objectively and by reasoning from it dispassionately. And when we try to compute what resources remain to us, we need first of all to determine the actual strength of the Christian tradition at the present time.

It is a fact, which Christians will regard with satisfaction and some atheists may deplore, that Western civilization, for about half of its recorded history, has been a Christian civilization in the sense that the great majority of the people belonging to it (though never, at any time, all of them) believed implicitly in the truth of the Christian revelation. That religious unanimity was for a long time so nearly complete that, after the fall of the Roman Empire and the evanescence of hopes for its restoration, we of the West regarded our religion as the bond that united us and distinguished us from the rest of the human species. During the Middle Ages, our ancestors occupied the greater part of Europe, and, until they discovered the American continents, they lived only in Europe, but despite that geographical unity, they did not generally refer to themselves as the Europeans. For all practical purposes, furthermore, our ancestors belonged to the same division of the white race: they, like the true Greeks and the true Romans before them, were all members of the great race that we now call Indo-European or Aryan, but they had in their languages no word to designate their blood relationship and biological unity. Thus, when they referred to the unity of which they were always conscious as something transcending the constantly shifting territorial and political divisions of Europe, they called themselves Christendom. And for many centuries that word was adequate and misled no one.

For many centuries the West was Christendom and its civilization was indubitably Christian: that, whether you like it or not, is an historical fact. There is a complementary historical fact that was less obvious at the time and that even thoughtful men overlooked or tried to ignore until the events of the past two decades made it indubitable: Christianity is a religion of the West, and, for all practical purposes, only of the West. It is not, as its polemical adversaries so often charge, a Semitic cult, for it has never commanded the adhesion of any considerable number of Semites, and it is not, as Christians once generally believed, a universal religion, for experience has proved that it cannot be successfully exported to populations that are not Indo-European.

Experience has also proved that it does not do the slightest good to deny ascertained facts. The men of Classical antiquity knew, of course, that the earth is spherical, and Eratosthenes in the third century B.C. calculated its circumference as 24,663 miles. But the early Fathers of the Church, living in the age of growing ignorance that shrouded the last century of the Roman Empire, decided, on the basis of some statements in the Old Testament, that the earth ought to be flat or, at least, no more curved than a shield. Lactantius was the most eloquent and probably, therefore, the most influential of the many who assiduously demanded that the earth be flat and so imposed on their contemporaries the conviction that it was. In the Middle Ages, to be sure, there were some learned men, such as Buridan, who knew that the globe is a globe, but they, like learned men today, who all know very well that talk about the equality of races is utter nonsense, usually refrained from publicly denouncing fashionable delusions. It was not until the Fifteenth Century that the truth became again inescapable, but when it did, the Christians, being men of the West, who do not deny the lessons of experience, surrendered the comfortable error in which they had once generally believed; and since that time, no rational Christian has doubted that the earth is spherical.

Today, as in the Fifteenth Century, Western men have had to discard a congenial assumption to bring their conception of the world into conformity with observed reality. So long as we of the West held unquestioned dominion over the whole earth, we permitted ourselves to assume that our civilization in general, and our religion in particular, could be exported and made universal. We did not sufficiently observed that talent for mimicry is common to all human beings and indeed to all anthropoids; that all human beings stand in awe of those who have power over them; and that a genius for dissimulation and hypocrisy is hereditary in the most intelligent Orientals. Even with these oversights, the evidence against our assumption was fairly clear, but in the pride of our power we felt that we could indulge an assumption that was so congenial to the romantic generosity that is a peculiarity of our race. But the events of half a century, and especially of the last two decades, have shown us, beyond peradventure of doubt, the shape of the world in which we live. We now know what our prolonged missionary effort, cultural as well as religious, accomplished—and how its visible effects were produced.

When Cortés and his small but valiant band of iron men conquered the teeming empire of the Aztecs, he was immediately followed by a train of earnest missionaries, chiefly Franciscans, who began to preach the Gospel to the natives and soon sent home, with naive enthusiasm, glowing accounts of the conversions they had effected. Their pious sincerity and innocent joy still lives in the pages of Father Sahagun, Father Torquemada, and many others. For their sake I am glad that the poor Franciscans never suspected how small a part they played in the religious conversions that gave them such happiness. Far, far more persuasive than their sermons and their book had been the Spanish cannon that breached and shattered the Aztec defenses, and the ruthless Spanish soldiers who slew the Aztec priests at their own altars and toppled the Aztec idols from the sacrificial pyramids. The Aztecs, Tepanecs, and other natives accepted Christianity, not because their hearts were touched by alien and incomprehensible doctrines of love and mercy, but because it was the religion of the white men whose bronze cannon and mail-clad warriors were invincible.

That was early in the Sixteenth Century and even then there were not wanting indications that should have given pause to a critical mind, but we of the West went on repeating that fond mistake for four centuries, as the missionaries whom we sent to all parts of the world wrote home glowing reports of the number of “hearts” they had “won for Christ.” It was only after our enemies’ campaign of “anti-colonialism” really got under way that most of us realized that what had won all those hearts was primarily the discipline of British regiments and the manifest power of the white man.

We now know what happened. On many a shore of Africa, for example, missionaries eager to “win souls for Christ” ventured to land alone, and the aborigines, after mutilating and torturing them for a good communal laugh, ate them, cooked or raw according to the custom of the local cuisine. Usually, a few weeks or a few months later, a British cruiser hove to off shore and lobbed half a dozen 4.5 shells into the native village, and, if not pressed for time, landed half a company of marines to beat the bushes and drag out a dozen or so savages to hang on convenient trees. Consequently the tribe, if not very obtuse, took the hint and respected the next bevy of missionaries as somehow representing the god of thunder and lightning. And if the men of God distributed enough free rice and medical care with their sermons, they were able to make “converts,” as the natives learned to utter the words that Christians like to hear.

That is, in essence, the whole history of “winning souls” among the savages. There were, of course, many local variations. If the first missionaries were preceded by troops or white settlers, the blacks had already been convinced of the virtues of Christian rifles and had learned that white men should not be regarded as esculent comestibles. It often happened, however, that the natives, even after many years of preaching and conversion, rejected the white man’s odd rites very emphatically, and a fresh supply of missionaries was needed. In 1905, for example, the Maji-Maji conspiracy in Tanganyika murdered all the missionaries and almost all the white men and women in the entire territory, and it required a German regiment and several companies of marines to restore the teachings of the Gospel. That was done by giving some forty or fifty thousand demonstrations that a Mauser bullet could penetrate even a black hide that had been most carefully anointed with the grease of a boiled baby.

The Christian missionaries did teach a ritual and often inculcated a superstition that had some superficial resemblance to their religion, but as for teaching the spiritual substance of Christianity, they might as well have followed the example of St. Francis and preached sermons to the birds. That is why the many, many thousands of devoted Christians who expended their whole lives to “save souls” built only an edifice of cardboard and tinsel that is now gone in the wind.

What the vanishing of that flimsy facade has made obvious was predictable from the first. The religion of the West has never been comprehensible to the rudimentary minds of Congoids, Capoids, and Australoids, races so primitive that they were congenitally incapable of inventing a wheel and even of using one without supervision—races that could not develop for themselves even the first and simplest preliminaries of a civilization. When the missionaries invented systems of writing the crude languages of the primitives, they had also to invent words to express such concepts as “God,” “soul,” “justice,” “morality,” and “religion”—invent them by either creating new words or by perverting to such meanings sounds that in the native jargons conveyed impressions that were faintly and remotely analogous. That fact alone should have made us think. It was clear, furthermore, that the “converts,” even those who had been most thoroughly imbued with an awe of the god of repeating rifles and locomotives, would conform to the white man’s morality only under coercion, and that whenever they escaped from the white man’s supervision they spontaneously reverted not only to their own mores but also to whatever form of voodoo they had practiced before. Even if earlier experience had not been conclusive, what happened in Haiti at the very beginning of the Nineteenth Century should have removed the last lingering doubt. But the missionaries did not learn, and the “Ladies’ Missionary Society” went on contributing their mites, plying their needles, and glowing with tender emotion for the sweet little savages depicted by their romantic imaginations.

Although it is true that in some places in the former colonial possessions missionaries are still tolerated, if they are obsequious to the natives and pay very well, we have at last learned that the Gospel follows the British regiments in the white man’s ignominious and insane retreat from the world that was his.

Categories
3-eyed crow

Map

Or:

Why this site receives hardly any comments from racialists

 
Why the silence among the commenters that Benjamin recently complained about?

Looking through the books I read years ago, I see things I already knew but didn’t dare to write about in this public forum out of respect for Hitler and his people. It all has to do with the metaphor I chose for the featured post, ‘The Wall’.

Despite being separated by a Wall, the white nationalists of this century and the National Socialists of the past are very close to each other. The Wall represents either accepting the necessity of genocide/extermination of the racial enemy—pre- and post-Christian ethics (north of the Wall)—or refusing to accept it (Christian ethics, south of the Wall).

If I were merely on the north side of the Wall but close to it, I could get along perfectly with, say, those who comment on Alex Linder’s forum or some of today’s few neonazi exterminationists.

But this is not the case…

I am so far north of the Wall that not even an eagle flying high above the Wall could spot me from its field of vision. I mean that both the National Socialists of the last century, and the white nationalists of the present, regard Jewish subversion as the primary cause of Aryan decline. And I don’t.

I have been very critical of the American racial right for its ‘monocausalism’ but, as I said, I hadn’t dared to confess why I was so separated, geographically, from the classical National Socialists. Perhaps one might get a quick idea of what I mean if we see that Hitler was closer to the Christian Wagner than to the anti-Christian Nietzsche, and I am closer to Nietzsche than to Wagner.

Like Nietzsche, I believe that Christianity and its bastard son (atheistic liberalism) is the primary cause of Aryan decline, not our racial enemies, the Jews. It is precisely Christian ethics, and this already breaks even with Nietzsche’s philo-Semitic stance, that prevents the Aryan from settling accounts with his historical enemies.

From this angle I wouldn’t be a Nietzschean, but a sort of neo-Nietzschean Hitlerite. But neither did Hitler and his ilk know that Christianity was the primary cause of Aryan decline. Most Nazis were monocausalists. Few were type A bicausalists. I, on the other hand, am a type B bicausalist (see this post from a dozen years ago).

Let’s give a few examples, but first let’s be clear that some of the top Hitlerites were aware of the Christian Question. Himmler for example said:

I have the conviction that the Roman emperors, who exterminated [ausrotteten] the first Christians, did precisely what we are doing with the communists. These Christians were at the time the vilest scum… [1]

But unlike me, Himmler was an A bicausalist:

The war we are waging is chiefly and essentially a race war. It is first and foremost a war against the Jew… [2]

And the same could be said of Hitler himself:

[The Jews were] the enzyme of decomposition (Ferment der Dekomposition).

And this, even though in Mein Kampf Hitler claimed that the North Americans held power on the continent, and not the Latin Americans, because the former hadn’t corrupted their blood by marrying Indian women. But in that passage of Mein Kampf Hitler omitted to blame Christian ethics for miscegenation in Latin America, since the Spaniards and Portuguese had admitted mixed marriages since the 16th century. As I have said elsewhere, Hitler couldn’t blame Christian ethics because it would have been political suicide in a Catholic/Protestant Germany. He also said, to his adjutants three days after the Wannsee Conference:

It is the Jew who prevents everything.

I am convinced that the internalised Christian ethics, as a result of an ogre of the super-ego in the Aryan collective unconscious (see my previous post), is what prevents everything. But as I just said, for political reasons Hitler could not speak openly as a bicausalist B, even though there are more critical phrases in Hitler’s Table Talk of Christianity than of Judaism.

The point is: since I am not a politician of my time, like Hitler, but a ‘man against my time’, in solitude I can afford to analyse the Aryan psyche to its ultimate consequences, to the extent that I go further and farther north where only very few will dare to follow me.

That is why this site receives hardly any comments from racialists. Although most are on the south side of the Wall, and only a few have crossed it, no one wants to migrate farther and farther north until they find the raven’s cave.

Even in racism it is much easier not to break with the accepted wisdom than to follow the raven’s lead.
 

______________

[1] P. Padfield, Himmler (NY: Henry Holt, 1990), page 334.

[2] He said this on 21 June 1944 to top military and SS leaders in Sonthofen.

Categories
Psychology So-called saints

Augustine, 6

BOOK IX: With his mother and friends he returns to his native Africa

‘…where I had offered you as a sacrifice, my old self’ Augustine writes in this chapter. He didn’t realise that his ‘new self’ was what psychologists today would call the false self: his relationship with his god, to whom he speaks in the second person singular, was a maternal introject—not his true self! But now imbued with his false self, the absorbing mother within him, he writes: ‘My heart was fire’ and ‘now I was disgusted by those who rebel against the Scriptures’: a preamble to the destruction of the works of Celsus and Porphyry ordered by Emperor Theodosius II.

After his ‘conversion’ Augustine wrote to Ambrose and signed up to be baptised, so he, his mother and Alypius, who would also convert to the cult of the Galileans (Emperor Julian’s term), returned to Milan.

We also brought Adeodatus, my natural son, born of sin. You had gifted him well. He was barely fifteen years old… His intelligence left me speechless.

A little later, Augustine devotes some interesting pages to how his grandparents had educated his mother, and how they had turned her into a puritan: through mistreatment. I was especially struck by these words, which are understandable if we imagine the African heat, where the family grew up: ‘Apart from the hours when they ate soberly with her parents, she wasn’t allowed to drink even water, even if she burned with thirst’. But I find it very strange that in his book Augustine didn’t tell anecdotes about his siblings. What did he want to hide from us? What we do know is that his mother had fulfilled her mission:

She said to me: ‘My son, as far as I am concerned, I no longer find pleasure in this life… There was only one reason why I wanted to stay a little longer in this life. I wanted to see you as a Catholic Christian before I died. My God has fulfilled this desire even more fully than I wished. I see you his servant, who despises the happiness of the earth. What am I doing here?’

I don’t remember my answer well. What I do remember is that, barely five days later—not many more—she fell into bed with fevers… At fifty-six years of age and thirty-three years of mine, that pious and holy woman was released from her body.

It is very significant for those of us who research mental disorders to read, a couple of pages later, a retrospective recollection when her mother was still alive:

And she also reminded me with emotional affection that she had never heard a harsh word or insult against her come out of my mouth.

But he would take out his pent-up rage with his theological pessimism, so opposite to that of Pelagius. The following year Adeodatus died (had the great doctor of the Church treated his son well?) and the narrative part of his Confessions ends. The rest of the next four chapters are mere homilies for new converts.

If we ignore them (books X to XIII of his Confessions), it seems very significant that Augustine ended his book with this great account of his mother. As my father told me, ‘Faith is suckled’. And as Monica told her son: ‘Where I was’, in her dream of the rule, ‘there you were’. The rest—the coming theology of Augustine—followed from there.

No wonder that the year Augustine died, 430 c.e., was the year in which the Dark Ages began. When I see the astronomical damage done to the white man by the Imperial Church, that Church of which Augustine was its great architect, I increasingly admire Nietzsche’s The Antichrist. Unlike Cervantes, Goethe, Dante, Shakespeare and Augustine himself, the German philosopher was a ‘man against his time’, a poet against the Christian Age. Now, thanks to new ways of refuting Christianity besides Nietzsche’s—Richard Carrier’s mythicism and the autobiographical genre I want to inaugurate (which precisely shows that faith is indeed a programme installed in us by our parents)—, the mental virus for the white man implanted by deranged theologians could, potentially, cease to infect us.

Giovanni di Balduccio, Tomb of St Augustine in Pavia, Italy.

Categories
Benjamin Power Racial right

Quietness

by Benjamin Power

I feel very frustrated that comments on WDH have on the whole tailed off. Where did they all disappear to? Or were they timewasters in the first place? I didn’t think so. I dislike the quietness. It’s like they’ve all lost their spines. I don’t know if they’re demoralised, or simply ideologically opposed all of a sudden when National Socialism didn’t turn out what they wanted it to be/didn’t turn out to be ‘hardcore’ WN with swastikas. I imagine it’s the Christian question, but more so especially the trauma model and animal rights that gets them the most—most people are cruel; I’ve gathered that, and resent being forced to high moral standards.

I had an obvious thought as to the commenters, and commenters in general. I notice the most responses are always to the ‘what was done in the war/what could have been done instead in the war’ topic set. It’s because, I think, this topic is basically abstract, and doesn’t require personal change. One can mull over nerdy history perspectives all day long, massaging tiny new snippets of information in.

But to discuss ethics is more of a quality than a slew of mere information, and brings the person in question into the debate, not just the abstract at arms length, and thus is harder to massage into their already-rigid position, as, for once in their lives, coming from the dissident right in general as they are, they are encouraged to see ‘the mentally ill’ not as hate objects, but as victims of parental cruelty, and, more than that, are encouraged to realise that by eating meat they are causing unnecessary suffering, and are so evil in some sense.

That takes too much effort to change over compared with editing in a tiny new snippet of historical insight here and there, or piping up with more. I don’t personally know a huge deal about that point in history (though like to learn), and I don’t have an endless fascination with regurgitating facts one could find in a book if they wanted.

I think that’s the root of it, qualities versus facts-by-rote. It’s a hard situation to get around.

If I wanted endless Jew-bait, as I call it (a pun on click-bait), I’d just go to The Unz Review. Don’t get me wrong, I consider it a problem, but Jews don’t really play on my mind much these days, unlike Christianized whites. The more they look at Jews, the more excuse they have, and the less they see themselves. Only when they see themselves, and tackle themselves, can they mount any sensible attack on their enemies.

I hope you have some new blood soon. At one point there were over 40 people, right? I count loads of commenters, and I get frustrated when the ones I like drop away. They should understand, as you say, that yes, the Jewish Question is a given, and we’ve all done it to death (if not, the SS Pamphlets cover it pretty well) but the Christian Question encapsulates everything. If not for the latter, these ignorant mercantile commenters really are no different to Jews in my eyes. They worship and obey the principles of the same alien god.
 

Editor’s 2 ¢:

I think the Christian issue has really alienated the dissident right from this forum, and the fact that I barely mentions Jews.

The position of this site, following the four words, is: Be kind to abused animals and children, and tough on the exterminable Neanderthals who abuse them. Conversely, the WN position in general is based on Christian ethics: Love one another, and exterminationism is unthinkable anathema.

To the commenters:

I wonder, if Ben and I launched a podcast talking about all of this (a WDH transformed from written word to spoken word, inviting listeners to speak to the show), would you come back?

Categories
So-called saints Stefan Zweig

Augustine, 1

Augustine (354-430) was not only a man of his time like the previous ones in this series. Of the five mentioned, this African author had the most significant influence on the civilisation of the white man (he was, for example, the most widely read author in Spain). I will not speak here of his magnum opus, The City of God. His infernal doctrine, which wreaked so much havoc in my young life, is already denounced in several parts of my autobiography. I will confine myself to his most popular book.

It will be remembered that in my article on Goethe I said that Zweig had written about Augustine, but I omitted what he wrote about this so-called Father of the Church. Here is the full passage:

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.

Before he can throw light into his soul, a man must be aware of its existence, and this awareness does not begin until after the rise of Christianity. St Augustine’s Confessions breaks a trail for inward contemplation. Yet the gaze of the famous divine was directed, not so much inward, as towards the congregation he hoped to edify by the example of his own conversion. His treatise was a confession to the community, a model Confession; it was purposeful, teleological; it was not an end in itself, comprising its own answer and its own meaning. 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.

But in previous pages Zweig had observed the obvious: Rousseau’s confessions were not honest either, since he never repented of his sin of having thrown all his children into the orphanage. Precisely because of this sort of thing Zweig said that autobiography is the most difficult of literary arts: one must betray oneself if one wants to tell the pure truth about one’s life, a truth that neither Augustine nor Rousseau really confessed for lack of insight, intellectual honesty and nobility of soul.

The biggest problem I see with the editions that have been made of the Confessions is that they have been prefaced by Christians, including Penguin Books. This bias makes the unsuspecting reader unaware that the accepted wisdom about the book is a myth. There was no such thing as his very famous conversion weeping in the garden of his house. He was always a Christian as I will demonstrate in this article divided into more than one blog posts.

By convention, the thirteen chapters of the Confessions are called books instead of chapters by the publishers:
 

BOOK I: Augustine’s childhood

In this first chapter Augustine mentions his wet nurses. It is pertinent to note that, in referring to his whining as an infant, he already sees it as sinful. The white man’s current seemingly terminal sense of guilt is due to having secularised the Christian notion of sin (now at ethnosuicidal levels throughout the West). Augustine speaks of ‘you’ to his god, which all editions capitalise, ‘God’; he doesn’t use the ‘thou’ when referring to this deity in the Confessions: a sort of epistle to the Christian providence by this Punic theologian.

‘Who shall make me understand the sin of my childhood, since before thee no man is without sin, even a child of a single day on earth?’ Three pages later he confesses: ‘I was still a boy when I began to invoke you as my help and refuge…, I was small, I begged you with no small affection that they wouldn’t whip me at school. Sometimes, for my own good, you didn’t listen to me, and I was laughed at not only by my elders but also by my parents’.

Augustine was unaware, as the vast majority of religious people still are, that the idea of ‘God’ is a sublimation of the parental image. In this anecdote we see that the child Augustine was the victim of beatings at school and of mockery of these beatings in his own home. Since the idea of the deity is a projection, it is not surprising that now, talking in written soliloquies to his parental introject, he tells this ‘deity’ that ‘for his own good’ he didn’t listen to his pleas. Alice Miller calls this poisonous pedagogy in one of her books, translated into English under the title For Your Own Good.

And why was he beaten? On the next page he tells us: ‘I was whipped because I played ball…’ Clearly, the teachers were childhood-breakers, but Augustine doesn’t identify with the wounded child inside him but with the perpetrator: ‘I sinned, Lord, by disobeying my parents and teachers’.[1] The religious introjects had begun in his early childhood:

I was still a child when I heard of the eternal life promised to us by our God, who humbled himself and came down to our pride. And from that time I was marked with the sign of the cross, and from my mother’s womb I was given a taste of his salt.

Then he writes: ‘With what fervour of spirit and with what faith I came to my mother and mother of us all, your Church’ (my emphasis: keep in mind that he is always writing to his god in this epistle-book called the Confessions). He continues:

In truth, I already believed, and my mother believed, and all the house believed, except my father, who, however, could never overcome in me the pious right my mother had over me that I shouldn’t cease to believe in Christ, in whom he didn’t yet believe. For my mother wanted you, my God, to be my father more than he did.

The next page already shows the enormous cognitive distortion that Christianity caused him from an early age: ‘Being such a small boy I was already a great sinner’, and shortly afterwards: ‘I still don´t fully understand today why I abhorred Greek literature’. As I read the following pages I couldn’t restrain myself from writing at the bottom of the page, ‘If what Augustine says is a sin, Tubby of Little Lulu is a sinner!’ Even common curiosity in the Greco-Roman world was sinful:

But my sin was to seek in myself and other creatures, not in him, pleasure, beauty, and truth, thus falling into pain, confusion.

 

____________

[1] What healed Alice Miller of her depressions, she confesses, was to identify with the wounded child inside her; not with the perp.

Categories
Autobiography Poetry

Dante

Like Cervantes and Goethe, Dante (1265-1321) was a ‘man of his time’, so much so that he was prior of Florence, i.e. one of its senators. So to understand the poet we must contextualise him in the Middle Ages.

In the century in which Dante was born, another Italian who would greatly influence Western civilisation, St Francis, whom my father taught me to admire in my adolescence, had founded an order of mendicant friars. On one occasion, speaking of the saint of Assisi, my father mentioned that in one town he had cast out demons. There are still people who believe that. My mother told an anecdote about some nuns in Coyoacán who said to her that the devil made noises in the convent, but that they laughed because they knew he wasn’t going to tempt them. My mother said this not as the nuns’ hallucination: she accepted their demonological interpretation of the noises.

Francis exorcises the demons at Arezzo, fresco by Giotto.

When Francis died, Thomas Aquinas was born, the Italian who fixed the doctrine of the Catholic Church to the extent that one pope called his theological legacy aeternis patris. We can already imagine Voltaire’s mockery of Aquinas in his Philosophical Dictionary. But from the point of view of the priest of the sacred words—a fancy way of referring to a contemporary National Socialist—Voltairean sarcasm is of little use if the Enlightenment bequeathed us the universal declaration of human rights: neochristianity. But let’s take it one step at a time.

In my article on Cervantes, I asked what was the point of the Golden Age of Castilian letters if the Church didn’t allow them to write freely. In Dante’s time there was already the University of Bologna, but what happened when someone wanted to philosophise free of the theological yoke? When Francis was alive, in Paris in 1210, several readers of Aristotle had concluded that there was no life after death. We can imagine how such ‘heresy’ would affect the control of the European population through the spiritual terror—fear of damnation—with which the Church controlled them. The reaction of the bishop of the city was not long in coming. Ten of the freethinkers were burned at the stake: a ‘hard totalitarianism’ compared to the ‘soft totalitarianism’ of today. (Nowadays they no longer burn the heretic, they only imprison him. Recall that two men who have commented on this site, Tyrone Joseph Walsh and Christopher Gibbons, are serving years in the UK for thoughtcrimes).

By Dante’s time, however, banking and the power of emperors were beginning to emerge, acting as counterweights to the once all-powerful Church, although Pope Boniface VIII tried to bring down that counterweight in Italy. Florence in particular felt the renaissance of the age: its arts were revived in that city with its characteristic tower houses, such as the one in the illustration above (even the tourist of our century can still appreciate something of the medieval air in some Florentine quarters).

Let us recall, in our abridgement of Karlheinz Deschner’s book, how the Church acted as the lobotomist of the Greco-Roman man since Constantine. Here we will only focus on one more example. Due to the translations of Aristotle and Galen, ancient medicine was already becoming accessible. But when, at the end of Dante’s life, a certain Mondino de Liuzzi began to dissect corpses, he came up against ecclesiastical authority. Pietro d’Abano, an illustrious physician, was even persecuted by the Inquisition and, after his death, his body was burned at the stake.

Fides (Faith) by Giotto. In the Middle Ages, Faith had the Aryan mind chained.

And the ‘men against their time’? In a world of hard totalitarianism they simply couldn’t flourish, although we must mention the English Franciscan Roger Bacon (1214-1292), who despite being persecuted attributed a new meaning to natural science and mathematics, which in centuries to come would become the foundation of experimental research. Nor should we fail to mention the Scotsman Duns Scotus (1263-1308), the only intellectual to question the doctrine of eternal damnation in a thousand years of Christendom! But this was the same century in which the Dominican order was founded: an order of learned theologians who were trained to fight the doctrines that the Newspeak of the time called ‘heretical’ (the term for social ostracism which in medieval times was equivalent to the ‘racist’ of our days). From this order came some of the greatest exponents of medieval thought, such as Aquinas.

The Militant Church and the Triumph of the Dominicans, fresco by Andrea Bonaiuti in Florence.

Parallel to this orthodoxy that forced an iron faith on the white man, a ‘little renaissance’ emerged at the time when Dante flourished. The liberal arts such as grammar and rhetoric, or geometry, music and astronomy (or rather astrology) were following their course. Secular music in particular, including troubadour music, moved away from Gregorian chant while retaining a liturgical stamp. Frederick II of Swabia encouraged intense cultural activity.

Compared to our ‘Empire of the yin’ in the 21st century West, the Aryan psyche, specifically the Italian one, was extremely quarrelsome. In paintings we can see crenellated city walls with men at arms. The clashing of swords was an almost daily occurrence in the tumultuous life of the communes. This balance between Yang and yin, militia and arts, also existed in Hitler’s Germany but unlike medieval society was on the verge of breaking with the Christian Era (and would have broken with it for the good had it not been for Anglo-American intervention).
 

Beatrice

Con Beatrice m’era m’suso in cielo
(With Beatrice I was enclosed in heaven).

Dante first met Beatrice in 1274, but it was not until 1283 that he received his first greeting from the lady, who died in 1290, the year Giotto painted the Cross of Santa Maria Novella. A quarter of a century after the death of his platonic love he began the Inferno, although he wrote the Divine Comedy in many different places during his troubled life. At the age of fifty-six, Dante died poor in Ravenna, but his poem was a spectacular success after his death. Only Renaissance ideals and the new tastes they brought would cause Dante’s fame to eclipse. The 19th century, despite its infatuation with the Middle Ages, was heir to this contempt for scholasticism and its theology.

The Comedy transports us, first, to an underground journey, then to the ascent of the mountain where sins are being purged, and finally to an interplanetary flight. Many years ago a friend I knew in a chess park gave me, in three volumes, the best translation of the Comedy into our native language. I lent the first volume, the one on hell, to a girlfriend of my brother’s who was studying Italian but she never returned it to me. I have only a few scraps left of the book of the Purgatorio and only the one on Paradiso I keep in its entirety.

The opening lines of the first song, which can be seen in this codex, are still the most famous: ‘Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark / For the straightforward pathway had been lost’. In my books I have used them to describe how I was for decades after the tragedy of my adolescence which left me without a career, without a job and—for reasons confessed in those books—without a partner. Being lost in a dark forest is a splendid metaphor for how I was before a Beatrice rescued me: the books of Alice Miller on parental abuse, with whom I got to correspond before she died.

Before a Beatrice appeared in my life, at least on an intellectual level, I had tried to get out of the forest through neochristianity, specifically, a religious movement (‘Eschatology’) that emerged in the previous century, inspired by the New Testament: a movement I have already discussed on pages 11-26 of Daybreak. The medieval universe in which my father lived is evident in an anecdote from the early 1980s.

We were having a Sunday lunch at home with Uncle Beto when, for some reason, Eschatology came into the conversation. To scold me publicly my father, a traditional Catholic, alluded to a passage in the Inferno in which Dante had put heretics (Eschatology was schismatic, outside the Catholic Church) in a place where they were quartered. My father imitated with his hands a sort of scythe wielded by a devil to dismember them, in the belief that these heretics had ‘dismembered the Church’. There are many other symbolic passages in the Inferno, such as the twisted landscape and the twisted bodies in the jungle of the suicides (admirably recreated by Doré centuries later).

With apologies to the vox populi, it is a mistake to read the Inferno and stop there. For Salvatore Battaglia, ‘among the three cantigas of the Poem, this one of Purgatorio represents the most truthful presentation of the human condition’. The middle book is flanked by the books of the damned and the blessed. Purgatorio is the realm of poetry, and in my opinion, given that publishing a book in the vernacular language questioning the existence of hell was impossible in the Middle Ages, beauty was the most direct form of therapy against the fear of damnation, while the poet sublimates it in art and the dogma is no longer felt as it was before: it is ‘weathered’ with sublime lyricism (for example, each of the three books ends with the word stelle, stars). As a counterpoint, on 30 December 1995 I made a note in my copy:

I have barely read the summary and I think that the whole Dantean Comedy is bullshit. Why on earth build a beautiful cathedral on false principles? In other words, even supposing it is true what Octavio Paz says, that Dante is the poet of our Age, that is beside the point: what pisses me off is that the poet believed the Christian worldview. A contemporary of his, Duns Scotus, questioned the most psychotic doctrine of the universe; so there is no excuse ‘that at that time it couldn´t be broken’.

The Comedy is a triptych. In the final book, with Beatrice and Dante flying from planet to planet, the traveller enters from heaven to heaven, passing through the sky of Mars and then Saturn. There are very old paintings reflecting these Dantean passages. At the end he arrives at the empyrean, in the centre of which the poet looks face to face with the greatest of mysteries. In reality, this deity is ultimately the god of the Jews and what I wrote thirty years ago still holds: the freethinker cannot bear to be enraptured by the worldview of the Dark Ages.

Avete il Novo e ‘l Vecchio Testamento
e ‘l pastor della Chiesa che vi guida:
questo vi basti a vostro salvamento.

You have the New, the Old Testament
And the pastor of the Church is your guide:
This is enough to your salvation.

And even worse:

ond’ei credette in quella, e non sofferse
da indi il puzzo più del paganesmo;
e riprendíene le genti perverse.

that’s why he believed in her, and didn’t suffer from
the pestilence of paganism,
and reproved the wicked people.

This last passage appears in the song to the Heaven VI, where Dante speaks to those he considers to be righteous spirits. Obviously, the apologists of Christian doctrine had to reside in Dantean heaven.

Sometimes coffee conversations with friends are more profound than the musings of scholars. Many years ago the poet Carlos Mongar remarked to me that, much better than having written the Comedy, Dante would have had Beatrice in his arms and, in sexual intercourse, subject her ‘to the ultimate desecration’ implying that the lady would have been delighted to be possessed / desecrated by a Dante who would never have felt the need to become a poet.

Let us remember what happened to so many Werthers in real life. How many Christian prose and poetry would the white man have been spared if so many young men hadn’t been prevented by circumstances from marrying and procreating as the Gods command?

In the article on Goethe I also quoted an Austrian biographer who said that the most profound level of literary art is autobiography in which the artist betrays himself by daring to confess the truth about his life. Let us betray ourselves a little and confess that, precisely because the tragedy of my adolescence affected me to the extent that I was never able to hold a real Beatrice in my arms, I idealised the eternal feminine and that is what moves me to write.