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Ancient Rome Architecture Christendom Darkening Age (book) Emperor Julian Evil Libanius

Darkening Age, 12

In chapter eight of The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, Catherine Nixey wrote:
 
In Palmyra, what remains of the statue of Athena shows that one single, furious sword-blow had been enough to decapitate her. Though often one blow was not felt to be sufficient. In Germany, a statue of the goddess Minerva was smashed into six pieces. Her head has never been found. In France, a relief of Mithras was smashed into more than three hundred pieces.

Christian writers applauded such destruction—and egged their rulers on to greater acts of violence. One gleefully observed that the Christian emperors now ‘spit in the faces of dead idols, trample on the lawless rites of demons, and laugh at the old lies’. An infamous early text instructed emperors to wash away this ‘filth’ and ‘take away, yes, calmly take away… the adornments of the temples. Let the fire of the mint or the blaze of the smelters melt them down.’

This was nothing to be ashamed of. The first Commandment could not have been clearer. ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image,’ it said. ‘Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them,’ it continued, ‘nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.’ The Greek and Roman temples, no matter how ancient or beautiful, were the homes of false gods and they had to be destroyed. This was not vandalism: it was God’s will. The good Christian had a duty to do nothing less.

The speed with which toleration slipped into intolerance and then downright suppression shocked non-Christian observer. The emperor Julian later acerbically observed that, while Constantine robbed the temples his sons overthrew them. In AD 356, it became illegal—on pain of death—to worship images. The law adopted a tone of hitherto unseen aggression. ‘Pagans’ began to be described as ‘madmen’ whose beliefs must be ‘completely eradicated’…

But Julian’s reign was brief and, just half a century after Constantine, it was already too late to reverse the attrition that had begun. Julian, one Christian would tell his flock, was ‘but a cloud which will speedily be dispersed’. He was right.

By the time Theophilus attacked Serapis the laws were on his side. But many other Christians were so keen to attack the demonic temples that they didn’t wait for legal approval. Decades before the laws of the land permitted them to, zealous Christians began to indulge in acts of violent vandalism against their ‘pagan’ neighbours…

Libanius, the Greek orator from Antioch, was revolted by the destruction that he witnessed. ‘These people,’ he wrote, ‘hasten to attack the temples with sticks and stones and bars of iron, and in some cases, disdaining these, with hands and feet. Then utter desolation follows, with the stripping of roofs, demolition of walls, the tearing down of statues, and the overthrow of altars, and the priests must either keep quiet or die… So they sweep across the countryside like rivers in spate.’

Libanius spoke elegiacally of a huge temple on the frontier with Persia, a magnificent building with a beautiful ceiling, in whose cool shadows had stood numerous statues. Now, he said, ‘it is vanished and gone, to the grief of those who had seen it’—and the grief of those who now never would. This temple had been so striking, he said, that there were even those who argued that it was as great as the temple of Serapis—which, he added with an irony not lost on later historians, ‘I pray may never suffer the same fate.’

Not only were the monks vulgar, stinking, ill-educated and violent they were also, said their critics, phoneys. They pretended to adopt lives of austere self-denial but actually they were no better than drunken thugs, a black-robed tribe ‘who eat more than elephants and, by the quantities of drink they consume, weary those that accompany their drinking with the singing of hymns’…

Then, in 399, a new and more terrible law came. It was announced that ‘if there should be any temples in the country districts, they shall be torn down without disturbance or tumult. For when they are torn down and removed, the material basis for all superstition will be destroyed.’

Categories
Christendom Daybreak Publishing Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Finally

Finally, the abridged translation of Karlheinz Deschner’s book on the history of Christianity is available in printed form (here).

This January, in a discussion thread at The Occidental Observer, Karl Nemmersdorf, the Christian author of the featured article, told me ‘Um… no, I don’t follow your blog. Please let me know, however, if you supersede St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Aquinas…’

In other words, these guys are so giants that I could not possibly mess with their divine wisdom. But however erudite Nemmersdorf may be in traditional Catholic literature, he is ignorant about the real story of his religion. His ignorance is explainable because only until very recently did someone turn his life into the encyclopaedic mission of uncovering the criminal history of Christianity. Apparently, white people had been unable to read an encyclopaedic work about real Church history for the simple reason that it didn’t exist before Deschner.

The fact is that the Big Guys mentioned by Nemmersdorf, Paul (recently discussed in this site in several posts), Augustine and Aquinas, were evil men. And evil men were also the church doctors in Augustine’s times, Athanasius and Ambrose, as demonstrated by Deschner.

Remember that I offered my opinion on a recent article by Andrew Joyce about Jewish psy-ops: they have infiltrated our educational system in order to brainwash generations of white children. Well, although Ambrose probably was not Jewish he was not white either, as can be seen in this ancient mosaic. In a passage from this first translated volume, Deschner talks about the psy-ops that this non-white doctor used to brainwash the Roman princes:

Bishop Ambrose saw the sovereigns daily. Since when Valentinian II was proclaimed Augustus (375) he was barely five years old, his tutor and half-brother Gratian had just turned sixteen and the Spanish Theodosius was at least a very determined Catholic, the illustrious disciple of Jesus could handle perfectly their majesties. Valentinian I died a few years after Ambrose’s inauguration. His son Gratian (375-383), of just sixteen years of age, succeeded him on the throne.

The emperor, blond, beautiful and athletic had no interest in politics. ‘I have never learned what it means to govern and be governed’ (Eunapius). He was a passionate runner, javelin thrower, fighter, rider, but what he liked most was killing animals. Neglecting the affairs of state, every day he killed countless of them, with an almost ‘supernatural’ ability, even lions, with a single arrow.

Note how this is eerily similar to contemporary Aryan frivolity in extreme sports—at the same time that the Jews plot how to exterminate them! (which is why we speak about an ‘Aryan question’ beside the ‘Jewish question’).

In any case, he also prayed every day and was ‘pious and clean of hearing’, as Ambrose affirmed: ‘His virtues would have been complete had he also learned the art of politics’. However, this art was practiced by Ambrose for him. Not only did he personally guide the young sovereign, effectively since 378: he also influenced his government measures. At that time the sovereign had promulgated, by an edict, precisely tolerance towards all confessions, except a few extremist sects. However, Ambrose, who four years before was still unbaptized, hastened to write a statement, De fide ad Gratianum Augustum (Faith for Gratian), which he quickly understood.

As soon as Gratian himself arrived at the end of July 379 in Milan, neutral as he was from the point of view of religious policy, he annulled on August 3, after an interview with Ambrose, the edict of tolerance promulgated the year before.

The Greco-Roman religion, reviled as ‘pagan’ by Christian Newspeak, was a religion originated by pure whites (see the articles of Evropa Soberana in The Fair Race). Eventually, the white religion was prohibited and the Jewish god imposed on all Roman citizens. A few pages later, Deschner tells us:

The young Gratian at first had given a good treatment to the ‘pagans’, but he learned from his spiritual mentor ‘to feel the Christian Empire as an obligation to repress the old religion of the state’ (Caspar).

Other early Christian writers were most likely ethnic Jews, as can be guessed when pondering on how they avenged the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem a few centuries earlier:

Lactantius [an early Christian author who became an advisor to the first Christian Roman emperor, Constantine I] is the one who then states that the sovereigns of the gentiles [emphasis added] were ‘criminals before God’, and he celebrates that they have been ‘exterminated from the root with all their type’. ‘Now those who pretended to defy God are laid prostrate on the ground; those who knocked down the Temple were slow to fall, but they fell much lower and had the end they deserved’.

Judeo-Christianity conquered the Roman Empire because the empire had become the melting-pot for non-white peoples, Jews included, who took advantage of the Roman upward mobility after the old religion became obsolete. This site, The West’s Darkest Hour is based on a passage from William Pierce’s Who We Are: that the ancient Greeks and Romans should have gotten rid of non-whites instead of using them as slaves or second-class citizens. If pre-Christian emperors had taken heed of a Cassandra prophecy, what Deschner says would not have occurred:

Constantine dedicated ten years to rearmament and propaganda in favour of Christianity as in the East; for example in Asia Minor, half of the population was already Christian in some areas [i.e., non-white]. After those ten years he rose again in search of the ‘final solution’.

That the earliest Christians were not white but fully Semitic is apparent in the footnotes below these maps provided by Evropa Soberana. We can assume that by the time of Constantine most Christians were also non-white, as Christians preached slave morality, blessed are the poor, etc. But I would like to continue to respond to the erudite Christian authors and commenters at The Occidental Observer. Not only St. Ambrose was non-white but St. Augustine was not white either (scholars generally agree that Augustine’s parents were Berbers), and probably the other great Church doctor of the time, St. Athanasius, was another non-white. Deschner wrote:

Probably like Paul and like Gregory VII, Athanasius was short and weak; Julian calls him homunculus. However, like Paul and Gregory, each one of them was a genius of hatred.

This suggest that Athanasius did not belong to the handsome Latin race (‘Aryan race’ the Nazis would say) to which Emperor Julian belonged. Like Nemmersdorf , Lew Wallace, author of the huge bestseller Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, did not admire Julian but the Christian emperors. What white nationalists ignore is that, without millions of useful idiots like this pair, the Jews would never have taken over the United States. These are the final words of Ben-Hur:

If any of my readers, visiting Rome, will make the short journey to the Catacomb of San Calixto, which is more ancient than that of San Sebastiano, he will see what became of the fortune of Ben-Hur, and give him thanks. Out of that vast tomb Christianity issued to supersede the Caesars.

The reading of Deschner’s books, and I mean not only this first translated volume but the next ones, will convince the honest reader that—contra Wallace—compared to the monstrous Christian emperors, the pagan Caesars were almost saints. If life allows, we will reach the pages where Deschner debunks the last doctor of the church mentioned by Nemmersdorf, Thomas Aquinas, but that is still too many books ahead.

For the moment, this is the Contents page of our first translation of:

 

Christianity’s Criminal History

Editor’s preface

Introduction

 
The Early Period: from Old Testament origins to the death of Saint Augustine
 
Forgeries in the Old Testament

The bibles and some peculiarities of the Christian Bible

The five books of Moses, which Moses did not write

David and Solomon

Joshua and Isaiah

Ezekiel and Daniel

The Jewish apocalyptic

Portrayals of the biblical female world

Opposition to the Old Testament

Forgeries in diaspora Judaism

 
Forgeries in the New Testament

The error of Jesus

The ‘Holy Scriptures’ are piled up

God as the author?

Christians forged more consciously than Jews

Neither the Gospel of Matthew, nor the Gospel of John, nor John’s Book of Revelation come from the apostles to whom the Church attributes them

Forged ‘epistles of Paul’

The Second Epistle to the Thessalonians

Colossians, Ephesians and Hebrews

Forged epistles of Peter

Forged John and others

Interpolations in the New Testament

 
The invention of Popes

Neither Jesus instituted the papacy nor Peter was bishop of Rome

There is no evidence of Peter’s stay and death in Rome

The story of the discovery of Peter’s tomb

The list of fabricated Roman bishops

 
Background in the Old Testament

Moses and the Book of Judges

The ravages of David and the modern translators

The sacred warmongering of the Maccabees

The Jewish War (66-70)

Bar Kokhba and the ‘Last War of God’ (131-136)

The Jewish religion, tolerated by the pagan state

 
Early Christianity

Interpretatio Christiana

‘Orthodoxy’ and ‘heresy’

First ‘heretics’ in the New Testament

Thirteen good Christians

Saint Jerome and Origen

 
The persecution of the Christians

Anti-Hellene hatred in the New Testament

The defamation of the Greco-Roman religion

Celsus and Porphyry

The persecution of the Christians

Most of the written statements about the martyrs are false, but all of them were considered as totally valid historical documents

The Roman emperors viewed retrospectively

 
Saint Constantine: The First Christian Emperor

War against Maxentius

War against Maximinus

War against Licinius

The Catholic clergy, increasingly favoured

Constantine as saviour, deliverer, and vicar of God

No more a pacifist Church

Christian family life and savage criminal practices

Constantine against Jews and ‘heretics’

Constantine against the Greco-Roman culture

 
Interim report

Persia, Armenia and Christianity

 
Constantine’s successors

The first Christian dynasty founded on family extermination

First wars among devout Christians

Constantius and his Christian-style government

A father of the Church who preaches looting and killing

First assaults on the temples

 
Julian

Hecatombs under the pious Gallus

Emperor Julian

Christian tall stories

 
After Julian

Rivers of blood under the Catholic Valentinian

Trembling and gnashing of teeth under the Arian Valens

 
Athanasius, Doctor of the Church

The complicated nature of God

It was not fought for faith but for power

The Council of Nicaea

Character and tactics of a Father of the Church

The death of Arius

The ‘battlefield’ of Alexandria

Antioch and Constantinople

Shelter with a twenty-year-old beauty

 
Ambrose, doctor of the Church

Non-white Ambrose drives the annihilation of the Goths

Emperor Theodosius ‘the Great’

Against the Hellenist religion

 
The Father of the Church Augustine

‘Genius in all fields of Christian doctrine’

Augustine’s campaign against the Donatists

The overthrow of Pelagius

Augustine attacks Greco-Roman culture

Augustine sanctions the ‘holy war’

Categories
Art Christendom Darkening Age (book) Evil

Darkening Age, 11

As the epigraph of ‘How to Destroy a Demon’, chapter eight of The Darkening Age: The Christian
Destruction of the Classical World, Catherine Nixey chose a passage from an hagiography of a so-called saint, The Life of Martin: ‘He completely demolished the temple belonging to the false religion and reduced all the altars and statues to dust’.

The pages of history might overlook this destruction, but stone is less forgetful. Go to Room 18 in the British Museum in London and you will find yourself in front of the Parthenon Marbles, taken from Greece by Lord Elgin in the nineteenth century.

The astonishingly lifelike statues are, today, in a sorry state: many are mutilated or missing limbs. This, it is often assumed, was the fault of Lord Elgin’s clumsy workmen or fighting during the Ottoman occupation. And indeed some of this was—but not all. Much was the work of zealous Christians who set about the temple with blunt instruments, attacking the ‘demonic’ gods, mutilating some of the finest statuary Greece had ever produced.

The East Pediment fared particularly badly. Hands, feet, even whole limbs have gone—almost certainly smashed off by Christians trying to incapacitate the demons within. The vast majority of the gods have been decapitated—again, almost certainly the work of Christians. The great central figures of the Pediment, that would have shown the birth of Athena, were the most sacred—and thus to the Christians the most demonic. They therefore suffered most: it is likely that they were pushed off the Pediment—and smashed on the ground below, their fragmented remains ground down and used for mortar for a Christian church.

The same tale is told by objects in museums and archaeological sites across the world. Near the Marbles in the same museum is a basalt bust of Germanicus. Two blows have hacked off his nose and a cross has been cut in his forehead. In Athens, a larger­than-life statue of Aphrodite has been disfigured by a crude cross carved on her brow; her eyes have been defaced and her nose is missing. In Cyrene, the eyes have been gouged out of a life-sized bust in a sanctuary of Demeter, and the nose removed; in Tuscany a slender statue of Bacchus has been decapitated.

In the Sparta Archaeological Museum, a colossal statue of the goddess Hera looks blindly out, her eyes disfigured by crosses. A beautiful statue of Apollo from Salamis has been castrated and then struck, hard, in the face, shearing off the god’s nose. Across his neck are scars indicating that Christians attempted to decapitate him but failed.

In Palmyra Museum there stood, at least until the city’s recent occupation by Islamic State, the mutilated and reconstructed figure of the once-great figure of Athena that had dominated a temple there. A huge dent in her once-handsome face was all that remained when her nose was smashed off. A recent book on the Christian destruction of statues focusing just on Egypt and the Near East runs to almost three hundred pages, dense with pictures of mutilation.

But while some evidence remains, much has gone entirely. The point of destruction is, after all, that it destroys. If effective, it more than merely defaces something. It obliterates all evidence that the object ever existed. We will never know quite how much was wiped out. Many statues were pulverized, shattered, scattered, burned and melted into absence. Tiny piles of charred ivory and gold are all that remain of some. Others were so well disposed of that they will probably not be found: they were thrown into rivers, sewers and wells, never to be seen again. The destruction of other sacred objects is, because of the nature of the object, all but impossible to detect.

The sacred groves of the old gods for example, those tranquil natural shrines like the one Pliny had so admired, were set about with axes and their ancient trees hacked down. Pictures, books, ribbons even, could be seen as the work of the devil and thus removed and destroyed. Certain sorts of musical instruments were censured and stopped: as one Christian preacher boasted; the Christians smashed the flutes of the ‘musicians of the demons’ to pieces. Some of the demolition, such as that of the temple of Serapis, was so terrible that several authors recorded it.

Other moments of vandalism were immortalized in glowing terms in Christian hagiographies. Though these are the exceptions. Far more violence was buried in silence.

Categories
Catholic Church Jesus Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 93

Below, an abridged translation from the second volume of
Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.

 
As the historical-critical exegesis of the Bible teaches us, Jesus—the apocalyptic man who, totally within the tradition of the Jewish prophets, waits for the immediate end: the irruption of the ‘God’s imperial rule’, and thereby makes a complete mistake (one of the most solid results of exegetical investigation)—certainly did not want to found any Church or institute priests, bishops, patriarchs and popes.

As late as the middle of the 2nd century, the Roman Christian community had about thirty thousand members and 155 clerics. None knew anything about the appointment of Peter, nor about his stay and martyrdom in Rome.

 
The list of fabricated Roman bishops

The oldest list of Roman bishops was provided by the father of the Church, Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon, in his work Adversus Haereses, roughly between the years 180 and 185. The original Greek text is not preserved; only a complete Latin copy of the 3rd century or 4th, if not the 5th. Literature about it is hardly noticeable, the text is ‘spoiled’ in a manifest way. What remains a mystery is the origin of the list. Ireneus wrote down a little more than the names.

And nowhere is there talk of a primacy of Peter! By the end of the 2nd century Peter was not yet counted in Rome among the bishops. And in the 4th century it is affirmed that he was pope for twenty-five years! Bishop Eusebius, a historian of little confidence, even guilty of falsification of documents, transmitted in his time the succession of Roman bishops.

Eusebius ‘perfected’ also the list of Alexandrian bishops, very similar to that of the Romans. The same with the Antioquian list, associating an Olympiad with each one of the bishops Cornelius, Eros and Theophilus. In the list of bishops of Jerusalem he also worked with artificial computations, not having ‘practically any written news’ of the years in which they were in office. Later, Bishop Epiphanius made an exact dating comparing it with that of the emperors.

Around the year 354, the Catalogus Liberianus (Liberian Catalogue), a relation of popes that goes from Peter to Liberius, indicating dates in days and months, was continued and ‘completed’, as indicated by the Catholic Gelmi, who immediately added: ‘All these data have no historical value’.

The Liber Pontificalis (Book of the Popes), the official book of the popes, the oldest list of the Roman bishops, contains ‘a great abundance of falsified or legendary material’, which the author ‘completes by new findings’ (Caspar). In short, it carries so many fabrications that until the 6th century it has hardly any historical value, not naming Peter, but a certain Linus, as the first bishop of the city. Thereafter Linus is in second place and Peter in the first.

In the end a ‘position of Peter’ is constructed (Karrer) and becomes ‘papacy’. ‘Like a seed’, writes the Jesuit Hans Grotz in a poetic way, ‘Peter fell on the Roman earth’. And then many others fell, as is still happening today. Little by little all the ‘successors’ of Peter could be counted, as has been said, with the year in which they acceded to the papacy and the date of their death, apparently in an uninterrupted succession. (Editor’s Note: Deschner’s books have no illustrations but see the image that I chose for this post: part of a poster of the purported bishops of Rome from St. Peter to Pope Francis under the heading ‘I Sommi Pontefici Romani’. The poster is so large that, already unfolded, I had to hang it on a wall to photograph it.)

However, over time the list of Roman bishops was modified, perfected, completed in such a way that, in a table compiled by five Byzantine chroniclers, of the first twenty-eight bishops of Rome only in four places do the figures agree in all columns. Indeed, the final editor of the text, perhaps Pope Gregory I, seems to have expanded the list of names to include twelve saints, in parallel with the twelve apostles. In any case, the list of Roman bishops of the first two centuries is as unreliable as that of the list of the Alexandrians or Antiochenes, and ‘in the first decades it is pure arbitrariness’ (Heussi).

Note of the Ed.: Fabricated list of popes. Starting at the left,
St. Peter. Note the noblest faces the artist used for these
non-existent popes to make the faithful believe that the first
popes were not only saints, but also holy men of the white race.

The invention of a series of traditional names and tables, partly constructed, artificially filling the gaps, existed long before the appearance of Christianity and its lists of bishops falsified from the beginning. It is comparable to the Old Testament genealogies, which through a succession of names without empty gaps, guaranteed participation in the divine promises; especially the list of high priests after the exile, as a list of rulers of Israel.

Furthermore, the ancient pastors of Rome were not considered in any way ‘popes’. For a long time they had ‘no other title than that of the other bishops’ (Bihimeyer, Catholic). Whereas in the East, patriarchs, bishops and abbots were long known as ‘popes’ (pappas, papa, father), this designation appears in Rome for the first time on a tombstone from the time of Liberius (papacy 352-366).

At the end of the 5th century, the notion acquired a naturalisation certificate in the West, where the Roman bishops used the word ‘pope’ to call themselves, along with other bishops, although they did not do so regularly until the end of the 8th century. And until the second millennium the word ‘pope’ does not become an exclusive privilege for the bishops of Rome.

The first to refer to Mt, 16, 18, is, of course, the despotic Stephen I (papacy 354-357). With his hierarchical-monarchical conception of the Church, rather than episcopal and collegial, it is to a certain extent the first pope.

Not even Augustine, so fond of Rome but sometimes oscillating delicately among the pope and his African brothers, defends papal primacy. That is why Vatican I, of 1870, even reproached his ‘erroneous opinions’ (pravae sententiae) to the famous father of the Church. Sumus christiani, non petriani, ‘We are Christians, not Petrians’, Augustine had affirmed.

Similarly, like the bishops and fathers of the Church, the ancient councils did not recognise the primacy of law of Rome.

______ 卐 ______

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Categories
Catholic Church Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) St Paul

Christianity’s Criminal History, 92

Fourth century glass mosaic of St. Peter,
located at the Catacombs of Saint Thecla.

 

Below, an abridged translation from the second volume of
Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.

The story of the discovery of Peter’s tomb

According to an ancient tradition, the tomb of the ‘prince of the apostles’ is on the Appian Way, and according to another version, under the church of St. Peter. It seems that in the middle of the 2nd century this tomb was already sought.

Around the year 200 the Roman presbyter Gaius believed he knew where Peter’s tomb was, ‘in the Vatican’, and Paul’s tomb, ‘on the way to Ostia’. And since Constantine it has been venerated—and visited—the presumed tomb of Peter in St. Peter’s church.

However, its historical authenticity has not been proven; simply, in the Constantinian era there was a belief that they had found Peter’s tomb. But this belief did not prove anything more in those times than today. What was found under the church of St. Peter (in whose vicinity was the Phrygianum, the sanctuary of the goddess Cybele) was a large number of pagan tombs: in the last excavations no less than twenty-two mausoleums and two open crypts.

Between 1940 and 1949 the archaeologist Enrico Josi, the architect Bruno Apolloni-Ghetti, the Jesuit Antonio Ferrua and another Jesuit, Engelbert Kirschbaum, excavated under the dome of St. Peter. The management was given to the prelate Kaas, who was then director of the centre.

The results of various critical researchers—Adriano Prandi, Armin von Gerkan, Theodor Klauser, A. M. Schneider, and others—ended up extracting from the Jesuits the confession that the (Catholic) report of the excavations was not ‘free of errors’. There were ‘defects in the description’. They spoke of ‘greater or lesser contradictions’ and mention that errare humanum est (to err is human) ‘which, unfortunately, continues to be fulfilled’. But the decisive thing is that they want to ‘believe’. In no way has criticism ‘caused them to falter’. Finally, Engelbert Kirschbaum records the following:

Has Peter’s tomb been found? We reply: the tropaion of the middle of the 2nd century has been found. However, the corresponding tomb of the apostle has not been ‘found’ in the same sense, but it has been demonstrated: that is, by means of a whole series of clues, its existence has been deduced, although there are no longer ‘material parts’ of this original tomb.

Ergo, the grave has been there, but it’s gone! ‘Fantasy would like to imagine how the corpse of the first pope rested on earth’, Kirschbaum writes, and assumes that Peter’s bones were removed from its tomb in the year 258—naturally, without the slightest demonstration.

When Venerando Correnti, a well-known anthropologist, studied the legs of the vecchio robusto (old robust), the presumed bones of Peter, he identified them as the remains of three individuals, among them with ‘almost total certainty’ (quasi ciertamente) those of an elderly woman of about seventy years old. However, on June 26, 1968, Pope Paul VI announced in his address on the occasion of a general audience: ‘The relics of St. Peter have been identified in a way that we can consider as convincing’.

In fact, any identification among the pile of buried remains was, both at the beginning and after two thousand years, impossible even if Peter was there. Erich Caspar has rightly pointed out, with a good dose of prudence, ‘that the existing doubts will never be eliminated’.

Within this same context, Johannes Haller has recalled, also rightly, the scepticism regarding the authenticity of the Schiller and Bach skulls, although the distance in time is much smaller and the conditions much better. Likewise, Armin von Gerkan writes that, even if Peter’s tomb were discovered with inscriptions that would attest to it—which is not the case—that would prove nothing ‘since that inhumation would come from the Constantinian era, and it is very possible it was a fiction’.

Norbert Brox, who in 1983 knows ‘with all certainty’ that Peter has been in Rome, confesses that the role that Peter played in the community of that city is unknown. ‘It is ruled out that he was its bishop’. The author of the First Epistle of Peter (the ‘apostle of Jesus Christ’ in ‘Babylon’, that is, Rome) did not present himself as bishop but, according to the Protestant theologian Felix Christ, ‘as a preacher and above all as an ‘elder’. Also for the Catholic Blank, Peter was not, ‘in all probability the first bishop of Rome’, and naturally not the founder of the Roman community.

Even for Rudolf Pesch, so faithful to the opposite line, there was no ‘such beginnings’, no episcopate in Rome. Neither Peter nor Paul—‘neither of the two apostles has had a direct’ successor ‘in a Roman bishopric’. However, at the end of his study, this Catholic declares that the papal primacy is ‘the Catholic primacy of Peter united to the succession of the apostles in the office of bishop, at the service of the faith of the Church, One and Holy’. This is the factum theologicum.

In plan English, hiding a fact to obtain what would not otherwise be achieved.

______ 卐 ______

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Free speech / association Holocaust

Ye shall know the truth…

and the truth will set you free, white man. But when it comes down to it, Kevin MacDonald is afraid to discuss the holocaust in his webzine and Greg Johnson says we should forget it—as if the genocidal system was not importing masses of non-whites under the pretext that we must atone for the Nazi sins!

I have surfed the sites of white nationalism for nine years and only today I learned that there is Castle Hill Publishers (CHP): a publishing house that specialises in revising the holocaust theme. Either I had not surfed well or the white nationalists did not mention this publishing house with due emphasis.

I think that all those who want to be free should start studying these books, especially since Amazon Books eliminated the 69 books from the CHP collection last year! Now you have to use other channels to request them. However, even if we do not have time to read them, or the money to purchase them, we are obliged to keep, in our hard-drives, the PDFs that CHP offers us on their site. As Jim Rizoli says about CHP, the time will come when not even these PDFs will be available on the web, so we should store them in our homes as soon as possible.

Nor did I know anything about the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH), which I discovered today, founded by Bradley Smith (1930-2016), which seems to be merging with CHP according to the Metapedia article. I recommend a very short video that presents, in a few words, the books published by CHP (here).

Today I will begin to save everything I can from this publishing house—a house as generous as David Irving’s books, which can also be obtained for free on his site.

Categories
Psychiatry

View from the tower

History is the mighty Tower of Experience… It is no easy task to reach the top of this ancient structure and get the benefit of the full view. There is no elevator, but young feet are strong and it can be done. —Hendrik Willem van Loon.

Psychiatry is a pseudoscience and an Inquisition. The chapter ‘From the Great Confinement of Louis XIV of France to a Chemical Gulag’ can now be read, in due order, on my Ex Libris page (here).

As I have said, while white nationalists know that in the universities some fields are pseudoscientific (for example, gender studies or so-called historical grievances), in the same universities there are other pseudoscientific areas that go completely unnoticed.

Psychiatry is one of them and, since I researched it a few years ago, having translated one of the chapters from my online book, why no translate a few others for this site?

But first I must finish the translation of a book I did not write: Deschner’s lifetime research on Christianity, from which I still have to add nine posts before the first volume is available, I hope, as a printed book through Lulu Inc.

The history of Christianity and the history of psychiatry have something in common. The System has hidden from us the facts of what happened. Reaching the mighty tower that Van Loon talks about is one of the objectives of this site.

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Evil Mainstream media Psychiatry

From the Great Confinement of Louis XIV of France to a Chemical Gulag (part 3)

The great revolution in modern psychiatry occurred in the 1930s. Previously, with his instruments Heinroth and his colleagues had assaulted the body of citizens to control. But in the 1930s the assault on the body was abandoned by a more effective method: assaulting the brain directly. Metrazol shock, insulin shock and electroshock were introduced knowing that it killed brain cells.
Pentylenetetrazol (commercially known as Metrazol in North America and Cardiazol in Europe) causes a huge reaction in the victims. They suffered seizures so violent that they frequently broke their teeth, bones and spine. Metrazol shock was so devastating to the brain that, once its effect passed, some suffered regressive states and acted like babies; they played with their faeces, masturbated and wanted the nurses to mollycoddle them. When they recovered they prayed ‘in the name of humanity’ that they would not be injected with Metrazol again: a drug that subjugated even the hardest of the military. But by 1939 it was common to use Metrazol in most hospitals of the United States, which meant that in those times some inmates used to receive several injections.
The New York Times, Harper’s, Time and even Reader’s Digest joined the chorus of praises about a similar psychiatric treatment: insulin shock, which also produced frightening seizures. A Time writer wrote that while the patient descends in the coma ‘he shouts and bellows, gives free vent to his hidden fears and obsessions, opens his mind wide to listening psychiatrists’. The psychoanalysts interpreted the complaints of the victims in favour of their colleagues. In a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association Roy Grinker interpreted that the patient ‘experiences the treatment as a sadistic punishment attack which satisfies his unconscious sense of guilt’.[16] Robert Whitaker, the author of a study on American psychiatry, calls this epoch, the first fifty years of the 20th century, ‘the darkest time’ in the history of psychiatry.
1935 marked the birth of lobotomy. Egas Moniz, a Portuguese psychiatrist, had started his experiments using alcohol to destroy the brain tissue of the frontal lobes, but changed the method by cutting them directly with a scalpel. His first guinea pig was a prostitute, and three months later he had lobotomised twenty people, each time daring to cut off more brain tissue from his victims. According to Moniz ‘to cure these patients we must destroy the more or less fixed arrangements of the cellular connections that exist in the brain’.[17] Moniz’s work led to an explosion of lobotomies in the West, especially in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom, Italy, Romania, Brazil, Cuba and eventually in Mexico.
In 1941 the neurosurgeon Walter Freeman called this practice ‘brain-damaging therapeutics’.[18] At least we must give Freeman credit that he did not express himself in Newspeak, but in the lingua franca of Heinroth: he recognised that lobotomy damages the brain. But in that decade the Swedish Academy awarded Moniz the Nobel Prize in medicine and the media was enthusiastic about the novel therapy, including the New York Times, Time and Newsweek. A New York Times editorial celebrated with these words the success on lobotomised people: ‘would-be suicides found life acceptable’.[19] With such social support tens of thousands of lobotomies were practiced in the 1940s and 50s. It was believed that college students who had emotional problems, and even spoiled children, were ideal candidates for Freeman’s lobotomy.
Whitaker mentions the effects of this radical operation. A lobotomised woman was described as ‘fat, silly and smiling’. Although she had been of lineage, another woman who underwent the operation defecated in a garbage dump. Lobotomised patients grabbed the food from the neighbour’s plate, or vomited in the soup and kept eating. Some of them did not get out of bed unless a family member ordered them to do so, and it was common for them to urinate there. Others just looked out the window. Those who had had jobs before the operation were unable to make a living by themselves. It was possible to insult them and get a smile in response.
Some referred to lobotomy as ‘a surgically induced childhood’, and you can already imagine the burden it represented for families to support them. But Freeman and his assistant Watts had a more positive view of things. They wrote that the lobotomised patient could be considered ‘a household pet’.[20] The reports of the scientific journals also painted things in a favourable light for the medical profession. The language of science claims to be neutral, apolitical and non-emotional. It does not wield value judgments: the diametrically opposite to what I do in this book. In the professional literature where graphs and figures abound it is easy to write articles where the tragedy left by these semi-vegetable humans was not perceived as a crime.

Walter Freeman at the moment of cutting the healthy
brain of one of his victims. Note how this was done
openly with students learning from the lobotomist.

The ‘brain-damaging therapeutics’ of Moniz and Freeman lost momentum in the 1960s and 70s. It is currently difficult to know how many lobotomies are made in the world each year. According to an article in defence of lobotomy in Psychology Today (March/April 1992), at the beginning of that decade there were at least 200 to 300 ‘psychosurgeries’ openly declared every year. In fact, in the new century a few doctors still promote ‘psychosurgery’ for severe emotional problems and in some states of the United States special councils have been formed to review all proposals for these operations.[21]
Although lobotomy fell into relative disuse, electroshock remains a standard psychiatric practice in the 21st-century profession. The electroshock was developed in 1938, inspired by a slaughterhouse in Rome where the pigs were electro-shocked to make it easier to slice their necks. A psychiatrist, Ugo Cerletti, had been experimenting with electric shocks on dogs, putting electrodes on the snout and anus of the dog. Half of the animals died of cardiac arrest. After seeing the electro-shocked pigs Cerletti decided to use it on humans.
Cerletti’s first guinea pig was a homeless man who roamed the train station in Rome. Shortly after, in 1940, electroshock therapy was admitted at the other side of the Atlantic. Manfred Sakel, who introduced insulin shock in medical practice, compared his technique to the electroshock and commented on the latter: ‘the stronger the amnesia, the more severe the underlying brain cell damage must be’.[22] This was another form of the ‘brain-damaging therapeutics’ of Moniz and Freeman.
Although the psychiatrists recognised all this in their specialised journals, in their public pronouncements they were more cautious. They painted ‘electroconvulsive therapy’ as a harmless therapy and said that the loss of memories was temporary. The media took the propaganda as honest science, and by 1946 half of the beds in American hospitals were occupied by psychiatric patients, some of whom had suffered the therapy.
Two years later Albert Deutsch published The Shame of the States and an article appeared in Life magazine with impressive photographs about a reality that the American people ignored: what happened in the concentration camps called psychiatric institutions. Although the images contributed to the reform of the public facilities in the United States, the 20th century witnessed two other psychiatric revolutions. One was the consortium between psychiatrists and pharmaceutical multinationals; another, the invention of chemical lobotomies in the 1950s. Surgical lobotomy would fell into relative disuse in favour of the use of neuroleptics: a more subtle form of social control.
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[16] The revelations about Metrazol appear in Whitaker’s book.
[17] Egas Moniz, quoted in Mad in America, 113.
[18] Freeman, quoted in ibid, p. 96.
[19] Quoted in ibid, p. 138.
[20] Freeman, quoted in ibid, p. 124.
[21] Lobotomy, Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2000. On the resurgence of lobotomy, see Breggin: Toxic Psychiatry, pp. 261ff and an article by Lawrence Stevens that can be read on the internet: ‘The brain-butchery called psychosurgery’.
[22] Manfred Sakel, quoted in Mad in America, p. 98.

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Evil George Orwell Newspeak Psychiatry

From the Great Confinement of Louis XIV of France to a Chemical Gulag (part 2)

At the end of the 18th century, there was no psychiatry as a medical specialty. The word ‘psychiatry’ was coined by Johann Reil in 1808. The new profession took for granted a postulate that had roots in the medicine of ancient Greece. A postulate is a proposition that is admitted without proof. The postulated platform of the new profession assumed the organic origin of psychic disturbances. This postulate elevated to an axiom, and even to dogma, prevented the introduction of subjectivity in the study of mental disturbances.
As we saw with John Modrow [explained in a previous chapter of the online book], the reality is the diametrically opposite. Only by introducing the subjectivity of a soul in pain, and by rejecting the organic hypothesis, is it possible to understand what the hell is going on in the innermost chambers of those who suffer from mental distress and disorders. Objectivity in matters of the internal world of a subject is as impossible as the opposite case: approaching the empirical world in the manner of philosophers like Plato, who, from his idealist Olympus, despised the practical study of nature.
This colossal error cost the Greek culture its moving upward, just as the antipodal error of reducing the humanities to science is misleading our civilisation. It is a categorical mistake trying to understand psychological trauma through neuroscience, as it is a categorical mistake trying to understand the empirical world, say astronomy, through social discourse. Postmodernist philosophers and psychiatrists represent two symmetrical, albeit diametrically opposed, attempts at extreme ideologies. The former want to reduce science to the humanities; the latter, the humanities to science: and none respects the other as a separate and intrinsically legitimate field. In another place I will delve into these two antithetical errors.
The birth of modern psychiatry occurs when the outcast leaves the jurisdiction of the houses of confinement in France and the rest of Europe and is left in charge of the medical institution. In the profession of the 21st century, armed with a battery of genetics, neurology and nosological taxonomy, it is impossible to see what psychiatry is at its root. But in the book by Johann Christian Heinroth, Lehrbuch der Störungen des Seelenlebens (Textbook on the Disturbances of Mental Life), published in 1818, we see the fundamentals of psychiatry without the pseudoscientific smokescreen so common in our days.
Following the tradition of the 17th and 18th centuries, Heinroth used the expression ‘mental illness’ and defined it as ‘selfishness’ or ‘sin’: terms he used interchangeably. Heinroth not only equated the Christian concept of sin with that of mental illness. Although he considered mental illness an ethical defect, Heinroth’s great innovation consists that he treated it with medical procedures.
How did Heinroth take this conceptual leap? Or we may ask, why should MDs reroute the flock of the straying sheep? This turn was not contemplated in the blueprints of the architects of the Great Confinement of the 17th century. Once the Inquisition was officially abolished, Heinroth himself wonders who would be the new social controller: ‘would this be the task of a doctor?, or perhaps of a cleric?, or of a philosopher?, or an educator?’ [7]
The task fell, finally, on the physician. Presumably this was because, as the doctor deals directly with the physicality of human beings, it was easier to cover physical violence in the medical profession than in the other professions. At a time when the ideals of the French Revolution were still in the air, civil society would have suspected a cleric or a philosopher with jurisdiction over other people’s bodies, but not a doctor.
In order for people to accept the new inquisitor, they also had to literalise the central metaphor of the profession. Originally ‘mental illness’ was understood as a mere metaphor of what in previous centuries had been called ‘men of unreason’, which put together the dissidents with the disturbed. When the doctor assumed the responsibility of occupying the role that used to be occupied by the officials of the houses of confinement, Heinroth assumed that the selfishness and sin that he treated were medical entities: something like saying that the ‘viruses’ that infect our hard drives are not metaphor of subversive programs, but microorganisms.
The literalisation of the metaphor ‘mental illness’ into an authentic illness would not have been possible if Heinroth and many other professionals of mental health had not counted with societal approval. The 19th century was the most bourgeois of recent centuries, and the social forces that drove the wealthy to lock up the undesirables were still expanding, even more than in the times when Heinroth himself was born.
The only way to understand Heinroth and his philosophy of the hammer is to let him speak. I have borrowed the following paragraphs from a study of Thomas Szasz. The first quoted sentence is taken from Medicina Psychica Politica (Psycho-Political Medicine): a title that perfectly illustrates how, in its origins, the psychiatrists did not speak in Newspeak but in Oldspeak. Heinroth wrote: ‘It is the duty of the State to care for mentally disturbed persons whenever they are a burden to the community or present a public danger; and the accommodation, cure, and care of such individuals is the duty of the police’. But who are ‘mentally disturbed’? He answers: ‘It is those least deserving of freedom, namely the maniaci [maniacs], who love freedom best; and as long as they are left to themselves and to their perverted activity, even if only in an Autenreith chamber, no recovery is thinkable’.[8] The Autenreith chamber and the mask of the same name were torture apparatuses on which he explains his modus operandi:

Experience has shown that the patient in the sack is in danger of asphyxiation and of falling victim of convulsions… [In the confinement chair] the patient can remain bound in the chair for weeks on end without incurring the slightest bodily harm. [The pear is a] piece of hard wood, with the shape and dimensions of a medium-sized pear, has a cross-bar with straps which can be tied at the back of the neck of the patient. Since the oral cavity of the patient is more or less filled by the instrument, the patient can obviously utter no articulate sounds, but he can still utter stifled screams.[9]

Heinroth articulated some guidelines for the psychiatrist: ‘First, be master of the situation; second, be master of the patient’.[10] Szasz comments that in these phrases psychiatry appears naked as to what it was and continues to be today: subjugation, enslavement and control of one human being by another. He also comments that contemporary psychiatrists, although they do similar things, do not speak frankly as they used to speak in Heinroth’s time.
However, Heinroth understood from the beginning that in his profession he had to disguise the torture chambers for social control as a hospital activity, for which he recommended: ‘all impression of a prison must be avoided’, a situation that persists today. In Spain, for example, contemporary psychiatrists have changed the bars of the windows by external blinds, some cosmetic though rigid metal sheets that serve as prison bars. The façade of psychiatric gardens of our century follows 19th-century regulations. About what happens behind the façade, according to Heinroth:

The edifice should have a special bathing section, with all kinds of baths, showers, douches, and immersion vessels. It must also have a special correction and punishment room with all the necessary equipment, including a Cox swing (or, better, rotating machine), a Reils’s fly-wheel, pulleys, punishment chair, Langermann’s cell, etc. [11]

Here are other words of this doctor who lived a century before Orwell wrote 1984. According to Heinroth, the psychiatrist

appears to the patient as helper and saviour, as a father and benefactor, as a sympathetic friend, as a friendly teacher, but also as a judge who weighs the evidence, passes judgement, and executes the sentence; at the same time seems to be the visible God to the patient… [12]

Heinroth seems a hybrid between the Orwellian O’Brien and a contemporary man of his times: Sade. The fact that some psychiatrists see in Heinroth one of the founders of modern psychiatry and the precursor of Eugen Bleuler, speaks for itself and does not need further comment.
Thanks to Heinroth and other apologists of medical violence, in the mid-19th century the metaphor ‘mental illness’ was recognised as an authentic disease. In England, the parliament granted the medical fraternity the exclusive right to treat the newly discovered disease. The first specialised journals in psychiatry appeared. The American Journal of Psychiatry, which was originally called the American Journal of Insanity and whose first issue appeared in 1844, published data, since its inception, that now are known to be fraudulent.[13] Throughout the 19th century countless of ‘imprudent’ women like Hersilie Rouy and Julie La Roche [cases mentioned at the beginning of the online book] were imprisoned by their parents and husbands; and the psychiatrists resisted attempts to inspect their ‘asylums’, as they were then called, because it interfered with medical autonomy. Many doctors tried to obtain important positions in the asylums.
The psychiatric profession, in its modern version, was born.
In the 20th century, the psychiatric profession consolidated its power and prestige in society. A smoke-screen terminology was developed and, for the man of the street, it became impossible to see psychiatry in its naked simplicity. Some sadists like Heinroth became ‘psychiatrists’, their tortures ‘treatments’, the social outcasts ‘patients’, the asylums ‘hospitals’ and dementia praecox ‘schizophrenia’.
Before the creation of the Newspeak the asylums were properly called Poorhouses. Before drugs were designed to induce tortuous states for the mind, Emil Kraepelin and Bleuler used other methods of subjugation. In 1911 the latter experimented with a particularly disgusting medication that caused bleeding vomit, but at least Bleuler confessed with a frankness something no longer seen in today’s psychiatry: ‘His behaviour improves. From the ethical point of view, I cannot recommend this method’.[14] Similarly, in 1913 Kraepelin used to inject sodium nucleate to cause fever in his patients, who ‘become more docile and obey the doctors’ orders’.[15]
____________
[7] Johann Christian Heinroth, quoted in Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Psychotherapy (NY: Syracuse University Press Edition, 1988), p. 73.
[8] Ibid., pp. 74-75.
[9] Ibid., pp. 76-77.
[10] Ibid., p. 77.
[11] Ibid., p. 79.
[12] Ibid., p. 78.
[13] See, for example, Robert Whitaker: Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus, 2001), pp. 75ff.
[14] Bleuler, quoted in John Read, Loren Mosher & Richard Bentall: Modelos de Locura (Herder, 2006), p. 39
[15] Kraepelin, quoted in ibid.

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Industrial Revolution Inquisition Louis XIV of France Paris Pseudoscience Psychiatry

From the Great Confinement of Louis XIV of France to a Chemical Gulag (part 1)


Above, French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel releasing so-called ‘lunatics’ from their chains at the Salpêtrière asylum of Paris in 1795. Below, a Spanish-English translation from my site critical of psychiatry. Since it is a chapter within an online book I’ll be adding explanatory brackets after some sentences.
 

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Aristotle said that to obtain a truly profound knowledge about something it is necessary to know its history. To understand what happened to the orphan John Bell [Bell’s testimony appears in another chapter of the online book] it is necessary to know how the profession that re-victimised him emerged. The following ideas about how the psychiatric profession was born are taken from Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation, that I will paraphrase here.
In England, three hundred years before John Bell was born, the pamphlet Grievous Groan of the Poor appeared, in which it was proposed that the indigent be banished and transferred to the newly discovered lands of the Oriental Indies. From the 13th century it had existed the famous Bedlam for lunatics in London, but in the 16th century it housed only twenty inmates. In the 17th century, when the pamphlet to banish the poor appeared, there were already more than a hundred prisoners in Bedlam. In 1630 King Charles I called a commission to address the problem of poverty and the commission decreed the police persecution of vagabonds, beggars ‘and all those who live in idleness and who do not wish to work for reasonable wages’.[1] In the 18th century, many poor and destitute people were taken to correctional facilities and houses of confinement in the cities where industrialisation had marginalised part of the population.
Prisons for the poor were also established in continental Europe. The spirit of the 17th century was to put order in the world. After leprosy was eradicated, the medieval leprosariums that had remained empty were filled with the new lepers: the destitute. Foucault calls this period ‘The Great Confinement’ and emphasises the fact that the concept of mental illness did not exist yet.
Isolating the leper, a true sick person, had had a hygienic goal in the Middle Ages. But isolating the destitute had no such goal: it was a new phenomenon. 1656 was an axial year in this policy of cleaning up human garbage from the streets. On April 27, Louis XIV ordered the construction of the General Hospital, a place that was hospital only in name: no doctor presided over it. Article 11 of the king’s edict specified who would be imprisoned: ‘Of all sexes, places and ages, of any city and birth and in whatever state they are, valid or invalid, sick or convalescent, curable or incurable’.[2] Lifelong directors were appointed to head the General Hospital. Their absolutist power was a miniature decal of the power of the sun king, as can be read in articles 12 and 13 of the edict:

They have all power of authority, direction, administration, commerce, police, jurisdiction, correction and sanction over all the poor of Paris, both inside and outside the Hôpital Général. For this purpose, the directors would have stakes and rings of torture, prisons and dungeons, in the aforementioned hospital and places that depend on it, as they deem it convenient, without being able to appeal the ordinances that will be drafted by the directors for the interior of said hospital.[3]

The goal of these draconian measures was to suppress begging by decree. A few years after its foundation, the General Hospital housed one percent of the population of Paris. There were thousands of women and children in the Salpêtrière, in the Bicêtre and in the other buildings of a ‘Hospital’ that was not a hospital but an administrative entity that, concurrently with the royal powers and the police, repressed and guarded the marginalised.
On June 16, 1676 another royal edict establishes the foundation of general hospitals in each city of the kingdom. Throughout France this type of prison is opened and, a hundred years later, on the eve of the Revolution, there existed in thirty-two provincial cities. The archipelago of jails for the poor covered Europe. The Hôpitaux Généraux of France, the Workhouses of England and the Zuchthaüsern of Germany imprisoned young lads who had conflicts with their parents; vagabonds, drunks, lewd people and the ‘fools’. These prisons were indistinguishable from common prisons. In the 18th century an Englishman was surprised to see one of these prisons, ‘in which idiots and fools are locked up because they do not know where to confine them separately’.[4] The so-called alienated were confused with the sane, though destitute, individuals; and sometimes it was impossible to distinguish one from the other.
In the Middle Ages pride was a capital sin. When the banking flourished during the Renaissance it was said that greed was the greatest sin. But in the 17th century, when the ethic of work was imposed not only in Protestant countries but also among Catholics, laziness—in fact: unemployment—was the most notorious of sins. A city where every individual was supposed to become a cog in the social machine was the great bourgeois dream. Within this dream, groups that did not integrate into the machinery were destined to carry a stigma. 17th-century men had replaced medieval leprosy with indigence as the new exclusion group. It is from this ideological framework of indigence considered a vice that the great concept of madness will appear in the 18th and 19th centuries. For the first time in history, madness would be judged with the yardstick of the work ethic. A world where work ethics rules rejects all forms of uselessness. He who cannot earn his bread transgresses the limits of the bourgeois order. He who cannot be integrated into the group must be an alienated.
The edict of creation of the General Hospital is very clear in this regard: it considers ‘begging and idleness as sources of all disorders’.[5] It is very significant that ‘disorder’ remains the word used by psychiatrists today. The very Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [henceforth referred by its acronym, DSM: the ‘Bible’ of today’s psychiatrists] uses the word ‘disorder’ instead of ‘illness’. As the 17th century marks the line in which it was decided to imprison a group of human beings, it would be wrong to believe that madness waited patiently for centuries until some scientists discovered it and took care of it. Likewise, it would be wrong to believe that there was a spontaneous mutation in which the poor, inexplicably and suddenly, went mad.
Imprisoning the victims of a big city was a phenomenon of European dimensions. Once consummated the Great Confinement of which Foucault speaks, the censuses of the time about the prisoners who had not broken the law show the type of people they committed: elderly people who could not take care of themselves, epileptics disowned by their families, deformed people, people with venereal diseases and even those imprisoned by the king’s letters.
The latter was the most widespread confinement procedure since the 1690s, and the petitioners that the king wrote a lettre de cachet were the closest relatives of those imprisoned. The most famous case of imprisonment in the Bastille by lettre de cachet was that of Voltaire. There were cases of foolish or ‘incorrigible girls’ who were interned. ‘Imprudent’ was a label that would correspond more or less to what in the 19th century would be called ‘moral insanity’ and which currently equals the adolescent oppositionalism or ‘defiant negativism’ in the contemporary DSM. I would like to illustrate it with a single case of the 18th century:
A sixteen-year-old woman, whose husband is named Beaudoin, openly claims that she will never love her husband; that there is no law to order her to love him, that everyone is free to dispose of her heart and body as she pleases, and that it is a kind of crime to give one without the other.[6] Although Beaudoin’s woman was considered foolish or crazy, those labels had no medical connotation. The behaviours were perceived under another sky, and confinement was a matter settled between the families and the legal authority without medical intervention.
People who would be committed were considered: ‘dishonest’, ‘idle’, ‘depraved’, ‘sorcerer’, ‘imbecile’, ‘prodigal’, ‘impeded’, ‘alchemist’, ‘unbalanced’, ‘venereal’, ‘libertine’, ‘dissipater’, ‘blasphemous’, ‘ungrateful son’, ‘dissipated father’, ‘prostituted’ and ‘foolish’. In the records it can be read that the internment formulas also used terms such as ‘very evil and cheating man’ or ‘inveterate glutton’. France had to wait until 1785 for a medical order to intervene in the confinement of all these people: a practice that subsequently took shape with Pinel [pic above]. As I have said, moving away from the social norm would bring about the great theme of madness in the 19th century, as we shall see with Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill by the end of this online book. It is from this point that we must understand the classifications of Kraepelin, Bleuler and the DSM of the 20th and 21st centuries.
In our century there are psychiatrists who openly say that ‘suicide is a brain disorder’: a blatantly pseudoscientific pronouncement. In the 17th century the pronouncements were not pseudoscientific yet, such as ‘murderer of himself’, a crime ‘against the divine majesty’ (i.e., the Judeo-Christian god). In the records of commitment for failed suicide attempts the formula used was: ‘s/he wanted to get rid’. It is to those who committed this crime against the Judeo-Christian god that the torture instruments were first applied by 19th-century psychiatrists: cages with an open lid for the head and cabinets that enclosed the subject up to the neck. The transformation from an openly religious trial (‘against the divine majesty’) to the realm of medicine (a purported ‘brain disorder’) was gradual. What is now considered a biomedical disease in the 17th and 18th centuries was understood as extravagant, impious behaviour that endangered the prestige of a specific family.
In the 17th century, for the first time in history, people from very different background were forced to live under the same roof. None of the previous cultures had done something similar or seen similarities between these types of people (venereal, foolish, blasphemous, ungrateful children, sorcerers, prostitutes, etc.). That behind the confinement existed a moralistic judgment is discovered by the fact that people who suffered venereal diseases were locked up—the great evil of the time!—, only if they contracted the disease out of wedlock. Virtuous women infected by their husbands were not at risk of being taken to the General Hospital in Paris.
Homosexuals were locked up in hospitals or detention centres. Any individual who caused a public scandal could be committed. The family, and more specifically the bourgeois family with its demands to keep up appearances, became the rule that defined the confinement of any of its rebellious members. This was the moment in which the dark alliances between parents and psychiatrists that would produce Dr. Amara’s profession would make a deal [I tell the story of psychiatrist Giuseppe Amara, who still lives, earlier in the online book]. Biological psychiatry would have an easy delivery with the gestation of the pair of centuries from the Great Confinement of the 17th century. The origins of the profession called psychiatry today can be traced back to that century.
Throughout the 18th century the confinement of people who did not break the law continued, and by the end of that century the houses of internment were full of ‘blasphemers’. The medieval Inquisition had had power in the south of France, but once the Inquisition was abolished, society found a legal way to control dissidents. It is known the case of a man in Saint-Lazare who was imprisoned for not wanting to kneel in the most solemn moments of the mass (this strategy was also practiced a century before). In the 17th century the unbelievers were considered ‘libertines’. Bonaventure Forcroy wrote a biography about Apollonius of Tyana, a contemporary of Jesus who was credited with miracles, and showed with this paradigm that the Gospel stories could also have been fictional. Forcroy was accused of ‘debauchery’ and imprisoned, also in Saint-Lazare.
The imprisonment of pariahs and undesirables was a cultural event that can be traced back to a specific moment in the long history of intolerance of post-Renaissance and post-Reformation Europe. The psychiatric values of Western man were moulded in the 17th and 18th centuries, values that continue to determine the way we see the world.
 
_________
[1] Quoted in Michel Foucault: Historia de la Locura en la Época Clásica (Volumen I), p. 106.
[2] Edict of Luis XIV, quoted in ibid, p. 81.
[3] Ibid, p. 81s.
[4] Ibid, p. 182.
[5] Ibid, p. 115.
[6] Quoted in ibid, p. 213. It is interesting to compare the encyclopaedic history of so-called madness by Foucault that I’ve paraphrased above, written in opaque prose, with the brief though clear history of psychiatry by Thomas Szasz (e.g., Cruel Compassion: The Psychiatric Control of the Society’s Unwanted, Syracuse University Press, 1998).