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Tag: Ireland

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Gaedhal (commenter)

Ireland

by Gaedhal

St. Colman’s Cathedral, County Cork, Ireland.

I would criticise atheism more, however, atheists are a tiny fraction of the Irish population. I expend my antitheistic energies upon what is causing the most harm. If I walk into town, I meet two illegally placed religious posters threatening me with Hell. Christian privilege means that Political Posters must come down, but posters threatening people with eternal post-mortem torture in the name of a fictitious legendary rabbi who floated off into the sky, 2,000 years ago, are never taken down. As a secularist, I would be equally opposed to illegally placed atheist posters. Secularism guarantees a neutral public space for us all.

And so atheism isn’t causing that much harm in Ireland. On the contrary, the divers hoisted Rabbi cults have caused 1600 years of harm in Ireland. Ireland hasn’t even begun to secularise, yet. Ireland is still, very much, a Christian theocracy. Our constitution begins by invoking an arithmetic-defying trinity of gods, and it ends with ‘Do chum glóire Dé agus onóra na hÉireann’ (This [constitution] has been composed for the glory of God and the honour of Ireland).

However, atheism can cause some harm. In this video, Seth Andrews drew a doodle of a cat, and Matt Dillahunty promptly tattooed this onto his thigh. Dillahunty just looks mentally ill, these days.

I agree with atheism on a single point: I claim to know, as a fact, that no classically theistic gods exist.

Mercifully, neither Seth nor Matt have reproduced. Hopefully natural selection will eventually put an end to this version of atheism.

However, all of the other things that atheists believe, my soul violently kicks against. Chaotic determinism, Heat death, Eliminative materialism etc.

Categories
Catholic religious orders Destruction of Greco-Roman world Dominion (book)

Dominion, 5

Or:

How the Woke monster originated

A soothsayer lay buried nearby who, according to Homer, had interpreted the will of Apollo to the Greeks, and instructed them, at a time when the archer god had been felling them with his plague-tipped arrows, how to appease his anger. Times, though, had changed. In 391, sacrifices had been banned on the orders of a Christian Caesar. Apollo’s golden presence had been scoured from Italy. Paulinus, in his poetry, had repeatedly celebrated the god’s banishment. Apollo’s temples had been closed, his statues smashed, his altars destroyed. By 492, he no longer visited the dreams of those who slept on the slopes of Gargano… In 391, the endemic aptitude of the Alexandrian mob for rioting had turned on the Serapeum and levelled it; four decades later, the worship of Athena had been prohibited in the Parthenon. [pages 159-160]

By the end of the fifth century, it was only out in the wildest reaches of the countryside, where candles might still be lit besides springs or crossroads, and offerings to time-worn idols made, that there remained men and women who clung to ‘the depraved customs of the past’. Bishops in their cities called such deplorables pagani: not merely ‘country people’, but ‘bumpkins’. The name of ‘pagan’, though, had soon come to have a broader application. Increasingly, from the time of Julian onwards, it had been used to refer to all those—senators as well as serfs—who were neither Christians nor Jews. It was a word that reduced the vast mass of those who did not worship the One God of Israel, from atheist philosophers to peasants fingering grubby charms, to one vast and undifferentiated mass…

Certainly no Christian could imagine that it was enough merely to have closed down their temples. The forces of darkness were both cunning and resolute in their evil. That they lurked in predatory manner, waiting for Christians to fail in their duty to God, sniffing out every opportunity to seduce them into sin, was manifest from the teachings of Christ himself. His mission, so he had declared, was to ‘drive out demons’. [page 161]

Five pages later Holland speaks of a remarkable pope:

Gregory, though, had no illusions as to the scale of Rome’s decline. A city that at its peak had boasted over a million inhabitants now held barely twenty thousand. Weeds clutched at columns erected by Augustus; silt buried pediments built to honour Constantine. The vast expanse of palaces, and triumphal arches, and race-tracks, and amphitheatres, constructed over the centuries to serve as the centre of the world, now stretched abandoned, a wilderness of ruins. Even the Senate was no more. [page 166]

The rhythms of the city—its days, its weeks, its years—had been rendered Christian. The very word religio had altered its meaning: for it had come to signify the life of a monk or a nun. Gregory, when he summoned his congregation to repentance, did so as a man who had converted his palace on the Caelian into a monastery, who had lived there as a monk himself, pledged to poverty and chastity, a living, breathing embodiment of religio. The Roman people, hearing their new pope urge them to repentance, did not hesitate to obey him. Day after day, they walked the streets, raising prayers and chanting psalms. Eighty dropped dead of the plague as they went in procession. Then, on the third day, an answer at last from the heavens. The plague-arrows stopped falling. The dying abated. The Roman people were spared obliteration…

Gregory, when he sought to make sense of the calamities being visited on Italy, turned above all to the Book of Job. Its hero, given through no fault of his own into the hands of Satan, and plunged into abject wretchedness, had endured his sufferings with steadfast fortitude. Here, so Gregory argued, was the key to understanding the shocks of his own age. Satan was abroad again. Just as Job had been cast into the dust, so now were the blameless suffering disaster alongside sinners. [pages 167-168]

Some pages later the author introduces us to the subject of how Christian eschatology began to be understood:

The new Jerusalem and the lake of fire were sides of the same coin. For the earliest Christians, a tiny minority in a world seething with hostile pagans, this reflection had tended to provide reassurance. The dead, summoned from their graves, where for years, centuries, millennia they might have been mouldering, would face only two options. The resurrection of their physical bodies would ensure an eternity either of bliss or torment. The justice that in life they might either have been denied or evaded would, at the end of days, be delivered them by Christ. Only the martyrs, those who had died in their Saviour’s name, would have been spared this period of waiting. They alone, at the moment of death, were brought by golden-winged angels in a great blaze of glory directly to the palace of God. All others, saints and sinners alike, were sentenced to wait until the hour of judgement came. This, though, was not the vision of the afterlife that had come to prevail in the West. There, far more than in the Greek world, the awful majesty of the end of days, of the bodily resurrection and the final judgement, had come to be diluted. That this was so reflected in large part the influence—ironically enough—of an Athenian philosopher. ‘When death comes to a man, the mortal part of him perishes, or so it would seem. The part which is immortal, though, retires at death’s approach, and escapes unharmed and indestructible.’ So had written Plato, a contemporary of Aristophanes and the teacher of Aristotle. No other philosopher, in the formative years of the Western Church, had exerted a profounder influence over its greatest thinkers. Augustine, who in his youth had classed himself as a Platonist, had still, long after his conversion to Christianity, hailed his former master as the pagan ‘who comes nearest to us’. That the soul was immortal; that it was incorporeal; that it was immaterial: all these were propositions that Augustine had derived not from scripture, but from Athens’ greatest philosopher. Plato’s influence on the Western Church had, in the long run, proven decisive. [pages 171-172]

I have always been suspicious of Plato and Aristotle for the simple fact that they were the pagan philosophers that Christianity spared in the Middle Ages. What did all those pagans whose works disappeared with the destruction of the Library of Alexandria have to say?

Monks who knelt for hours in sheeting rain, or laboured on empty stomachs at tasks properly suited to slaves, did so in the hope of transcending the limitations of the fallen world. The veil that separated the heavenly from the earthly seemed, to their admirers, almost parted by their efforts. ‘Mortal men, so people believed, were living the lives of angels.’ Nowhere else in the Christian West were saints quite as tough, quite as manifestly holy, as they were in Ireland.

That the island had been won for Christ was a miracle in itself. Roman rule had never reached its shores. Instead, sometime in the mid-fifth century, Christianity had been preached there by an escaped slave. Patrick, a young Briton kidnapped by pirates and sold across the Irish Sea, was revered by Irish Christians not just for having brought them to Christ, but for the template of holiness with which he had provided them. Whether working as a shepherd, or fleeing his master by ship, or returning to Ireland to spread the word of God, angels had spoken to him, and guided him in all he did; nor had he hesitated, when justifying his mission, to invoke the imminence of the end of the world. A century on from Patrick’s death, the monks and nuns of Ireland still bore his stamp. They owed no duty save to God, and to their ‘father’—their ‘abbot’. Monasteries, like the ringforts that dotted the country, were proudly independent. [pages 173-174]

The infinite mendacity of Christianity is particularly noticeable in Ireland. It is known that the average Irish person has a relatively low IQ compared to the European countries with the highest IQ. It was sheer stupidity to inject seminal chalice into the asses of the novices, instead of impregnating the Irish women. The Catholic vows of celibacy resulted in the poor monks burning themselves internally, trying to calm their impetus with the cloistered ephebes: a dysgenesis opposite to what the Jews have been done for centuries. Even rabbis marry, promoting eugenics that has led them to conquer the highest IQ.

An iron discipline served to maintain them. Only a rule that was ‘strict, holy and constant, exalted, just and admirable’ could bring men and women to the dimension of the heavenly. Monks were expected to be as proficient in the strange and book-learned language of Latin as at felling trees; as familiar with the few, ferociously cherished classics of Christian literature that had reached Ireland as toiling in a field. Like Patrick, they believed themselves to stand in the shadow of the end days; like Patrick, they saw exile from their families and their native land as the surest way to an utter dependence upon God. Not all headed for the gale-lashed isolation of a rock in the Atlantic. Some crossed the sea to Britain, and there preached the gospel to the kings of barbarous peoples who still set up idols and wallowed in paganism: the Picts, the Saxons, the Angles. Others, heading southwards, took ship for the land of the Franks.

Columbanus—‘the Little Dove’—arrived in Francia in 590: the same year that Gregory was elected pope. The Irish monk, unlike the Roman aristocrat, came from the ends of the earth, without status, without pedigree; and yet, by sheer force of charisma, he would set the Latin West upon a new and momentous course. Schooled in the ferociously exacting monasticism of his native land, Columbanus appeared to the Franks a figure of awesome and even terrifying holiness. [pages 174-175]

This [eternity], when supplicants ventured through the woods that surrounded Luxeuil and approached the settlement founded by Columbanus, was what they hoped to find. The very wall that enclosed the monastery, raised by the saint’s own hand, proclaimed the triumph of the City of God over that of man. The shattered fragments of bath-houses and temples had been built into its fabric: pillars, pediments, broken statuary. These, converted to the uses of religio, were the bric-à-brac of what Augustine, two centuries previously, had identified as the order of the saeculum. [page 177]

No surprise, then, that in time the wings of the most powerful angel of them all should have been heard beating golden over Columbanus’ native land. Almost certainly, it was Irish monks studying in Bobbio who brought home with them the cult of Saint Michael. From Italy to Ireland, the charisma of the warrior archangel came to radiate across the entire West. [page 178]

An icon depicting the Archangel Michael in St Mark’s Basilica, Venice, 11th century. This image appears in Holland’s book.

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Architecture

Euroepan beauty

Dublin, Ireland

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Beauty

European beauty

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Ancient Rome Celts Human sacrifice Indo-European heritage Julius Caesar Psychohistory Racial studies Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Romans and Celts

Excerpted from the 14th article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:


Both the fossil remains and the eyewitness accounts of Classical authors confirm that all these Indo-European peoples were racially Nordic. Because they settled in different areas after leaving the original homeland, and because they subsequently mixed with different races and to different extents, there are noticeable differences in various racial characteristics among their descendants today. But originally, Celt, German, Balt, and Slav were indistinguishably Nordic.

The Celts were the first group to make an impact on the Classical world, and so we will deal with them first.

The reason the Celts interacted with the Greeks and Romans before the other groups did is that their wanderings took them farthest south. They invaded and settled in a great crescent stretching across central Europe from eastern Hungary and Czechoslovakia through Austria, southern Germany, Switzerland, and France into the British Isles. At the eastern and western ends of their range, respectively, isolated bands of Celts penetrated into central Asia Minor and the Iberian peninsula, while in the center quite substantial numbers crossed the Alps into northern Italy.

The Roman conquest of southeastern Europe, Gaul, and Britain destroyed the greater part of Celtic culture, as well as doing an enormous amount of racial damage; the effects of the later German and Slavic incursions were largely limited to linguistic and other cultural changes.

But the Celts themselves, as much as anyone else, were responsible for the decline of their racial fortunes. They settled in regions of Europe which, although not so heavily Mediterraneanized as Greece and Italy, were much more so than the German, Baltic, and Slavic areas. And, as has so often been the case with the Indo-Europeans, for the most part they did not force the indigenous populations out of the areas they conquered, but made subjects of them instead. Thus, many people who think of themselves as “Celts” today are actually more Mediterranean than Celtic. And others, with Latin, Germanic, or Slavic names, are actually of nearly unmixed Celtic descent.

Fastidious, Fair, and Fierce

The early Celts were not literate, and we are, therefore, dependent on Classical authors for much of what we know about Celtic mores, lifestyles, and behavior, as well as the physical appearance of the Celts themselves. The fourth-century Byzantine writer, Ammianus Marcellinus, drawing on reports from the first century B.C., tells us that the Celts (or Gauls, as the Romans called them) were fastidious, fair, and fierce:

The Gauls are all exceedingly careful of cleanliness and neatness, nor in all the country… could any man or woman, however poor, be seen either dirty or ragged.

Nearly all… are of a lofty stature, fair and of ruddy complexion: terrible from the sternness of their eyes, very quarrelsome, and of great pride and insolence. A whole troop of foreigners would not be able to withstand a single Gaul if he called his wife to his assistance, who is usually very strong and with blue eyes…

The early Celts were not an urban people. Their dwellings, typically of timber construction, tended to be isolated farmsteads or, at most, clusters of a few buildings surrounded by a palisade.

In pre-Christian Ireland there was an intellectual class which had a social status approximately equal to that of the warrior-landowners. This class consisted of druids (priests), bards, physicians, artists, and skilled craftsmen, who moved freely from petty kingdom to petty kingdom in a way that was not possible for any other class, thereby helping to maintain cultural unity throughout a wide area. A similar class served the same functions on the continent.

Dark Side of Druidism

By the time of the Roman conquest, however, many extraneous elements had become inseparably blended into Celtic religion. The druids practiced not only solar rites, but some rather dark and nasty ones of Mediterranean origin as well. [Chechar’s note: today it’s known that the rites were not of Mediterranean origin—see below]

Celts, Germans Closely Related

Many later writers have not been as careful as Caesar was and tend to lump all Celtic-speaking populations together as “Gauls,” while sharply distinguishing them from the Germans. As a matter of fact, there was a much greater affinity between the Celts and the Germans, despite the language difference, than there was between the truly Celtic elements among the Gauls and the racially different but Celtic-speaking Mediterranean and Celtiberian elements.

In the British Isles the racial effects of the fifth-century B.C. Celtic invasions varied. In some areas indigenous Nordic populations were reinforced, and in others indigenous Mediterranean or mixed populations diluted the fresh Nordic wave.

Brennus Sacks Rome

Around 400 B.C. Celts invaded northern Italy in strength, establishing a permanent presence in the Po valley, between the Alps and the Apennines. They pushed out the resident Etruscans and Ligurians, founded the city of Milan, and began exploring possibilities for further expansion south of the Apennines.

In 390 B.C. a Celtic army under their chieftain Brennus defeated the Roman army and occupied Rome. The Celts were not prepared to stay, however, and upon payment of an enormous ransom in gold by the Romans they withdrew again to northern Italy. In the following centuries there were repeated clashes between adventurous Celts and the people of the Classical civilizations to the south.

But the Celts, unfortunately, despite their mobility and their intelligence, never formed a unified whole; they remained a collection of distinct tribes, as often hostile to one another as they were to non-Celts. This lack of unity brought their downfall.

Man against man, a Celt could usually beat a Roman; the Celts were at least as brave and as skilled in arms as the Romans, and the former were bigger and stronger, on the average, for the latter had by this time mixed for too many generations with southern races and lost most of the Nordic qualities of their forefathers. But the Romans had the supreme advantage of organization, without which little of lasting impact has ever been wrought in this world.


My comment:

With only the Romans’ word to go on human sacrifices performed by the Druids—the ancient Celts left no written record of their own—it has been easy for historians to dismiss such tales as wartime propaganda.

Recent archeological findings however are starting to unearth evidence of Druid sacrifices, sometimes on a massive scale. According to my “psychogenic” point of view (cf. my research on psychohistory), at the time of Caesar’s conquests of Gaul the Romans belonged to a more evolved “psychoclass” than the Gauls, which not only means more culturally evolved but also more integrated psychologically (with time the psychic development of the two psychoclasses, Celts and Latins, became homogenized).

An objective appraisal on the conflict between Romans and Aryan “barbarians” of more than two thousand years ago, therefore, ought to consider these two factors in any future study of the epoch: psychohistory and racial studies such as the one pioneered by Pierce.

Categories
Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Art Beauty Charlemagne Civilisation (TV series) Islamization of Europe Kali Yuga Kenneth Clark Literature Mainstream media Philosophy of history

Civilisation’s “The Skin of our Teeth”

For an introduction to these series, see here.

Below, some indented excerpts of “The Skin of our Teeth,” the first chapter of Civilisation by Kenneth Clark, after which I offer my comments.

Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages:


I am standing on the Pont des Arts in Paris.

What is civilisation? I don’t know. I can’t define it in abstract terms—yet. But I think I can recognize it when I see it; and I am looking at it now.

If I had to say which was telling the truth about society, a speech by a Minister of Housing or the actual buildings put up in his time, I should believe the buildings. But this doesn’t mean that the history of civilisation is the history of art—far from it. Great works of art can be produced in barbarous societies.

Whatever its merits as a work of art, I don’t think that there is any doubt that the Apollo embodies a higher state of civilisation than the mask. They both represent spirits, messengers from another world—that is to say, from a world of our own imagining. To the Negro imagination it is a world of fear and darkness, ready to inflict horrible punishment for the smallest infringement of taboo. To the Hellenistic imagination it is a world of light and confidence, in which the gods are like ourselves, only more beautiful.

It is not my intention to insult white nationalists. But what they ignore is that, presently, with their rock music and media tastes they themselves, like the overwhelming majority of the white population are, spiritually, far closer to the Negro mask than to the Apollo of Belvedere. For Lord Clark it would have been unthinkable to consider civilised the popular forms of cultural expression such as heavy metal and the movies that today are watched even by white nationalists throughout the West.

As we saw in some of my latest entries, other self-destructing forms of cultural expression already occurred in the times of the fall of the Roman Empire. Clark said:

The same architectural language, the same imagery, the same theatres, the same temples—at any time for five hundred years you could have found them all round the Mediterranean, in Greece, Italy, France.

What happened? It took Gibbon six volumes to describe the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, so I shan’t embark on that. But thinking about this almost incredible episode does tell one something about the nature of civilisation. It shows that however complex and solid it seems, it is actually quite fragile. It can be destroyed. What are its enemies? Well, first of all fear—fear of the supernatural, which means that you daren’t question anything or change anything. The late antique world was full of meaningless rituals, mystery religions, that destroyed self-confidence.

Unlike Gibbon and Nietzsche, before his TV audience Clark didn’t dare to point the finger at Christianity. But later in the program, Clark spoke about Islam:

In a miraculously short time—about fifty years—the classical world was overrun [by the Muslim conquests]. Only its bleached bones stood out against the Mediterranean sky. The old source of civilisation was sealed off, and if a new civilisation was to be born it would have to face the Atlantic.

But something very odd happened to Man’s self-image in the early medieval world facing the Atlantic in what today is Ireland. According to Clark:

The subject of Mediterranean man was man. Two hundred years have passed—perhaps a little more—and man has almost vanished.

Crude as this imago hominis may be when compared to the Apollo, presently some white nationalists advertise their blogs with soft-porn pics of semi-nude women: something far more degrading for the divine human figure than the image of 8th century insular art in the Echternach Gospels.

To my mind—and, like Clark, I must say that this is only my personal view­—, the imago hominis only means a psychogenic regression in Man’s understanding of himself compared to the Greeks and the Romans. However, the white nationalists’ soft porn spits on the avatar of God, even if I don’t believe in the existence of a personal god.

After the above image chosen by Clark for the first episode of his program, in the following pages of the book version Clark mentions how St. Gregory destroyed entire libraries of the classical world (I quoted part of it in my recent antichristian series, here), and on the next page he states that even in those obscure days the Europeans fought strenuously against their enemies:

All great civilisations, in their early stages, are based on success in war. The Romans were the best organised and most ruthless fighters in Latium. So it was with the Franks. Clovis and his successors not only conquered their enemies, but maintained themselves by cruelties and tortures remarkable even by the standards of the last thirty years.

Without Charles Martel’s victory over the Moors at Poitiers in 732, western civilisation might never have existed, and without Charlemagne’s tireless campaigns we should never have had the notion of a united Europe.

Charlemagne was the first great man of action to emerge from the darkness since the collapse of the Roman world. The old idea that he saved civilisation isn’t far wrong. On the whole, our whole knowledge of ancient literature is due to the collecting and copying that began under Charlemagne.

If we compared ourselves with the franks, what could it be said about present-day nationalists? Many of them don’t even let our most serious fighter discuss in their forums (by “serious fighter” I mean someone who’s actively planning a revolution). Didn’t the Führer say that those who want to live, let them fight, and that those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live? Do whites and white nationalists deserve to live? If so, where are the Charles Martels in today’s islamized Europe, in America’s mexicanized states?

I am not proposing to do something stupid in a world which media is a hundred percent dominated by the Enemy. But at least be prepared for the tough, revolutionary times that are coming after the dollar crashes.