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Tag: Religion

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Christendom Day of Wrath (book)

70 AD

Above, the first page of the Gospel of Mark in the readable edition (9.5 x 13″) of the four gospels that I inherited from my father. Regarding the Old Testament, to English speakers I recommend Young’s Literal Translation, an 1862 word-for-word translation of the Hebrew text. It sacrifices the beautiful poetry and readability of the KJV for extra accuracy.

Through a bizarre, subterranean and astonishing struggle, Judaism has not only persecuted the old culture, and Rome, its mortal archenemy, adopts a Jewish creed—but the Jewish religion itself, so despised and insulted by the old Romans, is now elevated as the only official religion of Rome along with Christianity!

Thus spake Evropa Soberana in a crucial passage of what has become the masthead of this site. Could it be a coincidence that the Gospel of Mark was written around the time when the Romans conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple, in 70 C.E.? Keep in mind that, according to a chronologically ordered New Testament, Mark’s gospel was the first gospel ever written, which means that the author inaugurated a literary genre that has hypnotized whites to date. As Soberana implied in his essay, the conquest of the Aryan soul by Judea was complete after Constantine and his Christian heirs. So complete I would say that even some of Alex Linder’s fans still worship the god of the Jews.

Last Saturday for example, I received an email from one of the regular commenters of this site, a Linder fan: a communication apparently sent to a circle of white nationalist correspondents. His letter contains this phrase: ‘Religion is a potent force in this world irrespective of whether or not God exists… and I privately believe that He does’.

If Judea had not conquered Rome, no white man today would be speaking about ‘God’, a word that I prefer to write with small letters, ‘god’, as it obviously refers to the god of the Jews. Without Judea’s triumph, polytheism would still exist today, along with atheism—but never monotheism, as ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’ is clearly a commandment of Semitic import.

Recently I mentioned my book ¿Me Ayudarás? From that book, only a couple of essays have been translated for the latest edition of my Day of Wrath. Several times I have linked both essays, including ‘God’. But apparently most white nationalists are uninterested in the notion that the Big Bug that is destroying the Aryan race is precisely the sort of Semitic monotheism that the Jews started to install in the white psyche right after the humiliating defeat of 70 C.E.

Or perhaps I should say 70 AD, the year when the Gospel of Mark was probably written, as even nationalists believe in such a thing as the anno Domini?

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Carl Gustav Jung Carthage Child abuse Day of Wrath (book) Human sacrifice Infanticide Israel / Palestine Judaism Moses (fictional Hebrew lawgiver) Old Testament

Day of Wrath, 20

Nine percent?

At the beginning of our century some Amazonian tribes continue the practice as horribly as described above. With the advances in technology we can even watch videos on YouTube about such practices, like children being buried alive.
Let us remember the exclamation of Sahagún. The humble friar would have found it rather difficult to imagine that not only the ancient Mexicans, but all humanity had been seized by a passion for killing their little ones. Throughout his treatise on infanticide, Larry Milner mentioned several times that our species could have killed not millions, but billions of children since the emergence of Homo sapiens. At the beginning of his book Milner chose as the epigraph a quotation of Laila Williamson, an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History:

Infanticide has been practiced on every continent and by people on every level of cultural complexity, from hunter-gatherers to high civilizations, including our own ancestors. Rather than being an exception, then, it has been the rule.

Milner cowers in his book to avoid giving the impression that he openly condemns the parents. Before I distanced myself from deMause, in the Journal of Psychohistory of Autumn 2008 I published a critical essay-review of his treatise. My criticism aside, Milner’s words about the even more serious cowardice among other scholars is worth quoting:

As for the research into general human behavior, infanticide has been almost totally ignored. When acts of child-murder are referenced at all, they generally are passed off as some quirk or defective apparatus of an unusual place or time. Look in the index of almost all major social treatises and you will find only a rare reference to the presence of infanticide. […] Yet, the importance of understanding the reasons for infanticide is borne out by its mathematical proportions. Since man first appeared on earth about 600,000 years ago, it has been calculated that about 77 billion human babies have been born. If estimates of infanticide of 5-10 percent are true, then up to seven billion children [9 percent!] have been killed by their parents: a figure which should suffice as one of incredible importance.

Even assuming that this figure is contradicted by future studies, the anthropologist Glenn Hausfater would have agreed with Milner. In an August 1982 article of the New York Times about a conference of several specialists at the University of Cornell on animal and human infanticide, Hausfater said: “Infanticide has not received much study because it’s a repulsive subject. Many people regard it as reprehensible to even think about it…” In that same conference Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, a primatologist at Harvard said that infanticide occurs in all groups of evolved primates. Given the psychological limitations of academics, it is not surprising to see that the few who are not silent on the subject argue that the primary cause is economic. But the “economic explanation” does not explain why infanticide occurred equally among both the rich and the poor, or why it had been so frequent and sometimes even more frequent in the most prosperous periods of Rome and Carthage. The same is true about those seeking explanations about the taboos, superstitions and customs of the peoples, or the stigma attached to children born out of wedlock. None of these factors explains infanticide for the simple reason that modern Western societies have had these features and refrain from practicing it. Marvin Harris’s position is typical. Harris has calculated that among Paleolithic hunters, up to 23-50 percent of infants were put to death, and postulated that female infanticide was a form of population control. His colleagues have criticized him as a typical proponent of “environmental determinism.” If environmental determinism were true, there would have to be more sacrifice and infanticide today given the demographic explosion.
It is true that Milner fails to condemn the perpetrators. But despite his flaws, outlined in my 2008 review in deMause’s journal, the information Milner collected under a single cover is so disturbing that it made me think: What is really the human species? I have no choice but to try to ponder the question by analyzing one of the most horrendous forms of infanticide practiced over the centuries.
 
Historical Israel
In the past, the shadow of infanticide covered the world, but the Phoenicians and their biblical ancestors, the Canaanites, performed sacrifices that turn pale the Mesoamerican sacrifices of children.
The Tophet, located in the valley of Gehenna, was a place near Jerusalem where it is believed that children were burned alive to the god Moloch Baal. Later it became synonymous with hell, and the generic name “tophet” would be transferred to the sacrificial site of the cemetery at Carthage and other Mediterranean cities like Motya, Tharros and Hadrumetum, where bones have been found of Carthaginian and Phoenician children.
According to a traditional reading of the Bible, stories of sacrifice by the Hebrews were relapses of the chosen people to pagan customs. Recent studies, such as Jon Levenson’s The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity have suggested that the ancient Hebrews did not differ much from the neighboring towns but that they were typical examples of the Semitic peoples of Canaan. The cult of Yahweh was only gradually imposed in a group while the cult of Baal was still part of the fabric of the Hebrew-Canaanite culture. Such religion had not been a syncretistic custom that the most purist Hebrews rejected from their “neighbor” Canaanites: it was part of their roots. For Israel Finkelstein, an Israeli archaeologist and academic, the writing of the book of Deuteronomy in the reign of Josiah was a milestone in the development and invention of Judaism. Josiah represents what I call one of the psychogenic mutants who firmly rejected the infanticidal psychoclass of their own people. Never mind that he and his aides had rewritten their nation’s past by idealizing the epic of Israel. More important is that they make Yahweh say—who led the captivity of his people by the Assyrians—that it was a punishment for their idolatry: which includes the burning of children. The book of Josiah’s scribes even promotes to conquer other peoples that, like the Hebrews, carried out such practices. “The nations whom you go in to dispossess,” says the Deuteronomy, “they even burn their sons and their daughters in the fire to their gods.” (12: 29-31). “When you come into the land that the Lord is giving you, you shall not learn to follow the abominable practices of those nations. There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering.” (18: 9-10).
This emergence, or jump to a higher psychoclass from the infanticidal, is also attested in other books of the Hebrew Bible. “The men from Babylon made Succoth Benoth, the men from Cuthah made Nergal, and the men from Hamath made Ashima; the Avvites made Nibhaz and Tartak, and the Sepharvites burned their children in the fire as sacrifices to Adrammelech and Anammelech, the gods of Sepharvaim” (2 Kings: 17: 30-31). There were kings of Judah who committed these outrages with their children too. In the 8th century B.C. the thriving king Ahaz “even sacrificed his son in the fire, following the detestable ways of the nations the Lord had driven out before the Israelites” (2 Kings 16: 1-3). Manasseh, one of the most successful kings of Judah, “burnt his son in sacrifice” (21:6). The sacrificial site also flourished under Amon, the son of Manasseh. Fortunately it was destroyed during the reign of Josiah. Josiah also destroyed the sacrificial site of the Valley of Ben Hinnom “so no one could use it to sacrifice his son or daughter in the fire to Molech” (23:10). Such destructions are like the destruction of Mesoamerican temples by the Spaniards, and for identical reasons.
Ezekiel, taken into exile to Babylon preached there to his people. He angrily chided them: “And you took your sons and daughters whom you bore to me and sacrificed them as food to the idols. Was your prostitution not enough? You slaughtered my children and made them pass through the fire” (Ezekiel 16: 20-21). The prophet tells us that from the times when his people wandered in the desert they burned their children, adding: “When you offer your gifts—making your sons pass through the fire—you continue to defile yourselves with all your idols to this day. Am I to let you inquire of me, O house of Israel? As surely as I live, declares the Lord, I will not let you inquire of me” (20:31). Other passages in Ezekiel that complain about his people’s sins appear in 20: 23-26 and 23: 37-39. A secular though Jung-inspired way of seeing God is to conceive it as how the ego of an individual’s superficial consciousness relates to the core of his own psyche: the Self. In Ezekiel’s next diatribe against his people (16: 35-38) I can hear his inner daimon, the “lord” of the man Ezekiel:

Therefore, you prostitute, hear the word of the Lord! This is what the Lord says: Because you poured out your lust and exposed your nakedness in your promiscuity with your lovers, and because of all your detestable idols, and because you gave them your children’s blood in sacrifice, therefore I am going to gather all your lovers, with whom you found pleasure, those you loved as well as those you hated. I will gather them against you from all around and will strip you in front of them, and they will see all your nakedness. I will sentence you to the punishment of women who commit adultery and who shed blood; I will bring upon you the blood vengeance of my wrath and jealous anger.

When a “prophet” (an individual who has made a leap to a higher psychoclass) maligned his inferiors, he received insults. Isaiah (57: 4-5) wrote:

Whom are you mocking? At whom do you sneer and stick out your tongue? Are you not a brood of rebels, the offspring of liars? You burn with lust among the oaks and under every spreading tree; you sacrifice your children in the ravines and under the overhanging crags.

The very psalmist complained that people sacrificed their children to idols. But what exactly were these sacrificial rites? The spoken tradition of what was to be collected in biblical texts centuries later complained that Solomon “built a high place for Chemosh, the detestable god of Moab, and for Molech, the detestable god of the Ammonites,” and that his wives made offerings to these gods (1 Kings 11: 7-8). And even from the third book of the Torah we read the commandment: “Do not give any of your children to be passed through the fire to Molech, for you must not profane the name of your God.” (Leviticus 18:21). A couple of pages later (20: 2-5) it says:

Say to the Israelites: “Any Israelite or any alien living in Israel who sacrifices any of his children to Molech must be put to death. The people of the community are to stone him. I will set my face against that man and I will cut him off from his people; for by giving his children to Molech he has defiled my sanctuary and profaned my holy name. If the people of the community close their eyes when that man gives one of his children to Molech and they fail to put him to death, I will set my face against that man and his family and will cut off from their people both him and all who follow him in prostituting themselves to Molech.”

Despite these admonitions, the influential anthropologist James Frazer interpreted some biblical passages as indicating that the god of the early Hebrews, unlike the emergent god quoted above, required sacrifices of children. After all, “God” is but the projection of the Jungian Self from a human being at a given stage of the human theodicy. Unlike Milner, a Christian frightened by the idea, I do not see it impossible that the ancient Hebrews had emerged from the infanticidal psychoclass to a more emergent one. In “The Dying God,” part three of The Golden Bough, Frazer draws our attention to these verses of Exodus (22: 29-30):

Do not hold back offerings from your granaries or your vats. You must give me the firstborn of your sons. Do the same with your cattle and your sheep. Let them stay with their mothers for seven days, but give them to me on the eighth day.

A similar passage can be read in Numbers (18: 14-15), and the following one (3: 11-13) seems especially revealing:

The Lord also said to Moses, “I have taken the Levites from among the Israelites in place of the first male offspring of every Israelite woman. The Levites are mine, for all the firstborn are mine. When I struck down all the firstborn in Egypt, I set apart for myself every firstborn in Israel, whether man or animal. They are to be mine. I am the Lord.”

The psychohistorian Howard Stein, who has written scholarly articles on Judaism since the mid-1970s, concludes in an article of 2009 that the gathered information suggests a particular interpretation. According to Stein, the substrate of fear for the slaughter “helps to explain the valency that the High Holiday have for millions of Jews worldwide,” presumably echoes of very ancient happenings: actual sacrifices by the Hebrews.
In contrast to what the evangelicals were taught in Sunday school as children, Moses did not write the Torah—it was not written before the Persian period. In fact, the most sacred book of the Jews includes four different sources. Since the 17th-century thinkers such as Spinoza and Hobbes had researched the origins of the Pentateuch, and the consensus of contemporary studies is that the final edition is dated by the 5th century B.C. (the biblical Moses, assuming he existed, would have lived in the 13th century B.C.). Taking into account the contradictions and inconsistencies in the Bible—for example, Isaiah, who belonged to a much more evolved psychoclass, even abhorred animal sacrifice—it should not surprise us that the first chapter of Leviticus consists only of animal sacrifices. The “Lord” called them holocausts to be offered at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting. After killing, skinning and butchering the poor animal, the priest incinerates everything on the altar “as a burnt offering to the Lord; it is a pleasing aroma, a special gift presented to the Lord.” A phrase that is repeated three times in that first chapter, it also appears in subsequent chapters and reminds me those words by Cortés to Charles V about the Mesoamerican sacrifices (“They take many girls and boys and even adults, and in the presence of these idols they open their chests while they are still alive and take out their hearts and entrails and burn them before the idols, offering the smoke as the sacrifice.”) In the book of Exodus (34:20) even the emerging transition of child sacrifice to lamb sacrifice can be guessed in some passages, what gave rise to the legend of Abraham:

For the first foal of a donkey, they should give a lamb or a goat instead of the ass, but if you do not give, you break the neck of the donkey. You must also give an offering instead of each eldest child. And no one is to appear before me empty-handed.

Compared with other infanticidal peoples the projection of the demanding father had been identical, but the emergency to a less dissociated layer of the human psyche is clearly visible. As noted by Jaynes, the Bible is a treasure to keep track of the greatest psychogenic change in history. The Hebrews sacrificed their children just as other peoples, but eventually they would leave behind the barbaric practice.

After captivity in the comparatively more civilized Babylon in 586 B.C., the Jews abandoned their practices. In his book King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice: Biblical Distortions of Historical Realities, published in 2004, Francesca Stavrakopoulou argues that child sacrifice was part of the worship of Yahweh, and that the practice was condemned only after the exile. Like their Christian successors, the Jews had sublimated their filicidal impulses in the Passover ritual. Each year they celebrate the liberation of their people and remember how Yahweh killed the firstborn Egyptians: legendary resonance of the habit of killing one’s eldest son.
But the biblical Moloch (in Hebrew without vowels, mlk), represented as a human figure with a bull’s head was not only a Canaanite god. It also was a god of the descendants of the Canaanites, the Phoenicians. The founding myth of Moloch was similar to that of many other religions: sacrifices were compensation for a catastrophe from the beginning of time. Above I said that Plutarch, Tertullian, Orosius, Philo, Cleitarchus and Diodorus Siculus mentioned the practice of the burning children to Moloch in Carthage, but refrained from wielding the most disturbing details. Diodorus says that every child who was placed in the outstretched hands of Moloch fell through the open mouth of the heated bronze statue, into the fire. When at the beginning of the 3rd century B.C. Agathocles defeated Carthage the Carthaginians began to burn their children in a huge sacrifice as a tactical “defense” before the enemy. The sources mention three hundred incinerated children. If I had made a career as a film director, I would feel obliged to visually show humanity its infamous past by filming the huge bronze statue, heated red-hot while the Greek troops besieged the city, gobbling child after child: who would be sliding to the bottom of the flaming chimney. In addition to Carthage, the worship of Moloch, whose ritual was held outdoors, was widespread in other Phoenician cities. He was widely worshiped in the Middle East and in the Punic cultures of the time, including several Semitic peoples and as far as the Etruscans. Various sacrificial tophets have been found in North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, Malta, outside Tyre and at a temple of Amman.
Terracotta urns containing the cremated remains of children, discovered in 1817, have been photographed numerous times. However, since the late 1980s some Italian teachers began to question the historicity of the accounts of classical writers. Tunisian nationalists took advantage, including the president whose palace near the suburban sea is very close the ruins of the ancient city of Carthage. The Tunisian tourist guides even make foreigners believe that the Carthaginians did not perform sacrifices (something similar to what some ignorant Mexican tourist guides do in Chiapas). Traditional historians argue that the fact that the remains are from very young children suggests sacrifice, not cremation by natural death as alleged by the revisionists. The sacrificial interpretation of Carthage is also suggested by the fact that, along with the children, there are charred remains of lambs (remember the biblical quote that an evolved Yahweh says that the slaughter of sheep was a barter for the firstborn). This suggests that some Carthaginians replaced animals in the sacrificial rite: data inconsistent with the revisionist theory that the tophet was a normal cemetery. Furthermore, the word mlk (Moloch) appears in many stelae as a dedication to this god. If they were simple burials, it would not make sense to find those stelae dedicated to the fire god: common graves are not inscribed as offerings to the gods. Finally, although classical writers were staunch enemies of the Carthaginians, historical violence is exerted by rejecting all their testimonies, from Alexander’s time to the Common Era. The revisionism on Carthage has been a phenomenon that is not part of new archaeological discoveries, or newly discovered ancient texts. The revisionists simply put into question the veracity of the accounts of classical writers, and they try to rationalize the archaeological data by stressing our credulity to the breaking point. Brian Garnand, of the University of Chicago, concluded in his monograph on the Phoenician sacrifice that “the distinguished scholars of the ridimensionamento [revisionism] have not proven their case.”
However, I must say that the revisionists do not bother me. What I cannot tolerate are those subjects who, while accepting the reality of the Carthaginian sacrifice, idealize it. On September 1, 1987 an article in the New York Times, “Relics of Carthage Show Brutality Amid the Good Life” contains this nefarious phrase: “Some scholars assert, the practice of infanticide helped produce Carthage’s great wealth and its flowering of artistic achievement.” The memory of these sacrificed children has not really been vindicated even by present-day standards.
The Carthaginian tophet is the largest cemetery of humans, actually of boys and girls, ever discovered. After the Third Punic War Rome forced the Carthaginians to learn Latin, just as the Spanish imposed their language on the conquered Mexicans. Personally, what most alarms me is that there is evidence in the tophets of remains of tens of thousands of children sacrificed by fire over so many centuries. I cannot tremble more in imagining what would have been of our civilization had the Semitic Hannibal reached Rome.
Lately I’ve had contact with a child that a couple of days ago has turned six years old and who loves his mother very much. I confess that to imagine what a Carthaginian boy of the same age would have felt when his dear papa handed him over to the imposing bronze statue with a Bull’s head; to imagine what he would have felt for such treachery as he writhed with infinite pain in the fired oven, moved me to write this last chapter. Although my parents did not physically kill me (only shattered my soul), every time I come across stories about sacrificed firstborns, it’s hard not to touch my inner fiber.
In the final book of this work I will return to my autobiography, and we will see if after this type of findings humanity has the right to exist.
 
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The objective of Day of Wrath is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering. If life allows, next time I will reproduce the final chapter. Day of Wrath will be available again through Amazon Books.

Categories
Bible Judaism Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Literature Martin Luther

Christianity’s Criminal History, 72

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

 

Fabrications in the Old Testament

The boldest, daring and of greatest consequence of this type was to attribute to the spirit and dictation of God all the writings of the Old and New Testaments.

—Arnold Meyer

 
The bibles of the world and some peculiarities of the Christian Bible
The ‘book of books’ of Christians is the Bible. The German translation Bibel appears for the first time in the moral poem ‘The runner’ of Bamberg’s school teacher and verse builder, Hugo von Trimberg (born around 1230, he was also the author of a collection of homiletic fables and about two hundred hagiographic almanacs). The term coined by Hugo derives from the Latin biblia, which in turn has its origin in the neutral plural ta biblia (the books).
The Bible is a ‘sacred’ scripture and texts. Books and sacred writings form, in the history of religions, part of the trade, of the business on which it depends closely and not only the monetary but also the political and, ultimately, anyone sheltered by the human heart.
The bibles of mankind are therefore numerous: the three Vedas of ancient India, for example, the five Ching canonical books of the Chinese imperial religion, the Siddhanta of Jainism, the Typitakam of Theravada Buddhism, the Dharma of Mahayana Buddhism in India, the Tripitakam of Tibetan Buddhism, the Tao-tea-ching of Taoist monks, the Avesta of Persian Mazdaism, the Qur’an in Islam, the Granth of the Sikhs, the Gima of Mandeism. There were many sacred writings in the Hellenistic mysteries, which were already referred to in the pre-Christian era simply with the word ‘writing’, or with the formula ‘is written’ or ‘as written’. In Egypt the sacred writings go back to the most ancient times and a sacred text has already been cited in the 3rd millennium BC, Words of God (mdw ntr).
Of course, we know that the Bible is not just a book among other books but the book of books. It is not, therefore, a book that can be equated with Plato’s, the Qur’an or the old books of Indian wisdom. No, the Bible ‘is above them; it is unique and unrepeatable’ (Alois Stiefvater). In its exclusivity, the monotheistic religions insist with emphasis—and that is precisely why they are, so to speak, exclusively intolerant! ‘Just as the world cannot exist without wind, neither it can without Israel’ says the Talmud. In the Qur’an it is said: ‘You have chosen us from among all the peoples; you have raised us above all the nations’. And Luther also boasts: ‘We Christians are bigger and more than all creatures’.
In short, the Bible is something special. But Christianity did not have its own ‘Sacred Scripture’ in its first 150 years, and for that reason it assimilated the sacred book of the Jews, the Old Testament, which according to the Catholic faith precedes ‘the Sun of Christ’ as the ‘morning star’ (Nielen).
The name Old Testament (Greek diathéke, covenant) comes from Paul, who in 2 Cor. 3:14 talks about the Old Covenant. The synagogue, which naturally recognizes no New Testament, does not speak of the Old but of Tanakh, an artificial word formed by the initials of Torah, nevi’im and ketuvim: law, prophets, and remaining writings.
The Old Testament, as they were transmitted by the Hebrews are, to date, the Holy Scriptures of the Jews. The Palestinian Jews did not establish the final received texts until the Council of Jamnia, between the 90s and 100 AD: twenty-four texts, the same number as the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. (The Jewish bibles of the 15th century were the first that proceeded to a different division and gave rise to thirty-nine canonical books.) In any case, God, to whom these Sacred Scriptures refer and from which they come, needed more than a millennium to compile and finalise the Bible.
The unique thing about the Christian Bible is that each of the different confessions also has different bibles, which do not coincide as a whole; and what some consider sacred, to others seem suspicious.
The Catholic Church distinguishes between Protocanonical writings, that is, never discussed, and Deuterocanonical writings whose ‘inspiration’ was for some time ‘put into doubt’ or was considered uncertain. This Church has a much wider Old Testament than that of the Jews, from which it proceeds. Besides the Hebrew canon, it collected within its Holy Scriptures other titles. In total, according to the Council of Trent in its session of April 8, 1546, confirmed by Vatican I in 1879: forty-eight books, that is, in addition to the so-called Deuterocanonics, Tobias, Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch and letters of Jeremiah, Maccabees I and II, Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Holy Children (Vulgate, Daniel 3:24–90), Story of Susanna, Bel and the Dragon (Vulgate Daniel 14; Septuagint epilogue), Esther 10, 4-16, 24.
On the contrary, Protestantism, which gives authority exclusively to the books that appear in the Hebrew canon, does not consider as canonical or manifested by God, the Deuterocanonics added by Catholicism. It grants them little value and calls them ‘apocryphal’, that is, that what Catholics call books never had canonical validity.
Luther, in defining what belonged to the canon, relies on the ‘inner spiritual testimony’ or the ‘internal sense’. He eliminates, for example, the second book of the Maccabees because Luther was disturbed by the passage on the purgatory, whose existence he denied. On that same book and also on that of Esther, Luther opined that ‘they have too many Jewish and pagan remnants’. Nevertheless, he considered the Deuterocanonical writings to be ‘useful and good to read’ although were not inspired by God, in any case by the ‘internal sense’ of the reformer.

An early German translation by Martin Luther.
His translation into the vernacular was highly influential.

In the Synod of Jerusalem, the Greek Church included, in 1672, among the divine word four other works that did not appear in the Council of Jamnia: Wisdom, Ecclesiastical, Tobias, and Judith.
Much broader than the Old Testament was the canon of Hellenistic Judaism, the Septuagint (abbreviated: LXX, the translation of the seventy men). It was elaborated for the Jews of the Diaspora in Alexandria by various translators in the 3rd century BC: the book for the Greek-speaking Jews, the oldest and most important transcription of the Old Testament into Greek, the language of the Hellenistic period, and the official Bible of Diaspora Judaism. It became part of the synagogue.
The Septuagint, however, collected more writings than the Hebrew canon and more also from those later considered valid by Catholics. The quotations of the Old Testament that appear in the New (with the allusions 270 to 350) come mostly from the Septuagint and it constituted for the Fathers of the Church, who used it with insistence, the Old Testament or Holy Writ.

______ 卐 ______

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Categories
Julian (novel) Literature

Julian, 30

Julian presiding at a conference of Sectarians
(Edward Armitage, 1875)

 
Julian Augustus
In March 351, I was admitted to the mysteries of Mithras. On that day I watched the rising of the sun; and I watched its setting, taking care to be unobserved, for since Constantius had made it illegal to pray to the sun, people had even been arrested for watching a sunset. Spies and informers were everywhere.
I had told Ecebolius that I intended to spend the day hunting on the slopes of Mount Pion. Since he hated hunting, he excused himself as I knew he would. He quoted Homer. I quoted Horace. He quoted Virgil. I quoted Theocritus. Together we used up nearly all of literature’s references to hunting.
The next obstacle was the bodyguard. Twelve soldiers and one officer were assigned to my household. At all times I was attended by at least two men. What to do about them? It was Maximus who decided that since Mithras is the soldier’s religion, at least two of the soldiers should prove sympathetic. Maximus was right. Of the twelve, five were Mithraists. It was then an easy matter to get two of the five assigned to me for the day. As Mithraic brothers, they were under the seal of secrecy.
An hour before dawn, Oribasius, the soldiers and I left the house. At the mountain’s edge we were met by Maximus and nine fathers. In silence we climbed the slope. At a pre-ordained spot, beneath a fig tree, we stopped and waited for the sun to rise.
The sky turned pale. The morning star shone blue. Dark clouds broke. Then just as the sun appeared on the horizon, a single shaft of light struck the rock behind us and I realized that it was not just ordinary rock, but a door into the mountainside. We prayed then to the sun and to his companion Mithras, our saviour.
When the sun was at last above the horizon, Maximus opened the door into the mountain and we entered a small cave with seats carved out of the rock. Here Oribasius and I were told to wait while the fathers of Mithras withdrew into yet another cave, the inner sanctuary. Thus began the most momentous day of my life. The day of the honey and of the bread and the wine; the day of the seven gates and the seven planets; the day of challenges and of passwords; the day of prayer and, at its end (past Raven, Bride, Soldier, Lion, Persian, Courier of the Sun, and Father), the day of Nama Nama Sebesio.
Libanius: Of all the mysteries, excepting those at Eleusis, the Mithraic is the most inspiring, for in the course of it one actually experiences the folly of earthly vanity. At each of the seven stages, the initiate acts out what his soul will one day experience as it rises amongst the seven spheres, losing one by one its human faults. At Ares, the desire for war returns to its source; at Zeus, ambition is lost; at Aphrodite, sex, and so on until the soul is purged. Then… But I can say no more. Nama Nama Sebesio.
 
Julian Augustus
When the day ended, Oribasius and I stumbled from the cave, born again.
It was then that it happened. As I looked at the setting sun, I was possessed by light. What is given to few men was given to me. I saw the One. I was absorbed by Helios and my veins coursed not with blood but light.
I saw it all. I saw the simplicity at the heart of creation. The thing which is impossible to grasp without the help of divinity, for it is beyond language and beyond mind: yet it is so simple that I marvelled at how one could not have known what is always there, a part of us just as we are part of it. What happened inside the cave was a testing and a learning, but what happened to me outside the cave was revelation.
I saw the god himself as I knelt among sage bushes, the red slanting sunlight full in my face. I heard that which cannot be written or told and I saw that which cannot be recorded in words or images. Yet even now, years later, it is as vivid in retrospect as it was at the time. For I was chosen on that steep mountainside to do the great work in which I am now engaged: the restoration of the worship of the One God, in all his beautiful singularity.
I remained kneeling until the sun was gone. Then I knelt in darkness for what I am told was an hour. I knelt until Oribasius became alarmed and awakened me… or put me to sleep, for the “real” world ever since has seemed to me the dream while my vision of Helios is the reality.
“Are you all right?”
I nodded and got to my feet. “I have seen…” But I stopped. I could not say what I had seen. Even now, writing this memoir, I cannot describe what I experienced since there is nothing comparable in ordinary human experience.
But Maximus immediately recognized what had happened to me. “He has been chosen,” he said. “He knows.”
Silently we returned to the city. I did not want to talk to anyone, not even to Maximus, for I was still enfolded by wings of light. Even the back of my hand where I had received the sacred tattoo did not hurt me. But at the city gate my absorption was rudely shattered by a large crowd which surrounded me, shouting, “Great news!”
I was bewildered. All I could think was: has the god remained with me? is what I saw visible to all? I tried to speak to Maximus and Oribasius but we could not make ourselves heard.
At the prefect’s house, I found Ecebolius with the town prefect and what looked to be the whole council. When they saw me, they fell to their knees. For an instant I thought it was indeed the end of the world and that I had been sent as messenger to separate the good from the bad. But Ecebolius quickly dispelled all thought of apocalypse.
“Most noble Julian, your brother…” All about us, men began to repeat Gallus’s names and titles. “… has been raised by the divine Augustus to share with him the purple. Gallus is Caesar in the East. He is also to be married to Constantia, divine sister of the divine Augustus!”
There was loud cheering and eager hands touched my robe, my hands, my arms. Favours were requested, blessings demanded. Finally, I broke through the mob and got inside the house.
“But why are they all behaving like lunatics?” I turned on Ecebolius, as though it were his fault.
“Because you are now the brother of a reigning Caesar.”
“Much good it will do them… or me.” This was unwise, but it relieved me to say it.
“Surely you don’t want them to love you for yourself?” Oribasius teased me. “You quite enjoyed the attention, until you heard the news.”
“Only because I thought it was the sun…” I stopped myself just in time.
“The sun?” Ecebolius looked puzzled.
“Only the son of God should be treated in this fashion,” said Maximus smoothly. “Men should not worship other men, not even princes.”
Ecebolius nodded. “A relic of the bad old days, I’m afraid. The Augustus of Rome is of course ‘divine’ though not truly a god as men used to think. But come in, come in. The baths are ready. And the prefect is giving us a banquet to celebrate the good news.”
So I beheld the One God on the same day that I learned my brother had been made Caesar. The omen was plain enough. Each was now set in his destiny. From that day on I was Hellenist or, as the Galileans like to call me (behind my back, of course!), apostate. And Gallus reigned in the East.

Categories
Julian (novel) Literature

Julian, 29

Julian presiding at a conference of Sectarians
(Edward Armitage, 1875)

Priscus:
Interesting to observe Maximus in action. He was clever. I would have guessed that at their first meeting he would have done tricks. Made the statue of Cybele dance. Something like that. But no. He gives a shrewd attack on Christianity. Then he offers Julian Mithras, a religion bound to appeal to our hero. Mithras was always the favourite deity of Roman emperors, and of many soldiers to this day. Also, Maximus knew that he would be sure of a special relationship to Julian if he were the one who sponsored him during the rites.
There is now no doubt in my mind that at this point in Julian’s life almost any of the mystery cults would have got him free of Christianity. He was eager to make the break. Yet it is hard to say quite why, since his mind tended to magic and superstition in precisely the same way the Christian mind does. Admittedly their worship of corpses did not appeal to him, but he was later to find manifestations of “the One” in even order places. Had Julian been what he thought he was—a philosopher in the tradition of Plato—one might have understood his dislike of the Christian nonsense. He would have been like you and me. But Julian was concerned, finally, with the idea of personal immortality, the one obsession Christians share with those who are drawn to the old mystery cults.
Despite everything Julian wrote on the subject, I have never understood precisely why he turned against the religion of his family. After all, Christianity offered him nearly everything he needed. If he wanted to partake symbolically of the body of a god, why not remain with the Christians and eat their bread and drink their wine instead of reverting to the bread and wine of Mithras? It is not as if there was anything lacking in Christianity. The Christians have slyly incorporated most of the popular elements of Mithras and Demeter and Dionysus into their own rites. Modern Christianity is an encyclopaedia of traditional superstition.
I suspect the origin of Julian’s disaffection is in his family. Constantius was a passionate Christian, absorbed by doctrinal disputes. With good reason, Julian hated Constantius. Therefore, he hated Christianity. This puts the matter far too simply, yet I always tend to the obvious view of things since it is usually the correct one, though of course one can never get to the bottom of anything so mysterious as another man’s character, and there is a mystery here.
Julian was Christian in everything except his tolerance of others. He was what the Christians would call a saint. Yet he swung fiercely away from the one religion which suited him perfectly, preferring its eclectic origins, which he then tried to systematize into a new combination quite as ridiculous as the synthesis he had rejected. It is a strange business and there is no satisfactory explanation for Julian’s behaviour. Of course he claimed that Bishop George’s partisanship disgusted him as a boy, and that Porphyry and Plotinus opened his eyes to the absurdity of Christian claims. Well and good. But then why turn to something equally absurd?
Granted, no educated man can accept the idea of a Jewish rebel as god. But having rejected that myth, how can one then believe that the Persian hero-god Mithras was born of light striking rock, on December 25th, with shepherds watching his birth? (I am told that the Christians have just added those shepherds to the birth of Jesus.) Or that Mithras lived in a fig tree which fed and clothed him, that he fought with the sun’s first creation, the bull, that he was dragged by it (thus symbolizing man’s suffering) until the bull escaped; finally, at the command of the sun god, Mithras stabs the bull with a knife and from the beast’s body come flowers, herbs, wheat; from the blood, wine; from the seed, the first man and woman.
Then Mithras is called up to heaven, after celebrating a sacramental last supper. Time’s end will be a day of judgment when all will rise from their graves and evil will be destroyed while the good will live for ever in the light of the sun.
Between the Mithraic story and its Christian sequel I see no essential difference. Admittedly, the Mithraic code of conduct is more admirable than the Christian. Mithraists believe that right action is better than contemplation. They favour old-fashioned virtues like courage and self-restraint. They were the first to teach that strength is gentleness. All of this is rather better than the Christian hysteria which vacillates between murder of heretics on the one hand and a cringing rejection of this world on the other. Nor can a Mithraist be absolved of sin by a sprinkle of water. Ethically, I find Mithras the best of all the mystery cults. But it is absurd to say it is any more “true” than its competitors. When one becomes absolute about myth and magic, the result can only be madness.
Julian speaks continually of his love of Hellenism. He honestly believed he loved Plato and reasonable discourse. Actually, what he craved was what so many desire in this falling time: assurance of personal immortality. He chose to reject the Christian way for reasons which I find obscure, while settling on an equal absurdity.
Of course I am sympathetic to him. He dealt the Christians some good blows and that delighted me. But I cannot sympathize with his fear of extinction. Why is it so important to continue after death? We never question the demonstrable fact that before birth we did not exist, so why should we fear becoming once more what we were to begin with? I am in no hurry to depart. But I look on nothing as just that: no thing. How can one fear no thing?
As for the various ceremonies and trials the Mithraic initiate must undergo, the less said the better. I understand that one of the twelve tortures is the pulling out one by one of the pubic hairs, a most spiritual discipline. I was also told that part of the ceremonies are conducted while everyone is roaring drunk and trying to jump over ditches blindfolded, a symbol no doubt of the bewildering life of the flesh. But men are impressed by secret rites, the more gruesome and repellent the better. How sad we are, how terrified to be men!
Libanius:
It is not often one finds a philosopher so entirely lacking in the religious sense. It is like being born unable to perceive colours which are plain to everyone else. Priscus does have a logical mind and a precise way of stating things, but he is blind to what truly matters. Like Julian, I was admitted to the Mithraic rites during my student days. The impression the mysteries made on me was profound, though I confess that the effect was not as revealing—for me—as it was for Julian. But I had never been a Christian, so I was not making a dramatic and dangerous break with the world I belonged to. However, for Julian it was a brave thing to do. Had Constantius learned of what he had done, it might have cost him his life. Fortunately, Maximus managed the affair so skilfully that Constantius never knew that at the age of nineteen his cousin ceased to be a Christian, in a cave beneath Mount Pion.
Priscus seems to have missed the point of the Mithraic mysteries, which does not surprise me. Priscus applauds our high ethical standards. We are grateful to him. But he finds the rites “repellent”. Of course he knows about them only by hearsay, since no one who has been initiated may recount what happens in the cave. But though the “trials” are often disagreeable, the revelation is worth all the pain that one has borne. I for one cannot imagine a world without Mithras.
Priscus observes with his usual harsh candour that the Christians are gradually absorbing various aspects of the cult. A thought suddenly occurs to me: might not this be the way in which we finally conquer? Is it not possible that the absorber will become so like the absorbed that in time they will be us?

Categories
¿Me Ayudarás? (book) Alice Miller Autobiography Bible Carl Gustav Jung Day of Wrath (book) God Psychology

God

This text appears in Day of Wrath

______ 卐 ______

 
As I said in Hojas Susurrantes, in California I suffered an internal persecutor: a Christian fear of damnation caused by my father’s miserable introjects. On May 24, 1988, a few months after returning from California still carrying in my soul a legion of dementors, I dined with my parents in a restaurant [I wasn’t living with them]. From the street, three days before I had seen the dry branches of my tree and I believed that the tree would die so, in penance, I shaved my beard the next day after having let them grow for a few months; the only time in life I let them grow.
 
Saint Augustine
Before telling what happened in the restaurant I must mention that throughout my childhood I lived under the shadow of the figure of St. Augustine; as I recall, the favorite saint of my father when we lived in San Lorenzo (as we know, Augustine’s ideas had been one of my greatest dementors in California). At dinner with my parents, barely convalescing from the idea that tormented me, I jumped when (my mother?) mentioned the aforementioned saint. I exclaimed that Augustine had rationalized the eternal fire for unbaptized infants… More than convalescing, the psychic wounds of my family’s religion were still open, though not as maddeningly as the suffering in California. My parents felt the vehemence of my words, but not my agony behind them. What my father answered deserves to leave a record and it is worth saying that I wrote it down not in my diary, but in a single sheet. (When planning this volume I had to order my correspondence, documents and loose sheets in dozens of labeled envelopes.) According to my notes, my father answered me:
—Those [Augustine’s views] are people’s mistakes; human failures. I go to what Jesus says.
When I answered that the Gospel of Matthew put Jesus talking about the gnashing of teeth of the damned, he said:
—I do not see [emphasis in his voice] the anathemas of Jesus. I prefer to see the lilies and the birds; come and they will be given food, dressing be added.
On my single sheet, the following day I addressed myself: “Where is the Augustinian father of San Lorenzo? I am reacting—my Epistle [first book of Hojas Susurrantes] and anti-Christianity—against a father and a mother who no longer exist!”
I wrote that, as I said, in 1988. Today, twenty-seven years later, the dementors still persecute me somehow, although in a very much attenuated way compared to my youth. What I want to get is that, if the perpetrator does not recognize his fault, the mental virus transferred to the adult child goes out of control. If my father had been like, say, my very Catholic friend Paulina (who almost daily goes to church), another would be my story. It is not enough to point out the beautiful verses of Matthew to counterbalance the threats of Jesus about Gehenna in that same gospel. It is necessary to recognize that one committed an outrage when “educating” the son in the Christian doctrine of damnation. In one of her letters that she sent me to England by the end of the century, Paulina wrote to me: “Also, since you are not a believer, and you feel that religion was the first reason for your father to crucify you [my emphasis], you must hate religion. And I understand you. And for you it does not make sense to go to church, to say things you do not believe. And that also caused you harm (hell, torture, sadism).”
My father is not like my humble friend. In a dream I had my unconscious caricaturing him, putting in his mouth these words: “I am very Catholic because I only think of my salvation.” To understand the parental egotism that affected me so much, the religious mechanism with which he defended himself from his early sufferings must be analyzed.
 
God for Miller fans
When I returned from California in my twenty-ninth year, I was not only an extremely damaged young man but also extremely naive. I left in the television room [of my parents’ house] a number of books in English that I had brought in such a way that their covers wore the face of Jesus so that my father could see them. At that time I still believed that it was possible to negotiate my father’s faith with solid arguments.
Let us take into account that with the words of Jesus it “sufficed him,” and what he would tell me during the confrontation of the crucifix [recounted in a previous chapter]: that the fact that the miracles were interwoven with the teachings of Jesus implied that the story was true. I arrived in Mexico in February 1988. By the end of 1989 I began to familiarize myself with the skeptical criticism of the allegations of the paranormal by writers whose magazine I subscribed to, The Skeptical Inquirer. It was thanks to these skeptics that I saw clearly that reasoning like those of my father was fallacious. For example, that the (supposed) goodness of the teachings of Jesus demonstrates the historicity of his miracles cannot be sustained. “Logical systems get in trouble,” I paraphrase now from one of the articles in The Skeptical Inquirer, “when they are forced to show their own logic to demonstrate its claims self-referentially.”
When on another occasion I confronted my father with what I had read in those books whose covers he saw, I argued that the killing of the innocents could not be historical, as the historian Josephus, who belonged to the Hebrew priestly caste, does not mention it. (This historian of the 1st century did not silence any of Herod’s authentically historical cruelties.) My father got angry, but he did not answer my argument. While it is more reasonable to assume that the verses of Matthew and Luke about the killing of the innocents are literary fiction, by pure reason I would never get to communicate with him. However, the writers of the CSICOP (acronym of Committee for the Skeptical Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal), as this group was then called, had a great limitation. Those who helped me overcome my belief in the miraculous narrative did not reach the core of the problem: the defense mechanism. If my grandfather and the elementary school [in the early 1930s] had not tormented the child César [my father], the adult César would not have clung to the idea of a dad God with the impregnable faith that he did. For Alice Miller, a child whose childhood was lived in an atmosphere of respect is perfectly capable of developing his self without needing the idea of a personal God; preferring, instead, human models. The child destined to be my father could not develop his psyche with worldly models. He had to project the parental luminous side onto the deity of the same religion that his parents taught him.
About five years before I wrote the Epistle [ca. 1983], my father had confessed something important that I picked up right there in the old epistle. He was in his youth completely devastated by something terrible that had happened to him, that he did not specify. He opened the gospels and, according to his words, saw the passage “Come blessed of my father…!” If, for theists like my father, a kind Father has replaced the failed human father, we should not be surprised if they experience great fear upon discovering that this substitute Father also has a dark side. My father does not know English and he did not read what I brought from the United States, but from my Spanish books he borrowed without me knowing Respuesta a Job (Answer to Job) published in 1952 by Carl Jung, of which he told me “I read everything.”
At his late seventy-six years, the Swiss psychologist had dared to uncover the dark side of the God of Hebrews and Christians. The same year that I wrote the Epistle I wrote down in Answer to Job that my father had exclaimed: “A terrible book!” with great emphasis on his voice when pronouncing “terrible.” Jung’s essay had disturbed him so much that he had to read a pious text about Job to console himself. What Jung said about the Judeo-Christian deity is valuable to those who have entered the underworld whose door Miller opened. In May of 1991, three years after the anecdote recounted above, I noted down on the back cover of Answer to Job: “This is the only book I know of that does not criticize religion or Christians or the church: it criticizes God itself.” I could not say it better today, almost a quarter of a century later. Later that year I noted down that Jung had tried to psychoanalyze God. Much later, in my rereading of 2005, I wrote down:

It is amazing how Miller-like this book can be if we only know the ABC of the mind that Jung did not know. Just replace “Yahweh” with “father” and “God” with “mother” and see what you find.
Read for example pages 25f (“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without wisdom?”). They remind me of the conversation I had with my sister in 2000, the day of the cut tree, about dad: “And who are you to…?” he said to my sister. And page 28 (“Yahweh shows Job his omnipotence with so many thunder and lightning”) seems to portray how he treated me in my last confrontation, in 2004 [recounted in my book’s previous chapter]. On page 31 Jung says what for a long time I have said: pride is the other side of infantilism.

Pride is the other side of infantilism. How many times have I told myself this when diagnosing my father! Almost at the beginning of his essay, Jung observes something that could be applied to my initiative to confront my father for what he did, citing the Bible: “Job ‘wanted to reason with God’ (Job, 13:3). Job says ‘I will defend my ways before him’ (13, 15).” Nice phrase, which could summarize what I have written in hundreds of pages: defend my ways before my parents and their witch doctors. Precisely as it was extremely naive of me to hope that whoever destroyed me could, at the same time, listen to my complaint, that same ingenuity had been committed by Job on another level. (Actually, on the same level if we consider that the theistic narrative is nothing but the internal struggle with the parental introjects.) In the context of the supposed goodness of Yahweh, observes Jung: “From a man who does us evil we can not wait that helps us at the same time,” and already openly psychoanalyzing God he adds something that we could impute to either of my parents: “The dependence of the object is absolute when the subject does not possess self-reflection, and, consequently, does not have any vision of oneself.” Like any toxic parent—I would say—, about our parental deities Jung writes: “But Yahweh is too unconscious to be ‘moral’. Morality presupposes conscience.”
What better indication that the idea of God is nothing but the projection of our unresolved, attachment system with our parents! (keep in mind Colin Ross’ class). From this angle, the idea of providence is a parental shadow insofar as it is so full of the dark side that we see ourselves in the need to project it outwards: something that Jung himself was afraid to say. Nevertheless, the Swiss dared to write: “It was natural that humanity, superior to God in certain aspects, should remain unconscious”—unaware of the ultimate nature of the deity. The dissident disciple of Freud wrote the following in the text that scared dad: “Yahweh does not show signs of doubt, repentance or compassion, but only of cruelty and disregard. Yahweh cannot come here with the excuse of unconsciousness, for he flagrantly violates at least three of the commandments that he himself had promulgated at Sinai.”
This brings back to me the fact that my moral was founded on the moralistic tablets of my father. Recall the [1960s] anecdote of Hojas Susurrantes about the “instantaneous introject” when a swarthy boy threw a stone at a helpless crab on the beach. Unfortunately, and parallel to how my father did not regret what he was doing to us, on the next page Jung writes: “Yahweh does not think… of giving Job at least some moral compensation.” And two pages ahead what he says seems to be a reflection of the mentioned speech to Germancito [my nephew], when my father blamed me for my sister’s behavior: “Yahweh puts things backwards, so to speak, and blames Job for what he himself does: man must not be allowed to have any opinion about God.”
Shadow projected to the deity: “Parents should never be judged,” my mother has told me several times. And it is that “Yahweh pays so little attention to the person of Job… that it is not difficult to see that he is totally occupied with himself,” which brings back the penetrating observation of Pedro Martín Moreno and Scott Peck about evil. Later Jung speaks of the “fear of Yahweh to become conscious,” which also brings back the fear of parents like mine to see their behavior.

Yahweh can project, without frowning, his face shadows on man, and remain unconscious at the expense of him…
Job knew Yahweh only of “hearsay.” But now he has experienced the reality of Yahweh even more than David himself. This is an important lesson, which should not be forgotten. Job was once a simpleton; he had come to dream of a “good” God… he believed that God was truthful and faithful…

But to his horror, Job has seen that Yahweh is not a man, but that, in a certain way, he is less than a man, and that he is the same thing that Yahweh says of the Leviathan: “He is king over all the proud” (Job, 41:34).

The mistreated son by his father must not expect moral satisfaction from an intrinsically unconscious being. “I am an amoral natural power, a purely phenomenal force, that does not see its own back.” Job, the son at the complete mercy of the Father whose voice of thunder crushes him when he dared to confront him, becomes, secretly, judge of the divinity.
The author of Answer to Job closes the book’s chapter with these words: “The drama has been consummated for all eternity: the double nature of Yahweh has been revealed, and someone or something has seen and recorded it.”

Categories
James Mason Judeo-reductionism

On James Mason

by Jack Halliday

In response to Mason’s opinion about Trump in this article and a previous one: The idea that Trump is some victim of the Jewish media is utter nonsense. He willingly appointed Jews into his cabinet. In fact, he had more Jews during his path to Presidency supporting him than any other candidate during the election.
Why is it that when the System seemingly does something “good” (a subjective term), people attribute it to Trump personally, but when the System does something bad, it is attributed to “Jewish influence”, something that is supposedly being done behind Donald’s back. The Daily Stormer does this dumb shit all the time. And now Mason is doing it.
The fact that he is a “reformer” who wants to build a wall is obviously a tactical move to make White Americans think somebody gives a shit about them. He is doing nothing whatsoever to advance White interests. He is still a Zionist and a Mammon worshipper who is sending Americans to their deaths for the sake of our racial enemies. He is as much an ally as Clinton, Obama and Reagan.
As for James Mason’s Christian Identity (CI) conversion: I am extremely disappointed and bereaved about this. I have never met the man, but I feel like I have lost a good friend. Probably the way people felt when GLR was murdered. Every time he says anything regarding CI and British Israelism, like in the article above, I simply feel a tinge of pessimism and disappointment wash over me. How could a man who wrote SIEGE and who spread the truth on Charles Manson suddenly become a schizophrenic lunatic?
I know nothing about his personal life, but what emotional void does his cranky belief system fill? I am not trying to sound rude here, I have the utmost respect for him, but this is slowly dwindling. The whole affair is really quite depressing to me.

Categories
Matt Koehl Metaphysics of race / sex

Faith of the Future, 7

by Matt Koehl

 

VII. The Faith of Adolf Hitler

Beyond its purely intellectual aspect, the revolutionary Idea of Adolf Hitler contains an added dimension, to which one must turn to discover the source of its ineluctable attraction—its compelling magic, as it were. It is from its sentient—its emotional—content that one must reduce the secret of its extraordinary mystique—just as it is here that one cannot help but perceive its nuclear potential as the mythos of a new age. For it is not by logic and reason that great, earth-shaking movements are impelled, but by the unfathomable force of suprarational faith subjectively felt by the adherents of such a movement.
In the arena of great world events, even the most rational of ideas must take on the character of subjective faith—or remain forever condemned to the realm of sterile abstraction. It must, in other words, proceed beyond the understanding of the mind to an appreciation of the heart. Only thus does it assume that mysterious and inexplicable quality which guarantees success.
If we examine the various individual features of the National Socialist idea—its views on such fundamental concepts as race, personality, the state, work, struggle and Nature, for example—we find that these do not, even when taken together, suffice to explain the curious fascination surrounding its manifestation. For that we must turn, ultimately, to the personality of its author. For in the person of Adolf Hitler, the Idea undergoes fusion into a transcendent whole which is greater than the sum of its parts. Only in a subjective appreciation of this phenomenon and what it represents does the Idea become comprehensible.

* * *

Who, then, was Adolf Hitler? What was he?
Certainly, he bore the attributes of any man. He had two natural parents. He had flesh and blood. He ate and slept. He grew up, went to school, and worked for a living. He formed friendships, had personal likes and dislikes, became angry, but also had a warm sense of humor. He experienced joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. In other words, his were all the normal human experiences and emotions. He was, in fact, completely human.
Historically, of course, Adolf Hitler was something more. He was a great national leader and statesman. Where can one find a comparable instance of a humble man of the people rising—by sheer will, determination and genius in the face of every conceivable obstacle and odd—to leadership of a great nation, liberating it from alien domination, purging it of racial and moral decay, and building within it a regime of national unity and social justice?
Where was there a similar statesman who, singlehandedly, was able to halt the seemingly inexorable advance of Communism across the face of a continent? Where else was there a leader who was able to lift his country—a country defeated in war and burdened with unbearable reparations—up out of economic and social misery and restore it to a position of prosperity, dignity and pride, while other nations sickened in the throes of a Great Depression? Where in all of history was there ever a ruler who enjoyed greater popular support?
Yet, it is beyond his manifest role as an outstanding national leader and statesman, as well as his obvious humanity, that we must look to discover the essential person of Adolf Hitler. Specifically, it is in the domain of the extrahistorical—i.e., in that area outside the normal historical process—that we must turn to find the true identity of the figure who stood in our midst just a few short generations ago. For although his life’s work continues to exercise an ongoing effect, its real meaning cannot be disclosed through the usual investigations of historiography.

* * *

More than one observer has commented on a certain strange, compelling quality which seemed to emanate from the person of Adolf Hitler. Kubizek, for example, has described the remarkable incident on the Freinberg.[1] Others have reported similar, if less dramatic, experiences in their own personal encounters with Hitler. And not only did this mysterious quality manifest itself in such individual meetings, but before larger audiences as well. Even persons who were not German and not National Socialist have testified to the singular ability of Adolf Hitler to articulate the unspoken feelings and aspirations of his listeners as though he were giving utterance to their innermost thoughts and emotions.
Recalling a Hitler rally which she attended in 1930, one Social Democratic writer described the phenomenon in this way: “The audience was breathlessly under his spell. This man expressed their thoughts, their feelings, their hopes; a new prophet had arisen—many even saw in him another Christ…” [2]
That he was able to affect his contemporaries in this manner is in itself remarkable. What is even more extraordinary and amazing, however, is the ability of Adolf Hitler to exert a continuing charismatic effect on generations which were not even born during his mortal lifetime! He still seems to articulate our deepest, most heartfelt feelings and longings as Aryans. He seems to strike a flawless chord with our innermost being. When he speaks, there is an immanent awareness that we are actually listening to the sound of our own inner voice. So perfect is his relation to our racial psyche that it is as though he has become one with it. We have the feeling that here before us is the consummate expression of the collective unconscious of our race.
It is as though we are confronted by an awesome presence, by a timeless charisma. Indeed, there is a certain enigmatic aura surrounding the figure of Adolf Hitler which seems to transcend all barriers of time and space. When we mention his name, we sense that we are speaking of more than a historical phenomenon; we allude to something which is eternal and infinite. We have the feeling that we are referring not only to the past, but to the present and future as well. Instinctively, we sense that here was more than just another man, that here was someone quite extraordinary.
The truth is that in Adolf Hitler we are confronted by a phenomenon which defies all objective analysis and rational explanation. Indeed, it is one which can only be understood in its symbolic, or representative, role—that is, through mythos interpretation. For only in the realm of the mythos—of the epic, the saga and legend—do we find those elements adequate to describe this most unusual personality. Only through a process of apotheosis can we hope to achieve a coherent understanding of the true reality of this remarkable figure. Only then do the various facets of his earthly life and career submit to plausible explanation.
Accordingly, we may proceed to a recognition that this very unusual being did, indeed, bear a divine mandate. He was, indeed, the instrument of a higher destiny. He was, indeed, endowed by Providence with a special mission. And, indeed, may he be described as an incarnation of the Absolute—of that great, ineffable Force without beginning or end, which rules and dominates this universe and determines the destinies of men.
Intuitively we recognize that represented here is something elemental, something primal—something that goes back to the very foundation of the world. We perceive that this singular figure was/is a manifestation of the will of the Eternal in corpore; that he was/is the voice of the Almighty, the word—the logos—spoken anew to modem man; that, indeed, he was/is the herald of a new age here on earth.
At the same time, we recognize him as the perfect personification of our racial soul. He is our consciousness and our conscience. In him is our racial will made manifest. In him do we see embodied the highest hopes and aspirations of Aryan man.
And so, in paying homage to this extraordinary personality, we at the same time defer to our own soul and to the divine which lies within us. In immanent relationship with him and in the service of his Cause do our lives acquire purpose, meaning, value, relevance, direction, structure, significance. Without him, we have no worth; we are nothing—nil. With him, we are privileged to become part of a larger order—indeed, we possess the possibility of transcending the limitations of our own mortal existence.
This, then, is the One whom we are honored to call Führer—Leader—our spiritual guide, special gift of Providence, the One chosen to disclose the divine will, the divine ordinances to the present age.
Every human order contains an idea which is symbolic of its higher purpose and mission. And so it is, above all, as a symbol of a new age that the figure of Adolf Hitler must be seen. It may be stated that he represents the inner principle—the raison— of our entire racial existence, of our history, our destiny, our life. He stands as our eternal emblem before the world. He is our law and our guide as Aryans for all time to come. He is our hope, our redemption, our promise of victory.
Thus do we perceive the outline of a new, immanent reality in which the transfigured person of Adolf Hitler joins with regenerate Aryan man and the Absolute in mystic union to form the noble mythos of a new faith.
Already, the rudiments of this faith, the Hitler faith—Hitlerism— exist in wordless, inchoate form in the hearts of a small, but growing number. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, a sacred retinue is gathering in sworn bond of deathless loyalty and honor. Defiantly, its banner is raised. The prospect of battle stirs its blood. It hails the struggle— the awesome challenge. It awaits the coming storm.
A new dispensation now looms on the horizon. A new, transforming reality is rising. As the darkness of a dying civilization casts its lengthening shadow over a confused and despairing world, the faith of the future will shine forth ever more brightly as the one great, redeeming hope—the polar star of a new age and a resplendent New Order, one which will be guided and instructed by the immortal personality of the greatest figure ever to walk the face of this earth.

[1] August Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew, tr. E.V. Anderson (New York, N.Y., Tower Books, Inc., 1954), Chapter 10.
[2] Lilo Linke, Restless Days (New York, N.Y., A.A. Knopf, 1935), pp. 397-398.

Categories
Eschatology Indo-European heritage Matt Koehl Metaphysics of race / sex Philosophy of history

Faith of the Future, 6

by Matt Koehl

 

VI. Worldview of a New Age


Today we are witness to the death throes of a civilization. An entire order is collapsing. The Old cannot be restored. It is doomed.
The confusion and uncertainty we now see is but a prelude to the utter chaos and agony which awaits. When the bright star of civilization implodes, it creates a spiritual black hole, one which acts in the same awesome manner as its material counterpart. All spiritual reality is impacted into nothingness by anti-spirit, as it were. No purpose, no meaning, no values, no standards, no principles, no roots, no direction, no ideals, no truth, no honor, no beauty, no excellence, no order, no gods—nothing—remains. Only that which is able to distance itself from the old world and remove itself from its terrible gravitational pull can escape the all-consuming vortex of the collapse.
In this latter category will be found all those now spiritually alienated, who somehow manage to find their way to a new world. Today there exists a brooding sense of despair—a despair reflecting more than a mere loss of faith in some governmental regime or social system, but touching every aspect of life and existence. Men cry out for something to believe in, for something to guide and inform their lives. Perceptive minds are searching for purpose and direction, for a new focus of faith to replace that which has been hopelessly and irretrievably lost.
But where is such an idea, such a faith?
As has been noted, Aryan man has suffered for over a thousand years from a spiritual tension caused by the intrusion of alien ideology into his natural thought-world—a process which has distorted the culture of the West from the very beginning, and prevented the fulfillment of a higher mission. Not only was an incredible cosmology foisted upon the reluctant Aryan by the new creed, but he was forced to accept a statement of teleological purpose which amounted to a declaration of war against the natural order and its eternal laws.
God was divorced from his creation; Nature itself became suspect; the spirit was set at enmity with the flesh; man was declared inherently and hopelessly sinful; God became an external object—a remote, arbitrary, despotic figure—whom man should fear and before whom he should cringe and cower, God was also seen as kind and benevolent; accordingly, he was said to have agreed not to torment and torture man in perpetuity, as he had planned, if man in turn would consent to ritual expiation through one of his three parts. By implication, responsible, upright behavior was denigrated in favor of forgiveness through divine grace.
The preoccupation of religion in the West for over a millennium with the salvation of the individual “soul,” without regard for any larger racial considerations, has had the most disastrous consequences. Not only has it encouraged the grossest form of spiritual pettiness and selfishness, but it has had an even more harmful effect.
By assigning cardinal importance to individual salvation, it thereby downgraded the well-being of one’s own kind—of one’s folk and race—to something of lesser significance. The community of believers—red and yellow, black and white—was more precious in the sight of the Church fathers than the true community of flesh and blood, love for which was denounced as a species of “idolatry.” Whereupon the spiritual marrow of Aryan man was left to marinate in a moral concoction of meekness, mildness, resist-not-evil and love-thine-enemy.
Finally, coupled with all of the foregoing measures for moral disarmament, there was added a Judeolatrous component: Those of the House of Israel were conveniently exempted from all of the above, on the grounds that as Chosen Ones they should not be disturbed by such unnecessary considerations. The modem condition presents itself as the end result of this extraordinary doctrine.

* * *

The worldview of the future will differ radically from the Judeo-Christian outlook. It will proceed from a totally different perception of the human condition and its purpose.
It will be based, in the first instance, upon a profound respect and reverence for Nature, which it conceives as a timeless order without beginning or end but undergoing constant change and cyclic renewal , and which in its ultimate configuration is consubstantial with the divine, which it treats as subject rather than object.
It regards man as part of Nature, and proposes to restore the natural laws to their rightful place in human affairs—thus reforging the sacred link between man and Nature, a link which was shattered by Semitic ideology.
At the same time, it declares that for the conscious Aryan there can be no separation from the divine; that his god is not in some other world, but resides within the precincts of his own heart; and that a proper religious attitude is one of veneration, rather than one of fear.
Thus does it lift the burden of original sin and guilt from his shoulders and end his abasement before the Almighty, proclaiming his glorious nobility instead. It restores the essential wholeness of man, for in its view there can be no cleft between body and soul. It represents, finally, an affirmation—rather than a negation—of life, and teaches joyful heroism, defiant courage and manly resolve in the face of inexorable destiny, even when it involves gloom and despair, adversity and death.
Thus does the new Idea—by returning to traditional values of Aryan religiosity—free Aryan man from that inner tension which has characterized spiritual life in the West for the past millennium, and bring him into harmony with the laws of Nature and his own being. In a word, the outlook of the future reinstates Aryan man to a sound, natural condition, once again allowing unhindered expression for his native spirituality, as well as freeing him for the accomplishment of a great mission.
In so doing, it recalls the faith of our ancient forefathers, who lived in communion and rapport with Nature and enjoyed a fully developed religious life, which established the moral and ethical standards of their society and set the spiritual tone of their destiny.
Most importantly, by going back to the primal source of life itself, the new Idea is able to re-establish the primacy of race as the sacred premise for all higher existence on this earth. By thus raising the concept of race to an inviolable religious principle—indeed, to a moral imperative—it is able to speak to the paramount issue of modem time, the supreme biological/environmental issue, namely, the survival of Aryan man as the most advanced form of life on this planet.
Hence, not the salvation of a mere individual, but rather the salvation of an entire race is its vital concern. By contrast, any system of contemporary philosophical or religious thought which fails to address this fundamental question in an explicitly positive manner is irrelevant, meaningless and useless—if not downright harmful—to the cause of our continued existence.

* * *

And here it must be noted that the threat to our racial survival begins with spiritual causes; consequently, it can only be overcome by a solution which is spiritual in character. It is not from a lack of political alternatives or intellectual strategies that we suffer, but rather a more fundamental lack of will, courage, determination, dedication, commitment, integrity and overall morale—not to mention a lack of basic understanding and insight and a sense of true common identity. Whatever external dangers pose themselves derive, in the final analysis, from this internal problem.
Therefore, the question of racial survival must be seen as involving not only political and propagandistic activity, but must in the first place encompass a moral and spiritual mobilization. Without such a moral muster, all other efforts—however noble and valiant—must necessarily prove futile. The effects of decades and centuries of cultural decadence are simply too advanced and widespread to be overcome through political appeal alone.
The proper function of politics, of course, is to take people—in the mass—as they are and utilize them for a larger purpose. The spiritual condition of the Western masses is such, however, as to preclude any useful potential for revolutionary political activity at this time. Consequently, the first task of the contemporary Movement must be to establish a firm spiritual/moral base—a standard of absolute moral fixity—capable of attracting those alienated young idealists of our race who are searching for answers in a confused and despairing world, one which will influence their lives and transform them into dedicated partisans of the holiest of causes.
It is just such a strong spiritual foundation which must underlie any effective political action in the future.
There is an accompanying consideration. It must be recognized that the condition which prevails evolved over a long period of time and cannot be eliminated by instantaneous panacea, but only through a process of protracted struggle involving decades and generations. The integrity of such a struggle, however, can only be sustained by spiritual—i.e., religious—conviction and commitment, with the Movement often depending solely on its moral resources for continuity and survival. Therefore, the development of those resources as a critical necessity must assume the highest priority over every other consideration.

* * *

If the new Idea represented merely an instauration of traditional Aryan spiritual values and the natural outlook of pre-Christian times, along with an appeal for racial preservation, it certainly would possess relevance, meaning and utility; yet it would remain incomplete, and would not hold its dynamic, historic quality. For ultimately, every great historical idea embodies a special mission as well as a call for a new type of man.
What is unique about the Idea of the future is that it proposes to relieve the human condition by transcending it. It proclaims a higher destiny for Aryan man, and summons him toward a full realization of his potential for physical, spiritual and moral elevation—indeed, toward godhood—an undertaking so tragically stymied and stunted till now by the warped, deforming doctrines of an alien creed.
Nevertheless, it is precisely the possibility for such upward evolution toward a godlike race in the Nietzschean sense which assigns to the new Idea its higher purpose and meaning and gives to it its extraordinary, revolutionary character.
If we examine all of the ideological and spiritual trends of the past one hundred years, as well as those of the present time, it becomes immediately apparent that there is but one Idea which can conceivably qualify to serve as the formative principle of a post-Western, post-Christian world.
The coming dispensation will not involve so-called alternatives which are merely secularized outgrowths of the same underlying idea which is itself the cause of our present condition.
And here it must be emphasized that in the revolutionary convulsions which are coming, the neo-Semitic ideology of Karl Marx will have no more lasting significance than that of a cultural emetic. Whatever momentary power and success it enjoys is all ephemeral within a larger historical context—just as is that of all the gurus, fakirs and exotic, new cults from out of the East in these latter days of the twilight civilization.
In the contemporary world, an idea or conception may be viewed as either reactionary—and therefore transitory—or as revolutionary and enduring. Everything which tends to perpetuate the Old Order is reactionary. Everything which continues to work within the framework of the past is reactionary. Everything which tends to foster decadence is reactionary. All falsehood, all hypocrisy and opportunism are reactionary. As such, they are transitory and will not last. Only that which embraces hard reality and difficult truth will form part of something new and wonderful. Only it can truly be called revolutionary, for it will endure. It alone will furnish the spiritual foundation—the radiant nucleus—of a new age.
Today there is but one Idea which may be regarded as the regenerating seed of a revolutionary New Order; but one Idea which can serve as a spiritual standard for post-Western man; but one Idea which holds the key to the future. It is the magnificent and mighty Idea of Adolf Hitler.

Categories
Christendom Matt Koehl Philosophy of history

Faith of the Future, 4

by Matt Koehl

 

IV. Twilight of the West

As we have seen, the ultimate source of the decline of the West lies in the failure of the polar ideology, or mythos, which has formed its foundation. Once the dogmas of the dominant faith were effectively called into question and challenged—an unavoidable development, given the preposterous assertions of Christian doctrine on the one hand and the truth-seeking nature of Aryan man on the other—it was only a matter of time before the entire cultural order which rested upon it was itself called into doubt.
With the loss of belief in its guiding ideology—that is, with the dying out of Christianity—the West has lost faith in itself, and its death becomes inevitable. For the Christian worldview has stood at the very heart and soul of the West, permeating its art and culture. It was no accident, for instance, that in times past the term “Christendom” was synonymous with the West.
Cultures live and die with their gods. That the god of the West should have died was foreordained from the very beginning, and it is in this sense that Nietzsche’s celebrated pronouncement must be understood. For how could a Middle Eastern import permanently satisfy the real spiritual needs of Aryan man? Yahweh/Jehovah could murder Zeus and Jupiter, Odin and Thor. But how could he maintain forever the fiction that he was the real father of their children?
If we disregard all ephemeral revivalism, it can be clearly seen that the culture of the West has now reached the point of practical disbelief and atheism, a fact which is reflected in every field of modern cultural endeavor. Atonality and the eruption of alien rhythms in music, formlessness and insanity in painting and the plastic arts, cheapness and vulgarity in literature and on the stage, vapidity and grotesque ugliness of line in architecture—all of this bears disturbing witness to a spiritual, emptiness and sterility, to disorientation and a lack of direction, to an absence of values and standards and an ethos to inform artistic expression.
It is modern technology, however, which—by assuming a utilitarian function in a soulless, materialistic produce/consume society, rather than serving a higher cultural purpose—offers the conclusive statement that Western culture has nothing more to say. The West, as a culture, has exhausted all of its historical possibilities; it has no new direction in which it can go. This, of course, does not mean that Aryan man himself no longer possesses a creative capability. But this genius and talents must now find expression in a Western context. Western civilization itself cannot experience a rebirth. It has exploited and expended its potential and destroyed its one hope for a resurgence, and now it can only wallow in decadence and die. The Old Order is doomed.
Not only is the final collapse of the West inevitable, but for a New Order to emerge such a collapse is historically imperative. For only out of a new formation can there be the possibility of racial salvation for Aryan man. Indeed, this civilization must die, so that upon its ruins a new and greater culture may now rise. That is the meaning and message of contemporary events. That is the iron will of history.