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Catholic Church Catholic religious orders Christendom Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (book) Destruction of Greco-Roman world Emperor Julian Free speech / Free press Libanius Ovid

Darkening Age, 21

Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Story of Saint Paul: The Burning of the
Books at Ephesus
, designed ca. 1529, woven before 1546 (medium:
wool and silk, woven under the direction of Jan van der Vyst).

Editor’s note.Bold-typed emphasis in the last paragraph is mine. In chapter eleven of The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, Catherine Nixey wrote:

In Egypt, a fearsome monk and saint named Shenoute entered the house of a man suspected of being a pagan and removed all his books. The Christian habit of book-burning went on to enjoy a long history. A millennium later, the Italian preacher Savonarola wanted the works of the Latin love poets Catullus, Tibullus and Ovid to be banned while another preacher said that all of these ‘shameful books’ should be let go, because if you are Christians you are obliged to burn them’…

* * *

Before there had been competing philosophical schools, all equally valid, all equally arguable. Now, for the first time, there was right—and there was wrong. Now, there was what the Bible said—and there was everything else. And from now on any belief that was ‘wrong’ could, in the right circumstances, put you in grave danger.

As Dirk Rohmann has highlighted, Augustine said that works that opposed Christian doctrine had no place in Christian society and had scant time for much of Greek philosophy. The Greeks, Augustine said dismissively, ‘have no ground for boasting of their wisdom’. The Church’s authors were greater, and more ancient. John Chrysostom went far further. He described pagan philosophy as a madness, the mother of evils and a disease.

Classical literature was filled with the incorrect and demonic and it came under repeated and vicious attack from the Church Fathers. Atheism, science and philosophy were all targeted. The very idea that mankind could explain everything through science was, as Rohmann has shown, disparaged as folly. ‘Stay clear of all pagan books!’ the Apostolic Constitutions advised Christians bluntly. ‘For what do you have to do with such foreign discourses, or laws, or false prophets, which subvert the faith of the unstable?’ If you wish to read about history, it continued, ‘you have the Books of Kings; if philosophy and poetry, you have the Prophets, the Book of Job and the Proverbs, in which you will find greater depth of sagacity than in all of the pagan poets and philosophers because this is the voice of the Lord… Do therefore always stay clear of all such strange and diabolical books!’…

An accusation of ‘magic’ was frequently the prelude to a spate of burnings. In Beirut, at the turn of the sixth century, a bishop ordered Christians, in the company of civil servants, to examine the books of those suspected of this. Searches were made, books were seized from suspects and then brought to the centre of the city and placed in a pyre. A crowd was ordered to come and watch as the Christians lit this bonfire in front of the church of the Virgin Mary. The demonic deceptions and ‘barbarous and atheistic arrogance’ of these books were condemned as ‘everybody’ watched ‘the magic books and the demonic signs burn’. As with the destruction of temples, there was no shame in this…

What did the books burned on such occasions really contain? Doubtless some did contain ‘magic’—such practices were popular prior to Christianity and certainly didn’t disappear with its arrival. But they were not all. The list given in the life of St Simeon clearly refers to the destruction of books of Epicureanism, the philosophy that advocated the theory of atomism. ‘Paganism’ appears to have been a charge in itself—and while it could mean outlawed practices it could, at a stretch, refer to almost any antique text that contained the gods. Christians were rarely good chroniclers of what they burned.

Sometimes, clues to the texts remain. In Beirut, just before the bonfire of the books, pious Christians had gone to the house of a man suspected of owning books that were ‘hateful to God’. The Christians told him that they ‘wanted the salvation and recovery of his soul’; they wanted ‘liberation’. These Christians then entered his home, inspected his books and searched each room. Nothing was found—until the man was betrayed by his slave. Forbidden books were discovered in a secret compartment in a chair. The man whose house it was—clearly well aware of what such ‘liberation’ might involve—‘fell to the ground and begged us, in tears, not to hand him over to the law’. He was spared the law but forced to burn his books. As our chronicler Zachariah records with pleasure, ‘when the fire was lit he threw the books of magic into it with his own hands, and said that he thanked God who had granted him with his visit and liberated him from the slavery and error of demons’. One of the books removed from the house in Beirut is mentioned: it is very possible it was not magic but a history by a disapproved-of Egyptian historian.

Divination and prophecy were often used as pretexts to attack a city’s elite. One of the most infamous assaults on books and thinkers took place in Antioch. Here, at the end of the fourth century, an accusation of treasonous divination led to a full-scale purge that targeted the city’s intellectuals. By sheer chance, Ammianus Marcellinus, a non-Christian and one of the finest historians of the era, happened to be in the city; a wonderful piece of luck for later historians and wretched luck for the man himself, who was horrified. As Ammianus describes it,

the racks were set up, and leaden weights, cords, and scourges put in readiness. The air was filled with the appalling yells of savage voices mixed with the clanking of chains, as the torturers in the execution of their grim task shouted: ‘Hold, bind, tighten, more yet.’

A noble of ‘remarkable literary attainments’ was one of the first to be arrested and tortured; he was followed by a clutch of philosophers who were variously tortured, burned alive and beheaded. Educated men in the city who had considered themselves fortunate now, Damocles-like, realized the fragility of their fortune. Looking up, it was as if they saw ‘swords hung over their heads suspended by horse-hairs from the ceiling’.

And, once again, there was the burning of books as bonfires of volumes were used as post-hoc justification for the slaughter. Ammianus Marcellinus writes with distaste that

innumerable books and whole heaps of documents, which had been routed out from various houses, were piled up and burnt under the eyes of the judges. They were treated as forbidden texts to allay the indignation caused by the executions, though most of them were treatises on various liberal arts and on jurisprudence. 

Many intellectuals started to pre-empt the persecutors and set light to their own books. The destruction was extensive and ‘throughout the eastern provinces whole libraries were burnt by their owners for fear of a similar fate; such was the terror which seized all hearts’. Ammianus wasn’t the only intellectual to be scared in these decades. The orator Libanius burned a huge number of his own works…

* * *

The Great Library of Alexandria might have attempted to collect books on every topic, but Christianity was going to be considerably more selective…

One surviving Byzantine manuscript of Ovid has been scarred by a series of ridiculous redactions—even the word ‘girl’ seems to have been considered too racy to remain. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jesuits were still censoring and bowdlerizing their editions of the classics. Individual abbots, far from Umberto Eco’s avenging intellectual ideal, sometimes censored their own libraries. At some point in the fifteenth century, a note was left in a mutilated manuscript in Vienna. ‘At this point in the book,’ it records, ‘there were thirteen leaves containing works by the apostate Julian; the abbot of the monastery… read them and realised that they were dangerous, so he threw them into the sea.’

Much classical literature was preserved by Christians. Far more was not. To survive, manuscripts needed to be cared for, recopied. Classical ones were not. Medieval monks, at a time when parchment was expensive and classical learning held cheap, simply took pumice stones and scrubbed the last copies of classical works from the page. Rohmann has pointed out that there is even evidence to suggest that in some cases ‘whole groups of classical works were deliberately selected to be deleted and overwritten in around AD 700, often with texts authored by [the fathers of the Church or by] legal texts that criticised or banned pagan literature’. Pliny, Plautus, Cicero, Seneca, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Livy and many, many more: all were scrubbed away by the hands of believers…

The texts that suffer in this period are the texts of the wicked and sinful pagans. From the entirety of the sixth century only ‘scraps’ of two manuscripts by the satirical Roman poet Juvenal survive and mere ‘remnants’ of two others, one by the Elder and one by the Younger Pliny.

From the next century there survives nothing save a single fragment of the poet Lucan.

From the start of the next century: nothing at all.

Far from mourning the loss, Christians delighted in it. As John Chrysostom crowed, the writings ‘of the Greeks have all perished and are obliterated’. He warmed to the theme in another sermon: ‘Where is Plato? Nowhere! Where Paul? In the mouths of all!’

The fifth-century writer Theodoret of Cyrrhus observed the decline of Greek literature with similar enthusiasm. ‘Those elaborately decorated fables have been utterly banned,’ he gloated. ‘Who is today’s head of the Stoic heresy? Who is safeguarding the teachings of the Peripatetics?’ No one, evidently, for Theodoret concludes this homily with the observation that ‘the whole earth under the sun has been filled with sermons’.

Augustine contentedly observed the rapid decline of the atomist philosophy in the first century of Christian rule. By his time, he recorded, Epicurean and Stoic philosophy had been ‘suppressed’—the word is his. The opinions of such philosophers ‘have been so completely eradicated and suppressed… that if any school of error now emerged against the truth, that is, against the Church of Christ, it would not dare to step forth for battle if it were not covered under the Christian name’…

Much was preserved. Much, much more was destroyed. It has been estimated that less than ten per cent of all classical literature has survived into the modern era. For Latin, the figure is even worse: it is estimated that only one hundredth of all Latin literature remains. If this was ‘preservation’—as it is often claimed to be—then it was astonishingly incompetent. If it was censorship, it was brilliantly effective. The ebullient, argumentative classical world was, quite literally, being erased.

Categories
Catholic Church

A message for Catholics

A few days ago some Santería practitioners ritually sacrificed a poor chicken and they came to throw the decapitated corpse at the corner of my house in Mexico City.

I want you to know that I blame the Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation, brought here by the Spanish and Portuguese, of these cruelties with animals.

If the Iberians had practiced ethnic cleansing in Latin America as the English did in the northern countries, there would be no reminiscence of ritual sacrifices in this part of the continent. Remember that, before the Conquest, the Amerindians practiced the sacrifice of children, as I explain in Day of Wrath. When the Spaniards banned such sacrifices, the Amerindians simply transferred their cruelty towards these poor animals.

Christian love for the Other is not only murdering the white race: it is contributing to a kind of cruelty to animals that is easier to outlaw in those nations that were Aryan. The Catholicism that the Europeans brought to the Americas—Thou shalt not ethnically cleanse; just marry the Indian women!—is a damn shit, recognise it.

Categories
2nd World War Evil Summer, 1945 (book) Thomas Goodrich

Summer 1945 • 3

Of all the graphic photos I have viewed in my years of research, the most horrific is not the smoldering bodies at Dresden after the fire­ storm, not the German women and children flattened by Soviet tanks on a snowy road in East Prussia, but that of the bodies at Dachau. No, not the bodies; not the emaciated concentration camp inmates who died not from a deliberate policy of extermination—as we have been told for decades now by the victors—not those, not those who had succumbed in the late stages of the war to typhus, diphtheria, dysentery, starvation, and neglect. No, the bodies I speak of were German bodies, German soldiers. And the photo is graphic not merely for the obvious; the photo is hideous more for what is not actually seen, than what is. There is a crushing, paralyzing oppression in the gray tones of the image; there is an overwhelming sense of evil in the very air; there is a terrifying embodiment of hate and malice in the forms of the Americans as they mechanically, and with utter detachment, go about their inhuman business.

As US forces swept through Bavaria toward Munich in late April, 1945, most German guards at the concentration camp near Dachau wisely fled. To maintain control and arrange for an orderly transfer of the 32,000 prisoners to the approaching Allies, and despite signs at the gate warning, “No entrance-typhus epidemic,” several hundred German soldiers obeyed when they were ordered to the prison.

When American units reached the camp the following day, the GIs were horrified by what they saw. Outside the prison were rail cars brim full with diseased and starved corpses. Inside the camp, wrote a witness, were found “a room piled high with naked and emaciated corpses… Since all the many bodies were in various stages of decomposition, the stench of death was overpowering.”

Unhinged by the nightmare surrounding them, conditioned by years of vicious anti-German propaganda, the troops turned their fury on the now disarmed German soldiers. While one group of over three hundred were led away to a walled enclosure, other Germans were murdered in the guard towers, in the barracks, or they were chased through the streets. All were soon caught and many were deliberately wounded in the legs, then turned over to camp inmates who first tortured, then tore limb from limb the helpless men and boys.

A German guard came running toward us. We grabbed him and were standing there talking to him when… [a GI] came up with a tommy-gun. He grabbed the prisoner, whirled him around and said, “There you are you son-of -a-bitch!” The man was only about three feet from us, but the soldier cut him down with his sub-machine gun. I shouted at him, “what did you do that for, he was a prisoner?” He looked at me and screamed “Gotta kill em, gotta kill em.” When I saw the look in his eyes and the machine gun waving in the air, I said to my men, “Let him go.” [1] 

While the tortures and murders were in progress, 350 German soldiers were lined up against a wall, two machine-guns were planted, then the Americans opened fire. Those yet alive when the fusillade ended, including the three young men still standing, were forced to wait amid the bloody carnage while the machine-guns were reloaded.

___________

[1] Howard Buechner, Dachau—The Hour of the Avenger(Metarie, Louisiana: Thunderbird Press, 1986), 75-76.

Categories
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn Psychology Revilo Oliver Thomas Goodrich

Gravitas

Five years ago I said on this site: I am writing this entry from a borrowed computer. It now looks like I’ll need some time to stabilize my financial situation, probably overseas, to the point of resuming my blogging. Meanwhile I’d like to add something to what I had said in previous entries, that in order to understand our woes you must purchase and read a copy of Tom Goodrich’s Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany (1944-1947).Readers of this book have complained a lot that a detailed account of the Allies’ atrocities committed during and after the Second World War—a true Holocaust of German victims—is too ghastly and painful to contemplate. The author himself told me that he died ‘a thousand deaths’ while writing Hellstorm.In his Archipelago Solzhenitsyn said that in prison you have to ‘eat a mountain’ of pain to be able to metamorphose your soul instead of becoming mad, as other zeks became mad in the Gulag. He meant to go across the Dark Night of the Soul all the way through the other side. Some passages of his book convey beautifully what I want to say here.

Recently Andrew Anglin, in his first article on his critical series of the white nationalist movement, mentioned George Lincoln Rockwell, William Pierce and David Lane as the background of today’s movement. Anglin made it clear that the new generation of nationalists did not rely on these names, as the chain had been broken. Anglin says that the new generation of American nationalists emerged from internet chats.

It is curious, but it is just this new generation of nationalists, to which Anglin himself belongs, the ones who are unable to delve into the subject of white decline—precisely because the chain of what was left of the spirit of National Socialism after WWII was broken. I mean the spirit not only of Rockwell but Pierce’s clever books, or the very learned texts by Revilo Oliver.

The figure of Oliver has always reminded me of the American aristocrats that I saw in the black-and-white films when I was a child (aristocrats not in the sense of riches, but of the educated bourgeoisie of a nation). If there is something antithetical to the aristocrat Oliver, it is precisely the vulgar kids who contribute and comment not only to Anglin’s blog but to other similar sites.

The neo-Nazis of today boast of naming the Jew constantly, but are incapable of telling the plot of a single opera by Richard Wagner, something inconceivable in real Nazis when my parents were children, or among learned Americans in Oliver’s generation. In the movement of white nationalism, people like Tom Sunic are the exception when it comes to what in Europe is considered an intellectual: a man with vast knowledge of History and Literature.

I cannot take the authors of the Occidental Observer seriously in this regard as they aren’t as radical as the real Nazis; or like Rockwell, Pierce and Oliver. For example, unlike the Observer, Pierce and Oliver knew perfectly well how toxic Christianity has been for Aryan and Western preservation. I cannot take Counter-Currents seriously either. Its anti-Nordicist editor would be considered a charlatan from the National Socialist viewpoint. For example, CC’s editor has said, ‘There is no evidence that Rome fell due to race-mixing’. Compare it with what a Swedish scholar who died in the times when I used to watch the above-mentioned films wrote about racial mixing and Roman decline.

But I am not talking to older folks such as those who contribute to the Observer or Counter-Currents. Young people in the United States should be modelled after the aristocrat Revilo Oliver instead of pubertal sites where one competes for who produces more LOLs. Just eat the mountain of pain that Solzhenitsyn talked about. Reading Solzhenitsyn and Goodrich is the only way to get out of the frivolity of those sites and develop the proper gravitas.

Last week I told a female friend that my gravitas is so severe that even when, unexpectedly, my sister—the only family member I loved—died in January 2016, I hugged nobody or shed a single tear in public. (They did embrace themselves sobbing, as everyone does at funerals.)

Categories
New Testament On the Historicity of Jesus (book) Richard Carrier

Unhistorical Jesus, 2

An icon of Saint Mark the Evangelist

 
How we know Mark was the earliest Gospel

How did students of the four Gospels determine that the earliest of them is Mark? The answer is fairly simple and the case is overwhelmingly clear. How certain is the conclusion? It is so certain that only a small percentage of scholars hold to any other theory. The large agreement among different interpreters of the Gospels that Mark came first is for a simply reason. That reason is what happens when you lay side by side the three “Synoptic” Gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

These three Gospels have been called “Synoptic,” a word which means “seeing together,” because they share in common a large amount of material, follow the same basic order, and stand apart from John, whose Gospel is unique among the four.

Long ago people realized you could display the text of the three Synoptic Gospels side by side in columns to form a synopsis or parallel Gospel or a harmony. When you do this you find that a large percentage of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are parallel. They share a large amount of verbatim agreement, though each of the three has unique ways of diverging from each other in small and large matters. Much is the same and some is different.

For a long time, people who have studied the Gospels in synopsis (parallel columns) have referred to “the Synoptic Problem.” That problem is: how do we account for the agreements and differences in the parallel accounts and in the other material in the Gospels? Many of the observations I will share here come from a book that I think is the simplest and best-explained handbook on the topic, by Mark Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s note: The rest of the above article may be read: here.

I must refer again to the bold-typed words in the first instalment of this series. For those priests of the 14 words who are knowledgeable about the secular approaches to the New Testament, the implications of those bolded words are enormous. But for white nationalists who are not so educated in this matter, before you continue reading my Mondays’ essay-review of Carrier’s book, I would recommend a little online research to become familiar with the evidence that Mark was the earliest of the four canonical gospels.

This is fundamental, as the other gospels are mere re-writings of the original Mark gospel, where the authors added fictional material of their own to an already fictional talltale.

Categories
Ancient Greece Eleusis Julian (novel) Literature Zeus

Julian, 53

Henryk Siemiradzki, Phryne at the Festival of Poseidon in Eleusis

VIII

Julian Augustus

A week after I arrived in Athens I met the Hierophant of Greece. Since I did not want the proconsul to know of this meeting, it was arranged to take place in the Library of Hadrian, a not much frequented building midway between the Roman and the Athenian agoras.

At noon I arrived at the library and went straight to the north reading room, enjoying as I always do the musty dry odour of papyrus and ink which comes from the tall niches where the scrolls and codices are kept. The high room with its coffered ceiling (for which we must thank Antinoüs’s protector) was empty. Here I waited for the Hierophant. I was extremely nervous, for he is the holiest of all men. I am forbidden by law to write his name but I can say that he belongs to the family of the Eumolpidae, one of the two families from which Hierophants are traditionally drawn. He is not only High Priest of Greece, he is custodian and interpreter of the mysteries of Eleusis which go back at least two thousand years, if not to the beginning of our race.

Those of us who have been admitted to the mysteries may not tell what we have seen or what we know. Even so, as Pindar wrote: “Happy is he who, having seen these rites, goes below the hollow earth; for he knows the end of life and he knows its god-sent beginning.” Sophocles described initiates as “Thrice-happy mortals, who having seen those rites depart for Hades; for them alone is it granted to have true life there; to the rest, evil.” I quote from memory. (Note to secretary: Correct quotations, if they are wrong.)

Eleusis is a city fourteen miles from Athens. For two thousand years the mysteries have been celebrated in that place, for it was at Eleusis that Persephone returned from the underworld to which she had been stolen by the death-god Hades and made his queen. When Persephone first vanished, her mother Demeter, the harvest goddess, sought her for nine days, neither eating nor drinking. (As I tell this story initiates will see the mystery unfold. But no one else may know what is meant.) On the tenth day Demeter came to Eleusis. She was received by the king and queen, who gave her a pitcher of barley water flavoured with mint which she drank all at once. When the king’s eldest son said, “How greedily you drink!” Demeter turned him into a lizard. But then, remorseful over what she had done, she conferred great powers upon the king’s youngest son, Triptolemus. She gave him seed corn, a wooden plough and a chariot drawn by serpents; he then travelled the earth teaching men agriculture. She did this for him not only to make up for what in her anger she had done to his brother, but also because Triptolemus was able to tell her what had happened to her daughter. He had been in the fields when the earth suddenly opened before him. Then a chariot drawn by black horses appeared, coming from the sea. The driver was Hades; in his arms he held Persephone. As the chariot careered at full speed into the cavern, the earth closed over them. Now Hades is brother to Zeus, king of the gods, and he had stolen the girl with Zeus’s connivance. When Demeter learned this, she took her revenge. She bade the trees not to bear fruit and the earth not to flower. Suddenly, the world was barren. Men starved. Zeus capitulated: if Persephone had not yet eaten the food of the dead, she might return to her mother. As it turned out, Persephone had eaten seven pomegranate seeds and this was enough to keep her forever in the underworld. But Zeus arranged a compromise. Six months of the year she would remain with Hades, as queen of Tartarus. The remaining six months she would join her mother in the world above. That is why the cold barren time of the year is six months and the warm fruitful time six months. Demeter also gave the fig tree to Attica, and forbade the cultivation of beans. This holy story is acted out in the course of the mysteries. I cannot say more about it. The origin of the ceremony goes back to Crete and, some say, to Libya. It is possible that those places knew similar mysteries, but it is a fact that Eleusis is the actual place where Persephone returned from the underworld. I have myself seen the cavern from which she emerged.

Now: for those who have been initiated, I have in the lines above given in the form of a narrative a clear view of what happens after death. Through number and symbol, I have in a page revealed everything. But the profane may not unravel the mystery. They will merely note that I have told an old story of the old gods.

Categories
Miscellany

Lacrimae lunae

sticky post

Why white nationalism is massively flawed from the point of view of National Socialism can be seen: here. Even their revolutionary wing borders lunacy. This site provides a cure for lunatics through access code to the finis Africae.

A couple of banned books of the finis Africae are Rome contra Judea; Judea contra Rome and Hellstorm: the best-kept secret in modern history, the holocaust that the Allies perpetrated in Germany. If you think the news is fake, wait until you learn about History!

(This site is only a bare backup of the original: https://westsdarkesthour.com)

Categories
Daybreak Publishing Fair Race’s Darkest Hour (book) On the Historicity of Jesus (book)

2019 edition

I recently flipped through the copy of the 2014 edition of The Fair Race that I own and was surprised that, since that year, I have eliminated no less than… fifty essays!

Many of the removed essays were brief, as the 2014 edition has 432 letter-size pages. Unlike that clumsy size for the first edition, the most recent ones of The Fair Race are of regular size for printed books. The 2019 edition for instance (pic above) contains 580 pages.

In the prologue of this last edition I mention the impact that, since the end of last year, Richard Carrier’s book has caused in my vision about the historicity of Jesus. For the same reason, I removed a footnote I had added, in the 2018 edition, within Evropa Soberana’s essay, ‘Rome vs. Judea; Judea vs. Rome’. On that note, now obsolete, you see that the previous year I still believed that there could have existed an ordinary Jew who became deified by the primitive Christian community. Now I believe that the whole story about Jesus was an invention of Mark the Evangelist. To understand the whys see the bold letters in my first essay-review articleof Carrier’s book.

Almost ten years ago I discovered the literature of white nationalism, when I lived in the island Gran Canaria, Spain. As can be seen in the metamorphosis recorded in the several editions of The Fair Race, with those 50 eliminated essays (as well as adding other essays), I constantly sharpen my vision of the world. Given my perfectionism, and that I am interested that new visitors of this site open the updated PDF of Soberana’s essay, I have deleted the old PDF of ‘Rome vs. Judea; Judea vs. Rome’ that contained that obsolete footnote. Instead, in the sticky post I have linked the version of Soberana’s essay that now appears in the print edition of 2019, the version without that footnote (see the first comment below).

Such perfectionism has a setback, of course. As I had been linking the old PDF in several entries and even in comments in other forums, when they click on my old links no document will show up. However, the most updated version of Soberana’s essay will always be linked in the sticky post of this site.

If there is a book that now contains the crème de la crèmeof the literature in favour of the 14 words, it is the latest edition of The Fair Race.