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Category: Indo-European heritage

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Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Aristotle Aryan beauty Classical sculpture Destruction of Greco-Roman world Eugenics Euripides Exterminationism Horace Indo-European heritage Leonidas Lycurgus Miscegenation Plato Plutarch Seneca Xenophon

Great personalities defend eugenics, 2

by Evropa Soberana

Antiquity

With the de-barbarization that ensued after the emergence of a sedentary lifestyle, the people soon realised that a society uprooted from Nature immediately degenerates. In short, humanity woke up to the dangers of civilisation.

To compensate for it, the leaders of these societies set up processes aimed at counteracting the pernicious effects of the greatest cancer that humanity has suffered: dysgenics, that is, the degeneration of the race that results from the absence of natural selection.

Here we will see that, in many civilised societies of antiquity, the laws of Nature were automatically followed. Its leaders intervened consciously and voluntarily to stop human reproduction and allow reproduction only to the best, so that the species did not degenerate. As Madison Grant wrote, where the environment is too soft and luxurious and it is not necessary to fight to survive, not only weak individuals are allowed to live. Strong types also gain weight mentally and physically!

The most illustrative examples of this era are Hindus, Greeks (among these the Spartans) and Romans. The Hellenic ideal of the kalokagathia, that is to say, an association of goodness-beauty—achieved by maintaining the purity of blood within the framework of a process of selection of the best—laid the foundations to everything that in the West has been considered ‘classical’ and ‘beautiful’ since then until recently.

In another long essay we have seen that the art that has come to us from European antiquity is perhaps only two percent of what existed and, to top it off, probably the least interesting and sublime: primitive Christians destroyed almost every legacy Greco-Roman civilisation. No one can know how many philosophers and authors suffered total destruction of their works, without anyone knowing again who they were or what they thought; and many other classic writings were censored, adulterated, corrected or mutilated.

However, we have at least some spoils of the pre-Christian era. Although ninety-eight percent of classical art was destroyed by the early Christians, what survived speaks for itself as a tribute to the selection, balance, health and excellence of all human qualities.

The Hindus. The Indo-European (i.e., Nordic) invaders arrived in India around 1400 BCE and immediately placed measures to favour high birth rates of the best elements of the population, identified with the Aryan invaders, and the decline of the worst, identified with the Negroid-Dravidic stratum.

The entire caste system was a great eugenics process in which the chandala (a term also used by Nietzsche to define the morals of Jews and Christians), the outcast, the untouchable, the sinful caste, the one considered inferior, was subjected to a horrendous lifestyle: using only the clothes of the dead bodies, drink only water from stagnant areas or animal tracks, not allow their women to be attended during childbirth, prohibition of washing, work as executioners, burials and latrine cleaners, and an unpleasant etcetera. Such impositions favoured that diseases were endemic among them; they fell like flies so that their numbers never constituted a danger for the best.

We are therefore faced with an example of negative eugenics: limiting the procreation of the worst. These measures are included in the Laws of Manu, the legendary Indo-Aryan legislator who laid the foundations for caste hierarchy. According to scientist Theodosius Dobzhansky, a renowned Ukrainian geneticist, ‘The caste system of India has been the greatest genetic experiment ever conducted by man’ (Genetic Diversity and Human Equality).

A woman always gives the world a child endowed with the same qualities as the one who has fathered him… A man of abject birth takes the natural evil of his father or his mother, or both at the same time, and can never hide its origin (Law of Manu, Book X).

Lycurgus (8th century BCE), a regent of Sparta, travelled through Spain, Egypt and India accumulating wisdom and, later, carrying out a revolution in Sparta after which the polis would militarize and establish a social system based on eugenics. The measures of this program highlight the infanticides of deformed, ugly or stupid newborns. Broadly speaking, Lycurgus’s policy was based on training perfect human beings that gave birth to perfect human beings, and there was no place for genetic engenders in that plan. On the other hand, the crypteia, carried out by the Spartan authorities on the helots (the submissive plebs) can perfectly be considered a very brutal and primitive example of negative eugenics.
 

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Editor’s Note: Having helots as slaves was a fatal flaw for Spartan civilisation. The laws of Lycurgus did not foresee that eugenic customs would fatally relax after a catastrophic war (as would happen after the Peloponnesian War). A real solution would have been, as William Pierce saw in his study on Greece, to exterminate the non-Nordic Mediterraneans of Sparta and extend such policy to all Greece, and eventually to all Europe.
 

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As for the Spartan policies of positive eugenics—favouring the multiplication of the best—we see popular rituals such as the coronation of a male champion and a female champion in a sports competition, or a king and queen in a beauty pageant, or tax exemption to the citizens who left four children. The best were expected to marry the best. Single people over twenty-five years old were extremely frowned upon and punished with fines and humiliating acts.

If the parents are strong, the children will be strong (Fr. 7).

Heraclitus (535-484 BCE), a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher known for his aphorisms in the style of the Oracle of Delphi. He established that wisdom was much more than a mere accumulation of knowledge and intelligence, also valuing intuition, instinct and will. He said: ‘I ask all mortals to father well-born children of noble parents’.

Leonidas (dies in 480 BCE), King of Sparta and supreme commander of the Greek troops in the Battle of Thermopylae. He fought in numerical inferiority against the Persians until the end, giving time for the evacuation of Greek cities, granting margin for an Athenian victory in the battle of Salamis and laying the foundations of the definitive Persian defeat in Plataea. Leonidas and his Spartans are an example of heroism, dedication to their people, a spirit of sacrifice, training and honour for all Western armies of all time.

Marry the capable and give birth to the capable! (exhortation to the Spartan people before leaving for the Thermopylae according to Plutarch, On the Malice of Herodotus, 32).

Theognis of Megara (6th century BCE) was one of the great Greek poets. He has bequeathed us in his Theognidea a series of interesting reflections and advice to his disciple Cyrnus. Among other things, Theognis divides the population into ‘good’—the nobility, identified with the Hellenic invaders—and ‘bad’—the native plebeian population of Greece, which progressively accumulated money and rights:

In rams and asses and horses, Cyrnus, we seek
the thoroughbred, and a man is concerned therein
to get him offspring of good stock;

Yet in marriage a good man thinketh not twice of wedding
the bad daughter of a bad sire if the father give him many possessions;

Nor doth a woman disdain the bed of a bad man if he be wealthy,
but is fain rather to be rich than to be good.

For ’tis possessions they prize;
and a good man weddeth of bad stock and a bad man of good;
race is confounded of riches.

In like manner, son of Polypaus,
marvel thou not that the race of thy townsmen is made obscure;
’tis because bad things are mingled with good.

Even he that knoweth her to be such, weddeth a low-born woman for pelf,
albeit he be of good repute and she of ill;
for he is urged by strong Necessity, who giveth a man hardihood.
 

Critias (460-403 BCE), Athenian philosopher, speaker, teacher, poet and uncle of Plato. He is known for being part of the Spartan occupation government known as the thirty tyrants. We will appreciate the importance that this man attached not only to inheritance, but to sports training without which a human being will never be complete.

I begin with the birth of a man, demonstrating how he can be the best and strongest in the body if his father trains and endures hardness, and if his future mother is strong and also trains.

Plato (428-347 BCE), probably the most famous philosopher of all time, was inspired by Sparta to propose the measures of Greek regeneration in his work The Republic, plagued with values of both positive eugenics—promoting the best—as negative eugenics—limit the worst—, especially with regard to the caste of the ‘guardians’. Plato, like most Greek philosophers, was in favour of exposing defective children to the weather so that they died.

It is necessary, according to our principles, that the relationships of the most outstanding individuals of one sex or the other are very frequent, and those of the lower individuals very rare. In addition, it is necessary to raise the children of the first and not of the second, if you want the flock to not degenerate (The Republic).

Based on what was agreed, it is necessary for the best men to join the best women as often as possible, and on the contrary, the worst with the worst; and the offspring of the best and not the worst should be raised, so our flock will become excellent (Statesman, 459).

That even better children are born from elite men, and from useful men to the country, even more useful children (Statesman, 461).

Xenophon (430-354), soldier, accomplished horseman during the Peloponnesian war, mercenary in the heart of Persia during the expedition of the ten thousand, philosopher, pro-Spartan and historian. Notorious anti-democrat who abhorred the Athenian government, he longed for fairer forms of government such as those he met in Persia and Sparta, where he sent his children to be educated. Together with Plutarch, Xenophon is the greatest source of information about Sparta, admiring the eugenic practices established by Lycurgus.

[Lycurgus] considered that the production of children was the noblest duty of free citizens (Constitution of the Lacedaemonians).

An old man had to introduce his wife to a young man in the prime of life whom he admired for his qualities, to have children with him (Constitution of the Lacedaemonians).

Isocrates (436-338 BCE), politician, philosopher and Greek teacher, was one of the famous ten Attic speakers and probably the most influential rhetorician of his time. He founded a public speaking school that became famous for its effectiveness and criticised the politics of many Greek cities, which instead of stimulating their birth rate inflated their numbers through the mass immigration of slaves, which he considered inferior to the Hellenic population. In this quotation it is verified to what extent Isocrates valued quality versus quantity:

It should not be said as happy that city which, from all extremes, randomly accumulates many citizens; but the one that best preserves the race of the settled since the beginning.

Euripides (480-406 BCE), playwright, a friend of Socrates and undoubtedly one of the greatest poets of all antiquity; his stain was an excessive machismo that led him to criticise the greater freedom enjoyed by women in Sparta. Disappointed and disgusted by the policies of a decadent Greece he retired to Macedonia, a place where Hellenic traditions were still pure, where he finally died.

There is no more precious treasure for children than to be born of a noble and virtuous father and to marry among noble families. Curse to the reckless who, defeated by passion, joins the unworthy and leaves his children to dishonour in return for guilty pleasures (Heracleidae).

Aristotle (384-322 BCE), the famous philosopher who educated Alexander the Great and laid the western foundations of Hellenism, logic and sciences such as biology, taxonomy and zoology. Aristotle extends extensively in his work Politeia on the problems posed by eugenics, birth control, childhood feeding and education (books VII and VIII). He generally admired the ancient Spartan system, with some reservations—in my opinion unfounded as Sparta was not decadent—because the ephorate was tyrannical.

(Left, a Patrician bust.) The Patricians were the Roman leaders in the early days, when Rome was a Republic. These men were the patriarchs or clan chiefs of each of the thirty noble families descended from Italic invaders, and they ran all Roman institutions including the legions, the courts and the Senate. Sober, pure, ascetic and hard, their people held them in high regard as repositories of the highest wisdom and Roman posterity honoured them as gods.

Their descendants formed the Patricians, the later Roman aristocracy, which gradually decayed throughout the Empire until almost completely dissolving, turning Rome into a disgusting decadent monster that deserved to be razed. After the Punic wars and Julius Caesar, Rome largely lost its Indo-European spirit.

In the IV of the XII tablets of the law, it was established that deformed children must be killed at birth. It was also left to the patriarchs of the patrician clans to decide which were the unfit children. They were usually drowned in the waters of the Tiber River, and other times abandoned, exposing them to wild animals and elements in a process called exposure. Apparently, the Romans did not fare so badly with this purifying tactic as we see in their conquering history.

Distorium vultum sequitur distortio morum, ‘A crooked face follows a crooked moral’—Roman proverb.

Meleager of Gadara (1st century BCE), Greek epigram compiler within the Hellenistic stage, who wrote: ‘If one mixes good with bad, a good progeny would not be born, but if both parents are good, they will beget noble children’ (Fr. 9).

Horace (65 BCE-8 CE) said: ‘The virtue of parents is a great dowry’ and ‘’The good and the brave descend from the good and the brave’ (Odes, IV, 4, 29).

Seneca (4 BCE-65 CE), Roman philosopher of the Stoic school (the same school that Marcus Aurelius and Julian the Apostate belonged), of Hispanic-Celtic origin and teacher of Emperor Nero.

We exterminate hydrophobic dogs; we kill the indomitable bulls; we slaughter sick sheep for fear that they infest the flock; we suffocate the monstrous foetuses and even drown the children if they are weak and deformed. It is not passion, but reason, to separate healthy parts from those that can corrupt them (Of Anger, XV).

Plutarch (45-120 CE). Philosopher, mathematician, historian, speaker and priest of Apollo at the Oracle of Delphi. It is also one of the important sources of information about Sparta in his books Ancient Customs of the Lacedaemonians and Life of Lycurgus.

Leaving a being who is not healthy and strong from the beginning is not beneficial for the State or for the individual himself (Ancient Customs of the Lacedaemonians).

When a baby was born he was taken to a council of elders to be examined. If the baby was defective in some way the elders threw him down a ravine. Such a baby, in the opinion of the Spartans, should not be allowed to live (Life of Lycurgus).

Categories
Charlemagne Christian art Indo-European heritage

Veritas odium parit, 5

The ‘Man of sorrows’, as Isaiah prophesied in one of the holiest books of the Jews, is one of the great images of the suffering Christ.

Crushed by the sufferings and in an attitude of giving himself, Giovanni Bellini seems to have interpreted him in this Pietà, Dead Christ Supported by Two Angels (1460) in Venice’s Correr Museum.

Real history was the opposite to this lamb who gave himself to sacrifice. Real-life Christians martyred and sacrificed the Aryan religion to impose on whites the god of the Jews. In ‘The Saxon Savior: Converting Northern Europe’ Ash Donaldson said:
 

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Into the North

The missionaries to the North, carrying out Christ’s injunction to baptize all nations, encountered a preaching environment utterly different from the Mediterranean. Here there were no large cities and no alienated, deracinated masses eager for something to give their lives purpose. Whether we use the term pagus or polis, the peoples of the North clearly lived in the type of communities Aristotle regarded as ideal: small, self-governing, and bound by common kinship, religion, language, and history.

The greatest difference of all, which perhaps encompasses all the rest, is that these people knew who their ancestors were. The line from which each individual sprang was not an unknown quantity to him—a faceless crowd that had bequeathed him nothing and to which he owed nothing—but a sacred lineage of names and deeds that ultimately issued from deity itself. These people did not hunger for an artificial family and tribe, for the one they had was dear to them.

This dramatic difference is illustrated by the attempt to convert Radbod, King of the Frisians. Intrigued by this religious force that had apparently swept through every land, he was curious as to what it had to say of his own ancestors. Told rather blithely that the unbaptized were in Hell, he immediately dismissed the missionary priest, declaring he would rather spend eternity in Hell with his ancestors than in Heaven with his enemies.

To absorb peoples apparently immune to the siren-call of universal brotherhood, the Church employed two other tools: physical violence and religious syncretism. Zealous authorities had employed both in the Roman Empire, but on nothing approaching the scale they would in Northern Europe. Because the communities of the North were stronger and more confident, the conversion process was far more violent than it had been in the Mediterranean, although the peacefulness of its spread in the Empire has been exaggerated.

Editor’s note: Donaldson is here completely ignorant about the extremely hostile, ISIS-like, takeover by the Christians of the Roman Empire, as we have been discussing with the texts of Deschner and Nixey. Apparently Donaldson has not even read the masthead of this site, authored by the blogger Evropa Soberana.

The beheading of 4,500 Saxon nobles by Charlemagne in 782 was far from exceptional: witness, for instance, the career of St. Olaf, whose tortures his Christian biographers quite readily detail.

Recently, historians such as Robert Ferguson have even suggested that the entire period of Viking raids began as an asymmetric resistance to the violent conversion efforts undertaken by Charlemagne. Even the adoption of Christianity by Iceland, long presented by historical apologists as the poster-child for peaceful conversion, took place under the threat of armed invasion by the King of Norway, who also held several prominent Icelanders hostage during the negotiations at the Althing.

In the Mediterranean, men like St. Augustine had engaged in intellectual combat with intellectuals who adopted a fashionable skepticism toward the old Gods. [Cf. my comment above—Ed.] In the North, the combat was often real, and the missionaries’ audience had little patience for the idea that the old Gods did not exist, which sounded as plausible as denying their ancestors’ existence—especially since, as told in works like Rígsþula, the Gods were their ancestors.

And so the missionaries tacitly acknowledged the heathen Gods, but introduced the “White Christ” as a stronger entity. In Iceland, for instance, the Saxon missionary Thangbrand did not try to convince the Icelanders that the Gods didn’t exist, but argued that they were no match for Christ. We find this curious exchange with a heathen woman:

“Have you heard,” she said, “that Thor challenged Christ to a duel and that Christ didn’t dare to fight with him?”

“Wha I have heard,” said Thangbrand, “is that Thor would be mere dust and ashes if God didn’t want him to live.”

As if to prove the point, during one duel in his blood-soaked mission, Thangbrand used a cross to kill a man.

More important than the violence was the purpose it served, for the actual wielders of the sword were less interested in the fate of their enemies’ souls than in the consolidation of royal power. From the deification of the emperors to Constantine’s cooption of the Church, it had long been recognized that religious standardization made it easier to rule, especially if the centers of religious life were under the watchful eye of the ruler. Throughout the North, Christianity’s representatives did not win by appealing to some disenfranchised lumpenproletariat, but by emphasizing the services the Church could render to Caesar. Thus, in Scandinavia, the official conversion paralleled the emergence of centralized kingdoms and the erosion of local liberties.

But while violence might win obedience, it could not win belief. To accomplish the latter, missionaries turned to syncretism. While the Church had employed this, too, in the Roman Empire, such as adopting the vestments and titles of the old pagan Pontifex Maximus, the need was much greater in the North, where people maintained strong ties to their ancestral ways. So, for instance, the Irish were given St. Brigid, with the same feast-day and associations as their Goddess by that name. Pope Gregory urged St. Augustine of Canterbury to let the Anglo-Saxons keep their sacred groves and feasts and merely repurpose them, while the more zealous St. Boniface cut down the sacred tree known as Thor’s Oak and used its wood to make a church.

These examples of syncretism are easy to spot, but more often the process was subtle. In Njal’s Saga, for instance, one of the Icelandic chieftains is considering conversion and asks if he can have the archangel Michael as his guardian angel, as the term is usually rendered in English translations. As Stephen McNallen points out, the Old Norse word the chieftain uses is actually fylgja-engill, prefacing the new, foreign word “angel” with the pagan word for a type of guardian spirit of the kin-line, or tribe.

By a similar process, the missionaries combined the Hebrew word for the ultimate destination of the wicked, Gehenna, with the Norse word for the pleasant meadows where the dead are reunited with their ancestors, Helja. After centuries of association, Gehenna was dropped, and Hell alone sufficed to induce shudders in the descendants of those who had happily looked forward to such a destination. The most ambitious effort of syncretism was an entire reconfiguration of the Gospels for the Germanic mindset, in a form that would have perplexed—and mortified—St. Paul.

Categories
Indo-European heritage Mein Kampf (book) Real men Schutzstaffel (SS) Tacitus Vikings

Holy wrath, 4

by Evropa Soberana

In Old Norse mythology, the einherjar means literally ‘army of one’ or ‘those who fight alone’; those who have died in battle and are brought to Valhalla by valkyries.

 
Another quality that was attributed to the berserkergang possessed was the ‘disable the arms of the adversary’, which probably implied that the berserkers were so fast, so invulnerable and inspired such terror in their enemies that they seemed to be paralysed with fear or that their blows were not effective.

Also, it is very likely that the aura of anger from a charging group of berserkers was ‘felt’ at a great distance by enemy soldiers as if it were an expansive wave, as the Roman historian Tacitus wrote while speaking of a Germanic männerbund whose members were called Harii, a word that, among Iranians and Indo-Iranians, meant ‘blondes’ and which is related to the einherjar of Valhala:

It will be enough to mention the most powerful, which are the Harii, the Helvecones, the Manimi, the Helisii and the Nahanarvali. Among these last is shown a grove of immemorial sanctity. A priest in female attire has the charge of it. But the deities are described in Roman language as Castor and Pollux. Such, indeed, are the attributes of the divinity, the name being Alcis. They have no images, or indeed, any vestige of foreign superstition, but it is as brothers and as youths that the deities are worshipped.

The Harii, besides being superior in strength to the tribes just enumerated, savage as they are, make the most of their natural ferocity by the help of art and opportunity. Their shields are black, their bodies dyed. They chose dark nights for battle, and, by the dread and gloomy aspect of their death-like host, strike terror into the foe, who can never confront their strange and almost infernal appearance. For in all battles it is the eye which is first vanquished [1].

We observe here the importance of the symbolism about the dark among these men. The night is essential in this symbolism because it symbolizes the dark age, this dark winter in which we were born for good or bad. The day, with the rays of the sun, the gold, is propitious for the will, for the courage, for the conscious struggle, to drive the spear into the enemy, to plunge the sword into the earth; in a word, to possess, to take over. The day represents the right hand; the order, the ritual and the ‘dry way’. The night, on the other hand, with its darkness, moon, stars, water and silver is more propitious to magic, to a certain chaos, to be allowed to be possessed, to raise arms to heaven instead of sinking them into the earth and therefore it is more related to the left hand and the ‘wet way’.

Since man is no longer a god, he must strive to become, at least, a blind instrument of the gods. For this, he must be emptied of all egocentric individuality in order to allow the divine outburst, that is, ‘to propitiate Odin to touch him with the tip of his spear’. And the first way to achieve this was through the establishment of severe discipline, asceticism and organisation.

Let us remember, with respect to the importance of the night, that Adolf Hitler himself spoke in Mein Kampf about the difference of the effect of his speeches among the crowds in the morning and at night. For him, the afternoons, and especially the evenings, were the ideal moment to give a speech and to assert his magnetism. Let us also note that, in the SS, the predominant colours in the uniforms and in their symbolism were black and silver. Symbolically, they were covered by night with darkness, with thunder and with lunar and star light.

Whoever had once been possessed by the berserkergang was already marked with a lifetime sign. From then on, the trance not only came to be invoked before the fight, but could also fall on him suddenly in moments of peace and tranquillity, transforming him in a matter of seconds into a ball of hate, adrenaline and subhuman cries striving for destruction.

Thus, Egil’s Saga describes how Egil’s father, a berserker, suddenly suffered possession of the berserkergang while peacefully playing a ball game with his son and another small one. The warrior, horribly agitated and roaring like an animal, grabbed his son’s friend, lifted him into the air and slammed him to the ground with such force that he died instantly with all the bones of his body broken. Then he went to his own son, but he was saved by a maid who, in turn, fell dead before the possessed.

In the sagas, the stories of berserkers are dotted with tragedies in which the uncontrolled berserkergang turns against those closest to the possessed. If we had to find a Greek equivalent, we would have it in the figure of Hercules, who during an attack of anger killed his own wife Megara and the two children he had with her, which motivated his twelve tasks as penance to expiate his sin.

In the field of mythology we have many examples of the fury of the berserkers. The Saga of King Hrólf Kraki speaks of the hero Berserker Bjarki, who fought for the king and who, in a battle, was transformed into a bear. This bear killed more enemies than the five select king champions. Arrows and weapons bounced off him, and he tore down men and horses from the forces of the enemy King Hjorvard, tore apart with his teeth and claws anything that stood in his way so that panic seized the enemy’s army, disintegrating their ranks chaotically.

This legend, which is still a legend, represents the fame that the berserkers in the North had acquired as small groups but, by their bravery, perfectly capable of deciding the outcome of a great battle.

Now, what is the explanation for these events, which far exceed the normal? How should we interpret the berserkergang? In our days, those who always look with resentful distrust at any manifestation of strength and health, have wanted to degrade it. For many of them, the berserkers were simply communities of epileptics, schizophrenics and other mentally ill people.

This ridiculous explanation is altogether unsatisfactory, as epilepsy and schizophrenia are pathologies whose effects cannot be ‘programmed’ for a battle like the berserkers did, and under epileptic or psychotic episodes it is impossible to perform valiant actions or show warlike heroism. An epileptic does more damage to himself by biting his tongue and falling to the ground than destroying the ranks of a large enemy army, and can also be reduced by a single person. Others have suggested that, as in the movies, the berserkers were alliances of individuals who had undergone genetic mutations, or the survivors of an old disappeared Germanic lineage, organised in the form of sectarian communities. Others even take into account the ‘shamanic’ explanation, according to which berserkers were possessed by the totem spirit of a bear or a wolf.

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[1] ‘Germania’ in Germania and Agricola by Tacitus, translated by Alfred J. Church, Ostara Publications (2016), page 17.

Categories
Indo-European heritage

The worst scum

‘If we forget what we have been or what we’ve done, we are not men anymore; just animals. Your memories don’t come from books. Your stories aren’t just stories. If I wanted to erase the world of men I would start with you’ I quoted in my previous post. This is much like what an adept of classical culture would be telling one of the few surviving Roman intellectuals or historians when the night king of Judeo-Christianity was sweeping away all the temples, statues, and libraries of ancient knowledge.

The quote above comes from a TV film. In the real history of the West the night fell, indeed, on the white man: a night in which he was apparently going to wake up in the Renaissance but the forces of evil won with Luther, as Nietzsche clearly saw, to the extent that the grotesquely named Renaissance of the North, represented by the Catholic Erasmus, was also a regression to psychosis and evil, as I’ve already said.

The Enlightenment did not wake us up completely. It was an imperfect apostasy of Christianity insofar as the ideals of the French Revolution not only left Christian ethics intact (‘human rights’, etc.) but strengthened those values, now from a purely secular point of view. Only until a Nietzsche, who was still sane when my paternal grandmother was born, someone really broke away from Christian moral tenets, as we have seen so many times on this site.

The Nazis followed this complete apostasy of Christianity and, as a punishment, the American Christians and the Judaized Soviets committed a holocaust of German victims: the greatest secret of the century in which we were born.

On the other side of the Atlantic, at least one awakened mind followed the German awakening not only by putting Christianity in its place in his writings, but by revaluating values as the leadership of Nazi power had done. Alas, as Pierce said, history carries on a great inertia. After his death the pro-white movement suffered a Christian and neo-Christian (‘enlightened’) regression that coined new terms: white nationalism in the mid-1990s and alt-right in recent years. In a way, the regression suffered by both Christians and non-Christians of that movement is a triumph of the story that has been killing the white man since Judeo-Christians took power more than 1,600 years ago.

Whites who claim to defend the white man at least in their blogs are reluctant to finish crossing the psychological Rubicon. Yesterday night came to me the thought that Jews and Muslims never condemn their terrorists (which they see as freedom fighters), but many opinion leaders of the white cause condemn their own. They do this precisely because they are unable to shake off the Christian morality that compels them to love their neighbour. That’s why I call most of today’s anti-Semites ‘Jew-obeyers’.

Everything has to do with stories. From Constantine the white man was forced to believe a false story about his past, which includes worshiping the god of the sworn enemy of the white race and a Jew who never existed. Those who have not read my post on Friday about the Romulus story will be unable to see the level of subversion that represented the infinite change from an Aryan story (Romulus) to a Jewish story (Jesus). In other words, the gospels are more subversive than all the Western media monopolised by Jewry that white nationalists complain about on a daily basis.

In a parallel world, if the Vikings had conquered the continent (including ethnically cleansing it of American Indians and from the Aztecs to the Incas), New Scandinavia would not have waged war on a Hitler who wanted to conquer the enormous lands of Judeo-Marxism for the Aryan race. But the world that we had to live in is not that parallel world. It is a world in which the worst scum of Christians of the Old World conquered the most powerful nation in the New World. And the so-called white nationalists and people of the alt-right have failed to repudiate this scum: many of them are part of it. That’s why they focus so much on Jewry, as if there were not more Christians than Jews!

The Arrival of the Pilgrims Fathers
Antonio Gilbert (oil on canvas).

I have said it several times and I must repeat it: the traitor is worse than the external enemy. The Christian is worse than the Jew. Without Christians, there would be no darkest hour in the West. The ideas of this site are ignored by nationalists simply because they represent a paradigm shift. While I accept the Jewish question more or less as a MacDonald exposes it, I also expand that vision on Judeo-Christianity. (I insist on this term, ‘Judeo-Christianity’, because there is no such thing as a ‘pagan Christianity’—a mental jerk of those males who believe that the chimera exists.)

There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it, not even the Jews who control the media—if at least we told that story to ourselves. If Westerners began to repudiate the great lie (the story of the non-existent Jesus) without replacing it with the story of the Enlightenment (axiological neo-Christianism), but rather with the story of Romulus, so to speak (in the sense of reconnecting with the classical world), in a single stroke the night king would be torn to pieces in a myriad of ice cubes, together with his army.

But this is something that, we know, won’t happen. At least it won’t happen soon in North America. The level of the conquest of the Aryan psyche by the worst scum who arrived to the continent is truly overwhelming.

Only a convergence of catastrophes could save them. Only an Apocalypse could, at last, change the story that these folks have been telling themselves from the pilgrims to a story in which, instead of finding inspiration in biblical Jews, a new generation of Americans find in Leonidas, Brutus (as Caesar betrayed the Republic), Hermann, Charles Martel and from there a leap to Hitler.

Categories
Evropa Soberana (webzine) Indo-European heritage Nordicism

Nordicism and National Socialism, 17

by Evropa Soberana

We can finish this list of quotes with a phrase of a SS general who never came to deny Nazism, Leon Degrelle (1906-1994), founder of the Rexist Party, the fascist movement of French-speaking and Catholic Belgium: ‘Every time you look for civilisation anywhere in Europe, you see the blood of the North’ (‘Europe Will Live’).
 
Conclusion

The Nazis had in mind that, in the future, the selection of the leaders and the best ‘Aryan’ spiritual talents should be carried out over the entire body of the ‘white race’, while the selection of the racial elements to predominate gradually in posterity should be done on the basis of the best specimens of ‘Nordic’ blood. For them, the value of the individual to the community was not necessarily the same as their genetic reproductive value.

In the same German National Socialism, we see a great variety of characters. Thus, Adolf Hitler and Hess; Göring, Heydrich, Darré, Schirach, Todt, etc., were predominantly ‘Nordic’. Goebbels, Streicher, Himmler or Frank were not.

(Adolf Hitler, in colour.)

The ‘Nordic’ ideal was what National Socialism was trying to promote for the future of Europe, since it was what it took as the mould of the Overman, divinity in power and the germ of a superior humanity. Thus, in National Socialist art and propaganda, Nordicism is extremely clear. Even in the National Socialist documentaries (such as The Triumph of the Will, Tag der Freiheit, Olympia, The March Towards the Führer, The Eternal Jew, etc.), whenever you see German crowds, the camera tries to draw close-ups of more or less perfect Nordic specimens with the aim of inculcating in the mind of the spectator the ideal of racial selection promoted by the NSDAP.

This ideal of Nordic beauty as representative of the most treasured heritage of a people is common to all eras and all Indo-European civilisations. Both the Indo-Iranians and the Iranians, the Hellenes, the Romans, the Germans, the Celts, the Slavs, feudal or Renaissance Europe, the colonial empires, etc., considered the Nordic aspect as ideal, ‘authentic’, aristocratic, pure and uncontaminated; depositing in it the hopes for the future.

In our days, normally without realising it, the birth of a blond boy with blue eyes is seen as a good omen of prosperity and happiness for what it symbolises by our instincts and by the hereditary cultural load that, unconsciously, takes root in our brain since ancient times.

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Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Beauty Feminized western males George Lincoln Rockwell Indo-European heritage Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Nazism Lite

For the 14 words the humanities are more important than the sciences. Greece and Rome were able to flourish thanks to a deep contact with their religion, history, art, language and architecture. The scientific method as we know it now would only begin until the 17th century. Our treacherous era prioritises hard sciences and technology at the expense of the arts and the humanities to demoralise and control the blond beast.

Among the humanities, the most important is that which tells the facts: History. As I have said repeatedly on this site, only two stories of the white race have been written: one by William Pierce and another by Arthur Kemp. Pierce died before I woke up to the real world, but I visited Kemp a few years ago at his home in a town in England.

One might think that the only American book (Pierce’s) that deals with the subject of the history of the white race would be an immense bestseller in the circles of white nationalism in North America. Today I realised that Amazon Books has vaporized all references to Pierce’s book. But that is not the worst. The worst is that Who We Are is very rarely mentioned in white nationalist forums. What is currently sold in white nationalism is a genre we could call Nazism Lite. For example, on this day, the Metapedia page has the Arktos Media Ltd. publishing house as its featured article. A glance at the titles is enough to see the ideological lukewarmness of that publisher whose books the white nationalists buy.

I see things in this way: In the English-speaking world what is closer, chronologically speaking, to the Third Reich was the noblest and true. That which is furthest removed by time, represents an attempt at a schizophrenic compromise between the 14 words and Americanism. From this angle, the only truly noble politician in the US was George Lincoln Rockwell. And the only non-schizophrenic intellectuals were William Pierce and Revilo Oliver. None of them, as far as I know, called themselves ‘white nationalists’. That is a term that originated after Rockwell and Oliver had died, and when Pierce only had a few more years in this world.

It speaks a lot about the so-called white nationalism that the content of Who We Are is currently only available, on paper, in abridged form in my The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour compilation (see the image at the top of the sidebar). It is as if every member of the Nazism Lite had decided to cut off a testicle from their bodies compared to the two-testicled racists of yesteryear.

Putting aside white nationalism, and speaking as racists spoke in more civilized times, just remember that the people with the longer memory are the people with the longest future (cf. Jews). Hitler, in one of his table talks, said: ‘Our history goes back to the days of Arminius and King Theodoric, and among the German Kaisers there have been men of the most outstanding quality; in them they bore the germ of German unity. This fact is too often forgotten, because since the 15th century it is only in Austria that the history of ancient Germania has been taught’.

That’s the spirit. The Nazis knew that we must reconnect with religion, literature and an architecture uncontaminated with Semitic religions. Remember that the Führer wanted to become an artist, either a painter or an architect. How many among the white nationalists of today have the same artistic proclivities? How many have websites appealing to the aesthetic instinct of the former Aryan?

In the Ancient World, the Spartan ephebes assiduously studied Homer, whose many verses they could recite. What should move to protect the culture of whites is the beauty of the Aryan woman. We can already imagine the Spartan women parading naked in a public event to invite marriage: those women had the reputation of the most beautiful in Greece. (Remember, the Doric Spartans did not contaminate their blood with the muds of the Mediterranean.) Precisely because beauty is the splendour of truth, the first thing the Judeo-Christian Semites did centuries later was to destroy the Greek statues.

The reason that Who We Are is not a bestseller is because Pierce’s pure neo-Nazism was not schizophrenic as white nationalism is. If the white nationalists have not published Pierce’s book to sell it in all their events, this is because the book does not make any concession to Americanism: it is not the chimera that has parts of a lion and parts of a bird.

Who We Are says things that are currently taboo in the chimera of today. For example, it is a Nordicist book. After the section ‘Unending Struggle Between European and Asian’, it is clear that even many Russians and Europeans from the Balkans mixed their blood with Asians and Turks respectively. In addition, Who We Are has some passages in which Pierce seems to promote the removal or extermination of the inferior races: the greatest taboo in those who have cut off one of their testicles. The book puts Christianity in its place, as a Levantine infection that grabbed the soul of the Aryan race. (‘It appealed directly to a sense of envy and resentment of the weak against the strong’. ‘But Christian ethics was like a time bomb ticking away in Europe, a Trojan horse waiting for its season’.) As if that were not enough, it isn’t a mono-causal book in the sense that it not only blames the Jews: the blunders that whites have committed throughout history, for example by placing economic gain above racial preservation, are conspicuous.

There is a way that the movement called white nationalism could be redeemed, and it is precisely that they abandon that term and embrace National Socialism. The bridge to do so in America is precisely the memory of politicians like Rockwell and geniuses like Pierce. Since Rockwell-like politics is no longer allowed in the US (cf. Charlottesville), at least a few Americans could be educated in private. Always remember what we have reiterated more than once:

We need to create the Aryan community—an ecclesia—, which whites never had. The Aryan ecclesias need to thrive in our towns and cities (think of the image at the top of this article). Our priests, for lack of a better word, are not experts in theology but in history, anthropology and Indo-European linguistics. They must be skilled in the various Indo-European traditions, with emphasis in Greece and Rome.

Categories
2nd World War Indo-European heritage Kali Yuga

History

To the sticky post, I just added the phrase, ‘If you think the news is fake, wait until you learn about History!’

Yesterday I saw YouTube moments when Jean-François Gariépy refuted, in ‘Vox Delusion’, Vox’s pseudoscientific pronouncements on biology. I told myself how alienated these guys from Alt-Lite and Alt-Right are regarding the humanities! If History is the mighty tower of experience, it doesn’t matter that a high IQ fellow like Gariépy says scientifically accurate things. Ultimately all that can go to the trashcan if it is not properly accompanied by a solid nexus with the past of the West. And Gariépy is so ignorant about elemental facts of History that he ignores that the ancient Greeks, and the patrician Romans, were whites of the Nordic type.

If we pay attention to what I have been saying in the sticky post, including its links, we can see that the white man went bananas simply because they lied to him about the facts of his past. What could be more important—as I do now on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays—than demystifying the great lies about the founding myths of the West?I mean: the non-historicity of Jesus (my Monday entries), the real Holocaust committed in the Second World War (my Tuesday entries), and the history of early Christianity (my Wednesday entries).

If you think the news is fake, wait until you learn about History! The white man will continue to be a raving looney unless the findings of the true historians permeate the popular culture to the degree of reversing the current narrative. Otherwise, they will continue to howl at the Moon until their race is extinguished.

Remember the old proverb, ‘Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad’. With the fictional life of Jesus (and the inversion of values it implies); the history that we were taught as children about early Christianity, and the history that we were taught as adults about WW2, (((they))) have taken over our souls.

In the odyssey of the human spiritthat Sallie Nichols recounts in Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, from the enchanted night of the Moon card we have to travel through that of the Splendor Solis. And the only way to do it is to set the record straight as far as History is concerned.

Remember, ‘there is no possible return: the road leads clearly forward’, that is, towards the tower at the left that contains the books of real history, unlike the tower at the right: the fake history we believed during the dense night of the West.

Categories
Heinrich Himmler Indo-European heritage

Himmler on Christianity

(June 9, 1942)

Although the Hitler regime largely limited itself to the subjugation and suppression of the Christian churches and postponed a “final solution of the church question” to the end of the war, there were radical groups within the government who called for the “de-Christianization” of the German people as soon as possible. At the beginning of the century, various neo-pagan currents were already making themselves felt in Germany. They often advocated völkisch-racial views and believed that the spiritual regeneration of the nation would come from its supposedly genuine Nordic-Germanic religion.
After 1933, the NSDAP lent official support to “God Belief” [Gottgläubigkeit], an ersatz religion borrowing from neo-paganism. By 1939, “God Belief” had more than 3 million adherents in Germany. One of the most important Nazi proponents of racial-mystical paganism was Heinrich Himmler, who regarded his SS as an elite Germanic tribe. In the following speech, which was delivered on the occasion of Reinhard Heydrich’s funeral, he explained some of the principles of his faith, which were based largely on a general contempt for individuality and humanity:
 

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[…] We will have to deal with Christianity in a tougher way than hitherto. We must settle accounts with this Christianity, this greatest of plagues that could have happened to us in our history, which has weakened us in every conflict. If our generation does not do it then it would I think drag on for a long time. We must overcome it within ourselves. Today at Heydrich’s funeral I intentionally expressed in my oration from my deepest conviction a belief in God, a belief in fate, in the ancient one as I called him—that is the old Germanic word: Wralda. We shall once again have to find a new scale of values for our people: the scale of the macrocosm and the microcosm, the starry sky above us and the world in us, the world that we see in the microscope.
The essence of these megalomaniacs, these Christians who talk of men ruling this world, must stop and be put back in its proper proportion. Man is nothing special at all. He is an insignificant part of this earth. If a big thunderstorm comes, he can do nothing about it. He cannot even predict it. He has no idea how a fly is constructed—however unpleasant, it is a miracle—or how a blossom is constructed. He must once again look with deep reverence into this world. Then he will acquire the right sense of proportion about what is above us, about how we are woven into this cycle.
Then, on a different plane, something else must happen: we must once again be rooted in our ancestors and grandchildren, in this eternal chain and eternal sequence. […]
By rooting our people in a deep ideological awareness of ancestors and grandchildren we must once more persuade them that they must have sons. We can do a very great deal. But everything that we do must be justifiable vis-à-vis the clan, our ancestors. If we do not secure this moral foundation which is the deepest and best because the most natural, we will not be able to overcome Christianity on this plane and create the Germanic Reich which will be a blessing for the earth. That is our mission as a nation on this earth. For thousands of years it has been the mission of this blond race to rule the earth and again and again to bring it happiness and culture. […]
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Source of English translation: Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds., Nazism, 1919-1945, Vol. 2: State, Economy and Society 1933-1939. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000, p. 304.
Source of original German text: Rede vor den Oberabschnittsführern und Hauptamtschefs im Haus der Flieger in Berlin am 9. 6. 1942 (Gedenkrede für Reinhard Heydrich), U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD, T-175, Roll 90, Frames 2664-2685; reprinted in Heinrich Himmler: Geheimreden 1933 bis 1945 und andere Ansprachen. Bradley F. Smith and Agnes F. Peterson, eds. Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen, 1974, pp. 159-61.

Categories
Architecture Catholic Church Charles Martel Christendom Destruction of Greco-Roman world Evil Ferdinand Bardamu Indo-European heritage Islamization of Europe New Testament Theology

Why Europeans must reject Christianity, 15

by Ferdinand Bardamu

 
What has Christianity done for Europe?
Christianity is a violent, destructive, murderous cult. It is dangerous for the following reasons: 1.) the religion promotes the survival of the sick, the weak and the stupid at the expense of good racial hygiene. This drastically lowers population IQ and capacity for civilizational attainment, and; 2.) the cult relies on blind faith instead of rational persuasion, which has resulted in long periods of widespread chaos and bloodshed, especially during the Christianization of Europe. These dangers were even noticed by contemporary pagan writers, who immediately recognized the threat a triumphant Christianity would pose to the survival of Western culture.
Christianity never “civilized” or “domesticated” Europeans. On the contrary, Europeans were forced to endure a Neolithic existence when Christians were at the apogee of their power and influence. The church sent men of genius to monasteries or had them consecrated to the priesthood. This prevented them from passing on their genes, a significant dysgenic effect that lowered the collective European IQ. Only the pagan science and reason of classical antiquity could re-domesticate Europeans after 500 years of total intellectual darkness.
The church successfully defended Europe from invasion, argue some apologists, but nothing could be further from the truth. Charles Martel’s confiscation of church property to defend Europe from Moslem intruders was met with significant ecclesiastical opposition. If the church had succeeded in withholding the necessary funds, all Europe would have been reduced to a province of the Umayyad caliphate. Nevertheless, Martel was unable to pursue the Saracens across the Pyrenees and dislodge them from their Andalusian stronghold. The Moslems would continue their occupation of the Iberian Peninsula for 800 years, until their final expulsion by Ferdinand and Isabella in the late 15th century.
Southwestern France and Italy were periodically raided and sometimes controlled by Moslem invaders. The emirate of Sicily endured for over two centuries. Even after Norman conquest, a significant Moslem presence remained on the island. The Moslems of Sicily were finally expelled by the middle of the 13th century. The crusades to retake the Holy Land from the Saracens (1095-1291), a series of large-scale military operations under the joint leadership of papacy and feudal aristocracy, failed to achieve its primary objective. In 1204, Christian crusaders sacked Constantinople in an orgy of rape, pillage and murder. The crusaders caused so much damage that the Byzantines were unable to resist their Ottoman conquerors in 1453.
Christianity provided no adequate defense of Europe. The church only did enough to maintain herself as a viable institution. In the process, the church weakened Europe, making her ripe for conquest by the Umayyad and Ottoman caliphates.
Apologists tentatively acknowledge that although Christianity hindered scientific and technological progress, it still made “contributions” to fields as diverse as architecture and philosophy. On closer examination, these “contributions” are neither “Christian” nor worthy of being considered “contributions.” The great churches of the Middle Ages are frequently trotted out, but these have their origin in Roman building methods. The dome, the arch and the vault, the typical features of the medieval Romanesque style of architecture are all borrowed from the imperial Roman architecture of pre-Christian times. The basic architectural plan of most medieval churches is the Roman basilica, a public building reserved for official purposes. Even the Gothic style that supplanted Romanesque still employed architectural features of Roman origin. The ribbed vaulting that was typical of Gothic architecture was originally used in Vespasian’s Roman colosseum and by Hadrian in the construction of his Tibertine villa.
While acknowledging Romanesque as an “accomplishment,” the Christian religionist will conveniently ignore the almost total disappearance of Roman building methods from western Europe for almost 300 years. This was a direct result of the church’s active suppression of Western scientific and technical knowledge. From the completion of Theodoric’s mausoleum in Ravenna to the consecration of Aachen in 805, nothing of monumental significance was built in western Europe. During the intervening period, Europeans, like their Neolithic ancestors, had returned to the use of perishable materials for use in building.
Apologists for Christianity will mention Aquinas and scholasticism as the highpoints of not only medieval, but European intellectual development, even though Aquinas set European scientific and technological progress back by hundreds of years. Scholasticism was an object of ridicule and mockery during the Renaissance. Religionists mention the Christian “contribution” of the university, oblivious to the many institutions of higher learning that existed and even flourished in the ancient world. The first universities taught scholasticism, so they were the frontline in the Christian war against the pagan values of intellectual curiosity, love of progress for its own sake and empirical rationality.
In the Christian religious mind, science and technology are of Christian origin because the men doing the discovering and inventing during the Scientific Revolution were nominal Christians, like Galileo and Newton. This argument is just as absurd as arguing that the Greek invention of logic, rhetoric and mathematics were the result of Greek pagan theological beliefs because Aristotle and other ancient scientists and philosophers were pagans. No, these men were “Christians” because public avowals of atheism were dangerous in an age where even the most innocuous theological speculation could smear reputations and destroy careers. It is a glowing tribute to the courage and honesty of these men that they were able to abandon Christianity’s reliance on blind faith, often in the face of public censure, and consciously re-embrace the pagan epistemic values that produced the “Greek miracle” 2000 years before the Scientific Revolution.
Christian religionists claim that the New Testament, a collection of childish scribblings penned by semi-literate barbarians, is a great contribution to Western civilization. As has been pointed out for generations, even by other Christian religionists, the work is notorious for its use of bad grammar and unrefined literary style. Much of it was composed by Jews who were not even fluent in koine Greek. Overall, the New Testament is an inferior production compared to the meanest writers of Attic prose. Even St. Jerome, the translator of the Vulgate, expressed contempt for the crude, unsophisticated literary style of the Bible. He preferred the elegant Latin of Cicero instead.
What has Christianity contributed to Europe? The answer is nothing! No art, culture, architectural monuments, science or technology. Christianity was a massive waste of European intellectual and physical potential. Furthermore, Christianity almost destroyed Europe.
The church discarded over 99% of ancient literature, including works on science, mathematics, philosophy, engineering and architecture. This was the largest campaign of literary censorship and suppression in history, an act of cultural and physical genocide that nearly severed medieval Europe from the great achievements of classical antiquity.
This was cultural genocide because the church nearly wiped out an entire civilization and culture; this was physical genocide because the church’s deliberate eradication of secular knowledge placed millions of lives in danger, unnecessarily subjecting them to the ravages of disease, war, famine and poverty.
Far from being largely benign, the Christian church is a power-mad religious mafia. It bears sole responsibility for perpetrating the greatest crimes in history against Europeans. How long shall the Christian church escape punishment for this criminal wrongdoing? No other religion has caused as much suffering and as much damage to Europe as this spiritual syphilis known as Christianity.

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Ancient Rome Architecture Art Christendom Constantine Destruction of Greco-Roman world Emperor Julian Ferdinand Bardamu Indo-European heritage Theodosius I

Why Europeans must reject Christianity, 13

by Ferdinand Bardamu

 
Christianity: bringer of violence and bloodshed
Word of mouth is notoriously ineffective as a means of spreading religious propaganda. This explains why Christianity’s growth remained largely unspectacular until the early 4th century. Of course, the primary reason for the Christianization of the empire was the conversion of Constantine to the new religion. The influence of Christianity in the empire was continuously reinforced and strengthened by the imperially coercive legislation of his successors. Christianization also sanctioned acts of religious violence against pagans, which contributed significantly to the religion’s spectacular growth in numbers and influence. Christianity unleashed a wave of violence that nearly drowned Europe in an ocean of blood. Without Constantine, and the religious violence of his successors, Christianity would have remained just another competing religion in the provincial backwaters of the empire, like Mithraism or the Eleusinian Mysteries.
The imperial policy of Christianization was further aided by the religion’s intrinsic advantages over rival philosophical and religious belief systems, making it more palatable to the ignorant masses. This facilitated its rapid spread across the empire until, by the reign of Theodosius in the late 4th century, most urban areas were predominantly Christian. These advantages included the egalitarian ethos of the Christian church. Unlike Mithraism, which was elitist, Christianity accepted all potential recruits, regardless of ethno-linguistic or socio-economic difference. The Christians of the first three centuries practiced a form of primitive communism. This attracted the chronically indigent, as well as freeloaders. Another advantage was the child-like simplicity of Christian doctrine.
The Crisis of the 3rd century, where rival claimants fought each other for the title of Caesar, was an internecine conflict lasting for decades. It produced widespread economic instability and civil unrest. This disruption of daily life encouraged men and women to seek refuge in the mystery religions, but also Christianity, which offered easy answers in an increasingly chaotic and ugly world. The Christian religion promised life everlasting to those who successfully endured tribulation on earth.
Passage of the edict of Milan in 313 meant that Christians would go from being a persecuted minority to a persecuting majority. Although persecution of religious dissidents had occurred before Constantine, such events were comparatively rare. Roman “persecution” of Christianity was mild and sporadic. It was not even religious in nature, but political; Christians refused to swear loyalty to the state by offering the pinch of incense to the emperor’s genius. Christians were not so much persecuted as they were subjected to Roman police action for disobeying the laws of the land. In contrast, Christian persecution of pagans and heretics was entirely motivated by religious hatred. It combined the authoritarian anti-pagan legislation of the emperors with the bigotry of the clergy and the violence of the Christian mob.
The first repressive laws against paganism were passed by Constantine. In 331, he issued an edict that legalized the seizure of temple property. This was used to enrich church coffers and adorn his city of Constantinople. He redirected municipal funds from the curiae to the imperial treasury. The curiae used these funds for the construction and renovation of temples, as well as for pagan banquets, processions and festivals. The redirection of municipal funds significantly diminished the influence of paganism in the public sphere. Constantine also showed preference for Christians when considering prospective candidates for government posts. For the first time in the empire’s history, conversion to Christianity was considered an attractive proposition.
Pagan temples and statuary were first vandalized and destroyed under Constantine. Christians believed that this first wave of iconoclasm was in fulfillment of scriptural command: “Ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves; . . . for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God” (Exod. 34.13f). The earliest Christian iconoclasm included the partial destruction of a Cilician temple of Asklepios and the destruction of temples to Aphrodite in Phoenicia (ca. 326 AD).
Constantine’s sons, Constans and Constantius II, followed in their father’s footsteps. In 341, Constans issued an edict banning animal sacrifice. In 346, Constans and Constantius II passed a law ordering the closure of all temples. These emperors were egged on by the Christian fanatic Firmicus Maternus who, in an exhortation addressed to both emperors in 346, called for the “annihilation of idolatry and the destruction of profane temples.” The fact that pagans continued to occupy important posts in the imperial administration made it difficult to legislate the active destruction of temples, statuary and inscriptions without alienating a large segment of the empire’s population. Nevertheless, Constantine’s sons turned a blind eye to private acts of Christian vandalism and desecration.
After the death of Constantius II, Julian was made emperor in 361. Having succumbed to the influence of pagan tutors in his youth, he developed a deep hatred for the “Galilean madness.” Accession to the throne allowed him to announce his conversion to Hellenism without fear of retribution. Julian set about reversing the anti-pagan legislation first enacted by his uncle. He re-opened the temples, restored their funding and returned confiscated goods; he renovated temples that had been damaged by Christian vandals; he repealed the laws against sacrifice and barred Christians from teaching the classics. Julian’s revival of pagan religious practice was cut short in 363, when he was killed in battle against the Persian Sassanids.
His successor Jovian revoked Julian’s edicts and re-established Christianity as most favored religion in the empire. The emperors who came after Jovian were too occupied with barbarian invasion to be concerned with internal religious squabbles; it was more expedient to simply uphold the toleration imposed on pagans and Christians alike by the Edict of Milan. Anti-pagan conflict again came to the forefront with Gratian. In 382 he angered pagans by removing the altar of Victory from the Senate. In the same year, Gratian issued a decree that ended all subsidies to the pagan cults, including priesthoods such as the Vestal Virgins. He further alienated pagans by repudiating the insignia of the pontifex maximus.
In 389, Theodosius began his all-out war on the old Roman state religion by abolishing the pagan holidays. According to the emperor’s decrees, paganism was a form of “natural insanity and stubborn insolence” difficult to root out, despite the terrors of the law and threats of exile. This was followed by more repressive legislation in 391, which re-instated the ban on sacrifice, banned visitation of pagan sanctuaries and temples, ended imperial subsidies to the pagan cults, disbanded the Vestal Virgins and criminalized apostasy. He refused to return the altar of Victory to the Senate house, in defiance of pagan demands. Anyone caught performing animal sacrifice or haruspicy was to be arrested and put to death. In the same year, the Serapeum, a massive temple complex housing the Great Library of Alexandria, was destroyed by a mob of Christian fanatics. This act of Christian vandalism was a great psychological blow to the pagan establishment.
Pagans, dissatisfied with the imperially-sponsored cultural revolution that threatened to annihilate Rome’s ancestral traditions, rallied around the usurper Eugenius. He was declared emperor by the Frankish warlord Arbogast in 392. A nominal Christian, Eugenius was sympathetic to the plight of pagans in the empire and harbored a certain nostalgia for pre-Christian Rome. He restored the imperial subsidies to the pagan cults and returned the altar of Victory to the Senate. This angered Theodosius, emperor in the east. In 394, Theodosius invaded the west and defeated Eugenius at the battle of Frigidus in Slovenia. This ended the last serious pagan challenge to the establishment of Christianity as official religion of the empire.
Apologists for Christianity argue that imperial anti-pagan legislation was more rhetoric than reality; their enforcement would have been difficult in the absence of a modern police state apparatus. This objection is contradicted by archaeological and epigraphic evidence. First, based on stratigraphic analysis of urban temples, cult activity had virtually ceased by the year 400, after passage of the Theodosian decrees. Second, temple construction and renovation declined significantly under the Christian emperors. In Africa and Cyrenaica, temple construction and renovation inscriptions are far more common under the first Tetrarchy than the Constantinian dynasty, when pagans still constituted a significant majority of the empire’s citizens. By the end of the 4th century, the authoritarian legislation of the Christian emperors had seriously undermined the strength and vitality of the old polytheistic cults.
The emperors did not stop with the closure of pagan religious sites. In 435 AD, a triumphant Theodosius II passed an edict ordering the destruction of all pagan shrines and temples across the empire. He even decreed the death penalty for Christian magistrates who failed to enforce the edict. The Code Justinian, issued between 529 to 534, prescribes the death penalty for public observance of Hellenic rites and rituals; known pagans were to seek instruction in the Christian faith or risk property confiscation; their children were to be seized by officials of the state and forcibly converted to the Christian religion.
Imperially mandated closure of all urban temples resulted in the privatization of polytheistic worship. This further exacerbated the decline of the pagan religious cults because of the object-dependent nature of ritual practice, which could not be fully realized in the absence of statuary, processions, festivals, lavish banquets and monumental building. In urban areas, imperial legislation was clearly effective. This was ruthlessly enforced by professional Christians and zealous magistrates, who used the additional muscle of the Roman army to get their own way, especially when preaching and public example failed.
Pagan rites and rituals were still observed at rural sanctuaries and temples for some time after the closure of urban centers of worship. These remained off the beaten track, so to speak, and were harder to shut down.
Churchmen like the fiery John Chrysostom, cognizant of this fact, exhorted the rich landowning class of the east to convert the heathen on their country estates. Those who allowed pagan worship on their rural properties were just as guilty of violating imperial anti-pagan legislation as the pagans themselves. Itinerant Christian evangelists, like Martin of Tours, fanned out across the countryside, winning souls for Christ through a campaign of intimidation, harassment and violence. In the end, aggressive evangelism, privatization of pagan religious practice and social marginalization ensured the death of paganism in rural areas.
Christianization of the empire was complete by 600 AD, although it is unclear to what extent Christ was considered just another deity to be worshipped alongside the old pagan gods.