Race and Religion
Evola As He Is
To what extent? To the extent - and this has been stated in black and white each time this issue has been raised on this list - in which J. Evola called modern Europeans 'Aryans' : in a typological sense.

Even in Germany from 1933 to 1945, as showed by lexical studies of the speeches delivered by members of the National-Socialist leadership during that period, Germans were far more often referred as 'Nordic' rather than as 'Aryan', more or less rightly or wrongly, since, as showed by H.F.K. Günther (http://www.white-history.com/earlson/gunther.htm), who did not convert to Islam, as early as the late Middle Ages and the Thirty-Years war, the predominant blood in Germanic countries was no longer 'Nordic', but rather 'Alpine', with a strong Slavic component. In 'The Passing of the Great Race', M. Grant, who did not convert to Islam either, summed up the extent of this racial catastrophe - one of the many caused in Europe in the past two thousand years by conflicts between two by-products of Judaism, namely Protestantism and Catholicism, and by their representatives by proxy -, as follows : "Two-thirds of the population of Germany was destroyed, in some states such as Bohemia three-fourths of the inhabitants were killed or exiled, while out of 500,000 inhabitants in Wurtemberg there were only 48,000 left at the end of the war. Terrible as this loss was, the destruction did not fall equally on the various races and classes in the community. It bore, of course, most heavily upon the big blond fighting man, and at the end of the war the German states contained a greatly lessened proportion of Nordic blood. In fact from that time on the purely Teutonic race in Germany has been largely replaced by the Alpine types in the south, and by the Wendish and the Polish types in the east. This change of race in Germany has gone so far that it has been computed that out of the 70,000,000 inhabitants of the German Empire, only 9,000,000 are purely Teutonic in coloration, stature, and skull characters. The rarity of pure Teutonic and Nordic types among the German immigrants to America in contrast to its almost universal prevalence among those from Scandinavia is traceable to the same cause."

In 'Sintesi di dottrina della razza', J. Evola makes it clear that, if the Germanic invasion of the Roman empire in the Vth century was a positive phenomenon, in that it constituted an influx of fresh blood into exhausted Roman stocks, the fact that most of these Germanic tribes converted to Christianity shows that, while being certainly superior to the shadow of what the Roman used to be, they were still not up to the task, to the task of rebuilding a true Aryo-Nordic civilisation, by lack of racial consciousness.

In 498, Clovis, the king to the Franks, and 3000 of his Frankish warriors were baptised. According to Gregory of Tours, Clovis converted to Christianity, which his wife Clotilda had been pressing him to accept, because he came to believe that his victory at Tolbiacum in 496 was due to the help of the Christian God. This Christian account of the conversion has however been questioned by historians, especially since it is deeply reminiscent of the Christian version of the so-called conversion of Constantine. Historians now believe that what Clovis actually accepted in 498 was Arianism, and not the Christian faith, and that he converted to the latter only in 508. Did he end up accepting it because he agreed with the doctrine of original sin and the Maryolatry which ensued from this dogma in the Christian Context? Of course, not. His conversion was politically motivated, ensuring him the support of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. "Mutual self-interest led kings and bishops into a wary alliance that would remain a dominant factor of political life throughout the Middle Ages. The kings, according the bishops great respect, sought their advice and often honored their requests. The bishops, broadening their secular activities, served the kings as mentors, judges, diplomats and top administrators–and thereby increased their influence on the church's behalf" ('Barbarian Europe', P. Dixon, Book Club Associates, 1976)

Mindaugas, the first known Grand Duke of Lithuania, converted to Christianity in 1250 or 1251. However, he returned in 1261 to heathenism and the Lithuanian state with him, and it was not before 1387 that "The Gordian knot (sic) was cut by the Grand Duke Jogaila", who was baptised in 1386 in Krakow. "We do not know the exact reasons which moved Jogaila to such a decision at this particular time. Nevertheless, some suggestions can be made. First, christianization was simply the agreed price he had to pay for the Polish crown which he desired; the crown not only enhanced his personal prestige as a ruler but also extended his personal power. Second, acceptance of the Polish crown gave him an opportunity for stabilizing his own position in Lithuania's domestic political life torn apart by a decade of internecine strife, accompanied by assassinations in the ruling family which threatened state unity and endangered Lithuanian rule in the Slavic principalities." (http://www.lituanus.org/1988/88_3_02.htm/). Once again, we find that religious motives did not play any part in the conversion to Christianity of the rulers of the last heathen empire in Europe.

"Once a warrior king embraced 'Christianity' – an adoption of form and formality with little or no regard to content – the warrior aristocracy followed its king" (http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/tribes.html/ this site, which we have only been able to skim, sounds worth reading). In fact, all the conversions from European sovereigns which took place from Theodosius' to Mindaugas' and Jogaila's were politically motivated, and, therefore, do not imply that the then European aristocracy was in agreement with the dogmas of the Christian Church, nor with the spirit from which it proceeds, neither intellectually nor spiritually, and even less racially. That's the first point.

The second point is that the fact that Clovis and the Frank aristocracy converted to Christianity and that this religion became the state religion does not mean ipso facto that the whole population became Christian - 'in spirit' - overnight. "An overview of the Southern-Estonian rural cemeteries - both village cemeteries and churchyards - presents data on their number, location, archaeological finds and chronology, as well as of burial customs. Estonian medieval burial customs are characterised by the durability of pre-Christian features (small grave goods, cremation in Southern Estonia up to the 16th c., generic opposition orientation in funerals in Võrumaa up to the 17th c.). In a wider European context, similar burial customs can be found in the same period only in Latvia, Lithuania, at the Saamis and eastward Finno-Ugrians. Substantially, the burial customs of 13th-18th-centuries' village cemeteries represent the phase of transition from pre-historic times to Christianity. Similar transitional phenomena occur also in the culture of all Northern Europe but in a more early time. The investigation results reveal a major difference between medieval rural and urban cemeteries: in their main features, urban burial customs correspond to Christian norms, characteristic of Medieval Europe, but not so in the country. From 16th c. the difference between burial customs in towns and in the country decreases: non-Christian features, typical of rural burial customs (small grave-goods), appear also in urban cemeteries." (http://www.arheo.ut.ee/Heiki_eng.htm). Many other academic studies have showed that, in general, the Christianisation process in European countries was not completed before the late XIXth century, with its 'industrial revolution' and the migration from the rural to the cities ; up to the XIXth century, the continuation of pre-Christian customs throughout Christianised Europe testifies to the persistence, mainly in the countryside people, of a heathen mentality and vision of the world and of life. One thing is to be formally Christian, whether by choice or by coercion, another thing is to be Christian 'in spirit', that is, to think and to behave, more or less unconsciously, according to the typically Semitic values upon which this religion is based. The Christian precept according to which "there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus" was never applied, nor even taken seriously under the Ancien Régime, neither by the aristocracy, nor by the people. This anti-racial precept expressed in Galatians 3:28, as many others of the Christian brand, was a time-bomb ; it only started to condition the thought and the behaviour of Europeans with the advent of the democratic egalitarian state, that is, once all the political, social, and psychological conditions were gathered for this precept to act as an "idée force", and once the main heathen opponents to Christianity were all exterminated, to start with. This 'change of religions', M.F. Strmiska notes, "is often characterized as the " rise" of Christianity, but it should also be understood as the " fall" of Pagan religions in Europe; a " fall" which was neither a simple nor a painless process, but rather a bloody and protracted struggle. Christianity did not simply " rise" like a spring plant or the dawn sun; it conquered. Nor did Paganism merely " fall" like a leaf from a branch or a fruit from a tree; it was crushed." (http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:05c2b0CS-QsJ:www.wickedness.net/strmiska.p\ df+charlemagne+einhard+%22religious+traditions%22&hl=fr&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=fr/)

In 772, Charlemagne, who warred Saxons 'in the name of faith', released a proclamation that every Saxon who refused to accept Jesus-Christ would be killed, and, henceforth, he kept a special detachment of Christian priests, who, in every Saxon village in which they halted, would liquidate anybody who refused to be baptised. In 782, he had a few thousands Saxons, who held to their own traditions with tenacity, beheaded, In his biography of the Frankish king, the monk Einhard stated that the Frankish king disposed of 4,500 Saxons who "like dogs that return to their vomit" had returned to the 'paganism' they had been forced to give up upon pain of death. In 794, he enacted a law by which every third Saxon living in any heathen area was kidnapped and forced to resettle and be raised amongst Christian Franks. A few centuries later, didn't Bernard of Clairvaux argue in his sermons "De Laude novae militiae ad milites Templi" that the religious Knight Templar "who kills for religion commits no evil but rather does good, for his people and himself. If he dies in battle, he gains heaven; if he kills his opponents, he avenges Christ. Either way, God is pleased," To subdue the Saxons and to coerce them into baptism (that is, 'spiritual circumcision' (Colossians 2:11–13) ; mikvah in Judaism), it took Charlemagne 30 years, during which many heathen reactions took place. For the first time in history, a people of Aryan origin - the Franks - waged a war in the name of religion, and, what's more, a fratricidal one, in the name of a religion which was not even theirs, and whose was alien to them. For the first time in history, religious proselytism, fanaticism, and intolerance, came to determine the policy of a European aristocracy.

Let's be coherent : just as these religious Saxon wars were politically motivated, as was the conversion to Christianity of European aristocracy, Christian Rome's motives may very well have been of the same order. However, the one who invokes a demon, Goethe and, in his footsteps, Evola rightly observed, often ends up being possessed by that demon, especially when this demon is invoked inadvertently. Before adopting a form, one should pay much attention to its content.

"The Saxons had a very rigid social caste system. There were three castes : edhilingui (nobles), frilingi (freedmen) and lazzi (serfs) who were not allowed to inter-marry on pain of death," This, as well as a religion and a world-view based on race and which is absolutely indissociable from race, was what, unconsciously, Charlemagne and his Christian counselors, possessed as they were by forces of which they were unaware, tried desperately to eradicate.

To finish answering your second question, very few Europeans, to this day, have consciously embraced the Christian faith, for the simple reason that they are baptised as children, as babies, a practice which, contrary to common belief, did not develop in the Middle Ages, but dates back to early Christianity :

"For as we are lepers in sin, we are made clean, by means of the sacred water and the invocation of the Lord, from our old transgressions, being spiritually regenerated as newborn babes, even as the Lord has declared: `Except a man be born again through water and the Spirit, he shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven' [John 3:5]" (Irenaeus, Fragment 34)

"Baptize first the children, and if they can speak for themselves let them do so. Otherwise, let their parents or other relatives speak for them" (Hippolytus, 'The Apostolic Tradition', 21:16)

"The Church received from the apostles the tradition of giving baptism even to infants. The apostles, to whom were committed the secrets of the divine sacraments, knew there are in everyone innate strains of [original] sin, which must be washed away through water and the Spirit" (Origen, 'Commentaries on Romans', 5:9)

""[W]hoever says that infants fresh from their mothers' wombs ought not to be baptized, or say that they are indeed baptized unto the remission of sins, but that they draw nothing of the original sin of Adam, which is expiated in the bath of regeneration... let him be anathema (Council of Mileum II, Canon 3).

Etc.
Evola As He Is
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Oct 25, 2019 at 9:03am
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Post by Evola As He Is on Oct 25, 2019 at 9:03am
"Christianity is at the root of the evil that has corrupted the West. This is the truth, and it does not admit uncertainty.

(...) Christianity first infected the race of blonde Germanic barbarians, (...)

The identification of our tradition with either the Christian or Catholic tradition is the most absurd of errors."

(excerpt from 'Imperialismo pagano', Atanor, Todi-Roma 1928 - www.centrostudilaruna.it/evolamedtrad.html ; the original, 'Tradizione Mediterranea contro tradizione cristiana', can be found here : www.politicaonline.net/forum/showthread.php?p=5349574)

So, what happened in the author's mind during the three years which separated the publication of 'Imperialismo pagano' and that of 'Heidnischer Imperialismus'? As a preamble to the examination of this question, let us recall again, for those who have not noticed yet, that this list is not meant to be a fan club, and that we are not into hagiography. It is called Evola-as-he-is because our statements are supported by quotations taken from his work, each time the question tacked has been dealt with by this author. Since his views on some of these questions have developed to a greater or lesser extent throughout the years, we also try to account for this development by relevant quotations. Once they have been exposed, they are critically examined and discussed, to the best of the abilities of members, and taken into account, when backed by arguments. Verbal incantation and psittacism do not interest us in any way. Nor do they impress us in any way.

So, to go back to the matter at hand, what happened, not only in J. Evola's mind, between the publication of the anti-Christian 'Imperialismo pagano' and that of 'Heidnischer Imperialismus'? "There was a reason for these disproportionate reactions [ the "true avalanche of attacks from the entire chain of newspapers served by the relevant agency [which] followed [the publication of 'Imperialismo pagano']], the author pointed out in 'Il Cammino del cinabro' thirty years later, the Concordat had not been signed yet, and it was feared that someone behind the scenes wanted to spoil the game." Still in the same passage, which is contained in the English edition of 'Heidnischer Imperialismus', which will be published and available on the 23rd of December), he added : "The most scathing aspect of the book was its attack on the religious problem, and the obviously convincing character of my thesis elicited many alarmed reactions. I asked to what extent the essential values of Fascist `ethics' were compatible with Christian ones, and whether it was not mere stale rhetoric to recall Rome and its symbols without reviving also its inseparable counterpart, the spirituality of heathenism, irreducible to Christianity."

No matter J. Evola's and others' efforts, the Concordate was signed a few months after the publication of 'Imperialismo pagano'. The worse had happened, and it was irreversible. It was then about 'sauver les meubles' : trying to salvage as much as possible. Hence, in 'Heathen Imperialism' (published a few months after the signing of the Concordate), a change of strategy, and the low-key character of his stand, if not on Christianity, at least on Catholicism, as showed by the excerpts you quoted from 'Heathen Imperialism'. From then on to 'Men among the Ruins', his stand on Catholicism will not vary. It is summarised in the interview he gave in French in late 1966 to 'La Nation Européenne', and which was published in the issues 13 (15 December 1966 - 15 February 1967) and 14 (15 February - 15 March 1967) of that paper : "If il Christianity has undoubtedly altered certain European values, yet, in some cases, these values have turned out to be rectified and modified by Christianity." Note that he has never said which ones he thought had been "rectified" (http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/1856/Muti.htm).

Originally, this stand was dictated by an attempt to 'wheedle' the Church to convince it to assume a traditional function, more than by a true conviction. Once again, this is not a personal interpretation of ours. It's all written down in 'Il Cammino del cinabro' as well as, possibly even more explicitly, in his preface to the Italian edition of Guénon's 'La Crise du monde moderne', which, hopefully, will be published some day in English. The second factor which explains his change of stand towards Christianity is the discovery of the French metaphysician's work and the influence, deleterious to some extent, which it exerted on him henceforth. In 'Il Cammino del cinabro', J. Evola, looking back at 'Imperialismo pagano', may have considered it as a "youthful" work ; the fact remains that the views expressed on Christianity in this "youthful" work were along the same wavelength as those expressed by the still sound part of the Roman aristocracy on that Semitic religion.

Had the Third Reich prevailed over the Jew and over "spiritually circumcised" goyim, some have speculated, the collaboration between the SS and J.Evola could have been even more fruitful, and the latter's work would have taken another dimension. The anti-racist Piero Mancuso, in 'Il seme Dell'odio', has tried to show that Evola's racism was actually far closer to the biological racism upheld by the National-Socialist leadership than superficial readers of the former's work and those who pontificate relentlessly about National-Socialist racism without ever having opened any of the works written by racialist Germans tend to assume, and, unsurprisingly, he has been successful (http://www.fuocosacro.com/pagine/articoli/ilsemedell'odio.htm). Both agreed on the necessity of racial purity and of racial hygiene. Racial purity and racial hygiene is paramount in the Veda ; those who are not aware of this may want to read the Veda, to begin with, just to make sure they know what they talking about and they are not rambling about a tradition which never existed, except in their mind. Ayurveda is a branch of Vedic science which explains the art of producing healthy progeny for the creation of a better society. In other words, it is about eugenics, which, therefore, at the risk of disappointing anti-racists and adepts of 'spiritual racism', was not created in the United States in the late XXth century. Even though J. Evola did not mention them in his history of racism ('Il Mito del sangue'), racial classifications do exist in early Buddhism (i.e. Purana Kassapa's and Makkhali Gosala's), but, if you want to keep on living in a fantasy world, all you have to do is to keep reading books such as F. Schuon's 'Castes and races' and similar 'traditionalist' poetry.

From a 'traditional' standpoint, everything you say in your message is perfectly orthodox. From our point of view, it is aberrant.

We'll go back to it later.
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Oct 25, 2019 at 9:05am
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Post by Evola As He Is on Oct 25, 2019 at 9:05am
The first step when it comes to understanding a text is to make sure that one reads it carefully and without prejudice, failing which, consciously or not, one tends to make it say, not what it actually says, but what one would like it to say, what one would like to hear, distorting it until it becomes a mere reflection of one's own views, whether one has an agenda or not ; failing which any discussion of a text is bound to be sterile. Selective quoting is usually paired with misconstruction.

Heiki Valk's study (see evolaasheis.proboards.com/post/82/thread) is not just about the burial practices of medieval and post-medieval Estonians. "In a wider European context, similar burial customs can be found in the same period only in Latvia, Lithuania, at the Saamis and eastward Finno-Ugrians (...) Similar transitional phenomena occur also in the culture of all Northern Europe but in a more early time.". It's no secret : "in somes cases, the Christianisation of the West was only superficial".http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/1856/Muti.htm/, at least until recently, and, in other cases, it did not happen overnight.

To support her thesis, the second scholar we mentionned the other day needs 'Humani generis' to say that the Church leaves open the possibility of polygenism ; it does not say it, but, to her, it does not matter, and here she goes : The Church "deliberately leaves open the possibility of polygenism for theological inquiry." To support her thesis of a development of racial consciousness in the Middles ages (more precisely : in medieval literature) and of the compatibility between Christianity and racism, the first goes so far as to see in 'Civitas Dei' what is not found in it, that is, a refusal to decide on whether other races descend from Adam or not.

What is absurd about your criticism against her thesis - the development of a racial consciousness in the Middle Ages, in medieval literature - is that you share it. What is absurd about your criticism against biological racism and your claim that "In the Middle Ages, Jews were either chased out or permitted to live in ghettos. This may be disliked by professors today, but it indicates a racial consciousness," is that, without your realising it, it turns out to be closely akin to that of one of the main representatives of that current, Reich Minister of the Interior Dr. Frick, who, in "Why the Aryan Law?", states, mistaking the racial plane with the religious one : "Even in the Middle Ages, the most important thing was not the difference between the Christian and Mosaic faiths. Rather, there was on the one hand the natural sense that the Jew was of a foreign race, and on the other hand the strict law of blood which demanded a clear separation if the Jews were to fulfill Jehovah's mission." However, he does not go as far as you do, insofar as, a few paragraphs below, he speaks of "the reawakening of German racial consciousness" in his time, which implies that racial consciousness was 'dozing' until then.

Nor did racial consciousness vanish in thin air overnight, it took time before the genocidal teachings of the Church managed to dull it, all the more easily as the very fact that Germanic tribes had converted to Christianity, no matter the reasons, shows that it was already weakened in these peoples. In the Middle Ages, it remained in the latent state, and, at the very best, on the plane of the soul, without manifesting itself, without asserting itself, without shaping the material world. The European medieval man was once defined rightly as an 'animic man'. See European medieval languages. Contrary to what scholars publishing on a yearly basis expensive manuals called 'Old English grammar', 'Old French grammar', 'Old Italian grammar' would like their students to believe, European languages had no fixed grammar until the late Renaissance ; as for orthograph, most words had fifteen or twenty different spellings. Nothing was fixed in the Middle Ages. We were still in an intermediary, subtle world, and so was the medieval European man, whose world was half-way between the dynamic stability of ancient traditional societies, whose languages, whether Saussure's followers like it or not, had rules derived from the very nature of things, and the rigidity of modern European languages, whose grammatical and orthographic rules are completely arbitrary and, in general, fanciful.

Race as an active principle and as a force, which was originally at work on the plane of the spirit, subsided gradually to the plane of the soul, and, finally, to that of the body, on which it was vegetating when, in the early XXth century, nationalist forces came to power in Europe. In 'Il problema della selezione interrazziale in Germania' ('Bibliografia Fascista'), J. Evola stated that Bismarck did not need to resort to race to accomplish what he did. Nor did any of the European kings who ruled from the early Middle Ages to the early XXth century.

Hence, maybe, the situation in which Europe found itself at that time, and the fact that, since nothing had been done for almost 2000 years, drastic measures had to be taken, to prevent it from sinking definitely.

Each year since 1945, veterans of the Waffen SS 20th Estonian Division have been celebrating, openly since 1991, the anniversary of the first clashes between Estonian pro-German troops and the Soviet Army in 1941, and so have veterans of the Estonian SS-Freiwilligen-Panzergrenadier-Bataillon Narwa, whose remnants, withdrawn to Germany, formed the core of SS-Füsilier Bataillon 20 which fought heroically in defense of Silesia, even when encircled, in 1945. Most of the survivors, tall old men, whose eyes are as blue as their hair are (still!) blond, would certainly be entertained by your sally about 'low caste' ones, as well as their offspring.