(Mythus des XX. Jahrhunderts)

by Alfred Rosenberg

All present day struggles for power are outward effects of an inward collapse. All State systems of 1914 have already collapsed, even if in part they still formally exist. Collapsed also have social, church and ideological creeds and values. No highest principle, no supreme idea governs undisputed the life of Folks. Group struggles against group, party against party, national values against international dogmas, rigid imperialism against spreading pacifism. Finance with its golden meshes swallows States and Folk, economy becomes nomadic, life is uprooted.

The Great War, as the beginning of a world revolution in all domains, has revealed the tragic fact that, although millions sacrificed their lives, this sacrifice was to the advantage of forces other than those for which the armies were ready to die. The dead of the war were victims of a catastrophic epoch that had lost all its values, but at the same time—and this is something which begins to be grasped in Germany today, even if so far by few—the martyrs of a new dawn, of a new faith. The blood which died, begins to live. In its mystical sign the cells of the German Folkish soul renew themselves. Past and present suddenly appear in a new light, and for the future there results a new mission. History and the task of the future no longer signify the struggle of class against class or the conflict between one church dogma and another, but the settlement between blood and blood, race and race, Folk and Folk. And that means: the struggle of spiritual values against each other.

However, the values of the racial soul, which stand as driving forces behind this new image of the world, have not yet become a living consciousness. Soul means race seen from within. And, conversely, race is the external side of a soul. To awaken the racial soul to life means to recognise its highest value, and, under its dominance, to allot to other values their organic position in the State, in art, and in religion. That is the task of our century; to create a new human type out of a new view of life. And for this, courage is needed; courage of each single individual, courage of the entire generation growing up, indeed of many following generations. For chaos has never been mastered by those without courage, and a world has never been built by cowards. Whoever wishes to go forward, must therefore also burn bridges behind him. Whoever sets out on a great journey, must leave old household goods behind. Whoever strives for what is highest, must turn his back on what is lesser. And to all doubts and questions the new man of the coming great German Reich knows only one answer: I alone will triumph!

Despite the fact that so many today agree with these words, nevertheless no community can as yet be established on the basis of the ideas and conclusions laid down in this work. These are personal avowals throughout, not points in the program of the political movement to which I belong. This has its own great special task, and as an organisation must keep itself remote from disputes of a religious, churchish political kind, as well as from the obligation to a definite philosophy of art or a fixed style of architecture. Thus it cannot also be made responsible for what is put forward here. Philosophical, religious, artistic convictions are only to be based on the prerequisite of personal freedom of conscience, and that is the case here. The work, however, is not directed at persons who live and work happily and firmly rooted within their own faith communities, but certainly at all those who, inwardly released from the latter, have still not fought their way forward to new ideological links. The fact that these already number millions lays obligations on every fellow fighter to help himself and other seekers through deeper reflection.

This work, the basic idea of which goes back to 1917, was already completed in fundamentals in 1925, but new everyday duties again and again held up its final appearance. Works of colleagues or opponents then demanded renewed attention to questions which had hitherto been put aside. Not for a moment do I believe that here a solution to the great themes placed before us by destiny has been achieved. But I certainly hope to have clearly posed questions and to have coherently answered them as the foundation for the bringing about a day of which we all dream.

Munich, February 1930

The publication of this work immediately called forth the most violent arguments. Owing to my deliberate questions and sharpened outlines, attacks were to be expected. But if I am to be completely honest, then I must say that I am astounded (but also overjoyed) at the concentrated hate I have encountered along with the unscrupulous distortion of what I have written, by the manner in which these attacks appeared as if by command. In particular, the wild unrestrained abuse by Roman churchish circles has shown how deeply justified the assessment of the Roman Syrian dogma in fact is in the present work. According to old established methods, certain conclusions and assertions were, of course, taken out of context from this extensive book, and the blasphemy, the atheism, the Wotanism of the author were held out before the credible reader in the German Roman press and in pamphlets. The falsifiers omitted that I even went so far as to postulate Wagner’s assertion that a work of art is the living representation of religion and the starting point for the whole of Germanic art and its foundation. The great respect which is shown the founder of Christianity in the work was overlooked. It was deliberately concealed that my religious observations have the clear intention of viewing his great personality without the eternal distortions by various churches. It was omitted that I rendered Wotanism as a dead religious form (but naturally have respect for the Germanic character which gave birth to Wotan as well as Faust) and, in an unscrupulous manner, the fantasy was concocted that I wished to reintroduce the pagan cult of Wotan. In short, there was nothing which was not distorted and falsified; and what appeared correctly expressed in a literal sense received a completely different colouring by being taken out of context. The Roman churchish press omitted entirely all historical—because unassailable—factual affirmations; all thought processes which led to a definite outlook were thoroughly distorted, and the bases of the requirements presented were deliberately overlooked. The prelates and cardinals mobilised the faithful masses, and Rome, along with atheistic Marxism, that is, with the political support of the subhumans, conducted a war of annihilation against Germany, to the total sacrifice of the German catholics, and yet had the effrontery to suddenly chatter about a culture war. The context of this work, which according to form and content certainly stands above those of the everyday level, were not made into an objective, and therefore, to be welcomed, critique, but were utilised for the most desolate everyday conflicts. Not against myself alone—that would have left me indifferent—but also against the National Socialist Movement to which I have belonged since its inception. Despite the fact that, in the introduction and in the work itself, I expressly declared that a political movement which includes diverse religious denominations could not solve questions of a religious or artistic philosophical nature; that consequently my world outlook as a creed was a personal one—in spite of all this—the obscurantists did everything in their power to divert attention from their political crimes against the German Folk, and once again to lament about religion endangered; although true religion is endangered by nothing so much as by the systematic cultivation of Marxism by the Centre Party under direction of the Roman prelates. The National Socialist Movement is not concerned with exerting religious dogmatism, neither for nor against a particular denomination, but the fact that a man in the forefront of political life must claim the right to represent a religious conviction which runs contrary to that of Rome, reveals to what degree spiritual gagging has already been successful.

The admissibility of activity in the national camp is measured by its value to the Roman dogmatism, instead of such a presumption being seen as impossible from the start. An undoubtedly serious attempt to cleanse the personality of Christ from the non Christian Pauline, Augustine and other additions, has as a consequence brought forth a one sided fury among the ruling utilisers of the distortion of the spiritual figure of Jesus; not because high religious values were touched upon, but because a position of political power attained through the spiritual anguish of millions is threatened by a potential proud awakening. Things are now such that the Roman Church feels no fear before Darwinism and Liberalism, because, especially in the latter, it saw only intellectual attempts without a strength capable of shaping communities. But the nationalistic rebirth of German man, from whom the entanglements of the old values had fallen away through the upheaval of 1914-1918, appears as so dangerous because from it a power, capable of forming Types, threatens to arise. The ruling priest caste only senses this from afar, and particularly it sees that this awakening makes efforts to strengthen everything noble and strong. Therefore its alliance with the Red subhumanity has to be close. This will only alter when the German Front proves itself victorious; at that hour, Rome will attempt as friend to achieve what it could not attain as enemy. However, to pursue these possibilities does not lie within the scope of this book; it is concerned with the chiselling out of the actual spiritual Types, hence about the man seeking to become self conscious; an awakening of the feeling of value and the steeling of the character; of resistance in the face of all hostile enticements.

The uproar about my writings was all the more typical, since not a word was uttered to express my disassociation from the slandering of great Germans, such as has for long been the literary preoccupation of the Jesuits and their associates. The slandering was quietly furthered, of Goethe, Schiller, Kant, and so on, and no objections were raised when the pacemakers of Rome saw their religious task in the hindrance of the formation of a German National State; when at catholic pacifist gatherings it was demanded that German soldiers be refused a salute; when catholic clergy dared to publicly deny the truth about the actions of the Belgian Franc tireurs and to accuse German soldiers of murdering their comrades in order to have an excuse for the persecution of Belgians; when the German Folk’s Army was wrongly accused in French propaganda of desecration of altars and the host committed in Belgian churches. No bishops and cardinals have protested against this deliberate slander of what is German, of its fallen and living defenders; but there certainly followed on the part of these same bishops and cardinals attack after attack upon German nationalism. And if the latter were pilloried, it shows that the Roman political and religious groups were advancing their own national feeling.

The Roman Church in Germany cannot dispute its full responsibility for the Folkish destructive work of its numerous pacifist clergy, since in other cases where honourable catholic priests found words of true German national will, they were excluded without further ado from free speech. Thus there exists a proven systematic politically ideological attempt to rob the German Folk of its pride in the defenders of the homeland of 1914, to desecrate their memory, and to drag into the muck the fiery will to protect Folk and Fatherland. To establish this requires the simplest truthfulness, and how the faithful come to terms with their church authority is a matter of conscience. Things are not such that in order to silence awakening struggles they can pass off these undeniable facts as mere aberrations, but courage is particularly necessary for defence against the politics of the highest church authorities. Whether those so awakening discern the entire ideological contrast or not must remain their own affair. What is important is that the serious will awakens to defend German national honour, not only against Marxists but equally so, indeed even more sharply, against the centre and its church allies as the massive breeders of Marxism. An evasion of this point would merely reveal an un German disposition.

I will not mention all the individual hostile voices. But the typically unscrupulous methods may be singled out in which the Jesuit Jakob Notges has the effrontery to assert that the protection of the mother tongue belongs to the catholic order, although his order in particular has been the most bloody opponent of the right to the mother tongue; that the love for Folk and Fatherland is demanded by all great moral theologians, in which respect his order in particular fights forever against German Nationalism! The Christian neighbourly love of this gentleman finally unloads itself in the words: This Balt is a culture fighter, in the manner of a boxer. The poor man suffers from an incurable fear of St Peter’s Square, which finds its expression in raging and shouting. Then Hitler is advised to put me in a straitjacket since putting me on ice is no longer of use because he has experienced the Russian winter too often. The furious unreasoned hatred by this Jesuit whose Roman sunstroke passes beyond every boundary is enlarged by other colleagues of his order in the contrasting manner of combat. The Jesuit Koch, for example, tries to speak of a German racial soul, calls the experience of life as this resounds from the Myth serious and honourable, in order in conclusion to celebrate Boniface as the greatest German! This form of one hundred percent falsification is something we will often meet in the future where there is the realisation that incitement no longer helps; therefore, such Germanic attempts must also be treated with caution. The destruction of the German soul is always seen as the goal both of the apostles of incitement as well as of the handyman artisans of the SOCIETAS IESV and its fellow protagonists—yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

My book has also called forth a violent upheaval in evangelical (protestant) circles. Countless articles in newspapers and journals prove that it clearly touched upon very sensitive spots. At evangelical synods, at congresses of the evangelical league, the Myth often stood at the centre point of debate, and many pamphlets of protestant theologians give evidence that a struggle of values has become renewed and deep in the midst of Lutheranism. My prediction that the evangelical church would behave in an anxious manner toward the new religious feeling—similar to Rome with its dogmatic base towards the Reformation—has unfortunately been confirmed. The theologians and professors fulminating against my work made it easy for them to be seen as being in full possession of evangelical truth; they simply confirmed the heretical nature of my assertions, praised national feeling (without obligation), and were delighted to be able to establish (apparent) inaccuracies, and then to reject these.

It was reported to me that at one of these synods after just such a report, an honest white haired clergyman stood up and declared that he could not acknowledge what had been said. It was hats off before this honourable man! Irrespective of whether his search reveals the same conclusions as mine, every genuine fighter will show respect to the searching opponent, but not to the old guardians of dogma who believe that they must at all costs hang on to their tenuous positions.

In discussion with learned theologians, I was further able to establish the following: they conceded to me that the evaluation of ancient history from the racial soul aspect was correct. But when I drew the conclusion that the Jews must then necessarily also have their own completely determined character—their blood linked idea of god—that consequently this Syrian life and spiritual form did not concern us in the least, then the Old Testament dogma arose like The Great Wall Of China between us; suddenly, the Jews appeared as an exception among Folks. In all seriousness, the Cosmic God was said to be identical with the dubious spiritual assertions of the Old Testament! Hebrew polytheism was elevated to a model of monotheism, and no deeper a knowledge had come to Lutheran theology from the original magnificent Aryan Persian idea of the world and the cosmic comprehension of God. In addition there appeared the revering of Paul, an arch sin of protestantism, against which Lagarde, as is known, attacked by the entire official theology of his day, fought in vain.

The protestant theologians everywhere submit, with universal agreement, to the antifolkish view of the world; the arrogant assertion of the Roman Church that the racial evaluation of Folks signifies un Christian idolatry. These gentlemen overlook, however, that the exceptional position which they attribute to the Jews, represents nothing other than idolatry of the parasitic Judaic manipulators, always hostile to us. Also typical is the answer which David Strathmann made in a leaflet to the criticism, that the churches should concern themselves with the German Folk, and, in view of the latter’s impoverishment, not bother about negro missions: as if that were their task! For the sake of the racial cult they are to deny the humanitarian task of the missions! The race and soul of the negroes is regarded—along with the good Jews—as being more important than the nation to which one has the honour to belong. This appears to them as self evident, just as they likewise prefer to overlook that this glorification of Jewry together with the unleashing of Jewish impulses has caused the impoverishment of our culture and our politics, against which the present direction of protestantism has proven itself incapable of successfully fighting, particularly owing to the idolatry of Jewish ways.

It is disconcerting if the present representatives of evangelical theology are so un Lutheran as to represent the views in which Luther was understandingly still caught up as permanently fixed dogmas. Luther’s great deed was, in the first instance, the smashing of the exotic priestly idea, and secondly, the Germanising of Christianity. The awakening of Germany, however, also led after Luther to Goethe, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Lagarde, and today approaches its full flowering with powerful strides. When David Kremers, a leader of the Evangelical League, declares in an article that the Myth is swallowed by academic youth, then he shows that he is aware how a powerfully new life is already active in the young protestant generation. Is it not more important now to promote this spiritual folkishly rooted life than to hang on inwardly to long fallen dogmatic idols? This young generation nevertheless wishes nothing more than to see the cosmic personality of the founder of Christianity in its actual greatness, without those falsifying additions with which Jewish zealots like Matthew, materialistic rabbis like Paul, African jurists like Tertullianus, or unprincipled crossbreeds like Augustinus, have presented to us as the most frightful spiritual ballast. The young wish to grasp the world and Christianity from their own essence, from Germanic values; to assert their self apparent right to this world, but which (especially today) must be regained with hard struggle.

If the ruling church orthodoxy is unable to grasp all this, it will nevertheless not alter the course of things; at most, only be able to make them hesitant. A great era would have then once more encountered a petty, self righteous generation. However, this coming time affirms both the Strasburg cathedral as well as the Wartburg, and denies the arrogant Roman Centre just as it does the Jerusalem Old Testament. It draws more strength from the roots of Germanic drama, its architecture and music, than from the comfortless tales of the Jewish people. It recognises much deep Folkish symbolism within the catholic church, and links the latter with the truthfulness of what is truly Lutheran. It unites with a great encompassing of racial soul world outlook all that is individualistic to the full blooded organism of a German essence.

The young evangelical priest must move forward since a training, crippling of the soul, does shackle him, as with catholic priests, until the time ripens when, from the latter also, Germanic rebels arise, and the work of the monks Roger Bacon and Eckehart lead to the freedom of practical life, just as the other great martyrs of the west also lived, suffered and fought in the past.

On the part of National circles, the Myth was greeted with deadly silence out of fear of the catholic Centre Party. Only a few risked joining themselves to its train of thought. The negative judgement from this camp, however, always consisted of claiming that I wished to be a founder of a new religion, but that in this respect I had failed. In the chapter on the Folkish Church, however, I have rejected this allegation in advance; what I am really concerned with, along with the foundation of the racial study of history, is to place in antithesis to one another the values of soul and character of the different races and Folks and systems of thought; to establish the organic order of rank of these values for what is German, and to pursue the Germanic will in all domains. The problem is thus: To introduce an orientation of soul and spirit against chaotic confusion; to reveal the prerequisites of a general rebirth. The value of my work is to be measured by this act of will and by criticism of what I have not undertaken to carry out, which will be the task of a reformer who will arise from the longings of a clearly adjusted generation.

Voices in other countries are throughout more objective than the echoes from circles needing reform in Germany. But more important than all this are the countless expressions of agreement from all countries of the world, above all from those Germans who have become conscious of the present great spiritual hour of destiny for both Germany and the western Folks. The questions which confront us, also confront other nations, and only a very grave destiny compels us to a more honest account, drives us to step out upon a new path because, otherwise, with political collapse, spiritual catastrophe must also appear, and the German Folk as a real Folk will vanish from history. However, true rebirth is never a matter of political power, even less than a matter of economic reorganisation, as empty Marxist heads arrogantly assert, but it signifies a central experience of the soul, the recognition of a highest value. If this experience is continued millionfold from man to man, finally, if the united strength of the Folk places itself before this inward transformation, then no power in the world will be able to prevent the resurrection of Germany.

The democratic Marxist camp had at first attempted by dead silence to deny the appearance of this work. However, it was then forced into declaring its attitude. These people have now attacked the fake socialism, such as was apparently taught in my work to the detriment of the workers. The true socialism of social democracy clearly surfaces in that there is an untroubled continuation of the literal enslavement of an entire Folk over many decades through continuation of the pawning of all still existing values with their subjugation under the dictates of international finance. True socialism further consists in that the decent creative German Folk are delivered into the hands of degenerate theatre and film propaganda, which knows only three heroic types: the prostitute, the pimp, and the criminal. The true socialism of the Marxist leadership, in effect, consists in that the little man is flung into jail for a small misdemeanour, whereas the big swindler walks away free, just as hitherto this had been the cultivated view of the most influential circles around democracy and social democracy. The whole of Marxism has revealed itself, as was unavoidable, as disintegrating of every organic community in favour of alien nomadic instincts. It must therefore regard a new foundation and the taking root of such Folkishly socialistic, style forming, feeling as an attack upon its existence.

Marxism and liberalism today find themselves along the entire front in a disorderly rearguard action. For many decades it was regarded as particularly progressive to speak only of humanity, to be world citizens, and to reject the racial question as retrogressive. Now all these illusions are not only politically disposed of, but the ideology upon which they are based has become brittle, and it will not be long until it collapses completely in the souls of those who, although misled, are still to some degree healthy. Closely pressed, nothing is left to scientific Marxism other than to attempt the proof that Karl Marx also expressly recognised the influence of Folk and race on world events! This mission to incorporate the blood awakening of the German worker, which can no longer be stemmed, into Marxist orthodoxy, which for decades has furiously fought the racial delusion, was undertaken, among others, by socialistic education—an attempt which in itself characterises the inward catastrophic spiritual collapse even if after the admission, with gnashed teeth, of the justification of the racial standpoint, is the general assertion that Marx rejected racial fetishism. What is self evident, is that otherwise he would have had to depart for Syria as a teacher—where he rightly belongs. To recognise this and to uproot Marxist materialism and financial capitalist backing from German life as an alien Syrian Jewish plant, is the great mission of the new German Workers’ Movement which as a result will win the right to the leadership of their own future.

We on our side do not deny very diverse influences: landscape and climate and political tradition; but all this is outweighed by blood and the blood linked character. Things evolve around the reconquest of this order of rank.

To reestablish the ingeniousness of healthy blood, is perhaps the greatest task upon which man can set himself today. At the same time, this affirmation gives evidence of the sad situation of the body and the spirit, that such a deed has become a vital necessity. A contribution to this great coming act of liberation of the 20th century is what the present book intends to be. Not only the shaking up of many awakening men, but also of opponents, is the desired result. I hope that the confrontation between a newly arising world and the old forces will take on more and more offshoots, penetrate into all domains of life, always fructifying anew, producing more blood linked pride, until the day when we can stand on the threshold of the fulfilment of our longing for a German life, until the hour when all wellsprings will unite into one great river of a Nordic German rebirth.

That is a dream worth being taught and lived. And this experience and this life alone are the reflections of a presaged eternity—the mysterious mission of this world into which we were placed in order to become what we are.

Munich, October 1931

In December, 1936, the printing of the Myth exceeded half a million copies. That is something which can no longer merely be described by the words a wonderful book, as it reveals far more that my work has become a part of the life of the German people, and has been taken as an inward possession by millions who had the courage to throw away from themselves what was dead in order to break courageously toward a new future.

I have been through the book once more, and have had to alter virtually nothing. Formulations which were laid down at the time of the most bitter political struggle, have revealed their deep justification for the present. Only in the domain of actual state political activities have some things been surpassed at one place, and the elaborations have been made appropriately.

The ideas laid down in the Myth have been established in later speeches which are summarised in two volumes: Blood and Honour, and Shaping of the Idea. I have answered my Roman opponents in the pamphlet: To the Obscurantists of our Times (edition of 680,000 copies).

The decisive transformation of soul and spirit completes itself throughout Germany. In its service, The Myth of the 20th century stands today in the foremost ranks.

Berlin, January 1937

Today one of those epochs is beginning in which world history must be written anew. The old images of the human past have faded, the outlines of leading personalities are distorted, their inner driving forces falsely interpreted, their whole nature for the most part totally misjudged. A youthful life force—which also knows itself to be age old—is impelled toward form; an ideology, a world view, has been born and, strong of will, begins to contend with old forms, ancient sacred practices, and outworn standards. This means no longer historically but fundamentally; not in a few special domains but everywhere; not only upon the heights but also at the roots.

And this sign of our times is reflected in a turning away from absolute values, that is to say, in a retreat from values held to be beyond all organic experience, which the isolated ego once devised to create, by peaceful or violent means, a universal spiritual community. Once, such an ultimate aim was the Christianising of the world and its redemption through the second coming of Christ. Another goal was represented by the humanist dream of mankind. Both ideals have been buried in the bloody chaos of the Great War, and in the subsequent rebirth out of this calamity, despite the fact that now one, and now the other, still find increasingly fanatical adherents and a venerable priesthood. These are processes of petrifaction and no longer of living tissue: a belief which has died in the soul cannot be raised from the dead.

Humanity, the universal church, or the sovereign ego, divorced from the bonds of blood, are no longer absolute values for us. They are dubious, even moribund, dogmas which lack polarity and which represent the ousting of nature in favour of abstractions. The emergence in the nineteenth century of Darwinism and positivism constituted the first powerful, though still wholly materialistic, protest against the lifeless and suffocating ideas which had come from Syria and Asia Minor and had brought about spiritual degeneracy. Christianity, with its vacuous creed of ecumenicalism and its ideal of HVMANITAS, disregarded the current of red blooded vitality which flows through the veins of all peoples of true worth and genuine culture. Blood was reduced to a mere chemical formula and explained in that way. But today an entire generation is beginning to have a presentiment that values are only created and preserved where the law of blood still determines the ideas and actions of men, whether consciously or unconsciously. At the subconscious level, whether in cult or in life, man obeys the commands of the blood, as if in dreams or, according to natural insight, as a happy expression describes this harmony between nature and culture. But culture, with the growth of all subconscious activity and of expanding consciousness and knowledge, becomes more and more intellectual, and ultimately engenders not creative tension but, in fact, discord. In this way, reason and understanding are divorced from race and nature and released from the bonds of blood. The ensuing generation falls victim to the individualistic system of intellectual absolutes, and separates itself more and more from its natural environment, mixing itself with alien blood. It is through this desecration of the blood that personality, people, race and culture perish. None who have disregarded the religion of the blood have escaped this nemesis—neither the Indians nor the Persians, neither the Greeks nor the Romans. Nor will Nordic Europe escape if it does not call a halt, turning away from bloodless absolutes and spiritually empty delusions, and begin to hearken trustingly once again to the subtle welling up of the ancient sap of life and values.

Once we recognise the awesome conflict between blood and environment and between blood and blood as the ultimate phenomenon beyond which we are not permitted to probe, a new and, in every respect, richly coloured picture of human history becomes manifest. This recognition at once brings with it the knowledge that the struggle of the blood and the intuitive awareness of life’s mystique are simply two aspects of the same thing. Race is the image of soul. The entire racial property is an intrinsic value without relationship to material worshippers who apprehend only discrete events in time and space, without experiencing these events as the greatest and most profound of all secrets.

Racial history is therefore simultaneously natural history and soul mystique. The history of the religion of the blood, however, is conversely the great world story of the rise and fall of peoples, their heroes and thinkers, their inventors and artists.

Today, historical vision can see deeper into the past than was imaginable at an earlier time. The monuments of all peoples now lie spread out before us, excavations of the very oldest examples of pictorial art allow a comparison of the driving forces of cultures, the myths from Iceland to Polynesia have been collected, the treasures of the Mayans in great part unearthed. In addition, modern geology enables us to draw maps as things were tens of thousands of years ago. Underwater exploration has raised solid masses of lava from great depths of the Atlantic Ocean, the summits of suddenly submerged mountains in whose valleys cultures had once arisen before one—or many—frightful catastrophes destroyed them. Geographers depict for us continental masses between North America and Europe whose fragments we see in Iceland and Greenland. On Novaya Zemyla, in one area of the far north, old water lines are revealed more than 100 metres above the present ones. These suggest that the north pole has shifted and that a much milder climate once prevailed in the Arctic. All in all, the old legends of Atlantis may appear in a new light. It seems far from impossible that in areas over which the Atlantic waves roll and giant icebergs float, a flourishing continent once rose above the waters, and upon it a creative race produced a far reaching culture and sent its children out into the world as seafarers and warriors. But even if this Atlantis hypotheses should prove untenable, a prehistoric Nordic cultural centre must still be assumed.

We have long since been forced to abandon the theory of an identical origin of myths, art, and religious forms among all peoples. On the contrary, the strongly substantiated proof of the frequent travelling of Sagas from people to people, and their taking root among many different groups, shows that the majority of basic myths have a fixed point of radiation—their place of creation. Thus, in their outward form, they are only comprehensible on the basis of a completely distinct point of origin, and the migrations of races also become a certainty in the most prehistoric times. The solar myth, with all its ramifications, did not arise spontaneously as a stage of general development, but was born where the appearance of the sun must have been a cosmic event of profoundest significance, that is, in the far north. Only there would the year be sharply divided into two halves, and only there would the sun represent a certainty in man’s innermost being of the life renewing, primal creative substance of the world. And so today the long derived hypotheses becomes a probability, namely that from a northern centre of creation which, without postulating an actual submerged Atlantic continent, we may call Atlantis, swarms of warriors once fanned out in obedience to the ever renewed and incarnate Nordic longing for distance to conquer and space to shape.

These currents of Atlantic men moved by water in their swan and dragon ships into the Mediterranean and to Africa; by land over central Asia to Kucha, perhaps even to China; over north Africa to the south of our own continent.

Ahura Mazda says to Zoroaster: Only once in the year does one see the rising and setting of stars and sun and moon; and the inhabitants hold to be a day, what is a year. This must be for the Persian god of light a distant memory of the Nordic homeland, for only in the far north do day and night each last six months.

The Mahabharata reports of the Indian hero, Arjuna, that during his visit to the mountain of Meru, the sun and moon daily passed around from left to right. Such an idea could never have originated in the tropical south, for only in the far north does the sun disc roll along the horizon. A prayer is also addressed to the Indian Adityas: May the long darkness not come over us, and it is complained of bright Agni that he had tarried too much in the long darkness, all of which can only be attributed to the long Hyperborean night.

Together with these primeval Aryan Atlantic memories appear those cult allegories, costumes, carvings which are understandable only in terms of Nordic origin. In predynastic Egypt, we find the Nordic boat with its swan neck and trefoil. But the rowers are the later ruling Amorites, already recognised by Sayce as fair skinned and blue eyed. They once traversed north Africa as strictly homogeneous hunter clans which gradually subdued the entire land. They then migrated somewhat further, across Syria and toward the future site of Babylon. The Berbers, among whom even today one finds light skins and blue eyes, do not go back to the Vandal invasions of the fifth century A.D., but to the prehistoric Atlantic Nordic human wave. The Kabyle huntsmen, for example, are to no small degree still wholly Nordic (thus the blond Berbers in the region of Constantinople form l0 % of the population; at Djebel Sheshor they are even more numerous). The ruling stratum of the ancient Egyptians reveals significantly finer features than the subject people. These Hamites are apparently a crossbreed of the Atlanteans and the negroid aboriginal population. Suddenly, around 2400 B.C., there appear reliefs of men with fair skin, reddish blond hair and blue eyes, those blond Libyans of whom Pausanias later reports. In the tomb paintings at Thebes, we find four races of Egypt represented: Asiatics, negroids, Libyans, and Egyptians. The last are depicted with reddish pigmentation; the Libyans, on the other hand, are always shown bearded, with blue eyes and white skins. Pure Nordic types are shown on a grave of the Senye dynasty, in the woman on the pylon of Horemheb at Karnak, by the swanboat people on the temple relief at Medinet Habu, and by the Tsakkarai who founded Phoenician sea travel. Light skinned men with golden hair are shown on the tombs at Medinet Gurob. In the most recent excavations in 1927 in the mastabas at the pyramid of Cheops, the Princess and Queen Meres Aneh (2633-2564) were found depicted with blond hair. Queen Nitokris, legendary and surrounded by myths, is likewise always said to have been blonde.

All these are racial memories of a prehistoric Nordic tradition in north Africa.

The Amorites founded Jerusalem, and they formed the Nordic weft in later Galilee, that is, in the pagan region whence Jesus is said to have come. The Amorites were then augmented by the Philistines, who also brought to Syria hitherto unknown Nordic ship designs, with axe and trefoil as the stem symbols.

It is still uncertain where the prehistoric homeland of the Nordic race lies. As the south Atlanteans swarmed over north Africa and southern Asia, so the north Atlanteans must have carried the sun god from Europe to Mesopotamia, even to the Sumerians, whose yearly calendar had once begun on the day of the winter solstice. The most recent investigations in Iceland and Scotland indicate a possible stone age immigration. The ancient Irish ideal of beauty was of milk white skin and blond hair. This was abandoned later with the arrival of a dark, round headed race.

Much remains obscure. Perhaps only future investigation will be able to establish whether the oldest of cult symbols—the first rock drawings of the stone age—were also the basis for the predynastic Egyptian linear script, and that other scripts in the world are also derived from this Atlantic symbolism. Whatever the results of future research, however, nothing can alter the one supreme fact that the march of world history has radiated from the north over the entire planet, determining in vast successive waves the spiritual face of the world—influencing it even in those cases where it was to be halted.

These migration periods—the legendary march of the Atlanteans across north Africa, Persia and India, followed by the Dorians, Macedonians, and Italic tribes; the diffusion of the Germanic folkish migration—culminated in the colonising of the world by the Germanic west.

When the first great Nordic wave rolled over the high mountains into India, it had already passed through many hostile races. Instinctively, as it were, the Indoaryans separated themselves from the dark alien peoples they encountered. The institution of caste was the outcome of this instinctive aversion. Varna means caste, but it also means colour. The fair Aryans thus linked themselves to an acceptable image of the human type, and created a gulf between themselves as conquerors and the black brown natives of pre Aryan India. According to this opposition of blood and blood, the Aryans evolved a worldview which, for depth and range, cannot be surpassed by any philosophy even today, although admittedly this was only after a long battle against the constantly intruding ideas of the racially inferior aborigines. The period, for example, which lies between the heroic songs of the Vedas and that of the Upanishads is one both of expansion and of a simultaneous struggle against sorcery and degenerate ecstasies. The sacrificial cult of spirits and gods had begun to infiltrate. The priest, with his sacred ladle and firebrand, was not immune to these magical ideas. Every touch of the hand, every gesture, acquired a mystical significance. As Deussen established, ritualism developed between the mythological and the philosophical periods. Prayer, which with the true Brahman was only a powerful elevation of the heart, became an incantation to compel the gods by magic. In the midst of this murky process, the Ãtman doctrine appeared to light a ray of hope. It was not an act of psychological development, which would be utterly meaningless (even Deussen does not attempt to explain it) but represented a new awakening of the Aryan soul in the face of the superstitious and magical beliefs of the subjugated non Aryans. This interpretation is at once confirmed when it is established that the great doctrine of the personal value of the spirit—devoid of magic and the demonic—originated in the courts of the kings, and was diffused from the warrior caste. Although the Brahmans were later to become the teachers of the new idea of the essential oneness of the world soul and the individual soul, they were never able to conceal the origin of the new concept. Thus it comes about that instruction concerning Ãtman is given by King Ajatactru to the Brahman Gargya Balake; by the war god Sanatkumara, to the Brahman Narada; by King Pravahna to the Brahman Aruni. Thanks to this aristocratic reassertion, the un Aryan magic cult retreated further and further, and did not proliferate once more until later when racial decay overtook even the India of the Kshatriyas.

As a born master, the Indian felt his individual soul expand into the Ãtman which pervaded the entire universe and lived within his own breast as his innermost self. The concept of an impersonal nature, rich and virtually all provident, could not divorce him from this metaphysical union. An active life, which was always demanded as an ineluctable duty of the world renouncing thinker, gave place more and more to the aim of journeying into the universe of the soul. This transition to the pure light of knowledge led to the noble attempt to overcome nature through reason. There is no doubt that many Indians, as individual personalities and aristocrats, were successful in this quest. But for later men only the teaching remained, devoid of its vital racial prerequisite.

Soon the rich, blood based meaning of Varna was entirely lost. Today it is only a division between technical, professional, and other classes, and has degenerated into the vilest travesty of the wisest idea in world history. The later Indian did not comprehend the threefold significance of blood, self, and universe. He saw only the last two. And he perished in the attempt at isolated contemplation of the self in racial pollution, whose modern products are wretched mongrels, seeking healing for their crippled existence in the waters of the Ganges.

After he had overcome the polarised ideas of self / universe by a rational choice in favour of the one part, the Indian monist also endeavoured to eliminate the antithesis between them, and violently to attain freedom through nature and master nature through freedom. He, therefore, was inclined to regard race and personality as being aspects of a higher concept and as illusory. The late Indian monist came to see nature as something unreal—an evil dream. The only reality for him is the world soul (Brahman) and its eternal reoccurrence in the individual soul (Ãtman). With this turning away from nature in general, the once clear idea and concept of race became ever more hazy. Philosophic dogma uprooted instinct from its earthly basis. If the only reality is the world soul, and if Ãtman is essentially one with it, then individuality vanishes and an undifferentiated universal oneness is achieved.

The result was that Indian thought ceased to be creative. It grew rigid. The alien blood of the swarthy Sudras, who were now thought of as equally valuable bearers of Ãtman, seeped in. Thus was destroyed the original concept of the identity of caste and race. Bastardisation was inevitable. Serpent and phallic cults of the aborigines began to flourish and spread. Symbolic interpretations of the hundred armed Shiva, like creeping vines in the primeval forest, begin to appear in a horrible, bastard art. Only at the courts of the kings were the old heroic songs still heard, and the lyricism of such as Kalidasa and other, mostly unknown, poets still honoured.

Çankara attempted a new refurbishing of Indian philosophy. But it was in vain. Through too deep an intake of breath, the arteries of the race were ruptured. Aryan blood flowed out and trickled away. Only here and there, where the dark soil of ancient India sucks it up, does it still fertilise. But it leaves only a cultivated philosophical and technical orthodoxy which, in its later insane distortion, rules Hindu life today.

We must not short sightedly assert that the Indian first polluted his race and then surrendered his personality. It is rather the case that a metaphysical process took place, and that this was manifested in a passionate yearning for the abolition of dualism as well as the reciprocally conditioning lower forms of polarity.

Viewed from the outside, philosophical acceptance of an equation of Ãtman Brahman engendered racial decay. In other cultures, this decay was not consequent upon the establishment of a pervasive philosophy, but was, simply, the result of uninterrupted miscegenation among two or more races. In such cases the essential characteristics of the various races were neither elevated nor strengthened, but ended in mutual annihilation.

From the sixth century B.C. on, Iran underwent a vast expansion by the Aryan Persians. Under Arshama, there arose one of the greatest personalities of Indoeuropean history, Spitama (Zoroaster, or Zarathustra). Concerned about the fate of the Aryan minority, he developed an idea which is only now beginning to revive in the Nordic west—protecting the race by endogamy within kin. But since the Aryan ruling aristocracy were sparsely scattered, Zoroaster tried to reinforce this imperative by creating an ideologically bound community of faith. Ahura Mazda, the eternal god of light, became a cosmic idea—the divine protector of Aryans everywhere. He had no special abode or temple like the gods of the orient and even of later Rome. He was simply the holy whiteness of perfection. His enemy is the dark Ahriman who is locked in struggle with him for world domination. This is a truly Nordic Aryan concept of Zoroaster. In this struggle, we must fight on the side of Ahura Mazda (just as the Einheriar in Valhalla would fight for Odin against the Fenris Wolf and the Midgard Serpent). Man must not, therefore, withdraw into world renouncing contemplation and asceticism. He must see himself as the struggling bearer of a world preserving idea; he must arouse and arm all the creative powers of the human soul. Whether as a thinker or an active creator, man must always serve what is highest. Wherever he goes, he serves the creative principle—when he sows and reaps; when he is true to himself; when he considers a handshake as an inviolable oath. The Vendidat epitomises all this in the sublime words: Whoever sows grain, sows saintliness.

But struggling man is surrounded by evil and temptation. To be able to oppose these forces successfully, Zoroaster invokes the Aryan blood which calls upon every Persian to serve the god of light. After death, good and evil are separated forever. In a final struggle, Ahura Mazda defeats Ahriman and constructs his kingdom of peace. For a time, the Persians derived great strength from this splendid religious epic. But in spite of such an heroic attempt, the dilution of Aryan blood in Asia could not be stemmed, and the great kingdom of the Persians declined. Yet the spirit of Zoroaster and his Myth continued to influence the greater world. The Jews adopted Ahriman as Satan, and evolved their own entirely artificial system of racial admixture out of a Persian system devised to preserve racial purity. This was combined with an obligation ridden religious law which was, of course, wholly Jewish. The Christian church appropriated the Persian idea of a saviour as a prince of peace—the Çaoshiahç, although adulterated with the Jewish idea of a messiah. Today, in the heart of northern Europe, there has awakened to heightened consciousness the same racial soul idea which was taught by Zoroaster. Nordic self awareness and Nordic racial discipline are the answer today to the Levantine east, which has diffused itself throughout Europe in the form of Jewry and varieties of faceless ecumenicalism.

Persian culture was a grafting upon a Semitic oriental trunk. As the commerce and money power of the lower races began to gain for them material influence, power, and honours, the graft began to decompose. The kin marriage imperative was forgotten, and the equalising of all races necessarily led to bastardisation.

Cut into the rock walls of Begistun on the order of a great Persian emperor are the words:

I, Darius, the great king, king of kings, of Aryan race .....

Today, the Iranian mule driver passes, uncomprehendingly, by this wall; a sign to the multitude that personality is born and dies with the race.

Most beautifully of all was the dream of Nordic man made manifest in Hellas. Wave upon wave came from the Danube valley and overlaid the earlier population of mixed Aryan and non Aryan immigrants, bringing fresh creative powers. The ancient Mycenaean culture of the Achaeans was predominantly Nordic in character. Next, Dorian tribes stormed anew the citadels of the racially alien aborigines, subjugating them and overthrowing the dominion of the legendary Phoenician Semitic King Minos. Until then, he had been master of all the area which was to be known in later times as Hellas.

As sturdy masters and warriors, the Hellenic tribes supplanted the decaying civilisation of the Levantine traders, and with the labour of the subjugated races, constructed an incomparable creative culture. Great sagas were carved in stone, and leisure time devoted to the composition and singing of immortal tales of the heroes. A true, aristocratic constitution proscribed any miscegenation. The Nordic strength, though reduced by chronic warfare, was continually refreshed by further immigration. Dorians, and then Macedonians, protected the creative blond blood up to the time when these tribes, too, were exhausted, and the vastly more numerous forces of the near east infiltrated through a thousand channels, poisoned Hellas and, in place of the ancient Greeks, produced the effete Levantines who share only the name with their predecessors. The Hellenes have vanished forever; only dead images in stone, only a few isolated remnants remain to proclaim the glorious racial soul which once created Pallas Athena and Apollo.

The Nordic’s absolute rejection of magical forms is never more clearly shown than in the religious values of Greece, which are still too little heeded. When scholars do happen to touch on the religious aspects of the Hellenes, they only interest themselves in the periods of introverted contemplation, when the Greek was already divided within himself and vacillated between his own natural values and those of alien and exotic origin.

But it was the earlier age of Homeros, confident in its destiny, which was a period of true religion. For this, our nineteenth century—another age of decline—had no real empathy. The Homeric golden age was not tormented yet with ethical problems. The figures of Apollo, Pallas Athena, sky father Zeus, were deifications of the truest religious feeling. Golden haired Apollo was the guardian and preserver of everything noble and inspired—order, harmony, artistic balance. Apollo was the dawn of day, at once the protector of inner vision and of the gift of sight. He was the god of song and of rhythmic movement; not, however, of frenzied dance. The swan, originating in the north, was sacred to him, a symbol of his own bright majesty. And in the manner of the south, the palm was also dedicated to him. On the Delphian temples are engraved the words:

Nothing in excess

and

Know Yourself

— two Homeric Apollonian credos.

Next to Apollo stood Pallas Athena, symbol of lightning, sprung from the head of Zeus, the blue eyed daughter of the Thunderer. She was the goddess of wisdom and prudent guardian of the destiny of the Hellenes.

These creations of the Greek soul exemplify the upright and still pure life of the Nordic. In the highest sense, they are religious postulates which proclaim confidence in the Nordic character and in the deities who, ingenuously, reveal themselves as well disposed towards men. Homeros offers neither polemic nor dogma, says Erwin Rohde, and in this single sentence Rohde has defined the very essence of true religion. This profound student of the Hellenic nature adds: Homeros has little interest in omens and ecstasies, lacking any taste for such. It is the moderation of a superior race which resounds from every page of the Iliad, and echoes in all the temples of Hellas. But beneath this creative level, there lurked and proliferated Pelasgian, Phoenician, Alpine, and, later, Levantine values. Continually, in proportion to the strengths of these races, their gods intruded. If the gods of the Greeks were heroes of light and heaven, the gods of the Levant were of the earth. Demeter, Hermes and others are essential creations of the alien racial soul. Pallas Athena is a warrior protectress of the life struggle: the Pelasgian Ares is a monster dripping blood, Apollo is the god of the lyre and song: Dionysos (at least in his non Aryan aspect) is the god of ecstasy and frenzied lust.

For the past two hundred years we have struggled over an interpretation of the Greek world. From Winckelmann by way of German classicism up to Preller and Voss came the adoration of light, of what is open to the world, of what can be clearly seen. Gradually, however, this line of inquiry loses impetus—its curve becomes flatter and flatter. Thinkers and artists became isolated objects of study, divorced from blood and soil. Attempts were made to explain and to critique Greek tragedy as products of an individual’s psychology. Homeros was understood only in a formal aesthetic manner. Late Hellenic rationalism was called upon to grace bloodless academic journalism. The other school—the Romantic movement—busied itself with the spiritual undercurrents which appear at the end of the Iliad, in the festivals for the dead, in the actions of the Erinyes (as described by Aeschylos). Romanticism delved into the souls of the chthonic countergods opposed to the Olympian Zeus. Proceeding from death and its riddles, it came to revere the female principle—especially Demeter—and it ended with the god of the dead, with Dionysos. Welcker, Rohde, and Nietzsche all allude to Mother Earth as the formless procreator into whose womb all expiring life returns. With shuddering awe, the great German Romantic movement sensed darker and darker veils interposed before the gods of celestial light, and it immersed itself deeper and deeper into the impulsive, formless, demonic, sexual, ecstatic and chthonic, and into mother worship. Yet it continued to describe all this as Grecian.

Now two lines of investigation go their separate ways. Albeit the Greek tribes took on a physically and spiritually alien nature; what interests the real researcher is not so much this alloying, which is often only artificial, but the content and form of the dominant element. When Jacob Burckhardt says: What they (the Greeks) did and suffered, they did and suffered freely and differently from all earlier peoples; they appear as original, spontaneous and wide awake, where with all others mindless necessity more or less prevailed, he illumes with the light of the mind the profoundest qualities of the Greek world. Yet, though he refers later to the Hellenes as Aryans, and instances other peoples and races, it never again occurs to him that he had uncovered a law of the racial soul.

Burckhardt describes the Greeks of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. as complete. The dramatic struggle of races, souls, and gods is thereafter lost in an individualistic aggregation of types. In the end, for all the accumulated knowledge, allusions, and intuitions, the Greek personality is extinguished. The inner freedom of the ancient Hellenes had waged a struggle against the oppressive brutishness of the near east. It was this great drama of an entire people which not only inspired their greatest achievements, but also made the Hellenes less fortunate than is commonly believed. If this contradiction in the history of Hellas was interpreted later in other ways, that is because the essential basis was ignored.

According to Bäumler, it was Görres who first attributed a universal polarity in history to the tension between the masculine and feminine principles. Bachofen it was, however, who developed and fully formulated this idea, which, in this present era of disintegration of all forms and figures, is celebrating its rebirth.

It was the maternal elements, Night, Earth, Death, which romantic intuition perceived as the undercurrents of ancient Greek life. From Etruria, by way of Crete and the depths of Asia Minor, matriarchy became dominant in both custom and law—even in the case of the masculine TYRANNIS. As a result there arose the Amazon concept and the hetairai, as well as poetic hymns to the dead and the mysteries linked with the earth spirit. Mother figures appear, each representing an aspect of the one great mysterious Earth Mother. They are holy and untouchable. If even one mother is slain, the earth itself arises in the shape of the Drinyes demanding blood who give no rest until the slayer’s blood has been spilled and sucked up by the earth as expiation. There is no question of whether right or wrong rests with the mother. A value in itself is represented by each one of them and affords them absolute inviolability. From the mother, the daughter inherits property which secures her independence, her name and her rights. Woman appears as the embodiment of the immortality of matter, or, more correctly, as the image of the indestructibility of matter as an abstraction.

So thought the Lycians and the Cretans (who alone used the term Motherland): so thought the Greek islands; so, indeed, thought Athens itself until the Nordic Theseus defeated the Amazons before its gates, and a mother was no longer the tutelary deity but the motherless and childless virgin, Pallas Athena.

From the aspect of the world history, the first great and decisive struggle between racial values was decided on Greek soil in favour of the Nordic. Thereafter man approached life from the day, from the laws of light and heaven. From the spirit and will of the father came everything which we claim for ourselves in the great legacy of Greek culture.

Thus it is neither true that matriarchy with all its consequences was devoid of any relationship to the people, nor that the new system of light was only a later stage of development, in which the dominance of woman persists as what was originally given (Bachofen). This one great misunderstanding, despite many accurate insights, clouds all other observation and gives rise to a misunderstanding of the whole spiritual development of Greek and Roman antiquity, as well as the deepest spiritual struggles of later western Germanic culture.

Late Roman, Christian, Egyptian, or Jewish ideas and values have penetrated into the soul of Germanic man and partly destroyed it. We shall have to separate the Germanic values from all others if we are not to be false to ourselves, and if we regard history in general as a manifestation and product of the struggle to give form to the most personal self. It is deplorable that first Christian, and later humanist, values have pushed this view of history more and more into the background, and substituted the dogma of a supposed general development of mankind.

In various guises, an abstraction began to uproot life. The reaction in the form of German romanticism was therefore as welcome as rain after a long drought. But in our own era of universal internationalism, it becomes necessary to follow this racially linked romanticism to its core, and to free it from certain nervous convulsions which still adhere to it. The Germanic peoples have not developed on the basis of some nebulous goal proffered by priests or scholars, but have either asserted themselves, or have disintegrated and been subjugated. Similarly, the pre Greek peoples of the Aegean did not develop from the basis of belief in chthonic gods to the sun heaven cult of Zeus Apollo. They were submerged after lengthy struggles and, in part, politically subjugated, in part spiritually assimilated. Nevertheless, they always waited for moments of weakness among the Nordic Greeks in order to assert once more their old values and their old gods.

Neither climate nor geography nor any other environmental influences are valid as ultimate explanations; for the sun that shone on Homeros shone likewise on the worshippers of Isis and Aphrodite. And it continued to shine over the same earth when Greece had passed away.

Before they arrived in Greece, the Hellenes did not view female dominance as the first stage of development. From the cradle, they obeyed the law of the father. Had it not been so, the Greek gods would have entered into an easy alliance with the Pelasgian Cretan or proto Libyan Egyptian gods in the same manner that the later Greeks rediscovered their own Hellos or Hercules in the gods of Aryan India. On the contrary, the Greek myths tell of constant struggle and victory. The Hellenes destroy the bloody Amazon rule in Lemnos with Iason’s raid; they send Bellerophon to wipe out this same rule in Lycia; in the Danaid version of saint Bartholomew’s Eve, they establish the triumph of Zeus and of the great saviour mediator, Hercules, over the dark tellurian powers of the earth and underworld.

In contrast, therefore, to Nordic Germanic mythology, Nordic Greek is so richly formed and so manifold (yet nevertheless in all its main lines the victory of light over darkness remaining) because the Teutonic Germanic gods had far less resistance to overcome with regard to the religious systems of other races. That is why the Iliad is one great paean to the triumph of life and light. Homeros understood that death and life are not opposites, but that they mutually condition each other. Goethe, too, was to recognise this. It is birth and death which confront each other, but both constitute life. Recognising the necessity of this inner law is also to recognise an impersonal destiny—the Moirai. Thetis foresees the death of her son, but she does not pray to Zeus to let him live. She knows that the sky, personified in him, is also subject to cosmic law, symbolised in the scales of eternity.

The Moirai, like the Norns in Teutonic mythology, are female because in woman the impersonal alone rules. She is the passive vessel of the law.

Here again a Nordic value is revealed; Apollo, whom Aeschylos calls destroyer of primeval demons, is the vanquisher of the un Nordic cults. The Lycian Glaucos, when Diomedes asks him about his family, says sadly that the generations of man are like the leaves of a tree. Here is seen the formless and depersonalised pre Greek ideas which persist despite the introduction of Apollonian sun worship into Lycia.

In Greek tragedy, which was born at a time when Greece fought its heaviest battles and shattered its human reserves, the Hellenes were compelled to struggle anew against the ancient chthonic forces. This can no longer be expressed in the confident, triumphant words of Homeros:

No, whoever once has died, should be sorrowfully mourned

For one day, and then buried with a resolute heart.

Now it takes the form of the most bitter struggle between two world views as expression of two utterly different racial souls.

Eriphyle betrays her husband for a necklace; the latter is avenged by his son, who kills his mother. The law of the pre Greek does not weigh the guilt of the mother. The very earth rises to avenge her shed blood, and the Erinyes drive Alkmaeon to madness. Only the advice of Apollo to place his foot on a piece of earth which was still invisible at the time of his mother’s slaying, finally saves Alkmaeon. He discovers a newly arisen island.

The conflict of racial souls appears most magnificently in Orestes. Here, in the clearest consciousness, the old and new forces are contraposed, and this work becomes a parable for all time. The law of the near east concerning motherhood is not concerned with the guilt of Klytemnestra, but dispatches its female agents to exact revenge upon the matricide.

The guardians of the Nordic ethos stand before Orestes to protect him as the avenger of his murdered father. She was not related by blood to the man whom she slew, cry the Erinyes. Apollo answers: It is the father, not the mother, who is the procreator of her children. Then Athena, daughter of Zeus, declares: With all my heart I honour everything masculine. However, Athena and Apollo magnanimously offer their hand to the defeated powers in a gesture of reconciliation. To appease them, they promise those dwellers deep in sunless night the respect of men:

But I, ever girded for bold struggle in battle for fame

Will not rest until all the world

Holds in highest honour my victorious city.

Thus Aeschylos concludes just as powerfully and conscious of strength as Homeros.

However, Apollo’s magnanimity had the result that the chthonic gods continued their subterranean life. After the later miscegenation between the Greeks and the aborigines, neither the chthonic nor the celestial deities appear again in pure form. They mingle in the Dionysian rites. Although Dionysos represents the father right, he also becomes the god of the dead upon whom Antigone calls. He loses the clear, strong character of Apollo, and becomes effeminate and drunken. Ultimately, he sinks down into all that is demonic, Maenadlike, and nocturnal. Even the animals consecrated to this demonic god are dark. Only at night is homage paid. Everything Dionysian in Greek life appears as something racially and spiritually alien—and ancient. It is to become the surest sign of the psychic deterioration which paralleled the attenuation of the Nordic blood.

By the flickering light of torches, to the clang of cymbals, accompanied by thumping on drums and the shrilling of flutes, the Dionysian celebrants performed their swirling, circling dances. It was mostly the women who whirled about to the point of exhaustion. They wore bassars, long flowing garments stitched together from the pelts of foxes. Their hair streamed wildly. Snakes, sacred to Sabazios, were held in their hands. They brandished daggers. In this fashion did they rave until they attained the uttermost climax of excitement. Then, in their holy madness, they fell upon the animals chosen for sacrifice, clawing and rending the bloody flesh with their teeth and swallowing it raw.

All such rites were diametrically opposed to the ethos of the Greeks. They represented that religion of frenzy (Frobenius) which dominated the entire eastern region of the Mediterranean world, and was evolved from the African near eastern races and racial mixtures. There is a direct line from the insanely possessed King Saul, through the earthbound intoxication of Dionysos, to the whirling dervishes of Islam. The phallus became the symbol of the later Grecian world idea. Thus, what we find relative to art and to life in this symbol is not Greek, but the antithesis, that is, near eastern.

The deities of the near east were everywhere sapping the foundations of the magnificent Hellenic edifice. Thus, for example, the primeval earth god Poseidon, repelled by Athena: he dwells in the ground under her temple in the form of a serpent; he is the fortress snake of the Acropolis who is fed each month with honey cake (Pauly Wissowa). The Pelasgian python dragon is also buried at Delphi under the temple of Apollo. Every eight years the slaying of this dragon was enacted before Apollo. This is the same place as the burial of Dionysos.

But the Nordic Theseus did not manage to slay all the monsters of the near east. At the first signs of the weakening of Aryan blood, they arose again and again as monsters combining the bestial with the physical robustness of oriental men.

So vital is this knowledge to the proper understanding of both mythology and world history that it is also desirable here to follow the great clash of racial souls where the victory of the Nordic Apollonian light principle (Pindar speaks of Danai with blond locks) was only temporary, and the old forces reasserted themselves in many hybrid forms.

This spiritual bastardisation was naturally furthest advanced in Asia Minor, in Colchis, and in some of the islands. There, the ruling Greek stratum was very thin and could not defend itself forever against chthonic multitudes.

These great and lengthy struggles were naturally condensed in saga and myth, as in the story of the Argonauts and the Apollonian Iason. They sailed, as the saga tells, before a northern wind—a memory of the Nordic origin of Apollo. From the north is the hero of light awaited.

Everywhere the followers of Iason go—like Greek Vikings—they find confronting them dark, chthonic gods, Amazon rule, and the most sensual conception of life. The existence of the Amazons can be easily explained. Roving bands of warriors often left their homes for long periods of time. The women who remained behind had to adjust their lives and to learn to defend themselves against attack. If their men folk finally returned, they often brought with them strange women, which repeatedly resulted in outbreaks of murder of the males. Such a deed, reported of the women of Lemnos, reverberated throughout the whole of Greece as a most horrible crime, and was retold again and again with renewed horror.

Women, maddened by sexual frustration, fell into unbridled hetairism, a way of life which always appeared when the Apollonian principle weakened. Yet initially the victory of the latter was always welcomed, since it laid the first real foundations of a stable civilisation. Later, nevertheless, the old impulses rebelled against it.

It was thus that Iason was received by the Lemnian Hypsipyle; it was thus that he wedded Medea, and contraposed the institution of marriage against the systems of the hetairai and the Amazons. Through marriage, the woman, the mother, gained a new and honourable status in accordance with the Nordic Apollonian principle, and the nobler, fruitful aspect of the Demeter cult gained ascendancy in a manner comparable to the transmogrification of Isis into the Mother of god of the Teuton. But this all disappears wherever Apollo, that is, the Greek, failed to maintain his dominion. This side of the story is illustrated by that same Iason who becomes unfaithful to his marriage while in Corinth, a city deeply under Phoenician influence. It is also to be seen in the story of Hercules, that enemy of matriarchy, who defeats all the Amazons and sweeps across the whole of north Africa as far as the Atlantic, only to fall before Omphale in Lydia.

Thus Apollo could not maintain himself in the east, and the compromise is represented by Dionysian religion. The fair haired Iason wears a panther’s skin across his shoulders, which symbolises the subordination of the Apollonian by the Dionysian. The emphasis on Apollo’s radiant virility is melded with hetairalike ecstasy. Dionysos’ law of unbridled sexual indulgence signifies the unhindered racial mixing between Hellenes and all types and varieties of the near east. The formerly man hating Amazons reappear as crazed Maenads. The Apollonian marriage principle is again broken, since the character of Sabazios is wholly oriented toward the female. The male sex begins to lose its identity. Men participate in the Dionysian revels, but only dressed as women.

From this racial pollution of the near east, the bastardy of Dionysos extended itself westward until it dominated the entire Mediterranean. In Rome, the Dionysians especially proliferated among the criminal classes. In the second century, the senate, after long tolerating this quasireligious cult, felt compelled to repress with great rigour the Bacchic gatherings. About 7,000 perjurers, swindlers, and conspirators were banished or executed. Only in Hellas itself did the radiant Apollonian principle, mastering chaos, still prevail.

Thus Dionysos, while he appears in Greek paintings as Hellenic, is effeminate and is surrounded by near eastern satyrs, who also appear on grave monuments as screeching grotesqueries of a decadent world. Bachofen sums it up by saying that Apollo invaded Asia, but returned as Dionysos. However, what he and others overlook is that Zeus Apollo represented the spiritual imperative of Nordic Greek blood, whereas the hetaira lifestyle is an expression of near eastern and African races. The mixing of Mythi and values was simultaneously a process of racial bastardisation, and many of the legends of the Greeks are the poetic allegories of the struggle between different racially determined souls.

This near eastern African underworld is revealed most vividly in the historically attested figure of Pythagoras. He is said to have travelled throughout Babylonia and to India. He himself is described as a Pelasgian, and he did in fact practice his mysteries in Asia Minor, joined by ecstatic mystical women. He was unable to gain credence in Greece proper. Aristoteles and Heraclitos referred to him derogatorily, and were plainly resentful of his mathematical cabalism. Aristoteles said that Pythagoras’ fame was based on his appropriation of alien spiritual values. This was also the opinion of Heraclitos, who said that Pythagoras had woven together a false art and charlatanry from various writings. A pretence at universal knowledge, said the Hellenic sage, does not instruct the spirit.

So Pythagoras moved to the west, to southern Italy, where, like some ancient blend of Rudolf Steiner and Annie Besant, he set up his school of mysteries complete with priestesses. He was regarded throughout the entire African littoral—whence came the collectivist sexual mysteries of the Egyptian Karpokrates to his aid—as the wisest of the wise. Universal equality is once again promoted in the form of democratic ecumenicalism. Women and property are held in common, although this had been the basis of non Nordic Mediterranean ideas when Apollo first battled against them.

It cannot be emphasised too often that such assertions, as the end of human development will again bring back the earliest animal state, represent a grotesque error. This is all the more certain when, like a lightning flash, we see that the Pythagorean cult can be traced back to pre Hellenic peoples. Further confusion follows, however, by statements to the effect that the Hellenes had wrested themselves free from the chthonic substance—as though they had been embedded in the latter!

The dramatic creation of Greece took place on two levels. On one level there is an organic evolution of substance—from nature symbolism, crowned with the gods of light and the heavens, to Zeus, father of the gods; and on the other, from the mystical artistic level to the dramatic artistic recognition of the spiritual essences, and finally, to the intellectual system of Platon, which was a philosophical perception of what had already been developed in myth.

This entire development, however, stands in continuous conflict with other mythical and intellectual systems, the products of alien blood. In part ennobled by fusion with the Greeks, nevertheless such systems eventually welled up on all sides. As products of the Nilotic swamps, the waters of Asia Minor, and the deserts of Libya, they were hostile to the Nordic ethos of the Greeks, and sought to pervert, falsify, and destroy its vital character.

This must not be mistaken for an explosion of natural tensions within an organic whole. It was rather a struggle between hostile racial souls to which we bear awed witness even today when we observe the ruin of Hellas with clear eyes. Our own blood dictates where our own loyalties lie, and only bloodless pedagogues can prate here about the parity of two great principles.

With infinite sadness we watch the epiphenomena of the psychic racial decline of the Homeric Greeks who once, in the proud words of the poet, entered the arena of world history: Always to be first, and always to press forward. We watch the Greek become a participant in racial spiritual decay, wearing himself out in the struggle against what is alien, as well as against his own disintegrating essence. The great Theognis complains that money mixes the blood of the noble with that of the ignoble, and that in this way race, which is strictly protected among asses and horses, becomes polluted among men. In the Gorgias Platon vainly makes Kallikles proclaim the wisest of messages: The law of nature demands that the higher breeds rule over the lower. To be sure, our (Athenian) laws were different. In accordance with them the strongest and most virtuous would be caught like young lions, to be corrupted by magical songs and trickery. If a true hero should again appear, he would trample down all these magical rites and advance radiantly forward by a natural right.

But this yearning for a hero was in vain; money, and with it the subhumans, had already triumphed over blood. Lacking sure instinct, the Hellene began to devote himself to trade, politics and sophistries, rejecting on one day what he had praised on the day before. Sons no longer respected their fathers; slaves from all over the world agitated for freedom; sexual equality was proclaimed. Symbolic of this democracy—as Platon scornfully remarked—asses and horses began to push aside men who stood in their way. As warfare depleted the race, newcomers were admitted to citizenship. Foreign barbarians became Athenians, much as in our era eastern Jews become Germans. Thus Isokrates, lamenting, remarked that after the Egyptian expedition of 458 B.C., those noble families which had survived the Persian War were annihilated. But call not that city happy which gathers its citizens willy nilly from all ends of the earth, but only that one which best preserves the race of its founders. Similarly the sad utterance of Jacob Burckhardt: From the inception of democracy, they were seized by an impulse to persecute without limit all superior individuals. It was the usual hatred of talent. However this democracy was not the rule of the people but the dominion of the near east over the Greek tribes, whose manpower and strength were being rapidly dissipated. It was the rule of the now uninhibited scum over the hoplites who were no longer sustained by a racially kindred peasantry, and had become effete. Demagogues without conscience incited the masses against Athens in order to be able to denounce them later. However, when the Athenians came, there was a mass flight from the threatened cities, and supine surrender to the advancing imperial power. The cry was: If we had not declined so quickly, we should have perished. In a frenzied effort to rebuild the land, the chaotic democracy instituted amnesties, cancellation of obligations and land redistribution. In doing so, it only became more effete than ever.

The city states exhausted themselves in bloody economic wars, or became desolate and empty, as the Hellenes migrated to all parts of the known world. There they either fertilised barbarian soil with Greek culture, or suffered further decline and ultimate annihilation. Where flourishing cities had once stood and gleaming temples, where the free Greeks had once competed in the arenas, later travellers found only desolation, a depopulated land, fallen pillars. Empty pedestals gave mute testimony to the gods and heroes whose statues had once stood upon them. By Plutarchos’s time, scarcely 3,000 hoplites could still be mustered. Dion Chrysostomos reported that the ancient Greek type had become a very rare phenomenon. Does not the Peneus stream through an empty Thessalia, and the Ladon flow through a devastated Arcadia? Are there any cities more abandoned than Croton, Metapontum, and Tarentum? Thus did Hysiai, Tiryns, Asine and Orneai lie in ruins. The temple of Zeus at Nemea had fallen; even the port of Nauplia was abandoned. Of Lakedaemon’s hundred cities, there remained only thirty villages. Pausanias described the ruins of Dorion and Andania in Mykenai. Of Pylos only ruins remained, of Letrinoi only a few dwellings. Megalopolis, Great City, was now only a great desolation. Only a few wretched traces could be found of Mantinea, Orchomenos, Heraia, Maenalos, Kynaitha, and so on. Of Lykosura only the city walls still stood; of Oresthasion only temple pillars. The acropolis of Asea was destroyed except for some fragments of wall. Daphnos, Augeia, Calliaros, once praised by Homeros, were torn down. Orleanos was dust. The jewels of Hellas, Kaledonia and Pleuron, were obliterated. Delos was so devastated that when Athens dispatched a guard to the temple there, they constituted the sole inhabitants.

And yet even in his deepening twilight, the Greek had stemmed the incursion of Asia and scattered his own brilliant gifts all over the world, gifts which inspired the Nordic Romans, and later became the greatest heritage of the Germanic west. In spite of the sacrifice of the Greeks, therefore, Apollo may be credited with the first great victory of Nordic Europeans, for after him there emerged from the Hyperborean fastnesses new bearers of the same values of freedom of soul and spirit, of organic shaping and questing creativity. For a long time the Roman sword repelled the reinforced near eastern spectre. More rigorously and consciously, Rome nurtured the patriarchal principle. It thereby strengthened the idea of the state as such and of marriage as the prerequisite of national and racial preservation. Finally, in time, Germania (in a new form) became the representative of the god of the heavens.

The history of Rome essentially parallels that of Hellas, although it is set against a greater expanse of territory and a larger political power structure. Rome, too, was established by a Nordic folkish wave which poured into the fertile valleys to the south of the Alps long before the Gauls and the Teutons. It broke the dominion of the Etruscans, that mysterious and alien near eastern people. Presumably this wave blended with the still pure indigenous tribes of the Mediterranean race, producing a hybrid character of the greatest toughness and tenacity which combined nimbleness of intellect with the iron energy of masters, farmers and heroes. Ancient Rome, about which history tells us little, became a true folkish state through sound breeding, and was united in the struggle against the whole of orientalism. All the brains and strengths, which would be squandered later when Rome engaged in world conflicts, were formed and banked, as it were, in this prehistoric period. The three hundred ruling noble families supplied the 300 senators, and from them came also the provincial governors and the senior army officers. Encircled by the maritime races of the near east, Rome was often compelled to defend itself ruthlessly with the GLADIVS.

The destruction of Carthage was a deed of superlative import in racial history: by it even the later cultures of central and western Europe were spared the infection of this Phoenician pestilence. World history might well have taken a very different course had the obliteration of Carthage been accompanied by a total annihilation of all the other Semitic Jewish centres in the near east. The act of Titus came too late. By then, the near eastern parasite was no longer centred in Jerusalem, but had already spread its strongest tentacles from Egypt and Hellas to Rome itself, to which city everyone possessed of ambition and greedy for profit was drawn. There they made every effort to buy the acquiescence of the sovereign, self governing people with bribes and promises. As a result of alien racial immigration, there arose from a previously legitimate popular electorate—peers with common roots—a degraded mass of characterless human rabble, a permanent threat to the state. Cato stood as a lonely rock in the midst of this quagmire. As praetor of Sardinia, consul in Spain, and finally censor in Rome, he fought against corruption, usury and extravagance. In this he resembled Cato the elder who, after a fruitless struggle to stem the utter decay of the state, threw himself upon his own sword. Such a deed has been called old Roman. Indeed it was. But old Roman is synonymous with Nordic. In later times, when the Germans offered their services to weak, degenerate emperors who were surrounded by impure bastards, the same spirit of honour and loyalty lived within them as had once lived in the ancient Romans. The Emperor Vitellius, a poltroon without equal, was dragged from his hiding place to the forum, a rope around his neck. His German bodyguard refused to surrender and spurned the offer of absolution from their oaths. They were slain to the last man. The same Nordic spirit possessed the German which had dwelled in Cato. It is the spirit we saw in Flanders in 1914, in the Coronel Islands, and for years in all quarters of the globe.

By the middle of the fifth century B.C., the first step towards chaos had been taken. Mixed marriages between patricians and plebeians were made legal. Racial mixing thus became for Rome, as it had for Persia and Hellas, the seed of ultimate decay of folk and state. In 336, the first plebeians had pushed their way into the Roman assembly, and by about 300 into the priesthood. In 287, the plebeian popular assembly had become a state institution. Traders and moneylenders pushed their interests. Ambitious, renegade patricians like the Gracchi espoused democratic causes—motivated perhaps by mistaken generosity. Others, like Publius Claudius, placed themselves openly at the head of the Roman city mob.

In these chaotic times, a few men still held true: The powerful, blue eyed Sulla, the pure Nordic Augustus. But they could not turn the tide. And so it was that control of the masses of the vast Roman Empire came to depend, like a monstrous game of chance, upon control of the praetorian guard, or the adherence of a mob of hungry clients. Sometimes a great man would arise; sometimes a bloodthirsty monster. Rome’s initial treasure house of racial strength was exhausted by four hundred years of democracy, destructive of race. The Caesares came now from the provinces. Traianus was the first Spaniard to wear the purple; Hadrianus was the second. Caesares were now adopted as a last ditch attempt to save the situation. Since reliance could no longer be placed on bloodlines, it was felt that only personal selection could ensure the continuity of the state.

The values held by Marcus Aurelius, another Spaniard, were already enervated by Christian influences. He openly elevated the protection of slaves, the emancipation of women, and doles to the poor (what we call unemployment benefit) to official state policies. He also disenfranchised the PATERFAMILIAS, which had been the strongest tradition in republican Rome, and which was the last remaining source of type formation.

There followed Septimius Severus, an African. Pay the soldiers well and scorn everyone else, he advised his sons, Caracalla and Geta. Influenced by his Syrian mother, (daughter of a priest of Baal in Asia Minor), Caracalla, the most loathsome bastard ever to sit on the throne of the Caesares, declared that all free inhabitants of the Roman empire were citizens of Rome (212 A.D.).

So perished the Roman world. Macrinus next murdered Caracalla and became Caesar himself. After he was murdered in turn, he was succeeded by the monster Elagabalus, nephew of the African Severus. In the midst of all this appeared the half German Maximinus Thrax and Philippus the Arab (a Semite). The senate seats became mostly lounging spots for non Romans. The culture of this period was supplied by the Spaniard Martialis and the Greeks Plutarchos, Strabon, Dion Cassios, and the rest. Apollodoros, who rebuilt the forum, was another Greek. Included in this last category was Aurelianus, an Illyrian born in Belgrade. There was also Diocletianus, son of an Illyrian slave (perhaps of partly German ancestry). Constantius Chlorus was of Illyrian origin, though of superior stock. After his death, the soldiers chose a truly powerful man to bear the title of Augustus. This was Constantinus, the son of Constantius Chlorus and a barmaid from Bithynia. Constantinus triumphed over all his rivals. With Constantinus the history of imperial Rome ends and that of papal and Germanic Rome begins.

In this sea of bewildering diversity, Roman, Syrian, African and Greek elements were intermingled. The gods and the ceremonies of all lands found a place in the venerable forum. There the priest of Mithras sacrificed bulls, latter day Greeks prayed to Hellos, astrologers and oriental sorcerers touted their miracles. The Emperor Elagabalus harnessed six white horses to a gigantic meteorite and had this dragged through the streets of Rome as a manifestation of Baal of Emesa. He himself danced at the head of the procession. Behind him were dragged the old gods, and the people of Rome applauded. The senators abased themselves. Street singers, barbarians, and stable lads became senators and consuls—until Elagabalus, too, was strangled and thrown into the Tiber, that final resting place of so many thousands for two millennia.

Even if we had lacked the more recent racial historical investigation, we should have been compelled to endorse this interpretation of the Roman past, because in the course of studying ancient Roman customs, myths, and definitions of law and the state in all areas, we see that the very ancient values which were associated with Africa and the near east, suddenly or gradually transformed into their opposites (even when retaining their old nomenclature).

Thus our learned historians have ascertained—and they are still doing so—that in north and central Italy lived the Etruscans, Sabines, Oscans, Sabellians, Aequi, and Samnites, whereas in the south were the Phoenicians, Sicilians, Greek traders and settlers, and various near eastern peoples. Suddenly—how and why is not explained—a conflict broke out against one section of these tribes, their gods and goddesses, their concepts of law, their political pretensions. No mention is made of the new factor in this upheaval, or if it is mentioned, it is without any inquiry into its real nature. The academic world falls back on the threadbare development of humanity cliche, which apparently rose up in the service of ennoblement. At this point the fact collectors are at one with the romantic school of mythologists; both agreeing that the Etruscans certainly possessed a higher culture than the bucolic Latins.

Since this version of a sudden, almost magical, leap toward a higher spiritual level and superior forms of social organisation eventually became discredited, even newer interpreters of history invented the theory known as cyclic culture. This new doctrine was just as vacuous as the theory of universal development, which has validity only in the mind of the academic or the priest. There was as little mention of the creators of this cultural revolution as there was of evolution in the writings of nineteenth century popes. Out of the blue one day, a cultural revolution drops magically upon Indians, Persians, Chinese, or Romans, and effects a total transformation of human creatures who had previously embraced different MORES. We are told of a kind of vegetablelike growth, the blossoming and decaying of mystical cycles, until the proselytisers of the morphology of history, faced with the strongest criticism, finally mumble at the end of the second or third volume something about blood and blood relationships.

Even this latest intellectual legerdemain is now beginning to lose credibility. The Roman culture cycle and new development did not stem from the native Etruscan Phoenician stock, but in spite of it and its values. The new culture bearers were Nordic immigrants and a noble Nordic aristocracy which began to contest the soil of Italy with the aboriginal negroid Ligurians and the near eastern Etruscans. It is true that in this environment the Nordic aristocracy had to make a number of concessions. However, it demonstrated its true character in the most bitter of struggles, and more relentlessly than the more artistically gifted Hellenes had done, when it expelled the last Etruscan king, Tarquinius Superbus. Though a great part of these achievements became the common heritage of all Europe, much that was decayed and alien was later transmitted into Europe by the strong resurgent tide of racial chaos.

The Etruscans, Ligurians, Sicilians, and Phoenicians (or Carthaginians) were not an earlier stage of development, nor were they tribes of the Roman people which had each made its contribution to the general culture. The true shapers of the Roman state stood implacably against them all, and, on the basis of racial folkish principles, subjected and partially exterminated them. Only that spirit, that will, those values which revealed themselves in this struggle, deserve to be called Roman. The Etruscans present us with an unequalled example of the way in which the Greek religion and way of life afforded them neither progress nor spiritual elevation. Like other near eastern peoples, the Etruscans had encountered at one point the Atlantic Nordic Mythi, which were by then embodied in Greek tradition, and they imitated Greek plastic and pictorial art as best they could, even appropriating the Hellenic pantheon. They succeeded only in corrupting everything they touched and turning each attribute into its opposite. Yet this provided reason enough for certain researchers to prattle foolishly about the extraordinary spiritual legacy of the Etruscans and the basis for growth it provided, and for the world historical dedication symbolised in their tragic fate. All this plainly derives from the same inner sense of identity which binds the rising asphalt humanity of the megalopolis in a very significant way to all the wretched refuse of Asia.

The legends and the tombs of the Etruscans make very clear the reasons why the virile, healthy farmer folk engaged in so desperate a war against them. Two examples epitomise the character of the Etruscans; the sacred prostitute and the priest magician who, by means of dreadful rites, kept at bay the terrors of the underworld. The great whore of Babylon of whom the Apocalypse speaks is no fairy tale or metaphor, but an historical reality attested to a hundredfold. It was literally the rule of the hetairai over the peoples of the near and middle east. On high festival days at all the centres of these various racial groups, the official prostitutes were enthroned as the embodiment of a common sensuality and universal lechery. In Phoenicia they served Kybele and Astarte; in Egypt, the great procuress Isis; in Phrygia as priestesses of wholly unbridled communal sexual orgies. The reigning priestess of love was joined by her lover dressed in diaphanous Libyan robes. Anointed with costly perfumes and bedecked with precious jewels, they then copulated before all the people (just as did Absalom with David’s concubines in II Samuel XVI:22). This example was imitated in Babylon, in Libya, and in Rome under the Etruscan dynasty where the goddess priestess pushed the institution of the hetairai to its extreme limit in the closest collaboration with the Etruscan priests.

Attempts were made quite early to interpret Etruscan inscriptions on graves, mummy wrappings, and papyrus rolls, but not until Albert Grünwedel was the script successfully deciphered, and the results show the Etruscans in a hideous light. Even the Greek solar myth that the sun dies and is then reborn as a god out of the dark night and with redoubled potency, was appropriated as an Etruscan motif. But in the hands of the Etruscan priests this becomes Asiatic magic, witchcraft linked with pederasty, masturbation, the murder of boys, magical appropriation of the manna of the slaughtered by the priestly murderer, and prophecies derived from the excrement and the piled up entrails of the victims. The virile sun impregnates itself with the magical phallus on the solar disc (the Egyptian point in the sun) which finally penetrates it. From this is born a golden boy, the foetus of a boy with a magical orifice. This is the so called seal of eternity. The violence of the magical phallus is imagined as a bull which copulates with such frenzied force that the disc rolls and the phallus bearer of the horn turns to fire, the phallus of him who possesses the heavens.

In endlessly repeated obscenities, the original myth is degraded into repulsive homosexual love. This is to be seen on the wall paintings of graves, as in the Golini tomb where the dead man holds a banquet with his boy lover in the next world, and where two gigantic phalluses spring up from a sacrificial fire as a result of magical satanic rite. According to the inscription, this, the lightning of perfection, is thus perfected.

Translated from the jargon of magic, that means that the creature born of woman is deified after putrefying, and becomes a phallus.

From the inscription of the Cippus of Perugia, there is recorded a convocation of satanic priests who perfect a spectral manifestation so as to burn in demonic frenzy. He who has this boy has the demonic knife. Eternal is the fire of the boy ..... a magus of the perfected seal.

The murdered boy now becomes a little goat. Thunder personified is a metamorphosis of the son gained by violation—the perfected little goat. Here is to be found the origin of the horned apparition and the goat headed devil, whose appearance in the literature of witchcraft was hitherto an unsolved riddle. Its antique types are the Minotaur, especially the one over the well known grave of Corneto, the Tomba dei Tori, and the Greek Satyr. He clearly illustrates a crime crying out to heaven, comments Grünwedel. The meaning of these constantly repeated customs of the Etruscan religion is to be seen in the fate of the shamefully abused boy prostitute who is slit open to symbolise the birth of the diurnal sun from the egg that his apparition has developed when fertilised by the semen collected in bowls.

Thus a spectral bull appears, fiery like the sun, sexually erect, and accomplishes again and again the demonic self copulation. With the performance of this ritual, the manna of the murdered boy is supposed to pass to the priest, who is the representative of the Chosen (Rasna, Rasena), as the Etruscans—like the Jews—called themselves. The priest next lets the fumes from the entrails ascend to heaven. There is also the magical use of faeces, once again in a vile travesty of the Greek solar myth. The divine cherub attains the supreme power which emanates from him as six rolls of gold excrement, creating the fire of the heavens.

The chosen one becomes such by supplying his entrails. Etruscan vases provide ample evidence of this; witches are portrayed, offering money to youths to persuade them to dedicate themselves and then to ascend to heaven in flames. Herein lies new evidence for the primeval home of witchcraft and Satanism on European soil. It is easy to understand a scholar like Grünwedel, who in this respect sees close analogies with the Tibetan Tantras of Lamaism, saying:

A nation which is ready to paint wall pictures over the entrances of graves like the two scenes in the Tomba dei Tori, which permits itself to write such filth in graves and paintings like those in the Golini grave, and to cover sarcophagi with the most repulsive scenes (I need mention only the sarcophagus of Chiusi), to place into one’s hands representations of the dead as in the text of the Pulenana papyrus roll, to cover toilet articles with the most hair raising obscenities, parades the most despicable human degeneracy as its national legacy and religious persuasion.

It is necessary as a prelude to be quite clear about the true nature of the Etruscans so that we may understand fully that the Nordic Latins, the true Romans, had the same experiences as the Nordic Hellenes before them and the Nordic Teutons after them. As a numerically small people, they waged a desperate struggle against the forces of hetairism, with their strong emphasis on patriarchy and the family. They purified the great whore Tanaquil by transforming her into the faithful protectress of motherhood and portraying her with dresses and a spindle as a guardian of the family. Against the sorceries of an outrageous priesthood they posed the hard Roman law and the dignity of the Roman senate. With the sword they cleansed Italy of the Etruscans (as a result of which the great Sulla came particularly to the fore) and of the Carthaginians, whom the former always called to their aid. Yet the preponderance of numbers, prevalent superstition, and the usual international solidarity of rogues and charlatans gradually eroded the old honourable Roman life. This was exacerbated by the necessity of maintaining Roman strength by enlisting the support of the racial cesspool of the Mediterranean peoples. In particular, Rome was unable to cast out the HARVSPICES and the AVGVRES. Even Sulla was accompanied by the HARVSPEX, Postumius, and Julius Caesar after him by another of that ilk named Spurinna. Burckhardt had already had an inkling of these now established facts—which are carefully ignored by the Etruscans of our great cities. He wrote in his Griechische Kulturgeschichte as follows:

When, however, with the unleashing of all human passions during the last years of the Roman republic, human sacrifice again appeared in a most abominable form, when oaths were made over the entrails of slaughtered boys—as with Catilina and Vatinius (see Cicero, IN VATINIVM, 6)—then it is to be hoped that this had nothing to do with Greek religion or the ostensible Pythagoreanism of Vatinius. The Roman gladiatorial contests, towards which Greece maintained a permanent abhorrence, had derived from Etruria, at first as funerary rites for dead aristocrats.

This clearly indicated that human sacrifice was also a feature of the Etruscan religion.

The Etruscan priest Volgatius who, at Caesar’s funeral, ecstatically proclaimed the last century of the Etruscans, was only one of the many who exercised great power over Roman life and manipulated the sufferings of the people in the interests of the near east. When Hannibal stood before the gates of Rome, these HARVSPICES declared that victory was only possible by adopting the cult of the Great Mother. This was brought from Asia Minor, and the senate abased itself by going down to the shore on foot to receive it. In this way, the priesthood of Asia Minor entered the eternal city along with the great whore of the Pelasgians or the beautiful and delightful whore (Nahum III, 4), and took up residence on the sacred Palatine, the focal point of the old Roman thought and culture. There ensued the usual near eastern religious processions. Later, however, the debaucheries were restricted to the district to the rear of the temple walls in order to escape the anger of the better part of the people.

The HARVSPICES triumphed. The Roman papacy was their immediate successor, and the temple hierarchy, the college of cardinals, represented an amalgam of the Etruscan near eastern Syrian priesthood, with the Jews and the Nordic Roman senate.

The medieval picture of the world also derives from the Etruscan HARVSPICES, that frightful superstition of magic and witchcraft to which the millions of Europe fell victim. Nor did this die out with the Witches’ Hammer. It still survives in church literature today, to be resurrected at any time. It can be seen in those gargoyles which not infrequently disfigure our Nordic Gothic cathedrals with a grotesquerie of extreme abnormality.

Even in Dante, in a grandiose form, bastardised Etruscan antiquity erupts anew. His Inferno contains the ferryman of hell, the fiery swamp of the Styx, the bloodthirsty Pelasgian Erinyes and Furies, the Cretan Minotaur, those fiends in the form of disgusting birds who torment suicides, and the amphibious monster, Beryon. The damned run through a scorching desert under a rain of fiery drops. Malefactors are turned into bushes upon which the Harpies feed, and from every broken twig of which their blood gushes forth accompanied by unending screams of agony. Black bitches pursue other evildoers and tear them to pieces with unspeakable pain. Horned demons scourge swindlers. Prostitutes are drowned in stinking excrement. Popes, guilty of simony, are confined within narrow ravines. There they languish, their tortured feet writhing in flames, while Dante rails loudly against the degenerate papacy as the whore of Babylon.

The grave inscriptions and paintings in Tuscany reveal that all these ideas of the underworld are of Etruscan origin. Just as in the Christianised upper world of the middle ages, the idea of eternity is depicted with people hung by their hands and tormented with burning faggots and other fiendish devices.

The avenging Furies were depicted by the Etruscans as utterly loathsome, with animalistic or negroid features, pointed ears, matted hair, fangs, and so forth. It was one such Fury with a bird’s beak who tortured Theseus with her poisonous snakes, as a wall painting at the Tomba dell’ Oreo at Corneto shows. Does this reveal the primeval hatred for the legendary conqueror of the ancient demons of Athens? Beside these Furies are Typhon and Echidna, those horrible, one eyed demons with snakes for hair. The Etruscans generally dwelt with sadistic pleasure over every possible representation of torture, murder and sacrifice. The slaughter of human beings was especially delightful for them.

Musically untalented, lacking any poetic gifts, incapable of producing an organic architecture of their own, and without even the rudiments of philosophy, this near eastern people devoted itself to the study of birds’ entrails, and to complex magical and sacrificial rites. Not without some technical ability, it was almost wholly dedicated to commerce, and because it was tenacious, it poisoned Roman blood and transmitted its obsession with hellish torments in the world to come to the churches. The ghastly and bestial demons became an enduring and effective tool of the popes, and, through the conceptual world that had been poisoned by the church of Rome, dominated our middle ages. Medieval art gives shocking testimony to this. One can see the proof of this even on the Isenheim altar, as well as in the Descents into Hell by other artists.

Only when we have learned to recognise the utterly alien origins of these concepts and muster the resolution to rid ourselves of this diabolism will we have cast off the middle ages. But with our emancipation, the Roman church, which is inextricably linked with the sadistic visions of the Etruscan hell, will collapse from within.

The whole mystagogy of Dante’s Inferno consists of a hideous marriage of Etruscan demonology and Christianity. Nevertheless, even though Dante was not free from the incubus of this thousand year old malefic vision, the Germanic spirit still stirred within him.

In purgatory, Vergilius says of Dante: He seeks freedom. Such words are a direct denial of the psychic milieu from which witchcraft and the idea of powerful evil spirits arose. In the end, Vergilius could safely leave his protégé, since Dante had acquired the necessary strength of his own.

My knowledge, my words, can explain nothing more to you

Free, upright, healthy, are the signs of your will.

It would be foolish not to follow it.

Such are the two worlds that tore apart the heart of Nordic man in the middle ages. On the one hand was the near eastern idea of a hideous hell which the church adopted; on the other, the longing to be free, upright and healthy. Only insofar as he is free can the Teuton be creative. Only where the insane terrors of witchcraft did not hold sway could great centres of European culture flourish.

Into this raceless stew which was now Rome came Christianity. Its success is largely to be explained by its concept of a sinful world and redemption through grace, which was its natural compliment. The doctrine of original sin would have been incomprehensible to a people whose racial identity was unadulterated. In such a people there dwells a secure confidence in itself and in its will, which it regards as Destiny. The concept of sin was as alien to the heroes of Homeros as it was to the ancient Indians, the Germans of Tacitus, or the epics and sagas of Dietrich von Bern. An oppressive sense of sin is a sure symptom of racial bastardy. Race pollution shows itself in a number of stigmata; in an absence of clear direction in thought and action; an inner self doubt; the feeling that existence is simply the wages of sin and not the necessary and mysterious imperative of self development. The sense of personal depravity leads to a yearning for grace, and this is the only hope for the products of miscegenation.

It was natural, therefore, in whomsoever the old Roman character still lived, that a revulsion arose against the spread of Christianity, most especially as it represented a thoroughly proletarian and nihilistic political ethos. The grossly exaggerated accounts of bloody persecutions of Christians were not in fact attempts at suppression of conscience, as church history claims (the Roman forum was open to all gods), but rather aimed at the protection of the state against a political threat to its existence. It was reserved to the church, in its Pauline Augustinian form, to invent doctrinal councils and burning at the stake for the purpose of annihilating the spirit. Classical Nordic antiquity did not know the like of this, and the Germanic world has likewise always rebelled against this Levantine import.

Ecclesiastical Christianity has made Diocletianus a particular target of its attacks. Diocletianus was of lowly origins, though probably of part German ancestry. He had blue eyes and a very white skin, and was a man of personal probity of the type admired by Marcus Aurelius. His family life was above reproach. In all matters of state, Diocletianus conducted himself with great moderation. He was opposed to all forms of oppression, and favoured religious toleration, and only authorised action against Egyptian tricksters, fortune tellers, and sorcerers. The Emperor Gallienus had already given official recognition to the Christian cult, and Christian buildings were erected without interference. What disturbed an organic development, however, was initially the squabbles of the rival bishops.

Diocletianus excused his Christian soldiers from the pagan sacrifices, and insisted only on military discipline. But it was precisely in this area that his authority was challenged by the leaders of the African church, so that recruits refused to perform their duties on the grounds of their Christianity. One such pacifist, despite friendly admonitions, persisted in his obduracy until at length he had to be executed for mutiny. Such threatening symptoms at last persuaded Diocletianus to insist on the participation of Christians in state ceremonies of a religious nature. Even now, he did not generally punish Christians who refused to obey, but merely granted them discharges from military service. The only result was a stream of unmitigated abuse from the Christians, the mutual conflicts of whose factions also menaced civil peace in other ways. Finally, the state took action in self defence. Even now, Diocletianus did not exact the death penalty (as he did in the case of some swindling merchants) but only reduced the contumacious to the status of the slave class. The outcome of this was rioting and arson directed against the Emperor’s palace itself. Provocations by the Christian communities, hitherto unmolested and which had become arrogant in consequence, followed one after another throughout the empire. The ensuing terrible persecutions of the Christians by the monster Diocletianus amounted to—nine rebellious bishops executed, and in Palestine, the centre of the most violent resistance, a total of eighty death sentences actually carried out. By contrast, that supremely Christian Duke of Alba slaughtered 100,000 heretics in the tiny Netherlands alone.

Only by reexamining these events is it possible to shake off the hypnotic effect of systematically falsified history. Thus does Iulianus the Apostate, who also believed in equal rights for all the cults, appear in a new light, because he did not shirk, on the grounds of pious convictions, standing out against teachers of the representative of god. He well knew what was involved when he wrote:

Through the follies of the Galileans, our state was almost ruined; but now, the gods be praised, it is saved. Therefore we shall honour the gods and every city in which there is still piety.

This proved thoroughly justified, for no sooner had Christianity become the state religion under Constantinus, than the old testament spirit of hatred showed its hideous face. The Christians at once demanded the application of the punishments prescribed in the old testament against the worship of idols. In Italy, with the exception of Rome itself, the temples of Jupiter were close