Losing My Religion

Western Identity: Part I

I recently had an eye-opening exchange with someone here on Substack, one which affected me deeply. I can candidly state that the back and forth caused a deep existential crisis that lasted the better part of fifteen minutes or so, during which time I was forced to question everything I thought I knew about religion. It was quite the ordeal. The following is an account of this spiritual journey, and the conclusions to which I came.

It all started when I posted a note stating that I disapproved of the idea that Hitler should have time-travelled, Terminator style, back to the dawn of the 1st millennium AD in order to kill Jesus and his family. I can see now how controversial that was, and a statement like that is bound to attract some strong responses. However, the backlash came not in the form of a deluge of comments but, in a noble example of the Western martial tradition, from a single white knight, his chivalry encompassing not only fair, autistic maidens but also homosexual boomers. Not one to take my implied Hitler-bashing lying down, he came out swinging.

At first, I didn’t know what he was talking about. Had I missed something in Church? I mean, I live in the South, so the sermons are mainly concerned with college football lore, and I couldn’t recall any Semites involved with that. So I asked for clarification, and he dropped a NUKE!!!

By Semites he meant Jews, and he hit me with something I’d never considered before- Jews had actually written both the Old and New Testaments. I didn’t believe it at first. I mean, I’ve read both books thoroughly and written about them at length here on Substack, but I guess I never really stopped to think about them. So I went back this afternoon and read them again, and again, and with my mind forced open by my commenter’s bold claim, there they were, plain as day- Jew after Jew after Jew. It was like reading the novelization of a Friars’ Club Roast. I was shocked. All the propaganda aside, it turns out that Jews were secretly behind the whole thing.

Harvey Corman’s considered assessment of the Bible

Well, that’s it for that, I thought. No more Jewish mind virus for me. So I naturally immediately began a search for my ancestral religion. Now, my paternal forebears are Germans, Pennsylvania Dutch from the Lancaster area, originally from the Rhineland but in America since the 1700s. So at first I thought I would embrace my German identity and worship the Germanic gods. But there were a couple of problems with this. First, while my ancestors are German, I’ve never even been to Germany. I certainly wasn’t born and/or raised there; I don’t speak the language, I wasn’t formed by the culture, and I don’t think anyone would assume I was German unless I advertised it by wearing Lederhosen and styling myself Bibliothekar von Kelaeno. Honestly, I think that would come off as cringe and insecure, like I’d grown up with a poorly-formed personal identity and sought to bolster my fragile sense of self by glomming on to a culture that seemed more substantial than the one around me.

But then I looked into the Germanic gods by way of the most important sources available, the Eddas, and what I found shocked me once again. According to Snorri Sturleson, the compiler of the Prose Edda, Odin/Woden and crew were actually not only immigrants, but from the Middle East to boot! Can you believe this?

Odin had second sight, and his wife also; and from their foreknowledge he found that his name should be exalted in the northern part of the world and glorified above the fame of all other kings. Therefore, he made ready to journey out of Turkland, and was accompanied by a great multitude of people, young folk and old, men and women; and they had with them much goods of great price. And wherever they went over the lands of the earth, many glorious things were spoken of them, so that they were held more like gods than men.

Now by “Turkland” Snorri means the Troad, and he further elaborates that the Aesir (a term which he theorizes derives from “Asian”) were originally Trojan royalty. Historically speaking, Troy was (probably) a Luwian city, Indo-European but heavily influenced by its Semitic neighbors, the civilization and its descendants representing an important vector for the Orientalizing Revolution that would so profoundly shape Ancient Greek culture and the wider West. The Theogony, for example, contains substantial adstrate material from Semitic sources, the most important of which was the Babylonian Enuma Elish. It’s just Semites all around!

Now you might want to reassure me by pointing out that Snorri was a Christian from a Christianized culture, and so his euhemerism was just his way of demoting the gods of his ancestors and reconciling their stories with the new order. Fair enough, but it’s all like that. Apart from the Greeks and Romans- tainted by their associations with the East- there really are very few pre-Christian primary sources for European paganism- certainly not enough in themselves to reconstruct a religion around. So rather than deal with all that, I’m going deeper, to ancestral gods unbefouled by any associations with Semites and immigrants. After all, it’s sort of arbitrary to stop at that strata of my ancestors who worshiped the Germanic pantheon when there were a thousand, thousand generations before them. So I dug around for a while, searching for something authentically, indigenously European, and I found this guy.

Perfect. Not only has this deity been in the Motherland for 40,000+ years, but they actually dug him up not far from where my German ancestors lived. He’s pretty cool looking too- a man’s body with a lion’s head, carved out of a mammoth tusk. This god is as based as based can be. I was pretty stoked.

However, there were again some issues. For one, he doesn’t actually have a name (the professors just call him Lion Man) and there’s not really any way to know more about how he was worshiped and all that. If this was going to be my new deity I needed some supplemental lore. But as it happens I didn’t think that would actually be too huge of a problem to surmount. If Snorri can add a whole Christian and Homeric backstory to his Norse myths, and everyone can still consider his work based pagan canon, I think I’m entitled to flesh out Lion Man’s mythos with something from my own culture.

You probably forgot about this awesome show. Gen-X remembers.

Now perhaps you’re thinking, ‘was the Librarian just going to fill in Lion Man’s backstory using plots involving Ookla the Mok from Thundarr the Barbarian?’ Before you start judging, consider that every neopagan cult (I use the term in the strict academic sense) necessarily must engage in a hefty amount of splicing and innovation. There are no pagan traditions in the West in the proper sense- a system of belief and practice handed down from generation to generation. Those lines were all broken and the lore lost. What remains are at best reconstructions, unless you allow for the possibility of revelation. This is the tack taken by groups like the Asatru Folk Assembly, who hold that their founder was given a “mandate” by Odin to “reforge” Asatru. Fair enough, but if you believe that Odin can reach out to restart his worship, surely Lion Man, a far more primordial European god, can also cross time and space to gather disciples. And how better to do it than by giving astrally-projected poetic inspiration to artists specifically tasked with molding the minds of the young? It was all starting to make a lot of sense…

And then- boom- it all fell apart. I was all set to spread the word of Ooklanism when curiosity got the better of me. I looked up the cartoonists on Wikipedia. I clicked on “early life.” A cold wave of despair took hold of me as I saw yet again the circumcised hand of the perfidious Jew. I’d come all that way for nothing. I was at a loss. Would I ever uncover an authentic Western spirituality? It was a real dark night of the soul, that three minutes or so.

I mean, I’d seen this, but who knew Jews were that involved in animation? At least Ralph Bakshi isn’t … [checks notes]… oh crap!

And then it hit me; perhaps I should try some lateral thinking. I’d experienced the shocking revelation that the Old and New Testaments were actually written by Jews, but maybe this hadn’t always been a closely guarded Rothschilds-Soros-tier secret. What if people had stumbled upon this arcane lore in the past? So, like Sam Hyde, I looked at the data, and what I found surprised me.

This man truly embodies the peak physical and artistic excellence of a Celtic warrior poet. Take notes, aspirants.

It turned out that not only was this knowledge not secret during the Classical period, Late Antiquity, and the Middle Ages, but the information was actually fairly widespread. The 9th-century Book of Kells, for example, that masterpiece of Celtic Christian art, presents all four Gospels in Latin without any words relating to Jews redacted. The foreignness (in the worldly sense) of the faith was necessarily bound up with its historical circumstances. And yet, somehow, it took.

To hear my interlocutor and so many others tell it, Christianity replaced the beliefs of the pagan Europeans as a kind of perfidious brainwashing on the part of missionaries, who were themselves the products of process of wholesale Judaizing. Upon reflection, I realized that not only was this an impoverished, reductive take, heavily dependent on a profoundly tendentious essentialism, but is also simply ahistorical with regards to the recorded development of the West. For example, regarding the New Testament as simply “Jewish” or “Semitic” ignores the very foregrounded interrogation of Jewish identity in the component texts. And of course, explaining Christianity solely in terms of texts from the first century, however central they are to the faith, ignores the dynamic relationship the early Church had with the surrounding culture and the many ways it came to relate to the Greco-Roman world. A Christian like Justin Martyr could argue that the philosophy of Plato and the teachings of the Hebrew prophets complemented each other, the predictions of the latter culminating in the physical instantiation in historical time of the abstract Logos of the Hellenes’ reason. The pagans of the Roman Empire, for their part, might conclude that Christianity was low and foreign, or they might instead find something in the wisdom of the East as so many of their forbears had done.

Hercules traveled all the way to India to defend the Buddha from demons. Why is this not an Anime?

The religion of the Ancient Israelites was profoundly unique, and its most significant gift to the world was the revelation of a universal ethical monotheism, expressed in the fullest in Isaiah, a God who takes the part of the just against the unjust, who will judge all nations according to the law He implanted in their hearts. Christians are the heirs to that promise, who accepted God’s revelation of Himself in the fullest sense. Christ’s apostles were sent forth not to preach to individuals but to make disciples of all nations. The phrasing is not incidental; the ethnoi of the world would remain what they were in one sense while transcending their identity in another. Unleashed upon the world, it changed everything it came into contact with, and in Europe it’s effects were particularly impactful.

Looking back at all the things I’d gone through on my spiritual peregrination, I noticed a conceptual through line. There was a paradox to Western identity, a thing that is at once distinct at its core and fluid at the edges. Cultures generally are a bit like stars; you can definitely say what and where they distinctly are, but it’s hard to tell where the light of one ends and that of another begins. The Luwians, Snorri, Justin Martyr, The Heiland, the Book of Kells and the Bible itself- all of these people and works represent a fusion rather than reflecting something wholly particular. And pondering that, I realized that this was especially true of the West.

The Axis Mundi of the West is surrounded by three-spoked wheel, three supports that allow it to roll along- the Classical, the Germanic, and the Christian. Now of course, each of these things is a fullness unto itself, but together, they become a far more encompassing form of identity. The greatest works of the West all bear the imprint of at least two, and one of them is always Christianity. Consider that Norse myth goes back a for millennia before Snorri, but we know them almost entirely from the Eddas, exactly the sort of tripartite cultural product I noted.

Each of the three forces was once wholly alien to the other two. Their encounter with each other was marked by tension, mistrust, and often violence. And yet, their coming together created the most dynamic civilization-state on earth. I noted in the last paragraph that whenever you see some great work of Western art or culture there are generally all three elements, but if there are two one is invariably Christianity. This is no accident. Sociologically and politically speaking, by separating belief from ethnos, Christianity made possible the layering of identities- one could be Northumbrian and English and Christian, or Southern and American and Christian, and so on. This in turn made possible medieval states that could confidently adopt Roman law alongside German custom and Christian mercy.

Over and against this is the notion, advanced by my friend who warned me about the Semites, where people are bound to a particular identity by genetics, an identity that is at once inescapable and intrinsic and yet strangely vulnerable to the machinations of Jews. One is meant to worship the gods of his ancestors, which begs the question of how Nuada et. al. replaced Lion Man, and why one should forgo the latter for the former, or what to do about the untold myriads of deities lost to time, the gods of one’s ancestors abandoned by their ancestors, who in turn were innovators against their forbears.

At one point, around 9,000 years ago in the Near East, people decided that the gods wanted them to bury their dead relatives in the floors of their homes, dig them up after they’d decayed, remove their skulls, cover the skulls with plaster and decorations, and pass them around at parties. Then, around 7,000 years ago, they decided that was actually kind of weird and stopped. There’s a lesson there.

One is told that blood is everything, and that Christians have forsaken this truth. White and European identity precludes any admixture with anything Semitic, a truth supposedly known by the pagans but psyoped out of them by mitered happy merchants. This idea is utter nonsense wholly divorced from the attested witness of history. Show me some source-any source- from some pagan author, or about some group of them, where they demonstrate any awareness whatsoever of themselves and others who share their haplogroups of some collective sense of identity beyond that of tribe or ethnos. For the Ancient Greeks, the people around them who mirrored their skin-tone and spoke related languages and worshipped similar gods were barbarians the same as Asians and Africans. The Romans slaughtered Celts without anyone stopping the genocide with a firm invocation of European brotherhood. Vikings killed each other, their fellow Germanics, Slavs, and Celts the same as they did Asians and Africans, the latter of whom they imported into Ireland and England in massive numbers after raids. Through all of this, there is exactly nothing of any attested white racial consciousness or sense of shared culture as men of the West- none. All notions of common identity as whites, Westerners, and Europeans postdate the Christianization of the continent and emerge directly from it. The faith alone made if possible to be at once particular and general, and as the faith goes, so too goes that solidarity that, for all the subsidiary divisions, kept the West from the disasters that have befallen it in the wake of the great apostasy of our time.

This is the really the Jews’ fault, when you think about it.

There’s a lot more to be said along these lines. I plan to follow this up with other essays featuring some examples from literature from the Medieval period showcasing the dynamic fusion I described here. But for now, I’m glad I can rest after my great spiritual ordeal. I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t mention that I’m not the only one for whom Thundarr the Barbarian inspires profundities…

Dear Peter Thiel, please do all the drugs and cut some anon an insanely huge check to make this movie actually. I’ll pass along a script treatment in our secret BAP-Yarvin Discord.