Stalin and Stalinism in History (2012)

Domenico Losurdo

2024-05-16

Original publication: lafauteadiderot.net

Translation: Roderic Day

Red Sails

On 12 April 2012, the Gabriel Péri Foundation hosted a panel on the question of “Stalin and Stalinism in History,” featuring anti-communist historian Nicolas Werth — who contributed the USSR chapters to Stéphane Courtois’s infamous Black Book of Communism (1997) — and philosopher Domenico Losurdo. [1] [2] Below is Domenico Losurdo’s keynote address. All citations are my addition. — R. D.

Philosophers like to evoke not only historical events but also the categories through which we interpret these events. Today, what is the category through which Stalin is interpreted? That of bloodthirsty madness. This category has already been used against Robespierre, against the Revolution of 1848, against the Paris Commune, but never against war, or against Louis XVI, or against the Girondins or Napoleon. Regarding the twentieth century, we have psychopathological studies of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, but not, for example, of Churchill. [3] However, all of the Bolshevik leaders spoke up against colonial expansionism, while Churchill wrote: “War is a game that is played with a smile.” [4] Then there was the carnage of the First World War. The Bolshevik leadership group, including Stalin, was against this carnage, but Churchill said again: “War is the greatest game in world history, here I play with the highest stakes. War is the sole acute sensation of our lives.” [5] So, why the psychopathological approach in the one case and not in the other?

Given these conditions, what central category can we part from? For the sake of reflection, I will cite Nicolas Werth: “The source (matrice) of Stalinism was the period of the First World War, the revolutions of 1917, and the Civil Wars, taken as a whole.” I fully share this view. So we have to start with the First World War. The origins of Stalinism lie not in an individual’s thirst for power, but in the permanent state of emergency that started with the First World War. But we need to take into account not just the First World War, but the whole period of the Second Thirty Years’ War — because even after the Treaty of Versailles, everyone sensed that there would be a Second World War. This is a war that would affect the Soviet Union and the West in different ways. The war in the East, against the Soviet Union — and before that, against Poland — was a colonial war. Eminent scholars today characterize the war against the Soviet Union as “the greatest colonial war in history.” [6] And I would add that this war was not just a colonial war, but a slaver war, explicitly aimed at the reintroduction of slavery. We can read about this in Hitler or Himmler. The latter, speaking at a meeting of Nazi leaders, declared “we need slaves for our culture.” [7] Then, if Hitler-led Germany was one of the protagonists of this colonial and slaver war, the Stalin-led Soviet Union was the other — its antagonist.

We can also place this war in a larger historical context. There is another important slaver war that we can consider: Napoleon’s war against Saint-Domingue. Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines were protagonists of a resistance to slavery, just like Stalin. And regarding this connection I want to draw attention to the fact that Stalin did not become a protagonist only in Stalingrad 1942 — even before the October Revolution he considered that Russia was in danger of becoming a colony: “Certain foreigners,” he writes “were behaving in Russia like Europeans in Central Africa.” [8] I’ll quote him again: the question of the Revolution is about “the liberation of Russia.” [9] Stalin clearly perceived a risk that Russia would become a colony.

Let’s now turn to the objection: “But what about the 1939 pact with Hitler?” For starters, to the extent there was a race to compromise with Hitler, Stalin lost it: the Third Reich had by that time a concordat with the Holy See (Reichskonkordat, 1933), an agreement with the Zionists (Haavara Agreement, 1933), and a naval agreement with Britan (Anglo-German Naval Agreement, 1935) — the last of which prompted Hitler to write in his diary: “this is the happiest day of my life.” [10] And then, of course, there was Munich (1938). [11] But that’s perhaps not the most important point. Here again I’ll draw a comparison with the politics of Toussaint Louverture, whose anti-conformism is beyond dispute: in early 1794 he allied with royal Spain and England against revolutionary France, and yet no one considers him an agent of feudalism. Toussaint Louverture and his followers may have made mistakes, but the fact that they were protagonists in the first great struggle against the colonialist and slave-owning system is not disputed.

Thus far I’ve only talked about grand gestures and not of tragedies, but the two things go hand-in-hand, because with the October Revolution come messianic expectations: power, the rationale behind States, States as such, nations… all of this was expected to disappear. One philosopher, Ernst Bloch, even claims Soviets will turn power into love! When Lenin introduces the New Economic Policy (NEP), tens of thousands of workers literally tear up their party cards in disgust, and rechristen it the “New Extortion of the Proletariat.” Stalin, of course, wasn’t Lenin, but he insisted on building socialism in Soviet Russia, although premised above all on national liberation: that’s how he invited people to study technology, to become masters of science. He thought the class struggle revolved, at this particular juncture, around the conquest of technology and of science.

When Walter Benjamin visited Moscow in December 1927, he said that, for many people, Bolshevism was the crowning achievement of Peter the Great. [12] However, Trotsky compares Stalin not to Peter the Great but to Nicholas II — and so the Stalinist regime must be dealt a fate analogous to that dealt to Nicholas II’s regime. [13] Trotsky then called Stalin “Hitler’s butler,” “a provocateur in Hitler’s service.” In turn, Stalin used the same language against Trotsky and others. This is the language of civil war. From his point of view, as a revolutionary, Trotsky had not only the right but also the duty to overthrow Hitler’s so-called butler. And this civil war was playing out not only in words, but also at the organizational level. In my book on Stalin, I quote Ruth Fischer, who says that by 1927 we can already speak of opposing parties and military apparatuses. [14]

The ideological struggle becomes a civil war: unfortunately, this is the history of all great revolutions. The civil war in Russia was particularly horrific, that’s not in dispute. But how can we understand the particularity of this horror? The challenge is to come up with categories which enable us to understand this horror in particular. On this subject, a well-known historian in the Western world, Robert Conquest, argues that “mental aberrations” are peculiar to the French and Russians, and mostly foreign to the Anglo-Celts. [15] Is this recourse to Anglo-Celtic natures as root explanation any different from Nazi recourse to Aryanism? For my part, in order to understand the particular horror of the civil war in Soviet Russia, I’ll quote Nicolas Werth again: “The collapse of all authority and institutional frameworks.” [16]

Let me emphasize: the Trotsky-Stalin struggle is not one between two different personalities. It’s a struggle between two different principles of legitimizing power.

What’s more, the civil war in Soviet Russia is characterized by the fact that both the opposing parties have experience in conspiracy and clandestine struggle, and agree upon the necessity underlined by Lenin in What Is To Be Done? of agitating within the army, the police, and the State apparatus; all while camouflaging and hiding it by speaking sometimes in an “aesopic language.” It should also be noted here that even Khrushchev in his report speaks of false denunciations and “provocatory accusations,” made either by “real Trotskyites” — who could thus “take revenge” and thrust the State apparatus into confusion — or by “conscienceless careerists” — prepared to get ahead by the most despicable means. [17] [18]

The dominant ideology equates the gulag system and the concentration camps (konzentrationslager) in Nazi Germany. In my book I discuss the “absent third party.” As a matter of fact, there are other concentration camps. Mike Davis brings the militarized labor camps of colonial India in the late 19th century, referring to them as “extermination camps.” [19] An Italian historian, Angelo Del Boca, also speaks of extermination camps, this time of Libyans incarcerated by liberal Italy. If we compare the various different camps, there is an important similarity between Nazi concentration camps and colonial camps: in both cases, the rule is a racial rule.

Ideology also plays a role in the terror. The most horrifying period was the collectivization of agriculture. Bukharin rightly spoke of the danger of a “St. Bartholomew’s Night.” [20] But finally the decisive role in collectivization was played by military concerns — though it in no way detracts from the horror.

One has to distinguish between horror and mythology. After the French Revolution mythologies spread widely, such as Robespierre wanting to become the new King of France, or of a genocidal Robespierre who, according to Babeuf, wanted to enact in the Vendée a “system of depopulation.” The October Revolution and the Stalinist period gave rise to mythologies of this sort.

The central question is the following: is Nazism the twin brother of Communism, or is Nazism the continuation and radicalization of the colonial tradition and the racial ideology that accompanied it? [21] This is a very important question. As a philosopher, I interrogate the watchwords of Nazi ideology. One of these is Untermensch, which is to say “sub-human.” This word is translated from English, from the expression under man, first used by Lothrop Stoddard in the United States. In Nazism, we find white supremacy [22] — the category of the colonial tradition and of the racist ideology of the United States. Similarly, while the Nazis spoke of “racial hygiene,” Lothrop Stoddard spoke of “race cleaning,” “race purification,” and, more generally, of “the science of ‘Eugenics’ or ‘Race Betterment’.” Even the decisive term “final solution” comes from the United States, where the Black or Indigenous question was referred to as the “ultimate solution” or the “final and complete solution.” [23]

Indeed, British and Western colonialism have long been compared to Hitler’s colonialism. Gandhi said: “I assert that in India we have Hitlerian rule however disguised it may be in softer terms.” [24] “Hitler was Britain’s sin.” On the other hand, he referred to Stalin as a “great man.”

In conclusion, the horror of the Stalinist period is indisputable, but we cannot forget that Stalin was a protagonist of the anti-colonial struggle. Similarly, if we want to understand Hitler, we have to start from the history of colonialism. All the harsh condemnations of Stalin must reckon with this fact: with the October Revolution and with Stalin, we see colonialism begin to disappear, and with it also go the central categories of Nazi ideology stemming from the colonial tradition and the racial ideology of the West.

[1] See also Nicolas Werth’s speech at the same meeting. [web] 

[2] Referenced in Grover Furr, “In Memoriam: Domenico Losurdo” (2018). [web] 

[3] See also Michael Parenti’s “Against Psychopolitics” (1992). [web] 

[4] Winston Churchill (1915) cited in Martin Gilbert’s The Challenge of War: Winston S. Churchill, 1914-1916 (1990), p. 651. [web] 

[5] In Alex P. Schmid, Churchills privater Krieg. Intervention und Konterrevolution im russischen Burgerkrieg 1918-1920 (1974). [web] 

[6] David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide (2011), London: Faber and Faber, p. 327. 

[7] Heinrich Himmler, Posen Speeches (1943). [web] 

[8] J. V. Stalin, “Foreigners and the Kornilov Conspiracy” (12 September 1917). [web] 

[9] J. V. Stalin, “The Logic of Facts” (29 October 1918). [web] 

[10] In Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (1998). [web] 

[11] “The Munich Agreement was an agreement reached in Munich on 30 September 1938 by Nazi Germany, Great Britain, the French Republic, and Fascist Italy. The agreement provided for the German annexation of part of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland.” — Wikipedia. [web] 

[12] Peter I (b. 1672-1725) was the Tsar under whose reign people began referring to Russia as an empire, due to military victories, territorial expansion, and cultural modernization. 

[13] Nicholas II (b. 1868-1917), overthrown by the revolution, was the last Tsar of Russia, known for military defeats and violent repression. 

[14] For Domenico Losurdo’s take on Trotsky and Stalin, see “Primitive Thinking and Stalin as Scapegoat” (2011). [web] 

[15] “The huge catastrophes of our era have been inflicted by human beings driven by certain thoughts. […] How did these mental aberrations gain a purchase?” (p. 3), “[S]pontaneous legal, public activity is clearly an adjunct, if not a condition, of the Anglo-Celtic culture” (p. 32), “The intention here is more to consider how and why this aberration took place, to differentiate its various species, […]” (p. 115) — Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1999). [web] 

[16] Nicholas Werth in Stéphane Courtois, Quand tombe la nuit: origines et émergence des régimes totalitaires en Europe, 1900-1934 (2001). [web] 

[17] N. Khrushchev, “Speech to 20th Congress of the C.P.S.U.” (1956). [web] 

[18] See also Domenico Losurdo, “How to Cast a God into Hell: The Khrushchev Report” (2008). [web] 

[19] Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (2000). [web] 

[20] “The St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572 was a targeted group of assassinations and a wave of Catholic mob violence directed against the Huguenots (French Calvinist Protestants) during the French Wars of Religion.” — Wikipedia. [web] 

[21] See Domenico Losurdo, “Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism” (2004). [web] 

[22] Written out in English in the original French. 

[23] Losurdo extensively lays out material illustrating this question in “The International Origins of Nazism” (2010). [web] 

[24] Mahatma Gandhi, “Answers to Questions (25 April 1941)” in Collected Works, vol. 74, p. 17. [web] 

 Domenico Losurdo

2024-05-15Twitter

Original publication: lafauteadiderot.net

Translation: Roderic Day

Losurdo interviewed by Eychart (2007)

An interview with Domenico Losurdo conducted by Baptiste Eychart in 2007, marking the occasion of the publication of his book Gramsci: From Liberalism to “Critical Communism.”

 Red Sails

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Baptiste Eychart: Domenico Losurdo, you’ve devoted several book-length studies to major thinkers of the modern era: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Hegel. However, this is the first time you’ve written an intellectual biography of an important figure of the workers’ movement: Antonio Gramsci. What circumstances led you to this choice?

Domenico Losurdo: Gramsci enables us to challenge both neoliberalism and postmodernism — two versions of today’s dominant ideology that often appear intertwined. How many books have been written attempting to demonstrate that Marxism and Communism sacrifice concrete individuality and moral standards at the altar of the philosophy of history?

Important liberal writers, including Benedetto Croce, justified Italy’s intervention in the carnage of the First World War, over and against widespread popular opposition, in terms of the right of heroic elites to force the cowardly masses to rise for the sake of the unity and regeneration of the nation. Gramsci became a communist through his criticism of this philosophy of history; he condemned its pretensions towards “transforming the working people into raw material for the history of the privileged classes.” [1]

Baptiste Eychart: The analogues between our current political situation and Gramsci’s period of counter-revolution are strong. The strength of your work lies in showing that Gramsci needed to carry out a self-critique of his previously held positions to better grasp the historical situation in the late twenties and thirties.

Domenico Losurdo: The most interesting Gramsci is the one who reflects on the stability of Western capitalism in spite of the horrors of the Great War it provoked. This led him to a radical critique of the theory of the collapse of capitalism, and to a much more sophisticated reformulation of the theory of revolution. Thus, his vision of socialism underwent an evolution: when he first greeted the October Revolution he emphasized that it would produce equality; nine years later he supported the NEP despite its flagrant social inequalities in the name of the need to develop the productive forces.

Baptiste Eychart: For Gramsci it’s also a question of abandoning a utopianism that turns out to endanger the construction of socialism…

Domenico Losurdo: Indeed. The horrors of the 1914-1918 war on the one hand, and the extreme hopes generated by the October Revolution on the other, encouraged a messianic reading of Marxism: in the same manner as classes, states and nations, religion, the market, money (or power as such), and in fact every manifestation of conflict, were all set to disappear. Compounding the non-stop state of emergency provoked by imperialist aggression, these utopian aspirations made it even more difficult to build a post-capitalist society based on democracy and the rule of law. Gramsci proposed a path that still must be followed from beginning to end: to conceive of a powerful project of emancipation that nevertheless does not presume to be the end of history.

Baptiste Eychart: In your opinion, the “critical return” to this cultural heritage shouldn’t be an occasion for Communists to engage in self-flagellation, it should be carried out from the perspective of a struggle against a capitalism whose novel features are yet to be fully theorized. Do you think that Gramscian categories such as “passive revolution” shed light into the dynamics of today’s capitalism?

Domenico Losurdo: There’s no reason for communists to resign themselves to self-hate (autophobie) and a flight from history. [2] Decolonization and, focusing on the West more properly, the birth of democracy and of universal suffrage, as well as the overcoming of the three great historical discriminations (based on race, caste, and gender) and the creation of the welfare state, are achievements that would have been unthinkable without the contribution of the communist movement. [3]

In the era which corresponded to the “passive revolution,” the West responded to the challenge posed by communist agitation by introducing important reforms, albeit under the direction and control of the bourgeoisie. With the disappearance of this challenge comes a period of more or less open reaction: it suffices to consider here the dismantling of the welfare state, or what the American historian Arthur Schlesinger describes as the return of discrimination based on caste (discrimination censitaire) as a result of the growing role played by wealth in the electoral process. Also indicative of this regression is the return of the principle of hierachies among entire peoples, exemplified by American representatives openly claiming to be “God’s chosen people,” with a duty to lead and dominate the rest of the world.

Baptiste Eychart: For a long time Gramsci has been classified as a representative of “Western Marxism,” with a series of authors claiming that Gramsci shared with them a number of objections of the early “Orthodox Marxism” of Kautsky and Lenin. You seem to challenge this characterization.

Domenico Losurdo: Gramsci’s point of view contrasts “our Marx” — a Marx read alongside the “Oriental” Lenin — to the the “Marxism contaminated with positivist and naturalist encrustations” of Bernstein and Kautsky (“Westerners”!), which appears incapable of understanding the dialectics and historical necessity of the October Revolution. Moreover, Gramsci distinguishes between, on the one hand, a dogmatic communism and, on the other, a “critical communism” that presents itself as heir of the highest summits of the bourgeois cultural tradition, parting from Hegel and classical German philosophy. [4] That said, even here the notion of “Western Marxism” turns out to be misleading: it’s finally Stalin who liquidates Hegel as an expression of German reaction to the French Revolution; a formulation accepted by many European Marxists, yet rejected by Mao Zedong.

The problem is that this category of “Western Marxism” positively contrasts the West to the East, and pure intellectuals to politicians engaged in the construction of a post-capitalist society. This brings us back to the problematic discussed at the beginning of this interview: those unable to criticize the self-flattering apologia of the West promoted by liberal ideology are forced to retreat from history — the “original sin” of “Western Marxism.”

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[1] The pejorative use of “philosophy of history” here refers to the common liberal argument that socialists are guilty of abandonding all norms under the premise that “the (historical) ends justifies the (political) means,” which Losurdo demonstrates is in reality is a very generic vice, at many points in history championed primarily by liberals themselves. — R. D. 

[2] See also Domenico Losurdo’s “Flight from History? The Communist Movement between Self-Criticism and Self-Contempt” (1999). [web] — R. D. 

[3] See for example Alice Malone, “Concessions” (2023). [web] — R. D. 

[4] “Bolsheviks […] are not ‘Marxists’ as such; they have not derived a doctrine out of the work of the Master, dogmatic and beyond questioning. They live out Marxist thought, the undying continuation of German and Italian idealism, that in Marx appeared contaminated by positivist and naturalist affectations.” — Antonio Gramsci, “The Revolution Against Das Kapital” (1917). [web] — R. D. 

 

Aryan Idols and the Search for Indo-Europeans

The Prehistory and History of Fascist Mythology Part I

by Bruce Lerro / May 14th, 2024

Orientation

Purpose of this article

Almost 2 years ago I wrote an article called Aryan Right-Wing Mythology for the New Age based on the work of Robert Ellwood (The Politics of Myth). In it Ellwood showed the conservative nature of popular mythologists Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell. My purpose was to show how the naïve New Age movement took these mythologists to be liberal in spite of their conservative and even proto-fascist leanings. All three mythologists were writing from the early to the middle part of the 20th century. In this article I want to trace the history of right-wing mythology back 200 years. For this task I will be relying on two great books. One is Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science by Stefan Arvidsson; the other is Theorizing Myth by Bruce Lincoln.

In search for the Indo-Europeans

Why explore a lost culture with little evidence to go on? From the early 19th  century to the end of World War II historians, linguists, folklorists and archeologists have tried to re-create a lost culture, a people older than the Sumerians. Those scholars who have maintained that this culture existed and have called them “Indo-Europeans;” “Proto-Indo Europeans”, “Aryans” or  “Japhetites”. It was in 1813 that Thomas Young coined the term “Indo-European”.

In Part I of this article I explore those theories that searched for the Indo-Europeans by dissecting language-based on the theories of Sir William Jones and Max Muller. Both these theorists suspected that India was the home of the Indo Europeans. Further on, in the hands of the Grimm Brothers, the search for the Indo-Europeans takes a nationalist turn. Finally, neo-traditional religion supports the vitality of chthonic earth gods. Lastly, I discuss the impact of racial anthropology in which the search for Indo-Europeans is now based on the climate of the area, the skin color and brain size of people in these cultures.

Part II continues this rightward turn in Indo European studies with explicitly fascist direction. Following Arvidsson, I contrast the difference between the “order” theorists and the more “barbarophilism” as they affect the rise of Hitler. India falls out of favor as the home of the Indo-Europeans and is replaced by Germany.

But later, following Bruce Lincoln we find a French fascism smuggled into the work of the great French comparative mythologist, Georges Dumezil. I close with a brief presentation of the fascist work of Roger Pearson in his efforts to carry Indo-European studies right into second half of the 19th century. By way of conclusion, I present comparative mythologist Bruce Lincoln’s ten methodological steps to be sure that the political use of mythology does not interfere with the science of comparative mythology.

Who were the Indo-European scholars and what were their methodological problems?

Interestingly, supporters for the discovery of IE culture were a multidisciplinary lot. They consisted of historians of religions like Mircea Eliade, Jan de Vries, Jacob Grimm, Frederic Max Muller; historians such as Georges Duby and Jacques Le Goff; anthropologists such as Claude Levi Strauss and Marshall Sahlins; archeologists like Gordon Childe; sociologists like Georges Dumezil. Others included Franz Bopp, Ernest Renan and Emile Benveniste.

The problem for these scholars was that Indo-Europeans have not left behind any texts and no objects that can definably be tied to them. Given these problems, why did these scholars not give up and turn their attention to other excavations? Why did they persist under these difficult conditions? The answer Stefan Arvidsson gives is that most of these scholars did so for religious and political/ideological reasons.

I The Ideological Origins of the Search for Indo-Europeans 

Anthropology typically examines the similarities and differences between cultures. Yet anthropologists are affected by the political climate of their countries. In European colonial times of the late 18th century, there was little to gain by elites for pursuing the Enlightenment dream of finding a universality of all cultures. Instead, religious and political zealots look for differences to justify the subjugation of these countries. The ancient history of the supposed Indo-Europeans became the proof that one branch of humanity was destined to exploit and rule the others. Mythology became an ideology to justify conquest. As Arvidsson pointed out, romantics like Chateaubriand, and Joseph de Maistre stressed importance of Laws of Manu found in India as a justification for a tripart conservative ideology as we will see later.

Indo-European “Aryan” studies were appropriated at an early stage by racial science. British archeologist Colin Renfrew has concluded from his own research that the research in IE is itself a modern myth. They included those who want to rekindle the old pre-Christian IE or Aryan paganism. Even as late as 1940-44 the most important dividing line among Europe’s inhabitants were between Aryans and Semites. After the fall of Germany in World War II “Aryan” was replaced by “Indo European” because post-war scholarship was dominated by Dumezil who never spoke about “Aryan religion”. Today the term is only used by Neo-Nazis.

Why was it so important for Germany to search for a culture of its origins? Unlike Britain, France or Spain there was no Germany until the end of the 18th century. The usual process of nation-building involved a reference to an ancient geographical homeland as well as an ancient religion. In this climate of imperial ambitions, Germany had neither, so it set out to discover one.

 II Discovery of Sanskrit

Sir William Jones

The Romantic use of language interpreted by various peoples who spoke IE languages made them have an organic unity and had a common fate. They claimed that all people who spoke IE had also inherited a common belief system. IE scholars like Bryant and Jones attempted to find similarities in the myths and god figures and found traces of these beliefs in at least four places: Roman texts, Greek myths, Indian hymns and Norse saga literature. 

Bruce Lincoln, in his great book Theorizing Myth says Sir William Jones (1746-1794), established himself as one of the world’s foremost linguists with a grasp of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Turkish along with a knowledge of Persian and Arabic. He was a scholar, poet and translator sympathetic to the most liberal causes of his day. By a series of occupational happenstances, this led him to study Sanskrit.

In 1785 he gave a lecture in which he proposed the common origin of the languages (Sanskrit) to which others would later derive and give the name “Aryan”. Jones discovered the similarities between Latin and Greek European languages and the Sanskrit and Persian languages which were termed “linguistic families”. The Bhagavad Gita was translated by Jones along with The Laws of Manu. India was assumed to be the oldest member of that group.

Jones focused on four specific domains of culture a) language and letters b) philosophy and religion c) architecture and sculpture d) science and arts. In his discussion of an evaluation basing his judgments on what he took to be levels of accomplishment, he considered India first among the nations and evaluated it most favorably. He connected the peoples of India and Iran on the basis of their linguistic, religious and artistic similarities.

Romanticism and India

Interest in Sanskrit exploded. Herder (1744-1803) was the first to spread the doctrine of Indomania in German. He thought it was one of the most important steps in the development of the human race. Raymond Schwab referred to the period around 1800 as an “Oriental Renaissance”. Schlegel’s book in 1808 made the case for India as the Aryan homeland. In the translation of the Laws of Manu, the word “Aryan” means noble. The plot thickens.

For romantics the idealization of India served both as a protest against and an escape from the contemporary world that seemed like a confident march of progress. Threatened by rationalism, mechanistic science, materialistic anthropology, anti-aristocratic politics and watered down theology Romantics made India a mystical unity that did away with interdisciplinary European conflicts. While the Enlightenment advocated a contractual right of man, German Romantics argued that human races are an organic part of the natural world with India as its model. Poets such as Shelley, Lord Byron and Schopenhauer attempted to synthesize India with European thinking.

Paris was the Mecca of Orientalism during the 1830s-1840s and it was hoped that studying Sanskrit would liberate scholars from their preoccupation with Greece and Rome. For some time, ancient India became the imagined home of Indo-Europeans. The attractive power of this world grew in 1819 through the writings of Frederic Schlegel, who attempted to build a comparative linguistics (1767-1845) along with von Humboldt and Jacob Grimm (1785-1863). Like many to come, Herder believed that Asia was the original home of human unity.

The discovery of IE language transformed India, Persia and Central Asia as a kind of European Orient. Thomas Trautmann writes that Jones’ work is nothing less than a project to make the new Orientalism safe for Anglicans. Interest in India was popularized by the historian of religion, Max Muller. What we are interested in is the relationship of that discovery to political interests of colonial British rule in the late 18th and 19th centuries. 

Language mediates how nature grows in culture

For Romantics, language was the most basic expression of the soul of a people and is the foundation for musical and artistic traditions as well as social laws. The study of the origin of language (philology) was the cornerstone in the 19th century of research in the search for Indo-Europeans. Language became the vehicle through which nature grows through people.

 For Hamann and Herder, the ancient vernacular of languages and literature — poetry and myth – was a prime basis of national identity. Each language embodied the history of the people who spoke it. Each language had a basis in poetry and music far deeper than the degraded prose of modernity. For Herder, the formation of culture consisted of 4 parts:

• A variety of climates — heat and cold have an impact on the disposition of customs and bodies. Climate first produces change at the body’s most superficial level. Over long periods of time the effects penetrate deeper to transform skeletal structure and even the shape of the skull and nose
• The landscape – the features of individuals in a culture are brought into line with the features of the landscape.
• Language impacts thought and social relations.Language impacts thought and social relations.
• The arts through music and dance.

III Max Muller and the Birth of Comparative Religion

Comparative religion as rooted in linguistics

As a philologist, Max Muller believed that religion is tightly linked to linguistic groups. Muller thought the only scientific way of classifying religion was by language. He raised the question that if the belief in God arises naturally, why are there such different religious types? In order to explain the origins of myths he founded the discipline of comparative mythology.

Primitive religion was monotheist and rooted in sun-worship

Which natural phenomenon had been the most prominent in catalyzing the mythopoetic imagination? Was it thunder and lightning, earthquakes, volcanos or the sun and dawn? Muller suspected that primitive religion was monothetic and this divine creator had originated from humanity’s encounter with forces of nature. However, it was not the wildest and most unpredictable events but it was the ones which were the most persistent and reliable. He thought the light of the sun fit the bill. Muller hoped to find traces of the original experience of the infinite among the oldest and most primitive peoples. He believed that the origin of monotheism was India. In the hopes of finding the monotheistic roots of India, he translated the Rigveda.

Use and abuse of myth: history of myth

According to Bruce Lincoln, the word “myth” has been used in many ways depending on the historical period. Myth had been used originally in early Greek times to mean a primordial truth or a sacred story. It gradually became discredited with the rise of the Pre-Socrates and dismissed by the Romans as a “fable”. Christianity saw myth as a lie and set them in dualistic opposition to the non-mythic bible. With the rise of science myth was seen as either a sign of ignorance, the result of poetic revelry or a children’s story. Resurrected by the romantics in the 19th century, it became politicized and used to assist in the building of nation-states. In the 20th century it helped to build support for the wave of fascism in the 20th century.

Muller sees myth as degenerative

Muller was a modernist Protestant. He was not a romantic when it came to myths. He found myth irrational and immoral. Muller agreed the IE mythology was a poetic explanation of nature.  But if Vedic India was equal to the West, what kept India economically and politically backward? Unlike Nietzsche and other romantics, Muller saw myth not as a foundation of all religion but as a source of religious degeneration. Like Hamann and Herder, he took poetry to be present from human origins and to reflect an innate religious awareness. Myth was a later development, a disease of language. The Jews, Muslims and Christians as staunch monotheists, were less disposed to the seductions of myth.

Muller and British colonialism

Muller hoped to influence a change in British colonial politics. He wanted to make the British colonists understand that their Indian subjects were Aryan brothers. During a long degeneration, Indian religion withered while Europeans grew and matured into monotheism.  Muller hoped that the people of India would leave behind worship of idols if they received knowledge about the old Aryan Vedic religion.

IV Romantics Champion Myth and Folklore to Build Nationalism

At the end of the 18th century romanticism turned its back on the Enlightenment, especially its more deterministic tendencies. Myth was given a new lease on life. People such as Jones saw myth symbolically as veiled wisdom which simply needed to be first interpreted and then explained. Interest in the vernaculars (local language) displaced the international languages of church and court while myths and, to a lesser extent, folk songs were constitutive as an authentic primordial voice of the volk.

The use of myth at the end of the 18th century was also used by nationalists in their search for a language and set of stories on which the emergence of the nation-state could be founded. In the hands of the Brothers Grimm and others this is exactly what happened. The Grimm’s monumental research shows a Herderian interest in language and myth. They devoted themselves to the first encyclopedic compendium of German myths of 4 volumes. The Grimms argued that it was the conversion to Christianity that shattered the nexus of land-myth and folk. Myth then became entangled with attempts to contrast Aryans and Semites, as we shall see.

Grimm stirs the use of folklore to build nationalism

For the brothers Grimm, prehistory was not a period of dark barbarism but a high cultural golden age. The recovery of ancient texts during the Renaissance included Tacitus’ Germania, first published in 1457.  It dealt with the German sense of honor and integrity, their physical prowess, their courage and sense of  beauty. They were received with enthusiasm by the people of Northern Europe, in part because Tacitus broke the Mediterranean monopoly on antiquity by giving the Germans, Scandinavians, Dutch and Anglo Saxons their first sense of the prestige derived from a deep and noble past.

Grimm (1785 – 1863) gathered folktales from German peasants in order to recreate a strong German culture. He wanted to find rich German stories that could successfully compete with classical Judeo-Christian traditions  He hoped that within the surface of folktales searchers  he could find traces of a German mythopoetic prehistory. Theorists of Northern origins challenged the Bible, for orthodox religion looked to Israel as the cradle of language. Grimm’s work spread and scholars began to record tales and customs of their society. Nationalist motives were always in the search for myths whether they were folktales or rituals.

 V From Modernist to Neo-Traditional Religion: Fall of Nature Mythology of Max Muller

Modernist theories of religion see the modernization process, including science, as part of the evolution of religion. The focus of religious experience is the individual. Modernist theories of religion look for a common core in all religion and its practices involve ethics and prayer. Modernists understand animism and polytheism as late degenerate forms of primitive monotheist tendency. To study non-modern cultures it focuses the language, and it studies myth. Max Muller was a modernist.

Capitalist class rejects modernist religious interpretations

Bruce Lincoln points out that when the bourgeois class at the end of the 19th  century became the ruling class, it grew all the more skeptical about modernization. One of the reasons was that more radical modernists, social democrats, communists, anarchists and union members became interested in these subjects. Events that shook bourgeois idealism and liberal humanism were the real threat of socialism as seen in the Paris Commune. Between 1880-1920, the bourgeois class became a dominating class whose interest in social change decreased, and the relationship between a civilized bourgeoisie and a barbaric working-class now became more important than the relationship between the bourgeois class and a reactionary aristocracy and priesthood which the bourgeoisie had defeated. In reaction, the bourgeois became conservative, nostalgic and nationalistic.  Correspondingly, the image of IE as cultural heroes changed from a modernist to a neo-traditionalist. But what does neo-traditionalist mean?

What is neo-traditional religion?

Neo-traditional ideals of religion want to recreate a vitalized traditional religion that could serve as a counterbalance to modernization (Muller). Von Schroder, a Baltic German Indologist, wants to renew folk-national, heathen rituals. Scholars like Lang, Von Schroeder, Harrison, Mauss and Eliade think that modernization has been chocked full of what is most vital in religion which was its magical, communitarian and collective rituals. What makes religion vital is what makes religion locally dispersed. Rather than ethics and prayer, what makes religion juicy is its altered states. Animism and polytheism are not only prior to monotheism, but once monotheism comes to power the part of religion that speaks to most people is chocked off. Further, evolutionary anthropologists claimed as Muller’s theories were no more than Christian crypto-apologetics. Frazer’s theories of ancient religion were an attempt to replace Muller’s philological paradigm with an evolutionist and folkloristic theory.

Jane Harrison and the chthonic roots of Olympian Greece religion

Beyond anthropology, the importance of ritual as opposed to myth was embraced by classicists like Jane Harrison (1850-1928), Francis Cornford (1874-1943) and the Cambridge ritualists. Jane Harrison argued chthonic religion had been the true religion of Greece up to the 7th  century BCE. With the Olympians’ victory over the Pelasgian religion, reflection, distinction and clarity triumph over pulsing life. She held that myth arose as an attempt to explain well-entrenched and no longer understood rites.

 VI Aryan Studies Turn Rightward at the End of the 19th Century

Aryan liberal romanticism, which began with Jones, had weakened substantially by 1870. Yet the search for the Aryans grew, with input from Michelet, Fichte, Lasson and Hubert on the left and Renan, Schlegel and Wagner on the right.

Right-wing transitions to Aryanism

On the right, Renan idealized the polytheism of the IE. He constructed a long-lived opposition between IE and Semitic people. He connected the Biblical Shem’s line with monotheistic intolerance, egotism, conservatism, otherworldliness, irrational rituals along with lack of feeling for art and nature. For conservatives, the Jews promoted modernism. From 1870 on IE became connected with anti-Semitism.

Schlegel questions whether the French Revolution really was, along with its cosmopolitan and humanistic optimism, about progress. Becoming a Catholic, he came to embrace a nationalistic, reactionary and pessimistic world view.  In circles close to Schlegel people began for the first time to value the Middle Agesmore highly.

Wagner

Wagner greatly admired Grimm for all his work on folktales. He sought to connect the Volk through art rather than scholarship. According to Wagner, a total work of art would integrate music, poetry, dance, theatrical spectacle, the plastic arts and architecture. This integration of all the arts would undermine the shallowness of modernism, and rejuvenate an appreciation of folk, where the arts and rituals were once one.

Wagner worked on his materials over the next thirty years into the four dramas of The Ring Circle. This was intended as a ritual celebration, not a theatrical performance. He claimed that both the science and art of today are specialization of activities that were once unified. He believed this appreciation of the beauty of nature could arise only out of polytheism. That Wagner traced the origins of the German Volk to India shows that he understood them as part of the Aryan Diaspora.

The place and misplace of Nietzsche in Aryan politics

For Nietzsche, myth was a necessary foundation for all religion. In his earlier writings on myth, he took Wagner’s theories as his point of departure, especially in his book Birth of Tragedy. But in his later life Nietzsche disliked the vulgar antisemitism and German nationalism of Wagner. Nietzsche threw in the towel with Wagner after The Ring premiere at Bayreuth. Nevertheless Nietzsche’s training was in classical philology and he was well-versed with research in Indo-European linguistics and myth and undertook his own studies. He was not dependent on Wagner for this.

Nietzsche has been mistakenly categorized as antisemitic, especially in liberal and socialist circles. But as Walter Kaufman pointed out many years ago in his great biography of Nietzsche, Nietzsche’s work was taken over by his sister who had fascist connections so that his work was pulverized to make it fit with Nazi ideology.

Bruce Lincoln gives us at least four reasons why Nietzsche was not antisemitic or a proponent of fascism:

• Nietzsche’s “blond beast” is not a special race but a category that encompasses multiple races, including Greeks and Japanese. However, he gave them further consideration. His detailed discussion was all devoted to the Greeks and the Germans.
• Soon after Nietzsche wrote Genealogy of Morals he came upon the Laws of Manu, an ancient Indian text on the ethics, law and social structure of India. Nietzsche admired the original religion and culture in India. While all the world’s people originated in India, he thought those of the West-Egyptians and Europeans came from the higher castes and it was for them that was reserved the title “Indo-Europeans”. While Nietzsche showed racial bias it was towards Europeans and Egyptians, not Germans.
• Nietzsche drew a sharp distinction between ancient and modern Germans. Ancient Germans (based on the work of Tacitus) had freedom and energy, but modern Germans did not, having become ever less Aryan and ever less barbaric. Therefore, Nietzsche saw nothing in the Germans of his time that was noteworthy.
• The Nazis were antisemitic – Nietzsche was anti-Christian. His early antipathy toward the Jews and Judaism was gradually attenuated and balanced by a growing, occasionally grudging, respect. Instead he become mercilessly more critical of Christianity. Everything wrong in Judaism was amplified and exacerbated in Christianity. The criticism he had of the Jews was that they were the first weak Christians, not that they had any of the other characteristics that fascists attributed to them. His most acidic systematic criticisms, his theory of resentment was leveled at Christianity not Judaism. Christianity is treated as the extreme form of all that is sickeningly present in Judaism.

VII) Racial Anthropology

As we’ve seen, the first Indo-European studies were grounded in linguistic observations. Max Muller equated linguistic affinity with ethnic affinity as opposed to physical appearance. In retrospect, he rightfully saw language, religion and nationality as independent of blood, skull or hair color. Jones also did not think skin color was important. However, both scholars’ contention was increasingly isolated and drowned out. The issue was how to measure being Indo-European.  Did one belong with those who spoke related languages and are considered to have a similar culture, or with those who looked similar?

During the 19th century racial anthropologists began to discuss IE, threatening the proprietorship of linguists. Instead of the study of religion, language and folklore to find the origins of Indo-Europeans, the new school focused on differences between people in material and physical characteristics and their geographical location. Racial anthropologists argued that people’s physical appearance could directly explain their degree of civilization. They debated which race was the original one and whether other races were the result of evolution or degeneration. They thought pure races were more fit than mixed ones. Racial anthropology became a study of signs where the internal moral and cultural states could be interpreted from external physical signs.

Climate, skin color and physique

According to Tacitus, the German climate is harsh and damper in the North and West, windier in the South and East. The cold and damp character of the Northern environment impressed itself on the bodies of those who live there. Bruce Lincoln says the whiteness of the cold must have scorched the Indo-Europeans and produced their red color. From mid-19th century, the empirical methods of racial anthropologists were improved to measurement of skin color and the size of skulls and noses. Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869) argued that Aryans could be identified by their long skulls, blond hair and blue eyes. In his more extreme moments, Carus associated blond hair with the color of the sun and blue eyes with that of the sky, which identified Aryans as day people in contrast to the darker, lesser races.

The changing meaning of “barbarians”

Bourgeois humanists before 1870 looked down on barbarians for having had destroyed classical Rome. But as romanticism gained hold of bourgeois ideology, barbarian invasions were seen in a more positive light. As European romantics grew more cynical of the benefits of civilization and they studied the decline of other world civilizations and tumultuous migrations, the violence of the barbarians seemed to be necessary steps in a process of revitalization. Over a period of time from 1870, the barbarian origin of Europe changed from having been a source of guilt and shame to being something honorable.

The right turn against India

A racial anthropology of India begins in 1840s. It was discovered that not all Indian languages were Sanskrit.  South Indians had Dravidian language roots. From this, John Stevenson developed the racial theory of Indian civilization. According to him Indian races were divided into Aryans and Dravidians. It was thought the caste society was developed as a protective mechanism against racial mixing. In other words, violence was justified as a means of maintaining racial purity. This theoretical framework served to legitimatize British colonialization. The relations of the British as a new invader into India was  only the latest version of a hierarchical order that had existed thousands of years before. These vital colonizers had no use for romanticizing India.

Arthur de Gobineau and Germany as the proposed new home of Indo-Europeans

Scholars like Gobineau, Chamberlain and Paul Broca described Indo-Europeans as blond, blue-eyed and tall with straight noses, a straight profile and long narrow skulls. In their hands, Indo-Europeans were no longer a large group of different people who spoke IE languages but a delineated group of people with defined physical characteristics.

According to Gobineau, what happened in India was that white Aryans became brown and their culture and religion had degenerated into Hinduism. This racist historiography was also backed up by philological interpretations of India’s oldest source, the text the Rigveda as an interpretation of the description of the Aryan Dravidian conflict. Gobineau’s moral of history claimed that when whites racially mix their superior civilization degenerates Indo-Europeans were  looking  less and less like Indians and Iranians and more and more like Germans. Led by Renan, the culture that was Indo-European was no longer to be discovered in West Asia but ultimately in Germany. Wagner was friends with Gobineau and tried to make de Gobineau’s theories less pessimistic and more antisemitic. Wagner’s son-in-law was Houston Chamberlain (1855-1927) whose book in 1899 was the foundation text for the development of Nazi ideology.

Please see my table which compares the framework for the changing meaning of Indo-Europeans.

Changing Meaning of Indo-European –19th-20th Centuries

Second-Half of 19th century	Time period	Early 20th century
Rising bourgeoisie	Situation of the bourgeoisie	Declining Attempted imperialism
Liberal values and humanistic ideals of science	Political views	Neo-traditionalist ideas
No Anti-Semitic and sometimes anti-Christian but not connected to a racial ideology	Is there a racial ideology?	Yes. Connected to racial ideology John Stephenson on racial anthropology in India: Aryans vs Dravidians
Muller, Jones	Theoreticians	Renan, Stephenson (India)
They were heroic, idealistic free thinking and rational humanists who fought against despotic power and antiquated customs	The stories told of Indo-Europeans	Stories of how Indo-European colonizers in ancient times conquered dark primitive original population (Stephenson)
Civilized India, Iran	Where Indo-Europeans came from	Barbarian Germanic, Nordic
Comparative linguistics	What was used to measure differences?	Physical criteria – long, narrow skull, blond hair blue eyes Gobineau
Extraordinary language and culture	Why were Indo-Europeans successful?	(Violence) No racial mixing (Gobineau)
Fought against backward superstition	What did the Indo-Europeans do?	They were a regeneration and revitalizing growth movement
Originally monotheists Animism and polytheism is degenerate	Religious origin	Originally animists and polytheists Monotheists degenerative
Shameful for barbarians having destroyed ancient Rome	Attitude towards the barbarians	Necessary for clearing out the rot of modern life
Humble monotheists		Proud pagans who don’t bend their knees

Bruce Lerro has taught for 25 years as an adjunct college professor of psychology at Golden Gate University, Dominican University and Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has applied a Vygotskian socio-historical perspective to his three books found on Amazon. He is a co-founder, organizer and writer for Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism. Read other articles by Bruce, or visit Bruce's website.

SEE 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Hinduism Is Fascism 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for YEZEDI 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for ARYAN 

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/03/black-sky-thinking-does-my-black-sun.html

The British Empire’s Gnostic Revival of Scientific Paganism and a New World

by Matthew J.L. Ehret / January 8th, 2024

MARXIST LENINIST (STALINIST)

CONSPIRACY THEORIST

[The following is a sequel to Sir Henry Kissinger: Midwife to New Babylon]

We had run up against the Judeo-Christian commitment to one God, one religion, one reality, that has cursed Europe for centuries and America since our founding days. Drugs that open the mind to multiple realities inevitably lead to a polytheistic view of the universe. We sensed that the time for a new humanist religion based on intelligence, good natured pluralism and scientific paganism had arrived.

— Dr. Timothy Leary (recounting Aldous Huxley’s 1960 demand for a new world religion)

The Science of History: Pregnant Moments vs Linear Chronologies

The study of history can be approached from a number of directions, and using a number of diverse assumptions… but not all of them are equal, and some are extremely destructive.

Some people believe that history is simply associating events onto a linear time line and then adding creative writing to explain away causes of those events. Others presume that history is divided by “ages” with the “causes” of each event explained away by the age in which they occur. Others presume that the events across ages are caused by a never-ending class struggle of rich vs poor while others presume no causality exists behind the events on a time line except for raw hunger, greed or stupidity.

Over the years, I have come to the conclusion that history is best understood as a living process shaped by 1) ideas of good and evil, 2) decisions to act according to those ideas whether right or wrong, and 3) the freedom to embrace error, corruption and lies which often wear the clothing of truth.

When those false ideas are permitted to shape the cultural standards of what is considered “normal” for too long, decay across all spectrums of life can be found.

The physical, mental and spiritual health of people slowly decays, as those creative discoveries needed to meet the challenges of nature fail to be made, and scarcity, hunger, wars, and ignorance grow like a cancer.

The tension caused by this decay, and the better expression of human nature animated by obedience to truth, morality and creative reason manifests in the form of periods of dense potential, comparable to ‘pregnant moments’ where systemic changes for good or evil become ripe.

1866: A World Caught Between Two Paradigms

As I wrote about in The Clash of the Two Americas volume one, the years following America’s Civil War (1861-1865) unleashed a brilliant example of what such a pregnant moment looked like.

During this time, humanity was pulled by two very different paradigms.

On the one hand, an ancient system of hereditary power which aspired to enslave of the masses of the globe was breaking down.

This ancient system of exploitation and suppression overextended itself globally, and like its earlier incarnation in the Roman Empire, the British Empire was collapsing under its own internal contradictions.

The British Empire had expended vast energy and finances in manufacturing wars around the world to weaken and destroy all of her rivals. While these manipulations wrecked vast destruction onto Russia (during the Crimean War), India (suppressing vast rebellions), China (during two Opium Wars), and through London’s orchestration of the Civil War in America. Despite vast bloodletting, the world was quickly awakening to the evil of this empire and the false Christianity promoted under its banner.

On the other hand, the positive example of Abraham Lincoln’s USA, as a nation founded upon liberty, the consent of the governed and the notion of equal rights for all were spreading electrically across the world in the wake of the Civil War.

In Russia, Lincoln’s national system of political economy was transforming an agrarian serfdom into a modern industrial nation with the application of the protective tariff, productive credit and internal improvements like canals, railroads, electric power and schools. Czar Alexander II, Finance Minister Sergey Witte and the great scientist Dimitry Mendeleev spearheaded this reform.

In France, Germany, Italy and across Asia this system was spreading rapidly centered on the notion that scientific progress and technological improvements were caused by a divine spark of reason found in all people elevating humanity above the status of mere cattle, slaves or feudal serfs.

Many had every right to believe that an age of moral reason was on the horizon as nations were breaking free of the shackles of colonialism and ignorance… The defining character of this global movement was characterized by 1) technological progress, 2) leaping over the limits to growth by encouraging new discoveries and 3) recognizing all people as creatures made in the image of a living reasonable Creator.

Lincoln’s leading economic advisor and global grand strategist Henry C. Carey outlined this clash of paradigms in his 1852 Harmony of Interests where he said:

Two systems are before the world…. One looks to pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism; the other to increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence, combination of action, and civilization. One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace. One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of ELEVATING while EQUALIZING the condition of man throughout the world.

Unlike the British Empire’s Theosophists and Fabians- obsessed with uniting eastern and western cultures around Aryanism, eugenics and mysticism, the leading American system strategists around Carey sought to unite the world around the universal aspirations for development, moral goodness and cooperation.

This spirit was expressed eloquently by Lincoln’s former bodyguard, first governor of Colorado, and leading proponent of the international rail corridors named William Gilpin who wrote in his 1890 Cosmopolitan Railway:

In Asia, a civilization resting on a basis of remote antiquity has had, indeed, a long pause but a certain civilization- although hitherto hermetically sealed up from European influence- has continued to exist. The ancient Asiatic colossus, in a certain sense, needed only to be awakened to new life, and European Culture finds a basis there on which it can build future reforms.

Contrasting his concept of a Christianity based on doing the greatest good possible in opposition to the British Empire’s perversity of Christianity, Gilpin described what this new state of human civilization was destined to look like as “win-win cooperation” replaced the outdated geopolitical doctrines of “might makes right” and zero sum thinking prevalent under oligarchism:

The weapons of mutual slaughter are hurled away; the sanguinary passions find a check, a majority of the human family is found to accept the essential teachings of Christianity IN PRACTICE… Room is discovered for industrial virtue and industrial power. The civilized masses of the world meet; they are mutually enlightened, and fraternize to reconstitute human relations in harmony with nature and with God. The world ceases to be a military camp, incubated only by the military principles of arbitrary force and abject submission. A new and grand order in human affairs inaugurates itself out of these immense concurrent discoveries and events.

It was clear that the days of empire were coming to an end.

In the face of this crisis of cooperating nation states breaking out of the cages of empire, a series of new think tanks were created that served to re-organize the dying British Empire using new techniques of psychological warfare, scientific manipulation, and predictive programming. Talent was needed from outside of the ‘elite bloodlines’ in order to figure out how to save systems of hereditary power.

Two of the most important new think tanks that were mandated to re-organize the crumbling system of empire were known as 1) The Fabian Society and 2) The Round Table Organization.

Fabian Society and New World Religion

The Fabian Society called itself a socialist, concerned for the working poor, but in actual fact saw the masses as useful tools to be manipulated by a scientific priesthood who despised them and simply desired the state grow in power not to defend the people but to control them through the science of eugenics, sterilization and murder of the unfit.

The Fabian Society soon created their own school called ‘The London School of Economics’ and established a political party dubbed the Labor Party in 1901.

Historian Stephen O’Neil wrote the following of the Fabian Society’s guiding principle of Permeation theory:

Despite their traditional political image, the Fabians, under the impetus of Sidney Webb, thought that they had a new and unique weapon in the policy of permeation. It was through the utilization of this tactic, according to Webb, that the Fabians, in the spirit of the Trojans and their legendary horse, would enter the ranks and minds of the politically influential by providing them with programs, ideas, opinion, and research heavily documented with statistics which could be conveniently drafted into public policy.

Despite being managed by members who called themselves “Christian” or at least “spiritual”, the Fabian Society’s disdain for Christianity can be gleaned from the logo commissioned by George Bernard Shaw in the form of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

This symbolism was a direct reference to the Apostle Matthew’s warning in the New Testament which read: “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”

The larger stained-glass window on which the Fabian wolf appears additionally features a large image of Sidney Webb and Shaw hammering the world featuring the line: “Remould it nearer to the heart’s desire”. Below this imagery, are the other 12 leading Fabians praying to socialist texts as new gospels.

Fabian grand strategist H.G. Wells (featured in the stained glass window alongside Theosophist leader Annie Besant), worked extremely hard to outline the need for a new religion for the new age, which he described in his 1928 work “The Open Conspiracy: Blueprint for a World Revolution” saying:

…if religion is to develop unifying and directive power in the present confusion of human affairs it must adapt itself to this forward-looking, individuality-analyzing turn of mind; it must divest itself of its sacred histories…The desire for service, for subordination, for permanent effect, for an escape from the distressful pettiness and mortality of the individual life, is the undying element in every religious system.

The time has come to strip religion right down to that [service and subordination is all Wells wants to keep of the old relic of religion]…The explanation of why things are is an unnecessary effort…The essential fact…is the desire for religion and not how it came about…The first sentence in the modern creed must be, not “I believe,” but “I give myself.” [emphasis added]

The aim of this new religion and remoulded human nature was outlined in blood curdling detail by Wells in his Open Conspiracy where he stated:

It is the system of nationalist individualism that has to go… We are living in the end of the sovereign states… In the great struggle to evoke a westernized World Socialism, contemporary governments may vanish…. Countless people… will hate the new world order….and will die protesting against it.

Wells’ remarks were widely held among the leading establishment of the British Empire and were expressed by Charles Darwin’s cousin Sir Francis Galton, who extended Darwin’s new theory explaining evolution into human systems when he created the new statistical science of eugenics. In 1904, Galton said:

[Eugenics] must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion. It has, indeed, strong claims to become an orthodox religious, tenet of the future, for eugenics co-operate with the workings of nature by securing that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races…. I see no impossibility in Eugenics becoming a religious dogma among mankind.

In 1911, Annie Besant- as leader of the theosophists, Indian Congress Party, eugenicist and Fabian spoke of her desires for a new world religion uniting all people under the British Empire stated:

Britain is working in India; how India is re-acting on Britain; until you can see gradually forming, amid the dust and the turmoil of the present, the outlines of a mighty World-Empire, with East and West together; mighty World-Powers linking, and marching side by side, until India shall no longer be a constant menace, a danger in the moment of Britain’s weakness, but shall be a buttress and a strength; the oldest and the youngest branches of the Âryan family joining hands in one mighty Empire, which, by the peace it will make, will offer a fit field for the spread, for the teaching, of a World-Religion.

Besant was explicit that this world religion would be based upon a universal mysticism and help liberate mankind from all concepts of right or wrong, which she attributed to the causes of war and conflict:

The World-Religion of the future will bring out the way again in sight of the people, will show them how to walk; it will lead them into a knowledge of their own Divinity; mystical in its teaching, so that the teaching can be translated by all the religions into the varied dogmas; scientific with the knowledge of the Spirit, so that men may learn to develop the spiritual faculties and then use them for the perfecting of their own nature; with no antagonists, for it will be universal; with no quarrels within it, for it will be all-inclusive. That mighty World-Religion is to be proclaimed by the supreme Teacher, the Teacher of Angels and of Men.

This world religion would not teach its adherents to become humble to God’s will, or find the divine within through obedience to the will of a reasonable god, but rather, Bessant’s World Teacher would help all mystics of the world realize that each of us, is literally, god. Bessant states that this future world religion will “transform man into God.”

While maintaining an outward appearance featuring differences in form, the two new organizations (Fabian Society and Round Table) would work closely together throughout the 20th century- following a very specific formula that was used by oligarchical systems as far back as ancient Babylon (and even earlier).

While one order took on a conservative veneer, the other a socialist veneer. Yet both were united in a commitment to eugenics, elitism, and the creation a new global priesthood to manage humanity which all leading members called ‘Social Imperialism’.

In fact, there were always strong overlaps with Lord Alfred Milner becoming a founding member of Beatrice and Sidney Webb’s Coefficience Club from 1902 where he was joined by other Round Table leaders such as Leo Amery, Philip Kerr, Lord Arthur Balfour and Halford Mackinder. H.G. Wells, Shaw and Bertrand Russell were also frequent participants of this so-called ‘dinner club’ which was nothing less than a nerve center of creative planning for the entire British Empire during the early 20th century. Meanwhile five Rhodes Scholars founded the Canadian Fabian Society in 1931- demonstrating that the differences were less than skin deep.

While much has been written about these entities and the evil their members carried out during the last 120 years (namely here, here, here and here), what is less known is that both organizations had directly revived ancient mystery cults that had overseen the transformation of Rome from a republic into an evil empire 2000 years earlier.

In the next installment we will explore the ancient (occult) roots of the British Empire’s Fabian Society, and a small, yet influential array of pagan mystery religions which have permeated society from the time of Babylon, Persia and Rome, through the Crusades, Templars, Franciscans, Inquisition, Jesuits and modern age.

This exercise will help us better understand how the ancient pagan mystery religions have been revived during the 20th century, the origins of today’s drug culture, the mass initiation ceremony being prepared under a new Great Reset.

This story will be continued in the next chapter “The Round Table as Grail Knights of Mithra and a New Gaia Cult of Cybele Revealed”.

The Ancient Occult Roots of the Fabian Society, Cybele and the Mysteries of Eleusis (part 4)

by MATTEHRET

POSTED ON JANUARY 7, 2024

[This is part four of an ongoing series. Part one is here, part two is here and part three is here.]

Although the organization known as the Fabian Society was outwardly materialistic and espoused “socialist” principles to attract the poor, it was rabidly elitist with all of its leaders espousing both imperialism (dubbed ‘Social Imperialism’) and eugenics- the science of eliminating useless eaters.

As outlined in part two of this series, the stained-glass mirror commissioned by Fabian leader George Bernard Shaw and featured prominently in the society’s London School of Economics features the infamous icon of a wolf in sheep’s clothing and leading agents of the organization forging a new world religion.

The name ‘Fabian Society’ was itself indicative of two things:

1) the techniques of warfare used by this sect, and

2) the revival of an ancient mystery religion with modern clothing.

The name Fabian was based on the example of the Roman oligarch Quintus Fabius Maximus (280-203 BC) who became dictator of Rome during the Second Punic War (218-201 BC) where he innovated a technique of attrition and psychological warfare to defeat Hannibal.

This period of the Punic Wars with Carthage which saw Rome’s ancient ally back-stabbed by a ‘scorched earth’ program that ultimately annihilated the race of Carthaginians- is extremely important for imperial grand strategists as the central moment of change that set the character of Rome as an empire (although it would take another 150 years before ‘officially becoming’ one).

Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) later reflected upon the source of Rome’s demise and located this correctly in the decision to destroy its one-time ally saying: “After the destruction of Carthage and before Christ’s coming, the degradation of traditional morality ceased to be a gradual decline and became a torrential rush.”

Caption: Rome and Carthage prior to the first Punic War (264-241 BC)

While Fabius’ tactic of slow attrition was unquestionably an important factor in the selection of the name “Fabian Society”, and was used to devastating effect by the society bearing his name during the 20th century, a lesser appreciated reason exists which has more to do with the revival of a new system of stasis, earth worship, de-industrialization and anti-humanism under leading Fabians from H.G. Wells, and Lord Bertrand Russell, to Julian Huxley (in the form of transhumanism, ecologism and cybernetics).

Magna Mater Cults Introduced into Rome

This lesser appreciated, yet more important factor is found in the importation to Rome of the cult of Cybele-Attis– sometimes referred to as the Cult of Gaia, or the cult of Magna Mater (ie: Great Earth Mother) in 205 BC.

Caption: The altar of Cybele. 295 AD Roman bas-relief. The goddess drives a chariot drawn by lions.

This event was extremely important, as it involved the most virulent eastern cult (also affiliated with Isis) to become a dominant force shaping Roman customs and the behavior of the elite. Quintus Fabius Maximus didn’t import the Cybele cult alone, but was responding to the commands of the Sibylline priests… who were a committee of 15 who had sole authorization to interpret the writings of the sacred Sibylline books (now long destroyed). By the 3rd century BC, the Sybelline Books were housed in the Temple of Apollo on Palatine Hill in Rome and it was on this same hill that the Temple of Cybele was soon constructed following the prophecy of the Sibylline priests.

The 15 initiated priests were alone permitted to touch and interpret the messages within the Sibylline books which shaped every major decision Rome took in times of crisis, and also oversaw which cults received permission to operate in Rome. It was during the 2nd Punic War that the Sibylline priests told the senate and Fabius that unless the cult of Cybele were imported from Anatolia, then Hannibal was sure to win. Although it took several years to negotiate the new cult, it was finalized in 205, and within two years, Hannibal was defeated.

These elite high priests thus influenced the Senate for nearly 900 years (until the Roman General Stilicho ordered their destruction along with the banishment of the Mithraic Cult in 405 AD).

The Roots of the Sibylline Books

According to the Roman historian Livy, the Sibylline books were acquired by Rome’s last king Tarquinius Superbus during the 6th century BC, although the details are wrapped in mystery.

Mate Marton of Eötvös Loránd University notes that: “By the end of the 3rd century they were connected with Greek rituals, Apollo, and, by association, prophecy.’ As Rome set foot on Greek soil, and with it Roman ambassadors and generals became regular visitors of Delphi, the books slowly began losing their unique monopoly as state oracle and started to be affiliated with a Sibyl or Sibyls.”

A Sibyl is a term for a priestess/prophetess that acted as a medium channelling messages from the Gods to man. Like modern “channelers”, mediums, clairvoyants, or Theosophists surfing the astral plane and speaking to spirit demons and the dead, the Sibyls played a similar role in the ancient world.

As Cynthia Chung outlined in The Ancient Roots of Occult Societies, one major Sibyl of the ancient world was the pythian priestess of Apollo at Delphi which coordinated a network of mystery cults shaping the geopolitical landscape of the kingdoms surrounding the Mediterranean.

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The Sibylline books delivered a prophecy in 45 BC, during Rome’s war against the Parthians, that only an emperor would be capable of winning the war.

Since Rome had not had a king since Tarquinius’ disposal in 579 BC, this prophecy was used to justify the creation of the roman emperor with a god-man as Ceasar standing, like Egypt’s Pharaohs, as a godhead. The pressure to accept this emperorship was placed on the war hero Julius Caesar (100-44 BC)… who by all accounts, really did not want the position, turning the offer down three times before accepting. His final acceptance of the position of emperor was used by a group of senators led famously by Brutus and Cassius to justify his assassination.

Brutus’ foolish actions led to a bloody civil war (32-30 BC) followed by Rome’s submersion into an imperial hell managed by mystery cults and war.

These same priests oversaw the introduction of the Persian mystery Cult of Mithra into Rome which every member of the Praetorian guard and Roman legions soon joined. The earlier Phrygian mystery cult of Cybele-Attis which the priests at the Temple of Apollo demanded be introduced into the Roman pantheon coordinated closely with the priesthood of Mithra, with many of the wives, and daughters of the Mithraic (male-only initiates) enmeshed into the rites of Cybele.

As outlined in part 3 of this series, the Cult of Mithra had been introduced into Rome by Pompey the Great in 63 BC, but appears to have faced a setback when Julius Caesar defeated Pompey’s forces amidst a civil war in 45 BC.

Caption: The Palatine Hill, where the Sibylline Books were kept (Herodotus / CC BY-SA 4.0), and also where the Temple of Cybele was constructed

While there are outward differences in the rites of the two cults (Cybele and Mithra), there were also many similarities. Both featured exoteric (outward) teachings for the lower degrees and uninitiated and esoteric (secret) teachings for the higher degrees of initiated. Both pagan cults featured sacrifices, self-denying stoicism mixed with hedonistic release, following Apollonian-Dionysian models of behavior, and something called the Taurobolium.

The Taurobolium were gruesome ceremonies involving the sacrifice of bulls, which bled onto the priests overseeing the mystery rites, which featured prominently in the rituals of both cults.

The early Christian polemicist Prudentius, 348- 410 CE described the rites of Cybele in the following terms:

“There are rites in which you mutilate yourself and maim your bodies to make an offering of the pain. A worshipper possessed thrusts the knife into his arms and cuts them to propitiate the Mother goddess. Frenzy and wild whirling are thought to be the rule of her mysteries. The hand that spares the cutting is held to be undutiful, and it is the barbarity of the wound that earns heaven. Another makes the sacrifice of his genitals; appeasing the goddess by mutilating his loins, he unmans himself and offers her a shameful gift; the source of the man’s seed is torn away to give her food and increase through the flow of blood. Both sexes are displeasing to her holiness, so she keeps a middle gender between the two, ceasing to be a man without becoming a woman.” (Prudentius, Perist. 1059-1073)

Additionally, both sects (Mithra and Cybele) featured death and rebirth rituals, involving the shedding of old identities of initiates in favor of new constructs groomed by a higher priesthood.

The priests- dubbed ‘Hierophants’ of the Cybele Cult (called ‘Galli’) were all castrated as part of their initiation which is why the conservative families of Rome ultimately demanded the cult be removed after too many of their sons were given over to ritual castrations. Wasson notes that “Followers of her cult would work themselves into an emotional frenzy and self-mutilate, symbolic of her lover’s self-castration.”

Caption: Funerary relief of a androgynous gallus priest, member of the Magna Mater cult of Cybele, 2nd century AD (Public Domain)

One of the main features of the castrated galli priests were belts of knucklebones used for self-flagellation. This would be a practice adopted by the Benedictines, Franciscans and Jesuits, whose ropes would serve an identical purpose in later years.

Historian Molly Dowdeswell writes: “After their act of castration, the galli wore exclusively women’s clothing. As signs of their positions, they wore a type of crown, maybe a laurel wreath, as well as gold bracelets called an occabus. The women’s clothing they wore was often yellow and accompanied by a turban and earrings. It is thought that these men also bleached their hair, which they kept long, and that they wore makeup. They would have walked around in groups telling fortunes in exchange for charity.”

Caption: A statue Attis, after the emasculation. In his left hand is a shepherd’s crook, in his right hand a pomegranate. His head is crowned with bronze rays of the sun and on his Phrygian cap is a crescent moon. (Dennis Jarvis / CC BY SA 2.0)

Within 200 years of its official acceptance by the Romans, worship of The Great Mother had become one of the three important cults of Rome, though it had few priests, it’s influence was extreme. The other two cults were those of Isis and Mithra and all were united in their common hate of Christianity and Judaism.

Caption: The self-castrated Attis- whose suicide is redeemed by his cyclical rebirth becoming the god of vegetation. Both Attis and Mithra are characterized by their Phrygian caps (later adopted by the Venetian Doge) and the ritual of castration of a bull during ceremonies.

However. by the reign of Emperor Claudius in 41 CE, the Cult of Cybele and Attis was given full support and the rampant orgies, hallucinogenic cocktails and bloodlust sacrifices overseen by elite eunuchs created a culture of insanity throughout Rome.

Temples of Mithra and Cybele (better known as Gaia in our modern age) have been found linked together by archaeologists during the past century implying that where one Cult went, the other always followed.

The famous researcher Jessie Weston who’s 1920 Ritual to Romance demonstrated the Mithraic origins of the Grail Myths, noted this synergy between Mithraic and Cybele/Attis cults:

“Between the cults of Mithra and of Attis, there was a close and intimate alliance. In parts of Asia Minor the Persian god had early taken over features of the Phrygian deity… The union between Mithra and the goddess Anahita was held to be the equivalent of that subsisting between the two great Phyrgian deities Attis-Cybele. The most ancient mithreum known, that at Ostia, was attached to the Metroon, the temple of Cybele. At Saalburg the ruins of the two temples are but a few steps apart.” [From Ritual to Romance p. 137-138]

Eleusinian Mysteries

Medievalist scholar Donald Wasson writes: “Known as the Great Mother or Magna Mater, Cybele, whose chief sanctuary was at Pessinus, was one of the early female deities, first appearing in the province of Lydia as a goddess of the mountains. Arriving from Phrygia, she made her initial appearance in Greece in the 5th century BCE with a temple in Athens (the Metroum); the Greeks identified her with the goddess Rhea (mother of the Olympians) and Demeter (goddess of the harvest). While never achieving great popularity in Greece, the cult reached Rome around the end of the 3rd century BCE.”

Caption: Relief of Demeter / Archaeological Museum of Eleusis, Greece

Manifesting with diverse names throughout the ancient world, in Greece, Cybele’s incarnation as Demeter placed her at the epicenter of the Eleusinian Mysteries which initiated generations of elites into a rite of passage into an initiation process of death, rebirth, and at the end of the process, ultimately ‘discovering’ a mystical deification of the self devoid of moral reason. As Albert Pike writes of the highest initiation: “Those initiated in the Mysteries of Eleusis believed that the Sun blazed with a pure splendor for them alone.”

Mounting evidence has indicated that drugs, sexual excesses, mixtures of torture/radical withholding of bodily needs (followed by release) played major roles in this initiation.

Modern occultist Marina Abramovic’s methods of initiating her students such as Lady Gaga involves a mixture of these techniques, and undoubtedly, occult psychiatrists managing the CIA’s MK Ultra program during the Cold War studied these methods of de-patterning/reprogramming test subjects before extending their findings to cultural programming.

None other than Dr. Albert Hoffman, the chemist who discovered LSD-25 in 1942 which was put to wide use in MK Ultra became the world’s leading authority on the Eleusinian Mysteries, having written a book in 1976 called ‘The Road to Eleusis’ (along with JP Morgan vice-President/psylocibin guru G. Gordon Wasson). Here Hoffman and his two co-writers correctly point out that the roots of LSD-25 (which are derived from a form of blight that grows on wheat called ‘ergot’) was among the sources of the secrets of Eleusinian rites of initiation.

“Ergot of barley is the likely psychotropic ingredient in the Eleusinian potion. Its seeming
symbiotic relationship to the barley signified an appropriate expropriation and transmutation of the Dionysian spirit to which the grain, Demeter’s daughter, was lost in the nuptial embrace with earth. Grain and ergot together, moreover, were joined in a bisexual union as siblings, bearing at the time of the maiden’s loss already the potential for her own return and for the birth of the phalloid son that would grow from her body. A similar hermaphroditism occurs in the mythical traditions about the grotesquely fertile woman whose obscene jests were said to have cheered Demeter from her grief just before she drank the potion.”

The priesthood which served the psychedelic beverage during the ceremonies was always performed by eunuchs, and as we will see was also central to the counterparty of Cybele named Attis (the son/husband of Cybele who self-castrated in terror/love of his mother, bled to death and was reborn as the god of vegetation. Hoffman and Wasson write of this:

“As he [the priest] performed the service, he intoned ancient chants in a falsetto voice, for his role in the Mystery was asexual, a male who had sacrificed his gender to the Great Goddess.”

In the 18th century, the ceremonies of Eleusis would be performed by leading figures of London’s satanic Hellfire Club that met in underground caverns located under Medmenham Abbey leased by Sir Francis Dashwood (Chancellor of the Exchequer of England). The Abbey had formerly been a Cistercian Order in the 13th century, and like all Mithraic cults, selected its location based upon the vast caverns located below which had been Mithraic altars built during Roman times.

Above the caverns, Dashwood restored the decrepit St. Lawrence Church in 1751 using as inspiration the Sol Invictus (Mithraic) Temple that had recently been discovered in Palmyra, and he dubbed his occult society ‘The Order of Knights of St. Francis (sometimes called ‘The Medmenham Monks’) as a not-too-subtle reference to 1) his own name, 2) the Abbey above the caverns, and 3) St. Francis of Assisi whom, as we established, created an order which served as a bridge between the Benedictines and later Jesuits.

The satirical painter William Hogarth astutely captured this irony in his biting rendition of Sir Francis Dashwood dressed as St Francis of Assisi, except featuring an erotic novel instead of a bible, a naked woman instead of Jesus, a Venetian masque, and the figure of fellow Hellfire leader Lord Sandwich as a lunar god instead of a hallow indicated the Dionysian orgiastic ceremonies performed at night by the initiated.

Hellfire Club member John Wilkes (Royal Society member, and grandfather of Lincoln’s assassin) stated “No profane eye dared to penetrate the English Eleusinian Mysteries of the Chapter Room where the Monks assembled on solemn occasions […] secret rites performed and libations to the Bona Dea”. Bona Dea was the name for earth mother Magna Mater, whom as established earlier is known variously as Demeter, Aphrodite, Venus and Cybele.

After redesigning the abbey above the caverns under the gothic style, Dashwood placed a banner above the entrance that read “Do What thou Wilt”… which brings us to another initiate of the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Caption: The Dashwood Mausoleum with St. Lawrence’s Church tower behind.

Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), self-professed anti-Christ, occultist, and British Agent famously developed upon his own variation of the Rites of Eleusis while heading the German branch of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO). In Crowley’s Eleusinian working, mescaline was the hallucinogenic drug of choice– which accompanied long days and nights of orgies, sacrifice and other ‘outer body’ experiences. In Crowley’s Eleusinian Ceremony, the same 7 gates of initiation as held by the Mithra Cult are featured prominently.

Crowley’s seven rites of Eleusis (which were made into a theatrical performance) were named ‘The Rite of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Venus, Mercury, and Luna.’

Even Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), President of the German and Austrian branches of the Theosophical Society, and founder of Anthroposophy, spoke at length about the glories of the mysteries of Eleusis and asserted that it was through this rite that pre-Christian Greeks were able to have communion with the spirit of the unborn Christ: “The Greek disciple learned to understand the Mystery of Christ in a pre-Christian period; again it was in a spiritual way that the Christ was placed before those to be initiated into the Mysteries of Eleusis.”

Steiner went on further to state that “All that is bound up with the Eleusinian Mystery is intimately connected with what we call our anthroposophical striving.”

Not just speaking of his Anthroposophical followers, Steiner went further and stated that “All that is connected with the Mystery of Eleusis, and all that has been achieved by the author in the historical re-awakening of the principles of initiation in the various epochs, corresponds to what is deepest and most intimate in the European soul.”

Satanist high priest and leading general of the confederacy during the civil war Albert Pike (1809-1891) described the rites of Eleusis in his Morals and Dogma (1871): “The Mysteries of Eleusis, celebrated at Athens in honor of Ceres [aka Demeter, Cybele], swallowed up, as it were, all the others. All the neighboring nations neglected their own, to celebrate those of Eleusis; and in a little while all Greece and Asia Minor were filled with the Initiates. They spread into the Roman Empire, and even beyond its limits.”

In 1870, one of Albert Pike’s lieutenants in the Scottish Rite named John Yarker (1833-1913) split off from the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry in order to create a new masonic order dubbed the Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis Mizraim. Yarker became a leading theosophist, Martinist Freemason, co-founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, joined the British Israelite Quator Coronati lodge in 1887, and co-founded the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) where he recruited Theodor Reuss and Dr. Franz Hartmann in 1902.

Both Reuss and Yarker worked closely with Rudolf Steiner in the Rites of Memphis and Mizraim and Steiner speaks at length about his affiliations with Yarker in his Autobiography describing his membership payments to learn Yarker’s rites. Steiner and his wife Marie von Sivers master and adapt the rite to their own lodge called ‘Mystica Aeterna’ expanding membership to women. Pro-Steiner researcher Peter Koenig writes that on June 15, 1907 “Reuss sends Steiner an Edict making Steiner a 33, 90 and 96 degree of Berlin and independently acting General Grandmaster of the Sovereign General Grandcouncil of the Mizraim-Rite of Germany. The stationary bears the expressions “Memphis and Mizraim Rite of Masonry, Order of Oriental Templars and Esoteric Rosicrucians”.

Yarker and Reuss also recruited Aleister Crowley to the OTO at this same time, giving the self-professed Anti-Christ full control over the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland OTO in 1912. In 1913, Crowley became Grand Master of the Rite of Memphis-Mizraïm, and in 1914 wrote a new constitution and gnostic mass for the international OTO.

For those who may be troubled by the Crowley-Steiner relationship, the work of academic occultist Carl Abrahamsson may prove useful in illustrating the fact that the same occult workings play out in both men’s practices- except modified by Apollonion vs Dionysian approaches.

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Meanwhile Dr. Franz Hartman was acting president of the Indian Theosophical Society and in 1907 alongside Annie Besant who became the first female member of the theosophy-infiltrated Indian Congress Party that later collaborated with the Nazis. Hartmann also co-founded the Order of the New Templars (soon to be led by Nazi occultist Herman Goering) and also founded (with Crowley) the Argentum Astrum (A∴A∴). Through Argentum Astrum, the Hellfire Club’s motto of ‘Do What Thou Whilst’ was here re-branded as ‘The Law of Thelema’ by Crowley.

John Yarker also practiced the Mysteries of Eleusis and in his book ‘The Arcane Schools’ describes how the rites continued through the occult underground after Rome collapsed writing: “The Eleusinian, Serapian, and Mythraic Mysteries were all very popular in Rome, and spread into all countries, practising their rites side by side with the aboriginal Mysteries, for the utmost tolerance existed amongst all the priests.  All are known to have existed in Britain, flourishing generally until the 4th century of Christianity, and practised long after in secret. Besides the State Mysteries, Alexandria became the centre whence radiated the Mystic schools, the Cabala, Gnosticism, Neo-Platonism, and Arcane Christianity.”

Yarker candidly admits that the Rites of Eleusis always stood in opposition to “their bitter enemies the Christians.” 

Reuss, Hartmann, Yarker, Crowley, Steiner, Carl Jung and many other occultists of the pre-WWI era frequented the Ascona Lodge in Monte Verita, Switzerland which Cynthia Chung writes extensively about here.

Masonic priest (33rd degree Scottish Rite) Manley P. Hall (1901-1990) additionally wrote extensively of the Mysteries of Eleusis as a practice that was geared to “initiating” subjects into the belief that the spirits of the dead were shaping reality, and that the true initiate of gnostic knowledge learned to give way to the dark unconscious forces (shaped by countless dead spirits infused within our soul) below our conscious domain.

In his Secret Teachings of All Ages, Hall writes: “An ancient initiate once said that the living are ruled by the dead. Only those conversant with the Eleusinian concept of life could understand that statement. It means that the majority of people are not ruled by their living spirits but by their senseless (hence dead) animal personalities. Transmigration and reincarnation were taught in these Mysteries, but in a somewhat unusual manner. It was believed that at midnight the invisible worlds were closest to the Terrestrial sphere and that souls coming into material existence slipped in during the midnight hour. For this reason many of the Eleusinian ceremonies were performed at midnight. Some of those sleeping spirits who had failed to awaken their higher natures during the earth life and who now floated around in the invisible worlds, surrounded by a darkness of their own making, occasionally slipped through at this hour and assumed the forms of various creatures.”

Jung’s Revival of Mithraism

If this smells at all like Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, then don’t be surprised as Jung was himself a devoted believer in Mithraic initiation ceremonies and a practicing occultist throughout his adult life. Throughout hundreds of lectures, Jung also spoke fondly of the mysteries of Eleusis.

In the next segment, we will explore Carl Jung’s occultism, his obsession with reviving gnostic Christianity as a new world religion and a new Mithraic Cult following the lead of the same Julian the Apostate, whose soul he believed to himself to be the reincarnation.

This will in turn set the stage for the New Age counter-culture overseen by occultists managing the Eranos conferences in Monte Verita and the Esalen Institute, as well as the new Mithraic theosophist revival under the gospel of the coming world teacher dubbed “Maitreya.”

Matthew Ehret is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review, Senior Fellow at the American University in Moscow, and Director of The Rising Tide Foundation. He has authored three volumes of the Untold History of Canada book series and four volumes of the Clash of the Two Americas. He hosts Connecting the Dots on TNT Radio, Breaking History on Badlands Media, and The Great Game on Rogue New. Read other articles by Matthew.