Chapter II. Love and Honour

Many wars during the last 1900 years have borne the stamp of wars of religion. In most cases justifiably, yet not always so. The very fact that struggles of extermination could be carried out at all for a religious conviction shows to what degree the Teutonic peoples had been successfully alienated from their original character. Respect for religious belief was just as natural to the pagan Teutons as to the later Aryans; only the assertion of the claim by the Roman church that it alone offered salvation hardened the European heart and necessarily called forth defensive struggles in the opposing camp which, since likewise conducted for an alien natured form, resulted in spiritual narrow mindedness (Lutheranism, Calvinism, Puritanism).

But in spite of everything, most of the struggles by leading heroes of our history were conducted less for theological principles of belief about Jesus, Mary, the nature of the holy ghost, purgatory and so on, than for character values. The churches of all denominations declared: as the faith, so the man. This was necessary for every church, and promised success, since in this way the value of a man was made dependent on its coercive principles, and men were thus spiritually enchained to the chosen church organisation. On the other hand the Nordic European creed—whether consciously or unconsciously—has always been: as the man, so his belief. More exactly put, as the nature or content of his belief. If the belief protected the highest values of character, then it was real and good, irrespective of what expressions of human longing might otherwise have surrounded it. If it did not do so, if it repressed proud personal values, then it must have been felt in the deepest innermost heart of every Teuton as bringing destruction. There are two values above all others, in which for nearly two thousand years the whole opposition between church and race, theology and belief, coercive doctrine and pride of character, are revealed; two values rooted in will, for which in Europe there has always been a struggle for predominance: love and honour. Both accordingly strove for recognition as highest values; the churches wished—however strange this may sound—to rule through love, the Nordic Europeans wished to live free through honour or to die free in honour. Both ideas found martyrs ready for sacrifice, but this conflict did not always attain the clearest consciousness, however often it revealed itself.

This recognition has persisted into our own days. It is a mythic experience, but nevertheless as clear as daylight. Love and sympathy, honour and duty are spiritual essences which, enveloped by different outward forms, represent driving forces of life for almost all races and nations capable of culture. Depending upon what room was made for love in its most general version or the concept of honour as such, the world outlook and form of the people in question developed in a manner corresponding to this desired goal. One or the other idea formed the yardstick by which the whole of thought and action were measured. But in order to create a determinative characteristic for an epoch, one or other ideal must predominate. The conflict between two ideas can nowhere be followed more tragically than in the disputes between the Nordic race and its allies with the particular racial and ideological environment.

With regard to what motive has above all proven itself as formative for the Nordic race in affairs of soul, state and culture, it is evident that almost everything which has preserved the character of our race, our peoples and nations, has been in the first place the concept of honour and the idea of duty inseparably connected with it, originating from the consciousness of inward freedom. But from the moment at which love and sympathy (or if one wishes: fellow feeling) became predominant, there also began the epochs of racial national and cultural dissolution in the history of all once Nordically determined states.

Today, Hinduism and Buddhism are preached to the point of superfluity. The majority of us possess no other idea of India than as it The Myth of the 20th Century 34

is presented to us by theosophists and anthroposophists. We speak of India as having a soft hearted philosophy of life merging with the universe, with human love as its highest teaching. Undoubtedly, the late philosophy flowing into infinity, the Vedanta Ãtman Brahman doctrine, Buddhism striving for redemption from the sufferings of this world, along with thousands of proverbs scattered throughout the whole of Indian literature, justify this interpretation: Nothing exists which cannot be accomplished by gentleness. Happy are those who withdraw into the forest after they have fulfilled the hope of the needy, have shown love for their enemies, and so on. And yet into these love and sympathy filled products of the late Indian period, quite different, older views intrude, which do not recognise personal feelings of happiness and absence of sorrow as the only goal worth striving for, but see the latter in the fulfilment of duty and the assertion of honour. In one of the oldest Indian poems, duty is even praised as a sixth inner sense. In the Mahabaratam the entire struggle revolves (in its original form) around this idea. Fima the hero, who only unwillingly participates in war, says he would abandon his ruler,

If my lord did not bind me with the bond of duty of a Chatya, so that I may even strike down without mercy my dear grandsons with its darts.

Karna the Strong says:

Honour, like a mother, provides

Men with life in the world,

Dishonour consumes life,

Even if the body’s well being prospers.

King Durjozana’s downfall is brought about in spite of all the laws of war, and he laments:

Are you not ashamed, that Fimasen

Has dishonourably defeated me?

We have fought honourably enough,

And honour remains to us in defeat.

You have always fought dishonourably

And bear your victory with disgrace.

But I have ruled the earth

As far as the sea’s distant shore,

Have stood courageously before the foe

And die now, as a hero

Wishes to die, in service of duty,

And rise up to the gods accompanied by

A host of friends .....

These are certainly completely different tones to the ones we generally find in the more familiar poems. But these, and a hundred other passages from Indian literature, prove that the ancient Indian—and it was he who created India—did not abandon his life for love, but for the sake of duty and honour. A faithless man was also condemned in Aryan India, not because he was loveless but because he had become to be without honour.

Better to give up life, than to lose honour: the giving of life one feels only for a moment, but the loss of honour day by day says a folkish proverb. It seems to the heart of a hero as if a purpose is attained by heroic behaviour, to a coward as if this can be attained by cowardice

affirms another proverb, and sets up a value. A keen eye will discern these features of ancient Indian nature which can be found until the time of the brave king Poros who, defeated by Alexander in honourable battle on the field, nevertheless remains a complete knight. Although wounded, he still did not flee the field when others ran away. How shall I deal with you? asked Alexander of his defeated foe. In a kingly way, was the answer. Nothing more? asked the Macedonian. In the word kingly lies everything, ran Poros’s answer. So Alexander enlarged the extent of Poros’s rule, who from then on was a true friend to him. Whether this tale be historically true is irrelevant. But it shows the inward standard of honour, loyalty, duty and bravery, which was common to both heroes and clear, indeed self evident, to the historian also.

The ancient Indian kingdom kept to this manly concept of honour, and made it the prerequisite of its social structure. But when this concept of honour was replaced by ritual religious philosophical systems denying all earthly limitations, coupled with racial decomposition, religious and dogmatic, then economic, viewpoints appeared authoritative. With the philosophy of Ãtman Brahman transferred to earthly life—as elaborated earlier—the Aryan denied his race, hence his personality, but as a result also the idea of honour as forming the spiritual backbone of his life.

Love and sympathy—even when they claim to comprise the entire world—nevertheless always direct themselves at the individual loving or suffering creature. But the wish to liberate others or oneself from suffering is a purely personal feeling which contains no element really strongly formative of race or state. The love of what is nearest or what is farthest can produce deeds of supreme self sacrifice, but this is nevertheless a spiritual power related to the individual, and no man has ever in seriousness demanded the sacrifice of an entire state, of an entire people, for the sake of a love unrelated to the latter. And nowhere has an army yet sacrificed itself for this.

Athenian life appears to us as fundamentally milder than the ancient Indian. Admittedly in Greece an heroic epic also speaks of heroic deeds; but these have more of an aesthetic foundation. However, the three hundred Spartans of Thermopyle are regarded by us as a parable for honour and fulfilment of duty. Nothing gives better proof of the influence of the latter than our attempts at a restoration of Greek life. We were unable to conceive things otherwise than that all Hellenes were impelled by honour and duty; only very recently have we been able to convince ourselves of the weakness of Greek life in this respect. The Greek, with his gift for fantasy, in fact did not lay great value upon his word in normal life; he scarcely recognised the sober legal value of an assertion. Here we discover the most vulnerable part of the Greek character, the trapdoor, so to speak, by which the deceitful hither Asiatic trader entered, so that lies and falsehood later formed the constant background of Greek life, which occasioned Lysander to the words that one cheats children with The Myth of the 20th Century 35

dice, men with oaths. But in spite of this the real Greek was pervaded by a feeling of freedom which one must describe as rooted throughout in consciousness of honour. The killing of wives and the suicide of men defeated in a battle is no rare occurrence. Do not give yourself into slavery, as long as it still remains open to you to die freely, teaches Euripides. The remembrance of the deed by the Phocians who before the battle surrounded those of their people left behind with a wooden wall, with the advice to set fire to this in case of defeat, remains heroic evidence of strong symbolic power. The descendants of Zakynthos preferred to die in the flames rather than to fall into the hands of the Punics. In even later times (B.C. 200) evidence of mythic heroism is provided, for example, in the case of Abydos which, besieged by Philippus the Younger, does not surrender, but whose men stab their wives and children, throw themselves from the walls, and destroy the city through fire. The same valuing of life, of freedom and honour, also passes through ancient womanhood, whenever it was necessary to protect the latter from violation. Thus Eurydice, influenced by her mother, hanged herself; with the overpowering of the ruler of Elis in the 3rd century, the latter’s wife hanged herself with her two daughters.

Nevertheless, it must be admitted that the static nature of Greek life was conditioned not by character but by beauty which, as mentioned, had political irresponsibility as a fatal consequence.

Through Alexander, a more disciplined idea of late Greek life, primarily aesthetic, once again predominated, and which was also conscious of racial differences. Alexander did not unconditionally pursue the aim of a world monarchy and the mixing of peoples, but wished only to unite the Persians and Greeks, recognised as racial kindred, and to bring them under one rule, so as to avoid further wars. He recognised the driving ideas and character values of the Persian upper stratum as being related to his own Macedonian idea of duty; for this reason he therefore only placed Macedonians or Persians in leading posts, whereas Semites, Babylonians and Syrians were deliberately excluded. After Alexander’s death his successors made efforts to emulate his type of state in their lands and provinces. Like a hero from primeval times stands out one eyed Antigonos who, at the age of eighty, falls in combat on the battlefield against the lawful heirs when he was unable to gain his aim of a united kingdom. The Nordic Macedonian cultural offshoots, however, were not permanent enough. Admittedly, they provided Greek science, art and philosophy, but they did not possess the power to act as typeforming, to set through their idea of honour. The subjugated alien blood triumphed, the time of clever but characterless Hellenism began.

If the concept of honour has anywhere formed the centre of all existence, then it is in the Nordic, Germanic west. With a self reliance unique in history the Viking appears. The unbounded feeling of freedom pushes one Nordic wave after the other out into the unknown, as the population increases. With a squandering of blood and heroic unconcern, the Viking sets up his states in Russia, in Sicily, England and France.

Here primal racial impulses dominated without restraint and discipline, unhampered by reflection of purpose or an exactly determined system of law. The sole emphasis which the Northman carried with him was the concept of personal honour. Honour and freedom drove individuals into the distance in the search for independence, into lands where there was space for masters, or the same urge caused them to fight to the last man on their farms and castles. A happy contentedness with earthly existence, remote from all trading interest, was the basic feature of Nordic man when he appeared in the west as a force, forming history, in spite of all youthful impetuosity. Close followers grouped around individual personalities which then gradually led by necessity to the establishment of laws of social life, and finally after migration a sedentary kind of rural life ensued, (which in the south naturally fell to pieces, and perished in late oriental glittering decay).

Seldom is a second example offered to the observer of history, during which the conduct of a people could be determined so purely and completely by a sole highest value: all power, all property, every bond, every action, is directed to the service of honour, for which life is even offered as a sacrifice if necessary without reflection and without a flicker of the eyelashes. As the law of honour rules life, so it is reflected in poetry and passes as a fundamental principle through the world of sagas: one encounters there no other word so frequently as that of honour. Therefore the Nordic world of heroes with its wild discord, its bubbling over subjectivism, is nevertheless so uniform in its nature and direction of destiny.

— Krieck: Menschenformung, page 154.

It is pleasant to find in advance these recognitions among circles of German scholars who hitherto had been caught up in graceful aestheticism. Here the nerve of destiny in our entire history is touched; our European and German future is decided from the nature of the valuation of the idea of honour. Even if ancient Nordic man acts violently, then the centre, conscious of honour, of his being creates a pure atmosphere even in battle and death. War could be conducted brutally, but to admit to his deed was regarded as the first requirement of the Nordic man (Krieck). This feeling of responsibility demanded of each individual personality was the most effective defence against the moral swamp, against that hypocritical decomposition of values which in the course of European history has come over us as an alien temptation in the different forms of humanity. Sometimes it called itself democracy, sometimes social sympathy, sometimes humility and love. The personal honour of the Northlander demanded courage and self control. He did not gossip for hours like the Greek heroes before every battle; he did not cry out like the latter when wounded, but his consciousness of honour demanded calm and the conserving of strength. Seen from this aspect, the Viking is in fact the man of culture, while the aesthetically perfected late Greek is the barbarian left behind devoid of a centre. The words of Fichte: True culture rests upon disposition, reveals our true Nordic nature when facing other cultures whose highest value is not character—which for us is synonymous with honour and duty—but another sense of value, another idea around which its life revolves.

The destinies of the western peoples have taken on diverse forms in the course of time, conditioned by different circumstances. Everywhere that Nordic blood predominates, the concept of honour is present. However, it is also mixed with other ideals. This is revealed by vernacular sayings. In Russia the idea of a church, of religious feeling, has become dominant, which cloaks even the wildest outbreak with religious fervour (consider, for example, the man in Dostoyevski’s Idiot who commits a murder for the sake of a silver watch, but says a prayer beforehand). The Russian therefore speaks of his motherland as Swjataja Rossija, that is, as holy Russia. The Frenchman approaches life from the formally aesthetic aspect; France is therefore for him La Belle France. Similarly the Italian. The Englishman is proud of his logical historical development, of tradition, firm, typical forms of life. He therefore admires his Old England. But with us, in spite of many displeasing attributes, reference is still always made with identical fervour to German loyalty, which The Myth of the 20th Century 36

proves that our metaphysical nature still feels the mark of honour as its permanent base.

Around this concept of honour, then, ultimately revolved the lasting struggle over millennia, when Nordic Europe saw itself facing the armed Roman south, and was finally subjugated in the name of religion and Christian love.

It is certainly beyond question that even without the intrusion of armed Roman Syrian Christianity, an epoch of Germanic history—the mythological era—had ended. Nature symbolism would have given way to a new morally metaphysical system, a new form of belief. But this form would undoubtedly have been invested by the same spiritual content, with the idea of honour as its leitmotif and yardstick. However, with Christianity, a different spiritual value penetrated through and laid claim upon first place; love, in the sense of humility, mercy, subjection and asceticism. Today it is clear to every honest German that with this doctrine of love, which included all creatures of the world in equal degree, a sore blow was thrust against the soul of Nordic Europe. Christianity, in the way it took shape as a system, did not recognise the ideas of race and nation, because it represented a violent merging of diverse elements: it also did not recognise the idea of honour, because in pursuing Rome’s later aims of power it proceeded with subjection not only of bodies but also of souls. But it is characteristic that the idea of love was in fact also unable to set itself through in the conduct of church institutions. Both organisationally as well as dogmatically, the structure of the Roman system has been from the first day fundamentally and consciously intolerant and rejecting all other systems, not to say hate filled towards them. Wherever it could, it proceeded to assert itself by excommunication, outlawry, fire, sword and poison. Apart form moral evaluations, we can only confirm this fact which indeed is not even denied by recent Roman catholic writers. But this fact proves more than all others that no typeforming power is inherent in the idea of love. Because even the organisation of the religion of love has been built up without love. And, in fact, with much less love than other typeforming powers. The ancient Goths tolerated—as Döllinger proves—both the catholic as well as other beliefs, and showed a faith felt to be spiritually necessary as such. This toleration vanished everywhere when the spirit of Bonifacius and the compulsory law of love triumphed. In this connection one should compare the conduct of the heathen Frisian Duke Radbod in contrast to the Roman will to persecution. He remained true to the belief of his forefathers, but nevertheless did not persecute the Christian preachers. When several particularly zealous Christian missionaries were brought before him and one of them, despite the Duke’s resultant anger, still courageously represented the new faith, the heathen Duke said: I see that you do not fear our threats and that your words are as your works, and sent the missionaries back with all honours to Pippin, the Duke of the Franks. So reports Alcuin. In nobility of soul this pagan Frisian Duke stands far above the representative of god in Rome who made great efforts to banish this inner freedom and respect from the world. It is not easy for any German to express a negative evaluation in face of the Etruscan Jewish Roman system, for despite the way the latter is constructed, it has nevertheless been ennobled by the sacrifice of millions of German people. They have taken over what is alien in this, together with what is strange but spiritually related; respected the first less, shaped the second lovingly, and asserted many a Nordic value within the whole. Nonetheless, today, at a time of great spiritual change, the truth demands the examination of what emanates from Rome concerning whether it is furthering of life, or harmful to the nature of the Germanic west. This must be undertaken, not from the standpoint of personal ill will, but by surveying the great tensions and detensionings of history over more than two thousand years, and in investigation of the racial soul values conditioning these upheavals. Then we see that fundamentally the same struggle by the Greeks and Romans has fallen to the Germans. They can just as little escape this struggle as the other two great Nordic folkish waves, because the latter in their ebbing backwards carried within themselves the Asiatic spiritual values once overthrown by them, and the human material embodying these values. They carried these with them over Hellas, far over the Alps, beyond the frontiers of German living space, at times into the heart of the Nordic race itself.

But if one traces back the causes why this was so successful, then one will discover that one of the most important factors was the challenge of Germanic greatness of heart, alongside the earlier technical superiority of the older, more experienced south, and at a time of religious crisis in Teutonic life which alone would not have explained such a long lasting victory. This greatness of heart, which is shaped allegorically forever in Siegfried, which presupposes with an opponent the same valuing of honour and open form of battle, indeed whose childlike honesty cannot believe the contrary, has contributed to many a hard defeat for the Germans in the course of their history; once when it began to admire Rome, in recent times when it carried out the emancipation of the Jews and thereby granted poison equal rights with healthy blood. The first took a terrible revenge in the wars of the heretics, in the Thirty Years War which brought Germany close to the abyss; the second has its revenge today when the poisoned German national body is seized by the gravest convulsions. And both these powers, hostile to us, still call upon the greatness of heart found with the gravely sick, call for the latter’s justice, preach love of all humanity, and make efforts to finally gnaw away all remaining resistance of character.

A complete triumph of this humanity would have the same consequences as once the victory of hither Asia over Athens and Rome, so that the latter, once the deadly enemy of the Etruscan Pelasgian Syrian world, became virtually the chief representative of these same forces after the original values of ancient Rome had collapsed; a collapse which was due to physical decomposition and the preaching of the aloneness of humanity and love. But the doctrine of love was not a typeforming power even in its most beautiful form, but a power melting resistance.

In order to preserve itself as a typeforming power and to assert itself further, the church could not and might not recognise any love. But it could certainly pursue power politics with the aid of love. If the consciousness of personality, of defending honour and of manly duty, are transformed into humility and love filled dedication, then the impulse to resistance against the forces organising and directing the belief in the latter is broken. A herd and a shepherd! This is, taken literally as was demanded, what had been the clearest declaration of struggle against the German spirit. If this idea had completely triumphed, then Europe today would consist only of a characterless human horde numbering many millions, ruled with the aid of a highly cultivated fear of purgatory and everlasting tortures of hell, paralysed by love in the struggle for a feeling of honour, its better parts in service of a humanitarian philanthropism represented by CARITAS. This is the condition for which the Roman system was forced to strive, insofar as it wished to exist as such, and as a spiritual and political power.

It is not my intention here to write a history of dogmas, but I wish only to describe a logical system with which (as far as his nature is concerned) an awakening Nordic man must by necessity come permanently into the gravest spiritual conflict. Either he subjects The Myth of the 20th Century 37

himself to it completely (as at times in the middle ages) or he rejects it according to feeling and consciously in principle. In the first event, an external authority is attained for a brief time which, however, must collapse on account of its organic impossibility, as the great struggles show up to Döllinger; in the second event, the way is free for real organic culture and a true form of belief according to blood and race. The last centuries have stood under the mark of a compromise which did not touch upon any fundamental questions of world outlook but only organisational and political power relationships.

It is characteristic of Roman Christianity that where possible it eliminates the personality of its founder, in order to put in its place the church structure of a rulership by priests. Jesus is admittedly set up as the highest and holiest, as the source of all faith and bliss, but only for the purpose of investing the church representing him with the halo of an eternal and untouchable glory. For between Jesus and man, the church and its representatives intrude with the assertion that the way to Jesus can only lie through the church. Since Jesus does not live upon earth, man is in fact only concerned with this church which is fully authorised to bind or release forever. The utilisation of the belief in Jesus Christ (The ruling Christ as the author of the Heliand poem calls him) for the power politics of a self deifying league of priests forms the essence of Rome in the same way as under other names it formed that of priestly politicians in Egypt, Babylon and Etruria.

To strengthen the power of the doctrines and statutes protecting the priestly male league, a great art of dialectics was used by pious men which traced back all church edicts over 1500 years to the gospels, with the emphasis, however, that the church alone possessed the right to dispense faultless dogmas of universal validity. Church Christianity of catholic form and protestant offshoot appears before us today as an historical phenomenon; the beginning and end allow themselves to be clearly surveyed. The building is completed, every beam has its supports, the dogmatic edicts all find their bases. Now rigidity has appeared; one may thus speak about the building without needing to fear that one is falsely interpreting a living, still growing phenomenon in its driving forces.

Doctor Adam, a leading catholic theoretician, assures us that:

catholicism is not completely identical with early Christianity, or even to be identified with the message of Christ, any more than the fully grown oak tree with the tiny acorn.

Here the sanctified arrogance of the church (the work bears the stamp IMPRIMATVR) concerning Jesus is openly expressed, and all further glorification of Christ serves, as said, only for the purpose of increasing the ruling tyranny of the church, not the message of Christ, of the little acorn. The office of the church rests completely in the hands of the priest who by the laying on of hands becomes the representative of the apostolic power. As a basis for this doctrine, the words of Jesus to Peter are quoted, according to which he calls him the rock upon which he will build his church. The fact that these words were a forgery inserted into the ancient texts much later by a true servant of the church, naturally does not prevent this demonstrably untrue doctrine from being repeated all over the world as the message of Jesus. This passage (Matthew XVI:18) is in fact an exceedingly clumsy one among the many pious forgeries, for a few verses later Jesus calls this same Peter a Satan who should get behind him. Jesus says the same in Mark VIII, 30). Would he have wished to build up a church upon such a man so clearly described, whose betrayal of him Jesus likewise foresaw? Such an assumption approaches an open abusing of the personality of Christ. Merx says in conclusion: Historical research concerning Jesus cannot allow itself to be deceived forever by such forgery; there must be an end of it. (Die vier kanonischen Evangelien, III, 320).

Doctor Adam goes on: When the catholic priest spreads the word of Christ, then it is not a mere man who preaches, but Christ himself. By this, the self deification of the priest has been elevated into a dogma which certainly contains the height of arrogance in the view that if anywhere a leading personality elevated his own poor self into a bearer of Christ’s message the church would at once have to utter its anathema over him: And it would utter this anathema, even if an angel who came from heaven taught otherwise than has been accepted from the apostles.

The last elimination of human self reliance in favour of an unreal office is perfected in the sacraments: The sacramental blessing is not produced by the personal moral and religious efforts of the receiver of them, but far more through the objective completion of the sacramental token itself. With this, the annihilation of the personality is demanded, its valuelessness as religious doctrine is announced. In the midst of a people who had placed honour—personal honour, family honour, race honour, national honour—above all else as the midpoint of life, the open broadcasting of such a demand would never have been able to be carried through. This has only been possible through the skilled replacing of the concept of honour by that of love, followed by humility and devotion. That this sacramental token is represented as having been established by Jesus himself, should be noted only as a small proof of with what lack of concern history is formed and structures of religion are built.

It is self evident that these ideas of a doctrine aiming at magic could not be maintained in such barren representation even after the denial of honour as a guiding idea. The blood related customs of Nordic man and his knightly way of thinking were unable to be completely driven out even with fire and sword. So the church then proceeded to the incorporation of popular pre Christian parables into its system which was apparently ready even before early Christianity. According to Adam, the church was already there, in disposition, in seed—virtually—before Peter and John were converted.

Belief in Wotan was admittedly dying, but the sacred groves in which the god was worshipped remained the goal of Germanic pilgrims. All destruction of the Wotan symbols and the cursing of the old belief did not help. So in place of Wotan, Christian martyrs and saints such as holy Martin were set up. Cloak, sword and horse were his symbols (thus the same symbols as Wotan, Odin); the respected groves of the sword god became in this manner the places of holy Martin, the saint of war, who is still worshipped today by German pilgrims (for example, the Schwertslocher chapel). Saint George and saint Michael also represent the renaming of old Nordic deities who through this baptism arrived in the domain of the Roman church. The she devil Lady Venus has been transformed into saint Pelagia; Donar, the thunderer and the cloud god, became saint Peter guarding heaven; the Wotanlike character of the wild huntsman is imparted to saint Oswald, and on chapters and carvings the redeemer Widar is shown tearing the Fenris Wolf to pieces (for example, at Berchtesgaden). The same Widar, who in trying to save Odin swallowed by the Fenris Wolf, kills the monster. The comparison with Jesus is clear. Even the pious Hrabanus Maurus, the most learned church teacher in Germany at the end of the 8th century, represents god as dwelling in the fortress of heaven, an idea which originates not from the bible, but from the heroic ancient Germanic soul. The Myth of the 20th Century 38

On the first of May, old Germania celebrated Walpurgis night, the beginning of the twelve festive nights of the summer solstice. It was the day of Wotan’s (Wodan, Odin) wedding with Freya. Today the sacred Walburg celebrates its name day on the first of May, while all customs have been altered by the church into magic and witchcraft, nature symbolism being thus transformed into oriental diabolism.

In Regensburg a chalice is preserved on a copper gilded stand, which is only drunk from on John’s day. This was the ancient form of festive wine for communion (which was still preached by the church in both forms in the 13th century) on December 27, the post celebration of the winter solstice. In remembrance of very old love potions, wine is still handed around from saint Sebastian’s skull cup even today (for example in Ebersberg, Upper Bavaria). This drinking to love, and drinking for luck to saint John the Baptist, to saint Martin and saint Stephen, are all very old customs. The devout catholic Johann Nepomuk Sepp says: The cup of Christ has been withheld from laymen by Rome, but the folk has not allowed the ancient pagan cup to be taken from it.

Along with customs, songs and images also altered. We see Oswald the holy illustrated in the Book of saints of 1488. He sits upon a throne in royal dress and crown. Around him fly the two ravens of Odin. Only the palms and the shepherd’s crook are Christian additions. Odin is still worshipped today under the name of Oswald and, for example, he has his church in Traunstein, but also sacred places on the Lower Rhine, in Holland, and in Belgium. Even the legend of saint Kuemmernis goes back to the figure of Odin as the Edda describes him to us, when Odin hung on the windy tree for nine nights wounded by a spear. The figure of a bearded, crucified man (Odin, Donar) who throws down a golden shoe to those who pray to him, recurs in many old sculptures and as motif in many songs. The female saint Kuemmernis has developed from this figure in a way still not completely clarified.

The church thus had to accommodate itself, to set its saints upon fiery steeds, to send them swinging sword and spear into battle with dragons and other foes, to acquire honour and fame or to save captured virgins from the clutches of an evildoer. The statues of Roland and saint George are examples of this kind which were only gradually replaced by those of Mary: in place of the symbol of honour the allegory of love appeared.

The Nordic gods were figures of light with spear and radiant cross and swastika, the symbols of the sun, of fertile ascending life. Since long before 3000 B.C., Nordic folkish waves carried these symbols, as can be proved, to Greece, Rome, Troy and India. Minutius Felix is zealous against the pagan cross; until finally the Roman (shaped like a T) gallows upon which Jesus was nailed, had to be recast to this pagan, now Christian, cross, and the pagan sun or cross of heaven appeared as saintly light above the heads of church martyrs or messengers of faith. Today we experience the birth of a new science: that of the interpretation of ancient Germanic symbolism. The circle with the four spokes appears as a cross of heaven, that is, as a projection of the directions of the sky, the sixfold division as points of the summer winter solstice. It is this symbolism of a cosmic kind which passes through all the centuries, taken over mysteriously as the last fragments of a time which laid down its world picture of the father of heaven, birth, death and eternity with symbols instead of with letters. The allegories of the sun are an excerpt from this world picture. The ray of light, the lance, becomes the allegory of ruling. The riding god with the lance therefore appears again and again anew on Christian memorial stones and designs: this was the eternal wanderer Wotan (Odin, Wodan) riding through the history of Christianity. Divided into many figures, this god lived and cast spells as saint Oswald, as saint George, as saint Martin, as a rider with the lance, indeed as saint Kuemmernis in catholic countries, and today as der Wode still passes invisibly through the soul of the people in Lower Saxony. As long as a people lives, its gods are immortal. That was Wotan’s revenge after his decline, until Baldur arose again and called himself the saviour of the world.

In Rome (also in Wittenberg) they were deeply outraged concerning this primal strength of ancient Nordic tradition which even Bonifacius and his successors up to the present day could not completely destroy. But there was nothing left other than to rename the other figures of the gods as Christian saints, and to transform their features in this manner. How this was carried out according to plan, is shown by countless Papal edicts. Thus, for example, Pope Gregorius the Great writes to Augustinus, the missionary to the pagans who begs him for advice on the best way to convert the latter:

For in our time may the holy church certainly turn with glowing zeal towards better men, but others she tolerates, yet in such manner that she often suppresses the evil which she fights, particularly by such tolerance and disregard.

— Bede, I, 27.

And on July 22, 601, the same pope writes to the Abbot Mellitus that if the pagan temples could not be destroyed, one might transform them:

Then if the people does not see its temples destroyed, it may lay aside error from its heart ..... and gladly find its way, according to old custom, to the place familiar to it.

And about allowing offerings:

When some joys are allowed to them outwardly in such measure, then may many accustom their mind easier to the inner joys. For quite certainly it does not happen that one cuts off hard dispositions all at once, indeed because even he who wishes to rise up to the highest peaks, works his way up by stages ..... not at one leap.

— Bede I, 30.

(Compare Thomas Hanlein: The proselytism of the ancient German to Christianity, Leipzig, 1910 and 1914, I, 57 and I, 64).

But the festivals of the Christian church appeared on the same day as the early peoples celebrated them, whether these were the festival of the fertility goddess Ostara, which became the Easter resurrection festival, or the festival of the winter solstice, which became the birthday of Jesus. Thus the catholic church in its fundamental forms in northern Europe has also been conditioned in a Nordic manner. The grotesque thing about this fact is only that it seeks to make a virtue out of necessity, and claims the richness of spiritual life exclusively in favour. The coercive church dogma declares in all seriousness that every national complexion can have a place in the church, that every kind of religiousity is under its protection; nowhere has the personal freedom of religious expression been so protected as in the catholic [!] church. (Adam.) This is naturally a reversal of facts which speak only too clearly. From Bonifacius by way of Ludwig the Pious, who made efforts to exterminate everything Teutonic with fire and sword, and a total of over nine million murdered heretics, we pass to the Vatican council which up to the present represents a unique attempt to assert a merciless uniform The Myth of the 20th Century 39

spiritual belief: one form, one compulsory dogma, one language, and one rite, identically for Nordics, Levantines, negroes, Chinese and Eskimos. (One should consider, in this connection, the eucharistic congress in Chicago in 1926, where negro bishops celebrated mass). For two thousand years the eternal blood of all races and peoples revolted against this. But just as the idea of a world monarchy has exercised a hypnotising influence on strong personalities from Alexander to Napoleon, so also the idea of one church ruling the entire world. And just as this first idea forced millions under its sway, so also did the second, as an idea, although it did not achieve complete subjection in its effect. Therefore the great men of the early middle ages also regarded the Roman church as an ally, or at least as a helper for the realisation of romantic plans of power. The church on its part saw in a worldly arm equipped with weapons, a means for creating a free path for its intentions. Examination of the inner motives for this, reveals that this struggle was essentially one for predominance, concerning what should be regarded as a supreme metaphysical value, a character value: Love, humility, denial, submission or honour, dignity, self assertion, pride.

Love was only demanded and practised by the supporters and lower grades of the Roman system; in order to have permanence and to stimulate strong natures, the leadership needed glitter, strength, power over the bodies and souls of men. Undoubtedly, a great spiritual readiness for sacrifice has been cultivated through this system: what the catholic church calls with pride its CARITAS. But it is particularly here, in its most beautiful human effect, that an equally powerful difference in the evaluation and consequence of an apparently identical action is shown. As the mercy of god is provided only through the church, so also are good deeds and mercy only a gift of the church to the unfortunate, to the sinner. This represents a cleverly weighed competition for broken men, with the purpose of binding them to a centre of power, and bringing before them both their nothingness in the sight of god, and simultaneously the power represented by the triumphant church. But this thought process also lacks everything which we would describe as knightliness. A Nordic people determined by the concept of honour would assert that someone in need should be supported not in the name of condescending love and mercy but in the name of justice and of duty. This would have had as consequence not a subservient humility but an inward honesty, not the breaking of personality but its strengthening, that is, the reawakening of the consciousness of honour.

To this context belongs pity, of the Christian church kind, which has also appeared in a new form in the humanitarianism of freemasonry, and which led to the greatest desolation of our entire life. From the coercive dogma of unrestricted love and the equality of all mankind before god on the one side, from the teaching of human rights supported by democratic racelessness and without nationally rooted ideas of honour on the other, European society has virtually developed as a protector of the inferior, the sick, crippled, criminal and rotten. Love plus humanitarianism has become a doctrine decomposing all commandments of life and the life forms of people and state, and, as a result, has come into conflict with present day avenging Nature. A nation whose midpoint was represented by honour and duty, would not preserve the corrupt and criminal, but eliminate them. We also see by this example that the faceless scheme in its lust for uniformity, pairs itself with unhealthy subjectivism, while a social and state community welded together by honour and duty must out of justice eliminate material privations and make efforts to increase the consciousness of individual value within this enforced discipline, but in such a way that, likewise through necessity, it would separate those racially and spiritually unfit for Nordic forms of life. The one or other results when honour is set up as the highest value of all actions, and the protection of the Nordic European race is given prime importance.

A typical example of how the Roman system utilised human weaknesses for its purposes, is shown by the compulsory dogma of the selling of indulgences. The church asserts that it possesses a fullness of representative atonement towards the poor sinner on behalf of Jesus and the saints. For releasing and binding, by virtue of their divine trust, it has the approval of Jesus at its disposal in dealing with a particular evildoer (in fact it was the African Tertullianus who extended the doctrine of dealer with much use of legal hair splitting). It has been attempted to surround this doctrine with many mysterious interpretations, and to build up an entire philosophy on this representation of absolution. However, its subbasis of dealing in the sense of trading will not remain concealed from any deeply perceiving man trading in both spiritual as well as material aspect. Fundamentally, the idea of absolution is based upon the keeping of accounts which the church is at convenience to manipulate by choosing convenient figures. This is a cultivation of emptiness of character and spirit, apart from other consequences such as appeared in Luther’s time, when a business representative of the Fuggers always accompanied Tetzel and took away from him all money received, because otherwise the Augsburg traders would never have been paid by Rome. The holy year invented by Bonifacius VIII brought in a huge income from the sale of indulgences. But the jubilee absolution could only be purchased in Rome. At first the ANNVS SANCTVS was to be celebrated every 100 years. Then it was held every 50, every 33, finally every 25 years, to obtain large sums of money more frequently. The first holy year brought the pope 200,000 foreign visitors and 15 million golden guldens. In 1350 the Vatican took in 22 million. One therefore understands why, after the 33 years celebrated in remembrance of Jesus’s years of life (as the festival was called after the second shortening of the interval between holy years), an interval lasting only 25 years was introduced on account of the brevity of human life. One sees that even the martyr’s death of Jesus can be good for furthering the business of his representative. In order to obtain even more gold, the opening and closing of the golden gates was introduced for the holy year: whoever went in there and left behind his offering, could also free his friends from all sins. In 1500, Alexander VI used the income of the jubilee indulgence for the dowry of his daughter Lucrezia. Every crime had its firmly fixed price with which one could buy oneself free: murder of parents, incest, had to be paid for highly. Only protestant criticisms controlled corruption. Thereafter, indulgence was reserved for magical customs (carrying of holy relics, privileged altars, and so on). Similar business was carried on by all lesser church establishments. The monastery of Monte Cassino, for example, had a yearly income of 500,000 ducats, and around the year 1500 comprised 4 bishoprics, 2 principalities, 350 castles, 440 villages, 336 estates, 23 harbour settlements, 33 islands, 200 mills and 1662 churches! One example among thousands. In addition came the transfer of giant sums as dues to the pope, Peter’s pennies, dispensation moneys, and so on. The very worst despots of the earth have not been more greedy than the representatives of the man whose kingdom was not of this world.

The doctrinal principle of absolution was only possible because during its formation the idea of a feeling of personal honour had not taken effect. It had to extend its sway further, to undermine the still existing consciousness of honour, and to give the stamp of piety to slavish thinking. The German rebellion against this disgrace compelled the Roman system to be more cautious in organising the system The Myth of the 20th Century 40

of indulgences. Fundamentally, however, it is still defended today as a just and pious practice of the church (for example, the general indulgence summons of 1926). It is self evident that this mischief is likewise traced back to ancient biblical practices. A thousand year old redisciplining of countless successive generations around a new pole—Rome—has had such a strong effect on the non Nordic undercurrent of the European peoples that this summons to divided mankind is not even felt by them as a disgrace, but as mutual aid by the limbs of the body of Christ.

The idea of intercession by the church emanates from this same mode of thought which abandons the idea of honour. On the basis of resolutions of the councils at Lyons, Florence and Trent, the condition of purgatory between life on one side and of eternal damnation or eternal purgatory on the other was introduced, and the authority approved for the church to conduct purgatory to a worthwhile end through its intercession. If one strips this doctrine of all its trimmings, that is, takes it just as it is intended, namely not as real intercession and spiritual remembrance of the departed, but as an action which influences the passage of the soul after death, then we have the most ordinary magical belief such as the south sea peoples still practice today. From a philosophical aspect, the dogmas of selling indulgences and of effective intercession (along with several others, such as the doctrine of the scapulary and the holy anointings and miracle working relics) represent the final outcome of a world outlook whose type is the medicine man. The medicine man whose prayer brings or prevents rain, whose curse kills, who has concluded a pact with god or the gods and can force or at least influence him (or them) in every way by some magical practice.

(An event not fitting strictly into this work, but which is of deep inner significance, may be mentioned here as characterising this spiritual attitude. On CORPVS CHRISTI day in 1929 at Munich, the procession was suddenly surprised by a violent thunderstorm. The monks, nuns, ministers, and so on, seized their crucifixes and candles under their arms and ran in all four heavenly directions. Later, Cardinal Faulhaber preached in the Frauenkirche and admonished the faithful not to allow their faith to be shaken by the bad weather, even if Jesus had this time not accepted the offering brought to him ..... Jesus is here represented as a rainmaker, and the rained upon CORPVS CHRISTI procession as an unsuccessful attempt at sorcery! The medicine man philosophy thus exactly characterises the spiritual conduct of the Roman church.)

The medicine man as a demonic figure can utilise independent thought by his supporters just as little as consciously honourable actions. Logically, to secure his position, he must make efforts to eliminate the one as well as the other with all the means at his disposal. He must excessively cultivate all too human anxieties and hysterical tendencies; he must preach witch mania and demonic sorcery; he must suppress with INDEX, fire and sword all inquiry that can lead to other results or even to liberation from the entire world picture taught by the medicine man. The medicine man throws such as Roger Bacon into prison in the same way as Galileo; he must declare the work of Copernicus outlawed and under ban, and make efforts to destroy all systems of thought which wish to assert honour, duty and loyalty between men—teachings in accordance with a personality of high value, as powers shaping life. To describe the attempt to assert the magically demonic world conception of the medicine man in a world political sense, means to write Roman dogma and church history. Rome has thus not only understood how to secure the representation of god in the eyes of millions, but by working on the deliberately cultivated magical belief of certain sections within the different peoples, also kept awake the belief in the universal power of its practices as being only possessed by the priest (such as indulgences, the last anointing, and so on) in contacting the other world. Other devices of similar kind in foreign lands were more logical in this respect. At the same time the pope knew how to escape responsibility for this sorcery. The teacher and headman of a primitive tribe boasting of magical powers will be killed, if his sacrificial ceremonies are fruitless and lead to drought or a universally destructive flood. The emperor of China was equal to god; as the son of heaven he was worshipped as such, but he was responsible for the prosperity of people and state. The pope has rendered impossible the further examination of his assertions by those believing in him as a result of his transferring their effect from this world into the other. However, if healing by hypnosis happens occasionally to be successful, then the catholic papers are filled with news about this, although they tenaciously keep silent about the thousands who leave the places of pilgrimage unaltered. Since nothing is spared in the painting of pictures of hell—an idea unfamiliar to the devout Ulfilas, for which no German word was descriptive—so Rome enchains the hopes of frightened millions to its rites by experiment. This method has also contributed much to the durability of the Roman system.

The attempt to put the world in a state of bewitchment has admittedly misfired, although not completely. The initial technical superiority of southern lands over the Germanic ones, the consequent extermination of those who were free, proud and conscious of honour with the aid of every conceivable alliance, the clever falsification of Nordic customs which remained as such in existence, only under different control ..... all this has not been without disadvantageous effects.

Jesuitism has drawn the last logical conclusions from the Roman system. The final stone in the structure of the medicine man philosophy was laid by the Vatican council. Here the medicine man was declared as god, as infallible god for the duration of exercise of his office. Strictly speaking, Jesus is no longer represented, but deposed; deposed and replaced by the Roman system, crowned by the medicine man invested with all power, who calls himself pope. The new testament is indeed an important but not entirely exhaustive product of this apostolic tradition permeating the entire consciousness of the church, condescendingly writes the afore mentioned modern catholic theoretician, Professor Adam.

Jesus is pushed aside; the Syrian Etruscan superstition which at the beginning enveloped his personality like weeds, appears in his place as apostolic tradition.

In fact, the Roman dogma does not regard the concept of honour as a problem in itself. It had, by necessity, systematically to eliminate the latter from its basic standpoint which demanded only subjection. The training school for the conscious extermination of the defiant appearance of this spiritual power in western life is undoubtedly represented by that body which, as if in mockery, describes itself as the Society of Jesus; the manner in which Ignatius Loyola wished to see the imitators of Jesus perform spiritual exercises thus signifies the uttermost contrast to Germanic thought and feeling. There is still dispute concerning what influences have been most fundamental in the inward and outward shaping of the Basque Loyola. To be true, the pious voices of Maria Laach are of opinion that the supernatural origin of the little book of exercises cannot be doubted by any rational person, but this childish attempt, as well as other fresh products which are attributed to divine dictate are somewhat embarrassing even to the priesthood. It is evident that the writings of The Myth of the 20th Century 41

Pater Garcia de Cisnero of Manresa, in the form of the Benedictine and Franciscan rules, exercised great influence upon Ignatius, but also the principles of the Moorish religious and political societies which extended over north Africa as far as Spain, must have been known to him since an astonishing resemblance exists between the Musulman order and the principles of the Society of Jesus. The Musulman texts teach:

You shall be under the hands of your sheikh like a corpse in the hands of the watchman of the dead.

Obey your sheikh in everything that he orders, for it is god himself who commands through his voice.

Livre de ses appuis de Scheich

Si Snouissi, Les Origines de la Compagnie

de Jesus, Paris, 1898;

compare also Charabounel: L’Origine Musulmane de Jesuites.)

Ignatius in his famous letter demands the same kind of obedience: blind obedience, corpselike obedience. The lucidity of blind obedience would vanish in the event of one’s posing the question as to good and evil in the face of a command. If it is necessary to fulfil an order by the superior, then:

Whatever it might be, a blind urge to obey will draw us with it, without leaving the slightest room for reflection.

It was on March 26, 1553, when the demand for corpselike obedience was flung as an open challenge into Germanic western spiritual life. Writes Ignatius:

Lay aside, beloved brother, as much as possible your will, and hand over and sacrifice your freedom .....

You must obey with a certain blind urge, allow yourself to drift devoid of will without any kind of investigation, to do whatever your superior says .....

In the Constitutions we read:

Each shall be convinced that whoever lives in obedience shall allow himself to be led by the superior, as if he be a corpse, allowing himself to be carried and laid down here and there in every manner; or as if he be the stick of an old man which serves him who holds it where and ever he will .....

In his Rules, which Loyola added to the Exercises, he again demanded:

Complete removal of personal judgement,

and furthermore:

When something appears white to our eyes which the church has defined as black, then this is likewise to be declared as black.

Subjection is demanded, completely irrespective of whether the servant holds something to be sinful or dishonourable; even the restriction, however threadbare, made earlier is lacking here, that one needs only to disobey when an open sin is demanded.

(A Memorial of the Jesuit college at Munich elaborates the 5th and 6th rules concerning obedience:

He obeys blindly, who like a corpse or the stick of an old man, having no feeling and no judgement, so obeys as if he had chained his own judgement, and to a certain degree completely eliminated this (TOTVM ECLIPSATVM), so that he no longer has a judgement of his own, and is unable to see, but has made the judgement by another completely not his own, namely that of his superior, and in fact so completely and so perfectly that whatever his superior judges and feels, he himself judges and feels exactly the same, and that this judgement by his superior be his own unfalsified and natural judgement. This is the power of true self denial and of truly making oneself blind (EXCAECATIO), to be impelled no longer by personal, but by another’s stimulus.

Reusch, Archival contributions:

Magazine for church history, 1895, XV, 263.)

But even the most zealous western members of the church could not tolerate this openness, this courage of accepting the final logical consequence from the prerequisites of the Roman system. Even the Roman and the Spanish inquisition rebelled against this all too clear language. Protests resounded from all corners of the earth against this demand for dishonourableness and slavishness. A public condemnation of the Jesuit doctrine also nearly occurred; however, the cunning Bellarmin—in the interests of the unity of the church—was successful in avoiding this. (The French Jesuit Julian Vincent, who even in the year 1588 showed the courage to declare Ignatius’s letter heretical, was thrown into prison by the inquisition, then declared to be insane. Thanks to the loving care of the Imitators of Christ he died the year afterwards in prison.)

Whoever wishes to follow a similar case of the brutal enslaving of an upright man within the present Jesuit order, should read the legal reports by the German Jesuit father Bremer concerning his struggle against the Jesuit general, and how the pope protected the latter contrary to all law. Bremer, a revered scholar, represented the old strict ideas concerning morals, which were simply banned as inconvenient. But the little PATER did not merely allow himself to be stifled like thousands of others, and he defended his standpoint on the basis of church law. This had as consequence one brutal act after another, then legal actions against the PATER, then his condemnation in Rome without his being heard. Bremer openly raised the accusation of falsification of ancient documents against the Jesuit general and the pope. Both had to allow this to occur ..... the splendid times of the inquisition are over, otherwise Bremer would long since have rotted in a prison (further details can be found in Doctor F. Ernst: Papst und Jesuitengeneral, Bonn, 1930). The demand by Ignatius to call white black, if the church so commanded, signified the declaring of holy the poisoning of souls, and was a recognition of the right to the destruction of conscience, the open elevation of a lie to a work of piety. The fact that this dogma, sucking away moral backbone, could not be completely carried out, lay once again not in the good will of the church which alone could bring salvation, but only in the strong defence shown by the European spirit, and in the impossibility, even by retrogressive breeding over decades, to burn out the European consciousness of honour. Today they are even compelled to declare that Loyola’s words, dictated by god, are no longer true; it is no longer risked to openly demand corpselike obedience and the abandonment of one’s honour in the Jesuit schools. But the aim and the way of creating a herd of soulless slaves are drawn unmistakably clearly. The slavish practices of the order which inject anxiety into the imaginative power and enslave the personal will, along with the subjection of the spiritual personality under the hypnosis of a strong central will, serve for breaking every feeling of dignity. The fact that the church did not condemn the doctrine of The Myth of the 20th Century 42

corpselike obedience shows that it strove for the latter, like its tool, the Society of Jesus. And just as the Syrian African order wished to work for the very greatest praise of god, so the Jesuit order worked conscious of its goal, AD MAIOREM DEI GLORIAM, for the disintegration of the Nordic Germanic west, and naturally wormed its way in everywhere that a wound became noticeable in the body of a people.

It is not good and evil which are discussed here, but unchangeable values of character. Loyola was, even if ambitious, nevertheless a courageous man, but his enslaving system is the reversal of all European values. Just as the theoretical materialist can be personally a good and satisfactory man, so also the warlike Loyola became the symbol of the most unscrupulous struggle against the soul of the Nordic race. Nothing is falser than to compare his Exercises with the Prussian educational system, as often happens with the purpose of obscuring the facts, because these two forms of league, training type, of men represent irreconcilable opposites. Loyola abolishes the uniform dress of monks, rejects excessive asceticism, sends his representatives in disguise among the affiliated in all cities, allows them greater freedom in their outward life. In return the Jesuits sacrifice to the order all personal enquiry, personality, human dignity—in the last analysis, their racially spiritual nature. The Prussian soldier was subject outwardly to harsh discipline, but inwardly he was free. The first system does not recognise the idea of honour, and whenever it encounters this, attempts to trample it down; the second revolves solely around the idea of honour. The first was and remains a fungus in the midst of our life, an acid dissolving all the strength and greatness of our ancient past; the second was and remains the primal cell for the structure of our entire existence, as this was operative when it appeared for the first time openly in the light of history with the Vikings and the early Teutons.

After the Basque Ignatius, Lainez—a Jew—was chosen as his successor for the further development of the Roman dogma directed hostilely against us all. Its efficacy, namely at the Tridentine council, and the consequences of the resolutions laid down there, would be worthy of a German doctorate thesis. On July 18, 1870, the Jesuitical Vatican council spoke its final creed:

We teach and declare that according to the will of the lord, the Roman church has predominance of proper authority of office over all others ..... that the judgement of the apostolic chair over which there is no higher power, may be withdrawn by none of a new confession, just as it is permitted none to sit in judgement over its judgement.

The chair of saint Peter remains always unspotted by any error.

We declare it as a principle of faith revealed by god: that the pope in Rome, when he speaks from his doctrinal chair (EX CATHEDRA) ..... decides a doctrine firmly adhered to by the entire church, concerning faith or morality, is capable of the divine support promised him by saint Peter, possesses that infallibility with which the divine redeemer wished to provide his church in deciding a doctrine concerning faith or morality ..... therefore if anyone should risk contradicting this our decision, which god forbid, he is under ban.

With this, the Roman Jesuitical systematic destruction of personality was perfected, Admittedly, millions of true believing catholics vaguely felt the monstrosity of this self deification of an office in itself, and a few men stood up to lay protest against this dishonouring of mankind which is the essence of the Vatican. The catholic rector of Prague university wrote in horror:

One permitted oneself to be killed off, and indeed did it oneself, threw away conviction, belief, priestly and manly honour. That is the result of a development which sees the essence of Christianity in blind obedience towards the Roman hierarchy.

Bishop Strossmeyer declared that the curia regarded the papacy as carrion, and hoped for the death of Pius IX, which would signify a truly good deed for mankind. Ignaz Döllinger rejected the dogma as a Christian, theologian, and historian. Even the proud leader of the Centre party, Windthorst, was nevertheless courageous enough, at least among friends, to reject the new doctrine of infallibility. As the Breslau prebendary Kunzer stated (Norddeutsche Allgemeine, January 11, 1871) he had to make the utmost efforts to calm Windthorst, and he sought to soften his fury against the Jesuits whom he declared guilty of everything and against whose expulsion he would not lift a finger. But what still seemed possible in the 16th century, was now in vain; nothing helped. Pius IX could even declare proudly of himself: I am the way, the truth and the life (Observateur catholique, 1866, page 357) without the spiritually decomposed, enslaved catholic world daring to protest against this presumption.

It is therefore not a question of the pope dispensing any special commands as infallible, but solely the fact that this possibility is permitted him. A fragment of that intangible something which every people feels as centre of its soul, has been broken off. The pope will not, of course, openly demand anything dishonourable, but the fact of the presentation of a complete carte blanche authority on the part of the catholic world alone shows sufficiently that in service of love manly honour has been cast away. The VATICANVM signified the breaking of all men of character in the church. And thus also at the present day: for existing dignitaries are already educated under the rule of this honourless dogma. So called political catholicism is only the necessary external side of the Jesuitical Roman system in general; thus not the misuse, but the logical application, of Roman principles, even if misuse of the real religion. Then every spiritual force free from Rome, every worldly power independent of Rome, appears as falling away from the only legitimate rule, and every means is holy for regaining this spiritual political rule.

This system has known how to force the self sacrifice of men influenced by love into the service of an unmerciful caste. By replacing the inner equilibrium of consciousness by humility and pity, the spiritual dignity of the Nordic peoples was undermined. Wars, revolutions—in part utilised by Rome, in part directly called forth by Rome—brought increased physical and spiritual attrition with them, until with democratically Jewish support it became possible in 1870 to place the final stone in the roof of the building. And this signified: the abandonment of individual honour, of national and racial honour, in favour of demands for government by a priestly society declaring itself to be god.

Seen in this connection, the greatness of Luther’s deed does not consist in merely founding a church, but is much more important than the introduction of a division between two versions of faith. However much Luther may still have been deeply embedded in the middle ages, his deed signifies the great revolution in the history of Europe after the penetration of Roman Christianity. Luther denied the priesthood as a power in itself, that is, denied the right of justification by a caste of men who claimed to be in closer relationship with the godhead than others, and who on the basis of alleged knowledge of god presumed they possessed better insight concerning god’s plans for salvation and conditions in heaven. As a result, Martin Luther hindered the further advance of that magical monstrosity which The Myth of the 20th Century 43

had come to us from central Asia by way of Syria and Africa. Monasticism is African in origin, so is the tonsure; and the antinatural castrations by means of which one is supposed to be brought nearer to god are central Asiatic in origin. The rosary is Asiatic, and it is still used in present day Tibet where its mechanism has been perfected in the prayer wheel. The kissing of the pope’s feet is Asiatic, the Dalai Lama still demands the same today—and several other things which, however, could not be established in Europe. In this connection it is worth recalling the behaviour of Alexander the Great. When he had conquered the whole of hither Asia, he made the Asiatics kneel down when they greeted him, but with his Macedonians he acted as with comrades; a single attempt also at introducing obeisance from them, but which failed at once. Here Nordic Europe already parted from orientalism, but Lamaism had completed its intrusion in the form of the Roman priest caste, and continued the oriental politics of the Babylonians, Egyptians and Etruscans. Martin Luther declared war on this spiritual collectivity, was victorious, and all catholics still conscious of honour must thank his labour for the fact that the papacy reformed itself and was forced to a purification, in order to continue to exist at all in the awakening cultural world of Europe.

It must now be made clear how things would have proceeded with the Germanic states if that spirit had triumphed which wished to link holiness with dirt and repellent life. Eusebios the holy ran around with 100 kilogram iron weights; saint Macarios purchased holiness for himself by bearing the tortures of an ant hill upon which he sat; saint Francis—admittedly in many ways a very great personality—paid tribute to the spirit of Asia by rolling around on thorns to the pleasure of god. Outstandingly pious nuns drank strangers’ spittle, ate dead mice and rotten eggs, all so as to become holier. The pious Hilarion is praised because he lived only in filth; the holy Athanasios was proud of never having washed his feet; the same is reported of Abraham the holy, of Sylvia the holy. The nunnery of saint Euphrasia had even taken an oath that its nuns might never bathe ..... with unhindered further development of this odour of sanctity. Europe today would have arrived at the same condition as the dirt contemplating saints of India and Tibet, at a condition of the most perfected stupidity, of the most terrible superstition, of poverty and of misery—with a constant enrichment of the priest caste. Europe was saved because of the extent of the anti Roman movements, and the greatest saviour of the west has therefore been Martin Luther because he combated the system from which the conditions described above resulted as a necessary consequence: the priesthood of Rome with its magic power, representing the continuation of the priestly societies of hither and central Asia. This German farmer’s son thus became the axis of a new world development for which all Europeans must be thankful, since he not only made the protestants free, but also saved catholics from spiritual decline. The later return of many fallen centres (Vienna and Munich were once protestant cities) to catholicism thus only became possible through an enforced cleansing of the odour of sanctity. However, it must also never be forgotten that if the protestant spirit were no longer to exist, the Tibetan Etruscan world would reveal itself anew (Spain, which was least protestant, has felt the rule of Rome bitterest of all, and nowhere in Europe was there such backwardness of spirit and soul as in Spain before the revolution of April, 1931). How deeply satanic superstition still prevails even today in the very highest posts, has been revealed to an astonished world by the Leo Taxil swindle which is on the same level as the exorcising of the devil by devout churchmen in all states.

The essence of the conflict between emperor and pope was first of all the struggle for predominance between knightly honour and the enervating doctrine of love. The living allegory of the first is the sword with the hilt in the form of a cross and the bishop riding on a battle charger. Without question, knightly honour predominated at first; even a Charlemagne would laughingly have rejected a Pius IX. But Charlemagne held it as expedient to allow his dignity to be sanctified through religion and to proclaim his rule over the peoples as originating from god’s blessing. Emperor and pope were thus at first political allies against the noble Saxons to whose fame it is—according to Goethe—that they hated Christianity in the form offered. Widukind admittedly fought for himself, but simultaneously for the freedom of all Nordic peoples. At the same time, Charlemagne remains the rugged founder of the German Reich as a political unit. After the reestablishment of the honour of Saxony, which had been derided for 1000 years, both great opponents pass into German history: Charlemagne as the founder of the German Reich, Widukind as defender of the Germanic values of freedom.

Loyalty by vassals and loyalty between men were likewise regarded by the old knights as above possessions and happiness, as with the author of the Edda. The Havamal closes with the words:

Possessions pass away,

Relatives die,

You yourself die as they.

One thing I know

That lives forever:

The famous deeds of the dead.

This is the Nordic form of the Buddhist Karma doctrine. In the Beowulf poem a mingling of the Germanic feeling of honour with the Christian idea of redemption is attempted, namely insofar as Beowulf undertakes to save outraged, tortured humanity; but he does not fight with the aid of the principle resist not evil, but as a hero, the terror of the wicked. (Compare in this connection Vishnu who appears in the world again and again for the destruction of evildoers). But a certain soft undertone already makes itself perceptible in Beowulf. While it was regarded as dishonourable for the ancient Germans to return home from the battlefield without their lord and leader, the miserable behaviour of the disciples of Christ in the garden at Gethsemane (which also seemed very painful to the poet of the Heliand) has already cast a shadow here. With the exception of one loyal man, the followers of Beowulf abandon him when they are seized by forebodings of death! This completely un Nordic, soft hearted feature is in fact again countered by a conscious praise of honour:

No event can weaken the man of noble blood.

And:

The end of this life threatens us all; therefore whoever can, should attain fame before death!

Finally, the dishonourable and disloyally fleeing men have banishment pronounced over them:

Now to all your race be refused The Myth of the 20th Century 44

The gift of swords and of bright treasures,

Joys of homeland and of the native hearth:

Bare of the rights of our life

Shall each be, when far away,

The noble learn of your flight,

That infamous deed. Death is better

For each noble man than a disgraceful life.

The Germanic knight also allows unpraiseworthy actions to be placed to his account, actions which result from weakness of will or the breaking through of lower impulses. But when he afterwards accepts them and takes the consequences upon himself, then we understand this more than the cowardly behaviour of the first apostles. A grim figure like Hagen seems to us significantly greater than, for instance, Peter the rock. Hagen throws away his honour in service of his king and at last dies for it proudly and unbroken. The gossip Peter denies his lord at the first test, doubly and trebly; the sole expression of emotion which allows him to appear sympathetically, when he draws his sword (which the poet of Heliand describes with perceptible relief), is very typically overshadowed by his later cowardly lies. Church tradition vainly makes efforts to turn Peter into a hero. But the devout poet of the Heliand poem attempts to excuse the behaviour of the disciples in Gethsemane by their sorrow, for otherwise their sleep would appear dishonourable and therefore incomprehensible to his Saxon audience:

..... The born of the lord

Found them sleeping in sorrow!

Their hearts were heavy

That the dear lord

Was to leave them.

The development from chivalry to knighthood already began under Konrad II, and this was maintained until far into the 14th century. The knights saw themselves as children of the empire, and were thus under obligation to defend emperor and kingdom against external foes. This fact gave them justification for the existence of their order, it led to the actual knightly concept of honour which is its first worldly representation attaining some highest purpose in accordance with social rank. After the almost complete subjectivism of the Vikings and the old Germanic captains with their followers, a large section of the people was consequently adjusted to the spiritual centrepoint of the entire race. The practice of granting a sword, of girding it, finally the knighting ceremony, represented symbolically an inward elevation and ennobling. If the later knight through his becoming ossified and stereotyped represented a fragment of antiquity amidst a new social life, if the plundering raids of idle knights during peace also offer a displeasing picture, then these are things which even the best idea does not escape containing, and the fact remains that up to the present the word knightly is used to describe only a man who greatly protects his fellow men and knows how to safeguard honour.

It is self evident that the Roman system also made efforts to render the knights’ order serviceable to itself which, among other things, found expression in the dedication of the sword. At the very beginning of his oathtaking, the knight obligated himself to serve religion, then to stand by the oppressed, and only lastly to grant the emperor obedience. This was the formal establishment of a Roman influence, such as had already been carried out earlier. Certain pious historians have even attempted to trace back the foundation of the knights’ order to Rome (like their dogmas to Jesus) and in fact Gregorius VII is cited as their founder. This naturally only occurs with the intention of bringing even the representation of this anti Roman idea—by tracing its origin back to the pope—into dependency upon the latter, naturally with different consequences resulting from it for the present. Thus, for example, the historian Gefrorer knows how to relate the manner in which the knightly idea of holy Rome originated, in order to then unveil the latter’s intentions: Only as a result of the powerful influence which the church gained through the office of Gregorius VIII on the warriors’ order of the western Christian kingdoms, and in fact on the Roman first, did the knights’ order attain its full substance as an institution or corporation which laid upon it the task of rendering serviceable by special duties the heroic courage of the soldiers of religion. Fame, honour, race, people, emperor and kingdom, were and are thus regarded by the representatives of the Roman system as mere names and subordinates; as the purpose of such a knights’ order is falsely attributed to the pope, only service for the latter appears. By this the unchangeable politics of the Roman church have also become completely clear, and in fact it has been successful by means of hypnotising sermons to shed torrents of blood for the power hungry church in countless crusades, to make the heroic heart serve religion, to subordinate honour to love. Iper and Arras, cry the Flemings; Husta heya Beyerlant, ran the battlecry of the Bavarians; Rome could not prevent this, but it could sow discord by playing off different interests against each other. And it has regarded this as its life’s task up to today. Out of instinct for self preservation, Rome cannot tolerate any organisation which is conscious of its people and honour, even less a self sufficient, completely honour conscious nation. Therefore it must promote dissension and sow war and racial decomposition. This is inherent in the nature of its faceless system and will not alter, as long as this system exists.

Another, apparently ineradicable, falsification of history dominates even today those circles which give a clear account of Rome and its system, namely that all education and culture which gradually passed over the west was a consequence of church activity. In fact, the exact opposite is the case.

Pressed by the Langobards, Pope Stephanus II (in approximately 755) begs for aid and implores that he might be invited into Franconia. This takes place and Pippin receives the pope on foot, but the latter, conscious of his weak position, shows himself as the poor apostle of Christ, wraps himself and his priests in hair shirts, strews ashes on his head, and on his knees implores the king to help the Roman people. Since this time France has regarded itself as the eldest daughter of Rome (wisely refusing, however, since Hugo Capet, the enticements of a Roman title). The same pope then works against the union of Charlemagne with a Langobard woman. He writes that Charles might not pollute in a disloyal and most stinking manner the high, noble and kingly race of the Franks with the blood of the Langobards, and in such event begs heaven to hand over Charles to the eternal flames. But since this threat made no impression upon the emperor, the holy father later allied himself with this same stinking Langobard king. The Myth of the 20th Century 45

At the time, when the spiritual influencing on the world is said to have been performed from Rome outwards, things in reality proceeded there in a highly unspiritual manner. In 896, Pope Stephanus VI hit upon the idea of digging up the decomposed corpse of his predecessor, condemning the dead man to death at a synod as an evil usurper, hacking three fingers off his perjured corpse, and handing him over to the Roman people to be drowned. Shortly afterwards, Stephanus himself was flung into prison and strangled, while the corpse of his predecessor was once again fished out of the Tiber and newly robed as pope. (this text taken from www.adolfhitler.ws)

After this, the popes alternately overthrow one another, and imprison each other by turns, until Sergius III, his concubine Marozia at his left hand, ascends the chair of Peter. This woman Marozia, along with her mother Theodora, secures herself influential bishops as lovers and props of her rule. When Sergius was disposed of, Marozia, after a brief pause, raised her son to be pope as John XI. Her first son Albrich was highly outraged at this and overthrew the rule of his mother. After his death his son occupied the papal office as John XII. But conditions still did not improve. In 938, the expelled Pope Bonifacius VII was successful in throwing his rival representative of Jesus into prison and leaving him to die there. But Bonifacius also did not enjoy the tiara for long: he was driven out himself by the royal nobility and by the woman Theodora, already mentioned, the famous mother of that very energetic whore Marozia, whose grandson Crescentius became master of Rome, and who now sold the papal chair to willing creatures. In 1024 a man took the papal throne who had previously never been a cleric. He bought himself the representation of god and called himself John XIX. Later a ten year old son of a count was elected as Pope Benedictus IX. But since the latter gave himself up prematurely to every conceivable vice, he became too dissolute even for the Romans; they therefore elected a new representative of Christ, who called himself Sylvester III. But the new pope was soon seized with anxiety at the dangers of his office and preferred to barter the latter for 1,000 pounds of gold to Gregorius VI, at which the expelled Benedictus was morally outraged and raised a renewed claim to the chair of Peter. The honourable cardinal Caesar Baronius openly called these popes whore’s stallions. This scandal only ceased when Emperor Henry III intervened.

These were the conditions in Rome during the 10th and 11th centuries which every German ought to be familiar with, but concerning which silence is wisely kept by a school of historical writing filled with lies on the one side and cowardly silence on the other. At this very time began the national gathering of the Germans under Heinrich I, and the conscious attempt at national recovery and development under Otto I the Great. Thanks to him, a German knight, the bishops obtained great influence, acquired the rank of princes, and provided spiritual knowledge, promoted crafts, trade and farming. Directed and protected by the emperor, not by the pope, the first cultural centres blossomed in Quedlinburg, Reichenau, and Hersfeld. The popes, on the other hand, had honourable men murdered; such popes as Hadrianus IV who ordered Arnold of Brescia to be strangled and burned when he heard of the latter’s sermons of repentance. It should be remarked in passing that the popes had fixed sums paid them by the whore houses, which Paul I (1464-1471) had shaped into a permanent source of income. Sixtus IV drew 20,000 gold ducats yearly form the houses of pleasure. The clergy had to pay fixed taxes for their concubines, while the Vatican rewarded its officials with passes for the brothels. Sixtus IV even permitted pederasty for a fixed payment. Innocentius VIII had 16 children of his own to feed. Alexander VI, however, declared that the pope stood higher than the king, in the same way as man above the beasts. Therefore, he had a dozen bishops and cardinals, who appeared dangerous to him, murdered. For 300,000 gold ducats Pope Alexander VI deposed the Jhem, the Turkish pretender to the throne, and with a clear conscience calmly gathered in the money of the unbeliever, the sultan. In 1501 Alexander VI named his daughter Lucrezia for a time as his representative.

Underlying the efforts of Otto I undoubtedly lay the idea of a German national church which seemed to have died out with the vanished Aryan Goths. For the same reason, he stipulated that the clergy be chosen from land owners, but this also caused him to subordinate himself to the papacy: the Romans had to swear not to elect a pope without the agreement of the Emperor. Otto III autocratically appointed two popes. Similarly Heinrich III purged the papacy. In the great dispute between Archbishop Willigris of Mainz against the antinational Roman centralism, all German bishops, because of their consciously open rejection, found themselves in opposition to the pope, who finally had to give way. One was freer then in Germany than in 1870 and 1930!

However, the papacy received a great strengthening from the Clunyians who wished to create an international structure dependent only on the pope and above the state. This movement admittedly set as its goal a reform of the dissolute monastic system, but very soon showed its un Germanic spiritual outlook. The hitherto customary practices of penance against the sinful devilish flesh, upon which the Teutons had looked with laughter, were divested of their earlier clumsy form and transformed into a cunning martyrdom of the soul (forerunners, as it were, of Jesuitism). For stipulated parts of the Clunylan monasteries, strict commands of silence existed, every gaiety of mind was forbidden, and friendships not tolerated. Informing upon others was given the stamp of pious duty, and those found guilty had to undergo dishonouring punishments. This unnatural form of discipline clearly originates from that Ligurian eastern race which, before the immigration of the Nordics, settled southeast France among other places. This trampling down of the soul, this inward self emasculation and lust for subjugation under alien demons and magical powers, however, shows us the spirit of the Roman church as being in the closest, racially conditioned mutual alliance with all un Aryan blood and decomposed populations. It is therefore also no accident that the reforms of the Clunyians immediately gained a foothold in the eastern racial parts of Lorraine. Archbishop Aribo of Mainz at once made a stand against this spiritual sickness and supported the power conscious Konrad II. In the north the old blood stirred almost simultaneously: Bishop Adalbert von Wettin set a Germanic national church as his goal: the word Deutsch became universal usage for the first time; German monks of the Roman church sought for the still remaining, almost destroyed spiritual treasures of their people.

The German emperor had lifted the pope out of a swamp, restored the church to honour, and ennobled its servants. Roman universalism, strengthened anew as a result, naturally utilised these forces and based itself—as usual—on proven forgeries in order to establish the rule of the papacy over the emperor as willed by god, and to set centralism against episcopalism. This struggle was carried on by every conceivable means: subjects were incited against the emperor, indeed the church ban was announced against unapostolic bishops. That was Rome’s gratitude.

The longevity of the papacy has been praised with particular emphasis by Roman historical writers as proof of its divine appointment. But anyone who knows that Rome has to thank the emperors first and foremost for its position of power, and solely the The Myth of the 20th Century 46

inner greatness of devout aristocratic spirits like Francis of Assisi, Albertus Magnus and Meister Eckehart for its spiritual influence, will certainly have a different opinion about this. Besides, the permanence of an establishment is not a measure of its inner value. It is solely a question of the forces which have helped it to perpetuate itself. Egyptian culture was much older than the Roman church; the Mandarin can record more known ancestors than the pope; Lao Tse and Confucius lived two thousand five hundred years ago and are still dominant today.

The German Roman Emperors only died out about a hundred years ago. The time approaches at which the pope will also become what he should be: the head of the Italian national church (the disputes between nationalistic Fascism and the Vatican will, it is to be hoped, hasten this). The papacy (irrespective of the fact that a number of really great men have also sat on the so called chair of Peter) had to build up its rule on the prerequisite of spiritual slavery and racial decomposition of the Germanically determined peoples. Out of the great free souls who even in the 11th to 14th centuries devoted themselves to Rome as an idea holy to them, the Vatican created weapons of servitude. Since the strengthening of Jesuitism, since the Tridentine council, Rome has remained under racially inferior influence and has become rigid. The unclean moral theory of Alfons the holy of Liguori on the one side, the dishonourable activity of Jesuitism on the other, has resulted in the fact that since the suffocating of Meister Eckehart’s religion, all really great European culture has sprung from an antichurch spirit, ranging from Dante (who in 1864 was still expressly damned by the papacy because, among other reasons, he had described Rome as a sewer) and Giotto to Copernicus and Luther; not to speak of German classical art and Nordic painting and music. Everything which a slavish mentality called love gathered under Rome, everything which strove for honour and freedom of soul, parted more and more consciously from the Roman spiritual world.

The knights’ order lost its importance in the 15th and 16th centuries. But the concept of honour which it cultivated had awoken in other sections of the people. The townsman commoner freed himself from the dominance of the castle, built his cities and churches, carried on commerce and trade, and joined together into powerful leagues, until finally the thirty years’ war ended an entire culture.

It is demonstrated by the Hansa that the Germanic concept of honour was embodied even in the merchant whenever the latter relied upon himself and could operate without oriental middlemen. Originally a modest merchants’ league with the purpose of safeguarding trade, the Hansa later stretched its arms out far; it not only traded, but built, founded and colonised. The ruins of Novgorod and Wisby speak an equally loud language of moral power as the town halls of Bruges, Lübeck and Bremen. Over 75 cities formed a protective league which, according to its innermost nature, had the task of forming a centre of German power against imperial impotence. But before other similar ideas could take deeper root, the greatest catastrophe of German history intruded. And with the same consequences as had been shown by the Huguenot wars in France: the character of the German people was altered. If Germany at the beginning of the 16th century, in spite of the weak imperial rule, possessed a proud peasantry and a prosperous burgher class, then thirty bloody years (which still did not satisfy Pope Innocentius X) exterminated the best blood of Germany, numerous hordes of alien race from foreign states destroyed the native stock, a whole generation grew up in the midst of robbery and murder. Bavaria alone recorded 5000 abandoned farmsteads, hundreds of flourishing cities lay in ruins, nearly two thirds of the German people were annihilated. There no longer existed any art, any culture, any character. Dishonourable princes plundered a wretched people, and these subjects dully and stupidly allowed everything to happen to them. And yet despite all, Germanic blood stirred itself against the ruination from the Habsburgs and the French threat. The blood of the Lower Saxons which had once advanced to the Duna demonstrated resistance to total decline above and below. Like a promising cry the trumpets of Fehrbellin still resound in our ears today, and the voice of the great Elector with whose deeds Germany’s recovery, salvation and rebirth, had their beginning. One may criticise Prussia however much one likes, but this decisive salvation of the Germanic substance remains forever its deed of renown; without it there would exist no German culture, in fact no real German people; at best millions defenceless to looting by neighbours lusting for booty and by the avaricious princes of the church.

It is no accident of chance, if today in the midst of a terrible new fall into the abyss, the figure of Frederick the Great appears particularly invested with radiant glory, that in him there are concentrated—in spite also of his human sides—all those values of character for whose predominance the best Germans struggle hopefully today, namely, personal boldness, ruthless power of decision, consciousness of responsibility, penetrating cleverness, and an awareness of honour such as had never before been chosen with such mythic greatness as the guiding star of an entire life.

How can a prince outlive his state, the fame of his people and his own honour?

he asks of his sister on September 17, 1757. Misfortune will never make him cowardly, on the contrary:

I will never accept disgrace. The honour which in war made me place my life at stake a hundred times, has allowed me to defy death as an event of lesser importance.

He goes on to emphasise:

One will not be able to say of me, that I have outlived the freedom of my Fatherland or the greatness of my house.

If I had more than one life, I would sacrifice it for the Fatherland

writes Frederick on August 16, 1759, after a terrible defeat.

I do not think of fame, but of the state.

My inalterable loyalty towards the Fatherland and honour allow me to undertake everything, although hope does not guide me,

are his words a few days later. To Luise Dorothea von Gotha he also makes the avowal:

Perhaps Prussia’s hour of destiny has come, perhaps one will experience a new despotic emperorship. I do not know. But I vouch for the fact that it will only come to that after streams of blood have flowed and that I will not look upon my Fatherland in chains and at Germans in the most disgraceful slavery.

And Frederick writes anew to d’Argens:

You should know that it is not necessary that I live but certainly that I do my duty,

and:

Never will I experience the moment which would compel me to conclude a disadvantageous peace. The Myth of the 20th Century 47

I will either allow myself to be buried under the ruins of my Fatherland or ..... make an end to my life myself ..... I have allowed myself to be guided by this inner voice and by the demands of honour and I also intend doing this in the future.

If Frederick Wilhelm I was the symbol of civic honourableness and self limiting diplomacy, then Frederick II was the symbol of everything heroic which appeared forgotten and vanished in blood, dirt and misery. His life is the truest, greatest German history, and any German who attempts to falsify with malicious gloss the figure of Frederick must appear to us today as a most despicable rascal.

But it was only a few whom he managed to influence. In spite of his great work for peace, the broad layers of the people were crude, without cultural tradition; the educated were decadent, foppish, un Prussian, un German. They only allowed the disciplining forms of Frederick to take effect upon them against their will and Frederick himself—to whose government Kant had dedicated his Critique of pure reason—found no intellectual independence within the Germans of his day compared with the French, so that his love for French literature also laid the way for the victory of the new French world of thought which in its version of love in the form of the teaching of humanitarianism, crippled the organic powers of Prussia which had still not awoken to full consciousness, and later made it incapable of resisting the armies of the French revolution.

This new doctrine of humanitarianism was the religion of the freemasons. The latter has provided up to the present the spiritual foundations of an abstract universalistic culture, the starting point of all self seeking sermons promising bliss. It also gave (around 1740) the stamp to the political slogans of the last 150 years: liberty, equality and fraternity, and gave birth to chaotic, racially decomposing humane democracy.

At the beginning of the 18th century men gathered at an assembly in London whose conflict with the former religion of love had led in many cases to their exile from people and Fatherland, and who in the midst of a dissolute time founded a league of mankind for the promotion of humanity and brotherhood. Since this league recognised only mankind, no racial or religious difference was made from the start.

Masonry is a humanitarian league for the spreading of tolerant and humane principles, in the striving for which the Jew and Turk can have as great a share as a Christian.

So ran the constitution set up in 1722. The idea of humanitarianism was to form the principle, the purpose and the substance of freemasonry. It is—according to the Freiburg ritual—more far reaching than all churches, states and schools, than all classes, peoples and nationalities; for it extends over the whole of mankind. The German lodge teaches us the same even today. The Roman church and the freemasonic antichurch are thus united in tearing down all barriers which have been erected by spiritual and physical forms. Both call upon their supporters in the name of love or humanity, in the name of a boundless universalism, except that the church demands complete subjection, subordination within its domain (which naturally is to be the entire earth), while the antichurch preaches an unrestricted destruction of frontiers, makes the suffering and joy of the individual man into the measure of its judgement, which must be regarded as the cause of the present situation, namely, that the material well being of the individual has become the highest good for democracy and receives the first place from it in the life of society.

This disintegrating view of the world was and is the prerequisite for the political teaching of democracy and of the coercive dogma of the necessity of the free interplay of forces. Thus all the forces which work for the loosening of state, national and social bonds, necessarily made effort to render themselves of service to this philosophy of freemasonry, consequently also the league of mankind. Here we see international Jewry worming its way from instinct coupled with conscious reflection into the organisation of freemasonry. Admittedly, the racial essence in the league of mankind reacted just as defensively against the attempt by the church to exterminate Germanic nature, but it is nevertheless easily proved that, while Nordic man defended himself against Rome, the blind Hodur unwittingly gave him the death blow from behind. Freemasonry in Italy, France and England, became a political league of men, and led the democratic revolutions of the 19th century. Year by year its world outlook undermined the bases of all Germanic nature. Today we see the busy representatives of the international stock exchange and of world trade moving almost everywhere behind the leadership of the antichurch. All in the name of humanitarianism. The hypocrisy of the present day exploiters of humanity is without question more degrading than those attempts at slavery which in the name of Christian love have so often plunged Europe into unrest and chaos. Thanks to the preaching of humanitarianism and the doctrine of human equality, every Jew, negro and mulatto can become a citizen of equal rights in a European state; thanks to the humanitarian concern for the individual, there are hosts of luxury institutions for the incurably sick and insane in European states; thanks to humanitarianism, the confirmed criminal is regarded as merely an unfortunate without any concern for the interests of the people as a whole, is let loose again into society at the first opportunity, and not hindered in his capacity of reproduction. In the name of humanity and freedom of spirit the pornographic journalist and every dishonourable scoundrel is allowed to trade in every imaginable brothel literature; thanks to humanity negroes and Jews may marry into the Nordic race, indeed even occupy important offices. This humanitarianism, unconnected with any racial concept of honour, has among others, made the indescribably corrupt system of stock exchange swindling into a respected profession; indeed this organised band of criminals in frock coats and top hats today decides at world trade and expert conferences veritably autocratically over the fate of millions of hardworking people.

In the wake of this freemasonic democracy swindle, the entire Marxist movement falsified the beginnings of a healthy protest by the workers, and controlled all social democratic parties in the service of the stock exchange with aid of Jewish finance, Jewish leaders and the Jewish, partly individualistic, partly universalistic, ideology. The industrial worker of the 19th century, cheated of his destiny, suddenly uprooted, robbed of all balanced judgement, fled to the alluring preachments of a proletarian international, believed that by class struggle, that is, by destruction of half his own body, he would be able to become free, intoxicated himself on the power attained, and poured over this the whitewash of humanism. Today this delusion has burst, and the Marxist leadership has been unmasked as perpetrating a frightful swindle of a hard struggling class. (See Alfred Rosenberg: International high-finance as the mistress of the workers’ movement in all lands, München, 1925).

The paradox both of democracy as well as of Marxist doctrine consists in that they both in actuality represent the most brutal, dishonourable materialistic view of the world and consciously foster all impulses which will aid decomposition, but at the same time The Myth of the 20th Century 48

give assurances of their mercifulness, their love for the subjected and exploited. In a clever way the spiritual readiness for the sacrifice of the proletariat is called upon, to make the latter inwardly dependent on its leaders. We see in Marxism the idea of sacrifice and of love playing the same role as in the Roman catholic system. Blood and honour were likewise mocked and derided by the leaders of Marxism until, however, these indestructible ideas nevertheless revealed themselves in the workers. Today there is at last talk of proletarian honour. If this idea spreads, then everything is still not lost, for with the holding aloft of the idea of honour in general, the German working class will also know how to rid itself once and for all of its Marxist leadership. If this idea of class honour then takes shape into that of national honour, then German freedom will be secured as a result. But this is only possible when all the real workers of the German people form a front against all those who have sold themselves to trade, profit and the stock exchange, irrespective of whether this fact is covered with the cloak of democracy, Christianity, internationalism or humanitarianism.

The spirit of Frederick the Great takes effect today on the German people like an unyielding natural force. Everything which rediscovered itself amidst the confusion of triumphing subhumanity, saw its highest striving embodied in the struggle for freedom conducted by old Fritz, as if a bronze pen has outlined Germanic nature in advance through all veils of time. But then, alongside this greatness, occurred the incomprehensible tragedy that the spiritual freedom possible to a great man became limited to small possessions, and his spirit which had striven to shape itself by a terrible but necessary discipline, was driven into the arms of French democracy brilliant with outward show. Napoleon encountered a Prussia given over to bewigged ostentation and outward show. The latter collapsed because it no longer thought in the manner of Frederick, but as pacifist liberalistic.

We have fallen asleep on the laurels of Frederick the Great,

wrote Queen Luise later to her father. But from this defeat there finally arose the idea of a united Germany; Prussia’s honour became Germany’s concern. Gneisenau and Blücher, Scharnhorst and Jahn, Arndt and Stein, were all the embodiment of the old concept of honour. They have also expressed this all their life long, like Queen Luise herself, who wished to do everything to ease the lot of her people, except what went against her feeling of honour.

We know all this, or should know, in the same way as the student bodies who unrolled their banners and climbed the barricades later, when weak and subservient spirit—those eternally unblessed consequences of the thirty years’ war, still dominant today—had cheated Germany of its supreme efforts during the war of liberation, until the dream of Germans then apparently found fulfilment on the battlefields of Metz, Mars la Tour, Saint Privat and Sedan. For the Versailles of 1871 was a political agreement devoid of any mythical outlook on the world. The unconditionality of the great German idea which made Blücher declare that if kings did not wish the elevation of their people, then they should be driven out; which occasioned Stein to put before the king of Prussia the choice of either signing the proclamation To my people, or going to Spandau; this unconditionality was lacking in the generation after 1871. The latter gave itself up to economics, to world trade, became freemasonic humanistic, became sated, forgot the task of enlarging its living space, and collapsed, disintegrated by democracy, Marxism and humanitarianism. Only today has the hour of rebirth come.

The humility of the Christian church and freemasonic humanitarianism were two forms by which the idea of love was preached as the highest value to human groups which were to be directed from some ambitious centre of power. The fact that many teachers of Christian humility as well as liberal humanism had no such intention did not play any role at all; it is merely a question of how the value proclaimed was utilised. At the end of the 19th century the idea of love appeared in a third form which was presented to us by Bolshevism: in the Russian doctrine of suffering and sympathy, symbolised in the Dostoyevskian man.

In his Diary, Dostoyevski speaks quite openly of an absolute, deeply rooted longing, among Russians, for suffering, for continual suffering; suffering in everything, even in enjoyment. On the basis of this, his characters act and live. Therefore in sympathy also lies the strongpoint of Russian morality. The people know that a criminal acts sinfully, but: There are unexpressed ideas ..... the description of a criminal as an unfortunate must be included in these ideas which are inherent in the Russian people. This idea is a purely Russian one.

Dostoyevski is the magnifying glass of the Russian soul; through his personality one can read the whole of Russia in its often incomprehensible diversity. In fact, the conclusions which he draws from his confession of belief are just as characteristic as his reflections when judging the condition of the Russian soul. He remarked that this idea of suffering is closely linked with traits of the impersonal and subjected. The Russian suicide, for example, has not the shadow of doubt that the self to be killed could be an immortal one. At the same time, he is not an atheist in any way. He has apparently heard nothing at all about this: Consider the earlier atheists: when they had lost faith in one thing, they immediately began to believe passionately in another. Consider the beliefs of Diderot, Voltaire ..... Completely TABVLA RASA with ours; indeed, and why make mention of Voltaire here? There is simply a lack of money to keep a lover to himself, and nothing more.

To find this recognition existing in a man who only wished to live to one day see his people happy and educated, is alarming and is made greater by Dostoyevski’s remark that in Russia there is no one who does not tell lies. In fact, the most honourable people of all can lie. First of all, because truth seems to bore a Russian; but secondly, because we are all ashamed of ourselves, and each makes efforts to unconditionally show himself as something other than he is. And despite all longing for knowledge and truth the Russian is nevertheless badly equipped. But here the reverse side of subjugation is revealed: unbounded arrogance. The Russian:

Perhaps understands nothing at all about the questions which he undertakes to solve, but he does not feel ashamed and his conscience is calm. This lack of conscience gives proof of such an indifference in relation to self criticism, of such a lack of self respect, that one falls into despair and loses hope of the nation ever possessing anything independent or bringing salvation.

Lieutenant Pirogow, in full uniform, is struck by a German on the street. After he has made sure that no one could have witnessed the incident, Pirogow flees into a side alley, in order as hero of the salon to make a proposal of marriage that same evening to an aristocratic lady. The latter knew nothing about the cowardice of her lover. Do you believe that she would have accepted him if she had known? Answer: She would have done so unconditionally.

Several Russians are travelling in a railway train with Justus van Liebig, the great chemist who, however, is recognised by none of them. One of them who understands nothing about chemistry begins to talk with Liebig on this subject. He talks beautifully and at length until reaching his station when he takes his luggage and leaves the compartment proudly and enormously satisfied with himself. But the The Myth of the 20th Century 49

other Russians never doubted for a moment that the charlatan had triumphed in the debate.

Dostoyevski attributes this self abasement (linked with sudden arrogance) to the cultivation over two hundred years of a total lack of self reliance and to constant spitting into the Russian face during a similar period which brought the Russian conscience into catastrophic subjection. Today we are forced to make another judgement, that there is something unhealthy, sick, bastardised in Russian blood, which again and again frustrates all attempts to reach the heights. Psychologism is not the consequence of a strong spiritual life, but exactly the opposite, a sign of a crippling of soul. Just as a wounded man will again and again feel and look at his wound, so a man sick of soul will examine his inner conditions. In the Russian idea of suffering and subjection, the most powerful tension exists between the values of love and honour. In the entire west the idea of honour and freedom broke through again and again, in spite of burnings at the stake and papal interdicts. With the Russian man, such as he became almost a prophet around the turn of the 20th century—not the slightest role is played by honour as a formative power. Mitya Karamasov, who kicks and ill treats his father, abasing himself again afterwards, is not familiar with the idea, nor the brooding Ivan, nor Stara Sossima (one of the most beautiful figures of Russian literature), not to mention old Karamasov himself. Prince Myshkin plays the sick idiotic role of a man devoid of personality to conclusion with shattering power. Ragoshin is of dissolute passion, a European backbone is also lacking to him. Raskolnikov is inwardly unbalanced, Smerdyakov finally the concentration of everything slavish, devoid of upward longing. To the latter are joined all those gesticulating students and sick revolutionaries who talk with one another entire nights long, debate without knowing in the end about what they actually argued. These are allegories of a sick blood, of a poisoned soul.

Once Turgenev looked around in Russia for a model of power and uprightness for the hero of a novel. He found no one suitable and chose a Bulgarian whom he called Insarov. Gorki descended to the dregs of society, described the tramp devoid of will, without faith, or at most only with such as glimmered like the glow of phosphorus in rotten wood. Andreyev created the man who received boxes on the ear, and as men they all confirm the bitter recognition by Shaadayev, that Russia belongs neither to the west nor to the east, that it is not governed by an organically strong tradition of its own. The Russian is a world exception in that he has not introduced a single new idea into the multitude produced by mankind, and everything which he has received of progress has been distorted by him. The Russian admittedly moves, but on a crooked line, which does not lead to any goal, and he is like a small child which cannot think correctly.

As elaborated, this recognition also slumbered in Dostoyevski; the lack of personality consciousness had clearly been recognised by him. But the torment of longing to nevertheless present the world with something original sprang from his idea of universal mankind, which was apparently to be regarded as synonymous with Russia. It is Russia which has presented in its bosom the true image of Christ, with the ultimate destiny, when the peoples of the west have lost the way, of revealing a new path of salvation to them. Suffering, sorrowing mankind is a prophecy for the coming message of Russia.

Today it is clear that Dostoyevski’s despairing attempt fundamentally resembles the behaviour of the Russian whom he had placed opposite to Justus von Liebig: a broken soul, devoid of personality, who arrogates to himself the position of conqueror of the world.

Dostoyevski had success spiritually among all Europeans who had fallen into a tired weariness, with all bastards of the great city and—disregarding his anti Semitic outlook—with the Jewish literary world, which saw in his characters and in Tolstoy’s barren pacifism a further welcome means for the disintegration of the west. The artistic power of Dostoyevski is not under debate here, but the characters as such, which he created, and the accompanying environment. From now on, everything which was sick, broken and decayed was held to be human. The humbled and persecuted became heroes, epileptics were represented as being problems of deep concern to mankind, as unassailable like the decaying holy beggars of the middle ages or Simon Stylites. By this the conception of Germanic man was transformed into its opposite. What the west regards as human is a hero like Achilles or the creative struggling Faust; human is a power like the untiring Leonardo; human is a struggle such as Richard Wagner and Frederick the Great embodied. A clearing out must be performed once and for all of this Russian disease of representing criminals as unfortunates, and rotten decayed men as symbols of humanity. Even the Indian, upon whom many Russians call (in a false way) accepts his fate as self guilt, as guilt from an earlier life. In whatever manner one interprets this Indian doctrine of the migration of souls, it is aristocratic, and once originated from a courageous heart. But Dostoyevskian lamentation about the power of darkness is the helpless stammering of a poisoned blood. This decayed blood created its highest value in the longing for suffering, in humility, universal human love, and became hostile to nature, as triumphant Rome once did, until Europe managed to a certain extent to shake off this ascetic Egyptian African masochism.

It is ill fated that today ancient Greek love is described by the same word in so called Christian teaching, and Dostoyevski and Platon are even mentioned in the same breath. The Eros of Greece was a spiritual exuberance, linked always with creative feeling for Nature, and the divine Platon is a completely different figure from that presented to us by theologians and professors. From Homeros to Platon, nature and love have been one, just as the highest art in Hellas remained racially connected. But church love set itself up not only against all ideas of race and people, but it even went beyond this. Zeno the holy said in the fourth century A.D.: The greatest renown of Christian virtue is to trample with the feet upon Nature. The church has faithfully followed this dogma wherever it could assert it. The insulting of the body as unclean has lasted uninterrupted into our days, when nationalism and the racial idea are combated as pagan. The Imitation of Jesus—to attain which the devout rolled themselves in ashes, beat themselves with whips, went about in pus and sores, loaded themselves with iron chains, sat on a pillar for thirty years like Simon Stylites, or, like holy Thalelaeos, spent ten years clamped inside a wagon wheel, to pass the remainder of his life in a narrow cage—all this was a parallel to the abstract good of Sokrates, and to later Dostoyevskian man.

It is not unnatural love, not an unrealisable community of the good and faithful, not a universal humanity with decomposed blood, which has always had a creative effect in culture and art, but, as in Hellas, fruitful Eros and racial beauty, in Germania honour and the dynamic of race. Whoever disregards these laws is incapable of showing the way to a strong future for the Germanic west.

With Dostoyevski one can virtually touch with the hand his great holy will in its constant struggle with the forces of decline. While he praises Russian man as the signpost of the European future, he already sees Russia delivered up to demons. He knows in advance who will be master in the play of forces: Unemployed lawyers and insolent Jews. Kerensky and Trotsky are predicted. In the year 1917, Russian Man finally disintegrated. He fell into two parts. The Nordic Russian blood gave up the struggle, the eastern Mongolian, The Myth of the 20th Century 50

powerfully stirred up, summoned Chinese and desert peoples to its aid, Jews and Armenians pushed forward to leadership, and the Kalmuch Tartar Lenin became master. The demonry of this blood directed itself instinctively against everything which outwardly still had some honest effect, looked manly and Nordic, like a living reproach against a type of man whom Lothrop Stoddard rightly described as the underman. Out of the impotent love of earlier grew an epileptic attack, carried through politically with all the energy of the insane. Smerdyakov ruled over Russia. Irrespective of in whatever way the Russian experiment may develop, Bolshevism as ruler has only been possible as the consequence of a racially and spiritually sick national body which could not decide in favour of honour, but only of bloodless love. Whoever desires a new Germany, will, as a result, also reject the Russian temptation from himself along with its Jewish manipulation. The turning away from the latter is already occurring. The future will record the results.

When the world war broke out, the leading men of national outlook in Germany, who were afflicted with sickness, did not recognise destiny as consisting either in the honour and freedom of the people or in love, but in trade. This poisoning necessarily led to a crisis, to a bursting of the swollen pus. This occurred on November 9, 1918. The ensuing times proved that all the old parties and their leaders were rotten, useless for a new structure of our state. They were forced to talk of the people and yet thought only of economics; they spoke of the unity of the Reich and yet thought of profits; they carried on Christian politics and diligently feathered their own nests. The spiritual and political situation of our times is therefore the following:

The old Syrian Jewish eastern church system has dethroned itself: starting from a dogma which did not correspond to the laws of spiritual structure of the Nordic west, in the effort to push to one side the culture carrying and creating ideas of the Nordic race—honour, freedom and duty—or to become evangelistic, this process of poisoning has led many times to the gravest disasters. Today we recognise that the highest central values of the Roman and protestant churches, as a negative form of Christianity, do not correspond to our soul, that they stand in the way of the organic powers of the peoples determined by the Nordic race, that they have to make way for the latter, must allow themselves to be revalued in the sense of a Germanic Christianity. This is the meaning of the present search after religious truth.

The old nationalism is dead. Once, in 1813, it flared up, but since then it has more and more forfeited its unconditional nature; it became poisoned by bureaucratic dynasticism, industrial politics, stock exchange profit economy, typified, thanks to humanitarian stupidity, in the idealless townsman of the nineteenth century, and finally collapsed on November 9, 1918, when its supporters and representatives ran away before a few hordes of deserters and jail birds.

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