"As a complete man with his honor unsullied, the honest Indo-European stands upright before his God or Gods. No religiosity which takes something away from man, to make him appear smaller before a deity who has become all-powerful and oppressive, is Indo-European. No religiosity which declares the world and man to be valueless, low and unclean, and which wishes to redeem man to over-earthly or superhuman sacred values, is truly Indo-European. Where "this world" is dropped, and in its place the "other world" is raised to eternal good, there the realm of Indo-European religiosity is abandoned."
-Hans Gunther
"The eternal Gods give everything utterly to their favorites: all joys, and all sorrows for all eternity- utterly and completely."
-Goethe
"If there's anything more powerful than Fate,
Then it's courage, which bears Fate unshaken."
-Geibel
* * *
Every writer or researcher worth the name who has studied the ancient Indo-Europeans has noticed something about the Teutonic branch of the family. They have noticed and remarked that the Teutons were unusually grim and fatalistic in their outlook on life. Even a short reading of the Eddas, Sagas, and other lore shows the deep belief that these noble people had in the idea of "inexorable fate". It is a cause of great regret and sadness to me that many modern Heathen writers, who should be carrying forth their Ancestors' belief in Fate, have either ignored it, or tried to water it down with cheap and false Christian models and notions of "free will".There is no basis for assuming that our Northern Ancestors believed in "Free Will" in the sense that it is usually known in the modern Christian west. As I will show, (aided considerably by Hans Gunther) not only does "free will" simply have no place in the worldview that is ruled by Orlog and Wyrd, but our Ancestors' essential religiosity cannot be understood or reclaimed so long as a person tries to force the foreign model of "free will" to fit into it.
For so long I have seen nominally "Heathen" writers and even self-proclaimed "leaders" of communities of Heathens doing mental gymnastics to force some idea of absolute "free will" to appear from authentic Heathen lore.
I have seen them claim that the mentions of the "dew" that falls from the branches and trunk of the World Tree and the water that flows in and out of the Spring or Well of Urd somehow represent the results from "deeds" that humans choose, which go on to influence other events, (the clear implication being that humans therefore have full, free choice in influencing the motion of events) even though this is nowhere stated in the lore itself. These ideas are modern interpolations, based on a need to find some sense of "free will" in the lore.
These modern ideas about what the "dew" and the "waters" all represent are, to use a phrase, manifestations of "unsubstantiated personal gnosis", the dreaded "UPG" that so many of these same people love to excoriate others over. Never is "free choice" or "will" mentioned- just dew, flowing water, white mud on the roots of the tree, and Norns who are given power in multiple sources of authentic Heathen lore over human lives, both their beginning and their end, and over other events besides.
A person can "read into" these things whatever meaning they desire- but how many people question precisely why they read what they read into them? And how many people simply ignore the great and well-attested belief in fate and destiny that appears in so many of our Ancestral sources of lore, when they decide what to read into these things? The answer to the first question is "not many". The answer to the second is "quite a few".
For a very long time I have seen writers bending over backwards to ignore what is written in the Eddas, regarding the Norns. Here's just one passage of many, their first mention in Voluspa:
Thence come the maidens, Mighty in wisdom,
Three from the place, Under the tree,
Wyrd is called one, Another Werðende
Scored they on wood, Scyld is the third;
There Laws they laid, There life chose,
To men's sons, And spoke Orlog. (Völuspa 20-25)
Here's an alternate translation:
Thence come the maidens, Mighty in wisdom,
Three from the dwelling, Down 'neath the tree;
Urth is one named, Verthandi the next,
On the wood they scored- And Skuld the third.
Laws they made there, And life alloted
To the sons of men, and set their fates.
Even though (assuming you understand what Orlog is) this passage is quite clear, some modern "heathens" have sided with non-Heathen writers like Bauschatz, and decided that "orlog" here can't literally mean what it says. Likewise, Bauschatz has dramatically decided that the term "to choose life" is "too vague to make any decision on as to its context".
Sure! To justify the modern assumption that our ancestors simply had to believe in free will, some scholar (who was no doubt raised a Christian, and in whom the Christian worldview exerts a massive influence) has managed to lead other modern "heathens" into a race of wishful thinking and "re-interpretation" of the lore. This is called "accomodation", and is a well-known historical practice, undertaken by commentators, when the truths about the past are simply too hard for the soft stomachs of modern people.
Before I turn to Hans Gunther's insights and scholarship, (and please read the important note on Hans Gunther at end of this article) I would like to begin with a more accessible favorite of mine. Brian Bates, in his incredible work "The Way of Wyrd", gives us a fictional meeting of minds between a Christian scribe named Wat Brand and a Heathen Seid-man and Sorcerer named Wulf. One of the topics they discuss is Free Will. The relevant passages, narrated by the skeptical Wat Brand, follow:
"Wulf reached over and fingered the sleeve of my tunic. "The weave of this cloth reveals to us the pattern of Wyrd," he said. "Your individual destiny is laid out on a loom. All the incidents in your life, all the dreams, thoughts, fears, are a pattern woven on to the loom. The duration of your life is measured by the vertical thread, held taught by the weights of life-force. The horizontal threads of the loom are the forces to be encountered during the course of your life, rather than days and nights. The patterns woven on to this loom is the pattern of your life, and the pattern is woven by the Three Sisters of Wyrd."
I breathed a deep sigh of relief for I knew that Wulf had not attempted to delude me and that his healing exploits were genuine. His error was simply in believing that disparate events were joined in some way other than being part of God's kingdom. Only by the hand of the Lord could events be connected without regard to time or location. And in the Three Sisters of Wyrd I knew now the faulty basis for his bizarre beliefs; in Mercia I had heard that warriors told tales of female spirits, three wild women who were dealers in death, choosing in battle those who would die and those who would live. But in the truth the teachings of Christ the Savior would not allow us to believe such superstition, for it rested on the blasphemous belief that our lives were under the control of such spirits. My memory fed me Brother Eappa's words: "When the Creator made mankind, he gave free will to the first people." Confidently, I retaliated.
"Wulf, I cannot allow myself to believe that life is controlled by such forces, for our God teaches that individuals are born of free will. Even when people transgress God's command and obey the devil, they become guilty through their own free will."
Wulf looked at me, his brow furrowed in obvious puzzlement. "The devil? Is this a spirit?"
I felt a spasm of unease. "He is not to be dwelt on, Wulf. Know only that he is anathema to our God."
"But how are people influenced by this "devil", if he is not a spirit with powers?"
"By free will. People go against the laws of God by free will and are therefore drawn by the accursed devil."
Wulf did not seem able to grasp my argument. The blessed truth of God's gift of free will was beyond him. He lay back on the bed and gazed into the roof-thatch. Eventually he rolled over to face me again.
"There is no need for your free will. Although the Wyrd Sisters spin the web of Wyrd and weave the loom of life, they do not thereby determine it, for they are agents of Wyrd and are therefore just as much a part of the pattern as we. The Wyrd Sisters simply express the will of Wyrd. And so do we. We cannot control our lives, because we too are inseparable aspects of Wyrd and express its will. But this is not the same thing as saying that our life is determined. Rather, it is saying we live like an ocean voyager, trimming our sails to the winds and tides of Wyrd as we skim across the waters of life. And cresting the waves of Wyrd is something that happens at every instant. The pattern of life is not woven ahead of time, like cloth to be worn later as a tunic. Rather, life is woven at the very instant you live it."
I stared at the weave of my tunic. Wulf seemed to be talking in riddles, but I was intrigued by his convictions.
"Wulf, how does a person who shares your views live in accord with Wyrd? If there is no free will, how can someone change his life for the better?"
"Patterns change as they are woven. A pattern that is complex has more scope for change, for there are many themes on which a new pattern may be based. But even the simplest of lives changes over the course of time. The task of a sorcerer is to become fully aware and sensitive to all nuances of his life-design as it unfolds. Aware, as the weaver, of all the forces that impinge upon the pattern- all colours, shapes, textures. With a weaver like Wyrd, there are no limits to the possible designs and we can never fully appreciate all of our own design. But we can try."
Bates, speaking through the incomparable wisdom of Wulf, expresses the point perfectly. People who believe in free will immediately leap to the question- "Then how can we change our lives for the better?" The answer is simple, right before their eyes, though they are typically too selfish or dull to receive it: Life changes. Every life changes. Wyrd is change. Wyrd is always changing; everything is in motion. You don't change your life; your life is you changing. You don't unfold your life-design; your life design unfolds on its own. Your task is awareness.That's not enough for most people. They want to be the weavers of Wyrd themselves. But they aren't, and they never will be. What they WILL be are people who convince themselves that they have a lot of power that they don't have.
But here is where the argument gets really good- it is Wyrd, it is Fate that these people should feel as they do. The people who refuse to believe in Wyrd or Fate are Wyrded to not believe in it, and to struggle against it.
And that is the subject of the second part of my post here: How our ancestors believed in Fate, yet fought hard and struggled every day of their lives to make a better life for themselves.
Hans Gunther, in his well-researched work "Religious Attitudes of the Indo-Europeans", makes the single statement that sums up so much about the Indo-European peoples:
"The great element of tragedy in the poetry of the Indo-European peoples stems from the tension resulting from his sense of destiny."
"Tension resulting from his sense of destiny" is the key. Fate is the power that dominates the lives of both mortals and the Gods, in genuine Indo-European Pagan and heathen philosophical thinking. Despite the fact of merciless Fate, each person is driven to struggle, even at times against Fate and the Gods. There is a great tension here, and a sense of doom, as the world and the Gods are driven by inexorable Fate to an end- Ragnarok among the Teutons is just one example. The idea of a people who believe in Fate and ultimately accept it, and yet, who are fated to struggle with the inexorable nature of Fate, is a most powerful idea, and more than any other idea I've encountered, it goes a long way towards helping us answer the "hard questions" about life.
Because what no one wants to admit, and yet, what our Indo-European ancestors readily admitted and accepted, is that life is a fated double-bind. We have limits set by Fate that cannot be exceeded, yet, we are fated to desire to exceed them. We are fated to struggle, and even to define ourselves by struggle, fated to lose or to win, to live and to die, and the whole time there is a sense of tension, of doom, of energy that makes us feel that life is so infinite and full of possibility. Life, the Web of Wyrd, is infinite and full of possibility- but we are not the weavers of the Web of Wyrd.
We enjoy the same sense of the infinite and the awesome that all living beings enjoy, by virtue of our participation in Wyrd. But no matter how much we want to avoid it or go into denial over it, we- as human beings- are not capable of being the masters of Wyrd or of our "destinies". We are capable of becoming aware of our true place in the very large scheme of things, and finding peace and acceptance, and with it, true wisdom. We are capable of penetrating into the very roots of existence itself, like the Allfather did, and finding a special power within those mysterious insights, but when we find ourselves doing this, tapping these powers, we are fulfilling Wyrd, acting as agents of the weaving of a Wyrd which is not born "only of ourselves", but in the great and ancient layers of Ur-law and the constant dynamism of reality itself. We are not writing Wyrd, or weaving it; in those blessed moments of insight, We are consciously experiencing what we naturally are- intrinsic and sacred parts of the Weaving. Any sense of "personal flaw" or "personal weakness" falls away in light of this great moment of truth and clarity, as does any sense that the events of our lives are "meaningless".
The tension-filled emotional/mental/spiritual reality of "being bound by Fate, yet struggling against Fate" is the supreme defining factor of authentic Indo-European spirituality. How we express our courage- and even at times our acceptance- in the face of that tension reveals to the world just what sort of people we are.
To accept a religion or philosophy that relieves a man of this tension is the supreme act of cowardice, and when that tension is lost, the true and noble essence of Indo-European Pagan religion is no longer available to that person.
I shall turn to Gunther now, and give some of his more penetrating insights, before I make some comments on the devastating consquences of the Eastern/Semitic thinking that came to permeate Europe and the rest of the world through Christianity and Islam, and the impact of its destruction of the more natural and realistic wisdom of the Indo-European peoples.
What becomes of a world where the acceptance of Fate and Destiny becomes corrupted by a belief in "free will", a belief which always arises when the belief in infinite world-cycles of repeating time becomes replaced by the false and shallow belief in "linear time"? A dangerous attitude arises and begins to destroy the fabric of life itself: the Greeks called it "hubris". Under the influence of hubris, humans begin to over-reach themselves in tragic ways, thinking that they are equal to the Gods.
Gunther writes:
"The fear of human hubris, of self overreaching, comes from the depths of the Hellenistic soul, and in the face of all hubris the limited man is admonished to keep his ordained position in the timeless ordering of the world, into which the Gods also had to fit themselves. It is the Indo-European's destiny to stand proudly, and with an aristocratic confidence and resolution, but always aware of his own limitations, face to face with the boundlessness of the Gods- and no human species has felt this sense of destiny more deeply than the Indo-Europeans; the great element of tragedy in the poetry of the Indo-European peoples stems from the tension resulting from this sense of destiny."
How the Indo-European peoples could fall victim to foreign philosophies and religions that underminded their own fundamental way of seeing the world is a question many have asked. One such man, quite a foolish man and an apologist for Christianity named W. Baetke, assumed that the anxiety arising from the Fatalism of the Indo-European way of thinking made the Indo-European peoples "ripe for redemption" or for the acceptance of the Christian worldview. To this, Gunther responds:
"It is completely impossible to conclude as W. Baetke has done, that tragic destiny signified for the Indo-Europeans a ban or spell and brought about an anxiety of destiny, which made them ripe for redemption. Not the God of Destiny, he claims, but the redeemer God brought the Teutons to the fulfillment of their religious longings. The conversion of the Teutons to Christianity can only be explained by assuming that amongst them many men of softer heart could not withstand the gaze from the eyes of a merciless destiny and- against all reality- took their refuge in the dream image of a merciful God. Indo-European men of stronger heart have always been, like Fredrick the Great, born Stoics, who standing upright like the devout Vergil, have recognized a merciless Fate."
Gunther makes it clear that despite the acceptance of Fate, the Indo-European peoples were never "fatalistic" in the usual sense of the word, for they never simply submitted to whatever unsatisfactory realities their lives might bring them. They struggled, the most noble among them being born warriors. They accepted Fate while at times struggling with it, and in so doing were driven to great glory.Without a doubt, however, Gunther's greatest summation of the essential religiosity of the Indo-Europeans (especially the Northern peoples) comes in this excellent passage:
"H.R. Ellis Davidson has strikingly described the religiosity of the Scandanavians, whose Gods like men were subject to destiny: "Men knew that the Gods whom they served could not give them freedom from danger and calamity, and they did not demand that they should. We find in the myths no sense of bitterness at the harshness and unfairness of life, but rather a spirit of heroic resignation: humanity is born to trouble, but courage, adventure, and the wonders of life are matters for thankfulness, to be enjoyed while life is still granted to us. The great gifts of the Gods were readiness to face the world as it was, the luck that sustains men in tight places, and the opportunity to win that glory which can alone survive death."
Gunther goes on to say:
"This is the Indo-European view of destiny, the Indo-European joy in destiny, and for the Indo-Europeans life and belief would be feebly relaxed, if this spectacle were withdrawn in favor of a redeeming God... but I repeat, this Indo-European view of destiny has nothing to do with fatalism... According to his whole nature, the Indo-European cannot even wish to be redeemed from the tension of his destiny-bound life. The loosening of this tension would have signified for him a weakening of his religiosity. The very fact of being bound to destiny has from the beginning proved to be the source of his spiritual existence. "The heart's weave would not have foamed upwards so beautifully and become spirit, if the old silent rock, destiny, had not faced it."
Being true to yourself in the midst of what can be seen as a grim reality is a powerful statement, one that has been shared by all people in all times, but expressed never so purely as by the Indo-European heroes, like Achilles, Hector, the heroes of the Icelandic Sagas, and others. Gunther writes:
"It has been said that the Teutonic conception of life was a Pan-tragedy, an attitude which conceives all existence and events of the world as borne along by an ultimately tragic primal ground. But this Pan-tragedy, which appears almost super-consciously with the true Teuton, Hebbel, is not solely Teutonic, and is found amongst all Indo-Europeans, permeating all Indo-European religiosity. The Indo-European becomes a mature man only through his life of tension before destiny. The Teutonic hero, superbly characterized by the Icelandic Sagas, loftily understands the fate meeting him as his destiny, remains upright in the midst of it, and is thus true to himself. Aeschylus commented similarly when he said "Wise men are they who honor Adrasteia", Adrasteia being a Hellenic Goddess of destiny."
Gunther goes on to say:
"Erik Therman has found a "mocking defiance in the face of destiny, a struggle against this destiny despite recognition of its supreme power" to be characteristic of the Edda and many of the Icelandic tales. Such a defiance also still speaks from the Medieval Nibelungenlied, which astonished Goethe by its non-Christian character, which characterized Teutonic imperturbability in the face of merciless destiny."
Finally, Gunther addresses the issue of how the true Indo-European person (that is, a person who has the strength and courage enough to understand and recognize inexorable Fate) can perfect themselves. He writes:
"It is not by dissolving the question of destiny in the idea of redemption that the Indo-European can perfect his nature- for such redemption would probably appear to him as an evasion; his nature is perfected solely through proving himself in the face of destiny. "This above all: to thine own self be true! The certainty of a destiny has not made the true Indo-European seek redemption, and even when his destiny caused him to tremble, he never turned to contrition of fearful awareness of "sin". Aeschylus, who was completely permeated by Hellenic religiosity and by the power of the divine, stands upright, like every Indo-European, before the immortal Gods, and despite every shattering experience, has no feeling of sin. Thus, Indo-European religiosity is not concerned with anxiety or self-damnation, or contrition, but with the man who would honor the divinity by standing up squarely amid the turmoil of destiny to pay him homage."
How powerful! How superior is this way of seeing and thinking to the typical and cowardly religious nonsense that today permeates the Western world! In these words of pure force and clarity, we can see how the West was truly lost- how the noble standards that were held up by our ancient Grandmothers and Grandfathers were stolen from us, to be replaced by eastern religious ideals in which humans were forced "below" and some false notion of "God" was raised above, a God before whom humans were expected to "repent" and grovel in the grip of their imaginary "sins". The noble tension of destiny, which etched character into the souls of our ancestors, and which gave our heroes their noble character, was destroyed and tossed aside for the false relief offered by stupid and impossible ideas of "free will".
And to make matters worse, some people today actually believe that this change was a GOOD thing! One such man is Thomas Cahill, who wrote a book that I saw on the shelves of a bookstore this weekend, a book entitled: "The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels". I looked on the back of the book, and there the following was written:
"In The Gifts of the Jews, Thomas Cahill, author of the bestselling How the Irish Saved Civilization, reveals the critical change that made Western civilization possible. Within the matrix of ancient religions and philosophies, life was seen as part of an endless cycle of birth and death; time was like a wheel, spinning irrevocably until ancient Jews began to see time differently, as a narrative whose triumphant conclusion would come in the future. From this insight came a new concept of men and women as individuals with unique destinies, and our hopeful belief in progress and the sense that tommorrow can be better than today."
I nearly became sick in the bookstore. Here, in one short paragraph, was the very death of the Truth, and the destruction of my Ancestors' wisdom. And not only was it their deaths, but a celebration, by the fool Cahill, of the untruths that have become widely accepted and which have brought us so low in the modern day. Look closely again at what the back cover of this "best-selling" book is really saying:
It begins by completely writing off the truth that all Indo-European peoples knew: that time is not linear, but a great cycle, and that all of the worlds have existed before, will end, and exist again in a great world-regeneration.
To this very day, that Indo-European wisdom exists in the beliefs of living Hindus and Buddhists, who are (outside of the brave men and women who practice Asatru and other revivalist Indo-European Pagan faiths) among the last people to benefit from this powerful and truthful perspective on life.
It was a real tragedy- a departure from the truth due to the worst breed of wishful thinking- that led the ancient Hebrews to fantasize that "time" was a narrative, a linear story told and directed by their God, with a "triumphant" ending, an ending that culminated in the benefit of their people being restored to life after their deaths, and restored as God's "chosen" again, in a paradisal world.
It is wishful thinking; it bears no relationship to reality. Christians who inherited this foolishness are likewise lost in the most wretched depths of wishful thinking. When Christianity largely replaced the ancestral faiths of the Indo-Europeans, our Ancestors were doomed to leave their children to live in a world ruled by untruth.
But the back cover of this book goes further- it actually becomes insulting. It presumes, outright, that our ancestors who accepted the TRUTH of the cyclical nature of time did not believe that men and women were "individuals" nor people with "unique destinies". This is a savage falsehood. All of our ancestors accorded men and women individuality, and the idea that each person had a unique destiny is ancient among the Indo-Europeans. By extension, Cahill is saying that Buddhists and Hindus alive today who accept the cyclical nature of time and reality cannot give dignity and accord unique destiny to human beings, but we know this is false, as Buddhism accords real dignity and respect to men and women, and does so in a profoundly deep manner.It is worth pointing out here that Cahill's book has been rightly and soundly criticized by people, for the simple fact that he blatantly ignores the many formative contributions of the Greeks, the Romans, and many other great people in the creation of the modern Western world, and chooses to focus completely and sycophantically on the Jews.
This is a typical attitude for Christians, and few attitudes are more disgusting from the perspective of ancestral spirituality. We are the sons and daughters of Indo-Europeans, and to vampirically suck off of the legacy of people who are not our Grandmothers and Grandfathers is the greatest dishonor we can do to our ancestors. Cahill is an example of a modern degenerate who is so far out of touch with his own ancestral roots that he lies dying on the ground, cut off from his true source, and blindly gropes in the corners of other people's spiritual history to find some meaning for his own life.
Jewish people alive today have their own organic spiritual and ancestral legacy, and they, through every era of their history, have been very honest and attentive to it. No one can accuse the Jews of selling themselves like whores to the beliefs and philosophies and religions of foreign people! They are known for sternly and conservatively perserving their own beliefs and cultural uniqueness in any place they have gone to live, despite the scorn they have received for this from many of their neighbors.
Thus, we can all learn a lot from the Jewish peoples with respect to our own search for ancestral faith and piety, but before we can actualize our own cultural uniqueness, we must stop trying to be other people, and stop co-opting the heritage of other peoples for our own. Europeans have done this to the Jewish people for too long.
If we respect them (the Jews) as a unique people, which they certainly are, we have to act respectful and stop forcibly inserting ourselves into their cultural hamingja and making plunder of it, to make up for our own lack of identity. It became so bad at one point, that European academics in earlier centuries did their best to "prove" that the "ten lost tribes of Israel" were the source and origin of the peoples of Europe. Some very ignorant people still believe this, though science has long ago shown that Europeans are from different stock than Semitic peoples.
We sons and daughters of the Indo-Europeans (whether we be their physical or spiritual descendants) have our own unique heritage and way of seeing the world, and we need it now, more than ever. Our lost souls can no longer remain deluded. I am not an unrealistic purist; all cultures will have influences on each other, in this small world of interaction that we live in. But if we look at modern Jewish people, we see a good example of a people who have, despite influences from outside cultures, managed to maintain their ancestors' unique way of seeing the world. The sons and daughters of the Indo-Europeans can do the same.
I support Muslims and Christians who wish to stubbornly remain who and what they are, entrenched in moronic worldviews that keep them asleep in delusion; I support modern Jews who wish to maintain a separate existence from their neighbors, and keep their religious beliefs alive and expressed in their unique cultural ways.Never mind the fact that I think modern monotheistic beliefs are absurd; that beliefs like "there is only one God" or "there is only linear time, beginning at creation and ending at God's will, followed by a single judgment" and the concept of "redemption" are foolish ideas of the worst kind; never mind that I know for a fact that these things do not exist in any place except for the wishful thinking of people who simply cannot face the power of inexorable Fate. The undeniable fact is that people who believe these things are, in my estimation, Fated to believe as they do, possibly as a warning to the rest of us of the devastating consequences of fleeing from our duty as human beings to stand upright in the face of hardship, and to face the truth.
After all, what Fate have the sons and daughters of Israel received for their beliefs and their strange ways of looking at the world? Certainly not peace and prosperity; they are a tiny people, a diaspora people, a long-persecuted people, still telling themselves over and over again that their God will "make it all better" one day, while the actual Gods have little chance to help them on account of the fact that their ancestors broke their bonds of friendship with the Gods ages ago. Even their own scriptures give us an account of Hebraic women lamenting the loss of their traditional Goddesses and Gods, and the pain, hunger, and violence that swept over their society when they were forced to abandon Pagan truths.
What have Christians and Muslims done for the world? What has their acceptance of their own fairy tales done for them and for the rest of us? It certainly hasn't brought them- or the world- any peace. Instead, they have bathed the world in oceans of blood. They created the world that we live in now on the plundered remains of the brilliant cultures of antiquity which they helped to destroy, and with them were destroyed the lion's share of the wisdom and scientific and philosophical advancements of antiquity.
Living as they do in their own spiritual denial, far distant from the truth, monotheists have been unconsciously and forcefully inspired to acts of madness and fear, acts of maniacal desperation to "convert" everyone else who maintained other religious worldviews. The new order cannot allow vestiges of the old to persist, especially not when the old order stares at them with accusing eyes, reminding their deeply guilty spirits that they have shirked the truth to embrace a lie.
I support any people who have a legitimate ancestral tradition to return to it and/or preserve it, and I support their right to live unharmed and unhindered. It's not truly my business what ethnic peoples from around the world wish to do with their ancestors' beliefs, regardless of how false I may think those beliefs are. It IS my business, however, to address the real loss of the unique and important ways of thinking that were once found among the Indo-European peoples, and to seek for those alive today who are strong enough to return to the unique Indo-European way of seeing the world. So long as I do not harm others nor suggest they be harmed, I have the same right they have: to disagree with their beliefs, or to call their beliefs false. And so I do.
They certainly do the same to me; but life and reason itself will show who is "correct" when our minds are examined: in whose mind do we find suffocating anxiety and guilt, which must be assuaged through farsical beliefs in scapegoating saviors or adherence to the dead set of some "law" that was supposedly actually written on tablets by some great God? Not mine. In whose mind do we find fairy-tale stories about "heavenly rewards for the righteous" and "free will" and "salvation" and "physical eternal life"? Not mine. In whose mind do we find pernicious religious teachings that suggest that newborn infants are born in sin, deserving of everlasting hellfire? Not mine.
In whose mind is there a hope for facing our difficult world that is based on a belief in a big "merciful God" who is protecting me, or on what reward I might get after I die? Not mine. In whose mind will you find sexual repression and tension, hatred for natural feelings and emotions, or dissatisfaction with this world? Not mine. In whose mind will you find outrageous religious beliefs justifying the repression of women, or the hatred of homosexuals? Not mine. If you're a Christian, you no doubt think that my mind is swimming in oceans of sin. If you're sane, on the other hand, your opinion of me will likely be quite different.
Cahill's ridiculous book claims it was only when we replaced the ancient and truthful Indo-European belief in the endless cycles of time with the Semitic belief in linear time, that we were able to accord men and women a sense of uniqueness, and to believe that "progress and a better tommorrow" was possible. Without this change, he says, "Western civilization" wasn't possible. This infuriating and untruthful statement is really believed by many foolish people today, whose actual spiritual and historical legacy has been stolen from them, and buried under layers of ignorance.
It was the Greeks who laid the foundations for democracy, for the idea of humanism, and the entire edifice of western art and science. They were in the Promethean heights of "civilization" long before many other peoples knew the meaning of the word.
It was the Teutons that believed in trials by jury, who accorded women the right to divorce husbands at will, and whose spirit of independance and freedom led to the foundation of a society totally governed by assemblies of free people. It was the Indo-European spirit that always treasured individuality, hated tyranny, limited the powers of kings, and which expected nothing from the world beyond a hard destiny which they knew they had to face with nobility.
They didn't expect some great reward for their noble actions towards other humans; the seat of their morality was in the noble individual, who treated others well because that was simply the sort of person they were. With few exceptions, we will never see a human being of this nobility ever again.
* * *
Note on the works of Hans F.K. Gunther: Hans Gunther was a professor at the University of Frieburg and a proponent of racial science under the National Socialist government of Germany in the last century. He was found, after the conclusion of the last World War and after a stringent trial and investigation, to be unconnected to the horrid atrocities of the former ruling party. The single work of Gunther's that was quoted in this article, "Religious Attitudes of the Indo-Europeans", is not a work of racist propaganda, but a legitimate historical review of religious attitudes among historical Indo-European peoples.
I have no connection with or sympathy for the Nazi party, either the historical Nazis or the modern "neo" Nazis. This particular work of Gunther's is a good work, in my opinion, for pointing out the important differences between Indo-European religious thinking and the religious thinking of other peoples with whom the Indo-Europeans came into contact. I have not read, nor do I endorse any of the other works by Gunther, especially his books regarding race and eugenics, which no doubt contain many outdated and unscientific ideas about "race". Gunther was, in final analysis, a product of his times. If close proximity to the ruling party of Germany during World War II is enough reason to ignore a man's writings, I suppose people should ignore the writings of the current Pope of the Catholic Church, Joseph Ratzinger, who was a member of the Hitlerjugend.
