Rome V.S. Germania: Ex Septentrione Lux
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A Compilation of Excerpts from (Proto-)National Socialist Intellectuals on the Racial History, Conquest, and Redemption of a Degenerate, Cosmopolitan Rome by an Amorphous, Rag-Tag Confederacy of a Young and Inexperienced Peasantry of Dormant Teutonic Übermensches—Absent Any Knowledge of Statecraft, but Brimming with Untapped Racial Energy & Potential
"You consider me to be a uneducated man: a barbarian. Well yes! We are barbarians! That's our intention. It’s an honorary title; For we are the ones who will rejuvenate the world!”
»Sie halten mich für ungebildet, für einen Barbaren.« »Ja! Wir sind Barbaren. Wir wollen es sein. Es ist ein Ehrentitel. Wir sind es, die die Welt verjüngen werden.«
—Hermann Rauschning; Hitler Speaks: A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on His Real Aims Book by Hermann Rauschning`
On the Origin of the Goths
The people of the Goths is a very ancient one. [...] [T]he meaning of their name in our language is tectum, by which is meant strength, and rightly so, for there was never a people on earth that succeeded in exhausting the Roman empire to such an extent. These were the ones that Alexander himself declared should be avoided, the ones that Pyrrhus feared, the ones that made Cæsar shudder. —Isidore of Seville
- Rome VS Germania—Overview
- Houston Stewart Chamberlain on Teutonic Superiority
- Alfred Rosenberg on Rome
- Richard Walther Darré on the Contrast Between the Germanic Peaseantry and the Roman State
- Hans F. K. Günther on the Nordic Race in Rome
- Sir Edward Creasy on Arminius' Victory Over the Roman Legions Under Varus (A.D. 9)
- Procopius on Gothic Valor: A Brief History of the Rise and Fall of Teïas, the Last Ostrogothic King of Italy
- Salvian Explains Roman Affinity and Preference for the Sometimes-Naive-but-Always-Inherenly-Just Barbarian Constitution Over the Insidious Duplicity of an Entrenched Roman Bureaucracy
Houston Stewart Chamberlain on Teutonic Superiority
[Excerpts from Houston Stewart Chamberlain's Foundations of the Ninteenth Century (1899)]
The Teutonic Peoples
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There is no doubt about it! The raceless and nationless chaos of the late Roman Empire was a pernicious and fatal condition, a sin against nature. Only one ray of light shone over that degenerate world. It came from the north. Ex septentrione Lux! If we take up a map, the Europe of the fourth century certainly seems at the first glance to be more or less in a state of chaos even north of the Imperial boundary; we see quite a number of races established side by side, incessantly forcing their way in different directions: the Alemanni, the Marcomanni, the Saxons, the Franks, the Burgundians, the Goths, the Vandals, the Slavs, the Huns and many others. But it is only the political relations that are chaotic there; the nations are genuine, pure-bred races, men who carry with them their nobility as their only possession wherever destiny drives them. In one of the next chapters I shall have to speak of them. In the meantime I should like merely to warn those whose reading is less wide, against the idea that the “barbarians” suddenly “broke into” the highly civilised Roman Empire. This view, which is widespread among the superficially educated, is just as little in accordance with the facts as the further view that the “night of the Middle Ages” came down upon men because of this inroad of the barbarians.
It is this historical lie which veils the annihilating influence of that nationless time, and which turns into a destroyer the deliverer, the slayer of the laidly worm. For centuries the Teutons had been forcing their way into the Roman Empire, and though they often came as foes, they ended by becoming the sole principle of life and of might. Their gradual penetration into the Imperium, their gradual rise to a decisive power had taken place little by little just as their gradual civilisation had done; [Note: Hermann is a Roman cavalier, speaks Latin fluently and has thoroughly studied the Roman art of administration. So, too, most of the Teutonic princes. Their troops, too, were at home in the whole Roman empire and so acquainted with the customs of so-called civilised men, long before they immigrated with all their goods and chattels into these lands.] already in the fourth century one could count numerous colonies of soldiers from entirely different Teutonic tribes (Batavians, Franks, Suevians, &c.) in the whole European extent of the Roman Empire; [Note: See Gobineau: Inequality of the Human races, Bk. VI. chap. iv.] in Spain, in Gaul, in Italy, in Thrace, indeed often even in Asia Minor, it is Teutons in the main that finally fight against Teutons. It was Teutonic peoples that so often heroically warded off the Asiatic peril from the Eastern Empire; it was Teutonic people that on the Catalaunian fields saved the Western Empire from being laid waste by the Huns. Early in the third century a bold Gothic shepherd had been already proclaimed Emperor. One need only look at the map of the end of the fifth century to see at once what a uniquely beneficent moulding power had here begun to assert itself. Very noteworthy too is the difference which reveals itself here in a hundred ways, between the innate decency, taste and intuition of rough but pure, noble races and the mental barbarism of civilised mestizos. Theodosius, his tools (the Christian fanatics) and his successors had done their best to destroy the monuments of art; on the other hand, the first care of Theodoric, the Eastern Goth, was to take strong measures for the protection and restoration of the Roman monuments. This man could not write, to sign his name he had to use a metal stencil, but the Beautiful, which the bastard souls in their “Culture,” in their hunting after offices and distinctions, in their greed of gold had passed by unheeded, the Beautiful, which to the nobler souls among the Chaos of Peoples was a hateful work of the devil, the Goth at once knew how to appreciate; the sculptures of Rome excited his admiration to such a degree that he appointed a special official to protect them. Religious toleration, too, appeared for a time wherever the still unspoiled Teuton became master. Soon also there came upon the scene the great Christian missionaries from the highlands of the north, men who convinced not by means of “pious lies” but by the purity of their hearts.
It is nothing but a false conception of the Middle Ages, in conjunction with ignorance as to the significance of race, which is responsible for the regrettable delusion that the entry upon the scene of the rough Teutons meant the falling of a pall of night over Europe. It is inconceivable that such hallucinations should be so long-lived. If we wish to know to what lengths the bastard culture of the Empire might have led, wo must study the history, the science and the literature of the later Byzantium, a study to which our historians are devoting themselves to-day with a patience worthy of a better subject. It is a sorry spectacle. The capture of the Western Roman Empire by the Barbarians, on the contrary, works like the command of the Bible, “Let there be Light.” It is admitted that its influence was mainly in the direction of politics rather than of civilisation; and a difficult task it was—one that is even now not wholly accomplished. But was it a small matter? Whence does Europe draw its physiognomy and its significance—whence its intellectual and moral preponderance, if not from the foundation and development of Nations? This work was in very truth the redemption from chaos. If we are something to-day—if we may hope perhaps some day to become something more—we owe it in the first instance to that political upheaval which, after long preparation, began in the fifth century, and from which were born in the fulness of time new noble races, new beautiful languages, and a new culture entitling us to nourish the keenest hopes for the future. Dietrich of Berne, the strong wise man, the unlearned friend of art and science, the tolerant representative of Freedom of Conscience in the midst of a world in which Christians were tearing one another to pieces like hyenas, was as it were a pledge that Day might once more break upon this poor earth. In the time of wild struggle that followed, during that fever by means of which alone European humanity could recover and awaken from the hideous dream of the degenerate curse-laden centuries of a chaos with a veneer of order to a fresh, healthy, stormily pulsing national life—in such a time learning and art and the tinsel of a so-called civilisation might well be almost forgotten, but this, we may swear, did not mean Night, but the breaking of a new Day. It is hard to say what authority the scribblers have for honouring only their own weapons. Our European world is first and foremost the work not of philosophers and book-writers and painters, but of the great Teuton Princes, the work of warriors and statesmen. The progress of development—obviously the political development out of which our modern nations have sprung—is the one fundamental and decisive matter. We must not, however, overlook the fact that to these true and noble men we equally owe everything else that is worth possessing. Every one of those centuries, the seventh, the eighth, the ninth, produced great scholars; but the men who protected and encouraged them were the Princes. It is the fashion to say that it was the Church that was the saviour of science and of culture; that is only true in a restricted sense. As I shall show in the next division of the first part of this book, we must not look upon the Early Christian Church as a simple, uniform organism, not even within the limits of the Roman union in Western Europe; the centralisation and obedience to Rome which we have lived to see to-day, were in earlier centuries absolutely unknown. We must admit that almost all learning and art were the property of the Church; her cloisters and schools were the retreats and nurseries in which in those rough times peaceful intellectual work sought refuge; but the entry into the Church as monk or secular priest meant little more than being accepted into a privileged and specially protected class, which imposed upon the favoured individual hardly any return in the way of special duties. Until the thirteenth century every educated man, every teacher and student, every physician and professor of jurisprudence belonged to the clergy: but this was a matter of pure formality, founded exclusively upon certain legal conditions; and it was out of this very class, that is, out of the men who best knew the Church, that every revolution against her arose—it was the Universities that became the high-schools of national emancipation. The Princes protected the Church, the learned clerics on the contrary attacked her. That is the reason why the Church waged unceasing war against the great intellects which, that they might work in peace, had sought refuge with her; had she had her way, science and culture would never again have been fledged. But the same Princes who protected the Church also protected the scholars whom she persecuted. No later than the ninth century there arose in the far north (out of the schools of England, which even in those early days were rich in important men) the great Scotus Erigena: the Church did all that she could to extinguish this brilliant light, but Charles the Bald, the same man who was supposed to have sent great tribute to the Pope of Rome, stretched his princely hand over Scotus; when this became insufficient, Alfred bade him to England where he raised the school of Oxford to a pinnacle of success, till he was stabbed to death by monks at the bidding of the central government of the Church. From the ninth century to the nineteenth, from the murder of Scotus to the issue of the Syllabus, it has been the same story. A final judgment shows the intellectual renaissance to be the work of Race in opposition to the universal Church which knows no Race, the work of the Teuton’s thirst for knowledge, of the Teuton’s national struggle for freedom. Great men in uninterrupted succession have arisen from the bosom of the Catholic Church; men to whom, as we must acknowledge, the peculiar catholic order of thought with its all-embracing greatness, its harmonious structure, its symbolical wealth and beauty has given birth, making them greater than they could have become without it; but the Church of Rome, purely as such, that is to say, as an organised secular theocracy, has always behaved as the daughter of the fallen Empire, as the last representative of the universal, anti-national Principle. Charlemagne by himself did more for the diffusion of education and knowledge than all the monks in the world. He caused a complete collection to be made of the national poetry of the Teutons. The Church destroyed it. I spoke a little while ago of Alfred. What Prince of the Church, what schoolman, ever did so much for the awakening of new intellectual powers, for the clearing up of living idioms, for the encouragement of national consciousness (so necessary at that time), as this one Prince? The most important recent historian of England has summed up the personality of this great Teuton in the one sentence: “Alfred was in truth an artist.” [Note: Green: History of the English People, Bk. I. c. iii.] ‘Where, in the Chaos of Peoples, was the man of whom the same could be said? In those so-called dark centuries the farther we travel northward, that is to say, the farther from the focus of a baleful “culture,” and the purer the races with which we meet, the more activity do we find in the intellectual life. A literature of the noblest character, side by side with a freedom and order worthy of the dignity of man, develops itself from the ninth to the thirteenth century in the far-away republic of Iceland; in the same way, in remote England, during the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries we find a true popular poetry flourishing as it seldom has done since. [Note: Olive F. Emerson: History of the English Language, p. 54.] The passionate love of music which then came to light touches us as though we heard the beating of the wings of a guardian angel sent down from heaven, an angel heralding the future. When we hear King Alfred taking part in the songs of his chosen choir—when a century later we see the passionate scholar and statesman Dunstan never, whether on horseback or in the Council Chamber, parted from his harp: then we call to mind the old Grecian legend that Harmonia was the daughter of Ares the God of War. Fighting, in lieu of a sham order, was what our wild ancestors brought with them, but at the same time they brought creative power instead of dreary barrenness. And as a matter of fact in all the more important Princes of that time we find a specially developed power of imagination: they were essentially fashioners. We should be perfectly justified were we to compare what Charlemagne was and did at the end of the eighth and beginning of the ninth centuries, with what Goethe did at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Both rode a tilt against the Powers of Chaos, both were artists; both “avowed themselves as belonging to the race which out of darkness is striving to reach the light.”
No! and a thousand times no! The annihilation of that monstrosity, a State without a nation, of that empty form, of that soulless congeries of humanity, that union of mongrels bound together only by a community of taxes and superstitions, not by a common origin and a common heart-beat, of that crime against the race of mankind which we have summed up in the definition “Chaos of Peoples”—that does not mean the falling darkness of night, but the salvation of a great inheritance from unworthy hands, the dawn of a new day.
Yet even to this hour we have not succeeded in purging our blood of all the poisons of that Chaos. In wide domains the Chaos ended by retaining the upper hand. Wherever the Teuton had not a sufficient majority physically to dominate the rest of the inhabitants by assimilation, as, for instance, in the south, there the chaotic element asserted itself more and more. We have but to look at our present position to see where power exists and where it is wanting, and how this depends upon the composition of races. I am not aware whether any one has already observed with what peculiar exactitude the modern boundary of the universal Church of Rome corresponds with what I have pointed out as the general boundary of the Roman Imperium, and consequently of the chaotic mongreldom. To the east I admit that the line does not hold good, because here in Servia, Bosnia, &c., the Slavonic invaders of the eighth century and the Bulgarians annihilated everything foreign; in few districts of modern Europe is Race so uncontaminated, and the pure Slavs have never accepted the Church of Rome. In other places too there have been encroachments on both sides of the old boundary-line, but these have been unimportant, and moreover easily explained by political relations. On the whole the agreement is sufficiently striking to give rise to serious thought: Spain, Italy, Gaul, the Rhenish provinces, and the countries south of the Danube! It is still morning, and the powers of darkness are ever stretching out their polypus arms, clinging to us with their powers of suction in a hundred places, and trying to drag us back into the Night out of which we were striving to escape. We can arrive at a judgment upon these apparently confused, but really transparent, conditions, not so much by poring over the details of chronicles, as by obtaining a clear insight into the fundamental historical facts which I have set out in this chapter.
Freedom and Loyalty
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Let us attempt a glance into the depths of the soul. What are the specific intellectual and moral characteristics of this Germanic race? Certain anthropologists would fain teach us that all races are equally gifted; we point to history and answer: that is a lie! The races of mankind are markedly different in the nature and also in the extent of their gifts, and the Germanic races belong to the most highly gifted group, the group usually termed Aryan. Is this human family united and uniform by bonds of blood? Do these stems really all spring from the same root? I do not know and I do not much care; no affinity binds more closely than elective affinity, and in this sense the Indo-European Aryans certainly form a family. In his Politics Aristotle writes (i. 5):
“If there were men who in physical stature alone were so pre-eminent as the representatives of the Gods, then every one would admit that other men by right must be subject unto them. If this, however, is true in reference to the body, then there is still greater justification for distinguishing between pre-eminent and commonplace souls.”
Physically and mentally the Aryans are pre-eminent among all peoples; for that reason they are by right, as the Stagirite expresses it, the lords of the world. Aristotle puts the matter still more concisely when he says, “Some men are by nature free, others slaves;” this perfectly expresses the moral aspect. For freedom is by no means an abstract thing, to which every human being has fundamentally a claim; a right to freedom must evidently depend upon capacity for it, and this again presupposes physical and intellectual power. One may make the assertion, that even the mere conception of freedom is quite unknown to most men. Do we not see the homo syriacus develop just as well and as happily in the position of slave as of master? Do the Chinese not show us another example of the same nature? Do not all historians tell us that the Semites and half-Semites, in spite of their great intelligence, never succeeded in founding a State that lasted, and that because every one always endeavoured to grasp all power for himself, thus showing that their capabilities were limited to despotism and anarchy, the two opposites of freedom? And here we see at once what great gifts a man must have in order that one may say of him, he is “by nature free,” for the first condition of this is the power of creating. Only a State-building race can be free; the gifts which make the individual an artist and philosopher are essentially the same as those which, spread through the whole mass as instinct, found States and give to the individual that which hitherto had remained unknown to all nature: the idea of freedom. As soon as we understand this, the near affinity of the Germanic peoples to the Greeks and Romans strikes us, and at the same time we recognise what separates them. In the case of the Greeks the individualistic creative character predominates, even in the forming of constitutions; in the case of the Romans it is communistic legislation and military authority that predominate; the Germanic races, on the other hand, have individually and collectively perhaps less creative power, but they possess a harmony of qualities, maintaining the balance between the instinct of individual freedom, which finds its highest expression in creative art, and the instinct of public freedom which creates the State; and in this way they prove themselves to be the equals of their great predecessors. Art more perfect in its creations, so far as form is concerned, there may have been, but no art has ever been more powerful in its creations than that which includes the whole range of things human between the winged pen of Shakespeare and the etching-tool of Albrecht Dürer, and which in its own special language—music—penetrates deeper into the heart than any previous attempt to create immortality out of that which is mortal—to transform matter into spirit. And in the meantime the European States, founded by Germanic peoples, in spite of their, so to speak, improvised, always provisional and changeable character—or rather perhaps thanks to this character—proved themselves to be the most enduring as well as the most powerful in the world. In spite of all storms of war, in spite of the deceptions of that ancestral enemy, the chaos of peoples, which carried its poison into the very heart of our nation, Freedom and its correlative, the State, remained, through all the ages the creating and saving ideal, even though the balance between the two often seemed to be upset: we recognise that more clearly to-day than ever.
In order that this might be so, that fundamental and common “Aryan” capacity of free creative power had to be supplemented by another quality, the incomparable and altogether peculiar Germanic loyalty (Treue). If that intellectual and physical development which leads to the idea of freedom and which produces on the one hand art, philosophy, science, on the other constitutions (as well as all the phenomena of culture which this word implies), is common to the Hellenes and Romans as well as to the Germanic peoples, so also is the extravagant conception of loyalty a specific characteristic of the Teuton. As the venerable Johann Fischart sings:
Standhaft und treu, und treu und standhaft,
Die machen ein recht teutsch Verwandtschaft!
Julius Caesar at once recognised not only the military prowess but also the unexampled loyalty of the Teutons and hired from among them as many cavalrymen as he could possibly get. In the battle of Pharsalus, which was so decisive for the history of the world, they fought for him; the Romanised Gauls had abandoned their commander in the hour of need, the Germanic troops proved themselves as faithful as they were brave. This loyalty to a master chosen of their own free will is the most prominent feature in the Germanic character; from it we can tell whether pure Germanic blood flows in the veins or not. The German mercenary troops have often been made the object of ridicule, but it is in them that the genuine costly metal of this race reveals itself. The very first autocratic Emperor, Augustus, formed his personal bodyguard of Teutons; where else could he have found unconditional loyalty? During the whole time that the Roman Empire in the east and the west lasted, this same post of honour was filled by the same people, but they were always brought from farther and farther north, because with the so-called “Latin culture” the plague of disloyalty had crept more deeply into the country; finally, a thousand years after Augustus, we find Anglo-Saxons and Normans in this post, standing on guard around the throne of Byzantium. Hapless Germanic Lifeguardsman! Of the political principles, which forcibly held together the chaotic world in a semblance of order, he understood just as little as he did of the quarrels concerning the nature of the Trinity, which cost him many a drop of blood: but one thing he understood: to be loyal to the master he had himself chosen. When in the time of Nero the Frisian delegates left the back seats which had been assigned to them in the Circus and proudly sat down on the front benches of the senators among the richly adorned foreign delegates, what was it that gave these poor men, who came to Rome to beg for land to cultivate, such a bold spirit of independence? Of what alone could they boast?
“That no one in the world surpassed the Teuton in loyalty.” [Note: Tacitus: Annals xiii. 54.] Karl Lamprecht has written so beautifully about this great fundamental characteristic of loyalty in its historical significance that I should reproach myself if I did not quote him here. He has just spoken of the “retainers” who in the old German State pledge themselves to their chief to be true unto death and prove so, and then he adds:
“In the formation of this body of retainers we see one of the most magnificent features of the specifically Germanic view of life, the feature of loyalty. Not understood by the Roman but indispensable to the Teuton, the need of loyalty existed even at that time, that ever-recurring German need of closest personal attachment, of complete devotion to each other, perfect community of hopes, efforts and destinies. Loyalty never was to our ancestors a special virtue, it was the breath of life of everything good and great; upon it rested the feudal State of the Early and the co-operative system of the Later Middle Ages, and who could conceive the military monarchy of the present day without loyalty?... Not only were songs sung about loyalty, men lived in it. The retinue of the King of the Franks, the courtiers of the great Karolingians, the civil and military ministers of our mediaeval Emperors, the officials of the centres of administration under our Princes since the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries are merely new forms of the old Germanic conception. For the wonderful vitality of such institutions consisted in this, that they were not rooted in changing political or even moral conditions, but in the primary source of Germanicism itself, the need of loyalty.” [Note: Lamprecht: Deut. Gesch., 2nd ed. i. 136. [End of note.]
However true and beautiful every word that Lamprecht has here written, I do not think that he has made quite clear the “primary source.” Loyalty, though distinguishing the Teutons from mongrel races, is not altogether a specific Germanic trait. One finds it in almost all purely bred races, nowhere more than among the negroes, for example, and—I would ask—what man could be more faithful than the noble dog? No, in order to reveal that “primary source of Germanicism,” we must show what is the nature of this Germanic loyalty, and we can only succeed in doing so if we have grasped the fact that freedom is the intellectual basis of the whole Germanic nature. For the characteristic feature of this loyalty is its free self-determination. The human character resembles the nature of God as the theologians represent it: complex and yet indiscernible, an inseparable unity. This loyalty and this freedom do not grow the one out of the other, they are two manifestations of the same character which reveals itself to us on one occasion more from the intellectual on another more from the moral side. The negro and the dog serve their masters, whoever they maybe: that is the morality of the weak, or, as Aristotle says, of the man who is born to be a slave; the Teuton chooses his master, and his loyalty is therefore loyalty to himself: that is the morality of the man who is born free. But loyalty as displayed by the Teuton was unexampled. The disloyalty of the extravagantly gifted proclaimer of poetical and political freedom, i.e., of the Hellene, was proverbial from time immemorial; the Roman was loyal only in the defence of his own, German loyalty remained, Lamprecht says, “incomprehensible to him;” here, as everywhere in the sphere of morals, we see an affinity with the Indo-Aryans; but these latter people so markedly lacked the artistic sense which urges men on to adventure and to the establishment of a free life, that their loyalty never reached that creative importance in the world’s history which the same quality attained under the influence of the Germanic races. Here again, as before, in the consideration of the feeling of freedom, we find a higher harmony of character in the Teuton; hence we may say that no one in the world, not even the greatest, has surpassed him. One thing is certain: if we wish to sum up in a single word the historic greatness of the Teuton—always a perilous undertaking, since everything living is of Protean nature—we must name his loyalty. That is the central point from which we can survey his whole character, or better, his personality. But we must remember that this loyalty is not the primary source, as Lamprecht thinks, not the root but the blossom—the fruit by which we recognise the tree. Hence it is that this loyalty is the finest touchstone for distinguishing between genuine and false Germanicism; for it is not by the roots but by the fruit that we distinguish the species; we should not forget that with unfavourable weather many a tree has no blossoms or only poor ones, and this often happens in the case of hard-pressed Teutons. The root of their particular character is beyond all doubt that power of imagination which is common to all Aryans and peculiar to them alone and which appeared in greatest luxuriance among the Hellenes. I spoke of this in the beginning of the chapter on Hellenic art and philosophy from that root everything springs, art, philosophy, politics, science; hence, too, comes the peculiar sap which tinges the flower of loyalty. The stem then is formed by the positive strength—the physical and the intellectual, which can never be separated; in the case of the Romans, to whom we owe the firm bases of family and State, this stem was powerfully developed. But the real blossoms of such a tree are those which mind and sentiment bring to maturity. Freedom is an expansive power which scatters men, Germanic loyalty is the bond which by its inner power binds men more closely than the fear of the tyrant’s sword: freedom signifies thirst after direct self-discovered truth, loyalty the reverence for that which has appeared to our ancestors to be true; freedom decides its own destiny and loyalty holds that decision unswervingly and for ever. Loyalty to the loved one, to friend, parents, and fatherland we find in many places; but here, in the case of the Teuton, something is added, which makes the great instinct become a profoundly deep spiritual power, a principle of life. Shakespeare represents the father giving his son as the best advice for his path through life, as the one admonition which includes all others, these words:
This above all: to thine own self be true!
The principle of Germanic loyalty is evidently not the necessity of attachment, as Lamprecht thinks, but on the contrary the necessity of constancy within a man’s own autonomous circle; self-determination testifies to it; in it freedom proves itself; by it the vassal, the member of the guild, the official, the officer asserts his independence. For the free man, to serve means to command himself. “It was the Germanic races who first introduced into the world the idea of personal freedom,” says Goethe. What in the case of the Hindoos was metaphysics and in so far necessarily negative, seclusive, has been here transferred to life as an ideal of mind, it is the “breath of life of everything great and good,” a star in the night, to the weary a spur, to the storm-tossed an anchor of safety. [Note: But quite analogous to Indian sentiment, in so far as here the regulative principle is transferred to our inmost hearts.] In the construction of the Germanic character loyalty is the necessary perfection of the personality, which without it falls to pieces. Immanuel Kant has given a daring, genuinely Germanic definition of personality: it is, he says, “freedom and independence of the mechanism of all nature;” and what it achieves he has summed up as follows: “That which elevates man above himself (as part of the world of sense), attaches him to an order of things which only the understanding can conceive, and which has the whole world of sense subject to it, is Personality.” But without loyalty this elevation would be fatal: thanks to it alone the impulse of freedom can develop and bring blessing instead of a curse. Loyalty in this Germanic sense cannot originate without freedom, but it is impossible to see how an unlimited, creative impulse to freedom could exist without loyalty. Childish attachment to nature is a proof of loyalty: it enables man to raise himself above nature, without falling shattered to the ground, like the Hellenic Phaethon. Therefore it is that Goethe writes: “Loyalty preserves personality!” Germanic loyalty is the girdle that gives immortal beauty to the ephemeral individual, it is the sun without which no knowledge can ripen to wisdom, the charm which alone bestows upon the free individual’s passionate action the blessing of permanent achievement.
Teutonic Italy
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The same feature of an indomitable individualism, which, in political as well as in religious affairs, conduced to the rejection of universalism and to the formation of nations, led to the creation of a new world, that is to say, of an absolutely new order of society adapted to the character, the needs, and the gifts of a new species of men. It was a creation brought about by natural necessity, the creation of a new civilisation, a new culture. It was Teutonic blood and Teutonic blood alone (in the wide sense in which I take the word, that is to say, embracing the Celtic, Teutonic and Slavonic, or North European races) that formed the impelling force and the informing power. It is impossible to estimate aright the genius and development of our North-European culture, if we obstinately shut our eyes to the fact that it is a definite species of mankind which constitutes its physical and moral basis. We see that clearly to-day: for the less Teutonic a land is, the more uncivilised it is. He who at the present time travels from London to Rome passes from fog into sunshine, but at the same time from the most refined civilisation and high culture into semi-barbarism—dirt, coarseness, falsehood, poverty. Yet Italy has never ceased for a single day to be a focus of highly developed civilisation; its inhabitants prove this by the correctness of their deportment and demeanour; what we have here is not so much a decadence that has recently set in, as men are apt to maintain, but rather a remnant of Roman imperial culture, regarded from the incomparably higher standpoint which we occupy to-day and by men who hold absolutely different ideals. How splendid was the glory of Italy, how it went ahead and held aloft the torch for other nations on the road to a new world, while it still contained in its midst elements outwardly latinised, but inwardly thoroughly Teutonic! The beautiful country, which had already under the empire degenerated into absolute sterility, possessed for many centuries a rich well of pure Teutonic blood: the Celts, the Langobardians, the Goths, the Franks, the Normans, had flooded nearly the whole land and remained, especially in the north and the south, for a long time almost unmixed, partly because they, as uncultivated and warlike men, formed a caste apart, but also because the legal rights of the “Romans” and of the Teutons remained different in all strata of the population until well into the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in Lombardy, indeed, until past the beginning of the fifteenth; and this naturally added considerably to the difficulty of fusion. “Thus these various Teutonic tribes,” as Savigny points out, “lived with the main stock of the population (the remnant of the Roman Chaos of Peoples) locally mingling, but differing in customs and rights.” Here, where the uncultured Teuton, by constant contact with a higher culture, first awoke to the consciousness of himself, many a movement first found the volcanic fire that burst into the formation of a new world: learning and industry, the obstinate assertion of civic rights, the early bloom of Teutonic art. The northern third of Italy—from Verona to Siena—resembles in its peculiar development a Germany whose Emperor might have lived on the other side of the high mountains. Everywhere German counts had taken the place of Roman provincial governors, and it was always only for a short time, till he was hastily called away, that a King resided in the land, while a jealous rival King, the Pope, was near at hand and ever rejoicing in intrigues. In this way the old Germanic tendency to form self-ruling cities, which is in the main an Indo-European characteristic, was able at an early period to develop in Northern Italy and become the ruling power in the land. The extreme north led the way; but Tuscany soon followed suit and profited by the Hundred Years War between Pope and Emperor to wrest the inheritance of Mathilda from both and to give to the world, in addition to a Pleiad of ever memorable cities, in which Petrarch, Ariosto, Mantegna, Correggio, Galilei and other immortals arose, the crown of all cities, Florence—formerly the townlet of a margrave, which was soon to represent the essence of anti-Roman, creative individualism—to be the birthplace of Dante and Giotto, of Donatello, Leonardo and Michael Angelo—the mother of the arts, from whose breast all the great men, even those who were born at a distance, even a Raphael, first drew the nurture of perfection.
Now and now only impotent Rome could adorn herself anew: the diligence and the enterprise of the men of the north had poured heavy sums into the Papal coffers, while at the same time their genius awakened and put at the disposal of the declining metropolis, which in the course of a two thousand years' history had not had a single creative thought, the immeasurable treasures of western Teutonic inventive power. This was not a rinascimento, as the dilettantic belles-lettrists, in exaggerated admiration of their own literary hobbies, imagined, but a nascimento—the birth of something entirely new—which, as it immediately, leaving the paths of tradition, pursued its own path in art, at the same time unfurled its sails to explore the oceans from which the Greek and Roman “hero” had shrunk in terror, and gave the eye its telescope to reveal to human perception the hitherto impenetrable mystery of the heavenly bodies. If we simply must see in this a Renaissance, it is not the rebirth of antiquity, and least of all the rebirth of inartistic, unphilosophic, unscientific Rome, but simply free man's regeneration from out the all-levelling Imperium: freedom of political, national organisation in contrast to cut-and-dried common pattern; freedom of rivalry, of individual independence in work and creation and endeavour, in contrast to the peaceful uniformity of the civitas Dei; freedom of the senses of observation in contrast to dogmatic interpretations of nature; freedom of investigation and thought in contrast to artificial systems after the manner of Thomas Aquinas; freedom of artistic invention and shaping in contrast to hieratically fixed formulas; finally, freedom of faith in contrast to religious intolerance.
In beginning this chapter, and at the same time a new division of this work with reference to Italy, I must disclaim any scrupulous attention to chronology; it would be altogether inadmissible to assert in so many words that the rinascimento of free Teutonic individuality began in Italy; rather might it be said that the first imperishable blossoms of its culture made their appearance there; but I wanted to call attention to the fact that even here in the south, at the doors of Rome, the sudden outburst of civic independence, industrial activity, scientific earnestness, and artistic creative power was through and through Teutonic, and in that sense anti-Roman. A glance at that age (to which I shall recur) proves it, a glance at the present age equally so. In the meantime, two circumstances have led to a progressive decrease of the Teutonic blood in Italy: on the one hand, the unhampered fusion with the ignoble mixed population, on the other, the destruction of the Teutonic nobility in never-ending civil wars, in the conflicts between cities, in the blood-feuds and other outbursts of wild passion. We need only read the history of one of these cities, for example, Perugia, which in the upper ranks of its society was almost completely Gothic-Langobardic! It is scarcely comprehensible how with such ceaseless slaughter of whole families (which began as soon as the city became independent), single branches still retained something of their genuinely Teutonic character until well into the sixteenth century; after that the Teutonic blood was exhausted. [Note: Goethe's unerring eye has perceived the race-relations here; of the Italian Renaissance he says: “It was as if the children of God had wedded the daughters of men,” and he calls Pietro Perugino “an honest German soul” (Ital. Reise, 18/10/86 and 19/10/86).] It is evident that the hastily acquired culture, the violent assimilation of an essentially foreign civilisation, the sudden revelation, moreover, of Hellenism which was in sharpest contrast to them yet mentally akin, perhaps too, the incipient fusion with a blood which was poison to Teutons ... it is evident that all these things had not merely conduced to a miraculous outburst of genius, but had at the same time bred madness. [Note: He who has not time for detailed historical studies should read the chapter on Perugia in John Addington Symonds' Sketches in Italy.] If any one ever wishes to prove an affinity between genius and madness, let him point to Italy of the Trecento, Quattrocento and Cinquecento! With all its permanent importance for our new culture, this “Renaissance” in itself reminds us more of the paroxysm of death than of a phenomenon that guarantees vitality. A thousand glorious flowers burst forth as if by magic, where immediately before the uniformity of an intellectual desert had prevailed; a sudden blossoming everywhere; in giddy haste talents just awakened to activity storm the highest peak: Michael Angelo might almost have been a personal pupil of Donatello, and it was only by an accident that Raphael did not actually sit at Leonardo's feet. We get a vivid conception of this synchronism when we remember that the life of Titian alone extends from Sandro Botticelli to Guido Reni! But the flame of genius died down even more quickly than it had blazed up. When the heart was throbbing most proudly, the body was already in the fullness of corruption; Ariosto, born a year before Michael Angelo, calls the Italy of his time “a foul-smelling sewer:”
O d'ogni vizio fetida sentina,
Dormi, Italia imbriaca!
–Orlando Furioso xvii. 76.
And if, hitherto, I have mentioned the plastic arts alone, I have done so for the sake of simplicity and because I wished to deal with the sphere which is the most familiar though the same truth holds good in all spheres. When Guido Reni was still quite young, Tasso died and with him Italian poetry; a few years later Giordano Bruno went to the stake, Campanella to the rack—the end of Italian philosophy—and shortly before Guido, Italian natural science closed with Galilei the career which it had so gloriously begun with Ubaldi, Varro, Tartaglia, and others, above all with Leonardo da Vinci. The course of history, north of the Alps, was altogether different: such a brilliant height was never reached, nor was there such a catastrophe. This catastrophe admits only one explanation: the disappearance of the creative minds, in other words, of the race that had produced them. One walk through the gallery of busts in the Berlin Museum will convince us that in truth the type of the great Italians is absolutely extinct to-day. [Note: “Les Florentins d'aujourd'hui ne resemblent en rien à ceux de la Renaissance, ...” says one of the most exquisite judges, Ujfalvi (De l'Origine des familles, &c., p. 9).] Now and again they flash upon our memory when we review a troop of those splendid, gigantic labourers who build our streets and railways: the physical strength, the noble brow, the bold nose, the glowing eye; but they are only poor survivors of the shipwreck of Italian Teutonism. This disappearance is adequately explained by the facts adduced, as far as physique is concerned, but there is another important consideration, the moral suppression of definite tendencies of mind, and hence, so to speak, of the soul of the race; the noble was degraded into a worker of the soil, the ignoble became master and lorded it as he thought proper. The gallows of Arnold of Brescia, the stakes of Savonarola and Bruno, the instruments of torture by which Campanella and Galilei suffered, are only visible symbols of a daily, universal struggle against the Teuton, of a systematic uprooting of the freedom of the individual. The Dominicans, formerly ex officio Inquisitors, had now become reformers of the Church and philosophers; the Jesuits had carefully provided beforehand against such deviations from the Orthodox; he who acquires even a little information about their activity in Italy, from the sixteenth century onwards—from the history of the order, let us say, by its admirer, Buss—will no longer wonder at the sudden disappearance of all genius, that is to say, of everything Teutonic. Raphael had still had the boldness to raise in the middle of the Vatican (in the “Disputa”) an immortal monument to Savonarola, whom he fervently admired: Ignatius, on the other hand, forbade even the mention of the Tuscan's name. [Note: Raphael's enthusiastic admiration for Savonarola, for his master Perugino, and his friend Bartolomeo (see Eugene Müntz: Raphaël, 1881, p. 133) is almost of as much importance in fixing the race of these men as the fact that Michael Angelo never mentioned the Madonna, and only once in jest mentioned a Saint, so that one of the greatest authorities on him could call him “an unconscious Protestant.” In one of his sonnets Michael Angelo warns the Saviour not to come to Rome in person, where a trade is carried on in His divine blood.
E'l sangue di Cristo si vend' a giumelle
and where the priests would flay him to sell his skin.] Who could live in Italy to-day and move among its amiable, highly gifted inhabitants without feeling with pain that here a nation was lost and lost beyond all hope, because the inner impelling force, the greatness of soul, that would correspond to their talent are lacking? As a matter of fact, Race alone confers this force. Italy possessed it, so long as it possessed Teutons; yes, even to-day its population reveals, in those parts where Celts, Germans and Normans formerly were specially numerous, the thoroughly Teutonic industry, and gives birth to men who strive with the energy of despair to unite the country and guide it on to glorious paths: Cavour, the founder of the new Kingdom, was born in the extreme north; Crispi, who knew how to steer it past cliffs of danger, in the extreme south. But how can a people be again raised up, when the fountain of its strength has run dry? And what does it signify when a Giacomo Leopardi calls his people a “degenerate race” and holds up to them the example of their ancestors? [Note: Cf. the two Sonnets: All' Italia and Sopra il monumento di Dante.] The ancestors of the great majority of the Italians to-day are neither the sturdy Romans of ancient Rome, those patterns of simple manliness, indomitable independence and rigidly legal sentiment, nor these demigods in strength, beauty and genius, who on the morning of our new day, in one single swarm, soared up like larks greeting the dawn from the sun-kissed soil of Italy to the heaven of immortality; no, their genealogy goes back to the countless thousands of liberated slaves from Africa and Asia, to the jumble of various Italic peoples, to the military colonies settled among them from all countries in the world, in short, to the Chaos of Peoples which the Empire so ingeniously manufactured. And the present position of the country as a whole simply signifies a victory of this Chaos over the Teutonic element, which had been added at a later time and which had long maintained its purity. This is the reason, moreover, why that Italy—which three centuries ago was a torch of civilisation and culture—is now one of the nations that lag behind, that have lost their balance and cannot again find it. For two cultures cannot exist on an equal footing side by side; that is out of the question: Hellenic culture could not live on under Roman influence, Roman culture disappeared before the spread of the Egypto-Syrian; it is only where the contact is purely external, as in the case of Europe and Turkey, or a fortiori Europe and China, that no perceptible influence is exercised, and even here the one must in time destroy the other. Now such countries as Italy—I might at once add Spain—stand in a very close relation to us in the north: the great achievements of their past prove their former blood-relationship; they cannot possibly withdraw themselves from our influence, from our incomparably greater strength; but where they imitate us to-day, they do so not of an impelling need, not on account of an inner, but of an outer necessity; holding up before their gaze ancestors from whom they are not descended, their own history and our example both lead them into false paths, and finally they are unable to preserve even that one thing which might continue theirs, a different, perhaps in many respects inferior, but at any rate, genuine originality. [Note: The views here expressed—bitterly opposed and ridiculed on many hands—have in the meantime been brilliantly confirmed by the strictly anthropological, soberly scientific investigations of Dr. Ludwig Woltmann, which are now to be had for the first time in connected form: Die Germanen und die Renaissance in Italien, 1905. [End of note.]
Alfred Rosenberg on Rome
[Chapter One, Pt. III of The Myth of the 20th Century (1930)]
Introduction
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The history of Rome essentially parallels that of Hellas, although it is set against a greater expanse of territory and a larger political power structure. Rome, too, was established by a Nordic folkish wave which poured into the fertile valleys to the south of the Alps long before the Gauls and the Teutons. It broke the dominion of the Etruscans, that mysterious and alien Near Eastern people. Presumably this wave blended with the still pure indigenous tribes of the Mediterranean race, producing a hybrid character of the greatest toughness and tenacity which combined nimbleness of intellect with the iron energy of masters, farmers and heroes. Ancient Rome, about which history tells us little, became a true folkish state through sound breeding, and was united in the struggle against the whole of orientalism. All the brains and strengths, which would be squandered later when Rome engaged in world conflicts, were formed and banked, as it were, in this prehistoric period. The three hundred ruling noble families supplied the 300 senators, and from them came also the provincial governors and the senior army officers. Encircled by the maritime races of the Near East, Rome was often compelled to defend itself ruthlessly with the gladius.
Carthage & Jerusalem
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The destruction of Carthage was a deed of superlative import in racial history: by it even the later cultures of central and Western Europe were spared the infection of this Phoenician pestilence. World history might well have taken a very different course had the obliteration of Carthage been accompanied by a total annihilation of all the other Semitic Jewish centers in the Near East. The act of Titus came too late. By then, the Near Eastern parasite was no longer centered in Jerusalem, but had already spread its strongest tentacles from Egypt and Hellas to Rome itself, to which city everyone possessed of ambition and greedy for profit was drawn. There they made every effort to buy the acquiescence of the sovereign, self-governing people with bribes and promises. As a result of alien racial immigration, there arose from a previously legitimate popular electorate—peers with common roots—a degraded mass of characterless human rabble, a permanent threat to the State. Cato stood as a lonely rock in the midst of this quagmire. As praetor of Sardinia, consul in Spain, and finally censor in Rome, he fought against corruption, usury and extravagance. In this he resembled Cato the elder who, after a fruitless struggle to stem the utter decay of the State, threw himself upon his own sword. Such a deed has been called old Roman. Indeed it was. But “Old Roman” is synonymous with Nordic. In later times, when the Germans offered their services to weak, degenerate emperors who were surrounded by impure bastards, the same spirit of honor and loyalty lived within them as had once lived in the ancient Romans. The Emperor Vitellius, a poltroon without equal, was dragged from his hiding place to the forum, a rope around his neck. His German bodyguard refused to surrender and spurned the offer of absolution from their oaths. They were slain to the last man. The same Nordic spirit possessed the German which had dwelled in Cato. It is the spirit we saw in Flanders in 1914, in the Coronel Islands, and for years in all quarters of the globe.
Patricians and Plebeians
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By the middle of the fifth century B. C., the first step towards chaos had been taken. Mixed marriages between patricians and plebeians were made legal. Racial mixing thus became for Rome, as it had for Persia and Hellas, the seed of ultimate decay of folk and state. In 336, the first plebeians had pushed their way into the Roman assembly, and by about 300 into the priesthood. In 287, the plebeian popular assembly had become a state institution. Traders and moneylenders pushed their interests. Ambitious, renegade patricians like the Gracchi espoused democratic causes—motivated perhaps by mistaken generosity. Others, like Publius Claudius, placed themselves openly at the head of the Roman city mob.
From Sulla to Septimus Severus
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In these chaotic times, a few men still held true: The powerful, blue eyed Sulla, the pure Nordic Augustus. But they could not turn the tide. And so it was that control of the masses of the vast Roman Empire came to depend, like a monstrous game of chance, upon control of the Praetorian Guard, or the adherence of a mob of hungry clients. Sometimes a great man would arise; sometimes a bloodthirsty monster. Rome’s initial treasure house of racial strength was exhausted by four hundred years of democracy, destructive of race. The Cæsares came now from the provinces. Traianus was the first Spaniard to wear the purple; Hadrianus was the second. Cæsares were now adopted as a last ditch attempt to save the situation. Since reliance could no longer be placed on bloodlines, it was felt that only personal selection could ensure the continuity of the State.
The values held by Marcus Aurelius, another Spaniard, were already enervated by Christian influences. He openly elevated the protection of slaves, the emancipation of women, and doles to the poor (what we call unemployment benefit) to official state policies. He also disenfranchised the paterfamilias, which had been the strongest tradition in republican Rome, and which was the last remaining source of type formation.
There followed Septimius Severus, an African. “Pay the soldiers well and scorn everyone else,” he advised his sons, Caracalla and Geta. Influenced by his Syrian mother, (daughter of a priest of Baal in Asia Minor), Caracalla, the most loathsome bastard ever to sit on the throne of the Cæsares, declared that all “free” inhabitants of the Roman empire were citizens of Rome (212 A. D.).
National Chaos in Rome
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So perished the Roman world. Macrinus next murdered Caracalla and became Cæsar himself. After he was murdered in turn, he was succeeded by the monster Elagabalus, nephew of the African Severus. In the midst of all this appeared the half German Maximinus “Thrax” and Philippus the Arab (a Semite). The senate seats became mostly lounging spots for non-Romans. The culture of this period was supplied by the Spaniard Martialis and the Greeks Plutarchos, Strabon, Dion Cassios, and the rest. Apollodoros, who rebuilt the forum, was another Greek. Included in this last category was Aurelianus, an Illyrian born in Belgrade. There was also Diocletianus, son of an Illyrian slave. Constantius Chlorus was of Illyrian origin, though of superior stock. After his death, the soldiers chose a truly powerful man to bear the title of Augustus. This was Constantinus, the son of Constantius Chlorus and a barmaid from Bithynia. Constantinus triumphed over all his rivals. With Constantinus the history of imperial Rome ends and that of papal and Germanic Rome begins.
In this sea of bewildering diversity, Roman, Syrian, African and Greek elements were intermingled. The Gods and the ceremonies of all lands found a place in the venerable forum. There the priest of Mithras sacrificed bulls, latter day Greeks prayed to Hellos, astrologers and oriental sorcerers touted their miracles. The Emperor Elagabalus harnessed six white horses to a gigantic meteorite and had this dragged through the streets of Rome as a manifestation of Baal of Emesa. He himself danced at the head of the procession. Behind him were dragged the old Gods, and the “people” of Rome applauded. The senators abased themselves. Street singers, barbarians, and stable lads became senators and consuls—until Elagabalus, too, was strangled and thrown into the Tiber, that final resting place of so many thousands for two millennia.
How Rome Came into Being
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Even if we had lacked the more recent racial historical investigation, we should have been compelled to endorse this interpretation of the Roman past, because in the course of studying ancient Roman customs, myths, and definitions of law and the State in all areas, we see that the very ancient values which were associated with Africa and the Near East, suddenly or gradually transformed into their opposites (even when retaining their old nomenclature).
Thus our “learned” historians have ascertained—and they are still doing so—that in north and central Italy lived the Etruscans, Sabines, Oscans, Sabellians, Aequi, and Samnites, whereas in the south were the Phoenicians, Sicilians, Greek traders and settlers, and various Near Eastern peoples. Suddenly—how and why is not explained—a conflict broke out against one section of these tribes, their Gods and Goddesses, their concepts of law, their political pretensions. No mention is made of the new factor in this upheaval, or if it is mentioned, it is without any inquiry into its real nature.
The Etruscans
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The academic world falls back on the threadbare “development of humanity” cliché, which apparently rose up in the service of “ennoblement.” At this point the fact collectors are at one with the romantic school of mythologists; both agreeing that the Etruscans certainly possessed a “higher culture” than the bucolic Latins.
Since this version of a sudden, almost magical, leap toward a higher spiritual level and superior forms of social organization eventually became discredited, even newer interpreters of history invented the theory known as cyclic culture. This new doctrine was just as vacuous as the theory of universal development, which has validity only in the mind of the academic or the priest. There was as little mention of the creators of this Cultural Revolution as there was of evolution in the writings of nineteenth century popes. Out of the blue one day, a cultural revolution drops magically upon Indians, Persians, Chinese, or Romans, and effects a total transformation of human creatures who had previously embraced different mores. We are told of a kind of vegetable-like growth, the blossoming and decaying of mystical “cycles,” until the proselytizers of the “morphology of history,” faced with the strongest criticism, finally mumble at the end of the second or third volume something about blood and blood relationships.
Even this latest intellectual legerdemain is now beginning to lose credibility. The “Roman culture cycle” and “new development” did not stem from the native Etruscan Phoenician stock, but in spite of it and its values. The new culture bearers were Nordic immigrants and a noble Nordic aristocracy which began to contest the soil of Italy with the aboriginal negroid Ligurians and the Near Eastern Etruscans. It is true that in this environment the Nordic aristocracy had to make a number of concessions. However, it demonstrated its true character in the most bitter of struggles, and more relentlessly than the more artistically gifted Hellenes had done, when it expelled the last Etruscan king, Tarquinius Superbus. Though a great part of these achievements became the common heritage of all Europe, much that was decayed and alien was later transmitted into Europe by the strong resurgent tide of racial chaos.
Hetæræ and Priests
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The Etruscans, Ligurians, Sicilians, and Phoenicians (or Carthaginians) were not “an earlier stage of development,” nor were they tribes of the Roman people which had each made its contribution to the general culture. The true shapers of the Roman state stood implacably against them all, and, on the basis of racial folkish principles, subjected and partially exterminated them. Only that spirit, that will, those values which revealed themselves in this struggle, deserve to be called Roman. The Etruscans present us with an unequalled example of the way in which the Greek religion and way of life afforded them neither progress nor spiritual elevation. Like other Near Eastern peoples, the Etruscans had encountered at one point the Atlantic Nordic Mythi, which were by then embodied in Greek tradition, and they imitated Greek plastic and pictorial art as best they could, even appropriating the Hellenic pantheon. They succeeded only in corrupting everything they touched and turning each attribute into its opposite. Yet this provided reason enough for certain “researchers” to prattle foolishly [Note: See Hans Mühlestein: “Die Geburt des Abendlandes” (“The Birth of the Occident.”) Berlin 1928.] about the “extraordinary spiritual legacy” of the Etruscans and the “basis for growth” it provided, and for the “world historical dedication” symbolized in their “tragic fate.” All this plainly derives from the same inner sense of identity which binds the rising asphalt humanity of the megalopolis in a very significant way to all the wretched refuse of Asia.
Hetæræ Witchcraft in the Near East
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The legends and the tombs of the Etruscans make very clear the reasons why the virile, healthy farmer folk engaged in so desperate a war against them. Two examples epitomize the character of the Etruscans; the sacred prostitute and the priest magician who, by means of dreadful rites, kept at bay the terrors of the underworld. The “great whore of Babylon” of whom the Apocalypse speaks is no fairy tale or metaphor, but an historical reality attested to a hundredfold. It was literally the rule of the Hetæræ over the peoples of the near and middle east. On high festival days at all the centers of these various racial groups, the official prostitutes were enthroned as the embodiment of a common sensuality and universal lechery. In Phoenicia they served Kybele and Astarte; in Egypt, the great procuress Isis; in Phrygia as priestesses of wholly unbridled communal sexual orgies. The reigning priestess of love was joined by her lover dressed in diaphanous Libyan robes. Anointed with costly perfumes and bedecked with precious jewels, they then copulated before all the people (just as did Absalom with David’s concubines in II Samuel XVI: 22). This” example was imitated in Babylon, in Libya, and in Rome under the Etruscan dynasty where the Goddess priestess Tanaquil pushed the institution of the Hetæræ to its extreme limit in the closest collaboration with the Etruscan priests. [Note: The extremely cautious explorer of Etruria, Karl Otfried Müller, who in the first half of the 19th century could of course not yet overlook the whole race question as we do today, wrote in his great work “Die Etrusker” [“The Etruscans”] (newly edited by Dr. W. Deecke , Stuttgart, 1877) on the Dionysias, which are evidently related to the Etrustian being, at first only women were initiated; only long afterwards, in Rome around 550 of the city, were men also consecrated, the Etruscan priests would then have formed “those hideous orgies in which the mind, numbed by Phrygian cymbals and timpani music, inflamed by Bacchic lust and unleashed greed, succumbed to all atrocities until the Roman Senate (568) with salutary severity repealed all bacchanalia “. (Vol. II, p. 78.)]
Attempts were made quite early to “interpret” Etruscan inscriptions on graves, mummy wrappings, and papyrus rolls, but not until Albert Grünwedel was the script successfully deciphered, [Note: Tusca, Leipzig 1922] and the results show the Etruscans in a hideous light. Even the Greek solar myth that the sun dies and is then reborn as a God out of the dark night and with redoubled potency, was appropriated as an Etruscan motif.
Etruscan Satanism
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But in the hands of the Etruscan priests this becomes Asiatic magic, witchcraft linked with pederasty, masturbation, the murder of boys, magical appropriation of the manna of the slaughtered by the priestly murderer, and prophecies derived from the excrement and the piled-up entrails of the victims. The virile sun impregnates itself with the magical phallus on the solar disc (the Egyptian “point” in the sun) which finally penetrates it. From this is born a golden boy, the fetus of a boy with a magical orifice. This is the so called “seal of eternity.” The violence of the magical phallus is imagined as a bull which copulates with such frenzied force that the disc rolls and the “phallus bearer of the horn” turns to fire, “the phallus of him who possesses the heavens.”
In endlessly repeated obscenities, the original myth is degraded into repulsive homosexual love. This is to be seen on the wall paintings of graves, as in the Golini tomb where the dead man holds a banquet with his boy lover in the next world, and where two gigantic phalluses spring up from a sacrificial fire as a result of magical satanic rite. According to the inscription, this, “the lightning of perfection, is thus perfected.” Translated from the jargon of magic, that means that the creature born of woman is deified after putrefying, and becomes a phallus.
Magic & Sorcery
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From the inscription of the Cippus of Perugia, there is recorded a convocation of satanic priests who “perfect” a spectral manifestation “so as to burn in demonic frenzy.” “He who has this boy has the demonic knife. Eternal is the fire of the boy... a magus of the perfected seal.”
The murdered boy now becomes a “little goat.” Thunder personified is a metamorphosis of the son gained by violation—the perfected little goat. Here is to be found the origin of the horned apparition and the goat headed devil, whose appearance in the literature of witchcraft was hitherto an unsolved riddle. Its antique types are the Minotaur, especially the one over the well-known grave of Corneto, the Tomba dei Tori, and the Greek Satyr. “He clearly illustrates a crime crying out to heaven,” comments Grünwedel. The meaning of these constantly repeated customs of the Etruscan religion is to be seen in the fate of the shamefully abused boy prostitute who is slit open to symbolize the birth of the diurnal sun from the egg that his apparition has developed when fertilized by the semen collected in bowls.
Thus a spectral bull appears, fiery like the sun, sexually erect, and accomplishes again and again the demonic self-copulation. With the performance of this ritual, the manna of the murdered boy is supposed to pass to the priest, who is the representative of the “Chosen” (Rasna, Rasena), as the Etruscans—like the Jews—called themselves. The priest next lets the fumes from the entrails ascend to heaven. There is also the magical use of feces, once again in a vile travesty of the Greek solar myth. The divine cherub attains the supreme power which emanates from him as six rolls of gold excrement, creating the fire of the heavens.
The Hetæræ Queen – Tanaquil
The “chosen one” becomes such by supplying his entrails. Etruscan vases provide ample evidence of this; witches are portrayed, offering money to youths to persuade them to dedicate themselves and then to ascend to heaven in flames. Herein lies new evidence for the primeval home of witchcraft and Satanism on European soil. It is easy to understand a scholar like Grünwedel, who in this respect sees close analogies with the Tibetan Tantras of Lamaism, [Note: See his other great work: “Die Teufel des Avesta” (“The Devils of Avesta”).] saying:
A nation which is ready to paint wall pictures over the entrances of graves like the two scenes in the Tomba dei Tori, which permits itself to write such filth in graves and paintings like those in the Golini grave, and to cover sarcophagi with the most repulsive scenes (I need mention only the sarcophagus of Chiusi), to place into one’s hands representations of the dead as in the text of the Pulenana papyrus roll, to cover toilet articles with the most hair raising obscenities, parades the most despicable human degeneracy as its national legacy and religious persuasion.
It is necessary as a prelude to be quite clear about the true nature of the Etruscans so that we may understand fully that the Nordic Latins, the true Romans, had the same experiences as the Nordic Hellenes before them and the Nordic Teutons after them. As a numerically small people, they waged a desperate struggle against the forces of hetaerism, with their strong emphasis on patriarchy and the family. They purified the great whore Tanaquil by transforming her into the faithful protectress of motherhood and portraying her with dresses and a spindle as a guardian of the family. Against the sorceries of an outrageous priesthood they posed the hard Roman law and the dignity of the Roman senate. With the sword they cleansed Italy of the Etruscans (as a result of which the great Sulla came particularly to the fore) and of the Carthaginians, whom the former always called to their aid.
The Power of the Haruspex
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Yet the preponderance of numbers, prevalent superstition, and the usual international solidarity of rogues and charlatans gradually eroded the old honorable Roman life. This was exacerbated by the necessity of maintaining Roman strength by enlisting the support of the racial cesspool of the Mediterranean peoples. In particular, Rome was unable to cast out the Haruspicies and the Argurs. Even Sulla was accompanied by the Haruspex, Postumius, and Julius Cæsar after him by another of that ilk named Spurinna. Burckhardt had already had an inkling of these now established facts—which are carefully ignored by the “Etruscans” of our great cities. He wrote in his Griechische Kulturgeschichte [Note: Vol. 2, p. 152.] as follows:
When, however, with the unleashing of all human passions during the last years of the Roman republic, human sacrifice again appeared in a most abominable form, when oaths were made over the entrails of slaughtered boys—as with Catilina and Vatinius (see Cicero, Vatin, 6)—then it is to be hoped that this had nothing to do with Greek religion or the ostensible Pythagoreanism of Vatinius. The Roman gladiatorial contests, towards which Greece maintained a permanent abhorrence, had derived from Etruria, at first as funerary rites for dead aristocrats.
This clearly indicated that human sacrifice was also a feature of the Etruscan religion. [Note: One of the first acts of the great Vandal Stilicho as regent of Rome was to abolish these Asiatic cruelties. Exactly the same ordered later the Oftgote Theodoric, who changed the gladiator fights to knight tournaments. Also in such details character is eternally separated from character. The bull and cock fights of the Spaniards and Mexicans are for their part testimony for it, but one for unclean, over the Germanic victorious people chaos.]
The Pope - Successor of the Haruspex
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The Etruscan priest Volgatius who, at Cæsar’s funeral, ecstatically proclaimed the last century of the Etruscans, was only one of the many who exercised great power over Roman life and manipulated the sufferings of the people in the interests of the Near East. When Hannibal stood before the gates of Rome, these Haruspices declared that victory was only possible by adopting the cult of the “Great Mother.” This was brought from Asia Minor, and the senate abased itself by going down to the shore on foot to receive it. In this way, the priesthood of Asia Minor entered the eternal city along with the “great whore” of the Pelasgians or the “beautiful and delightful whore” (Nah. III, 4), and took up residence on the sacred Palatine, the focal point of the old Roman thought and culture. There ensued the usual Near Eastern “religious” processions. Later, however, the debaucheries were restricted to the district to the rear of the temple walls in order to escape the anger of the better part of the people.
The Haruspices triumphed. The Roman papacy was their immediate successor, and the temple hierarchy, the College of Cardinals, represented an amalgam of the Etruscan Near Eastern Syrian priesthood, with the Jews and the Nordic Roman senate.
The medieval picture of the world also derives from the Etruscan Haruspices, that frightful superstition of magic and witchcraft to which the millions of Europe fell victim. Nor did this die out with the Witches’ Hammer. It still survives in church literature today, to be resurrected at any time. It can be seen in those gargoyles which not infrequently disfigure our Nordic Gothic cathedrals with a grotesquerie of extreme abnormality.
Dante’s Inferno
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Even in Dante, in a grandiose form, bastardized Etruscan antiquity erupts anew. [Note: Perhaps the figure of Macchiavelli can also be included here. Despite the fact that he fought against the Church for an Italian nation-state, despite the fact that the business of politics at all times has not exactly been a school of fundamental truthfulness: such a system, built only on human baseness, and a fundamental commitment to it, did not spring from a Nordic soul. Macchiavelli came from the village Montespertoli, which, as his life actor Giuseppe Prezzolini explains, (“Das Leben Nicolo Macchiavelli,” [“The Life of Nicolo Macchiavelli”] German Dresden 1929) “had predominantly Etruscan character.”] His Inferno contains the ferryman of hell, the fiery swamp of the Styx, the bloodthirsty Pelasgian Erinyes and Furies, the Cretan Minotaur, those fiends in the form of disgusting birds who torment suicides, and the amphibious monster, Beryon. The damned run through a scorching desert under a rain of fiery drops. Malefactors are turned into bushes upon which the Harpies feed, and from every broken twig of which their blood gushes forth accompanied by unending screams of agony. Black bitches pursue other evildoers and tear them to pieces with unspeakable pain. Horned demons scourge swindlers. Prostitutes are drowned in stinking excrement. Popes, guilty of simony, are confined within narrow ravines. There they languish, their tortured feet writhing in flames, while Dante rails loudly against the degenerate papacy as the whore of Babylon. The grave inscriptions and paintings in Tuscany reveal that all these ideas of the underworld are of Etruscan origin. Just as in the “Christianized” upper world of the Middle Ages, the idea of eternity is depicted with people hung by their hands and tormented with burning faggots and other fiendish devices.
The avenging Furies were depicted by the Etruscans as “utterly loathsome, with animalistic or negroid features, pointed ears, matted hair, fangs, and so forth.” [Note: MülIer-Deecke: "Die Etrusker", Vol. II, p. 109.] It was one such Fury with a bird’s beak who tortured Theseus with her poisonous snakes, as a wall painting at the Tomba dell’ Oreo at Corneto shows. Does this reveal the primeval hatred for the legendary conqueror of the ancient demons of Athens? Beside these Furies are Typhon and Echidna, those horrible, one eyed demons with snakes for hair.
Etruscan Magic in Europe
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The Etruscans generally dwelt with sadistic pleasure over every possible representation of torture, murder and sacrifice. The slaughter of human beings was especially delightful for them. Musically untalented, lacking any poetic gifts, incapable of producing an organic architecture of their own, and without even the rudiments of philosophy, this Near Eastern people devoted itself to the study of birds’ entrails, and to complex magical and sacrificial rites. Not without some technical ability, it was almost wholly dedicated to commerce, and because it was tenacious, it poisoned Roman blood and transmitted its obsession with hellish torments in the world to come to the churches. The ghastly and bestial demons became an enduring and effective tool of the popes, and, through the conceptual world that had been poisoned by the Church of Rome, dominated our Middle Ages. Medieval art gives shocking testimony to this. One can see the proof of this even on the Isenheim altar, as well as in the “Descents into Hell” by other artists.
Only when we have learned to recognize the utterly alien origins of these concepts and muster the resolution to rid ourselves of this diabolism will we have cast off the “Middle Ages.” But with our emancipation, the Roman church, which is inextricably linked with the sadistic visions of the Etruscan hell, will collapse from within.
The whole mystagogy of Dante’s Inferno consists of a hideous marriage of Etruscan demonology and Christianity. Nevertheless, even though Dante was not free from the incubus of this thousand-year-old malefic vision, the Germanic spirit still stirred within him. [Note: Today it is certain that Dante was of Germanic descent. His name was Durante Aldiger, which is a purely Germanic name. Dante's father was the great-grandson of Cacciaguida mentioned in the Comedia, who took part in the crusade under Conrad 111 and was knighted by the emperor himself. His wife was a woman from the old Germanic Aldiger family. All his life Dante had sided with the Nordic idea of the independence of secular power from priestly rule, that is, joined the Ghibellines; He was not afraid to put the degenerate popes into hell, to call Rome itself a sewer and, above all, he wrote in the language of the people, to whom he dedicated a special script, against abstract Latin.]
The Tragedy of the Middle Ages
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In purgatory, Vergilius says of Dante: “He seeks freedom.” Such words are a direct denial of the psychic milieu from which witchcraft and the idea of powerful evil spirits arose. In the end, Vergilius could safely leave his protégé, since Dante had acquired the necessary strength of his own. “My knowledge, my words, can explain nothing more to you Free, upright, healthy, are the signs of your will. It would be foolish not to follow it.”
Such are the two worlds that tore apart the heart of Nordic man in the Middle Ages. On the one hand was the Near Eastern idea of a hideous hell which the church adopted; on the other, the longing to be “free, upright and healthy.” Only insofar as he is free can the Teuton be creative. Only where the insane terrors of witchcraft did not hold sway could great centers of European culture flourish.
The Doctrine of Original Sin
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Into this raceless stew which was now Rome came Christianity. Its success is largely to be explained by its concept of a sinful world and redemption through grace, which was its natural compliment. The doctrine of original sin would have been incomprehensible to a people whose racial identity was unadulterated. In such a people there dwells a secure confidence in itself and in its will, which it regards as Destiny. The concept of “sin” was as alien to the heroes of Homer's as it was to the ancient Indians, the Germans of Tacitus, or the epics and sagas of Dietrich von Bern. An oppressive sense of sin is a sure symptom of racial bastardy. Race pollution shows itself in a number of stigmata; in an absence of clear direction in thought and action; an inner self doubt; the feeling that existence is simply the “wages of sin” and not the necessary and mysterious imperative of self-development. The sense of personal depravity leads to a yearning for grace, and this is the only hope for the products of miscegenation.
It was natural, therefore, in whomsoever the old Roman character still lived, that a revulsion arose against the spread of Christianity, most especially as it represented a thoroughly proletarian and nihilistic political ethos. The grossly exaggerated accounts of bloody persecutions of Christians were not in fact attempts at suppression of conscience, as church history claims (the Roman forum was open to all Gods), but rather aimed at the protection of the State against a political threat to its existence. It was reserved to the church, in its Pauline Augustinian form, to invent doctrinal councils and burning at the stake for the purpose of annihilating the spirit. Classical Nordic antiquity did not know the like of this, and the Germanic world has likewise always rebelled against this Levantine import.
The Misinterpreted Diocletian
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Ecclesiastical Christianity has made Diocletianus a particular target of its attacks. Diocletianus was of lowly origins, though probably of part German ancestry. He had blue eyes and a very white skin, and was a man of personal probity of the type admired by Marcus Aurelius. His family life was above reproach. In all matters of state, Diocletianus conducted himself with great moderation. He was opposed to all forms of oppression, and favored religious toleration, and only authorized action against Egyptian tricksters, fortune tellers, and sorcerers. The Emperor Gallienus had already given official recognition to the Christian cult, and Christian buildings were erected without interference. What disturbed an organic development, however, was initially the squabbles of the rival bishops.
Diocletianus excused his Christian soldiers from the pagan sacrifices, and insisted only on military discipline. But it was precisely in this area that his authority was challenged by the leaders of the African church, so that recruits refused to perform their duties on the grounds of their Christianity. One such pacifist, despite friendly admonitions, persisted in his obduracy until at length he had to be executed for mutiny. Such threatening symptoms at last persuaded Diocletianus to insist on the participation of Christians in state ceremonies of a religious nature. Even now, he did not generally punish Christians who refused to obey, but merely granted those discharges from military service. The only result was a stream of unmitigated abuse from the Christians, the mutual conflicts of whose factions also menaced civil peace in other ways. Finally, the State took action in self-defense. Even now, Diocletianus did not exact the death penalty (as he did in the case of some swindling merchants) but only reduced the contumacious to the status of the slave class.
The Pious Julian
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The outcome of this was rioting and arson directed against the Emperor’s palace itself. Provocations by the Christian communities, hitherto unmolested and which had become arrogant in consequence, followed one after another throughout the empire. The ensuing terrible persecutions of the Christians by the monster Diocletianus amounted to—nine rebellious bishops executed, and in Palestine, the center of the most violent resistance, a total of eighty death sentences actually carried out. By contrast, that supremely Christian Duke of Alba slaughtered 100,000 heretics in the tiny Netherlands alone.
Only by reexamining these events is it possible to shake off the hypnotic effect of systematically falsified history. Thus does Iulianus the Apostate, who also believed in equal rights for all the cults, appear in a new light, because he did not shirk, on the grounds of pious convictions, standing out against teachers of the “Representative of God.” He well knew what was involved when he wrote: “Through the follies of the Galileans, our state was almost ruined; but now, the Gods be praised, it is saved. Therefore we shall honor the Gods and every city in which there is still piety.” [Note: More details from Theodor Birt: "Charakterbilder Spätroms” [“Character Pictures of Spätroms”], Leipzig 1919.] This proved thoroughly justified, for no sooner had Christianity become the State religion under Constantinus, than the Old Testament spirit of hatred showed its hideous face. The Christians at once demanded the application of the punishments prescribed in the Old Testament against the worship of idols. In Italy, with the exception of Rome itself, the temples of Jupiter were closed. We can sympathize with the despair of Iulianus, but at the same time we can see that the history of early Christianity needs rewriting—and that Bishop Eusebios is hardly a reliable source.
Chrestos and Paul
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Christianity, as it was introduced to Europe via the Roman church, derives from a multitude of roots. This is not the place for a more detailed study of its sources; a few observations only must suffice.
The great personality of Jesus Christ, whatever form it might have taken originally, was distorted and confused immediately after his death with all the rubbish of Jewish and African life. In the Near East, Rome ruled with great firmness and exacted the taxes efficiently. Accordingly, among their subject populations there arose the desire for a liberator and leader of the slaves; hence the legend of Christos. Beginning in Asia Minor, this Christos myth spread to Palestine, where it became linked with Jewish messianic yearnings, and was finally attached to the personality of Jesus. Besides his own utterances, there were falsely attributed to him the words and doctrines of Near Eastern prophets and, ironically indeed, in the form of an extension of ancient Aryan moral precepts; for example, the nine commandment table which had already been appropriated by the Jews as their ten prohibitions. In this manner was Galilee joined with the whole Near East.
The Christian movement, disrupting old forms, seemed to the Pharisee Saul to hold great promise of practical usefulness. In a sudden decision he joined its ranks and, possessed by an unrestrained fanaticism, he preached international revolution against the Roman Empire. In spite of all subsequent attempts at reform, his teachings still remain the Jewish spiritual basis, the Talmudic oriental aspect of both the Catholic and the Lutheran churches.
Paul and the Racial Chaos
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Paul accomplished something which is never admitted in churchly circles. He made the suppressed Jewish national rebellion internationally effective, thus paving the way for the further spread of racial chaos in the ancient world. The Jews in Rome knew very well what they were about when they placed their synagogues at his disposal as places wherein he could make his proselytizing speeches.
The fact that Paul, despite occasional criticism of the Jews, knew quite well that he served a Jewish cause is to be seen in several all too candid passages in his letters:
...Blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles be come in.
And so all Israel shall be saved… Whose are the fathers... Who are the Israelites; to whom pertained the adoption and the glory and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises;
... and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came... For if you were cut out of the olive tree which is wild by nature, and were grafted contrary to nature into a good olive tree: how much more shall these, which be the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree? [Note: Romans 11:25, - 9, 4; 11, 24. This is the same as what the Bastard sect of the "Solemn Bible Students" teaches today.]
This is identical to the teachings of the modern misbegotten sect of “Serious Bible Students.”
The Gospel of Saint John, which still retains an aristocratic spirit, strove to defend Christianity against this collective bastardization, orientalization, and Judaization. About the year 150, Markion, who was a Greek, once again represented the Nordic idea of a world order based on organic tension and hierarchical structure. This was in direct contrast to the Semitic conception of a capricious God who exercised a boundless despotism. Marcion therefore rejected the Old Testament as the “Book of Laws” of so false a deity. Similar efforts were made by a few of the Gnostics. But Rome, now racially polluted beyond redemption, was utterly committed to Africa and Syria, and smothered the simple essence of Jesus with the accretions of late Roman goals of World Empire and ecumenical church.
The Ambiguous Nature of Christianity
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The conflicts of the earliest centuries of our era are not to be understood except as struggles of racial souls against the Hydra headed racial chaos. In this the Near Eastern amalgam of superstition, insane magic and sensual “mysteries” gathered to itself all that was chaotic, broken, and degenerate, thus infecting Christianity with that schismatic character which still afflicts it to this day. Thus a servile religion, its true nature disguised through the misuse of the great personality of Jesus, entered Europe. [Note: As far as Jesus' origins are concerned, as Chamberlain and Delitzsch have already emphasized, there is not the slightest compelling reason to assume that Jesus was of Jewish origin, even if he grew up in Jewish circles of thought. Some interesting research results can be found at Dr. E. Jung, "The historical personality of Jesus" (Munich 1924). According to the Syrian Christian preacher Ephraem (4th century), Jesus had a Danaite wife (born in Dan) and a Latin father as his mother. Ephraem sees nothing dishonorable in this and adds: "Jesus thus derived his descent from two of the greatest and most famous peoples, namely the maternal from the Syrians, the paternal from the Romans." Ephraem assumes this knowledge is well known.] Emergent Christianity, derived from a multiplicity of sources, demonstrated an astounding combination of abstract spirituality and demonic sorcery, as well as exceptional powers of infiltration irrespective of other currents which were assimilated in it. The idea of the trinity, for example, was familiar to many of the peoples of the Mediterranean basin in the form of the father, the mother and the son, and in the precept “Everything divides threefold.” The mother symbolized the fertile earth, the father the creative principle of light. Now, in place of the mother there appears the “Holy Ghost” as a conscious retreat from the purely physical. Such was the hagios pneuma of the Greeks, the prana of the Indians. This spirituality and its emphasis were not rooted in a racial national ground conditioned by the polarity of organic life. Instead it became a force without direction.
The Beginning of Dogmatism
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“Here is neither Jew nor Greek, here is neither slave nor free, here is neither man nor woman,” wrote Paul to the Galatians—that last remnant of a great Celtic migration down the Danube valley and into Asia Minor. On the basis of this nihilism, which is a denial of everything organic, he then calls for a belief in Christ. This constituted a total rejection of all the culture creating values of Greece and Rome—although to be sure, Christianity took over a degenerate form of such values—and effected their disintegration. Thanks to its strongly exclusive character, Christianity was then able to gather to itself all those who had lost direction.
A further step toward the denial of natural life lay in the dogmatic assertion of the Virgin Birth. Yet this is commonly a part of a solar myth to be found among various peoples from northern Europe to the South Sea Islands. [Note: Leo Frobenius: Leo Frobenius: “Das Zeitalter des Sonnengottes” [“The Age of the Sun God”].]
Abstract spirituality, however, was flanked on each side by all the magic of Asia Minor, Syria and Africa. The demons which were driven out by Jesus and passed into the swine; the calming of the stormy sea at his command; his “certified” resurrection from the dead; his ascent into heaven—all these were the real point of departure for Christianity, and undoubtedly greatly strengthened the ability to endure much suffering.
Goethe's Positive Christianity
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Thus the world did not proceed from the life of the savior (soter) but from his death and its miraculous consequences. This is the single motif of the Pauline epistles. Goethe, on the contrary, held that it was the life of Christ which was important, not his death. In this he was attesting to the soul of the Germanic west expressed in Positive Christianity, as opposed to negative Christianity based on priesthood and witch mania and deriving from Etruscan Asiatic concepts.
As we have indicated earlier, it is misleading when our scholars represent the transformation of Greek life as if there had been a development from chthonic Gods to a deity of light, and from matriarchy to patriarchy. It is equally false when they speak of a naive popular outlook which later ascended to lofty thought. In reality, alongside the antichthonic struggle, in the later predominance of intellectual doctrinal systems, in the attempt to exert political restraint over the earlier, unconstrained ways, there occurs a drying up of creative racial powers. In the end, we have only the Platonic reaction which strove to attain by artifice what the blood alone was already too weak to achieve.
The Nordic Greek recognized no separate priestly caste. His priests came from the aristocratic families. His singers and poets related to him the deeds and acts of his heroes and his Gods. The free Greek spirit was as alien to dogmatism as was the earlier Indian and the later Teuton. Gymnastics and music were the substance of his education, and these established the necessary prerequisites for the production of the hoplite, the citizen of the State. Only a Socrates could preach such insanity as: virtue could be taught and imparted to all men, an idea further refined by Platon. He who should really understand the nature of the world of ideas must of necessity be virtuous. With the promulgation of such an individualistic and faceless worldview, the axe was truly laid at the roots of Greek life.
Interaction Between Magic and Intellectualism
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At the same time, this rootless intellectualism permitted the recrudescence of all those Asiatic practices which had been put to flight by Apollonian Greek discipline. Here we can follow with absolute objectivity the alternating play which takes place between intellectualism and magic. Both reason and will, if not always consciously, pursue the same goal. Both are true to nature, blood determined and organically conditioned. To the degree to which the rational worldview becomes unsure of its validity because of the changed nature of those who represent it, it also becomes too narrow for rational constructs. At the same time, that part which is based on will degenerates into magic and the proliferation of one superstition after another. The result of the disintegration of the rational willed racial soul is a world view based on an intellectual magical substructure—when it is not merely meaningless individualism and unbridled bastardy. In the former case, the Catholic Church and, to a lesser extent, Protestantism provide intellectual justifications for a magical belief. Late Hellenism an example of the latter.
Negative and Positive Christianity were locked in conflict from the beginning, and that conflict is today being waged with ever more bitterness. The negative type emphasizes its Levantine Etruscan tradition, its abstract dogmas and hoary old customs; the consciously calls upon the Nordic blood to awaken, just as in their simple innocence the first Teutons did when they pressed into Italy bringing renewed vigor to that sick land.
The Teutons in Rome
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Like a mighty and awesome primordial destiny, the Cimbri had once stormed in from the north. An initial repulse could not stay the Nordic Celts and Teutons from repeatedly pressing upon the frontiers of Rome. In campaign after campaign the military skill of the Romans proved ineffectual against the rude strength of a young people. Giant blond slaves began to appear on the streets of Rome, and the Germanic ideal of beauty became fashionable among a decadent people bereft of all ideals of their own. Free Teutons also were soon no rarity in Rome. More and more the Cæsares came to depend for support on the loyalty of the Germanic soldiery. Yet at the same time the Germans came to constitute the greatest threat to the existence of the wretched state now without values of its own. By imposing fines on bachelors, subsidizing marriage, and public welfare, Augustus attempted to regenerate his own people. It was in vain. Teutons were instrumental in the election of Claudius, of Galba, and of Vitellius. Marcus Aurelius sent his Teutonic prisoners from Vienna to Italy where instead of making them into gladiators he had them farm the long desolate soil. By the time of Constantinus, the “Roman” army was almost entirely Germanic. Whoever cannot see racial forces at work here must be blind to all historical processes. It is patently obvious that both decomposition and rebirth are present in this. The regenerative process continues past Constantinus to Stilicho, Alaric, Ricimer, Odoacer, Theodoric, the Langobards and to the Normans. These last named started by establishing a kingdom in the south which reached its apogee under the incomparable Friedrich II, whose Sicilian kingdom became the first secular world state, and whose provinces were settled by German nobility.
In this process of Nordicizing Italy, the work of Theodoric the Great was particularly significant. For more than thirty years this strong, yet generous and gentle ruler, governed Italy. What Marcus Aurelius and Constantinus had begun, he continued. The Teutonic settlers now became not merely tenant farmers and small holders, but also the owners of large estates. One third of all the landed property passed into the hands of the Germanic soldiery. Although unfortunately widely dispersed, nevertheless more than 200,000 Germanic families settled in Tuscany and around Ravenna and Venice. Once again Nordic hands drove the plough through the soil of middle Italy and made the hitherto impoverished and desolate land fruitful and independent of the grain imports from North Africa.
Set apart from the indigenous population by their adherence to the Arian denomination and by laws prohibiting intermarriage, the Goths and the later Langobards played the same character forming role as had the first Nordic immigrants for old Republican Rome. Racial amalgamation only began with the conversion of the Germanic Christians from the Arian creed to Roman Catholicism.
At last came the Renaissance as a thunderous reassertion of Nordic Germanic blood. With a sudden shattering of constricting social barriers, there arose from the cultivated soil one genius after another. Meanwhile, all of Africanized Italy south of Rome remained mute and uncreative, until today, when Fascism, again arising from the north, is attempting to reawaken the old values. Attempting!
Richard Walther Darré on the Contrast Between the Germanic Peaseantry and the Roman State
[Exerpt from Chapter I of Darré's A New Nobility of Blood and Soil [Neuadel aus Blut und Boden] (1930)]
“A nation that does not retain a living connection to its origins is close to withering away, as surely as a tree that has been severed from its roots. We are today what we were yesterday.” – Heinrich von Sybel
On The History and Evolution of the German Nobility
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The reasons why the historical German nobility cannot claim to have ever been the pinnacle of the hierarchy of blood or the perfection of the German-Teutonic man (and thus to have become nobility in the Germanic sense) lie in the following.
In general, the view prevails that the Christian German nobility evolved gradually from the pagan Germanic nobility, eventually forming the so-called German “high” nobility after the emergence of the so-called ministeriales [Editor’s Note: The ministeriales were a class of serf-born individuals elevated to positions of authority in the Holy Roman Empire. They possessed social rank despite not being free men and held a variety of positions ranging from military service to imperial management.] in the High Middle Ages, whose remnants were then buried in 1918. However, this view overlooks a fundamental circumstance.
The nobilities of the pagan Germanic peoples and of the Germanic peoples who converted to Christianity no longer had the same conceptions of nobility and were, in essence, complete opposites. This is not altered by the fact that large parts of the old pagan Germanic nobility were undoubtedly absorbed into the Christian Germanic nobility, so that, for example, the German nobility of the Middle Ages, even if perhaps not equivalent in public law, were in fact regarded and respected in some regions in much the same way that the pagan Germanic nobility had originally been. V. Dungern [Author’s Note: See his Adelsherrschaft im Mittelalter (Noble Rule in the Middle Ages) (Munich: J. F. Lehmanns, 1927).] is therefore undoubtedly right when he describes the medieval German nobility as the ideal of combined, highly-bred völkish power; we shall see that this praise is only valid with reservations.
The nobility of the Germanic peoples—like that of the Indo-European peoples—was based on a knowledge of the hereditary inequality of human beings. According to the conception of the time, the cause of this hereditary inequality was divine ancestors. It was believed that “blood” was the bearer of a person’s qualities, that the physical and psychological qualities of a person were passed on from ancestor to offspring, and that noble blood also transmitted noble qualities; accordingly, it was also believed that an ancestor could be “reborn” in the offspring. Breeding laws of almost uncanny consistency ensured the purity of the blood. Von Amira states in Grundriss des Germanischen Rechts (Outline of Germanic Law), “The Germanic noble families could be diminished, but not supplemented or increased.” This explains the strikingly rapid extinction of the pagan nobility of some Germanic tribes during the Migration Period [Editor’s Note: The so-called Migration Period, in its most narrowly defined sense, is the migration of mainly Germanic groups into western and southern Europe during the period starting from the Hunnic invasion of Europe circa 375 until the Lombard invasion of Italy in 568.]. We do not know the reasons behind this sharp distinction of blood between the Germanic nobility and the Germanic freemen, but we do have the option of explaining it on the basis of more recent discoveries in the field of heredity by assuming the employment of breeding laws, about which I provided more detailed information in my book Das Bauerntum als Lebensquell der Nordischen Rasse (The Peasantry as the Source of Life of the Nordic Race).
The pagan Germanic nobility was therefore exclusively a nobility of dynasties which only included families distinguished by clarity of descent. They were the noblest and the best of the Germanic peoples—people of noble blood. They drew the moral justification for their existence and their breeding laws from sacred ideologies. Even if the ancient Germanic nobility did not possess any privileges of a public-legal nature over the other freemen of their tribe, but merely had social and material advantages, their influence was nevertheless reliant to a significant degree on the respect which the people had for these noble dynasties. We have absolutely no example from the whole of later German history which could even approximate to this relationship between the Germanic nobility and the Germanic freemen, which was built on moral ideas and hereditary facts. “With all their sense of freedom, the people were proud of their lordly dynasties. Not with jealousy and envy, but with joy and love, with veneration and gratitude—the people looked up to them,” wrote W. Arnold in Deutsche Urzeit (German Prehistory) [Author’s Note: Actually only in England do we have something that approximates this relationship between the nobility and the people found among the Germanics. See Dibleius, England (England, Leipzig and Berlin: 1929) vol. I, 146: “Above all, however, the idea of natural leadership by old families is so deeply rooting in English popular beliefs that all modern egalitarianism is thrown out the window. For every ministerial post, for every honorary position in the state and municipality, the noble candidate is the first to be considered.” Incidentally, we shall see in the following sections of this book that the position of the English nobility in the English people is by no means a coincidence—in addition to the still strong Germanic influence among the English, it can be traced back to the fact that the English nobility were able to avoid certain development that the German nobility fell into.].
An external marking of nobility was unknown to Germanism, as were external rank decorations such as crowns and scepters, thrones and princely dress; the well-known Iron Crown of Lombardy is only a work of the fifteenth century, using an iron bracelet from around 900. As Otto Lauffer wrote in Germanische Wiedererstehung (Germanic Resurgence; Heidelberg, 1926):
Courtly ceremonies and corresponding insignia increasingly penetrated the Germanic princely courts only after the migration of peoples from Byzantium. The emperors at Constantinople, for example, granted friendly Germanic princes a kind of nobility charter, by which they conferred on them the title of consul or patricius, granting special privileges with regard to honorary dress and forms of address. The Germanic princes adopted these distinctions primarily in consideration of their formerly Roman provincial subjects.
A reminder of this Germanic conception of nobility has been preserved in Sweden—a country in which some ancient Germanic customs have survived to the present day—in the fact that the oldest noble families of the country, e.g. the (translated here) Ochsenstern (not -stirn as in Schiller), the Schweinskopf, the Silberschild, the Lorbeerzweig, the Adlerflug, the Ehrenwurzel, and others exist in the unpretentious garb of a name that seems bourgeois (i.e. non-noble) to us Germans.
The free and noble Germanic peoples knew only Du as a form of address among themselves, without regard to differences of class. It was only later, following the Roman and Byzantine example, that kings were addressed as ihr [Editor’s Note: Addressing in the second person singular of the personal and possessive pronoun (du, dich, dein, etc.), colloquially called duzen, is the grammatically direct and simplest form of address that underlies all Indo-European languages. The ihr for individuals (ihrzen) of high rank is an outdated form of address in standard German.], over time this becoming generally accepted; it was not until the Carolingian period that the thoroughly un-Germanic and un-German [Author’s Note: As early as the eighth century, the collective name deutsch (German)—thiodisk, from thiod, meaning “people,” became commonplace among the Germanic tribes, particularly the West Germanic tribes of the mainland, while the name germane (Germanic) was used by Celts and Romans, but was not common among Germanic tribes.] courtly and noble ceremonies began, which developed more and more in the Middle Ages and reached their climax in the time of absolutism, reaching in 1918 their (hopefully!) final grave.
The conversion of the Germanic peoples to Christianity, i.e. to the doctrine of the Anointed One, deprived the Germanic nobility of its moral foundations.
We cannot imagine the magnitude of upheaval of moral concepts brought about by the German peoples’ conversion to Christianity to sufficiently understand the dissolution with regard to customs and law. In sharp contrast to the idea of the hereditary inequality of human beings, Christianity proclaimed “the accident of birth” and promoted the idea of the equality of all, imparting human traits to the throne of moral concepts. The Germanic nobleman had hitherto regarded himself as a guardian of divine order, placed in this world via the continuing power of procreation and originating from a divine ancestor. Consequently, he could not receive justification from the “self”; rather, he received it exclusively from what he was worth to the community or nation he led. With his conversion to Christianity, he was completely and thoroughly deprived of the moral ground of his own sense of self as well as his social—and not least his ideological—position in the nation. Regarding the nature of things, it was no longer a question of fulfilling a task in this world on the basis of special innate predispositions, but things were turned upside down, in that the assessment of every moral task fulfillment was, so to speak, turned from the eternal into the temporal, and from the temporal towards a beyond. The Germanic had hitherto, on the basis of his pagan faith, carried within himself a kind of divine moral law, to which he subordinated the worldly things of his earthly existence. Suddenly all this was worth nothing, and he had to make an effort to first attain the hereafter by living a life pleasing to God on this earth. The individual was no longer evaluated by the people on the basis of a moral order that was known and sacred to everyone and in the fulfillment of which he first had to prove himself, but he was now evaluated exclusively according to how he solved the task of securing a privileged place in the hereafter through an individually purposeful life, for only this was—thought through to the last—pleasing to God. Thus the value of the noble birth was actually destroyed in thought, for everyone was now equal to every nobleman in the competition for the salvation of the soul in the hereafter—which was now the actual moral task of life. The supremacy of this concept over all worldly things cleared the way for the noble and free Germanic peoples to be ruled by non-noble officials, and later, in the case of the Franks, even by non-free officials, for this, which was monstrous to the heathen Germanic, was self-evident the moment it was done in the service of Christian thought. Therefore, the conversion of the Germanic peoples north of the Alps to Christianity, from the Franks onwards, was not primarily a matter of divinity, but a political measure conducive to the purpose of the kings, who thereby consolidated their rule.
If the feeling of the Germanic peoples had not been so thoroughly noble, if an actual trait of Germanism had not been the desire for the order of all things—a desire that hates every “disorder” in the depths of the soul, then the effects of the conversion to Christianity could have easily taken on the proportions that today’s Bolshevism has managed to reach. For just as Bolshevism in Russia turned the whole previous conception of authority and morality completely upside down, so did Christianity at first among the Germanic peoples. And it must unfortunately be said that Christianity does not differ so much from Bolshevism in the crudeness of the means employed in realizing its plans. In this question, however, a sharp distinction must be made between what Christianity professed as a message of salvation and what was useful for certain kings who used it as a means to pursue selfish goals under a moral idea [Author’s Note: In more recent colonial history, too, Christian missionaries have often been used and deployed without their knowledge to advance political goals that could never have been dared to be said publicly.].
Experience has shown that today’s Germans generally find it difficult to comprehend the full impact of the conversion of the Germanic tribes. It has been so hammered into our heads that the conversion of the Germanic tribes to Christianity was a step forward on the path towards the general development of mankind (and that it was done for the good of the Germanic tribes) that we are hardly able to grasp the idea that the conversion of the Germanic tribes to Christianity was primarily a measure of political expediency on the part of ambitious kings and not a matter of inner conversion to a higher knowledge of God.
At the heart of this matter is the attitude of Germanism towards the concept of the state. This is in no way to suggest that the Germanic people already had clear ideas about a state and its nature in the sense in which we have understood a state since the existence of the ancient Roman Empire. However, the Germanic peoples had very clear ideas about the way in which communities, peoples, and associations of peoples could be united in a unified order that overlapped them. Such orders simply grew out of the needs of everyday life. They had the individual community as their foundation and were dependent on the feelings of kinship between the peoples and tribes, especially with regard to matters of faith; furthermore, they depended on the natural conditions of their land, and finally—but not least, on the ruling power of individual people’s kings or chiefs. The essential point, however, is that the system, as well as the representation of the entire order to the outside world, was of quite incidental importance and only came to the fore on special occasions where it was the main matter. The system grew from the bottom upwards, and had the father of the family (not every freeman, since only landowners were full members of the Thing [Editor’s Note: People’s assemblies (volksthing) and Germanic court assemblies were called Thing or Ding.])—and thus the family—as the actual bearer of influence; it then branched out from the family to community representation and from there on to the national assembly and so on, but in each case structured itself logically from the bottom upwards, rather than from the top downwards. It was a system whose foundational laws were determined by the Germanic peasants’ ideas of self-government, and whose composition depended on the more or less randomly assembled set of the lowest and smallest units, i.e. the landowners of each individual community. In this structure built on pure self-governance, any leader, no matter where he came from, was a commissioned leader—his status as a leader was not vested in any legal power or concept aside from free self-governance. In other words, the leader was never a source of law in himself or through the position he held, like the late Roman Caesar. Accordingly, and in essence also logically, every leader could be called to account by their legal peers in the self-governing body, and the Germanic peasants, if necessary, did not hesitate to lay their heads before the feet of their kings. The position of the Germanic kings and chieftains was thus far more what we would call today a “commissioned manager hired on notice,” than a king in the sense of our more recent German history. This explains why the Germanic king was not a distinguished ruler, but always remained an equal among equals, who was only endowed with special powers on a case-by-case basis and for the fulfillment of special tasks. He was then, however, allowed to wield these powers with all ruthlessness because of the responsibility he had assumed.
The strength of this Germanic political system (the basic tenets of which, by the way, passed over into the medieval German political system and are something which we have been consciously struggling to revive since Freiherr von Stein) lay in the fact that the law was upheld and the inner and outer freedom of the Germanic freeman remained untouched. Its weakness, on the other hand, lay in the fact that this system, built on a perfect foundation of natural law, lacked a firm structure, precisely what we today call the state and state borders. Thus, it also lacked a united external representation, as well as any outwardly directed purposefulness in general. This is the explanation for the fact that the foundations of early Germanic states, while astonishing in their perfect internal justice and their both artful and functional internal structures, are at the same time so conspicuously vacillating and aimless in their foreign affairs, with their cohesion against foreign enemies often entirely dependent on the personality of the individual leader.
When the Germanic peoples clashed with the Roman Empire, the late Roman political system and relationship of the individual to the state stood in stark contrast to this Germanic concept of the parts of the people united under one leader. Admittedly, the ancient Roman Empire had originally grown out of patrician institutions, which were more or less the same as those possessed by the Germanic peoples in their early days. But after the defeat of Carthage, the internal laws of the Roman Empire changed. The civil servants no longer felt themselves to be the agents of self-governance, but slowly and imperceptibly transformed under the influence of the moneyed people who were gaining more and more power in the state; they became the actual masters and developed into an independent leadership. The civil service, although still supplemented from the old Roman families, turned into the tool of the bankers. This state of affairs only became apparent in the time of Caesar, especially after his assassination, when the people began to deify his person in the oriental sense. Such a process would have been unheard of earlier in the Roman Republic, and it proves the Roman people’s complete turning away from the old Roman way of thinking and their accustoming to an unconditional leadership. With this, the path was clearly marked out and Augustus consequently followed; he designed the Roman state as an institution of expediency structured from top to bottom, which was fundamentally superior to the rights of the individual and served to carry out the subjugation of the peoples according to expedient points of view, irrespective of their uniqueness or peculiarities. Through this system the Roman state was able to weld together the Mediterranean basin into a kind of economic unit. At the same time, of course, the power of economic interests, which, through the influence of the bankers, was becoming more and more equal to that of the state, had priority over the interest of the personal freedom of individual citizens. Its success was ultimately an outwardly more or less clearly delimited empire with astonishingly developed institutions of expediency with regard to its domination and to the economy. There is no doubt that the Roman Empire of the Caesars realized, in a certain sense, the supranational world economy that we are striving for again today, for the Mediterranean basin was initially its own little world for the peoples living along the Mediterranean. But this Roman Empire, as far as man is concerned, was built over the peoples!
This is a fine example—Rome’s battles over Gaul prove it most clearly. Rome needed Gaul’s wealth and later needed Gaul as part of its economic zone from the Atlantic Ocean to the Orient. It was in the time of Augustus that this process was both initiated and completed, and we can clearly observe it historically. In carrying out his plan, Augustus resisted the tribal idiosyncrasies of the Gauls as well as other ethnic concerns. It is revealing to note that Augustus then deliberately set about suppressing ethnic issues in Gaul through measures that would take us far too long to discuss in detail here. His attempts to bring the Germanic tribes into the same economic dependence as the Gauls in order to protect the eastern border of Gaul failed. When the Roman governor Varus, who had been trained in the Orient and had been transferred from there to Germania, also tried to impose a tribute plan on the Germanic tribes—as was common practice in the rest of the Roman Empire—the well-known uprising in 9 A.D. arose, which, with the battle in the Teutoburg Forest [Author’s Note: In the Battle of Varus (also known as the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest or the Battle of Hermann, and referred to by Roman writers as the clades variana, or “Varian disaster”), which took place in the second half of 9 A.D., three Roman legions, together with their auxiliary troops and support forces, suffered a crushing defeat in Germania under Publius Quinctilius Varus against a Germanic army led by Arminius (“Hermann”), a prince of the Cherusci.], put an end to such Roman efforts for centuries to come.
The late Roman empire was thus a fully constructed system, the external boundaries of which were, as far as possible, oriented towards the material laws of the economy and whose inner workings were also oriented towards this goal. The human being played a secondary role. The laws of blood were either not taken into account at all or only to the extent that they did not disturb the state as such nor its activities.
Nevertheless, despite its disregard for human freedom and the human dignity of each individual, this Roman Empire was built on the recognized inequality of the human race. The inequality was no longer driven by noble patrician dynasties that could be confident of their people’s admiration because of their divine descent, but by property and economic wealth; the idea of the hereditary inequality of human beings was thus transferred from blood to the ownership of property. But this empire of the Roman Caesars, despite its immoral political system, remained insurmountable as long as this idea of the hereditary inequality of humanity was maintained. That is why this empire collapsed only with Christianity. The time of the actual collapse can be placed quite precisely in the years between 235 and 285 A.D. G. Ferrero has recently demonstrated this in his very readable study, Der Untergang der Zivilisation des Altertums (The Decline of the Civilization of Antiquity; Stuttgart 1923, second edition). He says, for example:
The Greek and Latin civilizations both rested on the basic noble principles of a twofold, unavoidably necessary, and divinely willed inequality—the differences of race and class.… Almost everywhere in the Greek and Latin cultures, governments were aristocratically based on the hereditary prerogative of a small oligarchy capable of governing alone.… Rome was never governed democratically, not even in the stormiest times of the Republic; even the ruling class of the Roman Empire until Caracalla, that is, until the beginning of the third century (only a century before Diocletian), can still be described as having an aristocratic selection of a nobility. The senatorial and knightly classes, which enjoyed the privilege of occupying all high imperial positions, were a selection from the totality of Roman citizens, who in turn were formed from the noble and lowly, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, together forming a second class within the imperial population, itself endowed with important privileges and subject to its own laws. The Greco-Latin selection was on the basis of the principle that individuals and peoples are not equal in their moral dispositions, but rather unequal.… Christianity, through its doctrine that all men were equal as the children of the same God, had shaken the aristocratic fabric of ancient civilization to its foundations.
Until the third century after Christ, there was no difference between the Germanic and Roman peoples in the fact that both were convinced of the hereditary and divinely ordained inequality of human peoples. However, the Germanic and late Roman peoples are sharply opposed to each other in the way they perceive the relationship of the individual to the people as a whole, or of the citizen to the empire.
In the third century A.D., the Roman Empire began to collapse for entirely internal reasons. Under pressure from Asiatic nomadic hordes, the Germanic peasant tribes flooded the territory of the Roman Empire at a moment when it was no longer able to defend its borders. That the Germanic tribes “conquered” the Roman Empire is historically inaccurate. For “conquest” as it is understood in this context presupposes the will to attack a country in order to rule over it. Such a will is nowhere to be found among the Germanic peoples (apart from the Lombards, who did not break into upper Italy until the sixth century)—they merely sought land in order to settle. The Germanic peoples were, in fact, quite willing to serve the Roman Empire if they were allowed to live according to their customs on lands assigned to them. However, late Roman law and Germanic law are two things that contrast like fire and water, and were so opposed that they could not coexist. Thus we see this time of general confusion, which is somewhat inaccurately called the “Migration Period,” filled with a push by Germanism to establish itself within the territory of the Roman Empire. This could not last and either perished, like the Vandals in Africa, or was pushed out, like the Visigoths from Italy. The latter finally found a place to stay in Spain, i.e. in a very remote corner of the Empire. Only in Gaul were the Franks able to gain a definitive and unrestricted foothold. Accordingly, it was in Gaul that the conflict between late Roman and Germanic law, and between the late Roman and Germanic political systems, came to a head and initiated a struggle that lasted through the millennia until it was conclusively decided by Napoleon I, who finally and conclusively imposed the late Roman administrative system.
We must keep in mind, however, that the Franks brought personal freedom to Gaul with their law and accustomed its people, which had completely degenerated and been enslaved in the mire of late Roman civilization, to freedom and human dignity again [Author’s Note: Strictly speaking, the French Revolution of 1789 can be called a joke of world history in its justifications. Louis XIV had imposed absolute monarchy in France. H. von Moltke writes in Die Westliche Grenzfrage (The Western Border Question), “This transformation of France under Louis XIV may justly be regarded as a Gallo-Roman reaction against the Germanic element which had hitherto still prevailed in France, as an annihilation of both the old Frankish popular liberties and the representation of the estates, and as a return to the former Roman despotism, such as what had been indigenous to Gaul for five hundred years from Caesar down to Clovis.” The French people rose up against this despotism and simply demanded back the safeguards of the old Frankish, old Burgundian, and so on constitutions, i.e. the old Germanic institutions of the original assemblies, the army, and the imperial assembly. But it is a great irony of world history that these demands of the French, certainly no longer a very Germanic people, had to be forced upon their still predominantly Germanic, i.e. blond and blue-eyed, nobility. Meanwhile the French revolutionary, who boasted of wanting to chase Germanism back into the forests of eastern France and who was not afraid to send a blond and blue-eyed man to the scaffold—even if he was not a nobleman, and who presented himself as the guardian and heir of Roman liberties, simultaneously demanded Germanic institutions from his Romanized nobility of Germanic blood. With which things were indeed turned upside down in every respect!].
But the Franks were also adaptable. In the south of their empire, where no rural Frankish settlement had taken place and the Franks only ruled their territory as landlords, the Roman administrative institutions had remained more or less intact, so that the Franks had the opportunity in their own empire to learn about the expediency of these institutions. They learned that Germanic law, while perfectly capable of preserving the human dignity of the law-abiding individual, was less useful for administering and managing an empire according to the interests of a centrally directed state. While in one part of Gaul the Frankish self-governance prevailed, the Roman administration prevailed in another part—an empire came into being whose Germanic leader was given the opportunity, in a thoroughly peaceful way, to train himself in Roman administrative and ruling customs and to learn to appreciate the Roman state institutions as excellent aids in creating a kingdom independent of the people—in this case, independent of the entirety of the Franks. The situation arose in which the Frankish king, who had been “commissioned” as king by his fellow Franks on the basis of Frankish law, believed that he could best satisfy his desire to expand his personal power by justifying his ambitions on the legal basis of his Gallo-Roman subjects. The advantages of the Frankish kings were best preserved by adopting Gallo-Roman legal views, and it is understandable that Frankish kingship began to lean in that direction. In those times, however, Christianity, as the previous Roman imperial religion, was synonymous with the Roman conception of state and law. It therefore makes sense that the Frankish king Clovis I, who converted to Christianity together with other Frankish leaders, in this way consolidated the foundations of his royal power and proceeded to rule in a decidedly un-Germanic manner. His Franks at first did not think at all of following him down this path, and it took centuries for all of the Franks to accept Christianity. But since the Frankish system of self-governance, with its commissioned kingship, could only be transformed into an autocratic kingship (complete with a civil service responsible only to the king) if this transformation was based on moral reasoning, it is logical then that the Frankish kings turned their attention to evangelizing Christianity among the Franks and promoted conversions to the best of their ability. Once all Franks were Christians, their king and his officials could rule over them—regardless of whether these officials were of free Frankish or non-free origin. At the end of this development, and representing it most fully, was a Frankish king who was not even descended from a noble Frankish family, but who nevertheless firmly and securely ruled the Frankish Empire through his retinue of officials of diverse origins who were devoted only to him—Charlemagne! With Charlemagne, the late Roman conception of the empire and the state had for the first time gained a firm foothold on purely Germanic soil and was able to assert itself.
From the Catholic side, we learn much from Dr. Eugen Mack’s Kirche, Adel und Volk (Church, Nobility and People; Wolfegg 1921, page 3), which describes how closely political and religious aspects interacted during the development of the Frankish royalty, and how it favored the emergence of a Frankish Christian nobility which no longer had much to do with the old pagan Frankish concept of nobility, but which nevertheless was to become of the most lasting significance for Germanism. Eugen Mack explains:
Exactly one hundred years before the Treaty of Verdun, in 743, we have a great turning point with regards to the Church and the Franks. The organizer of the Church in Germany, Saint Boniface, was at work. Pippin, the majordomo of the Merovingian house, who politically favored the work of Boniface, installed, after an interregnum beginning in 737, what would be the last Merovingian king—Childerich III (743). The state alone was not suitable for establishing a Frankish Christian nobility, and so it had to involve the Church as an authority superior to the state and work harmoniously with it. The Church itself came to this decision—at a synod in Eistinä (Estinnes) in Hainaut, where the spiritual and secular nobility met, it was decided that part of the church property secularized by Charles Martell (Majordomo 714–741) should be returned. If this was not possible for the time being, they would remain in the hands of their owners as precarious property. This meant that the owners would pay an annual tax and that their property would revert to the church in the event of their death, if the heir was not in need. This is the beginning of the feudal system, and in a certain sense also of the Leibfall und Gnadengüter (mortuary) [Editor’s Note: The mortuary was a payment in kind due to the feudal lord on the death of one of his bondmen.]. The Church began the system of fiefs on a grand scale. It bound land and soil and created for itself a tribal estate, and in later development a fideicommissum [Author’s Note: This sentence could be misunderstood: The Church did not bind land for the first time, since land had already been bound among the Germanic peoples, as the following sections will explain. However, the Church began to provide the families it liked with tied property—the system of benefices, in order to anchor its influence in the country and to keep the families in question dependent. At that time, land ownership was synonymous with economic power and, as a result, also with political power. Accordingly, Mack says quite correctly in another place, “The papacy would not have been able to project its power so effectively if it had not also had external political and economic influence through the significant land and properties which had been acquired by the Papal States, especially since Pippin, the father of Emperor Charlemagne. In 756, two years after the death of Saint Boniface, then the archbishop of Mainz—Germany’s largest archbishopric, Pippin donated the conquered Ravenna and the surrounding pentapolis to the Roman See by laying the keys of the conquered cities on the tomb of Saint Peter. From that time, this development had a very great significance on the history of the power of the Church over the peoples of the world, lasting at least until the end of the Papal States.”], subsequently serving as a model for the empire. As large landowners, the Church and the nobility formed a close alliance that lasted until secularization in 1803.
Hans F. K. Günther on the Nordic Race in Rome
[Racial Elements Of European History - Hans Günther [Rassenkunde Europas] (1929)]
Ch. VIII: The Nordic Race in Pre-History and History: Pt. III—The Romans
THE Romans were the final inheritors of all power in the ancient history of the Mediterranean; they, too, were sprung from Nordic blood. As early as 2000 B.C. the pile dwellings of upper Italy show 'peculiarities' pointing to an influence coming from north of the Alps. It was first observed in the domain of the general culture.
The immigrants settle down likewise in the protection of the lakes, and burn their dead.' The pottery and burning of the dead point to a Nordic inroad. Since the northern Italian pile dwellings contain both short- and long-headed men, it must be assumed that the people coming from the north, since they brought body-burning with them, and thus have left no bone-remains, formed a class ruling over Alpine- Mediterranean populations. Were they one of the Italic tribes settling here before the main Italic immigration, as its earliest forerunners? Were they the Oscian- (Samnite)-Umbrian tribes of the Italics? The lake-villages of upper Italy are laid out quite regularly, like the later 'Roma quadrata.' There were forms of worship connected with the bridges leading to the land, which are perhaps seen again in the title of 'pontifex' for the chief priest in Rome.
The true Italic immigration, leading to the foundation of Rome, came about later, 'at the height of the Bronze Age.' In the forms of its pottery it shows a migration that must have come from central Germany as its original home; and the same origin for the Italics is pointed to on philological grounds. Much writes as follows on the original home of the Italics: 'That the Italics were once settled north of the Alps is an irresistible conclusion to be drawn from their relations of kinship with the peoples of northern Europe.' Philology, owing to the close kinship between the Italic and the Keltic and Germanic, and between it and the Greek, cannot but assume some prehistoric region where these peoples (or the tribes whence these peoples are descended) were in contact; Bohemia or Moravia has been suggested for this region. Kretschmer assumes a region between the upper Danube and the Eastern Alps for the first home of the Italics. The Italic migration into Italy took place from the middle Danube over the lower passes of the Eastern Alps. Schuchhardt describes the road taken by the Italic forms of culture: 'This culture spreads along the Adriatic, then crosses the middle Apennines, and comes down the Tiber to Rome, where the pre-Romulean forum graves belong to it. Another branch keeps rather more to the north, and reaches Tarquinii, that is, southern Etruria; but, at the same time, the movement spreads east of the Apennines as far as Tarentum.' 'It is significant that the new culture skirts the main Etrurian region, evidently because here there was resistance from a well-established state system. The culture of Etruria does, in fact, form an old and solid block'. When we consider Roman history, we have the feeling that, in comparison with the non-Nordic people of Italy, the number of the Nordic new-comers who now prepared to found a world-empire was not very great, but that the Nordic gentes, through the strictest discipline and a simple and stern warriors' code, so fashioned and handed on the Roman type of the Nordic nature that down to late times the men of the blood of this creative race stood out as an unchanging people filled with stern resolve. The Romans are seen to be more Nordic than the Hellenes through their greater earnestness, the Roman gravitas and virtus, and through the freer position of the woman.
In late Roman times what Giuffrida-Ruggeri said is still true: 'In the calm tenacity and quiet growth of the Roman people perhaps the descendants of H. Nordicus represented the turbulent restlessness of violent and bold individuals which, even in Roman history, one is able to discern from time to time.' The legendary age of the kingship still holds memories of the contest between the first Nordic comers and the Etruscans for the supremacy in Italy. It may be presumed that with the loss of their Nordic upper class the Etruscans, too, lost an invaluable source to them of leaders. Probably the Hither Asiatic and Alpine elements went on ever increasing in the Etruscan people, for the late Etruscans show a quite Oriental voluptuousness, and finally are called 'well fed and fat' (obesi et pingues) by the Romans. They were looked on as examples of relaxed morals.
The oldest historical sources of the Italic tribes relate the contests with the other Italic tribes of Nordic origin and their gradual incorporation—the Umbrians and Oscians (Samnites), the Sabellans and Sabines. The Umbrians, perhaps the vanguard of the Italic tribes in prehistory, had already founded a State about the mouth of the Po. The Samnite love of fighting, the truthfulness and reserve of the Sabine tribe, and the chastity of its women are still spoken of in later Roman history, and may well point to these tribes having a strong element of Nordic blood.
The oldest Roman constitution gives us, like the Doric, a clear picture of classes founded on race: the 300 Patricians who by themselves make up the Roman Senate correspond to the 300 families of the Latin and Sabine tribe of the Nordic conquerors; the Plebeians correspond to the earlier population, predominantly Mediterranean, but undoubtedly already by that time with an admixture of the Alpine, Dinaric, and Hither Asiatic, and they have no political rights. Patricians and Plebeians, therefore, stood originally not in an opposition of rank or status, but were racially sundered. The Plebeians were the descendants of Ligurian-Iberian, predominantly Mediterranean tribes. There are also some signs of the Plebeians living under mother-right, while the Nordic Italics made father-right, which belongs everywhere to the Nordic tribes (patria potestas), a very essential part of their law. Ridgeway has shown that the Italics brought with them the Nordic round shield, and Nordic body-burning, which as late as the Empire was practised more in the upper classes. He has also shown that the confarreatio, the Patrician marriage custom, through its difference from usus and coemptio—the marriage customs of the Plebs—points to the difference in the racial origin of the two classes.
The civil discipline and simple warrior customs of old Roman times remind us in many ways of the true Nordic culture that prevailed in Iceland in the tenth and eleventh centuries; even in the Latin ways of expression much has been found that can be compared with those of the Icelandic saga. There is little to remind us of the independent history of the peoples before the Romans. The strong Roman will seems to have wholly shut itself off from the aboriginal people. Did the blond Romans mistrust the dark-haired man? A proverb quoted by Horace (Sat., i. 4, 85)—'He is black, beware of him, Roman' (hic niger est; hunc tu, Romane, caveto!)—goes back perhaps to early Roman times and their Nordic Mediterranean racial contrasts, though, of course, Horace could no longer know anything of such an origin for the proverb.
Eugenic practice was furthered by the killing of evidently misshapen children, prescribed by the Twelve Tables. But this seems to have led to abuses. The later Roman laws strive rather to raise the number of children, although the eugenic standpoint was never quite forgotten. Seneca, too, wrote: 'We drown the weaklings and misshapen. It is not unreason, but reason, to separate the unfit from the fit.' But at that late time (about A.D. 41) this seems to have been a counsel rather than the description of a custom. It was only when denordization and degeneration had already brought about conditions beyond all remedy that certain men in Rome turned to considered eugenic practice.
The laws of the Twelve Tables, that oldest element in Roman law, were the result of the first legal adjustment of the relation between Patricians and Plebeians. The first serious changes in the racial division of the Roman people were brought in under the Republic.
The consul, P. Valerius Poplicola, carried through laws which were to ensure him the favour of the Plebeians: henceforward men of new wealth of unpatrician blood were to be taken into the Senate (510 B.C.). Struggles arise between the two classes; young Patricians wish to bring in the kingship again; the Plebeians go off to the Holy Mountain to force their demands to acceptance; even the Patrician families are cloven with dissensions from one another, until at last agreements are reached, but agreements which mark the beginning of racial mixture. In 445 B.C. by a law, the Lex Canuleia de connubio, marriages between Patricians and Plebeians are declared valid. Before this the children of mixed unions had followed the pars deterior—the 'worse hand,' as an old German law term has it. Thus the blood of the upper class had been kept pure. Now the children take the father's rank; the division between the races has vanished. This blotting out of distinctions ended by bringing so much Nordic blood into the Plebeian class that from it distinguished families arose later with true Nordic qualities—families that down to the Punic wars appeared with great distinction mainly in the official nobility (nobilitas). The nobilitas formed of itself a new nobility of rank from the most capable families of the Patrician and the Plebeian class after the abolition of Patrician privileges.
The gradual change hereafter of the Roman constitution might be represented as the change in racial stratification. Nordic blood slowly runs dry; from it mainly come those warriors who fight for Rome's greatness and so fall, and those officials who govern the conquered lands. The struggles with the invading Nordic Kelts from the north had led to long wars in which Nordic race was opposed to Nordic race. Nordic blood wore itself out in the service of the motherland. Cato (d. 149 B.C.) will always be the type of the true Roman, born from the high nobility with lofty aims, a thorough patriot, a true Nordic general and statesman. He was (according to Plutarch and a satirical poem) fair-haired and light-eyed. But very likely in Cato's time Nordic blood was no longer strongly represented. The old Roman names chosen after Nordic characteristics—such as Fulvius, Flavus, Rufus, and others—were in part kept in use through tradition, and in part they may have been chosen again in late times because of the very rareness of fair hair. But again and again we find that, of two kinsmen with the same name, one gets the epithet niger (the Dark), the other rufus (the Fair) to distinguish them.
In the destruction of the Nordic class the Punic wars above all, and then the civil wars, may have played their part. Through the Punic wars the old Patrician families are said to have vanished but for a dozen or so. Through the civil wars Nordic leaders fell on both sides, or fell to the vengeance of the victor. We know how Marius, the leader of the Plebeian lower class, after his victory over Sulla, the fair-haired and light-eyed (according to Plutarch) leader of the nobility, had many leading men in the nobility put to death, and how Sulla afterwards took the same bloody vengeance on the leaders of his enemies. The noble families of Rome died out, particularly since they—under the weight of high taxation—seem to have more and more deliberately lessened the number of their offspring. The Fabians had had to make a law for their own house that every child born of their family must be brought up. But malaria, warfare, civil wars, moral decay, and the spread of empire over the whole Mediterranean area and beyond, was bound to make the Nordic stratum thinner and thinner, particularly when no more Nordic blood came from the land. The disappearance of the peasantry as a result of the import of corn from the colonies dealt the hardest blow of all to the racial strength of Rome (as it did afterwards to England's). It is in the countryside that the Nordic element seems to keep soundest and last longest.
The disappearance of the peasantry seems the first to show its effects of all the factors contributing to denordization and degeneration. But a certain Nordic upper class must still have clearly survived in the Roman state in the time of the Empire.
The fall of the Republic was at the same time the fall of the last of the men embodying the Nordic nature in the Roman state. Brutus and Cassius, and their fellows represented in their fall the fall, too, of the Republican ideal and of the remains of the Roman nobility.
They had murdered Caesar, the leader of the 'people'—that is, at this time, of the city masses of the lower orders. But in the end Caesar's monarchic ideal was victorious after his death against the old Roman republican ideal, which had no outstanding leaders; while Caesar is himself the example of a statesman high above all others and serving the 'declining years' of a late period. He founded Imperial rule in Rome, which gradually, in correspondence with racial changes, took on the features of Eastern despotism, and ended by becoming the splendid cloak thrown over a mouldering world.
The nobility gradually faded out of Roman life. The last family to survive was that of the Calpurnii, in which noble figures are ever appearing as late as Imperial times, and down to the end of the first century A.D. The Roman emperors were often obliged to keep the favour of the 'people' by breaking out against noble Romans in high places. Instead of the racial opposition between Patricians and Plebeians, there had long been in Imperial times the opposition between rich and poor. Old families grew poor when they kept away fEmpire into a racial morass. The constitutional expression of this breaking down of all racial barriers that had now come about was the extension of the citizenship by the lex Antoniniana to all freemen living anywhere in the Empire. This law was promulgated in A.D. 212 under Caracalla, the son of an African and a Syrian woman (Fig. 236), and the dreadful example of a criminal degenerate. His extension of the citizenship was 'hailed with easily understood joy by all the proletariate of the Roman Empire, since henceforward the dole socialism of the Empire, the corn distribution and so forth, would be shared in by the masses of those towns that had not yet received the citizenship by special grant.'
The few noble and thoughtful men could now but strive for that self-control and calm which preserves the honour even amidst corruption and decay. For any other endeavour it was too late. Thus for the best men of the Roman Empire there was naught left but the Stoic attitude, which addresses itself to the individual, whom it calls upon to have strength to bear as a man even the most crushing fate. It is by its uprightness of mind, its dislike of all barren sophistries, and the stress it lays on ethical conduct, as also by its calmness and contempt for the world, that Stoicism (which comes down from Zenon and Poseidonios, Figs. 219 and 220) in this age of decay may have drawn to itself in particular men of Nordic nature, who wished even amidst the destruction of the Roman Empire to show their nobility. Cicero's work, written from the Stoical standpoint, De Officiis, gives a picture of a manly Nordic soul in a late age.
But late Stoicism was the state of mind of men that looked without hope on a catastrophe. Hence its dislike of marriage and offspring. Hence, too, the stress it laid on the individual: these last high-souled men could no longer feel any ties between themselves and their people. They were seeking to combine together all the noble-minded men of the world in those days, and overlooked the fact that by this very aim they were cutting away the last of the roots linking the individual with his people and race. The last strong figures of old Rome were lonely men, and many Stoics under the Empire were banished and executed.
The ideal of beauty in late Roman times is still Nordic so, too, are some of the men.
Down to the second century A.D., Roman portrait busts were painted; the hair and lips often show remains of paint which to- day are of a light brown colour. But one cannot presume that the originals were fair, even when their features are predominantly Nordic. It may be that the paint was to show the hair-colouring associated with the idea of noble blood. The greatest part of the population, however, must about the time of the birth of Christ have been very predominantly a Mediterranean-Alpine-Dinaric mixture. Caesar, who was himself tall and fair-skinned, refers to the shortness of the Romans compared with the Gauls; and Strabo, describing a British (Keltic) tribe, the Coritavi (in the Lincolnshire of to-day), says that youths belonging to this tribe (described by him as blond), whom he had seen in Rome, were very much taller than the inhabitants of Rome. Under the Empire the height for the army had to be brought down to 1.48 metres. The Roman nobility, however, seems often to have still been recognizable by its fair hair. Anyone belonging to the wealthy and fashionable class who had dark hair liked to hide it: Juvenal (Sat., vi. 120) tells us of Messalina that she hid her black hair under a fair wig. The rich upstarts (homines novi) made their black-haired wives and daughters buy fair hair from Germany. In this way it was hoped to win a 'noble appearance.' Ovid mentions the custom of fair wigs. Juvenal, Martial, Lucan, and Pliny mention methods of dyeing the hair blond. Caracalla, of African-Asiatic blood, often used (according to Herodian) to put on a fair wig and walk about in Germanic garb.
Horace's ideal of beauty is Nordic, although he was himself dark, short, and fat. Vergil's ideal of beauty is Nordic. But among the living, too, fair hair is still to be seen: the swarthy Ovid knew two blond Hellene women. His ideal of beauty is founded on the Nordic race: he paints Romulus and Lucretia as fair. The swarthy Tibullus calls Delia blond; Martial speaks of several blond contemporaries; Horace names blond women; and other writers name other blond men and women who have played a part in history.
Apuleius, born in an African colony, a member of an old Roman family, and a follower of Platonism, calls himself tall, slender, and blond. Most of the sculptures representing Romans have a Nordic, or predominantly Nordic, expression. The narrow face, the long head, the sharp chin, the 'Roman nose,' taken all together make up heads which do not differ from hard Nordic heads of our time. His was already struck by the fact that Marcus Antonius, Caesar, Galba, Vespasian, and Trajan had a shape of the head which he had called the 'High Mountain form' after his discoveries in his own country, Switzerland, and which now is recognized as the shape of the Nordic head. Augustus himself was (according to Suetonius) very fair, and had light eyes; his mild expression recalls certain calm Nordic men. The later emperors in the time of Roman decay were often of 'barbaric' blood, of the blood of northern peoples, and are often painted as Nordic men by the old writers. The first true German on the throne of the Caesars was Maximinus Thrax (A.D. 235-238), the son born in Thrace of a Goth and an Alan woman. He was, according to old accounts, of giant stature, strikingly handsome, and with a dazzling fair skin. Valentinian I (d. A.D. 375), who was of barbaric blood, shows tall stature, fair skin and hair, and blue eyes. Under these late Roman emperors, who were often of Germanic blood, there was such a stream of Germanic mercenaries into the Roman Army, who finally settled within the Italian borders, that with these times a fresh flow of Nordic blood into the Roman Empire began, which stayed its fall for some time. It was even possible again to raise the height for the army in the fourth century to 1.65 metres, and for the Guard even to 1.72 metres. Tertullian describes, perhaps exaggerating, the change in conditions, this apparent new life in the midst of decay which the stream of Nordic blood had brought about:
'The world strides on front day to day. Now there are roads everywhere, all is looked into, all is busy. Estates have taken the place of ill-famed wildernesses, forests are held in check by sown land, wild life is driven back before herds, sandy wastes are sown, swamps are drained dry, there are more towns than there were once huts.' But the true Roman-Nordic creative powers were exhausted; the Empire went the way of its fall, and was finally brought to an end by the last Nordic wave, the invading Germans.
The last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus (one feels it is symbolical) was deposed from his throne, A.D. 476, by the first Germanic king of Italy, Odoacar. That which was still called the Roman people—indeed, that which already in the time of Augustus and his successors was called the Roman people—was a racial morass arising from the decomposition of peoples and every kind of mixture, a mob wherein now and again Nordic characteristics might appear. The decaying Roman Empire, anyhow the Mediterranean lands, was now mainly peopled by a mixture of the pre-Roman Mediterranean race with very much 'Semitic' blood—that is, with blood made up from various races, above all from Hither Asiatic, Oriental, Hamitic, and Negro elements (cp. Chapter IV), the blood of the many 'Semitic' slaves and freedmen (coming from Semitic- speaking nations). Besides these there came African recruits with Negro blood for the army, and fragments of Inner Asiatic races. Further, there came into Italy itself heavy strains of the Alpine and the Dinaric race. It was the end of everything, a true racial morass, whose degeneration and decomposition bred those repellent things we learn of from the last days of Rome. It was this swamp which Christianity had to go through before it reached the Germanic nations.
Christianity, which was now spreading, was at first the religion of the lowest classes in the Roman Empire, to whom the political ideals of the Roman freemen were just as foreign as the free thought and artistic creativeness of the Hellenes. In its origin and in the blood of its early followers it stood nearer to the Oriental standpoint than to the Nordic standpoint of the early Hellenic and Roman times. The laws of the first Christian emperor, Constantine, were directed against the setting out of children, a eugenically meant custom which had existed from the oldest times, but which had now undoubtedly grown to be an abuse. The Christian state church now built foundling homes; but in bringing up the blind, the deaf, the dumb, and the deformed, it also made their propagation possible; 'and with much good has also come much evil.' The importance of race in a people is seen particularly clearly from the Roman example.
The remarkable Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt, by Seeck (1910), which in its account makes much use of anthropological and eugenic considerations, comes to the conclusion that of all the causes given for the fall of Rome one is left always, 'the one main cause above all others: the mental and physical degeneracy of the race.' Disraeli, the English statesman, and a Jew proud of his blood, declared that race was the key to history, and the one and only, truth; and that any race which heedlessly mingles its blood with others must perish. In India racial separation by stern laws of caste had been long in existence before it disappeared with changes in general beliefs; in Greece and in Rome the racial opposition seems to have been less felt and to have disappeared sooner.
Everywhere the running dry of Nordic blood, and its heedless dilution, meant the death of a whole culture. The fall of the world of 'Antiquity' was not only the end of all creative strength; the strength even to keep the culture which had been built up was no longer there; this is seen, too, in the fact that the preservation of the technical knowledge acquired in the creative times (which was very considerable) was now beyond the powers of the denordicized and degenerate times following the fall of the Roman Empire.
If we survey the fall of the cultures of the peoples under Nordic leadership, certain agreements in its process are to be seen, which I have pointed out in the Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes through the following consideration: By following up the conception of the nordicizing and denordicizing of the peoples of Indo-European speech, a true theory of form for Nordic migration and history might be worked out, which would show the common features in the rise and fall of all peoples with a Nordic composition. The social or political form (if one may use such terms for these early times) probably went through changes mostly at the time the original home was left. Where the Nordics, keeping their racial purity, settle over an unbroken area, some kind of popular government must come into being, wielded by the most respected men of the several tribes. For areas with pure race some kind of republican system might well be fitting, since here for once it was really free and equal men alone that settled, and a graduation became possible only through the special gifts and energy of certain clans, and only so long as their energy lasted and was inherited. Popular rule, a kind of republic, might be brought in; as among the Nordic Icelanders, so among the Nordic Ditmarshers, and so, too, in earliest prehistoric times in all the regions of pure Nordic race. But so soon as the homeland had been left, there were bound to arise aristocratic forms, a rule by the nobles or the king.
The Nordic tribe moved through foreign lands, overcame peoples of other races, and ruled them as a class of nobles and husbandmen, as masters. Strongholds had to be built for securing the rule. It is very significant that the original Nordic home in north-west Germany has no strongholds. It is very significant, too, that the path of all Nordic peoples is marked by them, and in them stand rectangular houses and halls.
From district to district pushing forward as a ruling people from north-western Europe, not trickling in, but breaking in and conquering—it was thus that the migrations southward and eastward took place.
In long-drawn out struggles their destiny, we may suppose, led the several tribes to where their real settlement began in each case. When these Nordic tribes had once settled, and when fresh Nordic bands no longer found their way, then began the process which was to lead to the formation of separate peoples. The upper class felt itself at last no longer as foreign, but as the nobility and peasantry of a certain people, or rather, of certain tribes; for in all peoples of Indo-European speech the primitive form of collective life is the tribe made up of clans (wider families), which is led by a leader with restricted powers. The union of such tribes in a State to make one people under one king was a second stage in the growth of the community. The fusion of the two racial classes into a people which feels itself a unit generally lies in a time far earlier than the historical records of such a people. For their own historical consciousness tA contest in daring, in journeying and fighting, whirls the whole people into deeds which are sung by the old Hindu and Persian poetry, by the Greek Iliad, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, the Edda, the Icelandic Saga, and the German Nibelungenlied. The noble-minded men of this age always ask themselves whether their deeds can meet the eyes of the 'fathers'; they have a fixed code of honour, they lay much stress on clan discipline, they choose a wife almost always from the other free families, and give their daughters to hardly any but proved men. The clans that are famed for capacity and energy join their sons and daughters with one another. Weakly children are set out or killed. Heroism is the highest law, the individual thinks less of himself than of the clan and tribal honour. He demands strictly of himself that he keep all the traditional laws of vengeance, of duelling, of inheritance, and of religion. The commandments are: loyalty to oneself, loyalty to one's fellows, the extension and defence of the people that has come into being; what is prized is liberality, a generous heart, a noble mind, love of truth, self-confidence. The 'native hue of resolution,' that true Nordic hue, belongs to the nature and aspect of Nordic men in these early times. Thus do the early cultures of Nordic-led peoples arise, who ever fill us with wonder by their unconscious sure grasp of the laws of pure blood, healthy offspring, and the warrior's honour.
But the fusion of the Nordic upper class into one people with the non-Nordic lower class has already brought the possibility of racial mixture. Every constitutional change may disturb the class divisions, and for us to-day is a sign of such disturbance. The lower orders press for a shifting of power, as the upper class disappears. Therefore it is that racial mixture progresses as soon as 'the people' (the Demos, the Plebeians, the lower castes) has shaken the class divisions. This often happens under the lead of Nordic men who for some reason or other have become haters of the nobility. The lower orders win rights; many of the members have become wealthy, and their money buys them an influence in the State. Thus we gradually come to a 'rule of the people.' But this rule now means something quite other than in the purely Nordic regions, where, in fact, free and equal men were settled in the land. The rule of the people now means the rule of the masses, who cannot bear any men of distinction, as Herakleitos of Ephesus, the philosopher who came from the nobility, angrily says of them, and expresses his opinion by advising the Ephesians to hang one another man by man, for it was their view that 'no one of us shall be the bravest, or if he is to be, then it must be elsewhere, and among others.' The rule of the people now means the rule of the masses, led by agitators, and, above all, by the money of non-Nordic upstarts. The government becomes government by the masses. It is no longer based on landed property and descent, but on the possession of wealth. The land-owning nobility grows poor compared with the moneyed class of upstarts. Poverty brings the nobility to doubtful relations with the moneyed class; thus many members of the nobility degenerate. Capitalism is a sign of changed racial conditions, and hastens the disappearance of the Nordic upper class. Theognis, the Greek elegiac poet and writer of apophthegms, who lived at the time of such a change, has from his standpoint of the nobility given a clear description of this displacement of power:
'Wealth has ruined the race.' For the student of race it is very significant that the newcomer attracts notice and makes himself ridiculous. Wealth was a noble thing so long as it was essentially landed property, and belonged to a class that through its race was fitted for ruling, and brought up to own property, and loved wealth not for its own sake, but for the sake of power, and treasure, and honour. Wealth becomes something mean so soon as a class collects it which does not bring a high mind to the task; it becomes something mean in the history of a people under Nordic influence the moment the non-Nordic man comes to riches. He has not inherited the way of life that befits wealth if it is not to be something base. Rule and possession are not in his blood; hence he exaggerates, hence he seeks to copy the clothes and bearing of the Nordic class, and so makes himself ridiculous; for he makes mistakes every day. The purse-proud upstart, the new man, are seldom found among the Nordics. If a Nordic man should be raised from poverty to wealth, he would so have within him the way of life of the original upper class that he would not attract attention.
The new man makes himself ridiculous and offensive because he tries to copy the Nordic in his life. The history of all peoples under Nordic influence shows the figure of the newly rich man with political influence—the Roman satirists often draw his picture—and the moment of his appearance marks racial movement and change. From this moment the decline of the people is hastened.
The disruption shows itself in the daily life. Elements from the lower class have become rich, elements that have built up no idea of honour of their own, that are held back by no traditional sense of dignity from using their wealth to the full. Everything now can be bought: the State can be bought, so can fair hair to make a pretence of noble blood; the nobility itself can be bought. The ideas of the former upper class become ridiculous to the people that is changing: the heroic age lies far behind. Customs belonging to the races of the pre-Nordic populations again make their appearance. Morals change; the class- divisions are effaced by an unbounded freedom and restlessness, but, above all, by the rise of the new rich. The racial mixture has broken up the nobility; the new rich control the State, and use their power against the free peasantry, who now have the comparatively purest Nordic blood. The land goes to waste, the towns grow. The general mixture of blood ('the blood chaos,' Lundborg), to which the flow of foreign racial elements contributes, breeds the mob of the great cities—masses of men, who, as a result of the mixed blood, are utterly without goal, and exposed to any and every influence.
Late Rome is a good example of this.
While the early times were marked by a state of things that unconsciously worked for the good of the race and for efficiency, a change has now come about which leads straight to the preservation of the inferior blood, and the preservation and handing on of diseased tendencies. Fitness is no longer the principle of selection, but rather the cunning of great cities; it is not the daughter of the most capable family that is sought after, but the daughter of the rich house, even if she have the worst hereditary tendencies. A certain flight from responsibility for the future of the nation may lead to the raising of such children as would earlier have been exposed or killed. In Homer Thersites is the only cripple; in the late Roman writers long lists could be made of bodily deformities and signs of degeneration. In these late times, an upright mind is what leads least of all to advancement; the upright man may often be removed as it were from the heritage of the people by assassination or banishment (ostracism, proscription, religious persecution, banishment of the nobility). Sometimes these late times so hasten on the degeneration that a people becomes wholly changed in a short while. The money-power itself may, consciously or unconsciously, even breed up a degenerate mob for its own ends; great masses from their very nature fall quickest before the moneyed influence; they let themselves be paid by the new wealth, the invisible money-wealth, bread and the games, and then turned against what is left of the much smaller but visible wealth of landed property.
Although landed property down to late times was in the hands of an hereditary class, which probably had kept many Nordic characteristics, yet this, too, falls in the late times into the hands of the moneyed wealth of the towns. It would seem that, in the financial world of the cities of Greece and Rome in their decay, men with Hither Asiatic features were often met with. The Hither Asiatic race, indeed, has commonly a special gift for trade and the knowledge of men. Gregory of Tours (d. 594) mentions the Jewish and Syrian traders that went about in Gaul; and Jews and Syrians are just those nations with a strong Hither Asiatic strain (cp., too, Fig. 240).
The end of Greece, as of Rome, is marked by the want of outstanding men: Nordic blood has mostly run dry. The end of Greece and of Rome alike is marked by the more or less invisible domination of various financiers, by the mob-mind characterizing the more and more degenerate, more and more racially mixed people, finally by a slow dying out of whole regions. The records of antiquity speak of the ruin of formerly populous towns; the Mediterranean lands were exhausted. It was only the descendants of slaves from the farthest parts of the world that did not feel disgust. Thousands of men, and those without doubt the loftiest minded, eagerly entered the monkhood of the growing Christianity, turned away from this decaying world, and died without offspring. The 'fall' had come.
And so the history was bound to end of all Nordic-led peoples once they had in their progress taken a direction that led to the disappearance of the Nordic element. The process was bound to be speedier in those peoples who once for all had been cut off from the original Nordic region. Hindus, Hellenes, Persians, Romans, and some of the Kelts were, owing to the area they occupied, cut off from the main body of Nordic peoples, that had to stay in the German area, near the original home. A renewal of the Nordic blood within these southern peoples was impossible.
When we survey the fall in each case of the great empires and creative cultures from India to the West, this much is always clearly to be seen: that every 'fall' of a people of Indo-European speech is brought about through the running dry of the blood of the creative, the Nordic race.
A book is much spoken of now in Germany and Europe: Oswald Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes. In his book Spengler has examined into all the signs of the decay of the great cultures; but the cause—the exhaustion of Nordic blood in the peoples in question—Spengler has not seen. It is worth while here to examine Spengler's statements in the light of racial science.
For Spengler the so-called anthropological method in history has as yet been barren—but this is so far hardly a reproach. Thus we find false interpretations, as in the following example:
Spengler looks on it as a self-understanding of the Greek soul, living without history, without any conception of time, 'as a symbol of the first rank and unparalleled in the history of art,' that the prehistoric Hellenes 'suddenly' 'come back again' from building in stone to building in wood. And further on he declares: 'In the Homeric, as in the Vedic, times, there takes place the sudden step from burial to burning for which no material foundation can be found.' In all this, Spengler, therefore, overlooks the fact that it is not the same 'soul' which thus expresses itself. He overlooks this: the Nordic (Aryan) conquering, invading Hindus of the Vedic times, like the Nordic conquering, invading Greeks of the 'Homeric' times, bring their Nordic customs 'suddenly' with them into the lands, where they then further develop their 'soul'; they bring with them body-burning, which is common to all Nordic peoples; they bring with them building in wood, which still prevails among the Nordic Scandinavians. Thus Spengler keeps on overlooking the racial factors in historical phenomena. Other examples could be given; but we have no room here. Had Spengler made use of a racial view of history, he could not but see that, taken strictly, we cannot speak at all of the Greek people growing old, and the same is true for the Roman people; nor can we speak of a 'new feeling of life' arising in or after a late age. The 'degenerating' people, indeed, has for a long time not been the Nordic Grecian people whose likenesses its artists carved in marble. Degenerating Rome has long been no more the Nordic Rome that founded a world-empire. The 'new feeling of life' was, however, in each case that felt by the mixed population, which in the 'late times' went on living its uncreative mass-life as before; and every 'fall' in history, from India to the West, was always the running dry of the blood of the creative race in the life of a state and of a spirit.
If, then, we are to speak of a people of Indo-European speech 'growing old,' what we are to understand by this can only be: the disappearance of the blood of the creative upper class. Before Spengler, Breysig had already pointed out the likeness in the course of Greek, Roman, and German history, and shown that a Greek of 500 B.C. was at about the same 'stage' as a Roman of 330 B.C., and a German of A.D. 1500. But Breysig, no more than Spengler, had seen that this kind of 'contemporaneousness' in the history of Indo-European peoples is the result of the stage of denordization being the same.
Sir Edward Creasy on Arminius' Victory Over the Roman Legions Under Varus (A.D. 9)
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Procopius on Gothic Valor: A Brief History of the Rise and Fall of Teïas, the Last Ostrogothic King of Italy
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Salvian on Even Roman Favorability, Affinity, and Preferace for Barbarian Law and Leadership Over the Insidious Duplicity of an Entrenched Roman Bureaucracy
Meanwhile [those] who have enjoyed a liberal education, seek refuge with the enemy to escape death under the trials of the general persecution. They seek among the barbarians the Roman mercy, since they cannot endure the barbarous mercilessness they find among the Romans.
Although these men differ in customs and language from those with whom they have taken refuge, [...] yet they prefer the strange life they find there to the injustice rife among the Romans. So you find men passing over everywhere, now to the Goths, now to the Bagaudae, or whatever other barbarians have established their power anywhere, and they do not repent of their expatriation [...]
Hence the name of Roman citizen, once not only much valued but dearly bought, is now voluntarily repudiated and shunned, and is thought not merely valueless, but even almost abhorrent. What can be a greater proof of Roman injustice than that many worthy noblemen to whom their Roman status should have been the greatest source of fame and honor, have nevertheless been driven so far by the cruelty of Roman injustice that they no longer wish to be Romans?
The result is that even those who do not take refuge with the barbarians are yet compelled to be barbarians themselves; for this is the case with the greater part of the Spaniards, no small proportion of the Gauls, and, in fine, all those throughout the Roman world whose Roman citizenship has been brought to nothing by Roman extortion.
I must now speak of the Bagaudaæ, who, despoiled, afflicted, and murdered by wicked and bloodthirsty magistrates, after they had lost the rights of Roman citizens, forfeited also the honor of the Roman name. We transform their misfortunes into crime, we brand them with a name that recalls their losses, with a name that we ourselves have contrived for their shame!
We call those men rebels and utterly abandoned, whom we ourselves have forced into crime. For by what other causes were they made Bagaudae save by our unjust acts, the wicked decisions of the magistrates, the proscription and extortion of those who have turned the public exactions to the increase of their private fortunes and made the tax indictions their opportunity for plunder? [...]
Under such circumstances can we think ourselves undeserving of God's severe punishment when we ourselves continually so punish the poor? Can we believe that God ought not to exercise his judgment against us all, when we are constantly unjust? For where, or among what people, do these evils exist save only among the Romans? Who commit such grave acts of injustice as ours? Take the Franks, they are ignorant of this wrong; the Huns are immune to it; there is nothing of the sort among the Vandals, nothing among the Goths. For in the Gothic country the barbarians are so far from tolerating this sort of oppression that not even Romans who live among them have to bear it.
Hence it is that in those regions under barbarian annexation, there remains but one desire ubiquitous among all of its Roman inhabitants: that they may never again fall under Roman jurisdiction. There is one consenting prayer among the Roman population, that they might be permitted to spend their life, such as it is, dwelling alongside the barbarians.
Not only have our kinsmen no desire at all to escape from them to us, but they even leave us to take refuge with them.
Can we then wonder that the Goths are not conquered by us, when the people would rather become Goths with them than Romans with us?"
Unabridged Table of Contents
- Rome V.S. Germania: Ex Septentrione Lux
- Houston Stewart Chamberlain on Teutonic Superiority
- Alfred Rosenberg on Rome
- Introduction
- Carthage & Jerusalem
- Patricians and Plebeians
- From Sulla to Septimus Severus
- National Chaos in Rome
- How Rome Came into Being
- The Etruscans
- Hetæræ and Priests
- Hetæræ Witchcraft in the Near East
- Etruscan Satanism
- Magic & Sorcery
- The Hetæræ Queen – Tanaquil
- The Power of the Haruspex
- The Pope - Successor of the Haruspex
- Dante’s Inferno
- Etruscan Magic in Europe
- The Tragedy of the Middle Ages
- The Doctrine of Original Sin
- The Misinterpreted Diocletian
- The Pious Julian
- Chrestos and Paul
- Paul and the Racial Chaos
- The Ambiguous Nature of Christianity
- The Beginning of Dogmatism
- Goethe's Positive Christianity
- Interaction Between Magic and Intellectualism
- The Teutons in Rome
- Richard Walther Darré on the Contrast Between the Germanic Peaseantry and the Roman State
- Hans F. K. Günther on the Nordic Race in Rome
- Sir Edward Creasy on Arminius' Victory Over the Roman Legions Under Varus (A.D. 9)
- Procopius on Gothic Valor: A Brief History of the Rise and Fall of Teïas, the Last Ostrogothic King of Italy
- Salvian on Even Roman Favorability, Affinity, and Preferace for Barbarian Law and Leadership Over the Insidious Duplicity of an Entrenched Roman Bureaucracy