Myth to Power

The Preface's argument

Spencer opens with the central thesis: an international symbolic system, REM, has been passed down through initiates from the ancient world. Its form is unconventional but deliberate. The book is meant to be read from front to back, with each interconnected chapter adding another part of the argument.

He is candid about how the book came to be. Mark Brahmin wrote the original manuscript, an immense thing, and Spencer came in as editor. Editing became adding, then co-writing, until their contributions were difficult to separate. Brahmin is the originator of the thesis; Spencer was the sceptic who had to be won over. Close examination of the texts revealed the readings to be true, and his resistance was overcome by "the math," proof after proof after proof.

Then the practical things. The book has three parts: Groundwork, which gives you the concepts; Ancients & Moderns, the history; Cults and Culture, on what culture is and how the Mystery cults live on. It is the first of a series — The Caduceus and The Death of Tragedy come next. When you see (I, §3) it means Part I, chapter 3. Bible quotations are given word for word, often in the original Hebrew, because the words themselves carry treasure.

Central image

Two boys learning to swim. Brahmin's instinct is to throw the reader into the deep end. Spencer's is to put floaties on both arms first. Either way, he says, you are entering uncharted water.

Where it leads

The last pages set the thesis against Joseph Campbell and Jung. For Campbell, myth rises up from an unconscious we all share. Here it is the reverse: the great, lasting myths are designed, planted in a people by a priestly class — "collective consciousness" would be the truer term. Saturn eating his children is not only a picture of the narcissistic parent; it is a picture of one regime replacing another. Jacob and Esau are not just brothers; they are two peoples, and the younger takes the elder's birthright. "Myth is a will to power — more precisely, it is a path to power. Myth foresees victory. And what begins as a fable becomes fact."

The opening argument

The opening joins propaganda, myth, religion, culture, media, and art as one race-forming phenomenon, then shows the mechanism. What a people venerates holds its attention; that attention directs desire and conduct; over time, repeated choices shape mating and the genetic future. Genesis 30 gives the first image: Jacob places striped branches before Laban’s white flock, and what the flock sees directs its breeding. The deliberate use of symbols to form and empower a people or class — invariably at another type’s expense — is REM. Pygmalion gives the artist’s sacred function: the ideal becomes real. Art and religion are mating songs, and Judaism develops especially as a Bride-Gathering Cult that positions its own men as chosen.

Two racial terms govern the history that follows. Aryan is racial, and reaches beyond Europe through the Indo-European world — language, though, is not race. Proto-Jews names the symbol-wise, myth-bearing, culture- and religion-creating leadership within Aryan civilizations before there were Jews. The groups themselves may have been racially indistinct or non-Semitic in part or in the main, and the leadership was likely admixed. With those terms set, Japheth and Shem name the book’s fundamental contest: Europe against the Semitic world, Esau against Jacob, Rome against Jerusalem. Their hypothesis: this priestly class has persisted within Aryan civilizations since Sumer, and its cults later shaped Judaism, likely around the fourth century BC — Judaism itself a composite religio-culture, developed consciously out of those cults and joined to them by a continuity of initiates.

Central image

Jacob's flock before the striped branches and Pygmalion before the woman he sculpted: the image comes first, life conforms to it, and the artist fashions the future.

Words to know

REM · Pygmalion · cultural determination · mating song · Aryan · Japheth · Shem · Proto-Jews

The chapter's argument

Every schoolboy knows that Zeus and Jupiter are the same god under two names. Persephone is Proserpina; Hephaestus is Vulcan. The Romans read foreign gods this way as a matter of routine, and the practice has a name: interpretatio romana, Roman Interpretation. This chapter takes that old habit and sharpens it into the book's method. Carry the equations further and the mythical cognates emerge: Odin is a symbolic cognate of Mercury and evokes Jesus. Yahweh contains elements of Saturn, Vulcan, and Bacchus. Jesus is a derivative of Bacchus and Adonis. Odin, Yahweh, and Jesus are composite gods, and the Hebrew Bible and Gospels are fundamentally myths.

Why can outsiders see this when the professors cannot? Because the professor is a specialist. He sees the trees, maybe the leaves, never the forest — and he works under taboos, of which the sacredness of Judaism and Christianity is still the strongest. The generalist has the advantage. Just as the Aryan peoples can be traced through their languages, by cognate words, Jews and Proto-Jews can be traced through their myths, by "mythical cognates." That thread runs from Sumer through the Hebrew Bible, Greek religion and philosophy, medieval Christianity, and on to Hollywood.

Here the central terms take their full shape. REM is the phenomenon itself. Where it appears in Jewish or Proto-Jewish work, toward Jewish or Proto-Jewish ends, it is JEM. Where it appears in Aryan work, it is AIM — Aryan Inner Moralization — the only form with positive value. Works that are ambivalent or agnostic are "AIM-less." AIM must be developed, promoted, financially supported, cultivated, and made sacred. No other categories are needed: the Aryan has one true rival. The Greeks made their arts sacred under Apollo, Leader of the Muses. The chapter closes on Ovid's contest: Apollo on the lyre against Pan on the rustic flute. Everyone present gives it to Apollo — except King Midas, who gets the ears of an ass for his opinion. In Midas's chair, the book seats the modern professor who calls Congo drumming the equal of the Well-Tempered Clavier.

Central image

Apollo's strings against Pan's flute, and a fool with donkey's ears. That is the book's whole attitude to the arts in one scene: they are sacred, they have a ranking, and getting the ranking wrong is more than a matter of taste.

Words to know

REM · JEM · AIM · AIM-less · Roman Interpretation · mythical cognates · composite god

Where it leads

Every later reading — Odin as Mercury, Jesus as Bacchus, Superman as Moses — is Roman Interpretation carried one step further than the Romans took it.

The chapter's argument

How does a foreign myth get inside a people and come to feel like their own? Not by armies. By one man in the right seat. A bard, a skald, a druid, a priest, a playwright, a merchant — an outsider holding a position of cultural prestige can shape a nation's myths and even its language out of all proportion to his numbers. His contribution is anonymous. Nobody writes down that the storyteller came from somewhere else. The book calls this Promethean Transmission: fire carried in from outside and passed off as native. Think of Shakespeare, one poet, coining thousands of words that every English speaker now uses without a thought. No peasant, no nobleman, no king ever had that reach.

The second half is about names. The book would rather say "nocturnal" or "chthonic" — of the night, of the underworld — than keep repeating "Proto-Jewish," and would rather say "Hyperborean" or "Apollonian" than "Aryan." It quotes the opening of Nietzsche's Anti-Christ: "Let us look ourselves in the face. We are Hyperboreans." Those words carry a race, a temperament and a purpose all at once, and they point back to a god. Golden-haired Apollo is the noble prince, the northern invader, the founder of Delphi and Delos. He existed before Greece, in gods like Utu and Ra, and he has outlived Greece. Japheth, the Bible's European, is more or less Apollo under a Hebrew name: his son is Javan, "the Greek," and Ion, father of the Ionians, may mean "devotee of Apollo." The chapter settles, for clarity's sake, on "Aryan" — "while remembering that men really are born from gods."

Central image

A stranger with wonderful stories from far away, sitting by a king's fire. One man like that can carry a whole religion. He does not need a migration behind him.

Words to know

Promethean Transmission · chthonic · Hyperborean · Apollonian · Japheth and Javan

The chapter's argument

Three things travel between peoples: genes, language and myth. Genes move slowest — it takes migration or conquest to change a population. Language is slow too, and it sticks to its region; English will still be spoken in North America a century from now whoever lives there. But myth moves like lightning. A good story about the gods or the ancestors can seize a whole people once it reaches the high places — the temple, the king's court, the theatre, the cinema, the big social-media account.

And it takes only one carrier. He needs to learn the local tongue, pass as a native, and get an audience as a storyteller or a priest. A touch of the exotic may even help him: the bringer of wondrous tales from a far-off land. A single Egyptian could never change the Greek language. He could, in theory, hand the Greeks the myths that became the foundation of their religion. Bring a few companions who share his purpose, and it goes faster still.

So the language a myth arrives in tells you nothing about whose interests it serves. The inventor decides that, and keeps the secret. The "traditionalist" who assumes that a myth first written in Greek must express the highest hopes of the Greeks is holding one of the most naïve positions a man has ever adopted — "thus, naturally, it is popular on the right-wing."

Central image

Genes are a glacier. Language is a river. Myth is lightning. This is why the book will keep saying "whose myth?" rather than "whose language?" or "whose blood?"

The chapter's argument

Everyone knows the story as a warning against pride: men build too high and God knocks them down. Read the verses again. After the Flood the whole earth has one language. The people say, let us build a city and a tower, "lest we be scattered." And Yahweh's words are not "this is impossible" but the opposite: "the people is one, and they have all one language … and now nothing will be restrained from them." He comes down to confound their speech and scatter them because they are about to succeed. The tower does not fall from hubris. It is pulled down by a jealous god who fears human unity. The lesson, read from that angle, is that it is good for a people to speak one tongue and build great things — and the conservative's "cautionary tale about pride" is a demoralizing moral drawn from the wrong side of the story.

Then the words. Balal, "to confuse, to mix," gives the name Babel — and Babel is also Babylon, the city that burned Solomon's Temple; the razing of the tower is a story of revenge told in advance. The builders use brick, not stone. Stone is Yahweh's symbol — "Yahweh is my rock." The Hebrew for brick, lebenah, comes from laban, "white" — the same word as the name Laban, "Mr White," whose white flock Jacob turned speckled in the opening chapter. A tower of white bricks, unified like bricks in a wall, is a picture of Aryan cohesion. And Nimrod, its founder, a son of Kush: his name sits next to namer, leopard — the spotted animal, the book's sign of mixture. Either the Bible is writing the real founders of Mesopotamia out of the record, or it is quietly recording an African migration into those cities, or both.

Context

Genesis 10, the Table of Nations, gives the whole world to Noah's three sons: Japheth for the Europeans, Shem for Jews and Arabs, Ham for Egyptians and Africans. That map is the Bible's own racial geography, and Japheth against Shem is the hinge of history.

Central image

A tower of white brick going up, a god looking down and saying "nothing will be restrained from them," and then the scattering. The book wants you to notice who is afraid in that scene.

Words to know

balal · lebenah / laban · Nimrod and namer · Shem, Ham and Japheth

The chapter's argument

A short chapter with a sharp edge. Language rots the way peoples do — slang from below, pushed by the media — and it also rots by splitting one thing into many words. "Religion," "propaganda," "art": three words for one phenomenon, and the split has caused endless confusion. Even "propaganda" began as a good word, the Church's own, for spreading the faith.

The nationalist who guards his little language and his local customs as sacred has it backwards. REM crosses borders; Japheth and Shem are both global peoples with global projects. A hundred national tongues are a babel that keeps Aryans from combining their strength — and they have never once stopped amalgamation when outsiders were let in. The old gods and old tongues must not become a cargo cult. Grasp what they were for, or leave them.

The counter-example is Hebrew: a dead liturgical language brought back, within a few generations, as the mother tongue of a modern state — the Jews' own Tower of Babel, built. The book's proposal is Latin: revived as a formal, sacred lingua franca, to speak clearly and to honour the high point of the Aryan world, "one we strive to surpass." The world will be brought together one way or the other. "Let us make it for the better."

Central image

A dead language brought back inside fifty years as the mother tongue of a state, set beside peoples guarding a local dialect and a regional recipe for beer. The book is asking which of those is serious.

The chapter's argument

Here is the book's answer to Jung and to every theory of religion as wonder, fear, or revelation. Religion was never a sincere wondering at the stars. In its serious forms it was built, from the start, as a conscious will to bind and empower a people or a class — to say who is friend and who is enemy, who is master and who is slave. A religion thrown together sincerely and by chance would have died on the vine.

Picture the priest. He carries a cross of precious metal or some other idol into a village of barbarians, the poor, the simple. He watches their faces. He sees at once that they revere the thing without understanding it — and he sees that it is better they do not understand, especially when the god stands for a foreign tribe, perhaps his own. Saul of Tarsus is the example. So the priest does what a film producer does: he studies the reaction and finds ways to heighten it as the crowd grows used to his symbols. All his genius goes into this. In time he stops thinking of it as manipulation at all. He thinks of it as earning his bread — and finally as truth. "After all, what is truer than earning one's bread?"

Central image

The priest watching the barbarian's face as the idol goes by. Everything the book means by "consciously designed" is in that glance.

The chapter's argument

A long chapter that sets the rules of the game. It opens with Stan Lee and a deleted scene from The Amazing Spider-Man 2: Peter Parker's father tells him that his "work," hidden for years, found its way to the one person who could unlock it — "if you lose hope, then the Osborns of the world really have won." The Osborns, in the Spider-Man world, are the Aryan adversaries; the name is the eugenicist Henry Fairfield Osborn. Jewish readers, who know who made these stories, catch the message of ethnic pride. Gentile readers are left in the dark. A whole shelf of Jewish scholarship — Nathan Abrams in The Forward on the "secret Jewish meanings" of Alien, 2001, Rosemary's Baby — shows that the craft the book calls JEM is known to some of its own audience, presented as benign.

Then the key Hebrew word: ḥidah — riddle, enigma, parable, and also "dark saying," "insinuation." A Jewish parable is a riddle. But the riddle does not need to be solved to work. The programming is subliminal; the artist is a hypnotist, and the audience dreams with its eyes open — which is why the acronym REM, rapid eye movement, fits. The rules follow from this. REM must be decipherable, or it has no power; too obscure and it cannot bite. But what can be deciphered can be intercepted, and that is its weakness. A well-made work has one ultimate meaning and function, however many shallow meanings are wrapped around it, and it performs that function whether or not the people who keep it understand it. The best reader is a translator, not a critic.

Which brings the book to Christianity. Its intention is carried out through Christians who misunderstand it; Aryans would never have adopted it had they read the message. And a work's function cannot be changed by wishing. Christianity is not plastic, not benignly "mysterious," not available for a new meaning. On this one point the fundamentalist is right — though "the sincere Christian has never understood his own religion." The rest of the chapter builds out the community behind the craft: a small number of Jews who use JEM consciously, surrounded by many who do not; an "oral tradition" that was really secret-keeping; the archivist class of rabbis, critics, curators and fans who carry a work forward; the Greek hypokritēs, the actor, with Nietzsche's praise of the "delight in pretense" bred in families that had to bend with every wind. Against all that hidden fire the book sets its own method: the open, written record, the Library of Alexandria — Apollonian Transmission, "the sunlight of Apollo … contrasted with the coveted, stolen, hidden fire of Prometheus." And it names its goal in one line: religion, "defined as the sacralization of AIM."

Central image

Stolen fire carried in a closed hand, against sunlight that falls on everyone. Promethean Transmission is the first; Apollonian Transmission, the book's own method, is the second.

Words to know

ḥidah · hypokritēs · Apollonian Transmission · the archivist class · "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar"

The chapter's argument

To hold a secret is to look wise. Gnosis, knowing hidden things, is itself a kind of power — and the only thing more powerful is telling. Disclose the secret and its power is spent in one stroke. That is one of this book's central projects.

You know the feeling the chapter is describing. Foreigners who speak your language switch to their own in front of you. Are they talking about you? An opaque symbol from an out-group works the same way: it demoralizes, and it is reasonable to find it offensive, because a symbol only keeps its power if it means something against a rival. The example is the kippah. Its stated meaning is humility and caution. Its hidden meaning is hiding — the book sets it beside the caps of Mercury, Pluto, Mithra and the Cabeiri, gods of travel and invisibility; beside the Muslim ṭāqiyah and the practice of taqiyya, lying nobly in foreign lands; and beside the Roman pileus, the cap of the freed slave and of the Saturnalia, when the slave was king. And the humility is before a god who "takes sides" — "Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated."

A religious symbol says one of two things: "my people are superior" or "I defer to another people." Tolerate a symbol you cannot read, for fear of offending, and you are quietly reduced — the servile donkey carrying another people's hero into the town square. Modern Hebrew admits as much: lashon setharim means both "code" and "slander"; laʕaz means both "foreign language" and "slander." A foreign tongue is itself an offence. And so the chapter circles back to Babel: Aryans still speaking a hundred tongues to one another is a sign of bad faith. "What secrets need we keep from one another?"

Central image

The donkey in the town square, proud of its burden. That is what the book means by demoralization through opacity — not an insult you hear, but one you carry.

The chapter's argument

"Why do you talk so much about comic books and Hollywood movies?" The traditionalist asks it with a sneer, and this chapter answers him. He clings to old, inscrutable myths — some of which Aryans never made, some of which held only a few thousand people even in their day — and calls the stories that fill billions of minds right now "mere entertainment." But pop culture matters exactly as much as it is popular. Zack Snyder once said the Superman shield is the second or third most recognised symbol on earth, after the cross. That is not a joke; it is a fact about what shapes people. And the book's boldest claim is that the ancients and the moderns are talking to each other in one symbolic language. Read the Bible and Superman unlocks. Read Superman and old stories, long sealed off by time, open again.

Then the harder point. The Right has not merely misread art; it has barely tried to read it. "Art is an expression of our national soul!" — and the matter is closed. The practical man senses something soft and dishonest in art, so he pretends it has no power over him. That is whistling past the graveyard. It is also an admission: the Right cannot make a lasting myth, and "art and religion are mating songs." The Left fails from the other side, assuming religion is basically kind — even Marx's "opium of the people" is finished by "the sigh of the oppressed creature." Accepting religion as a given is exactly what REM does to you. Still, the Left has thought harder about religion and art than most "defenders of Western civilization."

Context

"Traditionalism" here means two things at once: the ordinary word, and the school of René Guénon and Julius Evola. Guénon believed true religion comes down from a source above man, through orthodox lineages, and that you must join a living cult — Sufism, Vedānta — to reach it. Evola threw out organised religion and went looking for the warrior spirit underneath it. They differ on the road; they agree that religion begins in the divine. And that, exactly, is where both are most profoundly wrong.

Central image

If religion only ever comes down to a man like a light from above, then he can never make one — and he will serve, forever, whoever has the nerve to make one on purpose. That single thought is the licence for the whole book.

The chapter's argument

Not every hidden meaning is REM. This chapter walks through artists who were plainly writing in code, but without the shared language that makes code work — and what their trouble teaches. Two warnings first. Do not become the man who sees JEM in every cartoon and in the Kennedy assassination; that must be avoided. And do use the lens the other way: to look at any story, whoever made it, and ask whether a few careful changes could turn it into real AIM. "Imagine Star Wars as carefully developed AIM!"

The cases, in order

Wagner, working almost alone on myths whose meaning was dark to him. In the Ring the dwarf Alberich renounces love to steal the gold; he is coded Jewish, the Rhinemaidens pure German. Siegfried dies as a sacrificial hero, Valhalla burns, and the ring goes back to the river: "we end up where we began." Wagner set out to bring back German paganism and found that the only honest way to do it was to stage the twilight of the gods. You can hear the strain in the music. That strain is unnecessary suffering — the suffering of an artist with no shared symbols among his own people, which lifts only when he can found a religion. The Aryan writes tragedies because "what else is truthful?" That is how Spengler became a great truth-teller: by conceding defeat.

Baum. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz really is a coded book — about the 1890s. Dorothy is a Populist from Kansas; the yellow brick road is the gold standard; the Emerald City is Washington painted the colour of greenbacks; the Tin Woodman is industry, the Scarecrow the farmer, the Cowardly Lion is William Jennings Bryan; the silver slippers are the silver money he campaigned for. Baum hid all this so well that almost nobody has ever seen it. But the answer to his riddle is a dead election. "Populist Esoteric Moralization," for a moment that passed — and when the film swapped silver slippers for ruby, what was left was a story about believing in yourself. The book adds its own touches: the Wizard behind his curtain is Yahweh behind the veil of the Tabernacle; green is Bacchus, Osiris and the Serpent; and Baum was a Theosophist, not just a man telling children a story.

Ayn Rand, and the problem of saying it out loud. Nobody can sit through an openly Christian film or an openly "woke" one; they preach, and preaching kills craft. But the answer is not to stop having a message — "all art is propaganda," said Orwell, and the Greeks knew that all art is religion. The answer is to hide it well. Plain statement irritates the outsider, whose vanity wants to be seduced into an opinion, and it even discourages the insider, who sees a tool too crude to convert his friends. Rand's novels can be gripping, but the ideologue in her damaged them. People are won "by emotion, beauty, and parable — pathos to stir thymos, rather than logos to stir logos" — and they are won at rest, on the couch, in the pew, when they do not want to think and are most open to suggestion.

The living directors. Nolan, Villeneuve and Ridley Scott get called contemplative; plodding is nearer the mark. Scott is beautiful and empty unless a Jewish writer or an old myth has brought some JEM aboard. Nolan has real depth but no common language, so his puzzles turn into mazes. Cameron fills the screen with action. David Lynch is the greatest Gentile symbolist — he worked out much of the JEM vocabulary on his own — but his grasp is partial, and he leans toward horror. Set them beside Spielberg and Stan Lee, chintzy as those two can be: they entertain, and their ease comes from taking a shared vocabulary for granted, strewing symbols through a story and passing over them quickly so the wealth is felt without being explained. That confidence can be copied. Get REM back and you get the pace back. Kubrick is the master of all of them; 2001 is a Rosetta Stone of JEM, and whatever he said about his own beliefs, his fluency shows a faithful Jew.

Lucas and Kasdan — the long case. Star Wars is what happens when an Aryan artist has to invent his own symbols: aliens as caricature, planets as mood, everything a little arbitrary. Then the production history. Vader was first the Emperor's henchman and the man who killed Luke's father. He became Luke's father only once The Empire Strikes Back was already shooting; early drafts kept Luke's hand; "from a certain point of view" was the patch. Lucas handed Lawrence Kasdan a skeleton, and Kasdan gave it flesh — and in story meetings for Return of the Jedi he backed the darker ending, where Luke kills the Emperor, puts on the helmet and turns the Empire against the Rebellion. The cave on Dagobah, where Luke finds his own face inside Vader's mask, had already set that destiny. Lucas chose the happy ending and the Ewok toys; but Star Wars is still a tragedy, Mordred against Arthur with the son as hero, and an Aryan empire falling. Luke's severed hand is the Tyr motif — the non-Jewish rival demoted. Leia, revealed as his sister, is Diana to his Apollo, a "racial sister," and Han Solo stands where Orion stood. Campbell and Jung, who influenced Lucas, saw that myth mattered and then, with loose readings, did about as much harm as good. "Our goal is to steady those steps."

Central image

Luke in the cave on Dagobah, opening Vader's mask and finding his own face inside it. An artist working without shared symbols keeps arriving at that scene, and calls it tragedy.

Words to know

The Parabolist's Law of Microcosm — in a coded story each hero stands for his whole race or class, so two men fighting over a woman is a political argument in miniature (Latin gens, the book notes, means "chief gods" as well as clan). Hypokritēs, the Greek word for actor, literally a dissembler: acting is lying, and a director's job is to tell a good lie from a bad one. Messiah ben Joseph, the name for a hero who dies so the story can go on.

Where it leads

The pacing argument — shared symbols let you lay meaning everywhere and keep moving — is the practical case for AIM that Part III turns into a programme. And the Aryan's reflex toward tragedy is the book's last word, on its last page, handing tragedy to the next volume.

The chapter's argument

Why hasn't art pulled us back from what everyone calls modern decay? Why has the Right made so little of it, and so weakly, and never a new god? The chapter's answer is that the nationalist loves the wrong symbols. Dragons, serpents, the vine — these are one family of signs, and they belong to the East and to the Semitic. Jewish esotericists have always known this. But the Aryan thinks it is "very Celtic, very pagan" that Arthur is the son of Pendragon, that the Viking ship has a dragon's head, that Daenerys is the Mother of Dragons. He cheers for her, "and look how blonde she is!" — while her symbols and her exile's story mark her as the enemy of Westeros. In the books her hair is not blonde. It is lunar silver.

So who is he in these stories? Not the hero. He is the Green Goblin. He is Lex Luthor — "Luther," the Protestant — set against a saviour. He is the Frost Giants, Goliath, Gog and Magog. If he keeps to his own kind he is a Pharisee, one of the "separate ones." The Jewish comic-book writer is triumphant precisely because the vain, lazy Aryan reader takes these coded figures for everymen and never notices that he has been cast as the villain. And when someone points it out — "you're reading too much into it!" The book compares that irritation to a husband who has ignored every clue for years. He is secure and faithful in his delusion, and he says, "I adore the Classics."

The chapter ends on what to do. Not "a Jew made it, shun it" — that is childish, and soon it will be impossible to know who made what; Judaism may go back into hiding and "Post-Jews" appear, and AI may write parables with no author at all. The only defence is to become sophisticated again, in reading and in making. A people that judges everything at face value will be ruled by someone who doesn't. The last century's catastrophe was not a military failure; it was a culture that was never won. "The most sophisticated always rule. It is the reason human beings are not governed by animals."

Central image

A man in the cinema cheering for the dragon. You can love a story and be its villain, and not noticing is the whole effect.

The chapter's argument

REM begins with the Word, so the writer comes first — the writer, the editor, the showrunner, the parabolist. Cinematographers, composers, illustrators, actors: potent, but "artisans of a secondary rank," in service of the storyteller. A good idea is durable; a good story is more durable still, because it looks harmless and slips past the censor. Stories are how children learn and how grown men make sense of their lives; they are the spells that form a people. Nietzsche said a man with a "why" can bear almost any "how" — a story gives him both.

Then two short turns. On artificial intelligence: a machine will never have a will of its own; it will be given one by its programmers, "and if history is any gauge, it will invariably be given an ethnic will." A sword is only as good as the hand that holds it. And on the Jews as "people of the Book": the advantage was never just literacy. It was comprehension. Jewish writers and filmmakers understand Christian and pagan stories better than the Gentiles who own them, while the upper-class Gentile's Homer and Dante is often display — encyclopedic, clerical, a way of signalling rather than knowing.

Central image

A sword and the hand that holds it. Camera, score and star are the blade; the writer is the hand, and the hand decides what the thing is for.

The chapter's argument

How do you actually read one of these things? Context first. A symbol takes its meaning from the other symbols around it and from the moment the work was made. In Aronofsky's The Wrestler, the hero's final opponent is called "The Ayatollah" — in the late Bush years, when the neocons wanted war with Iran. Randy "the Ram" is a broken-down Middle America, and the ram is the sacrificial animal of Leviticus, burned in Yahweh's fire so that Israel's enemies can be beaten. The modern politics and the ancient symbol confirm each other.

Superman is the great example. His Kryptonian name, Kal-El, is Hebrew, "voice of God" — that much is well known. Less known: "the Man of Steel," coined in 1938, is Stalin's invented surname in translation, because Superman was built from the start as the Jewish answer to Nietzsche's superman and to the dictators; in a 1940 Look feature he arrests Hitler and Stalin both. And "El" is also the name of a Phoenician god the ancients identified with Kronos — with Saturn, whose cult the book will later call Proto-Jewish. So the character is both "ripped from the headlines" and thousands of years deep at once. The Hulk works the same way: anti-Vietnam propaganda on the surface, and underneath, David hiding from Saul in a cave, "Bruce" Banner courting Betty Ross, the daughter of his enemy — with Betsy Ross's flag and Moses' altar, "Yahweh Is My Banner," folded into the names.

REM is developed and disseminated through initiates. Not every Jew has or had an understanding of JEM, and not every myth is Jewish: Jupiter, Apollo, and Mars are Aryan cults. The book calls the uninitiated Jew who nevertheless feels commanded by JEM a Sussman, after the dentist in the Coens' A Serious Man who finds Hebrew letters carved on a Gentile's teeth, goes on a wild goose chase through numerology, is told by his rabbi "Helping others? Couldn't hurt!", and goes back to golf — a Jew who does not understand the code but feels commanded by it all the same. The authors assume an unknown majority of Jews — perhaps most — are Sussmen, innocent collaborators in JEM rather than conscious initiates. The book coins de facto JEM: work that carries the sensibility without the craft, because the whole industry has been set to that tune. Then it names names — Wilder, Kubrick, Polanski, Spielberg, the Coens, Mamet, Aronofsky, Aster, the Wachowskis, and every major Jewish comic-book writer from Siegel to Stan Lee.

Words to know

Sussman · de facto JEM and true JEM · degrees of Judaism · "the Ram"

The chapter's argument

The conservative who complains about the Black Little Mermaid and "girlboss" Rey wants Hollywood to go back to the good old days. The chapter's point is that the good old days were saying the same thing, only beautifully. Two films prove it. In Sunset Boulevard, Norma Desmond, the silent star who could say everything "with one look," rots in her mansion after the talkies come. She meets DeMille and remembers dancing on a table: "Lindbergh had just landed in Paris." A throwaway line to date her — except that Lindbergh, by 1950, meant the man who had asked "who owns and influences the newspaper, the news picture, and the radio station," and Billy Wilder was a German Jew who fled Hitler. Norma's fall is the triumph of the Word over the adored, visible, pagan face. "They took the idols and smashed them!" The title says sunset.

The Natural carries the same reading beneath an outwardly wholesome American story: baseball, Robert Redford, small-town virtue. Roy Hobbs — "king" and "shining" — hits home runs that bring lightning down, and stops the clock itself. He is a comic-book Jesus. But look at where he was found: playing for the "Hebrew Oilers," and a messiah is one anointed with oil; the filmmakers added that. A dark woman who has read Homer shoots him with a silver bullet and ends his youth. He comes back to the New York Knights — Arthur's knights, the Church — under a manager called Pop Fisher, the Fisher King and the Pope in one. He is set up by "the Judge," the Pharisee in the ballpark, and he is caricatured as a scapegoat in the press. Hobbs is a Messiah ben Joseph: like Joseph in Genesis, sold for silver and humbled, he is allowed his moment of glory only in the service of the sons of Israel. Woke art is a new coat of paint on the same story, done clumsily. The old art did it slyly, because it still had to please a White audience. And when there are no initiates left to run the machine, the whole thing goes from mysterious to arbitrary — which is the moment, the book says, when something else can take its place, "as Apollo arrives at Delphi to unseat Python."

Central image

Norma Desmond and Roy Hobbs. Read those two right and you can read the rest of Hollywood.

The chapter's argument

What happens to a religion when the people who understood it are gone? It becomes a cargo cult — worship without knowledge. The great stone temples of India may be the cinema of their age, built late, after the god Shiva (its Bacchus) had risen; and there, as in Rome when Christianity rose and as now, the idols were made to flatter the rising group and the old ones were left to crumble. Then the knowers die out, the war the stories were fighting is already won, and what is left takes the metaphors for real gods and monsters, or for little lessons in good conduct. The Rig Veda's hymns of Indra beating the "dark brood" are a long way behind.

That is what Derrida and Mark Fisher were feeling when they named "hauntology": living in the shadow of a burst of culture you can no longer match. The book calls it fossilization. The shape remains; the life has gone out of it.

Central image

An empty temple, still beautiful, with no one left who knows what the carvings mean.

The chapter's argument

Yahweh is "a God who hides Himself"; to see him is to die. Pluto and Mercury wear helms of invisibility. Bacchus is Erikryptos, "completely hidden." Batman and Superman keep secret identities, and Superman's home is Krypton, from kryptos, "the hidden one" — the same root as crypto-Jew. Clark Kent, decoded, is "cleric" plus the Welsh "white": a White Priest, and what better word for a journalist, who teaches the public how to see. The chapter gathers all of this into one pattern. JEM glorifies the anonymous: hidden money, the anonymous account, the influence behind the curtain that Edward Bernays described so frankly. Pluto's very name means wealth. The Romans thought the opposite way. Secret oaths were sinister to them; a man's allegiance should be open and known, sworn before Jupiter in daylight. The Latin gens — race, family, and also "the chief gods" — is the root of Gentile, and to be of your race and to resist your gods was, to a Roman, a contradiction.

Then the chapter turns to light. The Greek word for goddess, thea, also means "sight." Theia, the Titaness of light, is the mother of the sun. Delos, where Apollo was born, means "the visible," and it filled with gold when he took his first steps. Theatron, the theatre, comes from the same roots. To a Greek, an invisible god was almost a contradiction in terms — an atheism — and beauty, kallos, meant nobility as well. Jewish thought draws the same line from the other side: Esau is the sun and the visible world; Jacob is the moon and the world to come; and the Yiddish word for a Gentile comes from the Hebrew for "idol."

Central image

A god you may not look at, against a god born on an island called The Visible. Everything the book means by solar against chthonic sits in that pair.

Words to know

kryptos · crypsis · gens · thea / Theia · Delos · theatron · kallos

The chapter's argument

Here at last is the definition. Racial Esoteric Moralization: infusing story and myth with a racial subtext so as to inspire health and boldness in your own people while demoralizing an adversarial group. Seen from the losing side it is RED — Racial Esoteric Demoralization. The initials are also a joke with a point: in REM sleep you dream, and the artist "incepts" his audience while they are awake. Mercury, the shepherd and priest, and Apollo, the protector of flocks and the artist, are both gods of dreams. The Aryan artist comes to see himself as Apollo, planting REM, as Jewish esotericists have long seen themselves as Mercury.

The older words for all this are "to bless" and "to curse." And a story is a spell — the Old English word meant a tale and also a command. A people's mythos, said Aristotle, is its plot; so a people's myths are its plot in the other sense too, its direction and fate. It matters if your stories end in Ragnarök or Camlann. It matters if your gods can die. Behaviour springs from myth. The Torah is a story, from beginning to end — and the Jews, in their wisdom, call it the Law.

Words to know

REM (defined) · RED · bless / curse · spell · mythos as plot

The chapter's argument

A Mystery religion, ancient or Hollywood, wants one thing from its audience: submission — by love or by fear — to its gods. In JEM those gods are of the night and the East, and the surest way to win submission is to show them beating the gods of the day. But you could never get a crowd to bow to Bacchus or Adonis by their own names; their cults had a reputation. So the god changes his name. Yahweh stands in for Typhon, Saturn and Bacchus; Jesus is a veil over Adonis, the dark lover of a fair Venus who has become Mary Magdalene. Sunday school says God is all-loving. The Bible shows a god who exterminates, and "fear of God" matters as much as love of him.

Then the villains. The Serpent in Eden, Satan in Job, the Pharisees in the Gospels — all three look like Yahweh's enemies, and all three work for him. The Serpent was put in the garden by Yahweh; Satan sits comfortably in his court; the Pharisees are messianic Jews who happen to reject this messiah. This is the Caducean role: synthetic opposition, the two snakes on one staff. And Jesus himself is "the snake in the wilderness" lifted up by Moses. The serpent is the thread that runs back through Python and Seth-Typhon to Mesopotamia. Deceived by new skins, one follows the Semitic god blindly — and fears him the same way.

Words to know

Caducean · synthetic opposition · "the fear of God"

The chapter's argument

"Why question Jesus, whom millions love? Why not let Superman be a farm boy from Kansas? Odin and Thor are badass — can't we just use them?" The chapter meets the objection head-on. Yes: this book keeps handing gods back to the other side, and giving cultural credit whether it is wanted or not. Esotericists would rather you kept the gifts. Maimonides himself thought Christianity was good for the Jews, because it prepares the world to recognise Yahweh — a view shared today by Prager and Shapiro. The Jewish or Proto-Jewish influence on civilization, dating back to Sumer, is deeply integrated and profound: so much that is now beloved in the art, religions and myths of European ancestors is owed to it. "No honest assessment could ever deny this." Whether those contributions should remain beloved is its own question.

To the European who fears this makes his ancestors look less creative: we come in peace. It is more important to be creative than to preserve. What must be preserved is the shared symbol language itself — the one language that may prove immortal — and it must be turned into "earnest hymns of praise to Apollo."

The chapter's argument

Why spend volumes on the other side's art instead of just making your own? Seven reasons, each a paragraph. To reveal what is being said to people, so they understand their relationship to Judaism as its own artists picture it. To learn what a serious adversary really thinks of us — his war plan, not his public relations. To break the spell: a riddle solved loses its power. To learn the craft, because the interior of a work must be as beautiful as its exterior, and you cannot outdo what you have not studied. To recover the ancient religion, since JEM today is a body of clues to what the symbols meant then — things Jews kept and Christianity made Aryans forget. To give the Aryan artist a clear conscience: what is good for the goose is good for the gander. And to pay Mercury, the trickster, his due, because for two thousand years his work has had no rival, and to say otherwise is bad manners.

Along the way the chapter imagines a class of trained interpreters, and an introduction to REM as part of an ordinary liberal education.

The chapter's argument

JEM was born in weakness. It never needed Jews in high places; for most of the centuries in which the Bible was compiled the opposite was true. Even today an esotericist in a story meeting may have to get his symbol past a collaborator — "you don't like Stan for that character? What about Peter?" Both names mean stone. The living artists in this book would deny every reading in it; that is expected. And the habit of inventing a false, harmless explanation for a symbol is so common that it needs a name: the exoteric alibi.

Tolkien used one. Asked whether his Dwarves were Jews he said, "I didn't intend it, but when you've got these people on your hands, you've got to make them different, haven't you?" — and had no other account of what they were. The book grants him the right; the Apollonian artist may deny too, as conditions require. It also notes the wit on the other side: Proto-Jews may have invented the dwarf as a self-deprecating joke, as Stan Lee invented the shape-shifting Skrulls and Polanski made the Devil a Jew. All of this is a way to slip past a taboo while wearing it down; radical ideas go in gradually, then become prophecy. "There are no Barack Obamas without David Palmers." Leo Strauss on Machiavelli closes the chapter: a blasphemy spoken aloud can be punished, but a concealed one makes the reader think it himself and so makes him an accomplice. REM is "the art of writing under persecution," and the Jews have made of it a "Collective Machiavellianism."

Words to know

exoteric alibi · plausible deniability · Collective Machiavellianism

The chapter's argument

The title chapter, and the end of Part I. REM works because it speaks to the part of the mind that does not argue back. A story well told releases pleasure, and the pleasure attaches to the story's ethos, and from then on it is pleasant to live that way. Men copy heroes before they know they are copying. Art with a tribe at its heart is the strongest art there is — and it must be edgy, and it must carry, however deeply buried, the destruction of an enemy. The stories of Exodus and Daniel are not only a past; they are a plan, and the plan keeps coming true. The Hebrew Bible had to be sacred for the Jews to survive as a people. Making it sacred to their adversaries as well was "an act of diabolical genius."

Then the sentence the book turns on. If an audience is shown a parable that declares it beaten and does not react, the victory is already won. "If someone says he is your master, even if esoterically without your knowing, and you do not object, then he is precisely that." That is conquest without a battlefield, or rather with the unconscious as the battlefield. And it is why REM is, in the end, the most civilized form of domination: it kills as surely as one of Apollo's plagues, and it is bloodless. "The master, however brave, is stingy with the blood of his brothers."

Central image

Myth is not a picture of power already held. It is the road to power for the man with no army — that is why the title runs from myth to power, and not the other way.

The chapter's argument

Did the Greeks and Romans believe in their gods? The neo-pagan says yes, with feeling. The chapter says he has it backwards. In first-century Rome it was the Christians who were prosecuted for superstitio — and called atheists in the same breath, for refusing the public rites. The educated Roman understood his myths as myths: real the way Plato's forms are real, as ideals and models, not as beings you might meet on the road. Pietas, Fides, Virtus, Honos, Veritas — a Roman god is a virtue with a face. When a man falls in love he meets Venus. When he goes at an enemy he knows Mars. And the chief gods — Jupiter, Mars, Apollo — are idealised ancestors, models of what a man should look like and breed toward. Christianity is the opposite kind of religion: believe, or burn forever. Terror is its floor.

The chapter walks the afterlife to show the reversal. In Homer, Achilles would rather be a poor farmer's slave alive than king of all the dead; the underworld is a place of shadows, eidōla, and life is what matters. Elysium comes later, for a few heroes favoured by the gods. Christianity turns the picture inside out: this life becomes the shadow and heaven the real thing — "an eternal Saturnalia," the slaves given the banquet in the sky. Plato had already seen how useful a promised afterlife could be: soldiers, he said, should not hear Hades disparaged, "for men who are to be fighters." That is the noble lie, and its influence runs on to the writers of the Gospels, the inventors of Norse myth, and even Hollywood. Nietzsche called Christianity "Platonism for the people." No truer words were ever uttered — and it turns round: Platonism might be considered Christianity for a vanguard elite. Socrates was no Greek pagan; his immortal soul came out of the chthonic Mystery cults, and Christianity is his heir. And the Aryan? "Two thousand years and not one new god." The question the chapter leaves for the next one is how good he was at making gods before that.

Context

Superstitio, to a Roman, meant excessive or improper religious practice — not "false belief." That is how the same Christians could be charged with superstition and with atheism at once, and that double charge is the chapter's opening move.

Central image

Achilles in the underworld, refusing consolation. The Greek afterlife is something you lose; the Christian afterlife is something you are promised — and the promise is a tool.

The chapter's argument

Read this one twice; the rest of Part II runs on it. Kronos castrates his father Uranus, the sky. Kronos then eats his own children so none can rise against him — until Rhea hides Zeus and feeds Kronos a stone. Zeus grows up, comes back, and overthrows him. What is that story, the chapter asks, if not regime change? Each god is an order of religion and rule. Zeus is Kronos' "son" in the sense that his bright, celestial system is a reaction to the dark, earth-bound cult that came before — the age of "the Pelasgian Kronos." The new order keeps the old gods on, but beneath it: Hephaestus, Hades, Dionysus, Hermes, all made to serve. And Apollo does the same thing again at Delphi when he kills the serpent Python and takes the oracle for Olympus. Python — "rot" — is near enough a twin of Typhon and of Bacchus; the fumes that intoxicate the priestess rise from his tomb.

One more layer, from Cicero. Kronos was identified with Chronos, time — "he devours his own offspring because time swallows up the periods of time." So when Jupiter overthrew Saturn he overthrew time itself, and won immortality for his line. That is why the Olympians are immortal: it is a picture of a healthy people that lasts. And it corrects a common idea. "Cycles" and "seasons" are not the pagan view of things; they are Saturn's view, Proto-Jewish. Zeus does not turn with the seasons. He overcomes them.

Logic map

Central image

Not a father and son. Two religions — and the stone Kronos swallowed in place of the child.

The chapter's argument

Could the ancients really have designed their myths this carefully? "They were a benighted lot." The chapter answers with Galton: the Athenians of Pericles' day were, by his estimate, nearly two grades brighter than the Victorian English — geniuses in any age. And it goes further back. In the northern wilds, where survival was hardest, a natural eugenics would have kept strength and intelligence together; the wolf is cleverer than the dog. Founding man may have been sharper than settled man. But civilization changes what intelligence is for. It turns to the handling of other people — it becomes verbal, "emotional," and in its late stages it breeds the docile, industrious, taboo-bound type: "it becomes Chinese."

That is where sophia comes in. Before it meant wisdom it meant skill in handicraft, cleverness, cunning — the traits of Mercury "of wiles" and Vulcan "the crafty." The sophist and the philosopher are the same trade under two names, and what makes either one impressive is seldom the depth of the idea; it is the cleverness of the telling — sometimes to make a hard thing clear, sometimes to make a simple thing obscure. The Serpent in Genesis was "more crafty than any beast of the field," and the Gnostics made him their sign of wisdom. Do we know ourselves better than the people who wrote Greek tragedy and the Hebrew Bible? Do we know more about how a man experiences love? No. Modern artists plant deliberate, deducible meanings in their work. So did the ancients. The same symbol language runs between them, millennia apart.

Words to know

sophia / sophos — skill, cleverness, cunning, before "wisdom" · initiates against the masses

The chapter's argument

We cannot read old myths because we think of the people who made them as another species. They were not. They had our worries — family, tribe, race, and the competition between them, fought through war, trade, art, propaganda and sex. The idea that nobody understood race or psychology until the scientific method arrived is absurd; that we now need university departments for these things shows only that we have lost the nerve to trust our own eyes. Man has always noticed that the people around him differ (Genesis notices a Japheth, a Shem and a Ham). He has always known he was in competition — Jacob and Esau, Saturn and Jupiter, the Dasyu and the Aryas. And he has always studied how different types respond to what is said to them, which is the study of power, and which teaches at once that whoever lacks power must disguise his road to it.

So the chapter lays out the cycle. The Aryan has moved, over the ages, from a wolf's intelligence toward a dog's domestication. Under a religion of the underworld like Christianity he rises for a season like Kore, the grain-maiden who becomes Persephone, and then goes back down to Pluto: an encoded harvest, in which he plays the woman's part — "an eromenos or slave." The Jews have kept the connection to their ancestry more easily, because their mentality never changed; through Christianity they cut the Aryan off from the memory of his own ancestor-god Jupiter by putting Yahweh and Jesus in his place — as Yahweh promised to "blot out the memory of Amalek." Our forgetting was done to us by a god of sleep, blindness and seasons. The method that follows is simple: judge the past by what you can see people doing now. Set the Bible beside Hollywood and you hear one voice, changed only in how carefully it hides. "We may decipher messages in ancient art only because they are we." The Freudian Jew was not invented by Freud; he first appears in Sumer.

Central image

Kore going down into the dark for the winter. That is what happens to a people under a religion of the underworld: up for a season, then back to Pluto.

Words to know

Kore and the harvest cycle · eromenos · Amalek · "they are we"

The chapter's argument

A warning against inheriting a dead civilization whole. When we look back we cannot tell the foundations from the rot that came late, partly because envious heirs played the foundations down and partly because a civilization makes most of its art after its peak — tragedy, Plato, the later philosophers. We are the drunk looking for his keys under the streetlamp: we go hunting for greatness and find ourselves admiring decadence, "and frequently looking at JEM." So Dionysus and Hermes come to seem as important as Apollo — though they were late arrivals on Olympus — and love between men becomes "a higher love," and philosophers rank with founding kings. The traditionalist assumes the dead made no mistakes. "If the kouroi were naked, so should ours be!" But cultic pederasty and the naked gymnasium came out of Crete, and we, being the same people, have every right to judge. Perhaps the athlete is best honoured in a loincloth. "These decisions are ours."

Then the title. Time disinfects. Sixties rock and eighties rap play in the drugstore now; grunge is Muzak. What was subversive comes down to us tamed and looking wholesome — and the explicit reliefs on Indian temples, the erect Priapus, were the pornography of their day, which was also their religion, since art and religion are one. Technology dulls the sexual instinct; boys once pleasured themselves in cinemas at fully clothed stars, women fainted at Elvis. So the chapter draws a programme: standards of modesty first; physical ideals, because good breeding needs them; never numb the instinct by overuse, because that kills fertility; chastity for women before marriage, as a normal institution; and lifelong chastity or castration, as in the cult of Cybele, is simply insane. Edginess in art should come from the young man's strength, not from a taste for the macabre.

Central image

Gangsta rap as background music in a pharmacy. That is how time turns yesterday's provocation into ordinary background music, making the ancient world look cleaner than it was.

The chapter's argument

A short chapter that hands you the key to the long one after it. The Cherokee have a creator god called Yowah. The Creek kept an eternal fire for a "Master of Breath," the way the priests of Leviticus did. Coincidence? A lost tribe? Jesus among the Indians? The book's answer: Christian missionaries and frontiersmen slipped a new god into the native pantheon and new ideas into native heads, to make conversion easy — "the best form of conversion is to convince the Native that he already believes." Then early-1800s Protestant ethnographers wrote it up as if Yowah had been worshipped from the beginning of time. And it worked: six in ten Native Americans are Christian. Now the turn. If earnest Protestants, who believed their own myths literally, could plant a god in a foreign people, what could Jews or crypto-Jewish monks manage? So — how did "barbaric" Europe come by what it calls paganism?

The second example is older: the Sibylline Oracles, Jewish prophecies written in the voice of the pagan Sibyl to bring the God of Israel to a Greek and Roman audience. Not a blend, like the Norse and Celtic myths the book is about to open, but the same idea done in the open: borrow the most respected pagan voice there is. The Sibyls, the chapter notes, belonged to Apollo.

Central image

A missionary telling a Cherokee that the god he is describing was always the Cherokee's own. Keep that picture for the Eddas.

Central image

"Norse paganism," in this chapter, is Christianity in a horned helmet — written down by Christian hands in a Christian age, built out of the Bible, and made to get a hard northern people ready for Christ. The title is the joke and the thesis at once.

The chapter's argument

Start with the sources. Nearly everything we know of Norse myth comes from two books, and the Prose Edda was written in Iceland in the 1220s — well into the Christian era — by Snorri Sturluson: a Christian, a merchant, a chieftain, three times law-speaker of the Althing. He was raised at Oddi, a centre of Latin learning, by Jón Loftsson, grandson of the priest Sæmundr who had studied abroad, was long rumoured to have compiled the Poetic Edda, and became a sorcerer in later legend. Both Loftsson and Snorri served at the Norwegian court. That is the milieu; hold it in mind.

Now the parallels. Tacitus said the Germans worshipped Mercury above all. Odin's name means frenzy, rage, inspiration — Bacchus's business. In the Hávamál, Odin hangs nine nights on the windy tree, wounded with a spear, "myself to myself," to win the runes: a self-sacrifice on a tree, with a wound in the side, to receive the Word. The New Testament's own word for the cross, xulon, means tree. Coincidence, archetype, or a Germanic story that inspired the Gospels? "The short answer is no." These tales were compiled by Christian poets under Christian rule; the Bible inspired them. The nineteenth-century philologist Sophus Bugge said as much — nearly all of it came from Christian and classical sources by way of a Christianised England — and the book adds only that the authorship was "likely more Jewish than Christian." The Edda's own prologue opens with Almighty God creating heaven and earth, retells Genesis, and says that after Babel only speakers of Hebrew kept the truth. Scholars call that prologue window-dressing. The book asks instead: was this Icelandic chieftain reading the Vulgate? Or was he the front man for a Torah-literate priest or a converted Jew? And if you throw out the prologue, what do you do with the Christian shape of the stories themselves?

Because the shape is everywhere. Iceland converted by vote, at the Althing in the year 1000, where Norway was converted by the sword; "Norse paganism" is offered as the gentler method — a Christianity in disguise, with extra war and manliness and a running joke against Dwarves, Dark Elves and the black fire-giant Surtr. Balder, Odin's shining son, beautiful and good, dreams of his own death; his mother takes oaths from everything but the mistletoe; the trickster Loki guides a blind man's arrow, and Balder falls. The book sets that beside Satan blinding unbelievers, and beside the Greek word for sin, hamartia, "to miss the mark," and the root of Torah, yarah, "to shoot."

Then Ragnarök, walked beside Revelation step for step: the long winter and brother against brother, the black sun and the sinking earth, the beasts, the dragon, the horn, the dead rising, Loki bound in a cave as Satan is bound a thousand years. Thor hooks the Midgard serpent on a fishing trip — "Can you pull in Leviathan with a hook?" asks Job. After the end, the earth comes up green from the sea and Balder returns from Hel to reign, as Jesus goes down to Hades and rises; and the Old English hel for Christian damnation is on record by 725, earlier than the "pagan" Hel of the Eddas. A wise man called Kvasir is killed by two Dwarves who brew the mead of poetry from his blood; the rooster that heralds Ragnarök and one of those Dwarves share a name, "deceiver," and a cock crows in the Gospels the night Peter denies his master.

Two purposes, then. In the Viking age the Eddas worked as war propaganda in Plato's manner — a promised Valhalla to send mead-drunk expendables into battle for power- and wealth-hungry men, such as crypto-Jews symbolised by the master gods Odin and Thor. And beneath that, a system of conversion: the mind of a barbarian prepared, story by story, to receive a Balder-like Christ. Christian Rock — several times more mysterious and "badass" than the modern genre, but the same idea. The neo-pagan cannot now say where the paganism ends and the Christianity begins; the skin may be native, the pith is not. One more possibility is floated: that the Germans who worshipped Mercury highest were worshipping the man who brought them their religion — a foreign priest, a wanderer, a merchant, who had every reason to make a god of himself. That the two great modern tellers of Norse myth are Stan Lee and Neil Gaiman is offered as a hint that some Jews know where it came from. Arthur is Christian Rock of a later, more open kind. And the chapter ends on Nietzsche's break with Wagner over Parsifal: by staging the twilight of the gods, had Wagner unlocked, without knowing it, the true message of the whole Germanic system?

Words to know

Christian Rock · the two Eddas · Snorri and Oddi · xulon · hamartia and yarah · Balder, Hod, Loki · Ragnarök · Kvasir · Gimlé

Where it leads

The next chapter does the same to the Celts. Balder-as-Christ comes back every time the book talks about a dying-and-rising god. And the Viking as pirate is picked up again in the last chapters of Part II.

The chapter's argument

The Celts get the Norse treatment. In the Irish Book of Invasions the Gaels descend from Noah through Japheth; in Geoffrey of Monmouth the Britons descend from a Trojan whose line runs back to Noah too. Scholars call those Christian additions to genuine native myth. The myths themselves were largely made by men working inside a Christian — or Jewish — frame. The Druids left not one written word. Ogham looks like a Christian invention. The manuscripts are twelfth-century. What we call "Celtic" is "a conscious synthesis," and it is JEM.

The argument begins in Miletus, in Anatolia, birthplace of the first Greek scientists, the men who looked for natural causes. Against them stood the Pythagoreans — mystics out of the Dionysian and Orphic cults, with numerology and reincarnation — and the Druids, the ancient writers say, taught reincarnation too. Now look at Irish myth. The "Milesians," human invaders from Spain, defeat the Túatha Dé Danann, the magical, shape-shifting god-people, and drive them underground. Irish monks, the best Latinists in Europe, wrote the invaders' leader as "Milesius" — the man from Miletus. So the story is the old quarrel in costume: the worldly, material Milesians beating the mystics, sword against sorcery, Esau who lives by the sword against the trickster Jacob. And who are the Túatha Dé Danann? Before that name the monks called them Túath Dé, "tribe of God" — the same phrase they used for the Israelites. Add "Danann" and you have the Tribe of Dan, the serpent by the path who bites the horse's heel; Dan, "judge," like Donn who judges the Celtic dead. They arrive in a dark cloud of mist, as Yahweh comes to Sinai in a thick cloud and leads Israel as a pillar of smoke — a motif Arthur's Avalon inherits and Stan Lee's "Foggy" Nelson still carries. Their four cities and four treasures are the four elements of the Greek philosophers, or the four camps of Israel in Numbers. The beaten gods stay gods, and rule the Otherworld where the dead are judged.

How did it get there? Three paths of transmission are considered, none excluding the others: Phoenician traders in the Bronze Age, Pythagorean influence on the Druids, and — the most compelling scenario of the three — crypto-Jewish bards and Christian monks who largely invented the surviving myths from local material. The same minimalism it applies to the Bible it applies here.

Central image

A monk in a scriptorium inventing Ireland's gods out of Genesis, Pythagoras and a few local tales — and doing it so well that his gods are worshipped by neo-pagans today.

The chapter's argument

Greek religion was never simply Greek. Egypt shaped the Minoans and Mycenaeans; Phoenicia gave the alphabet and the trade routes; Mesopotamia sent its cosmology; Anatolia its music and its myths. And behind all of them stands the most mysterious people in the story: the Pelasgians, whom the ancients themselves credited with founding Greek religion in its oldest forms. Achilles prays to "Pelasgian Zeus" at Dodona. Herodotus says the Pelasgians once worshipped nameless gods and only later gave them the familiar Greek names — which is to say, they invented the gods.

Yet archaeology cannot find them. No pottery, no tombs, no tools carry their name. Scholars call them a literary construct. Read the absence the other way: a small, migratory, myth-bearing minority leaves no footprint — as the Jews left almost none before Hellenistic times, and yet were real. The sources contradict themselves, calling the Pelasgians native one moment and seafaring foreigners the next. The migratory account is both more consistent and more revealing, and their itinerant nature would explain the absence of a clear archaeological footprint. "Pelasgian," then, is a cultic identity before it is an ethnic one, "godly" in Homer's word: as Etruscans were to Rome and Jews to Christendom. To be initiated into their Mysteries was, in a way, to become one.

The chapter ends on the question that carries the whole of Part II: who would need to invent religion more than an outside people with no army and no birthright to power? "And who better to have that talent than Proto-Jews?"

Context

Three ancient reports are the scaffolding: Homer's "Pelasgian Zeus" at Dodona; Herodotus on the nameless gods later given Greek names; and Strabo's note that they were called Pelargi, storks, for their wandering.

The chapter's argument

Two cities that loom huge in myth and small in the dirt. Argos has no palace, few tombs, no Linear B tablets; early Jerusalem is scarcely more. Both peoples claim to have sprung from the soil, and for the same reasons: antiquity gives authority, and a homeland needs a title. In Arcadia, Pelasgus rises out of the earth like Kronos or Python, in a lost Golden Age of milk, nectar and honey dripping from the trees — the Promised Land in Greek. Hermes is born there.

But even the "native" myths leak migration. Pelasgus descends from a river-god whose father is Ocean. Argos itself may mean silver — the moon's metal. And the Argive story is tangled with Egypt and Canaan exactly as the Bible is: Io, turned into a cow, wanders to Egypt and her line rules there; the daughters of Danaus flee Egypt back to Argos. Entry into Egypt, exodus from it, a homeland founded. The ancients drew the parallel themselves. Hecataeus tells of foreigners expelled from Egypt — some under Danaus and Cadmus to Greece, "but the greater number" to Judaea "under a man called Moses," who founded Jerusalem. Danaus, the Danaans, the Túatha Dé Danann: the Tribe of Dan again. So Homer's "Danaans," burning Troy, may be read with the Trojans as the wronged party, as Euripides read them. And the Argive king Apis leads to the Egyptian Apis bull — a black bull with white marks, born of a white solar cow made pregnant by a moonbeam. Livestock bred to a pattern; Jacob's speckled flock is the same picture, and in theory this may even be the very cult Genesis 30 refers to.

Central image

The black bull with white markings. From Laban's flock to the temple at Memphis, the book's argument keeps coming back to an animal bred for its spots.

The chapter's argument

Strabo says the Pelasgians "like birds, resorted to those places whither chance led them," and were called Pelargi — storks. The chapter gathers the birds. Aristophanes gives his cloud-city a "law of the storks." The crane, another migrant, is sacred to Hephaestus, the god thrown out of heaven. And in Hebrew the stork is ḥasīdah, the feminine of ḥasīd, "godly one" — set beside Homer's "godly Pelasgians."

Then Herodotus and the wall. The Athenians hired the Pelasgians as foreign builders to wall the Acropolis and paid them in land; then, the Athenians say, the Pelasgians began violating their daughters at the spring and plotting against the city, and were expelled. The Pelasgians, in revenge, carried off Athenian women to Lemnos and kept them as concubines — and later, fearing the half-Attic children, killed them all: the "Lemnian crime," the ancient byword for cruelty. Builders, expulsion, bride-taking, Lemnos: the pattern is there, and Hephaestus, the homely craftsman married to Aphrodite and cast out of Olympus, is its god. The Pelasgians worshipped the earth-gods, not the Olympians, in secret rites; Herodotus thought the Eleusinian, Dionysian and Samothracian Mysteries were theirs. Those cults lasted up to eighteen hundred years, until Christian emperors closed them, with Pericles, Plato and Alexander among their initiates, and a secret non-Greek tongue kept alive inside them. Robert Graves guessed the Pelasgians came from Egypt or Palestine. The book doubts the date and keeps the instinct: "to be an artist is often to create myths and encode them," and an artist can smell another.

Words to know

Pelargi · ḥasīdah / ḥasīd · the Lemnian crime · Hephaestus on Lemnos

The chapter's argument

When did the Pelasgians arrive? The dates are guesswork; what matters is the order of events. The usual story runs: first the farmers out of Anatolia, worshipping an earth mother, with their female figurines; then the Indo-European Sky Father, patriarchal and warlike; and Apollo killing Python at Delphi — once Gaia's oracle — is that conquest in a picture. The book keeps the picture but adds a second act. The myths may also record a later trouble: an established Aryan order disturbed by new cults, "subversive, innovative, and disruptive." Greek cosmology holds the sequence. Uranus rules Gaia; Kronos castrates him and takes Gaia's side; Zeus overthrows Kronos; Zeus's son Apollo kills the serpent. Hesiod and Homer wrote in the eighth century, so these stories may have taken shape not long before — and Kronos' coup fits the Mycenaean collapse around 1200 BC, the Sea Peoples, and the "Golden Age" of Kronos read as the melting of Mycenaean authority. Which leads to the thought that the Pelasgians were the Sea Peoples.

Then read the Iliad against the grain. Its Greeks — Achaeans, Argives, Danaans — may be a mask on the raiders who wrecked Egypt, the Hittites and Mycenae; "Argives" and "Danaans" both smell Pelasgian. Ares and Apollo fight for the losing side. Zeus loves Troy. Odysseus, descended from Hermes, gets the sequel. "Apollo-worshiping Troy represents the civilized order, sacked by invaders arriving in black ships." After the collapse, writing vanishes for four hundred years and comes back in a Phoenician script: a Year Zero, an old tradition wiped and a new one laid down. So the Pelasgians look like the Phoenicians and the Hyksos: a seafaring, mixed people led by priests, running traders and labourers and warriors through Mystery cults, worshipping male gods — Kronos, Hephaestus, a Pelasgian Zeus — with myths too worldly to be homegrown. "Imported goods." (Bárbaros only meant "foreign-speaking.") Before, alongside, or after the Hellenes? Alongside or after, tied to the collapse, and either way the mark of them is the cult: a Mystery needs a host. Herodotus says the Pelasgians took their gods' names from Egyptians; but a people does not mindlessly copy the foundations of a profound and esoterically rich religion from foreigners. So either native Pelasgians took it from Proto-Jewish newcomers and mixed with them, or — more likely — the Pelasgians simply were those newcomers, the "storks," from wherever, which is neither knowable nor interesting. Names prove nothing: Apollo's may be Anatolian, Athena's and Aphrodite's non-Greek, as Superman and Batman have English names and Esau and Amalek Hebrew ones. What counts is the part a figure plays. Evola and Rosenberg saw in the Pelasgians a dark "telluric" undercurrent; "where such thinkers saw analogy, we assert genealogy." The Pelasgians are Proto-Jews. And the Alexandrian Jews who said Zeus was a copy of YHWH were wrong on the dates and "correct in spirit."

Logic map

Words to know

Early European Farmers · the Sky Father · bárbaros · Year Zero · Argives and Danaans

The chapter's argument

Stop thinking of the ancient cults as local. The Mystery and underworld cults from Mesopotamia to India were one networked system — "a global JEM deep-culture" — with the regional pantheons, Egyptian, Greek, as subcultures inside it. The people who ran it were what Yuri Slezkine calls Mercurians: mobile, trading, wealth-seeking, choosy about brides, "the descendants — or predecessors — of Hermes, the god of all those who did not herd animals, till the soil, or live by the sword." Priests, artisans and merchants against warrior elites; Vulcan and Mercury against Mars and Apollo. The network followed the trade routes, and before mass media the trade routes were how a myth travelled. Over time the cults "Gentilized," opening to the masses with egalitarian afterlives, proto-Christian in shape — while a knowing element kept the direction and the profit. Without such knowers a cult goes inert. The tightest ones — Ptah, Vulcan, the Cabeiri, the Dactyls — stayed guilds, grew by marriage, and are the nearest ancestors of Judaism itself.

The chapter coins a word for how this works: Myth Acculturation. A person can acculturate on the outside and stay himself within. So can a god. Heracles wears the Greek warrior's face; Batman wears the American crime-fighter's; underneath, each is the same figure. That is why the world's myths look so alike — not borrowing, but one origin and one plan — and it turns Roman Interpretation on its head. When the Romans "identified" a foreign god with their own, often they were only recognising what had always been the same. The modern taste for unique, isolated, fragile local traditions — nationalist or leftist — is called defensive: "REM, on the other hand, is international, aggressive, and expansive."

Words to know

Mercurian · Myth Acculturation · deep-culture in a regional shell

The chapter's argument

Now the names are strung on one thread: Pelasgians, Sea Peoples, Hyksos, Phoenicians, Etruscans, Dan. The Sea Peoples were a confederation out of the Aegean and Anatolia; Yigael Yadin argued that one of them, the Denyen, was the Tribe of Dan, coast-dwelling seafarers in the Bible. The Hyksos were Levantine tribes who once ruled Egypt; were the Sea Peoples their remnant coming back in force? The Etruscans, pirates in the Hymn to Dionysus, were treated by Rome as the Pelasgians were by Greece; Helmut Rix links Etruscan to the language of Lemnos, the Pelasgian island of Hephaestus. Evola and Rosenberg saw a spiritual likeness among these peoples; the book, again, asserts blood.

The Phoenicians are the hinge. They called themselves Canaanites, and they were almost the only eastern power to survive the Bronze Age collapse — rich seafarers, the obvious target for raiders, untouched. Allies of the Sea Peoples, then, or the Sea Peoples themselves; maybe the whole collapse was a war of privateers. Their gods are Yahweh's cousins — El, El Elyon, Adonis — and Dionysus descends from the Phoenician Cadmus. The Hyksos seem to have come out of Byblos, the papyrus port whose name gave the Greeks biblion, "book" — the Bible traced, by way of a word, to a Hyksos city. Hyksos, Israelite, Phoenician: all Canaanites. Judaism, in this reading, is a shedding of skins — an offshoot of Phoenician polytheism and a rejection of it, with Baal, Asherah and Astarte (Jupiter, Terra, Venus) condemned as the wrong side to worship, and the eastern god of moon, fire and stone perfected into one jealous god, circumcision his brand of ownership. Scholars grant the family tree: "Yahweh and his Asherah" is carved at Kuntillet Ajrud, and Judah first appears in anyone's records as a small tribute-paying kingdom in 734 BC.

Last, the pirate. Jews have a documented history of it — after Pompey, after 1492, Henriques and Sinan Reis in the Golden Age of Piracy — and when the cultural road failed, the direct one was taken. The Pelasgians on Lemnos were the Sintians, "raiders." Even Freud, who as a schoolboy felt himself of "an alien race," took Hannibal the Carthaginian as his hero: "the tenacity of Jewry against the organization of the Catholic Church."

Central image

A trading city on the coast, untouched, while every kingdom around it burns. The book asks you to notice who was not attacked.

The chapter's argument

"Yahweh is everywhere." Nothing survives comfortably in our culture that displeases him, and the media carries his imprimatur; the Alt-Right and the anti-Zionist Left are marginal, crude and censored at will. The Christian centuries, when all Europe knelt to a Jewish god-man, are the plainest proof of his power. But the chapter is really about the small things. A man brings a woman a rose. He kisses her under the mistletoe. He hangs holly in the hall. He thinks he is dabbling in something old and pagan and Germanic. He is celebrating the marriage of Jewish men to Aryan women: Christ and a Venus-like Mary Magdalene, and behind them Adonis and Venus, Jasius and Ceres, Dumuzid and Inanna. Cupid on Valentine's Day is likely a Proto-Jewish invention. And the "Scrooge" who sniffs at Christmas decorations is a Jewish Sussman who, without knowing it, drives the irritated Aryan deeper into these very customs. "Insist on saying Merry Christmas!"

Santa gets the same treatment. Eight reindeer from Odin's eight-legged horse; a sleigh from the animal-drawn chariots of Thor and Freya; the chimney and coal from Vulcan's smithy. Comfort for the neo-pagan — until he asks what comfort it is, if these are Christian or Proto-Jewish inventions in regional dress. "Kris Kringle" is Christkindl, the Christ Child with presents: whatever he wears, Santa brings the flock back to Christ. Then the colours and the plants. Red is admixture, vulnerability, sin. Green is Osiris, the green man, the vine, the serpent, the fertility of the Jewish god. The rose grows from Adonis's blood and Venus's tears, its thorn a phallus, and becomes the rosary. Holly's leaves are Christ's thorns and its berries his blood. Mistletoe is Balder's death and Frigg's grief — and Balder and Frigg are Adonis and Myrrha, Christ and Mary. Holly, mistletoe, ivy and bindweed are all parasites, which gives one more layer: "the Semitic vine grows on the Aryan tree."

The larger point: even the pagan parts of our holidays are coded — Biblical, medieval crypto-Jewish, or older. That goes far deeper than the tired complaint that Jews wrote the Christmas songs, though the songs do illustrate one thing: Jews, and their ancient equivalents, are happy to furnish Aryans with a "pagan" folk-culture, whether they take part in it or not, as a place to put their own message. These are not recent corruptions. And as long as the Gentile stays blind to the symbols he hangs on his own door, he will carry the message for them — the unwitting propagandist.

Central image

Holly on the door. The chapter takes the things that feel most innocently ours and argues that their innocence is the delivery system.

The chapter's argument

In the Prose Edda, Odin says the gods built their stronghold "in the middle of the world, and it was called Asgard. We call it Troy," and that they sat in judgment on "Idavold" — the plains of Ida. Troy is a long way from Iceland. That one line tells you the writers were educated men with the classics on the shelf. There are two Mount Idas — one on Crete, one near Troy, from whose summit the Olympians watch the war in the Iliad — and Ida's plain is also where Balder returns after Ragnarök, to a new world with a new first couple whose names mean "life" and "life-striver," as Eve's name means "living." And there may be a new etymology for "Edda": not the eider duck of the dictionaries but Hebrew ʕedah, "witness" or "testimony." The Edda is, after all, a new testament.

Ida is then made the key to the Proto-Jewish past. Both mountains belonged to the Great Mother — Rhea on Crete, who hid the infant Zeus in the Idaean cave; Cybele in Phrygia, who nursed Dionysus and sent him out to spread the vine. Kronos and Dionysus, the two gods of Ida, are the two that went into the making of Yahweh. Lions drew Cybele's chariot, and Dionysus was "the Idaean Lion" as David was the lion of Judah. The Idaean Dactyls, smiths who rose out of the earth, are the model for the Norse Dwarves — and in the Eddas you see the Proto-Jews as they appear across the ancient world: artisans and smiths, Vulcan and Prometheus bringing gifts. If the Dactyls and Dwarves are accepted as Proto-Jewish inventions, their self-deprecating form makes them endosymbols — symbols a group adopts or creates to represent itself. On the other hand, the heroic Thor is likely a reference to them too, and to their leader, who was named Heracles, with a hammer for a club — Tacitus heard the Germans sing of Heracles before battle, and the Roman "club of Heracles" amulet is the ancestor of the Thor's-hammer pendant.

The centre of the chapter is Tacitus on the Sabbath. Some say, he writes, that the Jews rest on Saturn's day because they owe their religion to the Idaei, "who were expelled in the company of Saturn and became the founders of the Jewish race"; the Jews once lived "around the famous Mount Ida in Crete"; and Iudaei is "the barbarous lengthening of Idaei." Greek and Latin had no J, so the stretch is smaller than it looks. Modern scholars throw the passage out. It is absurd in the extreme to discard a scholar who lived while these cults were still going, in favour of the calculations of modern etymologists. And even if the etymology is wrong, the fact that the ancients tied Ida to the Jews, and took the two for synonyms, is of enormous interest — because if the Idaean cult was Proto-Jewish, then Odin and Thor can be read as Israelites in disguise.

A coda reads Polanski's Chinatown as a Mount Ida film: Noah Cross the Christian Gentile; his Albacore Club, alba plus core, a white core (and al bakara, milk cow — the Aryan as breeding stock, as fresh water is throughout JEM); his incest with Evelyn as "pathological" endogamy; a woman called Ida Sessions, Sessions from Soissons, "new hillfort" — Mount Ida; and Chinatown itself as Sinai, which means "China" in modern Hebrew, with Sinai traced back through the Egyptian Sin, the Vulcan cult on volcanic Lemnos, and the Akkadian moon-god Sin as one more proto-Yahweh. It closes: Jews are "a fascinating, clever and secretive people, foreign in mentality from our own," and Ida is one symbol still living in their memory.

Words to know

Mount Ida · Idaei / Iudaei · Rhea and Cybele · the Idaean Dactyls · endosymbol · ʕedah

The chapter's argument

Bacchus stands beside Saturn as the other great Proto-Jewish god, and the ancient witnesses tie his cult to Yahweh's. Tacitus, Cornelius Labeo, John the Lydian: the two gods were equated, and the two cults taken for one community. The shared signs are the vine, wine, the cup, the lion and the donkey; Josephus says the gate of the Second Temple was hung with golden vines "as tall as a man's height." Then the mask is placed on Judah himself. In Jacob's blessing, Judah "washes his garments in wine, his robes in the blood of grapes; his eyes are darker than wine" — which the book sets next to the dark-haired, purple-cloaked Dionysus of the Homeric Hymn, and next to the purple robe put on Jesus. Jesus is the true vine; his blood is wine; his first miracle was Bacchus's trick; and with Tammuz and Adonis he is a god who dies and rises.

In Phrygia Bacchus was Sabazios, and Plutarch made the link outright: the Sabbath is the feast of Sabazios, Jews and Bacchants are one cult, and "the Jews themselves testify to a connection with Dionysus when they keep the Sabbath by inviting each other to drink and enjoy wine." Rome agreed: in 139 BC a praetor expelled Jews from the city for "attempting to infect Roman customs with the cult of Jupiter Sabazios." And Sabazios is above all the Bacchus of Phrygian Ida — which is why Seneca's name for him, "the Idaean Lion," is offered as one more thread between Judah and Ida. The chapter ends with Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite, whose Lenny "Gildersleeves" Weinrib — lion, golden sleeve, vine — is a wink at the golden vine of Bacchus; Allen's story about an old actor's name is an exoteric alibi.

Words to know

Sabazios · Liber Pater · the Idaean Lion · the golden vine

The chapter's argument

Seven is the holiest number in Judaism and the Bible, and Revelation is drunk on it — seven seals, trumpets, bowls, churches, lampstands, horns, eyes, stars. Seven is Saturn's number, and Revelation's sevens mean the completion of the Sabbath: the end of creation. Sabbath means "to cease" — death. The Son of Man on his cloud, reaping souls with a sickle, is Saturn the harvester who unmanned the sky with a sickle. Six is the other number: the days of creation, when the elohim looked and saw that it was good, before Yahweh, as a distinct god, walks on in chapter two. Six is the number of man; 666 is the false prophet who opposes Yahweh; so six, on this reading, belongs to the Aryan and the sun — a distinction the internet's Saturn-hexagon meme (a cloud pattern no ancient could have seen) only muddies.

Why Saturn? The seven wandering lights of the sky gave the week its days, and the Germanic peoples swapped in their own gods for the Roman ones: Odin on Mercury's day, as Tacitus's report of German Mercury-worship would predict; Thor on Jupiter's, a smith-hero raised to a king's seat. The Romans had an eight-day week; Constantine introduced the seven-day week in 321 — an honouring of the Jewish god, and best understood as JEM. And the week itself, running from a Sunday of the sun to a Saturday of Saturn, seems to present the whole arc of a civilization in miniature. Is it a stretch to imagine it was built that way, to prepare the Aryan mind for the inevitability of decline? Then the Gnostics, called as Jewish witnesses rather than Roman ones: their Yaldabaoth, the ignorant Demiurge who traps souls in bodies and brings death, was the god of the Hebrew Bible and, in some texts, Saturn; he has a lion's face on a serpent's body, the signs of Judah, Jesus and Dionysus together — which may suggest crypsis: the noble face concealing a serpentine cunning. Sabaoth, his son or himself, echoes Sabbath and Sabazios and ṣabaoth, "hosts," one of God's seven names. The conclusion: seven was made sacred by Jews and Proto-Jewish cults like the Pythagoreans to honour, in secret, a god who was in his day unpopular — the one Jupiter overthrew, and "an adversary to this day."

Logic map

Words to know

Yaldabaoth · Sabaoth / ṣabaoth · elohim against Yahweh · six against seven

The chapter's argument

Saturn's other son is Typhon — the hundred-headed serpent monster whom Jupiter threw into the pit, as he threw Saturn. In Egypt Typhon was Seth, the jackal-headed god of the desert and the storm, and Seth was the god the Hyksos worshipped, for a time, above all others: the "rulers of foreign lands" who held the Nile Delta from about 1638 BC and whom Manetho and Josephus both tied to the Israelites. Their capital was Tanis; Hebrew tannin means serpent, sea-monster, dragon, jackal — so Tanis, the book proposes, was the city of the dragon. Typhon shares Yahweh's marks: the donkey, the number seven, the volcano. Plutarch says Typhon fled on an ass for seven days and fathered Hierosolymus and Judaeus — Jerusalem and Judah — and from 200 BC Egyptian Greeks identified Yahweh with him.

The volcano leads to Vulcan. Jewry came in part out of Vulcan's cult — an Israeli scholar, Nissim Amzallag, now argues the same, and Freud wrote flatly, "Yahweh was certainly a volcano god." For centuries it was said only in pictures: Sinai wrapped in smoke "like the smoke of a furnace"; Daniel's throne of fire on burning wheels, the smith-god's chair; Solomon the craftsman, builder of mechanical animals and raiser of idols in high places; and in Stan Lee, Professor X in his wheelchair with one-eyed Cyclops at his side. Then the whirlwinds. Tuphon is Greek for whirlwind — our word "typhoon" — and Yahweh comes to Job in the whirlwind, to Jeremiah, to Nahum, to Jonah as a storm and a great fish; and the east wind that ruins Pharaoh's grain is rendered in the Greek Bible with a verb the Egyptians used for Seth. The Seth of Genesis, Adam's third son, is the same name; Eve says "the gods" gave her this seed, and from Seth's line "men began to call upon the name of Yahweh."

Do Jewish artists still know this? Two films. In Rosemary's Baby the Satanists are the Castevets — "caste vetters" — coded Jewish; the obstetrician is Abe Sapirstein, "stone dear to Saturn"; he prescribes "Tannis root"; and in Rosemary's dream she goes below deck into an underworld, a serpentine devil takes her, and her old friend Hutch, dressed as a sailor, shouts "Typhoon! Typhoon!" The logic of that scene is a memory of Judaism's origin in the cult of Seth-Typhon. In Raiders of the Lost Ark the Ark lies at Tanis, in a well of serpents guarded by jackal-headed idols, and Indiana Jones wins it with fire, Yahweh's own sign. It seems certain that Spielberg and Kasdan are acknowledging that Seth of the Hyksos was a proto-Yahweh.

Words to know

Seth / Typhon · Tanis and tannin · tuphon and the whirlwind · the volcano god

Where it leads

The next chapter takes up Saturn's black stone; the Vulcan thread runs all the way to the announced sequel, The Caduceus.

The chapter's argument

A short chapter on one object. The Sabaeans, an Arabian people, worshipped Saturn as a black stone, and Jung records in a footnote that they called him "the god of the Jews" and his planet "the star of the Jews." In alchemy Saturn is lead and the sun is gold, and the work of turning one into the other has seven stages — which, speculatively, points to "a Semitic anxiety to admix with or disguise oneself as golden, solar or Aryan." The black stone runs on: to the Kaaba at Mecca, circled seven times and kissed; to the Bethel, the "house of God," the rock that held the spirit of El; to Yahweh "the eternal rock"; and to the black stone of Idaean Cybele, brought to Rome in the Punic War, whose priests castrated themselves as Saturn castrated the sky.

Then Kubrick. The monolith in 2001 — "one stone," a black slab that speaks to the apes with the moon overhead — is Saturn, Yahweh, Mercury and Prometheus at once: the tablets of the Law, the fire brought down from heaven, the hidden god himself. And the hero, David Bowman, is King David and the archer — but not Apollo the archer. He is Odysseus, the "bow-man" who alone could string the bow, great-grandson of Hermes, "that most Jewish of Greeks," in Slezkine's phrase.

Central image

A black stone, kissed. From Arabia to Rome to a film set in 1968, the book follows the same object.

The chapter's argument

Part II closes on a reversal. Roman religion was an imperfect master's religion: its great gods were the gens — race and chief gods in one word — and its capital virtue was auctoritas, the power to rule, toward which a worthy life pointed. Pietas was duty to country, parents and blood. Christianity turned that upside down — Nietzsche's "slave morality," fully worked out — and gave pietas to a foreign god from the East. Watch the word travel. In eleventh-century French, piete means piety, faith, and pity. Then the statues: the Pietà, the dead Jesus laid across his mother's lap, everywhere from the thirteenth century on. Women weeping over a dead god is older than Jesus — it is the lament for Adonis and Tammuz, with Mary standing where Venus stood. So this is what Christian piety is, the book says: pity for a tortured innocent; guilt, because he died for your sins; and terror, because he will send you to hell if you do not honour the sacrifice. "An odd alchemy of emotions." To speak plainly, it is redolent of Jewish guilt-tripping over their historical persecution and tragedy: one is obliged to feel sorry for Jews and to make their suffering sacred — or else. That makes perfect sense if Jesus, like Yahweh, is a totem of the Jews themselves.

The Norse tell it best. When Balder dies, Hel will release him only if every single thing in the world weeps for him. One giantess — Loki in disguise — refuses, and Balder stays dead, and that refusal sets Ragnarök in motion. That is the logic of the Christian apocalypse too: the world ends because not everyone has sincerely mourned. It sets the modern Holocaust narrative in the same frame — remember and grieve, or it will all happen again — and asks whether each is a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which a refusal to feel a fearful, worshipful pity must consign the world to destruction.

Words to know

auctoritas · pietas → piety and pity · the Pietà · transvaluation · Þökk, the giantess who would not weep

Where it leads

Part III opens by defining culture against civilization, and everything in this chapter about what a god asks of his worshipper feeds that distinction.

The chapter's argument

Kenneth Clark stood on the bank of the Seine, looked across at Notre Dame and said he could not define civilization but knew it when he saw it. The chapter asks what he was looking at. A monument to two thousand years of art — or to fear, abnegation, and Judea's conquest of pagan Rome? Spengler had his own pair: Greece the "culture," Rome the "civilization," and the German tradition set warm, folkish Kultur against cold, bureaucratic French civilisation. High culture, low culture — the opera and the comic book. The book finds all of these too loaded with snobbery and national rivalry, and none of them asks the one question that matters: what is the culture actually telling people to do? Stan Lee's Spider-Man is thick with symbols; Handel's Messiah sets the Bible to glorious music and adds nothing to it. Which is deeper?

So the book cuts on a different axis: not high and low, but deep and shallow. Civilization is the infrastructure of a way of life — cities, money, science, armies, administration — plus an inborn ethos, the mos maiorum, that comes from a people's nature the way a golden retriever's temper is its own. Culture is the myth that directs all that toward an end, up or down; and culture, more often than not, attacks the civilization it lives in. Deep-culture is made by a creator who knows what his symbols mean; it is global, it accepts no rivals, and it can only be JEM or AIM. Shoal-culture is everything else: folk ways, dialect, cuisine, "George Washington and the cherry tree," and also Shakespeare and Handel — glittering things that decorate a deep-culture without touching its code, like the gems on Smaug's belly. Since Constantine's deathbed in 337, the deep-culture of Europe has been JEM. The Renaissance was the old Greco-Roman deep-culture surfacing again and rubbing against it — Michelangelo's David, an Aryan body on a Hebrew name, is shoal-culture of the highest kind. And now? The making is over, and the culture fossilizes into worship of what was made: rock is dead, rap is dead, the same hundred masterpieces play in the halls, and the video essay about an old film is more alive than the new film. The Neoplatonists did this to Homer, turning myths that carried racial messages into "spiritual" ones about the soul; Evola and Jung did it to the whole Indo-European pantheon. Only AIM — a method in messaging, not a style — can break the rut.

Words to know

deep-culture · shoal-culture · mos maiorum · sub-creator · fossilization

Central image

A dragon and the jewels stuck to its belly. The jewels are our best-loved art. The dragon is the thing underneath, deciding where everything goes.

The chapter's argument

Shallow does not mean empty. A fantasy writer borrowing Norse names has messages of his own; they are just not consciously racial, and his grasp of the deep symbols is thin. Inside that shoal the book marks out ChEM, Christian Esoteric Messaging — hidden allusion whose purpose is to bring readers to the faith or borrow its depth for drama. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis are the masters, and they are doing a less subtle version of what the Eddas did. Had Tolkien worked out that Norse myth was built to convert barbarians? Or did he simply reinvent the trick, because the way to win readers to Christ is through the symbols they already love?

Two harder cases. Shakespeare's Puck, a son of Pan, begs his Christian audience's pardon for the pagan dream they have just watched; Hamlet, "the man from Wittenberg," is haunted by a father stuck in a purgatory Protestantism had abolished — is the play mourning the Catholic world, and is the brutal, Roman Fortinbras its real hero? A "hamlet," the chapter notes, is a village with no church of its own. Too ambivalent and complex to be simple esoteric Christian affirmation — a strength as art, but what does it do in the world except glorify paralysis? The Terminator is the plain case. John Connor is J.C. Kyle Reese comes from the future and fathers the saviour on Sarah: Mary, and Gabriel, and Abraham's Sarah too. The robot has an Austrian accent, so the film is Jesus against Hitler; the AI is "Skynet," the old Aryan sky-father; its soldiers are muscled Olympians; the sequel is called Judgment Day. But ChEM is always shoal. It takes the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection as given and never asks what they were metaphors for. "Deep-culture is JEM or AIM and the cults these directly produce; everything else is shoal-culture. The world revolves around REM."

Words to know

ChEM · sub-creator · the shoal

The chapter's argument

The anti-Christian Rightist wants Greek religion to be pure tribe against Christianity's pure universalism. Not so simple. Xenophanes said the Ethiopians make their gods black and the Thracians make theirs red-haired — and in Greek marble, Heracles, Bacchus and Mercury look as Aryan as Apollo, just as Superman and Spider-Man look as White as Luke Skywalker. The Greek pantheon was a deep-culture too: Aryan at the centre, hybrid at the edges, taking in the underworld and the Pelasgian. But it could absorb a foreign cult, tame it and neuter it, and it held up the ruling Aryan — the hale Jupiter, the polymath Apollo — as what a man should be. Christianity holds up a humble Jewish messiah instead.

Foreigners who bowed to Jupiter for the right to trade were never a threat, because the god was built to make his own people breed well and to shame their opposite. The danger came from cults that put another people's god above him. Jupiter was overthrown in men's minds, by Christianity. From here the book arrives at an unexpected agreement with the left-liberal line that "Whites don't have a culture": not the way Jews do. Their deep-culture is not their story. They idealise "freedom" and "tolerance," which are open to all — and once "White guilt" strips away the implicitly White folk-culture and forbids open pride, they are left thinner than the non-Whites who are praised for theirs. That was the aim of Christian deep-culture from the start: to destroy a tribal Pharisaic pride, with the "bad Pharisee" as the sin. A culture should be fuel for a civilization, not poison.

Yes, Aryan shoal-culture has "sanitized" the Jewish and Christian deep-cultures — made them more pagan, loftier, more "badass": the Terminator films, Tolkien, Parsifal, the Germanized Christianity J. C. Russell described. But the Aryan stayed inventive despite Christianity, not because of it, even if the fetter became a resistance that made him stronger. The Christian nationalist who skips the Gospels' Jesus for the Crusader knight only shows how JEM grows more refined in the hands of people who misunderstand it. Sanitizing slows the poison "but also keeps it in the bloodstream."

Central image

"Ours" is not about who worships a god. It is about whom the god was built to exalt.

The chapter's argument

In the museum in Athens stands a life-size youth in Naxian marble, long-haired, smiling, left foot forward: the kouros. He is aretē — human excellence — made real, the Aryan ideal in stone, and the book calls him a glimpse of AIM. Then it complicates him. His nakedness would have shocked its first viewers; the naked gymnasium that the statues inspired is tied to the rise of pederasty in Crete and Sparta; and the cult of Apollo was above all the cult of the koros, the noble youth — Apollo "of the unshorn hair," Apollo the "great koros." In the Dorian coming-of-age rite the boy cut his long hair and sacrificed an animal: the fair, long-haired youth that Apollo stood for was what he had to give up. The golden calf, Samson "man of the sun" — the book hears the same sacrifice of the solar Aryan there.

The heart of the chapter is the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, which is really two poems stitched together. The Delian half is all praise: Leto searching for a birthplace, the islands afraid to host a god who will "greatly lord it over the immortal gods." The Pythian half is different. Apollo kills the serpent — and then goes looking for priests, and finds Cretan merchants on a black ship. Cretans were proverbial liars; Crete was the home of piracy, the slave trade, and cultic pederasty. Apollo sinks into the "wine-like" sea — the sun going down into Dionysus's element — and comes aboard as a dolphin, delphis, from delphus, womb; it is also the word for a woman of Delphi. He sails about with these men for some time, "making the timbers quiver," and then makes them the solemn priests of Delphi, where they burn white barley in his honour. The paired hymns suggest Dionysus as the erastēs while the Hymn to the great koros Apollo humiliatingly suggests him as the eromenos — the beloved or subservient partner. In the Hymn to Dionysus, pirates seize the purple-robed youth and he turns into a lion and makes dolphins of them. Apollo's year of bondage to Admetus — some say his lover — says the same. The white barley the Cretans burn may be Apollo himself, the "white" burnt offering; and koros, besides noble youth, can mean puppet, doll, and a measure of grain — the brother of Kore, the harvested maiden.

This is how a Proto-Jewish cult works: first flatter the Aryan with a god in his own image — no one listens to a loser — then, once trust is won, bring the god low. Clint Eastwood before the humbling. The Ionians, Apollo's own people, thought pederasty shameful, and Plato in the Laws tied it to Crete and Sparta and wanted it curbed; the Romans never took it up. It may be possible to view the corruption of the cult as particularly Cretan — alluded to in the Hymns and manifested especially at Delphi — while regarding its origin as Ionian. The Delian material may contain “healthier elements” for bringing Apollo back.

Central image

The sun-god climbing aboard a black Cretan ship as a dolphin, and stepping off it with a priesthood. Everything Part III says about Apollo being honoured in order to be humbled is in that voyage.

Words to know

kouros / koros · aretē · erastēs and eromenos · delphis / delphus · the Delian and Pythian hymns · kretismos, "Cretan behaviour"

The chapter's argument

A deep-culture is a people's collective intelligence: a group working together toward an end, including the end of breeding better, through a shared language of symbols. Religion, on one of its etymologies, is re-ligare, to bind fast. Every race has this intelligence, and Aryans, the authors propose, have it to the greatest extent, especially early on — but as instinct rather than as a consciously developed religio-culture. So the idea that Aryans are "naturally individualistic" is discarded as obviously false, harmful and defeatist. The Puritans did not carve America out of the wilderness alone. High-trust and individualist cannot both be true. "Our hive mind always conforms, in this direction or that, to the heavens or to the pit." Black cohesion, Chinese cohesion, Jewish cohesion — the book runs through them and finds culture, not genes, doing the work: Blacks sold Blacks into slavery, and the ghetto is more atomised than the slumlord. Slave morality, too, is will to power — the man who spreads it while posing as a slave is serving his god and his group.

Then the trap. Aryan civilizations fall to Semitic deep-cultures because they have none of their own, and when they fall they cling to the Semitic ones: "Judeo-Christian values," traditional Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Odinism — ascribing to them a purity that is the opposite of their design. Every one of them carries an encoded ending — Armageddon, Ragnarök, Camlann — and a set of override controls the priest can reach for: "neither Jew nor Greek … and yet you defy Jesus by being a nationalist?" The good-hearted Aryan has no ground to stand on when that is said to him. Christianity was made for Aryans to misunderstand and adore. You cannot threaten an Aryan into submission; you can win his protection as a martyr. That is the only sense in which the faith is "European." "JEM clings to their unconscious." Deep-cultures are nets — Saint Peter's net. The gods worth rescuing from the pit are Mars, Jupiter and Apollo, who are Aryans, and out of them a new deep-culture can be made.

A last thought on how new gods arrive: always low, always as the profane and the subversive, until they are the establishment. Comic books are entering the universities; our great-grandchildren may worship Superman, which is exactly how Heracles and Apollo first entered the world, and how Christianity began. Apollo and Dionysus were both usurpers once. The answer to "creativity that builds instead of undermines" is not Plato's plan to make all the gods goody-goodies. Life is struggle and art must stir. "The answer is REM."

Words to know

collective intelligence · re-ligare · the death cycle · override controls · Saint Peter's net

The chapter's argument

The Abrahamic faiths are called "revealed religion" — truth handed down by the Word, not reasoned out. And they are taken literally to a degree no Greek ever took Hesiod: the Middle Ages hunted for the spear that pierced Christ and the foreskin of Jesus. That literalism, the "pretense of historicity," is one more veil. Christianity arose in an age of Mystery religion — Dionysus, Mithra, Cybele — and belongs among them. "Mystery" is from myein, to close, to cover. The cults had no public scripture, and their real mystery was the story their festivals celebrated: at Eleusis, the rape of Kore. Sex cult, secret club, networking society — whatever else they were, their job was to pass a symbolic language and its values into people who mostly did not understand it, and to show their symbols to the world at a distance, so that everyone would want in.

The survey. The Mysteries likely began on Bronze Age Crete. Eleusis was open to any Greek speaker, women and slaves included, and promised a happy afterlife; the Dionysian rites offered frenzy, and a wine ritual and a dying-and-rising god that fed straight into the Eucharist; Cybele's castrated priests held Rome for six centuries until the Christians shut them down. That the myth of Jesus owes its inspiration to Mithra, Tammuz, Adonis and Dionysus is no longer particularly controversial in educated circles, if still rejected by Christian believers and apologists — a line of scholarship from Bruno Bauer through Frazer to Richard Carrier. Look at the "meek and mild" saviour: blood that is wine, water turned to wine, death and resurrection, all a thousand years old in the Orphic cults. "Love one another. Love your enemies." That is the ethos of the orgy — the dissolving of rank and duty and sex into the oneness of the mystery, "all one in Christ Jesus" — a subtler road to the Dionysian end: a population psychologically enslaved to an Eastern fertility god.

Livy on the Bacchanalia of 186 BC — wine, night, "debaucheries of every kind," forged wills, poison, screams drowned by cymbals — is quoted at length: Woodstock and Antifa at once. Roman critics said the same of the first Christians; Christian bishops said it of their own marginal sects. And Mark's Gospel gives the game away: "the mystery of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to those on the outside everything is expressed in parables." Inner circle, outer circle. Paul's blindness on the Damascus road and his sight restored three days later is an initiation — the Eleusinian blindfold, then the unveiling in the hall of initiation, the epopteia, "the seeing"; the road itself is the Sacred Way from Athens to Eleusis. And the paradox at the centre of Jesus: he is the mystery — Greek, "the covered" — and he is the truth, aletheia, which means literally "the uncovered." "Symbolism is mistaken for reality in the darkness of the cave; a religiously induced blindness is proclaimed 'true seeing.'"

Words to know

revealed religion · pretense of historicity · myein · epopteia · aletheia · Mythicism · the Bacchanalian Affair

Central image

A blindfold taken off in a dark hall, and the initiate told that what he now sees is the truth. That is the book's picture of conversion.

The chapter's argument

The story everyone knows: Hades takes Persephone down into the dark; she eats the pomegranate and is bound; Zeus lets her come back for half the year, and her mother Demeter's grief is the winter. A story about the seasons — on the surface. Underneath, the girl has two names. As Kore, the maiden at her mother's side, she is spring, fertility, a civilization at its beginning, the pure Aryan — the sister of the kouros. As queen of the underworld she is something else, chthonic, Semitic, "a proto-Jewess." Golden-haired Demeter's daughter carried off by dark Hades is bride-gathering, and the cycle closes when the Aryan goddess goes down among the dead — as Adam and Eve are shut out from the Tree of Life. The initiates at Eleusis drank kykeon, barley and water: the book reads it as eating Kore, the Barley Maiden, the way Yahweh, the "consuming fire," eats his burnt offerings — and the Hebrew for "woman" can also mean burnt offering. The bread of the Eucharist is the kykeon; the wine is Dionysus; to eat Jesus, whose blood carries his ancestry, is the mingling of the human race under one universal Judaism. Bethlehem means "house of bread."

Persephone dies and rises, like Adonis and like Jesus — and that Eleusis centred on a female dying-and-rising god, rather than a male one, might be why her influence on Christianity has been largely overlooked or minimized. Bacchus was called on at Eleusis as Iacchus. Heraclitus said Hades and Dionysus are one; Kerényi thought Hades was a cover name for Dionysus of the underworld, and that Demeter refused wine because it had gone bitter for her. Yahweh, the hidden god, was linked in antiquity to Bacchus "the completely hidden." And it is Hades' victory the Mysteries celebrated: the harvester, Kronos. Jesus himself may carry a trace of Jasius, the Samothracian god who took Demeter in a ploughed field — his name may mean bindweed, the vine that strangles grain and was sacred to Dionysus — and Samothrace is the first place Paul lands in Europe, where Jason was initiated, where initiation was a washing: a baptism. Orpheus loses his head there, like John the Baptist. Persephone's Roman double, Libera, was the model for the Statue of Liberty. Her abduction, Kramer says, comes from a Sumerian dragon seizing Ereshkigal. Her rites fell at the autumn full moon. And "Elysium" may come from Eleusis — with Kronos as its king.

The Orphic ending: Zeus becomes a serpent and fathers Zagreus, the first Dionysus, on Persephone, and Zagreus is to inherit Zeus's throne — the wine-god supplanting Apollo, the heir, as Jacob supplanted Esau and David passed Jonathan; the serpent-Zeus is the serpent in Eden. Is there a chthonic Zeus, a "Pelasgian Zeus," brooding like Typhon? Or is this Dionysus, "Zeus of the East"? The chapter closes on the "key of Pluto" given to initiates — the same key Jesus gives Peter, and holds himself in Revelation: "the keys of Death and of Hades."

Logic map

Words to know

kykeon · Iacchus · Jasius and bindweed · Zagreus · Libera · the key of Pluto

The chapter's argument

In the 1600s a Dutchman built a lantern that threw painted glass pictures onto a wall. It is the grandfather of the slide projector, the cinema, the television and the phone in your pocket. And it became a fixture of the Masonic lodge, where symbols were thrown on the wall to teach initiates — a little more meaning revealed with each degree, the platitude first and the depth later, so the man stayed under the spell of symbols he could not quite read. The book stresses how hypnotic a projected image is: a bright thing held above the eyes until the lids grow heavy and the mind grows willing. Freemasonry needed that mystery, because — in Belloc's phrase — it was "a bridge between Jews and their hosts," and a Jewish institution for putting an Aryan face on a Jewish mission and capturing the ablest Aryans. Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, a Mason himself, is quoted: its degrees, passwords and explanations "are Jewish from the beginning to the end." The mechanism: enrichment, friendship, a character studied over decades and perhaps compromised, a man who could be corralled by implied threats — and then, perhaps, the day the initiate is addressed as a servant by men who have raised him above his peers.

The lodge is heir to something much older, and its own symbols say so: the smith-gods, the Cabeiri as artisan guild and secret society, Vulcan and the Egyptian Ptah, gods of stonemasons — the "Great Architect" is both of them (and The Matrix has an Architect). The Hebrews did not build the Pyramids; Proto-Jews were in Egypt as priests and temple-builders, and Joseph married into the priesthood of Ra. Batman, the Hulk, Green Lantern and Cyclops carry Masonic nods, and the message every later cult sends by referencing an earlier one is: "We've always had a hidden hand in things. You are part of an ancient continuity." Cinema made the magic lantern obsolete. The lodge, church, and temple are fading in the same way, but the priestly role remains. The book's claim is that since Sumer, priests have understood the power of temples and idols well enough to support them even when they lose money.

Then the chapter pulls back. This is not a book about cabals. The remarkable thing about JEM is that it hides in plain sight, and at the heart of every mystery — lodge, church, synagogue, mosque — is entertainment. We want to be told a story. We want to be the "little child," the "sheep," listening to the grinning cryptic wise man; we want something above us to serve. Jews understand themselves as above and chosen; Aryans have for centuries declined the adult's chair. The book says that wish to be entertained comes from weariness, laziness, cowardice, passivity, and a taste for flattery. "The active rule the passive in every case. The magic of the lantern is for us to wield, not to receive. Let it be illuminated by the sun of Apollo and not the fire of Vulcan."

Central image

A projector. Everything from the lodge wall to the cinema to the phone is the same machine, and the only question the book asks is who is holding it.

The chapter's argument

A darkened room, a beam of light passing over your head, strangers around you all facing one wall. The movie theatre is the last and greatest magic lantern — "the high temple of the Hollywood imaginarium," "the definitive Mystery cult of the modern age." Its Golden Age — five of six studio heads Jewish — sits beside the Golden Age of Kronos and the "Jewish Golden Age" of Muslim Spain: golden for whom? The book runs the history quickly — Lumière, Edison's peep-show box (the first phone), the nickelodeon, the Wurlitzer, The Jazz Singer — and then names the real inventor of cinema: Wagner. Bayreuth was the first darkened hall. He hid the orchestra so the music came from nowhere, fixed every eye on the stage, cut each listener off inside his own head and bound them all together in a trance. He was building a religion on purpose, and Hollywood moved into his church.

But Plato had already drawn the theatre. Prisoners chained since childhood, facing a wall; behind them a fire, and men on a raised path carrying puppets whose shadows fall on the wall, whose voices seem to come from the shadows. "They're like us." Backstage is behind the audience; the fire is a projector. One prisoner is freed, climbs into the daylight, is dazzled, sees reflections, then stars, then the sun; he could never go back, and if he did he would stumble in the dark, be laughed at, and perhaps be killed for telling the others to leave. "A prisoner is only imprisoned to the degree he is aware he is in a prison." The book follows the cave into Descartes' demon and The Matrix — Neo, the "one," the son of man — and notes that "the red pill" became the password of every marginal movement since, most of which built caves of their own with worse shadows.

Now the loose end. Who are the puppet-masters? Plato gives them one sentence. Surely they know what they are making; are they as enlightened as the escaped man — or more? Did they leave the cave, see the sun, and come back to run the show better? Is the cave not Plato's real model of education, and the noble lie its script? Read that way the allegory is a how-to, "A Gentleman's Guide to Ethical Brainwashing," and Plato's whole work a confession that he was an initiate — for a torch-lit cave is where the chthonic gods live. The sun is Apollo, god of light and seeing. The fire is Vulcan. And the trick is that Plato lets each reader put his own "Good" into the sun — not the physical sun "as is the race that Apollo represents," but an invisible sun of ideas, "a black sun" — so that Jesus, or Muhammad, or Marx, or capitalism can each be installed as the light by which truth is judged. Descartes coming out of the cave of the Church, still afraid the world is a trick of Satan, and deciding it is real because God is good, is a man whose eyes are adjusting. "Our eyes are still adjusting."

Central image

Everyone remembers the man who escaped. Look instead at the men behind the wall with the puppets — and ask whether Plato was one of them.

Words to know

the allegory of the cave · the puppet-masters · the black sun · Golden Age

The chapter's argument

The book reads Plato's cave as a memory of the Mysteries he knew: fire-lit caves, secrecy, and staged revelation. By his day Eleusis was an official festival of democratic Athens; the Republic opens with Socrates going down to the Piraeus to watch a festival for a new goddess, and the Piraeus was the Vegas Strip of its day, "its own sort of new cave." Yesterday's subversive cult becomes today's public holiday — Martin Luther King Day, Juneteenth, Holocaust Remembrance Day — as Hermes and Dionysus were late arrivals who got seats on Olympus. Nietzsche called Socrates "anti-Greek." Too simple, says the book: Greek paganism had been a battlefield of deep-cultures since the Iliad's Greeks burned Apollonian Troy. Plato writes as an initiate of three cults — Eleusis, Orpheus, Pythagoras — and praises them: "many carry the thyrsus but the Bacchants are few." His philosophy is "the Mysteries by another name," and "Christianity for a vanguard elite."

Take the Myth of Er, at the end of the Republic: a soldier from Pamphylia comes back from the dead to tell how souls are judged, rewarded, punished and sent to choose their next lives — a beta version of heaven and hell, and the answer to "why be good?" is what happens after you die. Even the name is a message: Pamphylia means "all tribes," so heaven is open to every race and the soul is loosed from its blood — "one in Christ Jesus." Aristotle said Plato followed the Pythagoreans "in most respects," and all three of Plato's cults trace back to Bacchus: Orphism a refined Dionysian Mystery, Pythagoreanism its child, and from Pythagoras, in Bertrand Russell's words, Orphic ideas passed into Plato and into every religious philosophy since. Christianity is the heir — "Platonism for the people" — and so is Kabbalah. Why did the Abrahamic faiths claim the pagan Plato? A clever rebranding by men who knew. And it may be far more plausible that Platonism shaped the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint than that Plato read the Torah; Judaism's surviving form was made in a Hellenised world.

The clincher is the Orphic original sin. The Titans kill the infant Dionysus; Zeus resurrects him and burns the Titans with lightning; mankind rises from their ashes carrying the guilt of the god's murder. Adam made from dust, Jesus dying for our sins and raised by his father — the book sees the outlines of both doctrines in this one forgotten cult. Which answers Nietzsche's question, "Was Socrates a Greek at all?" No. "Socrates, along with Plato, was Proto-Jewish, if not in blood, in spirit and in cult."

Words to know

the Myth of Er · Pamphylia · Orphism and Pythagoreanism · the Titans' ash · "Platonism for the people"

The chapter's argument

An old rumour says Pythagoras learned from the Jews. The book turns it round: later Judaism learned from Pythagoras. Look at the cult — mystical, tight-knit, itinerant, secretive, almost communist, with a numerology that looks like the Bible's — and you are looking at a proto-Judaism. Its founder, by legend, was an Easterner, son of a Phoenician gem-cutter, on an island famous for wine and for hating Miletus, the home of Greek science. His very name honours Python, the serpent Apollo killed. And the cult's loud reverence for Apollo may have been the oldest trick there is: flatter the tribal god of the people you mean to enter. The Pythagoreans kept Apollo's birthday on the seventh of each month — a Mesopotamian habit — and were run out of Croton for arrogance and secrecy.

One late myth gives the chapter its edge. Abaris the Hyperborean meets Pythagoras, who shows him a golden thigh, and Abaris decides he is Apollo in the flesh. "Thigh," the book notes, is a Greek and Hebrew euphemism — Dionysus sewn into Zeus's thigh, Jacob touched in the hollow of the thigh — so the story is about an uncircumcised crypto-Jew passing not just as a Greek but as Apollo himself, in a world where the circumcised were barred from the naked gymnasium. The earliest source is Porphyry, who by one report married a Jewish woman. The serpent, in other words, is still coiled under the tripod in the sun-god's own house.

Central image

A philosopher lifting his robe to show a golden thigh, and a Hyperborean falling to his knees. That is the book's image of the false Apollo.

The chapter's argument

Islam has taqiyya: a Muslim may hide his mission, call his faith a religion of peace, even deny it, when that serves. Surely, there are lessons here. When Apollonians hide, call it twilighting — twilight is when the sun hides, and Apollo is the sun. Apolloism might begin again as a secret guild of able, reliable men held together by a mission, and among themselves, since their god is truth, "inflexibly honest and ever ready to show compassion."

AIM can show in a painting, in a patron's choice of what to fund, in the colours and quiet symbols a man puts on in the morning, in how he speaks and carries himself. The posture is the boxer's: let the other man swing and miss by as little as possible, so the counterpunch lands. Every fight the enemy picks should cost him more than it gains. Before the bell, the two men look at each other, and the bully reads in the other's eyes whether he is cowed. "AIM is that look."

Words to know

twilighting · Apolloism as a guild · "AIM is that look"

The chapter's argument

How to write the hero. The temptation is to make him know everything the author knows. Don't. The audience is unconscious, so the hero should be too: a wronged innocent who wins by simply doing right, and makes the audience virtuous the way JEM makes the Sussman virtuous — without knowing it. Only the artist needs to know what virtue is. And the virtue is Roman virtus: manliness, valour, courage, loyalty, plain speaking.

And the hero is Apollo, however he is disguised. Sidekicks may help him; he is the model. The one task above all is to show him winning in sexual and racial competition — to point the flock, and the women, at the most desirable man. It is sacrilege to show his type, and Apollo himself, made evil, cowardly, lazy, jilted or effeminate "in the Cretan or Theban manner." In place of Plato's vague Good that is "like the sun," put Apollo, distilled to a concept, stripped of the myths that show him weak. "He is defined by us as the highest, ever-ameliorating element of the Aryan race. Apollo is the telos whether in life, art, or religion. We hail Apollo, always."

Central image

The ideal hero does right without understanding the doctrine he embodies.

The chapter's argument

Art, and the religion it may become, is prophecy: a tale of victory both inspires victory and brings it. The Hebrew Bible is the model. It never doubts the final triumph of the Jewish people; when they suffer, it is at the hands of their own god, and even that is moralizing — "nothing is more powerful than the god that represents us." The Tanakh ends not with a prophet's warning but with Cyrus's decree: go home, rebuild the Temple. The serpent in Eden, naḥaš, also means spell, enchantment, foretelling; Moses' rod becomes a serpent; and in Acts a fortune-teller has "the spirit of Python." Prophets were poets, writing in Hebrew measure, and their foretelling was advocacy. Strip the word of its mystery and a prophet is a spokesman — as Steve Jobs was the prophet of Silicon Valley — and a spokesman for his people's victory is their leader and their shepherd. Which is why Jews lament open Aryan triumphalism: it is the most moralizing thing there is.

So the task is given. Symbolism was Mercury's craft, in the unconscious underworld where symbols are weapons. That space must be lit and fertilised by Apollo — the polymath, the god of artists, who could outrun even Mercury. "Mercury has misused the shepherd's staff, and it shall be taken back from him, restored to the rightful hand of Apollo." Apollo's own epithets say what he is: Proupsius, foreseeing; Phoebus and Lyceus, light; Coelispex, seeing; Loxias, which was taken to mean "ambiguous" but comes from logos. Light, sight, order, beauty, truth, the visible — delos — and the eternal spring of Hyperborea, carried on in the plain-seeing science of Miletus, a city named for his son. The form for all this is the epic: adventure, humour, seriousness, a victorious energy, aimed at boys and young men, who will become the shapers of society. Comedy has its place too — the ancient kind, where the enemy is lampooned. And the last word is a hand-off: tragedy, "that quintessentially Bacchanal art," is the subject of the next book.

Central image

Mercury's shepherd's staff being handed back to Apollo.

Words to know

naḥaš · prophet as spokesman · Proupsius, Loxias, Phoebus · delos · the epic