Myth or the Great Hoax: The Origins of Modern Demonology

Myth or the Great Hoax: The Origins of Modern Demonology

Myth or the Great Hoax: The Origins of Modern Demonology

June 17, 2023/0 Comments/in Christianity, Featured Articles/by Tom Sunic, Ph.D.

We all use mythical language, although we seldom admit it. In contrast to concepts which are the hallmarks of modern discourse, myths are based on images and symbolic forms of speech. In the mythmaking narrative images change and vary over historical time and place although their driving force remains constant in the identity building process of peoples, tribes, nations, including political movements. Many Christians, along with many atheists and agnostics, who deride as surreal ancient Greek myths, resort to their own self-made myths, adorning them with their own pack of metaphors and imagery. In a sharp contrast to the historically recorded end-of-time, single-God revelation religions, such as Judaism, Islam and Christianity, European myths surfacing in epics, folk tales, legends or sagas have the advantage of overstepping the historical timeframe. They fuse the past present and future in one whole, offering the hope of gods’ return and announcing the rebirth of a vanished or destroyed political order.

The man of the myth discovers his freedom not in the possibility of building up his own history, but in the fact of being free vis-à-vis history.  It is in the abolition, relativization and reinterpretation of history that he finds his freedom.[i]

Ancient Europeans who believed in myths had a profound historical consciousness. Yet—unlike Christians, Jews or Muslims, let alone unlike modern political true believers—they could neither grasp nor embrace a linear historical and “unique” narrative announcing the beginning of time and the end of time. To a traditional man, of the myth, history, with its incessant flow of time, is always open. The belief in a plurality of gods means also the ability of accepting the plurality of ideas, the plurality of different truths and consequently rejecting a single religious or political dogma.

The tragic side of life is a cornerstone of ancient myths, as depicted in ancient Greek epics and dramas. However, one never spots in ancient mythical prose or poems signs of religious and political nihilism. The man of the myth is essentially a historical optimist: he believes in the return of historical cycles that will also bring about the return of the hero and witness the rebirth of gods, even if the sky is doomed to fall with the entire cosmos swept in chaos. One of the sharpest American scholars of the twentieth century, Joseph Campbell, understood well the subconscious human desire for the world of the myth, myths being “like dreams, revelations of the deepest hopes, desires and fears, potentialities and conflicts, of the human will.” [ii]  The mythical world is anchored in all of us, as can be witnessed by an ever-growing interest in the mythical characters inhabiting J. R. R. Tolkien’s novels or George Lucas’ movie Star Wars, as well as in the proliferation of hundreds of science fiction movies.

Despite his insight into various faces of mythmaking Campbell was not spared from demonization by new mythmakers who labeled him with their own mythicist vocabulary an “antisemite and racist.” [iii]

Vice, or better yet, virtue signaling squads of the modern morality police, such as the SPLC or the ADL, were quick to shove Campbell into the realm of underground demons.

Resorting to a mythical language is also a prime goal of modern political demagoguery. The word ‘myth’ is often used incorrectly in defaming a political adversary. This word, when used in political discourse carries a derogatory meaning, bearing no resemblance to the ancient belief in mythos. Today its verbal derivatives are widely used to delegitimize the beliefs of a political opponent, often having the goal of ruining his reputation in the public eye by painting him as some kind of a conspiracy theorist. The problem with conspiracy theorists, regardless whether they come from the Left or the rightwing political spectrum is that they can never be refuted with any empirical, forensic and contradictory argument.

To a very extent that conspiracy theories claim to “explain” everything, rejecting out of hand any contradiction and any argument put forward against them is seen either as a proof of their opponents’ “naivete”, or a simple plot by conspiracy theorists aiming to prevent them from being exposed. Any contradiction any denial only becomes an additional proof of the existence of conspiracy.”[iv]

Many conservative and nationalist authors in their own description of leftwing opponents have popularized expressions such as the “myth of progress,” the “myth of Marxism,” “the myth of multiculturism.” On their part, left-leaning authors accuse nationalists and conservatives of believing in the myth of race and the myth of Jewish world conspiracy. Many Jewish and liberal authors, however, seldom tire from resurrecting their own conspiracy-laden language depicting and evoking the mythical and ever lurking “white supremacist,” anti-Semite, or Neo-Nazi bent on destroying the liberal democratic order. Even if White anti-Semites and Neo-Nazis were to disappear, the Liberal System would need to reinvent them over and over again – similar to the ex-Soviet Union and its former client states who, in order to justify their repressive nature, constantly kept resurrecting the myth of the Fascist Evil.

Without using over and over again the modern myth of the Absolute Cosmic Evil, allegedly incorporated today in the eternal Neo-Nazi and White Supremacist, the Liberal System would fall part.

To the word of the myth, one could substitute more hyperbolic verbal constructs such as the “big lie,” the “grand hoax,” or “political theology,” or even “fake news,”—expressions which are quite trendy among conservative and nationalist authors. While the Left likes to denounce the “myth of the White race” as a sign of pseudoscientific and retarded mindset, the Right, by contrast, denounces the liberal and communist myth of egalitarianism as a belief contrary to the laws of evolutionary biology.

Credo quia absurdum, or the belief in the Big Lie.

The line between a belief in the big lie and a belief in some kind of a myth is often blurred. It is wrong to assume that only a few bad people impose their political lies on a credulous or stupid populace. Very often it is savants and allegedly great minds who are believers and instigators of surreal political myths, strange beliefs, bizarre victimhood stories which they usually discard after some time and replace them with new trendy myths or hoaxes. Often masses deliberately accept new political myths because it is all too human to take wishful thinking for granted. In the study of crowd hysteria, Gustave Le Bon observes how masses accept political myths without ever reflecting upon their disastrous consequences:

Crowds being only capable of thinking in images are only to be impressed by images. It is only images that terrify or attract them and become motives of action.[v]

It can be the mythic imagery of the shining communist future, or the myth of the end of the world caused by the Covid pandemic that can whip up masses into political frenzy or justify the most severe forms of political repression.  Religions, as well as modern beliefs and ideologies are also heavily interwoven with mythical scenes. Often those who ridicule beliefs in the mythical nature of the scenes from the Bible or from Homer’s Iliad are receptive to modern myths of a Marxist classless paradise on earth or the nature of permanent economic growth in Liberalism. One may recall intellectual enchantment with the Freudian-Marxist mystique by hundreds of thousands of US and European college professors in the first half of the twentieth century and extending even after psychoanalysis had lost all scientific credibility and communism had resulted only in political repression and economic stagnation. By the end of the century, these professors had no qualms in replacing their former ideologies with new myths of the free market and the myth of the invisible hand.  The capitalist myth aptly called “monotheism of the market” by the French philosopher Roger Garaudy, suggests the belief in permanent economic growth as the only salutary objective of human existence.[vi]

But one must be careful when reading Garaudy’s texts, as well as those of hundreds of other popular academics and authors preaching formulas of religious or political salvation. Garaudy was a reputable World War II antifascist resistant fighter, later a high-ranking French communist party member and a renowned intellectual—before he turned into a devout Muslim toward the end of his life. For his revisionist and anti-Israeli writings, he was also charged and convicted by the French courts with anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, claiming it to be a “Jewish myth.”[vii] Regardless of what one may think of Garaudy’s  many astute observations about Israel, Jews, and American decadence, recanting his once upon-a-time mythical persona and accepting the other mythical opposite is not a sign of integrity of character.

Many revisionist scholars critical of Jews and their social status depict the Jewish World War II victimhood as a new secular religion containing its own legions of saints, sacraments, salvagers and survivors. What strikes one is the following: while one may openly downplay, deride and minimize the number of victims of communist killing fields during the Ukrainian Holodomor, the Croat Bleiburg, the Gulag sewage system in the ex-Soviet Union, or the millions of killed German civilians, during and after World War II without facing legal troubles, critical debates on the Jewish Holocaust story must stay off limits—an excellent marker of the power of the Jewish community.

But even authors complaining about legal duplicity regarding the narrative of Jewish victimhood are seldom consistent. Many of them believe in good faith in the immaculate conception of Virgin Mary and various surreal miracles performed by Jesus and his early Jewish disciples. They would never consider their faith in Jesus a myth, let alone, a hoax, a fraud, or a conspiracy theory.  They reject the claims by anti-Christian authors “that Jesus was a deliberately constructed myth, by a specific group of people with a specific end in mind,”[viii] as David Skrbina wrote recently.

Neither do the faithful ones who believe in the Jesus story want to hear the arguments purporting that the history of Christianity is replete with serial killings of infidels as well as lengthy inter-Christian religious wars. It remains difficult for them to admit that Christianity emerged in Judaism and that until the end of the Second Temple and the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, all the way till the end of the second century, Christianity was just one of the several infighting Jewish sects in the Roman empire.

Christianity remained Jewish Christianity. As we move into the second century not only certain Christian sects can be described as ‘Jewish-Christian’, but Christianity as a whole can still properly be described as ‘Jewish Christianity’ in a justifiable sense.[ix]

The prominent Christian theologian Adolf Harnack also traces the roots of Christianity to Judaism, claiming that “it was the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple which seems to have provoked the final crisis, and led to complete breach between the two parties.”[x]

The debate on mythical Jewish-inspired origins of Christianity is largely avoided by modern White Christian conservatives and White Christian nationalists. It must be noted though that the most critical analyses of Christianity over the last century and half have not come from the Left, but primarily from conservative and nationalist authors, especially in Germany and France. Particularly in Germany during the National-Socialist regime, from 1933 to 1945, there was a flurry of well-researched books and scholarly pieces by hundreds of academics dealing with the interrelationship between race and religion. Most of those authors contend that there is a causal link between Judaism-Christianity and their modern secular offshoots in the modern myth of Communism and Liberalism

We cannot expect that Christian religion, which originated from Jewish racial heritage, and which today still feels constrained by a baptism commandment issued 2000 years ago in the Jewish land, will atone for the guilt of the German soul.[xi]

It is a great setback that the works by German religious scholars, regardless of the demonic, or rather demonized nature of the National-Socialist epoch when their works were published, have not yet received a proper scholarly evaluation. Nor are the books on the racial makeup of a man, tribe or a people and how it affects the choice of his religion easily accessible. This raises the question of genetic and racial proclivity of any racial ingroup toward accepting or rejecting a foreign religious or political myth. Wilhelm Hauer a prominent religious scholar in National-Socialist Germany, noted:

For one thing, there is no longer any doubt today that race means not only body forms, but also forms of the soul and the spirit. And secondly, religion is not just a matter of the absolute truth, but also of various forms of truth by the bearers of religion.[xii]

Each racial group has its own vision of afterlife including its own notion of truth, or for that matter its acceptance of the big lie. Accordingly, to a large extent it is racial heritage of each man that shapes his world view. Between the German notion of “reality (Wirklichkeit) and “truth” (Wahrheit) there is a sharp distinction that needs to be made.

In addition, it is with great modesty of which Indo-European man is aware: we possess reality while being also possessed by it, but we are eternally on the way to truth, if by this we mean the knowledge of finitude. The absolute truth in the sense of final possession of the deepest mysteries is nonexistent. Such possession would mean the death of the living spirit. [xiii]

Why did early Europeans in the ancient Roman Empire out of hundreds of different cults and sects, each with its own myth, metaphor or allegory, embrace a small Middle Eastern Judaic cult will remain a riddle. Starting with the second century, many Oriental cults had already spread like wildfire in the Roman Empire, cults such as the Persian Mithra cult among Roman soldiers and the Egyptian Isis and Serapis cult, very popular in the high echelons of the Roman imperial court.[xiv] But they did not last long.

Wilhelm Nestle, a German philologist and expert on the mindset of early Greeks and Romans, writes in one of his essays published in the quarterly Archiv für Religionswissenschaft that late Greco-Roman pagan thinkers were “hostile to the idea of the messiah insofar as they recognized in messianic prophesies a presumptuous claim by the Jews to future world domination.”[xv]

Nestle, along with many other German scholars in the first half of the twentieth century  voices amazement at how prominent and large European tribes and peoples had fallen prey to a strange Oriental cult preached by a small and insignificant tribe in Judea.

It seems incomprehensible that God did not send the messenger of his revelation to a large and famous people, but to the Jews in a small corner of the Earth, and that despite being omniscient he left his “son” to be shamefully punished by bad people. [xvi]

It does not make much sense to criticize inordinate Jewish political, social, and intellectual influence and popularity, which among other things can still be observed in the writings of a Jewish-born Karl Marx and his modern followers, or modern Jewish neocons dominating the U.S. foreign policy establishment, while at the same time accepting Christian scripts and screeds  which were originally written by Jewish prophets. This is a clearcut case of spiritual and political neurosis that the entire West has been victim of over the last 2000 years.

Seen from the secular perspective, the strong an unwavering support of Israel today by the United States is part of the predictable political theology based on the myth of self-chosenness borrowed from the Jewish Old Testament.[xvii]  It has served over the last one hundred years as a legal justification for its messianic do-good diplomatic efforts, but also its military engagements all over the world. The mythical “city on the hill,” the “manifest destiny” and the recent launching of “diversity” programs are essentially mythical derivatives from the Bible cloaked in modern languages.

It would be false to ascribe the mythical mindset or the religious mindset to one race or to one group of people only.  The myths of the nation and nationalism have  plunged European peoples into incessant and bloody civil wars, from Troy to the Thirty Years War, from the American Civil War to World War II and likely to the upcoming Third World War.

Myth, be it bad or good, is not a privilege of any people or race. Some of the sharpest Western minds who detected best the myth of the communist and liberal   myths were devout Catholics. We owe much to the early Catholic author Joseph de Maistre who criticized the French Revolution of 1789 and who was among the first to debunk the abstract globalist myth of “human rights.” Also, there are legions of Catholic writers who are critical of liberal modernity, such as J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, Thomas Molnar and many, many others.

One must also mention a Catholic conservative expert in the international law and a noted political scientist Carl Schmitt, who was very popular in Weimar Germany, National-Socialist Germany and post-World War Germany, and who is now a household name of the New Right and the Alt-Right both in the U.S. and E.U. To him we owe the statement that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”[xviii]

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NOTES:

[i] Alain de Benoist, „Mythe“, Krisis, (Paris, numéro 6, Octobre, 1990), p.8.

[ii] Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space; Metaphor as Myth and as Religion (Novato: New World Library), p.27.

[iii]  „ After Death the Writer is accused of Anti-Semitism “, The New York Times (Nov 6, 1989).

[iv] Alain de Benoist, „Psychologie du Conspirationnisme“, in Critiques-Théoriques (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme), p. 96.

[v] Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd; A Study of the Popular Mind (London: T. Fisher Unwin,1920), p.76.

[vi] Roger Garaudy, Avons-nous besoin de Dieu ? (Paris: Ed. Desclée de Brouwer 1993), p. 205.

[vii] Roger Garaudy, Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israélienne  (Paris: Samizdat, 1996).

[viii] David Skrbina, The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul’s Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years (Detroit: Creative Free Press, 2019), p. 23.

[ix] James D. G. Dunn, The Partings of the Ways (London: SCM Press, 2006), p. 307.

[x] Adolf Harnack, The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, Vol. I (NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908), p. 63.

[xi] Robert Luft, Die Verchristung der Deutschen (1937 Archiv-Edition, Verlag  Dietrich Bohlinger 1992), p. 74.

[xii] Wilhelm Hauer, Religion und Rasse (Tübingen:  JCB Mohr (Paul Siebeck, 1941), p. 6.

[xiii] Ibid., Hauer, p.48.

[xiv] Franz Cumont, Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism (1909 Eugene, OR:Wipfs and Stock Publishers, 2003).

[xv] Wilhelm Nestle, „Die Haupteinwände des antiken Denkens gegen das Christentum“, in Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, Vol. XXXVII, Book 1 (Leipzig: BG Teubner, 1941), p.61

[xvi] Ibid., p.87.

[xvii] T Sunic, Homo americanus; Child of the Postmodern Age, with preface by K. MacDonald and postface by A. de Benoist  (Arktos, 2017).

[xviii] Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (1934 Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press 1985), p.3