#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Castalia Cathedra #1: THE EVERLASTING MAN by G.K. Chesterton (Jan-Jul)
Castalia History #8: COMMENTARII DE BELLO GALLICO by G. Julius Caesar (Jan-Mar)
Castalia Library #32: THE OLD NORSE EDDA by Tamburn Bindery (Jan-Feb)
For more information about the newly announced Castalia Library and Castalia History books, please visit the Castalia Library substack. This is a very good time to start a subscription, as no catchup payments are necessary.
Forget Western civilization. When did the Jews ever have anything to do with any civilization? They’re still a literally nomadic tribe! Did they invent civilization when they were enslaved for four centuries in Egypt? When ten of the 12 tribes were carried off by the Assyrians? Or perhaps they invented Western civilization in Babylon while they were enslaved there? I don’t suppose they could have invented civilization when they were being ruled by the Medo-Persians or by Rome.
If we are to take their historic claims to the land of Israel by right of conquering the Canaanites seriously, then they’ve never been part of Western civilization at all, let alone responsible for any part of its invention. The fact that this historic land is in the Middle EAST would be the first clue there.
But Joel Berry does provide us with the useful service of conclusively disproving the ludicrous 115 average IQ fiction. The amusing thing is that these historical illiterates who take the Straussian Athens + Jerusalem metaphor literally don’t realize that it’s simply a metaphor that refers to Western philosophy and religion, not the actual cities or their historic residents.
Contemplations on the Tree of Woe contemplates the possibility that JRR Tolkien is the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe of our Aenean Age.
The defining conflict of Elendil’s era, the Second Age of Middle Earth, is fought by the Last Alliance of Elves and Men. The Last Alliance is a coalition of the remnants of great powers, united in the aftermath of Númenor’s fall to resist the rising darkness of Sauron. After decades of brutal struggle, The Last Alliance of Elves and Men achieves its purpose: Sauron is defeated and the One Ring is taken from him. Yet the victory is bittersweet. Elendil falls in battle and his sword Narsil shattered. His son Isildur chooses to keep rather destroy the One Ring, ensuring that the seeds of future conflict are sown. The Elves, diminished by their sacrifice, begin their long retreat into the West, and the kingdoms of Men, though triumphant, are fractured and weakened. Thus begins the Third Age.
Tolkien’s Third Age is marked by many moments of heroism and beauty, but even at its height it is a shadow of the glorious Second Age. By the time of The Lord of the Rings, the Elves have faded, Númenor has become a memory, Arnor has been conquered, and Gondor has been reduced to a pale reflection of its former strength.
If what was true of Middle-Earth is true of our own era, then what lies ahead is neither the dawn of a golden age or the night of a dark age, but rather a long twilight—an era where the remnants of greatness, having averted or avoided total annihilation, nevertheless must struggle to resist an ever-encroaching darkness at great cost. The civilization, while noble, will bear terrible scars from this struggle. Its grandeur will be tempered by humility and its ambitions will be limited by necessity.
I thus finish this essay with an unsettled heart. Tolkien, I am convinced, is truly a cultural mythmaker as influential as Goethe; and Elendil, I am certain, is a hero cut from the same cloth as Aeneas.
But Aeneas’s cloth is the purple cloak worn to an emperor’s coronation; and Elendil’s cloth is the shroud worn to a king’s funeral. Rome was greater than Troy, but neither Arnor nor Gondor was as great as Númenor. Thus an Elendilian Age would not be as bright as an Aenean Age. Its destiny would be somewhere between the inspiring future of my original essay and the hellish future anticipated by my essay’s critics.
Yet this ought be no cause for despair. If the Aenean spirit or Tolkien’s northern courage means anything, it means that the fight must be fought regardless of the likelihood of success. And Tolkien’s myths remind us that even in decline, there is beauty, heroism, and meaning. The Elendilian Age, if it were to come, might not shine as brightly as the Faustian, or even the Aenean; but it would still carry forward the light of what came before. And in the end, that light—however faint—will be enough to illuminate the path for those who follow.
When one reads a book like Brideshead Revisited, one can’t help but be struck by the way its elegaic melancholy almost perfectly expresses the mood of the end of the American empire. Evelyn Waugh was writing at, and about, the end of the British Empire, which is why the emotional tone of his literary work is so familiar to the modern American reader. The Tree of Woe is, in my opinion, to observe that we are at the end of one age and entering into a new one; whether it is as dark and challenging as he anticipates is yet to be determined, but on the basis of the panopoly of known facts, certainly appears to be correct.
Read the whole thing there. It’s well worth it. And remember that the light of Christian civilization will survive so long as at least one of us possesses the courage to stand against the rising Dark.
An X-commenter proves the case for untrammeled immigration presented by Elon Musk, Ramaswampy, and Fake Short Trump:
All the vile, racist drivel on this hell site can be disproved so easily with one real life example. Look at man in his most debased and primal state, man in prison, where his survival instincts emerge. Notice how prison gangs do not segregate on racial lines, but instead, scout the top talent from the prison system, as the Black Disciples and Aryan Brotherhood furiously compete for the Indian inmates and other elite human capital.
In actuality, history underlines, illustrates, and proves the truth of Andrew Torba’s recent statement: Be racist or be replaced. Consider the selection from today’s eerily timely serialization of The Cambridge Medieval History, published in 1911:
This is the role of nomadism in the history of the world: countries too distant from its basis it could only ravage transitorily, with robbery, murder, fire, and slavery, but the stamp which it left upon the peoples which it directly dominated or adjoined remains uneffaceable. The Orient, the cradle and chief nursery of civilisation, it delivered over to barbarism; it completely paralysed the greater part of Europe, and it transformed and radically corrupted the race, spirit, and character of countless millions for incalculable ages to come. That which is called the inferiority of the East European is its work, and had Germany or France possessed steppes like Hungary, where the nomads could also have maintained themselves and thence completed their work of destruction, in all probability the light of West European civilisation would long ago have been extinguished, the entire Old World would have been barbarised, and at the head of civilisation today would be stagnant China.
In light of these historical observations, isn’t it intriguing to observe that the economic nomadism encouraged by the Enlightenment-era elite for the last 200 years appears to be in the process of extinguishing West European civilization, barbarising the New World and the Old World alike, and thereby leaving staunchly racist China at the head of global civilization today?
Perhaps greater intellectual courage, which is to say greater knowledge and acceptance of the fact that racism is neither a sin nor an evil, but a civilizational prerequisite, could have averted what is shaping up to be a global cataclysm surpassed only by Noah’s flood.
In today’s post on Castalia Library, a selection from The Cambridge Medieval History, published in 1911, explains the inevitable social degeneracy that results from mass migration. Note that the same principle holds, whether the migration is sparked by economics or war, and whether the imperial superstate is erected by conquest or by elite corruption.
During the winter the wives and daughters of the enslaved became a prey to the lusts of the yellow-skins, by whom they were incessantly violated, and thus every conjugal and family tie and as a further consequence the entire social organisation was seriously loosened. The ancient Indo-European patriarchal principle, which has exclusively prevailed among the Altaians also from the earliest times, languished among the enslaved just because of the violation and loosening of the conjugal bond, which often continued for hundreds of years. The matriarchal principle came into prominence, for the Altaian adulterer repudiated bastards, and still more did the husband where there was one, so the children followed the mother. Where therefore matriarchal phenomena occur among Indo-Europeans, usually among the lower strata of population, they are not survivals of pre-patriarchal times, but probably arose later from the corruption of married life by systematic adultery. Thus the subjugated Indo-Europeans became — here more, there less — mongolised by the mixture of races, and in places the two superimposed races became fused into a uniform mixed people.
Indo-European usage and law died out, and the savage wilfulness of the Altaians had exclusive sway. Revolutions among the people driven to despair followed, but they were quelled in blood, and the oppression exercised still more heavily. Even if here and there the yoke was successfully shaken off, the emancipated, long paralysed and robbed of all capability of self-organisation, were unable to remain independent. Commonly they fell into anarchy and then voluntarily gave themselves up to another milder-seeming servitude, or became once more the prey of an if possible rougher conqueror.
There is a direct connection between the stupid Emma Lazarus poem, the 1965 Immigration Act, and the widespread corruption and degeneracy that plagues the USA and the rest of the West today. While we can hope that the Fake Biden Administration marks the nadir of the descent into degeneracy, we cannot be certain of that until the remigration has begun in earnest.
It’s one thing to change a team’s name and logo. It’s another to pretend it never existed.
NFL fans were buzzing when they noticed something important missing from a graphic used on Sunday Night Football.
Washington Commanders quarterback Jayden Daniels broke the record for most rushing yards by a rookie QB while facing off against the Atlanta Falcons on Sunday.
The NBC broadcast highlighted Daniels’ record-breaking night by comparing Jayden to Robert Griffin III, the former record holder.
Daniels’ 820 rushing yards this year surpassed RGIII’s 815 from his rookie campaign.
But something appeared off in the picture …
The broadcast deliberately omitted the logo of the Washington Redskins, the team rookie RGIII played for in 2012.
Look, we all know they’re going to bring back the Redskins name sooner or later. Even a significant majority of American Indians – including me – support this. It is not better to erase a popular reference to the American Indian, even if some find it offensive, than keep it. Do what Florida State does and donate a percentage of the merchandise revenues to the local tribes in the area if there is any need to assuage one’s conscience over the supposedly negative aspects of the term.
And there is no excuse for erasing history. That way much wickedness lies.
Archeologists and historians have determined that the so-called “wailing wall” that we’ve been told was part of the Jewish temple destroyed in 70 AD actually belongs to a Roman castra built for the Roman garrison of Jerusalem.
We have two major problems here. First, Roman and Christian literary sources agree with Jesus that not one stone of the Temple was standing on another. How can we reconcile this with the fact that the walls of the alleged Temple Mount still have more than 10,000 stones standing upon another? Secondly, Josephus, an eyewitness, says that that the only major building that the Romans spared in 66-70 was their own imperial headquarter, the Roman fort called Fort Antonia, built by Herod the Great and named after his patron Mark Anthony. Where is this fort? Archaeologists have been digging for it in vain, and can’t even agree where it was located. Here is what Israeli archaeologist Shlomit Weksler-Bdolah has to say:
Surprisingly, despite the long duration of military presence in Jerusalem, … no archaeological remains have been attributed with certainty to the military camp and its site has not yet been identified. … One cannot underestimate the difficulty caused by the absence of irrefutable evidence of the Roman army camp in Jerusalem. … At this stage, there is no acceptable solution to the problem of the “lack of remains”.
Fort Antonia housed a legion, that would number at least 5000 men and about 5000 support personnel. Josephus tells us it was like a city in size, dominating the Jewish city. It was so large that troops could perform military maneuvers within the enclosure, in mock war training exercises. We know that Fort Antonia was not destroyed in 70 because it continued to house the Roman Legion X Fretensis until 289 AD, when the Legion was transferred to Ailat on the Red Sea.
So while the sources tell us that the Temple was demolished down to the bedrock and the Roman fort remained in use for 200 years, we are nevertheless asked to believe that the opposite happened: the huge fortified Roman fort disappeared entirely, while the Temple compound is still perfectly recognizable, with its four walls almost intact.
By some additional miracle, that alleged Temple compound, the Haram esh-Sharif on which now stands the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, fits the standard design and size of the Roman forts scattered throughout the empire, and built after the pattern of the Praetorian Camp in the northeastern part of Rome.
There is only one way to make sense of this absurd situation: the Roman fort has been mistaken for the Temple Mount. As Professor George W. Buchanan put it in a 2011 article for the Washington Report for Middle East Affairs: “While it has not been widely published, it assuredly has been known for more than 40 years that the 45-acre, well-fortified place that has been mistakenly called the ‘Temple Mount’ was really the Roman fortress — the Antonia — that Herod built.”
The more we learn, the more we learn that the mainstream version of history is fiction when it isn’t an outright fairy tale.
A lot of important lessons are being learned, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say “relearned” from the current war in Ukraine. But, as Anarchonomicon observes, a number of the various elements of this war are unique and unlikely to be repeated:
You have the resources of dozens of nations representing over half the world’s economy being poured into a country that can neither win nor negotiate, to fight its similar neighbor that also has to fight it out despite the cost due to the international strategic implications, both of whom are Slavic-white countries who both had strong reserves of nationalism and patriotism and avoided the kind of multi-culti mass-immigration that has zapped the willingness to fight for their country right out of every white man in the west, and because of a series of geostrategic accidents they spontaneously agreed to limit the fighting to stretch of land as narrow as that between the Swiss Border and the English Channel.
That’s a whole lot of conditions that will probably never hold again. Or at least certainly not for the next hundred years given the demographic crises everywhere and the pending death of the nation state.
- If the smaller state doesn’t have allies who can fund it to the tune 50+% its annual GDP it can’t happen.
- If either country has endured mass immigration/multiculturalism and doesn’t have an eastern european level paradoxical ultra-nationalism for their decaying shithole country…it can’t happen.
- If either country isn’t being bribed/backed into a corner to refuse all negotiation, it can’t happen.
- And if either country would rather just expand the war geographically and not fight an attritional trench war, it can’t happen.
The most important thing to note is that Ukraine is Clown World’s proxy. The entire Empire That Never Ended is fighting Russia, and is in the process of losing the war militarily, economically, and diplomatically. And once Clown World either contracts or collapses entirely, there isn’t a similar force on Earth capable of recreating it.
Which means any lessons about late-stage imperial proxy wars will probably not be relevant for another 200 years.
Indeed. What are the odds? And looking at them, what are the chances that they aren’t related in some way? Once you grasp the basic concept of its reality, the outlines of Clown World become clearer and clearer over time. It’s a club, you’re not in it, and more importantly, if you value your immortal soul, you do not want to be in it or even have anything to do with it.
Dominic Cummings takes a page from Peter Turchin and observes that the West is entering the next phase in what has been observed to be a regime change cycle averaging about 50 years.
If you look back at European history since the French Revolution, there is a cycle of slow rot, elite blindness, sudden crisis, fast collapse, regime change that flares up roughly every 50 years… The vast majority of Insiders cannot see this process while they are playing their part in it and even those who see some only ever see a little. The process only acquires any coherence in retrospect when it becomes history, people define a period including the run-up then the crisis and the regime change and try to abstract critical features of it and argue for centuries about the ‘causes’. Though even after it becomes ‘history’ it remains unsolved: we still can’t describe a good model for the cause of war in summer 1914, we still argue about whether the French Revolution was net good/bad, most find it impossible to learn much from the Cuban crisis even though we can listen to secret recordings of key meetings.
Looking back since the French Revolution and end of the Holy Roman Empire we see this cycle repeat.
- A cycle of major war and revolution ended in 1815 with the Peace of Vienna.
- In Germany the 1815 settlement nearly crumbled 1848-50, barely held, then was transformed in 1866-71 (~50 years) then again, after another ~50 years, in 1918 (Weimar), again in 1933 (Nazis) and 1945 (West/East Germany), then ~50 years of relative stability then again in 1989/91 (a re-united Germany).
- France has had more regime changes depending how exactly you count them.
- Russia had four: the Tsars, Communists, Yeltsin, now Putin (although nominally the Yeltsin constitution largely remains I think it’s more accurate to see the current regime as fundamentally different in a similar way as Prussia/Germany was fundamentally different after 1866-67 even though the old Prussian constitution remained).
- The Habsburgs were chased out of Vienna in 1848 and had to fight their way back in, had to rejig the Empire after Italian and German unification, collapsed in 1918, that regime was replaced by the Nazis then replaced again in 1945.
- And so on…
Sometimes regime change goes faster and wider as crises multiply (e.g 1848-71, 1917-19), sometimes it is more stable (e.g 1815-48, 1871-1914, 1945-89). But 50 years seems to be about the maximum then at least a few big regimes change. And even Britain and America, avoiding revolution and defeat, have seen a similar process of the regime being reinvented every 50 years or so (Washington/Hamilton, Lincoln, FDR, ??).
I think what’s happening now across the western world rhymes with this cycle.
There are certainly a number of disaffected elites, which Turchin believes to be a necessary requirement of successful change. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are just two examples of elite figures who have been rejected by the system and thereby been inspired to transform it more to their liking. This does not, to be sure, make them “the good guys”; they are still elites, and, being products of the system, are naturally inclined to try to preserve and transform it rather than burn it down entirely and build anew.
However, it is encouraging that history is clearly not on the side of some of its most wicked players. The global imperialists are failing, as we know they inevitably will, because both God and human nature are against them.