The Aryan Christian religion and politics of Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner (1813-1883) is today universally celebrated as
the consummate exponent of nineteenth century German opera, whose
developed Romantic idiom helped to usher in the musical innovations
of Modernism in the early twentieth century.
Richard Wagner
Most people, besides, have a general notion that he was a
controversial figure on account of his pronounced anti-Semitic
views. Few, however, take care to peruse his several prose works to
understand the consistent ethical system, based on Schopenhauer and
Proudhon, which accompanied the great musical dramas of Wagner.
Since it is impossible to divorce the musician's mind from his
music, especially when it is the exceptionally developed one of a
genius such as Wagner, it would benefit us to have a clear idea of
Wagner's racial-Christian doctrines of social and political
regeneration alongside our easier appreciation of his
overwhelmingly powerful music. Although there have been a few
serious studies of Wagner's political thought in recent years,
these are, understandably, of varying quality (1). It would, in
general, be advisable to avoid classifying Wagner - as well as the
more rhapsodic and unsystematic Nietzsche - under any of the modern
"isms", and so I shall endeavour here to elucidate Wagner's
philosophy by merely pointing to pivotal passages in his major
prose works that illuminate the religious and political dimensions
of his thought.
It may at the outset be stated that Wagner considers in his work
only the history and culture of the Indo-European race since he
considers it to be the most highly developed spiritually. Wagner
tends to relate the strength of this spiritual faculty to the
dietary habits of the original stock, that is, to what he believed
to have been its original vegetarianism. In his late essay,
"Religion and Art", written in 1880 under the influence of his
reading of Arthur,
Comte de Gobineau's Essai sur l'inégalité des races
humaines (1853), Wagner traces the history of the Aryans from
what he considers to have been their original home in India and
posits a gradual migration westwards through Iran, Greece and Rome.
In the course of these migrations, Wagner observes that the race
has undergone a weakening of its spiritual force through a gradual
conversion from vegetarianism to meat-eating, which latter custom
has made the western peoples increasingly more violent in their
social and historical conduct. Christianity is considered by Wagner
to be a reversal of this trend in that Christ enjoined the peaceful
cohabitation of peoples devoted to the cultivation of inner
spirituality. Unfortunately, its intimate connection to Judaism has
transformed original Christianity into a creed of belligerent
rapacity and conquest which does not reflect the teachings of
Christ so much as the exhortations of the old Israeli prophets to
annihilate the enemies of Jehova.
Wagner's account of the progress of the Aryans is perhaps not
entirely accurate since there is no certainty that the Aryans were
first settled in India rather than in the Near East (most probably
in the regions around Armenia), along with the other branches of
the Indo-Europeans (2). Also, he tends to interpret the
peculiarities of Zoroastrian religion and Greek as being due to the
sociological conditions in which the Iranians and Greeks found
themselves in antiquity. For example, he explains the dualism of
the Zoroastrian religion as being due to the fact that the Aryans
who had moved into Iran as conquerors after having become
meat-eaters on the way from the gentler climate of India, "could
still express their consternation at the depths to which they had
sunk" and thus developed a religion based on a vivid conscience of
"sin", which forced an opposition between "Good and Evil, Light and
Darkness, Ormuzd and Ahriman" (3). This is of course false, since
all the ancient religions, including Zoroastrianism, were based on
cosmological insight and were not developed to explain the
historical conditions of any particular nation. Only Judaism may be
explained in such sociological terms since it represents a revolt
of one particular ancient Near Eastern ethnic group - the Arameans
and Hebrews - against the cosmological religion of their neighbours
in Mesopotamia. This is indeed made clear in the passages in
Josephus' Jewish Antiquities I,157 and Philo the Jew's
De mutatione nominum, 72-6, which expose the mundane
materialistic and nationalistic ambitions of the Hebrew, Abraham,
who instituted the tribal cult of Jehova.
According to Wagner, the first manifestation of a recognition of
the deterioration of racial strength among the western
Indo-Europeans was among the Pythagoreans who founded "silent
fellowships ... remote from the turmoil of the world ... as a
sanctification from sin and misery". The fullest exemplification of
the need for world-renunciation, however, was that offered by
Christ, who gave his own flesh and blood "as last and highest
expiation for all the sin of outpoured blood and slaughtered
flesh". Again, Wagner seems unaware of the fact that the Christian
story itself borrows heavily from Babylonian and Dionysiac
prototypes (Marduk, Dionysus) whose death and resurrection were
mere mythological representations of the primal drama of the cosmic
solar force that was forced into the underworld before it could be
revived in our universe as the sun (4).
Wagner understands the Christian story literally and maintains
that the problems of Christianity stem from the appropriation of
the administration of the rites of Communion by the priests, so
that the people in general failed to understand the injunction to
abstinence from all flesh contained in Christ's offering of his own
flesh and blood to his disciples. Besides, the Church as an
institution could maintain itself and propagate itself politically
only by supporting the violence and rapine of the emperors which
contributed to the eventual ruin of the race's inner strength. In
these international adventures the Church was gradually forced to
revert to its Judaic roots since
wherever
Christian hosts fared forth to robbery and bloodshed, even beneath
the banner of the Cross, it was not the All-Sufferer whose name was
invoked, but Moses, Joshua, Gideon, and all the other captains of
Jehova who fought for the people of Israel, were the names in
request to fire the heart of slaughter; whereof the history of
England at the time of the Puritan wars supplies a plain example,
throwing a light on the Old Testament evolution of the Church.
With the adoption of this quasi-Judaic
aggression, the Christian Church began to act as the herald of
Judaism itself, which, though characterised by a fanatic desire to
rule the world, had hitherto been forced to live an oppressed life
among the other nations in which it found itself during the
Diaspora:
Despised and
hated equally by every race ... without inherent productivity and
only battening on the general downfall, in course of violent
revolutions this folk would very probably have been extinguished as
completely as the greatest and noblest stems before them;
Islam in particular seemed called to carry out the act of
extirpation, for it took to itself the Jewish god, as creator of
heaven and earth, to raise him by fire and sword as one and only
god of all that breathes. But the Jews, so it seems, could fling
away all share in this world-rulership of their Jehova, for they
had won a share in a development of the Christian religion well
fitted to deliver it itself into their hands in time, with all its
increments of culture, sovereignty and civilisation.
In Europe, the Jews as money-lenders
viewed all European civilisation as a mere instrument of their own
gradual rise to power: "To the Jew who works the sum out, the
outcome of this culture is simply the necessity of waging wars,
together with greater one - of having money for them" ("Know
Thyself", supplement to Religion and Art). The undue
power that the Jews have achieved as a result of this clever
procedure, as well as due to their emancipation in the middle of
the nineteenth century, is thus based on what Wagner considers the
basis of all wars, namely 'property'. Internationally, the
protection of property entails the maintenance of "the weaponed
host" and "the astounding success of our resident Jews in the
gaining and amassing of huge store of money has always filled our
Military State authorities with nothing but respect and joyful
admiration".
The socialist and democratic
revolutions mounted in Germany were also inadequate solutions of
the problems resulting from property since they were totally
un-German imitations of Franco-Judaic upheavals. Indeed,
"democracy" itself is in Germany "purely a translated thing" which
exists merely in "the press" ("What is German?", 1865). Party
politics is altogether a vicious circle that obscures the real
conflict between Germans and Jews under a confusion of names that
are themselves wholly un-German, such as "Liberal", "Conservative",
"Social Democrat" and "Liberal Conservative". Only when the "fiend
who keeps those ravers in the mania of their party-strife no more
can find a where or when to lurk among us, will there also be no
longer - any Jews".
What is worse is that the Jewish
agitators used German nationalist catch-words such as "Deutschtum"
and "German freedom" to deceive the German folk and lull it into a
false sense of superiority:
Whilst Goethe
and Schiller had shed the German spirit on the world without so
much as talking of the 'German' spirit, these democratic
speculators fill every book- and print-shop, every so-called
joint-stock theatre, with vulgar, utterly vapid dummies, forever
plastered with the puff of 'deutsch' and 'deutsch' again, to decoy
the easygoing crowd.
In developing the German spirit
therefore one should take care to avoid the temptation of
self-complacency, of believing that every German is "quite of
oneself ... something great and needs to take no sort of pains to
first become it". Indeed the fact that
Goethe and
Schiller. Mozart and Beethoven have issued from the German people's
womb far too easily tempts the bulk of middling talents to consider
the great minds their own by right of birth, to persuade the mass
with demagogic flatulence that they themselves are Goethes and
Schillers.
Wagner's remedy to the problem of
international conflicts based on Jewish finance, or rather credit -
which has indeed replaced religion as "a spiritual, nay, a moral
power" ("Know thyself") - is the reawakening of the genuinely
German character. The proof of the racial strength of the Germans
is the "pride of race" which, in the Middle Ages, supplied princes,
kings and emperors throughout Europe and which can still be
encountered in the old nobility of Germanic origin. One obvious
sign of the truly German is the language itself (5):
Do we feel our
breath fast quitting us beneath the pressure of an alien
civilisation; do we fall into uncertainty about ourselves: we have
only to dig to the roots in the true father-soil of our language to
reap at once a reassuring answer on ourselves, nay on the truly
human. And this possibility of always drawing from the pristine
fount of our own nature that makes us feel ourselves no more a
race, no mere variety of man, but one of manhood's primal branches
- tis this that ever has bestowed on us great men and spiritual
heroes.
Wagner's
Parsifal
This strength of character is indeed
the only defence that the Germans have against the wiles of the
Jewish race, which manages to preserve its own racial character
easily on account of the unique nature of its "religion", which is
indeed not a religion at all but "merely the belief in certain
promises of (the Jewish god) which in nowise extend beyond this
temporal life ..., as in every true religion, but simply to this
present life on earth, whereon (the Jewish) race is certainly
ensured dominion over all that lives and lives not". This inhuman
ambition of the Jew is embodied in Wagner's Parsifal by
the character of Klingsor, who cuts himself off from all human love
by castrating himself in order to acquire power over others. As
Wagner put it, trapped in "an instinct shut against all ideality",
the Jew remains always "the plastic demon of man's downfall".
The liberation from the constrictions
of Judaism can begin only with an effort to understand the nature
of the instinctive repugnance that one feels towards the Jew's
"prime essence" in spite of his emancipation ("
Jewry in Music", 1850): "with all our speaking and writing in
favour of the Jews' emancipation, we always felt instinctively
repelled by any, actual operative conduct with them". Unlike the
true poet, who gains his inspiration "from nothing but a faithful,
loving contemplation of instinctive life, of that life which greets
his sight amid the Folk", the educated Jew stands "alien and
apathetic ... in the midst of a society he does not understand,
with whose tastes and aspirations he does not sympathise, whose
history and evolution have always been indifferent to him". The Jew
"stands in correlation with none but those who need his money: and
never yet has money thriven to the point of knitting a goodly bond
'twixt man and man". Thus the Jew only considers art-works as so
many objects to be bought and sold: "What the heroes of the arts,
with untold strain consuming lief and life, have wrested from the
art-fiend of two millennia of misery, today the Jew converts into
an art-bazaar". The tolerance of Jews in German society would thus
mean the substitution of genuine German culture with a simulacrum.
In the "'Appendix' to 'Jewry in Music'" published in 1869, Wagner
adds "Whether the downfall of our culture can be arrested by a
violent ejection of the destructive foreign element, I am unable to
decide, since that would require forces with whose existence I am
unacquainted". And all attempts to assimilate the Jews into German
society should take care to fully appreciate the real difficulties
of such an assimilation before any measures are passed that
recommend it.
To those who may think that Wagner is
just a Hitler in sheep's clothing, it may indeed be surprising that
he was in fact a deeply philosophical Christian, whose Christianity
was infused with the spirit of Schopenhauer's philosophy, which he
first read in 1852 (6). The first requisite for a true Christian,
according to Wagner, is to divorce his conception of Christ from
the Jehova of the Jews. Indeed, if Jesus is proclaimed the son of
Jehova, "then every Jewish rabbi can triumphantly confute all
Christian theology, as has happened indeed in every age" ("Public
and Popularity", 1878). Thus it is not surprising that most of the
population have become atheistic:
That the God of
our Saviour should have been identified with the tribal god of
Israel is one of the most terrible confusions in all world-history
... We have seen the Christian God condemned to empty churches
while ever more imposing temples are reared among us to Jehova.
The reason the Jews remain Jewish, the
people of Jehova, in spite of every change, is that, as we have
noted above, Judaism is not a religion but a financial political
ambition.
Wagner's Schopenhauerian Christianity,
on the other hand, demands the recognition of the "moral meaning of
the world", the recognition of the root of all human suffering,
namely the will and its concomitant passions. "Only the love that
springs from pity, and carries its compassion to the utmost
breaking of the self-will, is the redeeming Christian Love, in
which Faith and Hope are both included of themselves" ("What boots
this Knowledge?", supplement to Religion and Art, 1880).
Here again Wagner harks back to the natural constitution of the
Indo-Europeans, who alone possess "the faculty of conscious
suffering" in a highly developed form. In another supplement to
Religion and Art, 'Hero-dom and Christendom' (1881),
Wagner maintained that the superiority of the white race is proven
by the very fact while "the yellow races have viewed themselves as
sprung from monkeys, the white traced back their origin to gods,
and deemed themselves marked out for rulership". Although Wagner
believed that the substitution of animal food for vegetable was one
of the prime causes of man's degeneration ("a change in the
fundamental substance of our body"), his reading of Gobineau's
Essai led him to consider racial mixture, especially with
Jews, as another cause of the corruption of the blood:
It certainly may
be right to charge this purblind dullness of our public spirit to a
vitiation of our blood - not only by departure from the natural
food of man, but above all by the tainting of the hero-blood of
noblest races with that of former cannibals now trained to be the
business-agents of society.
Although the highly developed psychic
constitution of the Indo-Europeans is their distinguishing feature,
the excellence of Christ as an individual is due to the fact that
he alone represents "the quintessence of free-willed suffering
itself, that godlike Pity which streams through all the human
species, its font and origin". Wagner even pauses to consider
whether Christ could have been of the white race at all since the
blood of the latter was in the process of "paling and congealing".
Uncertain as to the answer, Wagner goes on to suggest that the
blood of the Redeemer may have been "the divine sublimate of the
species itself" springing from "the redemptive Will's supreme
endeavour to save mankind at death-throes in its noblest races." We
recognise in this statement the message of Wagner's last and most
intensely religious music drama, Parsifal. However, Wagner
also takes care to stress that, although the blood of the Saviour
was shed to redeem all of humanity, the latter is not destined to
achieve a universal equality as a result, since racial differences
will persist. And if the system of world rulership by the white
race was marked by immoral exploitation, the uniting of mankind can
be achieved only through "a universal moral concord, such as we can
but deem true Christianity elect to bring about".
In addition to these insights into the
redemptive grace of Christ to be found in this 1881 essay, Wagner
had already outlined the ethics of his own version of Christianity
earlier, in his 1849 sketch to the projected opera "Jesus of
Nazareth". According to this work, the first solution of the
problem of evil in the world had been the institution of the Law.
However, this static Law, when incorporated as the State, stood in
opposition to the ever-changing rhythm of Nature, and man came
invariably into conflict with the artificial Law. The faults of the
Law were indeed principally due to man's original selfishness,
which sought to protect his personal property, including his wife
and family, through man-made laws. Wagner, in a Proudhonian manner
(7), rejects these laws and insists on Love as the basis of all
familial as well as social relationships.
Arthur
Schopenhauer, 1788-1860
Man can achieve a oneness with God
only through a oneness with Nature and this oneness is possible
only through the substitution of the Law with Love. In expounding
his version of the Christian doctrine of Love, Wagner has recourse
to a quasi-Schopenhauerian theory of the Will and its egoistic
striving:
the process of
putting off my Me in favour of the universal is Love, is active
Life itself; the non-active life, in which I abide by myself is
egoism. This becoming conscious of ourselves through
self-abnegation results in a creative life, because by abandoning
our self we enrich the generality, as well as ourselves.
The opposite, or "non-becoming
conscious of ourselves in the universal brings forth sin". An
egoist who does not give anything to the universal will be robbed
in the end of all by the latter against his will and he will die
without finding himself again in the universal.
In this context, Wagner pauses to
identify the nature of women and children as being essentially
egoistic. A woman can get rid of her natural egoism only through
the travail of birth and the love imparted to her children. Thus
the woman can find salvation only through her love for a man,
though a man too is enriched by his love for a woman since it is
the most basic selfless act that he is capable of. Indeed, for a
man, the sexual act itself entails a shedding of his
life-substance.
Beyond this love for a woman, however,
a man can divest his ego also through love of a greater fellowship
than the merely personal and sexual. This is the love for one's
fatherland, which impels men to sacrifice their life for the "weal
of the community".
However, Christ pointed a higher path
than even patriotic self-sacrifice, and that is the giving up of
oneself for the sake of humanity at large. Every sacrifice is at
the same time a creative act, that of sexual love as well as
patriotic, since the former results in the multiplication of
oneself in children and the latter in the preservation of the many
lives that constitute one's nation. The sacrifice of oneself for
all mankind, however, is the most complete "parting with the
emptied casket of that generative force, and thus a last creation
in itself, to wit the upheaval of all unproductive egoism, a making
place for life." Such a death is the "most perfect deed of love".
Wagner thus identifies the transfiguration achieved through death
as the "enthralling power of the Christian myth" (Opera and
Drama, 1850). But we may note that this is equally the import
of all classical tragedy, and that Wagner was merely interpreting
the Christian story in traditional Indo-European terms.
Although the redemption that one
achieves through self-sacrifice is a personal one, Wagner had also
considered the government of nations from the point of view of
Schopenhauerian ethics. In his essay, "On State and Religion"
(1864-5), dedicated to his patron Ludwig II of Bavaria, Wagner
expounded his religio-political ideal of the philosopher-king using
the categories of Schopenhauer's philosophical system. He
begins by admitting the folly of his earlier participation in the
Socialist revolutions of 1848 and recognises the state as the
guarantor of the stability of the nation. However, the state is
most authentically and fully represented not by constitutional
democratic or socialist governments but rather by the monarch. For
the monarch
has naught in
common with the interests of parties, but his sole concern is that
the conflict of these interests should be adjusted precisely for
the safety of the whole ... Thus, as against the party interests,
he is the representative of purely human interests, and in the eyes
of the party-seeking citizen he therefore occupies in truth a
position well-nigh superhuman.
In the monarch thus the ideal of the
state is finally achieved, an ideal which is neither perceived nor
cultivated by the egoistic intellect but only by the supra-egoistic
"Wahn", or irrational "vision". Wagner associates this Wahn with
the "spirit of the race" and of the species that Schopenhauer had
pointed to in his analysis of the group behaviour of insects, such
as bees and ants, which build societies with an apparently
unconscious concern for the welfare of the whole regardless of the
individuals within it. In human societies this altruistic instinct
is indeed manifest as patriotism. However, the self-sacrifice that
patriotism demands is often so strenuous that it cannot hold out
indefinitely and is, further, likely to be contaminated by the
natural egoism of the individual, who may see in the state too only
a safeguard of his own interests along with those of his fellowmen.
In order to sustain the patriotic Wahn therefore is required a
lasting symbol and this symbol is indeed the monarch.
A monarch has "no personal choice, may
allow no sanction to his purely human leanings, and needs must fill
a great position for which nothing but great natural parts can
qualify". If his vision of his own patriotic duty is marked by
ambition and passion, he will be a warrior and conqueror. On the
other hand, if he is high-minded and compassionate by nature, he
will realise that patriotism itself is inadequate for the purpose
of satisfying the highest aspirations of mankind which indeed
require the vehicle not of the state but of religion. Patriotism
cannot be the final human political goal since it turns too easily
into violence and injustice against other states.
The particular instrument whereby the
patriotic Wahn is distorted into international strife is the
so-called "public opinion" which is created and maintained by the
press. Unlike the king, who is the genuinely disinterested
representative of the welfare of the state, the public opinion
created by the press is a travesty of the king in that it fosters
patriotism through the flattery of the "vulgar egoism of the mass".
Thus the press is "the most implacable tyrant" from whose despotism
the king, who is preoccupied with "purely human considerations
lying far above mere patriotism", suffers most. Thus it is that "in
the fortunes and the fate of kings the tragic import of the world
can first be brought completely to our knowledge".
Since perfect justice can never be
attainable in this world, the religious person naturally finds the
patriotic Wahn inadequate and follows instead a religious or divine
one which demands of him "voluntary suffering and renunciation" of
this entire world to which egoistic man clings. The inward
happiness, or revelation, which fills a man (or "saint") who
undertakes such renunciation cannot be transmitted to the ordinary
people except through religious dogma and the cultivation of
"sincere, undoubting and unconditional" faith. True religion is
preserved only in the individual who perceives beyond the diversity
of sense-perception "the basic oneness of all being". This inner
beatific vision can be transmitted to ordinary men not by the
exhortations of a vain clergy but only through the edifying example
of saintly figures:
Hence there lies
a deep and pregnant meaning behind the folk's addressing itself to
God through the medium of its heart-loved saints; and it says
little for the vaunted enlightenment of our era that every English
shopkeeper for instance, so soon as he has donned his Sunday coat
and taken the right book with him, opines that he is entering into
immediate personal intercourse with God.
Once religion turned to the state for
its maintenance and propagation, it too was forced to become an
institution of the state and serve the imperfect justice of the
state. Hence the abhorrent religious strifes which have marked the
political conduct of modern nations.
Since true religiosity can never be
conveyed through religious disputation or even by philosophical
sophistry, only the king can, if he be endowed with a particularly
elevated spiritual nature, or Wahn, unite the two essentially
different realms of state and religion into a harmonious whole. The
mark of a truly noble mind is that "to it every, often the
seemingly most trivial, incident of life and world intercourse is
capable of swiftly displaying its widest correlation with the
essential root of all existence, thus of showing life and the world
themselves in their true, their terribly earnest meaning." And only
the king's "exalted, well-nigh superhuman situation" allows him
also the superior vantage point from which to view the tragedy of
"mundane passions" and grants him the "grace" which marks the
exercice of perfect equity.
We see therefore that Wagner's
philosophical ideals revive Platonic, Schopenhauerian and
Proudhonian Socialistic ones in a message of Christian Love that is
as exalted as his music. More importantly, his criticisms of the
Jews for their domination of states through credit and their
degradation of the populace through the press have become more
compelling today than they must have been in his own day, since the
twentieth century forms of "democracy" and "socialism" and
"communism" have succeeded in robbing the world not only of
monarchy but also of all true philosophy and religion.
Notes
(1) After M. Boucher's Les idées
politiques de Richard Wagner, Paris: Aubier, dating from 1947,
the recent studies of Wagner's political thought include E. Eugène,
Les idées politiques de Richard Wagner et leur influence sur
l'idéologie allemande (1870-1845), Paris: Les Publications
Universitaires, 1978, F.B. Josserand, Richard Wagner: Patriot
and Politician, Washington, D.C.: University Press of America,
1981, A.D. Aberbach, The Ideas of Richard Wagner: An
Examination and Analysis of his major aesthetic, political,
economic, social and religious thought, Washington, D.C.:
University Press of America, 1984, P.L. Rose, Wagner: Race and
Revolution, London: Faber, 1992, and H. Salmi, Imagined
Germany: Richard Wagner's national Utopia, N.Y.: Peter Lang,
1999.
(2) See A. Jacob, Atman: A
Reconstruction of the Solar Cosmology of the Indo-Europeans,
Hildesheim: G. Olms, 2005, "Introduction - Historical". I
distinguish the Aryans as one branch of Indo-Europeans, the
Japhetic, whereas the generic Indo-European stock includes the
Semites and Hamites as well.
(3) All translations from Wagner are
from W.A. Ellis, Richard Wagner's Prose Works, London,
1897.
(4) See A. Jacob, op.cit.
(5) Wagner's focus on language as the
essential expression of the racial-national spirit is borrowed from
Fichte's Reden an die deutsche Nation (1807).
(6) See M. Boucher, op.cit.,
p.18. Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung
was first published in 1818.
(7) For the various similarities
between the philosophy of Proudhon and that of Wagner, especially
their veneration of Christ, their denunciation of the Jews, and
their anti-Communist socialism based on the genius of "le peuple"
(or "das Volk"), see M. Boucher, op.cit., p.160ff). Proudhon's
abhorrence of Communism is evident in his description of this
system as "l'exaltation de l'Etat, la glorification de la police"
(ibid., p.161).
along with the other branches of the Indo-Europeans Also, he tends to
interpret the peculiarities of Zoroastrian religion and Greek as
being due to the sociological conditions in which the Iranians and
Greeks found themselves in antiquity. For example, he explains the
dualism of the Zoroastrian religion as being due to the fact that
the Aryanswho had moved into Iran as conquerors after having become
meat-eaters on the way from the gentler climate of India, "could
still express their consternation at the depths to which they had
sunk" and thus developed a religion based on a vivid conscience of
"sin", which forced an opposition between "Good and Evil, Light and
Darkness, Ormuzd and Ahriman". This is of course
false, since all the ancient religions, including Zoroastrianism,
were based on cosmological insight and were not developed to
explain the historical conditions of any particular nation. Only
Judaism may be explained in such sociological terms since it
represents a revolt of one particular ancient Near Eastern ethnic
group - the Arameans and Hebrews - against the cosmological
religion of their neighbours in Mesopotamia. This is indeed made
clear in the passages in Josephus' Jewish AntiquitiesI,157
and Philo the Jew's De mutatione nominum, 72-6, which
expose the mundane materialistic and nationalistic ambitions of the
Hebrew, Abraham, who instituted the tribal cult of Jehova.
According to Wagner, the first manifestation of a recognition of
the deterioration of racial strength among the western
Indo-Europeans was among the Pythagoreans who founded "silent
fellowships ... remote from the turmoil of the world ... as a
sanctification from sin and misery". The fullest exemplification of
the need for world-renunciation, however, was that offered by
Christ, who gave his own flesh and blood "as last and highest
expiation for all the sin of outpoured blood and slaughtered
flesh". Again, Wagner seems unaware of the fact that the Christian
story itself borrows heavily from Babylonian and Dionysiac
prototypes (Marduk, Dionysus) whose death and resurrection were
mere mythological representations of the primal drama of the cosmic
solar force that was forced into the underworld before it could be
revived in our universe as the sun.
Wagner understands the Christian story literally and maintains that
the problems of Christianity stem from the appropriation of the
administration of the rites of Communion by the priests, so that
the people in general failed to understand the injunction to
abstinence from all flesh contained in Christ's offering of his own
flesh and blood to his disciples. Besides, the Church as an
institution could maintain itself and propagate itself politically
only by supporting the violence and rapine of the emperors which
contributed to the eventual ruin of the race's inner strength. In
these international adventures the Church was gradually forced to
revert to its Judaic roots since