Europe’s True Identity : Christian or really Pagan ?

‘In recent years European religious and political  leaders along with leading academics have emphasised on returning to Europe’s ‘Christian’ Identity but history tells a different story that actually Europe’s historical Identity and roots  has more in common with Hinduism’ :

Pope Benedict XVI

On 11 April 2011  Ex-Pope Benedict XVI accused anyone who denied Europe ‘s Christian roots of suffering from “amnesia” and said it was the equivalent of saying that humans “can live without oxygen or food”.This was enhanced in November by the Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti, who said that the Church’s Magisterium and the

Christian roots of Europe are in dispensable in facing the continent’s economic crisis. Already on 20 May 2010 at symposium in Rome on the Orthodox and Catholic Churches of Europe , president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, Cardinal Walter Kasper, stated,”If Europe wants to have a future again, it must first and foremost renew its Christian roots.”

The greater input of Christianity into public life has also been witnessed by David Cameron and his predecessor as prime minister, Tony Blair. On 17 May 2012, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Britain’s most senior Roman Catholic, warned that the spread of secularism and atheism were “very, very dangerous” fostering intolerance and the drive towards totalitarianism in order to eliminate Christianity in the nation. And recently David Cameron again has stated UK is a “Christian country“

Is Europe a Christian Product?

While such idealisation of Christianity can be expected from clerics and true believers in the faith, there have been other voices who see a European identity defined through Christianity as useful even if its not actually true. Even staunchly secular anti-clerical France has not been immune from pushing the importance of faith. Just before he lost office,

Ex French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared, “We should uphold both sides – accept the Christian roots of France … while defending secularism”.

Niall Ferguson :British historian.

 Scottish-born historian and political conservative Niall Ferguson calls himself “an incurable atheist” Nevertheless he is also a vocal champion for restoring Christendom because there isn’t sufficient “religious resistance” in the West to radical Islam.

Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci spent her last years before her death in 2006 inveighing against a Muslim influx that was transforming her beloved continent into “Eurabia.” Fallaci was a self-declared “Christian atheist” because she thought Christianity provided Europe with the essential cultural and intellectual bulwark against Islam. These become more than just intellectual gymnastics when right-wing extremist

Anders Breivik

Anders Breivik killed 77 people in a horrific carnage in Norway . In his political manifesto Breivik wrote “European Christendom and the cross will be the symbol in which every cultural conservative can unite under in our common defence. It should serve as the uniting symbol for all Europeans whether they are agnostic or atheists.”

While not an actual believer, the hardcore nationalist nevertheless had faith “in Christianity as a cultural, social, identity and moral platform.”

In his 2010 book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, Christopher Caldwell of theFinancial Times speaks of the revival of “Team Christian” as Islam asserts itself in Europe such as attempts to rededicate Cordoba Cathedral as a mosque. Already in Britain and France more people attend mosque on Friday than church on Sunday which sends pulses racing because while Christianity is seen as indigenous and part of what it means to be

France : Muslim Devout Praying on street

European, Islam and other such exotic Oriental creeds are seen as foreign intrusions. This has been as much an issue as human rights and democracy when resistance is made to Turkey joining the European Union.

In his classic work The Clash of Civilisations, Samuel Huntington reveals that the “West” has never actually generated a major religion:

Samuel Huntington

 “The great religions of the world are all products of non-Western civilizations and, in most castes, antedate Western civilization.”

Later he does define “Western Christianity” comprising Catholicism and Protestantism as “the single most important characteristic of Western civilization” defining itself against Byzantine Orthodoxy as much as against Islam. Yet he also mentions the “Classical legacy” which in his words included “Greek philosophy and rationalism, Roman law, Latin and Christianity”. So Huntingdon once again relates western identity back to Christianity. But it is his Greek and Roman citations which I wish to elaborate on further because they provide the core meaning when we look for the actual origins of ‘ Europe ’.

What do we mean by ‘ Europe ’?

Goddess Europa

The continent actually takes its name from Europa, a Phoenician woman of distinguished lineage, the daughter of Agenor the King of Tyre.

She was also descended from the nymph Io, priestess of Hera in Argos , who was seduced by the Greek god Zeus. Her brother Cadmus contributed the alphabet to Greece . Zeus was enamoured of Europa and decided to seduce by transforming himself into a tame white bull and mixed in with her father’s herds. Europa onto his back allowing Zeus to run into the sea and swim, with her on his back, to the island of Crete . Here he revealed his true identity, and made Europa the first queen of Crete .

Plato and Aristotle

Therefore the very identity of Europe is not grounded in Christianity but the long lost pagan past which produced the first great civilisation on the continent. Does anyone regard the teachings of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras and other great philosophers as backward? These are the great founding fathers of European and western civilisation which is so often touted as superior. Yet they were all products of a pagan environment as was the very ‘democracy’ first formulated in the city of Athens . For that reason if Islam and other ‘exotic’ creeds are an intrusion then where exactly does that leave Christianity? By that token it is as ‘foreign’ as Islam and another Middle Eastern import. The myth of Europe having Christian roots is exploded.

This use of ‘myth’ is interesting because while Christianity to this day derides others as heathens, idolaters and pagans, relegating folklore and moral stories into the realms of mythology, the real myth is that Christianity somehow protected or led to the rights and freedoms which we now take for granted. The historical reality is somewhat different.

Hammer of Christ

Roman Gods

The Romans were generally tolerant of different creeds and hence the empire had spiritual dynamism and vitality. Mithras and Isis shared the pantheon along with Jupiter, Mars and Serapis. It was this environment which allowed Christianity to grow and flourish in the first place until Constantine accepted it as the imperial creed because it helped him gain political power over his rivals. Once in power the angry male demiurge known as ‘God’ revealed his true power as Christianity brooked no rivals. That

Constantine

included within its own ranks as the Nicene Creed deemed many self-confessed Christians as heretics. The Emperor Constantius II, who reigned from 337 till 361, marked the beginning of the era of formal persecution against Paganism by the Christian Roman Empire, with the emanation of laws and edicts which punished Pagan practices. From the 350s, new laws prescribed the death penalty for those who performed or attended Pagan sacrifices and for the worshipping of idols.

Pagan temples were closed and the traditional Altar of Victory was removed from the Senate. Increasingly ordinary Christian formed mobs destroying, pillaging, desecrating, vandalising many of the ancient Pagan temples, tombs and monuments.Julian the Apostate attempted to restore the traditional pagan tolerance as practiced by the emperors before him but it was too late

Roman Emperor Julian

because the monotheistic mind set had spread too deep. The decrees of Emperor Theodosius from 389 to 391 that the iron grip of religious totalitarianism really took root. The remaining Pagan holidays were abolished, the eternal fire in the Temple of Vesta in the Roman Forum extinguished, the Vestal Virgins disbanded, while auspices and witchcraft were punished.

St Ambrose Converting Theodosius to Christianity

Until 395 Theodosius authorized or participated in the destruction of many temples, holy sites, images and objects of piety throughout the empire, participated in actions by Christians against major Pagan sites, issued a comprehensive law that prohibited any Pagan ritual even within the privacy of one’s home, Paganism was now proscribed, a “religio illicita”. He also is likely to have suppressed the Ancient Olympic Games whose last record of celebration is from 393.The repressive laws were  continued by Honorius and Arcadius as they attempted to snuff out any revival of paganism. The surviving pagans blamed the sack of Rome in 410 on neglect and suppression of the ancient traditions. But the monotheistic juggernaut of hate was by now unstoppable. Rationalism and philosophy became the bête noir of a religion that could not stand people thinking for themselves.

Burning of the library : Alexandria

In this burning atmosphere of intolerance and hatred the great Library of Alexandria was pillaged and destroyed by Christian mobs. The temples of Alexandria were closed by Patriarch Theophilus of Alexandria in AD 391 and this allowed the destruction of the great library. Anyone who could think outside the narrow confines of the monotheistic gagging order was at risk as Neoplatonist philosopher Hypatia found to her cost in 415.

Hypatia being dragged by Christians to her brutal death

Taken by a Christian mob to the church called Caesareum, they completely stripped her and then murdered her with tiles. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them. During the fifth century all Hellenic monuments, altars and temples of Athens , Olympia , and other Greek cities were destroyed.

In 529 Emperor Justinian closed the Academy of Athens leading some of the remaining Academy members to flee to Ctesiphon , the capital of the Sassanid Iranian emperor Khosrau I. In 542 Justinian allowed the inquisitor Ioannis Asiacus to forcibly convert the pagans of Phrygia, Caria and Lydia in Asia Minor . Within 35 years of this crusade, 99 churches and 12 monasteries are built on the sites of demolished pagan temples.In the sixth century, Christian authorities suppressed in Egypt the Navigium

Navigium Isidis festival banned in Egpyt as Christians took over

Isidis, a religious festival in honour of the goddess Isis. Yet as late as 840, the inhabitants of Laconia in Greece , resisted the attempt of Tarasius, Patriarch of Constantinople, to convert them to Christianity. The ancient culture and civilisation which had given rise to essential elements in our modern civilisation, were extinguished by the intolerant monotheistic deity of Christianity.

Women as Christ’s Sacrifice

Collapse of Rome

Christianity is said to have civilised the Europe of the Dark Ages, that period after the fall of the Roman Empire in western Europe plagued by disease, fragmented political systems, de-urbanisation and a return to a more rustic way of life as Germanic tribes, Huns, Magyars and Norsemen pillaged, raped, enslaved and caused general mayhem as well as massive demographic upheavals.

Christianity has always had this false  vision of itself as a superior creed against the rude backward ramblings of heathen tribes who worshiped fierce unforgiving  gods that sometimes demanded human sacrifice.  This is ironic considering that the new upstart creed claimed to drink the blood and eat the flesh of its god. We need to look behind a history written by the Christian victors. In doing so we find remarkable revelations.

Peaceful Druids

For example the Celtic druids had immense control over the population not so much from fear (as with the Christian clerics) but due to their knowledge of astronomy and religious rituals.

In pre-Christian Ireland , druids, poets or fili and a learned class of legalists known as Brehon had special status in a society which respected scholarship despite the dearth of written records.

A Druid Elder

Druids often sat on the right hand of Celtic kings, and in fact spoke before the king did. Myles Dillon, who was senior professor at Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, and Nora Chadwick, who was Honorary Life Fellow at Newnham College , made incredible parallels with the Indian situation, as far back as 1967:  “This class of professional men, priests and scholars, seems to,

Vedic Brahmin

share a common Indo-European inheritance with the brahmins of India, for the later and fuller evidence of Irish sources shows a similar class, the filid, who, while shorn of their priestly office in a Christian society, have retained the scholarly functions of the druids as poets, genealogists, lawyers, and the practice of oral rather than written tradition. Both the form and content of their learning show astonishing similarity to brahminical tradition.”

River Thames ‘Tamas’

The River Thames may in fact take its name from the Sanskrit Tamas meaning “dark” as its waters are often dark and cloudy; another school of thought is that it is named after the Roman Tam meaning “wide” and Isis meaning water. Chadwick was a major scholar on the Celts and commented on the common parallels between the Druids and Brahmans. Druids also taught that the self was immortal, the soul transmigrated into different bodies after death, and conducted ritual sacrifices to appease the gods. The Celtic religion survived most apparently in ancient Irish folklore.

Celtic Goddess Airmid

Like the Vedas,the extant Old Irish literatures-memorized and transmitted through a 12-year training by an Irish bard class who were the inheritors of the druids – are an essential window into Celtic thought. Again, like the early Vedas, the Old Irish sagas and hymns are at times locked in metaphor for which we have lost the keys, with vast gulfs of knowledge missing from the Old Irish literature. The only existing material is that put into writing-for the first time-by Irish Christian monks in the seventh century. By then 700 years of warfare and had been imposed by the Papacy virtually extinguishing the flames of the European pagan religions. All that remained was a Europe brightly misted in folk wisdom and sagas and inlaid with thousands of temple sites, holy groves and springs, stoneworks, fortresses, towns, cremation and burial grounds, sacred rivers, mountain aeries, seaside grottoes and treasure lakes all bearing names, artifacts and wisdom of the Celtic Gods, druids and

Druids cutting mistletoe :The Celts believed that Mistletoe held the soul of the Holy Oak & therefore embodied its Sacred fertility.

culture. Most of what is considered Christian Europe is actually pagan Europe . Christmas day (December 25th) was usurped and inaccurately fixed by Christians from the Roman festival of Mithra. It came in turn from the Celt festival of the winter solstice, an astronomical event the druids observed to set the exact beginning of the new solar year-the same calculation brahmins made in India .

 The Celts were not alone in this. Balts, Slavs, Germans and Nordics nestled in-all the way north to the frozen wastes of Iceland . They each radiated a language, spiritual mindset and culture that tracks that of the early Vedic civilisation. At dawn, Germans daily slipped into cold, sacred rivers for ablution, chanting and wearing loose-flowing robes and a topknot in their long hair “so emblematic of the brahmins”. So recorded Tacitus. The Slavs took seven steps around a holy fire in marriage. The Icelander saga-the Edda-contains creation passages that are Upanishadic in tone.

The British Isles and other areas of northern Europe that were formerly druidic are still densely punctuated by holy wells and holy springs that are now attributed to some Christian saint, often a highly local saint unknown elsewhere. Of course not all pre-Christian holy places were respected enough for them to survive, however, as most ancient European sacred groves, such as the pillar Irminsul were destroyed by Christianizing forces. Many Christian churches were built upon sites already consecrated as pagan temples or mithraea.

Santa Maria Sopra} Minerv :A pagan temple for Minerva then a church was built on top of it.

The church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva (literally Saint Mary above Minerva) in Rome is just the most obvious example of this. Sulpicius Severus, in his Vita of Martin of Tours, a dedicated destroyer of temples and sacred trees, remarks “wherever he destroyed heathen temples, there he used immediately to build either churches or monasteries”

When Benedict took possession of the site at Monte Cassino, he began by smashing the sculpture of Apollo and the altar that crowned the height. No surprise then that the historicity of several saints has often been treated sceptically by most academics, either because there is a paucity of historical evidence for them, or due to striking resemblances that they have to pre-Christian deities.

St Martin of Tours : Revered Christian Saint and Pagan temple destroyer

 Once the tribal king or chief was converted the bishops knew that the rest would follow. This is how Christianity established itself promising power and wealth not any deep spiritual succour. Clovis , King of the Franks, converted therefore as a matter of military and political expediency, forcibly converting his subjects to Christianity. But it was left to his descendant Charlemagne to slaughter tens of thousands of Saxons, Avars and Slavs in order that they might know God’s loving kindness.

Christian Crusaders on the Rampage

From the twelfth century Latin Crusades against the heathens of northern and eastern Europe as monastic military sects such as the Teutonic Knights spread Christianity among the Slavs, Finns, Estonians, Lithuanians and Latvians, from the eleventh to fifteenth centuries. German landowners dominated over the indigenous converts which they converted, conquered and colonised especially in Prussia , Estonia and Lithuania . In Prussia the Slavs were either converted or expelled as the Knights established centres at Konigsberg and Marienburg. The colonists established new towns which became centres of Germanisation in sea of heathen Slavs. Heathen Slav and Baltic women were subject to rape with the actual monks taking an eager and even more active role than the secular military auxiliaries. Yet Lithuania managed to hold out against Christianity as late as 1413.

Danish Bishop Absalon destroys the ‘idol’ of Slavic god Svantevit

Europe was now fully Christianised

“Triumph of Christianity”} by Tommaso Laureti (1530–1602), ceiling painting in Vatican Palace. Images like this one celebrate the triumph of Christianity over the paganism of Antiquity}

But the bloodthirsty cosmic tyrant of Christianity would not be satisfied now that his appetite for human flesh was insatiable. In terms of oppression and sadomasochistic violence, few things in the history of Christianity can surpass the omnipotent fear and brutality shown by the Inquisition. During the first fifty years after its founding in Spain in 1478, an estimated fifty thousand victims were tried, most of whom were burnt at the stake. In fact the numbers were huge for the time. In Toledo , about ten per cent of the population was tried by the Inquisition between 1486 and 1499.

Galileo before the The Inquisition

For more than three centuries the Inquisition was the most powerful institution in Spain and its colonies in the Americas and Philippines , and in Portugal and its colonies of Brazil , Africa and Asia . That is an incredible amount of the globe over an incredibly long time. The Inquisition allowed the Catholic Church to stamp out any remaining vestiges of paganism, such as belief in fairies, trolls, gnomes and other such beings. It was this that led to its campaign against witchcraft. Belief in witches had ironically been heresy. But in 1458, an inquisitor named Nicholas Jaquerius began to reverse this attitude so that by 1484, the Church performed a complete volte-face.

Witch Burning

Indeed it was heresy not to believe in witches. This became codified in 1486 with the writing of a book called Malleus Maleficarum, or Hammer of the Witches. Written by Dominicans Heinrich Kramer and Johann Sprenger, this obscene and pornographic book, this became a manual for anyone involved in the prosecution of witchcraft. In its unashamed misogyny, the authors of Malleus were literally psychopathic in their hatred of women, who were regarded as weak, fallen, deceiving, prone to heresy, bearer of falsehood, contaminating, and tempting the faithful with their insatiable carnal lust.

Women burnt at the stake

Midwives were also suspect due to their intimate knowledge of female gynaecology, and hence were suspected of killing newborn infants, causing others to be sick or deformed, and even bad behaviour among children. Girls that had been jilted were blamed for then seeking solace with devils. Anything could be ascribed to witchcraft: female masturbation, ergot poisoning, erotic dreams. In the terror it unleashed across Europe , when a suspect was found she was tortured or threatened into confession, a fair trial being completely out of the question.

It was not just the Catholics. Anti-witch madness spread to the Protestant churches as well. By the middle of the sixteenth century, witches were being burned at the stake in their hundreds. In 1585, two German villages were so decimated of female demographics that only one woman remained alive in each. The Inquisition itself boasted that it hard burned at least 30,000 witches over 150 years.

Between 1560 and 1680, a minimum of forty thousand victims were killed by the witch hunts of Protestant northern Europe . Protestants may have felt even more fear of witches than Catholics because they rejected rituals such as exorcism. However they kept the belief in demonology and the Malleus was amazingly just as popular in Protestant Europe. With the Reformation, Christianity became a political ideology used by the ruling elite to prove their piety in suppressing heresy and witchcraft.

Midwives,female healers all burnt at the stake

Women often accused other women of witchcraft to take the focus off themselves

The latter was said to be an international conspiracy against the state, church and god, even though most suspects were women that were poor and elderly. Economic changes may have also increased this general paranoia, with the sixteenth century witnessing famines and destruction with religious wars. Commercialisation of agriculture meant uprooting of peasant communities and severe demographic dislocation. Traditional female healers also posed a threat to the dominance of male doctors. So the cumulative effect was to prove deadly to thousands of women in Christian Europe. The last official execution for witchcraft in England was in 1642, and as late as 1775 for Germany .

But lynching for witchcraft continued in parts of Christian Europe until the twentieth century. Scotland saw witch-hunts from the 1590s. The misogynist carnage against innocent females peaked during 1643-9 and 1661-2, with most victims being from society’s lower orders. Most were also subject to killing by the mob even after being acquitted in court as happened as late as 1705 in Edinburgh .

Hatred of women played a significant part of course. But the Reformation was also a concerted attempt to purge Christianity of any vestiges of paganism.

Protestants saw veneration of Catholic saints as the offspring of heathen deity worship, which in many cases it actually was considering how those original shrines had been usurped by Christianity when not actually destroyed by the intolerant monotheistic faith.

St Francis Xavier who first requested the Inquisition to be brought to India

The same intolerance and destruction demonstrated by Christianity’s violent spread in Europe was to be exported. Highly sophisticated societies of the Mayans, Aztecs and Incas were pulverised as the same psychopathic monsters led their minions in the name of the intolerant male jealous god.

Whole civilisations were wiped out in order that Christ might demonstrate his misguided ‘love’ for humanity. The same was tried in India with the Portuguese Inquisition. But ancient Hindu civilisation proved a hard nut to crack which was to prove ominous for Christian belief in Europe itself.

A Return to the Roots of European Civilisation

Signing the Treaty of Westphalia

The Reformation did at least have the advantage of dismembering the power of an omnipotent church. As the centuries progressed and an uneasy toleration dictated by the Treaty of Westphalia prevailed after the destructive Thirty years War new ideas could develop.

As the eighteenth century Enlightenment progressed various scholars looked into Europe ’s pre-Christian past. While this included Celtomania and interest in the Norse sagas, it was ancient Greece which appealed to the German Romantics because it was composed of small virtuous states just like Germany .

Friedrich Schlegel

Herder and other Romantics saw language not to transmit reason but to express feeling. Greek was therefore valued for its poetic qualities. From 1802 Friedrich Schlegel in Cologne who began studying Sanskrit and thus learnt the antiquity of Indian culture, having been attracted by the work of Sir William Jones, Orientalist, and founder of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta who realised the affinity between Sanskrit with Latin and Greek. Believing that European peoples descended from the Indian Himalayas.

Hindu prayer flags : himalayas

 He published Essay on the Language and Wisdom of the Indians in 1808. Schlegel proposed that in the distant past, a nation of priests and warriors from the Himalayas had been transformed into murderous hordes and not only conquered India, but also struck far north into the cold forests of Germany and Scandinavia, claiming evidence for this migration existed in Sanskrit references to a sacred mountain revered by Hindus.

In 1803 Schegel said “Everything, absolutely everything, is of Indian origin.” Hegel (1770-1830) said that the Germans were direct disciples of Indian philosophy and culture.

Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer (1788-1866) preferred Buddhism and Hinduism over Christianity. Nietzsche went further in stating that Christianity had caused a “slave morality” and that it was inferior to Buddhism. It was apparent that given half a chance thinking people in Europe were actually getting quite sick of the chimerical Middle Eastern ideology which had been forced upon them by Constantine, Theodosius, Charlemagne, the Vatican, Calvin and Martin Luther having destroyed all vestiges of the deep spirituality which once thrived across Europe. This allowed for the spread of  monotheism to a people spiritually distraught and disheveled. As Nietzsche famously opined: “Not every one may be a Christian: one is not ‘converted’ to Christianity—one must first be sick enough for it.”

Léon Poliakov

Research by renowned French scholar Léon Poliakov’s reveals that looking to India was also part of the attempt of Europeans to give themselves cultural and civilisational origins cleansed of their ultimately Jewish heritage through the filter of Christianity and the Bible. Humanist ideas which followed the Renaissance and the opening up of the East to European exploration had led to a greater awareness of the antiquity of Indian civilisation. Kant and Herder saw analogies between the myths and philosophies of Europe and India which helped them to cleanse the former of its Judaic heritage, and in doing so tried to find the origin of Western culture in India and not the Near and Middle East.

Indeed this theory claimed an Aryan invasion of Europe before we have the theory even applied to India . The Germans believed that they had been the victims of great power rivalries, notably between France and Austria . German intellectuals therefore sought solace in an exotic land where like themselves the people were subjugated, India . Thinkers such as Frederick von Schegel (1772-1829), his brother August Wilhelm (1765-1845), Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) and Arthur Schopenhauer (1778-1860) were beyond being mere students of Indian literature and philosophy.

Colorful India

They were infatuated with the ancient land. But reaction against the imperialism of Napoleon led to the triumph of those forces which believed in a romanticist and mystical idea of a German nation with its special cultural mission as epitomised by Fichte’s Address to the German Nation but also found in a host of nationalist and anti-Semitic myths which drew upon and warped the original Romanticism and Enlightenment concepts. By the middle of the nineteenth century Wolfgang Merzel looked for inspiration to Medieval German Christianity and the pagan past with gods such as Odin. The construction of a non-existent pagan Germanic past was helped by figures such as Richard Wagner whose operas evoked primeval myths in a German identity cleansed of Roman, Christian and Jewish influence. Romanticist and racist German nationalism was popularised by scholars and writers and dominated intellectual and public life. Wagner’s idealisation of a German pagan past showed Siegfried as messianic and Christ-like with little resemblance to actual German mythology.

Nazis and the church close companions

Now none of this had anything to do with traditional paganism. It had more to do with an obsessive anti-Semitism integral to the Church from its very inception which was taken to its genocidal conclusions. The Romantics and other thinkers from the Enlightenment merely replaced the outer sheen of Christianity with a veneer of ancient paganism. The infrastructure provided by Christianity was left intact. It therefore lent itself easily to racial and religious fervour which were the direct result of secularising purely Christian concepts, however neatly they were embellished by stolen pagan imagery.

Red Army

The angry, jealous, male demiurge commonly referred to as GOD, could easily be secularised into the sole acceptable RACE, THEORY, dialectic, or a host of other ideologies which claim to hold the ‘Truth’ by qualifications which are self-evident only to the given ideology’s most zealous disciples and missionaries. No other way of life is acceptable and is best extinguished or kept in a museum. It is this which has led to the mass murder of millions in the name of progress, rationalism and science.

The unstoppable outward aggression is obvious if we understand that the millenarian and apocalyptic fervour emphasises this and only this. Introspection, self-discovery and indeed that knowledge of self is of no use for chiliastic ideas which have no concept of the inner journey and experience of the self, no matter how much they tout an amorphous ‘individualism’; which all so easily translates into conformity, coalescing into a mindless collective.

This is the diametric opposite of what Hindus have retained in the concept of yoga which is the inner journey of self-discovery, because it was not acceptable to the aggressive demiurge worshiped in monotheism as Christianity violently smashed its way through Europe . That explains not just continued Christian hostility to neo-paganism but to Hinduism itself. When the Pope and evangelical Christians urge their cowed followers not to partake of yoga because it brings evil spirits they know exactly what they are talking about because the inner journey is the greatest threat to an ideological infrastructure which emphasises nothing beyond the outer expression and the very crass materialism which it periodically denounces.

Pat Robertson

Pat Robertson, emperor of all evangelical hatemongers, says “we can’t let that stuff come to America” because it threatens his entire worldview as well as his lucrative business interests – just as he sends missionaries in the manner of a swarm of locusts to places such as India to destroy the ancient indigenous culture in the name of the angry, jealous, and ultimately lonely dysfunctional male demiurge they call GOD.   It does not matter that this god may indeed be absent.

Richard Dawkins : Prophet of Monotheist Atheism

 “It has served us well this myth of Christ”.

 The fact that something so seemingly innocent as yoga can lead religious demagogues to burn with hatred should tell its something about the intractable conflict between the monotheistic world view and the inherent natural spirituality which emanates from and guides humanity. The misnomered merciful god is nothing more than a cosmic dictator whose mannerisms are emulates by his followers on earth in their iconoclastic fervour. Millions will forfeit their lives should they refuse to bow before the omnipotent will of this repugnant entity. That is exactly what happened as Christianity spread through Europe .

Alexandria

Not content with desecrating pagan shrines, some of whichsuch as Alexandria were seats of ancient learning without which the modern western civilisation would scarcely have been possible, the disciples of the demiurge literally incinerated anyone suspected of holding onto ‘heathen’ beliefs.

Fraudster Robert di Nobili

In this New World Order dominated by a celestial male autocrat the voice of women was all but silenced. From Hypatia’s cruel dismemberment at the hands of a fourth century Christian mob in Alexandria it was not such a small step to a mindset which led to the burning of thousands of females at the stake for the crime of witchcraft, right up in fact until the late eighteenth century. Not exactly encouraging for those who wish to return Europe to its Christian roots.Yet also modern Hindus ignore these inconvenient facts.

Subjected to centuries of monotheistic imperialism they have internalised a deep inferiority complex. To have many gods is seen as a mark of shame. Arya Samaj was nothing more than Christianity with Hindu garb, just as was attempted by Catholic missionary Robert di Nobiliin the seventeenth century. This process of ‘indigenisation’ has been used more recently by hardcore groups such as Gospel for Asia , South Asian Concern and Fr. Bede Griffiths in his Christian ashram. ISKCON did the same while claiming to be a new faith, the only true faith, subverting Shri Krishna into the same demiurge which people in the west had come to Hare Krishna hoping to reject – only to get it forcibly rammed down their throats. Yet the loosening grip of religious dogma on much of the western world and the willingness to experiment with new spiritualism provides an opportunity. Hindus have preserved the ancient spiritual knowledge which was once common to cultures now denounced as pagan.

Estonian culture hasn’t forgotten its pagan roots

In August 2011 the BBC reported Estonia as being the least religious country. Barely thirteen percent of the population belongs to the once powerful Lutheran Church .

The fall of communism has led many in this former Soviet republic to look to their traditional paganism as they commune with nature in order to find deep spiritual purpose to their lives such as with Maausk where trees and the earth are cherished. About half the population adheres to these beliefs. The signs are therefore encouraging.

Lord Rama

Despite centuries of effort by the demiurge Hinduism has survived and its relevance to the modern age will only be enhanced by spiritual rediscovery in Europe such as that witnessed in Estonia . Europe needs to return to its pagan past, a glorious past where Druids and others communed with a cosmos and created the classical Roman and Hellenic heritage which western civilisation claims as its own.

Such defenders of this civilisation would therefore do well to understand and comprehend Hinduism as the only surviving pagan culture in order to reach full realisation of the statement written above the Oracle at Delphi in ancient Greece :

                                                                     “KNOW THYSELF”

This was the culture which not only gave the world the very word ‘democracy’ but also

God Poseidon

the basis of western philosophy, science, mathematics and logic. Plato and Socrates it must be remembered were the result of the very pagan environment so mocked and hated by the Church. That hatred has continued to this day.

Europe as Victim of Christian Colonialism

Cernunnos the thorned God

Modern Europe is not always the enlightened place one would think as under the veneer of democratic slogans, lies the sinister underbelly. Pagans and followers of indigenous European religions are thus still being targeted without mercy. As recently as October 2006, British pagans were attacked by Christian extremists while celebrating a sacred festival at Glastonbury .

In Greece the celebration and worship of the ancient religion of Zeus and Apollo at ancient temples is actually illegal.In 2000 Archbishop Khristodoulos of Athens mobilised thousands of supporters in condemning EU insistence on minority rights as leading to the de-Christianisation of Europe .

Indeed modern Greece is so far removed from its ancient roots that Samuel Huntington was prompted to write this:

“ Greece is not part of Western civilization, but it was the home of Classical

Worshipers dressed as ancient Greek warriors defy a Government ban to pray at the Temple of Zeus in Athens.

civilization which was an important source of Western civilization…..Yet Greece is also an anomaly, the Orthodox outsider in Western organizations.”

Archbishop Khristodoulos of Athens was therefore emphatic that Greece was firmly part of the East and not the West.

Under Vladimir Putin the position of the Russian Orthodox Church has been greatly enhanced as it provides moral and spiritual legitimacy to the new authoritarianism and nationalism which now underpins Russia . Putin has regularly attended church services and conspicuously wears a crucifix to demonstrate his Christian faith.

Putin a regular at church

Religious dogma, such as opposition to evolution, is taught as fact in Russian schools. So entrenched is the church into the organs of modern Russia, that in Lubyanka the church next to the FSB headquarters bears a plaque thanking them for their help in restoration work. The 2006 declaration by the World Council of Russian People, an assembly of secular organisations which recognises the spiritual leadership of the Orthodox hierarchy, adopted theDeclaration of Human Dignity and Rights to counter the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights. Patriarch Aleksei, head of the Orthodox Church, said that western ideas of human rights inhibited the faithful from living in accordance with their beliefs and indeed would lead to a neo-pagan revival. Faith, ethics and loyalty to fatherland were said to supersede the rights of the individual. Orthodox support for Russian nationalism, especially Putin’s anti-western ideology, lead it to support the idea of Russia’s civilisational uniqueness and superiority, enhancing xenophobia, racism and the idea that all other beliefs, including non-Orthodox forms of belief are foreign to Russian soil and a threat to its very soul. Religious freedom has thus been severely curtailed.

Church Uniting against Paganism

Presently the churches are united in their unceasing war against the vestiges of paganism. Islam can be accommodated through it being a common Abrahamic cousin and the self-flagellation which a declining church subjects itself when faced with a stronger party – as is obvious from the number of churches being turned into mosques right on European soil. Atheists, agnostics, humanists and secularists can be scoffed at as the preserve of intellectuals who can be defeated with the combination of sickly sinister smiles through outreach programmes catering to society’s most vulnerable in order to ensnare more gullible and desperate victims.

Swami Vivekananda

But with Hinduism the churches know that Christianity has a real alternative on its hands. Hence the extreme efforts to highlight issues such as poverty and caste in India , and excluding Hindus from the debate to which all others are invited.

Presently they can scoff at pagans having become so self assured that Christianity has won the day by imposing its imperialist monotheistic creed on Europe for the last 2000 years. But the true religion, the deep spirituality which lies within all of us was never crushed by the male demiurge that commanded the Church.

It is for that reason that Hindus need to encourage, work with and support the people of Europe who wish to rediscover their ancient past, reconnect to European roots and to what remains the basis of European civilisation.

Ganga Puja Ritual

As the Ramayana and Mahabharata are sacred to Hindus, so Hindus can help the peoples of Europe to rediscover the organic meanings, sounds and metaphors which is evident in the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Norse sagas, the compositions of Irish Celtic bards and the incredible revival of pagan beliefs in Estonia.

Only that way will Europe be able to connect to its ancient past and permanently throw off the monotheistic mindset which has plagued it and impeded its spiritual development.

As mentioned earlier, the continent takes its name from the pagan goddess Europa. for two thousand years she was all but banished from memory by the monotheist imperialism which tolerated no other deity than the jealous and aggressive male demiurge sanctioned by the Church.

How fitting then that it is through hinduism, the surviving pagan culture which has continued to honour the sacred feminine in the form of durga and kali as the female force of shakti, that she should return from her spiritual exile. if Europe wishes to return to its roots it can only do so by once again becoming the continent of its feminine deity, Europa.

Goddess Europa and the Bull