What we say here interrelates.
I discussed the weakness of the polis. The unity of Rome and the old gods were not destroyed by the Christians. By the end of the first century, few in Rome took the old gods seriously. As more and more people outside Rome were given Roman citizenship, the polis went the way of the old gods.
The polis was replaced by the Wordist “salvation cults.”
By the second century, there was no Rome. Into the vacuum came the salvation cults, from Isis to Hellenic Judaism. For a century, Emperors died off like flies. From the long rule of Augustus the Empire fell into a straight battle for power.
MONEY, the coins that had been the basis of the Classical economy, fell into disuse. If MONEY disappeared as a medium of exchange in America and presidents started living a few years or a few months we would consider that it had become a different society. Not so the history of Rome.
What we call “Rome” is considered the same thing until the city was actually conquered and burned. Only THEN do we see a problem in this smooth continuity.
Then Constantine appears. He establishes the Christian religion, but he makes Sunday, the Mithraian Sabbath, into the Christian Sabbath. This doesn’t fit so it is ignored.
So the Da Vinci Code declares that a collapse of true Christianity by the unilateral action of Constantine. Expanding on Brown, what I see here is a straight set of political compromises.
History concentrates entirely on the only two forces we see today, because their memory is still with us. Those two forces are the unified entity we call the Roman Empire and a unified and pacifistic Christianity.
The enormous power Mithraism, dominant in the Roan Army, becomes just another little bump that true Christianity overcame. The overpowering Persian Empire, which towered over Roman politics at the time, is totally ignored. The three priests of Mithras become a Black, an oriental, and a white man who are “Wise Men.”
What I see is a succession of men taking on the title of Emperor. I also see a parallel to this title in the Holy Roman Empire, where the title of Emperor meant something when the guy elected was sixteenth century Charles who also ruled Spain and other vast powers independently.
In other words, the title Emperor didn’t mean much in itself. It meant a lot to a Constantine who also had enormous REAL forces OF HIS OWN. If you wrote a history of the Holy Roman Empire declaring Europe was actually ruled by whoever held that title, you would be laughed at. But that is our history of Rome.
No one notices that the power of this so-called Rome died with the old religion and the polis. So what WAS the loyalty that replaced it? The powers that really replaced it became what we call, with the sole exception of Christianity, the “cults.”
Our picture of this time totally ignores the “cults.” But to Constantine the “cults,” like the giant Persian Empire, were the power realities of his day. They are all ignored by our “History of Rome.”
The situation was not all that different from what we face today. The old Constitution is gone, replaced by Marxists, Moral Majorities, race-mixers, Environmentalists, all sort of propositional groups, each of which is a cult. Politics today has nothing to do with the American unity based on blood, it is simply a balancing of different cults.
That was what Augustus saw when he made laws requiring the Roman upper class to have children. He probably didn’t see it so clearly, but he was trying to save the polis. Three centuries later, Julian the Apostate tried, by a weird revival of what he saw as the Old Religion, to revive the polis and overthrow Christianity.
Brown, in The Might of the West, 1963, gets part of this. Brown details the fact that, in the new society called Rome, what we would call nations existed in the form of cults. These were the political realities with which Constantine dealt. They were the realities real Roman politics had dealt with for a century or more.
Nothing that was taken for granted by Constantine has any place in our history of “Rome.” It is a moot question whether he would have laughed harder at our idea of “Roman politics” or our idea of Roman statues.
#1 by Pain on 03/08/2008 - 6:01 pm
That’s hilarious!
First, Brown was writing fiction.
No, scratch that, Brown was plagiarizing someone else who was writing fiction.
Constantine did not set ecclesiasitcal practice, least of all anything to do with Sunday, nor was there a Mithraic sabbath. The two religions aren’t even very similar, unless you consider every culture that uses the word “savior” to be the same religion.
The Mithras cult had a demi-god that slew a bull in the skies millennnia before the world was made. How is that like Christianity?
Mistakes like this are hard to overcome when one bases his whole intellectual system on the presupposition that he is the standard whereby reality is to be measured.
This is what I call the “tiny world” fallacy; that is, nothing outside the horizon of one’s own knowledge and understanding is acknowledged. Thus the whole universe exists in only as much as that individual grasps — a tiny world.
#2 by Pain on 03/08/2008 - 6:03 pm
Yes, and good ole “states-rights” Abe was reviving the small town when he had Sherman burn Columbia.
You see, both men solidified the power each of their empires over and against the cities/states.
#3 by backbaygrouch4 on 03/08/2008 - 8:01 pm
Your analysis that the complexity of society is unfathomable and that history is incapable of accurately portraying it is on point. However your illustrations are presented in a mixed up fashion. There are some facts that we do know. The flow of the story makes sense but some of the timeline markers are jumbled.
By the end of the third century the Empire’s capital had been moved to Milan. At this point Rome’s importance began to become increasingly a function of its position as center of the Catholic church. Then came Constantine who was proclaimed emperor in 308 and ruled from Milan, hence, the Edict of Milan in 313.. Rome was not captured and burned until the Visigoth, Alaric, invaded Italy from the Eastern Empire. He entered Rome, the city, in 410, seventy three years after the death of Constantine in 337..
If by Rome you mean Milan, it never fell while it was the Empire’s Western capital. When the Visigoths besieged it 402 the capital was transferred to Ravenna. Fifty years later Milan fell to the Huns but it was no longer the seat of the emperors. Rome’s ‘fall’ occurs in 476 at Ravenna. though there is numismatic evidence of a few later emperors being recognized and having coins .
This fact is a commentary on just how little we do know. Tomorrow some farmer in northern Italy could dig up a bucket of old coins and history could get a major rewrite. Our history has little to do with what happened, it reflects the propaganda needs of institutions protecting their turf today. Nonetheless it is best to keep the yarn anchored to the few facts that can be verified. It seldom requires much of a change in the main narrative.
#4 by Dave on 03/08/2008 - 8:02 pm
The Wordist cults dominating today function within technological and scientific conditions.
It is ironic, because owing to their Wordism, they don’t seem to care, nor do they care about advances in the science of genetics. Their take on technology and science is that it all somehow will eventually lead to everything “becoming local” in a rainbow coalition kind of world. Try to find one of these Wordists who have any understanding of the incredible texture of the real world. It takes enormous computing power to handle that texture when you are subjecting it to scientific observation. This is currently forcing a reduction of the resolution of data sets, which is a major reason why science today is in such a space of frustration. Our computers are just not powerful enough to accomplish what needs to be accomplished.
This is why the growing internationally based and mostly secret intelligence community ensconced within the elite offices of hedge funds, global banking institutions, sovereign wealth funds, global corporations, and military, multinational nonprofit, and other government-based intelligence agencies and organizations have fallen on hard times.
That and the scarcity of high IQ programming talent.
Now this is arithmetic that favors white people, regardless of present difficulties owing to lack of computing power.
It is just amazing the way Google looks into Internet use directly and what Google knows about the racial distribution of Internet users. The high value users of the Internet are blond and blue eyed. Of that, there is no mistake.
These facts leave the Wordist cults in the dust. Just plain in the dust.
But the more important point is that knowing real history matters, which is BWs point. It goes right along with a respect for scientifc observation which doesn’t attempt explanations before observing.
Conceits that are part and parcel of Wordist agendas lead us nowhere in understanding what is going on and what has happened to America.
The primary weakness of our enemies is that they don’t understand that loyalty must be founded on something other than mere words.
#5 by Brutus on 03/08/2008 - 10:33 pm
Pain,
He is talking about Lawrence Brown, not Dan Brown.
Bob,
The main point that should be noted about the Roman Empire is that it was flooded with foreign people, i.e., aliens. There was no Romans left by the time you are speaking of. What you have been laboring here the past few weeks on this Roman history is simply a rehash of what we all know: We keep going down under special interest groups. The Romans called them cults, we call them lobbyist.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
#6 by Brutus on 03/08/2008 - 11:41 pm
By the way all, this ongoing History lesson is out of Brown’s book, “The Might of the West.”
LOL! I told Bob the name of it some months ago on this blog. I wrote under a different name then. He knew the author’s name, but not the title (or maybe he knew the title but not the author, I can’t remember which). In the same post I stated it was hard to come by, which it was, not so long before. I had not looked, since I have had a copy for years, and thus did not know it was available again. Bob replied that he found it in about two minutes off Amazon.com. I stood corrected.
Anyway, Lawrence Brown was an engineer and a mathematician. He therefore asserted that science is the be all and end all of Western Civilization. He makes a strong case for this in his book. (I am in agreement with him, by the way). However, he makes some mistakes and gets carried away in denigrating Classical Civilization. Hence the somewhat simplified Roman History we are here being treated to.
Brown says the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation were both disasters for Western Civilization. Sound familiar?
Now, again, I believe Brown is mostly right and I agree with his overall thesis. Therefore I also pretty much agree with Bob here (so don’t think I am being “hostile,” Buddy, like you thought from my other post the other day, wink, wink, chuckle chuckle!).
If you are interested in a short review of “The Might of the West,” and want an idea about what it is about, Google “Two Deadly Legacies, Revilo P. Oliver.” You will be directed to the Oliver Collection on Stormfront.
I would also recommend buying and reading the book. You might also try to read the trilogy by Correa Moylan Walsh. He expands on and explains some of these aspects we are talking about.
#7 by Pain on 03/15/2008 - 9:33 pm
Bob here is talking about Dan Brown, the man who plagiarized the Da Vinci Code and settled out of court to the real author.
Later Bob talks about Lawrence Brown as if he is the same person.
Woops!