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Feb. 11, 2023 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
32:17
Apollo, Dionysius, and Christ

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comAdam Green joins the program to talk about his project regarding the history and nature of Judaism and Christianity. In this selection, Mark Brahmin and Richard Spencer discuss Apolloism, the nature of Indo-Europeans, the importance of skepticism, and the paradox of “faith” and historicity in Abrahamic religions. Late…

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I like the idea of having, you know, some type of mythology.
You know, it's essentially fairy tales and fables that we teach to kids to like, you know, instill morals into them in a way.
And so I can see benefit in that.
Romans wage war against my people and eventually impose Christianity on them.
So I don't know about if Apollo is really the winning God to go with.
All right.
Well, I mean, I can give you rationale for that because I'm also Northern European, so I'm not, you know what I mean?
Okay.
So, well, let me go back because I think that, so my argument that there is this thing called proto-Jews, right?
So I think that what you articulated is the kind of standard position, right?
So mine is a kind of unorthodox position, which I accept.
I mean, I'm happy to kind of bring this thesis to the world, which I think is the correct thesis.
But I wouldn't, for example, you said that, you know, you said correctly that Christianity is derived from myths in the Hebrew Bible.
That's also true, right?
So in other words...
Elisha and Elijah are, you know, Elisha is a precedent of John the Baptist.
Elisha is a precedent of Jesus.
And in fact, the sort of meanings of the name Elisha and Jesus are similar.
So they're clearly kind of linked figures.
And it's actually made explicit in the New Testament.
They do the same miracles.
Many of the same miracles are about the laughter.
Yeah, and some of the miracles are kind of references to, like, so in other words, the crossing, and Joshua would be another example, Joshua crossing the Jordan, right?
So Jesus' baptism in the Jordan becomes a kind of reference to Joshua's crossing of the Jordan.
But of course, Elisha and Elijah also cross the Jordan, right?
The biggest one really is Jesus as Joseph, as Messiah, son of Joseph, because they get the template for Jesus that he's rejected by his brothers, sold by his brother Judas, which represents the Jews, into slavery, and then he rises up to rule over the Gentile Empire, which is Egypt.
Yeah, I mean, Joseph is also taken from the Hebrew Bible.
So his father is also taken from the Hebrew Bible.
That's definitely the case as well.
So I don't, I mean, I recognize all that in my work as well.
So I'm not disputing that.
But what I'm saying, though, is that there is evidence in the ancient world, the ancient mythographers were basically saying that, you know, Bacchus is the same as Yahweh.
Yahweh is Typhon.
Yahweh is Saturn.
You know, this is what the ancient mythographers were saying.
El from Canaan, Canaanite El.
Yeah, El in Kronos, right?
Yeah.
So my thing, and I'm arguing that, you know, because Jews are kind of symbolized and symbol intelligent people, that more likely it would seem that the kind of, these cults are growing, you know, in the way that Judaism, or rather Christianity grows from Judaism.
We could say like the cult of Saturn or the cult of Vulcan, and Vulcan would be another example too, is that Judaism is kind of growing from these earlier cults, right?
But at the same time, they're kind of shedding their skin.
So that's the argument that I make in the book, and you'll have to read it to be convinced of it, I suppose.
But I will, and I certainly can go into examples on this call.
And I think that that's a kind of more compelling or convincing argument than the idea that they're just kind of like, you know, plagiarizing, and certainly not plagiarizing in a kind of mindless way, because, you know, when you look at the symbolism in the ancient world, there's a kind of coherency to the way the myths work.
The parables are kind of, there's a kind of consistent use of symbols.
You know, across these kind of different myth traditions, so from Sumer to Egypt.
To Greece, obviously, obvious examples would be lunar symbols versus solar symbols.
But it gets more detailed than that.
You know, the use of the symbol of the vine, the use of the symbol of the fish, the use of the symbol of the dove, these sort of things.
There's a kind of common symbol language in the ancient world that you encounter that's being used in a kind of intelligent way in one direction from this kind of thonic.
direction, this lunar or thonic direction, and then from another direction, which is sort of from this kind of solar or Arian direction.
But that often...
It's evidently the case today, because, you know, we could say that we're still in a kind of Aryan dark age, or at least as it concerns Aryan religion, as appeared in the Greco-Roman world, for example.
Can I interject real quick?
Sure.
So, the Jews and the Christians, the rabbis and priests, have the most disturbing thing in Kameh.
My big issue with Judaism is that they want a Moshiach to come and fulfill the prophecies and basically rule the world, right?
The Christians want the exact same thing.
They both want the king of the Jews, the Moshiach ben David, to come and fulfill the prophecies of the Torah and have the whole world worship him.
And anybody that doesn't want to do this is the epitome of all evil in their eyes and is a pagan.
They have a common enemy of the pagans, which really just is a derogatory term for anybody that doesn't worship the God of Israel.
And they do fear paganism.
They want Christianity.
They want Christianity because it prepared the world for the messianic age.
They created Christianity as a way to impose Noahide laws on the Gentiles.
And they're trying to, the agenda is to convert Christianity and direct it in a more Noahide law compliant type of philo-Semitic servant-esque religion.
And the JCPA, the...
I always forget what it stands for.
I put out an article a few years ago about the neo-paganism, and they thought it was terrible.
They're like, these people care about nature.
We want them to be Noahides.
We want them to worship our God.
So I do see them worried about this, any type of going back to the old gods type of thing.
But I don't know.
My hang-up is I don't think that this will genuinely work if people don't sincerely believe that these gods are true.
And I think that's why the God of Israel won out, is because they did a better job of historicizing their deity.
And they convinced everybody that Jesus is a real person.
And that's what gives it the power.
And that's why Jesus mythicism is such a big idea to expose.
Because if it comes out that Jesus actually, no Jesus existed, it looks more like this is a lie.
This is a forgery.
This is a fabrication.
And then you have to go, what was the motive?
And what was the agenda behind doing that?
And then that's where you get that, oh, this has been a Judeo-Abrahamic conspiracy to essentially Judaize the world.
All right.
Well, you've raised a couple of points there.
So in the first point was, okay, so paganism, right?
So you say that they're against idolatry.
And that's true in the Hebrew Bible.
You see that, right?
They're against idolatry.
Most famously, the golden calf is smashed and it's replaced by...
The Ten Commandments, right?
That's the kind of most iconic example.
They're against idolatry?
Let me finish my point.
Okay, go ahead.
Sorry.
Yeah.
No, because we don't disagree.
As far as explicit Judaism is concerned, it's absolutely the case that they're against idolatry.
So you and I agree on that point.
Religious Jews and Orthodox Jews are against idolatry.
But then, of course, you have other Jews in Hollywood.
That are Jews, that identify as Jews.
They may even identify as atheists.
Some of them are Orthodox Jews, though.
Some of them go to temples.
Some of them don't.
Some of them are secular.
But they run Hollywood in a very kind of conscious way.
And they're engaged in idolatry, very explicitly engaged in a kind of pagan presentation or idolatry.
And in fact...
You can find the exact same phenomena in the ancient world in the Dionysia, in the Greek Dionysia, which was a worship explicitly of Dionysus, the god Dionysus, who was identified in the ancient world by the ancient mythographers with Yahweh, right?
So we see exactly the same phenomena.
And this gets back to what Richard and I were saying before about this kind of Caducean phenomenon, where they're on both sides.
They're running the left and they're running the right.
I mean, which is something that you would acknowledge, right?
So they're both running the left, the political left, which we usually see as kind of friendly to Islam, but kind of secular and atheistic, or more so than the Republican Party.
And the Republican Party we see as Christian, we identify as Christian.
So in other words, there's a kind of duality to Judaism.
It has a kind of crypto aspect to it that you could say is pagan even, right?
But it's not.
Really pagan.
It's crypto-Judaism, effectively.
But it has a kind of pagan expression where they are creating idols.
I mean, evidently, they're creating idols.
And from our perspective, we would argue that, well, it's not necessarily bad that they're creating idols.
They're just creating the wrong idols.
They're creating idols of...
You know, they're like music idols and athlete idols and movie stars.
Is that what you mean?
Yeah, yeah.
They're creating negative role models, for example.
So I think you understand my point.
But to your other point, you were arguing, well, people are it's not going to take off because people don't believe it to be real.
They don't believe the God to be real, which is which is your argument.
Well, our goal is to appeal to like, you know, the most intelligent people, right?
So we're not trying to like, we're not trying to convince the Christians.
In fact, probably most of the people that will be drawn towards Apolloism will be sort of beyond Christianity.
Not in every case.
I mean, I think we've had some people who were Christians.
I mean, I guess that's the other thing that I would say, Adam, is that we're growing and people are excited about this.
So it's not like whether this works or not, it is already working.
But what I would say, too, is, again, that it's not a religion for everyone, right?
And I think that probably people who are Christians, it would be less appealing to.
So people who require a kind of superstitious vision or view of the world would not find this appealing.
Right.
But again, I mean, there is a kind of utilitarian aspect to what we're doing in the sense that we're building a, you know, on one hand, it's a kind of trade guild.
We're organizing together.
And we're also, but I'm also, you know, through my work, I'm also teaching a kind of symbol language so that people can create art.
So that we can have artists that are basically making kind of Apollonian works of art and basically essentially doing the same thing that Jews are doing in Hollywood, which is in Hollywood, they're creating what I call Jewish esoteric moralization, where...
Effectively, you're seeing non-white or Jewish characters succeeding over white characters.
But there is a kind of complexity to it.
Especially in earlier phases, there's a subtlety to it and a kind of esotericism to it where they're carefully encoding parables.
And using, in an intelligent way, a kind of symbol language to make their myths.
And these myths are ultimately demoralizing to us.
So that these myths, too, would be a way...
They would also be one of the ways that we would speak to a kind of a larger society, right?
I got a question, Mark.
Sure.
Why just the focus on Apollo?
There's tons of Roman gods.
So why do you have him as the one that's front and center?
Well, he's the most important god, and we think that from our perspective, he's the most important god.
And he's also the god that is most clearly an Aryan god.
He's the Hyperborean, right?
He's the blonde Hyperborean.
So you've said Aryan a few times.
What exactly do you mean by that?
I don't know what you mean by Aryan.
Hyperborean.
Nordic.
What do you mean by hyperbolic?
Well, not only Nord.
I mean, Aryan is synonymous with the Indo-European peoples that we can identify through a language group.
So, you know, you could say the white race.
I don't...
A lot of overlap there.
But we would understand who we are through a shared group of languages that would include Hindi and...
Persian cultures as well as more obviously European cultures.
So are you guys kind of like going back to like a Hyperborean religion and the Roman religion from 2,000 years ago?
Like kind of incorporating both?
Because they're not really essentially the same, right?
there's well i mean latin is a fundamental indo-european language so i mean they're they're deeply connected connected there are of some I don't want to speak entirely for Mark.
I think he would agree.
To quote Nietzsche, the Greeks can't mean as much to us as the Romans.
The Romans got it right.
They were able to integrate a world and sustain a civilization.
That really has not been surpassed.
Have you been to Rome?
I've certainly been to Rome, yeah.
Am I sensing some anti-Italian bigotry here?
No, no, no.
I've been to Rome, too.
I thought it was amazing.
Oh, okay, good.
What's right there, St. Peter?
Well, so, yeah, I mean, just to address Adam's point, though.
Yeah, I mean, we're both Apollonian.
And Hyperborea or the Hyperborean is, Apollo is the Hyperborean.
That was his epithet.
So he's understood as the founder of the Greco-Roman civilization.
He founds the oracle at Delos.
He founds the oracle at Delphi.
He slays serpents at Delphi and establishes an oracle there.
And he was understood.
By the ancient mythographers, it's the only god that was worshipped by the Hyperboreans, right?
So Hyperborea means above the north wind.
So, and what they're describing is a kind of Nordic Aryan race that's, you know, described by Apollo himself, who's the blonde, you know, fair god, in contrast to other gods that appear in that pantheon, such as Bacchus.
Also, let me jump in on this.
I have three or Or so ideas that I think will help communicate this to Adam.
So there's an almost built in Hyperborean quality to Indo-European languages.
So there are these remarkable cognates between the languages.
You can think about like the Hindi word Raj, which you probably heard, which is related to Rex.
In Latin, meaning king, obviously.
There's some interesting aspects of the language as well.
Indo-European languages, even to this day, share a word for snow.
So you can think of snow in English, schne in German, nege in French.
The S has been dropped, but it is the same cognate.
We don't, however, share cognates for oceans.
So there's mer, there's zay, ocean, otien, all of these words.
This seems to imply that we had a snowy origin and that that cognate, which exists in Persian, it exists in Farsi, it exists in Hindi, that snow cognate is actually much older.
Than our words for oceans.
So we actually originated on mountaintops or in a snowy climate to some degree.
And we spread out and began developing other words for oceans.
You can see some words for rivers and boats, nautical, also indicating that there is a kind of longer history of those words.
So, you know, there is a There is an implied or kind of inbuilt Hyperborean quality to Indo-Europeanism or Aryan.
But I want to go back a little bit on this in terms of what it means to believe in a god.
Because I do think that's a crucial question and certainly something that You know, we get all the time, which is that like, oh, you know, what's the difference between what you're doing in Scientology or you're just inventing gods and blah, blah, blah.
I think this Christian faith is something that is unique.
And even the Christian historicity is something that is unique and can be powerful.
But it also, as you would agree, it can be undermined.
So when you begin talking about the mythical or Dionysian aspects of Jesus or his fulfillment in the Pentateuch, it kind of undermines it.
I do think that most all people out there, most all Christians, that is, think that there was a man named Jesus, and maybe he didn't.
do all these miracles of water to wine and expanding the loaves of bread, etc.
Well, there's not really...
Much of any evidence for that.
You have some mentions of him in Josephus, etc.
He's absent in many histories.
There might very well have been some preacher named Josh hanging out around 33 AD or so, but the notion of a real historical Jesus Christ,
that is, that he possesses historicity, is But I think this, you know, like to go back to the Copenhagen thesis and the suggestion that there is a later date of the Jewish Bible, you have to wonder, like, to what degree did ancient people believe like Christians believe?
I get what you're saying.
I got a book from the library recently.
It was about the switch from the pagan Rome to the Christian Rome.
And they said the concept that Christians have, like, do you believe in God?
The Romans didn't think of it in that way.
It was kind of more like they didn't believe they literally existed.
Let me just expand on this a little bit.
You get what I'm saying, but there's some interesting things.
They're concepts.
Yeah, you can think of Hesiod or Homer.
You could almost think of those like the gospels of ancient paganism, but I think that's wrong.
They're like mascots for concepts.
Right, yeah.
And so the notion that...
Like, Zeus actually walked around and transformed into a cow and made love with Europa.
Like, the degree to which the ancient people...
I mean, I don't believe that they were so benighted and, like...
They were just children or something, and they believe that this really happened last Tuesday.
Last year, Zeus came down and whatever.
I don't believe that.
From what we can tell, the ancient Greeks were highly intelligent people, and they were possessed of a skeptical mind.
They were highly literate, etc.
I don't believe they were like a child who believes in Santa Claus.
And we all, whether you're eight years old or maybe even 12 or something, you hit some point where you no longer believe in Santa Claus, but you also kind of play along.
I don't remember exactly when, I don't know, nine or whatever like that.
I kind of no longer believed, and I had a bit of skepticism, and I heard some criticism of Santa among other students or older students or whatever.
But I also just kind of played along.
I got the spirit of Christmas, so to speak.
And I didn't really want to reveal that to people.
And I still like Santa to this day.
And so there's a kind of realistic notion that I think was present in the ancient world.
And what is unique is if you are a Christian, you absolutely must believe there was a You have to believe that.
And I think that faith concept that all these Christians have struggled with, you know, Martin Luther famously struggled with faith and so on.
That's a kind of new thing.
And it's not...
Totally distinct from the way that pagans understood their gods, but it really is new and it really is unique.
And I do think that the modern world where we're overwhelmed by information, in fact, we're overwhelmed by skepticism, I think we're almost kind of ripe for a new way of believing.
And this is my third point.
That I would push back on you.
Now, you might deny it, but I sensed a little skepticism, maybe a little sarcasm when you were claiming, don't worry about it, when you were saying you want to invent a new God that's going to wage war against Yahweh or something like that.
But I would stress this.
I think Christian faith is unique.
It's something that was brought into the world, and it really changed us, and it changed our psychology.
It kind of mindfucked us in a way, if you want to use a vulgar term like that.
But I do think that religion is part of who we are as human beings.
There is something to...
That phrase that you'll hear from Christians where they'll say, once people stop believing Christianity, they won't believe in nothing, but they'll believe in anything.
And so they'll believe in crystals, or they'll worship Marianne Williamson as a spirit deity, or they'll join Scientology, or they'll get obsessed with Marvel comic books.
That is a reality.
That is actually very true.
There's a lot of religious impulses you see among secular people.
And I think that gets to a deeper existential fact of religiosity.
We are a religious species.
And religion allows us to act in groups.
It's a way of consensually, at least on the surface, we're all on the same team.
You don't have to force someone to do something.
You might terrify them with hellfire or the fear of God or whatever, but you're basically getting everyone on the same page and we become like a school of fish or like a flock of birds.
If you look at a flock of birds, they'll adjust as a group.
It's not like there's one bird that goes off here and the other one goes off left.
They'll be on the same team and they'll flow in that way.
To use the team as a metaphor, when a basketball team is really working, the point guard just knows that the forward's going to do a...
Behind, you know, backdoor cut or something, or he'll do an alley-oop.
He just knows it.
He senses it.
Because they're all on the same page, and they're kind of connected psychically.
And I know this sounds a bit woo-woo, but I don't think it actually is woo-woo, you know?
Like, you know the guy is going to be open, and you throw it right when he turns.
You just know it.
And you're psychically connected with him in some way that we might be able to uncover via science, but it's there.
And a whole society can be connected in this way.
We're not going to survive, and I don't think we're going to really be who we are as human beings if we are just engaging with each other via money or force.
There has to be some kind of hurting, channeling, psychic mechanism that brings us together.
I think we evolved this many, many years ago.
I think this religious instinct, which you can see certain glimpses of in animals, but it is human.
And we evolved it millions of years ago, perhaps.
Definitely tens of thousands.
And so this is a fact of who we are.
Address another religion or even overturn it, you have to put another religion in its place.
New atheism is kind of attractive in some way.
I have admiration for Hitchens and Dawkins and company.
I agree with them on a lot of things.
But that kind of mentality is just an ultimate failure.
It's not going to work.
It's not going to speak to people.
You need to offer something that's going to replace this Judeo-Christian religion, which is on the one hand, withering and dying, and on the other hand, developing it into these comically absurd ways.
yeah and it's also i mean the other aspect of that too is that you know nature abhors a vacuum and jews want it they want to occupy that sort of vacuum that That sort of spiritual, psychological space.
This is evidenced by their desire to control media, right?
They want to give us our stories and give us our mythos and the sort of ethos that comes from that mythos.
And we have to do that, right?
And part of it, too, is defining religion, as Richard alluded to.
I mean, Christianity almost...
Falls under a different, entirely different category.
It's, you know, in terms of, it's a different type of religion than the Greco-Roman religion.
Again, which, you know, was not a superstitious religion.
They viewed Christianity as superstitio.
I mean...
As atheism, too.
Yeah.
As atheism.
Or Judaism was atheism.
Yeah, so it's a kind of like...
So they sort of accepted the reality of the world.
I mean, you know, this appears to be what we understand from the Greco-Romans, that they accepted the reality of the world, of the material world.
And, you know, to the extent that they were, you know, especially the adherents.
I mean, when you see these cults obsessed with sort of the afterworld or the hereafter, before Christianity, there are these sort of phonic cults, the Orphic cults.
You know, the cult of Adonis, the cult of Bacchus.
These are the cults that are interested in the hereafter and the afterworld.
But they were, you know, very kind of family-based.
They were interested in the familia, the gens, the race, the family.
And their gods are even, you know, modeled as a kind of family.
I mean, and I guess this goes back to the earlier question that you asked that, you know, why Apollo?
Why the focus on Apollo?
Well...
Again, Apollo is kind of the center of it.
He's the founder.
He's the god that was worshipped alone by the Hyperborean.
So he represents a kind of the first like sort of seed or kernel in our view.
But there are other figures that are kind of serve a useful parabolic function.
And those would be figures like Jupiter, who is, you know, literally he's overthrowing.
The Jewish God.
He's overthrowing Saturn, right?
And he allows for the conditions in which Apollo appears, who is this kind of God that represents more the sun and the future, and the sun as in someone's sun, while also having that solar aspect.
And he has a kind of eugenic aspect to him, right?
Where it's about creating a kind of ideal...
Fertility God that represents the best of the Aryan race.
And again, I think that we're not really interested in recruiting people that are...
It's definitely not a populist movement that we're engaged in.
And our hope, and it won't necessarily be the people that are part of the movement right now, though we hope to be part of it as well, is that what we're working on is a kind of nascent...
You know, for our people and that this would, or nobility, and that this would, you know, even if we're unable to kind of establish that or achieve that, that the ideas will be out there in the way that Marxism is out there or Christianity is out there and someone will establish it.
And, you know, we think that Apollo is kind of, you know...
Again, it's not a kind of religious revelation in the Christian sense of that idea.
It's kind of a deduction.
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