All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 11, 2023 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
35:11
The Cargo Cultist
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Here it is.
Shots fired by Tom Rousel, who calls himself The Jive.
And let me just play these.
We're being trolled, I guess is a way of describing it, right?
Yes.
Let me just play this original video, and then we can start talking.
Because Mark and I, last night, we listened to a number of...
Interviews of Survive the Jive, and we watched some of his presentation.
We listened to some of his material, but I can't claim to have a sort of deep familiarity with all his positions, for example.
But he evidently has no familiarity with our positions, so if we happen to miss him, I guess I'm not that upset about that.
Here's his comments.
So he's actually visiting the temple of Hephaestus in Greece.
So he's on vacation.
Interesting.
Certain people on the internet like to make a cult of Apollo.
It was quite distinct from the ancient cult.
And they regard Apollo in a way that would have been quite surprising to any of the people of the time when he was actually worshipped.
Because...
Their reason for focusing on Apollo above all other gods is they consider him to be more Aryan and by that they mean Indo-European rather than Indo-Iranian, which is what the word really means.
But they think that.
I don't know why.
Because he was a god probably imported to Greek worship from Anatolia.
Doesn't necessarily mean he wasn't an European on origin, but certainly he's possibly not from Europe.
And of course he's also gay.
He is a god who is well attested in mythology as doing gay things.
If you want to worship Apollo that's fine, but I just think worship Apollo, the god as he is actually known, and not this fake Apollo that they just made up.
These kind of people...
If you don't know who I'm talking about, then don't worry about it.
They're not important anyway.
But there's just some funny people on the internet who have invented a cult of Apollo because they consider that...
And none of these people are Greek anyway.
They're all Americans, likely of British descent and Germanic descent, who say that Odin is invented by the Jews and Norse mythology is Jewish.
But the real god of the Northern Europeans is Apollo.
And they don't really have any evidence to support that absurd claim, but they're not the sort of people who really care about evidence.
Yeah, I mean, the first thing I have to say about that, Richard, is rent-free.
Rent-free, bitch.
Look him in the guy's head.
I mean, you know, we don't think about him.
I was unaware of how to pronounce the guy's name before this, you know, and yet he's such a pussy.
He doesn't even mention us by name.
You know what I mean?
I have to say, I really do dislike that.
The other thing I would remind Tom of, of these, they're just people on the internet.
I would be curious.
How he is not a person on the internet.
He has a master's degree in medieval studies, which is great.
He does a lot of videos where he takes photography and footage from other sources or stock sources that I presume he purchases or something and creates these videos that seem almost like Netflix specials about the You know, the history of English paganism or the Druids, etc.
That's all fine.
I remember watching his video on the sky god and Zeus, Deos, etc.
It was informative, if a bit Wikipedian, I must say.
I don't understand how he is not- Yeah, he's a book reporter.
He's a book reporter.
Yes.
It's a book report nationalism.
I don't understand how he's not an intranet person or he's somehow more important and can't bring himself to mention our names.
I mean, I think it's safe to say that he's clearly addressing this at Mark and myself, or maybe, I don't know, also the broader kind of people on Twitter who- Are associating themselves with Apolloism, etc.
But I'll start out with that.
I've never been hostile towards him.
I've never said an unkind word towards him before this.
But he obviously feels very threatened if something is ridiculous or something like that.
It's just a bunch of Americans.
Coming up with some weird cults about a gay person who they think is Northern European.
That's obviously maybe some kernels of the making up a new religion.
I think that's something we might want to dilate on.
But it's obviously a mischaracterization.
So why are you saying it?
I mean, Tom surely is intelligent enough to know that he's mischaracterizing us.
So why are you saying this?
The other curious thing, and I'll just add this in to Tom, because Granted, I might be doing a little concern trolling myself, but I think he's moved away from this.
I did a brief look through just Google searches and so on about the colleagues he's working with, but he seems to have had a connection with Greg Johnson, and I think he's moved away from it.
Over the past two years, I don't see them collaborating too much.
But I would remind him that, you know, homophobia is not tolerated among gay Nazi groups, you know, like Gray Johnson.
So I would tread lightly, Tom.
You don't want to lose those associations with all these wonderful people.
But yeah, homophobia is not tolerated.
Like making little snipes like this and not even daring to mention us by name.
I mean, this kid also, so here's the origin of this conflict, if you can call it that.
Tom read some article of mine, and this was around the time, it was a while ago, right?
And you're better with dates than I am, Richard, so you can fill in the blanks here.
So we had that debate.
It was more of just a kind of friendly discussion with Stephen McNallan, who's the leaked Odinist.
Not only in North America, but probably the world.
He is knowledgeable in Norse mythology.
We had a friendly discussion with him, and I put forth my thesis, which I don't think has effectively been refuted.
I actually think that the thesis has...
I think that he's actually kind of...
Because I think that he may have reacted to that because we were watching a video.
And it seems that he's now taking a cynical view of Snorri Strolson, right?
He's kind of like, Snorri Strolson should not really be representative of North Smith now, right?
Well, Snorri Strolson...
Is where we get all our information about Norse myth.
He's a primary text of Norse myth.
Emerging, you know, Snorri Strolson was himself a Christian merchant.
I think it's probable or possible, at least, that he was a crypto-Jew.
If you read, you know, and, you know, in Norse mythology itself is a kind of brilliant mythology that I think that was probably invented by Jews, right?
I mean, that's my thesis.
And I think, and I have a number of reasons to back that up.
The mythology itself seems to be referential both to the Hebrew Bible and to the New Testament, right?
So, for example, with Leviathan, we see the equivalent with the Midgard serpent.
They're both kind of slain in Ragnarok.
We see Balder, who's recognized by mythographers as being kind of a reference either to Adonis or Jesus.
He dies and his death brings about this apocalypse, and then he appears at the end of the apocalypse.
And after all the gods have died, i.e.
paganism has died, and now the world is ruled by this one Christ-like figure named Balder.
You know, there's a garden of Aiden, or rather there's a character, a goddess named Aiden, who is a goddess of golden apples, right?
And mythographers recognize this as probably being a reference to the Garden of Eden.
You know, Hebrew is discussed in the preface of Snorri Strolson's opus, which is the foundation of Norse mythology, the prosetta, right?
So my thesis is a strong one, and it's the most plausible explanation for that myth body.
Now, he says that I have no evidence for it, but there is actually no rebuttal.
I mean, I'm unaware of him, like, critiquing my specific arguments on this point, you know.
You know, but it's a composite myth, so it's a derivative of earlier myth bodies, including the Hebrew Bible, but also including Norse mythology.
You know, it's a kind of characteristic work of Jem, I would argue, right?
And one of the reasons it...
Doesn't seem like Aryans should be following it is because the god Odin is an equivalent, has long been recognized, even through the medieval period, as equivalent to Mercury, right?
He's the kind of proto-Jewish god, essentially.
He's a deceiver.
He's a psychopomp.
He brings them to Valhalla.
He has similarities to Jesus as well.
He hangs on a tree.
And if you look at the Greek in the New Testament, the cross is also described as a tree.
So this is a reference.
And this shit is young.
It's relatively young.
The first fixed rune stone in Northern Europe is like 300 AD.
So the influence is coming from Christianity, the Hebrew Bible.
There's other influences there as well, but it's a kind of skilled work of symbolism.
It's a symbol-wise I think that's absurd, right?
I mean, I think that I think that there's gem also in the Greco-Roman myth body as well, right?
Yes.
We're talking about a symbol-wise people, an intelligent symbol-wise people that are certainly more literate.
And able to create something like this than illiterate Viking barbarians, right?
So this, I argue, is the origin of the myth body.
And I think that the claim, I think it's the most plausible.
And I'm not going to kind of dilate fully and give my full thesis here, but that's the kind of general thesis, right?
Yeah, well, let me jump in here.
I mean, because we don't know, and there's not going to be...
I doubt it ever any kind of smoking gun evidence of a claim that Odinism or Germanic paganism is a kind of Christianized or Judaized myth form.
There's not going to be smoking gun evidence.
The way you can establish the truth...
What would be the requirement for that?
Well, some letter...
Would we need a time machine or...
A time machine or some diary entry of, "Oh, I've really fooled them this time.
They don't know I'm Jewish and that they're worshiping Mercury.
Ha ha ha." I mean, obviously nothing like that is going to be found.
And so you can use...
Well, he's explicitly identified with Mercury.
Now, the question then becomes...
Tacitus said that the Germans are worshipping Mercury.
He was writing for a Roman audience.
And Hercules, right?
And Hercules, yeah.
Yeah.
And also, you can see this in the...
I mean, this is a very simple example of this, but you can see this in the days of the week.
In French, Mercredi is our Wednesday.
That's obviously...
It's Mercury's Day.
Our day is Wednesday, and it's a little bit difficult to see it, but that actually is Odin's day or Wotan's day.
So you can see just through something like the days of the week, there's this interpretation and connection between Odin and Mercury.
I think there's probably some interesting connection between Odin and Bacchus in terms of a god of frenzy and madness as well.
You know, that's by and by.
But I mean, this is the way that you can make, engage in informed speculation about the past.
And you can understand that these things are parabolic and that they aren't like historical documents.
I mean, we can look at Jesus Christ and see very clear parallels that he is a figure coming out of the Hebrew Bible.
Isaiah and Daniel...
Especially, but all over the Hebrew Bible.
He's also related to David, as the genealogy in Matthew and Luke, I think, say.
So he's coming out of that text.
And then you can also look at his deeds and the way he is depicted and begin associating him with other gods.
It's a God who turns water into wine.
It's a God who descends into hell and rises again.
Is he connected on the first case with...
A god like Bacchus.
Might there be an Adonis or dying and rising god quality to him of, you know, Adonis who's, you know, beloved by Aphrodite and he has to die and descend, go into the underworld and visit Persephone for a while and they have a love affair and then he comes back again.
So there's a kind of cyclical and seasonal aspect.
You can see that myth repeated in...
The Gospels of Jesus Christ and just the image of Jesus Christ that we've inherited from Christianity.
So no, we can't know any of this for certain, but we can engage in a kind of mythic genealogy, so to speak, or a kind of informed speculation about where these things are coming from and their kind of evolution and change through connection.
What happens with pre-existing myths?
And you can also try to reach a kind of dating process of, you know, aspects of the Hebrew.
I mean, this is the most obvious one, but the flood narrative.
Is that a kind of spin on Gilgamesh, which is assuredly written and propagated centuries?
Before the Hebrew Bible.
Can you kind of then start to kind of date these things and see one as a kind of evolution or spinoff or critique even of earlier myths?
So these are the tools that we have at hand.
This is the material that we have at hand.
And this is how we can do things.
And he's also just, he's like, what I see from people like this is that They want to engage in some kind of rehearsal.
So we were listening to some other interviews by him.
And he's like, well, you know, as a young Catholic schoolboy, I was attracted to Greek myths and so on.
But, you know, I'm not Greek.
And so I have to, you know, dedicate myself to English paganism.
Germanic paganism, et cetera.
And it's kind of like, well, no, you don't actually.
You're just engaging in some sort of petty nationalism in this way.
Like I'm going to engage in the religion of my forefathers and not the Christian one, of course, but I'm going to go back to this one point that I've discovered and that's true.
And I'm going to engage in a kind of rehearsal of what they did.
That is entirely unnecessary.
Indeed, in Tom's own...
You know, YouTube, Wikipedian videos on the progress of Aryans throughout the ages.
You see evolution.
You see movement.
You see conquest and domination.
You see ethnic cleansing all over the place.
This is a people of movement and change and evolution.
And to fixate on one period in time and then think you're like authentic because you are obsessed with this one moment of our history and that you can't in a way be inspired by other moments or at least recognize that there's transition and change and creatively try to reach something that would resonate with people in the 21st century.
You just kind of Can't do that because it's not authentic.
I mean, I'm just going to be frank.
This reminds me of, like, goofy, dumb Civil War reenactors.
Or just, like, these goofballs who want to, like, cling to tradition in an antiquarian fashion.
And in the words of Nietzsche, they want to, they think of history as a way of smelling the furniture of the past.
If he wants to do that, and if he wants to engage in, I don't know, some Druid worship or Odinism, knock yourself out.
I don't really have a problem with that, but let's recognize it for what it is.
You know next to nothing about what you are practicing.
And again, he is a practicing pagan, so I'm not like...
You know, insulting him by claiming that he's just going out in the woods and, you know, running around the fire and listening to black metal.
He is criticizing us.
He's a practicing pagan.
You have no earthly idea what actual practices were.
You can only use and form speculation.
And you're kind of fixating on this thing as a kind of new mystery cult.
It's like, you don't know what this is about.
You don't know what they're doing.
You're just rehearsing it and reiterating it without actually critically evaluating it.
Or, oh, heaven forbid, creatively attempting to generate a religion that is actually relevant.
For people living in the 21st century, as opposed to goofballs who want to, you know, reinvent the Middle Ages or God knows what.
All right.
End of rant.
Yeah.
I mean, he's criticizing us essentially for not being a cargo call, right?
And he doesn't have familiarity with us.
So if we happen to misrepresent him, he's misrepresented us.
And based on a lack of familiarity, it would seem.
Nowhere do we state or do we aspire to be recreating the Apollo cult in some perfect manner.
I mean, we're actually critical of a lot of the myths and rituals, right?
And we're looking at them in a kind of critical manner to sort of decipher what their significance is.
And so we're not just going to kind of blindly sort of follow the rituals of ancients, you know, in some of these mystery cults, because we want to know what the significance of these symbols are and what they mean and what they signify in their sort of psychic and spiritual power.
You know, symbolically, is it actually...
You know, something that is healthy for us to be making this ritualistic gesture, for example.
Or, you know, we want to understand the symbols, right?
So this is a work of deconstruction to some extent, a work of analysis, and then eventually a work of construction based on...
You know, an agreed-upon knowledge of symbols.
So that's more our project.
We're not just hoping to kind of like, you know, LARP, basically, as, you know, people at the Temple of Delphi, you know, thousands of years ago.
In rituals that actually can't be recreated because there's not enough information really to kind of piece them together in a completely accurate manner.
I mean, they can be roughly sort of recreated, but then we have to wonder, well, what do these symbols represent?
What does this symbolism represent?
Are we interested in recreating it?
What is it saying?
And I think that it can.
These symbols can be understood.
And for example, I think that Jews are a symbol-wise group, and I think that they understand their religion.
You know, it might be mysterious to us, but I think that they, you know, not all Jews, of course, understand their religion, and probably the majority of Jews don't understand their religion.
But I think that there is a kind of core of knowers, Gnostics, whatever term you want to use, who understand their religion.
And if you're going to practice religion, you should understand your religion.
So that's more of our project.
And he's ignorant of what our project is.
And, you know, the guy's claiming he's...
I mean, his critique is so primitive and stupid.
I just don't even really know where to begin.
He's saying that, you know, we're Americans so that we shouldn't be practicing, you know, a Mediterranean religion, for example.
But he says in the same critique that it's, well, it may have started in Anatolia, right?
I don't know if that's accurate, but if it started in Anatolia, it was Indo-European or it was Aryan, whatever term.
Now he's getting fussy about this term Aryan, right?
Which is a completely valid and legitimate term.
Though I think actually the better term is Apollonian.
I would advocate for the term Apollonian.
But I think it's certainly a kind of sufficient term, and it describes what we're getting at.
And it is a racial characterization of Apollo.
Apollo is a blonde god, a Hyperborean god, a northern invader.
He's described very clearly in physical terms as an Aryan figure, a northern descended Hyperborean.
More clearly, Than any of the gods in the Norse myth, right?
I mean, again, Odin appears to be a kind of Semitic figure.
Thor as well, I would say, is a Semitic figure.
And I would say that the myth genealogy there, he derives ultimately from an Idean cult.
On Crete, most likely, as a dactyl there named Hercules, who will then become the familiar Hercules, who is the hero wearing the club.
He starts off as a smithforged dwarf of sorts, an attendant of Vulcan, so an equivalent to Vulcan.
And this accounts for the hammer that Thor will have later in the midst of the Norse mythology.
And this transition, you know, this kind of this transition from Hercules worship.
Thor worship happens during the migration period, where we see the clubs of Hercules being replaced by the hammers of Thor.
It happens during a period of Christianization, actually, in fact.
I make the argument that the Norse myth may represent a kind of Christian rock, a way of...
Getting, you know, a kind of more badass myth to kind of indoctrinate these barbarians in a kind of more subliminal fashion toward Christianity.
Christian rock is a really good...
Yeah, you know, I mean, that's a kind of theory as to, you know, why this developed, why this exists, you know what I mean?
So it becomes a way of, like, you know, getting them comfortable with a hanging God, essentially, which is what Christ is, right?
So in the idea that...
Odin as a hanging god predates Jesus.
It's just ridiculous.
I mean, it's just like a cope.
It's just a cope.
You know what I mean?
And it's like, you know, and honestly, you know, we're all descended from barbarians.
You know, even Jews, of course, at some point are descended from barbarians.
But they're a more urban people.
And they've been urban people for a longer period of time.
And they're myth bearers.
And they're kind of skilled at the development of parable and the use of symbol.
I mean, you just got to give them credit.
You know what I mean?
And so this is most likely what's occurring with this myth body.
And, you know, I don't know.
I guess the guy has now backed off Snorri Strelson, right?
So I don't know if he's still promoting Thor or not.
I don't know what the guy's doing.
I think he's retreated into, like, studying the most primitive manifestation of these sort of proto-Indo-Europeans or these proto-Aryans.
And so he's studying...
You know, our ancestors at their kind of most primitive point, which is interesting from a kind of archaeological perspective.
I mean, if the guy, you know, didn't want to fuck with me ever, then that would be fine.
I think the guy can...
Yeah, we don't have a problem with any of that.
Yeah, that's cool.
You know, that stuff's interesting, but it's like if you're presenting that as a kind of ideal that we should revert to like...
You know, step tribes, these barbaric step tribes or whatever, that we should just go for drug mode.
I mean, is that, you know, and this is something that Nietzsche warned against, this idea of Vikingism is what he called it.
But he's, yeah, he seems to be promoting a kind of primitivism or barbarianism, which is just grug, dumb.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
That's my sense of it.
Yeah.
You know, so...
He's saying Apollo's from Anatolia.
You know, who knows?
That may be the case.
No one really knows.
He's an Arian figure, as I've already described, and certainly in the Greco-Roman context as he develops his figure, Apollo.
But there are earlier precedents in Sumerian myth, for example.
We have Shemash, who's a sun god.
His name actually is still in the Hebrew, right?
It's the word for sun in the Hebrew.
He's in early form.
He's a kind of proto-Apollo.
He's got the chariot.
Whole deal, right?
But certainly as he develops, and there as well, I would argue, as well, but he develops into a kind of Aryan figure.
He was equated by Herodotus with Ra and Horus and these sun gods.
He has a solar aspect to him.
He's an Aryan figure.
But yeah, so the idea that we're in America, so yeah, let's say he was from Anatolia, but then he ended up in Greece, and he ended up in Rome, and then he was worshipped in different forms by the gulls, and by the Germans, right?
So it seems like the god got around.
He was moving around.
Religions are also portable, of course.
I mean, there are Christians in America, but, you know, Jesus was in ancient Jerusalem and Galilee.
So how does that work?
I mean, shouldn't only people that live in Galilee— Because we're American, should we embrace Native American spirituality or something?
Yeah, I mean, the guy is just not coherent, basically.
I mean, he's kind of mindless.
I mean, you know, he acts kind of pretentious and like he's a badass, but he's kind of dumb.
I mean, his critique is very dumb.
If I'm being honest, you know?
And I think that he's getting irritated by us because people are saying, oh, Brahmin's got some interesting ideas.
What do you think?
And they're spamming the guy's chat or something.
So now the guy's getting pissed off.
You know what I mean?
Good.
Yeah.
We're here to stay.
We're going to take over, dude.
Sorry.
And the other thing, his other critique about...
Apollo being homosexual, gay.
Because, you know, a lot of the grugs that follow his content that are like, yeah, we should return to being step idiots or whatever.
So those people, you know, who are interested in these pre-civilizational religions for which we have almost no knowledge, right?
You know, forget about reconstructing Rome and Greece, where there were actual civilizations, where people built temples that we still have today.
And they weren't just like, you know, I mean, I don't want to go to, like, E. Michael Jones here, but, you know, it was relatively primitive barbaric conditions in Northern Europe at that point, right?
You know, and he's, it seems like he wants to kind of veer more in that direction, where, and I think, again, he's moved off the Norse stuff, or at least Snorri Strollson, which is, you know, the Bible.
It's the source.
It's the main source of that stuff.
So he's moved off that, and now he's talking about, you know, these, basically these carvings and tombs of solar wheels, and like, so now he's, I mean, at least he's kind of like, You know, so all our takes are picked up at some point by other people in the DR. They eventually come to us, right?
So he's leaning into the solar cult now.
And, yeah, you know, but it's primitive.
And there are not people that are civilizational, you know, civilizational people.
So they're not kind of imitable people.
You know, unless you're one of these kind of DR, like, collapsitarians and think that we should, like...
You know, move out into the woods and abandon the political struggle, this sort of thing.
You know, that might be your position.
But it is a grug-level position.
And, you know, and it's not, you know, in religion, you know, we look at Christianity, for example.
Christianity clearly had a kind of religio-political goal.
Ultimately, as does Judaism.
And it manifested it as something powerful in the world.
And that seems like a good goal for religion, to be power-seeking, to be involved in civilization and the construction of civilization and culture, and to work towards the amelioration and survival of positive forms of culture and civilization.
That should be the goal of religion.
It shouldn't be just retreating out into the woods and getting a bunch of grugs psyched about some caveman carvings.
It is true.
We are not alike, Tom, you and I. We're not alike.
But to address the homosexual question, right, because this is the thing that this is his real, like, gotcha.
Oh, Tom, were there gay guys in Greece?
Come on, dude.
No, there weren't gay guys in Greece.
That's impossible.
Yeah, we were aware that there were homosexuals in Greece, and we were aware that there is a kind of pederasty, there was a cult of pederasty in Greece as well that had an origin, especially in Crete.
And also Thebes.
And we don't consider that origin to be Arian, to be gentle about it.
And so, and that represents a kind of period of time in Greek history, and that there was a pre-period when that wasn't practiced.
But we look at some of the myths, some of the myths which appear to have a kind of Semitic inflection or influence, including Homer.
Right?
Including the Homeric hymns.
There's messaging in there that essentially fits Jem.
You know, this is the kind of cleverness and intelligence of these, what we would call proto-Jews, I think, at that point.
So they're involved early on in the development of Greek culture.
Now, at what point, you know, are they there at the formation of, for example, the cult of Apollo or the cult of Zeus?
You know, it's possible, certainly.
Or do these represent kind of corruptions of an earlier development?
That's also possible.
I mean, certainly what we do see there in the cult of Zeus and Apollo is that we see that Earth Mother Gods and Thonic Serpent Gods are overthrown for figures that represent Arians, essentially, that have, you know, there are sky gods, celestial eye gods.
Celestial sky gods that represent Arians.
And that is clear.
Apollo being one of them.
So the cultic Pateresti, it is something that develops in Greece, of course.
But, you know, these things actually develop when you have a civilization, when you actually have power in the world.
You do develop these kind of decadent aspects of your civilization over a period of time.
There's also something called civilizational decline where these things develop.
You know, these kind of maladies, you could argue, right?
So, I mean, you know, think before you talk, dude.
Because the other thing, too, I would say about you, Tom, is that, Tom, you know, you came in and attacked my argument, and I said, okay, cool, let's get on a stream and have a friendly, cordial discussion of this.
You fled.
You fled, right?
Tell your barbarian brothers that, dude.
▲
Export Selection