Россия, Украина и мир-VI: аспекты императивной девестернизации российского образования
Discussion with an astute Russian reader
Обсуждение с проницательным русским читателем
Contents
I. Introduction
II. How Western Europeans westernized Russians for 300 years
III. Unreliable Wikipedia
IV. Reading texts & reading in-between the lines of texts
V. Rejection of the fallacy of Hellenism: starting point of every effort of De-Westernization
VI. Why Shakespeare and the Western European Theater must be removed from the Russian, Chinese, Indian, African, Muslim and Latin American Education
VII. Shakespeare’s black magic trickery against the concept of Messiah, and his vicious hatred of Eschatology and Revelation
Содержание
I. Введение
II. Как западноевропейцы вестернизировали русских за 300 лет
III. Ненадежная Википедия
IV. Чтение текстов и чтение между строк текста
V. Опровержение заблуждения эллинизма: отправная точка всех усилий по девестернизации
VI. Почему Шекспира и западноевропейский театр надо убрать из русского, китайского, индийского, африканского, мусульманского и латиноамериканского образования
VII. Шекспир и его черная магия против концепции Мессии и его яростная ненависть к эсхатологии и Откровению
My articles about the Russia – Ukraine conflict generated vivid reactions from many readers and several among them wrote to me in order to ask about several topics or comment on my approach and description. A long correspondence ensued, and at times it helped me better feel how readers perceive different issues and understand my criticism of several practices or developments.
I. Introduction
Numerous recent speeches given or articles and books published by leading statesmen like Xi Jinping, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Vladimir Putin, Wang Yi, Dmitri Medvedev, Narendra Modi, and many others underscore the need to establish a new, multipolar world order and thus take mankind to the next stage of comprehensive, multilateral development and progress. An important part of this discourse is dedicated to the need of de-Westernization or de-Occidentalization. The topic is being now discussed in the foremost venues of the BRICS member states and in other international bodies. I herewith mention as examples the Valdai Discussion Club (est. 2004) and the Valdai Club Foundation (est. 2011), which manages the Club’s projects.
In his article “A New Era of De-Westernization Has Begun” (6 January 2023), Valdai Club expert Wang Wen made it clear that “the political equivalence structure between the West and the non-West is increasingly strengthened and is becoming an important feature of world politics in the third decade of the 21st century. Of course, the world in 2023 will not be mellow, but in any case, amid the “de-Westernization”, major changes unseen in a century will continue to evolve in an irreversible way, writes”. https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/a-new-era-of-de-westernization/
Although the need for de-Westernization is evident and highly acclaimed across Asia, Africa, Latin and -notably- Eastern Europe, it is not quite sure that all people mean the same connotation when using this term. I don’t suggest that there are opposite approaches to this issue, but many people still fail to fathom the depth and the width of the de-Westernization that is needed for nations across the Earth to finally achieve national identity, cultural integrity, political independence, and economic self-determination. Many people limit unconsciously their approach and efforts within politics; but there a major danger is lurking.
Does it really matter whether all the countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe are politically, militarily, economically and financially independent from the block of the Western European and North American states that colonized (and, in the process, Westernized) almost all the other nations of the world?
I would even ask the following:
Does it really matter whether all the countries of Western Europe and North America collapse and disappear from the surface of the Earth?
With the former colonizers dissolved and with Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe politically, militarily, economically and financially de-Westernized, still all these countries will indeed be inhabited by mere ‘copies’ of Western citizens and Westernized automatons or homunculi, if the de-Westernization effort fails to be as deep and as wide needed at the levels of academic and intellectual life, scientific research, education, socio-behavioral system, culture, mentality, and even religion and spirituality. This is so, because a Muslim incorporated into or accommodated within the Western system of values, principles, concepts and worldview will de facto function as a non-Muslim either he fasts, prays and has no extramarital relations.
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What is De-Occidentalization for Russia, Asia, Africa and Latin America?
In your school, you learn about the Kurukshetra battle (Mahabharata) – and not about the insignificant battle of Thermopylae
In your school, you learn about Gan Bao’s Soushen Ji (here in a Ming copy ca. 1550), which is a compendium of legends and narratives concerning the spiritual universe that was first written around the middle of the 4th c. CE – and not about Seneca’s Hercules furens (Mad Hercules)
In your school, you learn about the Annals of Ramses III and the narratives about his victories over the Sea Peoples that determined the World History – and not about the absurd lies that the Carian (non-Greek) traveler Herodotus wrote about the unimportant wars between a few Ancient Greek states and the invading armies of the Iranian Emperor Darius
In your school, you learn about Enuma Elish, the Assyrian-Babylonian Epic of Creation (four tablets in cuneiform in the upper picture), and Atrahasis (also known as Ut Napishtim), the archetypal, Mesopotamian Noah, whose epic (see one part in the lower picture) is at the origin of all later Biblical and Islamic traditions – and not about Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey or Virgil’s Aeneid
In your school, you learn about Kartir, the great Zoroastrian reformer and founder of Mazdeism (the Sassanid times’ reformulation of the Zoroastrian faith), imperial high priest, theoretician and mystic whose Celestial Voyage antedates that of prophet Muhammad (Mi’raj) – and not about the petty philosophers of Ancient Ionia, Macedonia, Thrace and Greece, who proved to be unable to fathom the spiritual universe in its true dimensions
In your school, you learn about the eschatological Hittite Epic of Ullikummi – and not about the racist anti-Macedonian discourses of the Athenian demagogue Demosthenes
In your school, you learn about the Ashoka edict (on the Delhi-Topra pillar) – and not about Thucydides’ worthless narrative concerning the incessant wars among the petty kings and politicians of the tiny cities-states of Ancient Greece
In your school, you learn about the Ancient Egyptian Holy Book Amduat that details events taking place in the Hereafter – and not about Julius Caesar’s boring historical description about how Romans killed one another, before massacring the inhabitants of Gaul
In your school, you learn about the Ancient Egyptian Expedition to Punt (Somalia) that was undertaken (ca. 1475 BCE) by Admiral Nehesy and the Imperial Fleet of Pharaoh Hatshepsut and became the object of a long narrative (texts and reliefs) inscribed on the walls of the first female pharaoh’s mortuary temple at Deir el Bahari, Luxor West – and not about the wrong stories of Diodorus of Sicily or Arrian’s description of Alexander’s military campaign
In your school, you learn about the Chinese Dunhuang Star map, the first known star chart (ca. 700 CE) from China, which contains the data collected from the three different schools of Astronomy that existed there – and not about Pausanias’ Description of Greece that has very limited value.
In your school, you learn about the Vendidad, which is the part of the Iranian Holy Book of Avesta that contains fragments from the discussion between Ahura Mazda and Zardosht (Zoroaster) concerning possible ways for humans to confound spirits and demons – and not Ancient Greek mythology where the Divine World is desecrated by Ancient Greeks’ fake and idiotic gods that were poorly conceptualized after sinful human behaviors and examples
In your school, you learn about the Dhammapada (collection of Buddha’s admonitions; here written in Gandhari language and Kharosthi writing) – and not about the verbose, worthless writings and the absurd scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas that constitute a major reason for the collapse of religiosity in the Western world
In your school, you learn about the Manichaean Evangelion (here as it is in the Cologne Mani-Codex), which was one of the seven holy books of the Manichaeans, who spread from NW Africa and Western Europe to North Africa to China – and not about Dante and his heinous Divine Comedy
In your school, you learn about the greatest historian of Islamic times Tabari (9th – 10th c. CE) and his History of Prophets and Kings (here portrayed in a miniature of the historical Farsi translation of his monumental opus by Amirak Bal’ami) – and not about Edward Gibbon, an 18th c. English historian, who wrote only to distort, adapt Roman History to English colonial interests, and propagate concepts of white supremacism and racism
In your school, you learn about the greatest epic poet of Islamic times Ferdowsi (10 th c.) and his majestic Shahnameh (‘Book of Kings’) that was called ‘the Iranian Quran'(here a book cover with a miniature from the Shahnameh especially handwritten and decorated for Shah Tahmasp in the 16th c.) – and not about 17th c. French Classicist Theater
In your school, you learn about the great innovations and inventions brought about by the great Turanian scholar Al Farabi (9th-10th c.), who established a groundbreaking Zodiac chart (left) and conceived an eight string ‘ud/lute (right) – and not the fallacious calculations of Nicholas Copernicus.
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II. How Western Europeans westernized Russians for 300 years
Russia is an excellent paradigm in this regard; as land, it was never colonized by any Western colonial country. Yet, today, Russia is extensively westernized and must be systematically and effectively de-Westernized. The discussion I had with an astute Russian reader sheds light on the innumerable niches of the de-Westernization (or detoxification or decontamination). I therefore publish it in its largest part.
– English Translation of a Comment Made by a Russian Reader –
Hello dear Shamsuddin.
I read your articles with numbers “IV” and “V” (while waiting for public transport and on the road). Be careful when referring to information from Wikipedia in your articles! I say this because this site regularly misrepresents information about my country.
Your article with the number “V” reminded me of the book by the Russian philosopher Povarnin “How to read books” and the American writer Adler “How to read the book”. After getting acquainted with these books, I realized that before my attitude to books was like to fast food: “quick breakfast / lunch”. And that I didn’t read a single book “correctly”.
After reading article “IV”, where you described Ancient Greece not as a State, but simply as a group of different people, I now can’t wait for you to read the book I recommended. They also show the “inconvenient” truth about Ancient Greece.
At the end of the article, I was struck by your idea of abolishing Shakespeare in school. I agree with this only if you meant that when you are young you cannot understand great works. To do this, you need to be older and so that life will harden you a little.
Last question.
There are authors who are unknown in Russia, or only one book out of many books of each of them has been translated. Could you evaluate which of these authors are “harmful” to the Russian public, and which should be known?
Sincerely,
Fedor.
————— My Response —————–
Dear Fedor,
Thank you for your points that will certainly empower me to better present my approach and to describe several hitherto undiscussed topics!
Reading and writing in transportation means, with or without a laptop (I never had and I will never have a smart telephone), has been for me a time-honored tradition; it involves trains, boats, ferryboats, airplanes, interurban buses, metro, trolleybuses, and buses. Also: taxis and private cars (of friends)!
As it happens with every series of articles, the complete idea about my approach you would get reading all of my five hitherto published articles about Russia, Ukraine and the world. My recent article-proposal for a new UN organization belongs -in a way- to this series, which is -never forget it!- ongoing. All the same, articles IV and V are quite representative; in the former, I expand on spiritual topics {because there is spiritual dimension in this conflict/the difference between Earth and Sea viewed as primordial elements of the Creation (in forming people and societies opposite to one another: ‘continental’ and ‘maritime’)}, whereas in the latter, I focus on educational issues and I expand on how to perceive History of Northern Asia and Northeastern Europe as History of Russia.
Now that you read article no V, you can easily read article no II, which is an entire repositioning of the History of Russia; this means that article no II serves as the foundation for article no IV. In it, I expand more on the long and wide historical continuity that you must focus on, instead of minimizing Russia’s history to an ethnic narrative of ‘Slavic’ tribes that accepted Christianity in Kievan Rus. Your History, the History of all Russians, is far larger than that; Western linguists, Slavologists and historians did their best to limit your view of your past and to make you see it as a ‘racial history’ (or an ‘ethnic history’ if you want) only to your disadvantage. History is not a narrative of ethnic groups and races, but a description of cultures and civilizations.
By making you focus on a limited past and by dragging you in a way that you use the racial-racist approach to your past (that they invented for others – haha! but not for themselves!!), they subtly bring you to a frontal clash with Turanian (Turkic) nations and with Muslims; this will be disastrous for Russia and for the entire world.
You must understand (and I don’t speak personally but generally for all Russians, your government included) that, for the evil Western forces, ‘politics’ starts with History, continues with Education, advances with Culture, and ends up with Political Philosophy and Ideology, which forms the context of what people call now ‘politics’, but in reality is ‘governance’.
What is called today ‘Western world’ is a fallacy that started with Renaissance and the early colonial empires, namely Spain and Portugal, but when it comes to the way modern countries are governed, the two Iberian kingdoms are obsolete forms of state that are closer to Ivan IV’s Muscovy, to the Eastern Roman Empire or even to Sassanid Iran. The structure of contemporary states originates from end of 17th c. Holland and post-Cromwell England. In this evil form of tyranny, everything is utilized in (i.e. distorted in order to be fit to) politics.
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Muscovy, a Christian-Muslim, Russian-Tatar, Asiatic City
The Conquest of Siberia by Yermak; painting by Vasily Surikov. In the 19th c., despite their advanced cultural-educational Westernization, Russian painters like Surikov reproduced a totally non-Western ‘image’ of 16th c. Muscovy and Russia.The Russian Soul is this.
The Siege of Kazan; painting by Vladimir Stepanovich Bodrov
‘Battle’ of the Ugra, 1480; from 16th c. miniature – The ‘battle’ took place because Ivan III did not want to pay tribute to the Great Horde; Ahmad Khan bin Küchük led the Tatar forces. It is a critical and quite odd historical moment, because the two armies stood on the opposite banks of the river and, in spite of tricks and threats, no battle was fought, and at the end, the two armies withdrew. It is not correct to consider this date as the beginning of Muscovite independence, because the Muscovites continued being vassal to the Tatars of Crimea. The overall situation was far more complicated, because Poland sided with the Tatars of Sarai, whereas Ivan III was supported by the Khan of Crimea; even more so, because the Great Khan was later killed by the Khan of Siberia and his Nogay Turanian allies.
Muscovy at the time of Ivan Kalita (early 14th c.), painting by Apollinary Vasnetsov (19th c.): apparently an Asiatic town that had nothing to do with Western European norms.
At a time of advanced Westernization, the famous Russian painter Apollinary Vasnetsov (1856-1933) felt the need to represent, based historical accounts, ‘Muscovy at the time of Ivan III’, thus fully revealing the entirely Oriental and Asiatic nature of his fatherland.
‘The Last Minutes of Metropolitan Philip’ painted by Aleksandr Nikanorovich Novokoltsev (1853-1919) in 1889 was the way the illustrious Russian painter evoked the awaken in the 15th c. Muscovite spirituality that had gone extinct in late 19th c. Imperial Russia due to the multi-layered and advanced Westernization; the painting also reflected the wrongdoings of Ivan IV the Terrible, who ordered the assassination of Philip II (1507-1569) because the thirteenth (13th) Metropolitan of Muscovy (1567-1568) rejected to bless him due to the Oprichnina system of persecution against the boyars (the wealthy and powerful landlords).
‘Ivan the Terrible and Associates’ painted in 1903 by Andrey Ryabushkin (1861-1904): there was nothing Western in Ivan IV.
Andrey Ryabushkin’s ‘Wedding train in 17th c. Moscow’ (1901) demonstrates that Russia was an culturally Asiatic realm.
‘Streltsy’ (the accent being on the last syllable / ‘Стрельцы’: infantry carrying firearms) painted in 1907 by Sergey Vasilievich Ivanov (1864-1910): one more evidence that the Westernized Russian elites of the beginning of the 20th c. felt an inexorable nostalgia for their totally non-Western past and heritage (Streltsy existed as military units from the mid-16th to the 18th c.)
‘The Morning of the Streltsy Execution’ painting (1881) by Vasily Ivanovich Surikov (1848-1916) helped spectators recall a critical historical event that took place in 1698, when Russia had almost no Western cultural or imperial attribute: the great uprising of the glorious military unit, which was due to the fact that the Streltsy rejected the vicious project of Westernization that Peter I wanted to introduce and the disastrous (because uncontrolled) presence of foreign (Western) advisers. Quite indicatively, an English soldier, Patrick Leopold Gordon of Auchleuchries (1635-1699) commanded the army that killed the genuine Russian officers in battle. All those, who were not killed in the Battle of Voskresensky (Resurrection) Monastery, which is also known as New Jerusalem Monastery, were executed in Moscow (between September 1698 and February 1699): more than 1000 noble soldiers – early victims of Westernization.
If you think that you can oppose, England, France and the Western world at the ‘political’ level, you are deceived and you will fail, because it was ‘politics’ to their elites
a. how to Occidentalize / Westernize Peter I;
b. how to progressively detach the executive of the Russian Empire from the Eastern Roman (falsely called ‘Byzantine’) imperial tradition and to drag it to sheer imitation of the Western pseudo-kingdoms;
c. how to corrupt the Russian elites by initiating them to various orders particular to the Freemasons, the Jesuits, and even the Zionists;
d. how to attach the Russian academic and intellectual elites to the fallacies of Renaissance, Classicism, Hellenism, Enlightenment, European Classical Music, and the Greco-Roman foundations of Modern European White Supremacism and Racism;
e. how to engulf Russians into Pan-Slavism in order to bring Russia in clash with Germany and Austria-Hungary;
f. how to ‘teach’ the Russian elites that ‘being Christian Orthodox’ meant ‘being anti-Muslim’ and thus engulf them in wars against the Iranians and the Ottomans; and
g. how to link Russia ‘historically-culturally’ with Classical Greece and Rome (which is wrong and disastrous) and how disconnect Russia ‘historically-culturally’ from Ancient Orient (Caucasus, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Syria-Palestine, Iran, Central Asia, China and Indus River Valley), which is also erroneous and calamitous.
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The Westernized Russian elites and their non-Russian venues
Peterhof Palace, St. Petersburg: Peter I’s ‘response’ to Louis XIV’s Versailles. All the same, this conventional approach is an oxymoron indeed, because in reality, the monumental palace was a ‘French’ (not ‘Russian’) response to something French!
Peterhof Palace, the main staircase
Peterhof Palace, the main staircase
The Greek Hall of Pavlovsk Palace
State Bedroom at Pavlovsk Palace
This is the Freemasonic ‘chapel’ in the Catherine Palace, St. Petersburg; the quasi-totality of her empire’s Christian Orthodox population would not find it proper to pray there. Along with Westernization in Architecture, Art and Religion comes the historical falsification that took the form of the Occidentalization of Russian History. Leading example in this regard is Nikolay Karamzin (Николай Михайлович Карамзин; 1766-1826) who wrote his 12-volume History of the Russian State (История государства Российского) only to break with the earlier Russian historiographical tradition that was exemplified by Vasily Tatishchev (1686-1750). Both distinguished Russian historians are described as proponents of autocracy, but this is very erroneous; actually, it looks like a deliberate effort to confuse specialists and average readers. Karamzin’s advanced Westernization made him write after French prose style and his exposure to Occidental post-Renaissance concepts made him introduce alien and corrupt elements (like Hellenism), insult Ivan IV Terribl,e and slander the true Russian identity – only to the benefit of the dark forces that incessantly promoted Russia’s rapid Westernization. What went wrong with Karamzin? This is easy to answer: in 1789, he traveled to Germany, France, Switzerland and England. This was an enormous mistake. He should have traveled to the Ottoman Empire, Qajar Iran, Mughal India, and Qing China instead.
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III. Unreliable Wikipedia
You mention the Wikipedia, the encyclopedia of sophisticated distortion, alteration, historical falsification, and adaptation of the historical truth to the ideological-political needs of the Western world’s ruling elites.
You misunderstood my attitude to constantly add numerous Wikipedia links to my articles.
I do not “refer to information from Wikipedia”; I only mention links to Wikipedia entries, so that my readers find them easily, go there, make their own search, check the notes, sources and bibliography, and thus have access to more specialized info that they may want, after reading some of my points.
As I do so quite often, in several articles I have already stated that I disagree with the contents of most of the Wikipedia entries that I mention. Now, your point makes me understand that I should perhaps prepare a 3-5 lines text about this issue, and copy / republish it in each and every one of my articles.
IV. Reading texts & reading in-between the lines of texts
“How to read books”! You raise an enormous topic.
Basically, you mean that one person must also read in-between the lines of a text.
That is very correct.
The real essence of the reality is never in the words of a text.
In fact, a word -in itself- is almost nothing.
Semantics is a field of ignorance and paranoia.
Ancient Greek philosophers’ opinions on these topics were childish and nonsensical; this was due to their low level of understanding the Ancient Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian and Iranian priests next to whom they studied for years.
Realities do not exist because humans exist; they exist on their own.
Only God knows the purpose of every element of the Creation, and the interminable possibilities that they have to amalgamate with one another. You can never know anything before duly identifying the composition of the elements that constituted it: Ether, Soft Waters, Earth, Air and Salt Waters.
Nothing is signified or denoted by a human; everything is signified per se – by itself. When someone speaks, describes and narrates about something, he only shows what he understood from a tiny part which belongs to a world created by the Almighty God. Our understanding is merely our revelation: what we reveal (and therefore represent to us and others) out of the infinite universe that God created. As God is invisible, the link of the tools that a speaker or narrator uses is invisible. Yet, without this link, all the words of a sentence are meaningless and can be re-arranged in a way so that they mean, reflect and describe other realities.
All the same, at this point, I should add that, in reality, language is not necessary for communication; it is only a low means of communication. Animals and even insects communicate with one another better than humans do. This fact deletes the stupidity of the idiots like Aristotle, and at the same time it demonstrates that longer we stick to rationalism and the Aristotelian thought, farther from the truth we will be and deeper into wars and misunderstanding we will be plunged.
A man, who has not awakened in the spiritual universe, can never have a clue of what exists in the material universe; this is so because nothing was created in the material universe without a counterpart (soul, spirit, etc.) in the spiritual universe. For this reason, the sciences of all the ancient Oriental nations were comprehensive systems of learning that combined spiritual and material research; ancient scholars never dissociated the spiritual aspect from its material complement of an item, point or issue. Consequently, every man reads a text differently from another, according to their progress in being re-connected with their soul.
Otherwise, one needs to stop in almost every line of a text and make questions about what he reads in order to extract further details and, above all, reach and grasp the deeper meaning of the text.
You are lucky that you realized this issue, namely that you had not read even one single book correctly, before you understood that this serious trouble was real. Most of the people do never reach that level. Even worse, in our days, there are many professors, specialists, experts, researchers and intellectuals who do not reach the point that you mention. They then project their mentality and knowledge, opinion and predilection onto the text that they read, and they don’t truly read the text that they have in front of their eyes, but an imaginative text that they create by failing to separate their personal delusion (i.e. their sick ego/I say ‘sick’ because ego is always so) from the true text that they supposedly read.
V. Rejection of the fallacy of Hellenism: starting point of every effort of De-Westernization
There is no ‘inconvenient truth’ about Ancient Greece. Your sentence is a minimal understatement.
In fact, there is a devastating truth, as documented by numerous sources, which simply deletes once forever the dreadful forgery ‘Ancient Greece’, which never existed.
Whereas Ivan IV and the Muscovites of his time knew the truth, i.e. knew nothing about Ancient Greece, you live within an enormous falsehood that had started being elaborated in Western Europe; thence it was diffused already in the last days of Tatar-Muslim prevalence in Russia. However, it took some time for this falsehood to be diffused outside Western Europe, which is the region where it was produced. The period of the diffusion of this enormous fallacy we call ‘colonialism’. Russia was never colonized at the military level, but even at the times of Romanov, it was colonized at many levels, namely political, economic, socio-behavioral, artistic, educational, academic and intellectual.
The Western European falsehood about Ancient Greece does not only involve distortion and misinterpretation of Ancient Greek and Latin sources, but it also includes systematic and extensive concealment of other historical sources. Now, this concealment is disproportionate, extraordinary and unprecedented. It starts with the Western scholars, who first explored Anatolia, North-Northwestern Africa, Egypt, Syria-Palestine, Mesopotamia, Iran, Caucasus, Central Asia, Sudan and Eastern Africa, Yemen, India, and China. These people, before traveling to explore, had studied all Ancient Greek and Latin texts about those lands, peoples, monuments, faiths and civilizations. As you can understand, these views and standpoints were external, irrelevant, erroneous and at times nonsensical. In fact, they did not consist in an authoritative source about those nations, empires and histories.
Herodotus’ and Plato’s descriptions of Iran and Egypt are ridiculous, idiotic and utterly valueless; they have the ‘value’ that an ignorant traveler’s idea has about a land that he has no skills, stamina and predisposition to duly study. The same is valid for other Ancient Greek travelers’ narratives about Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Iran, Anatolia, Egypt and other regions. Those guys did not know even the correct terms to describe the achievements and the traits of the great civilizations they wrote about, let alone the vast theoretical-spiritual background that these terms reflected.
Beyond that, there is an even more disastrous comparison: although there are -in Ancient Oriental sources- many references to the various and different nations that modern European scholars name “Ancient Greeks”, these passages are relatively few, brief and secondary because simply the Ancient Ionians, Aeolians, Achaeans and Dorians were not civilized enough to possibly attract the interest of the Hittites, the Assyrians, the Hurrians, the Babylonians, the Canaanites, the Egyptians and the Iranians. Ionia and Aeolia in Western Anatolia produced a civilization lower than that of the Phrygians and the Lydians who were better documented in Assyrian cuneiform sources. Even more importantly, Greece, i.e. the most confined part of the Balkan Peninsula, south of Mount Olympus, was a peripheral land far from the great centers of civilization.
Only when a serious trouble originated from those lands, like the Peleset-Pelasgian-Philistine reaction against the Achaean siege and destruction of Troy, we have longer descriptions in Oriental historical sources. This was the case of the ‘Sea Peoples’, as the Ancient Egyptians called the Peleset and their allies, Trojans included. When, as allies of the Hittites, the Achaeans were asked to attack Troy and they achieved to conquer the highly important city, the reaction of the enemies of the Achaeans, namely the Pelasgians, was forceful.
Near colorization of part of the bas-reliefs
Part of the bas reliefs of the northern external wall of Ramses III’s mortuary temple at Medinet Habu (Luxor West); texts and bas-reliefs full narrate the three battles that Ramses III won to disperse the Sea Peoples.
Drawing of a larger part of the bas-reliefs
First pylon of the Medinet Habu temple
Ramses III’s mortuary temple at Medinet Habu (Luxor West); view from the southeast
The Anti-Achaean and Anti-Hittite Pelasgians formed an alliance and then rebelled against the Achaeans and ruined them (which is mentioned in the Ancient Egyptian texts and archaeologically evidenced as the conflagration of the Mycenaean fortresses), attacked Hattusha and destroyed the Hittite Empire, invaded the Canaanite coast of Eastern Mediterranean, notably Ugarit (a small kingdom but the Ancient World’s greatest library and center of Translation), and Amurru (today’s Syria), and ultimately attacked Egypt (Kemet).
There Ramses III, after three battles, was able to destroy and disperse the Sea Peoples. The Peleset/Pelasgians, who took part in the invasions, settled in the coast of Southern Canaan and became known as the Philistines / Palestinians. Ionia and Aeolia in Western Anatolia and Ionians, Achaeans an Dorians in the South Balkans (‘Greece’) were plunged in abject misery and barbarism for 400-450 years (1200-750 BCE). When the epic cycle’s most famous poet Homer wrote about the deeds of the Achaeans, he in fact galvanized his contemporary fellow men and called them to form kingdoms and states after the Achaean example and to propagate the pro-Achaean and anti-Pelasgian version of History and narrative (rhapsody) that he composed. But all this was marginal, unimportant and trivial to the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Babylonians, and the Iranians.
So, this is the disastrous comparison I spoke about earlier:
1- the highly civilized nations of the Ancient Orient did not bother to describe the petty stories, absurd regimes, and endless strives that characterized all those uncivilized and peripheral tribes; and
2- the hardly civilized, ignorant and uneducated Ionians, Aeolians and Dorians, originating from tiny cities-states, which were at times smaller than the area of a major Egyptian temple (like that of Karnak, Luxor), traveled to study in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Iran (6th – 4th c. BCE), but failed to duly conceive the spiritual and the material universes after the local spirituality, wisdom, science and imperial culture.
That is why, when these people returned back to Ionia, Aeolia, Thrace, Macedonia, Illyria and Greece, they called themselves ‘philosophers’, i.e. ‘friends of wisdom’. In reality, this term is very modest, if not pejorative; this is so because it means that they were not ‘sophoi’ (wise) and they did not possess ‘sophia’ (wisdom). So, they were merely ‘philosophoi’. This means that all those guys, like Thales, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Democritus, Plato and others (who have been propelled to undeserved consideration and absurd evaluation by Western European scholars and intellectuals), knew very well that, in front of an Egyptian, Babylonian or Iranian (Zoroastrian) high priest, hierophant and mystic, they were humble and puerile schoolchildren.
Now, the low position of the peoples of South Balkans and Western Anatolia opposite the great Oriental civilizations is extensively reflected in the Ancient Greek texts. Plutarch wrote about the Ancient Egyptian Iwnw Heliopolitan religion (involving Osiris, Isis, Horus, etc.). But no Egyptian priest bothered to write about the petty cults of the clownish pseudo-divinities of the Ancient Greeks (Athena, Hera, Hermes, Poseidon, Zeus, etc.). The reason for this is double:
1- in many cases, the names of the Ancient Greek ‘gods’ were of Oriental origin, and
2- in every case, the cult was weaker and the spirituality nonexistent.
In striking opposition to the aforementioned historical realities, the 19th – 20th c. Western European explorers of colonial times, after their discoveries, excavations, decipherments, representations, essays, treatises and publications about Ancient Oriental civilizations, continued having the Greco-centric and Romano-centric approach that they had prior to their expeditions, researches, vast collection of documentation, and remarkable knowledge acquisition.
Although the texts and the monuments that they unearthed totally canceled their earlier knowledge (which was based on Ancient Greek, Latin and Hebrew sources), the Western European Orientalists continued preposterously viewing the anterior (the Ancient Oriental civilizations) through the eyes and the criteria of the posterior which was apparently lower and corrupted.
This absurd attitude only corroborates the fact that what the Western European scholars saw as ‘Ancient Greece and Rome’ was not what is documented in and reflected from Ancient Greek and Roman sources, but their biased delusions and preconceived schemes of racist nature.
For this reason, the Western European scholars did not modify their measures, standards and approaches, after the discoveries made over the past 250 years. They still stick to an absolutely obsolete and fully delusional model that -even worse- they want to impose onto Russia, India, China, Africa, Latin America, and all the Muslims of the world.
You understand of course that this model is false and disastrous in two dimensions:
1- first, it is an evolutionist model that serves to propagate the false concept that in the past the humans were uncivilized and that they progressed gradually until they reached the modern times, and the Western sciences. This is entirely wrong, because the Sumerians, the Akkadians and the Egyptians before 4500 years had spiritual and physical capacities that they gradually lost. It goes without saying that Western scholars want to hide this truth.
2- second, the Greco-Roman model that they intended and tried for more than 550 years to impose encompasses all the evil and corrupt elements that the forces, which selected it, need to diffuse and impose worldwide.
The clash between Orient and Occident is a fake, and that’s why they needed to diffuse Aeschylus’ sickness, paranoia and anti-Iranian racism and Herodotus’ silly lies and heinous bias.
The case of Ctesias clearly helps us understand that the ancient manuscripts must have been drastically tempered with by Catholic monks who copied them. So, there is an extra aspect to examine, analyze and comprehend in this regard.
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Ctesias could not make mistakes; others put lies in his mouth!
Behistun, NW Iran; the cliff with Darius I’s relief and inscriptions
Behistun (Farsi: Bisotun / Old Iranian: Bagastana, i.e. ‘the place of God’ / Ancient Greek: Βαγίστανον όρος) was mentioned by Ctesias, who totally misunderstood the inscription, attributing it to the ‘Babylonian’ Queen Semiramis and describing it as a dedication to Zeus! In reality, the text is part of the Annals of Emperor Darius I the Great, duly detailing his victory over a rebellion; the Iranian monarch dedicated his triumph to Ahura Mazda. However, Semiramis seems to have been an entirely misplaced Ancient Greek legend about the historical Queen of Assyria (but not Babylonia!) Shammuramat. The Assyrian queen was the consort of Shamshi Adad V; she has also been mentioned in the original, Assyrian cuneiform sources as co-regent during the early phase of her son Adad-nirari III’s reign (811-783 BCE). But the Assyrian Queen had nothing to do with Mount Behistun and the Achaemenid Iranian inscription.
If we now analyze the extraordinary errors made by Ctesias on this topic, while also taking into consideration the fact that he lived long in Iran where he served as physician to Artaxerxes II, we will find ourselves in front of impossible inconsistencies. Apparently, he was fluent in Achaemenid Iranian (taking into account that he was involved in the negotiations between the Iranians and the Greeks after the Battle at Cunaxa) or he had excellent interpreters (since this was crucial for the emperor’s health). With all these points confirmed, we have every reason to ask the following: how did Ctesias make so ridiculous mistakes when visiting Behistun and getting information about the holy mountain and the local reliefs and inscriptions?
First, it is quite doubtful that any Iranian, Babylonian or Elamite historian, erudite scholar, and knowledgeable courtier knew anything (or even had access to textual documentation) about the historical Assyrian Queen, who lived 400 years before Artaxerxes II. This means that not a single interlocutor of Ctesias would ever associate the Behistun inscription with her.
Second, and even more deplorable, either Ctesias was fluent in Achaemenid Iranian or he relied on excellent translators and interpreters, it is absolutely impossible that any person related to the imperial administration would ever attribute the Behistun inscription and reliefs to anyone else except Darius I the Great.
This concludes the case about the fallacy that average people and academics alike believe today as ‘Ancient Greek History’: it is an entirely fallacious fabrication of the Catholic monks who copied and in the process distorted the ancient manuscripts, replacing truths with lies, eliminating trustworthy narratives, and inventing silly stories to put in the mouth of ancient authors. Ctesias’ texts that have been saved down to our time were systematically and unrepentantly distorted by the pseudo-Christians monks of Western Europe.
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The endless wars, conflicts and divisions of the so-called Ancient Greek states were superbly reflected in Thucydides’ calamitous descriptions and historical narratives; but that was exactly what the forces that selected it needed. By making it part of the Western European education, they ensured interminable strives and bloodshed in Europe and, by means of colonialism, worldwide.
The utterly Anti-Christian, Greco-Roman model serves also to propagate corruption, immorality and extreme obscenity; several Ancient Greek temples were in reality brothels in which blasphemous orgies were practiced by the idiotic followers of various pseudo-divinities that were miserably fashioned in the Antiquity after the human weaknesses. The focus on Ancient Greece that the biased Western European intellectuals attempted and the modern pseudo-historical dogma of Hellenism are the main responsible for all the problems of our time. As disruptive and destructive elements, they must be cast away by all societies that intend to advance, progress and still preserve their identity, integrity and morality. Unfortunately, the Ancient Greeks had none.
VI. Why Shakespeare and the Western European Theater must be removed from the Russian, Chinese, Indian, African, Muslim and Latin American Education
People accept customarily what is offered to them as education. It is part of what is called ‘conventional wisdom’. But this is extremely erroneous.
So, there is first a question to make about the topic; why, on Earth, should the education of a Russian or Uzbek or Chinese or Indian or Somali or Algerian or Peruvian include texts written by an English author?
Second, in the modern Western world, the value and the importance of everything depends on Marketing. You know about the advertising campaigns of Coca Cola, but you don’t know anything about the advertising campaigns of Shakespeare, which were undertaken by the English embassies, diplomats, academics, etc. The latter lasted longer – clearly.
Third, there are many people nowadays, who realize that something went wrong in the West. Unfortunately, the entire West is a wrong, sick and devious construct whose elaboration spanned over 500-600 years. Now, if someone thinks that all the mistakes, the biased conclusions, and the preconceive ideas occur only at the political level, he simply does not have a clue about how this world functions.
Shakespeare and theater in general were instrumental in the deliberate corruption and decadence of the world. Colonialism is not mere occupation of territories; mainly it is projection (or imposition) of one nation’s culture onto another nation’s culture. Now, if the colonizing power’s culture is in an intentionally corrupted and putrefied condition, colonialism turns out to be a real contamination.
Gillis Mostaert, Passion play in Antwerp; 2nd half of the 16th c.: Christian ‘theater’
There was no theater in Christian times; it was prohibited. And for a very good reason! It was denounced as obscene, vulgar, salacious and disastrous for the moral standards of a Christian society. The only sort of theater that existed in Christian societies was the representation of the Passion of Jesus. Similarly, the sole type of theater that existed in some Muslim societies was the representation of Hussein’s martyrdom in Kerbala; these theatrical acts are performed in independent buildings known as Hussainiya. About:
Islamic ‘theater’ (ta’zieh/تعزیه): painting from Lukhnow, Mughal India (ca. 1800)
Public representation of Hussein’s martyrdom in Kerbala (680 CE) in Shiraz, Iran (1977)
Theater did not exist in monotheistic cultures and societies, like Assyria and Iran.
Historically, Theater started in Egypt. It was a religious, eschatological theater that involved the representation / repetition of acts and stories narrated as a diachronic or supratemporal description of the Creation, the Life and the End of the Universe. Thus, by ‘acting’ / playing the roles of the major driving forces of the spiritual world, the Ancient Egyptian Iwnw Heliopolitan sacerdotal colleges believed that they truly contributed to the auspicious developments that they expected to take place at the End of Times. In a way, it was a sort of magic, and they considered as such the inner enforcement of external facts and actions (also known as the royal art of Making). Since it was entirely benevolent, they considered it as moral, because it would contribute to the re-establishment of a perfect (or paradisiacal) order that had been lost.
Ancient Egyptian Opet religious festival procession: representation available on bas reliefs
Widely diffused across the Roman Empire, the Ancient Egyptian religious festival Navigium Isidis, as envisioned in 1902 by the American painter Frederick Arthur Bridgman
Bas-reliefs with representation of the main Divine Beings of the Hermupolitan dogma (known in Ancient Greek as Ogdoad); during the religious festivals, there were theatrical acts that represented the qualities and potentialities of each of them to faithful followers who participated.
Horus, Osiris & Isis: the major driving forces of the divine world, as comprehended and proclaimed in the Ancient Egyptian Iwnw Heliopolitan religious dogma.
You can correctly assume that Ancient Egyptian, Assyrian-Babylonian, and Hittite eschatology are vast narratives of supreme spiritual endeavors. As such they are at the origin of Ancient Hebrew Biblical (and therefore Christian and Islamic) world conceptualization, worldview, cosmogony, cosmology, eschatology and soteriology. Neither the Messiah nor the Chosen People is an invention of the Ancient Hebrews; as concepts they predate the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah by 2000 years, and there is nothing strange in it. The major Ancient Oriental civilizations constitute a hitherto unequaled peak of spirituality, transcendental power, wisdom and spiritual perfection that later nations, like the Phoenicians, the Hebrews, the Iranians, the Greeks and the Romans never reached. But the History of Mankind is a narrative of falls, decay, decadence and corruption, and unfortunately those, who could build great pyramids around the middle of the 3rd millennium BCE, could not do so again 2000 years later.
Meanwhile, the formation of polytheistic religions in Babylonia, Phoenicia, Carthage and elsewhere incorporated early theatrical acts in their religious processions, but this was not anymore a human comprehension of the various aspects of the Divine and of their consequences, but a human invention of otherwise nonexistent stories, which were only useful for the spiritual enslavement of the adepts of each and every religion. In this case, the religion and the early theater turned from benevolent into malevolent, monotheism became polytheism, and moral freedom was transformed into sexual exploitation of the victims (i.e. the believers). Spiritual achievements (like levitation, teleportation, materialization/manifestation, etc.) became ‘miracles’ and the great initiates turned out to become mystical swindlers, petty magicians, and slaves of evil spiritual hierarchies.
In Ancient Greece, theater took progressively a form of moral education, but it reflected the political divisions, the tribal conflicts, and the racist character of their elites, therefore giving deliberately biased and viciously erroneous representation of the ‘Other’, notably the Iranians.
Ancient Roman amphitheater in Siracusa (Syracuse), Sicily
In Ancient Rome, the amphitheaters and the circuses soon superseded to the theater, placing the military training and martial sports at the epicenter of the public interest and entertainment. During the Christian imperial times, the interest for the martial arts continued to generate great enthusiasm, massive attendance, and personal involvement as the illustrious Constantinople Tzykanisterion (Циканистерион) testifies to. (https://wiki5.ru/wiki/Tzykanisterion) Of course, this palatial sport demonstrates a Sassanid Iranian influence on the Eastern Romans. However, it also shows that Constantinople was culturally closer to Turan and Central Asia than to Merovingian France. But the ancient Greek theater was, as I said, entirely forgotten, duly rejected, and wholeheartedly despised as a villainous endeavor and obsolete, anti-Christian activity.
The Tzykanisterion was close to the great palace of Constantinople, by the seaside
After the early diffusion of the racist, colonial and fallacious concepts and ideas of the Renaissance intellectuals and anti-Christian magicians, the rise of Classicism brought forth a return to ancient Greek themes; all the same, the movement was a very wrong imitation of partly or entirely misunderstood topics. However, the end result was a sheer degradation not only in terms of art but also with respect to Moral. This we can fully understand, if we compare the representation of a topic by Ancient Greek playwright and the distortion of the same topic by a Modern European poet. The latter is definitely more immoral, more lascivious, and more sacrilegious. By the way, this entry is very distorted and absolutely false: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classicism
Example:
Phaedra, as narrated by Euripides in Hippolytus and by Seneca the Younger in Phaedra, and
Phèdre, as represented by Racine, who was born in France a quarter century after Shakespeare came to life in England.
Morality, Theater and content degradation: Phaedra from Ancient Greece & Rome to French Classicist Theater to Hollywood Cinema
Phaedra in fresco from Pompeii, ca. 60–20 BCE
Phèdre; painting (1880) by Alexandre Cabanel (1823-1889): based on Racine’s play
Jules Dassin’s Phaedra, 1962: a disgrace of ‘art’ produced to merely glorify the immoral elite
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As you understand, the issue is far wider than just one author, notably Shakespeare. It has to do with the entire modern Western European literature, art, philosophy, and intellectual-political life, which set the true foundations of today’s decayed, corrupt and infamous Western world. You will perhaps tell me that the Bolshoi Theater, like many other historical theaters built in Russia during the late 18th, the 19th, and the early 20th c., is part of the Imperial, Soviet and Republican social life of the Russians. You are right; but you surely know that the Western European Theater was not part of the Russian popular culture before the early 18th c.
Introducing the modern Western theater in Russia was a key tool of Westernization. But westernizing the non-western is tantamount to subduing, altering and controlling the de facto opponents of the cruel, racist, colonial, modern Western world.
Art played an important role in this regard; many nations worldwide were corrupted not because of the Western theater but thanks to the Western cinema. But this ‘art’, i.e. the fake art of the modern Western world, is detached from Moral, Religion, Culture and Spirituality.
But in reality, there was never a civilization in which Art was uncoupled from the moral considerations, values and principles of a specific nation. In the disreputable, heinous, racist and atheist state of Ancient Athens, which was duly destroyed by the Spartans after three decades of war, the priests denounced as heresy and blasphemy the fact that the worthless sculptor and painter Phidias dared to write his stupid name on his filthy works. There is no artistic value in an impious and sacrilegious work; such shameful works must be destroyed and pulverized.
As you see, I needed an introduction before proceeding to respond to your comments about my suggestion for removal of the English playwright from the Russian (and other) educational manuals. Now, I will focus on this poet.
Of course, you certainly have an idea about the extraordinary eulogies and the unmatched hyperboles that all the English constantly use when they refer to Shakespeare; examined without exaggerations and biases, his art hinges more on his particularity and bears witness to the mystical contents of most of his works. His plays do not allow us to openly describe him as paragon of the Western European Classicism, as it happens with Racine and his opuses. However, Shakespeare used Ancient Greek and Roman stories, myths, concepts and plots extensively.
Consequently, modern English scholars’ effort to dissociate Shakespeare from Modern European Classicism is absurd. Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, Pericles Prince of Tyre, and Cymbeline, namely 8 (out of a total of 38) plays have -even in their title- a direct reference to Greco-Roman Antiquity. This makes of Shakespeare a major champion of Modern European Classicism and a very particular playwright indeed among the other Classicists.
VII. Shakespeare’s black magic trickery against the concept of Messiah, and his vicious hatred of Eschatology and Revelation
When it comes to the needs of today’s Russian Education and to the desires of all Russians to see their fatherland as a major pillar in a multipolar world free of Anglo-Saxon perfidy, madness and criminality, I have to state the following points:
First, Modern European Classicism has nothing to do with the Asiatic civilizations that shaped the ancient cultures, which flourished on today’s Russian soil from Scythians to Huns to Tatars; it is therefore improper for Russian schoolchildren to learn what is not theirs and not to study what is theirs.
Second, Shakespeare does not represent anything related to the culture, the past, the civilization, and the spiritual-intellectual heritage of the Asiatic nations that are adjacent to the Russian Federation, namely the Turks, the Armenians, the Georgians, the Iranians, the Kazakhs, the Turkmen, the Azeris, the Uzbeks, the Kyrgyz, the Tajik, the South Asiatic nations of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the Chinese, the Mongols, the Tibetans, the Uighurs, and the Koreans. We have therefore to conclude that masterpieces of the literatures of the nations are far more useful for the new Russian generation that will speak Chinese as first foreign language.
Third, there is not a shred of Christian moral in Shakespeare plays; his theatrical plays disastrously encompass unprecedented cynicism, unsurpassed narcissism, absurd arrogance, villainous scheming, abject immorality, loathsome concepts, and plenty of other very negative traits and behavioral notions that are totally unrelated to the core of the Russian soul. Quite often, Shakespeare exacerbates the negative feelings and propels evil characters to the epicenter of the plot; even worse, he does not castigate the evil-minded characters, therefore leaving the audience with the impression that no substantive punishment awaits us at the end.
Fourth, there is not a single element of Russian (or Chinese or Indian or Turanian or Iranian or African or Latin American) value, character or virtue in Shakespeare’s plays. More specifically, and with respect to Russian culture, there are no Ivan Durak, no Baba Yaga, and no three Bogatirs in Shakespeare. And more importantly, there is no Stepan Razin in English history and culture. Quite critically, at the geographical level (whi so much affects and determines Human History), there is no Volga in England. To fully complete, one needs to spell the truth out: there is no heroism in Shakespeare and there are no heroes among the English.
Dobrynya Nikitich, Ilya Muromets, and Alyosha Popovich, i.e. the three Bogatirs after Victor Vasnetsov (1898)
Fifth, in many of his plays, Shakespeare incorporates eschatological and messianic stories and plots, but he does it in a most counterfeit manner. Through his mystical affiliation with the early Freemasons and other secret societies, Shakespeare had been ostensibly initiated in corrupted forms of the Ancient Egyptian Isiac mysteries. Isis- and Horus-related cults flooded, as you know, the Roman Empire in the first 3-4 centuries of the Christian era. Many Isea (Iseum is a temple dedicated to Isis) were excavated and monuments found in Europe, England included. The Egyptian esoteric tradition survived in England clandestinely forming at the antipodes of the Christianization a sub-culture that went down to the Knights Templar and later mystical orders; however, the tradition was progressively corrupted and spiritually dead.
Representation of an Iseum on a Roman fresco from the temple of Isis in Pompeii
Osiris, Horus and Isis: drawing from bas relief, made by the authors of the book ‘Egypt, Handbook for Traveling’ that was published (1898) by the German Verlag Karl Baedeker, the world’s pioneer in travel books. The prestigious edition comprises also 20 maps, 55 plans and 66 views and vignettes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baedeker
The original initiates of Isis’ esoteric orders and the faithful, who adored the goddess in Isis’ temples throughout the Roman Empire, believed the Iwnw Heliopolitan dogma that was also known as Ennead among Ancient Greeks during the Late Antiquity. This comprehensive spiritual system of Egyptian cosmogony-cosmology-eschatology/soteriology was extensively popularized in Greek and Latin thanks to the numerous Isis Aretalogies (Ареталогия). Plutarch expanded on the topic in his De Iside et Ossiride (About Isis and Osiris/ Об Исиде и Осирисе), which is part of the voluminous opus Moralia (Ethics). About:
In several of his plays, Shakespeare ostensibly rewrites the Isis-Osiris-Horus myth. This becomes strikingly clear in Hamlet. In an article of mine published before 30 years under the title “What a priesthood is and how it functions” (Trito Mati, Athens-Greece, September 1993), I established the correct parallels among
a. the original Ancient Egyptian myth,
b. the Revelation by John, and
c. Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
You can find the article (scanned pages of the review) online here (3rd page from the end, in 4 columns):
The correspondence of the major elements of the Ancient Egyptian myth to the main characters of Shakespeare’s play is a vast topic that would need a book to analyze. I herewith provide you with a brief diagram.
Egyptian Myth
Revelation by John
Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Osiris
God
The assassinated King Hamlet, Hamlet’s father
Isis
woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars
Gertrud, the Queen
Seth
Satan/Dragon
Claudius, the fratricidal king (of this world)
Seth (ditto)
{not mentioned}
Polonius, chief priestly figure and father of Ophelia
Nephthys
{woman sitting on a red beast}
Ophelia
Horus
King of Kings
Hamlet
substitute of Seth
beast coming out of the sea/Antichrist
Laertes
Now, all this is not merely useful for comparative literary analysis and for a dissertation in History of Religions. What matters most in this regard is the way Shakespeare was personally involved in the distortion of the Ancient Egyptian narrative, the Isiac myth, and the eschatological/messianic plot. And this is the most obscure and the most vicious part of Shakespeare’s role and work.
Egyptian Isis as the Christian Revelation’s ‘Woman Clothed with the Sun’ / From Apocalypse Picture Book; English, c. 1255-60; Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts (MRMSS) B1 350 B MS M.0524; the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York – http://ica.themorgan.org/manuscript/page/16/110814
Egyptian Nephthys as the Christian Revelation’s ‘Woman sitting on a red beast’/ From Beatus of Liébana’s Las Huelgas Apocalypse, Spain, ca.1220 (purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1910); Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts (MRMSS) B1 363 B MS M.0429; Pierpont Morgan Library – https://www.themorgan.org/collection/Las-Huelgas-Apocalypse/30
Different moments of the ultimately cosmic, eschatological clash between Horus and Seth (: the Antichrist or Laertes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet), as depicted on numerous bas-relief panels of the interior side of the external wall of the Horus Temple at Edfu (Behedet in Ancient Egyptian) in Upper Egypt, 750 km south of Cairo. The Pharaoh Ptolemy X (Alexander I) appears in several bas reliefs as also fighting against Seth, which symbolizes his close cooperation with the Messianic Heliopolitan priesthood and epitomizes the pro-Heliopolitan nature of his deeds. Seth is alternatively represented as hippopotamus or crocodile. About:
The pylon of the Temple of Horus at Edfu: the most voluminous corpus of texts of the world’s eschatological literature
Entire walls covered with panels of symbolic descriptions detailing, in texts and bas-reliefs, the major episodes of the End Times’ mythical (i.e. absolutely real at the spiritual and the material universes) fight between a. Horus (or Hamlet, Ninurta, Etana, Tasmisu, Messiah, Mahdi, King of Kings, Jesus Christ, Saoshyant, Maitreya, etc.) and b. Seth (or Laertes, Ullikummi, Masih ad-Dajjal, Antichrist/Beast, etc.) Brief presentation – interpretation of Horus’ eschatological drama & ultimate Victory: Edfu Temple and the Sacred Drama of Horus https://egyptraveluxe.blogspot.com/2014/11/edfu-temple-and-sacred-drama-of-horus.html
Read first the Ancient Egyptian myth (either Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic texts or Plutarch’s essay)! You get an impressive feeling of an overwhelming supratemporal victory and an enthralling prevalence of Horus-Messiah, who rules the spiritually rearranged and rejuvenated world as Emperor, having totally eliminated the evil (Seth).
Read the Revelation by John! There, you get an even more fascinating description of the victory of the King of Kings and of the annihilation of a) Satan (Dragon), b) the Woman sitting on the red beast, c) the Antichrist (Beast), and d) the Pseudo-Prophet. It is an identical narrative, which is incorporated within the nascent Christianity, although in Jesus’ words we find no reference to the three latter spiritual entities.
Read now Shakespeare’s Hamlet! Although basic parts of the plot and even the critical clash (Hamlet exterminating Claudius) are there, we observe with extreme indignation that, minutes after vanquishing Laertes, Hamlet dies too, when he and the rest hear the news of Fortinbras arriving. This makes the difference; the evil difference, I mean. Fortinbras is an absolutely unnecessary figure or character. He is absolutely useless and utterly nonsensical.
Only because the Satanic nature of Shakespeare wanted the Messiah (or Horus or Jesus-Christ or Mahdi or Etana or Saoshyant or Maitreya) dead and unable to savor his victory, the need for an extra character was created in the plot. It is a devilish trick against the noblest of all prophecies.
Do you know, Fedor, what Fortinbras means?
It means that there will not be any Kingdom of Heaven, because the Messiah/Horus will die at the moment of his victory. This is the World History’s most hateful, most lowly, and more fallacious concept; it constitutes the most blasphemous rejection of the Christian Revelation by John, and of all the anterior and posterior revelations, eschatological epics, and Messianic narratives. It is a vicious and shameless attempt to exterminate Soteriology and a conscious effort to prevent the Ultimate Emperor and Redeemer from ruling the Mankind with iron fist (inferred in Isaiah 11:4; explicitly stated in Psalms 2:7-9; and repeatedly evoked in Revelation 19:15, 12:5, 2:26-28).
Why is this so? Why is Fortinbras so badly needed to Shakespeare’s mystical and devilish peers? This is easy to answer! The evil societies cannot stand every notion of Kingdom of Heaven, because this brings forth their irrevocable annihilation; they therefore passionately and continually intend to disreputably prolong the present situation of the Fallen Mankind as long as they can. Their ‘poets’ perform therefore all possible acts of Black Magic to obtain the desired results. And the premeditated distortion of an eschatological narrative, plot and development, particularly when it is part of a play repeatedly performed by actors and formidably contemplated / cherished by the audience over the centuries (which means an enormous number of victims whose spirituality was held captive), is a very sophisticated form of Black Magic.
In Shakespeare’s malevolent and black magical eschatology, the Messiah (Horus or Hamlet) wins over the Antichrist (Seth or Laertes), but dies soon after! This irrevocable fact of the World Literature convincingly demonstrates where the location of Evil on Earth is.
Consequently, with a fallen human Fortinbras as bogus-ruler, the present condition will continue, and the (disastrous for Shakespeare and his peers) Kingdom of the Heaven will be delayed or averted.
Shakespeare did not have the strength or the paranoia to make Laertes kill Hamlet. This is genuinely impossible. He therefore did not attack spiritual forces that would madden and annihilate him on the spur of the moment, namely at the time he would be writing such an execrable obscenity. However, his evil nature was good enough to invent the Satanic trick: ‘the Messiah/Horus wins only to die after his victory’. Preposterous!
Exploring Shakespeare’s evil profundity, one can therefore unveil the depth and the extent of the English perfidy. I need now to terminate my lengthy response.
You are very knowledgeable, Fedor! But you seem to forget a critical detail.
Shakespeare was born in 1564 and died in 1616.
His active years are thought to have been between 1585 and 1613.
But the most important event of his life was not the coronation of James VI & I, who was the successor of Elizabeth I.
The historically most determinant fact that took place during Shakespeare’s life was the war between Spain and England (1585-1604) and mainly the circumnavigation of England and Ireland by the Grande y Felicísima Armada (also known as Invincible Armada), i.e. the Enterprise of England undertaken by the Imperial Spanish fleet in July-August 1588.
If the Spaniards won, you would never know Shakespeare and his black magical texts, which are idiotically staged in numerous countries worldwide only at their own detriment and to the prejudice of billions of readers and spectators.
You don’t need either Shakespeare or English in Russia. No one needs them.
De-Occidentalization is the guarantee for the Russian victory; and as you can guess, the term comprises also the most resolute de-Anglicization.
Replace therefore Shakespeare in the Russian Education syllabus with the Azeri Nizami Ganjavi, the Armenian Movses Khorenatsi, the Georgian Shota Rustaveli, the Iranian Ferdowsi, the Turanian-Indian Amir Khusrau, the Chinese Guo Jujing (郭居敬) and you will discover all the musical undulations of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade!
Removing Shakespeare from your education and defenestrating England out of the new multipolar world order, you will lose nothing, but you will gain the whole world! And the world will gain peace.
Thank you again for the opportunity you offered me to expand on these topics!
II. Skillful Western European Falsification of Russian History
A. Erroneous contextualization of Archaeology of Northern Asia
B. Deliberate use of overlapping terms: Northern Asia, Siberia, and Scythia
C. Prehistory and Ancient History of Northern Asia are subject to modern borders and to the meaningless attempts for ‘national archaeology’
D. Failure to discern Northern Asia in its entirety and true dimensions
E. Deliberate, multifaceted distortion of the Asiatic Turanian Migrations
F. Minimization of the cataclysmic presence and prevalence of the Turanian nations throughout Eastern Europe
G. European academia-backed biases: malignant disregard of the spiritual value of Kievan Rus, and absurd focus on ethnic, racial and linguistic considerations
H. Erroneous focus on Kievan Rus and disastrous neglect for Volga Bulgaria
I. Concealment of the historical reality of the Turanian (‘Tatar-Mongol’) period
Russia, Ukraine and the World-III: the need for a New UN or how UK, US, France and NATO must be defenestrated from the world (28 March 2023)
By Prof. Muhammet Şemsettin Gözübüyükoğlu (Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis)
Pre-publication of chapter XXIII of my forthcoming book “Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey – 2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists”; chapter XXIII constitutes the Part Nine (Fallacies about the Golden Era of the Islamic Civilization). The book is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters.
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Known rather through his cognomen (‘Paradisiacal’) and his kunya (teknonym: Abu’l Qassem, i.e. ‘father of Qassem’), Ferdowsi was born (ca. 940) in Tus (Khorasan, NE Iran) around the time Muhammad ibn al-Askari, son of Hasan al-Askari and 12th Imam, went into his Major Occultation (941). The apocalyptic eschatological fascination of those days is explicitly shown in Ferdowsi’s own name, because the quest for the Paradise is the epitome of every reliable Messianism (: Soteriology) and Eschatology.
Ferdowsi is a worldwide unique case of highly venerated poet whose work is absolutely immense and whose known details of life are incredibly minimal; although he was historically referred to as the leading epic poet, erudite sage, and unsurpassed master of Farsi (and there have been several historical biographies of him), we don’t know even his real name. Judging from his son’s name, Ferdowsi (940-1020) was a Muslim, but there stop all the important biographical details that we know. In fact, Ferdowsi’s life is enveloped in mystery and legend similarly with the contents of his monumental and sublime epic; we know however that he had a great Turanian sponsor: the formidable Conqueror and Emperor Mahmud Ghaznavi (971-1030; the founder of the Ghaznavid dynasty), who invaded the Indus Valley, Punjab and the Ganges Valley, unifying territories that stretched between the Caspian Sea and today’s Bangladesh.
Ferdowsi mausoleum, Tus – Iran
Ferdowsi’s unsurpassed masterpiece, the Shahnameh (: the Book of the Kings) is the world’s largest epic totaling more than 100000 (one hundred thousand) verses. In terms of Iranian Literature, it was not the first epic composed under this title. Thanks to his historical biographies, we know that Ferdowsi started the composition of the enormous opus in 977, initially viewing it as the completion of a similar effort earlier undertaken by another Iranian poet, Abu Mansur Daqiqi, who did not have the chance to advance his Shahnameh much before being assassinated. However, Ferdowsi’s epic differs greatly from all the other Shahnameh epic poems or prose compositions in many ways; although similar narratives have been attested in other Iranian and Islamic epics, Ferdowsi places his heroes in an atemporal field of semiotics whereby they function as symbols of spiritual ideas, moral principles, and eternal values.
Was Ferdowsi a ‘Sunni’ or a ‘Shia’? The question sounds irrelevant; although it is evident that he was a Muslim and a strong monotheist (which also applies to several forms of pre-Islamic Iranian religions), Ferdowsi does not contain the slightest portion of reference to the Early Islamic History into his legendary opus.
Is pre-Islamic Iranian-Turanian History reflected in Ferdowsi’s epic? In a way, yes! But it is an ahistorical reference to a series of dynasties that modern Iranologists, philologists, specialists in Comparative Literature, historians and historians of religions, experts in Mysticism Studies and Symbolism try in vain to accommodate within the scholarly known frame of the Achaemenid, Arsacid and Sassanid dynasties. This is however quite impossible a task to carry out; and Ferdowsi is the only reason for this. Although there is not a single indication that Ferdowsi divided his masterpiece into ‘periods’, the entire Shahnameh is divided, on the basis of typical literary analysis, into three sections: mythical age, heroic age, and historical age.
As per this – absolutely wrong – categorization, all the aforementioned pre-Islamic Iranian dynasties belong to the third section (historical age). But more than two thirds of the enormous epic’s verses are dedicated to the narration of episodes of the so-called ‘heroic age’. An analysis of Shahnameh goes beyond the scope of the present book, but with the above brief description I wanted to point out that Ferdowsi mainly focused on pre-Achaemenid eras and that his intention was to illuminate the spiritual ideas and the human valor that predestined historical Iran-Turan to be what we know through regular historical documentation that it was. Despite the numerous distortive presentations and worthless analyses, if one stays close to Ferdowsi’s verses, one concludes easily that, as per the illustrious poet and mystic, Iran-Turan constitutes an indivisible world.
Was Ferdowsi a Persian or a Turanian? This question in and by itself reveals total ignorance of Iranian and Turanian History, Culture and Civilization. The undisputed and definitely unequaled mastership of Farsi to which the majestic composition of Shahnameh bears witness does not make of Ferdowsi a Persian. Across the ages, many Turanians excelled in Persian poetry. Ferdowsi’s origin from Khorasan (a region traditionally inhabited by Turanians and Persians alike) and his close relationship with the great Turanian Emperor Mahmud Ghaznavi show that it is quite plausible that Ferdowsi was a Turanian. Mahmud Ghaznavi vanquished the Samanid state (995-999) pretty much like the Seljuk Turks had destroyed the Buyids half a century later. Consequently, we can conclude that Ferdowsi ostensibly sided with Turanian institutions and rulers against Persian states and kings.
There are also some other indicators that must be taken into consideration, as regards Ferdowsi’s identity: although his legendary narratives reflect the foremost values of the Achaemenid Civilization and represent the Zoroastrian conceptualization of the Universe, the contents of Shahnameh do not stringently correspond to the world of Parsis, namely those among the Sassanid times’ Persians who managed to escape the Islamic onslaught and survived in Iran and in India, preserving a posterior form of Mazdeism (and Zoroastrianism) that we presently call ‘Parsism’. Several PhD-level dissertations can be elaborated to properly demonstrate that on many critical issues Ferdowsi’s viewpoint on the pre-Islamic Iran and the Parsis’ traditions pertaining to the Sassanid (and earlier) past differ greatly.
In Shahnameh, one cannot find the slightest support for the Parsi faith, let alone of the Parsis’ anti-Islamic feelings. There is not a single sign that Ferdowsi saw his grand opus as an Iranian ‘comeback’ (let alone ‘revenge’), as an instigation of pre-Islamic Iranian ‘patriotism’ among Iranian Muslims or as anti-Islamic fascination and mobilization. On the contrary, throughout Shahnameh, there are incessant references to Turanian gallantry and passion, bravery and confusion, unity and division, crime and punishment, discipline and order, mysticism and divination, honesty and treachery, clarity and confusion.
The Iranian – Turanian epic presents a magnificent equilibrium among all tendencies and characters, trends and exploits, attempts and regrets. Shahnameh attains a spherical perfection, contains no pointless element, locates all elements in their correct place whereby everything meets its reverse reflection and all spirits are accompanied by their opposites. All this is put in perfect Farsi, in lines of 22 syllables, in rhyming couplets (masnaviyat), and in metre 1.1.11.
Where does Ferdowsi stand among his time’s mystics, orders, kings and warriors, erudite scholars and theological jurists?
Was he close to late Sassanid Zervanism? Certainly not as much as Tabari, a fully accredited Islamic exegete and theologian, founder of a major madhhab, and the Islamic world’s supreme historian! Tabari dedicated the introductory chapter of his voluminous History to a theoretical analysis of the Time (: Zervan or Zurvan, a late Mithraic figure that was the central god of a late branch of Mithraists). But Ferdowsi started his epic with Keyumars (Gayomard of the late Zoroastrian texts), the first man and first king (Pishdad dynasty); this approach makes of royalty the first human virtue.
Was Ferdowsi close to the late Sassanid followers of Gayomard? Not quite! His focus on the recapitulation of themes related to heroic combats gives us the impression that Ferdowsi envisioned a dynamic universe in which Cosmogony and Eschatology consisted in an indivisible entity of spiritual and material order based on a permanent movement back and forth between Being and Becoming.
From all the major groups of early Muslims and from all the followers of then extant Iranian religions, the Khurramites, the Parsis, the Manichaeans, the Mazdakists, the so-called Twelver Shia, the Isma’ilis, between the Mazdeists and all the rest, Ferdowsi seems to be equidistant.
The same attitude appears in the Shahnameh; between the Turanian Afrasiab and the Iranians Siyavash and Kay Khosrow, Ferdowsi pursues a narrative that does not favor any of the combatants, while presenting brave deeds and mythical facts as the straight result of the great legendary heroes’ spiritual choices and divine providence.
In fact, Ferdowsi is to be found at cosmic distance from all his contemporaneous mystics, poets, erudite polymaths, historians, scholars and theologians. Next to him, all the rest appear infinitesimal. That’s why we can safely claim that within the wider context of Islamic Civilization across Eurasia only Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh proved to be as influential a book as the Quran. The great epic impacted all the Islamic nations, ethno-linguistic groups, mystical orders, intellectuals, poets, authors, and artists so irrevocably that, from the beginning of the 11th c. onwards, it would perhaps be more accurate, instead of speaking of Iranians and Turanians, to start referring to them as Ferdowsians. About:
Kay Qobad (Kay Kawad) on his throne; a leading figure of the Kayanid dynasty that was transcendentally constructed by Ferdowsi
In fact, one cannot speak about the Seljuk Turks, before briefly presenting Ferdowsi’s Cosmogony within the Islamic world. This is so because the Seljuk dynasty, along with the Ghaznavids, proved to be the first and the most enthusiastic adepts and supporters of the heroic worldview narrated by Ferdowsi, of the spiritual ideas revealed in Shahnameh, and of the moral values respected by the great heroes of the legendary, atemporal and apocalyptic Pishdadian and Kayanian dynasties. In fact, only this phenomenon, i.e. the Ghaznavids’ and the Seljuk Turks’ wholehearted acceptance and overwhelming promotion of the Universe as reassessed by Ferdowsi, makes of the grand master of Farsi Literature the national poet of all Turanians.
Quite contrarily to the historical facts, the criminal Western Orientalists depict a terribly tarnished and viciously distorted image of this reality; as per their false and nonsensical interpretations, the Seljuk Turks accepted Islam through Persian culture. This is as idiotic as an eventual, irrelevant assumption according to which a (fully hypothetical) educational jury was supposedly awaiting at the northeastern Iranian borders for the Seljuk Turks to come, and then upon their arrival, they told them: “pass your Ferdowsi exam, and come-in”! So pathetic and ludicrous is the Western Orientalist approach to the topic! Things did not happen that way, and this reality shows that it is absolutely absurd and utterly calamitous for any Turkic and Iranian nation to accept the presence of Anglo-American institutions in their territories or to allow their nationals to study in Western universities or even to visit West European, North American, and Oceanian countries.
The heroic, legendary, cosmological and eschatological order revealed by Ferdowsi in his Shahnameh was the basic oral culture of all Turanians and Iranians, Persians included, for millennia. Simply, this cultural background was not (and could not be) the religious dogma of Zoroastrianism (and of its subsequent forms, i.e. Arsacid Zendism and Sassanid Mazdeism) as attested in the holy texts of that religion and in the imperial inscriptions of the faithful Kings of Kings.
The fallacy of Modern Western Humanities, as developed in the racist, colonial, criminal pseudo-universities of Western Europe and North America, is due to the paranoid (but intentionally implemented) method of compartmentalizing the historical truth and the exploration thereof; this occurs in total contradiction to the universal, comprehensive and holistic approach and method (of viewing and examining the historical truth) that prevailed among all the great historical civilizations (whereby there was no compartmentalization). This vicious method leads colonial historiographers to the distortive division of topics into separate ‘academic fields’: history, archaeology, philology (‘literature’), linguistics, history of religions, ethnography and social anthropology, philosophy, history of arts, history of sciences, architecture, and so on. Consequently, this makes researchers separate their various study topics between “written cultures” and “oral cultures”; but by so doing, they totally misperceive and misrepresent entire historical periods.
As a matter of fact, Ferdowsi did not ‘invent’ (or ‘envision’ or ‘conceive’ or ‘devise’ or ‘create’) his narratives; he only managed to compose them in an incomparably genuine and superior poetic manner. All the terms, names and ideas of Shahnameh’s stories antedate Ferdowsi for about 1500 years – to say the least; this is something that all Orientalists accept. But they fail to see that these terms, names, ideas and stories constituted the oral culture of all the Iranians and the Turanians long before the heliocentric fallacy of Mithras was first propagated among them in the first half of the first pre-Christian millennium. Ferdowsi wrote down this millennia-long Turanian and Iranian oral anti-Mithraic cultural tradition in a literarily majestic manner. And by doing so, he did not ‘give’ the Seljuk Turks their culture (which was already theirs and their ancestors’), but the wings that they needed to conquer the world and implement their millennia long values and virtues as reinstated in the Quran and reinterpreted in the Shahnameh.
Of course, there is a reason the colonial historiography appears to have some success in plunging readers into deceitful schemes, distortive narratives, and nonexistent popups; if you are naïve enough to believe that the Seljuk Turks came from the North Pole or the Moon, then you will certainly accept the fallacy of the so-called Seljuk acculturation in Iran, and you will start believing the nonsense of the Turanian nations’ ‘persianization’. But the Seljuk Turks were neither in the North Pole nor in the Moon! In fact, they had been -for several centuries- just on the other side of the Islamic Caliphate’s northeastern border. And for cultures, for nations, for faiths, and for civilizations, there are no borders; even more importantly, borders do not apply to oral cultures.
Even more absurdly, “border historiography” cannot exist across the Silk Road; by ‘stopping’ their premeditated and therefore fallacious description of historical facts at the borders of the various modern states, the criminal Western pseudo-historians intentionally implement their evil political axiom ‘divide et impera’ throughout Humanities. This is the way most of the people worldwide have been deceived in this regard.
For several centuries, the ancestors of the Seljuk Turks lived within the wider Yabyu (English: Yabghu) territory within the land of the Oguz/Oghuz (Oğuz) nomads’ state. Its location stretched across vast territories of the modern states of Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and (to smaller extent) Uzbekistan. Yabyu spanned east of the Khazar Khaganate (or Khanate), between the Caspian Sea and Aral Lake, and north of the border of the Islamic Caliphate. The forefather of the Seljuk Turks was a formidable Oghuz combatant named Seljuk, who served also in the Khazar army, before clashing with other Oghuz warriors, migrating to southeast (around the year 980), and settling in Transoxiana (Arabic: Mawarannahr / ماوراءالنهر), next to Syr Darya (Iaxartes) river. At that original stage, the ‘Seljuk Turks’ (i.e. the family of Seljuk) were less than 1000 people in total.
Seljuk made an alliance with the Samanids (a mainly Persian kingdom) and fought against the Kara-Khanids, a Turanian Khaganate, mainly known as the House of Afrasiab (آل افراسیاب / which means that they were named (as early as the 9th c.; so before Ferdowsi) after the most important Turanian hero of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. The development was not good for the Seljuk family, and Seljuk’s grandsons Tughril and Chaghri had to further migrate (ca. 1040) to the South (Khorasan). The son of Mahmud Ghaznavi, Mas’ud I of Ghazni, tried to prevent them from advancing, and the battle of Dandanaqan (near Merv in today’s Turkmenistan) opened the way for the Seljuk rise. Tughril’s and Chaghri’s victory (1040) was tantamount to Seljuk prevalence in Khorasan. Ten years later (1050), Tughril invaded Isfahan and established the Great Seljuk Empire.
However, only to prove the inalienable, indissoluble, and indelible nature of the Turanian–Iranian civilization and identity, the early Seljuk success across the Iranian plateau would have no historical continuity and impact without the astounding contribution of a Persian original: Abu Ali Hasan ibn Ali Tusi, who is rather known through his incredible title ‘Nizam al Mulk’ (:”Systems of Royal Governance”). Nizam al Mulk (1018-1092) was born two years before Ferdowsi died, but his inclination and genius covered a totally different field than that of the greatest epic poet of World History. Originating from Khorasan, Abu Ali Hasan ibn Ali Tusi left his position at Ghazni, the capital of the Turanian Ghaznavid Empire and entered the service of the Seljuk Turks (1043); there he was entrusted, among other tasks, with the education of Muhammad bin Dawud Chaghri (mainly known as Alp Arslan), i.e. the son of Chaghri and nephew of Tughril, the founding sultans of the Seljuk empire.
The assassination of Nizam al Mulk
Consequently, the rise of the Seljuk Empire is entirely due to the wise advice, the outstanding guidance, and the governance systematization introduced by Nizam al Mulk, a Persian; of course, all this would prove to be useless without the Seljuk bravery and thunderous attacks. One can call the Seljuk Empire a ‘Turanian’ (or ‘Turkic’ state); but it was equally ‘Iranian’ – notwithstanding the historical forgeries of the Orientalist gangsters of the Anglo-American universities.
Nizam al Mulk is perhaps the person, who studied best the infinite intrigues that occurred on daily basis among all the rulers who enjoyed some portion of power due to the already discussed phenomenon of the Abbasid Caliphate’s fragmentation. Highly respected and incessantly consulted by Tughril, Chaghri and their children, Nizam al Mulk methodically guided them in the splendid attempt to terminate the Abbasid Caliphate’s fragmentation. First, they consolidated their control across the northern part of the Iranian plateau until 1046-7. In 1048, they attacked an Eastern Roman – Georgian army near today’s Pasinler (or Hasankale), east of Erzurum, in the less publicized but historic battle of Kapetron. After ensuring a great capital for themselves at Isfahan (1050), in the Iranian plateau’s southern part, Tughril invaded Baghdad (1055), terminated the Buyid dynasty, and (according to modern Turkish Islamist bibliography) ‘liberated’ the Abbasid Caliph; this is however not accurate because it was not possible anymore to restore the original power of the Abbasid Caliphate. The Abbasids remained a weak and impotent dynasty for another 200 years.
Nizam al Mulk set up a series of academies named after him, ‘Nizamiyah’; his major opus Siyasatnameh (‘the Book of the Governance’) was the basic manual that was taught, discussed, and in-depth understood there, after the completion of an entire basic circle of studies. The numerous Nizamiyah academies that the indefatigable Nizam al Mulk founded in various parts of the expanding Seljuk territory were not similar either to the earlier appeared jurisprudential madhhabs or to the regular madrasas (theological schools).
The graduates of every Nizamiyah acquired first a spherical, encyclopedic knowledge, and at a second stage, an excellent command of the diverse methods of a successful administration of the state (one could vaguely compare them to various modern ‘national schools of administration’). Nizamiyah graduates could man the Seljuk administration and deliver spectacular results, due to the innovative and resourceful mindset that they were taught to build and thanks to their persistence on avoiding bureaucracy. Despite his indisputable imperial and administrative genius, Nizam al Mulk was also a combatant, and – contrarily to the worthless and corrupt, modern bureaucrats – he often accompanied his shahs in their campaigns.
Nizam al Mulk was ostensibly against the group of Isma’ilis and their system of secretive and elitist governance. In his book, he expanded on them; this however does not make of him a ‘Sunni’, as modern forgers pretend. He and his Seljuk emperors were Muslims, who did not accept either secretive governance or the particularities of various eschatological, messianic groups like the Isma’ilis (today mistakenly named ‘Sevener Shia’) or the apocalyptic adepts of the Ahl al Bayt (today erroneously called ‘Twelver Shia’), who expected the imminent reappearance of the 12th imam. This is an extra proof that throughout History there is no such sectarian division and false identification as “Turkish Sunni” and “Iranian Shia”; this is a colonial lie and a shameful Orientalist forgery.
All the same, because of the colonially imposed (during the 19th and 20th centuries) sectarianism, which prevails among today’s deceived and disoriented Muslims, Nizam al Mulk is totally unknown among African Muslims and Saudi-impacted Muslims in Southeast Asia, because he is idiotically viewed as “Iranian and therefore Shia”. This externally imposed pseudo-historical dogma is enough to reveal the criminal nature of the colonial countries France and England, of their successor state (USA), and of the various associated structures, like Canada and Australia.
The rise of the Seljuk Empire was the result of great bravery, heroic fascination, and superb imperial administration that greatly contributed to arts, letters, sciences and spirituality; but it was practically speaking the affair of one family. Few victories were enough to catapult the Seljuk Turks to world predominance between China and Rome. This was due to their wisdom, universal culture, and ability to compose out of many diverse elements; they therefore became a pole of major attraction. Within the general context of Modern Turkology, most of the researchers are specializing in the Ottoman Empire (eventually because of the abundance of historical sources) and have a certain predilection and admiration for the Ottomans, who also functioned as one family – only to the detriment of the Empire that they acquired and that they inherited. But this scholarly attitude is very subjective, highly sentimental, and therefore wrong.
In reality, the Ottomans were superior to the Seljuk Turks only quantitatively. They controlled larger territory and they lasted longer; that’s true. But if one examines the data qualitatively and evaluates comparatively, one easily concludes that the Seljuk were remarkably superior to the Ottomans. However, their undeniably inherent weakness, which consisted in numerous internal conflicts and in incessant, yet unnecessary, family divisions, antagonisms and rivalries, predestined them to fast decay. In fact, the Seljuk Golden Era lasted ca. 100 years: from the dissolution of the Buyid dynasty (1055) to the death of Ahmad Sanjar (1157). After that term, the Seljuk Empire split to several sultanates. The most remarkable among them was certainly the Sultanate of Rum, but that was an Anatolian state, not a major empire across Eurasia. All the same, the History of Mysticism and Spirituality in Seljuk Anatolia eclipsed the Imperial History of that branch of the Seljuk family.
Even Alp Arslan (1063-1072) and Malik-Shah I (1072-1092), who represent the top of Seljuk power, had to engage in battles to eliminate contenders to their throne, and the contenders were none else than their formidable uncles, Kutalmish and Qavurt respectively. Thanks to Nizam al Mulk, Alp Arslan organized a mixed form of feudal empire, at the same time sedentary and nomadic, and for this, he was praised by many Persians like Saadi Shirazi, whereas with the rising sectarianism of the 13th c. he was terribly scolded by Turanians like Shams al-din ibn Kızoğlu (Sıbt İbnu’l-Cevzi). Thanks to Nizam al Mulk’s concepts and Alp Arslan’s rule and practices, a great process of Turanian sedentism across Iran, India, Caucasus, Anatolia and Syro-Mesopotamia was initiated only to strengthen the local populations and transform the Central Asiatic and Siberian nomadism. More importantly, this ingenious idea and brilliant execution introduced -across a vast region- a new social system of mutual social interdependence among sedentary and nomadic populations, thus fortifying the states that would rule these populations. Many populations that still preserve their nomadic nature and traditions across the vast lands from the Mediterranean to the Indus River and from the Persian Gulf to the Tian Shan Mountains and the Siberian permafrost reached the regions where they currently live in the period between the arrival of the Seljuk Turks and the rise of Mughal Empire.
Contrarily to Orientalist deceitful schemes and deliberate misinterpretations, Malik-Shah I did not clash with the dangerous Isma’ili enclave of Hassan al Sabah (1050-1124) in Alamut and in various surrounding locations in the Alborz Mountains because of a hypothetical ‘Sunni’–’Shia’ dispute or an ethnic Persian–Turanian conflict. Simply, as a student of Nizam al-Mulk, he fully accepted and implemented his tutor’s and adviser’s recommendations as regards the nature of the imperial administration and state.
First of all, the small and perfidious Isma’ili state constituted real dynamite in the foundations of the Seljuk Empire; second, the treacherous nature of the Assassins consisted in permanent threat for all the local populations that wanted to live in peace across the Seljuk territory, and not in ceaseless strives. Above all, Malik-Shah I rejected the concept of elitist rule and the existence of spiritual orders with material aspirations. Unfortunately, his successors proved to be quite incompetent and totally unable to face the challenges that they encountered. Because of them and due to their internal discord, the Seljuk Empire was not prepared to oppose the Crusades that started at that moment. For a period of 26 years (1092-1118), four monarchs ruled the vast state that was gradually being decomposed; their incompetence triggered the secession of various lands that formed independent sultanates under the control of various members of Seljuk’s family.
Ahmad Sanjar (1118-1153) was the luckiest of the sons of Malik-Shah I, because he managed to defeat successive invasions from the Kara-Khanids (Afrasiab) of Central Asia, the Ghurids of Khorasan, and the Ghaznavids of the Indus River Valley; however, he faced a crushing defeat at the hands of the Siberian Turanians of Kara Khitan (at the Battle of Qatwan; 1141) and a disastrous uprising among his fellow Seljuk tribesmen (1153). After Ahmad Sanjar’s death, the Turanians of Khwarazm (Chorasmia) conquered the northeastern part of the Seljuk Empire, whereas the vast territory was finally divided among the Seljuk sultans of Hamadan and Baghdad, the Seljuk sultans of Kerman, the Seljuk emirs in Syria, and the Seljuk sultans of Rum (i.e. Romania-Ρωμανία: the Eastern Roman Empire). The endless internal strives of the Seljuk dynasty are no 1 reason of the Crusaders’ success in the Orient. In 1157, Muhammad II ibn Mahmud (1128–1159), Sultan of Seljuk Empire from 1153 to 1159, failed to conquer Baghdad, despite the siege that he laid to the city; this shows that the Great Seljuk state was already weak and that tensions often existed between Baghdad’s impotent caliphs and the various monarchs who ruled in his name.
The Seljuqian-e Rum (1077-1308 / سلجوقیان روم) lasted longer and became the forerunners of the Iranian-Turanian oral culture and the standard bearers of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh in the most important regions of the Eastern Roman Empire. If you only have a look at the list of the Seljuqian-e Rum monarchs for a moment, you come to realize that their spiritual world and their imperial identity originated from the all-encompassing Turanian-Iranian Universe of Shahnameh: among the 18 sultans, who ruled during a period of 231 years, there were three (3) named Kayqubad, two (2) named Kaykaus, and three (3) named Kaykhusraw. This means that almost half of this dynasty’s rulers named themselves after the most illustrious legendary Iranian kings of the Kayanian dynasty, which represents the focal point of Ferdowsi’s sublime Iranian-Turanian epic poetry.
Throughout Human History, we have known a great number of historical kings, who posthumously entered the world of the legend; but the Seljuqian-e Rum were the only to incarnate the legend and to make out of the realm of the spiritual intuition and the transcendental vision an undeniably historical reality. This fact irrevocably marked the central position that they occupy within the indivisible Iranian-Turanian world. About:
The prevalence of the Seljuqian-e Rum in Anatolia transformed this land into the high land of Islamic Civilization, Spirituality and Mysticism. Pretty much like the Islamic world’s gravitational center shifted from Arabia to Mesopotamia with the foundation of Baghdad and the establishment of the Bayt al Hikmah in the middle of 8th c., the Islamic world’s center of imperial power, mysticism and spirituality was relocated from Iran and Caucasus to Anatolia in the late 12th and early 13th c. For many centuries, Anatolia had lost its worldwide radiation; after the end of the Eastern Roman Isaurian dynasty (717-802), the defeat of the Iconoclasts (842), and the downfall of the Paulicians (dispersed in 872 and massively relocated in 970), Anatolia was in ramshackle. The overwhelming rejection of the evil Constantinopolitan theology by the quasi-totality of the Anatolian population irrevocably predestined their future and facilitated the forthcoming Islamization. The spiritual successors to the Iconoclasts and the Paulicians were to be the Mevlevis, the Bektashis, and above all the Qizilbash. The indigenous, traditional Anatolian mysticism predetermined the historical evolution.
The beginning of the Seljuk prevalence in Anatolia is entirely due to Kilij Arslan I (1092-1107; Kılıç Arslan / قِلِج اَرسلان), the first Seljuk to have Konya-Iconium as capital. He managed to defeat three Crusader armies and to secure a sizeable portion of Anatolia for his expanding state. He was a great warrior and an illustrious mystic. However, many scholars want to deliberately forget the fact that the two names of this sultan became the emblem of the Iranian Safavid Empire 400 years later! If this sounds somewhat strange, the English translation of the two names will be enough to clarify the case: “Kılıç Arslan” means “the sword holding lion”. See the emblem:
However, the main part of the preparatory work for the rise of Seljuk Anatolia was done by Rukn al-Din Mesud I (1116-1156; Rükneddin Mesud /ركن الدین مسعود) who was able to defeat two Crusader armies (led by the German Conrad III and the French Louis VII) in 1147 and 1148 and to welcome the adhesion of significant portion of the local Eastern Roman population to Islam. Even illustrious members of the Comneni / Komnenos imperial family, like John Komnenos Tzelepes (grandson of the Eastern Roman Emperor Alexios I Komnenos) who married Rukn al-Din Mesud I’s daughter, became Muslim around the middle of the 12th c.
Rukn al-Din Mesud I’s son and successor, Izz ad-Dīn Qilij Arslān bin Masʿūd (rather known as Kilij Arslan II (1156-1192; Kılıç Arslan / عز الدین قلج ارسلان بن مسعود) represents a very successful consolidation stage of the Seljuqian-e Rum; his critical victory at Myriokephalon (SW Turkey: between Isparta and Konya) in 1176 sealed the end of Eastern Roman presence in Anatolia. Kilij Arslan II, who claimed to be a far relative of Heinrich der Löwe (German prince of the Welf family and Teutonic Knight), expanded at the detriment of the Turkmen Danishmends and the Eastern Roman, but, despite his alliance with Saladin, proved to be unable to possibly stop Frederick Barbarossa’s Third Crusade; however, the numbers speak for themselves: for 76 years, the Seljuqian-e Rum were under only two kings – which is tantamount to great stability.
To the court of the Seljuqian-e Rum started flocking numerous Muslim mystics, spiritual masters, erudite polymaths, theologians, interdisciplinary scholars, great architects and artists, philosophers, leading medical doctors, poets, and other prominent intellectuals of those times. Konya had gradually become a major pole of attraction for the world’s leading wise men. In fact, Seljuk Anatolia eclipsed all other parts of the world in terms of spirituality, mysticism, letters, arts and sciences. This is not strange; despite the great confusion caused by colonial Orientalists and Western Medievalists, who elaborate a distortive and highly politicized representation of this historical period by focusing on the Crusades and the bloodshed caused by Papal Pseudo-Christianity, the 13th c. proved to be above all the peak of the Golden Era of Islamic Civilization.
Those were the times when Nizami Ganjavi (1141-1209; today celebrated as the national poet of Azerbaijan), based in South Caucasus, composed his illustrious epics Khusraw and Shirin (1177-1180), Eskandar-Nameh (: the Book of Alexander the Great; 1196-1202), and his apocalyptic eschatological masterpiece Haft Peykar (: the Seven Beauties; 1197), in which he detailed the troubles of seven major lands of civilization that will rise at the End of Time, when a formidable punishment will be adjusted to the evil perpetrator of crimes against those nations. The sublime epic is monstrously misinterpreted by materialistic Western pseudo-academics as “erotic poetry”, because those corrupt and worthless forgers cannot understand what apocalyptic symbolism is all about. The seven nations / lands of civilization are personified by
– Furak (or Nurak; India),
– Yaghma Naz (China, described as the land under the “Khaqan of the Turks”),
– Naz Pari (Turanian Central Asia, named ‘Khwarazm’/Chorasmia),
– Nasrin Nush (Russia, which is in reality Tatarstan, i.e. the Land of the descendants of the Rouran Touranian Khaganate),
– Azarbin (or Azareyon; Africa – called Maghreb, but viewed generally as the ‘West’)
– Humay (the Eastern Roman Empire’s lands), and
– Diroste (Iran, described as the House of Kay Ka’us, an illustrious Shah of Fardowsi’s heroic Kayanian dynasty whose deeds cover the largest part of Shahnameh).
Miniature from a manuscript of Nizami Ganjavi’s Haft Peykar: Bahram Gur in the Turquoise Pavilion with Azarbin, the personnification of Maghreb
Quite indicative of the Rum Sultanate’s court’s proclivity to mysticism, Turanian heroic tradition, and attachment to Ferdowsi’s epic genius is the fact that, only 14 years after Nizami Ganjavi wrote the incomparably revelatory Haft Peykar and only 2 years after he died, the new Seljuk sultan of Rum, Kaykhusraw I’s son, was named Kaykaus I (1211-1220). It was a time of extensive intermarriages with the Eastern Roman imperial family of the Comneni / Komnenoi. Kaykhusraw I (1192-1196 and 1205-1211) was fluent in Roman (‘Medieval Greek’) language and had evidently double Turko-(Eastern) Roman culture.
Kaykaus I’s mother was an Eastern Roman princess, daughter of Manuel Komnenos Maurozomes (Μανουήλ Κομνηνός Μαυροζώμης), who was an Eastern Roman nobleman. Ala ad-Din Kayqubad bin Kaykavus (1220–1237; Alâeddin Keykûbad / علاء الدين كيقباد بن كيكاوس) was the most illustrious sultan of the entire Seljuqian-e Rum dynasty. At the times of his son and successor Kaykhusraw II (1237-1246) starts the fall of the Anatolian Seljuk imperial power, basically due to the religious rebellion of Baba Ishak (1240-1243) and the Mongol victory at the battle of Köse Dağ (1243) where Baiju Noyan (appointed by Ögedei Khan) prevailed. As a matter of fact, this battle is the Seljuk equivalent of the Ottoman defeat in Ankara (1402) by Timur (Tamerlane).
In 1204, one of the most influential dignitaries of the Anatolian Seljuk court invited Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi (1165-1240; full name: Abu Abd Allah Muḥammad ibn Alī ibn Muḥammad ibn Arabī), the Islamic world’s foremost mystic and spiritual master, to Anatolia; Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi’s Futuhat al Makkiyah (: ‘the Mekkan Initiations’) is the greatest text of spiritual revelations (effectuated as result of successive initiations experienced under the guidance of supreme spiritual beings – not after the human fashion) that was ever written in the History of the Mankind. The incredible size (560 chapters or 37 volumes totaling ca. 10000 pages of modern books) of this unique masterpiece of spirituality matters very little when compared to the enthralling contents, which go up to the level of mystical communication with a) the souls of beings that were alive and inhabited the Earth during several generations prior to ours, and b) supreme hierarchies of spiritual beings, intelligences, spirits of elements, and numerous ethereal potentates.
h ttps://ibnarabisociety.org/futuhat-al-makkiyya-printed-editions-claude-addas/
Born in Andalusia’s coastal city of Murcia to parents of Arab and Berber origin, Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi studied in Seville, met and discussed extensively with Ibn Rushd (Averroes), worked as secretary in the city governorate, and undertook incessant travels across North Africa, Syria, Arabia, Mesopotamia and Anatolia. His travels’ most determinant stages took place in Mecca (where he wrote his celebrated masterpiece), in Mosul, in Damascus, and in Eastern Anatolia where he met the students of the great mystic Abdal Qadir Gilani (1078-1166), who was one of the leading mystics of an earlier generation and also the founder of the Qadiriyah mystic order.
Opening pages Konya manuscript Futuhat, handwritten by Ibn Arabi
It is interesting to notice the details of the theological and jurisprudential affiliation of that great mystic, who was born in Gilan (i.e. Caspian Sea’s southwestern coast) and lived most of his life in Baghdad and in various other locations of Mesopotamia. He was a descendant of Hasan ibn Ali, the second imam and grandson of Prophet Muhammad, but did not belong to Ja’far al-Sadiq’s madhhab; however, if one sees the world through today’s colonially imposed, sectarian and distortive lenses, Abdal Qadir Gilani should have been a Ja’fari. In fact, the great mystic and ascetic was a Hanbali and follower of the jurisprudential school that is nowadays said to be (whereas originally it was not) the most ‘anti-Shia’ or ‘anti- Ja’fari’.
The Qadiriya order had many followers in Anatolia and later in the Balkans, although its diffusion from Mesopotamia to China, to Somalia and to Western Sahara regions was spectacular. The sectarian viewpoint in this regard is posterior and it started with the catastrophic distortion of Ibn Hanbal’s doctrine by the vicious theologian Ahmed ibn Taimiyya whose pseudo-Islamic theology represents a sort of Christianization of Islam. The propagation of his fake Islamic ideas triggered obscurantism, ignorance, and utter hatred for the sciences and the arts among the Muslims; as a consequence, extreme fanaticism prevailed among the gradually decayed, spiritually debased, and increasingly ignorant Muslims of later periods (late 14th – early 16th c.), and then the Safavid reaction (as of 1501) to this situation only added oil to the fire.
Ala ad-Din Kayqubad (Kayqubad I) held in great esteem and sponsored numerous mystics, erudite scholars, poets, architects, artists and spiritual masters. His court was also frequented by very exceptional figures like Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi (1162-1231), a great spiritual master, alchemist, physician and polymath, who explored antiquities at both, the spiritual and the material, levels, thus being an early, Muslim Egyptologist.
Following Kayqubad I’s invitation, the great mystic, theologian and jurisprudential scholar (of the Hanafi madhhab) Baha’ al-Din Muhammad Walad (1151-1231), a Persian originating from Balkh/Bactra (Khorasan), arrived and settled in Konya with his entire family in 1228; this event would have an everlasting impact down to our days. The entire Seljuk royal family was fond of the newly arrived scholar and mystic, who had earlier faced negative treatment from Ala ad-Din Muhammad II of Khwarazm (Chorasmia) in whose state Baha’ al-Din Muhammad Walad used to live. Khwarazm was a Turanian state with constant problems with the Seljuk sultanates, and the main reason Baha’ al-Din Muhammad Walad had problems with his shah was the fact that in Khwarazm’s court the most influential mystic and theologian was Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, the scholar who invented the concept of Multiverse (: the parallel existence of many Universes) and with whom Baha’ al-Din Muhammad Walad had terribly clashed. It was therefore only normal that, to flee the Mongol invasions and to get rid of Ala ad-Din Muhammad II’s enmity and disgrace, Baha’ al-Din Muhammad Walad found a subterfuge in Seljuk Anatolia. The everlasting impact is due to the prodigious poetry composed and the mystical exploits performed by his son, Jalal ad-Din Mohammad Rumi, who is also known as Mawlana or Mevlana.
Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207-1273; جلالالدین محمد رومی) surpassed by far his father’s fame, literary mastership, mystical experience, intellectual acumen, spiritual ingenuity, and posthumous fame, being one of the Islamic world’s foremost mystics, poets, and holy men. Bringing spiritual activities at the epicenter of material life, Rumi turned dance into active meditation, and thus made of Anatolia the worldwide epicenter of all later Islamic mysticisms. He is considered as the founder of the Mevlevi Spiritual Order (the ‘tariqa’ of the ‘whirling dervishes’), although it is very clear that his son and his disciples founded the Order after Rumi’s death. In younger age, he was fascinated with the literary masterpieces of the mystic Sana’i Ghaznavi (1080-1141); remarkable influence on Jalal ad-Din Rumi was also exerted by his father, by the famous Persian Khorasani mystic and poet Farid ud-Din (1145-1221; known as Attar of Neyshapur), and by Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi. But the close companionship he had with Shams-e Tabrizi (1185-1248), a supreme spiritual hierophant and mystic, was the most determinant factor of his spiritual advance, mystical comprehension, sublime poetry, and whirling dance conceptualization as meditation technique.
Did Jalal ad-Din Rumi actually meet Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi?
This question has been raised by many modern scholars, although on the basis of several historical sources there is clear evidence that they first met during Rumi’s first arrival to Damascus, and later again during Rumi’s formative years there. Furthermore, there is ample evidence that several disciples of ibn Arabi (notably Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi) were companions of Rumi and that Shams-e Tabrizi knew personally ibn Arabi very well. In addition, several literary patterns and terms testify to a spiritual, intellectual and philosophical connection, despite the fact that the essence, the contents, and the forms of both masters of Islamic spirituality and mysticism differed greatly, pretty much like their respective quests, explorations, devotions, spiritual exercises, and transcendental experiences did.
Mausoleum of Jelaleddin Rumi Mevlana, Konya – Turkey
Rumi was a human, who discovered the divine world through love and through strict imitation/repetition of Prophet Muhammad’s manner of life; Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi was a man contacted by spiritual hierarchies, entrusted with the revelation of spiritual occurrences, and endowed with unique qualities to describe in human words unfathomable situations comprehended only through spiritual initiation. An enlightened man like ibn Arabi could never be strictly bound to only one religion.
Closer to Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi was indeed Haji Bektash (1209-1271; Hacı Bektaş-ı Veli / حاجی بکتاش ولی); born in Neyshapur (Khorasan), he was a descendant of Musa Kazim, the 7th imam and son of Ja’far al-Sadiq. He fled westwards because of the Mongol invasions and he arrived in Seljuk Anatolia in the late 1220s or early 1230s. He belonged to the Ja’fari jurisprudential tradition (madhhab), which is quite normal as he retraced his ancestry to the 6th imam’s son. Given his Arab ancestry, it is ridiculous to entertain discussions about his ethnicity (Persian or Turkic) as Western nonsensical Orientalists do; Haji Bektash was certainly acculturated among all Iranians and Turanians between Central Asia and Anatolia. However, this issue can allow us to better assess the locally prevailing ethnic and cultural environment; if a person of Arab descent, like Haji Bektash, living in Khorasan, preferred to bear a Turkish name, i.e. Bektaş, this means that we cannot afford anymore to consider that vast NE Iranian region as exclusively Persian (as fallacious colonial Orientalists do), but as predominantly Turanian. In his young age, Haji Bektash was apparently fascinated with the mystical poetry of the Turanian spiritual master, mystic, and Hanafi theologian Ahmed Yesevî (1093-1166; قوجا احمەت ياساۋٸ), the founder of Yasawiyah (Yeseviye) order.
The oldest painting of the Muslim mystic Haji Bektash Veli
Modern forgers and Western impostors try to associate Haji Bektash with the Qalandariyah Order (which is wrong) and with Baba Eliyas al-Khorasani, another Khorasani mystic who had settled in Anatolia and instigated the Babai revolt that was led by Baba Ishak in 1239. That’s totally false, because Haji Bektash, despite his Batiniyya approach to Islam’s holy scriptures (as per which all holy scriptures have ‘external’ and ‘internal’-mystical meaning), reprimanded the Isma’ili enclave in Iran, denounced Baba Ishak’s plot for the establishment of a Crypto-Christian state in Amasya (Anatolia), and condemned Baba Ishak’s infamous pretensions that he was a ‘prophet’. As a matter of fact, Haji Bektash was greatly esteemed by everyone in the Anatolian Seljuk court where they appreciated his contribution to the combat against the rebellion and to the refutation of anti-Islamic concepts among Turanian nomadic settlers in Anatolia. All the same, the early Bektashi Order accepted in their lodges (khanqah) many earlier adepts and followers of Baba Ishak, who had repented and regretted, and numerous participants in the failed rebellion. The Bektashi Order played later a determinant role in the formation of the Ottoman Sultanate and Caliphate and in the relations between the Ottomans and the Safavids.
The Seljuk Turks managed to assimilate among them a great number of Anatolian, Eastern Roman populations. This topic is critical in understanding later historical developments in the region. Whereas the Achaemenid Iranians failed to plainly assimilate Anatolia during their rule (546-330 BCE) and finally only later (during the Seleucid and Roman times) we clearly attest an undeniable Iranian cultural impact on the various Anatolian kingdoms, the Rum Sultanate proved to be far more efficient in rapidly shaping a diverse yet inclusive Anatolian Muslim identity which revolves around the Iranian-Turanian epic traditions and legends and an Islamic interpretation of the Eastern Roman Christianity. About:
I. Ошибочное восприятие Сталина у большинства людей сегодня
II. Ошибочное восприятие Второй мировой войны современными обывателями
III. Настоящая Ялтинская конференция
IV. Большая игра никогда не заканчивалась
V. Добрые намерения и злые цели
VI. Рузвельт и Сталин: как Авраам Линкольн и Александр II
VII. Настоящий, скрытый Сталин: опытный мистик
VIII. Посол Турции говорит о жизни Сталина в Артвине и Стамбуле
IX. Сталин в Османской Анатолии: 1911-1912 гг.
X. Турецкий государственный деятель Риза Нур отметил, что Сталин понимал турецкий
XI. Культурный фон Сталина: искажен и неизвестен большинству людей
XII. Митраистское иранское культурное наследие Грузии и Сталин
XIII. Длинная, тяжелая тень Сасанидов
XIV. Несмываемая печать на исламе: иранское интермеццо
XV. Переплетенное исламское и христианское культурное наследие Грузии, и Шота Руставели
XVI. Русские переводы Руставели и псевдонимы Сталина
XVII. Археологические раскопки и открытия востоковедов до пребывания Сталина в Анатолии
XVIII. Текстовые источники информации о Митре и митраистских мистериях для Сталина
XIX. Духовность, религия, эсхатология, сотериология, вымирание человечества и Сталин
XX. Основные темы духовных исканий Сталина в Анатолии – 1. Тавроктония и Распятие
XXI. Основные темы духовных исканий Сталина в Анатолии – 2. Митраическая троица, христианская троица, духовность и Сталин.
XXII. Основные темы духовных исканий Сталина в Анатолии – 3. Солнечная природа митраизма / Непорочное рождение из скалы.
XXIII. Как сталинские митраистские медитации в Анатолии сформировали его принятие решений
1. Войны понтийского царя Митридата VI с Римом.
2. Митраистские пираты Киликии в борьбе с Римом: осквернение Греции и Сталин.
3. Посещал ли Сталин величайший в мире монумент Митры в Немрут-Даге?
4. Митраистские медитации Сталина и антисвященническая позиция
5. Митраистская версия ассирийско-вавилонского Гильгамеша: Вератрагна и его связь с Гераклом в Немрут-Даге
6. Митраистская анатолийская имперская духовность против скандинавской мифологии: Сталин против Гитлера
XXIV. Рим, Новый Рим, Третий Рим, и Сталин
XXV. Митраизм, христианство, Сталин и антихрист
Table of Contents
I. The erroneous perception of Stalin among most people today
II. The erroneous perception of WW II by average people today
III. The true Yalta Conference
IV. The Big Game never ended
V. Good intentions and evil purposes
VI. Roosevelt & Stalin: like Abraham Lincoln & Alexander II
VII. The real, hidden Stalin: an experienced mystic
VIII. A Turkish ambassador speaks about Stalin living in Artvin and Istanbul
IX. Stalin in Ottoman Anatolia: 1911-1912
X. Turkish statesman Rıza Nur noted that Stalin understood Turkish
XI. Stalin’s cultural background: distorted & unknown to most
XII. The Mithraic Iranian cultural heritage of Georgia & Stalin
XIII. The long, heavy shadow of the Sassanids
XIV. An indelible stamp on Islam: the Iranian Intermezzo
XV. The intertwined Islamic & Christian cultural heritage of Georgia, and Shota Rustaveli
XVI. Rustaveli’s Russian translations and Stalin’s pseudonyms
XVII. Archaeological excavations and Orientalist discoveries prior to Stalin’s sojourn in Anatolia
XVIII. Stalin’s textual sources of information about Mithra and the Mithraic mysteries
XIX. Spirituality, Religion, Eschatology, Soteriology, the Extinction of the Mankind, and Stalin
XX. Major themes of Stalin’s spiritual quest in Anatolia – 1. Tauroctony and Crucifixion
XXI. Major themes of Stalin’s spiritual quest in Anatolia – 2. Mithraic Trinity, Christian Trinity, Spirituality and Stalin
XXII. Major themes of Stalin’s spiritual quest in Anatolia – 3. Solar nature of Mithraism / Immaculate birth from the rock
XXIII. How Stalin’s Mithraic meditations in Anatolia formed his decision-making
1. Pontus’ King Mithridates VI’s wars with Rome
2. Cilicia’s Mithraic Pirates in fight with Rome, the desecration of Greece, and Stalin
3. Did Stalin travel to visit the world’s greatest Mithraic monument at Nemrut Dagh?
4. Stalin’s Mithraic meditations and anti-sacerdotal stance
5. The Mithraic version of the Assyrian-Babylonian Gilgamesh: Verethragna, and his association with Heracles in Nemrut Dagh
6. Mithraic Anatolian Imperial Spirituality vs. Nordic Mythology: Stalin vs. Hitler
XXIV. Rome, New Rome, the Third Rome, and Stalin
XXV. Mithraism, Christianity, Stalin and the Antichrist
The idea that most of the people around the world have about Stalin is entirely false. This is due to the fact that atheists, materialists, Marxists-Leninists, liberal socialists, socialist-democrats, evolutionists and all the trash of Anglo-Saxon and Ashkenazi Khazarian pseudo-intellectuals and bogus-academics have first perceived, then interpreted, and last analyzed/presented Stalin and his historical role through the most erroneous, Trotskyist misunderstanding/distortion of the Georgian-origin Soviet statesman. But Stalin was an unconditional transcendentalist and a remarkable mystic.
Mithraic Tauroctony from a Mithraeum in Syria (currently in the Israel museum in Jerusalem): a mythical-religious topic early conceived by evil forces as purely eschatological symbolism
Human sacrifice: dead bodies wait for cremation in Dresden after the bombardment of the ‘Allied’ forces.
I. The erroneous perception of Stalin among most people today
According to this irrelevant story, Stalin (1878-1953) was a resolute materialist, a convinced Darwinist, a devoted Marxist-Leninist, and a heartless dictator who decimated entire nations, before purging the old guard of Communist-Bolshevik partisans, relocating populations, and sending millions to jail. There is only little truth in all this. In fact, Stalin was as realist as Kemal Ataturk; he therefore had to appear to others in the way he did in order to succeed Lenin and eliminate Trotsky. Many may agree with the last sentence, stating that this is part of the well-known History.
But there is also the ‘Other History’; the one that is unknown, because it did not happen. This is, in other words, the negative reflection of the reality. All the same, because this ‘other’ or ‘unknown’ History did not happen, this does not mean that it was not attempted. And indeed many secret and known organizations and ‘societies’ tried to prepare several developments which finally did not occur. It is essential for a true Historian to know well these failed attempts; in fact, he only then understands History as the Absolute Sphere that contains the outcome of all the desires, feelings, thoughts and attempts of the humans.
II. The erroneous perception of WW II by average people today
The unhappened History would trigger indeed far more spectacular developments than what the so-called WW II did – if it happened; part of the evil plan that Stalin triumphantly averted was that Trotsky would succeed Lenin and stay for some time in Moscow, incessantly planning his ‘global’ revolution, which so well reflects the paranoia, the deviance and the putrefaction of today’s ‘American’ (in reality: Anglo-Saxon and Ashkenazi Khazarian) Left. Today, few people can guess the monstrous and inhuman tyranny that comes after the eventuality (May God forbid!) of the American Left’s prevalence.
On the contrary, we know very well what would have happened, had Stalin failed to eliminate Trotsky; it is very simple. Hitler would have invaded, destroyed and demolished the Soviet Union, implementing in the 1940s what Victoria Nuland, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and the rest of the American Left trash intend to carry out now: the complete decomposition and dismemberment of Russia. This is so because, as Charles de Gaulle always knew, the USSR was in reality ‘Russia’. If the above statement seems incredible to you, this is only due to the fact that, via a mental mirror game, the true Nazis made the world believe that Hitler was a Nazi and the paragon of Nazism.
As a matter of fact, Hitler was only the Venice Ball mask of Nazism.
The true Nazis were those who fully instrumentalized and utilized Hitler, detaching him from the spiritual tutorship of the great mystic Rudolf von Sebottendorf and usurping the Thule Gesellschaft from the very founder of the society, who had to flee to Turkey. Hitler was merely one of the tools of the true Nazis, i.e. the Anglo-Saxon and Ashkenazi Khazarian Satanists, who were identical then to Trotsky and today to the American Left.
III. The true Yalta Conference
This reality was encrypted in the eschatologically dramatic and historically tragic painting elaborated by Vitaly Komar (Виталий Комар; born 1943) and Alex Melamid (Александр Меламид; born 1945) in 1984 under the title ‘The Yalta Conference’ (Ялтинская конференция). The painting was repeatedly decoded in a distorting manner and duly misinterpreted in order not to disturb those who are embarrassed every time their criminality is revealed in the daylight and every moment they realize that their irrevocable end is about to befall on their wretched heads.
Of course, the painting raises plenty of serious questions; but if -as many forgers and cheaters pretend- the supposed meaning of the painting is that Hitler prevailed by fooling the (three) participants of the illustrious Yalta Conference, then why one of the participants is missing (W. Churchill)? The answer is simple: England was the epicenter of Nazism, the real producer of Hitler, and the true planner of all of his movements. Then, Churchill does not appear in the painting, simply because he was not fooled, being rather in the know. About:
I don’t intend to discuss either the (crypto-) Nazi English fabrication of Hitler in the 1920s or the apocalyptic painting in the present article. I need only to state at this point that -as historian- I don’t consider the so-called ‘WW I’, ‘WW II’, and ‘Cold War’ as independent episodes or isolated facts, but as an uninterrupted continuity of the evil, Nazi, Anglo-Saxon and Ashkenazi Khazarian colonial plans against Prussia / Imperial Germany, Austria-Hungary, Czarist Russia, Qing China, the Ottoman Empire, Qajar Iran, and the Mughal Empire. It is a clash that has lasted for more than 300 years under various forms, and certainly the most enduring, frontal opposition until now took place between the Anglo-Saxon pseudo-states (UK, US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, etc.) and (Monarchical-Communist-Republican) Russia.
When it comes to Imperial Germany, the real moment of victory of the ‘Entente cordiale’ was not the abdication of the Kaiser (November 1918), but the rise of Hitler (January 1933).
When it comes to Imperial Russia, the real moment of victory of the ‘Entente cordiale’ was not the abdication of the Czar (March 1917), but the rise of Lenin (October / November 1917).
Pseudo-Nazi (or only partly and reflectively Nazi) Germany was geared to be the tool of the final split of the Russian Empire. Many people have failed to notice (let alone understand) that this was already attempted during the period November 1917-November 1918. Numerous ‘lands’ and nations declared independence quite early, notably Ukraine, Finland, Lithuania, Moldova, Belarus, Estonia, Poland and Latvia.
Furthermore, several other republics declared their independence in 1918, although most of them did not last for long: Tuvan People’s Republic (Тувинская Народная Республика), Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic (закавказская демократическая федеративная республика), Kuban People’s Republic (Кубанская Народная Республика), Idel-Ural State (mainly a Tatar state named Ural-Volga state in Tatar; Урало-Волжский штат), Kaluga Soviet Republic (Калужская советская республика), North Ingria or Republic of Kirjasalo (Республика Северная Ингрия или Кирьясало); similar phenomena took place also in Central Asia, notably the Turkestan Soviet Federative Republic.
V. Good intentions and evil purposes
It would be correct and accurate to observe that the theoretical foundations on which these developments (secessions) took place can be retraced back to the famous essay by Stalin ‘Marxism and the National Question’ (1913) and to the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia (Декларация прав народов России), which was one of the earliest documents signed by the revolutionary government only on the 15th November 1917, just 8 days after the October Revolution (7th November or 25th October 1917, according to the Old Calendar).
In fact, if the demolition and the split of Imperial Russia into a total of 40-50 states did not occur in the period 1918-1922, this is due mainly to two factors:
First, the evil colonial forces realized that this was quite premature, because they did not possess local stooges and docile pawns among all the nations and the states that would emerge. In this case, they would be met with eventually nasty surprises.
Second, Lenin and the Soviet government feared that many seceded nations could eventually fall into the hands of monarchists, republicans, local landowners, various reactionary pseudo-religious leaders, and private businessmen; even more so, since they had to face a Civil War in many parts of the Empire.
All the same, this early experience must have been a very good lesson for Stalin, who apparently realized that anyone’s best intentions can always be used for the worst purposes, notably by inhuman, evil and criminal forces and secret organizations. It is very clear that during his many years in power, Stalin acted differently, promoting centripetal forces.
What good is it for all the nations and the ethnic groups of the world to accept the equality among the peoples, to ensure free development of all national minorities and ethnographical groups, and to recognize the right of every people to free self-determination, national sovereignty, and even secession and formation of a separate state, if all this serves ultimately the interests of evil, inhuman monsters that will be able -through use of deliberate fraud and extremely sophisticated lies tailored as per the ignorance of every local leader, elite and nation- to exploit this situation in order dominate these seemingly independent nations and to totally enslave them by means of corrupt pawns, involving bribed gangs, clownish politicians, bogus-academics, pseudo-intellectuals, lawless legislators, fraudulent judges, infidel religious ‘leaders’, treasonous military officers, nationally calamitous diplomats, criminal businessmen and untrustworthy ‘statesmen’ like those of today’s Greece, Cyprus, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, etc.?
VI. Roosevelt & Stalin: like Abraham Lincoln & Alexander II
The main fact is therefore that Stalin effectively averted the -much desired by the Nazi rulers of England- disintegration of Russia (USSR) in 1941 – something that Trotsky would prove unable to do. How did Stalin manage to do that? Many people fooled by Western propaganda would answer this question by mentioning details of the Lend-Lease Act that US President F. D. Roosevelt signed on 11th March 1941. This is only partly true; even worse, those who think that the US ‘saved’ Soviet Union do not know the true nature of the US-UK relationship at the time; they actually confuse it with the present circumstances. Yet, we know that, on plenty of occasions, Roosevelt humiliated Churchill in their meetings.
In fact, the American aid helped Soviet Union to avoid heavier casualties and longer war. And the personal relationship between Roosevelt and Stalin was parallel to that between Abraham Lincoln and Czar Alexander II. The villainous English hated the American and the Russian rulers on both occasions.
The evil English hysteria unleashed: in a cartoon from the London Punch magazine (1863), the Russian Czar and the American President are depicted as tyrants, under the paranoid label “Extremes meet”; Abraham Lincoln addresses Alexander II with the words: “I see that we are both in the same situation: you are with your Poles, I am with the southern rebels”. From: https://историк.рф/journal/15/aleksandr-avraam-i-drugie-ofitsialnyie-litsa-6f.html
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Consequently, the main question stands before us: how did Stalin manage to save the USSR and to avert the defeat and demolition of the Russian Empire (which was then named Soviet Union’)? I would simply respond to this question with just few words:
– With his great spiritual force!
VII. The real, hidden Stalin: an experienced mystic
This may sound bizarre to many. But surely not to Alexei Alexandrovich Menyailov!
This Russian mystic and intellectual (Алексей Александрович Меняйлов; born in 1957) has already researched the topic and published several books about Stalin, fully counterbalancing the earlier mentioned, Trotskyist disfigurement of the Soviet statesman and the conveniently naïve idea of an atheist, materialist, evolutionist, Marxist-Leninist Stalin. Menyailov’s books have titles that speak for themselves; I will only mention here a few.
Сталин: посвящение Волхва (Stalin: the Consecration of the Magician)
Сталин: Путь волхвов (Stalin: The Way of the Magi)
Сталин. Прозрение волхва (Stalin. The Enlightenment of the Magician)
Сталин. Тайны Валькирии (Stalin. Secrets of the Valkyrie)
Сталин. Культ девы (Stalin. The cult of the Virgin)
In his many books and videos, Menyailov revealed a totally different and spiritually powerful Stalin in striking contrast to the nonsensical portrait and disinformation, which prevailed in this regard for long. With respect to Stalin’s spiritual force and material achievements, the Russian author focuses on the young Georgian’s years in exile and on the Shamanist-Tengrist initiation rituals in the Siberian taiga (boreal forest) to which the arrested revolutionary was introduced after he escaped from the prison and during his period of hiding; those were apparently Stalin’s true formative years. Certainly, Alexei Alexandrovich is not the only to dig in this direction. As the topic is vast, I don’t intend to further explore it within the limits of the present article.
VIII. A Turkish ambassador speaks about Stalin living in Artvin and Istanbul
One element that can shed more light on Stalin’s spiritual formation is the period of almost 24 months during which the Soviet leader seems to have disappeared from all screens (1911-1912). In fact, after the middle of 1910 and until the beginning of 1913 (when Lenin’s disciple traveled to Vienna), Stalin’s biography has been mainly a matter of purely theoretical reconstruction. For someone known to have constantly escaped jails, any illegal border-crossing appears to be a minor issue, particularly if we speak about mountainous terrains and pre-electronic times.
The topic of Stalin having spent one or two years in the Ottoman Empire is not new; individuals, journalists and ambassadors have spoken about that in the past. I will now mention only a few – merely on indicative basis.
The veteran Turkish diplomat Ender Arat, speaking to the journalist Şenol Çarık in an article-interview about one of his books, mentioned Stalin’s presence in Artvin, in today’s NE Turkey. As a matter of fact, the former Turkish ambassador’s remarkable book highlights selected episodes from the sojourn of many worldwide important people in Turkey (or earlier in the Ottoman Empire); indeed, many famous Russians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Germans, and Austrians lived in Turkey during a certain period of their life.
Ender Arat’s book is titled ‘Türklere Güvendiler – Tarih Boyunca Türk Topraklarına Sığınanlar’ (They Trusted the Turks – Those who have taken Refuge in Turkish Lands throughout History); it was published by Tarihçi Kitabevi in 2016 and republished in 2020. It can be found here:
Despite the fact that the said book concerns numerous famous persons, who resided in Turkey for some time, the interview-article’s title revolves exclusively around the Soviet statesman:
Stalin’in bilinmeyen Artvin dönemi (Stalin’s unknown period in Artvin)
The interview-article was published on 8th March 2016 under the subtitle:
Emekli Büyükelçi Ender Arat, tarih boyunca bu topraklara sığınanların kitabını yayınladı (Retired Ambassador Ender Arat has published the book about those who took refuge in these lands throughout history)
The excerpt about Stalin is rather brief, but it also makes state of his travels up to Istanbul.
Mesela Stalin daha Stalin değilken, Gürcistan’dayken, Artvin’de bir köye gelip domuz avlıyor, İstanbul’da domuz satıyor.
An English translation reads:
For example, when Stalin was in Georgia, at the time he was not called Stalin, he came to a village in Artvin and hunted wild boars, and then he sold them in Istanbul.
Ambassador Arat refers to the time Stalin had not yet been given this illustrious nickname by Lenin, and he was then known merely through his Georgian name and surname Ioseb (Joseph) Dzhugashvili (also spelt Jughashvili; Иосиф Джугашвили). It is only after 1913, at the age of 35, that the young revolutionary started being called ‘Stalin’.
The aforementioned brief mention would be almost entirely immaterial without the reference to Istanbul where Stalin used to travel and sell the skin of wild boars that he had hunted; this is so because at the time Artvin was part of the Russian Empire.
When the Russian army occupied Artvin during the Russian-Ottoman War of 1877-1878, there was an exodus of Ottoman populations and an influx of Georgian and Armenian newcomers; Artvin belonged then to the Batumi region (область), i.e. the same province where Stalin used to reside after 1901. The Adjara capital functioned indeed for him as a true gate to the Ottoman Empire.
IX. Stalin in Ottoman Anatolia: 1911-1912
There have been many other testimonials as regards Stalin’s movements and sojourn in parts of the Ottoman Empire – for the same always period, i.e. from some time in the second half of 1910 until some moment in 1912.
In an article posted on 20th September 2007, the Russian portal Islam News (https://islamnews.ru/news-7368.html) reproduced a feature (Сталин провел два года в Турции и знал турецкий язык, i.e. ‘Stalin spent two years in Turkey and knew Turkish’) that had been earlier published in the magazine Most, which was a periodical issued at the time by the Russian-Turkish Association of Friendship and Entrepreneurship. According to the publication, I. V. Dzhugashvili (Stalin) smuggled his way to Anatolia and hid there for two years in the village of Tashburun (today inhabited by ca. 2000 people), Akyazi district, Sakarya region.
Living in the house of his friend from Batumi, Vezir Yurt (apparently an Adjarian, i.e. Georgian Muslim), Stalin needed to cross a distance of about 190 km to reach the Ottoman capital.
According to the same portal, “Nejmi Colak, one of those who knew him (: Stalin) in Turkey, says that at that time he (: Stalin) used the surname Beriyashvili”. This is quite plausible, as Stalin was already known for his numerous pseudonyms and various nicknames; trying to appear as having an unusual surname, the paradoxical émigré apparently fabricated this hypothetical family name out of a basically Mingrelian family name (Beria or Berya, like that of the famous Soviet statesman Lavrentiy Pavlesdze Beria; 1899-1953) conventionally Georgianized with the addition of the surname ending –shvili. Stalin’s absolutely extraordinary father, who was literate and multilingual (something extremely rare for a shoe maker), may have introduced -thanks to his Ossetian origins and Mingrelian acquaintances- his young son Ioseb Besarionisdze (later Russianized as Iosif Vissarionovich) to some of his Mingrelian friends or colleagues.
In any case, when it comes to Stalin, all things Mingrelian are in reality a constantly recurring matter, particularly if we also take into account the notorious ‘Mingrelian affair’ (Мингрельское дело), a story stupendously invented to best inculpate several Soviet officials due to their contacts with Western diplomats.
The portal Islam News states that the testimonial about Stalin’s biannual residence in Tashburun is due to Kemal Yurt, who was (back in the middle 2000s) over 80 years old; he was the son of Stalin’s friend and refugee from Batumi Vezir Yurt in whose house Stalin stayed. Vezir Yurt and Stalin had known one another in Batumi and they were constantly in contact.
Stalin in young age; painting by Irakli Moiseevich Toizde (1902-1985; Ираклий Моисеевич Тоидзе) About:
Kemal Yurt noted that, in one of the letters written by Stalin a year after his return to Russia (1913) and dispatched to Vezir Yurt, the Communist activist expressed the desire to move to the Ottoman Empire again. Kemal’s father dissuaded him from going, writing: “You are already known here. Don’t come or they’ll kill you”. It is however noteworthy, as a sort of ‘parallel lives’, that Vezir Yurt was elected headman of the village, and he held this position for many years, when his old friend was the sole ruler of the USSR.
The same story was published under the title ‘Stalin Türkiye’de saklanmış’ (Stalin hid in Turkey) in the high circulation Turkish daily Hurriyet on 21st April 2005.
X. Turkish statesman Rıza Nur noted that Stalin understood Turkish
The same article provides two more independent testimonials of people whose relatives and ancestors had encountered the young Georgian fugitive and later recognized him, when the Turkish newspapers started publishing pictures of the Secretary General of the Communist Party of the USSR (after 1922). The fact that Stalin spoke and understood Turkish is also revealed by an episode narrated by a very bizarre and controversial Turkish physician, writer, politician and statesman Rıza Nur (1879-1942).
Early elected as deputy (from Sinop) in the second term of the Ottoman Parliament (Meclis-i Mebûsan; 1908), Rıza Nur was also elected in the first and the second terms of the Turkish Parliament (Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi). He took office in several ministries (notably he was Minister of Health for the period 1921-1923), and he participated in the Moscow Treaty (Moskova Antlaşması, 1921) and the Lausanne Treaty. Openly self-declared as homosexual and known for his endless demands for unusually bold reforms, Rıza Nur clashed with many crypto-Islamists around Kemal Ataturk and he was finally forced to leave Turkey in 1926. He then lived in England for several years, taught Turkic languages and Turkology, authored several articles and books, entrusted his biography to the British Museum (so that it is published posthumously), and he was ultimately allowed to return to Turkey, after Kemal Ataturk’s death (1938), due to the persistent English diplomatic demands.
Moscow Treaty
The disreputable and squalid rascal, criminal and traitor Kadir Mısıroğlu (1933-2019), a clownish humanoid widely acknowledged as MI6 informer, agent and pawn known for his demented, execrable, and treacherous Neo-Ottomanist propaganda, was secretly entrusted by the British Museum with the treacherous and insidious task of publishing in Turkey Riza Nur’s biographical book in order to intentionally generate intellectual-educational- social-political turmoil. Of course, the book was duly and automatically banned in Turkey, because the liberal ideas and narratives of the author would eventually tarnish the image and the heritage of Kemal Ataturk among idiotic average people who would consider the founder of Modern Turkey as intolerably tolerant toward Rıza Nur, a man who explicitly and blatantly stated that he was ‘feeling like a woman’.
Rıza Nur wrote that, when he was sent (along with Yusuf Kemal and Ali Fuad) by the Grand National Assembly of Turkey to Moscow to conclude the border treaty (which became known as Moscow Treaty) and to get, if possible, financial help, the Turkish delegation failed to find common ground with Georgy Chicherin (Георгий Васильевич Чичерин; 1872-1936), the then Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR. They then decided to meet with Stalin, whom they considered a more efficient person, although Stalin did not hold an important position, being merely People’s Commissar for Nationalities of the RSFSR (Народный комиссар по делам национальностей РСФСР; 1917-1923) and People’s Commissar of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate of the RSFSR (Народный комиссар рабоче-крестьянской инспекции РСФСР; 1920-1922). At this point, one must take into consideration that Stalin became Secretary General (Генеральный секретарь ЦК КПСС) only in 1922; even worse, Stalin’s military command (1918-1921) was at times controversial and he was repeatedly accused by Trotsky and Lenin for ‘strategic mistakes’ in the Polish-Soviet war, during which Stalin appeared to be defiant, disobeying orders to transfer his troops and to assist Tukhachevsky (Михаил Тухачевский) in attacking Warsaw.
According to Rıza Nur’s narrative, immediately before the meeting, Stalin witnessed an argument among the Turkish delegates, who spoke in Turkish. One of them was shy enough to ask financial help from the Soviet government, which too had to face many problems, wars and local uprising, and said: “I can’t ask the Communists for money, ask for it yourself”. Rıza Nur was more resolute and replied pointing out that they do not ask the money for themselves but for their motherland; he then went on stating that “the one who asks is equivalent to one beggar, and the one who does not give is equivalent to two beggars”. Upon hearing this, Stalin smiled, in an indication that he had understood it all, and subsequently greeted them. The border agreement was concluded as the Turkish delegation wanted it to be, and Stalin agreed with the Turkish demand for some financial help (something that Lenin was already willing to offer to Kemal Ataturk as early as 1920). Details:
XI. Stalin’s cultural background: distorted & unknown to most
Most of the people worldwide have a very erroneous idea also about Stalin’s cultural, intellectual, educational, literary, and ethnographic background. They view Stalin as a Russian of the end of the 19th c. and of the beginning of the 20th c., but this is fully wrong. It would be certainly worse to view the young Stalin as a European, even up to the (minimal) degree that average Russians were Europeanized or westernized in the last three or four decades of Imperial Russia. Only the Russian elites were then partly Europeanized; I say so, because there was an Orthodox Russian part of the Czarist elite, which rejected with vehement indignation and absolute disgust any sort of Europeanization or Westernization.
Georgia was indeed part of the Russian Empire, but Georgians were very different from the Russians in every sense. Georgians are Christian Orthodox, but for the early Christian period of their past, they were Monophysites (or rather Miaphysites), which makes them far closer to the Armenians, to the Aramaeans of Syria (and, in any case, originally Iberia/Georgia depended on the Patriarchate of Antioch), Mesopotamia and Phoenicia (Lebanon) and to the Copts of Egypt than to the Russians or the Eastern Roman Orthodox peoples (Romanians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Greeks, Albanians, etc.).
Only their rivalry with the also Monophysitic (or Miaphysitic) Armenians and the embarrassing attempt of the latter to get involved in the administration of the Georgian Church pushed -after many long centuries- the Georgians to accept Constantinopolitan Orthodoxy and to organize two events to subsequently denounce and utterly reject the Armenian Church:
– the Third Council of Dvin (in 607), and
– the council of Ruisi-Urbnisi (in 1103).
Perhaps most of today’s Russian priests, monks and theologians would pronounce these Georgian toponyms with some difficulty, but Urbnisi, a historic site known for its majestic monuments and outstanding role in the History of Georgia, is located only few kilometers away from Gori, the city where Stalin was born.
Although an integral part of Oriental Christianity, Georgian Orthodoxy has only the name common with the Eastern Roman, the Early Slavonic and the Modern Russian churches. On the contrary, the Georgian Church is culturally and historically closer to the Monophysitic and Nestorian Aramaeans of Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, as it is clearly demonstrated by a multitude of historical sources, notably the famous story of the Thirteen Assyrian Fathers. Since the term ‘Assyrian’ may appear odd, I have to herewith clarify that the Nestorian Church or rather Patriarchate, was first based in Seleucia-Ctesiphon, then in Abbasid Baghdad, and later in Qudshanis, near today’s Hakkari (SE Turkey), and it was named (in Syriac Aramaic) after the historical land of Assyria: Edta Atureta d-Madenha, i.e. ‘Assyrian’. This occurred in spite of the fact that it was initially an entirely Aramaean Church before numerous Asiatic nations, notably Sogdians, Turkic nations, Mongols and Chinese, accepted Nestorianism.
The story of the Thirteen Assyrian Fathers, who preached Christianity in Georgia, and the theological and liturgical foundations of Georgian Christianity were among the topics that Stalin studied scrupulously for five years (1894-1899) in the Russian Orthodox Spiritual Seminary in Tbilisi (at the age of 16-21). Reacting against the Russian priests who were teaching there, Stalin realized very well (and in young age) the value of national identity and the importance of cultural integrity. He never became a Russian. This means that even fewer were the chances of him ever becoming a Europeanized or westernized intellectual and activist – let alone a European or Western.
It is not only with respect to Christianity that Stalin was an entirely (and consciously) Oriental (and not Muscovite, Kievan or Constantinopolitan, let alone Catholic or Protestant) young intellectual; Georgia’s Antiquity is irreversibly intertwined with that of Iran. For a large part of their Ancient History, Georgians lived in an Iranian imperial province (satrapy). This may appear natural, since the entire Caucasus region, Anatolia, the southern part of today’s Ukraine, Crimea, most of today’s Romania and Bulgaria, involving Thrace and Macedonia, were also parts of the Achaemenid Iranian Empire (550-330 BCE), pretty much like today’s Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Syria-Palestine, Mesopotamia, Central Asia, Indus Valley region, and the Arabian Peninsula’s coastlands of the Persian Gulf. In fact, pre-Islamic Georgia was independent from Iran only when the Empire was weak, notably during the Arsacid Parthian dynasty (250 BCE – 224 CE).
This historical reality is quasi-entirely concealed in the forgery published by the Nazi Wikipedia as ‘History of Georgia’:
XII. The Mithraic Iranian cultural heritage of Georgia & Stalin
Thank God, there was no Wikipedia at the time of Stalin; but all the monuments, the historical texts, the inscriptions, the traditions, the legends, the myths and the epics were there. The historical past of Georgia has nothing to do with that of Ancient Rome, except for some Roman military expeditions which were parts and episodes of the interminable Roman-Iranian conflict. Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, the Universal Imperial concept and discipline of Iran (of which Georgia and the entire Caucasus were an integral part), and the legacy of the Achaemenid dynasty have always been part of Georgia’s history, culture and heritage; the same is valid for the terrible civil wars, which were caused (as early as during the reign of Kabujiya/Cambyses II in the late 6th c. BCE) by the evil and polytheistic Mithraic Magi, who opposed the monotheistic imperial rulers of Achaemenid Parsa (Persepolis),
The aforementioned is valid for the comprehensively Iranized (or Orientalized) Macedonian kingdom of Pontus that controlled parts of Georgia (Iberia). It is also noteworthy that the monarchs of that kingdom fully abandoned their earlier culture and religion, and they were solemnly named after, and sacramentally blessed by, Mithra (Mitra; also known as Mehr). That’s why they wholeheartedly propagated their new religion throughout Anatolia and across the surrounding seas. More importantly, ruling in the name of Mithra, Pontus King Mithridates VI (135-63 BCE) supported the Cilician Mithraic pirates, who caused terrible damage to the Roman interests, desecrated the most important temples of the blasphemous barbarians of Greece, and duly profaned the peak sanctuary of Mt. Olympus, i.e. Ancient Greeks’ supposedly holiest place.
Mithraism is an integral part of the Georgian identity. The House of Mihran (i.e. the dynasty of the Mithraic faithful nobles), which was one of the seven royal houses of Iran, is at the origin of the kings of Aluank (Caucasian Albania; basically known as Ardhan in Parthian and as Arran in Middle Persian), of the kings of the Armenian Gardman, of the kings of the Armenian Gogark, and of the Chosroid dynasty of Georgia (which was based mainly in Kakheti). The Georgian (Iberian) Chosroid kings (Khosrovianni), who accepted Christianity (337 CE), ruled from 284 CE until 580 CE as vassal kings of the Sassanid emperors of Iran (even after the death of Vakhtang I in 522 CE); their offspring offered an Iranian royal continuity in Caucasus down to the Guaramids and the Nersianids (who ruled as erismtavari, ‘great dukes’ in parts of Georgia from 588 until 786, with intervals of Islamic occupation), as well as to the Bagrationi (the Georgian Bagratids), who ruled from 888 CE {when king Adarnase IV (ca. 870-923) took power over part of Georgia} until 1810, when the Russians canceled the Treaty of Georgievsk, which was signed in 1783, and abolished the Georgian Monarchy. This was the true historical past of Stalin and this is what he learned as his own national past, thanks to his home and school education.
The first Chosroid monarch, Mirian III of Iberia (277-361; reigned after 284 as vassal), bears a Mithraic name, as Mirian in Georgian is the equivalent of Mihran. The name of the dynasty is due to the (non-ruling) father of Mirian Chosroes (Khusraw), and this is a typically Iranian name of high spiritual, universal and imperial connotation. The Georgian Chronicles (Картлис цховреба /Kartlis Tskhovreba), which were composed first in the 8th c., make state of his conversion to Christianity (337 CE), following the ministry of Nino, a female Cappadocian monk; his second wife, queen Nana of Iberia, accepted the Christian faith first. All three were canonized in Georgia as Equal-to-Apostles (motsikultastsori/равноапостольный); in spite of the evident Christianization, the Chosroid dynasty is filled with rulers bearing Iranian names and venerating Mithraic concepts, symbols and traditions. Perceiving the historical developments within the correct contextualization, one can safely state that the Christianization of Georgia and Armenia consisted merely in the evangelization of a part of the wider Iran. And Stalin’s mother was a devout Christian, well versed in the theological dogma, and very knowledgeable in Ecclesiastical History. About:
In fact, the vast symbolic, liturgical and spiritual thematic, which was transferred from Mithraism to Christianity, thus totally disfiguring the teachings of Jesus, helped perpetuate the presence of Ancient Iranian spiritual, religious and cultural concepts within Georgian Christianity. This fact concerns also several other religions that were formed or diffused and prevailed in the region, Islam included. Of course, Stalin was not an Orientalist, neither did he study Orientalism to know these topics in detail, but he was inevitably impacted by them as I will explain below. This definitely makes of him an original Oriental. About:
We have to demonstrate a similar historical understanding for the role that the flamboyant Sassanid Empire of Iran (224-651 CE) played in the formation of the Georgian soul, tradition and spirituality. In fact, the country was an Iranian province and, despite its apparent Christianization, the cultural life was entirely Iranian. The Sassanid reassessment of Zoroastrianism, as undertaken by Kartir (a major high priest, a revered mystic, and a great religious and imperial reformer who lived during the 3rd c. CE), brought about
a) a striking contrast to, and virulent rejection of, Mani and his religion (Manichaeism),
b) an unprecedented and divinely consecrated heroism,
c) a formidable effort to make of the Achaemenid ancestors of the Iranians the legendary and exemplary figures of a Divine Order (without involving though a typical ancestor veneration),
d) a universal vocation, role, and mission of Iran to save the world within an eschatological context, and
e) a paramount change in terms of religious intolerance, military brutality, imperial commitment, and behavioral determination. This overwhelming transformation has left enormous traces in Iran, Caucasus, Central Asia, and many other parts of the Turanian-Iranian world throughout the ages.
In fact, no other empire in the world could have served as better paradigm to both, Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, than the Sassanid Empire of Iran. The Roman Empire did not develop or represent any mythical or legendary reference to the ancestors of the Romans except for the very limited attempts of Virgil, Horace or Ovid; even these poets did not envision any universal role, let alone vocation, for the Romans.
The Roman poets, who recalled the Roman national past, retracing it up to Aeneas and Troy, who attempted to reveal human wisdom in rhymes, and who envisioned human and divine interaction, were not sacerdotal masters, spiritual mystics or universal hierophants able to possibly position Rome in terms of Cosmogony, Cosmology, Eschatology and Soteriology. They were low-level talented artists, who wrote for merely personal or social purposes to please the Roman elite around them. In fact, for the worldwide standards of a truly universal empire, the Roman Empire is a most failed state – either you examine its pre-Christian period or you focus on the Eastern Roman imperial model.
Hitler’s references to the Nordic mythical context and Stalin’s calls for the Great Patriotic War (Великая Отечественная война) and exultations of the heroes of the motherland (герои родины), despite their great dissimilarities, are culturally closer to the Sassanid Iran than to the, spiritually impotent and intellectually weak, Roman Empire where Art acquired value per se, due to the total absence of true spirituality, sacerdotal potency, divine order, and universal appeal.
The extraordinary centripetal dynamics launched by Kartir triggered also centrifugal forces; Mazdak, a 5th c. – early 6th c. Iranian priest, the worldwide first to evangelize a Communist society, unleashed a thunderous religious attack against the Sassanid establishment, before failing and being banned. But both movements motivated and galvanized several generations of formidable opponents to the Omayyad and the Abbasid caliphs, leading people to either military resistance (like the Khurramites) or secession {like in numerous cases attested during the period of Islamic History that is known as ‘Iranian Intermezzo’, a term aptly introduced by the Russian Orientalist Vladimir Minorsky (1877-1966)}.
All the above was of vital importance for the History of Georgia and, more particularly for the survival of Georgian Christianity. In a way, the continuance of the Christian kingdom of Georgia depended basically on its Iranian nature, character and affiliation. As Iranian periphery, Georgia (like Armenia) was occupied during the early Islamic invasions. Resistance against the caliphates of Damascus and, after 750 CE, Baghdad was multifold throughout the territories of the Caliphate:
a- Islamic (notably led by the descendants of Ali ibn Abi Taleb who were the only rightful pretenders to the title of Caliph),
b- Iranian spiritual and cultural (involving notably the Khurramites who were sort of Neo-Mazdakites), and
c- Christian (mainly in Georgia and Armenia).
XIV. An indelible stamp on Islam: the Iranian Intermezzo
In fact, it is the success of the Iranian spiritual and cultural resistance that brought about groundbreaking results as early as 200 years after prophet Muhammad died (632 CE). In fact, the Abbasid Caliphate was vast and difficult to rule (from Morocco to the borders of China and from Siberia to Mozambique); the Caliphs had to care mostly about their survival because the outright majority of Muslims virulently opposed them. That’s why centrifugal forces were early developed and formidable militants of Iranian ancestry, culture and faith seized sizeable mountainous or remote lands and, one way or another, seceded from the Abbasid Caliphate.
This overwhelming phenomenon took various forms; sometimes a local feudal lord, who remained Mazdean for 70 or 80 years after the Islamic invasions, accepted Islam nominally, helped militarily the governor who was sent from Baghdad, and then gradually reduced him to impotency, making him unable to prevent the seizure of power at the local level. This was the case of the Samanid rulers (819-999), who imposed Iranian-Turanian culture and language over a large part of NE Iran and Central Asia, while being ceremonially Muslim.
Another example was the Tahirid dynasty (821-873), which was launched by Tahir ibn Husayn, an Iranian of noble descent who served the Caliph al-Ma’mun in his fight against his brother al-Amin only to be rewarded with the governorship of first Mosul and then Khorasan. First from Merv and then from Neyshapur the Tahirids ruled independently, only nominally accepting the authority of the Caliph at Baghdad.
And this was in fact the manner through which the Abbasid Caliphate totally collapsed already 100 years after its rise (750 CE); in fact, by the middle of the 9th c., the ruler at Baghdad was a powerless figurehead merely receiving news about ‘his’ provinces, which were controlled -in his name- by various Iranian and Turanian combatants whose culture was markedly Sassanid Iranian, although they nominally acknowledged Islam as religion.
The Samanids, the Tahirids, the Saffarids of Khorasan (861-1003), the Sallarids of Caucasus (919-1062), the Ziyarids of Northern Iran (931-1090), and above all the Buyids (934-1062), who held the Abbasid Caliph captive in his palace in Baghdad, ruled all lands between Syria and Pakistan, and used the Sassanid title ‘Shahanshah’, actively promoting the reinstatement, the rehabilitation, and the reinvigoration of all Sassanid ideals, virtues, principles, values and concepts. At the same time, an Iranian origin family, the Barmakids (Бармакиды/برمکیان), managed to obtain great power as advisers of the imperially inexperienced Abbasids, thus gradually transforming them into culturally Iranian caliphs of Muslim faith. In parallel, and as part of the imperial emancipation of the Abbasid family, Aramaeans and Iranians transferred their libraries and schools to Abbasid Baghdad, thus forming the greatest center of science, learning, research, translation and wisdom in the then world, namely the Bayt al Hikmah (بيت الحكمة/ Дом мудрости).
Only because the aforementioned developments caused the central Abbasid force to vanish into thin air, was it possible for the Caucasian Christian kingdoms of Georgia and Armenia to be reconstituted in the late 9th c. It is to be however reminded that these two seceded kingdoms constantly fought against one another. For all these reasons, one has to realize that, before the arrival of the Seljuks, the borderlines of the different kingdoms or emirates that were located between the Eastern Mediterranean coast lands, the Persian Gulf shores, the Indus River Valley, and Central Asia were moving like the sand of the desert. About:
When it comes to the wider Caucasus region, of major importance for developments that took place in Georgia and Armenia is the establishment of the Sajid dynasty (889-929; Саджиды / ساجیان). Muhammad ibn Abi’l-Saj Devdad was the founder of the dynasty, as he benefitted from his father’s fight against the already mentioned legendary rebel Babak Khorramdin, the leader of the Khurramites. Muhammad’s father, Abu’l-Saj Devdad (after whom the dynasty is named) was a Sogdian from Osrushana (Уструшана/اسروشنه) in Transoxiana (in today’s Uzbekistan), who served the Abbasid Caliphs in many battles, first against the Khurramites (837 CE) and later against other dissidents and rebels during the 9th c. Although he was appointed as governor of Khuzestan (today’s SW Iran), he joined forces with the Saffarids because of the spectacular disintegration of the Caliphate, which convinced numerous experienced military rulers that they could contain or even subdue the Caliph.
Similarly, the rise of the Mazyadid dynasty in Shirvan (in today’s Azerbaijan) under Haytham ibn Khalid in 861 further weakened the Abbasid ability to possibly bring the Caliphate’s Northern provinces under control. The historically Iranian title Shirvahshah (شروانشاه) was reintroduced and, after the Mazyadids, the later branches of the same dynasty, i.e. the Kasranids and the Darbandis, ruled large parts of the Caucasus region from 861 until 1538 (witnessing many ups and downs).
One must bear all this in mind in order to understand how the Georgian Bagrationi dynasty and the Armenian Bagratids (880-1045) were able to establish their small kingdoms in the 880s. One has also to add that, in the vicinity of Caucasus, few pre-Islamic Iranian dynasties survived for centuries after the Islamic conquests in the southern coastland of the Caspian Sea, i.e. the quasi-inaccessible northern valleys of the Elburz mountain range; the Dabuyids (a dynasty originating from the Sassanid Emperor Kavadh I) controlled that region (known in Farsi as Tabaristan / طبرستان) from 642 until 760, whereas the Karenids (also known as Qarivand) controlled the western parts of Tabaristan (currently named Mazandaran) from 550 until the 11th c., constantly fighting against the Abbasids.
XV. The intertwined Islamic & Christian cultural heritage of Georgia, and Shota Rustaveli
The aforementioned brief description helps also understand another fundamental aspect of the Georgian culture; this has to do with a deep cultural exchange and interrelationship between Muslims and Christians that took place in the Caucasus region, in Anatolia, in Central Asia and many other parts of the Islamic world. As Christians and Muslims interacted within the domain of the Iranian Civilization, a remarkable phenomenon of cultural flocculation was produced, which prevented acculturation from happening – thank God! In fact, this situation cancels totally the racist Western notion and theories of ‘acculturation’.
Acculturation is defined as ‘assimilation to a different culture, typically the dominant one’. Assimilation is described as ‘a two-way process in which the majority culture is changed as well as the minority culture’. Quite contrarily, flocculation is ‘a process by which a chemical coagulant added to the water acts to facilitate bonding between particles, creating larger aggregates which are easier to separate’.
In fact, to establish a parallel with the aforementioned definitions, Georgian Christianity and Iranian Culture did not ‘meet’ within the land of the Islamic Caliphate. Such an approach would be very superficial and erroneous. In reality, Christianity and Islam encountered one another within the soft waters of Iranian Culture and Civilization. Referring to the above definition, the ‘water’ was the Iranian Civilization, the particles were ‘Christianity’ and ‘Islam’, and the ‘chemical coagulant’ was common cultural life itself.
Then, without any change in the religious dogma, without any compromise in liturgical matters, and without any renunciation of their Christian past and identity, Georgians were greatly impacted by the Sassanid Iranian Cultural Renaissance of the 9th – 10th c., which stimulated poets, mystics, spiritual masters, and visionaries to reassess, reinstate and recompose the Iranian Imperial Universalism in Kartir’s heroic and divine terms, while also incorporating prophet Muhammad and his Islamic preaching within the eternal recapitulation that is now called World History. The narration of noble and heroic deeds of early, divine dynasties became then revelatory of the human condition, because the various aspects, the braveries and the sins, of many different kings and heroes could be poetically sculpted in order to create new, diachronic hyper-characters, who were able to encapsulate in one ‘person’ the achievements and/or the weaknesses of many.
The first Iranian Muslim to excel in these universally Iranian epics was Ferdowsi (فردوسی; 940-1025); his absolutely misunderstood, grand opus Shahnameh (شاهنامه) is not a merely chivalric romance, as fallacious English Orientalists constantly pretend, but a unique, supratemporal epic in which the superb poet elaborated multilayered heroic characters reflecting the past and heralding the future. For the Muslim world from the Balkans, Russia (and Tatarstan), Anatolia and the Caucasus region to India, Central Asia, and Siberia, Ferdowsi (Фирдоуси) impacted the culture of the Iranians, the Turanians and many other nations as much as prophet Muhammad did, whereas his fabulous epic Shahnameh (Шахнаме; more than 100000 verses) was astutely considered as ‘second Quran’ in terms of divine revelation.
Ferdowsi had an enormous impact on the language, the education, the literature, the popular religion, the culture and the spirituality of many nations; one century later, the national poet of Azerbaijan Nizami Ganjavi (نظامی گنجوی/Nizami Gəncəvi / Низами Гянджеви; 1141-1209) reproduced many of the legendary topics that Ferdowsi narrated, giving fully eschatological context to his portraits of the Sassanid Emperors Bahram V (420-438) and Khusraw II (590-628) and of Alexander the Great in his masterpieces Haft Peykar (هفت پیکر; ‘Seven Beauties’), Khosrow and Shirin (خسرو و شیرین), and Eskander Nameh (اسکندرنامه; ‘the Book of Alexander’) respectively. Amir Khusraw Dehlevi (1253-1325; امیرخسرو دهلوی), the father of Hindavi Literature (in the subcontinent), emulated these topics in the late 13th and the 14th c.; he was not only the national poet of Hindustan, but also a leading mystic and an accomplished musician who merged the traditional Iranian, Arabic, Turanian and Indian singing into what has been known as Qawwali (a devotional song of Muslim mystics). About:
What Nezami Ganjavi did in Azerbaijan and Amir Khusraw carried out in India, Shota Rustaveli (1172-1216; شوتا روستاولی / Шота Руставели) accomplished in Georgia. The national poet about whose life little is known composed the famous epic ‘The Knight in the Panther’s Skin’ (Vepkhist kaosani), which is truly flooded with Iranian themes, concepts, values, names, heroic deeds, mythical-eschatological connotations, and brave, honest characters. In fact, the main hero of the epic (the knight Tariel who wears the panther’s skin) is the Georgian literary emulation of Rustam, one of the foremost Iranian legendary heroes about whom Ferdowsi and all the other great poets and mystics composed thousands of verses. This is easy to conclude, when one takes into account that Rustam used to wear babr-e bayan (بَبْرِ بَیان), namely a magical, ever-lasting suit made of the skin of a tiger or leopard or panther, which makes the person that wears it invisible and invulnerable to weapons, fire and water.
It is not possible to expand on this topic within the limits of the present article, but it is essential to state that this enthralling epic poem reflected and determined the Georgian identity, culture, traditions and values. The Georgian national epic is at the middle of the dogmatic distance between Islam and Christianity; there are references to the Old Testament, the Gospels, and the Quran, but most of the characters are Muslims. This is so because in the 12th and the 13th c. there was no real antagonism between the two religions among people living in the Caucasus region. Every trouble started much later, and only after the calamitous infiltration of numerous Catholic and Protestant missionaries, English and French colonialists, and villainous, racist academics who deliberately spread hate, discord, enmity and rancor; it was then that a historical revisionism was attempted by the small part of the Georgian elite that was westernized (with the help of their foreign -mainly French and English- masters).
In fact, these vicious Western missionaries, academics, ‘explorers’, agents and diplomats, who reached there with perfidious mentality, evil intentions, and insidious targets, incited the Georgian priests to burn and destroy all manuscripts of Rustaveli’s majestic epic under the pretext that ‘it was not Christian’, but in reality because it very much defined and consolidated Georgian soul as entirely Oriental, and absolutely clear of the Greco-Roman contamination that these Western gangsters intended to diffuse instead.
XVI. Rustaveli’s Russian translations and Stalin’s pseudonyms
All this and much more was indeed part of Stalin’s culture, education, religious traditions and world conceptualization. It is well known that Stalin loved very much the aforementioned masterpiece of the National Georgian Literature and he wanted to make it widely known to Russians. Only in the period 1935-1940, there were four (4) complete poetic translations of the epic in Russian (Konstantin Balmont, 1933; Georgy Tsagareli, 1937; Shalva Nutsubidze, 1937; Panteleimon Petrenko, 1938). And for a lavish celebration of Rustaveli’s 750th birthday, celebrated in 1937, the Bolshoi Theater was chosen as the correct venue.
Quite interestingly, there was an earlier (actually the first) Russian translation of the epic and even an independent book (of biographical content) about Rustaveli, which was written by the translator himself (also in Russian). The translation (Барсова кожа-Грузинская поэма Шота Руставели / Panther skin–Georgian poem by Shota Rustaveli) was published in Tbilisi in 1888. Three years earlier (1885), also in Tbilisi, the book was published under the title: Шота Руставели – Грузинский народный поэт (Shota Rustaveli – Georgian popular poet).
The author and translator was a renowned journalist with a career spanning over the 19th and the early 20th century. Son of a Polish officer (of the Czarist army) and of a Georgian lady, he was born in the Caucasus region in 1837 and he died around 1912, after having authored several books and been the editor-in chief of various important publications. All the same, his translation and book remained unknown to almost all; they were out of reach for most of the 20th c.; the sole reason for the confiscation and the concealment of these publications seems to have been a rather mysterious, personal involvement of Stalin himself.
– Why does a ruler decide to literarily ban a book about the national poet of his own fatherland and the translation of the poet’s grand opus – particularly if this leader so much adores this poet and finds great pleasure in repeatedly reading the illustrious epic?
The late Prof. William Vasilievich Pokhliobkin (Вильям Васильевич Похлёбкин; 1923-2000) believed that he found the reason; either he is right or not, the fact is that the Czarist officer’s son, author and Russian translator of Rustaveli, was named Evgeniy Stepanovich Stalinsky (Евгений Степанович Сталинский). And for Prof. Pokhliobkin, the reason for the removal of Stalinsky’s publications from every public library and bookshop is the fact that Stalin wanted to hide the true origin of his own (and most famous) pseudonym, which was an abbreviation of the translator’s name.
Speaking about Stalin’s pseudonyms, we can discover other traces of Iranian cultural impact. One of his earlier pseudonyms was Koba; many believe that the young rebel selected this pseudonym for him, after identifying his role in real life as that of the homonymous hero of a novel written by the Georgian writer Alexander Kazbegi (1848-1893; Александр Казбеги). In the novel Patricide (Отцеубийца), Koba is a character-embodiment of justice, truthfulness and respect for women; a Caucasian bandit, who has no respect for any authority, defends the poor, and takes revenge on wrongdoers, the hero of the novel fascinated the mind and imagination of the young Joseph Dzhugashvili. About: (Russian translation) https://www.litres.ru/aleksandr-kazbegi/otceubiyca/chitat-onlayn/
The aforementioned interpretation of the origin of the pseudonym Koba is only partly true; in reality, the Georgian novelist used a name that was historically known to Georgians. This was the Modern Georgian rendition of the name of the Sassanid Emperor Kavadh I (pronounced Qubad in Farsi: قباد یکم /Кавад I/473-531; ruled 488-496 and 499-531), who was one of the greatest Sassanids, even more so because he supported the revolutionary, Communist, high priest and visionary Mazdak and his groundbreaking reforms that he wanted to initiate in order to entirely overhaul the socio-economic structure of the Empire.
After eight (8) years of controversial rule, Kavadh I lost his throne due to his extraordinarily brave and adventurous character and because of his determination to adopt the ideas and the concepts of someone, who wanted to confiscate the lands and the fortunes of the landowners, i.e. the imperial nobility, and to distribute the national wealth proportionally to all the subjects of the Empire; even the women should be common to all men as per Mazdak’s teachings, which were put to use for some time. All the same, escaping to Turan and getting reinforcements, the toppled monarch managed to quickly return and to rule for more than three decades, also invading (partly) the vassal kingdom of Chosroid Georgia (Iberia); but Kavadh I had to permanently forget Mazdakism, which was definitely the World History’s first conceptualization and implementation of a Communist society.
Kavadh I’s historical importance pales indeed, if it is compared with the sublime, universal significance of his legendary counterpart, namely Shah Kay Kawad of the ‘mythical’ Kayanian dynasty that Ferdowsi prodigiously envisioned and marvelously narrated in his majestic epic Shahnameh. And such the spiritual, moral and imperial importance of Ferdowsi’s epic characters was that, many centuries after the national poet of Iran died, Seljuk sultans of Rum in Anatolia were named after Kay Kawad (notably Kayqubad I).
The Georgian Chronicles do not mention Mazdak, but the greatest Islamic historian al-Tabari (839-923; Ибн Джарир ат-Табари / الطبري) wrote extensively about the controversial imperial reformer in the 5th volume (out of 40 volumes of the recent English edition) of his History of the Prophets and the Kings (تاريخ الرسل والملوك/Tarīkh al-Rusul wa al-Muluk); in this part of his text (or volume of the publication), the illustrious historiographer, theologian, mystic and scholar covers mainly the History of the Sassanid Empire. As Tabari was widely known, read and quoted not only among Muslims but also by Syriac Aramaean, Georgian and Armenian scholars, historians and various writers, it is certain that his narratives were shared among several non-Muslim populations. It makes therefore sense to assume that Stalin’s pseudonym Koba reveals key aspects of his Georgian and therefore Iranian cultural background.
XVII. Archaeological excavations and Orientalist discoveries prior to Stalin’s sojourn in Anatolia
If I expanded so much on Stalin’s national, socio-cultural, educational, intellectual and spiritual background, it is because it is essential to understand who exactly the young man truly was. When Joseph Dzhugashvili at the age of 33 decided to escape from the czarist prisons and to secure a calm place for survival, meditation, spiritual exercises and practices, he was not at all a European or a Westerner with knowledge of, or interest in, Dante, Pascal, Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Goethe, Lamartine, Fichte, Victor Hugo, and various other cornerstones of the Modern Western European intellectual life. He was an Oriental, a Caucasian, culturally very familiar with Anatolian and Iranian Muslims, with Turanian mystics, with Iranian epics, with Asia (and not with Europe), and with a legendary reconfiguration of the Pre-Islamic Antiquity and of the Divine, Imperial Universe (Ferdowsi, Nizami Ganjavi, Shota Rustaveli, etc.).
Anti-czarist projects and activities were certainly a common ground between Stalin and Lenin, his 8 years older mentor, whom the young Georgian met in 1905, but in reality, when it comes to education and culture, the main two Soviet sovereigns had very little in common during their first 33 years of life. It is very clear that Lenin and Stalin did not have the same reading of Karl Marx. Lenin was a Marxist, and Stalin was a Leninist; but Stalin was a Marxist only in the sense that he was a follower and a disciple of Lenin. More importantly, Stalin did not view Lenin in the way Lenin viewed Marx.
Stalin’s time of visit to Ottoman Anatolia coincided with an overwhelming colonial movement of academic-intellectual explorations, mainly undertaken by French, English, Belgian and Dutch scholars, who generated a treacherous antagonism in order to benefit from the work of their German, Austrian, Italian, Russian, Danish, Swedish, Swiss and American competitors; this occurred because the latter did not realize that what they were doing only contributed to the -fabulously beneficial to the colonial powers of France, England and Holland- academic, educational, cultural, intellectual, artistic and spiritual colonialism, which is now known as ‘Orientalism’.
Orientalism was not an accurate representation of the Ancient Oriental, Oriental Christian, and Islamic civilizations, but a monstrous, deliberate, systematic and racist distortion of the historical reality that the criminal colonial academia intentionally adjusted to their already elaborated inhuman forgery, which they called ‘Greco-Roman Civilization’, ‘Judeo-Christian culture’ or simply ‘Western world’. It is clear that the inhuman forgers wanted to pull Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Qajar Iran, Qing China, and all the lands that they had already colonized (notably the vast Mughal Empire of South Asia, the sultanates of SE Asia, and Africa) into their bogus-historical revisionist dogma that started with the Renaissance and expanded ever since,
a) criminally usurping the local and/or regional cultural identity of hundreds of millions of people,
b) shamelessly substituting their cultural identity with a fake,
c) physically exterminating dozens of millions of people in different manners, and
d) totally revising, altering and disfiguring the earlier History of the Mankind.
Due to the aforementioned practice, hundreds of archaeological, historical, linguistic and philological projects were undertaken, ancient scripts deciphered, monuments and sites unearthed, languages studied – and ferociously misinterpreted, falsified, and at times concealed only to justify the evilness of the Frankish and Anglo-Saxon racism and to vindicate the fabricated myth of Hellenism, the constructed falsehood of Catholic Christianity, and the Anti-Oriental, Anti-Asiatic and Anti-African paranoia of the colonial elites.
Numerous important archaeological sites were then excavated in the already colonized territories of Egypt, Greece, Sudan, India, Tunisia, etc., throughout the ailing Qajar Empire of Iran, and notably in the still vast territory of the Ottoman Empire without however the idiotic sultan Abdulhamid II (1842-1918; reigned from 1876 to 1909, being a nominal figurehead afterwards; عبد الحميد ثانی / Abdülhamid II / Абдул-Хамид II), the most pathetic and useless of all Ottomans, understanding anything. The unfathomable historical resources of his country were being stolen, the pre-Islamic past of his empire was uncovered only to be distorted and adjusted to heinous plans, and the silly trash Abdulhamid II was still smiling to the ambassadors of France and England! Even worse, the discoveries were popularized, discussed and introduced into educational manuals, always as per the forged representation that each Western explorer and scholar established.
Newspapers were spreading the news of each and every archaeological exploration and excavation which was tantamount to material discovery and intellectual-academic-spiritual disguise and cover-up.
Before Stalin crossed the Ottoman Empire from its northeastern confines to the northwestern fringes, the following major sites were explored and unearthed in Mesopotamia: Nineveh in 1842, Nimrud (ancient Kalhu) in 1845, Ur in 1853-1854 (and again later in 1922-1934), Khorsabad (Dur Sarrukin, the capital of Sargon of Assyria) in 1855, Babylon in 1899, Assur (the main Assyrian capital) in 1903, Hatra (the famous Aramaean caravan-city, one of the most important stations on the Silk Roads; surveyed by Walter Andrae of the German excavation team working in Assur from 1906 to 1911), Uruk in 1912-1913, and many other sites – without forgetting the very spectacular monuments of Taq-i Kasra in Al Mada’in (the Sassanid capital Tesifun / Ctesiphon) that the French explorers Eugène Flandin and Pascal Coste visited in 1851 and confessed about the stupendous imperial gate: “the Romans had nothing similar or of the type”.
By that time, in Iran, many sites were already explored and excavated too; Parsa (Persepolis), known as Chehel Minar (چهل منار /i.e. forty minarets) during the Islamic times, was one of the most visited (by Western Europeans) sites; various travelers from Europe reached there in 1320, 1474, 1568, and 1602, whereas in 1618 the Spanish ambassador (to the court of the Safavid Shah of Iran Abbas I/1571-1629; reigned after 1588) García de Silva Figueroa was the first to associate this location with the great Achaemenid capital that was known as Persepolis in Ancient Greek and Latin sources. Pasargad (the early Achaemenid capital) was first explored by the German Ernst Herzfeld in 1905, whereas Shush (Susa), an Elamite and later an Achaemenid capital, was explored in 1851, 1885-1886, 1894-1899, and then systematically excavated by the French Jacques de Morgan (1897-1911).
Not far from Hamedan (the Ancient Median capital Hegmataneh / Ekbatana), the splendid site of Behistun (Bisotun) had become world-famous even before it was excavated (initially in 1904) by Leonard William King and Reginald Campbell Thompson (sponsored by the British Museum); this happened because the famous rock reliefs and inscriptions of the Achaemenid Darius the Great were copied and published by the German surveyor Carsten Niebuhr in 1764 and then used by the German Georg Friedrich Grotefend to decipher the Old Persian cuneiform script. He deciphered 35 cuneiform signs of the Old Achaemenid in 1802. Later, Sir Henry Creswick Rawlinson studied and fully deciphered the script in 1838. Without the decipherment of the Old Achaemenid, it would be impossible for Rawlinson to decipher the Assyrian-Babylonian cuneiform, and later for others to read the Hittite script which enabled us to have access to the most important and the most original Anatolian literature of pre-Christian times. Last, quite interestingly, the German spiritual-scientific society Ahnenerbe, which used Hitler for their non-Nazi, highly secretive projects, explored Behistun too – in 1938. And to the Georgians, the northwestern parts of Iran were like their backyard.
Again in the Ottoman Empire, Rekem/Petra (the capital of the Nabataean Aramaean state, which controlled most of the territory of today’s Jordan) was first explored in 1907, whereas the Nabataean royal necropolis Hegra (Mada’in Saleh) was visited by the famous German explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt in 1812 and by Charles Montagu Doughty in 1876. Early in the 20th c., the site was expected to be duly explored {because of the vicinity of a station built for the Ottoman Hejaz Railway (that was constructed between 1901 and 1908), which passed through the site}; but it was quite unfortunately never explored, let alone excavated, before the year 2000, due to the rise of the barbarian Wahhabi pseudo-Muslims and their allies, namely the criminal Saudi puppets of UK and US. These obscurantist forces carried out the anti-Ottoman revolt of 1916, destroyed the station and the railway, and stupidly prohibited all excavations in their hitherto illegally occupied territory.
In the region of Anatolia, three major sites attracted explorers, archaeologists and scholars. The ruins of Hattusha, the capital of one of the world’s most formidable military forces, i.e. the Hittite Empire, were discovered (in Boğazköy, near Yozgat) in 1834 by the French Charles Texier. The first excavations started in 1893 and, after 1906, the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society) excavated the site thoroughly until 1951 (almost uninterruptedly), unearthing 25000 cuneiform tablets written in Hittite, Assyrian-Babylonian, and other ancient Oriental languages. Most of the tablets were found already in 1906 by Hugo Winckler and Theodore Makridi, an Ottoman-Turkish archaeologist of Greek origin. This extraordinary archaeological treasure, known as the Boğazköy Archives, opened the way for the decipherment of the Hittite by the Czech Orientalist Bedřich Hrozný whose first solid conclusions were published in 1915. https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/hattusha-excavations-continue-for-more-than-a-century-176616
It is noteworthy that Hattusha/Boğazköy is located on the historical road between Constantinople/Istanbul and Theodosiopolis/Erzurum that Stalin took to move from Artvin to Adapazarı. It is therefore very probable that he visited the site of Anatolia’s first empire and he watched the enormous, massive walls of the Hittite capital, although by that time no one knew that in 1596 BCE the Hittite king Mursili I (1620-1590) undertook from that very location the longest military expedition ever undertaken until his time, and after crossing 2000 km, he destroyed Babylon.
Of lesser importance was the discovery of Hisarlık by Heinrich Schliemann, who started excavating there in 1870 and found what is believed to be the Ancient Anatolian city of Tarwisha or Wilusa that the Ancient Greeks called Troy or Ilion. After the death of the amateurish, fraudulent and surely untrustworthy Schliemann, Wilhelm Dörpfeld continued the excavation of the site and published his findings.
Far more important than the excavation of Hisarlık (Troy) was the discovery of cuneiform tablets near Kayseri (Caesarea of Cappadocia) around 1880. After an amount of them was bought by the British Museum, Ernest Chantre started excavating for two seasons in 1893; Hugo Grothe continued in 1906, and then Hrozný unearthed more than 1000 cuneiform tablets (in Assyrian-Babylonian), which document in detail the deeds of the Assyrian karum (trade post) in Kanesh (or Nesha), in today’s Kültepe (20 km SW of Kayseri), for the period 2050-1750 BCE. As a matter of fact, the great Assyrian entrepôt and trade community constitutes the world’s earliest known instance of international trade; the topic was elucidated by my former professor, the Assyriologist Paul Garelli in his thèse d’État ‘Les Assyriens en Cappadoce’ (Paris, 1963).
Eclipsing the aforementioned sites, the most outstanding discovery that took place in Anatolia in the late 19th c. is that of Nemrut Dağı (Немрут-Даг / Mount Nemrut). The monumental site at the peak of the 2130 m high mountain is apparently the foremost Mithraic sanctuary ever found; it was established out of three enormous terraces (eastern, northern and western) located around a tumulus (with height of 49 m and diameter of 152 m), namely the tomb of Antiochus I of Commagene (69-34 BCE). The burial chamber has not yet been discovered, but due to the inscriptions found, we know that the magnificent king explicitly boasted to descend from Darius the Great (through his father’s family) and from Alexander the Great (through his mother’s family).
Turning point in the diffusion and the transplantation of Mithraism from Central Asia and Iran to Greece, Rome and Europe, Mount Nemrut sanctuary features five enormous and several other smaller statues and reliefs in each of its terraces (the northern is lost due to an earthquake). The majestic marble sculptures represent (from left to right):
Apollo-Mithra-Hermes-Helios (spiritually the preponderant deity of the sacred place),
Tyche-Commagene (Fortune, as embodiment of the Iranian Mithraic goddess Anahita, identified with the kingdom of Antiochus I),
Oromazdes (the Iranian God Ahura Mazda linked with the Ancient Greek god Zeus),
Antiochos I of Commagene (as divinity), and
Artagnes (the Iranian god Verethragna associated with the Ancient Greek hero Hercules), with one eagle and one lion on each side of the five enormous statues.
The site was first studied by the German engineer Karl Sester in 1881, then explored by Otto Puchstein of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (German Archaeological Institute) in 1882, and finally studied by an Ottoman-German team (under the Ottoman archaeologist Osman Hamdi Bey and the sculptor Osgan Effendi who started working there in 1883). Thanks to the discovery of a long inscription in Ancient Greek many historical, religious and spiritual points were elucidated, and the general public read the results of the excavations and the associated research already in 1890.
XVIII. Stalin’s textual sources of information about Mithra and the Mithraic mysteries
– Beyond all the archaeological and epigraphic discoveries that were published in newspapers and magazines, what were Stalin’s sources of information about Mithras, Mithraism, Mithraic mysteries, and Mithraic spirituality?
Stalin was not a historian or an archaeologist by formation; but he advanced much in his formation of Christian theologian in the Russian Tbilisi Spiritual Seminary, as I already said. This means that he must have greatly benefitted from the library of that academic institution and the advice of highly educated men like
a) the famous archimandrite Seraphim Mesheryakov (Серафим Мещеряков / born Яков Михайлович Мещеряков; 1860-1933), who was the rector of the famous Tiflis Theological Seminary, member of the Georgian Imeretian Synodal Office (1893-1898) and later became an active member of the Obnovlenchestvo (Обновленчество / Renovation) movement, and
b) the bishop Hermogenes (Germogen) Dolganev (Гермоген Долганёв / born Георгий Ефремович Долганов; 1858-1918), who was inspector (1893-1898) and rector (1898-1901) of the Tbilisi Seminary; this brave man opposed Imperial Russia’s westernization and moral decay, facing Rasputin personally and even threatening him in an effort to contain his evildoing. However, by the time he was promoted as rector of the Tbilisi Seminary, the young Joseph Dzhugashvili may have already shaped his personal opinion about the historical role of Christianity and the true essence of the forces which -from Rome- imposed Christianity throughout the Roman Empire. Then, he apparently envisioned another future for himself, and ceased to be interested in the Seminary; consequently, the bishop Hermogenes decided to finally expel him.
In the Seminary, Stalin must have probably become acquainted with a great number of apologists and Fathers of the Christian Church, like the Carthaginian Tertullian (155-220; Тертуллиан) and Gregory of Nazianzus (329-390; Григорий Богослов), who wrote much about the Mithraic mysteries, as well as the beliefs and the cults of the Mithraists, who then (2nd – 4th c. CE) appeared to be the greatest rivals of, and the most formidable challenge to, Christianity.
When it comes to Tertullian (who wrote in Latin), there have been several 19th c. Russian translations that Stalin may have read in his youth: the first bishop Athanasius of Moscow translated the ‘Apologeticus pro Christianis’ in 1802 (Квинта Септимия Флорента Тертуллиана Защищение христиан против язычников. / Пер. еп. Афанасия. М., 1802. 230 стр.); the lieutenant-general Igor V. Karneev (Егор Васильевич Карнеев; 1773-1849) published his translation of selected works of Tertullian in four parts (1847-1850; the last two parts posthumously/available online: http://www.odinblago.ru/tertulian_1/); and in the 1910s, N. N. Shcheglov (Н. Н. Щеглов) and Archbishop Basil Bogdashevsky (Архиепископ Василий; born Дмитрий Иванович Богдашевский) published another Russian translation of the apologetic, dogmatic and polemical works of Tertullian.
With respect to Gregory of Nazianzus, one of the major Fathers of the Christian Church, there have been Russian translations of his works already in the second half of the 18th c., notably the publication of Fr. Turgenev in 1783 and that of archbishop Irenaeus (Архиепископ Ириней; born Иван Андреевич Клементьевский) in 1798 (involving 13 homilies). However, it is more probable that Stalin used the 6-volume, edition (complete works of Gregory of Nazianzus) of the Moscow Theological Academy (Московская духовная академия; 1843-1848); this edition, slightly abridged, was reprinted in 1912 by the Publishing House P. P. Shoikin (in Sankt Petersburg). It is available online: http://www.odinblago.ru/sv_grigoriy_t1/
Remarkable textual evidence about the diffusion of Mithraism throughout the Mediterranean, narratives concerning the adoption of Mithraic cults, concepts and symbols by the nations of the Roman Empire, and descriptions of the penetration of Mithraic esoteric mysteries among the Roman society the young student Stalin may have got while reading texts of several authors of the Late Antiquity. Authors like the Phoenician Porphyry (Порфирий), the Greek Plutarch (Плутарх) who was the high priest of the Oracle of Delphi, Ancient Greece’s holiest temple, the Roman Dio Cassius (Дион Кассий), the Carthaginian Lactantius (Лактанций), and the Upper Egyptian Nonnus (Нонн Панополитанский) expanded on various topics associated with Mithraism. The same is valid for a very particular Egyptian, who stands literally between the two worlds, namely Early Christianity and the Egyptian Memphite Theology of Ptah: Origen (Ориген).
Russian translations from the Ancient Greek and Latin texts existed already at the time; Stalin may well have found them in the Seminary Library and discussed them with his instructors. Plutarch’s ‘Parallel Lives’ (and most importantly the Life of Pompey where the Greek author documents the desecration of the most important temples of Ancient Greece by the Mithraic pirates of Cilicia, who imposed Mithraism throughout Western Anatolia, Southern Balkans, and Southern Italy) were translated in 1814-1821 by Spyridon Yurevich Destunis, the Ottoman-origin, Christian Orthodox Russian scholar, author and diplomat (1782-1848). https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/Плутарховы_сравнительные_жизнеописания_славных_мужей_(Плутарх;_Дестунис)
There was also the translation (Жизнеописания Плутарха) published in 1862 by Vladimir Guerrier (1837-1919; Владимир Иванович Герье), a French-origin Russian historian and academic.
However, I believe that it is more probable that Stalin used the then most recent Russian translation of the ‘Parallel Lives’, which was prepared in 1889 by Vasilii Alexeevich Alexeev (Василий Алексеевич Алексеев; 1863-1919) under the title Жизнь и дела знаменитых людей древности (Life and deeds of famous people of the Antiquity):
As regards Lactantius, the first Russian translation dates back in the 18th c.; it was published by Ivan Nikitich Tredyakovsky (Иван Никитич Тредиаковский) in 1783, whereas Igor V. Karneev (Егор Васильевич Карнеев) produced, in the middle of the 19th c., a very much criticized (for linguistic inaccuracies) translation of Lactantius’ works in two volumes (1848).
Origen’s works were repeatedly translated to Russian during the 19th c., notably by Ivan Nikolaevich Korsunskiy (Иван Николаевич Корсунский) in 1884, 1886 and 1897; I. N. Petrov’s translation appeared in 1899 (И. Н. Петров, Творения Оригена), whereas Leonid Ivanich Pisarev (Леонид Иванович Писарев) published (Kazan, 1912) Origen’s famous work ‘Against Celsus’ (Κατά Kέλσον / Contra Celsum / Против Цельса), which is available online: https://azbyka.ru/otechnik/Origen/protiv_celsa/
There may have been no Russian translations of the complete works of Dio Cassius, Nonnus, and Porphyry at the end of the 19th c. and the beginning of the 20th c., but as a Seminary student, Stalin was in the propinquity of several priests, theologians and monks, who were well versed in Ancient Greek and Latin and knew the modern bibliography. They could have narrated to their student all the stories of Mithraic content that are included in the works of these authors, notably Porphyry’s ‘On the caves of the nymphs’. About:
XIX. Spirituality, Religion, Eschatology, Soteriology, the Extinction of the Mankind, and Stalin
The core of every religion revolves around a specific and detailed vision of Cosmogony, Cosmology, Eschatology and Soteriology, therefore constituting a diachronic view of the History of the Mankind; this view is expressed in absolutely mythical terms through use of codified symbols that reveal to every human mind what the human soul can perceive out of the spiritual universe.
As a particular vision of the Truth, no religion can be communicated in rational terms, because human ‘reason’ is the epicenter of the Human Fall, and consequently every ‘reason’ or ‘logic’ destroys the Truth. It cannot be otherwise; as it is a purely mental -non-spiritual- activity, ‘reason’ is indeed handicapped from its inception. It therefore can never perceive the Truth, because reason is material, whereas the Truth is spiritual of essence.
The Fallen Man’s challenge is that, either he likes it or not, he exists for the Truth and not vice versa; it is therefore the Fallen Man’s task to subdue, contain, and eventually eliminate ‘reason’ in order to achieve illumination, unite with his soul, and attain spiritual-corporeal synergy. The revelations that every religion’s codified symbols can offer are always there. You don’t need the high priest of Ishtar in Assyria in person to initiate you in the perception of the realities permanently encoded in the Assyrian monotheists’ symbols; you can do it by yourself. Suffice it that you empty yourself from all unnecessary misperceptions, useless biases, egoistic elements, and unsolicited assumptions that the Fallen World into which you came was devilish enough to force you to make or develop.
Every moral code included in a religion is in reality appended to the interpretation of its codified symbols; that is why the monotheistic and polytheistic priesthoods, in their ceaseless fight, which shaped Human History, developed themes and added narratives as regards the deeds of God (or of the gods). Through these narratives, the different priesthoods reflected or projected spiritual patterns, motions, movements, conditions, motivations and attitudes onto the souls of their followers. In the light of this reality, any insane researcher could describe all the religions as simple psy-ops, but this is preposterous; this is so because you can never define the original fact or situation by taking any posterior, altered, and distorted fact or any unfortunate circumstance as a point of reference. The beginning point is always the original one – not the ulterior, decayed and degraded one. Modern times’ psy-ops are launched by demented materialists, who have no clue about the spiritual universe, let alone its laws, rules and realities.
But by reflecting spiritual patterns, movements, motivations and attitudes onto the souls of their followers, the ancient priesthoods drew them closer to the Divine or to the rejection of the Divine (: the fallen hierarchies). So, if one is foolish enough today to take an ancient religion as psy-ops, he must realize that the so-called ‘psy-ops’ had fundamentally targets of spiritual nature. Priesthoods turn humans to either good or evil; negative spiritual forces may be always there and they stand for temptation or deception, but humans yield to temptation, being induced at a moment of weakness. That is why what really matters is what you do (or what everyone does), not what the others are able or foolish enough to devise; every human is fully capacitated to timely outmaneuver or outfox the most negative, the most vicious, and the most monstrous plot or trap.
When a polytheistic priesthood unleashes negative patterns, motions, movements, conditions, motivations and attitudes -via absurd themes and evil narratives-, a huge flux of terrible calamity is directed against their followers and believers; then, the good character and the gallant morals disappear, civilization moves away from its original roots, and various forms of inhumanity, barbarism, vulgarity, cruelty and corruption start to appear. A debased, barbarian society is a good tool in the hands of an evil sacerdotal or ‘royal’ elite: these are the lawless societies, the devilish priests, and the ignoble rulers that we so often encounter throughout Human History.
– What are fallen hierarchies, negative spiritual forces, polytheistic priesthoods, and negative patterns, motions, movements, conditions, motivations and attitudes?
I believe that the term ‘rejection of the Divine’ is the best response to the above question. Any form, intension, predisposition or scope that denies the Creation and the world that it encompasses (in its own terms) is a repudiation of the Creator and an ostensible effort to move from the status of ‘Being’ to that of ‘Nonbeing’. It is the absurd ‘existence’ of someone or something who/that -in reality- does not want to ‘exist’.
And this entire affair is something that the Mankind had always to deal with, because the quintessence of every eschatology is about ‘Being’ and/or ‘Nonbeing’; the scope of every soteriology is about ‘Being’. That is why there cannot be religion without eschatology and soteriology. All these stories started very early with the antediluvian split of the originally united, monotheistic, priesthood; that fact was a sheer interference of the fallen hierarchies into the human condition. And this fact was first (before the Flood) prophesied and later (after the Flood) mythologized as the dismemberment of the Osirian body.
Quite unfortunately, this entire affair will end in a very bad manner because, for
– for the monotheistic priesthood, ‘eschatology’ means the ‘struggle of the good people to ideally preserve the condition of Being’, but
– for the polytheistic priesthood, ‘eschatology’ means the ‘struggle of the good people to ideally bring about the condition of Nonbeing’.
This ubiquitously manifested polarization takes an even more atrocious appearance, because for the polytheistic priesthood ‘soteriology’ means the achievement of ‘Nonbeing’. In other words, the Salvation of the Mankind is its total extinction and disappearance.
This is very clearly stated in Manichaeism, the religion that Mani solemnly preached in Seleucia-Ctesiphon on the 19th April 240 CE, just one week after the coronation of the Sassanid Iranian Emperor Shapur I (12th April 240 CE) to whom Mani dedicated his book ‘Shabuhragan’ (which means ‘the book of Shapur’).
Manichaeism was reviled by Christians and Muslims alike for many long centuries; its monastic aspect must have been seen as an impact on Christianity by Stalin. An absolutely non-heroic faith of self-denial like Mani’s spiritual-religious system must have not attracted Stalin. On the contrary, it is quite possible that it looked quite disgusting and inhuman to him.
But the fact that the polytheistic priesthood intends to produce an unprecedented sacrifice of the Mankind at the End of Times (a long lasting conflagration as per the terms of Manichaeism), in order to bring about the instinctively pursued target, i.e. the human annihilation, can also be identified within the context of many religions, Mithraism included. And this is what the young student of the Tbilisi Seminary must have sensed. On the other hand, the continuance of the ancient priesthoods down to our times under the form of religious orders and secret societies was also apparent to him.
The means by which the polytheistic Mithraic priesthood of Central Asia prefigured the extinction of the Mankind was the narrative about Mithras slaying the Bull or, to put it according to the original expression, Mithras killing the Celestial Bovines. That deed was a sacrilege.
XX. Major themes of Stalin’s spiritual quest in Anatolia – 1. Tauroctony and Crucifixion
Tauroctony (bull-slaying) is a particularly revolting theme; in real terms, it is a divinely unwanted and therefore unnecessary sacrifice. Its origin dates back to the end of the 3rd millennium BCE, and its first mention is attested in the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh in which the two friendly but different heroes, Gilgamesh (identified with the Biblical and Islamic Nimrud) and Enkidu, slay a bull. All the same, in later periods, the monotheistic priesthoods of Assyria did their ingenious best to conceal the topic and that is why, in replacement of the historical truth, they mythologized Gilgamesh as a lion hunter.
When the theme of bull-slaying was introduced by the early Iranian-Turanian Magi in Central Asia, it caused terrible friction and the benevolent Magi kicked the evil ones out. The theme was banned among the majority of the local mystics and tribal spiritual leaders; furthermore, there is no mention of it in Tengrism, Shamanism, and the earlier forms of Ancient Iranian and Ancient Indian religions; as a matter of fact, the sacralization of the cow in the Hindu beliefs is also an extreme reaction to this very ancient mythical topic. Zoroaster too erased every trace of the topic, which is not mentioned in the Avesta, and that is why the Iranian Magi of the Achaemenid times (550-330 BCE) hated so much the emperors, who were strictly aligned with the monotheistic dogma of Zoroastrianism. Mithra in Zoroastrianism is merely the solar aspect of the only god: Ahura Mazda. Reversely, Ahura Mazda in Mithraism is an obsolete deity, similar to the ‘dei otiosi’ (inactive gods) of the Ancient Romans. At this point, I need to add that labeling Zoroastrianism, a fully monotheistic dogma, as ‘dualism’ is a cover-up of the blasphemous polytheistic priests of Anti-Christian (‘Catholic’) Rome.
As the evil and inhuman, Mithraic sacerdotal college proceeded to the West and reached the Iranian plateau, one cultural vestige was left in Central Asia only to survive down to our days: buzkashi, a collective sport in which horse riders attempt to grab the decapitated carcass of a goat and hold it for as long as possible or ride with it to the finish line. However, in reality, buzkashi is a form of substitute to the bull-slaying; and as such, it remains until today a cherished tradition among numerous people in many countries in Asia. The Biblical and Quranic traditions relate also to a well-known substitute to an unnecessary sacrifice: a lamb instead of Isaac (as per the Biblical tradition) or Ishmael (according to the Quranic textual references). Similarly, a substitute for Stalin in Anatolia was the practice of boar hunting, which was, literally speaking, ‘bull-slaying in reverse’.
At the very beginning of the Sassanid times (first half of the 3rd c. CE) a nobler sport was invented in Iran, in replacement of the buzkashi among the imperial elite: chowkan (چوگان/chowgan in Farsi). Indicative of where the line of distinction between Civilization and Barbarism lies, the Sassanid imperial game was introduced in the Eastern Roman Empire as tzykanion and a majestic tzykanisterion (a special stadium for this sport) was erected in New Rome-Constantinople as early as the reign of Theodosius I (408-450). But this culture failed to be further diffused west of the Balkans where the bull-slaying theme was propagated only to stay down to our times in the form of the Corrida de toros (bullfighting).
Fugitive in the Ottoman Empire, Joseph Dzhugashvili must have spent much time, contemplating the real meaning of tauroctony and examining why, in striking contrast to Anatolia, Caucasus, Iran, Central Asia, Russia and Siberia, this theme was widely diffused, promoted, propagated and cherished in the Western parts of the Roman Empire, while being also mentioned by several ancient authors.
Tauroctony is the eschatological dimension of Mithraism. In this sacrilegious act, the evil spiritual force of Satan, i.e. Mithra, wants to exterminate the Mankind, which is symbolized as a ‘Bull’. In different eschatological conceptualizations established by monotheists, there is a constant reference to the end clash between the ‘Good’ and the ‘Evil’; quite contrarily to that approach, in all eschatological conceptualizations that were established by polytheists, there is no end clash at all. There is a dead end. In Manichaeism, there is a universal conflagration. In Mithraism, there is a mass killing, that of the ‘Bull’. The concept of the Celestial Bovines reflects the early spiritual force and omnipotence with which the Man was created. The Man has been created as ‘Celestial’; not ‘Earthly’! This irrevocable transcendental reality was later echoed by Jesus in his ‘Kingdom of the Heaven’.
What makes us equate Mithra with Satan? One of the easiest possible responses relates to Mithra’s true position: initially, he was always subordinate to Ahura Mazda (or Oromazdes in Commagene). There was never a form of Mithraism in which Mehr or Mitra would occupy the position of Ahura Mazda in the Early Iranian religion or in Zoroastrianism. Mithra’s statue was not placed at the center of the five statues that we encounter in Nemrut Dagh’s three terraces; the central statue was clearly that of Oromazdes (Ahura Mazda). But within the purely or entirely Mithraic environment (i.e. in the Western part of the Roman Empire), Ahura Mazda was inactive and apathetic, pretty much like the ‘Father of Greatness’ in Manichaeism. In fact, Mithra was never the God of an original religion. He was always the god of the alteration, the disfigurement and the corruption of an original religion; that is why he can be equated with the Demiurge of Manichaeism and of the various Gnostics, with the Satan of the Biblical and the Quranic texts, and with the ‘Ruler of this world’ as per Jesus’ words (Gospel of John, XIV:30).
These analogies can be very easily assessed and understood at the simple linguistic level; when Mani wanted to name the ‘demiurge’, who created the structure of the present world, he used in Middle Persian two words that mean ‘living spirit’ (: Mihr yazd), thus involving one of the two names of Mithra (Mehr and Mitra).
The young Joseph Dzhugashvili must have understood in Anatolia the very crucial significance of the fact that the evil Magi, who intend to finally exterminate the Mankind in order to service their Master, failed to diffuse their main theme in Iran, India, Central Asia, Caucasus and Anatolia, but they were successful indeed in flooding the Italian Peninsula and the western part of the Roman Empire with Mithraea filled with representations of the tauroctony. In fact, in every Mithraeum, the most sacred part (which corresponds to the ‘holy of the holies’ of a Christian church) was decorated with a bull-slaying relief.
The theme of Tauroctony in a Mithraeum was supplanted by the concept of the Crucifixion in a Church. When Stalin was in Anatolia, more than 10 years had already passed after he left the Tbilisi Seminary; his originally negative conclusions about Christianity must have been nuanced in Anatolia. Simple observation shows that, throughout the lands where Oriental Christianity prevailed, there had never been any representation relating to the bull-slaying topic.
Then, this observation may have revealed to the young inquisitive explorer the reality hidden from the eyes of the entire world, which was then at the eve of what is now called WW I. The evil sacerdotal force that wanted to annihilate the Mankind since times immemorial, after having failed to control Mesopotamia, Iran, Central Asia, Caucasus and Anatolia, migrated to Rome where they formed a strong foothold, then diffused the tauroctony theme, and later replaced it with the Crucifixion cult, thus shifting from the Mithraic narratives to the Christian apologetics.
Stalin must have had an idea about the schisms (869 and 1054) between the Eastern Roman Orthodox Church and ‘Catholic’ Rome; he knew that the reason for the final collapse of the Eastern Roman Empire was the Anti-Constantinopolitan hate, rancor and malice of Rome. This must have had cataclysmic impact on his perception of extant threats against Russia, the Orient, and the entire Mankind.
If ‘New Rome’ (Constantinople) opposed and rejected Rome up to the point of a mutual excommunication, this simply meant that Rome had ultimately ceased to be ‘Rome’ and therefore the only true Rome was ‘New Rome’, since Rome had turned out to be a -properly speaking- Anti-Rome.
If the Roman (in reality: ‘Anti-Roman’) sacerdotal force managed to finally destroy ‘New Rome’, this fact clearly meant that they would attempt to do exactly the same with the ‘Third Rome’, i.e. Russia, because Moscow postulated to be the successor of the Eastern Roman Empire.
And if Rome (in reality: ‘Anti-Rome’), after the two schisms, did not care much about the fact that Constantinople chose the appellation ‘Orthodox’ for the Eastern Roman Church, this demonstrates that they truly did not show a genuine interest in the true Christian faith, but only in the manipulation of the Christian populations (if possible all of them: ‘Catholic’) as per their own real and concealed plans. After all, the persistence of the ‘Roman’ (in reality: ‘Anti-Roman’) Church in the use of the cognomen ‘Catholic’ for themselves in reality fully encapsulated their millennia long aspiration to entirely entrap, deceive and annihilate the Mankind.
This helps us understand that, as early as 1912, Stalin may have been able to perceive the lurking dangers and accurately identify their origin. He was then better placed than Czar Nicholas II to assess the extent to which Russia’s position in the world was seriously endangered by the Mithraic – Anti-Christian force which ruled from Rome. It is true that the imperial authorities reacted strongly to the Jesuit infiltration which was undertaken as early as 1907 with the formulation and diffusion of Imiaslavie, a heretic spiritual-religious theory and movement as per which the ‘name of god’ is ‘god’ himself! This sort of name exultation ends up in evildoing in the name of God.
Certainly, the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church denounced the treacherous belief; in June and July 1913, Russian naval forces disembarked in Mount Athos to impose the decision and to arrest the heretics, injuring many and killing few monks, but this was merely a small local and temporal reaction.
Quite contrarily, and seeing things in a wider context, Stalin may have anticipated, even before these events in Mount Athos, the notorious Jesuit-demonic spectacle at Fatima (Portugal) in 1917 and the subsequent postulation as regards the so-called Consecration of Russia, which is tantamount to Russian enslavement to the Anti-Christian rulers of Rome, who have long been preparing the forthcoming tauroctony and extermination of the Mankind.
In the light of Stalin’s Mithraic contemplations, Russia emerges de facto as the frontal opponent of the sacrilegious pseudo-Christian forces, which need first to desecrate Russia in order to achieve their blasphemous plan providing for the extinction of the Mankind. Even more importantly, on the basis of the aforementioned, the young fugitive, who had already been enthralled by mythical figures, legendary characters, and novel heroes like Koba, must have first identified his role, his destiny, and his calling: he had to properly defend the simple, good and innocent people, to duly fight the evil priests who wanted to sacrifice the Mankind, and to ultimately defeat the tool of the Papo-Caesarist elite. From that moment on, Stalin -similarly to both, his heroic paragon in the novel and the illustrious Sassanid Emperor Kavadh I in real History- was a fully committed Caesaropapist, absolutely conscious of his task and scope. He would do everything to rise in power and he would kill as many as needed to prepare Russia for battle in order to avoid Russia’s unnecessary sacrifice, desecration and extinction.
But would he have the support of Tyche-Russia, just like Antiochus I of Commagene, who was in company of Tyche-Commagene at the peak sanctuary of Nemrut Dagh? Only his further initiation in other Mithraic mysteries would tell.
XXI. Major themes of Stalin’s spiritual quest in Anatolia – 2. Mithraic Trinity, Christian Trinity, Spirituality and Stalin
Many religions contained trinities in their Cosmogony, therefore automatically projecting this element onto their cosmologies, eschatologies, and soteriologies, and thence further on, onto the lives of their believers and their societies. This point has nothing to do with monotheism or polytheism; in monotheism, every trinity is perceived as reflecting different aspects of the Divine Being, whereas in polytheism, the three parts of the trinity are rather viewed individualized.
Technically speaking, the eventual mention of several ‘gods’ in the sacred texts of a religion does not necessarily make of it a ‘polytheist’ system, because these ‘gods’ may have been viewed as aspects or emanations of the One God. Reversely, the strict reference to one ‘god’ does not make of a religion a ‘monotheistic system’, because eventually basic parts of the dogma and the cult or -even worse- ulterior theological interpretations may be of absolutely polytheistic nature, concept and character.
These two words of Greek etymology (‘monotheism’ and ‘polytheism’), which are of ample use nowadays, are indeed very simplistic and quite wrong; in fact, they should be rather avoided and respectively replaced by the terms ‘sacred (or divine) faith’ and ‘profanity’ (or blasphemy). Only clear terms of spiritual connotation can accurately denote the nature of the Divine and that of the opposition to the Divine; in this regard, simply ‘rational’ or ‘technical’ terms should not be in use, because in reality they consist in sheer abuse.
As per the Ancient Sumerian and Akkadian (Assyrian-Babylonian) representation of the Divine Order, Anu, Enlil and Ea (ENKI in Sumerian) formed an early trinity that reflected God’s control over the Sky (or Heaven or Ether), the Air, and the Soft Waters respectively, and its reflection on every human being. This is not a form of ‘polytheism’, but the way of the early Sumerian and Akkadian sacerdotal colleges to accurately describe the nature and the consequences of the divine arrangements with which the humans were created to comply. The early Mesopotamian priests, back in the 4th millennium BCE, did not have the need of prophet Muhammad to castigate the Roman and Constantinopolitan priests, who viewed the essence of Ether as an independent ‘person’ (‘Holy Spirit’) and considered it possible that a human being could eventually be ‘God’. Every faith and every preaching reflect the time, the needs, and the context of its proclamation.
Similarly, in the Ancient Egyptian Iwnw (Heliopolitan) dogma, which was composed as Cosmogony, Cosmology, Eschatology and Soteriology at the same time, there were two trinities: Osiris-Isis-Horus and Isis-Horus-Seth.
The former reflected the pattern ‘father-mother-son’ at its transcendental and symbolic dimension, while it also heralded the typical tradition of the Pharaonic families (in which very often princes married their sisters). It was -in its conception- a supratemporal narrative of the History of the Mankind from A to Z, with focus on the predestination of Man, i.e. his victory over the Evil, the cancellation of the Evil’s deeds, and the ultimate reacquisition of the spiritual potency with which Man was initially created.
The latter was of entirely eschatological content, as it detailed the End Clash in terms far more extensive than in any other religion’s sacred texts; within this context, Isis absolutely portends the ‘Woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars’ (Revelation by John 12:1), her ‘child’ (which is interpreted as ‘Jesus’ by Christians) being actually a reflection of Horus, whereas the ‘beast coming out of the sea’ (Revelation by John 13:1; which was interpreted as the ‘Antichrist’ by Christians) consists merely in a later version of Seth (or -to transfer the topic within the context of Hittite Anatolian Eschatology- of Ullikummi, the ‘monster that rises from the sea’ only to be defeated by Tasmisu, the Hittite Horus or Messiah or Christ or Mahdi, etc.).
It is not necessary for a monotheistic priesthood to endow its creature, i.e. the dogma, the cult, and the theological interpretation of its religious narrative, with a trinitarian form; in many ways, this is rather an assumption expressed by modern scholarship, and not a distinction explicitly made by ancient believers. Quite contrarily, for a polytheistic priesthood, a trinitarian system has a particular use: as it also follows the pattern ‘father-mother-son’ at its simple, sociological-anthropological order (in a reverse effort to totally destroy the Divine Order ‘as above so below’ and to turn it to an Evil scheme ‘as below so above’), the trinitarian system comprises very long and extensive narratives, through which it de facto alters the original form of the religion.
These narratives help expand the cultic endeavors among the faithful exponentially. The increased cultic endeavors contrive, after black magical patterns, the believers to further engage in material acts that dissociate them from their souls and spiritual tasks, therefore transforming them into mere slaves of their priests. Larger the cultic part of a religion is, stronger its polytheistic character becomes. At the end, this fake, putrefied form of ‘religion’ has absolutely nothing to do with the spiritual universe; all it has to do is about practicing homicidal acts, namely the spiritual-intellectual-cultural subordination of the faithful to the priesthood. This evil development fully engages the so-called priesthood in the true governance of the society or country, transforming it into an undeserved, unsolicited and treacherous dictatorship. Then, this status of ‘religion’ was correctly specified by Karl Marx as ‘the opium of the people’ (‘das Opium des Volkes’) in 1843 (in his Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie / Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right); but no original religion was ever like that.
The first ostensibly trinitarian dogma in the World History of Religions is the Ancient Egyptian Theban polytheism, which was a middle of the 2nd millennium BCE religious-theological construction of the Memphite polytheistic priesthood of Ptah; this system was an attempt to put together a state religion of absolutely Papo-Caesarist function. Amun of Thebes, as per the earlier Ancient Egyptian monotheistic religions {the Iwnw / Heliopolitan system (known as ‘Ennead’) and the Hmnw / Hermupolitan faith (known as ‘Ogdoad’)}, was a profane and evil abomination. That is why the illustrious reaction against the evil Theban polytheistic priests was of so strong Caesaropapist nature; it was superbly undertaken by the magnificent mystic, spiritual master, art theoretician, and poet, Pharaoh Akhenaten (reign: 1354-1336), who finally closed down all the temples and proclaimed Aten as the sole God, therefore prohibiting anthropomorphism in the Egyptian Art.
The Theban Trinity Amun-Mut-Khonsu of which we first hear around the 16th c. BCE (with the rise of the 18th dynasty) caused enormous friction among the people and was rejected by the royal family; the process was very long and caused a terrible religious schism and a disastrous civil war after which Egypt (: Kemet in Ancient Egyptian) never recovered. It destroyed the spiritual life of the Ancient Egyptians, rendering them unable to properly perceive the dynamic symbols that had been established by means of sophisticated composite, zoomorphic and anthropomorphic, representations. Only due to the abomination of the Theban Trinity was the Roman poet Juvenal able 16-17 centuries later to pertinently articulate his historic question:
– Quis nescit, Volusi Bithynice, qualia demens Aegyptos portenta colat? (‘Who knows not, O Bithynian Volusius, what monsters demented Egypt worships?’ / From Satire XV ‘An Egyptian Atrocity’)
However, Juvenal could have never fathomed the original form of the Ancient Egyptian religion and spirituality; he merely encountered its most decayed form. One has also to add that the Theban Trinity Amun-Mut-Khonsu was constructed in order to later empower the profane polytheistic priests to develop the blasphemous theory of Theogamy, which they first did in the case of Hatshepsut to justify her impious, illegal and anarchic rule. The concept that God can possibly enter into a sexual intercourse with a human (and in Hatshepsut’s case, her mother Ahmose, the Great Royal Wife of Thutmose I) by taking the material form of a human (and in this case, that of Hatshepsut’s father) is a spiritual sacrilege.
Mithraism is a trinitarian religion, with Cautes and Cautopates forming a Solar Trinity with Mithra. A trinitarian god would be such a profanity in Iran and Central Asia that it would automatically cause capital punishment. Within the entirely monotheistic environment of Zoroastrianism, as it is reflected in the Mihr Yasht (Mihr yašt), the Zoroastrian Mithra (i.e. an entirely solar divinity-aspect of Ahura Mazda’s Benevolence and Justice) was mythologized as accompanied by two minor deities (or divine attributes), namely Rashnu (Rašnu) and Sraosha (Sraoša). But within the religious-magical environment setup by the Magi, the minor divinities were promulgated to the auroral (Cautes) and vesperal (Cautopates) hypostases of Mithra, who represented the meridian aspect of the heliocentric cult.
The Mithraic Trinity gives a temporal dimension to the faith and the cult of the Mithra worshippers; religiosity is then appended to the daily rhythm of life and vice versa. The need of the Magi to fully control the life of their adepts ended up with the emergence of the earlier nonexistent concept of Time. That’s why, while establishing the Mithraic Trinity, the evil mystics and enemies of Zoroastrianism had to also drag Zurvan (‘zruvan’ in Avestan Persian means ‘time’) to the forefront of their cult. They thought that the deity of ‘endless time’ (‘zervan akarana’) would secure a cutting-edge superiority over Ahura Mazda. For this reason, within the Roman Empire, the overwhelming prevalence of Mithra brought Saturn / Cronos back to active cult (whereas earlier they belonged to the ‘dei otiosi’ of the respective pantheons), as a terminal revenge and elimination of the worthless younger ‘generation’ of Jupiter / Zeus.
Due to the strictly divided segments of diurnal and nocturnal periods of time, the Mithraic Trinity helped the Mithraic Magi therefore create societies of the foremost militaristic discipline, and it is not by coincidence that the otherwise small Mithraic Kingdom of Pontus happened to be an important military power and a mighty opponent. Cautes-Mithra-Cautopates was a god suitable for pirates, like the Cilician pirates, who desecrated the worthless temples of the Ancient Ionians, Aeolians and Dorians, including the peak sanctuary at Mount Olympus in Thessaly. Trinitarian (‘triplasios’ in Alexandrine Koine) Mithra was fit for harshly fighting soldiers and combatants; that is why entire Roman legions were initiated to the Mithraic mysteries, methodically praying before sunrise, after sunset, and at noon.
Christian Trinity has no foundation on a single word uttered by Jesus. However, the least studied topic in this regard is what the Christian Trinity is not. Despite the numerous parallels that can be drawn between elements of several Ancient Egyptian religions and the basic dogmas of the Christian religion, it is very clear that a trinity scheme of the type ‘Amun-Mut-Khonsu’ did not find its position within the corpus produced by the Fathers of the Christian Church; there was never a scheme ‘God-Virgin Mary-Jesus’ among the founding dogmas of Christianity. We cannot however state that it would be so undesirable, especially if we take into consideration the absurd terms of extreme veneration of Virgin Mary by the heretic Catholic Church (‘Assumption’ instead of ‘Dormition; and in general, the so-called ‘four dogmas’ of Catholic Mariology). About: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assumption_of_Mary
We can therefore assume that, in spite of the slow rise of the trinitarian dogma within Christianity, the theoretical foundation of the Christian Trinity (as we know it) by St. Basil bishop of Caesarea, and basically through his book ‘On the Holy Spirit’, which was written in 374 CE, must have displeased several groups of monks who tried to deny that the Holy Spirit was God, thus becoming widely known in the Eastern Roman Empire as Pneumatomachi {‘fighters against the (divinity of the Holy) Spirit} and in the Western Roman Empire as ‘Macedonians’ {namely followers of Macedonius I bishop of Constantinople (from 342 to 360)}, the main source of inspiration.
If we now take into consideration the fact that the so-called Apostles’ Creed (a 6th or 7th c. CE forged document that was totally ignored by all Eastern Roman authorities) mentions Virgin Mary in its 3rd verse (after God the Father and Jesus, who are referred to in the first two verses, and after the Holy Spirit, which is stated in the first half of verse 3), we understand the nature of the intentions and the extent of the machination. The text reads as follows (Latin and English translation):
“Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem, Creatorem caeli et terrae, et in Iesum Christum, Filium Eius unicum, Dominum nostrum, qui conceptus est de Spiritu Sancto, natus ex Maria Virgine, …” (“I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived from the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary,…”)
In other words, only the Cappadocian Fathers, notably St. Basil of Caesarea and St. Gregory of Nazianzus, prevented Christianity from becoming a mere replica of the Ancient Egyptian Theban trinity, by propelling the Holy Spirit to a level of inevitable and irreversible dogmatic formality. But if conspiring heretics were to take control of a major Christian center, in any deviate re-assessment of Christianity (as it happened in the Renaissance and Modern Times), the issue of the constituent elements of the Christian Trinity would certainly be tackled again. And this is what happened with the evil idol of the so-called Pietà that was created by Michelangelo at the end of the 15th c.
Stalin must have realized that the paradoxical character of the Christian Trinity was merely the provisory result of an enormous theological effort to avert a detrimental religious fall. But the evil forgers of the Marianist absurdity were always waiting in the wings. Understanding the functionality of all the different forms of religious, social (: different classes), governmental (: triumvirate), political (: separation of powers) and geographical-topographical (: directions of orientation) trinitarianism must have been a major issue for Stalin to explore during his two years in Ottoman Anatolia.
XXII. Major themes of Stalin’s spiritual quest in Anatolia – 3. Solar nature of Mithraism / Immaculate birth from the rock
The early priesthoods attempted to systematically and overwhelmingly identify the ‘Hand of God’ everywhere and that is why they soon came up with hymns exalting the Omnipresence of the Divine. The sun would apparently not escape from their efforts; for this reason, it was soon portrayed as an evidence of the Love of God, as a symbol of the Justice of God, and as a proof of the everlasting Omnipotence of God.
With respect to the sun, its life-giving force, and its position in the Heaven, different world conceptualizations and world views led to diverse narratives and descriptions; in Egypt, Ra was initially and almost always adored as Ra-Horakhty (Ra as ‘Horus of the Two Horizons’), which definitely identified him as the Lord of Heaven. In Sumer and Akkad (and later in Assyria and Babylonia), Shamash (also known as UTU in Sumerian) could not possibly be propelled to that level of divine aspect, because the earliest monotheistic currents revolved around Anu (AN in Sumerian), the sole Lord of the Kingdom of the Sky (Ether); as a matter of fact, nothing and nobody could possibly be equated with the undisputedly Only God after the completion of the Creation (7th Day).
Why Shamash, similarly to Ishtar, was mythologized as ‘offspring of Sin’, i.e. the Mesopotamian symbol of the moon, would take long to explain at this point, but it was certainly a later invention and interpolation. However, it is essential to clarify here that ‘divine procreation’ was then perceived rather as ’emanation’ among the Sumerian and Akkadian priesthoods. The subordination of a divine aspect (or ‘god’ for the polytheists) to another divine aspect (or ‘god’) was a later phenomenon in Mesopotamia; it reflected only the earliest form of religious juxtapositions and/or wars, thus underscoring the spiritual identity of every royal order and state.
Mithraism is the earliest religion in which the sun itself appears as the sole and undisputed ruler of the divine world; no parallel can therefore be established between the Ancient Egyptian Aton (: the sun disc taken merely as a symbol of the Only God) of the 2nd millennium BCE and the Iranian Mithra of the 1st millennium BCE. Mithraism was always the very antipodes of what Atonism had been. Another odd trait accompanied this insolent solar ‘god’ from the beginning: Mithra was never a creator-‘god’. He was always irrelevant to the Creation; although he was later said to be the Creator, there has never been a single narrative in this regard. This was normal, because in fact the evil Magi extracted the solar symbolism of Ahura Mazda in Zoroastrianism, made it an independent divinity, and thus fabricated their ‘god’. In other words, the Universe had already been created before Mithra appeared. As the Satanic Magi did not want to subordinate Mithra (also known as Mehr) to the God of the Achaemenid Iranian imperial religion, they had to urgently and slyly invent something about Mithra’s mystical emergence into being. This need led them to the inevitable trickery of the ‘Immaculate Conception’; so, Mithra came out of a rock (or of a tree, eventually the Tree of Life).
In Central Asia and Iran where the Shamanic, Tengrist and Zoroastrian monotheistic traditions were very strong as early as the 1st half of the 1st millennium BCE, the representation was initially prohibited (Achaemenid times), subsequently tolerated (Arsacid period), and finally limited (during the Sassanid dynasty) to forms like that of the Taq-e Bostan reliefs. Quite contrarily, in spiritually impotent, culturally poor, and morally degenerated environments like that of the Roman Empire, the profane representation of the ‘little child’ as a ‘god’ being born (similarly to the verses of the Christian Nativity Kontakion: “since for our sake the eternal God was born as a little child!”) is attested in the numerous Mithraic Nativity reliefs, like that of Dieburg-Heddernheim which is found today in the Kreismuseum Dieburg (V 1247). Modern scholarship failed to comprehend that Mithraism (which conclusively pre-modeled Roman Christianity) spread and prospered in Rome and Europe, only because it was systematically, skillfully and forcefully expelled from Iran.
A heliocentric mystery religion with a ‘god’ coming from nowhere is apparently the correct tool in the hands of an evil priesthood attempting to effectively concoct the promulgation of Satan as the ‘master of this world’. The Mithraic Magi did not have the intellectual plasticity of the Late Antiquity Gnostics to merely define Mithra as the Demiurge; but this is what Mithra was in reality. After all, Porphyry (De Antro Nympharum / Περί του εν Οδυσσεία των νυμφών άντρου / On the Cave of the Nymphs, 11) says it explicitly: “For Mithra, as well as the Bull, is the Demiurgus and lord of generation”. Mithra was a substitute for Satan-Demiurge! Only Satan (and for all Gnostics, the ‘Demiurge’) came to existence in an already created world. However, by adding the Immaculate Conception theme to the solar version of Mithraism, the evil Magi believed that they achieved the stage of perpetual recapitulation of their master’s setting and rising. This assumption will be proven wrong at the End.
After all, who can possibly be a ‘god’ that is being born, except a ‘god’ that is not?
Then, periodicity guarantees the permanence of sacerdotal rule in a state that expands through acculturation of neighboring populations exactly like the sun warms the land progressively. That is why this version of Mithraism could not be imposed but in a spiritually and imperially impotent state surrounded by barbarians and other uncivilized nations – a sacerdotal state, I mean. Finally, this is what only Justinian I understood: the prevalence of Mithraic Rome (if not fully averted) would gradually turn the Oriental State (Eastern Roman Empire) into a pseudo-empire, i.e. an evil Papo-Caesarist abomination at the instance of Rome.
Then, the fall of the Western Roman Empire would be followed by the collapse of the Oriental State, and the ‘patriarch’ of New Rome Constantinople would diffuse a Fake Christianity to the barbarians who would interminably fight among themselves only ad maiorem ‘dei’ gloriam. For this reason, Justinian carried out his vast legislative work, forcefully imposing on Rome the institution of Constantinopolitan popes, i.e. heads of the Roman Church selected and approved by the Emperor of the Eastern Roman State. Thus, Justinian became ultimately known as the most ostentatious embodiment of Caesaro-papist statesmanship of the Christian and Islamic times.
Mithras’ Nativity in the cave is not attested explicitly in the historical sources, but there is an implicit description in Porphyry’s On the Cave of the Nymphs; the two-entrance cavern that Porphyry described as formed on the axis North-South was the location of Mithraic initiation. Using as pretext Homer’s mention of the Cave of the Nymphs in the 13th book of the Odyssey, Porphyry expanded on the use of caverns by Mithraic esoteric orders for the initiation of their members. It is noteworthy that the candidates descended into the cavern from the northern gate and, after the initiation, ascended from the southern gate; they entered as ‘men’ and they left as ‘gods’. This becomes very clear in the 12th paragraph:
“Since, however, our terrene habitation is more northern, it is proper that souls which are born in it should be familiar with the north wind; but those that exchange this life for a better, with the south wind. This also is the cause why the north wind is, at its commencement, great; but the south wind, at its termination”.
The Mithraic cave was believed to be a miniature of the entire universe (viewed by all ancient nations as a ‘globe’ or ‘sphere’ – of which the plane that intersected the center of the sphere was the surface of the Earth); since the Mithraic initiates were ‘born’ there, it is quite plausible for us to assume that there was also located the rock from which Mithra emerged in his immaculate birth. More:
This undeniably chthonian birth comes in extremely striking contrast with the celestial epiphany which is attested in the case of Jesus and John the Baptist; actually, Jesus and his disciples did not spend time in caverns. However, the driving force behind Roman Christianism attempted to associate Jesus’ birth with a cave, and so they did with his entombment. If the New Testament and the Patristic Literature keep Jesus clear of anything chthonian, the unnecessary and unsought Catholic orders of monks did their ingenious best to continue their Mithraic initiations in caves. And here you have the unique absurdity of the filthy Anglican pseudo-Christianity to continually maintain Jesus close to caves:
Stalin must have early understood that there were indeed many different versions of Mithraism, and that heliocentric culture and solar imperial identity in some of their incredibly diverse forms can help increase the strength of a society considerably. The young Georgian refugee, being at the same time an explorer and an initiate, seems to have duly assessed and meticulously investigated several key issues pertaining to spirituality and governance. His conclusions may have effectively armored him well ahead of the epic battle for which he probably felt that he had to prepare himself.
XXIII. How Stalin’s Mithraic meditations in Anatolia formed his decision-making
1. Pontus’ King Mithridates VI’s wars with Rome
Adept of Mithra, the great Anatolian king, who claimed imperial descent from Cyrus the Great, Darius the Great, Alexander the Great, and Seleucus I Nicator, was the standard bearer of a very different version of Mithraism that was totally unrelated to the typical Mithraic religion of the Roman Empire. Betrayed by the Anatolian Magi, Mithridates VI (135-63 BCE; ruled after 120 BCE) was an exceptional king, who demonstrated that, in combatting the wicked, it is always possible to turn the evil to good. Antiochus I of Commagene (86-38 BCE; ruled after 70 BCE) seems to have followed the same path. But few decades later, the Roman Emperors, acting differently, failed to prevent Rome from becoming home to an uncontrolled sacerdotal college, which by utilizing the fools and by eliminating the opponents effectively grabbed the power at the right time.
The completely and permanently different trajectories of the imperial/governmental authority and the sacerdotal dominance must have early become clear to Stalin; his conclusions were at the origin of his rather anti-sacerdotal (than anti-Christian or anti-religious) stance. In fact, he did not want to eliminate Christian Orthodoxy, but to make it so marginal that the Anti-Christian and pseudo-Christian Roman Catholic Church would find it worthless to infiltrate.
2. Cilicia’s Mithraic Pirates in fight with Rome, the desecration of Greece, and Stalin
The well-known history that Plutarch narrated in his Parallel Lives (Life of Pompey, 78-106) about Mithridates VI’s close allies, i.e. the noble pirates of Cilicia (who combatted the Roman Republic), contains an important revelation. The following excerpt is quite enlightening:
“Nor was it merely their being thus formidable that excited indignation; they were even more odious for their ostentation than they were feared for their force. Their ships had gilded masts at their stems; the sails woven of purple, and the oars plated with silver, as if their delight were to glory in their iniquity. There was nothing but music and dancing, banqueting and revels, all along the shore. Officers in command were taken prisoners, and cities put under contribution, to the reproach and dishonor of the Roman supremacy. There were of these corsairs above one thousand sail, and they had taken no less than four hundred cities, committing sacrilege upon the temples of the gods, and enriching themselves with the spoils of many never violated before, such as were those of Claros, Didyrna, and Samothrace; and the temple of the Earth in Hermione, and that of Æsculapius in Epidaurus, those of Neptune at the Isthmus, at Tænarus, and at Calauria; those of Apollo at Actium and Leucas, and those of Juno, in Samos, at Argos, and at Lacinium. They themselves offered strange sacrifices upon Mount Olympus, and performed certain secret rites or religious mysteries, among which those of Mithras have been preserved to our own time, having received their previous institution from them. But besides these insolencies by sea, they were also injurious to the Romans by land; for they would often go inland up the roads, plundering and destroying their villages and country-houses”.
Supported by Mithridates VI and several other kings of Anatolia and of the Caucasus region, the Cilician pirates desecrated the main sacred places of Ancient Greece, a territory claimed and occupied by the Roman Republic. The contrasting attitudes of the Roman authorities and the Oriental kings are impressive; an imperial realm does not engage orderly forces and armies in a disorderly element, such as the sea. In this regard, there are few exceptions in the Antiquity and the Christian-Islamic times. Imperial armies fight only on land, which is the main element that helped humans develop their civilizations. There were never original cultures or civilizations grown in the sea, which is a location that humans can only cross and never live in. As a matter of fact, all the cultures that may have spread on islands originated from nearby lands.
Contrarily to the Oriental kings, to the spiritual order of their temples, and to the moral discipline maintained in their kingdoms, the disorderly Roman state used their orderly and official armed forces (their army and navy) and a leading Roman statesman and general (Pompey) to oppose the disorderly forces, i.e. the Cilician pirates. The tremendous difference must have been sensed by Stalin. The disorderly expansionist tendency of the Roman Republic, which unequivocally heralded the ulterior collapse of the Roman Empire, ended up with the calamitous formation of an unsustainable and absurd state around a sea (namely the Mediterranean Sea). This was a unique case in the World History. Even in its greatest extension, the kingdom of Pontus did not encompass all the lands around the Black Sea.
States are not established around seas or with regard to seas; with the brief exception of the Ottoman Empire, there was never a state that included all coastal lands of the Black Sea within its territory. All the same, one has to admit that the said region was rather marginal to the Ottoman Empire, and its annexation was never crucial for the existence of the Caliphate. No state controlled all lands around the Red Sea except the Ottoman Empire, but again this fact was not the reason of its existence. Only the Mongol Turanian Empire occupied all lands around the Caspian Sea, but again this occurred for a rather brief period of time and it was of lesser importance for both, its structure and aspirations. Last, never a kingdom put under control all the coastal lands around the North Sea, the Baltic Sea or the Arabian Sea.
These observations may have led the young refugee Iosif Dzhugashvili to the correct conclusion as regards both, the fate of the Roman Empire, and that of all modern efforts to revive it. So, to the very normal question “what went wrong with the Roman Empire?” he must have answered:
– the expansion of Rome was apparently not a noble imperial exploit, but a villainous ‘republican’ affair. Instead of expanding, a Republic must simply cease to exist in the first place.
Straightforwardly, Stalin would be considered a ‘Eurasianist’ today; it is easy to understand that his Mithraic contemplations and considerations during his time in Ottoman Anatolia made of him an entirely committed Eurasiatic continentalist. Stalin rejection of Trotskyism, and of the nonsensical theory of world revolution (the so-called ‘permanent revolution’), originates from the core of a Eurasiatic conviction. Stalin’s effort to extend Soviet Union’ influence in post-WWII Eastern Europe is the reasoning care of a Eurasiatic strategist.
Stalin’s Eurasiatic conviction can be noticed particularly in the Fourth Moscow Conference (9th-19th October 1944), and even more specifically in the so-called Percentages agreement. In that secret and informal agreement, Eastern Europe (from Poland to Greece) was divided into two spheres of influence between Churchill and Stalin. At the time, Greece was being abandoned by the Germans (they left Athens on 11th October 1944); the entire country was almost totally under the control of the Communist rebels, but Stalin did not care at all about that space (and the Russian sphere of influence was finally fixed at 10% there). Quite contrarily, the Soviet ruler evidently attributed greater importance to the territories of Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Hungary. Stalin’s reluctance to include Greece in the Soviet block after WW II is sheer consequence of his Eurasianism, and this world view and approach date apparently back to the time he spent in Ottoman Anatolia.
3. Did Stalin travel to visit the world’s greatest Mithraic monument at Nemrut Dagh?
From Adapazari, Stalin could have easily taken the train (Ottoman railways) to Adana and thence continued by simple transportation means to Adiyaman (330 km) and Kahta (365 km), which were the correct basis for an expedition to Nemrut Dagh.
However, this is unlikely, because the tendency to visit archaeological sites was very limited at the time; in addition, it was the result of Western mentality and lifestyle. More importantly, although it is undeniably rewarding to meditate and contemplate in a specific location (and more particularly in a site with ancient monuments), this was not Stalin’s main vocation and target. All the same, articles about the site were easily found in the Ottoman press at those days, and he may have noticed some of them, also closely examining the pictures. At this point, it is essential to take into consideration the fact that Stalin was not a historian, a historian of religions, an archaeologist or a philologist, and he never wanted to become one.
As a mystic and practitioner of spiritual exercises, Stalin wanted to accurately identify the diverse spiritual origins of imperial governance; he needed to fully and deeply comprehend the specific analogies between the types of spiritual motivation, the forms of religious narratives, the styles of governance, and the patents of social organization; he desired to discover where his mystical prototypes, his spiritual paragons, his models of legendary heroism, and his moral standards originated from. Last but not least, he wished to identify earlier examples of rulers who fought effectively against the same Iniquity, Injustice, and Inhumanity that he wanted to combat. Mithraism offered a vast documentation to explore in this regard and what land could be more advantageous for this spiritual challenge and mental exploit than Anatolia?
The scope of Stalin’s explorations and investigations was of sentimental, mental, intellectual and spiritual of nature. It involved endless ruminations, cogitations, considerations, and comparisons of systems of thought, of systems of faith and of systems of governance. This was the only way for him to identify the continuity of sacerdotal intentions, practices, choices, propaganda patterns, and end targets, thus identifying correctly his enemies and retracing their ancestral line (at the mental, intellectual, and spiritual levels).
Before his travel to and sojourn in Ottoman Anatolia, Stalin had already collected enough knowledge, sufficient data, critical experience, and great exposure to the realities of his world. He therefore needed a period of time to work on this material, reassess everything, and make most of his education; in other words, he had to turn the accumulated documentation into an efficient system of interpretation that would help him not only face challenges but also anticipate plots and threats. He had to identify the enemies of the vast empire that had every chance to effectively become the real Ark of Mankind at the height of the most critical upheaval in World History: Russia. As there were several centers of power that targeted Russia at the time, he had to also prioritize among his foes.
4. Stalin’s Mithraic meditations and anti-sacerdotal stance
Stalin had early understood that Christianity was nothing more than a theatrical banner under which the worst enemies and the most opposite forces gathered in order to dissimulate their enmity and conceal the conflicting spiritual motives of their theological treatises; that’s why he left the Tbilisi Spiritual Seminary. Mithraism and its variants from Central Asia to Iran to Rome offered him the keys to clearly see what had happened long before Russia and Kievan Rus were incepted as realms and how it continued down to his days. Only by retracing the origins of these opposite forces could Stalin accurately realize what was at stake, identify the real players, and conclude as to how he would act. He had already sensed that evil forces intended to split and pulverize the major Eurasiatic Empire; he wanted to effectively oppose them and ultimately destroy their dreams. That’s why he settled for some time in Anatolia, somehow making the time stand still – at least for him.
Then, in addition to what I already pointed out in chapter XX about Stalin’s views on Nicholas II, Imiaslavie, and the Anti-Christian Roman Church, I have to state that his own career and decisions bear witness to the fact that he considered Vatican (and the Jesuits who control the Curia) as the no 1 enemy of Russia (and the Soviet Union) not in terms of ideological rivalry but eschatological agenda. Stalin did not view the Catholic effort of infiltration in Russia (and, after 1917, the villainous, Satanic plan providing for the Consecration of Russia ‘to the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary’ according to the blasphemous Jesuit terminology related with the so-called ‘Fatima Marian apparitions’) in terms of dogmatic or doctrinal juxtaposition (Orthodox – Catholic). It was clear to him that this was a dangerous attempt to further extend the Satanic Papo-Caesarist concept worldwide, therefore canceling Russia’s possibility to act as the real Ark of Mankind. It was purely eschatological.
Stalin’s strong anti-sacerdotal stand was justified by the treacherous and idiotic acts of several fools like the Russian Orthodox bishops of Ulyanovsk (then Simbirsk) and Omsk, who sent an absurd open letter to Benedict XV (papal tenure: September 1914 – January 1922) to denounce the persecution of Orthodox Christianity in the Soviet state. This was an outrageous attempt. In their despair, instead of undertaking a courageous and thorough self-criticism, these bishops -acting in extreme panic- seemed to have disregarded the following facts:
a- the pope was never the head of Christianity, particularly after the schisms (867 and 1054);
b- the head of Orthodox Christianity was the patriarch of Constantinople;
c. Vatican openly and provenly hated the Russian Empire in the first place, and this was indicated on many occasions, and more recently at the time in the cases of the Imiaslavie heretic dogma and the Fatima delusions;
d. in any case, Vatican could not exercise any influence on the Freemasons and the Zionists, who controlled most of the early Soviet partisans and statesmen; and
e. their act was a real attempt of high treason, as they appealed for help to Russia’s worst enemy (the ‘holy see’ was the moving force behind the anti-Russian stance of Austria-Hungary and Imperial Germany and the formation of the pre-WW I alliances).
The absurd letter was due to despair, fear, and total absence of insight; the Orthodox bishops in reality invited a declared enemy to ‘save’ the territory that the enemy intended to destroy. Stalin must have reasonably been deeply exacerbated and extremely enraged; the act was tantamount to betrayal of one’s own land for the sake of an institution promoting a faith at the very antipodes of one’s own faith; sheer madness.
It was therefore only normal for Georgy Chicherin, the Soviet Foreign Minister, to turn down the disreputable suggestions of Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII), who wanted to make a bargain and provide food procurement in exchange of a compromise involving a moderate Soviet stance toward religion (notably with respect to the ordination of priests and the religious education). The total failure of the secret mission of Michel d’Herbigny (1880-1957) to Soviet Union (1926-1932) was the result of Stalin’s adamant position as regards the Roman Catholic Church.
Many people have read and retained Winston Churchill’s mention of Stalin’s conversation (on the 24th May 1935) with Pierre Laval (only weeks before the latter become the French premier for a second time); according to the narrative, in response to the French statesman’s demand for some concessions or even gestures toward the pope (then Pius XI), Stalin sarcastically responded by asking the famous question: “The Pope? How many divisions has he got?”. Footage and pictures from the visit:
It is essential at this point to explain that this sarcasm has been widely and severely misinterpreted. It does not show contempt for Vatican; on the contrary! Simply, the response-question reveals the techniques of a typical political dialogue in which the truth is never said – let alone shown. By minimizing Vatican’s importance, the Soviet ruler appeared as a naïve guy unable to accurately estimate the formidable power that every pope has had. These words served greatly as smokescreen fully concealing Stalin’s intentions, knowledge and understanding. This is the way typical politicians engage in discussions: the epitome of hypocrisy. As a matter of fact, the best way for outsiders to duly assess what politicians mean when speaking in public is to always accept as true the exactly opposite of what they say.
And this is what actually happened; after pursuing a policy of untrustworthy, hypocritical and penetrative ‘dialogue’ with the USSR between 1958 and 1978, the Vatican -although entirely deprived of army divisions- declared unequivocal war in 1978 on, and marked an irrevocable victory in 1991 over, Soviet Union. This fact was not the result of Marxist-Leninist ideological failure or the consequence of Soviet economic inefficiency; it was merely the direct and disastrous outcome of the Soviet leaders’ inability to deeply analyze Stalin’s choices and decisions and to continually and unquestionably implement them further on.
5. The Mithraic version of the Assyrian-Babylonian Gilgamesh: Verethragna, and his association with Heracles in Nemrut Dagh
Any heroic and legendary symbol or prototype of overwhelming fighter and fellow-combatant for Justice and Truth would certainly fascinate Stalin; I already expanded on the topic in the units XV and XVI. An outstanding divinity of the earliest stage of Iranian-Turanian religion was Verethragna; the heroic life and the legendary exploits of the early nomadic fighters demanded a valiant example and the divine approval of a life dedicated to audacious deeds, bravery and intrepid character. The markedly indomitable lands of Siberia and Central Asia would certainly not allow any weak, shy and cowardly men to survive; frail persons and invertebrate societies indulging in pusillanimity, timidity, risk aversion, and luxury simply disappear in any harsh or adverse natural environment.
It was therefore only normal that this gallant attitude had to be retained within the context of Zoroastrianism; that is why Verethragna was praised as the divine aspect of Victory. In the Yasht 14, which is also known as Bahram Yasht (as the name was transformed over time in Middle Persian), there are several expressions of worship, eulogies and exaltations of Bahram (Verethragna). As an aspect of Ahura Mazda, Bahram was triumphant over demons, evil men, and Angra Mainyu (Ahriman; i.e. the Zoroastrian ‘Satan’), thus demanding praise (from his adepts) of his glory and of his superiority. For this reason, his name became that of six Sassanid emperors, and more importantly of Bahram V (400-438; reigned after 420), who was notably known as Bahram Gur (the ‘onager’) and was later taken by the most illustrious Iranian epic poets of Islamic times as the perfect embodiment of the Messiah and Savior at the End of Times, thus being identified with the Avestan Saoshyant.
Although Verethragna’s association with Fereydun (by modern Western scholarship) is wrong, the heroic character of both legendary figures must have attracted Stalin’s imagination and sentimentalism. Whereas in Mesopotamia and Syria, Babylonian and Aramaean priesthoods made an equation between the controversial historical-mythical figure of Gilgamesh and Verethragna, in Anatolia, the kings of Cappadocia, Pontus, and Commagene established parallels between the Iranian divinity and both, a rather ulterior form of Heracles and an Oriental aspect of Ares, coining the name Artagnes (Hellenization of Verethragna). This shows that, in the different versions of Anatolian Mithraism, the heroic element and dimension were retained, in striking contrast to the Roman Mithraism where Verathragna/Artagnes vanished, eventually absorbed by Mithra himself. Apparently, for the Mithraic Magi, the end target did not include any heroic character. This means simply that they intended to bring forth a non-heroic society of fully subservient slaves.
The presence of Verathragna/Heracles in Nemrut Dagh must have been noticed by Stalin as an indication of the different stages and metamorphoses that the Mithraic polytheistic priesthood underwent in its flight to the West. In fact, the eschatological aspect, which was still indispensable to the Magi in Central Asia, Iran, Caucasus, and Anatolia (so that they are not be rejected by the local populations), was ultimately replaced by the ominous sacrifice (the tauroctony theme) in Syria, Greece, Rome and Western Europe. In this manner, independent from the very tight control of the Iranian emperors, the Mithraic Magi -once settled in Rome- made it very clear that the final ‘salvation’ that they intended to offer to the Mankind was the Hell on Earth (namely the extinction of the human race).
Then, the Crucifixion from firm belief of the early Christians turned out to be the inalienable patent of the formula that the crypto-Mithraic Jesuits will use at the End of Time to effectively carry out their abomination; if Jesus was crucified to ‘redeem our sins’ before 2000 years, the Antichrist will soon demand from his believers to collectively ‘commit suicide and thus achieve redemption’. It sounds absurd, but it has already been staged managed; the Waco massacre in Texas (carried out under the false Christ David Koresh) did not take place for nothing. When the 51-day siege by the FBI ended, with 86 casualties (19th April 1993), it was Easter Monday morning (after the Orthodox calendar). Next time a similar event happens, the magnitude of the scale is going to be incommensurate.
And this concludes the case of Stalin and the unjust accusations that many expressed against him and his systematic elimination of opponents. Heroism and militarism saved the Mankind for millennia, preserving in life the outright majority of the humans. Every law, every theory and every discussion against violence constitute the most viciously inhuman monstrosity; they herald the extinction of the Mankind. It is not during the wars and the conflicts, the civil wars and the purges that the quasi-totality of the Mankind will go extinct; it is during no war that the wickedest plan will be implemented. And all the ongoing controversies about the necessary depopulation are merely the preamble of a hitherto unseen calamity that the real rulers of the Anti-Christian, fake Rome have systematically programmed long ago. Negative narratives can be effectively transformed into beneficial lessons and virtuous teachings can forcibly be transmuted into malevolent plans. Then, only the prey makes the real difference; whereas Mithra killed a bull, Verethragna/Heracles (Artagnes) hunted and killed a boar. And this was Stalin’s best known occupation in Ottoman Anatolia.
6. Mithraic Anatolian Imperial Spirituality vs. Nordic Mythology: Stalin vs. Hitler
Neither Stalin nor Hitler had great consideration for or good opinion of the Jesuits and the Anti-Christian Roman Catholic Church; however, Stalin had far greater margin of maneuver against Vatican. This is so first because Stalin lived in a country where the Roman Church’s impact had always been minimal ever since Emperor Theodosius I made of Christianity the only legal and official religion (380 CE) of the Roman Empire. In addition, Stalin accepted an ideology that totally rejected all the religions as the “opium of the people”, thus totally emancipating himself from any possible papal affiliation and/or connection. Quite contrarily, Hitler lived in a country that had been totally controlled by Rome for almost a millennium before undergoing a devastating religious schism (Luther and Lutheranism), which left ostensible traces until today. Adopting Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’ theories, as well as Lenin’s interpretations and attempts of practical implementation, would be tantamount to political career terminator for Hitler in Germany.
Contrarily to Hitler, Stalin did not rise to power by fascinating the masses, founding a political party, and defending his theories and world views. Although the two rulers are comparable when it comes to governance, they differ enormously with respect to their beginnings. As regards his ascent to power, Hitler is certainly more comparable to Lenin; the former was more impulsive, whereas the latter -markedly more systematic and coherent- appeared to be at the same time a rationalist thinker and sentimental orator. Stalin was less vociferous than both; a group of subordinates was always the typical environment for both, Lenin and Hitler, whereas Stalin rather dwelled in loneliness.
Stalin and Hitler had their own visions, ideals, beliefs, Weltanschauungen (world conceptualizations), and -above all- mythical and legendary systems of reference. The latter could not fully and methodically present in public his views and faith; this would be tantamount to outspoken rejection of Christianity, and he would face enormous opposition. The former could not utter a single word of his esoteric beliefs, because this would demonstrate that he was not a Marxist-Leninist.
Hitler’s system of reference was evoked quite often, and then smoothly publicized among the masses, although there were always around the Führer several top Nazi statesmen who were practicing Catholics and Protestants. However, this system of reference was never clearly presented; and many are fully convinced that Hitler’s ideals, visions, beliefs and system of reference were never accurately outlined in his own mind. I find this approach very close to the reality. Apparently, he was not a prophet, he was not a proper mystic, and he was not an eloquent visionary. Being fully impartial, one has to admit that, although evidently Messianic, Hitler did not know where to lead his nation even if wars did not take place; this automatically makes of him a false Messiah or rather a model for a posterior False Messiah. His dysfunctional approach to humanity resulted in rejection of a vilified ‘other’ than in construction of (or advance toward) a truly new, ‘ideal’ society. Lenin was far more radical, resolute and effective in terms of social change. Then, one is led to conclude that Hitler only used the legends he frequently echoed without truly believing them.
Hitler momentarily fascinated the popular imagination during his speeches, but the end destination was a very nebulous, and therefore ill-defined spiritual-material environment that comprised the Brothers Grimm (die Gebrüder Grimm), Wagner’s operas, Germanic mythology and folklore, elements of Norse eschatology, various Celtic and Teutonic cults, several aspects of occultism mixed with Pan-Germanic romanticism, Guido von List’s Wotanism, all the calamitous traits of Nietzsche’s nihilism, and an idealized Hyperborean utopia. This was ominously detrimental for two reasons: Hitler did not possess the intellectual stamina to possibly master these vast and disparate resources in order to fuse selected elements into a coherent new vision, and -even worse- the ensuing confusion could not lead either the Führer or das Volk (the people) anywhere. It is impossible to match identitarian governance (race superiority and contempt for few selected and targeted races) with obfuscate ideals. That’s why the Roman Catholic Church did not view Hitler as a real religious threat.
Stalin’s system of reference was totally unknown to all; this situation freed his hands, because his real intentions were not known to others. In fact, historical materialism and scientific materialism functioned perfectly well as a true smokescreen for Stalin. Many refer to the anti-religious campaign undertaken in the USSR during the period 1928-1941 in order to ‘demonstrate’ that Stalin was truly an atheist. This approach is quite misplaced; in fact, without understanding it, all those, who accuse Stalin of atheism, are Darwinists and materialists. This is so, because these people take things in absolute forms and do not examine systematically what was the ‘religion’ (or every ‘religion’) that Stalin tried to uproot. In fact, starting with the Renaissance in Western Europe, through worldwide colonial expansion, and due to the systematic diffusion of all aspects of Modernism, almost all the traditional religions disappeared or were corrupted in Modern Times. Deprived of any spirituality, stripped of their popular reception, left without their earlier vivid and vast cultural context, and compromised with philosophies, theories, sciences, political ideologies, republican states, political discourse, and the ensuing overwhelming immorality, modern times’ ‘religions’ are empty, meaningless systems. By eliminating these spiritually and culturally dead systems, one only helps rekindle spirituality, morality, intuition and, last but not least, true communication with one’s soul and thence with the spiritual world.
There is however a critical differentiation between Hitler and Stalin that we have to take into account when comparing their spiritual, religious, cultural and intellectual backgrounds with their state/government/party activities: Hitler was acting as a Messiah (and he may even have thought that he was a Messianic figure); Stalin was not! This played a key role in the outcome of their confrontation. When one of two opponents mistakes himself for someone else and the other has an important degree of self-knowledge, a tremendous advantage is being formed in favor of the latter. Many people will ask how this relates to Stalin’s Mithraic contemplations in Ottoman Anatolia. This is simple.
Focusing on eschatological issues during his Mithraic meditations, Stalin must have realized a simple reality hitherto disregarded by most people worldwide; there cannot be a Messiah in a non-Messianic time. The eventual ordeals and upheavals of any society, nation or even continent are not enough to turn those days into a Messianic era properly speaking. Disasters took place during WW I and greater destructions were carried out during WW II, but the 1930s and the 1940s were not the period a Messiah could possibly appear. In striking contrast with Hitler at the cultural, educational and theoretical levels, Stalin had an Oriental background to which he added a certain knowledge of the Western world viewed through Marx’s, Engels’ and Lenin’s lenses. But, Hitler was the natural product of the Western world.
Stalin could understand what Hitler could not: the Christianization of the Roman Empire was not a universally important development. It was significant only for a small part of the surface of the Earth, namely a) all the lands located west of Eastern Europe and Russia, Caucasus, Euphrates, and the Red Sea, and b) all the regions north of Sahara. However, this area did not determine World History; the most critical developments that took place on Earth did not happen there.
Having a sufficient understanding of the History of Asia and duly taking into consideration other continents (Africa, America), Stalin could successfully reckon the very limited impact that 4th c. CE developments in Rome had on the rest of the Earth. What made them ‘important’ was the ulterior Western European expansion. But the Messianic Times would come only when this expansion would reach the farthermost confines of the Earth. But this was not the case in the 1910s or the 1930s. So, Hitler was not a Messiah, but an expendable fool.
Thanks to Stalin’s Mithraic contemplations and meditations in Ottoman Anatolia, there was a considerable difference between the Soviet ruler and Hitler in terms of spiritual and intuitive strength. This has to do with their respective systems of reference; Hitler was fond of Norse spirituality, faith, mysticism, folklore, heroic narratives, legends and mythology, whereas Stalin was attracted to Georgian epics, Iranian Islamic legends, Sassanid imperial heroism, Shamanic-Tengrist spirituality, Anatolian Mithraic mysticism, ant-Roman piratic bravery, and Eastern Roman Caesaropapism. The German Führer was an enthusiast of the Nordic superman, whereas the Georgian Soviet Comrade Secretary General was a devotee the Iranian-Caucasian superman. However, at the end, the former relied on a very materialistic approach, namely Nietzsche’s Übermensch, whereas the latter trusted primarily Ferdowsi’s Fereydun and Rustaveli’s kingdom of Phridon, fully delving into the spiritual realm.
Norse spirituality: not an imperial system
In fact, there are two major points of essential differentiation in this regard; first, Norse spirituality, mysticism, epics, heroic characters, mythology, cult and popular religion were not parts of an imperial culture and tradition. Their narratives, the plots, the exploits, and the values reflect a non-imperial system of governance that suits rather nomadic populations of the North in full mutation. This spiritual, moral, legendary and cultural system does not fit an empire; in other words, Hitler believed or evoked a system that could never become an imperial religion. It was pointless and absurd for him to intend to popularize an absolutely nomadic system of values among settled populations of an industrially advanced society. Simply, it could not work that way. On the contrary, if Hitler identified Mithraism as ancestral religion of the Germans (this was actually true, taking into consideration the diffusion of the Mithraic cults throughout all parts of Germany), he would be more successful in his attempts.
This situation must have been very obvious in the eyes of Stalin; as a matter of fact, it must have also been quite reassuring for him. Noticing the fundamental mistakes perpetrated by an adversary is always re-comforting. Under no circumstances must have Stalin worried about Hitler possibly winning the war; this situation can be very well examined at the very beginning of Operation Barbarossa (i.e. Nazi Germany’s attack against Soviet Union on 22nd June 1941). Many Soviet statesmen, partisans and military officers denounced Stalin’s supposed indifference or gullibility or carelessness, but they were absolutely wrong. The Soviet ruler merely stuck to his deal (Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact; 23rd August 1939), therefore fully implementing the famous maxim ‘pacta sunt servanda’, honoring his signature, and highlighting his Mithraic moral commitment. In his earliest Iranian form, the Zoroastrian Mithra is also a divinity supervising, protecting and blessing covenants, pacts and oaths. In striking contrast to Hitler, Stalin did not even try to unveil his spirituality, faith, intuition and conviction in public; the reason for this is simple: it is up to a Prophet or a Messiah to do so, not up to mystic.
Anatolian Mithraism, Norse Mythology, and their different solar ideologies
The two rulers’ systems of reference were markedly different as regards their solar aspect and dimension. Stalin’s Mithraic imperial heroism constituted a far wealthier, stronger and brighter source of meditation than Hitler’s Norse heroism. In fact, Norse mythology is a system of spirituality, faith and legend with weak solar traits. Whereas one can eventually establish some parallels between Ahura Mazda and Odin, the main god of the Norse faith and mythology, all other concepts of divinity are greatly different. A very particular element of the Norse religion is the prominent position of Thor (son of Odin), who symbolizes the thunder. This has no parallel in Zoroastrianism and in Mithraism. It is quite interesting that, although in the Ancient Assyrian-Babylonian religion, which exercised remarkable impact on Zoroastrianism and the Achaemenid Iranian court, the divine aspect of the thunder was revered as Adad, in either the Zoroastrian faith or in the Mithraic spirituality, this theme is totally absent.
In general, within the context of a religion, the sheer prevalence of the Thunder is tantamount to the subordination of the Sun. This is a rather polytheistic tendency. In the Ancient Assyrian-Babylonian religion, Adad (also kniown as Hadad and as Ishkur) was early mythologized by the Babylonian priests of the first half of the second millennium BCE as ‘son of Sin’ (i.e. the divine aspect of the Moon) and therefore ‘brother of Shamash and Ishtar’ (namely the divine aspects of the Sun and Venus respectively). But the rise of monotheistic tendencies in the Neo-Assyrian times (1363-609 BCE) left Adad in the backstage and brought Ishtar and Shamash to the forefront.
Within the context of Norse and Germanic mythologies, in total contrast to all Mithraic cults, Sol (or Sunna/Sohne) is a female divinity of second or third rank. Mythologized as daughter of Mundilfari, Sol is the sister of Mani (i.e. the Moon), who was considered as a male divinity. Even worse, in Norse eschatology, during the catastrophic events named Ragnarök (the Norse version of the End Times), the Sun (Sol) is expected to be killed by a wolf, although this will happen after she gives birth to her daughter, another Sun that will replace her. This tragic narrative was not a forgotten fairy tale for the early 20th c. Germans; it was the nucleus of Richard Wagner’s celebrated opera Götterdämmerung. Making of these topics the core of a popular ideal and culture is tantamount to ethnocide; to establish the correct parallel, I would say that the propagation of this sober and apocalyptic theme among the educated urban populations of Germany was tantamount to adopting a different Christian Liturgy of the Word (in the Christian churches) in which the reading of the Gospel would be replaced by that of the Book of Revelation.
Wherever the solar divinity is female, the solar imperial ideology is weak. Among the Hittites of Anatolia, one of the most formidable nations of the Ancient Orient, the solar divinity (Arinna) was mythologized as female. The Hittite Empire did not have solar aspects in its imperial doctrine. There can certainly be empires with no solar aspect in their imperial world view and doctrine; but a strong solar dimension in the imperial doctrine contributes to the state’s cultural radiation and land expansion.
At the end, I have to add that, contrarily to Mithraism, the Norse cult and mythology has also a strong maritime dimension; as the god of the sea and the wealth, Njord was mythologized as the father of Freyja and Freyr, two important divinities. But if Njord was necessary to the small coastal communities of some Scandinavian sailors and fishermen, he was certainly impermissible and disastrous for any great empire of Eurasiatic aspirations. The religions of great empires never include gods of the sea; even in the case of the Roman Empire that was, as I already said, a truly bizarre state formation and an exception in World History, Neptune never occupied a position of central importance. As a matter of fact, Mithraic priests and adepts always reviled the sea. When Tiridates I of Armenia traveled to Rome to be crowned by Nero and to initiate him in the mysteries of Mithra, as he was a high priest, he traveled by land, because the Mithraic sacerdotal hierarchs never exposed themselves to the salt waters. Further readings: https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/bitstream/handle/18452/2578/stern.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Stalin’s Mithraic contemplations and meditations in Ottoman Anatolia fully enabled him to acquire a wide angle view of the identity of Russia as Third Rome and to realize what was/is at stake in this regard. This sounds odd to many who view the Soviet ruler as an atheist and a materialist, but behind this convenient façade was hidden a spiritual fortress that few people would be shrewd enough to discern. Many will reject my previous statement and contend that the persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church and the total absence of religious cults and of spiritual references in the Soviet Union fully prove that Stalin did not want Third Rome to exist. This last assertion gets a totally different meaning, if one duly completes it.
Yes, Stalin did not want Third Rome to exist in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The plain statement has however a completely different meaning.
Meditating on the striking differences between Anatolian Mithraism and Roman Mithraism was quite revelatory for Stalin. It was also crucial for his personal and deep understanding of Holy Russia (Святая Русь / Sviataya Rus), of the country’s historical role, and of the difficult, dangerous relations that the country would always have with Rome.
The Anatolian-Caucasian Mithraic kingdoms, notably Pontus, Commagene, Armenia and Iberia, similarly with the Empire of Parthia (Arsacid Iran; 250 BCE – 224 CE), were not states that reflected the ideals and the targets of the Mithraic Magi in any way. Although the local priesthoods accepted a preponderant role for Mithra, they systematically attempted and achieved to shift the focus of interest toward monotheistic Zoroastrian concepts and imperial continental ideals of purely Caesaropapist nature. Thus, the Mithraic Magi flight continued further to the west, and they found the ground that they needed in Rome.
Following the abandonment of Mithraism and the promotion of Christianity, the rivalry between Republican Rome and Royal Anatolia was transformed into an opposition between Papo-Caesarist Rome, capital of the Western Roman Empire, and Caesaropapist New Rome-Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. The foundation of New Rome by Constantine the Great occurred at the very moment the Roman Mithraic priesthood abandoned Mithraism and adopted Christianity. It was apparently an uncontrolled development that displeased enormously the new pseudo-Christian Roman establishment; in reality, when the Mithraic sacerdotal college, which had opposed the Achaemenid emperors Cambyses and Darius I the Great, achieved its target to put Rome under control, another Rome arose in force: a Second Rome or the New Rome.
Stalin must have understood that a tremendous issue of authenticity and identity was thus formed; when an entity emerges bearing the name of another, the first point that everyone wants to know is which of the two is the true, the original one. The quest for the original Rome dragged the two capitals’ establishments to wars and conflicts. It was a subtle confrontation at all levels: imperial, spiritual, religious, theological, liturgical, cultural, artistic, intellectual, administrative, socio-economic, and military. The pre-Christian rivalry within the context of Mithraism pre-fashioned the rivalry between Rome and New Rome to great extent.
In fact, 600 years after Mithridates VI, Justinian I -due to his exceptional spiritual force, Reconquista, legislation, decrees, administration, and imperial practices- took revenge on
a) Pompey the Great who had finally won over the Mithraic pirates,
b) the part of the Roman establishment that assassinated Caesar, and
c) the seditious, pseudo-Christian sacerdotal Roman establishment, i.e. the spiritual-intellectual descendants of the Iranian Mithraic Magi.
This priesthood was the responsible for the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, because the papal regime did not want any imperial authority to challenge the religious sovereignty of the pope (which is the essence of Papo-Caesarism). As a matter of fact, the imposition of popes approved by the Eastern Roman Emperor (from 537 to 752; namely the Caesaropapist period of Rome) prevented New Rome – Constantinople from collapsing and enabled the Oriental State to endure no less than 700 years after the termination of the practice introduced by Justinian I. During the said period, New Rome also proved to be indomitable by the pope of Rome, because the Anti-Christian Latin kingdom of Constantinople proved to be short-lived: 1204-1261. About:
Stalin could better assess Russian History in the light of the aforementioned; he knew that it was the papal establishment that, after the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II (1453), took good care to dispatch Sophia Palaiologina (born Zoe; 1449-1503), niece of the last Eastern Roman Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos, to Moscow (via Lübeck, Tallinn, Pskov and Novgorod) in 1472 (with great custody and following a great number of deliberations, plots, ceremonies and agreements) to her husband, Ivan III (1440-1505; ruler after1462) duke of Moscow, as his second wife. Ivan Fryazin (Иван Фрязин) was the Muscovite ruler’s proxy in the marriage in absentia, which took place on the 1st June 1472 in Rome (at the Old St. Peter’s Basilica). This fact makes of Constantine XI Palaiologos’ niece the mother of Vasili III (1479-1533; ruler after 1505) duke of Moscow and the grandmother of Ivan IV the Terrible (1530-1584; ruler after 1533 and ‘czar’ after 1547), who significantly expanded the small territory of the Muscovite state, turning it to a kingdom, which claimed continuity from the Eastern Roman Empire (the title ‘czar’ being the Russian translation of ‘Caesar’). About:
Stalin cared for History only up to the point of assessing the identity of the sacerdotal colleges that pull strengths, manipulate petty rulers, produce historical events, use lands, take advantage of adepts, confuse enemies, divide peoples, destroy kingdoms, and employ every trickery to change the world according to their plans, while hiding behind religions, theological systems, spiritual practices, and mysterious cults.
If the Mithraic priesthood, which first prevailed in Rome and subsequently adopted the early Christian belief only to gradually distort it (4th to 15th century) and then straightforwardly challenge it (by means of the Renaissance and the Classicism), reviled so deeply New Rome and the ostensibly Caesaropapist Eastern Roman Empire, then why did they attempt to revive Constantinople in a way, by making of Moscow the Third Rome?
Following a convincing response to this question, one can certainly understand better the labyrinthine tactics that the Roman Catholic establishment implements wherever a conflict takes place or does not; for sacerdotal colleges that have been perennially renewed through member initiation, the targets are irrevocable, the parts of the schedule can last centuries, and duplicity has always been the method to fool the others. Rome did not help Third Rome to emerge -after the fall of New Rome- for good but for bad purpose. It appeared good, of course, in the beginning; but this was deceitful.
Those who intend to control the world and for this purpose they sent Spaniards to decimate Mexicans and Peruvians cannot possibly have good intentions for anyone; they do not create partners, but they fabricate tools and puppets. Stalin’s typically realistic approach must have most probably driven him to the conclusion that Third Rome (Moscow or later Russia) was only a good tool against the Mongols and the Muslims for the papal perfidy. After they would use Third Rome against Islam, they would invent ways to penetrate Russia, infiltrate the Russian Orthodox Church, and corrupt the Russian people. They had already done it against the Roman Empire; they would not hesitate to repeat their method, eventually devising new tricks and delusions. And they ultimately perpetrated the same tactics against Russia.
The above thoughts must have been the result of Stalin’s Mithraic Anatolian contemplations; apparently he concluded that the Russian Orthodox Church of the last decades of the czarist establishment was good for nothing. It could be easily penetrated and it was an ostensible target of the Roman Catholic Church. So, Stalin’s task should be to guarantee conditions of incomparable impermeability and to seal Russia off against any attempt or attack.
So, it was clear that the true, final, ultimate Third Rome had not yet come. Stalin’s work should be to ensure that, when the time would be ripe, the Third Rome would rise to save the world from the Anti-Christian Roman perfidy of the unconditionally Mithraic sacerdotal college. Others would certainly ask one more question:
– Why on Earth would Rome target Russia so systematically?
Stalin would not need to spend time to find out the response; he knew very well that, by infiltrating among Russians, by consecrating Russia to ‘the Immaculate Heart of Virgin Mary’, and by corrupting the local populations, the Mithraic priests would merely effectuate a triumphant return to the land from where their millennia-long adventure started: Central Asia and Siberia.
Stalin would definitely stand on the way; after all, every persecution that the Catholic Church underwent in Nazi Germany was tacitly accepted by Vatican in the (secret) hope that Hitler would invade the entire Soviet Union. The work of the Mithraic sacerdotal college would then be much easier.
XXV. Mithraism, Christianity, Stalin and the Antichrist
Stalin’s Mithraic contemplations and meditations in Ottoman Anatolia fully empowered him to discern the true identity of the worst enemies of Christianity, Russia, and the Mankind: the sacerdotal college that fused Iranian Mithraism, Egyptian Memphitism, and Manichaeism into one faith that they presented under a Roman Christian mask. Finally, they launched the Renaissance intellectual, socio-educational, cultural and theoretical system of tyrannically imposed deception and falsehood, while also re-organizing their institution to appear as ‘Societas Jesu’ (Jesuits) over the past five centuries. Thanks to his inquisitive mind and method, Stalin understood the entirely Anti-Christian character and nature of the Roman Catholic Church and the deep-seated hatred that the Jesuits harbored against Orthodox Christianity, as well as against other cultures and civilizations. Due to his early conclusions, the Soviet ruler was able to effectively oppose Hitler, vanquish Nazi Germany, and deliver a terrible blow to Vatican and the Catholic Church’s interests and presence in Eastern Europe.
However, Stalin knew that WW II was only a small episode in a long enduring, historic rivalry; he would not see the final outcome in person. In the period 1939-1945, opposite sacerdotal colleges siding on both sides of the front only readjusted their forces, preparing for a new conflict. Jesuits, Freemasons and Zionists would soon start another combat duly utilizing their resources against one another. Stalin was not fooled with stories like Hitler’s purported death; neither did he undermine the notorious Operation Paperclip (1945-1959), i.e. the US intelligence program, which involved the transportation of more than 1500 leading German scientists, specialists and experts to the US for government employment. In fact, this operation did not consist in mere utilization of German Nazi scholars by the US establishment; it was rather an outstanding boost of the hidden pro-Nazi (or, if you prefer, the crypto-Nazi) part of the deep American state.
Last but not least, Stalin was aware of the fact that, after the defenestration of Rudolf von Sebottendorf from Thule Gesellschaft (that he had founded), a Satanic English pseudo-Freemasonic lodge put Hitler under total control, also using other stooges around him and thus fully short-circuiting him. In fact, the only really Nazi state was the UK; it simply appeared anti-Nazi, while being crypto-Nazi and testing its stooges and puppets, namely all those who openly appeared as Nazis without ever realizing whose tools they truly were. The abdication of Edward VIII (1894-1972; reign: 20th January-11th December 1936) was due to the fact that he had been publicly exposed as openly pro-Hitler, thus fully revealing UK’s totally Nazi nature and maladroitly conditioning his country’s margin of maneuver. But, by being the ultimately Nazi country (due to the evil deeds of the apostate Anglo-Zionist Freemasonic lodge), England devolved in reality to papal vassal state being adequately utilized by Rome.
Despite their Anglican identity and past, their strong anti-papal rhetoric, and their purported affiliation to Freemasonic lodges, the English were deceived due to the slow and subtle infiltration of the apostate Freemasonic lodge which subordinated today’s fake Freemasons to the pope and the Jesuits. That’s why England supported and guided Hitler in his first steps (after Rudolf von Sebottendorf’s defenestration from Thule Gesellschaft), contained him through use of many spies planted around him, and finally turned him against the USSR – which was an act straightforwardly against Germany’s natural, historical, objective, and inalienable interests. This fact does not mean however that all the anti-Nazi forces were resolutely destroyed and ultimately eliminated within Germany; there were powerful organizations, like Ahnenerbe, which carried out critical and everlasting deeds under a Nazi mask; thus, these secret societies deceived Hitler, his administration, and his masters (England’s fake Freemasons and Vatican’s Jesuits).
When it comes to the warring parts of WW II, one must therefore conclude that the true opponents were the USSR and the UK. That’s why so many deliberations took place notably involving the four conferences held in Moscow; it is noteworthy that, in the Fourth Moscow Conference (1944), which lasted more than 10 days (!!! ??? !!!: 9-19 October 1944) and in which President F. D. Roosevelt was represented by the US Ambassador Averell Harriman, the latter was not present (as he was not invited) in the deliberations between Stalin and Churchill about the notorious Percentages Agreement. This means that the post-WW II situation in Europe was decided upon exclusively by UK and USSR. About:
With the above, I have completed my brief presentation about the far reaching consequences of Stalin’s Anatolian Mithraic contemplations and meditations, their momentous importance, and their paramount contribution to his successful defense of USSR (Russia). Only one last question is now left to be answered:
– To what extent can Stalin’s conclusions from his 2-year long Anatolian sojourn be beneficial to us today?
It is essential for many Russians and other people worldwide to spend some time, exploring the use that they can make of Stalin’s perception of the realities of this world. In fact, nothing ended with the termination of hostilities in 1945. There is only an absolute reality that all the fooled and deceived people worldwide must now open their eyes and accept, before it is too late for them.
Germany is still in the state of war with more than fifty nations; as a matter of fact, not a single peace contract has been signed since 1945. Germany cannot therefore be blamed for any governmental and international decision taken by the entirely unrepresentative governments imposed on the German nation by the true Nazis, who kept hiding themselves behind the worthless jargon of ‘politics’, ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’, ‘civil rights’, etc. The duplicitous and biased jargon is fully revealed, when it comes to the word ‘nation’.
Whereas, for the crypto-Nazi governments of post-1945 UK and France, ‘Estonia’, ‘Latvia’, ‘Lithuania’, ‘Ukraine’, ‘Moldova’, etc. are nations that deserve to have their own state and be separated from the USSR (or Russia), quite contrarily, Occitania, Brittany, Euskadi (Bask land), Catalonia, Elsaß-Lothringen, and Corsica in France and Scotland, North Ireland, and Wales in Britain ‘must’ remain occupied territories, endlessly targeted with spiritual genocide by the respective capitals, Paris and London, that are fully controlled by the crypto-Nazi apostate Freemasonic lodge.
Similar duplicity, bias, false jargon, and historical forgery occur when it comes to ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’, ‘civil rights’, etc. The same applies to international legalism: after the criminal colonial powers England and France imposed their evil world order due to their military and technological superiority over 19th c. Asiatic and African nations, states and empires, they aptly invented the worthless pseudo-notion of ‘International Law’ – only to defend their lawless, absurd, and inhuman deeds. The paranoid deniers of violence are the cruelest tyrants who carried out the most violent, the most genocidal, and the most Satanic plans for no less than 500 years (1453-1945).
After successfully infiltrating the 18th–19th c. US establishment, the colonial powers turned the US from a consciously anti-colonial state to a subservient tool. They have therefore excessively utilized this state for their own benefit, while also blaming and defaming it; every anti-Americanism started either in Paris or in London. However, one has to be shrewd enough to understand that behind every ‘Vietnam’, there is a state called ‘France’; and similarly, behind every ‘Afghanistan’, there is a realm named ‘England’.
Deeply engulfed in their delusions, the fake Freemasonic lodges and the anti-Jewish Zionist congregations fail to understand how intelligently they have been utilized and instrumentalized by the Jesuits; in reality, although their plans appear to be quite opposite to those of the Roman Satanists, in reality they only contribute to the advance needed for the hidden plans of pseudo-Christian Rome to come to surface. The petty eschatological plans of these societies will apparently fail and their foretold failure is exactly the cause of the friction that we notice today worldwide.
Stalin must have apparently anticipated what the final game would be like; he soon realized that the Mithraic priesthood of the Magi did not jump onto the bandwagon of Christianity for nothing. On the other hand, Manichaeism would be the true eastern (Asiatic) counterpart of an early ascended Roman (i.e. false) Christianity. With their version of fake Christianity being unhindered throughout the Roman Empire, with Manichaeism prevailing in Iran and Asia, and with a Renaissance-style science emanating from the Sassanid University at Gundeshapur (or Jundishapur), the mankind would soon enter in an eschatological orbit that would bring the end around the year 1000 CE.
But then, the plan started to go wrong; first, the high priest Kartir was very watchful and he promptly blocked the diffusion of Manichaeism in Iran. Second, St. Basil, bishop of Caesarea, -with his ingenious theological consolidation and with the Holy Spirit solemnly declared as the third person of the Trinity- irrevocably prevented the rise of Marianism within Christianity. Third, Emperor Justinian felt the danger more clearly than anyone else and he masterfully managed to fully impose Eastern Roman order and Constantinopolitan popes in Rome for more than 200 years. Fourth, while preaching Islam, prophet Muhammad made state of the situation that prevailed among Christians; there were faithful believers and evil infidels among them.
The Magi were therefore forced to postpone their eschatological plans and the propagation of the delusional science that would usher the world into the End Times. These historical facts may not have been clearly studied or assessed by Stalin, but the prevented-postponed delusion and the Jesuits’ eschatological trickery were apparently clear to his eyes. When there is an absolute contrast between a divine missionary, who calls for the Kingdom of Heaven, and a sacerdotal college that systematically exploits the divine missionary’s revelations and preaching for their material benefit, we have a frontal clash between two diametrically opposed moral standards, world concepts, and spiritual paths; the termination of this conflict is actually called ‘End Times’.
Fighting against the Truth and the spiritual heroism of so many luminaries in order to maintain the unjust and evil order that suits their interests, the Mithraic Jesuits of the Anti-Christian Rome will ultimately be forced to come up with a fake savior, who would confirm every single point of their iniquity and viciousness and whom they would present as the true ‘savior’, ‘Messiah’ and ‘Jesus Christ’. To fully service him, they would also need to create a Third Rome as a fake challenger to the fake Messiah; this would be the solemnly announced (in Fatima; 1917) consecration of Russia by the Anti-Christian Church of Rome. In other words, the Jesuits would do to Russia what the apostate Anglo-Zionist Freemasons did to Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.
In the spiritual and the material universes, everything is the reflection of its opposite and all the beings consist in the double refraction of their spiritual prototypes; by solemnly targeting the land of Russia, the Jesuits reveal its exceptional importance and the outstanding role that it will play in the period of upheaval that is commonly called ‘End Times’. But by prompting the fake, the Jesuits will only precipitate the apparition of the real Savior; then, their firm anti-Russian predisposition unveils the location where the main opponent of their fake savior will be manifested in. Stalin’s Mithraic contemplations and meditations in Ottoman Anatolia did not enable him only to effectively oppose Hitler and his secret mentors; they also made him sensible enough to potentially foresee that from the same land and from a position analogous to his, another person, who was not then in life, would oppose and vanquish the Jesuit Antichrist.
In the mystical cave that our Earth -under the Firmament- is, Russia represents the Northern Gate. The forthcoming upheaval period (or ‘End Times’) is tantamount to initiation for the survivors. And as the Phoenician-Aramaean mystic Porphyry said before 1700 years, the initiates enter from the Northern Gate as ‘men’ only to undergo the initiation rituals and exit from the Southern Gate as ‘gods’. Then, the very few survivors, who will discover their presently lost divinity during the unparalleled adversities and difficulties of the ‘initiation’, will emerge in the New Day to live on a New Earth, under a New Sky, and without any sea. Jesuit Rome or, if you prefer, Babylon the Great will have disappeared.
Or why I defended Pope Benedict XVI in 2006 against the thoughtlessly irascible Muslims
When a Muslim writes an Obituary for the Catholic Church’s sole Pope Emeritus…
Table of Contents
I. From Joseph Ratzinger to Pope Benedict XVI
II. The theoretical concerns of an intellectual Pope
III. Benedict XVI: A Pope against violence and wars
IV. Manuel II Palaeologus and the Eastern Roman Empire between the Muslim Ottoman brethren and the Anti-Christian Roman enemies
V. The unknown (?) Turkic mystic interlocutor and the Islamic centers of science and reason that Benedict XVI ignored
VI. Excerpt from Benedict XVI’s lecture given on the 12th September at the University of Regensburg under title ‘Faith, Reason and the University–Memories and Reflections’
VII. The problems of the academic-theological background of Benedict XVI’s lecture
VIII. Benedict XVI’s biased approach, theological mistakes, intellectual oversights and historical misinterpretations
IX. The lecture’s most controversial point
X. The educational-academic-intellectual misery and the political ordeal of today’s Muslim states
Of all the Roman popes who resigned the only to be called ‘Pope Emeritus’ was Joseph Ratzinger Pope Benedict XVI (also known in German as Prof. Dr. Papst), who passed away on 31st December 2022, thus sealing the circle of world figures and heads of states whose life ended last year. As a matter of fact, although being a head state, a pope does not abdicate; he renounces to his ministry (renuntiatio).
Due to lack of documentation, conflicting sources or confusing circumstances, we do not have conclusive evidence as regards the purported resignations of the popes St. Pontian (235), Marcellinus (304), Liberius (366), John XVIII (1009) and Sylvester (105). That is why historical certainty exists only with respect to the ‘papal renunciation’ of six pontiffs; three of them bore the papal name of ‘Benedict’. The brief list includes therefore the following bishops of Rome: Benedict V (964), Benedict IX (deposed in 1044, bribed to resign in 1045, and resigned in 1048), Gregory VI (1046), St Celestine (1294), Gregory XII (1415) and Benedict XVI (2013).
I. From Joseph Ratzinger to Pope Benedict XVI
Benedict XVI (18 April 1927 – 31 December 2022) was seven (7) years younger than his predecessor John Paul II (1920-2005), but passed away seventeen (17) years after the Polish pope’s death; already on the 4th September 2020, Benedict XVI would have been declared as the oldest pope in history, had he not resigned seven (7) years earlier. Only Leo XIII died 93, back in 1903. As a matter of fact, Benedict XVI outlived all the people who were elected to the Roman See.
Benedict XVI’s papacy lasted slightly less than eight (8) years (19 April 2005 – 28 February 2013). Before being elected as pope, Cardinal Ratzinger was for almost a quarter century (1981-2005) the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which was the formal continuation of the Office of the Holy Inquisition, and therefore one of the most important sections (‘dicasteries’; from the Ancient Greek term ‘dikasterion’, i.e. ‘court of law’) of the Roman administration (‘Curia’).
A major step toward this position was his appointment as archbishop of Munich for four years (1977-1981); Bavaria has always been a Catholic heavyweight, and in this regard, it is easy to recall the earlier example of Eugenio Pacelli (the later pope Pius XII), who was nuncio to Bavaria (and therefore to the German Empire), in Munich, from 1917 to 1920, and then to Germany, before being elected to the Roman See (in 1939). Before having a meteoric rise in the Catholic hierarchy, Ratzinger made an excellent scholar and a distinct professor of dogmatic theology, while also being a priest. His philosophical dissertation was about St. Augustine and his habilitation concerned Bonaventure, a Franciscan scholastic theologian and cardinal of the 13th c.
II. The theoretical concerns of an intellectual Pope
During his ministry, very early, Benedict XVI stood up and showed his teeth; when I noticed his formidable outburst against the ‘dictatorship of relativism’, I realized that the German pope would be essentially superior to his Polish predecessor. Only in June 2005, so just two months after his election, he defined relativism as “the main obstacle to the task of education”, directing a tremendous attack against the evilness of ego and portraying selfishness as a “self-limitation of reason”.
In fact, there cannot be more devastating attack from a supreme religious authority against the evilness of Anglo-Zionism and the rotten, putrefied society that these criminals diffuse worldwide by means of infiltration, corruption, mendacity, and simulation. Soon afterwards, while speaking in Marienfeld (Cologne), Benedict XVI attacked ferociously all the pathetic ideologies which indiscriminately enslave humans from all spiritual and cultural backgrounds. He said: “absolutizing what is not absolute but relative is called totalitarianism”. This is a detrimental rejection of Talmudic Judaism, Zohar Kabbalah, and Anglo-Zionism.
It was in the summer 2005 that I first realized that I should study closer the pre-papal past of the Roman Pontiff whom St Malachy’s illustrious Prophecy of the Popes (12th c.) described as ‘Gloria olivae’ (the Glory of the olive). I contacted several friends in Germany, who extensively updated me as regards his academic publications, also dispatching to me some of them. At the time, I noticed that my Christian friends already used to question a certain number of Cardinal Ratzinger’s positions.
But, contrarily to them, I personally found his prediction about the eventuality of Buddhism becoming the principal ‘enemy’ of the Catholic Church as quite plausible. My friends were absolutely astounded, and then I had to narrate and explain to them the deliberately concealed story of the Christian-Islamic-Confucian alliance against the Buddhist terrorism of the Dzungar Khanate (1634-1755); actually, it took many Kazakh-Dzungar wars (1643-1756), successive wars between Qing China and the Dzungar Khanate (1687-1757), and even an alliance with the Russian Empire in order to successfully oppose the ferocious Buddhist extremist threat.
Finally, the extraordinary ordeal of North Asia {a vast area comprising lands of today’s Eastern Kazakhstan, Russia (Central Siberia), Northwestern and Western China (Eastern Turkestan/Xinjiang and Tibet) and Western Mongolia} ended up with the systematic genocide of the extremist Buddhist Dzungars (1755-1758) that the Chinese had to undertake because there was no other way to terminate once forever the most fanatic regime that ever existed in Asia.
Disoriented, ignorant, confused and gullible, most of the people today fail to clearly understand how easily Buddhism can turn a peaceful society into a fanatic realm of lunatic extremists. The hypothetically innocent adhesion of several fake Freemasonic lodges of the West to Buddhism and the seemingly harmless acceptance of Buddhist principles and values by these ignorant fools can end up in the formation of vicious and terrorist organizations that will give to their members and initiates the absurd order and task to indiscriminately kill all of their opponents. But Cardinal Ratzinger had prudently discerned the existence of a dangerous source of spiritual narcissism in Buddhism.
III. Benedict XVI: A Pope against violence and wars
To me, this foresight was a convincing proof that Benedict XVI was truly ‘Gloria olivae’; but this would be troublesome news! In a period of proxy wars, unrestrained iniquity, and outrageous inhumanity, a perspicacious, cordial, and benevolent pope in Rome would surely be an encumbering person to many villainous rascals, i.e. the likes of Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Nicolas Sarkozy, and many others so-called ‘leaders’. The reason for this assessment of the situation is simple: no one wants a powerful pacifier at a time more wars are planned.
At the time, it was ostensible to all that a fake confrontation between the world’s Muslims and Christians was underway (notably after the notorious 9/11 events); for this reason, I expected Benedict XVI to make a rather benevolent statement that evil forces would immediately misinterpret, while also falsely accusing the pacifist Pope and absurdly turning the uneducated and ignorant mob of many countries against the Catholic Church.
This is the foolish plan of the Anglo-Zionist lobby, which has long served as puppets of the Jesuits, corrupting the entire Muslim world over the past 250 years by means of intellectual, educational, academic, scientific, cultural, economic, military and political colonialism. These idiotic puppets, which have no idea who their true and real masters are, imagine that, by creating an unprecedented havoc in Europe, they harm the worldwide interests of the Jesuits; but they fail to properly realize that this evil society, which early turned against Benedict XVI, has already shifted its focus onto China. Why the apostate Anglo-Zionist Freemasonic lodge would act in this manner against Benedict XVI is easy to assess; the Roman pontiff whose episcopal motto was ‘Cooperatores Veritatis’ (‘Co-workers of the Truth’) would apparently try to prevent the long-prepared fake war between the Muslims and the Christians.
IV. Manuel II Palaeologus and the Eastern Roman Empire between the Muslim Ottoman brethren and the Anti-Christian Roman enemies
And this is what truly happened in the middle of September 2006; on the 12th September, Benedict XVI delivered a lecture at the University of Regensburg in Germany; the title was ‘Glaube, Vernunft und Universität – Erinnerungen und Reflexionen’ (‘Faith, Reason and the University – Memories and Reflections’). In the beginning of the lecture, Prof. Dr. Ratzinger eclipsed Pope Benedict XVI, as the one-time professor persisted on his concept of ‘faith’, “which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole”, as he said. In a most rationalistic approach (for which he had been known for several decades as a renowned Catholic theologian), in an argumentation reflecting views certainly typical of Francis of Assisi and of Aristotle but emphatically alien to Jesus, Benedict XVI attempted to portray an ahistorical Christianity and to describe the Catholic faith as the religion of the Reason.
At an early point of the lecture, Benedict XVI referred to a discussion that the Eastern Roman Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus (or Palaiologos; Μανουήλ Παλαιολόγος; 1350-1425; reigned after 1391) had with an erudite Turkic scholar (indiscriminately but mistakenly called by all Eastern Roman authors at the time as ‘Persian’) most probably around the end of 1390 or the first months of 1391, when he was hostage at the Ottoman court of Bayezid I. In the historical text, it is stated that the location was ‘Ancyra of Galatia’ (i.e. Ankara).
This Eastern Roman Emperor was indeed a very controversial historical figure; although undeniably an erudite ruler, a bold diplomat, and a reputable soldier, he first made agreements with the Ottomans and delivered to them the last Eastern Roman city in Anatolia (Philadelphia; today’s Alaşehir, ca. 140 km east of Izmir / Smyrna) and then, after he took control of his ailing kingdom thanks to the sultan, he escaped the protracted siege of Constantinople (1391-1402) only to travel to various Western European kingdoms and ask the help of those rather reluctant monarchs (1399-1403).
At the time, all the Christian Orthodox populations, either living in the Ottoman sultanate or residing in the declined Eastern Roman Empire, were deeply divided into two groups, namely those who preferred to be ruled by Muslims (because they rejected the pseudo-Christian fallacy, evilness and iniquity of the Roman pope) and the fervent supporters of a Latin (: Western European) control over Constantinople (viewed as the only way for them to prevent the Ottoman rule); the former formed the majority and were called Anthenotikoi, i.e. ‘against the union’ (: of the Orthodox Church with the Catholics), whereas the latter constituted a minority group and were named ‘Enotikoi’ (‘those in favor of the union of the two churches’).
V. The unknown (?) Turkic mystic interlocutor and the Islamic centers of science and reason that Benedict XVI ignored
Manuel II Palaeologus’ text has little theological value in itself; however, its historical value is great. It reveals how weak both interlocutors were at the intellectual, cultural and spiritual levels, how little they knew one another, and how poorly informed they were about their own and their interlocutor’s past, heritage, religion and spirituality. If we have even a brief look at it, we will immediately realize that the level is far lower than that attested during similar encounters in 8th- 9th c. Baghdad, 10th c. Umayyad Andalusia, Fatimid Cairo, 13th c. Maragheh (where the world’s leading observatory was built) or 14th c. Samarqand, the Timurid capital.
It was absolutely clear at the time of Manuel II Palaeologus and Bayezid I that neither Constantinople nor Bursa (Προύσα / Prousa; not anymore the Ottoman capital after 1363, but still the most important city of the sultanate) could compete with the great centers of Islamic science civilization which were located in Iran and Central Asia. That’s why Gregory Chioniades, the illustrious Eastern Roman bishop, astronomer, and erudite scholar who was the head of the Orthodox diocese of Tabriz, studied in Maragheh under the guidance of his tutor and mentor, Shamsaddin al Bukhari (one of the most illustrious students of Nasir el-Din al Tusi, who was the founder of the Maragheh Observatory), before building an observatory in Trabzon (Trebizond) and becoming the teacher of Manuel Bryennios, another famous Eastern Roman scholar.
The text of the Dialogues must have been written several years after the conversation took place, most probably when the traveling emperor and diplomat spent four years in Western Europe. For reasons unknown to us, the erudite emperor did not mention the name of his interlocutor, although this was certainly known to him; if we take into consideration that he was traveling to other kingdoms, we can somehow guess a plausible reason. His courtiers and royal scribes may have translated the text partly into Latin and given copies of the ‘dialogues’ to various kings, marshals, chroniclers, and other dignitaries. If this was the case, the traveling emperor would not probably want to offer insights into the Ottoman court and the influential religious authorities around the sultan.
Alternatively, the ‘unknown’ interlocutor may well have been Amir Sultan (born as Mohamed bin Ali; also known as Shamsuddin Al-Bukhari; 1368-1429) himself, i.e. none else than an important Turanian mystic from Vobkent (near Bukhara in today’s Uzbekistan), who got married with Bayezid I’s daughter Hundi Fatema Sultan Hatun. Amir Sultan had advised the sultan not to turn against Timur; had the foolish sultan heeded to his son-in-law’s wise advice, he would not have been defeated so shamefully.
Benedict XVI made a very biased use of the historical text; he selected an excerpt of Manuel II Palaeologus’ response to his interlocutor in order to differentiate between Christianity as the religion of Reason and Islam as the religion of Violence. Even worse, he referred to a controversial, biased and rancorous historian of Lebanese origin, the notorious Prof. Theodore Khoury (born in 1930), who spent his useless life to write sophisticated diatribes, mildly formulated forgeries, and deliberate distortions of the historical truth in order to satisfy his rancor and depict the historical past according to his absurd political analysis. Almost every sentence written Prof. Khoury about the Eastern Roman Empire and the Islamic Caliphate is maliciously false.
All the same, it was certainly Benedict XVI’s absolute right to be academically, intellectually and historically wrong. The main problem was that the paranoid reaction against him was not expressed at the academic and intellectual levels, but at the profane ground of international politics. Even worse, it was not started by Muslims but by the criminal Anglo-Zionist mafia and the disreputable mainstream mass media, the likes of the BBC, Al Jazeera (Qatari is only the façade of it), etc.
I will now republish (in bold and italics) a sizeable (600-word) excerpt of the papal lecture that contains the contentious excerpt, also adding the notes to the text. The link to the Vatican’s website page is available below. I will comment first on the lecture and the selected part of Manuel II Palaeologus’ text and then on the absurd Muslim reaction.
VI. Excerpt from Benedict XVI’s lecture given on the 12th September at the University of Regensburg under title ‘Faith, Reason and the University–Memories and Reflections’
I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried on – perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara – by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both.[1] It was presumably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than those of his Persian interlocutor.[2] The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur’an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship between – as they were called – three “Laws” or “rules of life”: the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Qur’an. It is not my intention to discuss this question in the present lecture; here I would like to discuss only one point – itself rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole – which, in the context of the issue of “faith and reason”, I found interesting and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.
In the seventh conversation (διάλεξις – controversy) edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: “There is no compulsion in religion”. According to some of the experts, this is probably one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the “Book” and the “infidels”, he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness that we find unacceptable, on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”[3] The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. “God”, he says, “is not pleased by blood – and not acting reasonably (σὺνλόγω) is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats… To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death…”.[4]
The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.[5] The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.[6] Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazm went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practice idolatry.[7]
Notes 1 to 7 (out of 13)
[1] Of the total number of 26 conversations (διάλεξις – Khoury translates this as “controversy”) in the dialogue (“Entretien”), T. Khoury published the 7th “controversy” with footnotes and an extensive introduction on the origin of the text, on the manuscript tradition and on the structure of the dialogue, together with brief summaries of the “controversies” not included in the edition; the Greek text is accompanied by a French translation: “Manuel II Paléologue, Entretiens avec un Musulman. 7e Controverse”, Sources Chrétiennes n. 115, Paris 1966. In the meantime, Karl Förstel published in Corpus Islamico-Christianum (Series Graeca ed. A. T. Khoury and R. Glei) an edition of the text in Greek and German with commentary: “Manuel II. Palaiologus, Dialoge mit einem Muslim”, 3 vols., Würzburg-Altenberge 1993-1996. As early as 1966, E. Trapp had published the Greek text with an introduction as vol. II of Wiener byzantinische Studien. I shall be quoting from Khoury’s edition.
[2] On the origin and redaction of the dialogue, cf. Khoury, pp. 22-29; extensive comments in this regard can also be found in the editions of Förstel and Trapp.
[3] Controversy VII, 2 c: Khoury, pp. 142-143; Förstel, vol. I, VII. Dialog 1.5, pp. 240-241. In the Muslim world, this quotation has unfortunately been taken as an expression of my personal position, thus arousing understandable indignation. I hope that the reader of my text can see immediately that this sentence does not express my personal view of the Qur’an, for which I have the respect due to the holy book of a great religion. In quoting the text of the Emperor Manuel II, I intended solely to draw out the essential relationship between faith and reason. On this point I am in agreement with Manuel II, but without endorsing his polemic.
[4] Controversy VII, 3 b–c: Khoury, pp. 144-145; Förstel vol. I, VII. Dialog 1.6, pp. 240-243.
[5] It was purely for the sake of this statement that I quoted the dialogue between Manuel and his Persian interlocutor. In this statement the theme of my subsequent reflections emerges.
[6] Cf. Khoury, p. 144, n. 1.
[7] R. Arnaldez, Grammaire et théologie chez Ibn Hazm de Cordoue, Paris 1956, p. 13; cf. Khoury, p. 144. The fact that comparable positions exist in the theology of the late Middle Ages will appear later in my discourse.
VII. The problems of the academic-theological background of Benedict XVI’s lecture
It is my conviction that Benedict XVI fell victim to the quite typical theological assumptions that Prof. Dr. Ratzinger had studied and taught for decades. However, the problem is not limited to the circle of the faculties of Theology and to Christian Theology as a modern discipline; it is far wider. The same troublesome situation permeates all the disciplines of Humanities and, even worse, the quasi-totality of the modern sciences as they started in Renaissance. The problem goes well beyond the limits of academic research and intellectual consideration; it has to do with the degenerate, rotten and useless mental abilities and capacities of the Western so-called scholars, researchers and academics. The description of the problem is rather brief, but its nature is truly ominous.
Instead of perceiving, understanding, analyzing and representing the ‘Other’ in its own terms, conditions and essence and as per its own values, virtues and world conceptualization, the modern Western European scholars, researchers, explorers and specialists view, perceive, attempt to understand, and seek to analyze the ‘Other’ in their own terms, conditions and essence and as per their own values, virtues and world conceptualization. Due to this sick effort and unprecedented aberration, the Western so-called scholars and researchers view the ‘Other’ through their eyes, thus projecting onto the ‘Other’ their view of it. Consequently, they do not and actually they cannot learn it, let alone know, understand and represent it. Their attitude is inane, autistic and degenerate. It is however quite interesting and truly bizarre that the Western European natural scientists do not proceed in this manner, but fully assess the condition of the object of their study in a rather objective manner.
In fact, the Western disciplines of the Humanities, despite the enormous collection and publication of study materials, sources and overall documentation, are a useless distortion. Considered objectively, the Western scientific endeavor in its entirety is a monumental nothingness; it is not only a preconceived conclusion. It is a resolute determination not to ‘see’ the ‘Other’ as it truly exists, as its constituent parts obviously encapsulate its contents, and as the available documentation reveals it. In other words, it consists in a premeditated and resolute rejection of the Truth; it is intellectually barren, morally evil, and spiritually nihilist. The topic obviously exceeds by far the limits of the present obituary, but I had to mention it in order to offer the proper context.
It is therefore difficult to identify the real reason for the magnitude of the Western scholarly endeavor, since the conclusions existed in the minds of the explorers and the academics already before the documentation was gathered, analyzed, studied, and represented. How important is it therefore to publish the unpublished material (totaling more than 100000 manuscripts of Islamic times and more than one million of cuneiform tablets from Ancient Mesopotamia, Iran, Canaan and Anatolia – only to give an idea to the non-specialized readers), if the evil Western scholars and the gullible foreign students enrolled in Western institutions (to the detriment of their own countries and nations) are going to repeat and reproduce the same absurd Western mentality of viewing an Ancient Sumerian, an Ancient Assyrian, an Ancient Egyptian or a Muslim author through their own eyes and of projecting onto the ancient author the invalid and useless measures, values, terms and world views of the modern Western world?
As it can be easily understood, the problem is not with Christian Theology, but with all the disciplines of the Humanities. So, the problem is not only that a great Muslim scholar and erudite mystic like Ibn Hazm was viewed by Benedict XVI and Western theologians through the distorting lenses of their ‘science’, being not evaluated as per the correct measures, values and terms of his own Islamic environment, background and civilization. The same problem appears in an even worse form, when Ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, Assyrian-Babylonian, Hittite, Iranian and other high priests, spiritual masters, transcendental potentates, sacerdotal writers, and unequaled scientists are again evaluated as per the invalid and useless criteria of Benedict XVI, of all the Western theologians, and of all the modern European and American academics.
What post-Renaissance popes, theologians, academics, scholars and intellectuals fail to understand is very simple; their ‘world’ ( i.e. the world of the Western Intellect and Science, which was first fabricated in the 15th and the 16th c. and later enhanced progressively down to our days) in not Christian, is not human, and is not real. It is their own delusion, their own invalid abstraction, their abject paranoia, and their own sin for which first they will atrociously disappear from the surface of the Earth (like every anomalous entity) and then flagrantly perish in Hell.
Their dangling system does not hold; they produced it in blood and in blood it will end. Modern sciences constitute a counter-productive endeavor and an aberration that will terminally absorb the entire world into the absolute nothingness, because these evil systems were instituted out of arbitrary bogus-interpretations of the past, peremptory self-identification, deliberate and prejudicial ignorance, as well as an unprecedented ulcerous hatred of the ‘Other’, i.e. of every ‘Other’.
The foolish Western European academic-intellectual establishment failed to realize that it is absolutely preposterous to extrapolate later and corrupt standards to earlier and superior civilizations; in fact, it is impossible. By trying to do it, you depart from the real world only to live in your delusion, which sooner or later will inevitably have a tragic end. Consequently, the Western European scholars’ ‘classics’ are not classics; their reason is an obsession; their language and jargon are hallucinatory, whereas their notions are conjectural. Their abstract concepts are the manifestation of Non-Being.
VIII. Benedict XVI’s biased approach, theological mistakes, intellectual oversights and historical misinterpretations
Benedict XVI’s understanding of the Eastern Roman Empire was fictional. When examining the sources, he retained what he liked, what pleased him, and what was beneficial to his preconceived ideas and thoughts. In fact, Prof. Dr. Papst did not truly understand what Manuel II Palaeologus said to his Turkic interlocutor, and even worse, he failed to assess the enormous distance that separated the early 15th c. Eastern Roman (not ‘Byzantine’: this is a fake appellation too) Emperor from his illustrious predecessors before 800 or 900 years (the likes of Heraclius and Justinian I) in terms of Christian Roman imperial ideology, theological acumen, jurisprudential perspicacity, intellectual resourcefulness, and spiritual forcefulness. Benedict XVI did not want to accept that with time the Christian doctrine, theology and spirituality had weakened.
What was Ratzinger’s mistake? First, he erroneously viewed Manuel II Palaeologus as ‘his’ (as identical with the papal doctrine), by projecting his modern Catholic mindset and convictions onto the Christian Orthodox Eastern Roman Emperor’s mind, mentality and faith. He took the ‘Dialogues’ at face value whereas the text may have been written not as a declaration of faith but as a diplomatic document in order to convince the rather uneducated Western European monarchs that the traveling ‘basileus’ (βασιλεύς) visited during the period 1399-1403.
Second, he distorted the ‘dialogue’, presenting it in a polarized form. Benedict XVI actually depicted a fraternal conversation as a frontal opposition; unfortunately, there is nothing in the historical text to insinuate this possibility. As I already said, it is quite possible that the moderate, wise, but desperate Eastern Roman Emperor may have discussed with someone married to a female descendant of the great mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi (namely Bayezid’s son-in-law, adviser and mystic Emir Sultan). Why on Earth did the renowned theologian Ratzinger attempt to stage manage a theological conflict in the place of a most peaceful, friendly and fraternal exchange of ideas?
This is easy to explain; it has to do with the absolutely Manichaean structure of thought that was first diffused among the Western Fathers of the Christian Church by St Augustine (in the early 5th c.). As method of theological argumentation, it was first effectively contained, and it remained rather marginal within the Roman Church as long as the practice introduced by Justinian I (537) lasted (until 752) and all the popes of Rome had to be selected and approved personally by the Eastern Roman Emperor. After this moment and, more particularly, after the two Schisms (867 and 1054), the Manichaean system of thinking prevailed in Rome; finally, it culminated after the Renaissance.
Third, Benedict XVI tried to depict the early 15th c. erudite interlocutor of the then hostage Manuel II Palaeologus as a modern Muslim and a Jihadist. This is the repetition of the same mistakes that he made as regards the intellectual Eastern Roman Emperor. In other words, he projected onto the ‘unknown’, 15th c. Muslim mystic his own personal view of an Islamist or Islamic fundamentalist. Similarly, by bulldozing time in order to impose his wrong perception of Islam, he fully misled the audience. As a matter of fact, Islam constitutes a vast universe that Prof. Dr. Papst never studied, never understood, and never fathomed in its true dimensions.
In fact, as it happened in the case of the Eastern Roman Emperor, his interlocutor was intellectually weaker and spiritually lower than the great figures of Islamic spirituality, science, wisdom, literature and intuition, the likes of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, Al Qurtubi, Mohyi el-Din Ibn Arabi, Ahmed Yasawi, Al Biruni, Ferdowsi, Al Farabi, Tabari, etc., who preceded him by 150 to 500 years. But Benedict XVI did not want to accept that with time the Islamic doctrine, theology and spirituality had weakened.
The reason for this distortion is easy to grasp; the Manichaean system of thinking needs terminal, crystallized forms of items that do not change; then, it is convenient for the Western European abusers of the Manichaean spirit to fully implement the deceitful setting of fake contrasts and false dilemmas. But the 15th c. decayed Eastern Roman Orthodoxy and decadent Islam are real historical entities that enable every explorer to encounter the multitude of forms, the ups and downs, the evolution of cults, the transformation of faiths, and the gradual loss of the initially genuine Moral and vibrant Spirituality. This reality is very embarrassing to those who want to teach their unfortunate students on a calamitous black & white background (or floor).
All the books and articles of his friend, Prof. Theodore Khoury, proved to be totally useless and worthless for the Catholic theologian Ratzinger, exactly because the Lebanese specialist never wrote a sentence in order to truly represent the historical truth about Islam, but he always elaborated his texts in a way to justify and confirm his preconceived ideas. Prof. Khoury’s Islam is a delusional entity, something like the artificial humans of our times. Unfortunately, not one Western Islamologist realized that Islam, at the antipodes of the Roman Catholic doctrine, has an extremely limited dogmatic part, a minimal cult, and no heresies. Any opposite opinion belongs to liars, forgers and falsifiers. As a matter of fact, today’s distorted representation of Islam is simply the result of Western colonialism. All over the world, whatever people hear or believe about the religion preached by Prophet Muhammad is not the true, historical, religion of Islam, but the colonially, academically-intellectually, produced Christianization of Islam.
Fourth, in striking contrast to what the theologian Ratzinger pretended through use of this example or case study (i.e. the ‘discussion’), if Benedict XVI shifted his focus to the East, he would find Maragheh in NW Iran (Iranian Azerbaijan) and Samarqand in Central Asia. In those locations (and always for the period concerned), he would certainly find great centers of learning, universities, vast libraries, and enormous observatories, which could make every 15th c. Western European astronomer and mathematician dream. But there he would also find, as I already said, many Muslim, Christian, Buddhist and other scholars working one next to the other without caring about their religious (theological) differences. This situation is very well known to modern Western scholarship, but they viciously and criminally try to permanently conceal it.
This situation was due to the cultural, intellectual, academic, mental and spiritual unity that prevailed among all those erudite scholars. Numerous Western European scholars have published much about Nasir el-Din al Tusi (about whom I already spoke briefly) and also about Ulugh Beg, the world’s greatest astronomer of his time (middle of the 15th c.), who was the grandson of Timur (Tamerlane) and, at the same time, the World History’s most erudite emperor of the last 2500 years. However, post-Renaissance Catholic sectarianism and Western European/North American racism prevented the German pope from being truthful at least once, and also from choosing the right paradigm.
IX. The lecture’s most controversial point
Fifth, if we now go straight to the lecture’s most controversial point and to the quotation’s most fascinating sentence, we will find the question addressed by Manuel II Palaeologus to his erudite Turkic interlocutor; actually, it is rather an exclamation:
– «Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached»!
This interesting excerpt provides indeed the complete confirmation of my earlier assessments as regards the intellectual decay of both, Christian Orthodoxy and Islam, at the time. Apparently, it was not theological acumen what both interlocutors were lacking at the time; it was historical knowledge. Furthermore, historical continuity, religious consciousness, and moral command were also absent in the discussion.
The first series of points that Manuel II Palaeologus’ Muslim interlocutor could have made answering the aforementioned statement would be that Prophet Muhammad, before his death, summoned Ali ibn Abu Taleb and asked him to promise that he would never diffuse the true faith by undertaking wars; furthermore, Islam was diffused peacefully in many lands outside Arabia (Hejaz), notably Yemen, Oman, Somalia, and the Eastern Coast of Africa. In addition, there were many Muslims, who rejected the absurd idea of the Islamic conquests launched by Umar ibn al-Khattab and actually did not participate.
We have also to take into consideration the fact that, in spite of the undeniable reality of the early spread of Islam through invasions, there has always been well-known and sufficient documentation to clearly prove that the Aramaeans of Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine, the Copts of Egypt, and the Berbers of Africa, although fully preserving their Christian faith, preferred to live under the rule of the Caliphates and overwhelmingly rejected the Eastern Roman imperial administration, because they had been long persecuted by the Constantinopolitan guards due to their Miaphysite (Monophysitic) and/or Nestorian faiths.
On another note, the Eastern Roman Emperor’s Muslim interlocutor could have questioned the overall approach of Manuel II Palaeologus to the topic. In other words, he could have expressed the following objection:
– «What is it good for someone to pretend that he is a follower of Jesus and evoke his mildness, while at the same time violently imposing by the sword the faith that Jesus preached? And what is it more evil and more inhuman than the imposition of a faith in Jesus’ name within the Roman Empire, after so much bloodshed and persecution took place and so many wars were undertaken»?
Last, one must admit that the sentence «Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new!» would have been easily answered by an earlier Muslim mystic of the Golden Era of Islam. Actually, this statement is islamically correct and pertinent. The apparent absence of a spectacular response from the part of Manuel II Palaeologus’ Muslim interlocutor rather generates doubts as regards the true nature of the text. This is so because he could have immediately replied to Bayezid I’s hostage that not one prophet or messenger was sent by God with the purpose of ‘bringing something new’; in fact, all the prophets from Noah to Jonah, from Abraham to Jonah, from Moses to Muhammad, and from Adam to Jesus were dispatched in order to deliver the same message to the humans, namely to return to the correct path and live according to the Will of God.
Related to this point is the following well-known verse of the Quran (ch. 3 – Al Imran, 67): “Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian but he was (an) upright (man), a Muslim, and he was not one of the polytheists”. It is therefore odd that a response in this regard is missing at this point.
It is also strange that, at a time of major divisions within Christianity and more particularly among the Christian Orthodox Eastern Romans, the ‘unknown’ imperial interlocutor did not mention the existing divisions among Christians as already stated very clearly, explicitly and repeatedly in the Quran. Examples:
“You are the best community ever raised for humanity—you encourage good, forbid evil, and believe in Allah. Had the People of the Book believed, it would have been better for them. Some of them are faithful, but most are rebellious”. (ch. 3 – Al Imran, 110)
“Yet they are not all alike: there are some among the People of the Book who are upright, who recite Allah’s revelations throughout the night, prostrating in prayer”.
(ch. 3 – Al Imran, 113):
To conclude I would add that elementary knowledge of Roman History, Late Antiquity, and Patristic Philology would be enough for Benedict XVI to know that
– in its effort to impose Christianity on the Roman Empire,
– in its determination to fully eradicate earlier religions, opposite religious sects like the Gnostics, and theological ‘heresies’ like Arianism,
– in its resolve to exterminate other Christian Churches such as the Nestorians and the Miaphysites (Monophysites),
– in its obsession to uproot Christian theological doctrines like Iconoclasm and Paulicianism, and
– in its witch hunt against Manichaeism, …
… the ‘official’ Roman and Constantinopolitan churches committed innumerable crimes and killed a far greater number of victims than those massacred by Muslim invaders on several occurrences during the early Islamic conquests.
So, when did the Christian Church encounter Reason and when did it cease to be ‘unreasonable’ according to the theologian Pope Ratzinger?
One must be very sarcastic to duly respond to those questions: most probably, the Roman Church discovered ‘Reason’ after having killed all of their opponents and the so-called ‘heretics’ whose sole sin was simply to consider and denounce the Roman Church as heretic!
If Benedict XVI forgot to find in the Quran the reason for the Turkic interlocutor’s mild attitude toward the hostage Manuel II Palaeologus, this is a serious oversight for the professor of theology; he should have mentioned the excerpts. In the surah al-Ankabut (‘the Spider’; ch. 29, verse 46), it is stated: “And do not argue with the followers of earlier revelation otherwise than in a most kindly manner”.
Similarly, the German pope failed to delve in Assyriology and in Egyptology to better understand that the Hebrew Bible (just like the New Testament and the Quran) did not bring anything ‘new’ either; before Moses in Egypt and before Abraham in Mesopotamia, there were monotheistic and aniconic trends and traits in the respective religions. The concept of the Messiah is attested in Egypt, in Assyria, and among the Hittites many centuries or rather more than a millennium before Isaiah contextualized it within the small Hebrew kingdom. Both Egypt and Babylon were holy lands long before Moses promised South Canaan to the Ancient Hebrew tribes, whereas the Assyrians were the historically first Chosen People of the Only God and the Assyrian imperial ideology reflected this fact in detail. The Akkadian – Assyrian-Babylonian kings were ’emperors of the universe’ and their rule reflected the ‘kingdom of Heaven’.
If Etana and Ninurta reveal aspects of Assyrian eschatology, Horus was clearly the Egyptian Messiah, who would ultimately vanquish Seth (Satan/Antichrist) at the End of Time in an unprecedented cosmic battle that would usher the mankind into a new era which would be the reconstitution of the originally ideal world and Well-Being (Wser), i.e. Osiris. There is no Cosmogony without Eschatology or Soteriology, and nothing was invented and envisioned by the Hebrews, the Greeks and the Romans that had not previously been better and more solemnly formulated among the Sumerians, the Akkadians – Assyrian-Babylonians, and the Egyptians. There is no such thing as ‘Greco-Roman’ or ‘Greco-Christian’ or’ Greco-Judaic’ civilization. Both, Islam and Christianity are the children of Mesopotamia and Egypt.
And this concludes the case of today’s Catholic theologians, i.e. the likes of Pope Benedict XVI or Theodore Khoury; they have to restart from scratch in order to duly assess the origins and the nature of Christianity before the serpent casts “forth out of his mouth water as a river after the woman, that he may cause her to be carried away by the river”. All the same, it was certainly Prof. Ratzinger’s full right to make as many mistakes as he wanted and to distort any textual reference he happened to mention.
X. The educational-academic-intellectual misery and the political ordeal of today’s Muslim states
Quite contrarily, it was not the right of those who accused him of doing so, because they expanded rather at the political and not at the academic level; this was very hypocritical and shameful. If these politicians, statesmen and diplomats dared speak at the academic level, they would reveal their own ignorance, obscurantism, obsolete educational system, miserable universities, nonexistent intellectual life, and last but not least, disreputable scientific institutions.
The reason for this is simple: not one Muslim country has properly organized departments and faculties endowed with experts capable of reading historical sources in the original texts and specializing in the History of the Eastern Roman Empire, Orthodox Christianity, Christological disputes and Patristic Literature. If a Muslim country had an educational, academic and intellectual establishment similar to that of Spain or Poland, there would surely be serious academic-level objection to Benedict XVI’s lecture. It would take a series of articles to reveal, refute and utterly denounce (not just the mistakes and the oversights but) the distorted approach which is not proper only to the defunct Pope Emeritus but to the entire Western academic establishment; these people would however be academics and intellectuals of a certain caliber. Unfortunately, such specialists do not exist in any Muslim country.
Then, the unrepresentative criminal crooks and gangsters, who rule all the countries of the Muslim world, reacted against Pope Benedict XVI at a very low, political level about a topic that was not political of nature and about which they knew absolutely nothing. In this manner, they humiliated all the Muslims, defamed Islam, ridiculed their own countries, and revealed that they rule failed states. Even worse, they made it very clear that they are the disreputable puppets of their colonial masters, who have systematically forced all the Muslim countries to exactly accept as theirs the fallacy that the Western Orientalists have produced and projected onto them (and in this case, the entirely fake representation of Islam that theologians like Ratzinger, Khoury and many others have fabricated).
If Ratzinger gave this lecture, this is also due to the fact that he knew that he would not face any academic or intellectual level opposition from the concerned countries. This is so because all the execrable puppets, who govern the Muslim world, were put in place by the representatives of the colonial powers. They do not defend their local interests but execute specific orders in order not to allow
– bold explorers, dynamic professors, and impulsive intellectuals to take the lead,
– proper secular education, unbiased scientific methodology, intellectual self-criticism, free judgment, and thinking out of the box to grow,
– faculties and research centers to be established as per the norms of educationally advanced states, and
– intellectual anti-colonial pioneers and anti-Western scholars to demolish the racist Greco-centric dogma that post-Renaissance European universities have intentionally diffused worldwide.
That is why for a Muslim today in Prof. Ratzinger’s lecture the real problem is not his approach or his mistake, but the impermissible bogus academic life and pseudo-educational system of all the Muslim countries. In fact, before fully transforming and duly enhancing their educational and academic systems, Muslim heads of states, prime ministers, ministers and ambassadors have no right to speak. They must first go back to their countries and abolish the darkness of their ridiculous universities; their so-called professors are not professors.
Here you have all the articles that I published at the time in favor of Benedict XVI; the first article was published on the 16th September 2006, only four days after the notorious lecture and only one day after the notorious BBC report, which called the Muslim ambassadors to shout loud:
megalommatiscomments 