Neo-Paganism and the Birth of Fascism

Although European paganism was suppressed by Christianity, it did not die out. It survived under the guise of various teachings, movements, and secret societies, such as the Freemasons, and re-emerged in a definite form in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. A number of European thinkers, influenced by the works of ancient Greek philosophers, such as Plato or Aristotle, began to revive concepts from the pagan world.

This neo-pagan current became increasingly influential, and in the 19th century, surpassed Christianity and imposed itself on Europe. It will be useful to examine the main outline of this lengthy process here, without necessarily going into details.

The vanguard of neo-pagan movement were those thinkers known as "humanists." Influenced by ancient Greek sources, they tried to spread the pagan philosophies of such philosophers as Plato and Aristotle. The belief they professed in the name "humanism" was a perverted philosophy that ignored the existence of God and man's responsibilities to Him, but instead considered man a great, superior, and independent being. The influences of humanism took on further aspects with the philosophy of the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries. Enlightenment philosophers were influenced by and fiercely defended materialism, an idea which developed in ancient Greece. (Materialism is a dogmatic philosophy put forward by such Greek thinkers as Leucippus and Democritus, positing that only matter exists).

The rebirth of paganism is clearly evident in the French Revolution, widely accepted as the political end-product of Enlightenment philosophy. The Jacobins, who led the bloody "terrorist" period of the French Revolution, were influenced by paganism, and nurtured a great hatred for Christianity. As a result of intensive Jacobin propaganda during the fiercest days of the revolution, the "rejection of Christianity" movement became widespread. In addition, a new "religion of reason" was established, which was based on pagan symbols rather than Christianity. Its first signs were seen in the "revolutionary worship," on the Festival of Federation on July 14, 1790, which were then widely disseminated. Robespierre, the ruthless leader of the Jacobins, brought about new rules for "revolutionary worship," setting out their principles in a report under the name "Cult of the Supreme Being." The most significant outcome of these developments was the conversion of the famous Notre Dame Cathedral into a "temple of reason." The Christian icons on its walls were torn down, and a female statue known as the "goddess of reason" was erected in the center of it, in other words, a pagan idol.

These pagan tendencies were portrayed among the revolutionaries by a number of symbols. The liberty cap worn by the revolutionary guards of the French Revolution, and which often became a symbol of the revolution, descended from the pagan world and the worship of Mithras.5

The rebirth of paganism, and the beginning of its intellectual dominance over Europe, also led the way to a rebirth of fascism, itself a system rooted in the pagan world. In fact, Nazi Germany, with its system reminiscent of that practiced in Sparta, was based on paganism. Towards this development, a number of fundamental cultural changes were necessary between the French Revolution, at the end of the 18th century, and Nazi Germany, at the beginning of the 20th. These important changes were brought about by a number of thinkers during the 19th century. The most important of these was Charles Darwin.

Darwinism and the Revival of the Pagan Superstition of "Evolution"

One of the superstitions to survive from paganism, but which only began to be revived in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, was the "theory of evolution," a theory which maintained that all living things came into existence as the result of pure chance, and then developed from one to another.

Unaware of the existence of God, and worshipping false idols which they themselves devised, pagans answered the question of how life came about with the concept of "evolution." This notion is first seen in inscriptions from ancient Sumeria, but was given shape in ancient Greece. Pagan philosophers such as Thales, Anaximander and Empedocles, claimed that living things, in other words human beings, animals and plants, formed themselves from such inanimate substances as air, fire and water. According to their theories, the first living things suddenly emerged in water and then adapted to the land. Thales had spent time in Egypt, where the superstition that "living things formed themselves out of mud" was widespread. The Egyptians believed that in this way the frogs which appeared when the waters of the Nile receded were formed.

Thales adopted the superstition and attempted to present a number of arguments on its behalf, proposing that all living things came into existence by and of themselves. These claims of his were based solely in theory, not on experiment and observation. Other ancient Greek philosophers employed the same method.

Anaximander, a student of Thales, developed the theory of evolution, giving rise to to two important modes of Western thought. The first of these was that the universe had always existed and will continue to exist into eternity. The second was the idea that living things evolved from each other, an idea which had slowly begun to take shape in Thales' time. The first written work to discuss the theory of evolution was the classical poem On Nature, in which Anaximander wrote that creatures arose from slime that had been evaporated by the sun. He thought that the first animals lived in the sea and had prickly, scaly coverings. As these fish-like creatures evolved, they moved onto land, shed their scaly coverings, and became humans.6 Books on philosophy describe how Anaximander shaped the foundation of the theory of evolution:

We find that Anaximander of Miletus (611 B.C.-546 B.C.) advanced the traditional evolutionary idea, already quite common in his day, that life first evolved from a type of pre-biotic soup, helped along a bit by the rays of the sun. He believed that the first animals developed from sea slime which had been evaporated by the sun rays. He also believed that men were descended from fish.7

In short, one of the two fundamental components of Darwinism, the claim that living things evolved from each other as a result of coincidences, was the product of pagan philosophy. The second important element of Darwin's theory, "the struggle for survival," was also a pagan belief. It was the Greek philosophers who first suggested there was a war for survival between living things in nature. The notion of evolution, which the pagan philosophers had construed, not by experiment and observation, but by abstract reasoning, began to be reiterated in 18th century Europe. In pagan thought, the concept of evolution was called "the Great Chain of Being," an idea that influenced such early defenders of evolutionary theory as the French scientists Benoit de Maillet, Pierre de Maupertuis, Comte de Buffon and Jean Baptiste Lamarck. In his Histoire Naturelle, Buffon reveals himself as "an exponent of the doctrine of the Great Chain of Being, with man being placed at the tope of the Chain."8 Buffon's evolutionist views were passed on to Lamarck, and eventually inherited by Charles Darwin. Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was an evolutionist who adhered to pagan beliefs. Erasmus Darwin was one of the masters at the famous Canongate Kilwining Masonic lodge in Edinburgh, Scotland. He also had close connections to the Jacobins in France, and the Masonic organization of the Illuminati, whose founding principle was the hatred of religion. From the research he carried out in his eight-hectare botanical garden, he developed the ideas that would later go on to shape Darwinism, collected together in his books The Temple of Nature and Zoonomia. The concept of "the temple of nature" that Erasmus employed was a testament to the pagan beliefs he adopted, a repetition of the old pagan belief that nature possesses a creative force.

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