Other Natural Religions

[Husky]

That was on Plethon.

More extracts.



Can see - in broad and extremely PC strokes - how GR Hellenes (and even other traditionalists the empire was in contact with) were extincted by christianism over centuries: first the Hellenes lost political power and were hounded by increasingly anti-heathen christolaws. Then the remaining GR traditionalists were driven out because of this persecution or they had to hide their Hellenismos and even fake some christianism on the outside. Then the last remaining outposts of Hellenismos - both outside (on the edges) and hidden inside the empire (undercover) - were hunted, found out, and thereafter the discovered inconvertible traditionalists exterminated: genocide.



1. First:

When freedom of conscience disappeared under Justinian, pagans chose either a dangerous but exciting* clandestine existence that promised the manifestation of supernatural powers or else a withdrawal to hinterlands as far removed as possible from the eyes of imperial authority. Justinian's ruling of 529 that prohibited pagans from teaching shuttered the last window that enabled us to see them clearly. From then on their existence can be glimpsed only during periods of forced conversion. The single exception is a Platonic school, at Harran in Upper Mesopotamia, which survived after the Arab conquest until the arrival of the Seljuk Turks in the eleventh century, as has recently been shown by Michel Tardieu. Islam, by redrawing the political map and permanently destroying the system of the polis, which was replaced by another form of urban civilization, erased nearly all vestiges of the paganism of classical Antiquity. **

[color="#800080"](* "Exciting?" It was not of their choosing to go into hiding, I'm sure.

** So in the empire's former lands which were eventually occupied by islam, whatever remained of Hellenismos after christianism was through with it got done in by islam.)[/color]



The history that follows is therefore a kind of parallel history which cannot possibly convey in all their amplitude the great political events and theological disputes of this tumultuous period. Some of these events are mentioned incidentally, without relation to their true significance (such as the draining struggle with the Persians, because it makes all the more regrettable the destruction of a temple-citadel on the frontier), others not at all. 8 During this period pagans were not the only ones persecuted for their faith, nor was theirs the most brutal persecution; Gnostics, Manichaeans, Jews, and of course Christian heretics came in for their share as well. But only the pagans had always been intimately associated with the power and culture that dominated the Greco-Roman world. Their decline, beyond the human dramas that it engendered, was a political, intellectual, and religious revolution.

[color="#800080"]("Revolution?" Oh what a quaint word to couch Total Genocide of an entire civilisation in. Hellenismos was a religio-cultural civilisation: the GrecoRomans attributed the well-spring of it all to (the benediction of) their Gods.)[/color]



To help understand this revolution, we have at our disposal documents whose abundance and variety are unique in all of Antiquity: accounts by historians or participants in the events seen from various sides; official acts, legal texts, inscriptions, correspondence, autobiographies, and biographies. To this can be added, on the one hand, the anti pagan polemics of Christian apologists and, on the other, the pagans' own expression of their beliefs, such as hymns to the gods by the philosopher Proclus, or Orphic fragments and, though little seen from that angle, the Dionysiaca by the poet Nonnus of Panopolis, and the Argonautica in which an anonymous writer makes Orpheus the narrator. There is even a request for divorce from Horapollo, a famous pagan of the fifth century!

[...]

2. The following I found to be an interesting section for several reasons, including for how eventually a few Hellenes of the christianised empire apparently sought out Persia (GR's traditional enemy) and why:

Athens was a small town where teaching had always been a distinguished career and a source of pride. It was unlike Alexandria or Beirut, having neither their power of Christian religious authority nor their host of believers. The Academy, outstanding under Proclus or Isidorus, declined under Hegias, but regained its prestige under Damascius, who was the director when Justinian closed it in 529. At the time it was abolished, it was neither in decline nor in crisis.



[...]



The Academy's endowment was confiscated by the emperor toward the end of 531 or the beginning of 532.16 The philosophers of Athens then sought refuge in Mesopotamia among the Persians. This is surely one of the most fabulous episodes of the period: the worshipers of the Sun marching East, taking with them the treasures of Hellenic wisdom. According to Agathias, they were [b]seven, like the planets they worshiped and the sages of ancient Greece. (IIRC elsewhere, the book mentioned an image of Socrates teaching the Seven Sages [of Greece]...) These facile symbols would not, by themselves, make the episode any less historical.[/b] Chosroes, the young sovereign on the throne of the Sassanid empire, invited them to his court; he wanted scholars around him. When he failed to hold the philosophers, he succeeded in retaining an Aristotelian doctor, Uranius, about whom the historian Agathias, born in 532, paints the unflattering portrait of a charlatan, a great speechmaker when drunk, carrying on discussions with the Zoroastrian priests of Persia, the magi, about the eternity of the world.17 The mediocrity of Uranius highlights the talent of those who preceded him--the flower of contemporary Greek philosophy.



What could they have been seeking in the court of Chosroes? They might have been prompted by intellectual curiosity, by the desire to find an alternative to Christianity. We may suppose that this impulse was analogous to the one that led the last pagans to foreign gods. However, although Zoroastrianism does not exclude polytheism**, Chosroes was not really a pagan. According to Agathias, the philosophers imagined the Persians as honest and sincere, in short, virtuous. This idealized and rather naive image apparently was inspired by the works of Herodotus and Xenophon, written a thousand years earlier. They would have sung a different tune very quickly, when confronted by a harsher, more hierarchical, and less hellenized society than the one they expected to find. And they would have shrunk from the task of teaching their beloved doctrines to Persian courtiers, little inclined to asceticism, through the raucous sounds and inevitable inexactitude of Pahlavi interpreters.

(** Do they rather mean any other traditional Iranian religions still extant in Persia at that time? (Mithraism and Zoroastrianism might not have been the only ones to exist in Persia then.) Because Zoroastrianism seems to repeatedly refer to the religion having one God - going by translations of various bits from Gathas - and that the worship of the other Iranian Gods were abolished due to Zarathushtra's teachings?)



Greeks were shocked by Zoroastrian religious customs, such as leaving the dead in special places for dogs and vultures to pick the bones clean, so as to prevent the earth from coming into contact with corpses. Agathias quotes an epigram, placed in the mouth of a Zoroastrian ghost whose corpse the philosophers tried to bury: "Do not bury one who should not be buried, leave him as prey for dogs; the Earth, universal mother, does not receive a man who soils his mother."

These lines underscore the Zoroastrians' obsession with preventing the earth from being sullied, and on the endogamous tendencies of Persian society that even sanctioned the marriage of mother and son-what could be more Oedipal! The epigram, which seems to have been written ("revealed in a dream") by a member of the expedition on their return trip, undoubtedly expresses their overall disenchantment. But it lacks originality, and any idiosyncratic particular: the classical tradition had long been scandalized by the matrimonial customs of the Persians.18 The general imprecision and purely rhetorical character of the expedition's account in Agathias has led Michel Tardieu to deny all historicity to the story, which would have been forged to strengthen the claims of Simplicius and his followers to live in Carrhae. According to Agathias' narrative, Chosroes' guests left after spending a few months at his court, but without having quarreled. The fiction lent credence to the pretense that the peace concluded in 532 between the Persian king and Justinian guaranteed the safety of their persons and their eventual return home to live "as they chose."19 Damascius apparently retired to his native province of Syria (he was from Damascus). In Emesa [Homs, 105 miles north of Damascus] an epitaph for a female slave has been found dated 538; it is also recorded in The Palatine Anthology where it is attributed to Damascius:



I, Zosimus, who until now was a slave only in body,

Now have I obtained freedom for my body as well.20



Damascius' disciples, especially Simplicius, did not return to Athens, although they continued to write. Tardieu has shown that Simplicius settled in Carrhae (Harran), within Roman territory but beyond the Euphrates, near the Persian border, and there established a Neoplatonist school. It remained active for nearly five centuries in a milieu that was and continued to be hospitable. As a matter of fact, although Carrhae--Abraham's stopover on his way to Canaan, and the land of Laban where Jacob met Rachel near the famous well--attracted Christian pilgrims and monks, the population had remained pagan. In the spring of 384, Lady Egeria, who had come from Galicia, made a long detour on her way to Jerusalem in order to stop in Harran. She chanced to arrive during the feast day of a local saint, Helpidius, and was able to meet with the monks of Mesopotamia, "but when night fell they returned to the desert, each to his own hermitage. In the city, outside of a small number of priests and the holy monks who lived there, I did not find a single Christian, but there were pagans everywhere."21



After the campaign of 540, during which Chosroes invaded Syria, sacking, depopulating, and partially destroying Antioch, the conqueror exempted Carrhae from paying a tribute because "a majority" of its population was faithful "to the ancient religion."22 Manichaeans had also taken refuge there. During the truces between Romans and Sassanians, if a clause granted some freedom of conscience, it was not to benefit a handful of vagrant philosophers. It was to guarantee border inhabitants that they would not suffer too much at the hands of their temporary master.



In the ninth century Tabit ben Qurra, the Harranian founder of the School of Baghdad, declared that his birthplace had "never been sullied by the error of Nazareth."23 Shortly before 946, the Arab traveler al Masudi, when visiting Harran, saw "on the door knocker of the meeting place of the Sabians, an inscription in Syriac characters, taken from Plato. It was explained to me by Malik ben Uqbun and other people of the same sect: 'He who knows his nature becomes god.'"



Tardieu recognized this as a quotation from the First Alcibiades (133 c), which Platonists considered the very gateway to their master's doctrine.24 The fundamental affirmation at the core of the teaching of these "Sabians"--there is "a cause in the world that has never ceased: a monad, not a multiple, which is affected by none of the attributes whatever of the things caused"--reflects the theories of Proclus and extends the metaphysics of the Parmenides on the subject of the One and the many, the holy of holies of late Platonism.25 Throughout the centuries the Aramaicized heirs of Plato, Plotinus, Porphyry, and Proclus kept their rituals, prayers, fasts, sacrifices (especially of cocks, the solar animal, an offering made by Socrates as his final sacrifice), and, within the school, use of the old Attic calendar which was both solar and lunar.26 They claimed the name of pagans, but their meeting place was separate from the pagan temples of the city, only one of which was still functioning in the tenth century. It was through the intermediary of the school of Harran that Greek philosophy reached Baghdad, whence it returned to the West, translated into Arabic, via Muslim Andalusia. As for the school of Harran, it disappeared in the eleventh century during the unrest caused by the arrival of the Seljuk Turks in Iraq.27

Justinian's closure of the school at Athens [...]

3. It's good to at this point revisit the following to refresh the memory a little, even if one has already seen it. Especially the 2nd half of the page (marked mid 5th century CE onwards):



http://www.ysee.gr/index-eng.php?type=en...ovestories

Christian Persecutions against the Hellenes





4. And then, in that context, comes the following slightly more fleshed-out detail of some of the events mentioned in the timeline above:

The Last Refuges of Paganism

On occasion, an archaeological find discloses a halt in the general retreat of paganism. In 515 at Zoara, an Arabian locality just south of the Dead Sea, Theandrites, a god venerated by Proclus and Isidorus, was replaced by Saint George. Stones bearing ex-votos to the fallen god were used again in

the new masonry, and an inscription dated March 22, 515, lyrically evokes the transformation of the temple into a church: "God has his dwelling where there was once a hostel of demons; redeeming light now shines where once darkness spread its veil; where once sacrifices were made to idols, angels now dance."30



Occasionally we also see a kind of coexistence between the two cults, as when Christians were in a small minority or when the pagan god was protected by the worship of powerful neighbors outside imperial authority. We have the example of the bishop of Harran, who must have felt somewhat lonely in his city. In Baalbek a church had been standing in the courtyard of the colossal temple of Jupiter Heliopolitan ever since the reign of Theodosius I, at the end of the fourth century. Nonetheless, "no one had been able to discredit" the ancient Baal of the Bekaa Valley by 555, the year lightning severely damaged the pagan ruins. "This temple, above all because of its splendor, kept the pagans in their error," Bishop John of Ephesus acknowledged at the time.31

(I.e. only when christians are a minority - or there are powerful heathen neighbours holding an important stake in local Temples - is there any co-existence. Readers can work out why such situations saw 'co-existence' and who was driving it: the majority traditionalists or the minority christians.)



On the island of Philae in Egypt the presence of Christian churches did not prevent the temple of Isis from remaining in use. Between 449 and 468, the wall that protected the island was restored by the military governor of the Theban border with the bishop's help in collecting and distributing funds. As Etienne Bernand, the last editor of the inscription that disclosed this construction, remarked, "Bishop Daniel was concerned with fortifying the island, not with exorcising the temple of Isis." Also found were a number of dedications dating from the same years, made by a priestly family that served the temple, perhaps on behalf of the fearsome Blemyes. Under a peace treaty concluded with the Romans in 451-452 , this tribe came every year from the Sudan to fetch the statue of Isis. They carried it to their territory where she made prophecies for them, and then returned it to her temple, until the following year. In 537 Narses, duke of the Thebaid, a Persian-Armenian general won over to Rome, permanently closed the temple. The statues (Isis, Osiris, and "Priapus," which is probably Min) were sent to Byzantium and the priests were jailed.32

("Under a peace treaty concluded with the Romans in 451-452 , this tribe came every year from the Sudan to fetch the statue of Isis." <- Assuredly a reference to the 'powerful [heathen] neighbours'?)



Augila (Awjidah) in Cyrenaica, far to the west of Siwa, seems to have maintained a sanctuary to "Ammon and Alexander the Great" under Justinian, who prided himself on suppressing the cult, building a church in its stead and installing a bishop in that remote oasis. We may well wonder today what gods those Saharan Berbers worshiped, 400 kilometers south of Cyrene, a four days' march from Boreion, a small Jewish settlement on the shore of the Syrte, that the evangelical emperor also Christianized during the same campaign. Did Alexander the Great really inspire their adoration? Justinian's act established him as a [color="#FF0000"]missionary[/color] whose successes went all the way to the ends of the inhabited earth, the oikoumene; his prestige only stood to gain from his encounter with the shade of the great conqueror.33

(Wherever the heathens are, they are to be found and converted-or-killed for jeebusjehovallah. Wherever. "To the ends of the inhabited earth". AKA Evangelism - forcing the 'good news' of the arch-terrorist non-existent jeebus on everyone.)





John the Inquisitor

On the basis of this evidence, we might get the impression that under Justinian paganism was finally eradicated. It does not seem to have survived even in the desert outposts to which it was ultimately relegated. It was pushed to the edge of the Empire and the fringe of society with the Platonists of Harran. And yet, the episodes that are vividly related in enormous detail by John of Ephesus, a monk then bishop, bring us back to the heart of the Empire and within close range of the emperor. In 542 John of Ephesus became [color="#FF0000"]the charge d'affaires for pagans[/color], super paganos, in Asia (meaning the western part of Asia Minor): Caria, Phrygia, and Lydia. Shortly thereafter, in 545-546, he [color="#FF0000"]evangelized[/color] the mountainous area around Tralles in Asia Minor, in the lower valley of the Meander, in the region of Ephesus, near the Aegean coast. Tralles was at that time a flourishing city, according to Agathias. Christodorus of Coptus wrote a poem about its traditions, and it was the birthplace of Anthemius, one of the architects of Hagia Sophia. 34



John [color="#FF0000"]cleansed[/color] the countryside around a large city, a region where the mountains stand in striking contrast to the flatness of the surrounding landscape. The mountains and plain are completely different-in topography, resources, climate, and even population. An ethnographic study made by Altan Gokalp in the region of Aydm (the Turkish name for Tralles) has shown how, in a predominantly Sunni population, these mountains have provided a refuge for a solitary group of Shiite "Red Hats" resettled in hilltop villages where approaching strangers can be seen from a great distance.35



The inquisitor himself described his campaign. He built twenty-four churches and four monasteries and destroyed "a house of idols" where the pagans held annual celebrations with their priests. John became bishop of Ephesus in 558 and in 562 unleashed new persecutions.36 Even though his fidelity to Monophysitism had previously forced him into secrecy and imprisonment, he had the support not only of the empress Theodora (who died in 548), herself a cobeliever, but

also of Justinian, who paid for the expenses and robes of the baptisms John administered and contributed one-third of gold coin (aureus) given-to each of the new Christians. They then helped to destroy the temples, overturn the idols, break the altars, and "cut down the many trees they used to worship."



The great persecution, for us the final episode (there must have been numerous lesser ones that did not find their John of Ephesus to chronicle them), took place during the second year of the reign of Justinian's successor, Tiberius (from 580 on). Tiberius, having sent a general to repress an uprising of Jews and Samaritans, ordered him to take care of the pagans in Heliopolis (Baalbek) along the way. The Bekaa Valley was subjected to a reign of terror: "He arrested many of them. . . humiliated them, crucified them, and killed them." Under torture, his victims denounced their coreligionists, who were "in most of the cities of the East and particularly in Antioch."



They included Anatolius, the governor of the province, who was planning to take part in a secret ceremony to honor Zeus at the home of a pagan priest in Edessa. When the police surrounded the house, the priest committed suicide with a razor. The faithful, seeing the police arrive, stayed away, but their names were revealed by the priests' servants, an old invalid and his aged wife, who were arrested beside their master's body and cult objects. Anatolius, hoping to establish an alibi, rode off in travel clothes to the bishop's house in the middle of the night, pretending that he wanted to discuss a question of Scripture with him. He was arrested as he left the bishopric.



The case was immediately heard by the judges of Antioch. Denunciations followed in torrents. The patriarch of Antioch and a monk who had since become the bishop of Alexandria were implicated in a case of human sacrifice in Daphne.** Following this, the informer, who was Anatolius' secretary, was found dead in his prison cell, presumably killed to prevent him from revealing any more information. "For the honor of Christianity" the authorities decided to stop harassing the bishops. On the other side, during a house search, Anatolius fell victim to what seemed to be a divine judgment: an icon of Christ that he had hung in his house to testify to his faith turned its face toward the wall three times. After careful examination, it was discovered that the icon concealed an image of Apollo in such a way as to prevent detection. That was the end of Anatolius, who was taken to Constantinople with the other defendants. The trial took place behind closed doors.

(** More christofiction: like the christolibel against the Jews or like how in the later Inquisition christian heretics would be framed with false charges and made to either sign a confession-and-die-by-suffocation or else Burn, these Hellenists were framed on absurd charges of 'human sacrifice'. The only human sacrifice - and it is provable - is that of christians murdering out all these Hellenes.)



But those closed doors aroused suspicion among the people. Were the judges corruptible? Would they be tolerant toward paganism? The city had been in an uproar ever since the events in Antioch. This time riots took place all along the city's central artery (the Mese, presently Divan yoiu), with their concomitant looting and fires. The rioters threatened the bishop and invaded the courtroom. Their furor was at its peak when they broke open the cabinet containing the bail warrants: it was filled with gold. Two unfortunate defendants, a man and a woman, who probably had been the only ones not to pay bail, were caught, dragged to the port, and put aboard a boat. The mob told the executioner to burn them alive. When he refused, the rioters threw him on the boat with the two suspected pagans and set fire to it. The executioner managed to save himself; the other two perished by fire and by water.

(Note the christian mob of christian laity. They were acting for christianism, for jeebus.

The usual apologetics about the many many many persecutions of Hellenes is that "christians were actually innocent", that it was only "(some) christian emperors" who were bad, who "made" the innocent everyday christians commit massacres and brutal murders of heathens like of Hypatia etc. <- You know, the familiar (christo)Nazi Excuse: 'just acting on orders'.

But in this instance, you can clearly see - in case you didn't in other cases - that the christian mob were not "made to do it by the christian rulers": they wanted to dispense *jeebus*' own biblically-ordained justice when they felt cheated by the christians in charge - felt cheated for not being given the public lynching of these last remaining 'polytheistic idolators'.

They were made to do it by that jesus christ, who never existed.)



The mob then continued on to the prisons. "The pagans were let go, why should Christians be held?" So the prisons were emptied of some good Christians, albeit felons. The prefect of the Praetorium managed to save his palace from being looted by convincing the rioters that he was on their side. He was obliged to accompany them to the emperor, leaving behind his insignia of office. At the imperial palace words were exchanged "that could not be put in writing." Tiberius placated the rioters by promising to give them what they wanted. He quickly organized games, meanwhile preparing to have troops massacre his subjects in case the uprising started again, which it did not. The inquest was resumed under the direction of a more zealous prefect. Since culprits were needed for the previous uprisings, a few well-placed tortures revealed that the true criminals were-rather surprisingly for us, if not to a Byzantine mind-the Jews, the Samaritans, and the Montanists. They crucified some, whipped others, and still others were sent into a variety of exiles. As for those Christians whose part was investigated, their punishment was a charade: lash marks were simulated on their backs with leeches and red paint, and they were paraded around the city on muleback. Then "the Christians were pardoned. But the Jews who were found were arrested and brought to trial."



After such preliminaries the sentences of those accused during the great trial could be nothing but severe. Anatolius was not only condemned to death, he was tortured, clawed by wild animals, and finally crucified. The cadavers of the condemned were "treated like donkey carcasses," dragged through the streets and thrown outside the walls on public trash heaps. The inquisitions continued after the death of Tiberius (582), under his successor, Maurice, the victims thrown to wild beasts and then burned. Unhappy they who observed a few rituals from the ancient religion after they were baptized! All of this seems to herald the torments inflicted, much later and with greater perseverance, on the Marranos of Catholic Spain. "And that is why every day more are denounced and they receive the just desserts of their actions, in this world and in the next," John of Ephesus complacently concludes.37 His extraordinary account was written while the witch hunt was still going on.

(Note how John of Ephesus is like various later inquisitors and christian saints rolled into one, such as the 13th century santa Thomas Aquinas famous for his "Unbelievers deserve not only to be separated from the Church, but also... to be exterminated from the World by death." )

Post 69 continues a bit further on from where the above left off.





5. And one more time: look over the following (esp. the 2nd half of the page again) to put the above in perspective:

http://www.ysee.gr/index-eng.php?type=en...ovestories

Christian Persecutions against the Hellenes





So christianism behaved like this in the 4th, 5th, 6th to 10th centuries (post 69) towards Hellenismos. Thereafter the disease destroyed all of Europe. Down to the 17th century (was it?) christians were still seen beheading Irish traditionalists. The Inquisition of inconvertibles was going on elsewhere even after that. And to this day faithful christians are christoterrorising traditional (which esp. includes Uncontacted and hence in christoterms: 'Unreached/UnEvangelised') South American communities by exterminating them, forcibly kidnapping their children under false and propagandistic charges of infanticide, putting the inconvertibles in concentration camps (like the christos did to the Hellenes of yore). You know, what's known as evangelism: spreading the good news of non-existent jeebus' "love". And the faithful christians are likewise still terrorising Hindus too: murdering swamis, Hindu heroes and Hindu laity, destroying temples both openly and through the christist government's 'secular' laws, landgrabbing, taking over entire regions of Indian states, cryptochristianism, implementing laws favourable both to them and to their partners in the calculated genocide (islamism), and implementing laws that discourage Hindu Dharma as much as christianism can at the present stage.





It's not "Some Christians" or "The Church" or "White Christians/The White Church" <img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/blink.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':blink:' /> or "Missionaries/Evangelicals/NGOs" or whatever excuses secular/dhimmi apologetics keeps coming up with.

It's christianism=The Jeebus Lie.