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"A nation of slaves is always prepared to applaud the clemency of their master, who, in the abuse of power, does
not proceed to the last extremes of injustice."
Edward Gibbon, The history of the Decline and Fall of the the Roman Empire, II
On the term 'Pagan'
(1) The term "Paganism" is properly used by modern writers with hesitation. Professor Alexander Wilder, in his
edition of Payne Knight's Symbolical Language of Ancient Art and Mythology, says: "It ('Paganism') has degenerated into
slang, and is generally employed with more or less of an opprobrious meaning. The correcter expression would have been 'the
ancient ethnical worships,' but it would be hardly understood in its true sense, and we accordingly have adopted the term
in popular use, but not disrespectfully.
http://www.blavatsky.net/magazine/theosophy/ww/additional/christianity/TheFirstChristians.html
Its not fair to us, the victims of one of the great crimes of a long and terrible history, that these things should not
be remembered and understood.
The Gods have proclaimed Christ to have been most pious, but the Christians are a confused and vicious sect.
Porphyry_(philosopher)
As poets, some of us are but distantly aware of the awful hollowness inside of us, for we are recovering from an ancient
wound.
Fewer still can trace its original causes, because history, as the saying goes, is always written by the victor.
It was the romans, more than any other, and the institutions they spawned, that learnt above all others before that history
shapes a people.
As a tool in the hands of a master artisan, might make something beautiful in wood, that combines both the transcendent
qualities of the work and the intrinsic qualities of the material, or shape something artificial, dead or distorted, so we
have been shaped on the work bench of politicians into something ugly and lacking.
As we were shaped, so too were our perceptions.
In its natural state history is an organic thing. A genuine scholar of history attempts to build a three dimensional profile
from multiple sources.
Succesiive governments, and institutions began the war against the pagan mind by writing and preserving only one form
of history, by suppressing alternative beliefs and writing, they effectively gave the people of their empire a single framework
of belief.
This policy of suberversin was inherited and honed by the catholic church, adolf hitler and most other governments, but
no other succeeded as the roman catholic did,, in destroying reverence, history and understanding.. at the roots.
What little is preserved, we find in the annals of the church, preserved by intellectual monks of ireland, or buried underground.
We do not say it is unnatural for gods to die, but we say that the impious catholic church suffocated belief and faith.
It can afford to apologise now, much like the american administration can apologise to native americans.. when it has succeeded
in its task of creating a monoculture through genocide and intimidation.
As artists, pagans and as people dispossessed of the lands of the birth.
As the growers, the tree-planters of barren ground.
<DIV>"The paganism of the Classical Greek and Roman civilizations did not die. It was murdered."</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>"an upstart cult that borrowed what it needed from the pagans and then suppressed them with a totalitarian
fury."</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><A href="http://www.sdsmt.edu/student_orgs/tfs/reading/freethought/murder.html" >http://www.sdsmt.edu/student_orgs/tfs/reading/freethought/murder.html</A></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><EM>Porphyry's Against the Christians--The Literary Remains</EM> edited and translated by R. Joseph
Hoffman of Oxford University(180pp., Prometheus Books), is almost a synopsis in itself of pagans vs. Christians.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> <EM>Chronicle of the Last Pagans</EM>(Harvard University Press, 150pp.) by Pierre Chuvin</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>It began, in our living memory, with the hateful crimes of those inveterate politicians
who abused the trust of their own people and placed a yoke around the neck of its citizens, the weight of
which today, has become heavy enough that</DIV>
<DIV>their descendents are unable to remember their own cosmologies that lie above them engrained
into the very stuff of the heavens.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Pagans, who have, for two thousand years, become a repisitory and convienient scapegoat for the christian church,
despite being clothed in the rags of once deeply beautiful beliefs, are awakening again. After a long winter, as spring buds
crowning bare, barren ground, we are opening our eyes again to see a world reduced in proportion by a disease grown rampant.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>What are the qualities of the disease? Fear. Paranoia. Lust for power. Delusions of grandeur. An abrogated
understanding of human need. A relentless curiosity that has now become a rapacious desire to exploit. Without claiming in
any way that crime and criminals are particular to any way of living, let us look back on the foundations of that military
organization called the christian church as a whole, without being now caught up in its own internal factionalism.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Theodosius, who prohibited sacrifice. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Cynegius, Praetorian prefect of the east, Jovious and Gaudentius, who in special commision, shut down temples,
seized or destroyed the sacred navel of the pagan faiths.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> Martin, bishop of tours, who marched at the head of his monks to destroy the sacred art of our faith,
the consecrated trees.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> Marcellus of Syria who levelled the stately temples of Apamea. Who, with soldiers and bloodthirsty
gladiators, attacked the country temples and sacred places. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Christian outbursts led to the burning of pagan libraries (such as at Antioch in 371-372 C.E.) and the execution
of philosophers, such as Maxximus of Ephesus, and Simonides, burned alive. Chuvin suggests the murder of the philospher Hypatia
by St. Cyril's thugs in 415 C.E. owed as much to local politics as to her paganism; but her paganism increased her vulnerability.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><A href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Suetonius_Paulinus" title="Gaius Suetonius Paulinus"
><FONT color=#0000ff>Gaius Suetonius Paulinus</FONT></A>, the pillager of the sacred groves.</DIV>
<DIV><A class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legio_XIV_Gemina" title="Legio
XIV Gemina" ><FONT color=#0000ff>XIV <I>Gemina</I></FONT></A>, <A href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legio_XX_Valeria_Victrix"
title="Legio XX Valeria Victrix" ><FONT color=#0000ff>XX <I>Valeria Victrix</I></FONT></A>,</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Armies of fanatics, from every province of the roman world, with tacit approval of their masters, ruined the
structures of antiquity, stamped on the bowers of the framework of our minds.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>As in the example of the temple of Serapis, levelled by Theophilus, a man whose 'hands were stained alternately
with gold and blood.' Who raise an insulting church of the ruins of his crime. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>As refugees running from war and corruption, when they have exhausted themselves and their families, have
reached an island of peace, even momentarily in time, must take stock of their sorroundings and reach out for their
brothers and sisters, so it seems now the time is coming when those roman styled 'pagan' people must take up the reins of
their own beliefs.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>The church's venality and corruption, it's great decaying heart, is beating more faintly now, and it seems
the time to us that jesus should be gently carried from the soldiers of christ and brought back into the sacred fold of the
real religion, in which no one god may impose his own bloody handprint on another.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>It is only through polytheism that the our natural spirit shines, and further, as our roman masters realised,
only through monotheism that all people may be exploited with one uniform, one shackle that fits all spirits. So tied by the
leg we have clanked our way into the future, a game for governors, prime ministers and presidents.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>We do not argue for or support the categorization of our beliefs, or their institutionalization, the stupidity
of which should be evident from the legacy</DIV>
<DIV>of the catholic church. Rather, we ask that stock should be taken of the legacy,</DIV>
<DIV>we ask that, in these declining hours of our people, that the sacred cord between</DIV>
<DIV>ourselves and the earth should be tied once more, for this is a mother that we</DIV>
<DIV>will never leave in our lifetimes, and without whose umbilical promise we wither</DIV>
<DIV>and die like flowers on the edges of the growing desert.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>We are dying increasingly, and by degrees, for the culture of metal carries with it</DIV>
<DIV>only the lament of the knife, the howling of axes on shields. There is no place</DIV>
<DIV>for our imagination between one hard surface and another. Simple iron, tar and stone, with its unyielding
spirit offers no place for the purchase of our imaginations. There is only war. This is the legacy of the soldiers of christ.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>We do not argue for against violence, which is a part of life, nor condemn the unique spirit of iron. We argue
against a culture that takes on the life of that iron to exclusion of all else. We argue for the gods, even now concealed
in the mocking words of the church, like holocaust victims who have lain concealed in coal-cellars, we argue for their passage
back into the light, to be bathed in air and conciousness as is their right.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Amongst the gentle tributaries of the trees, the casual colours of flowers, the mind bends easier, is tractable,
passes between the earth and sky in gentle rays not unlike the radiance of a distant star.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>This terrible political surgery these men with their steaknives have performed on us, by seperating this part
of the spirit from the that, have left us deformed, much like the roman citizen, stripped of his power, his land and his reason
for existence. We cannot take pride in mass production, as we ourselves are produced en masse to consume this, and to excrete
money.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>They have continued to act in proxy for us, as we have diminished from being men and women, incapable of survival,
a domesticated species, self deluded slaves. They have taken our right to justice under the guide of acting responsibly for
all men, extorted taxes for their self-enriching wars.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>"These warlike and honourable men, after they, had thrown everything into confusion and disorder and had
thrust out hands, unstained indeed by blood but not pure from greed, boasted that they had overcome the gods, and reckoned
their sacrilege and impiety a thing to glory in." Eunapius.</DIV>
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