Do the Ghost Dance

Putting back soul into our blood

In the concluding paragraph of my previous post on Disraeli, I commented on “the amazing transgenerational tenacity of the Jewish people,” and I called it “truly admirable, although devastating for Western civilization, rendered clueless and emptied of its own sense of blood by two thousand years of Christianity.” I owe my readers an explanation (drawn partly from chapter 3 of my book The Pope’s Curse). And that gives me the opportunity to explain the title of my Substack too.

“Radbod’s Lament” is a reference to the story of King Radbod or Redbad (c. 680-719), the last independent ruler of Frisia before Frankish domination, as told in the Life of the Frankish missionary Wulfram. Radbod had been persuaded to accept baptism and had put one foot in the baptismal font, when he had second thoughts and asked Wulfram: “Will I join my ancestors in the hereafter?” Wulfram bluntly told him that it was out of the question, since his ancestors, being not baptized, were all in Hell, while Radbod would join the blessed in Heaven. Radbod then retracted his foot and declared that he would rather dwell with his ancestors in Hell than in Heaven with sad-faced clerics. Radbod died a pagan and therefore joined his ancestors. But soon after his death, the Frisians were beaten and baptized, and no more was heard of their national independence.

This story illustrates the culture shock that Christianity represented for our pre-Christian ancestors (“pagan” is a derogatory term that should be avoided). For Radbod, what matters is not where, but with whom you’ll be after death. The dead are social beings like the living; they want to be with their loved ones, and that means primarily their relatives. There is soul in the blood.

Christianity is hostile to this idea. Salvation is strictly individual, and clan solidarity is irrelevant. No nepotism in Heaven. Imagine you are relaxing in Heaven and your brother, your father or your son is being tortured in Hell, forever. Not only you can do nothing for him, but you don’t even want to. Instead, you will rejoice watching him suffer, according to Thomas Aquinas:

Wherefore in order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that they may render more copious thanks to God for it, they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned. (Summa Theologica, Question 94, Article 2)

This outrageous statement, in a book that earned its author sainthood, provoked Nietzsche’s disgust.[1] Did the “angelic doctor” write this in a moment of demonic possession? No, he followed where the logic of Augustinian soteriology led him. Salvation is for the saved, the others be damned, and that’s God’s way, so Alleluia! If God predestined your brother for eternal hell, just enjoy the show. To their credit, the Greek Fathers never fell into such perversity. Neither did Orthodox Christianity fully endorse Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, which amounts to saying that human beings inherit from their ancestors no spiritual element except Adam’s deadly sin, for which baptism is the antidote. The magic blood of Jesus the Galilean will cleanse your own indigenous serpent-infected blood.

There is a mystery here, if we think of Christianity as an offshoot of Judaism. How did a people whose every member, according to Martin Buber, makes blood “the deepest, most potent stratum of his being,” perceives “what confluence of blood has produced him,” and “senses in this immortality of the generations a community of blood,”[2] come up with a salvation cult for the Gentiles that declares blood ties a curse? This lends credence to the suspicion that Christianity was created in a Jewish laboratory as a virus targeted to destroy the social fabric of the Romans. The biggest mystery of all is why the Romans swallowed it. Didn’t the Book of Revelation warn them that the plague will wipe out the Babylonians, meaning the Romans (18:2-8), while Jerusalem, which they destroyed, will pop down again from heaven (21:10)?

Before they became Christians, the Romans were a gens-centered society (gens being roughly synonymous with “clan”, a Scottish word). And no matter what children are taught at school, the most important religious duty for the Romans was not toward the gods, but towards the dead. The “veneration of the dead” (the term preferred today to “cult of the dead”) was the root of all Indo-European cultures, as French historian Numa Fustel de Coulanges explained in The Ancient City: A Study of the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome, published in 1864: “Before men had any notion of Indra or of Zeus, they adored the dead.”

Generation established a mysterious bond between the newborn infant and all the gods of the family. Indeed, these gods were his family — they were of his blood. The child, therefore, received at his birth the right to adore them, and to offer them sacrifices; and later, when death has deified him, he would be counted, in his turn, among these gods of the family.

The dead needed the living, and vice versa. Caring for your ancestors and preparing your own afterlife were the same thing, because you wanted to be joyfully welcomed by them upon leaving this earth. This was symbolized in Roman funeral processions, when the image of the newly deceased was carried toward the family mausoleum, to be met halfway by the images of the dead parents.

Ethnologists have come to regard ancestor veneration as the very root of religion. Weston La Barre made it the subject of his book The Ghost Dance, taking as archetype the trance-inducing dance of the Lakota Sioux calling out to their ancestors for help.[3] Do we not, still, make God the Father look like an ancestor figure, with his long white beard? Some historians speculate that culture itself, and not just religion, evolved from funerary rites: the first stone constructions were made for the dead.[4]

For Christianity, your fate in the other world is independent of the fate of your ancestors. And it is every man for himself. Christian death cancels kinship. Jesus’s own emphasis on personal salvation actually comes with a strong hostility to blood ties. Forget about performing the most elementary duty to your dead father, he said to a would-be follower: “let the dead bury the dead” (Luke 9:60). Love your neighbor, but hate your parents: “Anyone who comes to me without hating father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, yes and his own life too, cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). That’s what the saints in our catechism did. One of the most popular medieval legend was the Life of Saint Anthony, the father of monasticism. He gave away all his family’s wealth and responsibilities, committed his sister to a convent, then went into the desert and lived alone for the rest of his life. Quite an egocentric way of life, if you think of it.

Salvation religions are individualistic by nature, but Christianity is the most individualistic of all. Buddhism, at least, teaches the impermanence of the self, while Christianity teaches the eternity of the self. And since Christianity was exclusive and compulsory, the only alternative was between eternity in Heaven or eternity in Hell. Christianity is an extreme form of metaphysical individualism that has left a deep mark on Western mentalities. That point was made by Louis Dumont, a specialist of India, in his essay “The Christian Genesis of Modern Individua­lism.” Indian society is holistic; it admits that some individuals, the sadhus, forsake their social existence to seek enlightenment, only as long as these individuals do not challenge the social order and its holistic dynamic, but remain the exceptions that confirm the rule. Christianity, according to Dumont, has upset that balance by declaring that individual salvation from this world is every Christian’s calling[5]. Christianity is responsible for the creation of that WEIRD (“White, European, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic”) man that anthropologist Joseph Henrich has contrasted to the rest of the world:

Unlike much of the world today, and most people who have ever lived, we WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical. We focus on ourselves — our attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations — over our relationships and social roles. We aim to be “ourselves” across contexts and see inconsistencies in others as hypocrisy rather than flexibility. … We see ourselves as unique beings, not as nodes in a social network that stretches out through space and back in time.[6]

It may be counter-intuitive to blame Christianity for the corrosion of kinship bonds, since today’s practicing Christians are the defenders of family values in the West. That is because of the paradox that Christianity is both revolutionary and conservative. It was revolutionary at the beginning, and conservative at the end, as are all established religions. But Christianity’s conservatism is about preserving what little kinship structure it didn’t destroy in its revolutionary stage: the nuclear family, the final stage before complete social disintegration.[7]

It is also true that the Church, in its competition with blood ideology, claimed to embody another form of collective organicity, to bring men together in a higher fraternity, through the blood and body of Christ. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither man nor woman; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28-29). Did the Church succeed in creating a new, bigger, better social body? To some extent and for some time, yes. The Church was a big family. Jesus looked like us, and Mother Mary had her holy well nearby. Christian rituals were part of nationhood. Unlike Radbod’s, our ancestors were Christians, so being Christians was, in itself, ancestor veneration.

And as long as there was a blood aristocracy, blood ideology endured. At its core, wrote French medievalist Georges Duby in The Knight, The Lady, and the Priest, was “probitas, a valor of body and soul that produced both prowess and magnanimity,” and “was transmitted through the blood.” Marriage, which until the tenth century evaded clerical control, “was to unite a valiant progenitor to a wife in such a manner that his legitimate son, bearer of the blood and name of a valorous ancestor, should be able to bring that ancestor to life again in his own person.” Mothers contributed just as much as fathers to the quality of their offsprings’ blood.[8] That ideology persisted not thanks to Christianity, but in spite of it, and Duby’s book tells the story of its siege and ultimate surrender to the Gregorian papacy.

Ultimately all social classes became fully embraced by that great organic body of the Church. But when that body began to decay, when the religious glue no longer worked, when the Christian God was declared dead, all that remained was the rootless individual with nothing to worship but himself, because Christianity had mortgaged our “syngenic instinct” (Ludwig Gumplowicz), and disappeared without giving it back to us.

And ironically, by what was Christianity ultimately defeated, if not by a worldview that precisely redefines humans as the exclusive product of their ancestry, namely Darwinism? What a dialectical backlash! The Christian man had a soul that was zero-percent genetic (each man’s soul is a new creation by God), while the new Darwinian man has no soul but is hundred-percent genetic (see my post on Darwinism). Damned if we do Christianity, damned if we don’t. Either bloodless soul, or soulless blood. Christianity was better, and I think that White nationalists who argue from the Darwinian standpoint are misguided: how can Darwinism breathe new life into the peoples of Europe when it is a materialistic theory that allows no place to spiritual forces?

My purpose here is not to finish off Christianity. My sincere admiration and my best wishes go to people who still find in their Christian faith the resource for preserving or rebuilding the clan. God bless the Amish! But the general situation is that the clan is now decimated, and the nuclear family shrinking into single parenthood. And we are being greatly-replaced. I believe this is the end result of Christianity, and I believe it is important to realize it, as a simple of case of etiology — finding the cause of the disease. Christianity has not just neglected, it has negated the spiritual depth of blood and race — even of gender, for that matter: has a priest ever explained the difference between a man’s soul and a woman’s soul? No, in Christ, “there is neither man nor woman.” In that case, why not transgenderism?

That is why I do not believe that Christianity can be of much help in recreating European ethnic solidarity. It undermined it in the first place. It wasn’t that much of a problem as long as Christians were ethnically homogeneous in their own countries, when everyone’s neighbor was everyone’s distant relative. But that is not the case anymore. What we now need is a spiritual doctrine that commands respect for the blood lineage. Do not offend your ancestors, for you belong to them! That is the command that is so ingrained in Jews’ collective unconscious that they just cannot resist it. We need the Gentile version. Make your ancestors proud, and they will bless you. Pay your debt to them by having children and raising them well. And in whatever they failed, try to redeem them. The ghost dance didn’t save the Sioux, but we can dance better, and it’s not too late for us. We just need to change paradigm. Christianity has failed us.

Christian apologists claim that Christianity contributed to the progress of civilization by “transforming ‘archaic societies’ into ‘metaphysical societies’ that accept the idea of a radical separation between the living and the dead.”[9] I doubt if building a wall between the living and the dead has made us more civilized. I think there is more truth in Jean Baudrillard’s point that, “shattering the union of the living and the dead, and slapping a prohibition on death and the dead [is] the primary source of social control.”[10]

If civilization means breaking the social bonds between the living and the dead, then China has never been a civilization. “In China,” writes sinologist François Jullien, “religion is mainly organized around ancestral worship, and is therefore principally family-based: it is structured entirely around kinship. So much so that the Chinese term used today to translate the commonly adopted notion of ‘religion’ literally means: ‘ancestral teaching’ (zong-jiao).” There was no priestly class in China, because the head of the ancestral cult was the continuator of the lineage. In Confucian tradition, honoring the dead ritually is an extension of filial piety, which is the very foundation of social harmony. For that reason, Montesquieu thought that “it is almost impossible for Christianity to ever become established in China.”[11] The Catholic Church did make some headways in China, but only after retracting (in 1939) its official ban against ancestor worship, and the recent progress of Protestantism is a byproduct of Western cultural influence.

Do we have, in our own European heritage, something comparable to the Chinese Confucian tradition, that we could try to revive? I think we do, actually. The Greeks called it philosophy. I’ll write about it. Stay tuned.

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[1] Nietzsche commented on this passage in On the Genealogy of Morals, chapter I, aphorism 15.

[2] Quoted in Geoffrey Cantor and Marc Swetlitz, Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism, University of Chicago Press, 2006, p. 142.

[3] Weston La Barre, The Ghost Dance: The Origins of Religion, Allen & Unwin, 1972.

[4] Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 1932; Jan Assmann, Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt, Cornell UP, 2014.

[5] Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropo­logical Perspective, University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 23-59.

[6] Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People on the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2020, p. 21.

[7] David Brooks, “The Nuclear Family was a Mistake,” March 2020, www.theatlantic.com

[8] Georges Duby, The Knight, The Lady, and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France, Pantheon Books, 1981, p. 37.

[9] Jean Delumeau, La Peur en Occident (XIV^e-XVIII^e siècles). Une cité assiégée, Fayard, 1978, p. 82.

[10] Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), SAGE, 2017, p. 150.

[11] François Jullien, Moïse ou la Chine. Quand ne se déploie pas l'idée de Dieu, Folio/Essais, 2022, pp. 113-115.