The end of the heathens

In 438 BCE the 12 meter image of the great goddess Athena made by the foremost of the yavana idol makers, Pheidias under the patronage of Perikles was installed at the Acropolis in Athens. It was built with 1.1 tons of gold, the face and the arms were made entirely from ivory and it was decorated with gems. It was described thus by the Pausanias in the 100s of the common era:

“The image of Athena is upright, with a tunic reaching to the feet, and on her breast the head of Medusa is worked in ivory. She holds a statue of Nike about four cubits high, and in the other hand a spear; at her feet lies a shield and near the spear is a serpent. This serpent would be Erichthonius. On the pedestal is the birth of Pandora in relief [description of the Parthenon temple of Athena].”

873 years after its installation, the pious Christian emperor Theodosius II passed an edict to extirpate the already beleaguered heathens:

“All persons of criminal pagan mind we interdict from accursed immolations of sacrificial victims and from damnable sacrifices and from all other practices prohibited by the authority of the more ancient ordinance, and we order that all their shrines, temples, sanctuaries, if any even now remain intact, should be destroyed by the magistrates’s command and that these should be purified by the placing of the venerable Christian religion’s sign [the Cross] – all persons knowing that if it it shall have been established by suitable proofs before a competent judge that anyone has mocked this law, the said person must be punished with death [Theodosius II legal edict 16.10.25 Nov 14th, 435 CE].”

The pretasAdhaka-s swung into zealous action putting the pious emperor’s directives into practice. They damaged the eastern pediment of the Parthenon and then uprooted the Athena from its precincts and placed a cross atop it. Thus, they recycled it as a church for the puMshchalI who birthed the preta. Subsequently, the Parthenon was to become a Masjid when fatih sultan Mehmed-II of the Osmans conquered it from the pretAcharin-s in 1460 and erected a minar. In 1687 during the war between the two West Asian cults the temple was blown up by the pretacharin-s leaving the ruins we see today at the Acropolis.

While the image of Athena was uprooted it was not destroyed and was taken by the last of the great yavana R^iShi-s, Proclus (Πρόκλος), the mathematician, heathen lawyer, philosopher, hymn composer and ritualist, to a villa in the southern Acropolian slope. Here the last sacrificers of the old deities of the yavana-s, besieged and battered, charily assembled for their rituals, away from the gaze of “those who moved that which should not be moved” and “the neighbors who abandon sobriety”. Though “the typhonic winds of Christianity” were hammering their world, they still took hope as long as the towering figure of Proclus could still invoke the gods and compose his hymns. Then on April 17th 485 BC Proclus died at the age 75 – he had stated in a hymn of “mokSha” in his 42nd year that he would attained oneness with the stars. He had lived through the darkest hour of the heathen world in the near West, yet was one of its greatest. His end, like that of the great emperor Julian before him, was to almost mark the end of the brahma and kShatra of that world.

Even before the convert and enforcer of the pretamata, Constantine, came to power, it was not without risks for the Hellenes to freely express their view: The Greek philosopher Porphyry who wrote the brilliant tract “Against the Christians” was beaten up by a mob of shavapUjaka-s at Caesarea in Palestine. Thus, it was gradually becoming harder to openly voice an opinion on the shava or the preta-pustaka without running into the danger of being attacked by them. All this even when the shavapUjaka-s were claiming to be persecuted and heathen emperors were still in power. With the coming to power of Constantine, he passed an edict that all copies of Porphyry’s “Against the Christians” be burned and prescribed the death penalty for any one who kept secret copies of the text. More than a century later Theodosius II and Valentinian II were still burning copies of Porphyry’s works with much vehemence. It was the reign of Theodosius II during which the heathen really came to see the grim darkness of the pretamata bringing an end to their world. Heathen thinkers like Hypatia the daughter of Theon were murdered by pretAcharin gangs. Temples were desecrated and Proclus and his school could only refer to the shavapUjaka-s with cryptic terms. As we have said many times before on these pages, these events are a chilling reminder of what can and is happening to us, who uphold the last, unbroken transmission of the Indo-European heathen tradition. Today in bhArata it is not easy to criticize the violent West Asian lunacy cults. The Hindus are losing their rights in their own land despite being the majority. A parallel to the desecration of the Acropolis could very well be the next stage. In this context we feel it worthwhile to revisit the brilliant heathen thinker Georgios Gemistos Plethon whom we had briefly alluded to on these pages.

Continued …