By Ben Klassen

Christianity has distanced humanity from nature as people came to perceive God as a singular supremacy detached from the physical world. In Christian eyes, the physical world became the realm of the devil in contrast to a society that had once celebrated nature through seasonal festivals, and were now forced to commemorate biblical events bearing no connection to the earth. Holidays lost much of their celebratory spirit and took on a tone of penance and sorrow, and time, once thought to be cyclical like the seasons, was now perceived to be linear. Because of their rejection of the cyclical nature of life, orthodox Christians came to focus more upon death than upon life and Nature was seen as the realm of the devil. The image of Pan, the Greek god of Nature, was chosen by the Church to portray the devil. The hoofed, goat-legged and horned man had been associated with a number of fertility figures and had previously been deemed essential to rural well-being. It was now used by the Church to fight God in a never ending struggle. Pan’s skill on the pan-pipes was believed to fill the woods and pastures with enchanted music, hence the distorted Christian view that the devil was the “angel of music”. After the turn of the millennium when the Church authorized specific portrayals of the devil, the vilified Pan came to evoke terror or “panic” as the image of satan. The perceived separation of nature from God affected the treatment of animals and they were often thought to be agents of the devil. The frightening belief in werewolves were also spread by the Inquisition.

Lewis Regenstein writes in his 1991 book “Replenish the Earth” the following, “In the ten centuries preceding the present one, there are accounts of the trials, torture and execution (often by hanging) of hundreds of animals, mainly by ecclesiastical courts acting under the assumption that animals can be used by the devil to do his work”. Another cruel practice which continued throughout the centuries of witch-hunting, was the burning of cats together with witches – this became official policy in 1484 under Pope Innocent VIII. Zealous Christians most frequently targeted cats, wolves, snakes, foxes, chickens and white cocks as animals to be eliminated, and since many of these animals helped control the population of crop eating and plague-carrying rodents, their elimination intensified outbreaks of plague. Ignorant Church-licensed physicians ordered cats and dogs to be killed during times of plague thinking that this would halt infection. The Church spent centuries prohibiting displays of reverence that involved nature, and worship now took place indoors away from the natural elements. Christians destroyed outdoor temples and built churches with roofs in their stead while the Church condemned the veneration of trees and springs, where people would place candles or decorations. The sixth century ignoramus Martin of Braga asked in a fitness of insanity, “But what is the lighting of wax lights at rocks or trees or wells or crossroads if it is not worship of the devil?” In 789 the General Capitularies of Charlemagne decreed : “With regard to trees, and rocks and springs, wherever ignorant people put lights or make other observances, we give notice to everyone that this is a most evil practice, execrable to God, and wherever they are found, they are to be taken away and destroyed”. Ignorant people? You must be talking about yourself General Madness. The Church was unable to convince people of the absence of God in Nature, so instead they incorporated aspects of the very Nature worship it condemned, much in the same way that it developed ecclesiastical magic when it could not eliminate pagan magic. Hypocrisy or what? Church columns were sculpted to simulate tree trunks and perhaps even the mythical tree of life while those trees which had traditionally been venerated by Pagans, often appeared in churchyards.

While the Pagans used to mark the seasons with celebrations and rituals that integrated their activity with the earth’s cycles, the Church now incorporated annual Pagan festivals and holidays, claiming them as Christian. In the hope of winning easier acceptance and recognition for its new religion, the Church placed Christian holidays to coincide with these older festivals. While the traditional meaning of most of these holidays had nothing to do with orthodox Christianity, the Church usually tolerated the older rituals as it tried to teach a new biblical meaning. To the Pagans the cycle of the year, at both the change of the four seasons as well as the height of each season, used to hold great importance. The winter solstice, the darkest day of the year, was a time of new birth, and often symbolized by the birth of an annual male fertility figure, a representation of the year’s new sun. The height of the winter, midway between the winter solstice and spring equinox, was a time to nurture that new life while spring was about encouraging fertility, when the sun and earth would unite to later bring forth the abundance of the harvest and the bounty of the hunt. The sun’s energy transferred to the crops from the summer solstice through autumn. Celebrations of the year’s harvest and bounty was held at the height of summer and the fall equinox. At the height of autumn was a time to honor the dead and release the past, as the year came to an end and as fields lay dormant and the earth seemed to die. All this had to make way for the watered down, materialized, centralized and authoritarian Christianity. Instead of creating their own religion based on their own holidays, own festivals, own myths and their own symbols, their arrogant and intolerable “church” had to steal from the Pagans, and in the process sow discord, division and death on innocent White Naturalists. Disgrace!

While no evidence are known to indicate the actual time of Jesus’s birth, such an event most easily correlated to winter solstice festivals. The Roman celebration of the birth of the sun god, Mithra, had also been observed on December 25th. A winter solstice ritual involved participants who would withdraw into the inner womb-like sanctuary of shrines in pre-Christian Egypt and Syria, and at midnight they would come forth trumpeting, “The Virgin has brought forth! The light is waxing!”. In that way the Pagan birth of God’s sun at the solstice now became the Christians` birth of God’s son. The Christian Epiphany on the 6th of January was taken from an Egyptian winter solstice celebration, the birth of Osiris, the divine representation of masculine fertility. Although the Church declared that it signified the manifestation of Jesus’s divinity, it is clear that the spirit of both Christmas and the Christian Epiphany embodied the timeless celebrations of the winter solstice. Celebrations to mark the height of winter also found their way into Christianity. The Christian Candlemas was also stolen from the Pagans, whether celebrated on the second or fourteenth of February, celebrations was in honor of feminine faces of divinity such as Brigit and Venus, who encouraged art, poetry, healing, fire and wisdom. Spring equinox celebrations were adopted by the Church and became the Christian Easter. So similar were the Easter celebrations, particularly those which recognized the resurrection of the Babylonian Adonis, the Greek Apollo and the Roman Attis, that a bitter controversy arose with Pagans claiming that the Christian Easter celebration was a spurious imitation of the ancient traditions.

Fertility symbols such as the egg and the incredibly prolific rabbit, associated with spring, survived as well. Sadly, as Christianity spread, festivals of spring and summer gradually lost their original meaning. The height of spring became Pentecost or Whitsunday, an biblical event when people spoke in tongues, and a commemoration of the birth of the Church, and not an observance of fertility. No longer was the summer solstice to recognize the culmination of the sun’s light, but rather was to honor St. John who had baptized Christ. Holidays now honouring the Virgin Mary such as “Our Lady’s Herb Day” and Assumption Day, the day when Mary was “assumed” into heaven, now replaced Celebrations of the summer season. The fall equinox celebrations made place for Michaelmas (the feast of the archangel Michael, the conqueror of satan) and the Nativity of Mary. Shrines of Mary covered in ears of corn can still be found to this day, resembling the older Pagan figures of grain that can be found in autumn. The end of the earth’s annual cycle, the height of fall, was believed to be a time when the veil that separates the world of the living from the world of the dead becomes very thin. The Church did attempt to prevent the celebration of this holiday, but by the ninth century the feast of All Saints Day had been moved to November first and by 1045 the monasteries of Cluny had begun to observe the time as a “day of all the departed ones.” The Pagans also observed the cycles of the moon, and when the Church could not halt such celebrations, it again incorporated them into the Christian calendar, usually under the guise of honoring Mary – The day when St. Anne conceived Mary, December 8th; the day Mary was born, September 8th; the day Jesus’s conception was announced to Mary (Annunciation), March 25th; the day Mary was purified from having given birth, February 2nd or 14th; and the day Mary was assumed into heaven, (Assumption), August 15th.

Orthodox Christians repudiated the cyclical nature of physical life as well, such as James 1v15, : “Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin : and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death”. In 2 Corinthians 5v6 Paul writes the following : “Therefore we are always confident, knowing that, whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord”. In Romans 8v13 the Bible affirms that meaningful, spiritual life is found only when one is detached from the physical body : “For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die : but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live”. The Bible states in Ecclesiastes 7v1 that “the day of death [is better] than the day of one’s birth”. What we see here is that orthodox Christianity had taken on the character of a death cult. Orthodox Christians denied cycles entirely and became preoccupied with death, rather than appreciating the natural life cycle, such as birth, sex, and death, the facets of human life which speak of a connection to cycles. Understanding earthly, physical life to be hostile to spirituality fostered a zealous anticipation of the end of the world and expected God to revisit the earth in a second coming to usher in the end times. In Matthew 16v28 Jesus gives the impression that such an end may be short at hand : “Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom”. Orthodox Christians used death as a tool to evoke fear in people instead of accepting death as a natural part of the life cycle. Instead of the the ancient concept of an underworld where one would go after death for rest and rejuvenation, it became the frightening Christian idea of hell, a place filled with fire and brimstone where one endures eternal pain and agony. The concept of purgatory adopted by the medieval Church reduced the harshness of orthodox ideology. Instead of being sent directly to heaven or hell after death, one’s soul could go to an intermediate place, to do penance and be punished for sins before hopefully being allowed into heaven. The Church was ready to cash in and by maintaining that it could influence the destiny of these souls, the Church collected a good deal of medieval society’s money for its services on behalf of those in purgatory.

It`s clear that orthodox Christianity changed the way people think about the earth and the natural environment. The idea that God reigns from above, Nature is understood to be distant from, if not devoid of, God’s presence. It is understandable then that such a world view led to dramatic changes in the meaning of holidays, the character of those holidays, and the perception of time, all of which were alienated from the earth’s seasonal cycles. In its tradition of hindering scholarly work, the Catholic Church continued by persecuting Galileo through the Inquisition and by opposing much of Newton’s work. In the same way that orthodox Christians tried to triumph over lower hierarchical components, Western physicians attempted to conquer over the body rather than to work together with it, by encouraging its ability to heal itself. The treatment of non-life-threatening illness with antibiotics is a good example of this. Antibiotics overpowers the body’s own capacity to defend itself from illness, destroying the body’s immune system. Antibiotics are valuable in the treatment of life-threatening illness, but the frequent use of them in less serious situations has led to a whole new group of diseases and has spawned new strains of bacteria which do not respond to any known treatment.

The dark side of Christian history has been and continues to be about the domination and control of human freedom and spirituality. Orthodox Christians built an organization that from its creation encouraged not freedom and self-determination, but obedience and conformity. During the Dark Ages, civilization collapsed as the Church took control of science, medicine, education, technology and the arts. Countless wars were sparked during the the Protestant and Catholic Counter Reformation, where Christians slaughtered other Christians, each convinced that theirs was the one and only true path. The witches holocaust plumbed the depths of horror as it eradicated countless women and men as well as the belief in earth-based divinity. From a multi-dimensional spirituality it took its roots and changed it into a limited belief in a singular supremacy and only one face of God, that has resulted in tyranny and brutality. On what grounds of logic does Christianity see itself as right? There is none, and by ignoring the dark side of Christian, history allows the beliefs which have motivated cruelty to go unexamined. This belief in a singular face of God who reigns at the pinnacle of a hierarchy sustained by fear, had devastating consequences, as people must constantly determine who is superior to whom. The efforts to convince us that God demands our fear and unquestioning submission, are in fact efforts to control humanity and to contain their spirituality. Yes, the White Pagans (not interested in the practices of the non-white Pagans) were no angels, but their “sins” are mild compared to Christianity, especially seeing that they were still in the process of evolving consciousness. The Church saw the potential to control a lot of people and centralized power into its own hands through theft, murder and oppression. Christianity did more damage to the White Race then good. This is not my opinion but historical fact, and any fool who denies this is just that, an ignorant, arrogant fool.