Invasion of Europe by the Barbarians John Bagnell Bury

John Bagnell Bury’s Invasion of Europe by the Barbarians takes the story of the fall of the Roman Empire and tells it from the barbarian point of view.  This is not the normal perspective on the story, but it is a more positive way to look at it.  After all, when the empire fell a lot of new states were created and each of them has its own story.  So from this point of view Alaric, the first man to sack Rome, is seen as an ambitious and capable ruler who was just trying to get his share of the action.  But this doesn’t detract from the drama of the story.  

The city is under siege by Alaric’s Goths, but has also been largely abandoned by the authorities.  Thrown on their own resources the population of the city looks for radical solutions.  The pope, who unlike the emperor had stuck with the city, collaborated with the pagan leadership.  Was the problem the failure to carry out the sacrifices to the old gods of the city?  When you are in trouble anything is worth investigating and the pope authorised the revival of the antique practice.  But in the event nobody dared to actually do it.  Sacrifices were illegal and the penalty was death.

It is unlikely they would have saved the day anyway.  It was a desperate idea for a desperate situation.  In the end, the defences were broken and the Goths poured in to sack the city.

Alaric’s triumph was short lived, he died shortly afterwards, and the empire managed to pull itself together but was soon faced with an even bigger threat.  The name of the Huns’ leader Attila has still not been forgotten in Europe even today.    Attila  was able to raid through the Balkans to the walls of Constantinople, but could not overcome such a well fortified city.  But there was no city so strong in the western half of the empire.  He also had a romantic interest in it.  The emperor’s sister had tried to get out of a forced marriage by sending her engagement ring to Attila and asking for his help.

Attila’s interpretation was that this was a proposal of marriage to himself.  He instantly accepted and claimed half the western empire as a dowry.  His prospective brother in law tried to explain that it wasn’t really meant to be taken that way, to which the response was war.  The Huns penetrated Gaul in force.  The Goths and the Romans pulled together what forces they could and miraculously managed to turn the Huns back at Chalons.  This has long been considered as one of the decisive battles of history.  Well it might be, but Attila was only diverted not defeated.  He would be back again and his threat was only removed when he himself died – from a burst blood vessel brought on by the excitement of a new bride.  For a bloodthirsty barbarian leader he does seem to have had a romantic streak in the mix somewhere.

The culmination of the book is the foundation of the kingdom of Clovis in what is now France, and a key event in the creation of France.  This is told as both a straight forward bit of politics, but also probes the psychology and introduces us to the characters.  Clovis emerges as a very characteristic man of his time.  He is uneducated but intelligent, ruthless but pragmatic and has a clear idea of what he wants.  His aim is to found a dynasty.  It was a common enough ambition among the men that wrecked the empire, and not a particularly visionary or forward thinking one.  But it was there actions that gave us the Europe we now live in.  His adoption of Catholicism set the scene for the Catholics to ultimately wipe out both paganism and Arian christianity.  There must have been some pretty convincing advantages to following this course of action, and I dare say we could work them out with a bit of study.  One surprising one was keeping his Catholic wife happy.  Clovis was a hard man who thought nothing of advancing his empire but killing rival kings or securing his position inside his empire by killing relatives.  The idea that he was henpecked at home doesn’t really stack up.  But it is amusing to think of it, and that is what one of the chroniclers says happened. 

It is an enjoyable story.  It was written in the twenties and has the flavour of its time.  A lot of the ideas about the constitution of the barbarian tribes and their economics has a very dated feel to it.  I don’t have time to follow the literature in this area but I would be very surprised if modern scholars still stick to the idea that the Germans underwent an agricultural revolution at the time the emperors were ruling in Rome, and that it was this that led them to start their migrations.  On the other hand, I don’t imagine there is much more to be said on the way the Lombards managed their new conquests in Italy, and I am sure that must explain why that part of Italy even today has a rather different outlook than the rest of the country.  The example of the Lombards is one that other barbarian conquerors followed.  They installed themselves as an aristocratic elite governed by their own laws.  Their new subjects continued with Roman laws.  That aristocrats are governed by a different code to others survived as a concept and as a practice for centuries.  Indeed in Britain it is still theoretically possible for a member of the aristocracy to insist on trial by the House of Lords rather than a standard court.

For an introduction to the confusing goings on in the Dark Ages it is a pretty good starting point, with one rather strange caveat.  For some reason, Britain is neglected.  I am guessing that it is covered by another of the author’s works, but it does make this account a bit unbalanced.  For a British reader this is not too big a problem as we are very familiar with the story of how the Anglo Saxons overran Roman Britain, but it might put off someone who wants the whole story.  But this aside, it covers that period where the classical world was subsumed and the shape of modern countries begins to emerge.  From now on the names begin to sound like the names we still use and institutions that are still around have their origins. 

I consumed this book in audio form.  The narrator does a good job, but keeps up a very dramatic tone throughout the whole thing.  This is a bit wearing after a while and forced me to split up my listening more than I would have chosen to.  But all in all a good read or listen, in retrospect probably a better read.  If nothing else, it provides yet another reason to explain Rome fell.  It was in the way of some people with other plans and who laid the groundwork for modern Europe.

Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire by Edward Luttwak

The history of the Byzantine Empire merges with the history of the original Roman Empire which it grew out of.  But although there was never a day when the eastern half of the empire announced that it was now a different entity, the story of the Greek speaking Byzantines is radically different from that of their Latin predecessors.

Nowhere is this clearer than in military strategy. The early history of the Romans was about domination. They aimed to destroy their enemies.  Caesar summed it up in a few words.  ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’  The Romans aspired to be and soon became the predominant military power in their world by the simple process of eliminating all their rivals.

But once that power collapsed, what was left was a new world full of aggressors who were certainly dangerous, but none of which were strong enough themselves to replace Rome as the overwhelming superpower.

As a former military policy wonk in the Pentagon, Edward Luttwak would probably describe this as a move from a unipolar to a multi-polar world, or something like that.  Luckily for the reader he doesn’t bring much of the jargon from his day job to his account of the strategic problems facing the Byzantines. But he does bring the insight of someone who has wrestled with those kinds of dilemmas.  He is not afraid to be controversial.  In fact he seems to relish it.  I heard him on the radio in the UK recently astonishing an interviewer with the view that the US should withdraw its troops from Afghanistan and instead bribe the Chinese to occupy it.  Whatever the pros and cons of this approach, at the very least it would be cheaper.  And given that foreign policies rarely have the desired outcome picking one that requires a low outlay of blood and treasure deserves to at least be considered.  So that impressed me enough to seek out this book.

This isn’t Luttwak’s first study of Roman history. He has also famously written a book about the western empire’s defensive strategy, which I have yet to read.  This got a mixed reception with many specialists not agreeing with it.  But this book covering the Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire has received as far as I can tell universally positive write ups and doesn’t seem to contradict the conventional wisdom.  It is certainly a good read.  You don’t need any prior knowledge to follow it and the author doesn’t make too many references to other works in the field, so even though it is detailed and scholarly it is perfectly suitable for a general reader even one who doesn’t know anything about the subject.  He does use a few unfamiliar terms that you might need to look up.  To give one example and to save you the trouble, redacting gets used quite a lot.   It means editing together a document from multiple sources.  I imagine that is an everyday word in an intelligence gathering department but not for those of us who don’t work with spies regularly.  But it reminds you that Luttwak is a backroom guy and this a book about what was happening in the backrooms of Constantinople during centuries it was the centre of a declining empire trying, always against the odds but usually successfully, to survive in a hostile world. 

There was a culture in Constantinople that individual emperors could draw on, and contribute to.  The Byzantines studied war as a science and wrote up what they learned.  This gave them an edge that allowed them to deal with their many enemies in the field effectively.  The goal was not the glory of an individual commander.  Alexander the Great would have got short shrift.  They did not aim to eliminate the enemy.  Pitched battles with their inevitable losses of precious troops were to be avoided.  Clever strategies and spying were the preferred way to operate.   Professional soldiers require training, equipping and supplying – all resource intensive procedures.   The result was highly effective troops, but there were never many of them and they could not easily be replaced. 

The perennial shortage of manpower meant that military investment was capital intensive.  Weapons were sophisticated with designs committed to vellum and later to paper.  Some forms dated back to antiquity others were more recent innovations.  The most famous was the Greek fire that enabled attacking fleets to be completely destroyed.  For all their social conservatism and deep seated religiosity the Byzantines were always ready to develop creative solutions when new problems arose.

This was never more evident than in the Byzantine response to the Huns.  The Huns deployed advanced bows whose range and power combined with superb horsemanship made them invincible.  They could simply fire their bows from a safe distance and massacre their enemies.  If attacked they could retreat more quickly than any pursuit.  Their speed allowed them to run rings around the movements of any regular army deployed against them.

For a while the Huns had the empire at their mercy.  No quick countermeasures could be devised.  But when the Hun menace disappeared following the death of Attila there was time for the lessons to be absorbed and used.  The training of cavalry was overhauled.  Bows were upgraded.  Before long the Romans could deploy units as effective as the Huns themselves, but with all the machinery of a sophisticated state to back them up.  This was one of the reasons that in the Sixth Century Justinian was able to revive Roman power and start the reconquest of much that had been lost.  He even recaptured Rome itself.  If he could have matched the numbers as well as the skills of the Huns, who knows what he might have achieved.

But even when it was at its strongest the Byzantine position was always fragile.  The state could only function thanks to highly efficient tax collection.  But this in turn created a concentration of highly visible and portable wealth that made it everyone’s target of choice.  It was never strong enough to overawe everyone at the same time.  It was necessary to project what is now called soft power as well.  Byzantine officials underwent huge journeys, thousands of miles sometimes, to influence foreign powers and get them to do their bidding using guile, gold and God.  The religious prestige of the emperor and the archbishop of Constantinople could be used to help achieve state objectives. Subsidies, gifts and out and out bribery were also in the toolkit, as was intrigue. Dissidents who might be useful were always welcome.

Byzantine commanders didn’t just follow the book without any imagination. They often formulated highly creative and risky solutions to the problems they faced.  For example once sending a large force into the Persian homeland even when the Persians were laying siege to Constantinople itself. The Byzantines were able to behave like a superpower long after they ceased to have the resources of a superpower.  When they were at war they used the forces at their disposal intelligently for maximum impact.  They rarely aimed to destroy their enemies.  In Byzantine diplomacy today’s enemy could be tomorrow’s ally.  There were in any case an unlimited number of new enemies to take the place of someone you defeated, so overall final victory was never a possibility.  War was never their favoured approach even though they continually prepared for it.  

The Byzantine empire was finally ended in 1453 some eleven hundred years since Constantine moved the capital from Rome. For most of that time it had looked weak, often catastrophically so.  It had been on its knees many times.  Somehow it always managed to come through against the odds.  Edward Luttwak’s book goes a long way to explain how it managed it.  If you are managing a declining superpower, this is a must read book.

Why I like Ron Paul

Lots of people like Ron Paul. But not generally people like me. Not many Europeans have even heard of him. The maverick Republican senator only gets microscopic coverage in the news media over here, even now when he is one of the hopefuls trying to pick up the nomination for president.  I am pretty much on the left politically, so I don’t generally warm towards Republicans. I’m not keen on their politics to begin with. And on top of all that, as an atheist I find bringing religion into politics annoying, so the primaries when the candidates are trying to appeal to the committed are something I usually prefer to ignore.

So what gets me into the Ron Paul fan club?

I’ve forgotten how I first came across him, but somehow I ended up watching a video on Youtube where he was talking about legalising drugs, not a position I’d have expected from the right of the Republicans. I did a bit of googling and found an article with more detail. It was thought provoking stuff.

I have never taken drugs nor ever been greatly tempted to, and I am pretty supportive of legislation to stop other people from taking them. I personally think that one of the good things about living in an ordered society is that we can have rules that stop people doing stupid things to themselves that they are quite likely to regret later. Drug abuse is a classic case, damaging the health of the taker themselves and also affecting the people around them. So when governments deploy police and troops to cut off the supply of drugs I am one of the people cheering.

But Ron Paul came at the subject from an angle that had never crossed my mind before. The war on drugs is effectively an intervention by the government to stop people doing what they choose with their own money. Fair enough in my opinion, limiting individual freedom is sometimes a price worth paying in order to achieve a greater good.

But what are the effects of this policy?  In particular what are the consequences of the ‘war on drugs’ where effort is concentrated at tackling drug supply at source.  Well one undesired consequence is it generates monopoly profits for people daring and ruthless enough to run the gauntlet of the enforcers. This makes some pretty unsavoury characters rich and powerful. So the efforts to stamp out drugs, while they may reduce drug use, also create a huge problem that didn’t exist before. In some countries the drug barons have both wealth and armed supporters and can rival the power of the government. Wouldn’t it be better just to let people who want to take them get on with it?

The answer is no of course, but the Ron Paul argument is very persuasive. When I thought about it, it occurred to me that the problem could be solved by making the supply and distribution of drugs legal and only imposing penalties on the end users. I wasn’t keen on that as a solution at first. It was only on reflection that I realised why. People who use drugs are a lot like me. I sort of identify with them. Ideally I wouldn’t be interfering with their freedom to use drugs in the first place, and actually punishing them for using them, particularly in small quantities, seems a bit draconian. By contrast drug barons are a long way away and I don’t have much sympathy for them. They also don’t give me personally any particular trouble. So directing action at the providers rather than the users is the most convenient for me personally.

So if I am honest the status quo happens to suit me fine. It would do so even more if I was a recreational drug user.  I can afford the elevated prices – I get to enjoy the drugs and the thrill of breaking the law without much fear of getting caught and I’d only suffer a fairly light penalty if I did. None of which alters the reality which is that the war on drugs is a huge waste of resources that doesn’t even achieve much of a reduction in the behaviour it is supposed to suppressing.  And for people who have to contend with the operations of drug trafikers it can be a deadly problem literally.  Allowing drugs to be sold cheaply would very likely cause considerably less misery than the illicit trade in drugs currently does. It would also make it much easier to prosecute the end users who at the end of the day are the people who actually caused the problem in the first place.

So that was quite beneficial. Confronted with a point of view I didn’t agree with, and still don’t agree with, I ended up realising that my own opinion had been not only wrong, but was probably positively harmful.

I have had similar experiences with quite a lot of the libertarian views that Ron Paul expresses in various places online.  I recommend having a look at some of Youtube videos of him.  His views on Israel are particularly interesting and I think illuminating.  This is an area where most people focus on issues of morality or justice.  What is Israel justified in doing to defend itself?  Should there be a two state solution? Etc, etc.  All interesting and important stuff of course, but not something that lends itself to easy answers.  Some people dispense with the ethical issues and concentrate on the power politics.  Is Israel simply a tool of American policy, providing military bases and support in projecting US power?   Paul on the other hand seems to regard the whole thing as simply an exercise in pork barrel politics.  He doesn’t say this explicitly, but I think he regards the vast sums of money the US gives to Israel as the main issue.  Could he be right?  Could the high level of funding, a relatively recent development historically, simply represent the strength of the Jewish lobby? Piles of cash for projects of dubious value is the ultimate sign of success for a lobby after all.  This would put Israel in exactly the same position as the farming lobby seeking to get agricultural subsidies.  It has to be said that Israel did pretty well before it started receiving large levels of cash from the US.  Regardless of what you think of Israel based on their track record they ought be able to manage quite well without it.  Perhaps Paul is on to something there as well. Does even Israel merit a blank cheque?

I think this independence from the vested interests that so many politicians – not just in America -rely on may be the key to Ron Paul’s appeal.  He seems to be immune to lobbies.  If nothing else, the fact that he almost never votes for increased spending shows that either nobody is paying him, or they are getting a terrible deal on their donations.  In any democracy vested interests play as big a role in decision making as they can get away with.  But this is the case in spades in the United States where Washington is packed with full time lobbyists promoting their particular agenda.  The Jewish lobby is the most effective, but they are simply one member of a huge industry employing tens of thousands of people.  It is mainly a reflection of the size of the US, which has a budget large enough to make such activities profitable.  The generally commercially minded political culture helps as well.  But it makes it very easy for the ordinary voter to feel excluded and alienated from the government, so it isn’t surprising that both the Tea Party movement and the Occupy Wall Street protests arise and both show a deep suspicion of Washington insiders.  I wonder if they ever get together to compare notes – they may find they have quite a lot in common.  But it also explains why Ron Paul’s campaign seems to have resonated with so many people.  He talks the way a conservative would talk if he was simply speaking his mind.

I don’t want him to win the presidency of course. I am still a socialist and I don’t want a more libertarian world. I don’t think his ideas are really up to being the basis for a programme of government. Having said that, the decision making of people with more mainstream views isn’t always that great so if he did pull it off, it probably wouldn’t be any more of a disaster than usual.  In any case, at time of writing the level of support he is attracting makes the prospect of him reaching the White House slim in the extreme.

But I hope he stays in the race and keeps up what he is doing, and I hope the supporters he has stick with him. From what I have gleaned from Youtube and his websites he seems to be an honest, intelligent and sincere man. I recommend finding the video where he is booed at a Republican party meeting for suggesting that Al Qaeda’s objectives should be taken at face value rather than the rather bizarre fiction that they ‘hate liberty’. He must have anticipated that reaction. If you have ideas to get across, then there is every reason to keep going even if, as all the pundits are saying, you are not going to win. You can win people over without winning the vote, and ideas can be tough things with a life of their own if you can get them planted. It is a shame there aren’t more people like him around. I would much rather follow a debate about ideas than try and work out what a sound bite means, and I really want to hear ideas that I disagree with and that challenge my assumptions. Thank you to Ron Paul for providing them.

(Big caveat – I don’t follow American politics that closely. He has been in politics since the seventies and so has had plenty of time to get up to all sorts of things I wouldn’t approve of if I knew about them.)

Why The West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History and what they reveal about the Future by Ian Morris

As an industrial scientist I have learned quite a few problem solving tricks over the years.  One of the simplest, at least in principle, is just to tabulate the data into a meaningful form.  Many impossible issues that fox everyone involved suddenly become obvious if you just look at the information in a way that makes it easy to understand. It can be tedious to do, but is often very effective.  But there is a downside. You present your painstakingly assembled piece of work to your colleagues. With the hard work done for them, somebody usually grasps the issue rapidly and often claims to have solved it themselves and proceeds to give themself a slap on the back for their penetrating insight.  Nobody requires a huge amount of information to confirm their own genius.  From that point on people start to focus on the next problem and your weeks or months of effort are rapidly forgotten. 

Ian Morris’ Why the West Rules is a somewhat similar exercise on a much larger scale.  What he has done is pull together all the data he can to try and quantify the social and economic development of different parts of the globe over a very long period indeed.  Using this data he can assess how they are doing compared to one another.  The work involved must have been huge and I don’t doubt that Morris would have loved to have written a book about the process.  But wisely he has put that to one side – though there is a website for anorak wearing enthusiasts to pore over his workings.  But that isn’t the bit we want to know about.  What we are interested in is how well people are doing, and we are really interested in how we are doing relative to other people.  We want to hear how the West came to be on top, and this is the story we get.

The scope is enormous.  It goes right back to prehistory and comes up to the present day – in fact there is even some speculation about technologies of the future towards the end of the book.  Early on it becomes clear that there were only ever two contenders in the race to be the most advanced.  The West is defined here as the culture that developed in Mesopotamia and spread out from there to cover Europe, Egypt, North Africa and the rest of the Middle East, and which later subsumed the Americas.   The only rival is China.  To make this point the book opens with a fictional account of a Chinese ship visiting London in the reign of  Queen Victoria.  I am not normally a fan of alternative history scenarios.  A bit of speculation on what might have happened diffierently in the aftermath of a particular event is okay, but elaborate flights of fancy of what might have happened if Helen of Troy’s nose had been a bit longer generally leave me cold.  It is hard enough working out what actually happened let alone what might have happened.  But in this case it sets the scene for the rest of the book beautifully.  After all, it is such an ingrained feature of the history of the world for the last five hundred years that Europeans set sail towards the rest of the world that it is a jolt to imagine that it might have worked the other way around.

What we get next is the whole story of how it came to be that in the Victorian era it was British troops that arrived in Peking rather than Chinese troops  in London.  And it really is the whole story, going right the way back as far as it can be taken.  The West has almost always been in the lead, getting started first and usually maintaining that lead.   But it has always been close.  There have been centuries on end when China took the lead.  It very nearly beat the West to the stage of full scale industrialisation for example.   For much of history this race has been a totally unconscious one.  The Chinese only became aware of the Roman Empire some time around the reign of Marcus Aurelius in the second century.  The Romans in turn never had more than the haziest notion of the other big civilisation on the block even though they did manage to trade with them via intermediaries.  It wasn’t until the late Middle Ages that Marco Polo brought back detailed accounts of just how advanced Chinese civilisation was.

During the Middle Ages the sophistication and size of China dwarfed anything in Europe or the Middle East and an impartial observer would no doubt have confidently predicted that it would be the Chinese who were destined to rule the world.   But they had achieved this by default thanks to problems and instability at the other end of the huge Eurasian continent.   Later it was to be the Chinese that succumbed to problems leaving the West to forge ahead.  Today the situation is that both are stable enough for development to proceed.  They are also very well aware of one another and interacting like never before.  This is a new and unique situation in history.  What will happen next?

Morris can’t and doesn’t answer this directly.  But what he does do is tell the story in enough detail to give an idea of where we are now.  And it is quite a story.  The economic history is used as the backbone of the book, but we get a lot of insight into how most of the time people are simply working to solve the problems they are faced with.  We don’t see the big picture on a day to day basis.  You have to read a book like this to see that.

Zenobia the Musical

I am afraid I know almost nothing about this, but as this is the Internet I am not going to let that stop me.

I have just come across this rather amazing Youtube video of a musical version of the life of Zenobia.  I am a bit behind the times because it seems to have been put on in Dubai in 2008.  And boy must it have been spectacular judging the by the clip with a huge cast up to and including horses and camels.  The music sounds pretty good too.

It is good to see Zenobia getting some decent billing and being portrayed in a positive light.  I have previously covered the full story of Zenobia but I don’t know how well she is known in the Arab world – though I guess this musical must have raised her profile whatever it was.  I hope some people were inspired.

The Hymn to Cybele by Julian the Apostate

The Goddess Cybele praised by Julian the Apostate (thanks to Wikipedia for the image)

The Roman emperor Julian the Apostate is a one off in history. He was the nephew of Constantine, the man that introduced Christianity to the empire. But he spent most of his adult life trying to convert it back again. He was born a Christian and died a pagan. He was a philosopher by inclination. He could easily have been remembered as a leading exponent of Neoplatonism, but proved to be a great warrior when forced to become one. Above all, he was full of surprises.

So naturally I was interested when I found his hymn of praise to Cybele online. I couldn’t find out anything about how it came to survive or what else is known about it so all I can say is what I have gleaned from the document itself. It sounds like a speech given at a religious occasion. I assume it was given in Athens, since the Athenians are specifically praised in it. And given that bits of it are rather unpolished and rambling it sounds a lot like it was a record made by somebody as the speech was being given. Reading it aloud took about 40 minutes, about the length of time a reasonable speech might take. As such it is a pretty rare chance to listen to someone speaking in their own voice from the ancient world. And it is a speech from one of the most interesting characters from that world.

Very few people can talk to an audience off the top of their heads, so I imagine Julian had done some kind of preparation. Even so, his ability to talk on his feet is impressive. Accounts of him from his own time report that he was likeable and engaging, and reading this speech made that easy to believe. It is less easy to work out why he made it and to who. It sounds to me like he was consecrating a new temple, or more likely reconsecrating one that had been desecrated. Whoever was listening, Julian has high expectations of them. He doesn’t hold back on the full details of his Neoplatonic philosophy, and to follow him you would have to have a pretty good grasp of who Plato, Aristotle and Epicurus were and what their teachings were about.

We get to hear what Julian himself thinks of these leading lights of Greek thought. Epicurus is dismissed: he is just plain wrong. Aristotle has made himself ridiculous by diverging from Plato. It is Plato that is regarded as the authority. Porphyry, who had reinterpreted Plato’s ideas for Julian’s time, also gets a respectful mention.

Who is Cybele?

As we’ll see, Julian is interested in how Cybele fits into the general metaphysical system of the Neoplatonist philosophy to which he subscribed. But today we probably first have to answer the more basic question of who Cybele was in the first place, given that she isn’t one of the gods whose name is still a part of everyday speech.

The cult of Cybele goes back a long way, and she may well have originally been worshiped as an earth mother way back in prehistory. The origin of her worship was in Phrygia. This is the region of central Turkey roughly where the current capital of Ankara is. There are a lot of respectful and knowledgeable references to Phrygia and its culture in the speech, enough to make me think that there may have been some Phrygians in the audience, or indeed the speech may have been given somewhere in Phrygia. The Phrygians were closely related to the Greeks, and early on the Athenians had picked up the worship of Cybele from them. There was a temple to Cybele in Athens which also contained the public records.

Cybele comes to Rome

The Phrygians must have had a good marketing department, because when the Romans were in trouble during their war with Carthage they turned to Cybele for divine support. A statue of the goddess was commissioned from Phrygia and dispatched to Rome in a large ship. When the vessel approached the Tiber the city’s inhabitants turned out to greet it, led by the priests and senators. Unfortunately it got stuck in the mouth of the river, and nothing would move it. The rumour arose that the chief vestal virgin, Clodia, had not been sticking to the purity of her vows and this was offending the goddess. Stories like that tend to spread.

In order to clear her name Clodia wrapped her girdle around the statue. As a result the boat finally started moving getting the delivery back on plan. Julian was telling this story some five hundred years after the event but had no truck with people who were skeptical about it. Julian insists on taking the story at face value. There were plenty of testimonials attesting to it. It also fitted in with his idea that the gods took an active interest in human affairs, intervening when the need arose.

The Romans went on to be highly successful in their fight against Carthage. Cybele was obviously effective as a protector. She rapidly became one of the most popular gods in town. Augustus built a huge temple to her right next to his own palace.

The Meaning of the Cybele

But Julian is just as interested in her religious significance as her history. He asks, who is the mother of the Gods? He then proceeds to answer his own question in great detail. As a pupil of Neoplatonism he was intensely interested in the metaphorical significance of these kinds of myths. We get a lot of detail of the philosophical meaning of it all. This is pretty involved, going deep into Plato’s theory of forms and with references to Aristotle, Porphyry, Theophrastus and Xenagorus. And this isn’t simple name dropping. Julian has clearly read them and understood their arguments and feels quite able to put his own ideas forward in the same company. It is tough going, believe me. But he eventually gets where he wants to go. Cybele is identified as the greatest being created by the One, and the god who transfers creative urges from the Divine Mind down to the Earth.

Prayer to Cybele

Having warmed up with this, fairly major, metaphysical explanation he goes on to draw some conclusions about how one of the stories about Cybele could be used to explain the path of the Sun in the sky.  He then seems to get a bit sidetracked with quite a bit of rather unfocused speculation about the origin of particular dietary restrictions required by traditional religious practices. As we all know, the cleverest of speakers can wander off topic and end up forgetting what they are supposed to be talking about. But Julian pulls it back. He finishes with a simple and sincere prayer to the Goddess.

“Grant unto all men happiness, of which the sum and substance is the knowledge of the gods; and to the Roman people universally, first and foremost to wash away from themselves the stain of atheism, and in addition to this, grant them propitious Fortune, that shall assist them in governing the empire for many thousands of years to come! To myself grant for the fruit of my devotion to thee–-Truth in belief concerning the gods, the attainment of perfection in religious rites, and in all the undertakings which we attempt as regards warlike or military measures, valour coupled with good luck, and the termination of my life to be without pain, and happy in the good hope of a departure for your abodes!”

The West’s Lost Legacy of Paganism

The reference to the stain of atheism is poignant. Julian may have been making a general point, but I can imagine that he was speaking in a temple that still had signs of damage. Atheism referred to Christianity. Christians do not accept the Platonic concept of a single transcendent God who is the source of creation, so the atheist tag can be justified from Julian’s point of view though to our way of thinking it is a bit confusing. 

Many temples had been attacked and destroyed during the previous forty years, many converted into churches. Julian’s love and veneration for the gods of his country is evident, and he must have found the evidence of this desecration heartbreaking. But the buildings could be restored – the loss of the tradition was much harder to make good. This culture, once destroyed, could not be revived. Julian himself, being brought as a Christian must have felt keenly this break with the past. But at least as emperor, he could now save what was left. But it was not to be. His reign was not even to last two years, and when he was gone it was not long before the destruction resumed. Steadily more severe laws against pagan practice were brought in, stripping them of rights and forbidding their literature.Paganism did not die out, it was killed.

Much of our culture has been lost forever. Julian failed to save it, but at least he put up a fight, and a visible one. Julian will certainly never be forgotten. His Hymn to Cybele is both a window on a world that has been destroyed and a reminder that people cared deeply about it.

Orwell, Tolkien, C.S.Lewis and the Nazis

My three favourite twentieth century English authors are Orwell, Tolkien and C.S.Lewis.  It isn’t a perfectly equal trinity though.  I think Orwell and Tolkien are writers of huge genius who will be read for centuries to come.  Lewis I like a lot and enjoy reading, but he isn’t really in the same category.  He can certainly write well and has lots of interesting ideas, but I think he is very much of his time and will get steadily less relevant as the world changes.  He also got a lot of his ideas from the other two.  This doesn’t diminish how much fun you get from reading him.  But originality always commands more respect than derivation, no matter how skilfully done.

But it is interesting to consider that all three men were pretty close to each other in age and to some extent background, and so had fairly similar lives and influences.  The major events of their lives were the two wars.  They would all have followed the rise of the Nazis in Germany and were all influenced by it.  But they all developed their ideas and outlooks beforehand, and so responded in the light of their prior positions.

For Orwell, whatever else he had in the way of problems and issues, had no difficulty in working  out his position towards the Nazis.   Orwell was a socialist, a moderniser and a believer in progress.  The Nazis were clearly opposed to everything he believed in.  He was very acute in working out the psychology of it all.  He bemoans they way some people seem to have a need to belong which is transferred to enjoying marching around carrying flags and the like.  He spotted the link between nationalism and totalitarianism, pointing out that it was significant that Hitler was Austrian.  He was close to being a German but wasn’t actually one himself, and so could work out what made Germans tick in a way an insider would be blinded to by familiarity.  He suggested than any English dictator would probably be an Ulsterman for the same reason. 

He was also well aware of the link between organised religion and the Nazis. He had seen the support given to the fascists in the Spanish Civil War by the Catholic Church.  He was an atheist himself and was quite happy to regard the established church and less mainstream irrational belief systems as being much the same to all intents and purposes.  Basically the Nazis were his perfect enemies.  They were conservative, backward looking and wrapped up all their illiberal prejudices in a medieval mumbo jumbo.  

Although they didn’t give Orwell any ideological problems, living near and working in London through the war they did give him some practical issues in the form of dropping bombs on him.  The solution to this was pretty straight forward, like most people at the time Orwell did what he could to help his country’s war effort.  Being a writer he used his skills in producing propaganda.  More widely he used his literary gifts to promote the causes he believed in.  Even before his two hugely influential novels he was well known both for his skill putting words together and for his left wing political sympathies.  Once the war was over and the Nazis were no longer an immediate threat he turned his attention to the problems with his own beliefs.  Everyone on the left has to come to terms with the fact that if you want to create a fairer, more equal and more tolerant society, it doesn’t come for free.  You have to restrict people’s economic and social freedoms to some extent which can work against their individual liberty.  How do you make sure you don’t go too far?  These were the issues to which Orwell turned his mind, and important and serious stuff it is.

But while he was getting on with fighting totalitarian fascism and keeping socialism from becoming totalitarian, he didn’t totally neglect straight forward conservatives.  He was well aware of C.S.Lewis and there are two mentions of him print that make this clear.  (There may be more but I have only found these two.)  First off is a scathing dismissal of a radio programme by C.S.Lewis.  Orwell derides the false chuminess of the tone, and warns that religious viewpoints often sound a lot more comforting than they work out in practice.  He also reviews That Hideous Strength, one of C.S.Lewis’ science fiction trilogy.  This he effortlessly damns by faint praise.  He acknowledges it is well written but draws attention to the supernatural elements in the plot, saying that these let down what otherwise might have been a decent novel.

I feel sorry for anyone who took Orwell’s review at face value and spent good money in a time of great austerity to buy the book on the grounds that it was basically okay apart from a bit of magic here and there.  The magic is the whole point of the book and if you don’t like it you are going to be very disappointed.  Lewis must have read the review – being noticed by Orwell was a compliment in itself.  But he wouldn’t have been fooled by the apparently positive tone. He would have realised straight away that Orwell was dismissing his fundamental world view as redundant and out of date.

At the time, the political situation that enabled Orwell to be both a radical calling for change and a leading figure in the establishment had the effect of isolating Lewis, a natural conservative if ever one was born.  And I think the Nazis were a big part of the problem.  Considering how big an impact they had on the times in which he lived, it is surprising how little Lewis talks about them.  But I don’t think he ignored them.  I suspect he agonised over them.  And the root of the problem was, as it often is, religion.  Orwell is well aware of the Nazis general religious approach, but is more interested in other things about them.  Lets face it, there is a lot to talk about when it comes to Nazis.

Despite the huge numbers of television documentaries, books, and now websites and podcasts about the Second World War, it is surprising how little coverage the religious attitudes of the Nazi’s gets.  In fact, it gets so little coverage that it is often grossly misrepresented.  There is the Hitler was an atheist myth for example.  This one goes roughly Hitler was a bad man, therefore he wasn’t a Christian.  And so as he wasn’t a Christian and was a bad man, this shows that non-Christians are bad men.  That atheists are specifically criticised by Hitler in Mein Kampf ought to be enough to sink this one, but I suspect it probably won’t.   But detail is usually the enemy of a good debating point.  This didn’t stop the Pope insinuating that rational belief systems predisposed people to totalitarian forms of government in a speech he gave in his recent visit to Britain.  I dare say if challenged he would have said that he was thinking of the Soviet Union.  But in Britain the first totalitarian system most people think of is the Nazis.  They were the ones that dropped all those bombs on us after all.

The pope’s point was an unpleasant one, but at least he wears a silly hat so we know not take him seriously.  But he raises an interesting point.  For Orwell it didn’t matter too much what the details of the Nazis’ beliefs were.  They were clearly wrong ones.  Likewise, he took no trouble to investigate what exactly Lewis was going on about in That Hideous Strength.  It wasn’t true and it ruined the suspense of the plot. What more needs to be said?  This is a reasonable position if you dismiss supernatural beliefs.  Most rational people reject religion along with homeopathy, astrology, flying saucers and so on.  But to completely twist the pope’s actual message into the precise opposite of what he was saying, are there particular irrational beliefs that lend themselves to totalitarianism?

Because nobody exists that accepts all non-rational beliefs.  You just wouldn’t have a head big enough to hold them all in.  Christians in particular are generally very snooty about mixing their particular beliefs with ones from other traditions.  You have to take the whole package and give it largely exclusive adherence.  You can’t really be a Christian and also believe in other stuff.  You might get away with reading your horoscope, or wishing someone luck.  But you can’t back up your prayers with a sacrifice to the Earth Mother to be on the safe side. But this is tough.  Most people in history have been a lot more eclectic in their approach.  Look at Japan for example. It is quite standard for people to accept both Shintoism and Buddhism.  The process of blending religious systems even has a name.  It is called syncretism.  It seems a bit odd if you are imbued in the Christian tradition, but syncretism does have a long history.  The most blatant example was the god Serapis in ancient Alexandria.  He was a blend of Jupiter and Osiris, and was created by one of Alexander the Great’s generals.   The idea was to come up with a deity that suited both Greeks and Egyptians in his new kingdom.  Everyone knew that he had done this, but that didn’t stop it becoming a very popular cult.   

So to go back to the religion of the Nazis, they were syncretists.  The idea was to meld ancient Paganism, Medieval Christianity, Hinduism and modern Catholicism.  This sounds crazy, and indeed on one level it is indeed crazy.  But it had a certain logic.  For a start, the pagan elements linked the Nazis to the historic German gods.  This gave them a patina of nationalism, and also tied in with Hitler’s love of Wagner.  They also had some ideas about the Aryan race having descended from refugees from Atlantis.  This was where the interest in Hinduism originated, and where they got the swastika symbol from.  The story was that the Atlanteans (or whatever they would be called) had escaped to the Himalayas.  Himmler sent an expedition to Tibet to investigate this.  Probably mystified by the whole process, Tibetan villagers were induced to have their skulls measured.  They also searched southern France looking for the Holy Grail.

It would be easy to laugh at this kind of thing, but remember this is the Nazis we are talking about.  They meant business.  They took this kind of thing seriously.  They even used astrology and dousing to deploy their submarines once the war started. But they also wanted to keep the Church onside as well.  This wasn’t a pushover, but they did manage to get formal support from the Catholic organisation and many of the protestant denominations as well.  It wouldnt’ be fair to say they had wholehearted support from all Christians.  There certainly were individuals who showed great personal courage in resisting the Nazis.   There were also individuals who went out of their way to help the Nazis.  In fact the famous exit of the leading Nazis to South America after the war was facilitated by high ranking Catholic officials.  But the Nazis got enough co-operation from enough churches to portray themselves as Christians.

In fact Hitler clearly had ideas for Christianity.  He was from the Catholic tradition himself, but he went out of his way to speak positively of Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible into German and announced plans to unite all the protestant churches of Germany.  Churches and cathedrals were used for Nazi ceremonies.  Of course we can’t know what the long term plan was.  It might have been to steadily remove the Christian element and replace it with more pagan ones.  But if so, Hitler was offering a lot of hostages to fortune in his frequent claims to be a Christian himself.  I think it is way more likely that he planned a national Christian church into which pagan and occult elements were inserted to give it a distinctly national character.  

The Nazi obsession with paganism is most clearly visible in their use of runes.  The most famous one is now so familiar you hardly notice it.  The SS used a pair of the Sig runes in their symbol and you see them in every war film.  This symbolised victory. (Or something like that – the Nazis were not too scholarly about this kind of thing.)   But runes turned up quite often in Nazi imagery.

The Nazis were not the only people interested in this sort of stuff.  Tolkien and Lewis were both medievalists who read Old English poems like Beowulf for fun.  They had reacted with horrors to the mechanisation of suffering during the First World War.  The general ugliness of the Britain they lived in thanks to the reliance on coal as an energy source and bricks as the main building material probably didn’t help.  They retreated into the same past that the Nazis were ransacking.  

Neither C.S.Lewis or Tolkien had the remotest sympathy with Nazism.  They were decent compassionate human beings who would have had no truck the brutality of the Nazi regime.  And leaving that aside, unlike the Nazis they actually did care about getting things right. So they had a much deeper and more rounded picture of what the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages were actually like.  Tolkien even had the chance to make his position clear.  A German publisher wanted to translate the Hobbit in 1938.  But the publisher didn’t want to publish anything by a Jewish author and asked the question directly. Tolkien replied that he regretted not having any blood from that talented race but objected to the impertinent question and refused to go on with the deal.  He lost out on royalties in favour of his honour.  But it showed a very particular frame of mind. To attribute talent to an ethnic grouping is not particularly objectionable, but it is a form of racism when you think about it.

It is also interesting that Nazi Germany was the first country to show an interest in the Hobbit.  Bilbo Baggins is hardly a good example of the Aryan superman, so the appeal was not a direct one.  But think of it in terms of a syncretic pagan-christian project and it begins to make perfect sense.  Distinctly northern European dwarves with rune maps looking for a dragon’s treasure.  Wagner comes to mind straight away.  And it is such a moral story too.

The Hobbit, set in an imaginary world, is one thing.  The Silmarillion is another altogether.  Tolkien produces a whole set of gods controlled by one overarching God.  It is a pre-Christian world so there is no Christ in it.  But there are plenty of heroic warrior figures with germanic sounding names wandering around doing heroic warrior stuff.  The Nazis would have loved it.  There is plenty for Christians to love as well, since the morality all comes directly from the Christian tradition.  But it would really appeal to a Neoplatonist.  Tolkien seems to have lifted big chunks of Platonic thought to give his creation a sort of intellectual coherence.  I have to say that if I didn’t know Tolkien was specifically a Christian I wouldn’t have worked it out even from my many re-readings of the Silmarillion.  Once you know it, you can see it.  But there is plenty of other stuff in there too.  In other words, if Tolkien had set out to create a bit of work to help with a syncretic objective he really couldn’t have done much better.

Was Tolkien a closet syncretist, aiming to reconcile Paganism and Christianity?   If he was, you could understand why he might have wanted to keep it to himself.  With the Nazis trying to do the same thing while trashing Europe there was clearly a risk of things being misunderstood.  Much better to withdraw into his own world.  He seems to have been the kind of self reliant individual who would be happy to do this.  And if you are going to withdraw into your own world, well he had quite a good one worked out to do it it.

C.S.Lewis was a much more outgoing character than his friend Tolkien, and also much keener on pushing his ideas.  But he too seems to have had a real interest in things on the margins of Christianity and beyond.  By contrast, he was remarkably uninterested in the doctrinal issues within Christianity.  He joined the least ideological denomination going, the broadest of broad churches, the Church of England.  All of his explicitly Christian writing that I have read is geared towards advising the lay Christian how to be a good Christian, or coming up with good reasons why non-Christians should sign up.  I suppose that avoiding controversies within the faith is a sound tactic if you want to win over new converts.  But he wrote loads and tackles all kinds of subjects, often coming up with very original ways of looking at them.  That he never takes any interest in internal Christian debates in his writing suggests to me that he himself simply wasn’t interested in them.   (Actually on reflection, I have just remembered what he wrote about Purgatory.  Basically he said it was optional.  It was more convincing in his words, but that was clearly not so much ignoring a doctrinal difficulty as positively arguing it away.)

 When you look at his other interests things get even more intriguing.  He was interested in philosophy and classical myths.  He was also interested in the stars and astrology.  And although he probably wouldn’t have claimed to actually believe in any of that stuff, I can’t help thinking that it must have at least influenced him.  And again, deep down did he dream of a single uniting religion pulling in elements from both Christianity and classical sources?  Again, given what the Nazis were up to if he did have that sort of notion you could understand why he wouldn’t want to shout it from the rooftop.   In fact he did go up on the rooftop.  That was where he kept his telescope that he used to watch the planets at night.  As I say, he was really interested in this stuff.

At the very least, unifying people who believe in something against people who believe in nothing must have seemed like a good move to someone like Lewis in the war years and afterwards.  Writing apologetics for Christianity didn’t seem to be achieving very much.  Church attendance was declining.  People like Orwell who didn’t just disbelieve in God, but could hardly even find the time to mention Him were making all the running.  Being criticised is bad enough.  Being ignored is intolerable.

The thing was, Orwell was just so good.  He could write clearly and understood what he was writing about.  And he got results.  Animal Farm was published in 1945 and rapidly became a phenomenon translated into multiple languages.   It got over the message to a huge number of people.  Lewis published a book called Miracles in 1947 that argued form first principles that miracles were in fact possible by adapting David Hume’s notions of…. well who cares what the argument was. It isn’t a bad one actually, but nobody was reading it.   

Lewis had attempted to sneak his ideas into a wider audience via his trilogy of science fiction novels.  These had not been tremendously successful.  The first two aren’t bad reads, though I wouldn’t want to read them again.  The third one despite the good review from Orwell is virtually unreadable.  I can’t actually remember how it ends, though whether that is because I have forgotten or gave up I don’t know.  But in any case the least appealing thing about them is their overt religious message.  

There can’t be much more depressing than writing a book to popularise Christianity which turns out to be unpopular.  Meanwhile Orwell showed how to do it. In 1949 he released 1984,  a genuinely popular science fiction novel with a serious purpose.  The Devil it seemed, not only had the best tunes but the best plot lines, syntax. pacing and ability to reach a wide audience.

I think this woke up Lewis.  He had been working on some stories for children since 1939, but it was now he chose to get them into shape for publication.  They were the now highly familiar Narnia chronicles.  There were a number of reasons he might have held back earlier.  For a start, they featured talking animals very heavily.  Fair enough for something for very young children, but not really an obvious way of carrying a serious message.  But Orwell had done it in Animal Farm and it had not done his reputation any harm at all.  There was also the problem that the stories were not exactly mainstream Christian stories.  In fact they were shot through with syncretism.  Bacchus even turns up in one of them.  There is also a thinly disguised Saturn sleeping in a cave in one of them, and who turns up to destroy Narnia in the last of the series.  The last book, the Last Battle, is the one that deviates most conspicuously from Biblical Christianity.  Narnia is dispatched by one of the pagan gods in a huge battle,  Christ in the form of Aslan carries out the judgement role assigned to him, but sinners don’t end up getting judged.  Instead, they simply don’t understand what is going on and end up living in their own world unaware of the wonders about them.  Its an appealing way of getting out of the need for a Hell.  But it is also far closer to the idea of the soul forgetting its divinity as per Neoplatonic ideas than the damnation us unbelievers are normally allocated Christian theology.

So was Lewis a syncretist?  There are plenty of reasons to think not.  For a start he was pretty clear about his Christian affiliation.  He was pretty respectful of other beliefs.  But that has become a characteristic of quite a lot of Christians.  The intolerant zealotry of former centuries is a lot cooler now.  And he certainly never let on that he was anything other than an orthodox believer.  

But we can say that he was aware of the issue.  Towards the end of the Last Battle, we get a full on example of the dangers of syncretism handed to us up front.  The Narnians’ enemies the Calormenes come up with the notion that their god, Tash, is the same person as Aslan.   They call him Tashlan.  This initiative doesn’t work largely because Tash himself makes an appearance.  So that would seem to settle the matter – Lewis was not just not a syncretist, he was positively opposed to it.

Or was he?  The problem with the Tashlan notion was that both Tash and Aslan existed, and were not the same being.  Elsewhere in the stories, the Voyage of the Dawntreader I think it is, Aslan tells Susan that she will have to get to know him by another name in her own world.  Not quite syncretism, but sort of getting on that way.  If the same being can have multiple formats in different places then couldn’t different religions be looking at the same thing from a different angle?  And as critics have pointed out, Aslan does seem to be very different in different books.  Lewis did write very quickly and often in a single draft, but even so I find it hard not to believe that this is a flaw.  To my mind it was quite deliberate and gives Aslan a lot more depth than he would have if he was more consistent.

But given the example of Nazis, maybe he just didn’t dare say out loud that he was a syncretist.  The science fiction novels that nobody reads are full of some seriously weird stuff.  Merlin even shows up in the last one.  Once again like the Silmarillion, if you read them not knowing Lewis was a Christian there is a good chance you wouldn’t realise. Everything is in code.

But it is the Narnia books that are far and away the most interesting part of Lewis’ output.  They are beautifully written and full of really interesting stories that force you to keep turning the pages.  The Christian symbolism is well hidden enough to not spoil the plots. And his cheerful ransacking of classical mythology and folklore along with his own vivid imagination gives you loads of new and surprising characters to meet in every book.  It is a rich and varied experience, and one that goes well beyond the need to get over some biblical ideas in a palatable form.  And when you get to the very end notice this.  Once Narnia has passed away the characters themselves pass up to a new and better Narnia.  But this is not their final destination, there is another even better one beyond once they have grown enough.  If the death and rebirth of Aslan on the stone table in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a great illustration of the death and rebirth of Christ, the continual ascendancy of the characters to ever higher realms at the end of the Last Battle is a superb depiction of the Neoplatonic idea of the ascent of the soul.