Ancient World Review

The Drought Theory Of The Collapse Of Classic Maya Civilization

Video from 2015. Ancient Apocalypse was a 2001 BBC documentary series.

Note: "Dick Gill [featured in the documentary] was a most unusual person to put forward a bold new theory explaining the collapse of Mayan civilisation. When he started his hunt for clues, he was actually a banker." Source: BBC (2011). Gill spend a considerable amount of time investigating his theory that a major drought led to the collapse and believed that he had found conclusive evidence that this is what had happened:

"The drought theory holds that rapid climate change in the form of severe drought brought about the Classic Maya collapse. According to the particular version put forward by Gill in The Great Maya Droughts ... '[Studies of] Yucatecan lake sediment cores ... provide unambiguous evidence for a severe 200-year drought from AD 800 to 1000 ... the most severe in the last 7,000 years ... precisely at the time of the Maya Collapse." (Wikipedia)

The drought theory seems to be widely accepted now. LIDAR scans support the theory, according to Wikipedia, and Gill's evidence is apparently pretty solid -- I haven't found any sources questioning the evidence itself. Still, it's possible that drought may not be enough to explain what actually happened.

"David Webster, a critic of [Gill's] megadrought theory, says that much of the evidence provided by Gill comes from the northern Yucatán and not the southern part of the peninsula, where Classic Maya civilization flourished. He also states that if water sources were to have dried up, then several city-states would have moved to other water sources. That Gill suggests that all water in the region would have dried up and destroyed Maya civilization is a stretch, according to Webster, although Webster does not have a precise competing theory explaining the Classic Maya Collapse." (Wikipedia)

Earthquakes may have played a big part in the collapse as well:

"A study published in Scientific Reports in 2016 showed that between 750 and 900 a cluster of four earthquakes affected the wet tropical mountains south of the Yucatán lowlands, which are not vulnerable to drought, and include such important cities as Quirigua and Copán. These earthquakes left detectable destruction in several Maya cities and led to the abandonment of Quirigua. The study hypothesizes that repeated destruction combined with declining trade with the Maya kingdoms of the Yucatán lowlands to propagate the collapse to the southern part of the Maya realm." (Wikipedia)

Related: Scientists Measure Severity Of Drought During The Maya Collapse

The Battle Of Tours & The Modern Islamification Of Europe

Charles Martel's victory over the Moors/Saracens at the Battle of Tours, one of the most critical battles in the history of the West, "rescued our ancestors of Britain and our neighbors of Gaul from the civil and religious yoke of the Koran," according to Gibbon. The importance of this battle can't be overestimated.

"Few battles are remembered over 1000 years after they are fought, but an exception is the battle of Poitiers [another name for the battle of Tours] in 732, where Charles Martel turned back a Muslim raid that, had it been allowed to continue, might have led to the conquest of Gaul." -- Fighting Techniques of the Medieval World, p. 19. Note: this battle of Poitiers shouldn't be confused with the battle of Poitiers that took place during the Hundred Years' War.

The battle of Tours checked the Muslims' advances into western Europe after they had carried out a long series of destructive incursions into north Africa, Spain, the Near East, and eastern Europe. In 719 AD, the forces of al-Hurr al-Thaqafi captured the southern French city of Narbonne, but were subsequently defeated by Duke Eudo of Aquitaine:

"The Muslims withdrew only to return in two years with a far larger army, which defeated Eudo and pursued him as far as Tours, the major religious center. In 732, between the towns of Tours and Poitiers, the two armies [the western forces now under the command of Charles Martel] faced one another for seven days without fighting," according to A History of the Middle Ages, by John M. Riddle (p. 147). The Muslims ran out of patience and attacked first, but "could not penetrate the Franks' lines." By nightfall, the Muslims withdrew.

If Martel hadn't defeated the Moors, western Europe would probably be Muslim today, but everything that goes around comes around and it's starting to look like the sacrifices those Frankish soldiers made were all in vain. Europe has degenerated to the point where its corrupt leaders are now welcoming the Muslims with open arms and European liberals are cheering them as they pour into their countries.

Video from 2015.

I wonder what Martel would have said if he'd known that huge crowds of Muslims would be praying in the streets of modern Paris, blocking traffic in a passive statement of political power with the full cooperation of the authorities? Would he have bothered to fight the Saracens if he'd known that modern Europeans would simply invite the Muslims into their countries, all in the name of "diversity" and "multiculturalism?"

Video from 2010.

1,283 years after the battle of Tours, the Muslims are achieving through immigration what they couldn't achieve through warfare in the Middle Ages. The Islamification of Europe is happening at an incredible rate. It was already well advanced before the latest "refugee crisis," which may turn out to be the modern equivalent of the Germanic tribes pouring into the Roman Empire.

Video from 2015.

The "barbarians" who overran Rome had a lot in common with the Romans, however. Islam is a foreign and hostile religion, totally incompatible with western civilization. If something doesn't happen soon, Europe is finished, assuming that it isn't too late already. Betrayed by their own leaders, demoralized by the poison of Cultural Marxism, the decaying welfare states of western Europe seem to be committing cultural suicide. Are we witnessing the birth of the future state of Eurabia? Don't think it can't happen, because it is happening.

Charles Martel had it easy. He only had to stop a military invasion. The current crisis is something completely different.

Activists Demand More "Social Justice" In Medieval Studies

Video from 2018. More on Rachel Fulton Brown here.

"A group of medieval studies scholars is threatening to boycott next year's International Congress on Medieval Studies to protest the rejection of sessions proposed by 'Medievalists of Color.'" Source: Campus Reform (2018).

"Conference organizers, however, insist that workshops like 'How to Be a White Ally in Medieval Studies 101' and 'Toxic Medievalisms' were rejected based on standard criteria such as lack of intellectual justification." (See below)

Comment: Aided and abetted by cowardly administrators and leftist academics (is there any other kind?), the Cultural Marxists have almost completely destroyed the Liberal Arts programs at most universities in the West. They've even been trying to worm their way into traditionally immune STEM fields.

These parasites have been going after Medieval Studies for some time now:

"A growing concern among Medieval Studies scholars is that the field is too dominated by white, male scholars who appreciate its link to Christian values and the fact that it’s been somewhat resistant to identity politics changes seen in other humanities departments." Source: College Fix (2017). (Emphasis added)

The Social Justice Warriors are trying to undermine any field dominated by whites, especially white males seen as being "too sympathetic" to Christianity. That's what's really happening here. It's all part of the general assault on "whiteness" and men and Western Civilization. And the SJWs can't stand it when they're faced with any kind of resistance. They keep protesting and protesting until they get their way.

In the case of the International Congress of Medieval Studies, the July 19 Campus Reform story quoted at the top of this article makes it sound like the conference organizers still have the sense to resist the demands for idiotic workshops like "How To Be A White Ally In Medieval Studies," but according to a statement (PDF) I found on the ICMS' website (dated July 20), it sounds like the steering committee is ready to cave in:

"We are also willing to reconsider all four of the rejected sessions proposed to be co-sponsored by the Fellowship of Medievalists of Color for the 2019 Congress, should we be contacted by the sponsoring groups who proposed them."

If this keeps up, it won't be long until Medieval Studies programs have been transformed into discussion groups about white privilege, gender fluidity, BLM activism, postmodernism and the politics of intersectionality. The best professors will leave or take early retirement. Enrollment, such as it is, will drop as the best programs are systematically undermined. This pattern has repeated itself endlessly with other schools all around Europe and the United States.

Luckily, the universities don't have a monopoly on knowledge. If you're interested in the Middle Ages, you can learn just as much, if not more, about the period through a program of self-directed reading. There are still a lot of good history books out there, especially the ones written before the SJW blight started to spread its poison through the system, and you won't have to take a mandatory diversity-training workshop before you're allowed to read them.

Related: The Unbearable White of Medieval Studies.

The Education Of Julian The Apostate

Flavius Claudius Iulianus Augustus (331 - 363 AD) was a great man and one of the last true Romans. He is more commonly known today as Julian the Apostate, the name he was given by the Christian church for his determined attempt to restore paganism in the dying Roman empire.

Born in Constantinople in 331, Julian was "placed in the care of an Arian bishop" as a child and "from 342 was confined for six years on an imperial estate in Cappadocia," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised). "He impressed his Christian tutors there as a gifted and pious pupil, but his reading of the Greek classics was inclining him in private to other gods."

Christians who read and think too much tend to lose their faith, even if they're "heretics" like the Arians. "In 351, as a student of philosophy, [Julian] encountered pagan Neoplatonists and was initiated as a theurgist by Maximus of Ephesus," a Neoplatonist philosopher and magician who should be commemorated by pagans everywhere for the role he played in converting Julian to the traditional beliefs of the ancients.

Related: The philosophy of Neoplatonism.

Julian played a double game for years while waiting to see if he would be executed or made emperor. "For the next ten years Julian's pagan 'conversion' remained a prudently kept secret," according to the OCD. "He continued his studies in Asia and later at Athens until summoned to Milan by [Constantius II] to be married to the emperor's sister Helena and proclaimed Caesar with charge over Gaul and Britain."

Julian fought successful campaigns against the Alamanni and Franks that made him very popular with the army, which mutinied and declared him emperor after Constantius "ordered the transfer of choice detachments to the east..." (OCD). Luckily, civil war was avoided when Constantius died later that same year (361) and Julian took over Rome.

He publicly declared his paganism, purged the imperial court, issued a declaration of general religious tolerance that "foreshadowed a vigorous program of pagan activism in the interest of Hellenism," restored "the temples and finances of the ancestral cults," and established "a hierarchy of provincial and civic priesthoods." During the process, "Christian churches and clergy lost the financial subsidies and privileges gained under Constantine and his successors."

Julian discriminated in favor of pagans, but, unlike the Christians themselves, he didn't believe in using violence to persecute the people who didn't share his beliefs. Instead, he tried to marginalize Christianity, partly through argument, such as in his essay Against the Galileans, which is still well worth reading.

Julian's "learning and literary talent" as well as his control of the Roman legal apparatus could have changed the future course of the world in dramatic ways, but he was killed in a "minor skirmish" in his war against Persia after only three years in power. Wounded on June 26, 363, he died three days later on June 29, a  day which should also be commemorated by pagans.

By the time of Julian, Rome was already in serious trouble and the western empire would collapse around a hundred years later. Ultimately, Julian was fighting a rearguard action against Christianity, but his reforms might have made a difference if he had lived longer. After all, Christianity owed much of its influence to official support and a lot of important people converted in order to gain the favor of the court. Once that support had been removed, who knows what might have happened?

The real Rome was a pagan, not a Christian, empire. In Julian's day, the empire was being destabilized and distorted beyond recognition by a foreign religion and Julian might have been able to turn that around. 

"One of the persistent themes of Julian's antagonism towards the Christian church was his belief that they were troublemakers, causing political discord in any community where they formed the majority: 'they turn everything upside down.'" -- from the introduction to "Julian's Against the Galileans," edited and translated by R. Joseph Hoffmann, Prometheus Books, 2004.

Here's to Flavius Claudius Iulianus Augustus. Rest in peace.

Christian Basilica In Paris No-Go Suburbs Heavily Vandalized

Video from 2012.

"The over 800-year-old Basilica of Saint-Denis in France was heavily vandalized this week, with vandals smashing stained glass windows and severely damaging the nearly 200-year-old organ." Source: Breitbart.

"The destruction was discovered on Sunday morning by the basilica’s organist, who found that the engine of the organ had been damaged along with other parts of the massive instrument, designed between 1834 and 1841, Le Parisien reports."

"...The vandalism comes just under a year after the Basilica was stormed by far-left activists and illegal migrants who occupied the place of worship to protest a law directed at curbing illegal migration into France."

Video from March, 2018.

Note: I'm guessing that Muslims committed this sacrilege, but French leftists could have been involved as well. The left has vandalized Saint-Denis in the past:

"In July 1793, heralding the first anniversary of the French Republic that ousted the Bourbon monarchy, the new government issued a decree that shocked Europe and haunts France still. To punish the vanity of the deposed 'tyrants' and to cleanse the nation of their memory, the National Convention [first government of the French Revolution] ordered the destruction of the ancient royal tombs, most of which were in the basilica of St-Denis, near Paris—for centuries France’s royal necropolis, deconsecrated in 1793 and its Benedictine monks disbanded." Source: Yale - Center for the Study of Material & Visual Cultures of Religion.

The radical left has always been a problem, but Muslims are definitely enriching French culture.

Related: French church is the ninth in 11 days vandalized across the country. (Some of these attacks were apparently robberies instead of deliberate acts of desecration.)

Terrorism & Neglect: Current Threats To French Gothic Cathedrals

"French Gothic architecture is a style which emerged in France in 1140, and was dominant until the mid-16th century. The most notable examples are the great Gothic cathedrals of France, including Notre Dame Cathedral, Chartres Cathedral, and Amiens Cathedral. Its main characteristics were the search for verticality, or height, and the innovative use of flying buttresses and other architectural innovations to distribute the weight of the stone structures to supports on the outside, allowing unprecedented height and volume ..." (Wikipedia)

Comment: If France becomes a Muslim country, something that could very well happen if current trends continue, these beautiful old cathedrals could end up being destroyed or turned into mosques or museums like the Hagia Sophia, the former Greek Orthodox cathedral in Istanbul. There have already been several terrorist attacks right outside Notre Dame cathedral and how long will it be before some ISIS-inspired or connected scumbag tries to blow up the cathedral itself?

Report from 2016. More information here.

Video from 2017. More information here.

In the case of Notre Dame, there may be no need to blow up the cathedral since the French state (which owns the cathedral and seventy other churches in Paris) has been doing a good job of letting it fall into disrepair:

"For 13 million visitors per year, Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris soars in splendor. But beyond its façade, look closely, and you'll see that the majestic medieval monument is falling apart. Now, a foundation in France hopes Americans will donate money to help save the place that's home to some of Catholicism's most important relics, including the crown of thorns said to have been worn by Jesus." Source: CBS News (2018).

I'm not sure if any renovation work has actually started. More information about the damage to the cathedral and how to make donations can be found at the Friends of Notre-Dame de Paris site.

How Far Back In Time Could You Go And Still Understand English?

Comment: Another change which has occurred over time -- most of it fairly recently -- has been a radical simplification in our written language. Take popular novels, for instance. As recently as a century ago, they commonly used longer and more complex sentences, and the material in general was denser, more detailed and requiring more concentration to read. For example, compare the writing style in Dracula, Bram Stoker's 1897 masterpiece, with that in most contemporary bestsellers. Modern books tend to use much shorter, simpler sentences and paragraphs and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they also use smaller vocabularies as well.

Much of this simplification has occurred as a result of the dumbing down of the schools, the general decline in reading, and the diminishing attention spans that have gone along with the rise of computers and the internet. Now that we're living in the "information age," the majority of the population doesn't seem to have the focus to read much of anything that requires sustained attention, and by "sustained" I mean anything that goes on for more than a few sentences at most. So how much information are people actually absorbing?

Related: As Attention Spans Get Shorter, Content Gets Even Shorter

This decline in reading has been called an "epochal transformation," but I think it would be more accurate to call it a symptom of the catastrophic decline of western civilization. In response, the tendency in publishing, at least in fields aimed at a general audience, has been to push for shorter sentences, shorter paragraphs and faster-paced writing, a trend that can be clearly seen in writing for the internet.

The claim is often made that traditional books and newspapers are in decline because people have shifted to internet reading, but I really doubt if most people are actually reading anything but the shortest pieces on the internet. Web surfers skim; they don't read. That takes too long. Regular English is giving way to textspeak, an even more radical simplification of the language driven by the widespread use of smartphones. The situation has gotten so bad that some linguists think emojis may evolve into an entirely new language.

The evolution from Old English, which might as well be a foreign language, to modern English is nothing compared to the transformation which is taking place now. What we are seeing isn't just another step in the natural evolution of English, but the rapid disintegration of English and perhaps the whole concept of language itself. If this keeps up, our descendants will be living in the ruins of a collapsed civilization, speaking in one-syllable grunts and scribbling emojis on the walls of buildings left over from a time they don't know anything about because they can't read the few history books still moldering in the wreckage of ancient libraries.

The Digital Dark Age

Comment: There's no need for the government and computer industry to "develop practical solutions" to the problem of long-term information storage. The problem is the direct result of the proliferation of digital technology and the solution already exists -- acid-free paper and archival storage methods. Nothing's perfect, of course, but I can guarantee that if you take reasonable care of it, a paper copy of a document will last a lot longer than a digital copy of the same document, not to mention the computer that it's stored on. And by "a lot longer," I'm talking about decades, if not centuries or even millennia.

A thousand years from now, if any historians still exist, how much will they be able to reconstruct about our civilization? Most likely, this period will be a digital black hole. They'll have to try to figure out who we were and what we were like by studying our garbage dumps. Buried in landfills along with all the TVs, Coke cans, dead batteries, plastic bags, hypodermic needles and toxic sludge, the rusted remains of millions of laptops and smartphones will probably be the only things left behind by the Age of Information.

Related:

A Digital Dark Ages? Challenges In The Preservation Of Electronic Information (PDF)

Coming Soon: A Digital Dark Age? (CBS News 2003)

The Kali Yuga

The Hindus believe that we're living in the Kali Yuga, an apocalyptic Dark Age ruled by the demon Kali, the source of all evil and destruction. The Kali Yuga, also known as the "Age of Vice," is a period of warfare, chaos, social decline and spiritual decadence brought about by Man's separation from the gods. Kali himself is frequently pictured as a deranged figure dancing on corpses and wearing human heads as jewelry. I don't believe in demons, but this bloodthirsty lunatic with ten arms is the perfect symbol of human history.

Most writers use the term Kali Yuga to mean "end times" or the "last days," but technically this isn't accurate. The Hindus see Time as a cycle of four ages or Yugas known as the Yuga Cycle. The other three periods are called the Satya Yuga, the Treta Yuga and the Dvapara Yuga, and they all go spinning around like a cosmic ferris wheel. So the Kali Yuga isn't the end of the world. It's just the end of one cycle and the beginning of the next.

The Yuga Cycle describes a fall from grace--a loss of enlightenment. The first age, the Satya Yuga, is a golden age of supreme goodness when the gods rule and the average human lifespan is thousands of years long, but, like the Garden of Eden, it's all downhill from there. The other Yugas follow in order, the gods withdraw, the situation deteriorates and bottoms out with the Kali Yuga, then the whole thing starts all over again. Time is a circle--an infinite, recurring progression of Yugas in which the gods advance and retreat like the tides or the phases of the moon.

Now, this is good stuff and very ancient, but is it an accurate description of Reality? That probably sounds like a strange question to ask. The Yuga Cycle is a symbolic, mythical cosmology based on the Hindu concepts of samsara, karmic cycles, rebirth, reincarnation and cyclic change. Taking it literally misses the point, but is it possible that Time is actually circular? Does the Yuga Cycle or at least its concept of Time have some basis in fact? Personally, I think the idea of circular Time is more interesting than the linear Christian view of history as moving in a straight line from Creation to Apocalypse, but I don't see any evidence that the universe actually runs in cycles like this.

Time is a one-way thing. The future changes into the present which changes into the past in an infinite stream of Becoming. There are cycles in nature, but they're more like recurring patterns with thousands of variations and they never repeat themselves in exactly the same way. The fossil evidence shows a gradual evolution from the simple to the complex punctuated by catastrophes, mass extinctions and sudden bursts of new life forms like the Cambrian Explosion. If there are cycles in nature, they are cycles of chaos in the mathematical sense. The gods of this world are fractals and strange attractors.

Human history repeats itself, but only in the sense that high cultures are subject to universal laws of growth and decay as described by Oswald Spengler. Personally, I think there's a good argument that civilization in general has deteriorated over the last two thousand years, but I'm more inclined to blame it on the Second Law of Thermodynamics than the Yuga Cycle. Entropy and chaos are the natural state of things and organized systems tend to deteriorate over time. It takes energy and intelligence to keep a civilization going and both are in short supply.

The Yuga Cycle is appealing because it explains the decay and turmoil we see around us and because it suggests that things will change for the better as the cycle turns once again. Unfortunately, these cycles are so long that they don't really have any meaning for the human race in general, never mind individuals. The Kali Yuga is supposed to have started around 3000 BC and they say it will last for 432,000 years, almost half a million years. Considering the fact that only 5000 years or so have passed since the Kali Yuga started, we've got a long way to go.

Note: Many cultures have legends about a mythical Golden Age and a subsequent fall from grace. For instance, "Both Hesiod and Ovid offered accounts of the successive ages of humanity, which tend to progress from an original, long-gone age in which humans enjoyed a nearly divine existence to the current age of the writer, in which humans are beset by innumerable pains and evils. In the two accounts that survive from ancient Greece and Rome, this degradation of the human condition over time is indicated symbolically with metals of successively decreasing value." (Wikipedia)

Christianity Is Becoming A Third-World Religion

1,707 years after Galerius's Edict of Toleration ended the persecution of Christians which started under Diocletian, the religion that once exercised absolute dominion over the West is rapidly disappearing from Europe. That's not very surprising, though. Even the United States is becoming less religious and Christianity as an institution has been in decline for a very long time now.

The history of Christianity has been one of schisms and fragmentation, a long process of disintegration caused by theological disputes, administrative squabbles and church corruption. When the Catholic church lost its monopoly during the Protestant Reformation, Christianity as a unified institution (1) ceased to exist. Protestantism itself went through a long chain-reaction of schisms with the result that there are now hundreds of Christian denominations in the world.

(1) Early Christianity wasn't a single movement with a unified belief system, but this gradually changed after Catholicism became the official religion of Rome and the church began its centuries-long process of stamping out "heretical movements." Very roughly speaking, and taking into consideration the fact that the eastern and western churches of the time had distinct differences, Christianity survived as a near-monolithic religious institution for about a thousand years before it started to fall apart.

Video from 2016.

The rise of science and the spread of secularism accelerated the decline of Christianity in the West. Some denominations have attempted to "adapt to the times" by dropping or "interpreting" their mythology and transforming themselves into little more than progressive social-work institutions, but these congregations are in rapid decline. Conservative churches which preach a defiant fundamentalism are thriving in the United States and Christianity is apparently exploding in the Third World.

According to Chuck Colson, "the percentage of the world's population that is, at least by name [emphasis added], Christian will be roughly the same in 2050 as it was in 1900. By the middle of this century, there will be three billion Christians in the world -- one and a half times the number of Muslims. In fact, by 2050 there will be nearly as many Pentecostal Christians in the world as there are Muslims today.

"But at that point, only one-fifth of the worlds Christians will be non-Hispanic whites. The typical Christian will be a woman living in a Nigerian village or in a Brazilian shantytown."

Video from 2016.

After almost 2,000 years, the historical trajectory of the rise and fall of Christianity is becoming clear. The religion originated in the Near East, spread into the Roman empire, rose to the height of its power in medieval Europe, then began to fragment and decline. This decline has been a long, complex process that started centuries ago and it has accelerated dramatically during the last hundred years or so in the western, developed world:

"The decline of Christianity is a widespread, ongoing phenomenon that has affected the Western world, developed countries and denominations in the post-World War II era, which have shifted towards a post-Christian, secular, globalized, multicultural, and multireligious society. Infant baptism has declined in many nations. Thousands of churches have had to close or merge and mainline Protestant denominations in the United States lost many members of their congregations." (Wikipedia)

Christianity has been struggling to survive the transition to the so-called postmodern world, itself a symptom of the overall decline of the West. The religion has been under attack for a long time now, but the biggest problem is that religion in general is no longer believable to most educated people. In Europe, even the church's own leaders don't seem to believe its teachings anymore, a sure sign that the religion is in its last stages in countries like Britain, where many churches are being closed, turned into historical museums or converted into mosques. As a result, Christianity is dying off in the West and thriving in the Third World. It will survive in the form of die-hard fundamentalist sects and the various syncretic mixtures of Christianity and native religions now spreading through places like South America, Asia and Africa.

Video from 2010.

Christianity is finished in Europe and declining in the United States, but it will continue to thrive in its original form as a prescientific, preliterate religion in the Third World. "In 1900, 80 percent of Christians lived in Europe and North America. In 2000, 60 percent lived in Africa, Asia and Latin America, with many in developing countries." (Facts and Details) By 2050, if present trends continue, "four out of every 10 Christians in the world will live in sub-Saharan Africa" and "the number of Muslims will nearly equal the number of Christians around the world." (Pew Research Center (2015))

Updated Feb. 2019

Related:

Why There Is No Way Back For Religion In The West.

Is Religion Dying Out?

Where Churches Have Become Temples of Cheese, Fitness and Eroticism