by Professor Revilo P. Oliver

February 1985

The Winter issue of the "Skeptical Inquirer" reports, without skepticism, the findings of a "Gallup Poll," which has no apparent political implications and may be accepted with only the usual formal reservation about the selection of samples and techniques of interrogation. A total of 507 youngsters between the ages of 13 and 17 were asked about their superstitions. It was found that 59% of them believed in "Extra-sensory perception" and 55% believed in the hokus-pokus of astrology. Those findings are depressing, but not inexplicable, since both rackets are being so assiduously peddled to the boobs these days. What was astonishing was that 69% believed in the existence of angels, the supernatural beings that were once prominent in Christian mythology but have been scrapped by most theologians today and are embarrassing to almost all of the others.(*) Angels are decidedly out of fashion now, and what makes the incidence of superstitions about them even more amazing is the fact that belief in them greatly exceeded belief in ghosts (20%) and witches (22%), which are being peddled by some con men today. (* The sources of the Christian notions about angels are complex and I can here mention only essentials. In the part of the Jew-book that Christians call the "Old Testament" there is frequent mention of supernatural beings called ML'KYM (now vocalized as "malachim"), who appear to have been originally like the Arabian jinn, whom everyone remembers from the "Arabian Nights". In the Hebrew tales, the "malachim" are sometimes called gods. ('LHYM, vocalized as "elohim"), but are more often described as the sons of the gods or of the particular god called Yahweh, and they generally appear as agents of the major god or gods and carry out his or their orders, but they sometimes act on their own, as when they copulated with mortal women and became the fathers of the giants. The "malachim" are usually distinguished from another kind of supernatural being, the RWH (vocalized as "ruach"), a 'wind,' originally thought of as a gigantic bird, who was quite possibly the ancestor of the roc (rukh) of the "Arabian Nights." It will be recalled that in the Jews' version of a Babylonian creation-story in "Genesis" it is said that the gods ("elohim") "created heaven and earth," and began by sending a "ruach" to move (fly) over the already existing waters of the abyss, i.e., the ocean yet unbounded by land. There were yet other supernatural beings, especially the seraphim (winged dragons) and the cherubim (who were either polycephalic birds or winged bulls, such as are familiar from Babylonian sculpture). When the Jews prepared a Greek version of their story book around the first century, B.C., they used the neuter noun "pneuma" ('breath, air') to represent RWH, and "angelos" ('messenger, herald') to represent ML'K. These Greek equivalents were, of course, used when the stories about a Jesus were composed, a few of which were collected to form the 'New Testament." When the intensive peddling of Christianity to the "goyim" got under way around the middle of the Second Century, the non-Jewish holy men who became prominent in the business were generally proletarians with mediocre educations, and they naturally imagined the "angeloi" in the stories to be supernatural beings like the Graeco-Roman "daimones" and "genii" they saw depicted in contemporary art, which had been much influenced buy Neo-Platonism, a pseudo-philosophical cult that appealed to the religiosity of the 'intellectuals' of a mongrelized and decadent empire. The Christian conception of an angel was obviously taken from pictures of a "genius", such as the sculptured representation, produced shortly after A.D. 161 for a monument to Antonius Pius, which may conveniently be seen in a good photograph in George Every's "Christian Mythology" (London, Hamlyn, 1970), p. 104, where it may readily be compared to Christian pictures of angels. The only difference is that the Christians, with their sexual obsessions, thought that their angels should always be fully clothed. The Fathers of the Church were, of course, strongly influenced by Neo-Platonism, with which they were in competition, and devised a whole mythology about angels, which was systematized in a work, "De hierarchia caelesti, written around 500, but, in keeping with the Christian habit of forgery and deception, circulated under the name of 'Dionysius Areopagita' to make it seem to have been written in the First Century. Angels were given a very prominent place in the myths of the Catholic Church and are still a part of its official doctrine, although one that now embarrasses most of the professionals. In fact, one of the current rows in Catholicism is over a bundle of pious hokum, "Christ Among Us," by the Reverend Anthony Wilhelm, which has been selling like hot dogs at a country fair and is now in its second million. Wilhelm is denounced by Catholics who persist in taking their cult seriously because he has jettisoned belief in angels along with the "perpetual virginity" of Mother Mary and other dogmas that were forced on our people by the earthly business managers of Yahweh & Son, Inc., so long as the salvation-market was booming. Protestants, on the whole, were much more interested in devils than in angels, who weren't very exciting topics for polemical oratory, but the greatest literary work on angels came, oddly enough, out of the strongly Judaized Protestant cult of the Puritans, who, it will be remembered, made celebration of Christmas a crime and demoted Jesus in the cult so far as they prudently could. "Paradise Lost" is one of the very greatest poems in English and angels are among the most brilliant characters in it, but also the ones a modern reader is least equipped to understand. For a good introduction to that part of the epic and an exposition of what its very learned author thought he knew about angels, see Robert H. West, "Milton and the Angels" (Athens, Georgia, 1955). The extraordinary extent of a belief in angels among the ignorant youngsters turned out by the schools, as measured by the "Gallup Poll," indicates a market that some enterprising dervish will surely exploit on the boob-tube before long. And since hobnobbing with supermen from outer space on "flying saucers" is becoming commonplace and tedious, we may soon suffer a vogue of chats with Gabriel, Raphael, Michael, and other ranking officers in Yahweh's army. (End of footnote)

The racial factor was not entirely ignored in the poll, which produced the finding that Blacks were less gullible than Whites. That would seem incredible, if it were not accompanied by the report that "there is a tendency for the educationally advantaged to report above-average belief" in the various superstitions. The jargon, 'educationally advantaged,' must be intended to designate youngsters whose brains have been most thoroughly soaked in the bilge of the public schools. That, of course, is only what one should expect, for to every objective observer it has long been obvious that intellects that have been so weakened that they can believe in the equality of all anthropoid bipeds have been so addled that they can believe in anything that is preposterous, from "one world" to hobgoblins. The poll, then, merely attests the efficiency of our tax-supported boob-hatcheries, which have for decades been operated by experts to produce precisely this result. It will be remembered that the menticide began with sabotage of the traditional education on the specious pretext that children's minds should early be accustomed to scientific thinking -- to the facts of chemistry, physics, and biology. The racketeers, whether covert revolutionaries or mere swindlers, then devised a "science of education" and, like all witch-doctors, promised to make magic for the suckers. And as soon as the gangsters got legal control of the schools and power to pick the pockets of the tax-paying victims of "democracy," the factual sciences were eased out and replaced with the stinking garbage of superstitions called "social science," guaranteed to make more "democracy," as in the "educators' " Soviet models. All of this has been obvious since the 1920s to anyone who looked and was willing to see, and the consequences today are precisely what could have been predicted by any reasonably intelligent person who took the trouble of trying to understand the contorted gabble of John Dewey and other "padrini" of the new Mafia. And what has happened now was in fact predicted by many, who often summarized the facts by calling Dewey et al. Communists, as they obviously were, whether or not they had been issued credentials by the official Communist Party -- an irrelevant point that was already raised by journalists whose owners instructed them to shriek and spit to cover up subversion of a nation that "could" have acted in the 1920s and early 1930s to retain its independence. It is much too late now, of course. The gangsters have sabotaged the minds of children for three full generations and are now operating on the brains of the great-grandchildren of their early victims. What is left of "our" nation, the Aryans who once owned the United States and gave it away to their enemies, has been made childish and feckless, irrational and irresponsible, It is true that a few children, genetically superior or born of parents wise enough to administer some prophylaxis against the poisons of the schools and the environment the schools created, try to understand their race's plight rather than "adjust" to it, but they are in a hopeless minority. We can only hope that, through chance events now unforeseeable, they will survive the chaos ahead and leave progeny that can fulfill the potentiality that was once innate in our race.