Once More Between Rome and Judea (Part I)
Introduction and Critique to REM Theory and Apolloism - The Basics
The internet is a strange place. The number and variety of online subcultures is truly bewildering and the landscape caters to every imaginable interest, from the mindless bubblegum of aspirationally viral videos, songs, images and challenges, to fitness and body-building cults, to “rise and grind” entrepreneurial hustles, to IRL-activist conspiracy theories like QAnon and to all manner of other political and social movements. Without leaning too much into the sprawling and dense literature of technological capitalism and post-capitalism (which has been explored in profitable detail by many other insightful commentators), it is hard to see these phenomena as being unrelated to the commodification and consumerization of identity itself—to what Hans-Georg Moeller would call the phenomenon of “profilicity”, and the contradictory demand we experience to internalize to ourselves various external social roles that we observe in our daily lives and then also to regard them as second nature to us. This drive to create and curate a profile of who we are at our most “authentic”, to endlessly model to others the particular way that we relate to the world, is tangled up in a decidedly consumerist approach to ideas and ideologies themselves, which become mere accessories and options that can be selected from a menu, adopted and shed as needed to cultivate the image one desires (for however long). In this landscape of contrived, ephemeral and patchwork identities lies one particularly curious instance of what is possible in our moment today—technologically, informationally, psychologically and spiritually. I refer now to a peculiar movement called “Apolloism”.
In its ambitions, Apolloism sees itself as distinct from and intellectually more sophisticated than the subcultures from which it arises (namely, the remnants of the Trump-era online Alt Right). While other dissident right-wingers dwell on petty culture war issues, exult in juvenile internet meme campaigns and routinely fall for the cynical and insincere exploitation of their concerns by mainstream conservatives, “Apollonians” see themselves as rising above the fray and offering an intellectually rigorous and novel account of what troubles the “Aryan race”.[1] This preoccupation receives an astonishing treatment in the main outlets for the movement, consisting of a blog called the Apollonian Transmission, numerous appearances in livestream video discussions, a forthcoming book and the regular Substack podcast with American liberals’ bête noire, Richard Spencer.
So what is Apolloism? This essay explores what the movement is, with an emphasis on its underlying theoretical framework (known as “REM Theory”). I’ll begin by introducing the substance of the movement and its intellectual background, highlighting several problems I believe are endemic to this scheme, and will then examine a number of the core historical claims that are assembled in support of the basic premises, evaluate their application to the theoretical project, and finally I will briefly review just a couple of examples of the interpretive work generated by its advocates and offer a word about its prospects as a motivating force within the American radical rightwing. Constraints of time and patience mean that I cannot possibly hope to cover every one of the many problems I believe are both built into and created by the movement, or to examine all of the interpretations and symbolic meanings proposed in the relevant writings, or to take up each of the historical quandaries emanating therefrom. I hope nonetheless that this essay offers an introduction to some of the key elements to an uninitiated reader and provides a basis for further critical reflection.
I. The Basics of Apolloism and REM Theory.
So, what is Apolloism? According to Mark Brahmin (the pen name of the anonymous founder of this particular online movement[2]), Apolloism is at least in part a “political formation” which sees itself as reviving the ancient Greco-Roman cults of Apollo, albeit with some important and as-of-yet not fully developed modifications.[3] These modifications apparently involve improving and explaining what he believes has historically been merely esoteric about not only the ancient Greco-Roman cults, but also ancient and contemporary Judaism, Christianity, art, literature, cinema and more.
To Brahmin, the esoteric dimension to these cults is the racial agenda that is encoded within their underlying myths and texts, which is revealed by his “REM Theory”. REM Theory (“racial esoteric moralization”) is the theory that myth—broadly understood as including not only traditional myths but also art, literature, religion, political propaganda, cinema, comic books and arguably every other domain of human creativity—should be understood fundamentally and primarily as a cultural artifact that consciously encodes specific breeding strategies that cash out in competition among different racial groups. The theory is proclaimed as the decisive decoding of the symbol language that is the actual machinery of this competition, such that moral instruction in race hygiene stands behind myth as its foundational and ultimate meaning. On this reading, myth directs humanity in either eugenic or dysgenic directions so as to generate peoples and cultures within an ecosystem of eternal racial competition.
The thesis that myth, art and religion are essentially interchangeable and are formative of character, personhood and indeed race itself is not at all new and was well understood by the ancients as well as the German and French Romantics and English liberal eugenicists who created the racial perspectives that provide the theoretical backdrop for Brahmin’s writings. The novelty in this theory instead lies in its application as an interpretive tool for understanding texts, which connects with critical presumptions about the facts of historical development and about human psychology. Importantly, the interpretive component of the theory is no mere critical textual method used by, say, the gender scholar who pores over Chaucer and discovers that, at the end of the day, there are deep queering forces at work in Harry Bailly’s identity. Rather, REM Theory sits precariously atop a welter of presuppositions about the way the world works, what the stuff of history and humanity really is and how human beings are motivated. Indeed, REM Theory involves an entire metaphysics, an epistemology and a radical theory of mind, all of which go largely unspoken in Brahmin’s writings, and yet they make up the crucial conceptual apparatus behind Apolloism as a movement. I’ll turn to these basic premises next.
A. Metaphysics, Symbols and Minds.
REM Theory entails a set of bold metaphysical, epistemological and cognitive-theoretical commitments about how human beings exist and how human minds work in the world—namely, that there exists a “neutral and universal”[4] language of symbols out in the world and that human minds are in some sense structured around and responsive to these symbols, which reliably and intelligibly work various effects on human psychology, moods, cognition, behavior, social organization and more. None of Brahmin’s positive claims about myth or history make sense without these elements, which amount to radical metaphysical claims about the world itself. Whereas the systems of meaning in which symbols exist and the way humans interact with them have posed formidable questions to philosophers for centuries, in REM Theory it is breezily assumed that symbols constitute a body of information and knowledge that exists independently of communities of interpretation, ever susceptible of retrieval and instrumentalization by those with the requisite esoteric knowledge.[5] This realm of symbols and meanings has two additional curious features: first, the meanings cannot be significantly or arbitrarily modified in a new myth without rendering it completely “useless and ephemeral”, and second, the meanings that mystically subsist in the symbols work their power on humans regardless of whether or not one is aware of them or interprets them correctly.[6] In this way, meaning in REM Theory is fixed at the outset with its own ontic superpriority which operates rigidly through symbols as a hard constraint on symbolic development.[7]
This immediately presents a curious structural dilemma within the theory—the first of several significant contradictions that I believe reside at the heart of REM Theory—which I’ll take up in Section B below. But first, given that the decoding of esoteric meanings is the crowning achievement of REM Theory, and given the rigidity of meanings just described, one might expect to find beneath the obscure symbols, allusions and names that interest Brahmin some of the mainstays of the humanities, like perennial virtues, tragic struggle, endless self-overcoming, the work of a divine mind, or even just primordial, mammalian instinct. The actual meanings contained within the symbolic language, however, turn out to be quite astonishing. Without attempting to reproduce all of the meanings that REM Theory purports to discover hard-coded into symbols, here are just a few for illustration: green stems represent the Jewish god; thorns, parasitic grape vines, ivy, holly and mistletoe all represent Jews;[8] Hercules’ club represents an Aryan, as does the Nemean lion;[9] the ichthys fish represents Aryans as a “consumable resource”;[10] Psyche or “spirit” (surprisingly) represents “flesh” or Aryan breeding stock;[11] being “first-born” signifies Aryanism, while being second-born represents Jewishness (for instance, the biblical character Cain, as both a farmer and a first-born, is doubly indicated as an Aryan, while the shepherd and second-born, Abel, is doubly a Jew);[12] lions more generally represent Aryans and stones represent Jewry and/or Jewish phalluses; the “lion’s den” and gold signet rings each represent Aryan vaginas; the number 3 is a reference to Jewish insemination of Aryan stock;[13] bread represents the consumption of Aryans;[14] serpents represent Jewry and trees represent Aryans; Eve’s seduction by Satan in the form of a serpent and her eating of the Tree of Knowledge is actually a metaphor for miscegenation; pomegranates and grapes signify Jews;[15] Spiderman is a Jew;[16] verdant and fertile imagery signifies Aryans and arid, stony, parched and non-arable earth signifies Jews;[17] and on and on and on. The sheer number of references to Jews and Aryans that have apparently always laid at the core of myth and literature is truly staggering.[18]
From these examples, the picture emerges clearly: Brahmin takes as metaphysical bedrock for his symbolic language the materialist, scientific racialism that emerged for the first time out of Enlightenment thought and which was perfected by 19th Century ideologues, preferring for his work a vulgar, dehistoricized, Galtonian-Nordicist variant.[19] I need not recount the historical development of these ideas, or their reliance on the 19th Century ferment of Anglo-empiricism, Romanticism, liberalism and nationalism, except to note two points: first that Brahmin’s particular breed of Aryanism—rife with the biological idioms of health, degeneration, survival, genes, resources, eugenics—happens to be closest to the versions that were embraced by the populist, liberal, nationalist, post-industrial movements which ultimately received their fullest expression in the turn-of-the-century American eugenics movement and the Nazi regime several decades later. (I mention this not as some facile attempt to saddle REM Theory with the stigma of Nazism but simply to remark on this as an instance of the carefree borrowing of ideas without any inkling that their history and hermeneutic context might be important to them, and also to note the irony that, for all the pretensions to elite appeal, Brahmin starts right out with a crude, materialist theory of race that was largely reviled by the cultured, aristocratic right-wing on the Continent, from Nietzsche, Müller, Renan and Lagarde to Spengler, Moeller van den Bruck, Jünger, Mohler, Evola and Maurras.[20])
And second, this view excavates a specific picture of identity from history and confuses it for a pre-theoretical, pre-historical constant. The very fact that “Aryanism” as a concept has a clear and comprehensible history should be a strong clue that it is perhaps a bad candidate for being the first principle in a symbology that transcends historical contingency. This move of abstracting and dehistoricizing identities and relocating them to an esoteric realm of meaning that animates myth also has a distinctly Platonic character. According to Brahmin himself,[21] the esoteric meanings are preexistent, immutable and, for all intents and purposes, transcendent.[22] My qualm here is not with Platonism per se; I present this as an issue rather, first, because Brahmin himself makes much of the contrast between his putative Aryan Nietzscheanism on the one hand and the supposed Jewishness of Platonism and Greek philosophy on the other hand.[23] Yet the entire notion of a deep, concealed, esoteric realm preceding, conditioning and informing human thought and behavior is clearly Platonic. And second, the fact that this domain of meanings appears to stand above and beyond the reach of history, with racial categories in fact preceding history, contradicts the import otherwise given to human action by REM Theory and imposes stark limitations on will as a force in history (which I discuss more below). Now, the fatuous notion of racial categories standing outside of history is formally rejected by REM Theory which takes race to be formed after and according to myth; yet, the preexistence of racial categories is required by the theory both in order to establish the meanings that symbols convey and in order to justify the invective hurled at those outside of the REM Theory fold who, according to the theory, consistently fail to identify and understand the symbols and incorrectly assume that their meanings can be changed or repurposed. Here, we face a paradox: racial categories either must be historicized, placed within history and thereby made vulnerable to human will, hermeneutics and contingencies—in which case, they are malleable after all—or they are dehistoricized, permanent and fixed in their symbols on a transcendent plane, beyond the reach of human will and safe from tampering and reinvention.
But moving for now from the vulgar racialism that supplies the foundational meanings to the theory, the terrain that Brahmin stakes out for his symbolism is actually already extremely crowded in the academic and philosophical literature. Again here, I cannot hope to do justice to an array of disciplines developed by knowledgeable and thoughtful scholars, nor do I want to engage in a tedious summary of concepts that I would not even expect anyone to accept fully and without considered qualifications. The minimal point I want to raise here, however, is that REM Theory introduces claims about the nature of signs, symbols and meanings which, to any serious semiotician, linguist or philosopher of language, deserve the distinction of being “not even wrong”. I make this point to emphasize the way in which REM Theory and Apolloism establish their particular profile in the landscape of online identities (namely, the inattentive and superficial adoption of an air of profundity which is used to convey a certain “vibe” to outsiders), and also to note that what REM Theory seeks to accomplish is nothing short of the wholesale displacement of existing understandings of texts, meanings, symbols and artistic and literary analysis. But despite this ambition, it makes no attempt to escort entrenched opinion from where it stands out into these radical new conclusions, and rather blunders into existing domains of knowledge, labor and expertise and impudently demands acceptance. There are many reasons to believe it will find no receptive audience among academic theorists, but to briefly (and admittedly, without any terminological rigor) identify one such reason, REM Theory’s use of symbols and meanings forces a choice between two alternative positions[24] that each proves hopeless in light of the theory’s basic conceit: either meanings are arbitrarily attached to their signifiers by force of the creative act of mythmaking or they are in some sense naturally related to them.
The first option immediately raises important questions: why should meanings that are arbitrarily connected to symbols be in any sense immutable, and why should they have any power over minds? Whence comes their “fixedness”, and what explains their durability? If the connection is arbitrary (mistletoe representing Jewry comes to mind), then how did it come about unless there is a fundamental malleability to the relationship between symbols and meanings? For if the meanings are simply created or embraced in a creative act of will by the artist, then how could they not be undone by other acts of will? And how can readers “climb aboard” a text (to use Wolfgang Iser’s phrasing) when the symbols’ meanings are apparently mysterious to readers from the outset? The hard meanings create hard problems. This understanding also departs violently from the traditional understandings of symbols in currency among the Romanticists, who held that the language of symbols maps out a spiritualized reality which cannot otherwise be accessed: symbols (unlike allegories) stand in for referents that cannot be properly modeled by other language. This approach, even with some qualms, at least offers a picture that makes sense of the role of symbols in human language and cognitive processing. In REM Theory on the other hand, the “symbol” is just taken to be a kind of a disguise for a readily understood concept and set of relations, and symbolists are engaged in a game of deploying these disguises in the same never-ending ethnic struggle that is constitutive of history.
The second option for understanding the relationship between symbols and their meanings is one where epithets and rank peasant prejudices are merely substituted for actual analysis by dint of a supposed natural relationship of identity: lions symbolize Aryans because Aryans just are noble, regal predators, while parasitic vines symbolize Jews because Jews just are parasitic, consumptive, unfeeling organisms. Apart from its more obvious shortcomings, this approach collides with a different yet crucial element of REM Theory, which is that there is a generative capacity in the symbol language. If symbols are naturally connected to their referents, then it is difficult to see how they could provide any essential evolutionary or locomotive force in the world that does not already exist within the referents themselves—the esoteric realm of the symbolic language would be entirely superfluous to the nature already embodied by the objects or beings that they represent (a point I expand upon below). It might be supposed that, while they are somehow naturally embodied by objects and beings, they nonetheless operate as “force multipliers” of latent potentialities: for instance, people consist of the potential to be either weak or strong, and if they are exposed to symbols that represent weakness, then the symbols merely help actualize the weakness latent within the person. Yet this still does not explain how signs and signifiers that lack an obvious connection to each other actually become connected in the first place or why the associations could not change in tandem with racial development. And here we see the crux of the dilemma: to the extent that this approach even leaves any room at all for racial development to occur, then the meanings of symbols could not be fixed and unmalleable after all, since they would correspond to referents whose essence could be remade or reinvented in history. The consequence of this situation would be a total collapse in confidence that the meanings of symbols used thousands of years ago actually apply to categories and identities that we find among us today, or that we could know anything at all about what was being referred to by symbols used in the deep past without robust contextual corroboration.
Now, it must be said that the entire premise of a system of fixed meanings and symbols is manifestly absurd and contradicted by history itself, where we see at every turn people finding, creating, forging, fighting over and refashioning meanings, symbols and myths in such a way that defies the groundwork of REM Theory in almost every way. The point should be obvious, but especially so for anyone who has passed over 19th Century philosophy and literary criticism with any seriousness, that meaning and significance are in some sense always “up for debate”. This is borne out by the fact of empire, by the untidy flux of history through conquest and the often violent confrontation between alternative systems of meaning, by the delegitimization of rival understandings, by the capacity of humans to reach out and conquer, to gather up what is distinct and divergent and drive them into order under a new regime of symbols—these are what mark out will, empire and fortuna as forces that are actually generative of the categories that Brahmin elevates to an ethereal, ahistorical and excessively abstract realm of significance. Indeed we have no trouble finding meaning and signification even in the mundane territory of pure “facticity”. To provide just one gratuitous illustration, one need only peruse the page histories of Friedrich Nietzsche on Wikipedia to see that even simple biographical details become hotly contested affairs in a greater war over the gestalt. Static and consensus-based conclusions prove elusive even in the relative objectivity of biography. If we readily become mired in dogged and indeterminate fights over the significance of such basic facts, then how much more must the meaning of misty, esoteric symbols be up for debate? What else is history, if not the momentary resolution of struggles over meaning, each contest staged by the cruel ground conditions of contingency? If territories, peoples and even “facts” can be conquered, remade and repurposed through acts of will and imperialism, then so too symbols can be conquered by communities of interpretation.[25] To the REM Theorist, however, symbols are said to miraculously defy conquest and retire safely to the realm of transcendence to furnish their racial meanings from afar, only by the gentle hand of myths that respect their identities. More than the elaborate ethnic slander that defines the movement, this—the utter contempt for history, power and empire—should scandalize us.
In any event, and regardless of how the problem of meaning is resolved, in this account we see the theory straddling several wildly implausible and outlandish understandings of how minds work. REM Theory holds that “the programming [of symbols within myth] is largely subliminal and thus deeper and more influential. Hence, the artist, through the use of symbols, functions as a type of hypnotist, inducing a state of hypnosis.”[26] This amounts to a radical theory of mind with obviously far-reaching empirical consequences. Yet, there is no attempt whatsoever made by Brahmin to demonstrate how on his view esoteric meanings actually relate to human cognition and behavior, how we are moralized, demoralized and otherwise directed by them when they are disguised in ordinary language and narrative. This we are expected to take all on faith or simply as obvious in human experience. However, the basic premise that exposure to subliminal symbolic messaging is effective as propaganda is pure pseudoscience. It is beyond my competency to review and evaluate the literature on the topic, but it is enough to note two things here: first, the idea of directing people’s behavior through subliminal messaging has a long history and more recently features in the dreams of intelligence and security agencies and digital advertisers. If there were any evidence that subliminal messaging (particularly through the use of esoterically coded symbols with mysterious connections to their meanings) had the kind of mechanical cause-and-effect relationship posited by REM Theory, then surely the world we inhabit would look radically different—John Carpenter’s They Live would likely have been prevented from ever reaching the big screen. And second, granting my own limitations as a researcher in a field of cognitive psychology, I can find no published study or abstract by any relevant expert that suggests in any way that esoterically encoded messages can act as stimuli that produce specified outcomes in human behaviors or mental states.[27] The existence of empirical research demonstrating the efficacy of such esoteric, subliminal messaging to activate and deactivate specific human behaviors is an absolute requirement for this very basic premise of REM Theory to be taken seriously, yet nowhere does Brahmin or any of his collaborators make any attempt to present evidence of it. Here again, we see the haphazard adoption of poorly devised ideas instrumentalized in the creation of a new identity for online theater, masquerading as intellectual rigor and sophistication.
B. Some Other Structural Problems.
In any event, now to return to some of the major structural contradictions I alluded to above: recall that the thesis is that myth, art, religion and culture broadly operate as a kind of “mating call” which is generative of race, and that symbols contain secret meanings which can either moralize or demoralize the consumer of the particular cultural product, depending on how these symbols are deployed and what sorts of stories (or, in Brahmin’s own quirky terminology, “parables”) are constructed around them. The first of these contradictions is the incoherent relationship I have pointed to above, where the supposedly generative force of symbols on race is contradicted by the fact that symbols apparently come already loaded with racial meanings that represent categories which must precede and stand apart from history. This contradiction flows naturally from Brahmin’s dehistoricized understandings of Nordicism and 19th Century Galtonian eugenics which treat these categories as bedrock principles of reality.
A second, related structural problem arises in one of the concepts that recurs in the Apollonian Transmission blog posts, which is so-called “Jewish Esoteric Moralization” (or “JEM”). In examples of JEM proposed by Brahmin, Jewish artists create works that symbolically choreograph Jews triumphing over Aryan adversaries, in parabolic rehearsals of real-world ethnic competition. Jews are thereby moralized and enjoy an advantage out in the world over their Aryan foes, who unwittingly consume myths and media that cast them as losers and victims. One problem here is that from the very outset (and regardless of how one attempts to resolve the problem I point out in Section A above about meanings becoming fixed in symbols), Jews in fact are at a dramatic metaphysical and symbolic disadvantage because the very symbols that they are mystically and immutably associated with are in fact, by their nature, extraordinarily demoralizing. For just a couple of examples of this: (i) Mercury is interpreted as a Semitic god who is a deceiver, charlatan and salesman[28]; (ii) in Rosemary’s Baby (deemed by Brahmin a veritable “Rosetta Stone” of JEM), the “Jewish-indicated” elderly Castevets couple lay claim to the Aryan Rosemary’s womb by way of serpentine rape, which symbolizes the Jewish conquest of the Aryan female[29]; and (iii) in the story of Snow White, the seven dwarves are “obviously a Saturnine reference” and clearly represent Jews[30]. Bearing in mind that the meanings at issue here are supposedly not created by mythmakers but subsist on their own in the “neutral and universal” language of symbols, we might ask in what way Jews could be said to experience any myth—even if loaded with so-called JEM—as actually moralizing, when the symbols themselves necessarily implicate Jews in an eternal state of wretchedness? And moreover, as pointed out above, in what sense do they actually furnish any basis whatsoever for racial development? By the terms of the theory, the fixity of meanings is not open to manipulation, so there is neither any escape from these associations for Jews nor any apparent hope for evolving beyond them; for if the meanings could be overcome through racial development, then that would mean that they are not static after all.
So, Brahmin urges on his readers a view that Jews can simultaneously conceive of themselves as being old, deformed, ugly, sterile, deceptive, serpentine and so on, but also that they can draw a moral lesson of racial triumph from these stories. Why the activity of symbols should be more important than the meanings of the symbols, we are not told. In any event, the entire situation is at odds with the basic theory that myth is generative of race and consciously deployed to this end by elites. Notwithstanding the thousands of years of mythmaking attributed to Jews by Brahmin, the “Semitization” or degradation of Aryan deities and symbols, and so on, if the Jews nevertheless remain “stuck” in a symbolic self-understanding of aridity, sterility, ugliness, deception, etc., then no real transformation has occurred. In other words, the entire thesis of myth and religion as the conscious, race-forming activity of elites is contradicted by the fact that the political and cultural power wielded by Jews for thousands of years has failed to produce any spiritual transformation or generated any fundamentally new racial character at all.[31]
A third structural problem with the thesis and its insistence on fixed meanings in invincible symbols is that it doesn’t appear to leave much space for actual creativity. An artist is permitted only to deploy the existing symbols (however many there may be) in new myths, but not create new “symbols” from scratch. Rather than a hard logical contradiction, this description of how symbols and meanings follow each other simply problematizes the creative aspect of symbolism and the ability of an artist or theorist to creatively use, in either allegorical or true semiotic fashion, an object, place or person to indicate a meaning if it has not already been mysteriously inscribed with the meaning from the eternal source at work in REM Theory’s account. In other words, there is no real openness to the possibility that there could ever be two sources for meanings (the artist and the mysterious, eternal divine source required by the theory). This is a peculiar situation and offers another example of the theory’s incompatibility with examples that we find in history. To take just one such example that I believe is never reviewed by Brahmin and does not have any obvious antecedents in ancient myth, we can look at the case of Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. Moeller van den Bruck sought to solve a problem not unlike the one Brahmin attempts to solve, and the former’s solution was to imagine a “Third Reich” that could draw together the Germanic diaspora under a unitary, supernational vision of a shared purpose and destiny. This destiny was the Third Reich, which was proposed as an act of will of an imagined community which subsequently came to exist. Moeller van den Bruck’s imagery is even rife with the symbolism of an ideal that transcends the Second Empire of Bismarck and the petty nation-state order of black, red and gold flags—a historically contingent ideal rooted in the outcome of the First World War that nonetheless furnished a new symbolic meaning to the German conservatives who would come to be theorists of Hitler’s movement, which of course then enacted that vision. Moeller van den Bruck thus apparently served as a second source to symbolic meaning in that he creatively proposed a myth, a spiritualization of a problem and a new “symbol” which proved up to the task of mobilizing the German Volk into the concrete realm of historical agency. Was this just a chimera, a fake symbol that lacked true meaning because it did not actually fit into the essential scheme of nature depicted by REM Theory? Why should we assume that REM Theory’s mysterious eternal source of meaning is more “real” than the meanings created by artists and dreamers like Moeller van den Bruck acting concretely within the draft of history?
A fourth structural contradiction is metatheoretical but is likewise built into REM Theory architecturally. As noted above, Brahmin asserts plainly that esoteric symbols, through their own mystical logic, work a kind of subliminal influence on readers and viewers of myths, which he appears to take as just an obvious point. We can clearly grasp the meanings of these symbols because they relate to the fundamental reality around which our minds are oriented, so we are told. Yet, in the thousands of years of myth surveyed by his study, not a single other person anywhere or at any time appears to have noticed this fact, commented on it or otherwise communicated it to any other person (or, if they have, he does not tell us). Nor is there any record, catalogue, archive or repository of any sort of the symbolic knowledge which he purports to have discovered. And nor is there any evidence whatsoever of any elite or institutional coordination or custodianship of this knowledge, which is nonetheless supposedly collected, organized, systematized, transmitted and instrumentalized by initiates into his gnostic elite.
So, to be clear, Brahmin would have it that the ultimate and definitive source and driving force of Western history—politically, religiously, socially, culturally and biologically—for the last several thousand years has been an encoded language of symbols that has been maintained in utter and absolute secrecy by an invisible cabal (consisting of how many hundreds of thousands or even millions of individuals?), whose activities and designs have gone undetected for thousands of years, despite its activity on a fundamental human capacity to respond to the subliminal influence of esoteric meanings. (I feel the need to emphasize that this is hardly even putting it unfairly to the REM theorist; this is the actual account that he must defend.)
Contrast this situation with a different case—uncontroversial and presumably accepted as a historical fact by Brahmin and the handful of other REM Theorists—where we also see a body of knowledge developed, disseminated and ultimately deployed in the conquest of peoples, minds and institutions: the rise of Christianity. The history of just the first few centuries of Christianity is one marked by a dramatic supernova of textual, discursive, administrative, demographic and political work product of thousands upon thousands of people engaged vigorously in the growth and development of a system of belief, mass production of opinion, meaning-making and mythmaking, and political coordination toward concrete ends. There is manuscript evidence of this activity that numbers in the thousands of examples; there is contemporaneous historiography, commentary and letter-writing; there are written records of robust discussions and debates among Christian authorities about particulars of doctrine and orthodoxy; there are rancorous pastoral disputes and leadership tilts; there is terraforming of political structures; there are Church councils attended by thousands; there are imperial decrees and rescripts about its legal status; there is archaeological evidence of worship, sacramental practice and ritual; there are political controversies over administrative appointments; there are monasteries singularly devoted to the proliferation of texts and orthodox beliefs; there is the institutionalization of mentalities within episcopacies; there are multiply-attested historical records of bloody disputes, massacres, persecutions and wars. Importantly, there are also vestiges of competing movements that attempted but failed to coopt or helm the nascent movement, which shed light on the trajectory of how beliefs and creeds developed. In short, the energy shed by thousands of individuals actually attempting an imperialistic campaign of conquest over peoples, minds, souls and institutions radiates in the telltale signature of rich and abundant historical evidence. Moreover, in any similarly successful movement like Christianity, there is a requirement that the information and institutional work product in the forging of a new world be visibly and publicly conserved and promulgated intergenerationally to ensure its legitimacy. The alternative notion entertained by REM Theory that a similar campaign of conquest of peoples, minds, souls and institutions has occurred not just once before, but recurs many times and in many places throughout history, yet in each case does so without any evidential signature whatsoever (or else having had all such evidence carefully swept up and forensically erased from the record in order to maintain the secrecy of the operation) is an impressively stupid one.
To summarize, where this leaves the REM Theorist is in the unenviable position of having to defend two paradoxical claims: first, that all humans are fundamentally subject to the deep, influential power of a universally intelligible language of racially indicative symbols which are simply too obvious to need justification; and second, that despite the obviousness of this situation, until the arrival of an anonymous 21st Century American hobbyist to decode this universal language for us, we observe millennia of absolute silence from learned readers, scholars, thinkers, philosophers, artists, poets, theologians, statesmen and students about the existence of this phenomenon. This inconceivable situation is the inevitable result of the dubious methodology of the entire project, which is the topic of the next section.
C. Method: Inferences and Form of Argumentation.
Throughout the blog posts, livestreams and related discussions of REM Theory, one encounters roughly five types of argumentation that purport to furnish REM Theory with its justification: the first consists of simple assertions of fact that rely on either ambiguous evidence or no evidence at all, without any additional consideration of alternative explanations or appeals to critical historical context; the second is a fragile cross-referential textual argument offered from within the REM Theory framework itself, where inferences are made based on the content of myth and narrative; the third is a type of appeal to human pattern-recognition that I believe is a staple of conspiratorial thinking; the fourth is a type of pop-etymological rumination, where words, names, places and events are speculatively connected to each other in order to establish causality or intentionality based on real or perceived phonological proximity; and finally, we occasionally see inferential arguments that purport to eliminate competing alternative explanations to myths and history. This last form of argument, while procedurally and methodologically valid, is only rarely used and, in the examples that I’m aware of, is ultimately misused and therefore fails to actually offer REM Theory any support. These failures cumulatively help explain the shaky theoretical foundations of the project outlined above.
1. Bald Assertions of Fact. The majority of writings on REM Theory, including the explorations of decoded symbolic meanings in myths, consist of bald assertions of fact based on ambiguous evidence or no evidence at all. For instance, one of the crucial claims of the theory is that the use of esoteric racial symbols is conscious in the most influential myths and cults, including the Hebrew Bible, the cult [sic] of Apollo, modern cinema and much more. This claim is foundational to the entire theory, yet virtually no work is done at all to establish the element of intent to infuse myths with meanings of racial struggle on the part of the authors of myths, despite frequent intonations that claims are “evidently”, “obviously” or “ostensibly” the case. To my knowledge, the only evidence—in the sense of some uncontested, independent testimony or other confirmation of basic theoretical assumptions—that is ever brought to bear on the concept of intentionality in mythmaking is the following excerpt from a more recent blog post:[32]
“Jews are far more likely to be aware of the Jewishness or non-Jewishness of creators. And once it is determined the artist or creator is Jewish, closer attention is paid for veiled yet unmistakable messages. This is a phenomenon revealed through the work of Jewish film scholar Nathan Abrams, who has contributed a series to the Jewish newspaper The Forward, identifying “the secret Jewish meaning” in films as diverse as Ridley Scott’s Alien, Kubrick’s 2001, Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, and Michael Bay’s Transformers series. Here, in one of the oldest, most respected and most influential Jewish newspapers in the world, we find a Jewish scholar discussing the appearance of Jewish messaging in Jewish films, including the use of meaningful esoteric symbolism, with a largely Jewish audience. In other words, evidently some number of Jews are themselves aware of the phenomenon that this study dubs JEM. Of course, Abrams’s perogotive [sic] is one of understanding, or at least presenting, JEM as a benign or beneficial phenomenon.”[33]
There are several points to make here. First, it bears reminding that what is novel about REM Theory is not the idea that Jews have a certain ethnic or in-group bias that they bring to bear on certain artistic, cultural and scholarly activities in which they are engaged; such a claim is certainly not at all new and moreover very few Jews would even deny this, at least in a wide variety of circumstances. Rather, the original contention of REM Theory is the existence of an esoteric realm of racially-indicative meanings fixed in a language of symbols which conditions and directs human breeding strategies in an environment of racial competition. Second, having read several examples from Abrams’ column cited above by Brahmin, this citation turns out to be either a careless or intentional misrepresentation of what is actually being published in the Forward. Nowhere in his writings does Abrams suggest that he believes in an esoteric language or system of meanings at all resembling what Brahmin imagines, nor that the use of esoteric Jewish symbolism is done in any way as part of a “Semitic bride-gathering” gambit such as Brahmin’s theory calls for, nor that there is any desire within the symbolism he discusses to depict Jewish triumph over Aryan competitors or subversion of Aryan identity or pieties. As just one example of the misleading use of this source as evidence, in Abrams’ column about Rosemary’s Baby—trumpeted, as we’ve seen, by Brahmin as the veritable Rosetta Stone of JEM—he documents several references to Jewish tropes which are actually demoralizing to Jews (e.g. “nebbishy, loud, pushy New Yorkers”, “nosy”, Minnie nagging her “henpecked husband”, etc.). There is no exulting in a final mythic victory over Aryans in the film that ultimately transforms these meanings so as to moralize Jewish viewers. Abrams also hints that Polanski doubtless drew from his own experiences in the course of writing and directing. This suggestion of course should scandalize absolutely no one. Likewise, in Kubrick’s 2001, Abrams claims that Kubrick was doubtless familiar with the Jewish myth of the golem (at least through Shelley’s Frankenstein), and that HAL-9000 represents an example of such a golem, citing Kubrick’s consultation with certain Jewish professionals in his making of the film. Here again, the examples do not amount to a fiber of evidence that corroborates Brahmin’s fundamental claims; the notion that a Jewish filmmaker would draw on stories and traditions from within Judaism to create a film is in no way suggestive of a conscious concern with ethnic agitation of Aryans, the existence of any esoteric symbol language like the one Brahmin purports to have decoded, or that symbols are being used in coordination with other Jews as a weapon against Aryans. Rather, this merely demonstrates the misuse of ambiguous evidence to bolster a central argument of REM Theory.
2. Circular Textual-Critical Argumentation.[34] What we see used as the main surrogate for hard evidence is instead a fragile cross-referential mode of argumentation with liberal use of inference from textual content and dependency on the way that symbols and meanings just “hang together” within the larger scheme so as to enable one to make sense of things in a racially-sensitive manner. This method supposes that the cumulative weight of the symbolic meanings offered by REM Theory should compel belief just on the merits of mutual reinforcement within the theory. To paraphrase Brahmin, he knows that certain myths are of Semitic or Jewish origin because Jewish comic book writers also employ the same names and symbols. This of course is simply motivated reasoning and suffers from vicious circularity and question-begging, but it nonetheless appears to be a preferred tack for Brahmin. To take two similar examples of this type of argument, we observe in one case the claim that the Etruscans were a Jewish or “proto-Jewish” tribe.[35] No argument is made for this other than a vague appeal to Lemnian origin (which he also believes implies Jewishness) and a chthonic character to certain Etruscan deities. Another example is his more provocative thesis regarding Norse myth, which he claims is also a Jewish or proto-Jewish myth body. In each case where this type of argument is deployed, we find a concatenated set of inferences that fail at any point to connect to anything that might be considered uncontroversial and unambiguous, affirmative evidence that both the REM theorist and the skeptic could agree on; instead, we are left with tendentious, circumstantial and circular extrapolations, bolstered only by idiosyncratic readings of myths, movies and comic books. In this sense, it is no easier to “refute” the claims of REM Theory than it is to refute the claims of the astrologer or paranormal psychic who insists that a carefully worded prediction is fulfilled by a certain interpretation of subsequent events—the rejection of the claims is less about offering a syllogistic or empirical disproof and more about the abundance of satisfactory alternative understandings that make better sense in the context of our experiences.
I take up the case of Norse myth later in this essay, so let’s look briefly at how this type of argument is actually used with respect to the Etruscans. Here, we see that the claim of Jewish or proto-Jewish identification appears to ultimately find its terminus in the hypothesis that chthonic deities are Semitic deities, and specifically that the cult of Vulcan is synonymous with the cult of Yahweh.[36] Apart from this equation, the only other argument appears to be an appeal to the largely discredited 19th Century proposition that the Etruscan language might have been Semitic and connected to the mysterious tongue of the Lemnians.[37] Since this is not expressly argued by Brahmin, we are left only with the chthonic-Semitic dyad, which is a recurring theme in the textual analysis of REM Theory. So what is the problem? The claim here, distilled down into a crude syllogism, is that an ancient people (the Etruscans) were actually ethnically so-called proto-Jewish because they worshiped chthonic deities, and chthonic deities are Jewish deities. To be clear, the claim of ethnic identity of an ancient people is one that resounds in hard historical, linguistic, archaeological, anthropological, genetic and demographic chords. Brahmin skirts the obligation of a serious thinker to muster corroboratory evidence for this type of thesis in any of these domains by handwaving it away as “absurd”,[38] and instead relying on the circular appeal to his own symbolic definitions. Why is it absurd that linguistic and genetic evidence be provided for the racial origin of myth? Brahmin simply misses the point here in his sanctimonious dismissal. The challenge is not to identify the “racial origin” of a myth per se, but to establish independent facts that would provide a warrant for belief that a specific ethnic group actually inhabited the relevant geographic area at the relevant time period and consciously and intentionally imparted distinctive, subversive cultural traditions and myths to their hapless Aryan neighbors. This is certainly not too much to ask of a historical thesis; we have copious evidence that, when Jews dwelled among Romans and Greeks, the Romans and Greeks knew something about them, had things to say about them and their customs, religious practices and so forth. Because no evidence for the historical claims that they also dwelled among the ancient Etruscans, Phrygians, Scythians, Indo-Aryans, Norsemen, etc. is offered by Brahmin, we are left only with the axiom of chthonic-Semitic equivalence to bootstrap the entire case.
Yet, the chthonic-Semitic equivalency in theology and myth is not one that any religious scholar, historian, anthropologist, archaeologist, linguist or other expert has, at least to my knowledge, ever seriously advanced or defended. Nor does any scholar believe in any strict division between chthonic and celestial divinity corresponding to ethnic self-identification. What the historical record actually shows is persistent, ubiquitous mixing of celestial and chthonic elements within theologies of virtually every single polytheistic culture we know of. The point here is not that the argument is incorrect because no scholar has made it before, but rather to show the circularity of reaching radical conclusions like an Etruscan-Jewish identity simply because the decoded meanings supplied from within REM Theory demand it. The upshot of all of this is that again REM Theory makes incredibly ambitious claims which ramify in non-textual domains but relies almost exclusively on textual-critical analysis and dubious pattern recognition (addressed below). The Apollonian is offered the most tenuous, circumstantial just-so story about the identity of an ancient people which he is exhorted to just “go along with” in order to uphold broader claims about Jewish activity in history and schemes of symbolic meanings. The price of his compliance is that he must accept an impossible tangle of profound evidentiary lacunae. All of this amounts to a frightfully crippled epistemological condition.
3. Pattern Recognition. A similar thread running through the Apollonian Transmission blog that facilitates the circular goose hunt for evidential support is the supposed identification of patterns in symbols and deities in myths, juxtaposed with dubious historical claims about ethnic origin of the type described above.[39] This operates as a type of argument in REM Theory, but it is also the hallmark of conspiratorial, synchronistic and pseudoscientific perspectives more generally. Just as numerologists, astrologers, phrenologists, Freudians and others compose easily digested explanations in which facts are strategically arranged and infused with a narrative momentum that channels the mind toward the desired conclusion, REM Theory offers up a similar sequence of carefully assembled facts and propositions and ignores or disingenuously attempts to explain away those that present any difficulty.
The insidious part of this approach is that conspiratorial thinking always comes with a sort of “stickiness” to it. Once presented in short, bite-sized format, one struggles to unsee the connections and patterns as long as unfavorable information and criticism is prevented from seeping too deeply into the fold. This preventive action is accomplished in part by the crafting of a self-sealing rhetorical technique but also by the continuous additive process of introducing new and previously unforeseeable details, explanatory mechanisms and shades to the conspiracy that can account, inorganically, for the troublesome counterfactuals that inevitably arise from methodologically compromised conspiracism.[40] We see exactly this phenomenon in REM Theory via the invention of the “proto-Jew” construct, the “exoteric alibi” and the concept of the “Caducean”.[41] I cannot unspool the entire mechanism of the Caducean here, but in short, this is the proposition that Jews throughout history have attempted to thwart opposition to their agenda by devising and manipulating what appears to be the antidote to their venom, but which is actually impotent and serves to insulate JEM and Jewish influence from any real resistance. The concept of controlled opposition is legitimate and well understood, but the Caducean phenomenon is deployed apologetically and disingenuously to deflect criticism of certain claims of REM Theory.[42]
Another telltale sign of conspiratorial thinking is that it sees behind every detail the residue of human agency and intentionality. The blog posts are rife with examples, but one particularly bizarre one is the belief that the many different languages spoken by European populations and the variety of foods and drinks enjoyed by different European ethnicities are actually a burden on people and “often designed as such”.[43] There is no attempt made to justify this absurd claim with any specific evidence because it emerges out of necessity from the unsubstantiated conspiratorial methodology and core motivation of REM Theory, which is to imagine every detail of the world as the work of carefully crafted race war strategics.
4. Speculative Philology. An ancillary set of claims advanced in REM Theory is based in linguistic and philological speculation. Brahmin has no apparent training in linguistics, philology, ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Syriac, Akkadian or any other relevant foreign language, but he frequently engages in speculation about etymologies and intended meanings in texts. His preferred philological method appears to consist largely of observing phonological correspondences and noting that many words have multiple definitions and then assuming that one is free to choose whichever definition best facilitates the preferred interpretation of a text. Two brief examples of Brahmin’s forays into linguistic analysis for consideration: in one instance, he explores the use of the words “spirit”, “flesh” and “body” and their ancient Greek counterparts and notes that the word “spirit” in English includes the verb form which means to “draw or take away”. He connects this meaning to both the Christian emphasis on the life of the soul and spirit, which leads the Aryan woman (signified by spirit) away from the Aryan man, and to the myth of Psyche in which she is stolen away from the Aryan man by the Jewish Cupid.[44] Somewhat embarrassingly, he fails to note that the use of “spirit” in the verb form nowhere appears in the English language until the year 1666, making the linguistic connection here completely misleading. In another instance, he writes “the rib that is taken from Adam may itself corroborate the Aryanness of both Adam in Eve. To wit, the word for rib here, tsela, צֵלָע , may also mean ‘beam’ in Hebrew. The Kings James Bible will also translate this word as ‘boards’ ‘planks’ and ‘leaves.’”[45] His aim here is lead readers to his preferred conclusion about the symbolic connection between Aryans and arboreal natural resources, but his method is to mingle early modern King’s English with ancient biblical Hebrew and infer that the intention of the ancient Hebrew authors was the very same one grasped by English clergy in the 16th Century.
This type of move would never be considered legitimate by actual linguists because the technical demands of interpreting ancient languages are simply too exacting and the dataset often too limited to permit strong conclusions in ambiguous cases. Scholars will grapple with the correct understanding of a single line or word of a text, agonizing over the implications of a tense, working to establish the parameters of narrative or registering discourse modes, aspectual choices, semantic ordering and associations, pragmaticity, the careful placement of adjectives and nouns, and so on.[46] As an example of academic biblical etymological work, James Barr notes the following with respect to establishing credible phonological correspondences between different languages, or between different stages of the same language:
“Where this element of phonological correspondence is not strictly observed, etymology becomes a mere loose association between words that look alike or sound alike and that have some sort of imaginable association of meaning; and such indeed was the state of most etymological study before modern scholarly methods were worked out. In popular etymology, unlike modern scholarly etymology, these essential elements are usually lacking: popular etymology has lacked a historical perspective; it has been confused about the relations between one language and another; and it has had no clear appreciation of the importance of sound correspondences in determining the relations between one word and another. The relations which it perceives, the assonances, similarities and associations, are occasional, accidental and non-universalizable; its perception of them is undisciplined. It is because scholarly etymology has a disciplined and regular procedure that it can produce imposing results, and it is the use of scholarly etymology that forms the centre of the problem of etymology in modern biblical study.”[47]
This exhortation for rigor in linguistic analysis was written over fifty years ago in response to the exact sort of sophistry on display throughout Brahmin’s writings. The field it turns out is quite inhospitable to the untrained practitioner.
5. Inference to the Best Explanation. The last family of arguments that we find in REM Theory is at once the most legitimate and the most rare: the inference to best explanation by ruling out alternatives. This is occasionally only hinted at in the Apollonian Transmission, but the primary exemplar is in Brahmin’s treatment of the story of Jacob and Laban in Genesis, which I address in Section III below. We might expect to see this approach used liberally in order to justify the bold claim that intentional use of esoteric symbols to demoralize and moralize racial groups is what characterizes the most influential myths in history, but instead we see primarily the rash and naïve presumption of intentionality without any entertainment of alternative explanations. By way of comparison, in the context of legal prosecution for criminal or even civil offenses, the element of intent is heavily litigated and best demonstrated through testimony of the perpetrator that he intended to cause the effect that resulted from his action. Absent this direct evidence, a finder of fact can only legitimately infer intent from very strong circumstantial evidence. Typical jury instructions on this point will provide that if the circumstantial evidence allows the jury to draw at least one alternative, reasonable conclusion from the evidence which does not require the attribution of intentionality to the defendant, then the circumstantial evidence is inadequate to establish the crucial element of intent and instead, as a precautionary matter, we leave the question open (or, where justified, we infer that in fact the defendant did not have the requisite intent). When working with historical evidence, the standards may be considered a bit looser, but nonetheless, no responsible scholar will immediately infer malicious intent on the part of a historical actor in the absence of extremely strong circumstantial evidence which does not reasonably permit alternative explanations. With this in mind, what is remarkable about this fifth type of argument is simply how often it fails to appear in REM Theory where it should—notably in the theory’s account of the ancient cults of Apollo and Dionysus, to which I now turn.
[To be continued.]
Anyone who takes the time to apply REM theory to modern Jewish art, such as Hollywood films, comics, and video games, will find Jews are actively using the symbols, motifs, and naming conventions that Brahmin has decoded on his website, and with the apparent purpose of moralizing Jews at the expense of their racial competitors.
Your critique didn't even touch the main thrust of his thesis, which is that Judaism is an ancient bride-gathering cult seeking Aryan admixture (which is esoterically encoded for obvious reasons). Indeed Jewish storytellers encoding JEM poke fun at Israeli Jews for not understanding this.
At the end of the day all you've done is point out where Brahmin is speculating on this and that -- which he himself admits one can only speculate about -- but you haven't actually debunked REM theory or taken the time to examine Jewish art to understand why he's come to the conclusions he has. Which is a shame, as you seem to be bright enough that you could easily apply REM analysis to Jewish art.