Dear All,

Two things. First, I unfortunately have to reschedule the usual Thursday “Members Only” discussion. We’ll push it off one day to Friday.

Secondly, we’ll be talking about Darren Aronofsky’s Noah (2014) on Saturday. And then, at last, we’ll discuss the first four chapters of The Odyssey on Sunday.

Our upcoming schedule:

• “Members Only” on Friday;

• Unconscious Cinema on Saturday;

• Then ALEX U on Sunday!

As for Members Only on Friday (September 4),

9 PM New York / 8 PM Chicago / 7 PM Denver / 6 PM Los Angeles

See you soon!

RS

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REM Theory will undoubtedly upset many people, and this has been apparent to us since we began this project. While Christ mythicists, among whom we count ourselves, have already greatly irritated Christians for obvious reasons, REM Theory will become irritating to neopagans as well—or, really, to anyone who is fondly attached to the idea that Norse, Celtic, or Greek mythic bodies are the products entirely, or even predominantly, of Aryan authors with the best of intentions. And this is to say nothing of liberals, whose reaction may or may not be more interesting. Maybe, finally, all factions can put aside their bitter animosity and unite to ritually attack the scapegoat! They should be careful whom they choose to martyr, as martyrs have a certain way of rising from the dead and abiding.

The political Right has a strange relationship with culture. To them, it is, at once, toxic in its contemporary manifestations … and beyond reproach in its more ancient manifestations. European culture, at least of a certain age and type, is, in some manner, beyond analysis, or at least beyond the sort of analysis that might raise questions regarding the purity of its initial motives. The Classics(tm) may only be subject to a positive analysis, whereby the reviewer rationalizes why it is, and has always been, good. Certainly, it is bereft of elements that we might consider “anti-civilizational.”

This premise is childish. Even Plato, a figure often championed by the political Right, questioned Homer and complained about the poor morality demonstrated by his heroes. And, to be sure, some of our critics—while accepting the general thesis that subversive, anti-civilizational messages have been encoded into works of art and even religion through the sophisticated use of symbols—are primarily irritated by the scope of our application of the theory. In other words, some would be delighted with the theory if its application omitted an analysis of Christianity, others if it omitted Islam, others if it omitted Norse mythology, and still others if it omitted everything not immediately identifiable as Judaism or even merely contemporary Jewish art. Indeed, we know of some analysts whom we suspect of deriving their analysis from our work, without attribution, who are nevertheless hypocritically promoted by these right-wing critics. This may be due as much or more to their omissions—and lack of relative depth—as to personal alliances.

Yes, It Is Personal

And this neatly segues us to our other school of critics: Those who have an obvious personal grudge toward us—whether long-standing, well-documented, and openly expressed, or long-simmering and only recently revealed. They are eager for our thesis to be poorly received, whatever its inherent worth. In many cases, our thesis is contrary to, and threatening to, their “brand ideology” and “proposed civilizational solutions” and is therefore even economically threatening to them. Through their “agnotology”—deliberate, cultivated ignorance—and motivated reasoning, they seek to manufacture doubt about our proposals. Their vested interest constitute a clear conflict of interest, rendering most of them unfit to analyze our thesis. And this is putting aside their general lack of familiarity with the subject matter at hand, a frequent characteristic of our critics. Often, they look for an easy point of attack and, to this end, attack things the crowd finds challenging to its usual understanding. In this way, they seek to increase their popularity and prestige as influencers by targeting what they perceive—falsely, in this case—as easy targets.

Of course, this latter category of critic is more ubiquitous, and all theses—or at least worthwhile theses—are likely to encounter them. In more professional environments, however, the tone of such criticism is often more subtly veiled and less revealing of the critics’ profound personal antipathy. Regardless, it is worth addressing some of their criticism, even if much of it is poorly made and/or made in bad faith. After all, strawman arguments will deceive some who are unwilling or unable to think an argument through. And why limit the number who might gain from an understanding of REM Theory?

Incomplete Proofs

First, we will concede one point to our detractors. We may, on occasion, declare the meaning of a symbol or parable without providing full or substantial proof. There is a very good reason for this, which our detractors can probably guess. To make the obvious plain, the book and its sequel volumes are obligated to be of a particular salable length, so that this important thesis may reach as many readers as possible. In other words, there may be cases in which we more or less ask you to “take our word for it,” as a full proof cannot be provided without adding meaningful digressions. Indeed, meaningful digressions have ensured that this book contains some lengthy and fascinating footnotes that may be more impactful, in the long run, than the entire oeuvre of our detractors.

Currently, we anticipate at least two more books in which many, if not all, of these important “asides” can be addressed. In truth, the REM lens provides the opportunity for a nearly unlimited number of books in which it can be applied to important mythic and media texts, both contemporary and ancient. We recognized this inherent and unique challenge of the REM project early on and, in fact, initially intended to add cross-references in this book to future tomes, which had not even been published but were already largely complete. We decided against doing so, as the order and numbering of the chapters are likely to shift, at least somewhat, during the revision process.

Our hope is that, through convincing exegeses of various central and important myths, we will earn enough confidence from our readers that they might “trust us” when we address the odd symbols, myths, or mythical figures—more or less as an aside—in order to build a larger case. These are editorial decisions—one of the few issues that delayed the publication of this book—and, again, inherent challenges of this undertaking that can only be rectified through the publication of more books. In the interim, readers always have the option of investigating any of our hypotheses on their own using their new REM lens.

That said, to be fair to ourselves, offering a theory about the meaning of a particular symbol or myth, more or less offhandedly, without an exhaustive supporting argument, is asking considerably less of our audience than the mystical, psychological, and metaphysical interpretations commonly asserted by thinkers such as Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and René Guénon—thinkers whose work has attracted considerable, uncritical intellectual admiration, including from some of our detractors. Why the intolerance for our method? The reason may be, in part, that their readings, at least in most cases, are more benign but also, we would humbly suggest, of less value.

Unlike them, we are not attempting to engage in spiritual-intellectual “self help” or to assume the role of guides to personal or spiritual transformation. Yes, of course, we should be healthy persons of sober and sane mind and body and thereby useful members of our society, but this is an obvious point that scarcely needs a new thesis. Our case—that many important myths contain esoteric ethnic or racial propaganda and, even more controversially, that they may do so from perspectives that are not our own—was sure to ruffle feathers. Indeed, doubtless one objection to our thesis is that we fail to deliver more “We wuz kangz!” propaganda, directed at atomized online right-wingers. But our goal is to find the formula for moralizing civilization en masse by transmitting our ideas to the top minds, who are adult enough to handle occasional hard truths. Our goal is not to convince some underemployed Edgelord that he is really a formidable Viking awaiting Ragnarök or a spiritually elite Evolian wizard possessing transformative powers simply unavailable to “normies.”

Nevertheless, what appears in this first volume provides a substantial, if incomplete, basis for the arguments we make throughout the series. And we are eager to one day have an unabridged REM tome. Because of the complexity of the arguments we set forth in this first book, it should be read in its entirety before anyone attempts to argue against its propositions. One can’t simply stick it into an AI, as some early reviewers clearly have, and, for example, ask it to drum up controversial arguments and then point and sputter at those arguments out of context.

“Unfalsifiable”?

Many of our detractors have hand-waved at some of our key arguments, calling them as “unconvincing,” without bothering to explain why they are unconvincing. But, of course, anyone can just as easily say the same of the notion that the Earth is spherical, despite the evidence: “The argument is unconvincing.” Whether they say this because they truly find the arguments unconvincing or because they hope to convince others that they are unconvincing through willful ignorance is a separate question. But simply denying an argument, however original and controversial it may be, is not a counterargument.

This brings us to the first bad-faith argument our detractors have made: “Your theory (or some substantial part of it) is unfalsifiable.” Let us take as an example our argument that Christians—and possibly, if not likely, crypto-Jews—were significantly involved in the creation and development of Norse myths that would otherwise be attributed to Aryans. This has been a particular target of the “insufficient evidence” objection. The retort is obvious: the counter-theory—that preliterate Scandinavians, who left behind no written records, independently developed these sophisticated and symbolically coherent myths in something closely resembling their surviving form through the inherently unstable tradition of oral transmission, prior to contact with Christians or Jews—is itself unfalsifiable and lacks sufficient evidence.

Meanwhile, our theory is both explanatory and more plausible—indeed, sufficiently so that the burden of proof should now be shifted to those who insist upon the contrary claim. Regardless, the objection that our theory is “unfalsifiable” or “lacks sufficient evidence” sets an effectively unattainable evidentiary threshold: every piece of evidence is discounted as insufficient, while the critic never specifies what evidence would actually suffice to establish the theory. This amounts to moving the goalposts to an unfalsifiable evidentiary standard. We have accounted for a set of observed facts by identifying a coherent underlying mechanism that makes those facts intelligible. Meanwhile, our critics, much less familiar with the subject matter, have sputtered: “Unconvinced!”

Seeing Things

Regardless, we know that we will invariably find ourselves called “conspiracy theorists,” often by people who hold the most insane ideas imaginable, such as the belief that Jesus walked on water or rose from the dead; that the creation story is literally true and evolution is false; that the races are, on average, perfectly equal in physical and intellectual abilities, despite having spent tens of thousands of years evolving separately in different climates and terrains and facing different environmental challenges; or, most absurdly, that the salient myths that have come down to us from antiquity arose entirely from ancient mystical experiences.

Regarding the thesis of proto-Jewry: Some will argue against the notion we are proposing: “a conspiracy theory that is 4,000-plus years old.” They will argue that such a premise is impossible because it would require untold thousands of people to keep quiet about it. Yet these same people, when discussing Judaism, will generally acknowledge that Judaism is a tradition that has persisted for 2,200–3,000 years and is both insular and esoteric, with unusually strong esoteric traditions—most famously Kabbalah—some of whose teachings were historically restricted to learned initiates.

They’ll admit that Jewish communities also maintained strong communal boundaries through distinctive laws, customs, and education, often reinforced by legal segregation and persecution in Europe. Outsiders consequently encountered a cohesive minority whose religious practices and texts they did not understand. Thus, while Jewish esotericism and communal cohesion are genuine historical phenomena, they’ll doubt that anything similar persisted before this period or that this tradition grew out of something earlier.

With at least certain proto-Jewish cults—those that were more exclusive and particular in nature, as opposed to universalistic ones like Christianity—we would surmise that a similar dynamic was in place, albeit frequently within a more open pagan system rather than the closed system we find during the Christian period. Those who take the time to read the book will discover that the cult of Judaism was, indeed, linked to ancient cults by ancient writers, whether to the religion of the Hyksos, the cult of Bacchus, the Idaean cult of Saturn, or the cult of Sabazios, as mentioned by Manetho, Plutarch, Tacitus, and Strabo, respectively. This is all the more remarkable because, from the period in which Plutarch, Tacitus, and Strabo wrote (roughly the first century BC to the early second century AD), and certainly from the period in which Manetho wrote, the overwhelming majority of ancient literature has been lost. Perhaps only a few percent of works survive in any substantial form, with these writers accounting for a significant but unquantifiable portion of the surviving corpus from their respective periods. We can reasonably surmise that this surviving corpus is heavily skewed toward works that later generations regarded as important, useful, or prestigious. And in the modern era, as discussed in the book, we do discover Jews arguing that Judaism is linked to ancient cults, whether Greco-Roman, Zoroastrian, Pythagorean, or Sumerian. We also find Jewish artists working in the modern era who intelligently reference them in their art in a way that suggests they are related to Judaism. So the secret is out. Our uninformed critics were simply unaware.

The particular madness they will accuse us of is “parallelomania,” a term popularized by biblical scholar Samuel Sandmel in his 1962 article of the same name. 1The term refers to the tendency to exaggerate similarities between religious texts or traditions and infer borrowing or influence without sufficient evidence—a methodological warning rather than a rejection of comparative mythology itself. The criticism of “parallelomania” is definitely a valid objection to weak comparative arguments—we are certain that there will be incompetent REM readings—but it does not invalidate comparative mythology itself. Rather, a strong comparative argument examines the quantity and specificity of the similarities, their sequence and unusual details, possible cultural contact, which tradition is earlier, whether the proposed source was available to the later author, and similarities in wording, structure, themes, and narrative function. The key question is whether cultural borrowing or influence explains the similarities better than independent invention.

In the ancient world, interpretatio Graeca among the Greeks and interpretatio Romana among the Romans—terms later applied by scholars—were, in effect, the comparative mythology of the ancients. No serious person questions their legitimacy or usefulness in helping us understand the nature of the various deities and cults of the ancient world. REM Theory is the update.

To be certain, this takes training, a long exposure to and study of myth, both contemporary and ancient, and a certain eye—one that is both rational and intuitive, possessing what might be called both a “left” and “right” brain; one with a sense of history, art, logical thinking, and science. It requires someone more polymathic, someone unlike what Nietzsche might call “fragmentary men,” whether they be “woo-woo,” spiritualists who believe religion arose purely from mystical experience, HBD science nerds, or others. On the other hand, specialization is useful. The jack-of-all-trades is the master of none. The expert must be well-versed in the important myths, both contemporary and ancient.

Myth and Mystical Experiences

As mentioned, the silliest people will accuse us of conspiratorial madness, even while believing in the most absurd things themselves. One example is the mad, baseless, and entirely unsupported theory that some of the most important examples of ancient religions have come down to us through divine revelation, mystical experience, or supra-human spiritual realization. Rather, it is evidently the case that many of these important examples are conscious constructions invented by, yes, mortals. This claim is supported by the myths themselves and by the intelligence, cleverness, and logic that comprise them. For instance, is it meaningful that the Hebrew name of “Eve,” Chavah, who is called the “mother of all the living” (Genesis 3:20), means “living” or “to live”? Or did the Hebrew name, along with the rest of the Genesis tale, simply arise from an ancient Jew’s fever dream? Is it meaningful that an equivalent of Eve in Norse myth, “Líf,” who appears in the post-Ragnarök age of Christ-like Balder, bears the meaning “life”? And what might this imply about Norse myth and its connection to the Hebrew Bible? This, along with numerous other clues, allows us to build our case that major, central elements of Norse mythology are esoterically Jewish.

A particularly strong example, alongside Eve in the Hebrew Bible, is Adam and the adamah in Genesis 2–3. Adam is formed from the adamah, the ground or soil, and the Hebrew words are deliberately brought into proximity. The narrative then returns to that relationship when Adam is told that he will return to the ground from which he was taken:

By the sweat of your brow you will eat your bread, until you return to the ground—because out of it were you taken. For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.

Scholars regularly identify this as obvious wordplay, arising from an artist’s imagination and his conscious and careful use of symbolism.

In Greek myth, Pandora is another good example. Her name is conventionally understood as deriving from pan (“all”) + doron (“gift”), meaning “all-gifted” or “gift of all.” In Hesiod, the gods adorn her with various gifts before sending her to mankind. Prometheus offers another striking case. His name is traditionally connected with promētheia, “forethought” or “thinking ahead,” while his brother, Epimetheus, means roughly “afterthought” or “thinking afterward.” That opposition isn’t incidental. Prometheus anticipates consequences and devises schemes; Epimetheus acts first and understands afterward. Hesiod even makes the brothers’ contrasting names part of the myth’s conceptual structure. The two figures effectively personify two opposite modes of intelligence: foresight and hindsight.

We could go on for days, and we would happily do so. Unlike our critics, we are steeped in the study of these traditions. None of the examples I’ve given you are controversial. Serious scholars don’t attribute this kind of analysis to “conspiratorial thinking.” Strangely, however, the political Right, stunted by a kind of neo-Medievalism, does. Spiritual Right-wingers, drunk on Evola, have interpreted as a kind of “magic” what artists have made—and perhaps only artists can fully understand. They probably should not be involved in the analysis of myth, let alone critiques of those who may soberly analyze it.

Skill Issue

We encounter another problem: Frankly, it’s a skill issue. Not everyone can do what Richard and I have done. In fact, there is even a meaningful body of literature devoted to this simple reality. Pierre Bourdieu and scholars of cultural consumption have argued that, while everyone can have aesthetic preferences, the ability to perceive, interpret, and evaluate art with sophistication is unevenly distributed and strongly shaped by education, exposure, and cultural capital. And this, especially as it appears among conservatives, is a problem discussed in the book.

Right-wingers are often too obtuse or simply too uninterested to decipher meaning in art, let alone produce it. And this is borne out in the broader activities we observe on the online Right, where dissident scholars, to the extent that they qualify as scholars, are devoted to writing political essays or analyzing differential crime statistics and IQ disparities between Whites and non-Whites. To the extent that they comment on the arts, such as cinema and television, it is largely uninsightful. They either complain about the explicit neoliberal propaganda contained therein—where, for example, the races of characters in adapted novels or historical episodes have been altered to fit a politically correct agenda—or, in the more supposedly erudite corners of the web, where men fancy themselves polymathic philosophers, they use art as an opportunity to signal cultural capital.

What films are of value, they often wonder, purely aesthetically? Which contain a right-wing subtext that might be moralizing to us, whether or not this was the artists’ intention? Which reveal the nefarious plots of our overlords, which might be illuminating to us? And here the goal is purely utilitarian. Their aim is to establish themselves as the thought-leader of a space, generally for economic reasons. Therefore, in their minds, they must establish themselves as the definitive master of all relevant spheres: philosophical, political, and cultural, even when they lack the natural skill, experience, and training in one or more of these key areas.

According to Plato, philosopher-kings, in addition to being philosophers of morality, were required to possess a cultivated sense of aesthetic discrimination—a kind of “taste” developed through proper education that enabled them to recognize beauty, harmony, nobility, and order. Part of this is the dilemma of the new-media podcast landscape and its economic realities, where influencers are consigned to styling themselves as topical variety shows so as to react to the news cycle or the latest cultural trend. Everyone is eager to be the general store, the one-stop shop, the definitive sage on all relevant things, lest customers go elsewhere. And for the same reason, they’re eager to discredit competition, whether through strategic cooperation with others or otherwise.

But in the end, their analysis of myth, whether contemporary or ancient, is generally shallow, unoriginal, and unconfident in its conclusions. At the very least, it doesn’t approach the penetrating insight and depth of REM Theory. In fact, all this has been one of our basic assumptions. The Right is largely incompetent in its analysis and production of art—to the extent that it is even interested in this—and this is a problem that needs to be rectified. REM analysis may require a polymathic mind, but it also requires focusing and specializing that mind; it requires study and expertise. Indeed, Plato also regarded specialists as valuable because they possess genuine expertise in particular crafts.

We certainly don’t stake the validity of the REM premise on credentialism—Richard and I have made our allergy to the mainstream academy and its clear limitations known. The arguments in this thesis will survive regardless of our backgrounds. And yet these backgrounds are worth mentioning. Richard’s is well known. He graduated with high distinction in literature and music; he has a background in Shakespeare and opera; he studied intellectual history at the University of Chicago before entering a doctoral program at Duke. From there, he entered journalism, and the rest is history, as they say. My own academic training is in cinema studies; I earned a Master’s degree at a top-ranking university in this discipline, for which the school is known. There, I won the only merit scholarship and first prize in an annual film competition each year I attended. I have been involved successfully, both professionally and artistically, in the production of video and film works, both fictional and narrative, as well as commercial works, serving as a writer, director, editor, and producer. This accounts, in part, for my deep knowledge of cinema. Most relevantly, since my twenties, I have been an independent researcher, intensely focused on analyzing mythology and symbolism—whether in contemporary film, ancient myth, or the Bible—initially to create narrative art. Richard’s background is well known: He worked in theater and opera.

The artist’s view of parable, I often argue, is particularly insightful in deciphering myth, as the artist is frequently interested in embedding symbols into his myth to deepen the significance of the tale. In other words, “To catch a fish, you must think like one.” In fact, it could reasonably be argued that the contemporary artist’s perspective, whether that of a filmmaker or writer, is the perspective of a scribe or myth-maker during the formation of a living religion, in its creative period before it dogmatizes or even fossilizes. As Joseph Campbell wrote, “The artist is the one who communicates myth for today.” Robert Graves, a British poet and novelist, also approached myth from the artist’s perspective. And while we differ with some of his conclusions, his theories have remained compelling to those who study myth to the present day. The classicist’s view of ancient myth, on the other hand, can fundamentally misunderstand what he observes because he approaches myth from the outside: He analyzes what the myth-maker created without ever having experienced the imaginative act of creation himself.

For more than a decade, Richard and I have collaborated in film analysis through the podcast Unconscious Cinema and, more recently, through an Alexandria class focused on ancient mythology and Bible studies. There, we have constantly tested the thesis of REM Theory against each other and against an intelligent, well-attended student body. And while we certainly won’t insist that only we have the eyes to decipher REM—indeed, one of the major purposes of the book is to teach the skill—or to decipher myth and art more broadly, we would insist that our analysis is clearly far better than that of those who have chosen, thus far, to criticize this book.

More generally, the right has a massive bias against the arts and humanities and in favor of so-called “STEM,” where we find, for example, the controversial school of Human Biodiversity. Indeed, sociological research by scholars like Matthew Woessner, April Kelly-Woessner, and Stanley Rothman has shown that conservative students predominantly self-select into STEM and business fields because of pre-existing worldviews focused on objective rule structures and marketplace utility. This has been corroborated by the propaganda of various salient conservative influencers, from Matt Walsh to the late Charlie Kirk. The Right sees the Left’s problem as composed of “theater kids.” What they can’t explain is why these Theater Kids, with their superior cultural competence, always win. While we accept many of the premises of HBD analysis as base assumptions, we understand that solutions to civilizational problems are found in culture.

To be clear, this is not to argue that everyone with a liberal arts degree will understand or appreciate REM Theory … or that Theater Kids aren’t, on many occasions, quite risible. Quite the contrary.

Anecdotally, we know of one such STEM-minded individual—and critic of this work—who, having completed an advanced degree in Religious Studies, has nevertheless mysteriously arrived at the conclusion that Christianity is the religio-cultural solution, apparently finding it neither unusual nor problematic in the slightest that Christianity asks European Gentiles to bow before a foreign Jewish messiah. He has even gone so far as to wonder, startlingly, whether the humbling of the European Gentile before a foreign god is one of Christianity’s important virtues. Does this person, with such a gaping intellectual and even psychological blind spot, with, frankly, the religio-cultural sensitivity of a warthog, have the authority to evaluate our work, let alone cultural texts such as the Hollywood films we study? It’s like a layman telling a mechanic how to rebuild his engine or a housewife telling a brain surgeon how to perform a cerebral aneurysm clipping.

This is a problem with the arts and religion and their analysis: They are emotionally accessible, and people often grasp them on an emotional level because they are designed that way. Because they are received emotionally, they are perceived as simple. As a consequence, everyone assumes that they can understand them on a deeper symbolic level and that their assessment is as valid as anyone else’s. REM Theory decisively shows this to be false.

This subject has been debated in the literature. C. P. Snow, in The Two Cultures, described the divide between scientific and literary intellectuals, while F. R. Leavis responded by challenging the assumption that scientific expertise entitled Snow to pronounce authoritatively on literature and culture. Stanley Fish’s concept of “interpretive communities” emphasizes that competent interpretation depends on learned conventions and practices rather than simply having a personal reaction to a text. Research on expertise similarly suggests that trained readers can perceive and analyze texts differently from novices. Pierre Bourdieu, meanwhile, helps explain the social dimension, whereby people may rank scientific knowledge above literary or artistic knowledge and dismiss unfamiliar forms of expertise as mere “opinion.”

Regardless, empirical research in cognitive psychology and text linguistics confirms that expert readers, such as literature professors or critics, process texts using advanced schemas, recognizing structural, historical, and rhetorical patterns that novices routinely miss. As if we needed studies to know this.

To the HBD theorist—that is, the archetypal “intellectual” of the online Right—culture is wholly mysterious. And to the hammer, everything is a nail. To them, the problems of civilizational decline are addressed through insufferably boring recitations of concerning crime statistics or racial IQ disparities to a room—whether actual or digital—full of aging, stodgy conservatives commiserating over the decline of the West. “Red-pilling to the choir,” we might say. While we have no reason to oppose the yeoman work of such activities—as one must know a problem before attempting to solve it—and, in theory, there are still some people who can be “red-pilled” in this manner, the rest of us got it a long time ago and are on to solutions that are religio-cultural. Nietzsche’s opinion was the correct one. Science may indicate the flow of things, but it is not the goal. In his words, “Science is never in itself something which creates values.” And surely these HBD specialists should not be the captains of Plato’s proverbial “Ship of State.”

Denying Common Ground

And then there are the other bad-faith tactics of critics, such as refusing to acknowledge established common ground and shifting the burden of proof onto us for a premise that isn’t actually at issue, one that they themselves don’t dispute except, selectively, when challenging a thesis that is disruptive to their other, more specific propaganda efforts. This is best explified in their insistance that particular mythic traditions or religions are either benign or sacred. The tedious, regressive skepticism goes something like this: You haven’t established that media can influence human behavior, let alone mating choices; that a Jewish-dominated media has been interested in promoting multiracialism, integration, and intermarriage; or that Jews are even involved in secreting themes and ideas subtly or esoterically into their narrative media.

In other words, it’s rather like writing a modern astronomy book for educated adults and being criticized for not first proving that the Earth is approximately spherical. And this from people who spend some significant portion of their intellectual activity lamenting the depiction, and therefore promotion, of interracial couples in films, TV, and commercials; who, nearly every other day, boost some viral tweet lamenting the DEI casting in some BBC historical drama set in Medieval England or some beloved fantasy or science-fiction realm adapted from a novel in which all the characters were originally depicted as White; who consider it meaningful and damnable that a Black Irish citizen is being celebrated in the media as a Riverdance performer; or that a white teenager is cast as the murderer in the miniseries Adolescence, despite a reportedly unrelated murder having been committed by a Black teenager in Southport the previous year. Of course, the Left shares their assumptions and their belief in the power of media to shape society. Positive media depictions of non-Whites and sufficient representation of them are essential to achieving integrationist goals.

And yes, research does suggest that everyone’s intuition is correct—that, for example, media exposure to interracial relationships can increase acceptance of interracial dating and marriage. Researchers Lienemann and Stopp found that exposure to Black–White relationships in the media was associated with more positive attitudes toward interracial relationships.2 More recently, Paterson et al. found preliminary evidence that media exposure surrounding Prince Harry and Meghan Markle was associated with more favorable attitudes toward interracial romance through perceived social norms.3 Scholarship also shows that more subtle, if esoteric, messaging preceded more explicit depictions, in line with REM Theory. For example, film scholarship supports the idea that the integrationist film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) was the culmination of a gradual shift: Thomas Cripps’s Making Movies Black, Ellen C. Scott’s Cinema Civil Rights, and Susan Courtney’s Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation document how Hollywood moved from challenging racial stereotypes and depicting interracial cooperation toward increasingly direct representations of interracial intimacy. And, of course, conservatives understood all this intuitively and were outraged by films like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner because it portrayed interracial marriage as morally acceptable at a time when sixteen states still prohibited it.

And from the proverbial “horse’s mouth”: Key scholarship on Jewish media producers’ role in promoting racial and religious tolerance, integration, and intermarriage narratives includes Neal Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (1988), which examines how Jewish studio founders shaped an idealized, assimilationist vision of America on screen; Joshua Louis Moss’s Why Harry Met Sally: Subversive Jewishness, Anglo-Christian Power, and the Rhetoric of Modern Love (2017), which traces over a century of Jewish-Christian romantic pairings in American film, literature, and television as a vehicle for negotiating Jewish assimilation and secular modernism; and the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s essay “The Role of Jewish Americans in the Civil Rights Movement,” covering Black-Jewish civil rights alliances and Jewish involvement in founding the NAACP. For postwar “message pictures” with Jewish screenwriters and producers addressing race relations directly (e.g., Gentleman’s Agreement, Pinky, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner). J. Hoberman’s writing on Jewish American film culture is also useful scholarship.

And yes, Jewish scholars also admit to encoding their art with subtle and coded messages, including what we might term JEM. Jewish thinkers and cultural critics have often described the discreet transmission of Jewish themes through popular art as a form of cultural coding: Irving Howe, writing in World of Our Fathers, described Jewish comedians’ coded use of Yiddish on early American television as “waving to the folks back home.” Henry Bial calls this “double coding,” describing performances that communicate “one message to Jewish audiences,” while conveying another to gentile audiences—a Jewish viewer, he argues, can “glean Jewish specificity from performances that a general audience decodes as universal,” through cues like speech patterns, humor, or an anxious relationship to tradition and modernity. And scholars such as Paul Reitter and David Yehuda Stern have argued that even mainstream American animation carried “coded Jewish themes.” Together, they suggest that Jewish identity can enter ostensibly universal popular culture indirectly—through humor, language, performance, character types, and other signals recognizable particularly to Jewish viewers. Key texts include, again, Neal Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own, which traces Jewish studio founders’ outsized influence on early cinema; Henry Bial’s Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen, which examines how performers signaled Jewish identity through coded gestures and humor; and Vincent Brook’s Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the “Jewish” Sitcom, on Jewish coding in television comedy.

Races in the Bible!?

One perhaps more subtle example of this tactic of regressive skepticism is the denial of a European racial taxonomy in the Hebrew Bible or in the ancient mythological contexts more broadly. This is done to refute the suggestion that it contains esoteric racial messaging. But it’s a disingenuous argument, likely not believed by those who advance it. As is made clear in Myth to Power, the Hebrew Bible is first and foremost a book of tribes, tribes that we assume, and that have always been assumed, to possess genetic identities, if also important cultic identities. And, of course, the common visible and physical variations between different populations in inherited traits are, first and foremost, skin pigmentation, hair texture, facial features, and so on.

In Numbers 12, Moses’ Cushite wife is identified by her association with Cush, while the racist Miriam is struck with a skin disease that makes her “white as snow” when she objects to the union. In Jeremiah 13:23, the rhetorical question “Can the Cushite change his skin?” explicitly treats the Cushite’s skin color as a conspicuous and unchangeable physical characteristic. The Hebrew Bible contains several references to physical complexion or coloration that doubtlessly reflect how ancient Israelites perceived differences among peoples. The Hebrew root יפ״ה (y-p-h) means “beautiful” or “fair,” and Japheth’s name has traditionally been connected to this root, while his descendants in Genesis 10 are geographically identified with regions of Anatolia, the Aegean, and areas farther north and west—that is to say, Europe. Indeed, Jewish and Christian writers famously understood Japheth as the progenitor of Europe. And this is discussed in the book.

The 20th-century shift away from viewing biblical peoples through racial categories was, in important part, the consequence of the spread of liberal ideas about equality and human rights, liberal historical-critical scholarship, decolonization, and the rejection of older racial hierarchies, especially during the postwar period. So the critique that we are imposing a later European racial taxonomy onto the Bible, and in so doing are erroneously contrasting Aryans with Semites, with this biblical character or that, is a liberal critique. But the premise is absurd and is akin to insisting that we don’t translate Hebrew words that mean “fair,” “ruddy,” or “dark” into English when describing complexion because “fair,” “ruddy,” and “dark” are later European “concepts.” In reality, they are merely later European words that accurately convey the meanings found in Hebrew.

To be clear, among Caucasoids, whether Semites or otherwise, with which the Hebrew Bible largely deals, “fairness” might be understood as “more Aryan.” Obviously, we are not asserting a specific DNA profile in this instance or that. Why would we? After all, we are talking about myths, composed of mythical characters that often have only the faintest attachment to history. But the premise that the Hebrew Bible describes different tribes, often represented by persons, such as Japheth and Shem, Esau and Jacob, Joseph and Judah, and so forth, that correspond with ethnic or racial groups that the writers of the Hebrew Bible were aware of, is uncontroversial and is not something such right-wing critics would normally disagree with, except when the Bible is presented as something that is subversive. Then, suddenly, they become liberals, and “race doesn’t exist” in the Bible.

This awareness of different peoples, some fairer and some darker, corresponds with the world the Jewish scribes of the Bible would have experienced. For instance, it’s commonly believed that the Hebrew Bible was largely written and developed in the land of ancient Israel, particularly Judah and Jerusalem, with significant composition and editing occurring during the Babylonian exile and Persian period. Contemporary scientists disagree about what Caucasoid populations looked like during this period because ancient DNA from the Persian/Hellenistic Levant is sparse and pigmentation is genetically complex. Some evidence suggests ancient Levantine populations were lighter-pigmented than some modern Middle Eastern populations, while other studies argue they were darker. Political pressures may have influenced what is considered the mainstream view.

Under a “minimalist,” Hellenistic-dating model, some biblical material may have been shaped in diaspora communities—particularly Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean—that were strongly Hellenized and Greek-speaking while remaining distinctly Jewish. And here is the important point: The Levant and the wider Persian and Hellenistic world were ethnically and genetically diverse, and Alexandria in particular was a cosmopolitan Greek-founded city where conquering Greeks, Egyptians, Jews, and other peoples lived together, representing a range of complexions from fair to relatively dark. Again, the writers of the Hebrew Bible would have been aware of, and even in contact with, various peoples who were either darker or fairer in complexion—that is to say, racially distinct.

At some point, no doubt, these objections to basic assumptions drift into a form of solipsism. Solipsism is the philosophical view that only one’s own mind is certain to exist, while everything else may be an illusion. “Now it may seem that these things appear in the Bible and ancient myth, but how can we verify that reality is even real and not the illusion of the devil or the demiurge?” they may ask us. Indeed, we might say solipsism is inherent to personal salvation cults such as Christianity and the more ancient proto-Jewish ones from which it was derived. Here, the concern is with one’s own personal soul and its continuance, something that can’t be verified empirically or by the visible. At this point, they may reintroduce the patristic concept diabolus simia Dei (“the Devil is the ape/imitator of God”), developed by writers including Tertullian (c.155–220), whereby pagan myths and rituals resembling Christianity were explained as Satanic counterfeits that anticipated and imitated the genuine Christian revelation. And to be sure, many sophists will be eager to defend this position, and many insane people will be willing to adopt it. But we welcome the insanity of our detractors. The proto-Jesus Bacchus was a god of madness, and “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”

Yes, It’s “Just a Theory.” Get over it.

While we are strongly convinced of our thesis, we are obliged, of course, to call it a theory. But humans are allowed to have theories, especially ones that are explanatory and useful for understanding the past and human phenomena. And we are far from alone in this endeavor. Consider, for example, some broadly adopted but still speculative theories about the classical world:

• that the Trojan War reflects a real Late Bronze Age conflict and that The Iliad preserves memories of the Mycenaean world;

• that the Sea Peoples contributed significantly to the Late Bronze Age collapse;

• that Minoan civilization was heavily influenced by Egypt and the Near East and that the Thera eruption helped destabilize Crete;

• that the Dorian invasion preserves a distorted memory of population movements;

• that Homeric poetry developed through centuries of oral transmission and contains layers from different periods;

• that Proto-Indo-European speakers formed a real prehistoric population, despite uncertainty over their homeland and migrations;

• that the Mycenaean collapse resulted from interconnected systemic stresses rather than a single cause;

• that the Greek alphabet was deliberately adapted from Phoenician;

• that the Eleusinian Mysteries may have involved altered or psychedelic consciousness;

• that we can partially reconstruct a historical Socrates behind Plato and Xenophon;

• that Persian motives in the Greco-Persian Wars were more complex than Greek sources suggest;

• and that Sparta’s supposedly rigid social system was more historically fluid and complicated than its later reputation implies. And the list goes on.

We feel REM Theory is explanatory and, in many ways, similar to Darwin’s theory of evolution. In fact, it is demonstrated in similar ways. Darwin’s theory of evolution is demonstrated through many forms of evidence, including fossils, comparative anatomy, DNA, embryology, biogeography, and observed changes in organisms. In REM Theory, we have similar forms of evidence: surviving literary texts, comparative mythology, inscriptions, temple and sanctuary archaeology, funerary remains, votive offerings, vase paintings and other material and iconographic evidence, and observed developments in contemporary Jewish and Gentile art.

Because it is a cultic phenomenon, and REM Theory might be understood in one of its dimensions as an evolutionary theory of cults, genome studies—which are already limited by the fact that they may account for only a minuscule percentage of the population of any ancient civilization—may ultimately prove to be of little or no use to the study, especially because the precise genetic makeup of a proto-Jew is unknown and only a tiny minority of proto-Jews might be required to dominate the introduction and production of cults and myths in this place or that. Hence, comparative mythology and the study of ancient religions become, in a sense, a form of mythic DNA study. Other myths that seem clearly to have influenced later myths might be understood, metaphorically, as bearing common DNA, whereby a later cult has evolved from an earlier one. Yet here we might understand the myths as all being of the same species in the sense that they may interbreed. Moreover, cults and mythic bodies can have multiple parents, even, in theory, an unlimited number of parents; hence, their reproduction, to continue the metaphor, becomes an example of heteropaternal superfecundation.

Similarly, while Darwin’s theory is not “imperfect” in the sense that evolution itself is necessarily unreliable, scientists can certainly be wrong about the specific relationships between ancient species. Because the fossil record is incomplete and evidence is often limited, scientists may initially conclude that two species were closely related and later discover, through new fossils, genetics, or other evidence, that they were more distantly related—or vice versa. In fact, changing conclusions when new evidence emerges is an expected part of science. And, of course, this is true of REM Theory. Mistakes will be made. But this is not disruptive to REM Theory. Just as Darwin’s theory first appeared as a well-supported hypothesis based on observations and has since gained support from additional evidence, we believe REM Theory will likewise gain support as more people become convinced of the thesis and become REM theorists in pursuit of its confirmation. The critiques of our current critics will disappear, as will the unoriginal and unimportant theses they’ve authored. REM Theory will abide. Whether some or many remain opposed to it, or whether it experiences periods of relative popularity or unpopularity, is irrelevant. What humanity has finally seen cannot be unseen.

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This essay is found in Myth to Power (2026), by Mark Brahmin and Richard Spencer

“Jew” is certainly a less contested category than “Aryan,” as the former refers to adherents of the universally recognized religion of Judaism and followers of the Torah. Even here, though, we encounter ambiguity, for “Jew” is also an ethnic category. One can be an “atheist Jew,” say, in a way that one cannot be an “atheist Catholic.”1 A Jew is part of a lineage, whether he believes in his god or not. One of the first recorded accounts of Jews is found in a manuscript fragment from the fourth century BC. Jews were classed then as a “people of philosophers” among Syrians.2 Jews themselves like to understand their history as hearkening back four thousand years: “From Moses to Sandy Koufax,” in the memorable words of Walter from The Big Lebowski. This covers David’s kingdom and Solomon’s holy temple, putatively a thousand years before Christ, and further back to Abraham, to whom Yahweh revealed himself. In this broader study, we will bring much of this story into doubt; in fact, we question whether the Bible possesses any sort of useful historicity whatsoever. We do not, however, deny Jews’ antiquity and staying power. Indeed, “four thousand years” might be an underestimation!

Our hypothesis presumes that Jews—or Proto-Jews, a more accurate moniker—have persisted within Aryan civilizations since Sumer (post-3100 BC), where they have operated as a “people of philosophers,” a symbol-wise, myth-bearing group, or priestly class. Proto-Jews were a cultic phenomenon. The myth, symbolism, and cultic practices of these Proto-Jews will eventually influence the form and matter of the Jewish religion and culture, likely around the time they began to appear in pagan accounts, that is, in the fourth century BC. Our study advances the premise that Judaism is a composite religio-culture, developed consciously from these earlier Proto-Jewish cults as an evolutionary adaptation vis-à-vis survival challenges, whereby earlier cults become obsolete and no longer useful to genetic and cultural success. We suggest that between Jews and Proto-Jews, there is a continuity of initiates, who abandoned earlier cults to inhabit the new cult of Judaism. Before they were known as “Jews,” they were known by other names and cults, and through the study of REM, these cults can be identified. This list includes the Etruscans, Lemnians, Spartans, and Pelasgians (at least as they appear in the mytho-historical literature), and it might include the mysterious “Sea People.” Likewise, it includes the Zoroastrian Magi. Proto-Jews are detectable especially in chthonic, nocturnal, lunar, and fire cults appearing throughout the ancient world. These cults include the Sumerian adherents of Enlil, Nanna, Dumuzid, and Ningishzida. They also include the Egyptian cults of Ptah, Amun, Thoth, Yah, Set, and Osiris, as well as the Phoenician cults of El and Adonis. In the Greco-Roman world, Proto-Jews appeared in the form of Vulcan, Bacchus, Mercury, Saturn, Pluto, the Idaean Dactyls, and the Lemnian Cabeiri.3 Gods like Vulcan and Ptah, as well as the Biblical figure of Solomon, are especially telling manifestations of the Jewish god, as they are temple builders, idol makers, propagandists, and priests. Jews are, in a word, “Promethean.” Meaningfully, Jews and Proto-Jews themselves identify with chthonic, lunar, fiery, and nocturnal figures. In other words, it was not a case of Aryans thrusting these designations upon them, even if this may have occurred in some instances. Rather, Jews and Proto-Jews eagerly embraced the mantle of the secretive and mysterious “other.” In any case, they saw it as their clearest path to cultural, economic, and sexual success. To be clear, Proto-Jews especially represent the culture- and religion-creating leadership of the groups and cults mentioned here, which may have been of a racially indistinct or non-Semitic nature, in part or even in the main. Moreover, this leadership itself, much like Jews today, was likely always an admixed type.

Gods wander. Euripides reports that Dionysus hails from Lydia (in Anatolia or modern-day Turkey), suggesting a recently arrived Eastern deity. Whether Euripides was accurate in fact or accurate in spirit is its own question. The Proto-Jewish Hermes, in turn, is the god of wanderers and wayfarers, equipped with his “petasos” (travelers cap) and winged sandals and symbolized by road markers (”Herms”). For our purposes, the point is that history is replete with the introduction of new gods. Sometimes they evoke an earlier deity, perhaps one that had fallen out of favor; sometimes the god is vividly foreign, announcing a more pronounced cultural change.

This essay is found in Myth to Power (2026), by Mark Brahmin and Richard Spencer

“Aryan” is a designation used throughout this study. Today, the term might be contentious, even inflammatory, but it should not be. “Aryan” can be taken as roughly synonymous with “White” or “European,” as those words are commonly used, but it references something broader. In the contemporary academic context, the term is viewed as an antiquated form of “Indo-European.” The Indo-Europeans are a global group of peoples speaking closely related languages. “Aryan” itself derives from a Sanskrit word, Ārya (आर्य) and the Old Persian equivalent. The archaeologist and anthropologist J.P. Mallory relays, “By the first century AD, historical records reveal peoples settled from the shores of the Atlantic to India all speaking languages closely related to one another.

These are the Indo-European languages, whose origins can be traced back to a common ancestor [Proto-Indo-European] that was spoken in Eurasia some 6,000 years ago....

If details are still a matter of controversy, the Indo-Europeans hypothesis is most certainly not. It is the only explanation that can convincingly account for why approximately half of the earth’s population speaks in languages clearly related to one another. This requires the assumption that at some time and some place in Eurasia, there existed a population which spoke a language directly ancestral to all of those we now recognize as Indo-European.1

Traditionally, scholars located three “superfamiles” of languages: Indo-European, Semitic, and the now-outdated Turanian (which lumped together Uralic, Altaic, Turkic, Mongolic, and other tongues). In fact, there are more than one hundred and fifty distinct language families, including Sino-Tibetian, Niger–Congo, and Afro-Asiatic, the latter of which includes Hebrew, Arabic, and Ancient Egyptian. The Aryans were the Mycenaean Greeks, Hittites, Indo-Iranians, Celts, Gauls, Germans, Scythians, Balts, Slavs, Norsemen, and others. While recent breakthroughs are occurring through the study of artifacts, remains, and even genetic material,2 there is still a tremendous amount we can learn through the study of languages, including living languages. A word like rex (”king”) in Latin and rāj (”ruler” or “state”) in Hindi are clearly cognates; that is, they come from a common root, *h₃reg-, which spread thousands of miles to the Indian subcontinent and Italian peninsula and mutated along the way. The prospect that this similarity arose by chance is simply not credible. We see the same with the English “snow,” German Schnee, Russian sneg, and French neige (with a “s-mobile”). Interestingly, this phenomenon does not recur with the same regularity for all maritime and nautical words (”sea,” See, mer, mare, etc.). This suggests that new words were developed for bodies of water after the population had divided. The Aryans originated in a cold environment, and thus, speculatively, the “snow” cognate is retained in all Indo-European languages. As Aryans divided, sub-groups discovered lakes and seas and named them in a novel manner.

As early as the sixteenth century, French scholar Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609) observed distinct patterns in how various Aryan groups expressed the concept of “god”: The Latin deus gives us the Italian dio, Spanish dio, and French dieu. In Central and Northern Europe, we find the German Gott, Dutch god, Swedish gud, and English “god”; further east, we encounter the Russian bog, Ukrainian bog, Polish bog, and Czech buh. Scaliger had uncovered the Romantic, Germanic, and Slavic language groups, each of which are interrelated but define major junctures in history, geography, and culture.3 The mutation of individual words follows sound laws, and major divergences reflect migrations, splittings, conquests, and collapses. Regardless, “Indo-European” is, strictly speaking, not a biological or racial category. That said, its development certainly implies an original people living in an original homeland. Such a place is likely found on the Eurasian plateau. Its discovery, along with the apprehension of a Proto-Indo-European tongue, are now possible through scientific inquiry and informed speculation.

We should be clear, language is not race. This becomes doubly true when we commit ourselves to the study and understanding of myth. For instance, in Sumer, both Sumerian and Akkadian were spoken. The former is an isolate, belonging to no known family; the latter is a Semitic language. Around the time the oldest mythological texts appear in 2500 BC, personal names with Akkadian morphology are present in Sumerian cities, suggesting mixed communities. By this time, “loan words” have appeared in both languages. By 2350 BC, administrative tablets show scribes fluent in both languages, while many texts include Sumerian with Akkadian glosses—an early sign of formal bilingualism. By 2100, bilingualism is widespread and institutionalized. Meanwhile, the early mythic elements first appearing as mere fragments and glimpses in 2500 BC had expanded into fully developed narrative myths (e.g., the Enmerkar cycle and Inanna myths). Hence, in many cases, one cannot assume that a myth is “Sumerian” simply because it is rendered in the Sumerian tongue, any more than one might assume an American comic book or film is “Aryan” or coming from the Anglo founding stock because it is rendered in English. In so doing, we might as well call Woody Allen films and the Seinfeld sitcom “Indo-European.” Similarly, that the Akkadians spoke a Semitic tongue does not necessitate they were all racially Semitic.

The French anthropologist and diplomat Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882) observed a distinct general pattern: Civilizations are established by Aryans; they experience decline; and eventually the founding stock dissipates or is displaced.4 Recent studies of the genomes of ancient humans tend to corroborate his thesis. With regard to Ancient Rome, archaeological studies have discovered that, in the wake of the collapse of the Bronze Age, an Aryan population established the Republic (traditionally dated to 753 BC). This population increasingly mixed with Middle Eastern and Near Eastern peoples as Rome emerged as an empire, due to the tremendous advances in transportation and communication this entailed. By Rome’s decline and formal conversion to Christianity, the people—including and perhaps especially the ruling elite—had been transformed.5 Parallels with the United States and Europe are obvious and have been witnessed in real time by successive generations. With this in mind, we might surmise that the Semitic-speaking Akkadians were more racially Aryan in the main, at least prior to a decline in civilizational significance. This is true even if they would be directed by an ethnically Semitic culture-creating class from the beginning. Indeed, even among contemporary Jews, we find a de-facto racial hierarchy that would have characterized any of the important ancient civilizations at their founding. It is, in fact, a racial hierarchy that continues to characterize civilizations where Aryans persist, from South America to Iran, however admixed they might be and regardless of political and cultural efforts empowering non-Aryans. Indeed, “the most Aryan of the Jews,” the Ashkenazim, at least from the seventeenth century onward, have been the most influential in collective Jewish success and development. It might be plainly said that Aryan blood is an important factor in this regard.

With all of this in mind, in this study, our use of “Aryan” does, indeed, connote race, one that predominates in Europe as well as many other lands across the world.6 That the original Indo-European Sanskrit word ārya, from which the English word “Aryan” was taken, had racial connotations in the ancient world should be beyond dispute. Consider, for example, its use in the ancient Indian caste system. There it designated the upper three social classes: the Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas. Notably, these classes were called varna, meaning “color” and “appearance.” The connotation is racial, as can still be observed in India today. While Indians have abided millennia of admixing, with the caste system only officially abolished in 1950, the higher castes remain fairer than the lower.

As Jews interacted with Aryans in the ancient world, they keenly observed and categorized them. They, indeed, named them. In the Hebrew Bible, Aryans are “Japhetites,” the descendants of Noah’s son Japheth (יֶפֶת). The Hebrew root is often thought to mean “beautiful” or “fair,” or, we could say, “European looking.” Shem, Noah’s second son, is the forefather of Jews and Arabs, this name being the root of “Semite.” The third son, Ham, is the ancestor of Africans (the Kushites) and Egyptians (I, §3). Though Hamites will play a role in what unfolds in this study, Japheth vs. Shem is the fundamental dynamic. It is arguably the fulcrum of world history: Esau vs. Jacob, Edom vs. Judah, Rome vs. Jerusalem.

This essay is found in Myth to Power (2026), by Mark Brahmin and Richard Spencer

This is a study of world mythology. We pay special attention to the Western and Near Eastern mythology from Sumer to Greece, from the Hebrew Bible to Hollywood. The subject is vast and expanded further by our contention that propaganda, myth, religion, culture, media, and art are essentially one. They are of a similar origin and kind and mutually reinforcing. Whatever impresses one deeply—whatever one venerates or places above oneself—impacts the individual psychologically and morally. It will ultimately shape the future genetically.

Every medium invariably posits models of moral conduct and desired mating types. We are familiar with the term “fertility god,” calling to mind the Venus of the Greeks or the so-called “Venus of Willendorf,” she of the bounteous breasts and tummy, who was carved out of limestone in the late Paleolithic period. Every god or goddess, in his or her way, promotes fertility, but that is only half the story. For every god promotes a type of breeding, directed towards a type of person. In art, it is no different. We find men who are venerated, physically or morally defined, whether beautiful and fair like Apollo or concealed and dark like Vulcan or Yahweh. Likewise, we understand that every story that gains currency and is fondly remembered is of a “cult” of some kind, especially if temples are built in its honor or it appears in a movie theater. This is doubly true of those characters who return in story after story in different manifestations—from Heracles to Moses to Jesus to Superman to Luke Skywalker.

Religion can be defined as the knowledgeable and skillful use of symbols toward a specific end, so as to convince observers to advocate for it. He who does not master religion is mastered by it. The cultists, esotericists, and artists, who at least by the fourth century BC were known as “Jews,” have taken these insights for granted. An excellent example can be found in Genesis 30 of the Hebrew Bible, in the parable that describes Jacob’s acquiring of Laban’s flock of sheep. The story is simple, yet profound in its implications. Jacob, working for his father-in-law, Laban, makes a deal with him: Jacob will receive the less desirable sheep of the herd, those that are spotted, speckled, or black. That the name “Laban” (לָבָן) means “white,” and his flock is indicated as such, is key to the significance of the parable. To turn the entire flock speckled, so that he might claim them all, Jacob creates stripes on the branches of trees by peeling back the bark and exposing the inner wood.

Then he placed the peeled branches in all the watering troughs, so that they would be directly in front of the flocks when they came to drink. When the flocks were in heat and came to drink, they mated in front of the branches. And they bore young that were streaked or speckled or spotted (Genesis 30:38-39).

By this method, Jacob encouraged a certain type of mating among the sheep. The offspring were born speckled and darkened, and Jacob surreptitiously acquired the whole lot. The sheep, consistent with the archetypal Christian metaphor, represent humans. Jacob’s scheme might seem an absurd form of husbandry, but the passage is ultimately a parable—a parable of cultural determination. Ideas, ways of being and seeing, impress the eye or enter the mind through words or images and change the future. Importantly, culture, media, art, and propaganda direct race formation. In other words, viewing the striped trees informed the flock’s mating selection. Hence, the parable, esoterically, demonstrates an understanding of what we call REM or Racial Esoteric Moralization. The message: Whatever holds the attention and forms the cultural milieu, whether an ancient Egyptian temple or the screen of a movie theater, governs human behavior and breeding. The covetous sacralization of the Bible has made certain that the knowledge and techniques contained in parables such as this would be passed on intergenerationally. And they would be passed on esoterically, that is, secretly.

The parable of Jacob and Laban also points to a primary goal of Jewish art and propaganda: the mixing of Laban’s “white flock.” The esoteric goal is consistent with more explicit stated goals appearing in contemporary media, as well as in academic and political efforts. Put bluntly, Jewish organizations and activists have been at the forefront in advocating for multiracial societies.1 Though some Jews might adopt a minority position, certainly none would argue for a homogenous society. One of those exceptions is, of course, the unique Israeli ethno-state. And to be sure, the story of Laban’s sheep is only one of innumerable stories containing “subversive” messaging tailored to specific cultural goals. Hence, what emerges, among many other insights, is an esoteric subversion throughout the Bible, one that goes much deeper than what Nietzsche called “slave morality.” And such messages are not limited to the Bible but are found as well in other ancient, foundational, and even “Aryan” art, such as Homer, where we would be wise to suspect “Proto-Jewish” authorship or influence (I, §3).

The myth of Pygmalion, which recurs memorably in Ovid, George Bernard Shaw’s play of that name (1913), and the musical My Fair Lady (1956), may even have developed, in its origin, as a conscious metaphor describing this phenomenon: Art may create, may breed, types. In the original telling, the artist, Pygmalion, falls in love with an ivory statue of a beautiful woman he has labored over. She is truer and more “human” to him than the flesh-and-blood women around him, who have become shallow, hollow, and false in comparison. The artist aspires that his work come to life, a wish granted to him by Venus. Life imitates art. Those artists who seek merely to depict life “as it is” are blind to their profession’s sacred function. The ideal becomes real, and the artist’s task is to bring this about.

The Pygmalion myth is poignant on another level as well. Propaganda, religion, myth, and art have their most profound effect on women, who emerge as “choosers” in the mating game. Thus, myths, religions, cultures, media, and art represent mating songs.2 The goal is to position a certain type of man as “chosen.” Indeed, Judaism, we argue, develops especially as a Bride-Gathering Cult, and this becomes discernible through a close analysis of Jewish art and religion, whether contemporary or ancient. Jacob, David, and even Jesus present the Jewish male as an object of desire and affection, sometimes as a trickster, sometimes as a warrior, sometimes as a sage. David’s name, in fact, means “beloved.” In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus describes himself as a “bridegroom” for attendant virgins, who should wisely keep their “lamps” well oiled (25:1-13).

We do not deny that parenting and the local community often provide strong countervailing influences to such propaganda. Put another way, peer pressure and tradition are their own forms of propaganda. But in the end, these are retarding, vestigial forces, stemming from a wary older generation. In a religious society—or in a media-saturated society, in our case—the “old ways” simply slow down a process and are of waning significance as time passes. Again, myth, religion, propaganda, and even “mere” art are race-forming tools. To be clear, this is distinct from the notion that culture emanates from a race or people. To the contrary, a few artists or myth-makers, as well as their acolytes and patrons, form race, as if gods, through their works. Nietzsche expounded similarly, but much less specifically, when he posited that some men are the “seed-bearers” of peoples or even “new states” and “communities.”3

For example, consider the European-derived Christian of today or his “secular” or “liberal” descendant. Without doubt, both are formed by the mollifying and egalitarian parables of apostolic scribes and are, importantly, distinct from the earlier race whence they derive. This is a phenomenon Tom Holland describes in his book Dominion.4 Western man was transformed from pagan to Christian; even the contemporary, post-Christian, secular liberal remains fundamentally Christian. Oswald Spengler arrives at a similar conclusion as Holland, providing the pithy aphorism: “Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism.”5 What we suggest is more radical. This transformation is both biological and psychological, with the biological proceeding from the psychological (”spiritual”). Myth and ethos direct breeding. Indeed, Madison Grant (1865-1937) and Lothrop Stoddard (1883-1950) observe that Christianity, with its tendency to protect the weak and unwell, has had dysgenic consequences. Here, the critique is of explicit messaging, the egalitarian and anti-racist creed that is propounded by Paul and Jesus himself (Galatians 3:28, 1 Corinthians 1:27-28, Matthew 20:16, etc). While we agree with this assessment, we argue that Christianity influences genes on a deeper, esoteric level. This formation through Christianity, whether a given White man still calls himself “Christian” or not, seems to account, for instance, for this same man’s passivity in the face of displacement, degeneration, and decline. After all, what is “multiculturalism” if not an esoteric Christianity finally revealed and made explicit? What is it if not the fulfillment of Paul’s tenacious striving in Romans to break down cultural barriers between Christians and Jews, in order to make disparate ethnicities “one in Christ Jesus”?

In other words, the notion that Christianity is merely a shroud the Aryan wears is false. Christianity has formed the European through many successive generations. It has selected him, often from among men who refused it. This remains true even if the genes of some crypto-atheists and crypto-pagans persisted, as clearly they have. Jews well understand this: The Christian is no longer the Roman. The Christian who denies this—who doubts the intrinsic effect and meaning of his own religion, believing himself unchanged by a god he insists is his creator—believes himself to be no more “moral” than the pagan. Likewise, he believes Christendom to be no more “moral” than pagan Rome. One must ask: Why then is he a Christian? The answer is that his “benevolent” god damns to hell those who do not believe in his only son’s most incredible truth. Has Christianity simply been taken for granted and not properly scrutinized and perfunctorily accepted as “our faith”? Have many taken up Pascals wager, professing belief or going through the motions just in case?6

Myth and art, as we generically call these closely related things, is one of the primary mechanisms responsible for racial divergence and development. We have never not been surrounded by art. We do not discount the possibility that the earliest, most primitive, pre-human expressions of art—such as cave paintings of the hunt—acted as braggadocio mating calls, even, in some cases, with tribal significance; that is, they were REM. This is a core part of the meaning of the opening sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 (1968). There, we find ape-men, our ancestors, barely eking out an existence, dumbly grazing, much like the prey animals surrounding them. Their behavior radically changes by the introduction of media, in this case, a black monolith (II, §20). The monolith mysteriously educates the ape-men and encourages them to become the dominant—and ultimately most violent—species on the planet. The crude club made of bone progresses into a nuclear-powered spaceship, allowing man, still an ape on the inside, to project power beyond the confines of Earth. It is not mere evolution, according to Kubrick, that allowed for this giant leap to take place. It occurs through the intervention of an outside force, a medium of enlightenment that can only be called “religion.”

The fashioning of men through myth and education is what we term REM. In this book, we posit that the most salient and abiding forms of myth, religion, and art, whether appearing from Aryans or Semites, are the result of a conscious desire to moralize, form, and empower a people or class, invariably at the expense of other types. Religion and art do not, as is commonly assumed, appear spontaneously from the individual imagination or “collective unconscious,” divinely or mystically inspired, at least not in their most important manifestations. Myth is not best understood as a way of explaining natural phenomena (”just so”), nor is art’s primary aim to describe the world poetically or explore the “human condition.” In this discussion, Jung’s idea of a collective unconsciousness is of only limited value.7 While certainly we accept that myths and parables call upon primal hopes, fears, and even imagery that all men have in common, the most important, abiding, and influential myths arise from artists’ conscious aligning of symbols, so as to transmit messages from one generation to the next and remake the world anew.

This essay is found in Myth to Power (2026), by Mark Brahmin and Richard Spencer.

The decline we see in Hollywood is far from unique in the history of religio-cultural development. It seems instead to be the norm. Very likely a similar process took place in Hindu India, at least after the ascent of Shiva, the Indian Bacchus, during the first to fourth centuries AD. Doubtlessly, his cult—among others, including much earlier ones—was either an offshoot of Judiasm or was crypto-Jewish.

The monumental stone-temple architecture and the recognizable corpus of South Asian sculpture—what most people picture when they think of “Indian temples”—developed quite late, sometime between the third century BC and the sixth century AD, flourishing from the seventh to twelfth centuries. We can consider these temples to be the equivalents in religio-cultural significance of the cinema of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is worth noting that as film and video have become the premier vessels for the delivery of messaging, architecture has suffered a corresponding atrophy. Regardless, as occurs today with the rise of woke, and as occurred in Rome with the rise of Christianity, we find idols designed to pander to the vanity of ascendant groups, with those of the older, Aryan population disfavored and consigned to the dustbin.

At some point during this process, the religio-culture became, in effect, a “cargo cult,” that is, something worshiped without any understanding. This occurred after the Aryan and Semitic populations, which originally created the cults and formed their esoteric cores, had become largely extinct. The “mystery” that made them generative had been long forgotten. There were no more “knowers,” who could create, give, and receive. And no longer was there any reason to anyway, as the ethnic battle in which their forbears had been engaged—what inspired the art and religion in the first place—had already been won. Instead, religious devotees assumed these metaphors to be describing actual gods and monsters or maybe, if one were among the more elite classes, parables conveying simple truths about good conduct and so forth. Long gone were the days of the Rig Veda (1500–1200 BC), wherein several verses describe Aryan gods, especially Indra, defeating the “dark brood” of the Dasyus and protecting the “Āryas.”1 While it may be too simple to say that such passages are akin to D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), where Southern White Klansmen are depicted, unabashedly, in triumphal conflict against Blacks, likely some comparison can be drawn.

Gazing at those elaborate Indian shrines, or watching contemporary woke Hollywood, we experience something like what thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Mark Fisher call “hauntology” or cultural malaise. We find ourselves living in the ruins of a recent cultural explosion, unable to create works ourselves with comparable power. This is the fossilization of a religio-culture, where only half-remembered forms remain.2

This essay is found in Myth to Power (2026), by Mark Brahmin and Richard Spencer

In the 2020s, “wokeness” in Hollywood became an obsession among various conservative critics and online influencers. Indeed, complaining about “woke” turned into a cottage industry. Their ire was mostly directed at gender- and race-bending recasting of classic characters (e.g., the “Black Little Mermaid”) and feminist themes inserted into their favorite sci-fi and comic-book franchises (e.g., Rey “girlboss” Skywalker). These conservatives invariably called on Hollywood to return to the “good ol’ days,” which were putatively more meritocratic, focused on storytelling, and even patriotic. In the end, the critics of woke are often observing ham-fisted, half-hearted, and, worst of all, boring implementations of messaging that has been prominent in Hollywood since its inception. These beloved classics—commonly admired by those who have never watched them and played on endless repeat on cable channels throughout the 1990s—were often deeply political, subversive, and esoteric. Woke screenwriters, directors, and producers (frequently women and Gentiles) often lack the subtly, skill, and complexity that marked Hollywood’s earlier generations. Woke Hollywood will produce a Black Little Mermaid or female Luke Skywalker in a clumsy attempt at “diversity and inclusion.” Such schlock comes in the wake of twentieth-century JEM, and much more complicated and veiled filmmaking, which was, in so many cases, disseminating the very same message.

Take, for instance, Sunset Boulevard (1950), directed and co-written by Billy Wilder (1906-2002). Here, we meet “Norma Desmond” (Gloria Swanson), the greatest star of the silent era, who lives in narcissistic isolation in her decaying mansion south of the Hollywood Hills. She has been left behind, as she aged and Hollywood began producing “talkies,” films with sound and dialogue. Norma could convey everything “with one look.” Wilder subtly indicates that Norma’s downfall has a political component. When Norma encounters the famed director Cecil B. DeMille, she tells him, “I saw you last someplace very gay. I remember I was dancing on a table.” DeMille responds, “A lot of people were. Lindbergh had just landed in Paris.” The line is casual, apparently included to establish Norma’s age—Lindy crossed the Atlantic in 1927. It also connects Norma’s heyday and power to Charles Lindberg, who, by the time of the film’s production, was more relevant for his opposition to America’s entry into the Second World War. As he stated in a 1939 radio address, “We must ask who owns and influences the newspaper, the news picture, and the radio station.… If our people know the truth, our country is not likely to enter the war.”1 Notably, Wilder was a German-Jew who had fled to California in 1934 after Hitler’s rise to power. There is another level, too. With the memorable character of Norma, Wilder constructs a grand metaphor for the triumph of “the Word” over the adoration of visible, material, “pagan” beauty. Lonely and forgotten, Norma exclaims, “They took the idols and smashed them!” Sunset Boulevard depicts, in a manner, a “twilight of the idols” or, as it is phrased in Judaism, “Tikkun Olam.” The film’s title fittingly evokes “sunset.” Perhaps the highly literate Wilder was referencing Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918-1922), whose German title, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, evokes the “evening” (Abend) of Aryan civilization. On the other hand, the understanding that the Aryan represents something solar—and thus the sunset, a symbol of Aryan decline—is a notion present in JEM, ancient and otherwise.

Another example of Hollywood’s sophistication is the baseball drama The Natural (1984), written by Robert Towne and based on a novel by Bernard Malamud. Here we find Jewish messaging in the seemingly least likely of places. The film celebrates America’s old and storied pastime, and the lead actor is the notably WASPy Robert Redford. He plays the titular “natural,” “Roy Hobbs.” He enters as a small-town boy, seemingly reared on small-town morals, and he drips with gentility, at least on the surface. The bulk of the film is dedicated to Roy as a thirty-something rookie with a murky past who, in 1939, comes out of nowhere to become the “savior” of America’s pastime. His home runs are accompanied by lightning strikes in the sky. On one afternoon, he stops time itself, hitting a ball into the clock tower in Wrigley field. Roy Hobbs—whose first name means “king” and surname, “shining”—is, needless to say, a “superman Jesus,” and his exploits are straight out of a comic-book. But this is not the whole story. He is also indicated as a figure appointed by Jews. Hobbs was (re-)discovered while playing for the minor-league “Hebrew Oilers.” The team’s name evokes the literal meaning of “Messiah,” as one anointed with oil. (This detail was added by the filmmakers and does not appear in the novel.)

Hobbs’s return to baseball at an advanced age is a mystery to those around him. The audience learns that at 19, while on a train to his first professional tryout, he met the dark-haired and beautiful “Harriet Bird,” a seeming baseball fan and love interest. Unlike Hobbs, she is educated, and, lacking his insouciance, attracted to death and the past. Bird asks him, “Have you ever read Homer?” His response: “The only ‘homer’ I know has four bases in it!” Hobbs simply wants to shine as a god: “When I walk down the street, people will say, ‘there goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was.’” Harriet seeks something more “glorious.” What she has in mind is the creation of a tragedy, perhaps out of an inner-resentment or nihilistic urge, perhaps out of a desire to play the role of the dark goddess or fury, bound to torture anyone who angers a god ... or aspires to be one. Whatever the case, she dons a black veil and shoots Hobbs with a silver bullet. Failing to kill him, she nevertheless ends his promising career.

Hobbs wanders for more than a decade, before attempting a return. He is signed by the “New York Knights,” a fictional team that, unlike, say, the Dodgers or Yankees, evokes Medieval Christendom. Malamud admitted to this intention. In particular, he drew inspiration from the Arthurian Legend, with the name of the team being only the most obvious reference.2 Understanding this, critics of the novel would compare Hobbs’s sacred bat (”Wonderboy”) to Excalibur and the Pennant to the Holy Grail, and Hobbs himself to King Arthur or Perceval. What is interesting to us is why a Jewish creator would chose Arthurian Legend, a Christo-pagan myth, as inspiration. Then again, this is no isolated incident but a rather ubiquitous phenomenon. Stan Lee will explicitly expand upon both the Arthurian and Norse mythos through his comics; Steven Spielberg and Stanely Kubrick will remake Pinocchio in their film AI; Barry Levinson himself will revisit the metaphors of Arthurian myth in his film Avalon (1990). Here, “Avalon,” the fabled afterworld of Arthurian legend, becomes a description of America as a kind of paradise and land of opportunity for Jews leaving war-torn Europe. Ultimately, it is incorrect to view all these “pagan” references as a kind of simple appropriation (II, §7).

In any case, Hobbs becomes the team’s “king” ... or something more. The manager of the Knights is named “Pop Fisher,” which critics have assumed to be a reference to the Fisher King, and surely, on one level, he is this. But the Fisher King himself is a reference to Jesus or possibly Peter, Jesus’s famous “fisher of men.” And Pop’s name suggests him, much like the apostle Peter, to be the Pope (”papa”) of the Knights. As Christ, Hobbs is scapegoated: The bullet hole left by Harriet Bird becomes the bleeding wound in his side; he is “crucified” in the press, literally caricatured as a scapegoat, a sacrificial animal akin to the pascal lamb; and set up to fail by “The Judge,” the primary owner of the team. This latter character wants the Knights to lose so that he can buy out Pop Fisher’s ownership shares. The Judge is the leader of the dark, Pharisaical forces, which reside within the ballpark, as they do within Jerusalem in the Gospels. More precisely, the decidedly Gentile Roy Hobbs is a “Messiah ben Joseph,” an aspect of Jesus, and an archetype based on the figure of Joseph in Genesis. Like Roy Hobbs, the non-Judean Joseph, too, will be guilty of dreaming of greatness, dreaming that all the sons of Israel are destined to bow before him, even Judah, the namesake of the religion. And like Joseph, Hobbs will be punished for his pride, curtailed, diminished, and humbled. Rather than realizing his full personal greatness, he will be relegated to serving Pop Fischer and his Knights for a fleeting moment of glory. Again, metaphorically, Pop’s Knights are the Catholic Church, which is itself understood as a metaphor of the Biblical Israel. Here, the silver of the bullet that wounded Hobbs suggests that ultimately it was the lunar Yahweh who humbled him. And something similar is suggested in the 20 silver coins by which the Biblical Joseph will be sold to Midianite slavers at the suggestion of his own half-brother, Judah. Joseph, too, will thereafter suffer a long road to greatness. And when he achieves it, having been enslaved and brought low by Yahweh, he will use it to serve Judah and the sons of Israel.

Characters like the (Black) Little Mermaid, Roy Hobbs, and Norma Desmond are all “derivative” on some level. There is rarely anything new under the sun, and characters gain power through their history. Hobbs and Norma, however, tap into ancient archetypes. The Black Little Mermaind, on the other hand, amounts to a new paint job slapped onto a franchise without renewing or complicating the underlying symbolism. “Wokeness,” to the extent that it persists, does threaten Hollywood, in that it marks decline, atrophy, and laziness. Subversion, “liberalism” (properly understood), and the promotion of the Dionysian ideal, however, have been present in Hollywood from the very beginning. Again, wherever we find a conscious Jewish mind in film, we typically find JEM, buttressing the story at the esoteric level.3 In turn, the subtlety evinced in earlier works is, to some degree, a matter of relative power and the need to placate and pander to a White audience. Wokeness, on the other hand, is crude and “in your face,” where it could be artful and sly. This nevertheless represents the full completion of the mission of JEM.4 Ruined by success, Hollywood is gradually departing from the forefront of defining global culture. At some point, if demographics shift enough, an artistic, cultural or religious movement, driven at its core by JEM, as Hollywood has been, loses its hidden intelligence. This is particularly true when there are no longer a sufficient number of initiates around to inhabit it. Then this art, culture and religion, to the extent it remains creative at all, goes from something mysterious and meaningful to something arbitrary, regional, and irrelevant. This is also a critical point at which something else might come to replace it—as Apollo arrives at Delphi to unseat Python.

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Dear All,

It’s with great pleasure that I announce the publication of Mark Brahmin’s and my first book, Myth to Power.

As a subscriber to ALEXANDRIA, please enjoy this free eBook edition.

Hardback and paperback editions will be available imminently.

Best,

RS

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Richard and Mark discuss Darren Aronofsky’s film Caught Stealing (2025). “Hank Thompson,” a former baseball phenom derailed by a drunk-driving crash, gets pulled into a Lower East Side scheme involving his neighbor Russ, a stolen cat, a hidden key, corrupt cop Inspector Roman, Russian and Puerto Rican gangsters, and brutal Hasidic Jewish killers; Yvonne…

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AI-generated summary

Timestamps

00:00 Mic Check

00:39 Free Ebook Announcement

02:03 Audiobook Plans and AI Narration

03:30 Uncanny Valley Explained

06:33 Apolloism v…

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Richard, Mark, and the gang revisit Darren Aronofsky’s Pi (1998), a remarkably accomplished low-budget, 16mm debut with strong photography, synth soundtrack, gritty verité texture, and aesthetics reminiscent of The Matrix. Mathematician “Maximilian Cohen’s” is obsessed with patterns linking mathematics to the stock market and the Torah, pursued by Wall …

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