Julian

Emperor of Rome

Flavius Claudius Julianus, properly known as Julian the Philosopher, was a Roman Emperor of the Constantinian dynasty. He was known as the last Satanic emperor and attempted to halt the spread of Christianity that had been spreading rapidly since the 2nd century, for his rule saw swift religious reforms driven by a desire to return Rome to its polytheistic, Hellenistic roots and minimize the influence of Christianity with strict, anti-Christian edicts.

Furthermore, Julian was initiated into at least two mystery schools during his life, receiving his education from Neo-Platonic philosophers like his teacher, Maximus of Ephesus, himself a student of Iamblichus (Tierney 593). As an emperor, philosopher, and soldier, Julian stands out as a remarkable figure in the late days of Rome who represented a final attempt to wipe away the corruption of Christian rot. This exploration will reveal his upbringing and rise to power, rule, and Hellenistic affiliations, presenting him as a heroic example against the corruption of Judeo-Christianity.

THE PRECARIOUS CHILD

Julian’s early life was marked by significant stress and anxiety. His family were in a volatile position, as Julian was the nephew of Constantine, who had converted the Empire to Christianity. Ambitious, paranoid and crude, Constantine had seized power in a violent and irregular manner through warfare and was an unstable personality motivated by power and fear. In proximity to Julian, the truest great individual of the Constantinian dynasty, fate herself shows how two individuals from the same family can be very different. Much like the intervention at Fátima, the war Constantine waged had certain supernatural elements and was helped greatly by the enemy.

During the war, Constantine was inclined to murder his own son and to murder his wife by strangling her to death in a bath. As Zosimus relates correctly, when the priesthood told him there was no excuse for the murder of one’s own child, at the behest of a Jew from Alexandria, Constantine sought the solace of the ascendant Christian sect in penance for his crimes. For this reason, he was a useful puppet to use in the designs of the enemy, becoming increasingly weaker and more erratic upon seizing power in Rome.

Due to his endless sacrilege against ancient rites, Constantine was cursed by the non-Christian element of the population of the city of Rome, reviled by the Senate and endeavored to build a new capitol at the Bosphoran city called Byzantium, which he renamed as Constantinople. In spite of these missteps, Christianity was incredibly entrenched in Roman life at this point, although many practitioners did not understand its nature; it was only fully unveiled in stages and did not take the form we understand it as during Constantine’s time. Constantine levelled exorbitant taxes upon the Roman people. He organized mass-seizures of sacred property which led to extreme levels of urban depletion, notable even hundreds of years later. Julian was not, therefore, born to a popular family. Perhaps for reasons of fate, he was the first individual born in the city of Constantinople after its renaming and rededication.

As soon as he was born, Julian was placed under heavy guard as a child and treated as a prisoner, ironically all for the purpose of ensuring he would never become an apostate to the ‘holy faith’. Raised in Arian Christianity under the guidance of a bishop named George of Cappadocia and taught by the eunuch Mardonius, Julian managed to view and interpret many classical works. Having access to the Christians surrounding his uncle, the young man learned many things about the nature of the creed of the Nazarene, becoming extremely well-versed in the Bible and the apologetic arguments to defend Christianity. Cappadocia was the province that produced many fervent Christians.

In 337, to secure his position as sole emperor, Julian’s zealous Arian Christian cousin, Constantius II, orchestrated a massacre of Julian’s family and many other family members, leaving only Julian and his half-brother Gallus alive:

That on the father’s side I am descended from the same stock as Constantius on his father’s side is well known. Our fathers were brothers, sons of the same father. And close kinsmen as we were, how this most humane Emperor treated us! Six of my cousins and his, and my father who was his own uncle and also another uncle of both of us on the father’s side, and my eldest brother, he put to death without a trial; and as for me and my other brother, he intended to put us to death but finally inflicted exile upon us; and from that exile he released me, but him he stripped of the title of Caesar just before he murdered him. But why should I “recount,” as though from some tragedy, “all these unspeakable horrors?” For he has repented, I am told, and is stung by remorse; and he thinks that his unhappy state of childlessness is due to those deeds, and his ill success in the Persian war he also ascribes to that cause.¹

Julian further elaborated that the point of this mass murder was for the psychotic Constantius to seize the properties and monies of his relatives. They were subsequently exiled to the imperial estate of Macellum in Cappadocia, where he and his brother endured the most severe house arrest and lived as slaves:

This was the strain they kept up to soothe us when we had been imprisoned in a certain farm in Cappadocia; and they allowed no one to come near us after they had summoned him from exile in Tralles and dragging from the schools, though I was still a mere boy. How shall I describe the six years we spent there? For we lived as if on the estate of a stranger, and were watched as though we were in some Persian garrison, since no stranger came to see us and not a single one of our old friends was allowed to visit us; so that we lived shut off from every liberal study and from all free intercourse, in a glittering servitude, and sharing the exercises of our own slaves as though they were comrades. For no companion of our own age ever came near us, nor was allowed to do so.¹

THE END OF CONFINEMENT

Thanks to the intercession of the Gods, whom Julian thanks in the same letter, this exile ended when Julian turned eighteen. Consequently, he was pushed into the Christian priesthood, assuming a position in the clergy in line with the mores of his family and piously Christian mother, quickly becoming a lector but also quickly a prelate. This further course of study during adulthood and elevation to a high office in the church enabled him to learn further things about the nature of Christianity.

Julian, however, internally rejected Christianity in favor of Greek Hellenism by the age of twenty (Tierney 585–586). His contempt of Christianity became obvious to some of his teachers who noted his smirk when discussing the Nazarene, while others accused him of using his office to practice supernatural feats in the presence of Christians to unnerve them. In 351, he abandoned the priesthood and returned to Asia Minor to study Neo-Platonism (New World Encyclopedia). Julian then went to study among Maximus of Ephesus who taught him a mystical form of theurgical rite and even went to the Platonic Academy in Athens.

In a twist of fate, he quickly rose to prominence when he was called to serve Rome’s interests in the province of Gaul. Julian was essentially kidnapped after going off the radar and brought to the palace of the emperor in Milan under the pretense of intrigue and treason. Constantius had his beard shaven and forced him into certain soldierly clothes, forcing the title of "Caesar of the West" on him, while surrounding the young man with dozens of Christian informants who spied on him for months. The empress Eusebi treated Julian with kindness; but as Julian wrote a customarily kind letter, the Gods warned him not to send it as it would result in a gruesome death.

LEADER OF THE GERMAN LEGIONS

The imprisoned Julian learned that his brother Constantius Gallus, who had preceded him in ruling the East, mentally deteriorated after being subjected to endless house arrest and torture. As a result, he became something of a tyrant and was executed in 354. In response, Constantius II turned to his only remaining male relative, Julian, appointing to assist in defending against surrounding barbarian nations pillaging the Rhine, as his attempts to produce an heir came to nothing and his own military capabilities were worthless. Julian’s mother protested that he was too scholarly to fulfil this position; it is speculated Constantius essentially intended to send Julian on a suicide mission.

It is known at some point while residing in Milan, Julian managed to enter the Eleusinian Mysteries. Over the next five years, Julian defied expectations to achieve a series of stellar victories with the Roman army under his command. By his second and third year most of the towns in Gaul had recovered from the barbarian raids and destruction. He defied orders from Constantius to be conciliatory to the invaders, driving them out by the sword. Essentially, he reversed the fortunes of Rome with a border that had caused problems for a century and a half. Julian defended the Rhine frontier valiantly at the Battle of Argentoratum, leading the Petulantes, an elite guard, to proclaim him emperor of all of Rome.

Constantius, already being enraged by these developments and the adept nature of his cousin, had sent Julian countless letters of abuse and threatened to wipe the Romans in Gaul out. Time after time, he sent informants and spies to kill Julian. When Constantius heard his cousin had been crowned emperor, he even demanded he submit to him "for his pleasure" and courtiers sent huge amounts of money to the camp of Julian’s soldiers to convince them to betray him. Although civil war seemed likely as Julian descended from France to seize several cities in Northern Italy and the Balkans with his army, he put his faith in the Gods’ providence that inspired the supreme loyalty of his soldiers rather than obeying his wicked relative for an instant.

Suddenly, Julian heard from ambassadors at Sirmium that Constantius II died in Anatolia after being baptized and had reportedly recognized Julian as emperor in his last will, something that he accepted with a certain reluctance and ambivalence. Consequently, Julian was free to rule Rome as he saw fit. Now, to focus Julian further as a personality contributing to the Joy of Satanas, the following events followed:

After gaining the purple, Julian started a religious reformation of the state, which was intended to restore the lost strength [Hellenic Polytheism] of the Roman State. He also forced the Christian church to return the riches, or fines equaling them, looted from the pagan temples after the Christian religion was made legitimate by Constantine. He supported the restoration of the old Roman faith, based on polytheism. His laws tended to target wealthy and educated Christians, and his aim was not to destroy Christianity but to drive the religion out of "the governing classes of the empire—much as Buddhism was driven back into the lower classes by a revived Confucian mandarinate in thirteenth-century China" (Brown, as cited in New World Encyclopedia).

The anti-Christian edicts provide some of the clearest evidence of Julian’s policies. In his school edict, he prohibited Christian teachers from using any pagan texts, stating, “If they want to learn literature, they have Luke and Mark: Let them go back to their churches and expound on them” (Brown, as cited in New World Encyclopedia). This aimed to diminish Christian influence on youth education and financially starve Christian scholars, tutors, and teachers.

Additionally, the Tolerance Edict of 362 “decreed the reopening of pagan temples and the restitution of alienated temple properties”. Julian established new priesthoods for these temples, excluded Christians from court and state positions, and revoked grants and immunities for Christian bishops (Tierney 596). The ability of Christians to organize and to deploy verbal propaganda was circumscribed, as was their usage of Greek, with Julian classifying this as a holy language and exhorting them to use Hebrew instead. Overall, these measures sought to marginalize Christians as much as possible, as they had formed a very powerful fifth column within Roman society at this point.

Julian played a precarious game by turning the Jews of the Empire against the Christians in many conflicts, playing divide and conquer, whereas previously they had formed a stronger united front. Many of these conflicts in fact contributed to the major entrenchment of anti-Semitism in Europe and Asia among Christians and eventually Muslims for centuries to come, a persistent pain for the enemy. The fact Julian gave ‘promises’ to Jews has led some moronic Christian authors to allege Julian was a philo-semite selling out to Jews to sustain paganism: being an indirect student of Iamblichus, he was anything but.

However, Julian was given a task by the Gods in asking the final time for the Hebrews to collectively repent and to cease their aggressive course against humanity. The clinical manner in which he dissects Judaism in his writings must be understood in this lens. His reign represented something of a final warning. Suffice to say, repentance did not occur.

THE IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION

Strictly speaking, this was not just a religious crusade either, but one of bureaucratic efficiency revolving around the Roman state being near-bankrupt. Julian was mystified by the extreme amount of foreigners, scheming eunuchs and otherwise useless public servants on the payroll of Constantine and Constantius present in the halls of power at Milan, Constantinople and Rome, a parallel we can certainly relate to our own modern Western era with encroachments of worthless marauders. Due to his experiences on the Rhine, he was conscious of the decay in combatting foreign invasions and hordes of aliens crossing the border with weapons which the Christian administration gleefully did nothing about.

Although the Roman Empire was never perfect, Christianity had bought a very strange and rapid dissolution of caste, sexual mores and even racial mores, which left Julian in some consternation. Julian, like his idol Marcus Aurelius before him, did not gleefully indulge in any persecution, holding that as far as his own mission was concerned, exceptionally averse circumstances did not justify enacting terror. He was not present at the execution of Eusebius who was found guilty of murder; even the Christian sources attempting to portray Julian as a monster relate that he disdained bloodshed.

Like the Temple of Zeus today, he understood the Gods as both real and allegorical, as well as syncretic across cultures, but he also had a personal communication with the Gods. It is without doubt that Julian was an advanced initiate of the Mithraic Mysteries and Eleusinian Mysteries.

He attempted to synchronize the position of the High Priest with being Emperor, speaking to virtually any member of the public, which many contemporary pagans disliked as they felt it beneath him. Julian understood very advanced matters like theurgy and practiced Rituals to that end described in his writings. He attempted to reform the system of Rome to create a truly national religion with standardized forms of worship passed down to him from Plotinus and Iamblichus.

Many of the problems of Rome came to a head when Julian visited the heavily Christian city of Antioch. Christians instigated a riot when his administration removed the bones of a so-called “saint”, actually a common murderer moved to the district of Daphne to insult the Temple of Apollo there.

Shortly after this incident, Julian had completed his spiritual studies and was pressed to follow the Pathway to Heaven. The accounts list that he “died” near Maranga, during a battle against the Sassanid army or as some claim, assassinated, succumbing to wounds. As Libanus says in parable, however, Julian actually ascended beyond any level imaginable, completing his rite.

Afterwards, the Christian tide again swept in, and Rome would never see a Pagan ruler again, but this does not diminish his heroic ideals and his pious nature towards the true Gods that he displayed. Therefore, from three of his most notable works, that is his "Hymn to the Mother of the Gods" and his "Hymn to King Helios", as well as a "Fragment of a letter to a priest", much of his wisdom is illustrated.

PHILOSOPHY OF JULIAN

Julian attempted to inaugurate a centralized religion based on Zeus-Helios, with Apollo-Mithra serving as the public face of the religion. Julian aligned Helios with the Neoplatonic triad. Drawing on Platonic language, he describes a supreme God (the Good and One) above all; beneath this is the “intelligible” realm of perfect forms or Gods; then the “intellectual” God Helios who rules the intermediary world and imparts unity and life; and finally the material world governed by the physical sun. Helios is celebrated as the Mediator (Mesites) linking all levels of reality.

He also attempted to explain the allegories behind pagan myth to counteract Christian slander, such as his explanation of the allegory of Cybele and Attis. Julian sought to unify distinct pagan cults by highlighting their commonalities and subsuming them under Neoplatonic theology.

In Against the Galileans, Julian argued that Christianity was a novel superstition that had deviated from both Greek and Jewish traditions, offering nothing truly virtuous or wise that wasn’t already found in older religions. For example, he accuses them of adopting the Jewish idea of the one exclusive YHVH (which he calls “atheism”) along with what he saw as a contemptible, anti-social way of life drawn from the worst of Greek cynic ideals – resulting in a “sordid and slovenly” lifestyle. Julian also attacks the idea of YHVH as being relevant only to Jews and as a racial God of theirs.

In Julian’s eyes, Christians had cherry-picked elements from Judaism and Hellenism “but have not accepted a single admirable or important doctrine” from either, instead combining the worst of both worlds. This was an allusion to what is obvious to us: nothing Christians do ultimately benefits them whatsoever. They worship death and a system foreign to their racial soul.

From the “Hymn to King Helios:”

For I am a follower of King Helios. And of this fact I possess within me, known to myself alone, proofs more certain than I can give.

Besides these, another marvelous activity of Helios the King of the All is that by which he endows with superior lot the nobler races — I mean Gods, Daemons, Heroes, and those divided souls which remain in the category of model and archetype and never give themselves over to bodies.

For the priests of the mysteries tell us what they have been taught by the Gods or mighty Daemons…

For the Romans themselves not only belong to the Greek race, but also the sacred ordinances and the pious belief in the gods which they have established and maintain are, from beginning to end, Greek. And besides this they have established a constitution not inferior to that of any one of the best governed states, if indeed it be not superior to all others that have ever been put into practice.

From the “Hymn to the Mother of the Gods:”

Who then is the Mother of the Gods? She is the source of the intellectual and creative Gods, who in their turn guide the visible gods: she is both the mother and the spouse of mighty Zeus; she came into being next to and together with the great creator; she is in control of every form of life, and the cause of all generation; she easily brings to perfection all things that are made; without pain she brings to birth, and with the father's aid creates all things that are; she is the motherless maiden, enthroned at the side of Zeus, and in very truth is the Mother of all the Gods.²

From the “Fragment of a letter to a priest” (which provides the most practical wisdom for a Zevist):

Though just conduct in accordance with the laws of the state will evidently be the concern of the governors of cities, you in your turn will properly take care to exhort men not to transgress the laws of the gods, since those are sacred.

…and the Gods created us all together, at the first when the world began, not one man and one woman only, but many men and many women at once.

Then let everyone make the basis of his conduct moral virtues, and actions like these, namely reverence towards the Gods, benevolence towards men, personal chastity; and thus let him abound in pious acts, I mean by endeavoring always to have pious thoughts about the gods, and by regarding the temples and images of the Gods with due honour and veneration, and by worshipping the gods as though he saw them actually present.

For zeal to do all that is in one's power is, in truth, a proof of piety, and it is evident that he who abounds in such zeal thereby displays a higher degree of piety; whereas he who neglects what is possible, and then pretends to aim at what is impossible, evidently does not strive after the impossible, since he overlooks the possible. For even though God stands in need of nothing, it does not follow that on that account nothing ought to be offered to him. He does not need the reverence that is paid in words.

What then? Is it rational to deprive him of this also? By no means. It follows then that one ought not to deprive him either of the honour that is paid to him through deeds, an honour which not three years or three thousand years have ordained, but all pastime among all the nations of the earth.

And it is reasonable to honour the priests also as officials and servants of the gods; and because they minister to us what concerns the Gods, and they lend strength to the Gods' gift of good things to us; for they sacrifice and pray on behalf of all men.

As for men who with reckless minds work wickedness against the priests of the deathless Gods and plot against their privileges with plans that fear not the Gods, never shall such men travel life's path to the end, men who have sinned against the blessed Gods whose honour and holy service those priests have in charge. ³