Thor's hammer
A three-stage sequence can describe the vanishing of the religious matrix of our societies: active religion (belief and practice), zombie religion (non-belief with survival of moral and social values), zero religion (nothing left). I first applied this sequence to Christianity, whether Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox. I then extended it to its two parent monotheisms, Judaism and Islam, and more specifically to the Shiite component of Islam. In Scandinavia, for example, we can describe a sequence of ‘active Protestantism, zombie Protestantism, zero Protestantism’. For Iran, we would have the same sequence, but incomplete, ‘active Shi'ism, zombie Shi'ism’, without ruling out the possibility of ‘zero Shi'ism’ in the future. For Israel, we can already describe a complete sequence: ‘active Judaism, zombie Judaism, zero Judaism’.
The case of Israel, like that of the United States, makes it necessary to go further in our historical analysis because new religions have appeared in these two countries: nutty evangelicalism in the United States and ultra-orthodox Judaism in Israel. These are certainly religions but they are innovations, post-Christian in one case, post-Jewish in the other. Never before in the history of Protestantism had we seen such a cool god, granting monetary gratifications in the absence of morality; never before in Jewish history had we seen such an exponential growth of a group of idlers living off state subsidies and the labour of their wives in order to go around in circles in the Torah. Both these two new religions have rejected the work ethic of Protestantism or Judaism. These two innovations, however, are not the most important if we try to grasp the religious phenomenon after Christianity or Judaism.
As I said in La Défaite de l'Occident (The Defeat of the West), the emptiness that follows Christianity produces a deification of emptiness, a nihilism that seeks the destruction of things, people and reality. Nihilism is the matrix of the new religions. The real new mass religion today is a cult of war. Paradoxically, or logically, this takes us back to before monotheism. Indeed, human history endlessly aligns religions of war, at the very least gods and goddesses of war. Ares and Athena among the Greeks, Indra among the Indo-Aryans, Ningirsu in Sumer, Sekhmet in Egypt, not to mention the one best-known to us Frenchmen, thanks to Asterix, Toutatis, the Celtic god of war. Our Gaulish ancestors were quite simply head-choppers.
On the Fréquence populaire channel, discussing the latest American-Israeli assault on Iran with Diane Lagrange, I had mentioned, somewhat improvising, the Aztec god of war Huitzilopochtli as a possible candidate for the new American-Israeli religion. But the Pentagon, as befits, revealed the true god, by naming its operation against Iran's nuclear sites « Midnight Hammer ». The “hammer” is the instrument and emblem of Thor, the Norse (and more generally Germanic) god of war. A short-handled hammer that returns to its master's hand after striking. As the third millenium begins, Thor is the god of neo-Nazis. His original Scandinavian world is now the site of an impressive warmongering revival. I therefore propose to call « cult of Thor » the new religion of war which is taking over from monotheism and its morality in Protestant and Jewish countries.
We'll need images to fix this concept. Why not replace the five- or six-pointed stars on the American and Israeli flags with Thor's hammer? Fifty-one white mini Thor's hammers in the left-hand corner of the Union flag; a single Thor's hammer, still blue, in the centre of the Israeli flag. Thor now is the true god of America and Israel.
