[atreestump]

In the early hours of a cold November morning, somewhere in the archives of an old library, a scholar flips through a brittle, yellowed manuscript. The pages whisper secrets of long-dead gods, their names half-forgotten but their essence still lingering in the air. The scholar pauses, eyes tracing the lines of an ancient invocation to Zeus, and for a moment, he is no longer in the 21st century. He is somewhere else, somewhere older, somewhere before the great rupture—before the gods were killed, before man was told he must kneel before a singular and jealous deity. Before, in Alain de Benoist’s words, the world was stripped of its soul.

It is a strange thing, the way monotheism conquered Europe. It did not happen in a single moment, nor even in a single epoch. It seeped through cracks in the Roman Empire, spreading first among the poor and the outcast, then coiling itself around the corridors of power. By the time Julian the Apostate tried to turn back the tide, it was too late. The new religion had already rewritten history, erasing its own traces, calling its predecessors “barbaric,” “demonic,” or simply irrelevant. The stories of Achilles and Hector, of Romulus and Remus, of Odin and Thor—these were no longer the guiding myths of civilisation. Instead, there was one story, one book, one truth. And there was no escape from it.

Alain de Benoist, writing centuries after this slow and methodical coup, seeks to undo it—not by attempting to resurrect the old gods as historical artifacts, but by questioning the very foundation of the monotheistic worldview itself. He sees in Christianity and its Abrahamic kin not just a religion but an entire way of thinking, a structure that has shaped everything from philosophy to politics, from morality to economics. The world we live in today—the world of democracy, capitalism, human rights, globalism—is, he suggests, merely the secularised shadow of this monotheistic revolution. And like any shadow, it distorts and conceals as much as it reveals.

The key difference, he argues, lies in the concept of dualism. Before monotheism, reality was complex, layered, plural. The gods of ancient Europe were not omniscient, omnipotent, or omnibenevolent—they were flawed, driven by passions, entangled in the very fabric of existence. Zeus was a ruler, but he was not the only one; he was bound by fate, subject to the whims of an order greater than himself. This was a world where contradictions did not demand resolution, where good and evil were not absolute categories but shifting, dynamic forces, where morality was not dictated from above but emerged organically from within.

Then, something changed. The Hebrew god, the god of the burning bush, made a claim no deity had ever made before: I am that I am. This god did not merely exist within the world; he stood apart from it, above it, outside of it. He was the sole creator, the absolute lawgiver, the ultimate judge. Where the old gods had lived among men, shaping their destinies but also bound by them, this new god ruled alone, demanding obedience not just in action but in thought. To worship another was not just incorrect—it was heresy, a crime not only against man but against reality itself.

And from this single, shattering idea came everything else. If there is only one god, there is only one truth. If there is only one truth, there can be no alternatives, no variations, no ambiguities. The sacred became centralised, monopolised, and then—inevitably—weaponised. What began as a theological claim soon became a political imperative. The Church, inheriting the imperial machinery of Rome, set about ensuring that its vision of the world was the only vision that remained. Pagan temples were torn down or repurposed; local traditions were either absorbed or obliterated; entire cultures were reshaped to fit a narrative in which they had always been incomplete, waiting for the arrival of the one true faith.

For a time, it seemed as though this project had succeeded. The old gods were gone. The myths were forgotten. Even the Renaissance, that great revival of classical thought, could not fully undo what had been done. Plato and Aristotle returned, but only through the filter of Christian theology. The scientific revolution broke the authority of the Church, but not the deeper structure of its worldview. The Enlightenment proclaimed the death of superstition, but in doing so, merely replaced divine providence with rational progress, the celestial hierarchy with the march of history. And so modernity, that proud rebellion against the past, turned out to be nothing more than monotheism in disguise.

Benoist sees the consequences of this everywhere. In the obsession with universalism, the belief that one set of values must apply to all people in all places at all times. In the drive towards abstraction, the constant attempt to strip the world of its particulars and reduce it to mathematical formulas, economic models, bureaucratic procedures. In the demand for moral purity, the impulse to divide the world into righteous believers and heretical unbelievers, now translated into the language of politics, ideology, and human rights. The names have changed, but the structure remains the same. The world is still divided between the chosen and the damned, between the saved and the lost. It is still, at its core, a theological battle.

Yet there are cracks in the facade. The West is restless. It is losing faith—not just in God, but in itself. The great secular religions of the 20th century, whether liberal democracy or Marxism, promised salvation but delivered only fragmentation. People speak of crisis—of meaning, of identity, of belonging. They turn to the past, searching for something they do not fully understand. The myths are returning, but they are distorted, misremembered, or worse, commodified. Viking runes appear on t-shirts, Athena’s wisdom is reduced to self-help slogans, the old festivals are revived as theme-park attractions. It is not yet a rebirth, merely a haunted echo.

But the possibility remains. If monotheism was not inevitable, then neither is its dominance. If the sacred was once plural, it can be so again. The gods never truly die—they sleep, they wait, they return in new forms, through new voices. Perhaps, as Benoist suggests, we are at the beginning of something, the first stirrings of a deeper transformation. Not a return to the past, but the discovery of a future that was always there, hidden beneath the surface, waiting to be remembered.

The past is not dead. The future is not written. The world, despite everything, is still alive.

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