The Age of the Great Beliefs
Christ handing the keys to St.Peter. Wikimedia Commons
Europe Resurgent
The Isle of Saints
Ireland’s Christian devotion had its first origin in Kieran. His parents and every other one were marveling at the extent to which all his deeds were virtuous. Before she conceived Kieran in her womb, his mother had a dream: as it were a star fell into her mouth. Telling this to the knowledgeable ones at the time, she was told: “Thou wilt bear a son whose fame and whose virtues shall to the world’s latter end be great.” After that, her holy son Kieran was born. Learning that Christian piety was in Rome, Kieran went there and studied the scriptures for twenty years. When the Roman people saw Kieran’s wisdom and cunning, his devotion and his faith, he was ordained into the church. Afterwards, he returned to Ireland. On his way home, he met Patrick. At that time Patrick was not a bishop, but he was made one later on by Pope Celestius. Kieran preceded Patrick back to Ireland.
The coming of Patrick to Ireland is traditionally set at 432 A.D. The date may have been chosen as a symbolic one, since when multiplied by 60 (the old Sumerian sexagesimal “soss”) it yields the number 25 920 – which is precisely the sum of years of a so-called “Great” or “Platonic” year. This is the sum of years required for the procession of equinoxes to complete one cycle of the Zodiac. In the Germanic deity Odin’s warrior hall (Valhall) there were 540 doors through each of which 800 warriors fared to the “war with the Wolf” (Fenris) at the end of the cosmic eon. 540 x 800 = 432 000, which is the sum of years ascribed, also, in India to the cosmic eon. The earliest appearance of this number in such an association, however, was in the writings of the Babylonian priest Berossos (about 280 B.C.), where it was declared that between the legendary date of the “descent of kingship” to the cities of Sumer and the date of the mythical deluge, ten kings reigned for 432 000 years. In the Genesis, between the creation of Adam and the time of Noah’s deluge, there were ten Patriarchs and a span of 1656 years. But in 1656 years there are 86 400 seven day (i.e. Hellenistic-Hebrew) weeks, while if the Babylonian years be reckoned as days, 432 000 days constitute 86 400 five-day (i.e. Sumero-Babylonian) weeks. And, finally, 86 400 divided by two equals 43 200. All of this points to a long standing relationship of the number 432 to the idea of the renewal of the eon. Such a renewal, from the pagan to the Christian eon, is exactly what the date of Patrick’s arrival in Ireland represents.
The fierce High King of Ireland in those days was Laeghaire (Leary) son of Niall (ruled 428 – 463). From his day of coming to Ireland, Patrick was met with resistance from the king. The king in the end wanted to kill Patrick, but Patrick produced miracles and managed to circumvent all the traps that the king made for him. In the end, King Laeghaire yielded to Patrick’s force, and converted to Christianity, along with all his people. Ireland is a very special case in the history of Northern Europe. The monks in Ireland developed a very strong culture which was quite unique, and there was not such a radical rejection by the monks either of the virtues of natural man or of the symbols of pagan iconography as was to be characteristic of the later missionizing of the German tribes.
In the words of professor T.G.E Powell in his study “The Celts”: “Whereas in the early Teutonic kingdoms of Post-Roman Europe, the Church found but the most rudimentary machinery for rule and law, in Ireland the missionaries were confronted by a highly organized body of learned men with specialists in customary law, no less than in sacred arts, heroic literature, and genealogy. Paganism alone was supplanted, and the traditional oral schools continued to flourish, but now side by side with the monasteries. By the seventh century, if not earlier, there existed aristocratic Irish monks who had also been fully educated in the traditional native learning. This led to the first writing down of the vernacular literature, which thus became the oldest in Europe next after Greek and Latin. The continuity of native Irish traditional learning, and literature, from Medieval times backwards into prehistory is a matter of great significance.
The Weird of the Gods
The Roman historian Tacitus (about 55 – 120 A.D.), in his “Germania”, has given the earliest known account of the life and religion of the German tribes beyond the Danube and the Rhine. The German tribes worshipped Mother Earth in the way one would have expected from a culture with numerous strains of neolithic diffusion. It appears that we may safely assert that whether in early Greek and Celtic, or in the later Roman and Germanic zones, the European neolithic heritage produced largely homologous mythic forms, derived from and representing the old order of the great Age of the Goddess. It was upon this basic stratum that the later layerings of high culture myth were superimposed.
Three major German deities to whom, in Tacitus’ time, sacrifices were addressed, were Thor, Wodan, and Tiu, after whom Thursday, Wednesday and Tuesday have been named. In the literature of the Icelandic Eddas and Middle High German Nibelungenlied, from which Wagner drew his Ring, they are among the most prominent male divinities. The figure of Thor, however, shows signs of being the eldest of the pantheon, even going back, possibly, to the paleolithic age – when his celebrated hammer would have been properly a characteristic weapon.
In Tacitus’ day Thor was identified with Hercules, but in later Germano-Roman times, the analogy was rather with Jove (Jupiter). Jove’s day in the Latin world (jovedi in Italian; jeudi in French) became Thor’s day (Thursday) among the Germans. Thor’s hammer, accordingly, was identified with fiery bolt of Zeus, which opens up a vast range of associations into the sphere of Hellenistic synchretistic thought. The association of Jove and his planet Jupiter with the principle of justice and law, links to the Icelandic “Tings” (assemblies) and the god invoked in testimony of oaths, as the “Almighty God”, was Thor. Scandinavian assemblies generally were opened on Thursday. The bolt of Jove, moreover, is cognate both in meaning and in origin with the “vajra” – lightning bolt – of the Mahayana Buddhist and Tantric Hindu iconographies.
It is not difficult to identify the paths and ways by which the great Hellenistic, syncretic style of mythic communication penetrated beyond Roman reach, into the ramparts of the German rivers and woods. Firstly, the runic script, which appeared among the northern tribes directly after Tacitus’ time, is thought to have been developed from the Greek alphabet in the Hellenized Gothic provinces north and northeastward of the Black Sea. Secondly, much had come to pass since the period of Tacitus’ primitive account. The impact of the Hunnish raids from Asia had set the entire German constellation in movement, so that tribes had been tossed from east to west, north to south, and back and forth from all sides. Furthermore, a continuing stream of influence had come pouring into this caldron, from Byzantium in the southeast, and then, suddenly, from Islam in Sicily and in Spain.
By the time the Viking period opened, about 750 A.D. the Germans of the earlier phase of movement were already settled members of an established, crude but Christian, European culture province. This province was marked off, on the one hand, from the Moors of the southwest and, on the other, from the now tottering Byzantine Christian Empire of the southeast. And the Vikings of the marginal north were now not the primitive tribesmen of Tacitus’ account seven centuries before, but developed, powerful barbarians, building and sailing great sea-craft, elegantly decorated, that were sent to sea in fleets of up to six hundred vessels.
If the god Thor retains in his character something of the crude dawn memories of his people – the Paleolithic hammer and the bold works of the primitive giant-killer – the character of Wodan (Othin, Odin) shows no such primitive traits, giving place to a steely-bright symbolic figure, highly fashioned and of great surface brilliance, but also of astounding depth. Wodan is the all-father of a securely structured, vastly conceived cosmology. The entire system of images of the cosmic tree of life (Yggdrasil) and runic wisdom, the four cosmic directions with their companies of powers, the great eon of 432 000 years terminating in cosmic battle (Ragnarok), dissolution and renewal, accords well with a known pattern from earlier mythologies. The Eddic system was eloquent of the same Stoic and Neoplatonic themes out of which the noblest minds of Europe had for centuries gathered strength.
ROMA
The formulation of the Christian myth set forth by Pope Innocent III (1198 – 1215) at the Fourth Lateran Council in November 1215 was intended to fix for all time the gospel of Christians. This act marked the most awesome victory over heresy by an orthodox consensus that the world had yet seen, and therewith the apogee of papal power. The problems found in the Church prior to this moment are illustrated by the following statements of Bernard of Clairvaux (1090 – 1153) and Hildegard of Bingen (1098 – 1179), respectively: “Whom can you show me among the prelates who does not seek rather to empty the pockets of his flock than to subdue their vices?” “The prelates are ravishers of the churches; their avarice consumes all that it can acquire. With their oppressions they make us paupers and contaminate us and themselves.”
It is hardly to be wondered then, why, in the course of the twelfth century there should have developed throughout Europe a deep trend, not merely of anti-clericalism but of radical heresy, of which the Cathari or Albigenses were the most threatening examples.
Albigensianism seems to have been a resurgent variant of Manichean religion, which had recently entered Europe by way of Bulgaria, Bosnia, Hungary, and then, to Italy, to flourish largely in the southern France of the troubadours. It has been the fashion of Christian critics to ridicule the Manichean notion that the virtue of their clergy was the actual and sole agency by which the principle of spirit and light, caught in the meshes of material darkness, was to be released and returned to its proper state. To actually produce a type of clergyman who could be honored as a model of the virtues that he preached, represented a dangerous challenge to the Church, against which the most vigorous measures were invoked.
As early as 1017, which is the earliest recorded date of a public burning of heretics, thirteen Albigensians out of a group of fifteen apprehended in Orléans remained steadfast and were taken to the stake. And in southern France, during the Albigensian Crusade of 1209 – 1229, after the capture of the Castle of Minerva, one hundred and eighty went together to the stake. The problem for the Church in southern France lay in the indifference of the aristocracy to anathemas, excommunications, bulls, embassies, legates, or anything else emanating from Rome to frustrate the rising heresy. The climax came in 1167, when the Cathari actually held a council of their own at St. Felix de Caraman near Toulouse. The business was that of an established and independent Church, which looked upon itself as destined to supersede the Church of Rome. Rome replied. Pope Alexander III (1159 – 1181) summoned a Lateran Council that in the year 1179 took the unprecedented step of proclaiming within Christendom itself a crusade. After a period of hesitation and unrest, Pope Innocent III launched in 1209 an army of great magnitude from the city of Lyon, and carried through a massacre of great magnitude in Béziers – where a slaughter of nearly twenty thousand people was reported.
Throughout this period papal power and authority was questioned by many, and greatly increased when Pope Boniface VIII (1294 – 1303) tried to establish Papal authority above the worldly authority of the kings. The king of France, Philip IV the Fair (ruled 1285 – 1314), accused him of heresy and sent armed men to arrest him. The old prelate died of the shock, and the following pope was a Frenchman, dwelling in Avignon. By 1377 there were two popes, one in Avignon, one in Rome, each excommunicating the other, until 1409, when a council of cardinals at Pisa elected still another, so that one then had three popes. The great council at Constance, 1414 – 1418, attended by some 6500 persons, only advanced the rampant process of decomposition of the Church through its entrapment and burning of the popular John Huss (about 1373 – 1415). One century later, following further periods of papal misuse of power, Martin Luther rose from the ashes of Huss. The Roman Catholic Church was, thereafter, but one of a constellation of contending Christianities in the European West.
The chief creative development in the period of the waning Middle Ages and approaching Reformation was the rise of the principle of individual conscience over ecclesiastical authority. This marked the beginning of the end of the reign of the priestly mind, first, over European thought and subsequently in most of the world.
Ireland’s Christian devotion had its first origin in Kieran. His parents and every other one were marveling at the extent to which all his deeds were virtuous. Before she conceived Kieran in her womb, his mother had a dream: as it were a star fell into her mouth. Telling this to the knowledgeable ones at the time, she was told: “Thou wilt bear a son whose fame and whose virtues shall to the world’s latter end be great.” After that, her holy son Kieran was born. Learning that Christian piety was in Rome, Kieran went there and studied the scriptures for twenty years. When the Roman people saw Kieran’s wisdom and cunning, his devotion and his faith, he was ordained into the church. Afterwards, he returned to Ireland. On his way home, he met Patrick. At that time Patrick was not a bishop, but he was made one later on by Pope Celestius. Kieran preceded Patrick back to Ireland.
The coming of Patrick to Ireland is traditionally set at 432 A.D. The date may have been chosen as a symbolic one, since when multiplied by 60 (the old Sumerian sexagesimal “soss”) it yields the number 25 920 – which is precisely the sum of years of a so-called “Great” or “Platonic” year. This is the sum of years required for the procession of equinoxes to complete one cycle of the Zodiac. In the Germanic deity Odin’s warrior hall (Valhall) there were 540 doors through each of which 800 warriors fared to the “war with the Wolf” (Fenris) at the end of the cosmic eon. 540 x 800 = 432 000, which is the sum of years ascribed, also, in India to the cosmic eon. The earliest appearance of this number in such an association, however, was in the writings of the Babylonian priest Berossos (about 280 B.C.), where it was declared that between the legendary date of the “descent of kingship” to the cities of Sumer and the date of the mythical deluge, ten kings reigned for 432 000 years. In the Genesis, between the creation of Adam and the time of Noah’s deluge, there were ten Patriarchs and a span of 1656 years. But in 1656 years there are 86 400 seven day (i.e. Hellenistic-Hebrew) weeks, while if the Babylonian years be reckoned as days, 432 000 days constitute 86 400 five-day (i.e. Sumero-Babylonian) weeks. And, finally, 86 400 divided by two equals 43 200. All of this points to a long standing relationship of the number 432 to the idea of the renewal of the eon. Such a renewal, from the pagan to the Christian eon, is exactly what the date of Patrick’s arrival in Ireland represents.
The fierce High King of Ireland in those days was Laeghaire (Leary) son of Niall (ruled 428 – 463). From his day of coming to Ireland, Patrick was met with resistance from the king. The king in the end wanted to kill Patrick, but Patrick produced miracles and managed to circumvent all the traps that the king made for him. In the end, King Laeghaire yielded to Patrick’s force, and converted to Christianity, along with all his people. Ireland is a very special case in the history of Northern Europe. The monks in Ireland developed a very strong culture which was quite unique, and there was not such a radical rejection by the monks either of the virtues of natural man or of the symbols of pagan iconography as was to be characteristic of the later missionizing of the German tribes.
In the words of professor T.G.E Powell in his study “The Celts”: “Whereas in the early Teutonic kingdoms of Post-Roman Europe, the Church found but the most rudimentary machinery for rule and law, in Ireland the missionaries were confronted by a highly organized body of learned men with specialists in customary law, no less than in sacred arts, heroic literature, and genealogy. Paganism alone was supplanted, and the traditional oral schools continued to flourish, but now side by side with the monasteries. By the seventh century, if not earlier, there existed aristocratic Irish monks who had also been fully educated in the traditional native learning. This led to the first writing down of the vernacular literature, which thus became the oldest in Europe next after Greek and Latin. The continuity of native Irish traditional learning, and literature, from Medieval times backwards into prehistory is a matter of great significance.
The Weird of the Gods
The Roman historian Tacitus (about 55 – 120 A.D.), in his “Germania”, has given the earliest known account of the life and religion of the German tribes beyond the Danube and the Rhine. The German tribes worshipped Mother Earth in the way one would have expected from a culture with numerous strains of neolithic diffusion. It appears that we may safely assert that whether in early Greek and Celtic, or in the later Roman and Germanic zones, the European neolithic heritage produced largely homologous mythic forms, derived from and representing the old order of the great Age of the Goddess. It was upon this basic stratum that the later layerings of high culture myth were superimposed.
Three major German deities to whom, in Tacitus’ time, sacrifices were addressed, were Thor, Wodan, and Tiu, after whom Thursday, Wednesday and Tuesday have been named. In the literature of the Icelandic Eddas and Middle High German Nibelungenlied, from which Wagner drew his Ring, they are among the most prominent male divinities. The figure of Thor, however, shows signs of being the eldest of the pantheon, even going back, possibly, to the paleolithic age – when his celebrated hammer would have been properly a characteristic weapon.
In Tacitus’ day Thor was identified with Hercules, but in later Germano-Roman times, the analogy was rather with Jove (Jupiter). Jove’s day in the Latin world (jovedi in Italian; jeudi in French) became Thor’s day (Thursday) among the Germans. Thor’s hammer, accordingly, was identified with fiery bolt of Zeus, which opens up a vast range of associations into the sphere of Hellenistic synchretistic thought. The association of Jove and his planet Jupiter with the principle of justice and law, links to the Icelandic “Tings” (assemblies) and the god invoked in testimony of oaths, as the “Almighty God”, was Thor. Scandinavian assemblies generally were opened on Thursday. The bolt of Jove, moreover, is cognate both in meaning and in origin with the “vajra” – lightning bolt – of the Mahayana Buddhist and Tantric Hindu iconographies.
It is not difficult to identify the paths and ways by which the great Hellenistic, syncretic style of mythic communication penetrated beyond Roman reach, into the ramparts of the German rivers and woods. Firstly, the runic script, which appeared among the northern tribes directly after Tacitus’ time, is thought to have been developed from the Greek alphabet in the Hellenized Gothic provinces north and northeastward of the Black Sea. Secondly, much had come to pass since the period of Tacitus’ primitive account. The impact of the Hunnish raids from Asia had set the entire German constellation in movement, so that tribes had been tossed from east to west, north to south, and back and forth from all sides. Furthermore, a continuing stream of influence had come pouring into this caldron, from Byzantium in the southeast, and then, suddenly, from Islam in Sicily and in Spain.
By the time the Viking period opened, about 750 A.D. the Germans of the earlier phase of movement were already settled members of an established, crude but Christian, European culture province. This province was marked off, on the one hand, from the Moors of the southwest and, on the other, from the now tottering Byzantine Christian Empire of the southeast. And the Vikings of the marginal north were now not the primitive tribesmen of Tacitus’ account seven centuries before, but developed, powerful barbarians, building and sailing great sea-craft, elegantly decorated, that were sent to sea in fleets of up to six hundred vessels.
If the god Thor retains in his character something of the crude dawn memories of his people – the Paleolithic hammer and the bold works of the primitive giant-killer – the character of Wodan (Othin, Odin) shows no such primitive traits, giving place to a steely-bright symbolic figure, highly fashioned and of great surface brilliance, but also of astounding depth. Wodan is the all-father of a securely structured, vastly conceived cosmology. The entire system of images of the cosmic tree of life (Yggdrasil) and runic wisdom, the four cosmic directions with their companies of powers, the great eon of 432 000 years terminating in cosmic battle (Ragnarok), dissolution and renewal, accords well with a known pattern from earlier mythologies. The Eddic system was eloquent of the same Stoic and Neoplatonic themes out of which the noblest minds of Europe had for centuries gathered strength.
ROMA
The formulation of the Christian myth set forth by Pope Innocent III (1198 – 1215) at the Fourth Lateran Council in November 1215 was intended to fix for all time the gospel of Christians. This act marked the most awesome victory over heresy by an orthodox consensus that the world had yet seen, and therewith the apogee of papal power. The problems found in the Church prior to this moment are illustrated by the following statements of Bernard of Clairvaux (1090 – 1153) and Hildegard of Bingen (1098 – 1179), respectively: “Whom can you show me among the prelates who does not seek rather to empty the pockets of his flock than to subdue their vices?” “The prelates are ravishers of the churches; their avarice consumes all that it can acquire. With their oppressions they make us paupers and contaminate us and themselves.”
It is hardly to be wondered then, why, in the course of the twelfth century there should have developed throughout Europe a deep trend, not merely of anti-clericalism but of radical heresy, of which the Cathari or Albigenses were the most threatening examples.
Albigensianism seems to have been a resurgent variant of Manichean religion, which had recently entered Europe by way of Bulgaria, Bosnia, Hungary, and then, to Italy, to flourish largely in the southern France of the troubadours. It has been the fashion of Christian critics to ridicule the Manichean notion that the virtue of their clergy was the actual and sole agency by which the principle of spirit and light, caught in the meshes of material darkness, was to be released and returned to its proper state. To actually produce a type of clergyman who could be honored as a model of the virtues that he preached, represented a dangerous challenge to the Church, against which the most vigorous measures were invoked.
As early as 1017, which is the earliest recorded date of a public burning of heretics, thirteen Albigensians out of a group of fifteen apprehended in Orléans remained steadfast and were taken to the stake. And in southern France, during the Albigensian Crusade of 1209 – 1229, after the capture of the Castle of Minerva, one hundred and eighty went together to the stake. The problem for the Church in southern France lay in the indifference of the aristocracy to anathemas, excommunications, bulls, embassies, legates, or anything else emanating from Rome to frustrate the rising heresy. The climax came in 1167, when the Cathari actually held a council of their own at St. Felix de Caraman near Toulouse. The business was that of an established and independent Church, which looked upon itself as destined to supersede the Church of Rome. Rome replied. Pope Alexander III (1159 – 1181) summoned a Lateran Council that in the year 1179 took the unprecedented step of proclaiming within Christendom itself a crusade. After a period of hesitation and unrest, Pope Innocent III launched in 1209 an army of great magnitude from the city of Lyon, and carried through a massacre of great magnitude in Béziers – where a slaughter of nearly twenty thousand people was reported.
Throughout this period papal power and authority was questioned by many, and greatly increased when Pope Boniface VIII (1294 – 1303) tried to establish Papal authority above the worldly authority of the kings. The king of France, Philip IV the Fair (ruled 1285 – 1314), accused him of heresy and sent armed men to arrest him. The old prelate died of the shock, and the following pope was a Frenchman, dwelling in Avignon. By 1377 there were two popes, one in Avignon, one in Rome, each excommunicating the other, until 1409, when a council of cardinals at Pisa elected still another, so that one then had three popes. The great council at Constance, 1414 – 1418, attended by some 6500 persons, only advanced the rampant process of decomposition of the Church through its entrapment and burning of the popular John Huss (about 1373 – 1415). One century later, following further periods of papal misuse of power, Martin Luther rose from the ashes of Huss. The Roman Catholic Church was, thereafter, but one of a constellation of contending Christianities in the European West.
The chief creative development in the period of the waning Middle Ages and approaching Reformation was the rise of the principle of individual conscience over ecclesiastical authority. This marked the beginning of the end of the reign of the priestly mind, first, over European thought and subsequently in most of the world.