(You don't need to know what I'm talking about on this first page to follow this piece. If you want to know exactly what I'm talking about, the research isn't difficult. There are plenty of Wikipedia articles and YouTube videos available. I feel like I don't really have to go into the specifics because I'm not talking about specifics. Not really. Also, Tristan cum King Arthur is the foundation of Western storytelling. Not just Western Romantic storytelling. I feel like you probably should know this, whether you do or don't. So do yourself a favor.)
I've been reading the corpus of King Arthur fiction. The Mabinogion, Chretien de Troyes... As many commentaries as I can find which are relevant to my questions about the texts.... The reading is never done.
There's a lot of scholarship on this topic I disagree with.
It seems to me that Historians ignore Folklore and Folklore-ologists (Narratologists? Anthropologists?) ignore History.
What is evident to everyone who reads the Arthur stories as we have them – really, that should be said the Owain/Gowain/Peredur/Percival/Lancelot stories... but that's a lot more letters; or maybe the post-Tristan and Iseult stories— Anyway, what is evident to everyone who reads the stories is how sexual they are in nature. And how subtextual all of the sexual roles that women play are. What no one seems to agree on is what it means.
Moderns are confused about the nature and the role of the Story in human civilization.
Graham Hancock is trying to make the idea that we, humans, are a species with amnesia popular. He's not wrong. But it's not amnesia we have. We are a species with PTSD. We haven't forgotten our past – we've locked it away in a secret place where we don't have to think about it. And we only bring it out as paper dolls and anthropomorphized stuffies to point at roughly where it touched us.
I get in arguments with very smart, very well educated people all the time – all the time – about this.
We all know the maxim The victors write history. We act, when we say that, like the losers are just washed away in the sands of time. Not that their stories are irrelevant, but that their stories are irrecoverable.
This isn't what I want to talk about, but it is culturally relevant:
Part of the reason Kanye West is the way he has become is because of a wildly damaging Alternate History theory which has all the Black American slave population belonging to the (probably mythical) Lost Thirteenth Tribe of Israel. That's actually not a new phenomenon. Ethiopia did something similar centuries ago, naming themselves that Lost Tribe. That's why this conspiracy theory Kanye West seems to have been baptized in works so hard to discredit the Ethiopian Jews.
Which, interestingly enough, does indeed date back to the tribes which sold said slave population to the Americas – their mythology portrays Jews of any sort, but specifically the Ethiopian Jews, as were-hyena.
Anthropologists, et al, are unwilling to make statements like I did because they can't prove it. Not definitively. Not in the same way you can prove a square isn't a triangle. But it seems to me that Historians, et cetera, portray non-contemporary people as somehow more idiotic than humans have ever been at any time period in an effort to portray themselves as somehow smarter than both the audience and historical people.
Which I find distasteful.
And more than a little annoying.
And that's what I'm talking about when I say we lock our past in a box and try to forget about it.
You don't have to look far from your front door to see it done. I've written in the past about how North Carolina legislated that new weather and sea-level data weren't allowed to be included in future decisions made about the lighthouses and coastlines in any way.
So I argue with people about this, right?
There seems to be this idea that the story exists solely to entertain.
That has never been true at any time in human history.
Historians, even Narratologists, make this mistake all the time. They dismiss story as fiction. And then in their own works they make the mistakes they criticize ancient authors of making: namely being biased about their topic and what the reader should take away from their storytelling.
They say things like myths are anthropizations of natural events.
But the archaeology and the history say that myth is really more like an oral history which arranges its historical characters according to the established hierarchy of natural events.
FOR EXAMPLE:
If you're reading my work (and you're not. You should get on that) you know I've already dived pretty deep into the Gilgamesh story. In fact, I've dived so deep I've come out the other side, and I've developed the skills I'm talking about right now – and which I'm applying to the Arthur canon.
No one seems to notice that Chretien de Troyes's work is a Homerication (cum Virgilization) of the Celto-Welsh oral tradition.
That's reductive. But it's also....
No one seems to ask the question Why Chretien.
This is a question I don't think is asked nearly often enough, either by the lay student or the educated commentator: Why these books.
When you ask the question, you get a lot of hand-waving about burnings and the Church and, and, and... but there's no comprehensive story of the reading lives of the literate throughout history. But....
It's in our folklore.
One of the hallmarks of American Horror fiction is the quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.
Books are fragile. And precious.
We forget that, removed as we are from the painstaking process of scrivening and illustrating a manuscript by hand. Today creating and ingesting any book, nearly the entire corpus of human literature, are as easy as your access to a keyboard and your willingness to engage with a thoroughly non-modern artistic medium. Even this, what we are doing here, is wildly out of the ordinary as far as prose goes – one person's personal journal of their quest to discovery, and the dissonance in his own mind with what he finds to be true and what his culture holds to be Ideal?
Hell no.
Who really cares? And more than that, who isn't going to be upset? We don't read to be upset anymore.
Furthermore, I don't have the credentials necessary to be either an historian or a philosopher. Certainly not a commentator. And if I were, only other historians and philosophers and commentators would care what I have to say – and only then to scorn me and try to exclude me from the club for thinking and being different than they are.
Which makes me think of this person that shot up that place who is now requesting non-binary status. Not because it's explicitly relevant. But it is about what I want to talk about.
Sexual identity is why I started this.
There is so much about our modern sexual identity which we don't understand. And we understand nothing about antique sexuality.
I read as much Feminist literature as I can stomach. (Remember how I said I find it distasteful that commentators and historians feel like they have to misrepresent reality and condescend to their audience in order to feel somehow intellectually superior? See: Feminist Literature.)
(But, really, though – why do educated women talk to and write to one another like you all think everyone but you is a stupid bitch? What's that about? I find it unpleasant to engage with.)
The Feminist interpretation of history relies on women being in a perpetual state of victimhood.
But that isn't even the case in any culture's stories in any historical time period besides the modern. Women are portrayed as willing participants in the sexuality of their society, even when it isn't necessarily to their benefit to participate. Even the Persephone cum Rapunzel trope. Hell – Chretien de Troyes says outright after Owain (I think. Names run together for me. It's a problem) wins a big fight and all the hundreds of women in the castle are gathering around to kiss him on the mouth in celebration that he didn't want to kiss the better part of them, but (paraphrasing) when a good thing is there to be had, only a stupid person doesn't take it; even if the thing belongs to someone who doesn't will it taken.
Raped women – even violently captured and gangraped women – weren't seen as victims. And before you start on me with the “No, they were shamed out of society” argument, that's also wrong. That, as a practice, only makes sense:
If you invited the circumstances where you could be gangraped – you can take them and their consequences anywhere else.
And that's only wisdom. There are only so many emotional resources to go around. And if a gang of men willing to rape a woman – and let's be real, what is narrated as rape is often an agreement in ignorance – know that said woman is being given succor, as they say in the Arthur stories, by a bunch of women who also can't defend themselves – well, that's how that gang now has a bunch of sex slaves.
We forget something very important about the pre-modern world. You're likely flinching away from the idea of the cruelty of that paragraph. Well, it shouldn't be that way! Sure. I don't disagree. Not necessarily. It shouldn't be that gangs of men with weapons could hold such a sway over such a larger group of people. But they do.
The thing we forget is how powerful a person with a weapon is in a room, a town, even a countryside, when no one else has weapons or the know-how to use them.
It wasn't so long ago that gangs of thugs with Thompson submachine guns were terrorizing the US.
Doesn't South America have a problem of roving gangs of men with weapons holding entire nations hostage?
It isn't so hard to get a burr up your ass that people don't think you look trans enough to be non-binary and get a similar weapon to kill five people with.
We act like it's difficult to kill.
It's difficult to put a knife in someone. It's difficult to hack someone with an axe.
It's remarkably easy to pull a trigger.
Didn't I see a news article this week that a Florida man “accidentally” shot a cop because he “jokingly” pulled the trigger on his gun because he “didn't know it was loaded?”
In fact, I'm writing about this because of my own cognitive dissonance – out of a place of my own inability to reconcile what I'm reading with who I am and the things that have happened to me.
The argument seems to go that girls should be protected as girls from the consequences of their behavior.
There's like a Daddy's Little Girl (complex) ideal that people all seem to share. That would partially explain why the Girl Dad icon is so prevalent in our culture.
(For what it's worth, this is still about what I'm seeing in the Arthur stories.)
From my vantage point as the eldest of four (two sisters) who bridged the gap between ye olde school style of raising kids – namely hitting them until they either do right or stay invisible (The Stephen King Novel Parent school) – and the new, Everybody Gets a Trophy, school of parenting.
I'm genuinely not resentful that my sisters weren't beaten like my brother and I were. But, like a Survivor, I do still think my brother should have manned up and just taken the beatings. They would have been over sooner and our parents wouldn't have divorced and we all likely would have gotten college educations because our parents were losers. But instead my brother had to make her chase him around the house with a fucking potato masher. So what the fuck do I know? Do I blame him? No. What happened is what happened.
What happens is going to happen sooner or later.
Another post-trauamatic stress response.
I notice Survival responses all over the pre-modern stories.
These people aren't Victims.
Victims are blameless participants.
A victim is a person who is mugged, raped, and permanently maimed by a stranger from outside the community for no reason. Like... the prey of Serial Killers are often Victims: Blameless.
But....
Not everyone can be blameless all the time.
The Media (I hate that word as a catch-all, but you all know what it means and what it means when people use it conspiratorially) are primarily storytellers. I was trying to explain something similar to a person with a History Masters the other day— As a storyteller, are you going to choose the one story about the empathetic victim to focus in on, or are you going to expand your story to include the thousands of other, significantly more complex non-victims of sexual assault?
I should have done so before now, but I am also the Survivor of many different kinds of sexual assault. So it's something I can talk about.
It's like—
We talk a lot about the Rapunzel-type. But what about professional musicians and actresses? The reason women weren't allowed to perform at the highest levels of society is because performers were only one step removed from prostitutes. When you booked a harper or whatever, you weren't just booking them for the one gig. They were also your – and likely your men's – sexual object for the duration of their employment. Are you a victim if you participate?
It's like— No one just wanted to be an actress fore modernity. Hell— Even our own First Lady, Nancy Reagan, was a chickenhead for Hollywood's elites. And with the same throat we demonize Deshawn Watson and Harvey Weinstein we laugh that Ronald Reagan was professionally cuckolded.
I once read a story about a young guy in the 80's who wasn't sure he was gay, so he went to a gay bar to hang out and see if he liked it. The next thing he knows, he's waking up in a pool of his own dried blood and someone's cut his dick off in a bathroom stall. That's a Victim – he didn't do anything wrong.
You could argue he could have not gone to that bar, but....
It's like the argument that “woman” was making against that guy that shot up those people—
He should have been safe among his “Community”.
In the case of those people that got shot up – we don't know what they did wrong. But if you look into the Postal situation (where Post Office workers were shooting places up in the 80s and 90s) you'll find that the guys who went postal were targeting specific people. The one who kicked it all off specifically warned and then “allowed to escape” the secretary – the one person, he said to her, who was nice to him in the whole world.
Like...
There are a lot of ways these stories can be told.
The girl who has too much to drink at the party and doesn't know she consented to sex to the guy who had too much to drink at the party. That could be rape, or that could be the way sex has happened since alcohol was first introduced to the human brain.
By the High Middle Ages, European nobility had a ritual for the Marriage Chamber of arranged couples which is portrayed as comical today. Like, Why would they do this? It's so weird and dumb! But which actually makes perfect sense if you just look at it as an holistic piece rather than tearing the parts off and making fun of them:
The new couple would have a bunch of post-sexual adults in the room with them. They would all drink (rapidly) to excess, and the girl would be encouraged to dance and sing. Then the new couple would climb in bed together and the women would encourage the male from the other side of their veil.
It seems hilarious and awkward.
Until you remember that these people, while centuries removed from them, are still the same people who used to live all as a community in one great big house. These people used to sleep on the floor according to rank. The stories include 500s of people in a “Castle” (that is, a Manor House) at a time. All of those people did everything together. Fast forward to our ritual, and the nobility are dramatically separated from the people they rule. No longer do they eat the same food from the same table and sleep in the same room – no. Now they live behind big stone walls that are defended by people in metal armor. They eat a wildly different diet from their people; a diet which if their people take for themselves even a taste (even a sniff for some nobles) they will be murdered without a second thought by anyone.
Which makes me wonder whether even the families of the offenders – even their mothers – had second thoughts.
It happened so damned often.
It wasn't until guns democratized warfare that monarchs who lived like that were forcibly removed from power.
But the nobility who lived that way usually met terrible ends, anyway. Their deaths often self-selected themselves.
Which is to say that nearly everyone met a terrible end.
Even Henry I, who is portrayed as one of the great hero kings of the British Isles, died an idiot's death – eating a fish which everyone but him knew would kill him. Like....
We just sort of overlook that, don't we? If you already know that fact, you also know it's presented with a shrug emoji and a That's all, folks!
But that detail is included for a reason.
His entire family and everyone allied to him had just been horribly murdered at sea.
But, like, we act like because we can't prove it that only one person surviving a routine sea voyage which results in the king being ally- and heir-less and which is followed almost immediately in the timeline of major events in his life by his eating and dying from lampreys – apparently a toxic but very common foodstuff in the region – are connected? Like... Roll my eyes.
Come the fuck on.
That's like dying from eating pufferfish. No one who is served pufferfish doesn't know it's toxic.
So the question becomes why the Historian included that detail.
I actually don't know and I don't have a good supposition at this point. That's sort of beyond the scope of what I wanted to do, here. That work's for Rob.
But that remains an example of what I'm talking about when I talk about asking Why of the text and not just settling on the first answer you or someone else comes up with.
Everyone says now that the first thing you say is what you mean – and that you should go with your first response on multiple choice quizzes. That the brain thinks best if we let it do what it do without second-guessing it.
But the brain is also where our biases are developed and stored. So, like, the first thing you think is always wrong.
Our initial reactions are always wrong.
We have frontal lobes specifically so we can second-guess our initial responses.
The paths of philosophy and religion, of the Tao, these are specifically about developing the Frontal Lobe of the brain.
There's a reason the Jedi take children before they've had time to develop thinking habits, and it's not just that Buddhists, et al, did (and probably continue to do) the same. It's because if you want to teach someone to think in a particular way, you have to do it before they think they've learned how to think for themselves.
This piece has wandered and gotten massive and I don't really care.
I am a troubled person with no friends and no understanding outlets and I have a lot on my mind. Would that I could stand on a stage and do this. But whatever. I still have things to sort through. And no one's going to read this (or comment) anyway.
I had to teach myself quite literally everything I've ever learned.
My parents were useless as educators. They're both remarkably stupid – and embarrassed about it.
I can remember teaching myself to read, practicing spelling on my own, writing.... All of my creative pursuits as a child were not just criticized but heavily discouraged. I wasn't allowed to watch most movies or television.
But it wasn't a Hell.
People always tell me “I'm sorry you went through that”, like I'm a Victim. Like it happened to me.
Like that's where my story ended.
Like they think they know who I am now.
And that's relevant because that's what we do with the characters in our stories.
Our characters aren't just written to be relatable, and stories aren't told to be liked.
Stories are lessons.
The Plot, the most basic and most necessary element of any story, is, at its heart, a closed causal-effectual loop.
Today we like our stories to be largely disconnected from one another. We cynically see sequels and franchises as cash grabs rather than creative challenges. But that isn't how creators see their work.
And that isn't how the historical audience saw sequels, remakes, and adaptations.
Because you're a stupid person if you think we haven't been retelling, expanding, and adapting the stories we tell since the beginning of human time.
I mean, come the fuck on, the major piece of literature Arthur Scholars hold up as the Christianization of the Celtic tradition is The Life of St Collen (As I understand it to be titled, but it's also between the covers of a book titled The Greal, so you tell me!). And that book has a story in it which is a dialogue between St Collen and the Celtic psychopomp, Gwyn ap Nudd. ...Which scholars will tell you, again, is a Christianization; indeed, a demonization of the Celtic tradition. But the only thing the story does is establish that the Celtic tradition has a deeper antiquity for its memory than the Judaeo-Christian tradition does.
Which....
Is something you can only say if you've read a lot of Mesopotamian storytelling and you know that the Celts and the Mesopotamians and the people who would go on to be the Hindu are all from a common lingual ancestor. That means a common cultural ancestor. That means their stories are all going to employ the same cultural tropes. You also have to disavow yourself of the notion that the Hebrew Bible has any historical authority before about 300 BC (All of the dates are thought to be flubbed to coincide with the Greek memory of their Cataclysm (itself flubbed by millennia to give it authority with...?)
If you're reading that parenthetical and wondering how I'm going to segue from there, you're right to do that. I shouldn't leave that in the parentheses.
You have to forget anything you think you know about the Hellenic Period and its myths having any great antiquity. Homer wrote about but did not live during the events of the conflicts between “Greece” and Troy.
I'm almost a full eight pages in, and I'm approaching what I wanted to talk about. Precedent.
Anyway. Troy and all that jazz, that all happened in the 1200s BCE. That's a full 500 years before Homer's 700s BCE. Plato died just before the 350s (BCE).
Throughout his and Aristotle's work, Athens (and, we're led to assume, the Greek Intelligentsia) routinely agrees that no one is as good at anything as Homer was at telling the stories of the – to them as to us – ancient world.
There's a certain fascination in the human species with Cataclysm – with Apocalypse.
Sometime around 1600 BCE, the Aegean island of Thera (aka Santorini) exploded. It took with it the Minoan (not what they called themselves) city of Akrotiri. In what must have felt like the blink of an eye nothing would ever be the same in the Mediterranean ever again. The Egyptians took the time to write about the tidal wave on their walls.
What would come, around the year 1100 BCE, was the extinction of the Bronze Age Civilizations of the Mediterranean.
But not all life. Just that highly complex expression of life which we call Civilization.
Homer is great because he had a story to tell. And because it was semi-historical it stuck in the minds of the people to whom he told it.
500 years isn't so long, not so long ago. Not in the memories of a family. Certainly not of a village. The Mesopotamian peoples routinely accurately remembered events from as many as thousands of years before their own time.
Sure – the names change and characters are conflated and the good guys become the bad guys....
But that's what I was talking about when I said storytellers have been retelling, reworking, and adapting one another's stories since the beginning of time.
Storyteller, as such, like in that book, The Giver, was once an honored and treasured position in society. (Let's differentiate society from civilization by saying that society is the category of all human cohabitation, from a single pair to the collective 7.5 billion of us or whatever it's up to, now; All Civilizations are Society, but not all Societies are Civilizations.)
At every period before the modern, if a story was told about your life, it was composed first by someone else. Unlike Stephen King, the pre-modern people did not believe that every living person has a story to tell and a book to write if only they will develop the skill. They believed that certain people were born to it and certain other people could be trained.
But training a person to be literate, like training them to be an athlete, is the pursuit of an entire childhood.
We treat pre-modern children like Victims – like captives in their own homes. Because in the modern world we have this incredible existential angst of and dread for Growing Up because we know that we are not in any way adequately Prepared.
See—
This is why I was talking about my childhood.
I never got the sense that literally all of my classmates got that the adults knew what the fuck was going on. My parents sure as shit didn't have things on lockdown, and they definitely didn't know anything about anything. My mother had to confess to me – this is one of my earliest memories of her – that she couldn't read; not phonetically. So when I was learning phonics, she, rather than learning with me, was too embarrassed to participate at all and tried to shame me into not doing the schoolwork.
She did a lot of that.
Shaming my intelligence and my success at school. Discouraging me even from going to class. I know why – she was basically a high school dropout because she had me as a senior and, wielding her Victimhood like Red Riding Hood's cape, she was damn well sure going to make sure I didn't amount to fucking anything.
So far, so good.
We all sense it. That's why the girls are all such insufferable bitches through primary school. That's why boys grow to resent you. Or they decide that if they can't not get their scorn they can become them.
But our first reaction is to say that can't be what's happening.
Like when you feel a familiar hand touch your shoulder or that spot the person you love most used to rest their hand, even long after they're gone from your life – it was just an illusion created by our minds.
But what about when we think of someone and they call us to tell us they were thinking about us?
Coincidence.
Okay. But the first thing you think is always wrong.
It is a fact that teaching someone how the brain works vis-a-vis logical fallacies only reinforces their cognitive dysfunction. Thoughtfully explaining an oppositional argument will only deepen any irrational distaste – often sending it violent. We learn how to argue and how to reason to bring ourselves to a place of cognitive closure.
I don't know is terrifying.
You're literally not allowed to say it to customers in a Service position.
The idea that the people in their immediate vicinity don't know literally any and everything that an individual doesn't know in the moment is quite literally terrifying for many – most – people. This used to be assuaged – succored – by the knowledge that God or the gods or, in the case of the Celtic faiths, the spirits of ancient warriors which are tied to the land, wandered the empty, the uncivilized places, rescuing victims from the consequences of their fates.
Post-Modernism is a movement which, at its core, has removed the religious answer from people's lives. As a result, it's filled the world with people who identify as Spiritual but not Religious and who can't sleep at night because they don't know how to confront what they don't know they don't know. The darkness within the darkness that looks back and whispers things into your mind like how everything could go wrong at any moment.
You can shrug that feeling off with a quick prayer and a hand gesture in the pre-modern world. Because your god is a benevolent god – and, by the time the Holy Grail was fully inserted into the King Arthur canon – and those eyes which look back at you from the darkness aren't real.
Jesus and Arthur and his Knights already killed those demons for you.
And Science as it was had explained the Fae and such and the old folklore.
But... Christianization. What were once lessons for dealing with what people are beginning more and more I find to call the Unseen Realm, became stories for children, to be dismissed by discerning thinkers.
And fine.
Sure.
Whatever.
That makes sense.
The stories were composed in such a way that they would fascinate children. They were told to be remembered – not just to be remembered, but to be remembered so deeply you don't know you remember them until you're lost in the woods and see a house made of fucking candy. Which, you know, when the European woods were so thick you couldn't see daylight in them just a few feet in and the extended over the entire continent north of Italy, yeah, that's a problem that might actually happen to anyone at anytime. It's not called the Black Forest before the trees are black.
If you've never heard the stories, what do you do?
Having heard the stories, you, like me and everyone else who has watched a Slasher flick – or a Haunted House movie or a Possession or a Monster or a Rom-Com – would ask why anyone else, having heard the stories, would go in the goddamned house.
You don't eat your house.
You get eaten in that house!
But, see, this is something I genuinely love about American Black people as such, and a lesson I learned from them in my own psycho-spiritual development: Just because you can't see it doesn't mean the Spooky can't reach out and touch you. If you aren't specifically trained and developed to deal with it, the only thing you can do to retain any power over the Situation at all is deny it any power over you – specifically by denying its existence.
Nope, indeed.
(I actually haven't seen that movie.)
I opened with what Story is not.
What story is is something like a lesson which plays out into the future. The very best stories which have ever been composed in history are those which grip a child or a person still in the Child state of development and stick with them long into their adulthood, unfolding new mysteries and demonstrating deeper wisdom with each passing experience. Aladdin means something different to me now than it did when I was a child, but I would still hold it up as my favorite story.
And I don't mean the one in the 1001 Nights. (I haven't read that, yet. But I'm confident it holds to the theme and the pattern I'm noticing. It is, after all, narrated by a woman for a reason – it's the story of the civilization of a barbarian. Shamhat and Enkidu in longform. Because seven days and seven nights is a long time to spend doing nothing but humping.)
I don't think it's a coincidence the Celtic people had two professional classes of storyteller and they were both men.
First of all, the stories have to pass Mother's Muster to be retold. There's nothing worse than telling a story and having no one tell someone else they should also experience the telling. (Let me tell you.) In the pre-modern world there was no Someplace Else the children could go during Mommy and Daddy time.
That's how your entire village lost all its children. No.
Everyone was in the same room. Hell, you could wake up in the middle of the night to both your parents going at it and a guest in your house going at it with your sisters – for the amusement of all involved. And that's way late in European history. We're talking about the developing nuclear family by that point. When everyone slept in one big room together...?
Lol
I read a story once about how a mother had her boyfriend over to stay the night (Late Medieval Europe, there was at least a bed); but her teenaged and sexually viable daughter slept in the bed with her. So while he's humping away the daughter wakes up and the mom tells him to finish in the daughter.
Like.
These people weren't not perverts.
There's a reason the priests were like “O.O Y'all need Jesus” re: Sodomy.
Like, Victorian morays and the weirdness of European porn didn't happen by accident, in an historical vacuum.
What we consider Civilization – that is, the behaviors which we consider to be Civilized – are in opposition to their opposites. And they seem to be specifically those rules of sexual engagement which differentiate themselves from antiquity.
Like – ask a Feminist what makes a good man and she'll give you a long list of Nots. What he's Not.
It is, indeed, easier to describe something which can't exist by what it isn't – re: the Medieval argument for God. (But a Feminist wouldn't know she's making a Medieval Argument for the Existence of God, would she? If She read Roger Bacon and his contemporaries, She did so badly, with a head full of preconceptions how he must be wrong because he's a Medieval Man and Priest. But this is besides the point and poking a thing I don't care to attend to.)
Let's take one example and work on it. Today, a Civilized Male is one who doesn't sexually assault the women around him, as a feature. We're defining sexual assault as any advance toward her which she hasn't explicitly consented to.
That means explicitly than an Uncivilized Male is any man who does sexually assault the women around him. But here's the thing – what used to be considered routine, normal sexual encounters even as recent as ten years ago are framed in the pop-culture narrative (a narrative is a story with no plot, positioned to the audience as an on-going Plot) as sexual assaults and thus Uncivilized. Even women are getting caught up in this.
I have been explicitly told from the lips of a woman that if I wanted to have sex with her I would have to date rate her. That's the only way she got turned on to sexual activity was by being overpowered into it.
That's confusing for everyone – not her particular kink— The recipient also being socially as well as psychically responsible for initiating the sex act. I'm not here to argue it should be one way or another. I'm here to talk about what I think the King Arthur fiction thinks about it.
Because there has been a lot of ink spilled on the subject of Medieval sexual weirdness as it's captured in the King Arthur stories. Everyone's favorite “comedy” troupe, Monty Python, even did their best to spoof some of that weirdness.
But how do you spoof walking into a castle and 24 beautiful women and their even more beautiful queen telling you that they are yours for your sexual satisfaction if you'll just kill this genuinely – and as his character traits go, only – Evil man for them. NBD. You got this. And then you'll get these.
Cue Josh Abrams lens flares at pelvis level of 25 women holding up their skirts.
That skirt thing – that actually happens in Mesopotamian and Egyptian mythology: The goddesses identify one another by their labia.
I wish I were joking sometimes.
That – the labia thing – we've lost what that means because we're so ethnically diverse at this point we assume every woman just has a different vagina. At least – I guess guys do. I do. I did. I shouldn't make assumptions about what women think about their genitals – y'all are all confused. But if you remind yourself that every girl in a village would have the same overall body shape, facial features, and, yes, labia type... well, it makes sense to recognize that this goddess is from that place because her pussy is shaped this way and that goddess is from that place because her pussy looks like that.
I mean—
Whatever. People don't like the idea that we can geographically or ethnograpically identify where our bodily traits adapted and that they were – if not popular now – popular once. If not they wouldn't have developed into you.
Like the red hair in the Middle East thing—
People say that's because of how many “wives” that one Khan had. (Khaaaaaaaaa... ahem)
But doesn't it make just as much sense to remember that the Caliphs (and thus their warriors) were obsessed with white-skinned red-heads? And, you know, collected them and put babies in them like they thought their sex parts would dry up?
Maybe it doesn't. Maybe I'm a wildly stupid person. But it makes sense to me. More than thinking one guy started a trend that was centuries old by the time he got there.
(You don't think the Vikings were trading “wives” with the Turks while they were fighting their wars? If there's one thing I know about Europeans, it's that they love humping non-European women. Like – it pretty much formed the identity of the Roman elite for centuries.)
And that's kind of what I want to talk about.
We don't like to talk about humping – and about the cultural significance of humping.
But there is Civilizational significance to humping.
This is a true statement: males who aren't getting regular sex from females are more violent than males who are. That flips and becomes pathological sex-violence in males who get too much sex as a result of competitive violence (re: Deshawn Watson). The Roman backstory is that they had no women so they went and stole the women from another place.
That, right there, that's not historical – as in that wasn't a single historical event. That was just the human experiment. We've been doing that very thing since the beginning of time.
The Best Man tradition as it is in the West— That stems from a Northern European tradition wherein when a man wanted a wife, he and his “best men” had to liberate her by force from his father's house. It was once a violent and bloody affair. If you couldn't survive taking her, you couldn't protect her – that's for damn sure.
The ceremony has become entirely symbolic, now. The Bride was once protected by Groomsmen of her own. Now she is represented by Bridesmaids – implicitly virgins would offer no resistance in a violent struggle for the wife: symbolic gifts for the raiding “Groomsmen”. A groomsman is another name for a Squire or a Page. A Squire or a Page is another name for a Vassal. And a Vassal is another name for a fucking Best Man.
So, anyway.
All the conversations we have about sex today, that dominate Twitter and the larger Conversationsphere.... They all stem from the same places as every conversation that's ever been captured in Story. The difference is that we have the laughable – frankly the hysterical – hubris to think we have and can come to Final solutions. Laughable because unlike our predecessors, we don't have the historical context to understand where we've been to meaningfully manage where we're going. We don't acknowledge that the conversation isn't as cut and dry as Good versus Evil seems to be before you think about it.
The rate of change in History was as slow as it was because any single rapid change – any single Santorini or Vesuvius – could at any moment spell the end of Civilization. When Vesuvius obliterated Pompeii and Herculaneum (among others, I'm sure), for the people in those cities, it was The End.
For nearly 800 years Pompeii had been settled.
For nearly 2000 more it has been a reminder of the devastation a single moment can have on a city.
And it was interpreted in the immediate aftermath – by survivors and commenters alike – that The End as foreseen by the Bible writers was upon them.
Can you imagine the number of converts Jesus got that day? How many people must have hit their knees and thought it was all Over? Here are these lunatics, refusing to get rich and enjoy the success of this world empire thing Rome was doing, saying that their God was going to punish the unrighteous – and two of the most unrighteous cities in the Empire are suddenly under maybe the most horrific and devastating natural event imaginable – a lake of lava.
It wasn't that dramatic. But still.
They were frozen in stone forever.
It doesn't get worse that that.
Unless it's to be forgotten entirely.
There is always a survivor.
In the stories there's always a survivor. As Disney so famously got it wrong with that Jack Birdface movie, dead people tell no stories. Not about their lives. Not about where they've come from. Dead people are dead.
That isn't to say they can't learn clues.
People knew that. That's why graves are so elaborate – especially for people the living wanted the past to know were important. Graves are our only time capsules into the past which aren't disasters or the result of unbroken habitation – and I don't think it's for no reason.
When you're putting something of tremendous value into a “grave”, you know what you're doing. People went back and got those gravegoods all the time, curses or whatever fingerwagging – or head-taking notwithstanding. Gold is gold. And throwing it in a grave because you want your loved one to make it to the Afterlife is still throwing gold in a hole in the ground.
It's still throwing a beautiful thing you made in a hole in the ground.
And if we're talking deep antiquity, it's still your friend or your loved one or your family member whose throat you're slitting to send them with the deceased, too.
The frontal lobe works specifically to give us cognitive closure. Without it, we couldn't sleep. It's like— I actually don't know what it's called. It's like the thing on the four-wheelers my grandfather had. It had a throttle limiter, I guess – it wouldn't let the vehicle go above a certain speed. I never learned how to disengage it and didn't want to anyway. My cousin did. And of course he got hurt. That's how that goes.
But the frontal lobe is like that – it's the thing that lets you rationalize, but it also has inhibiting systems to keep you from rationalizing everything at all times. In fact, you learn to do it without realizing you're doing it before you learn to speak. That's how important it is to the function even of speech. Have to be able to limit though before you can organize it to force it out the funnel of speech.
But
I can't prove that.
I'm not a Neurologist. I'd just like to think
I've read enough to have a good idea what I'm talking about. You tell
me. Am I just wrong? Lol. Maybe I am. That would be a joy, actually.
You be just wrong
about this all.
But I know I'm not.
Ancient people understood they were throwing their hard work in the ground. They also understood it was inevitable that people in the deep future would dig up their remains – they dug up animal remains all the time. The popular theory today is that the Heroes, Giants, and Cyclops of Greece were all based off the dimensions of dinosaur bones. Which could be true but sounds a touch silly to me. The Giant thing is a metaphor, guys.
Cue Drax or whatever his name is.
Gravegoods are symbolic. They lost their life. You can part with something precious to you. The sacrificed people....
Imagine if after every American presidential election the former president and all his cabinet and staff were ritually executed so they couldn't cause political trouble without actually participating in the Process. There's an informal agreement not to cause trouble, since the former president presumably can't get elected again. That's what the handshake and the passing off at the Inauguration are about – again, ancient symbols of fealty and integrity which stretch into the deep past but which are played to represent our politicians' loyalty to the United States, if not to one another.
More than that, ancient people weren't stupid: if your goods were chosen to go in the grave of a great person, that means your goods were what the deceased or those left behind wanted to survive.
They don't really seem like sacrifices so much when you think of them that way. Gods or no gods, afterlife or no afterlife.
I think people were more pragmatic in history than we give them credit for. What does a goldsmith care where his work goes so long as he is adequately paid for it and the completed work comes with better paying jobs? What does the Historian care what he says so long as the commissioning family pays and is satisfied with what's said?
A different question to the theme: What author does care that his work survive on its own merit?
I've written before about the paradox of writing to the future. There is no audience if you are writing to the future.
So next to no one does it. Do you think JK Rowling was concerned with whether her stories stood the Test of Time? Clearly not. They haven't even stood the test of a few decades. I think Homer was, however. And the authors of the Bible clearly were.
There has to be someone who survived.
Not just because the fictional or mythical narrative needs a survivor. Not just because there's no plot if no one survived to tell what actually happened. (And not, from a Hermetic interpretation, because GOD can't experience utter oblivion.)
(It's like, if a ship sinks at sea and no one knows it was there, did anyone die? Not until the survivor shows up to tell the story!)
No one “survived” Sodom and Gomorrah, afterall. But that's the point of that particular tale: utter oblivion.
It's also why the Egyptians were so keen to remember names. In their faith, you didn't really die, not really, until the last living person forgot your name.
So obviously only special people would have their names immortalized forever. We don't know who Bob the Builder of ancient Mesopotamia is. That's why we know who these Kings and these Nobles are. And to a lesser degree their wives and mothers: Because they commissioned their histories. Of course they did. Or someone associated with them.
Or the person who'd just conquered, enslaved, or – more likely – killed them.
But it's in the stories.
Just like we can identify Dark Matter by its absence— We know that Dark Matter exists, even though we can't observe it, because the universe doesn't have enough observable matter to exist the way it does. In that same way we can know things about the past. Specifically we can know what they assumed by what they didn't talk about. And we can parse out the reasons they weren't specific about things which seem strange by looking at what isn't said. And asking the text Why. Not asking ourselves and imagining an answer that makes us feel smart.
As an example let's look at Excalibur.
I thought, until I read the Mabinogion, that Excalibur was Arthur's special sword from the Lady in the Lake. It never occurred to me that the sword had a backstory. ...Until I saw that Owain was carrying it. Then I was confused, so I went and did a little research. And, again, the researchers aren't communicating with one another. Or, if they are, they're too busy making sure their audiences think they're smarter than everyone else to actually look at what's right in front of their eyes.
Alright, so I don't want to bore you – because I don't know this well enough to quote it off my dome – but the name Excalibur is so very obviously a Late Medieval attempt at a Latin invention. It sounds sorta roughly Latin. By the time the name shows up, no one fuckin speaks Latin anymore. That version of the sword is not in a scholarly telling of the tale. That is in the Mort d'Artur by one Thomas Mallory – a thoroughly mystical, alchemical telling of the by-then century-or-so old Grail Myth. But another version of the name, its actual Latinization, is something like Caliburnus.
That's important because you'll hear in University classrooms the phrase, “Sounds like is not Is like” re: words and phonemes and their meanings and their transmissions to other languages. For instance, it's probably true that the Mayans didn't have any Egyptian loanwords. Therefor, any sounds like is like comparisons are probably false.
But Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, and Ireland all spoke the same language. They just said some of the sounds different and they wrote them down with different characters. To a Medieval writer – especially one who doesn't actually speak Latin – sounds like very much is like.
For instance: (everyone loves this story, but they tell it wrong; so I'm going to get it right for my own amusement) The word Left in Latin is Sinister. Sinister, over the course of time and misusage – and more importantly misunderstanding in translating and copyediting – instead of meaning generally the left side of your body and thus your left hand, came to mean a lurking kind of evil. Like Brutus, carrying his knife in his left hand in the shadow—
As he was portrayed at the time because that was the dirty-work hand. Romans wiped their butts with their left hands, they jerked off with their left hands, and they stabbed their good friends in the back with their left hands. But centuries passed – and the people who know what the symbols meant were all dead. And all that was left was people living in the ruins of a once great civilization and the best they could do was work with what they had.
If you look at Medieval symbolism, it is extremely on the nose.
So many modern historians and storykeepers want to hand-wavingly say we can't understand the symbols because we're too far removed from the people who made them. And they're right. Sort of. The reason it's only sort of is because the symbols are intentionally as simple as possible because no one except those who were capable of understanding them knew what they meant. So you could put a great big ol Green Man, for example, in the middle of your church. (I was going to look for the one that I thought I knew about, and it turns out to be so common there literally isn't any one that represents this class of dogmatic blasphemy.)
Even the Easter Bunny and his eggs – we want to act like we don't know what it means.
But, I mean, rabbits are a symbol known pretty much exclusively for humping, and eggs are what babies come out of... so to me a rabbit rooting around in bushes for eggs sounds an awful lot like what it would look like if you were to look out in the Spring fields of Medieval Europe – teens and young people humping behind every bush the eye can see.
Cus that's what it was like back then.
I don't know about you, but I remember what it was like to be a teenager.
Horny all the damn time.
Girls really just wishing you'd pinch their nipples.
And that was without being cooped up inside all day because it's winter in the Middle Ages and we're all freezing to death.
The thing is, if you weren't a noble, no one was telling their teenage girls not to get pregnant. Property ownership throughout Celtic Europe clear up into the 1300s was Matrilineal. That means that mothers distributed land among their children – usually by laundering it through churches and religious institutions to protect it from men with swords. But girls went to live with their husbands. So a girl being pregnant was actually fucking great news if you didn't have enough food to feed the mouths at your table. Soon you'd have one less to feed: yonder pregnant belly.
In fact, poor girls, like that Reba song – “Jolene?” No. “Fancy” – were encouraged to seduce and get pregnant by men from above their station. Like – the stories where mothers scold their daughters for their choice of baby daddy are the ones where he's also too poor to feed the baby.
Moderns, especially Feminists, want to frame these stories like that's somehow bad. Like social mobility because you bore a child into a higher class.... Isn't that how one becomes a Citizen in the United States? ...Hm.....
See, to me, that argument, besides being facile and Sophisticated only enough to satisfy a stupid person, smells of motivated reasoning.
Like the motivated reasoning rich women might have about poor women marrying their eligible bachelors. A bachelor, by the way, is any unmarried unemployed man.
So, yeah. Fight away, girls. Lol.
That's why Medieval mothers encouraged their bachelor sons to get peasant girls pregnant: If they had to work to support a bastard baby, they'd make themselves attractive to a woman in their peerage.
But we act like men didn't have to make themselves attractive to the women in history. Like Eleanor of Acquitaine and her grandmother, Empress Mathilda, never existed.
Like – I'm not sorry that I'm not sorry about this – the Feminist argument requires that actually great women in history didn't exist. That's... not very... feminist to me. That's... rich whites wanting to remain at the top of the social hierarchy – a position which is threatened more and more each day, and by non-white women, no less.
So, yeah. Fight away, girls.
When you look into the name of Arthur's sword, though, you'll find that it means something to the effect of Hard Cutter. Historians say that Mallory's interpretation, that the word comes from Hebrew and means something to the same effect, is spurious. But.... 14th century Europe didn't know that Celtic was a language group. But they did know that Hebrew was a faraway, magickal language. Now, he could have said that it was the Celtic word, but then he would have to explain to his audience why a Celtic sword has a name at all.
Because we seem to not know this, but the naming weapons thing, that's a Viking thing. That's a Norse thing. And the Norse and the Celts are different people with different cultures – different Civilizations, to use a word I don't love. Evidently, best I can piece it together, the Celtic word(s) which would translate to Caliburnus (none of which is legible in modern English, so I'm not bothering) seem to belong to a catch-all word which just means iron sword. And, if you really stop and think about it for a few seconds, the Celtic people of antiquity were a copper- and bronze-working people. If the source story to which Caliburnus belongs is the historical account of how iron came onto the Celtic continent, a weapon called Hard Cutter would not only stand for all such weapons, but would be itself mythic. Iron is, as a singular characteristic, significantly harder than copper and bronze.
Arthur doesn't become explicitly the sole owner of Caliburnus for centuries after it first appears. And the way it's used in the text leads me to believe the word is being translated wrong. Rather than the name of a particular sword, its a type of sword. Because, see, they don't much fight with swords. They mostly fight with lances and shields, which is a widly anachronistic combat style. I think that's specifically because only a handful of iron swords would have shown up in the Bronze Age Celtic source myths writers like the anonymous author of the Mabinogi, Chretien de Troyes, and Marie de France all say they're sourcing.
But by the 600s AD, when the Arthur myths were being shaped out of the chaos of Post-Roman Britain, iron swords – that is, hard cutters – were no longer uncommon. It isn't until the 800s that the Vikings will introduce their customs into Wales, Ireland, and Cornwall. And it's in the 1200s that Caliburnus appears as the name of Arthur's magick weapon. By the 1300s the magick isn't in the enchantments on the blade, as is the case in Viking mythology, but the scabbard. Which is specifically myth-making about the value of a warrior who doesn't cut his way through his problems like Alexander with the Gordian Knot.
It is a specifically pacifist motif.
But the original stories weren't pacifist. Nor were they particularly adventuresome.
For the most part all that happens is our heroes adventure out, then some weird stuff happens, then they seem largely to forget about it all and go about their way until they do suddenly remember it all, go mad, and are healed by the love of a woman. That's kind of specifically Owain's arc, but they all seem to be retellings or only slight modifications of Tristan and Isold. Specifically to me they look like then-modern allegories – the ancient stories and characters positioned and speaking in such a way as to directly reflect the modern political realities at court.
I've never seen anyone say this, but King Arthur is explicitly a ghost in Chretien de Troyes Percival. No one seems willing to even consider that Gwenevere dying is Chretien trying to talk about the end of the Anjevite Empire.
But specifically they deal with a lot of women offering or giving themselves to men for a lot of reasons, and mostly they're about the various proofs of whether a man is worthy of marriage and copulation at all. Most of the dialogue is men agreeing that other men who make promises to a woman, bed her, and then don't follow through on those promises deserve death, and that saying nothing when you should speak, that keeping your hands to yourself when you should caress, that not kissing when you could kiss – that these are bad things. And they spend most of their time encouraging women to social mobilization.
And all of that is cultural opposition to the Viking Poetic Eddas – which, by the time the Arthur canon really got going, was the major cultural force that Celtic Britain was facing. They weren't at war with the Vikings. Indeed, they were allied against the Angles and Saxons. So their cultures traded freely. That means stories even more than it means goods.
Think about it. Not everyone can afford American Blue Jeans and Coca-Cola.
But everyone can listen to the guy who's seen an American movie retell it.
And that's what happened in Celtic Britain: the Viking Sagas got mixed into the King Arthur story and Hard Cutter the iron sword became Caliburnus the magick sword which unified an entire Empire. Sort of. Because Owain carries it, too.
And Arthur is already an old man by the time he shows up in his earliest stories.
A child is incredible leverage.
You can kill me, a Medieval mother could say if her man was upset at her for demanding more support for her and the child, but I will kill this child first. They use that motif with Arthur and Morgan LeFay and Mordred. But it's a motif – a metaphor. By the time all that stuff is going on the narrative, many mythical kingdoms which all were represented by Arthur – both his fictional and his actual kingdoms – had fallen. And usually through succession.
It's conspicuous to me that Arthur and Gwenevere don't have a child.
We know how their story ends – because the earliest quasi-historical account of Arthur tells us: Gwen betrays him and his kingdom is laid to ruin as a result.
I don't know that any one specific Gwen or any of the three Arthurs is being referred to. If anything, this is further metaphorical language from yet another poet who was speaking of the dead and conquered to the killer and conquerer – you have to watch what you say in the biggest way in that context.
Gwen as vile betrayer, though?
Seems entirely mythical.
Especially when you're talking about a people who have been Matrilineal and who resent their mothers giving their birthrights to churches when they could be giving it to sons to kill each other over.
It's important to remember that the patriarchal Gauls, the lingual and cultural group to whom Charlemagne belonged were patrilineal and the father divided the land holdings among his sons according to his preference for them – not their age – and that Charlemagne's Empire lasted fewer than three generations before the infighting had completely toppled it. Hell, his sons were killing themselves over his land before he'd even legally inherited it to them. They fucking attacked and locked him in a monastery on pain of death if he wouldn't inherit them their land. And they killed their half-brother just because, even though his land was significantly smaller.
We act like people aren't and haven't always been dicks.
Like....
Historical people were conniving, and they were dickheads just like we all are.
And historical women knew just exactly how to play the Game. They were the only ones, often, educated in it. The betrayal of a wife to her husband, in a matrilineal society, of killing that son – or taking another man to your bed, betraying the basic marriage contract, and getting pregnant by him – these things destroy whole kingdoms. Not just individuals.
That's why storytellers like to use their personal dramas to talk about the meta-narrative of their civilizations – because not everyone is a noble, and not all of these events are the day to day for everyone. Some people want to hear the current events of their country and the neighboring country – while also being told a pleasantly mythic story. That way they don't have to ask the storyteller how the story is going to end.
Narratives have no Plot.
The Medieval storyteller weaves his plot to imply how the future will play out – like how the past played out.
And the Great storyteller takes the events of the past, redresses the players in mythic garb, and has them sing and dance in a meaningful way for the future.
My mother used that particular leverage for something like 21 years of my father's life. Probably still does. I don't know. I don't keep in contact with either of them for reasons I can't seem to figure out.
My therapist is fictional and says maybe I'm being too hard on them. I also happen to think therapists are idiots, too.
But I begin to appear to think everyone is an idiot.
That's because I do.
I just also happen to think I'm a complete fucking idiot.
If I weren't, I wouldn't have spent more than 10,000 words on a topic I still don't have cognitive closure on.
The behavior of the women in these stories changes, over time. But their details get more sparse. I don't think this is unrelated to their being representations of Celtic goddesses. In Christianity – which could be seen as a cultural identity swap: the Grecco-Roman identity with a very particular version of the Jewish characters – Persephone, Demeter, and all the female deities that appear in that story (and all their much more ancient antecedents) are gender shifted to male in the person of Jesus. Everyone knows this. It's the basis of Feminist scholarship.
But that's also facile.
The gods had been gender-swapping for millennia.
And only in the West was the Feminine altogether written out of the Christian faith. Simultaneous to the Malewashing, the Arthur stories, which are pretty explicitly to me about Goddess worship, were thriving. It was only after the Crusades, when Roman Catholicism further needed to separate itself from Christianity in the East, influenced in fact by the rich and powerful and apparently wise Muslims, that Goddess worship and women as a whole began to take more of a backseat to European politics.
But that aligns, not-inconsequentially and not-coincidentally, with the overall centralization of power among the monarchs of Europe. As the world got more stable, as the Civilizational groundwork which their grandmothers and mothers and wives and sisters had put in to get Europe going became more and more productive in valuable commodities – that is stories, Science, Art... the more imperative it became that men with hard cutters didn't come from Faraway and burn down their temples and take away their idols.
But there's only so large a standing army you can maintain before it must needs be used on foreign shores. And that's why King Arthur stopped developing when we left for the Modern World: We had so thoroughly forgotten the Celtic and even the Christian world we came from that only the motifs remains – and only the very best works from the very best writers.
I never did explain how those writings can survive history.
I guess that will just have to remain a curiosity – like those very tomes which have survived from yore.
And, seeing as I'm too exhausted now to connect any more ideas together, is why I say we don't have amnesia – we have hidden away all of our memories under pleasanter ones.
...That doesn't make the trauma go away. It just means you'll have to face it again sometime in the future. Whether that be in this lifetime or in another, it's not just going away.
We can track that in civilizations. The one flaw, the one trauma, that they try to hide always comes to light sooner or later, and it always kills them. It's like a secret that becomes a cancer that kills the body.
But that's the story of nobility.
There's always a survivor. Even when you ritually kill the entire Cabinet and all the Staff, there's always a survivor. If you believe him, famed Jewish historian Josephus survived the ritual suicide of his entire village. He was supposed to go last – to make sure everyone died comfortably.
But he survived.
Because Civilizations don't die in their entirety. Even when you burn the temples and steal the idols, the foundations remain – and the idols remain. Often so long they develop their own myths and folklore – not just of how they came to this new place, but the wonders that came with them.
Because that's how humans work.
And historians frustrate me when they want to separate the two things. Like the kings and the warriors and the warchiefs of Celtic Britain didn't all employ bards to compose songs and poetry about their lives and their histories. The only way we can think the ancient world doesn't survive to us is if we have so little imagination we can only be called stupid.
These poets and bards – they were the left hand of the two-part Celtic storytelling tradition I mentioned earlier. The right hand was the Druids.
They would meet (I don't know how often) at a council of all the Bards and Druids and they would tell the stories – all the different personal variations. And the Druids would yea or nay changes. This tradition remains in Oral Storytelling to this day. I often imagine this. A bunch of old men and women listening to these flamboyant poets and bards in their 20s, reminding them all: “The theme. You have to stay to theme. The ancient stories were about something. They weren't just news about the wider world, they weren't just a reminder of centuries past, they are a warning not to step into the pitfalls which have taken from us our greatest heroes and our loveliest ladies. You must always remember the theme.”
Because What we have is all theme and no Plot. We can't understand the Plot. Not anymore. That's what Chretien and de Boron and Mallory and so many (literally countless) others tried to do: to put a cohesive plot, to weave a single thread through, connecting in one timeless quilt, an entire lost Civilization's oral tradition – exactly the way Homer did, the way Virgil did, the way the Bible authors did, the way the Gilgamesh poets did.
I don't think it's inconsequential that both Virgil and Chretien, who were trying to take their native folklore and connect it to the events of the Greek Dark Ages ultimately died, their work unfinished.
I'm listening to an uplifting instrumental and feeling like I'm wrapping up.
What I want you to take away from this (thank you for sticking with me for so long) is that everything really is as simple as it seems to be. Anyone making it too complex is doing it for their reasons and your adulation. I would ask you whether adulation is deserved of those who would manipulate your ignorance to elevate their class status. Is that not the very betrayal the stories which are the foundation of the Western tradition are about?
Is that not Tristan's sin? Is that not the redemption Owain seeks from Lunet? Is that not why Arthur is impaled upon his own magick sword at the hands of his son and half-nephew, killing him and any future succession his kingdom may have enjoyed in the process?
The stories tell us explicitly to ask Why.
I find it so frustrating that the so-called experts on the stories dont I had to write this 22-page behemoth.
Thank you for participating.
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