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Carolingian dynasty Catholic Church Charles Martel Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Roman Catholic popes

Christianity’s Criminal History, 157

 
The formation of the Church-State by wars and pillage

‘But be vigilant, my children, strive earnestly to take part in what we desire! For you know that he who is on the other side will be excluded from eternal life’. —Pope Stephen II

‘The struggle for Christ and the Church is assigned to the Franks as their historic vocation’—John Haller


Plaque marking the casket containing Liutprand’s
bones in San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro in Pavia.

 

Papal negotiations between Byzantium, Longobards and Franks

While the dispute over the images was raging in Byzantium and its repercussions were shaking Byzantine Italy, King Liutprand was trying to seize the opportunity to extend the Longobard kingdom throughout Italy, especially in Emilia and Romagna. He systematically annexed Byzantine territory, conquered castle after castle, and strengthened his authority over the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento. In short, he continually increased his political power within and beyond his borders. And when in 732 (or 733) Liutprand first conquered Ravenna—which had been in Byzantine hands for almost two hundred years and the exarch fled to the Venetian lagoons—the ally proved too dangerous for the Papacy…

Liutprand was a pious person, a faithful Catholic, a friend of the priests and an outspoken promoter of the Church. He erected a domestic chapel in his palace and was the first Longobard king to procure private chaplains. He instituted ecclesiastics ‘to celebrate daily divine service for him’ (Paul the Deacon). One of his relatives was the bishop of Pavia. He was generous with the clergy. He founded monasteries, built many churches which he decorated and practised the superstitious cult of relics. A prologue to his laws opens with a biblical quotation. And in a later prologue he expressly presents himself as a defender of the Roman Catholic faith. Gregory II fought against the return of the nuns to civil life, and Liutprand supported him with a relevant law…

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Editor’s note: Contrary to what we were told as children, Christianity was imposed on whites through royal power. This vindicates what I said yesterday: that only a brutal iconoclasm ordered by a Fourth Reich could cure the white man from the mental virus that is Christianity.

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Transamundus II had forcibly deposed his father Farvald in 724, imposing on him the tonsure and entry into the clerical state. When Liutprand advanced against him (738-739), set fire to the Pentapolis and ravaged Spoleto, Transamundus took refuge with the pope, who put the Roman army at his disposal against Liutprand. Liutprand in turn stormed into the Roman duchy, sacking it and conquering its castles on the northern frontier. And war broke out everywhere, both in Roman territory and in the lands of Ravenna. It is true that Transamundus provisionally (in December 740) conquered its capital and killed the new duke Hilderic, instituted by Liutprand. But the pope, who also used his bishops in the Longobard kingdom against his sovereign, was wary of the king’s power and appealed to the Frankish prince Charles Martell, who was far away but strong.

The Frankish steward, who from 720 undisputedly controlled the whole kingdom and fought almost without pause—also involving the Church to a large extent and using the monasteries as bridgeheads (Schwarzach, Gengenbach, Schuttem, the abbey of Reichenau)—saw the expansion of his authority and the spread of Christianity as inextricably linked. To put it briefly, Charles had become the most powerful man in Europe, and so accustomed was he to war and conquest that, as contemporary sources expressly note, there was hardly a year without war (namely 740). And that man appeared precisely as the true patron and protector of Christ’s representative.

So Gregory III tried repeatedly in 739 and 740 to incite Charles Martell against Liutprand, although the two were personal friends. The pope dreamed of unshackling Rome from the Byzantine empire and offered Charles the collation of the Roman consulship as well as the rank of patrician. Gregory III, who persisted in his efforts until his death (‘In no age’, a Frankish chronicler comments flatteringly, ‘was such a thing ever heard of or seen’) appealed in vain to Charles. The latter, who was little devoted to the Church, who was genealogically related to the Longobards, who was allied with and a friend of Liutprand, who in 737 adopted his son Pipin, remained completely deaf to the first call for papal help and died before a second could eventually reach him.

Among the ancestors of the Carolingians, Charles is the only one whom later ecclesiastical authors condemn, casting him into hell for all eternity because of the systematic reduction of the ecclesiastical patrimony due to him (precaria verba regis). In his lifetime this was interpreted in a completely different way, even if he had one of his ecclesiastical relatives beheaded, Abbot Wido, who, according to the monastic chronicle, was more fond of hunting and war than of divine service. Of course, he didn’t have him beheaded for that, but a conspiracy against Charles. What we know for sure is that he was far from being a stubborn enemy of the Church. We know of eight donations of goods, which he made to him personally.

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Charles Martel Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Lloyd deMause Roman Catholic popes So-called saints

Christianity’s Criminal History, 152

 
St Boniface, ‘Apostle of the Germans’ and of Rome

The Greatest Englishman. —Title of an anthology by Timothy Reuter

‘He was an utterly devoted person, one might almost say tender, not a tempestuous personality or a force of nature. A man of utterly pure and lofty idealism’. —Wilhelm Neuss

‘Moreover, any historian—including an atheist—should recognise that Boniface opened the door wide for us, that through him the frontier of Europe was opened to the east. The same is true of Charles’s wars against the Saxons’. —K. König and K. Witte

‘Boniface, who has influenced the history of Europe more profoundly than any other Englishman after him, was not just a missionary but a statesman and a genius of administration, and above all a servant of the Roman order’. —Christopher Dawson

‘The glory of the Middle Ages rests in a good part on his work’. —Joseph Lortz, Catholic theologian

 

Around 680, probably at the age of seven, the Anglo-Saxon boy Wynfreth (Winfrid), later called Bonifatius in Rome, was given by his father to the monastery as puer oblatas.

Editor’s Note: Anyone familiar with what we have quoted on this site from historian Lloyd deMause will know that paedophilia is not a recent phenomenon in the Catholic Church. From its earliest days parents who didn’t love their young donated them to monasteries—the institution of Oblation—where they could be sexually used by the elders. Deschner continues:

‘But the boy, who had been entrusted to the monastery without consulting his will, grew up to become a man of his own free will’, writes the German scholar Schramm today. In a monastery! A man of his own free will? As if Boniface had not been a servile slave of Rome for the rest of his life! ‘Day and night he cultivated scientific studies to procure eternal happiness’, according to the priest Willibaid in his bombastic Vita, which he wrote about his monastic hero in Mainz at the end of the 8th century.

Boniface began a propagandistic pilgrimage, but with a ‘missionary authorisation’ from Rome. Pope Gregory II (715-731) commissioned him on 15 May 719 ‘to exercise the service of the kingdom of God among all peoples imprisoned in the error of unbelief’. He was to examine—again in the poetic language of the biographer Willibald—‘whether the uncultivated fields of their hearts were to be ploughed by the plough of the gospel’.

 

Deliverance from ‘all uncleanness’ among the people of Hesse, Thuringia, Saxony and some bloodshed

The inhabitants of Hesse were still largely pagan, while the Thuringians—among whom the Frankish conquerors built the first churches in their feudal castles—had been partially converted to paganism by Saxon raids and pagan reactions. In any case, despite his honey-sweet doctrine, Boniface quickly failed here, partly because of the Christian bishops and priests and partly because of the lack of military support.

Still in 719 he left Thuringia and went, ‘filled with great joy’ at the death of the Frisian Duke Radbod (according to Vita Bonifatii), to Frisia until 721, where he was placed under the command of the elderly missionary Willibrord, an ‘Oblate’ like himself, i.e. already spiritually violated as a child.

With the backing of the high Frankish nobility and the force of Frankish arms, Willibrord had, since 690, spread his knowledge among the West Frisians under Pippin II and, briefly and unsuccessfully, among the Danes and Saxons. He fled from Radbod with little apparent martyr’s vocation and only returned after his death. Only the victorious campaigns of Charles Martell in 718 and 720 (repeated in 722 and 724) against the Saxons made possible the beginning of their Christianisation, their liberation from ‘demons’, ‘error’ and ‘diabolical fraud’ (Gregory II). With the invocation of the Holy Trinity, Willibrord destroyed the ‘idols’, desecrated and reduced to ruins the sanctuaries of the Frisians, killed their sacred animals and worked astonishing miracles. To put it briefly: it was in connection with the military men Pippin and Charles Martell that he weeded out ‘the tares of unbelief’ and strove to ‘renew by baptism those who had just been subdued by force of arms’ and ‘to spread without delay all the light of the gospel’ (Alcuin).

In 721 Boniface separated from Willibrord for reasons we ignore. He had refused to be consecrated bishop by Willibrord and returned to the territory of Hesse-Thuringia, where he founded a small monastery on the Amoneburg… After the first successes Gregory II called Bonifacius back and on 30 November 722 consecrated him a missionary bishop (without a fixed see). He thus became entirely bound to Rome by oath…

Boniface benefited from the campaigns of Charles Martel and his donations to the church of Utrecht and the monastery of Echternach, which soon became the basis of gigantic Catholic propaganda that extended as far as the Meuse, the Scheldt and the mouths of the Rhine.

In 722 Gregory II had also given the ‘apostle of the Germans’ a missionary commission for the Saxons. It is true that in 718 they had been driven out of the lower Rhine and defeated by Charles, but they remained almost entirely faithful to their ancient beliefs. They were one of those Germanic tribes east of the Rhine. The planned ‘conversion’ of the Saxons with mass baptisms only came about after Charles’ long and carefully prepared campaign of 738, which was carried out in close cooperation with the clergy. Gregory III (731-741), who once called the Frankish warlord who waged war almost year after year ‘St Peter’s beloved son’, declared the following in a letter to Boniface on 29 October 739:

You have given us knowledge of the peoples of Germania, whom God has delivered from the power of the pagans, by having gathered into the bosom of the holy mother Church hundreds of thousands of souls by your efforts and those of the Frankish prince Charles (tuo conamine et Caroli principis Francoruni).

The number is certainly exaggerated. But the Saxons were ‘delivered from the power of the heathen’ only by the military expedition of Charles Martell (738) ‘with dreadful bloodshed’ (Fredegarii continuationes). And in connection with this came the mass baptisms of the Saxons. Their conversion to Christianity took place ‘in close contact with the military-political organisation’ (Steinbach). This is probably even a ‘large-scale attempt at a Saxon mission before the period of Charlemagne’ (Schieffer).

It is true that Charles Martell was not very religious, but for political reasons he was ‘extremely interested’ (Buchner) in the spread of Christianity in the east. And there is no doubt that Boniface ‘owed everything to the victorious arms and personal protection of Charles Martell’ (Zwölfer).

Already in the years 718, 720, 722 and 724 Charles had fought against the Saxons, as mentioned above. He repeatedly crushed uprisings of the Frisians and Saxons, and it was only through these bloody acts of violence that the ‘conversion’ or, as Boniface puts it, the liberation of ‘all the heathen’s filth’ depended. Gregory III attributed the missionary success as much to Charles Martell as to Boniface. And Boniface personally confesses to the English bishop Daniel of Winchester: ‘Without the protection of the prince of the Franks (sine patrocinio principis Francorum) I could neither have guided the people of the Church nor defended the priests and ecclesiastics, the monks and servants of God, nor without his command and his fear could I have eliminated the pagan customs and the horrors of idolatry in Germania’.

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Catholic Church Franks Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) So-called saints

Christianity’s Criminal History, 148

– For the context of these translations click here –

 

St. Gregory of Tours (Louvre)

When we read the History of the Franks, as amorphous as it is detailed, by Gregory of Tours, which is the main source of that period, we are surprised that the same head in which such a grotesque belief in miracles and the devil was floating around, and that seems to have no other concern than some obscure miracles and signs—for him unquestionable facts, gesta praesenti—, we are surprised, I repeat, that this same head relates with the most realistic tone and often with an almost amoral indifference the horrors of the time without admiring either the decadent displays of conscience or the most criminal heroes of the age.

He doesn’t feel the slightest scruple and knows nothing of the conflicts between loyalties, being unreservedly in favour of the brutal policy of the princes, that is, in favour of their crimes insofar as they represented the advance of the Catholic Church. This means, however, a halfway between securing for the Church a stable situation and for the high clergy’s ever-increasing riches; he belonged to that clergy. (Someone has observed that the episcopal ministry, supposedly so exhausting, left Gregory sufficient time to write his extensive works.)

No doubt civil and fratricidal wars didn’t entirely fit into the saint’s mind, for they naturally affected him and his Church. But external wars, wars aimed at the aggrandisement of the Christian kingdom—the annihilation of the ‘heretics’ and especially the Arians (four times he tells the hoax story of the fathers of the Church, according to which Arius burst in the toilet); the extinction of the pagans and other infidels—, could never be terrible enough. Thus, at the beginning of the fifth book of his History of the Franks, he confesses without a qualm: ‘Would that you too, O kings, were engaged in battles like those in which your fathers struggled, that the heathen terrified by your union might be crushed by your strength! Remember how Clovis won your great victories, how he slew opposing kings, crushed wicked peoples and subdued their lands, and left to you complete and unchallenged dominion over them!’

Fighting battles, killing enemy kings, and subjugating hostile peoples as well as his own, is what a famous Catholic saint, after more than half a millennium of Christianity, calls all this. For ‘the triumphs of the Franks are also the successes of Gregory’ (Haendler).

Even when it comes to sexually motivated murder, Gregory acts as a modern ‘progressive’. Without batting an eyelid he recounts the case of the exuberant Deoteria. While her husband was on a trip to Béziers, she sent word for King Teudebert: ‘No one can resist you, dearest lord. We know that you are our master. Come, then, and do what is pleasing in your eyes’. And Theudebert came to the castle, made Deoteria his concubine, his wife; and Bishop Gregory calls the Catholic lady (who afterwards began to fear her own daughter’s rivalry and had her killed at Verdun) ‘a skilful and clever woman’. As skilful and clever as Theudebert himself because, as Gregory himself proclaims, ‘she ruled her kingdom with justice, honoured the bishops and made donations to the churches’; and ‘all the taxes, which had hitherto reverted to the royal treasury of the churches of Auvergne, she graciously remitted to them’.

In other words, Gregory turns a blind eye to the well-known Catholic double standard.

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Catholic Church Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Merovingian dynasty

Christianity’s Criminal History, 146

 

The Church in the Merovingian Period

‘The Frankish reign of the Merovingians… was an age bathed in blood and murder, full of the most dreadful tragedies, at the same time replete with believing zeal and holiness’. —Franz Zach, Catholic

‘No one in history ever founded so many monasteries again…’ —P. Lasko

‘… a bloody period of the Frankish Church’. —A. Huack

‘Naked violence reigned everywhere… the continually renewed spectacle of almost unspeakable crimes’. —Daniel Rops, Catholic

 
In the Merovingian period Gaul was already fundamentally Christian, and became increasingly Christianised.

It is true that its oldest inscription, certainly Christian, only dates from the year 334 and Lyon; but today it has been lost. And, indeed, at that time Christians were still a minority, even in the cities where the Christian emperors, and of course their Christian collaborators too, lived.

In any case, the spread of Christianity in Gaul had already made rapid progress, and it seems that by 250 there were already bishops there: in Toulouse Saint Saturninus, Arles Marcianus, Paris Saint Dionysius and Narbonne, where a few decades later there is evidence of a Christian cemetery. And in any case, these bishops, like those of Tours, Clermont and Limoges, were in no way delegates of Rome. The alleged Roman mission is undoubtedly a falsehood of the 5th or 6th century: an attempt by the papacy to assert its authority. And, naturally, such a falsehood also had to ensure the apostolic origin of these Gallic bishoprics. The same motif is also found in Spain.

But in the 4th century, episcopal sees already swarmed Gaul. In the Belgian-Germanic territories, too, there are more and more bishoprics: in Orléans, Verdun, Amiens, Strasbourg, Speyer, Worms, Basel, Besançon, and Chalon-sur-Saone. Not to mention older ones, such as those of Trier, Metz and Cologne, all of which—like those of Tongeren and Mainz—falsely claimed to be foundations of disciples of the apostles.

At the end of the 5th century, when Gaul became the epicentre of Western history, some 115 bishops ministered there, almost exclusively in cities. And by the end of the 6th century, Gaul was occupied by 11 metropolitan sees with 128 dioceses: Arles had 24 bishoprics, Bordeaux 17 and Bourges 9, Lyon 10, Narbonne 7, Reims 12, Rouen 9, Sens 7, Tours 8, Trier 9 and Vienne 5.
 

A kind of holy cancerous ulcer

This period, in which Christianity infected the Germanic world, the dominance of the Frankish nobility was forged and the typical medieval society of royalty, church and nobility emerged from the 5th century, was an era characterised, as few others had been, by unbridled passions and bloody atrocities, betrayals and untold crimes.

Palace intrigues, dynastic quarrels, incessant betrayals, the unscrupulous elimination of kings and princes (the average lifespan of the Merovingians was 24.5 years) and the bestial campaigns to wipe out entire families were as commonplace as drunkenness and epidemics, famines and plundering. The history of Gaul in the Merovingian period is a unique chronicle of barbarism. Administration, trade and agriculture all collapsed to a greater or lesser extent, and crime triumphed to the full.

There has hardly ever been a more anarchic period in Europe than these early centuries of the Middle Ages. And yet the clergy didn’t think of forbidding intervention. The prelates were not overly incited by the desire for martyrdom. And the Church itself came to enjoy all the plundering and pillaging. Its real estate, which had already increased in the 4th century, then increased immeasurably.

Already in the 6th century its wealth grew ‘to infinity’ (Dopsch). ‘During the Merovingian period no memorable rebellion of ecclesiastical authority ever broke out, simply because the Church was not in opposition to the civil power, but collaborated closely with it’ (Bodmer). Indeed, the Frankish bishops participated in the power struggles between kings and grandees, ‘albeit with material and not spiritual weapons’ (Bund), going so far as ‘the de facto usurpation… of instruments of state and military power’ (Prinz).

In reality the high clergy and the first nobility are the driving forces of that immense confusion. In the imperium, they set up semi-independent powers, causing it to lurch either to one side or the other in permanent crises, which led to chaos.

There have never been so many saints, perhaps except for the martyrial era with its squadrons of so-called blood witnesses. In the 7th century alone, no fewer than eight hundred have been counted. Moreover, ‘that Merovingian century, so decisive for the development of the West’, found ‘a spiritual expression appropriate to the age in the lives of saints’, hagiography having experienced ‘an undoubted increase’.

The saints enjoyed high prestige. They built great monasteries with pompous churches. Like their biographers, they had an unmistakably positive attitude towards the monarchy and the nobility, most of them coming from aristocratic families. One could almost have the impression that ‘nobility was the anteroom to sainthood’, and one could speak of the ‘self-sanctification’ of Merovingian noble society (Prinz).

This was just as beneficial to the Church as the caste of the lords. Its desire for political-charismatic domination, which had been damaged by the apostasy of the old faith, was strengthened by the resources of the new faith providing Christian legitimisation. At the same time, however, the epoch, and especially the 7th century, was characterised by a ‘flowering’ of hagiography and a taste for the miraculous, which amounted to ‘the greatest falsification of historicity’, and consequently led to ‘the state of prostration of Western historiography’. All in all, this ‘was the result of a barbarisation, after the ancient stream had dried up’ (Scheibelreiter).

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Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Merovingian dynasty Monarchy Roman Catholic popes

Christianity’s Criminal History, 144

 
The fall of Brunhilda and the first peak in the Christianisation of the idea of kingship

(Left, pen drawing from the earliest manuscript of the Chronicle of Fredegar which is believed to depict Eusebius and Jerome, 715 AD.) On the death of Childebert II, he was succeeded by his two sons: Theudebert II (595-612) in Austria, and Theuderic II (595-613) in Burgundy. Brunhilda was the first to rule in the name of her grandchildren, who were still minors, and who only gradually began to intervene in the struggles with the royal house of Neustria after they had reached majority.

In Burgundy, of which she soon became the true ruler, she continued the struggle against Chlothar and, to take revenge on her Austrian enemies, instigated Theuderic against his brother Theudebert of Austria, who, she kept repeating, was not the son of a king but of a market gardener. As late as 600, the two brothers had jointly inflicted a heavy defeat on Chlothar II, who was then only sixteen years old, and had sacked his kingdom, reducing it to a narrow coastal strip around Rouen, Beauvais and Amiens. And still in 602 they had jointly fought the Basques and ‘with God’s help’ had subjected them to tribute.

But afterwards they fought each other fiercely and bloodily. The Chronicle of Fredegar recounts that

never since time immemorial had the Franks or any other people fought so fiercely. Such was the deadliness between the two armies that, where both sides began the battle, the corpses of the dead had no place to lie, but the dead were so crowded together among the other bodies that they stood upright as if they were alive. But Theuderic, with the help of God, defeated Theudebert once more; and the vassals of Theudebert during their flight from Zülpich to Cologne were put to the sword, covering the ground in stretches. On the same day Theuderic came to Cologne and seized all the treasures of Theudebert.

In Cologne, where the Franco-Burgundians entered, Theuderic had his brother tonsured and then cut off his head and annihilated his entire family. ‘Even a very young son of his was grabbed by the foot by order of Theuderic and beaten against a rock, until his brains fell out of his head’, says the Chronicle of Fredegar.

It was the end of one of the innumerable purely Catholic fratricidal wars.

The victor then attempted to seize control of the whole of Gaul and immediately advanced on Neustria. But when he was at the height of his triumph he died unexpectedly, still in his youth, in the year 613. His sons were also killed by Chlothar II of Neustria. But not his godson Merovech, whom Chlothar imprisoned in a monastery, but ‘whom he continued to love with the same affection with which he had taken him from the sacred font of baptism’ (Chronicle of Fredegar).

On the death of Theuderic in Metz, Brunhilda immediately had his eldest son and great-grandson, Sigibert II, who was about ten years old, proclaimed king of Austrasia and Burgundy. But the Austrasian grandees betrayed her. Led by the glorious ancestors of the Carolingians, the two traitors, the steward Pepin of Landen and Arnulf—the future saint and bishop of Metz—, went over to the side of Chlothar II. And after the high treason of the Austrian aristocracy, the queen was also abandoned by the feudal lords of Burgundy under the steward Warnachar. They had decided it beforehand ‘and of course both the bishops and the rest of the great lay lords, according to the contemporary chronicler… resolved not to let a single son of Theuderic escape, but to kill them all and then annihilate Brunhilda and to promote the sovereignty of Chlothar’.

This sealed the queen’s ruin, the exclusion and even the elimination of the Austro-Burgundian branch of the Merovingian dynasty, as well as the triumph of the nobility over the crown.

Brunhilda’s army deserted without resistance. She fled to the Jura and tried to sneak into Burgundy, but at Orbe (in today French Switzerland), by Lake Neuchatel, she was taken prisoner by the Frankish steward and handed over to her nephew.

Chlothar, as God-fearing as he was cruel and thoroughly ecclesiastical-minded, and who as the first Frankish king compared to David, whose ‘piety’ the Chronicle of Fredegar exalts, was a ruler who granted the clergy new rights and abundant donations, guaranteed them freedom of episcopal elections, exempted them from all the burdens of ecclesiastical property, was ‘clement and full of kindness to all’. The queen consort of Chilperic I, Fredegund, subjected her to torture for three days in the year 613. (Note of the Ed.: queen Brunhilda of Austrasia was Fredegund’s sister-in-law.) This happened when Brunhilda was already almost septuagenarian; she then had the soldiers ride her on a camel, and finally tied by her hair, one arm and one foot ‘to the tail of the wildest steed’ and dragged her to death, until ‘her limbs were torn off one after the other’ (Chronicle of Fredegar). Her bones were burned. And her offspring were also eliminated up to her great-grandchildren, with the sole exception of Prince Merovech, Chlothar’s godson.

(Left, Brunhilde is dragged to her death.) But a modern researcher writes: ‘It was precisely under this ruler that, as can be clearly demonstrated, the Christianisation of the idea of the king reached its first peak’ (Anton).

Pope Gregory had miscalculated. It was neither Brunhilda nor the Austrian branch that emerged victorious from these massive atrocities: the victor was the Neustrian Chlothar II, to whom Gregory had sent only a single letter of his 854 letters that have been preserved. In 614 the king convened a national synod in Paris which marked the beginning of the national Frankish Church, independent of Rome for a century.

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Catholic Church Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Pederasty Roman Catholic popes Theology

Christianity’s Criminal History, 141

– For the context of these translations click here –

 

Pope Gregory’s books

The triumphs of the abstruse, not to say of foolishness, in no less than thirty-five books, which the author himself described as libri morales and that in the Middle Ages, to which they served as a compendium of morals, were called Magna Moralia, with incessant summaries, compilations, commentaries and enormous diffusion. And that creation of Gregory, the most ancient and vast, founded his fame as an expositor of Scripture (deifluus, radiator of God) and a moral theologian: the product of a mind that contemporaries and posterity placed above Augustine and exalted as incomparable, whose works in copies or epitomes and summaries flooded all medieval libraries and for centuries obscured the West!…

The famous papal book, which, like everything else written by Gregory, lacked any originality, summarised, it was said, what had already been formulated by the three ‘great Latin fathers’—Tertullian, Ambrose and Augustine—and at the same time transmitted to the Middle Ages the ancient exegesis of the Catholic coryphaeus. No doubt this great work deserves consideration.

The imposing and grandiose work Dialogues on the Life and Miracles of the Italic Fathers soon became extraordinarily popular with the help of God and the Church, exerting ‘the widest influence’ on posterity (H.J. Vogt). It contributed through the Longobard Queen Theudelinde to the conversion of her people to Catholicism. It was translated into Arabic, Anglo-Saxon, Old Icelandic, Old French and Italian. Pope Zacharias (741-752), a Greek who was characterised above all by ‘prudence’, translated it into Greek. It was to be found in all libraries and greatly broadened the spiritual horizons of the religious. It was ‘read by all learned monks’ and with its ideas about the afterlife, which created a school, and especially with its numerous miraculous claims, it gave rise to ‘a new type of religious pedagogy’ (Gerwing)…

There is nothing crude or superstitious here, which goes by the name of virtues: healings of the blind, resurrections of the dead, expulsions of unclean spirits, miraculous multiplications of wine and oil, apparitions of Mary and Peter, apparitions of demons of all kinds. In general, punitive miracles enjoy special preference. Creating fear was—and is—the great speciality of the parish priests.

It is no coincidence that the fourth and last book ‘for the edification of many’ (Gregory) revolves dramatically around death, the so-called afterlife and the reward and punishment in the beyond: extra mundum, extra carnem. During the plague of 590, Gregory says that in Rome ‘one could see with one’s bodily eyes how arrows were shot from the sky, which seemed to pierce people’. A boy, who, out of homesickness and a desire to see his parents, escaped from the monastery for one night, died on the very day of his return. But when he was buried, the earth refused to receive ‘such a shameless criminal’ and repeatedly expelled him, until St. Benedict placed the sacrament in the boy’s breast. Criminals were naturally those who, even as children, were locked up for life in the monastery exclusively for the ecclesiastical ambition of power and profit.

 

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Editor’s Note: And also for the asses of the ephebes, insofar the vow of celibacy of the monks burned them (and continues to burn them). Without such a vow, they could be able to have a normal outlet for their lust. In the country where I live there is an obscene saying: “En tiempos de guerra cualquier agujero es trinchera” — ‘In times of war [burning celibacy] any hole is a trench’!
 

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Pope Gregory ‘the Great’ records a whole series of resurrections of the dead, carried out by the priest Severus, St. Benedict, a monk of Monte Argentario, and Bishop Fortunatus of Todi, the famous conjurer of spirits, who also immediately restored sight to a blind man with the simple sign of the cross. On the other hand, an Arrian bishop was punished with blindness. And among the Longobards there is a demon who was dragged out of a church by monks.

Gregory tells us of the multiplication of wine by Bishop Boniface of Ferentino, who with a few bunches of grapes filled whole barrels to overflowing. And the Prior Nonnoso of the monastery of Mt. Soracte, in Etruria, with his prayer alone moved a stone which ‘fifty pairs of oxen’ had not been able to move. Gregory reports that Maurus, a disciple of St. Benedict, walked on water. ‘O miracle unheard of since the time of the Apostle Peter’ and that a ‘brother gardener’ tamed a snake, which stopped a thief; that a raven carried away bread that was poisoned (‘In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ take this bread and carry it to a place where no man can find it! And then the crow opened its beak’).

Gregory the Great! A nun forgets to ‘bless with the sign of the cross’ a head of lettuce before eating it, and so gobbles up Satan, who snarls out of his mouth: ‘But what have I done, what have I done? I was sitting quietly on the head of lettuce, and she came and bit me’. Bad woman but blessed be God: a saint expels Satan from her, Gregory the Great!

But there are also altruistic and helpful devils; devils who even, and precisely, render their services to the clergy and obey their word. ‘Come here, devil, and take off my shoe!’ a priest orders his servant, and the devil promptly serves him personally. Oh, and Gregory knew the devil in many of his forms: as a snake, a blackbird, a young black man and a foul monster. Only as pope he didn’t know him. Indeed, caution and enlightenment were called for.

According to Gregory, the holy bishop Boniface performed one miracle after another. Once, when he was in urgent need of twelve gold coins, he prayed to St. Mary, and immediately found in his pocket what he needed: in the folds of his tunic appeared ‘suddenly twelve gold coins, glittering as if they had just come out of the fire’. St. Boniface gives a glass of wine, the contents of which don’t run out, although one constantly drinks from it. And what about the miracle of the caterpillars, or the miracle of the wheat? No, Gregory ‘cannot pass them by in silence’. Indeed, when St Boniface ‘saw how all the vegetables withered, he went to the caterpillars and said to them: “I adjure you in the name of the Lord and our God, Jesus Christ, get out of here and don’t destroy these vegetables”. Immediately they all obeyed the words of the man of God, so not one of them was left in the garden’…

But for this doctor of the Church, ‘the Great’, not even all this gross nonsense—which whole generations of Christians have believed, they had to believe—didn’t exclude him from the supreme honours of a Church.

The miracles of punishment have always been preferred. Sometimes a fox falls dead, sometimes a minstrel. The important thing is that the power of the priests is seen! Even the most believing churchman cannot believe (and not only today) that the ‘great’ pope would have been so gullible. But Karl Baus, for whom the ‘greatness of Gregory’ lies precisely ‘in his vast pastoral action’, doesn’t say a single word about the very pastoral Dialogues in the four-volume Catholic Handbook of Church History. And Vogt opens the chapter on Gregory with a grandiosely comic sentence about his greatness: ‘Gregory the Great, the last of the four great doctors of the Latin Church, lived in an age which neither demanded nor permitted great achievements’. Á la bonne heure! Well said, indeed.

He who was to be the guide of the centuries to come also enriches the topography of hell. Its entrances, he declares, are mountains that spew fire. And as in Sicily the craters were getting bigger and bigger, he declared once again the imminent end of the world: due to the agglomeration of the damned, wider and wider accesses to hell were required. Whoever enters there will never return. But Gregory knew that some of the dead were released from purgatory after thirty masses. This was the case with a monk who had broken his vow of poverty. Gregory also knew that not all are freed from limbo, and that even children who die without baptism burn in eternal fire.

The modern progressives, who are now rushing to extinguish hellfire—because it seems incredible to them—have against them not only the great pope and doctor of the Church, but also Jesus himself and countless other coryphaei of the Church. For Gregory, the eternity of the pains of hell ‘are true with all certainty’, and yet he teaches that ‘the torment of his fire is for something good’…

Isn’t this a magnificent religion, the religion of love?

Categories
Neanderthalism Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Technology

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 39

But this slowly decadent Hellenic world, which, after having been subjected to Christianity was only to be reborn to detach itself more and more from ‘Europe’ without being able or willing, even today, to integrate with it, is characterised by the boom in experimental sciences and their applications.

The thirst to study the phenomena of Nature and to discover its laws (that satisfy reason and is becoming more widespread as the traditional science of the priests of Greece and Egypt, fruit from a direct intellectual intuition of the very principle of these laws) becomes rarer there. And above all, there was a growing determination, as there was later during the Renaissance and even more so in the 19th and 20th centuries, to use these physical laws to construct devices of practical use—such as the endless screw, the inclined screw and forty other machines whose invention is attributed to Archimedes such as the ‘burning mirrors’, enormous magnifying glasses using which this same man of genius set fire to the Roman ships that blocked Syracuse, or the ‘compression fountains’, or robots, of Heron.

Anatomy, physiology and the medical art which is based on both are, and this too is to be noted, in the spotlight. If it is true that in the 17th century Aselli and Harvey were already foreshadowing Claude Bernard, it is no less true that at the end of the 4th century B.C., two thousand years earlier, Erasistratos and Herophilus were foreshadowing not only Aselli and Harvey but also the famous physiologists, physicians and surgeons of the 19th and 20th century.

Of course, there is a long way to go from Herophilus’ automata to modern computers, just as there is a long way to go from Herophilus’ dissections and, four hundred years later, Galen’s dissections, however horrific they may have been, to the atrocities of organ or head transplanters, or even to those of cancer specialists, carried out today in the name of scientific curiosity and ‘in the interest of mankind’.

There is a long way to go in terms of results, from the embryonic technique of the Hellenistic world, and later the Roman world, to that which we see developing in all areas around us, and even to that of the 16th century. But it is no less true that in these two periods when a form of traditional religion relaxed before being definitively cut off from its esoteric base, there was a resurgence of interest in the experimental sciences and their applications, a reawakening of man’s desire to dominate the forces of Nature and living beings of other species than his own, with a view to the profit or convenience of as many people as possible.

This is not yet the excessive mechanisation and mass production that the 19th century would inaugurate in Europe and that the 20th intensified with all the consequences that we know. But it was already the spirit of the scientists whose work had, in one way or another, prepared this evolution: the spirit of experimental research to apply the information gained to the material comfort of man, to the simplification of his work and the prolongation of his physical life, that is to say, to the fight against natural selection.

The machine enables the individual or the group to succeed without innate strength or special ability, and the drug or the surgical operation prevents even the most useless and uninteresting patient from leaving the planet and giving up his place to the healthy man, more valuable than he.

It is difficult not to be impressed by the ever-increasing importance, both in the last centuries of the ancient world, in the early modern period, and in our own time, of experimentation on living beings to gain more complete information about the structure and functions of bodies and apply it to the art of healing—or trying to heal at any cost. These are times when, as today, the physician, the surgeon and the biologist are honoured as great men and when vivisection—older, of course, since as early as the sixth century B.C. Alcmaeon is said to have dissected animals, but increasingly encouraged thanks to unrestricted anthropocentrism—is regarded as a legitimate method of scientific research.

There are, therefore, precedents. And we would no doubt find others, corresponding to other collective declines, if the history of the world were better and more uniformly known. But it seems that the further back in time we go, the less certain traits that bring the most sophisticated ancient civilisations closer to today’s mechanised world are evident. I am thinking, for example, of those very old metropolises of the so-called Indus Valley civilisation, Harappa and Mohenjodaro, where archaeologists have attested to the existence of seven- or eight-storey buildings, and pointed to the enormous mass production of earthenware vessels and other objects, all of them perfectly made but all hopelessly similar. How can we not be struck by this uniformity in quantity and imagine, in the workshops from which these mass-produced objects emerged, on the assembly line, a robotization of the worker that already, five or six thousand years later, prefigured that of the ‘human material’ of our factories?

And how can we fail to see in the successive Aryan invasions which, from the 4th millennium before the Christian era if not earlier, that came up against this ultra-organised world—mechanised, as far as it was possible at the time—and destroyed it (while assimilating, certainly, the best that its elite could offer). How can we fail to see in them the blessed instruments of a recovery?

How can we fail to see in their work the installation of the Vedic civilisation in India: a halt, at least momentarily, in the downward march of the Vedic civilisation?: a halt in the downward march that the course of our Cycle represents, especially in the Dark Age, then close to its beginning: an attempt to fight ‘against Time’ undertaken by the Aryas under the impulse of the Forces of Life as were to be undertaken, centuries later, still driven by these same Forces by invaders of the same race, the Hellenes and Latins at the decline of the Aegean and Italic cultures, technically too advanced; the Romans, at the decline of the Hellenistic world, the Germans, at the decline of the Roman world?

But the hold of mechanisation on the civilisation of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro—modest mechanisation, moreover, since it was still only a matter of mass production of crafts—was to be less fatal than that which the Mediterranean and then the Western world underwent, respectively in the time of Archimedes, then Heron and the ergastulas of Carthage, Alexandria, then Rome, and in the 18th century and especially the 19th and nowadays. The world of the Indus Valley still had, even in its decline, something else to give to its successors than recipes for production. It is said that they learned at least some forms of Yoga. In the same way, the Hellenistic and later the Greco-Roman world even in its most advanced decadence retained, if only in the Neo-Pythagoreans and Neo-Platonists, something of the essence of ancient esotericism. This was, along with what was eternal in the teaching of Aristotle, assimilated into esoteric Christianity, survived in Byzantium and gave rise there, as well as in the West throughout the Middle Ages, to the flowering of beauty that we know: beauty is the visible radiation of Truth.

But of the treasures of the Middle Ages—of all that it had preserved of the eternal Indo-European Tradition, despite its rejection of the forms that this had taken in Germania and in the whole of the north of the continent, as in Gaul before the appearance of Christianity—the narrowly ‘scientific’ spirit of the Renaissance, and above all of the centuries that followed, wanted, or was able, to retain nothing. If we are to believe René Guénon and a few other well-informed authors, these treasures would have been put beyond the reach of the West as early as the 14th century, or at the very least the 15th, as soon as the last direct heirs of the secret teachings of the Order of the Temple disappeared.
 
The interest of so many 19th-century writers in the Middle Ages remains, like the 16th-century infatuation with classical antiquity and Greco-Roman mythology, attached to the most picturesque and superficial aspects of that past. The proof is that, for them, it goes hand in hand with the most naive belief in ‘progress’ and the excellence of generalised literacy as the surest way to hasten it (we may recall the pages of Victor Hugo on this subject). The link with immemorial Indo-European wisdom, and even with the little that Christianity has managed to assimilate from it after having destroyed—by snatch or by violence, from the Mediterranean to the North Sea and the Baltic—all the exoteric expressions, is indeed cut.

And it is in the place of this ancient wisdom that the West is seeing a true religion of the laboratory and the factory take shape and spread and flourish: a stubborn faith in the indefinite progress of man’s power, and I repeat, of any ‘man’, ensured by the ‘enslavement’ of the forces of Nature, that is to say, their use in parallel with the indefinitely increased knowledge of its secrets. It is in its place that he sees it imposing itself, and no longer alongside it, as in India or Japan and wherever peoples of ‘traditional’ civilisation have, reluctantly, and while clinging to their souls, accepted modern techniques.

This leads to the ‘conquest of the atom’ and the ‘conquest of space’ (so far, of the tiny space between our Earth and the Moon; less than half a million of our poor kilometres). But we are not discouraged. Soon, say our scientists, it will be the entire solar system that will fall within the ‘domain of man’. The solar system and then, for why stop?, ever-larger portions of the physical Beyond ‘without bottom or edge’. This also leads—at the cost of what horrors of experimentation on a world scale!—to the Luciferian dream of the indefinite prolongation of corporeal life with, already, the terrible practical consequence of the efforts made so far to reach it: the unrestrained pullulation of man, and more particularly of the lower man at the expense of the noblest flora and fauna of the earth and of the human racial elite itself.

Categories
Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book)

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 38

Unlike the Indies and Japan, Europe has unfortunately not been able to preserve a visible form of Tradition that is uninterrupted and whose origin is lost in the mists of time. In other words, even from the dawn of its history, not to mention its pre-history, it has nowhere continued to worship the same gods.

On the other hand, it is her sons, and even only those of a very limited West, who, after having cultivated the experimental sciences, invented one after the other all the modern industrial techniques, as well as the medical art and the ‘preventive’ hygienic measures of today and yesterday, which have so lamentably contributed to the overpopulation of the continent, and soon of the planet, and to the sacrifice of the quality of men to their number. And increasingly, in this West in the narrow sense of the word, people’s attachment to the pomp, customs and teachings of exoteric Christianity has relaxed in favour of an ever greater infatuation with ‘Science’ and especially for the applications of science as a source of wealth, easy enjoyment and power, both individual and collective.

This is especially true of the 19th century, if we look at the material achievements, the staggering progress of the sciences of the measurable world and the industries that depend on them, and the naive confidence, increasingly widespread in all domains (including the ‘moral’ domain) parallel to the progress of the sciences and the generalisation of their applications. But don’t be fooled!

The cult of positive science based on the experimental study of phenomena, and the dream of enslaving Nature to man through the application of scientific discoveries in the search of human well-being, have much more distant origins. To understand them, we must go back to the 17th century, Cartesian rationalism and the anthropocentrism that is inseparable from it. We must go back even further, to that fever of universal curiosity combined with the Promethean will of ‘man’ to dominate, the characteristic features of the Renaissance.

The physiologist Aselli, who studied the process of digestion in the open entrails of living dogs, is the counterpart of Claude Bernard, two centuries later. And Descartes himself, with his frenzied anthropocentrism—his famous theory of ‘machine animals’—as well as his eagerness to examine everything, to dissect everything, to want to know everything by the sole means of ‘reason’, and Francis Bacon, for whom science is above all the means that ensures the ‘triumph of man’ over Nature and so many others who, between the 1500s and 1750s, thought and felt the same, are also the fathers, or elder brothers, of all the more recent enthusiasts for science, technology, and the salvation of man by both—the Victor Hugos and the Auguste Comtes, no less than the Louis Pasteurs, the Jenners, the Kochs, and, closer to home, the Pavlovs, the Demikhovs[1], and the Barnards.

Certainly, the European Middle Ages had, alongside its undeniable greatness, weaknesses and barbarities which classify it without question among the epochs of the advanced Dark Ages. It had, among other things, all the shortcomings linked to his narrowly Christian faith, and therefore rigorously anthropocentric, faith: a faith whose esoteric aspect didn’t even embrace anything beyond ‘Being’ (in contrast to Hindu esotericism, for which Non-Being is also a manifestation of the fundamental ‘Non-Duality’). It deserves the sometimes virulent attacks of thinkers and artists who were most hostile to it but… provided that it is made clear that the centuries that followed it, far from being better than it from viewpoint of the essentials, were worse; worse, because they got rid (and how slowly!) of some of its superstitions and atrocities, only to replace them by superstitions of another order but just as crude, and by atrocities just as revolting, and this, without retaining anything of what had made its greatness.

It deserves the attacks of its detractors provided that they are fair, and recognise that within the Dark Ages, which covers almost everything we know about world history it represents, despite everything, a cultural and above all a spiritual ‘recovery’: a period when, with all the narrow-mindedness, all the religious intolerance inherited from the authors of the Old Testament, and all the anthropocentrism inherent in Christianity as it has come down to us, Western Europe (and Eastern Europe, for all this is also true of Byzantium) was then closer to the traditional ideal order than it was at the time of the decadence of Greco-Roman Paganism, and above all than it has been since the 16th century.

There is no doubt that Christian esotericism—which the initiates of a spiritual elite still lived, whose existence until the 14th century at least, and perhaps even afterwards, for some decades more—ensured this connection of the whole social edifice—the feudal pyramid where, in principle, everyone was in his place—with its secret archetype.

The light of a more-than-human knowledge penetrated from above, through symbols, into the life of the people, and in particular into that of the craftsmen-masons, woodcarvers, glassmakers, blacksmiths, weavers, goldsmiths. It was expressed in the world of forms and colours through the wealth of anonymous and disinterested creation that we know, from the Romanesque or Gothic or Byzantine cathedrals to the delicate illuminations of gold, azure and vermilion; creation, I repeat, anonymous and disinterested: of a beauty whose secret was to be sought in truths independent of time. The practical utility of the works of art it inspired was nevertheless less important than their ‘meaning’, revealing a world held to be more real than the visible.

It is curious, to say the least, to note that it is precisely when initiatory knowledge, and thus knowledge of the Eternal, becomes obscured in the elite that had previously held it, and when, as a result, the spiritual ‘meaning’ of every work of beauty increasingly escapes the artist and the craftsman, that the thirst for investigation of the future using systematic experimentation begins to spread. It is from this moment onwards that the demand for visible and tangible proof of all knowledge, the refusal to believe in the existence of the overman (or at least to be interested in it) and the growing preoccupation with the development of the world’s material wealth for the benefit of the greatest possible number of people converge—in other words, experimental science and the technology, both industrial and medical that derive from it, are increasingly being imposed.

And it is interesting to note that this is not a unique state of affairs, appearing only with the decline of Christianity at the dawn of the Modern Age. The same moral and cultural phenomenon, the same transfer of values manifested itself, along with the weakening of the traditional faith, during the long and slow agony of the Ancient Greek World, from the end of the fourth century BC, until the end of the next century. It was then, already in the field of letters and even more so than at the time of the Renaissance, that began the reign of quantity at the expense of quality.

There was a proliferation of polygraphs, rather like in our own time, and an almost complete absence of major works, apart from Aristotle’s (admittedly gigantic) work, which was still in its infancy when the period was just beginning. It was a time of grammarians, not poets; of scholars of the word, not creators through the word; of people who knew well and were able to analyse in detail, the work of their predecessors, not of literati whose own work, like that of the tragic authors of the classical Greek period, was to dominate the centuries to come. The geniuses of the verb and pure thought—the Virgils, the Lucretia—appear, in the famous century of Augustus, no longer in Greece or Hellenised Sicily, or Alexandria, but in Italy proper, already in the sphere of that West from which will eventually emerge, still under the influence of the peoples of the North, a young Europe, the only true one.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Once we finish translating Savitri’s book from French to English we’ll resume the translation of Karlheinz Deschner’s book about the Middle Ages. We discover a very different medieval history once, instead of reading Christian authors, we read those who have actually left Christianity behind, as Savitri did.

I will devote tomorrow to producing a PDF of a German translation by our friend Albus. I refer to Ferdinand Bardamu’s essay on why Europeans must abandon Christianity, a long essay that appears in The Fair Race (see sidebar). This essay mentions the Middle Ages but Kevin MacDonald refused to publish it in his webzine when Bardamu submitted it to The Occidental Observer.
______________

[1] The Russian physiologist who, in the 1950s and 60s, was involved in grafting dog heads onto other living dogs.

Categories
Feminism Game of Thrones

The mountain and the viper

‘The Mountain and the Viper’, the eighth episode of the fourth season of HBO’s fantasy television series Game of Thrones, begins when Mole’s Town is sacked by the wildlings near the Wall. Among the wildlings is the beautiful redhead Ygritte. Because of her leptosomatic muscles all the scenes in which they put her as one more murderer among the male raiders are unreal. Ygritte doesn’t even have the body of a Valkyrie like Brienne: she’s a slender woman in the prime of her age for childbearing.

While characters like Ygritte are audiovisual creations to destroy the Aryan race, or more precisely to brainwash the Aryan male, later in the episode we see another redhead, Sansa Stark. As I have already said Sansa is the only main character who at least until this season assumes a feminine role, as medieval women really were. Here we see her in her room at the Vale.

Categories
Feminism Game of Thrones St Paul

The ghost of Harrenhal

‘The Ghost of Harrenhal’ is the fifth episode of the second season of HBO’s medieval fantasy television series Game of Thrones. It premiered on April 29, 2012.

In the first bad message of the episode we see Theon Greyjoy with only one ship assigned for a sort of Viking raid that they plan while his sister obtains thirty ships for a similar campaign. We can already imagine the Vikings in real history doing something similar!

When the female warrior Brienne of Tarth takes her loyalty oath with Catelyn Stark she utters these words: ‘I swear it by the Old Gods and the New’. As Martin was inspired by the history of the West, this would be equivalent to saying in a medieval parallel world: ‘I swear by Zeus and the Olympian Gods and by Yahweh and the new Christian saints’, which never happened.

Yahweh didn’t tolerate any other god. Remember the second commandment of the Hebrew Decalogue, which Christians also follow. And the saddest thing is that white nationalists, supposedly awake to the Jewish question, continue to obey that command. It wouldn’t even occur to them to put old Zeus together with the new Jesus in their prayers. They lean one hundred percent towards the latter, and then these idiots don’t understand why the Jews have so much power in the West…

One of the reasons why, despite its crazy feminism, it’s perhaps a good thing that many normies have seen Game of Thrones is because it is a parable of the West (‘Westeros’ in Martin’s prose). And since the common normies are never going to be educated about Aryan religions, and I mean pre-Christian religions, this fantastic tale can be an introduction to their past (always keep in mind the Weirwood tree).

The common normie is familiar with what we used to hear in the churches about Paul’s epistles. Many of us remember that passage from the first letter to the Corinthians that says ‘While I was a child I spoke like a child, felt like a child, reasoned like a child; but when I became a man I put aside the childish things’. The problem begins when normies refuse to put aside childish things, let’s say what they see on TV, and begin to become familiar with their true Aryan roots.

We see another bad message from the episode when the big black guy from Qarth I was talking about in my previous post proposes to Dany, and even wants to have coffee-and-milk princes and princesses with the blonde!

A bit of hindsight: Jorah Mormont comes from House Mormont, the Lords of Bear Island. Jorah had a distinguished early career and participated in the Siege of Pyke during the Greyjoy Rebellion, for which he was knighted. Now, in Qarth, where the black guy wants to marry the blonde, the dialogue between Jorah and Dany is incredibly feminist: ‘There are times when I look at you and I still can’t believe you’re real’.

This absolute idealisation of a capricious woman is unworthy of a medieval knight. Anyone who has read chivalric literature knows that women were indeed idealised, but as women: not as generals who should lead armies and conquer iron thrones. Jorah is painted by the series more like a loyal dog than a legit son of Jeor Mormont.