Ancient World Review

The Creation Of The Domesday Book

BBC program from April 2014.

"Nearly a thousand years ago, a famous king created a famous book, later given the title 'Domesday' (pronounced 'doomsday')." Source: Science Daily.

"At least that's been the common story: William the Conqueror, 20 years after his 1066 invasion of England from Normandy, ordered a massive survey of his new realm. One year later, he got a book with the results -- a record of the nation's wealth and resources, everything from property to sheep to servants."

Putting the Domesday Book together in a single year would have been an incredible feat, but as it turns out this may not have been what happened at all:

"Now, after years of research, [Illinois history professor Carol Symes] makes the case in the journal Speculum that the final 'Great Domesday Book' came years and perhaps decades later than the 1087 date to which it's attributed, also the year of William's death."

Video from 2010.

Comment: The state is the monopoly on violence over a particular territory. When you strip away the self-serving rhetoric, governments of all kinds are little more than bureaucratic machines which use physical violence and the threat of physical violence to maintain control over a territory and exploit its resources (which include its human population).

The Domesday Book is a classic example of this principle in action. After William's conquest of England, he took an inventory of his new territory so he get his cut of the action, sending his agents "over all England into each shire; commissioning them to find out 'how many hundreds of hides were in the shire, what land the king himself had, and what stock upon the land; or, what dues he ought to have by the year from the shire." (Wikipedia)

In other words, the tax assessment that resulted in the Domesday Book was an act of "legitimate" robbery -- legitimate because William was now the "legal" ruler of England. His agents set a value on every piece of taxable property and there was no appeal. That's why the book is called the Domesday Book. "Domesday" is Middle English for "doomsday," according to Wikipedia.

"... for as the sentence of that strict and terrible last account cannot be evaded by any skillful subterfuge, so when this book is appealed to ... its sentence cannot be quashed or set aside with impunity. That is why we have called the book 'the Book of Judgement' ... because its decisions, like those of the Last Judgement, are unalterable." -- Dialogus de Scaccario (circa 1179), Richard FitzNeal.

Mystery Of The Codex Gigas: The "Devil's Bible"

"Codex Gigas, otherwise known as ‘the Devil’s Bible’ is the largest and probably one of the strangest manuscripts in the world.  It is so large that it is said to have taken more than 160 animal skins to make it and takes at least two people to lift it.  It measures approximately 1 metre in length." Source: Ancient Origins.

"According to legend, the medieval manuscript was made out of a pact with the ‘devil’, which is why it is sometimes referred to as the Devil’s Bible. It was written in Latin during the 13th century AD, and although the origin of the manuscript is unknown, a note in the manuscript states that it was pawned in the [Cistercian] monastery at Sedlec in 1295."

Note: Sedlec is the home of the bizarre Sedlec Ossuary, a Roman Catholic chapel which contains "the skeletons of between 40,000 and 70,000 people, whose bones have in many cases been artistically arranged to form decorations and furnishings for the chapel," according to Wikipedia.

The Sedlec Ossuary. Video from 2016.

The Climate Catastrophe Of 535-536 AD

Video from 2017. Part Two here.

"The extreme weather events of 535–536 were the most severe and protracted short-term episodes of cooling in the Northern Hemisphere in the last 2000 years. The event is thought to have been caused by an extensive atmospheric dust veil, possibly resulting from a large volcanic eruption in the tropics [1], or debris from space impacting the Earth. Its effects were widespread, causing unseasonal weather, crop failures and famines worldwide." Source: Wikipedia.

[1] New research blames the catastrophe on a series of eruptions in the northern hemisphere. See note below.

According to the next documentary (2017?), the disaster was caused by a supervolcanic eruption in Central America.

Wherever it happened, the disaster had global effects:

"A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. 'For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,' wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C [~36 degrees Fahrenheit], initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record 'a failure of bread from the years 536–539.' Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, [medieval historian Michael McCormick] says." Source: Science (Nov. 2018).

Note: According to this Science article, the most recent information I could find, the catastrophe was caused by a series of volcanic eruptions in Iceland rather than Central America:

"Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious clouds has long been a puzzle. Now, an ultraprecise analysis of ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono has fingered a culprit. At a workshop at Harvard this week, the team reported that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere early in 536. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640..."

The sources are kind of confusing, but it appears that multiple eruptions occurred around the same time in both the northern and southern hemispheres:

"Scientists had long suspected that the cause of all this misery might be a volcanic eruption, probably from Ilopango in El Salvador, which filled Earth's atmosphere with ash. But now researchers say there were two eruptions—one in 535 or 536 in the northern hemisphere and another in 539 or 540 in the tropics—that kept temperatures in the north cool until 550." Source: Smithsonian Magazine (2015).

As expected, the drastic change in climate had a major impact on civilizations around the world, but the extent of that impact is apparently still a matter of conjecture. For example, "[a] book written by David Keys speculates that the climate changes may have contributed to various developments, such as the emergence of the Plague of Justinian, the decline of the Avars, the migration of Mongolian tribes towards the West, the end of the Sassanid Empire, the collapse of the Gupta Empire, the rise of Islam, the expansion of Turkic tribes, and the fall of Teotihuacán." (Wikipedia)

Keys' ideas aren't widely accepted, according to Wikipedia, but a catastrophe like this would have had all sorts of effects, some of them more subtle than others. For example, the invasions of the Huns probably had more to do with the collapse of the Gupta Empire in India than any change in the weather, but a cooling trend in Asia could have been at least partially responsible for the migration of plague-carrying rats into the West.

One way or another, this kind of disaster could easily happen again. The planet is inherently unstable so the odds are that it will happen again. It's just a matter of time.

Why Do Babies In Medieval Paintings Look Like Ugly Old Men?

Comment: According to this theory, these babies are supposed to be homunculi, i.e., tiny versions of fully formed humans. "Most of those medieval babies were depictions of Jesus," according to Phil Edwards (Vox 2015). "The concept of the homuncular Jesus affected how children were portrayed." But even if that's true, why were they so ugly? I mean, some of the babies in these paintings look like zombies. Did medieval painters really think that Jesus was that grotesque in real life?

For some reason, the butt-ugly baby Jesus became a convention in the medieval world. "The strangeness that we see in medieval art stems from a lack of interest in naturalism, and they veered more toward expressionistic conventions," according to Matthew Averett, art history professor and editor of the anthology The Early Modern Child in Art and History. (Quoted in the Vox article.)

"In turn, this made most of the people in medieval art look similar. 'The idea of artistic freedom to depict these people however you want would have been new. There were artistic conventions,'" according to Averett.

Next video shows how Jesus was depicted in some medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts.

The depiction of Jesus in medieval art apparently caused a lot of controversy at first, especially since the New Testament doesn't provide us with a description of what he looked like. According to Wikipedia, "The conventional image of a fully bearded Jesus with long hair emerged around 300, but did not become established until the 6th century in Eastern Christianity, and much later in the West. It has always had the advantage of being easily recognizable, and distinguishing Jesus from other figures shown around him, which the use of a cruciform halo also achieves. Earlier images were much more varied."

Even so, I've yet to see a medieval depiction of the adult Jesus that was as fugly as these babies, though some come close in various ways. The video What Did Jesus Really Look Like argues that an early tradition about Jesus' appearance still survives in various writings and artwork, describing him as beardless and probably short and kind of ugly or at least ordinary looking. The main thing I got out of the video is that the character of Jesus, like that of Sherlock Holmes, has a million different faces and that suggests to me that he had no face at all because, like Holmes, he never actually existed.

Gargoyles On Gothic Cathedrals

"In addition to religious figures, many Gothic cathedrals are heavily ornamented with strange, leering creatures. These gargoyles are not merely decorative. Originally, the sculptures were waterspouts to protect the foundation from rain. Since most people in Medieval days could not read, the carvings took on the important role of illustrating lessons from the scriptures." Source: Thought Company.

According to Medievalists.net, "[The word 'gargoyles'] in its most technical [sense] refer[s] to waterspouts projecting from the roof of the Cathedrals. These beasts spray rain from their mouths off of the side of the roof, protecting the stones from water erosion," and would sometimes drench people as they entered the cathedrals. As far as I can tell, the only difference between the gargoyles and grotesques found in Gothic cathedral architecture is that the grotesques didn't serve as waterspouts.

Besides being important for water drainage, the gargoyles (and apparently the grotesques as well) were supposedly meant to scare away demons. In other words, they were a form of Christian superstition and warding-off magic. As a result, some believe that these weird sculptures prove the connection between the Catholic Church and Satanism and other occult practices. Some Christian writers have asked why demons would be frightened off by statues of demons -- a pretty good question, now that I think about it.

Gargoyles are normally associated with Christian cathedrals, but they have deep roots in the pagan world. According to the Washington National Cathedral's website, "Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans all employed animal-shaped waterspouts, but the ancestors of the American gargoyles are thought to date back to the 12th century. St. Bernard once disapprovingly wrote, 'What is the meaning of these unclean monkeys, these savage lions, and monstrous creatures?' Gargoyles caught on anyway."

Related: "The Gargoyles of Chile," Mysterious Universe.

Hieronymus Bosch And Psychedelic Plants

Comment: Bosch (1450-1516) was a Dutch painter--one of the greatest in the world, if you ask me, and one of the strangest. Anyone who has ever taken mescaline will find something very familiar about his paintings and I've always liked to think that he was a member of an ancient secret society that used hallucinogenic plants in its rituals and had to conceal its activities from the church.

There's no evidence to support this as far as I know (other than the paintings themselves), but there has been speculation that he may have been afflicted with what was then called St. Anthony's fire, now known as ergotism, an infection caused by the grain ergot fungus which was apparently rampant at the time Bosch was alive. Ergot baked in bread can produce a kind of LSD-like substance and is known to cause delirium and hallucinations, among other things.

If Bosch did take psychedelic plants as part of some forbidden ritual, the only candidate for the plant that I can think of would be the fly agaric mushroom. It apparently grows well in northern Europe, but whether it was native to the Netherlands during Bosch's time is another question. The fly agaric mushroom, incidentally, is also known as amanita muscaria, the same mushroom that John Allegro believed was used in the ancient fertility cults that eventually evolved into Judaism and Christianity.

In "The Secret Heresy of Heironymus Bosch" (1996), author Lynda Harris argues that the bizarre symbolism in Bosch's paintings reveal that he was a member of the heretical Cathar sect which was persecuted and driven underground by the Catholic Church. I'm no expert on any of this, naturally, but her argument makes a lot of sense in some regards. Bosch's religious paintings have something demonic about them which fits in with the Catharist's (apparent) beliefs that the Catholic Church in particular and the material world in general were totally evil.

Harris' theory has been criticized for various reasons--including the fact that very little is actually known about the Cathars--but even if she's right, it still doesn't explain the strangely organic and hallucinatory nature of Bosch's symbolism. As far as I'm concerned, his paintings are all the evidence I need. Even if his paintings do contain hidden Catharist and anti-Catholic meanings, the guy was definitely tripping on something. You can see it in every detail of the Garden of Earthly Delights.

More of Bosch's paintings can be found here.

The Voynich Manuscript

"In the library of a famous Ivy League college rests an illuminated manuscript book, hundreds of pages long. No one knows how old it is, where it comes from, who wrote it, or what it is about. A monarch is believed to have bought it for a fabulous sum from a notorious practitioner of the black arts, after which it disappeared for centuries. Its illustrations are pictures of unidentifiable plants and incomprehensible scientific diagrams. The test is in an unknown script which some of the world's best codebreakers have been unable to decipher. The language of the script is also unknown, but computer analysis shows that the manuscript is written in no known human tongue." -- from the introduction to "The Voynich Manuscript for Beginners," by Richard Newmanson.

The Voynich Manuscript has been described as "the most mysterious book in the world." Its author and the date of its composition are unknown -- along with everything else about it -- but the medieval manuscript is probably (1) authentic and entropy analysis (PDF) of the text reveals that the book is highly organized and doesn't just consist of random gibberish. It may be an alchemical text or a Cathar bible (specifically a few books from the Bible) used for ritual purposes, but this is all speculation at this point. Whatever it is, the book was encrypted using a complicated and still unknown code, possibly to hide its contents from the Inquisition.

(1) Some experts believe that the book may be a hoax, but entropy analysis seems to rule this out.

The short book by Richard Newmanson cited above gives a concise but relatively complete overview of the Voynich Manuscript. Highly recommended. Judging by the illustrations,  the book appears to be divided into several sections dealing with herbs, astronomy, cosmology, biology, pharmaceuticals and recipes, but Newmanson points out the possibility that the figures may simply have been inserted in order to obfuscate the actual contents of the manuscript. The fact that no one knows what language was used to write the book makes it extremely difficult to break its code, but lots of people are working on it and every now and then someone will announce that the mystery has been solved.

 The book has attracted a lot of attention and speculation, but as far as I can tell the text is still a mystery. Some experts have suggested that it was written by Roger Bacon or the notorious occultist John Dee, but no one really knows for sure (2). Considering its apparent medieval origin, the manuscript is likely alchemical or perhaps Rosicrucian.

(2) "Like its contents, the history of ownership of the Voynich manuscript is contested and filled with some gaps. The codex belonged to Emperor Rudolph II of Germany (Holy Roman Emperor, 1576-1612), who purchased it for 600 gold ducats and believed that it was the work of Roger Bacon. It is very likely that Emperor Rudolph acquired the manuscript from the English astrologer John Dee (1527-1608). Dee apparently owned the manuscript along with a number of other Roger Bacon manuscripts." Source: Yale University Library.

"The hoax hypothesis can’t be ruled out," according to The New Yorker (2013). "But if the Voynich is a fake, it’s an elaborate one. A twentieth-century scam artist would have to have located a hundred and twenty sheets of blank six-hundred-year-old vellum in anticipation of the invention of radiocarbon dating (which did not yet exist when the manuscript first reëmerged, in 1912). Scholars remain deeply divided over the question of whether the text is likely to be meaningful. But the distribution of letters and words is anything but random, even demonstrating statistical features generally associated with natural-language texts—features that weren’t discovered until the nineteen-thirties."

My favorite theory about the Voynich Manuscript is that it is either the real version of the Necronomicon invented by H.P. Lovecraft or that it inspired Lovecraft and other fantastic writers such as Arthur Machen. This is all fictional, though. "The link between those two mysterious manuscripts - Voynich’s book and the Necronomicon - was first hypothesized in the Cthulhu Mythos fiction of the English author and critic Colin Wilson," according to Daniel Harms (1998). Unfortunately, the Voynich MS is only a couple hundred pages long -- too short to be the Necronomicon - and linguistic analysis has shown that it wasn't originally written in Latin or any Arabic language.

Personally, I hope that the Voynich Manuscript is never decrypted. If it is, the book will probably turn out to be yet another medieval grimoire and lose all of its mystery.

Related: The Mysterious Voynich Manuscript Has Finally Been Decoded. According to this 2017 Ars Technica article, one researcher claims that the book is "mostly a plagiarized guide to women's health, " but "[s]cholars have started to debunk these claims about the Voynich manuscript, noting that the [researcher's] translation 'makes no sense' and that a lot of the so-called original findings were done by other researchers."

Laptops Of The Ancient World

Note: Widely used in the ancient world and middle ages, wax tablets or tabulae ceratae (cera = wax) were "thick pieces of wood usually of an oblong shape, covered over with wax," according to Lacus Curtius (LC).

"These tabulae were sometimes made of ivory and citron-wood [citrus? Thyine wood?] ... but generally of a wood of a more common tree, as the beech, fir, &c. The outer sides of the tablets consisted merely of the wood; it was only the inner sides that were covered over with wax. They were fastened together at the back by means of wires, which answered the purpose of hinges, so that they opened and shut like our books ..."

Wax tablets are still being manufactured and sold today, but I don't know of any writers who actually use them. The next video clip, from HBO's great series Rome, shows Octavian (the future Augustus) using a wax tablet to compile a list of political enemies to be executed. I suppose you could use a wax tablet for transient notes and so on, but they're a little large to carry around. The "laptops of the ancient world" do have one critical advantage over modern laptops, however, namely they don't have any distractions.

According to Wikipedia, "[t]he earliest surviving exemplar of a boxwood writing tablet with an ivory hinge was among the finds recovered from the 14th-century BCE Uluburun Shipwreck near Kaş in modern Turkey in 1986. This find further confirmed that the reference to writing tablets in Homer [?] was far from anachronistic. An archaeological discovery in 1979 in Durrës, Albania found two wax tablets made of ivory in a grave believed to belong to a money lender from the 2nd century CE."

A selection of ancient wax tablets with detailed information about the text they contain (if legible) can be found in the University of Michigan's Advanced Papyrological Information System.

Bring Back The Medieval Witch Hunts

"Researchers at the University of Dundee have recreated the face of an 18th-century 'witch' who died in jail before she could be burned for her 'crimes'." Source: Archaeology News Network (2017).

"Lilias Adie, from Torryburn, Fife, died in 1704 while held in prison for her 'confessed' crimes of being a witch and having sex with the devil."

Comment: This isn't ancient or medieval history, but I can't resist posting stories involving sex with the devil. If this reconstruction is accurate, Lilias Adie looks like she was a sweet old grandma, which just makes the wicked old trollop's behavior all the more shocking. But never mind that. Reading her tragic story made me think, in my usual roundabout way, that it's about time to bring back the medieval witch hunts.

Witchcraft, at least in a watered-down, New Age, politically-correct and feminazified form, is alive and well in the modern world. Witchcraft is now a brand, according to Buzzfeed (2017) in an article about how "entrepreneurs [have blended] a passion for the occult with an understanding of e-commerce to capture a share of the new economic activity surrounding witchcraft." Magic, it seems, is a hot market these days:

"The owner of one such business, Goddess Provisions, said her customer base has grown from 300 subscribers to almost 6,000 in the last year and a half."

The goddess who runs this online store sells everything from crystals to aromatherapy, superfood snacks and spiritual growth tools, and her customers are undoubtedly a pack of rabid Third-Wave feminists who see themselves as being oppressed by the non-existent patriarchy. I have no evidence to back this up, but I imagine that the majority of them are -- among other things -- suffering from extreme forms of Post Trump Stress Disorder.

 

Video from Feb. 2017.

"'Witches are everywhere these days,' says the introduction to Basic Witches, 'a cheeky how-to book about witchcraft published in August [2017]. At Catland [an occult boutique in Brooklyn], along with candles, pheasant feet and little jars of mouse bones, you can buy the beautifully produced feminist witchcraft magazine Sabat, whose covers feature black-and-white photos of gorgeous girls looking like pensive pop stars. There are a surprising number of magical paraphernalia subscription boxes. 'Why the Witch Is the Pop-Culture Heroine We Need Right Now,' said the headline of a recent piece on New York Magazine’s Vulture site, part of its Witch Week Halloween series." Source: New York Times (2017).

May the Great Cthulhu save us all from this plague of modern witches and neopagans in general.

It's amazing that in the 313 years since Lilias Adie died in a Scottish prison after her confession -- three centuries that saw the rise of modern science and technology -- witchcraft has become a widespread, public, relentlessly left-wing and completely legal subculture with a thriving market for witchy products like mouse bones and pentagram pins. These feminist witches and white-magic practitioners are kind of boring, though. Maybe some of them dabble in curse spells and the like, but you'd be hard pressed to find any modern equivalents of Wizard Whateley in The Dunwich Horror or the evil sorceress Queen Taramis in Conan the Destroyer. As far as I can tell, modern witchcraft is more of a pose and a fashion statement than anything else.

Back in Lilias Adie's time, people took witchcraft seriously. Guilty or not, that's why she was in prison. The modern witchcraft brand, if nothing else, shows how much Christianity has degenerated over the centuries. Many modern Christians still believe that witches are real, but they're not inclined to do anything concrete about it. These days, even the most fundamentalist congregations have succumbed to creeping liberalism. For instance, they would never even think of actually going out and burning one of their local goddesses at the stake. That's too bad, if you ask me. Granted, it's hard to take these modern witches very seriously, but considering how obnoxious they are a revival of the medieval witch hunts would not only be a positive benefit to society, but highly entertaining.

What we need is a New Inquisition. The Catholic Church has become a squalid viper's nest of corruption. pedaresty and Cultural Marxism, so the responsibility would fall on the shoulders of fundamentalist congregations around the world. Modern witches aren't hard to locate; most of them have Facebook and Twitter pages and so on. Once the Inquisition Intelligence Service identifies them, the IIS could send out howling mobs with torches to burn down every upscale witchcraft boutique they could find and round up all the Goddesses and Pop-Culture Heroines they could get their hands on. Teenage girls with a pack of Tarot cards, Goth chicks wearing pentagram necklaces, shady characters like this little girl -- no one would be immune except for Elvira. They would all have to stand trial, preferably by ordeal:

The guilty could then be disposed of humanely, just like they were in the Middle Ages:

"In England and New England Witches were hanged; elsewhere the most common form of execution was burning. Burning, by the way, didn't mean being burned alive. If you recanted (admitted you'd made a mistake and were sorry), you were killed beforehand, and then your body was consigned to the flames. Nobles were beheaded, commoners were hanged -- being burned alive was an extreme and unusual punishment except in Spain and Italy where the Inquisition did regularly burn people alive." Source: Summerlands. (Firefox is giving me an Untrusted Certificate warning about this site, but it's probably OK.)

Witches weren't always executed. Sometimes they were banished, imprisoned or forced to do penance. When they occurred, the executions were usually public because they were thought to be valuable "teaching tools," which I'm sure they were. The religious courts handed the condemned over to the secular authorities in order to keep the church's hands clean, but in the modern world I suppose the New Inquisition would have to do the dirty work itself. I imagine a lot of people out there would object to this, but look at it this way: The executions would not only rid us of all these LARPING New Age witches, but they would be good for the tourist economy wherever they took place:

"Executions were popular events. The largest had thousands of attendees, who often traveled many miles to see the deaths. Crowds were so large that the Inquisition would sometimes erect bleachers, so that everyone could see and hear." (Summerland)

Bring back the medieval witch hunts. It's just a suggestion.

The Vatican "Secret" Archives

Video from 2011.

Comment: If nothing else, this huge labyrinthine archive proves that the Vatican, like any other bureaucracy, generates tons of paperwork. I suspect, though, that this "secret archive" isn't the real secret archive and I'm sure they've got more interesting -- and dangerous -- material hidden away in some underground, climate-controlled bunker that very few people know about.

The Vatican, after all, is a state in its own right with a very long history of intrigue, corruption and the occasional murder. I'm sure this book about the secret archives (The Vatican Secret Archives, Vdh Books) only contains documents that the Church decided can be safely shown to the public. Even though it's an interesting and historically important book in its own right, it's also a kind of PR effort by the church designed to counter popular conspiracy theories and show they have nothing to hide.

Nonsense. They've probably got all sorts of juicy documents hidden away somewhere. I'd love to know, for example, what kind of information they have about the early days of the church--how it was actually founded, who the original Popes were, how they managed to accumulate so much power and wealth. The real story, I think, will turn out to be radically different from anything we've been told so far.

I also suspect that they've got a lot of documents relating to more modern scandals like the alleged connections between the Vatican Bank and the Mafia and the death of "God's Banker," Roberto Calvi, who was found hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge near the financial district in London back in 1982. (Take a look at the Wikipedia photograph of Calvi on his Wikipedia page; he looks like a mafiosi.) It would be interesting to read those documents, to say the least, and I'd also like to read the transcripts from the trial of Giordano Bruno, the 16th Century philosopher who was burned at the stake.

The thing I'd most like to find out, however, is how much the Vatican knows about the origins of Christianity. It's possible, I suppose, that they don't know anything more than we do, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they have secret histories that go all the way back which are locked up because they're too dangerous for the world to see. This assumes, of course, that the documents weren't destroyed long ago.