"Archaeologists and specialists from Lebanon, Spain, Poland and Portugal focused on the massive Roman-era temple structure which they say has two main phases: the first is from the time when the building was erected in the early Roman period, the second is related to its major reconstruction in the late Roman period."
"This Phoenician city, where a triad of deities was worshiped, was known as Heliopolis during the Hellenistic period. It retained its religious function during Roman times, when the sanctuary of the Heliopolitan Jupiter attracted thousands of pilgrims. Baalbek, with its colossal structures, is one of the finest examples of Imperial Roman architecture at its apogee." Source: UNESCO World Heritage List.
The Roman ruins here are truly monumental. "...the Baalbek temple complex ... includes two of the largest and grandest Roman temple ruins: the Temple of Bacchus and the Temple of Jupiter." (Wikipedia)
"The now all-too-familiar figure of the ‘witch’ – that frightening old hag with warts on her nose and curses at her fingertips – didn’t appear until the 15th century. Despite being dubbed ‘The Renaissance’ and ‘The Age of Discovery’, the centuries that followed [the Renaissance lasted from the 14th to the 17th century] were witness not only to ruthless witch-hunts, but also to a new belief in the reality of magic." Source: The Conversation.
"In the Middle Ages [see note below], the practice of magic was not yet imagined to be essentially ‘female’. In fact, according to court records from the first half of the 14th century, the majority of those tried for maleficium (meaning sorcery, or dark magic) were men. [Emphasis added] That was because the most troubling form of magic – necromancy – required not only skill, learning and preparation, but above all education, which was less readily available to women. Necromancy involved conjuring the dead and making them perform feats of transportation or illusion, or asking them to reveal the secrets of the universe. Because many books describing necromancy were Latin translations, anyone wanting to practice the craft would need a good working knowledge of Latin."
"It wasn’t until the publication of Heinrich Kramer’sMalleus Maleficarum (or, Hammer of Witches) in 1487 that the specific connection between women and satanic magic became widespread. Kramer warned that 'women’s spiritual weakness' and 'natural proclivity for evil' made them particularly susceptible to the temptations of the devil. He believed that 'all witchcraft comes from carnal lust', and that women’s 'uncontrolled' sexuality made them the likely culprits of any sinister occurrence."
Comment: Heinrich Kramer (1430 - 1505 AD) was a German churchman and inquisitor. If he was alive today, the Catholic Church would defrock him for slut-shaming and general misogyny and he would be attacked by every paper and liberal group in the western world. Ironically, the medieval inquisitor would fall victim to modern inquisitors who would probably try to burn him at the stake.
Kramer's views seem to have been considered extreme, or at least doctrinally incorrect, even during his time. According to Wikipedia, "Kramer failed in his attempt to obtain endorsement for [the Malleus Maleficarum] from the top theologians of the Inquisition at the Faculty of Cologne, and they condemned the book as recommending unethical and illegal procedures, as well as being inconsistent with Catholic doctrines of demonology."
Note: Despite popular misconceptions, the church didn't conduct witch hunts during most of the medieval period. According to Wikipedia, "[t]hroughout the medieval era mainstream Christian teaching had denied the existence of witches and witchcraft, condemning it as pagan superstition." The persecution of witches didn't really start until the Reformation and Renaissance periods:
"The prosecution of witchcraft generally became more prominent throughout the late medieval and Renaissance era, perhaps driven partly by the upheavals of the era – the Black Death, Hundred Years' War, and a gradual cooling of the climate that modern scientists call the Little Ice Age (between about the 15th and 19th centuries). Witches were sometimes blamed. Since the years of most intense witch-hunting largely coincide with the age of the Reformation [emphasis added], some historians point to the influence of the Reformation on the European witch-hunt." (Wikipedia)
Video from 2019. The rest of the series can be found scattered around in this playlist.
"A rare copy of the medieval manuscript Invectives Against the Sect of Waldensians, which, alongside the later published Malleus Maleficarum, detailed how to recognize, question, torture and burn witches, is possibly being resurrected at the University of Alberta. The originally mis-catalogued book is one of only four copies in the world, with the other three housed in libraries in France, Brussels, and Oxford, and is a stunning historical artifact." Source: The Malleusmaleficarum (2012).
Note: Technically, the Waldensians were proto-Protestant Christians, not witches, but the distinction didn't matter to the author of Invectives:
"The Waldensians were medieval heretics who disavowed the power of the priests and allowed women to preach. But for the author of this book, Dominican inquisitor Johannes Tinctor, 'Waldensian' was a synonym for 'witch'."
Many of the Waldensian doctrines sound perfectly reasonable, but they challenged the Catholic church's authority and suffered really horrendous persecution for centuries as a result. For instance, the massacre described in the video below "became known as the Piedmont Easter. An estimate of some 1,700 Waldensians were slaughtered; the massacre was so brutal it aroused indignation throughout Europe." (Wikipedia)
"Mortification of the flesh is an act by which an individual or group seeks to mortify, or put to death, their sinful nature, as a part of the process of sanctification. In Christianity, common forms of mortification that are practiced to this day include fasting, abstinence, as well as pious kneeling. Also common among Christian religious orders in the past were the wearing of sackcloth, as well as flagellation in imitation of Jesus of Nazareth's suffering and death by crucifixion." (Wikipedia)
Video from 2015. Self-flagellation and crucifixion re-enactments are still practiced in the Philippines during Holy Week.
Comment: There's a dark and twisted sadomasochistic streak in Christianity that goes all the way back to the early martyr stories. These stories, mostly apocryphal, glory in the deaths of persecuted Christians, the more brutal the death the better. They feature lovingly detailed descriptions of how the pure and innocent martyrs were tortured, mutilated, burned at the stake, fed to wild beasts, etc. etc., in order to prove their faith and confirm the power of God. Martyr stories could be called a type of religious snuff porn and they are just as gruesome and perverse as the worst examples of extreme horror and splatterpunk fiction of the 80s and 90s.
The glorification of martyrdom and the mortification of the flesh, still practiced by several denominations in various forms, are two aspects of the same underlying disease. This disease isn't an aberration but a natural result of Christianity's fundamental belief in the dualism of body and soul and the fallen nature of Man. The flesh is weak and evil. It has to be controlled, disciplined, punished, put down, chastised in order to purify the spirit. This disease is quite literally a form of existential self-loathing that causes people to actively look for ways to suppress their natural instincts and torture their own bodies.
Henry Suso, mentioned in the top video, is a good example of this Christian masochism. A German Domican Friar who lived in the 13th and 14th centuries, he devised all sorts of methods to mortify his flesh. "Some of these were: an undergarment studded with a hundred and fifty brass nails, a very uncomfortable door to sleep on, and a cross with thirty protruding needles and nails under his body as he slept." (Wikipedia) Suso wasn't completely crazy, however. He managed to overcome his compulsion towards neurotic self-abuse, concluding that these mortifications were "unnecessary distractions from the love of God." That's one way to put it, I guess.
Most Christians who believe in mortification have toned it down considerably, but the magdarame who conduct flagellation and crucifixion rituals in the Philippines take it to extreme lengths that would probably have shocked even Henry Suso. Some of these Filipino devotees really seem to get into it. One guy, for example, a carpenter and sign painter named Ruben Enaje, "has been crucified 33 times as of 2019." Call me a cynic, but I think there's more going on here than just religious devotion. This stuff is sick, masochistic, an overt expression of a deeper, philosophical disease. Most Christians don't have themselves nailed to crosses as an expression of faith, but their belief that self-sacrifice and suffering make you more "spiritual" goes a long way towards explaining the bizarre and frequently commented upon tendency of some Christian denominations to actively work against their own self-interests.
"In 1894, gold prospectors digging up a peat bog near the Russian city of Yekaterinburg unearthed something bizarre: a carved wooden idol 5 meters long. Carefully smoothed into a plank, the piece was covered front and back with recognizable human faces and hands, along with zigzag lines and other mysterious details. It also had a recognizably human head, with its mouth open in an 'o.' For more than a century, the statue was displayed as a curiosity in a Yekaterinburg museum, assumed to be at most a few thousand years old." Source: Science (2018).
"This week, a paper published in the journal Antiquity argues that the statue was crafted from a single larchwood log 11,600 years ago, making it one of the world’s oldest examples of monumental art. In age and appearance although not material, the authors write, the so-called Shigir Idol resembles the stone sculptures of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, which are often cited as the first monumental ritual structures. Both monuments represent a leap beyond the naturalistic images of the ice age."
According to the Siberian Times (2019), "The idol has already shattered our understanding of early ritual art by the hunter-gatherers at the end of the Ice Age, all the more so when tests revealed last year proved it to be older - it was created some 11,500 or 11,600 years ago - than previously understood.
"‘According to the dendrologist Karl-Uwe Heussner, the Shigir Idol stood [on the] shore of a large Shigir paleo lake for about 20 years; then a large crack appeared in the middle, followed by a series of smaller cracks.
"The Idol fell into the water, floated for about a year, then sank to the lake's bottom and formation of peat around it began."
"Urfa Man, known formally as the Balikligöl statue, is the oldest human-size statue of a man yet discovered in the world. He is currently housed in Şanliurfa’s Archeology Museum, Southeast Turkey. Urfa man was discovered in the Old Town section of Şanliurfa, but in antiquity belongs to the same thought world of Göbekli Tepe, a site half an hour away from the museum by car." Source: Ancient Origins (2015).
Notes: Gobekli Tepe, a very ancient complex of monumental stone shrines decorated with bizarre statues and animal relief carvings, is especially mysterious because it was built during the Neolithic, apparently by Stone Age hunter-gatherers.
According to Ancient Origins, the Urfa Man cultic (?) statue may be similar to the "Eye Idols"--figurines with huge staring eyes that have been discovered at Tell Brak, one of the oldest cities in the world which dates back to the 7th millenium BC:
"Urfa man’s voiceless image cast by a conspicuously absent mouth and gazing obsidian-filled eyes is hauntingly enigmatic, but offers a link with another class of ancient statuary known as the eye idol."
Urfa Man idol shown at 11:19.
According to Julian Jaynes, author of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, the missing mouths of these eye idols were meant to "enhance more hypnotically the hallucination of the dead (kings, priests, ancestors, etc) continuing to speak to the living." Jaynes argued that early humans weren't conscious in the modern sense of the word, but heard auditory hallucinations that they considered to be the voices of the gods.
"Jaynes perceived eye idols not as ornamental, but as speaking statues containing voices of the dead - as figurines assisting as aids in the production of hallucinated voices. Some types of eye idol were placed near elements such as running water to increase their speaking power, while others were located in temple areas and feature markings that symbolise gods." (Ancient Origins)
The speculation here is that the Urfa Man statue may be one of Jayne's "bicameral idols." If true, then the Neolithic people of the time may have actually heard the statue speak to them.
During the medieval period, the trade in holy relics was a lucrative and widespread racket operated by the Catholic church:
"Throughout the Middle Ages, Europe hosted a thriving trade in holy relics. But many of the relics, if not all of them, were fake." Source: The Museum of Hoaxes.
"The relics collected and worshiped by medieval Europeans ranged from the mundane to the truly bizarre. Bones or body parts of saints and martyrs were always in high demand. One church proudly displayed the brain of St. Peter until the relic was accidentally moved and revealed to be a piece of pumice stone."
Christians didn't invent the worship of relics, however. According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised), "the practice goes back at least to the Geometric period [in Greece 900-700 BC], persisted through antiquity, and has survived within the Catholic and Orthodox churches."
Relics in ancient Greece were commonly associated with hero cults and they were certainly just as fraudulent as the medieval Christian variety. According to the OCD, "there are numerous examples of relics, which fall into three main categories: first, those put into a certain place on purpose and subsequently worshiped there; second, those brought from one place to another for worship at the latter; third, those found by chance, given an identity, and venerated."
The relics of heroes and saints were thought to be "imbued with the power to benefit their possessor." (OCD) According to A History of the Middle Ages, 300-1500, by John M. Riddle, "the [medieval] age was devoted to the cults of the saints, wherein 'numinous' power was believed to be acquired by veneration of a specific saint, mainly by touching or kissing the saint's physical relic." (p 238)
This is clear evidence that medieval Christians believed in magic and practiced a form of polytheism with the saints as a kind of pantheon of minor deities or demigods. This veneration of relics still continues today in many parts of the world, especially among Catholics, and there's no doubt that every one of these relics is a fake. Next video is a news report from 2015.
Relics were valuable in the medieval world because they attracted patronage and pilgrims, a form of tourism that could greatly increase the wealth of parishes and monasteries. Some monks enjoyed the favor of the rich and weren't above fleecing their own flocks:
According to Nature (2007), "four Franciscan churches in central Italy claim that they each hold a habit of St Francis of Assisi, the friar who founded the Franciscan order in the early 1200s ... Every year more than three million visitors come to the major shrine of St Francis, a basilica in Assisi that hosts famous frescoes depicting the saint's life, and one of the habits said to have belonged to the saint." [Emphasis added]
When it comes to relics, the Catholic church hasn't changed much over the centuries.
I have to wonder how anyone knows that this or that piece of cloth was part of St. Francis's habit or that the bones of St. John Chrysostom and St. Gregory the Theologian are actually their real bones. Did St. Francis have a name tag on his habit? I'm not sure what happened to St. Gregory's body, but in the case of St. John Chryostom, his remains were scattered all over the Christian world in the years following his death. His skull apparently ended up in the hands of the Russian Orthodox Church -- it's apparently still on display at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. At least, they have a skull there. Who knows who it really belonged to?
"Today, the monastery at Vatopedi posits a rival claim to possessing the skull of John Chrysostom," according to Wikipedia, "and there a skull is venerated by pilgrims to the monastery as that of St John. Two sites in Italy also claim to have the saint's skull: the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence and the Dal Pozzo chapel in Pisa. The right hand of St. John is preserved on Mount Athos, and numerous smaller relics are scattered throughout the world."
Unless St. John had four heads, at least three of these skulls have to be fakes. Most likely, they all are. Wouldn't it be hilarious if these various body parts turned out to have belonged to common peasants, criminals or, better yet, notorious heretics? Some of the smaller fragments may even be animal bones for all we know, bones that now play an important role in the religious tourist trade that specializes in conning the superstitious rabble.
Video from 2019. Note the way the worshipers kiss these relics and kneel down to them as if they have occult properties. If this isn't a belief in magic, I don't know what is.
Holy relics fall into various classes. First-class relics consist of the actual body parts of saints. Second-class relics are items of clothing or other objects used by the saint, while third-class relics are objects which have touched first-class relics, thereby absorbing some of their magical power. Dividing relics into classes like this makes it possible to create hundreds, if not thousands of new relics. In the case of the supposed crown of thorns, for instance, many of the "holy thorns" attached to the crown qualify as third-class relics while others are apparently first-class relics. All of these various bits and pieces of the crown could be scattered around different churches in order to attract tourists.
This kind of system led to a wild proliferation of relics. Any thorn could be presented as part of the crown of thorns, just as a common nail, suitably aged, could be said to have been used in the crucifixion. Back in the Middle Ages the church wasn't above calling rocks and random bone fragments part of a saint's skeleton, and the faithful would line up to venerate them, make donations to the church and spend money in the local community.
This lucrative racket went on for centuries and it's still thriving today. And why not? The authenticity of these relics can't be determined in any case. There's absolutely no way to prove that the crown of thorns on display at Notre Dame is the "real" crown of thorns, but it doesn't matter. The faithful will apparently believe almost anything is a "holy relic" if it's put on display in a golden case and surrounded with enough solemn ritualism.
"The ancient Egyptians had an elaborate set of funerary practices that they believed were necessary to ensure their immortality after death (the afterlife). These rituals and protocols included mummifying the body, casting magic spells, and burial with specific grave goods thought to be needed in the Egyptian afterlife." (Wikipedia)
"The ancient Egyptian burial process evolved over time as old customs were discarded and new ones adopted, but several important elements of the process persisted. Although specific details changed over time, the preparation of the body, the magic rituals, and grave goods were all essential parts of a proper Egyptian funeral."
People have been collecting honey from bees since the Stone Age. According to Wikipedia, "[c]ollecting honey from wild bee colonies is one of the most ancient human activities and is still practiced by aboriginal societies in parts of Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. In Africa, honeyguide birds have evolved a mutualist relationship with humans, leading them to hives and participating in the feast. This suggests honey harvesting by humans may be of great antiquity. Some of the earliest evidence of gathering honey from wild colonies is from rock paintings, dating to around Upper Paleolithic (13,000 BCE). Gathering honey from wild bee colonies is usually done by subduing the bees with smoke and breaking open the tree or rocks where the colony is located, often resulting in the physical destruction of the nest."
"Skeps, baskets placed open-end-down, have been used to house bees for some 2000 years." (Wikipedia)
Honey was an important commodity in the ancient world. According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised), "bee-keeping had the same importance for antiquity that sugar production has now. Honey-gathering preceded the culture of bees which began perhaps in the mesolithic period. The evidence for bee-keeping in classical antiquity is mainly literary, ranging in time from Hesiod onwards and in content from incidental allusions to codifications of the practical experience of Greek, Roman, and Carthaginian bee-masters."
Then, as now, honey was used both as a food and a medicine. Note: Honey is currently used as an antibiotic and a treatment for coughs, wounds and burns. (Wikipedia) The Egyptians and other people in the Middle East also used honey to embalm the dead in some cases.
Bees, along with other insects, were also used for divination, a form of augury known as entomomancy. Pliny the Elder describes the practice in a section on bees and beekeeping in Book XI of his monumental Natural History:
"Bees provide signs of future events both private and public, when a cluster of them hangs down in houses and temples -- portents that have often been presaged by momentous events. They settled on the mouth of Plato when he was a young child and foretold the charm of his very pleasing eloquence. They settled in Drusus' camp at the time of our great victory at Arbalo; indeed augurs, who always think the presence of bees is a bad omen, are not invariably correct." -- from Book XI, Pliny the Elder, Natural History: A Selection, Penguin Classics.
Note: "The oldest known honey remains were found in the country of Georgia. Archaeologists found honey remains on the inner surface of clay vessels unearthed in an ancient tomb, dating back some 4,700–5,500 years. In ancient Georgia, several types of honey were buried with a person for their journey into the afterlife, including linden, berry, and meadow-flower varieties." (Wikipedia)
Report from 2012.
Related:How to Construct a Claypot Hive. "Clay tiles were the customary homes of kept bees in the eastern end of the Mediterranean," according to Wikipedia. "Long cylinders of baked clay were used in ancient Egypt, the Middle East and to some extent in Greece, Italy and Malta. They sometimes were used singly, but more often stacked in rows to provide some shade, at least for those not on top. Keepers would smoke one end to drive the bees to the other end while they harvested honey."
Bees and their secretions have many unusual properties, some of which were described by the great Roald Dahl in his story Royal Jelly.
The Mortification Of The Flesh
"Mortification of the flesh is an act by which an individual or group seeks to mortify, or put to death, their sinful nature, as a part of the process of sanctification. In Christianity, common forms of mortification that are practiced to this day include fasting, abstinence, as well as pious kneeling. Also common among Christian religious orders in the past were the wearing of sackcloth, as well as flagellation in imitation of Jesus of Nazareth's suffering and death by crucifixion." (Wikipedia)
Video from 2015. Self-flagellation and crucifixion re-enactments are still practiced in the Philippines during Holy Week.
Comment: There's a dark and twisted sadomasochistic streak in Christianity that goes all the way back to the early martyr stories. These stories, mostly apocryphal, glory in the deaths of persecuted Christians, the more brutal the death the better. They feature lovingly detailed descriptions of how the pure and innocent martyrs were tortured, mutilated, burned at the stake, fed to wild beasts, etc. etc., in order to prove their faith and confirm the power of God. Martyr stories could be called a type of religious snuff porn and they are just as gruesome and perverse as the worst examples of extreme horror and splatterpunk fiction of the 80s and 90s.
The glorification of martyrdom and the mortification of the flesh, still practiced by several denominations in various forms, are two aspects of the same underlying disease. This disease isn't an aberration but a natural result of Christianity's fundamental belief in the dualism of body and soul and the fallen nature of Man. The flesh is weak and evil. It has to be controlled, disciplined, punished, put down, chastised in order to purify the spirit. This disease is quite literally a form of existential self-loathing that causes people to actively look for ways to suppress their natural instincts and torture their own bodies.
Henry Suso, mentioned in the top video, is a good example of this Christian masochism. A German Domican Friar who lived in the 13th and 14th centuries, he devised all sorts of methods to mortify his flesh. "Some of these were: an undergarment studded with a hundred and fifty brass nails, a very uncomfortable door to sleep on, and a cross with thirty protruding needles and nails under his body as he slept." (Wikipedia) Suso wasn't completely crazy, however. He managed to overcome his compulsion towards neurotic self-abuse, concluding that these mortifications were "unnecessary distractions from the love of God." That's one way to put it, I guess.
Most Christians who believe in mortification have toned it down considerably, but the magdarame who conduct flagellation and crucifixion rituals in the Philippines take it to extreme lengths that would probably have shocked even Henry Suso. Some of these Filipino devotees really seem to get into it. One guy, for example, a carpenter and sign painter named Ruben Enaje, "has been crucified 33 times as of 2019." Call me a cynic, but I think there's more going on here than just religious devotion. This stuff is sick, masochistic, an overt expression of a deeper, philosophical disease. Most Christians don't have themselves nailed to crosses as an expression of faith, but their belief that self-sacrifice and suffering make you more "spiritual" goes a long way towards explaining the bizarre and frequently commented upon tendency of some Christian denominations to actively work against their own self-interests.
Posted at 07:00 AM in Christianity, Commentary, Culture, Medieval, Religion, Videos | Permalink