George Grie, In Search Of Meaning, digital artwork
If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction and overview of that needs updating. Old posts are in the archive on the right. Shorter occult posts have their own menu page.
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SaMo-art, Caras Galadhon
It's been a bit. Got a little side-tracked on the notion of applicability from the Silmarillion post - mostly how it applies to history as well as literature. Because both confront us with the problem of time, or more specifically, the relationship between a temporal material world and timeless abstractions.
We've been working through the roots of Western art and culture as a way to counter the webs of lies that gave us modern globalism. Blowing up the illogic is relatively easy, but lies also hide the truth, leaving a void in the wake of their destruction. Reconnecting with the foundations of our cultural heritage lets us identify what the
terms of creation really are. How to replace the lies with reality-facing paths to the true, the beautiful and the good.
George Grie, Lost City of Atlantis, digital artwork
It is possible...
This post was going to look at the centralizing impulse in the roots of the West in a mainly historical way - how Charlemagne and the Carolingians create a home-grown variant on concept of the Roman Empire as an imperial archetype. But thinking about Tolkien's applicability turned us more towards the larger patterns that the Carolingians call attention to as a narrative. The seeds of modern inversion in the historical formation of the Western nations. Empire has always been a anti-national impulse in the West, but it became clear that the social inversion of historical empire is the same thing conceptually as the cultural corruptions and inversions of modernism and globalism.
And we have to start to consider time in relation to what and how we can know.
After this post, we've got the other half of the white rabbit occult post, then it's time for something different. We're going to revisit a piece and rework the Tolkien posts into something less rambling and fragmented. Some comments from an astute reader convinced us of the value of doing that. After that? Wait and see. Things should come a bit faster now too.
Gospel of Luke 1:1, Quoniam (Foramuch as), Book of Kells, around 800, Trinity College Library MS58 f188r, Dublin
Historically, we were considering the beginnings of the European nations out of the arrival of the Germanic tribes from the east and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. The last post on the roots of the West used the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon arts of the British Isles to see national cultures forming - adapting Classical ideas, sharing influences, and adjusting to circumstances. What makes this hard to delineate is that cultures aren't static. This is obvious when we look at the arts.
Agris Helmet, 4th century BC, iron, bronze, gold, coral, Musée d'Angoulême, Agris, France
The arts, like the cultures they express, reveal patterns of change and continuity over time. Always identifiable, but never the same. The Book of Kells is clearly "Celtic" or "Irish", but looks different from the equally Celtic or Irish art from the pre-Roman past, like this helmet. You can see the ancestry, but the decoration isn't the same.
The basic spirals carry over, but the Germanic knotwork on the right of the Matthew detail, the lettering, the figures, and lack of symmetry are all new. They can be linked to contact and influence from other cultural traditions.
This raises an intrinsic problem with the Band's approach. We represent conceptual relationships graphically because they clarify things on very general levels. But graphics are static - they can't capture movement or change within those relationships. That doesn't matter for abstracts or absolutes because they are by nature unchanging, but becomes an issue when we get into material reality and historical developments.
The difference between the temporal - the changing, evolving, moving - and the the timeless - unchanging, static, eternal - is fundamental. Whether by timeless we mean logical abstractions or ultimate reality/God.
Fundamental to both to our experience of reality and to the lies that invert it. To how history is known. One way to conceptualize modern inversion is as the misapplication of the timeless to the temporal.
Time to continue the roots by looking at the Franks historically and in terms of conceptual applicability. Tolkien's applicability refers to fictional insights into the real world that aren't direct allegorical or symbolic references, but conceptual resonances. When you think about it, history has a similar kind of applicability. An older post observed how
history is a form of storytelling - the difference from Tolkien's "Sub-creation" is in the relationship to reality. Fiction is derives its images from the real world imaginatively, while history chooses ones that actually happened. But both simplify the confusion and chaos of reality to highlight underlying themes. Both are structured around "plots" - either something that actually happened or an author's narrative that unfolds as if it did.
John Pettie, The Vigil, 1884, oil on canvas, Tate London
Applicability in history would looks for patterns in the historical record that offer insights into morality and meaning today. Because the West isn't a diagram with discrete parts. It's a moving tangle where relationship patterns cross political, moral, spiritual, and conceptual boundaries that illuminate each other. Identity is complex.
Quick aside - note how Postmodern notions of "identity" form around a single trait - the self-erasure of reducing a person to a single adjective. One more reason why we call de-moralized secular transcendence Flatland.
An underrated aspect of Postmodern is how stupid it is. The mindless stupidity makes it easy for the left half of the bell curve to latch onto.
The Band's mantra 'what can we know and how can we know it' is just a not-technical way of referring to epistemology and ontology - the structures of knowing and the nature of reality respectively. It has led us to recognize that our understanding of the world is inherently imperfect and gets blurrier as you get further from the material into abstraction. Different levels of reality are known with different limitations in different ways. What we call
the limits of discernment is just how far our understanding can extend in different domains. Empirical observation for the material, logic and reason for abstractions, and faith for ultimate reality.
Henry Mosler, The Birth of the Flag, 1911, oil on canvas
History is material level reality - what happened - and is known empirically through the historical record. But the historical record is a man-made creation interpreted theoretically. Historiography covers a wide swath from evidentiary standards to lunatic Postmodern theorizing. They're all abstract processes that come between the direct empirical experience of the kind that we have in our own lives and the past.
All histories are imperfect. But they aren't all the same. As with any human activity, the difference is defined by your intentions - your sincere internal moral direction. Is your agenda to represent the truth, as revealed in the full historical record that we do have? Or is it a desire to reshape the past to fit toxic incoherent preconceptions? This isn't something that a "system" can guarantee. To have reliable history, like reliable anything, the historians have to be internally motivated to serve historical truth as it is available. They have to be... honest. Nihilistic materialist historians are literally unfit for purpose. They don't serve history.
Göbekli Tepe, 10th-8th millennium BC, Southeastern Anatolia, Turkey
This site is often called a temple but archaeologists have no idea what it actually was. There are minimal signs of habitation and the apparent age blows out the usual timelines.
According to Infogalactic: "The surviving structures, then, not only predate pottery, metallurgy, and the invention of writing or the wheel, they were built before the so-called Neolithic Revolution, i.e., the beginning of agriculture and animal husbandry around 9000 BC. But the construction of Göbekli Tepe implies organization of an advanced order not hitherto associated with Paleolithic, PPNA, or PPNB societies. Archaeologists estimate that up to 500 persons were required to extract the heavy pillars from local quarries and move them 100–500 meters (330–1,640 ft) to the site. The pillars weigh 10–20 metric tons (10–20 long tons; 11–22 short tons), with one still in the quarry weighing 50 tons."
What had been uncovered suggests a religious, or at least ritual, nature but anything beyond that is pure conjecture - and most often projection. Archaeology is plagued with a reverence for whatever intellectual flyweight happens to be running a site - consider the lead archaeologist here blathering about a "cathedral on a hill" and a "pilgrimage" site. The problem is that this nonsense limits research and interpretation until more intelligent observers have access. Thinking of it as a cathedral conceals all the the ways it isn't. Nonsense hides knowledge.
The truth is that the only way to build historical knowledge is empirically. Excavate new sites, explore new archives, translate forgotten texts, develop new analytical tools - add concrete pieces of information to the pitiful historical record that we do have. But this requires awareness of what and how we know. Abstracts are drawn from observations of material reality. Material reality isn't determined by the historian's abstract beliefs. Globalism is based on the inversion.
Consider the history that we can access. We only have reliable records going back to Sumeria, although there is plenty of evidence of older systems that are not understood -
the Danube Valley Civilization is a good example. The Band is also more open to more esoteric "alternative" histories than most, but without material remains or documentary evidence these can't be more than speculative.
Venus of Brassempouy, around 25,000 BC, mammoth ivory, National Archaeological Museum, Saint-Germain en Laye
What older artifacts have survived are too rare and decontextualized to tell us much of anything beyond that they exist. What can we say about a nearly 30,000 year old broken head pulled out of the ground?
It's looks like a limit of discernment...
Early writing tablet recording the allocation of beer; 3100-3000 BC, from southern Iraq, British Museum
We have reasonably reliable written accounts going back ~5500 years - plenty old enough to make a point. This is when our timelines become less speculative, though there are still problems interpreting this "historical" material as well.
Here's the point of this sojourn into the distant past. The oldest records we can read are Sumerian, but they are nowhere near the beginning of humanity "The Sumerians" themselves had to have existed before they built the cities of Sumeria and devised the written language they are remembered for. We just have no idea where they originated, what they believed, and how they organized socially. Their prehistory is more of a black box than Göbekli Tepe, since at least there, we have a site to look at.
This means that the beginning of history isn't the beginning of people. It's just when they become visible to us centuries later. To use a literary term:
You pick up a story that's in progress, no matter how old your records are. It's
moving. Suppose concrete evidence was found proving the existence of Atlantis. It would radically alter the official timelines, but do nothing to clarify the search for origins. It would just push when you join the on-going story back to an earlier date. There would still have been people prior to whatever piece of information you found. We can't see the higher "abstract" structure empirically. Like a reader, we are jumping in and trying to figure it out as we go.
Ted Nasmith, Turin and His Band Are Led to Amon Rudh, illustration for Chapter XXI, "Of Túrin Turambar," of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion
Tolkien nails this in The Silmarillion when Men enter the story from unclear origins. They have echoes - cultural memories - of a past history, but nothing concrete, and no record of where they first came from. So no way to find out.
Like Sumeria. Or any other ancient history.
Obviously, the same is true in Europe - it's true everywhere - only with worse records. In the last post, we looked at the foundation of the British Isles nations out of tribal groups - the various peoples called Celts and the Germanic tribes from "the East". Neither of these kept written records prior to contact with "civilized" cultures, so their deep past is not knowable. They're in motion. They come on record - the curtain raises on them - when they establish permanent settlements and build nations. The processes that leave the evidence we can see.
This goes wrong when "historians" project their own assumptions onto things beyond knowing. It's how we get absurd ritual conjecture off disjointed artifacts, hot air, and fantasy. Like defining Göbekli Tepe in terms of cathedrals and pilgrimage while locking down access to the site. All that's missing are the claims of matriarchal egalitarianism. But the problem isn't inversion and stupidity of individual projections - it's the nature of the field itself. Modern History! is structurally retarded.
It is common for ridiculous contentions to be taken as ironclad fact, so long as they accompanied by some caveat claiming "we aren't certain". It's a slight of hand that is widely unnoticed, but when you look into the actual research supporting founding historical myths, there isn't much there beyond projection and appeal to authority. And it isn't just the "alternative" archaeology
decried in this link. Exalted hacks like Schmidt at Göbekli Tepe are equally imaginary, if less clever. Not only was Göbekli Tepe not Eden or Atlantis, it likely wasn't a temple at all. Now consider the consequences of the authorized narrative pushing more and more detailed interpretations of a religious meaning that clearly doesn't fit, and may not have existed at all. Put bluntly:
Modern History! actually retards the progress of knowledge by elevating credentialed midwit gatekeepers and treating their empty projections as fact.
The empirical reality of the developments of peoples
and how we know them historically is a moving process. One of material change over time that we can only ever open into the middle of. It is temporal and limited by our discernment - the diametric opposite of everything that a theoretical abstraction is. Subordinating history to historiography rather than inferring historiography from history is completely inverted. Not just wrong but dead wrong. Fall for it, and your world view is lie constructed by those who hate not just what you are, but the very idea that you are something. And it goes beyond history.
Thomas Cole, Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, 1828, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
One recurring pattern that is learnable from the Fall is the damning consequences of choosing what you wish to be real over what observably is real. Whether in the history or in the present. All the putrid threads of globalist false consciousness are built on telling you that what you are seeing isn't "true" in some inverted way. From psychology to "privilege", the one constant in globalist "knowledge" is denying empirical reality for incoherent lies. Material reality is uncertain and our discernment limited, but the observations we can make are align with the truth and stand up over time. Declaring idiot theories may get funding and attention short term, but long-term is a continuum from irrelevance to self-immolation.
Visualize. Reality exceeds our limits of discernment. The limits and origins are beyond perception. We have empirical tools - the senses - to make sense of our surroundings, but we are born into something that cannot be fully grasped by those means.
To impose universals from our perspective is to pretend all that fits into a tiny conceptual range that someone came up with. Except the universals keep changing.
But
this one is really true...
We do impose structures on reality to make it comprehensible. But these are based on observable patterns - you may not think the constellation looks like what it is supposed to be, but you agree on the empirical facts about where the stars are. You can come up with a better organizing system, find more representative patterns - that's the human-level interpretative stuff that does change
We are subjective, limited, socially-conditioned creatures. Our conceptions of the world are always projections to some degree. What matters is that the subjective projections originate in material reality.
The patterns are secondary observations of reality, not things that predetermine it. They are meaningless out of context.
Here's a painful irony of authorized history: believe it or not,
modern historians really do study the history of history. This means that:
1. The same people who profess that 'ignorance of history dooms us to repeat it'...
2. ... actually read the string of luciferian gasbags past and their grand theories...
3. ...and still proclaim "theoretical models" of their own!
What's fake faith without fake hope? This time, hanging textbook summaries of self-idolizing dead materialists on decontextualized records and artifacts is bound to get to the truth...
And speaking of that flacid bromide, it is telling that most can't get it right - phrasing or speaker. Incidentally, this is why the Band is skeptical of the bulk of speculation on mandela effects - mandela effects assume that there was a normative version to change in the first place. Experience appears to be too temporally and circumstantially malleable to allow for concrete certainties to mandela effect in the first place. It's the darkling glass / valley of shadow nature of material existence.
When the Band calls modern culture institutions not fit for purpose - this is why. They teach wishes. Only they call it "methodology". When the very notion of an abstract model to explain history is inherently nonsensical. The only worthwhile methodologies are practical. Things that help clarify and make accessible the material facts of historical record and organic culture formation. We are opening into an ongoing story. A moving picture. The only "models" are what we can abstract from the evidence we have. And these are only useful as far as they can remain coherent as new information surfaces. Like predictive value, only backwards in time.
The Neolithic to Mesopotamia model of the origins of civilization fails to account for the social organization or the technical accomplishment of Göbekli Tepe. It's not that the Mesopotamian records are somehow false. It's that our limits of discernment prevent us seeing what came before.
Theoretical models are static, history is moving - like the game says. There is no one snapshot of "history" or any subset of history - like the historical identity of a nation. So the correct historiographic question isn't what nations are, it's how they form. And formation implies change.
We become aware of the peoples who formed the European nations when they settle and start leaving records. We aren't interested what motivated this - why it happened. Some combination of environmental pressures and genetic dispositions but ultimately unknowable. What we can know is that whatever they were when they've come into our view, they were already changing. The same settled civilizations needed to produce material remains and written records creates new physical and social environments - new ways of life. The very processes that makes them visible historically also ensures that they are no longer what they were.
Material history has no "origins" beyond the point where the historian starts. To claim otherwise is by definition not empirical. It is an act of faith.
Thomas Cole, The Garden of Eden, 1828, oil on canvas, Amon Carter Museum of American Art
The thing about faith is that it refers to knowledge outside empirical verification categorically. The closest we can come is to ask whether the articles of faith are compatible with what we can know empirically, or if they require us to believe things that are empirically contradictory. Well, that, and being honest that we are operating on faith and avoiding epistemological category errors. The Band is very careful about doing this . If the lying, globalist peddlers of secular transcendence were equally honest, we would be in a very different place.
Consider: we accept the limits of what and how we can know and admit that we accept an empirically-inaccessible Edenic origin story on faith. But we will also point out that the historical blurriness - the impossibility of determining origins empirically that requires a leap of faith in the first place - is completely compatible with everything we have observed about the limits of discernment in a fallen finite world.
Now consider the epistemological retards that are accorded lab-coated "authority" in an inverted beast system that runs on power, projection, and, at the end of the day, naked evil. Because what is more evil than depriving humanity of understanding their actual place in the universe? Ask one of these fake priests to walk you through the physics of creation ex nihilo. This is faith in ontological impossibilities that openly contradicts what can be known.
Neither are verifiable, but only one is compatible with what is materially possible.
In general, the Band finds it best to work with three rough categories - the material, the abstract, and the ultimate - corresponding with empirical observation, logic, and faith as modes of knowledge. What we can know and how we can know it. But when we are thinking about time and experience, we can actually simplify the working structure further into a binary distinction. Consider - the upper tiers of our ontological hierarchy - Ultimate reality and abstract universals - are both constant and timeless. As we already noted, material reality is constantly changing in time. Dividing temporally gives us two categories - abstracts and considerations of ultimate reality on one side and material existence in the other. Call them the eternal and the temporal.
J. Z Gtogowa, Geocentric Cosmos with Christ and the Apostles, 1506
We are not the first to observe that the material world is uniquely temporal. Aristotle made mutability - temporal change - a characteristic of what he called the subluneary sphere. That is, the elemental realm including the earth inside the moon's sphere in his geocentric system. It's marked here by "Lune" and is the transition from the earthly to the heavenly.
We just removed the astronomical concordance and separated the physical from the ontologically higher cleanly:
Combining logical abstractions and God in one category papers over some fundamental differences, but it lets us avoid getting tangled in the weeds. And Postmodernists don't care about being precise with terms and concepts - their entire world view is predicated on belief in absurdities. Globalist inversion of all forms misapplies faith and logic to the material with equal disregard, so we may as well put all their category errors in one basket and identify the underlying pattern:
pretending eternal things are properties of material reality - either social or physical.
Back to secular transcendence.
The Band works to help readers understand the web of lies that blankets the West so they can see their way free of the ensnarement. We operate at the broadest range because that's where we can see the underlying illusions and deceptions that the whole inverted modern system is built on. And once you recognize that the whole foundation is sand, the architectural details in the plan don't matter. The foundation is sand.
But what's more important is making the observations accessible to readers so they can undercut the towers of nonsense as easily. And that's the value of a term like secular transcendence - it is
a practical litmus test. There is no need to get lost in the minutia of an argument once you note that an SJW or globalist is misapplying charactistics of ultimate reality or logical abstraction to material existence. The timeless isn't directly accessible to us, and anyone claiming otherwise is at best a thoughtless mouthpiece and at worst a deceiver.
It's a choice, but only one is real.
The Band dislikes the term secular transcendence rhetorically despite coining and using it repeatedly, it because it sounds clunky. But it captures the core error of claiming transcendentals - eternals, ultimate or abstract reality - are applicable to temporal reality or knowable in themselves in subjective human terms. Once you see through this, all the charlatans peddling fake truth evaporate like the smoke they are. So when you come across some self-idolator with an "ism" to fix mankind, ask how the "principles" are knowable. If they are claiming abstract ideals or articles of faith are somehow possible for subjective humans in a fallen world, give them a huge pass. Their family tree springs from the Father of Lies.
Consider the U.S. Constitution - held up by some as almost holy writ, but there is little "timeless" about it. The underlying sentiments come from Enlightenment-era intellectuals of colonial English extraction, and while excellent ideals in principle, have objectively failed in the present. In other words, the "universals" of the 18th century are a poor fit for devilry of the modern world. Calling something "eternal" does not excuse vigilance and effort in protecting your culture from corruption and inversion. If anything, false faith in papers distract you from what is important.
This isn't a rhetorical question. How retarded to you have to be to pretend the this is still how we're ruled?
Coming back to history, we can see why it was relevant to clarify the eternal / temporal distinction. History is pure temporality - the study of what happened in the past time of ever-changing material reality. And luciferian globalists have been trying to impose fake eternals on it from the beginning. As if they can see the world not through the darkling glass, but a crystalline one.
Or a crystal ball...
This is why all the different fields in what passes for globalist "knowledge" fail in the same way. They all impose some eternal or set of eternals over what can be logically concluded from the full set of empirical facts. The "social sciences" try and cram the range of human behavior into vacuous theories that are little more than the theorists' own projected sociopathy and are swapped out on a regular basis.
History! makes up patterns and supports them with random factoids, pulled out of context and contorted into something historically unrecognizable, or just declares them true without any evidence at all. It isn't a different interpretation of what we can know about the past, its a replacement of what we can know about the past with atavism and self-serving lies.
Consider the Anglo-Saxons from the last post.
St. Augustine preaching to Ethelbert I (Aethelberht I), 19th-century colored wood engraving.
Ethelbert I, long-serving king of Kent (560–616) produced the first known code of Anglo-Saxon laws and gave the Christian missionaries a relatively warm welcome.
Prior to the Norman Conquest, the Anglo-Saxon legal system was based in folkright offset by privileges. Folkright is the assumption that the public has fundamental rights in certain areas like property, succession, and contracts - and that laws regulating these "
had to be declared and applied by the people themselves in their communities". The link defines folkright as "the aggregate of rules, whether formulated or not, that can be appealed to as an expression of the juridical consciousness of the people at large or of the communities of which it is composed". Privileges were special enactments or grants accorded individuals - the basis of royal power and the foundation of a centralized legal system.
The replacement of folkright with central law is often portrayed as Romanizing, but this is a bit of a misconception intended to create a fake contrast between a mystical Germanic pagan freedom and Christian oppression. If you aren't trapped in an imaginary D & D game of your own projection, you will encounter things like "history" and "books" - particularly that actual historical Dooms of the Anglo-Saxon kings that began the development of written law in real life. You can read them yourselves at this link. What we see is that when the Normans brought Roman law, England was already centralizing along traditional Anglo-Saxon lines.
Ethelbert Baptized by St. Augustine of Canterbury, from the Roman de Brut, 1325-1350, British Library Egerton 3028 f55r
Ethelbert's Dooms of Ethelbert, the earliest known Anglo-Saxon law code. A Christian with marital ties to the powerful Catholic Merovingian Franks - his law did establish the rights of the Church. But the bulk deals with traditional wergilds for breaching the peace. Centralized rules are needed in a centralized polity, and religion has less to do with early English law than subordinating the Maegth or kin-based society to a royal state.
In other words, stabilizing the polity by ending blood feuds for perceived slights. It remains an amusing irony that those who LARP hardest for a return to a trials by fire and blood vengeance would die quickest. But note what the Dooms aren't - rules proclaimed to be universal truths with nearly religious reverence. Centralized authority builds out of folkright - it ultimately corrupts and replaces it, but the illusion is that it comes from some nebulous popular consent. The Dooms are just "codifying" what was always done. Which, as we are all too aware, is the fast track to inversion on the empirical-temporal / abstract-eternal divide - this time in a social and legal context.
Pharaoh, depicted as an Anglo-Saxon king, as judge with a hanged man, from the Old English Hexateuch, 1025-50, Cotton MS Claudius B IV f59, British Library, London
Late Anglo-Saxon translation of the six books of the Hexateuch - the first six books of the Old Testament, or the five books of the Torah plus Joshua - into Old English, with 394 drawings. The depiction of Pharonic authority as a hanging king shows the centralization of legal power in the king.
That's the mechanism. We have to consider folkright in terms of content and form. The content would be the laws and customs themselves - what is a transgression, what are the penalties and so forth. The form would be the adminstration through local shire councils and kinship obligations. Centralization starts by keeping the content more or less but changing the form to standardized processes of royal justice. Same crimes and penalties, just run through a depersonalized system. The way it was always done. Except once there is a central authority, there is nothing to stop the inversion of administering the rights of the people by replacing them.
The Norman conquest imposes a new legal system and the friction with English tradition culminates in the restrictions on royal privilege in the Magna Carta - a document with an 800-year history of anachronistic rights claims that illustrates the shift from the temporal to the timeless.
Careful though. If anything happens to it, our rights vanish...
Edmund Evans, King John signs the Magna Carta, 1864, for James Doyle's "John" in A Chronicle of England: B.C. 55 – A.D. 1485, London, p. 226
Historically, the Magna Carta was a power-sharing arrangement that bought support for the crown by enshrining the aristocracy in the structure of the state. But there were a few passages pertaining to the larger public that have gained totemic status. Like clause 39 of the original 1215 charter, a precedent for the Petition of Right in 1628 and the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679:
"No free man shall be arrested or imprisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled
or in any way victimised, neither will we attack him or send anyone to attack him,
except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land."
David Parfitt, King John and Baron Fitzwalter in the act of sealing the Magna Carta, 1997, Bath stone, brick, and Norwegian granite, Egham town centre, Surrey, UK
Where are "the people"?
Due process, trial by jury - these are held up as traditional Anglo-Saxon folkright carrying over into English law. But see the switch? The writers of new laws and codes aren't citing "traditional Anglo-Saxon folkright" in their legislation, they're citing a piece of paper detailing an agreement between monarchy and aristocracy. Exactly the opposite "authority" that traditional folkright rested on. The only way the king can "concede" things he doesn't rightfully own is if he's taken them wrongfully, by force. That is, no claim to them at all.
It's the form / content problem. People have been so taken by the content - the notion that a tyrant would voluntary limit power for money and toss you back a few crumbs from what used to be your food - that they miss the form. In accepting the Magna Carta as the "source" or your rights, you've conceded two falsehoods:
1. that they were the king's to give in the first place.
2. that they now reside in a piece of magic paper
From the folkright "freedom" perspective that the Magna Carta supposedly supports, a tyrant is someone who takes your rights from you without your consent. How can he transfer them to a piece of paper, also without your consent, and how does doing that restore anything to you?
Magna Carta stamp, part of ‘The Citizen's Tale’ series within the Royal Mail's Millennium Collection, 1999
The sort of design abomination that comes from diverse committee design. More seriously, you can see how the document has been stretched and twisted beyond historical recognition into a totem of secular transcendence. Imaginary universals that the signers didn't have the power to grant in the first place.
Treason Ale from Grantham, England's Newby Wyke Brewery, 2018
It's almost like the paper-fluffers were lying...
Tyranny shifts from the personal to the systemic - fluffing paper instead of a strongman. Consider the religious undertones in the word "enshrining". Rights that were historical and organic - empirically real - only last as long as they can be defended. What is laughably described as a historic march of "freedom from tyranny" is another bait and switch. What we actually see is the gradual replacement of personal authority with the systematic version that will slowly metastasize into the corrupt, globalist, oppressive legalistic oligarchy that we are enshrined enmeshed in now.
But at least we have the Magna Carta.
All legal systems are fictions in that they are either imposed or agreed upon at a particular time and in response to particular circumstances, but profess materially-impossible timelessness. General principles are abstractions - specific charters are specifics. Treating the latter like the former is a necessary compromise for a functioning society but it is a compromise. Where things go wrong is when the compromise acceptance is taken as metaphysical truth. Illusory universality isn't the problem with legal systems.
It's the pretense that this universality is based on something other than faith.
Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, Writing the Declaration of Independence, 1776, 1932, from the artist’s series The Pageant of a Nation, oil on canvas, Virginia Historical Society
The Declaration of Independence sidestepped this trap and acknowledged that claiming transcendent knowledge of the temporal material world is an act of faith.
But here too, the piece of paper somehow comes to replace the divine sanction as the source of the rights described. Like magic, if not quite reaching the level of a full Franklin...
This is yet another reason why the Band grows increasingly dismissive of the whole nonsensical post-Enlightenment ball of hot air and fantasy that has been passed off falsely as modern reality. It is obvious from reading these posts that we are not lacking in historical awareness, and that doesn't come without effort. It is rather irritating to tally up the years spent studying smoke. When you consider what the historical record preserves, and then compare it to the preposterous mythologies, you see how freaking dishonest and inverted this fallen world is. Just look at the temporal arrangements morph into into fake totems of secular transcendence.
Folkrights are material level developments - organic and unsystematic. People figuring out their own affairs within commonly understood communal standards. Divine rights are faith level knowledge - metaphysical and therefore more systematic or abstract. But in either case, they are something that is objectively yours within the relevant epistemological mode. They are not reducible any further or to anyone else. You are born to them either by cultural custom or by faith in God - organic and unsystematic or metaphysical and abstract.
Faith in the magic paper concedes the inverse - that these are held by someone else and subject to their terms and conditions.
The English evolved a three-part system with power divided between a king, the nobility in the House of Lords, and the "people" represented by Parliament ruled by a Common Law supposedly rooted in folkright. It was messy and imperfect because it was an organic reaction to circumstances over time, but it had the flexibility to be functional in a nation where common culture was assumed. The potential for subversion comes in at the point of implementation - where the ideal formula of
flexible guidelines + reasoned judgment actually plays out in human systems.
Early Anglo Saxon Village
Pre-Norman folkrights were applied through local moots or assemblies in small-scale societies. Communities were small and cohesive - there's room for flexibility when things are this local.
But with centralization, these morph into "representative bodies". Parliament in the system that evolves post-Conquest.
History has shown that separating a small ruling collective culturally and geographically from their "constituents" is how the notion of the people's rights and interests gets replaced by an authoritarian oligarchy.
Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin, Palace of Westminster, begun 1840, London
Is there a better symbol for the oligarchic assumption of power than a fake "Gothic" skin on a hub of unaccountable power? Maybe "timeless" classical wisdom...
All systems are imperfect in a fallen world. All tend towards moral entropy and the openness to inversion that follows. Now think about what modern governance actually is. How different it is from any of the foundations that the claims are built on, whether custom or metaphysics. There's a really annoying human trait - when people believe or accept something
because of certain terms or arguments, the initial terms or arguments invert or cease to exist, and the belief is still maintained. For example - acting like a government founded by and for a people still is when it obviously and self-evidently isn't in any actual material way.
Allyn Cox, The First Continental Congress, 1774, 1973-1974, oil on canvas, Great Experiment Hall, Cox Corridors, U.S. Capitol, Washington
Ben Garrison, Ship of Fools
It is so past obvious that these are not only not the same thing - one is a complete inversion of the letter and spirit of the former.
The Band could understand why corrupt and tyrannical globalist oligarchs would want to lie to the people, but what possible purpose is there in the people lying to themselves? We suspect that admitting that the Emperor has no clothes is subconsciously painful because it opens the path to considering all the other ugly lies that are conveniently ignored in pursuit if short-term fancies.
Consider the idea of privilege in the Anglo-Saxon system. Theoretically, privileges were dispensations that the people voluntarily gave up because it was in their better interest to do so. The necessary compromises for a safe and stable society. The power to fine and tax was the most significant concession, since it violates the fundamental folkright to one's person and property. Were we actually in possession of our rights - were the freedom propaganda real - the granting of those privileges would be very rare. Think about it - would you choose to surrender self-determination or property when the benefit isn't obvious? And there'd be restrictions and benchmarks - you're not going to voluntary give someone life and death power over you in exchange for some nebulous blather about "security".
But the propaganda isn't real - just the machinations of a "representative assembly" and their shadow masters.
Henry Bacon (architect) and Daniel Chester French (sculptor), Lincoln Memorial, 1914-1922, Washington, DC.
To an Anglo-Saxon, our "Republic" is agreeing to a group of strangers twisting and restricting your folkrights, regardless of your will, in your name. But all systems are flawed and history teaches us that the next will spew pretty lies and accrue worldly power and wealth too.
The problem is the self-deception that comes from misaligned faith.
To be clear, we are not claiming that folkrights have some metaphysical character. They don't. That would be a different version of the secular transcendence category error that gave us enchanted papers and magic dirt. All culture is the organic material-level expressions of a people. That's all the material human world can be. So folkrights are as "real" as possible down here. They just don't exist in some timeless abstract form - if they did, they couldn't be extinguished by force. But that isn't the point here - the point is that they weren't openly extinguished at all. Lip service continues to be paid to fake notions of freedom and self-determination that observably
don't exist in reality. Folkrights in Anglo-American tradition
are one of the empirical facts of that cultural history. Metaphysics are metaphysics. Right now, we're looking at material lies.
This is why the eternal / temporal distinction matters.
Material reality - human reality - is time-bound and changing. Our perspectives are finite and subjective. Everything around us tends to entropy, and evil is empirically real everywhere we look. Even the smartest, the most far-sighted are reacting to our formative circumstances, and these are always changing. Fake abstract materials don't exist. You don't need metaphysics to show this - just eyeballs.
Albert Herter, The Signing of the Magna Carta; The Signing of the American Constitution, around 1915, murals in the Supreme Court Room of the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison
We see this in the fate of the pre-modern representative governments. The British system was an intricate accommodation of a long complicated history and the American a reaction to their immediate adversaries - kings and aristocrats. Note the implicit Progress! in the empty center between the warring aristocrats in the Magna Carta filled by the representative of the people in the Constitution. And that neither system foresaw the real enemy: creeping control of a centralizing system by corrupt, luciferian, unofficial oligarchies.
Just consider how tyranny is
personalized in the Western imagination. It's obvious in the history we've been looking at - Bad King John or King George as the oppressive force to be defeated and rightful freedom established or restored. But this model repeats over and over in countless venues. Call it the Star Wars - throw the monster down the well and
paradise "freedom" spontaneously erupts. Of course, Tolkien warned us about crediting one person or entity with responsibility for evil. Smoke the Dark Lord and evil carries on. The world is fallen.
In more modern times, the personalization is transformed to a party, but the overall pattern is similar. Orwell's Big Brother is the rhetorical face on an anonymous all-powerful bureaucracy rather than an evil king. But it is still a single entity monolithic enemy inspired by contemporary circumstances. In the mid-20th century, the "Dark Lord" was the totalitarian state ruled by some sort of party instead of an evil monarch. The wicked king gone corporate. What doesn't change is the division between an identifiable oppressor and a collective "we the people" longing to be free. Clearly defined good and bad guys. A binary. A false dichotomy between "tyranny" and "democracy".
John A. Woodside, We Owe Allegiance to No Crown, 1814, oil on canvas, US National Portrait Gallery, Washington
Mythologizing the revolution as an abstract struggle between liberty and tyranny, removes it from history and turns it into a whatever the narrative engineers want. Any foreign conflict can be transformed into a moral imperative by invoking the holy name of never-defined "Liberty". The structure was preset. Just switch up the names.
And while the public is obsessed with defending imaginary freedoms from imaginary dark lords...
Now consider a system where control is financial/legislative - they're same thing in the modern world. Where there is a state mythology that speaks of freedom and folkright related things, but the "leadership" - elected, corporate, intellectual - are all co-opted and corrupted by same inverted luciferial materialist reward system. Where the self-proclaimed "elite" flounce about on clouds of money appropriated, borrowed, or spun out of thin air blathering incoherent, logically self-detonating lies. Because this gets "prestige". Or stuff. Or the opportunity to satisfy depraved appetites.
When it is the modern system itself that the problem. The centralized oligarchic absolutism that inverted legitimate ontological foundations - empirical culture and/or metaphysical faith - into an atomized, materialist, moral hellscape beneath a complicit pop culture glamour.
How can you identify who is responsible. Is it a cabal? A global elite? A beast system? It's so vast, intertwined, and shrouded in deception that you can't even hang a label on it.
It doesn't fit the good guy/bad guy dichotomy that it tells us defines issues of tyranny and freedom. There's no Darth.
So those ensnared in the lies can't even see it.
The media changes, but the outcome is consistent.
A centralized fake reality promoting de-moralized greed and desire so that soulless monsters can arbitrage the destruction of all that you are.
Alternatively, you can let it go and connect with reality....
Albert Bierstadt, Sunrise on the Matterhorn, after 1875, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
... it's nice here.
Think about the pattern of Western centralization and authoritarianism historically. Rome introduced the ancient form of imperial control - a foreign power that invades militarily, establishes new governance and may alter demographics. This had profound influence, but was externally imposed. The "influence" of the imperial occupation is the extent to which the imposition is internalized by the conquered people.
The Franks were different. If Rome was the quasi-legendary external ideal of "Empire", the Carolingians were the homegrown version.
Charlemagne's Empire. The Franks were one of the Germanic tribes that moved into Western Europe at the end of antiquity and emerged as the dominant power. By the time Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of the West much of Western Europe, including Rome, was under his control. Some patterns already visible on this wide view map. The Anglo-Saxon / Celtic British Isles are distinct from the continent, Iberia and southern Italy are likewise, there is and East/West split, and the Muslim Caliphate has fractured along tribal-national lines.
The Carolingian period is an important one for the development of European history and culture, but too big for a blog post. So we aren't going to try recap the history - that's easy enough to find if you are interested in looking further.
Here's a long chapter on the importance of kingship in Carolingian political theory and theology and its implications for the future. How the idea of King of the Germans became one with an imperial vision of King/Emperor of the Romans. Basically the birth of German imperialism as a coherent ideology. But "German" comes later - Charlemagne's empire combines Germany and France. It's the prototype pan-European fantasy. The German imperialism/Holy Roman Empire thing kicks in later with the Ottonians - by this point, the Empire is the Eastern "German" portion of Charlemagne's original while the western "French" side is becoming France.
We will stay broad and look at Charlemagne as the archetype for a internally-generated super-national imperial order.
It's just one aspect of the historic significance of the Carolingians, but it is a deep pattern that gets at one of the fundamental structural flaws in the historical formation of the West.
The notion of a Western empire raised a conceptual problems. The template - the Roman Emperor - as well as more contemporary versions - the Byzantine Emperor and the Muslim Caliph - were religious authorities as well as political ones. The West was unique for the split between sacred and secular as distinct domains, with the pope emerging out of late antiquity as the supreme spiritual authority. In theory, the Carolingian Emperor was a purely secular power, while the Church looked after religion. It even lines up with the Biblical injunction to
render unto Caesar that we look at in an earlier post.
Pope and King, first page of the Gratian Decree, from Toulouse around 1300, Special Collections of the Catholic University of Lublin
The two legal authorities in the Medieval West -canon and civil - from a Medieval legal collection compiled around 1150. Notice who isn't there - Common. Because common law was not based in the fake universals of illusory secular transcendences.
Is anyone surprised to hear that the imaginary balance didn't hold up?
The reality was centuries of tug-of-war, with secular rulers seeking to control the material wealth and prestige of the Church and the popes trying to extend their authority in political affairs. It is a fallen world and all systems are subject to entropy and corruption. What is notable in a general pattern way is that there is a theoretical division between "secular" and "sacred" built into the historical origins of the West that is unique to the West. Materialist protoplasm likes to interpret this as a mythical politics without religion. It is more logical to think of it as recognition that the secular authorities have no claim to matters of faith and higher truth. And yet that is precisely what de-moralized Flatland is.
Marinus van Reymerswaele, The Moneychanger and His Wife, 1539, oil on panel, Museo del Prado
We also see the vulnerability that opened the road to globalism: greed. Royal interest in "religion" had less to do with theology than wealth and influential ecclesiastical appointments. Meanwhile, the Church was consumed with enhancing its own material status. It was this materialist lust for generally moronic ends that made monarchs and aristocrats susceptible to control by financial powers.
But that's down the road. For now, we can link Charlemagne directly to another unique vulnerability in the historical formation of the West. Call it
toxic insecurity.
It is easy to spot the immediate socio-political implications of notions of pan-European empire and an imperial ruling class. Napoleon, Hitler, and the EU have all revived that dream of Franco-German "unity" in their own ways. The prognosis for the last of these doesn't look any better then the earlier tries. It's just that now it's "globalist".
The cultural insecurity is even more consistent. It's just deeper and less obvious on a glance.
Consider what historians call the
Carolingian Renaissance - a deliberate enculturation process launched by Charlemagne to raise the level of education and "sophistication" of his empire. The Franks seemed rude and rustic compared to the courts of Constantinople and Damascus, to say nothing of the memory of Rome.
Basilica of Constantine or Aula Palatina, early 4th century, Trier, Germany
Structures like this Constantinian hall were reminders of the Romans' superior wealth, logistics, and engineering building.
"Renaissance" is an interesting term, because it means the revival of something - literally "rebirth". In the modern West, the word immediately calls the Italian Renaissance humanists to mind, although their attitude towards "antiquity" was quite different from Charlemagne's. This confusion is at least partly deliberate. Remember that this is authorized post-Enlightenment
History!, a wonderland where secular materialism gets to be teleological too, and any hint of "Classical learning" is evidence of this glorious
Progress!
Leonardo, Vitruvian Man, around 1490, drawing,
According to its own rhetoric, the Italian Renaissance was a self-conscious attempt to "restore" contemporary culture to an ancient standard that never actually existed. Ignore the "accuracy" of their understanding of the past - they really didn't know what they were talking about at first, but that's not the point here. What's relevant to us is that the idea of historical revival over a long gulf of time was central. The fiction of a Medieval Dark Ages that have to be reached across to undo the decline.
A break from the Christian present for a pagan past that conveniently put man at the center of the universe.
Charlemagne was reacting as a central authority to what he perceived as existential issues in the survival of his empire. This was not a deliberate revival of earlier cultural norms as much as a codification and securing of the civilizational knowledge needed for a tribal society to bootstrap an comparatively advanced culture quickly. Consider this Carolingian representation of an ideal man.
Charles the Bald welcoming monks from Tours bringing the Vivian Bible, dedication page to the Vivian Bible, around 845, Ms. lat. 1, f422v, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris
The Vivian Bible came from St. Martin's Abbey in Tours - an important Carolingian book illumination center - and was presented to Charlemagne's grandson, the Emperor Charles the Bald. The name comes from Count Vivian - the lay abbot of the Abbey who commissioned the book for Charles.
You can see the "Renaissance" appeal in the roughly antique style of the painting and image of enthroned emperor. But look closer at the how his importance is represented:
It's the hand of God between two incense burners symbolizing the Christian Church.
This authority doesn't come from classical learning or alignment with cosmic harmonies, but from divine will filtered through religious devotion. The style resembles late antique painting, but the way imperial power is defines is very different from the divine emperors of pagan antiquity. This is a new form of Christian imperium.
We know it's divine will, because it is the same hand of God that gives the Commandments to Moses.
This isn't the same sort of humanist ideal as Leonardo's at all. It may not even be a Renaissance!
There is a lot of historical smoke swirling around the Carolingians for reasons that are worth considering. Calling this a Renaissance both diminishes and mischaracterizes what was actually going on. It is often remarked that Charlemagne's movement wasn't a "real" renaissance because the revival of Classical culture was limited to extended circles of the imperial court rather than a broad social movement. What this obscures is that the "revival of Classical culture" wasn't the point in the first place. The Italian and Carolingian "Renaissances" - we'll use the term grudgingly for lack of better - were radically different on every level. To the point where likening them requires selective reading to the point of distortion.
Jacopo Sansovino, Bacchus, 1511-18, marble, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence
You can say they both sought societal improvement through learning and culture, but that is where the similarity ends.
A statue like this is pure antique revival. A nude, white marble figure of a pagan god accompanied by a little satyr. The Italian Renaissance - rhetorically anyhow - was consciously promoting ancient cultural forms because they put human potential and perfectibility in a better light than the blunt ontological honesty of medieval Christianity. The idea was to elevate the human on its own merits, rather than for its relationship to Logos. It's called humanism for a reason. But they were also way more licentious morally. And we can see how this founding act of self-idololtry set the "intellectual" cultural of the West down the reductive path to modern solipsism, de-moralized materialism, and finally hedonic nihilism.
The broad goals laid out by Charlemagne in his
Admonitio Generalis were completely different. Christianity was the foundation and backbone of his plans for improving the moral health of the empire. Classical learning was secondary - what rebirth there was was much more Christian imperial late antiquity and not the earlier pagan version. Because for him, this was a pressing and practical concern. Not the abstract knowledge for it's own sake notion of scholarship projected by too many modern historians.
The Carolingians didn't view history as decline and rebirth - for Charlemagne and his circle, the Franks coming to Christianity represented collective and individual improvement in every possible way. This provided clear moral direction to his actions that was lacking in the more do what thou wilt-centric ideology of the Renaissance humanists.
The Four Evangelists, from the Aachen Gospels f13r, around 820, Cathedral Treasury, Aachen
Stunning Carolingian Renaissance manuscript painting. The style of the figures and fantastic landscape are out of late antiquity. But the subject is purely Christian. From Charlemagne's practical perspective, ancient art wasn't a ideal to restore. It was an way to make representations of important subjects that looked good and had imperial connotations.
Performance and status - not cultural replacement.
From sufficient distance, we can see that Charlemagne was trying to manage socio-cultural change on an almost unimaginable scale. The final transformation of what had been migrating tribes into a stable imperial civilization on late antique lines while shifting to a radically new Christian morality and metaphysics.
In practical terms, civilizing and Christianizing both required cultural skills in information management and communication that hadn't been needed previously and were in short supply. Charlemagne actually saw them as the same thing - his civilizing is Christianizing. Preserving classical knowledge was an important concern, but sound Christian doctrine and teaching were paramount - his idea of improvement was moral and spiritual first, and aesthetic second. The exact opposite of the inverted luciferian "freedom" from empirical observation, logic, and faith that drives the inverted secular transcendence of modern morality.
Imperial Abbey of Corvey, consecrated in 844, Germany
Westworks, the massive additions to the west ends of Carolingian churches were a development of the Carolingian Renaissance. But the only things remotely antique about it is the massive masonry form and round arches. Neither of which look Roman stylistically.
On the other hand, Corvey was an important scriptorium and manuscript production center.
The Carolingian Renaissance wasn't broad social movement because that wasn't the point. Charlemagne wasn't retarded enough to deny the basic socio-cultural reality of daily Frankish life. He was focused on institutional and logistical things - how to ensure that the knowledge and skills were there for this new imperial Christian Frankish entity. Rome wasn't of interest because of some Classical ideal, but because it
was civilization in any meaningful way. If the tribal peoples who migrated into western Europe were going to organize into empire, Rome was the only model to follow. But not for reasons of aesthetic purity, but because that's where the information was.
Initial page from the Wernigerode Gospels, 10th century, around 950-975, illumination on parchment, The Morgan Library & Museum, M755, f16v
A 10th-century manuscript produced at Corvey Abbey. You can see the bits of Celtic interlace that reflect the influence of the Insular Irish manuscript schools on the Carolingian style. Their "Renaissance was more based on knowledge in general than a specifically Greco-Roman revival. Hence the focus on schools. Christianization meant preserving, building, and teaching the legacy of Christian knowledge, and producing literate men needed to disseminate this.
Beinecke MS 413, f165, a codex from a scriptorium connected with the court of Charles the Bald containing capitularies of Charlemagne, Louis the Pious, and others from around 873, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT
The Admonitio Generalis puts heavy emphasis on the training and conduct of clergy and monks, but the "secular" subjects go hand in hand with this educational focus - knowledge and literacy were also key to jurisprudence, commerce, and literature - though the Carolingians didn't distinguish.
Centralizing also needs a common language, and the Carolingian scriptoria developed a clean minuscule script seen here that transformed written communication.
Again, classical revival wasn't the point. Classical elements come through when they reflect the Roman - read "civilized" - way of doing something. Like the
Carolingian miniscule - it is based off Classical Latin, but the goal was to create a clear standard for written communication. Latin wasn't a "choice" - in their context, it's what literacy was. Or it was a choice in the sense that you could read and write or you couldn't. A clear, standardized Latin was a practical tool transmitting and managing the information needed for a complex society. And more specifically, a complex Christian society.
Odo of Metz, Palatine Chapel, 792-805, Aachen
Charlemagne's palace chapel is the surviving masterpiece of Carolingian architecture. A Christian building based on a Byzantine model, rendered in the more massive Frankish style. The mosaics are late antique and striped arches come from the Dome of the Rock and the Muslim caliphate.
It's an early Medieval power-building - a descendant of the Classical tradition, but not a revival.
Then why did historians judge the Carolingian Renaissance in terms of an Italian revival that had the opposite goals and a completely different perspective on the ancient world? The short answer is our old pal
discourse - modern history fits interpretations to the dominant master narratives as if they were absolutes.
And we're back to the issue of the temporal and the timeless.
History is material and moving, and patterns appear in hindsight, but the patterns have to reflect what actually happened - as far as we can know it from the record anyhow. The Carolingian and Italian Renaissances were completely different movements with completely different values, attitudes towards past and present, and metaphysical frames. The only reason to pretend they are alike is to impose a timeless pattern onto the past from the top down. A familiar myth for us - secular transcendence and its
Progress! subset.
François Boucher, Project for a Cartouche: An Allegory of Minerva, Fame, History and Faith Overcoming Ignorance and Time, 1727, oil on canvas, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Official history is a bit like this - an elaborate fake structure to glorify the preferred narrative that anyone at any time can be plugged into. Good for grants and promotions, but not much help for understanding the past.
On the official timeline, the Renaissance began the path to human enlightenment and freedom, making it "seminal". And the way it did this was by recasting Christian Europe as a Dark Age and turning to antiquity for the do what thou wilt alternative. Hand-waving followed, and Classical humanism covered up Logos at the center of Western ontology like a cheap appliqué.
Antonio Verrio, mythological room at Burghley House, 1687, Lincolnshire, England
Jean-Simon Berthélemy and Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse, Man formed by Prometheus and animated by Minerva, 1802, repainted by Mauzaisse 1826, Musée du Louvre, Paris
As we've said many times, this is a fundamental misappropriation of faith-level knowledge structures to material subjects. But if you ignore the absurdity and take the fake faith at face value, a facile sort of catechism comes into view. One where "classical learning" is a proxy for the Progress! towards de-moralized secularism.
To be fair, these aren't what you would call high-IQ thought patterns. Their appeal comes through emotional appeal - the flattery and comfort of seeming mastery - and repetition. And the mastery is comforting because it doesn't require moral reasoning or control of appetites. Just familiar tales where you and your present-day reality gets to be the telos. However, turning your back on ontology requires pretending that "meaning" comes from somewhere else. Pretending that our society is somehow destined by imaginary teleologies forces is the pallid incoherent sham faith that globalism offers in place of our connection to Logos.
Stefan Meisl, Tol Morwen
Recognizing the misapplication of "timeless" secular transcendence for the inverted faith that is is explains the value judgments - how modern history determines what is "significant". What events belong on the timeline in the story that they are using traces of the past to tell. Because value judgments are structurally the same as applied morality, even when not applied to conventionally "moral" subjects - specific events held to a timeless standard. And "secular morality" is self-contradictory. Actual moral principles presume a permanence that can't exist in our temporal material world.
You can have preferences perhaps, or things you value - but moral certainty requires something more ontologically fundamental. Probably why cucks and liars love talking about "muh values"... Morals not so much.
The link is on codes of conduct for dealing with the deaf, but an excellent example of values without morality. It is incoherent, meaningless, and easily spun to whatevere agenda the controllers want. The picture doesn't include any moral principles. Just open adjectives that can be anything.
Just utterly hollow.
Globalists and other de-moralized materialist Flatlanders get around this the same way they do all the impossibilities in their belief system - they make something up, then deceive and misrepresent until an inevitable crisis, then reset around a new version of the lies. Think of all the variations on
Progress! since the Renaissance - how it keeps coming back around in a new form every time there is a major change in the Western elites. It is the non-existent teleology at the heart of globalist fake faith in secular transcendence. The modern timeless "moral" standard against which events can be judged.
The Renaissance has a special place in this fake materialist telos because it's the place where the path to modern secularism is considered to have begun.
Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1538, oil on canvas, Uffizi, Florence
Ignore the fact that the Renaissance humanists were Christian - cherry-picking globalist historians tend to, preferring to focus on the aspects that represent progress towards de-moralized materialism. Like Titian's openly erotic nudes as a move towards degeneracy freedom from prudery.
Keeping with the fake faith idea, the Renaissance is like the globalist historian's new covenant - a change in the nature of reality - only if the change was pretend. And foundational events in any faith are symbolic as well as historical - that's the moral value that lets them be the grounds for future judgments. Their details have an applicability that is functionally timeless. In the case of the Renaissance "classical learning" is the historical event that gets tapped as foundational, and becomes symbolic of a fake timeless truth.
As a symbol, classical learning becomes a distant early warning of
Progress! anywhere in the West. Find the classical learning and you've found the
Progress! And since that's the fake teleology, you've also found the metaphysical anchor to make a value judgment.
Leiden Aratea, around 830-840, illuminated copy of a Roman astronomical treatise based on the Greek Phaenomena of Aratus, Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, VLQ 79, f6v Engonasin/Hercules; f30v Andromeda; f32v Pegasus; f42v Pleiades
Manuscript with early versions of the Greek constellations, though the stars aren't accurately placed like a chart. The subject matter is clearly ancient - Arratus, a 3rd-century BC Greek poet, is exactly the kind of source that Italian Renaissance humanists loved. And the paintings are in the lively style of late antiquity.
Suddenly, the Carolingian gathering and codifying knowledge is "the revival of classical learning". That is, Progress! So one of the "good" eras in history.
Hence the Carolingian Renaissance. Historical clarity can't be seen to get in the way of conforming to the narrative, because not furthering
Progress! is a fast-track to official backwater status. The equation is simple:
Significance of the kind that moves us closer to the ontological self-erasure of luciferian solipsism, except they never state it quite so plainly...
Needless to say 20th-century medieval scholars made a mistake when they decided to "rehabilitate" their discipline by hunting for early classical revivals. The idea was that things like the Carolingian Renaissance and the Renaissance of the 12th Century would counter to the claim that the Italian Renaissance revived classical learning after a Dark Age. How could they have been Dark if there was classical learning?
The Renaissance of the 12th Century was a big one. Haskins' book was the groundbreaking one but it wasn't alone.
"We're the real Renaissance" was as rhetorically inept as the modern variant - accusing the Left of being the real racists. Because it concedes the deceiver's inverted frame of reference. The notion that Classical revival shows progress along a solipsistic materialist fake teleology is nonsensical when stated plainly. Arguing as if it were a standard of anything just legitimates the nonsense.
Hunting for classical learning as a measure of worth accepts the fake teleology of
Progress! and therefore accepts secular transcendence in history - a top-down timeless pattern as truth in changing material world. You can't have a material world with thermodynamics or quantum theory
and teleology. Teleology is a super-natural - literally above nature - concept, but it can't be inferred logically either. Temporality is open-ended, and there is nothing in the historical patterns that suggests movement towards a fixed material goal. There is no sign of it empirically or logically - it rightly belongs more abstract ontological level of faith.
Rogier van der Weyden, The Last Judgment, 1445–1450, Hôtel-Dieu of Beaune, France
Note the relative numbers heading in the two directions.
Christian teleology on the moral or eschatological levels coexists just fine with a material world that's a valley of shadow seen through a glass darkly. It just isn't visible in the material
qua the material.The pattern that we see in a fallen world is the endless repetition of the solipcism and vanity at the heart of the Fall. The same depressing impulse that gives us the self-deifing fiction that we can spot metaphysical truths in a temporal world from a subjective perspective. In other words, the only timeless truth is the truth of getting it wrong.
The very idea of a Carolingian "Renaissance" is an artifact of the fake teleology that distorted modern historiography. Obviously Charlemagne's plans don't map onto the Italian Renaissance - why would they? They were looking for completely different things. His plans don't map onto the Third International either. The responsible thing to do historically is to switch lenses and look at what he actually does do. Step into temporality and consider the record. Any theorizing will be applicable observations built out of that.
Charlemagne's Palatine Chapel at Aachen again
Carolingian culture was Frankish with some osmotic Classicism from inhabiting formerly Roman lands and whatever trickled in through Christianity. Charlemagne turned to the only examples of complex imperial social order that were available to him - Rome with some Byzantine seasoning and a dusting of caliphate. He's operating pragmatically more than ideologically. But the consequence has proven to be a significant vulnerability in the historical formation of the West:
He created an official culture external to the organic culture of the people that was held up as superior. Think about that. Imperial unity
implies homogeneity, and that is intrinsically hostile to the free formation organic culture. In Charlemagne's case, the governing ethos was Christian, but the mechanism was the beginnings of enforced centralization.
This is not a value judgment - looking at the world of the 8th century from here, it appears a strong Christian emperor was absolutely necessary. A strong Christian emperor would be an improvement over the soulless globalists currently staining the corridors of power.
Charles the Band Enthroned from the Psalter of Charles the Bald, 850-69, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Ms. lat. 1152 f3v
Psalter for the grandson of Charlemagne. Look at the symbolism - he's an enthroned king in a late antique style - a Carolingian version of a Roman emperor. Be he's also holding religious symbols. His authority literally comes from the hand of God, shown at the top of the picture pretty much putting on Charles' head. The orb and cross is an old symbol of medieval power representing Christ's dominion over the orb of the world.
Put it together and you get the emperor ruling in Jesus' name. The divinely anointed Christian king.
The applicability the Carolingian Renaissance starts with a division of form and content in the notion of the divinely anointed king. The content - a Christian monarch - may be appealing, but pay attention to what it represents structurally. The form of the Christian emperor is a central political
material office claiming spiritual authority through a faith that it has no ontological or empirical claim to. That is, false faith in temporal eternals. From this perspective, the governance or morality of an individual ruler is irrelevant. What matters is that Charlemagne furthers a process of transforming Christianity into socio-cultural ideology. Starts to break render unto Caesar and blur the line. They couldn't see it at the time, but this starts the path to secular transcendence and globalist Flatland.
Applicability means that things that are literal in the story - like Charlemagne's centralization being armies and scholars - are more conceptual in our reality. As social structure and technology develop, the range of control tightens until we get to modern mass culture and surveillance. Historically, the Carolingians belong to the distant past, but conceptually, the concept of home-grown empire is archetypal - global, universal, ideologically timeless. Except that while the control structures real, the timeless ideology is now fake. A fig leaf over a lust for power.
In modern times, the Christianity has been replaced with the inverted fake faiths of globalism, and dour-handed rulers like Charlemagne with ravening atavistic liars. But staying on the structural level, the marriage of central control and "moral" authority remains. It's just hard to see because its an inverted fake morality built of epistemological incoherence and lies.
The cultural insecurity is a secondary consequence with the same form / content split. Again, put aside Charlemagne's Christian beliefs and look at the applicable conceptual structure that he creates. The notion that the elites reject the organic cultures of the people and try an impose some "improvement" of their creation top down, then pour derision on those who "don't get it". The Carolingians were not perfect - fallen men never are - but they were at least ontologically responsible enough to acknowledge that their moral direction was guided by their faith. Globalism is Flatland, so it can't apply faith to reason - it only has make-believe secular transcendence. And lies and inversion can't create - only pervert and destroy.
Martin Creed, Work No. 227, 2001, shown in MOMA, 2007, purchased Tate London 2013
The elite / popular culture split that starts with bringing logos and order to wild peoples becomes the opposite - fake faith masquerading as "freedom" and Progress! to drag us away from empirical observation and logos and into degeneracy. Like imposing the aesthetic, cultural, and spiritual blasphemies of the MOMA on the landscape of the nation.
This "piece" consists of the lights going on and off every 5 seconds in an empty room. That's it. It's objectively retarded. Charlemagne would find it retarded. But it has been pushed so hard - bought and shown in major museums with help from big funders, and won a "Turner Prize" - whatever that is. This isn't a parody: "Creed celebrates the mechanics of the everyday, and in exploiting the existing light fittings of the gallery space he creates a new and unexpected effect. An empty room with lighting that seems to be misbehaving itself confounds the viewer's normal expectations".
Applicability - Charlemagne's centralization was physical and political while modern globalism is more legalistic and economic, though the threat of force is constant. And the faker the secular transcendence, the less grounded in reality the imposed narrative or culture. Because there is no timelessness in the material world. Everything that is not grounded in truth and actively supported and defended is subject to entropy - moral and physical - and corruption to evil. Pretending centralizing structures are somehow an exception to this is to pretend that our reality isn't temporal. The will to dominate is timeless - the recursive cycle of vanity, overreach, and collapse that defines human history, but the ideas sure aren't.
The EU is Carolingian Europe 2.0 - an ascendant France and Germany with a subordinate Rome and backwater England - just with more territory. But the metaphysical beliefs - the faith - is completely inverted, from Charlemagne's muscular Christianity to satanic one world globalism.
This is the problem with imperialism, universalism, and anti-nationalism - they impose centralizing structures that are at odds with reality and are therefore prone to corruption and convergence. But because they pretend to be timeless truths, they demand acceptance, and commitment to a material falsehood is inevitably disastrous long term.
It seems we need to be more time-conscious...
