Wahya Circle
Tuesday Travels

World Studies 101
Central European Culture Shift

Central Europe is considered to be an area between Eastern and Western Europe, generally accepted as comprising Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Liechtenstein, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Switzerland. Most of these locations are considered to be a part of what is now a governmental cooperation called the “European Union”.

The European Union was set up with the goal of ending the frequent and often bloody wars between Kindred, which culminated in the Second World War. As of 1950, the European Coal and Steel Community began to unite European countries economically and politically in order to secure lasting peace …and prosperity. Regardless, this act saved a lot of lives at the time.

For this Lesson, we will be traveling to a time before that peace.

THIRTY YEARS WAR
Prior to this Act, the Thirty Years' War was a 17th-century religious conflict fought primarily in Central Europe.

It remains one of the longest and most brutal wars in human history, with more than 8 million casualties resulting from military battles as well as from the famine and disease caused by the conflict. The Folk Healers and Medicine People were much needed. (This is what motivates us to this day to continue sharing this Knowledge of Medicine.) For quite some time they were tasked with keeping the community they had always known, well. In times of “war”, this was often a heavy task to undertake.

By this time, many Roman provincials were of Christian higher clergy, or ‘assigned’ to micromanage the lands that Rome had conquered. Those who worked for benefit of their homeland had to Keep Silent.

But let us go back even further.

WHAT ROME DID
In the beginning, the Church merely transposed the Roman Senate roles into the hierarchy of what was becoming the Catholic Church. Between the legalization of Christianity by Constantine around or about 313CE and the adoption of Christianity as the legal religion of Rome by the emperor Theodosius I in 380, Christian communities received immense donations of land, labor, and other gifts from emperors and wealthy converts. (The is what Vlad’s family had been fighting against during their time in Wallachia.)

The Christian clergy, originally a body of community elders and managerial functionaries, gradually acquired sacramental authority and became aligned with the grades of the imperial civil service.

The rest of Europe had no idea what was coming across the land.

THE NEW CIVITAS
Each civitas (community or city), a Roman term for an urban unit and its surrounding district, had its bishop (Bishop stems from the Latin word episcopus, “overseer”). Because there had been more Roman civitates in the Italian and provincial European areas - due to proximity naturally, there were more and usually smaller dioceses in these regions than in the distant north and east. The area was becoming saturated with this mindset. Long gone were many of the pre-existing Indigenous, or, as some believe, they assimilated.

Moving forward again through time, to the 5th and 6th centuries, bishops gradually assumed greater responsibility placed upon them for supplying the cities and administering their affairs, replacing the local governments that for centuries had underpinned and constituted the local administration of the empire. Clergy of the Roman were also tasked with ensuring compliance to the “new religion”. It simply grew stronger.

TWO BISHOPS
Ambrose of Milan (339–397) and Gregory I of Rome (pope 590–604), wrote influential guidebooks on episcopal (overseer) and other clerical duties and responsibilities toward congregations. These works set standards for all later bishops who helped colonize the world and are still observed in many churches today. Stolen and assimilated as the practices were, the practices that the bishops did steal and tweak for the Christian Path are the most well preserved to this date. (The Pope has the finest altar of us all!) Despite this preservation, they are considered some of the more adulterated pagan practices that we know.

Besides the bishops and their subordinates, the priests, who tended to the spiritual and material needs of newly converted Christians living in the world—the “secular clergy”— also in existence were communities of monks and religious women who had fled the pagan world preemptively out of fear of persecution.

Reverend Richoz feels that we had already begun to stop sharing our Eternal Knowledge with our Community before this point on many levels. That fostered complacency to set in amongst the people, and that in turn allowed Rome to conquer them more easily.

RULES OF LIFE AFTER ROME
These communities were independent, although nominally under the control of the local bishop. They followed diverse rules of life, as there were some people native to the area that were present. These “pagans” with rich beliefs and culture were ALREADY PRESENT on the land. All things could NOT be pushed asunder despite the Roman efforts.

The designation as “regular clergy” (from regula, “rule” - Ruling Clergy) became the norm. The most influential monastic rule in Latin Christianity after the 8th century was that of Benedict of Nursia (c. 480–c. 547). Benedict’s rule provided for a monastic day of work, prayer, and contemplation, as well as offering psychological balance in the monk’s life. (We all know this is how cults begin. Control as many aspects of an individual’s life as one can.) It also elevated the dignity of manual labor, to make it more appealing to the conquered, and in the service of a new God.

This practice of “making work more appealing” was long scorned by the elites of antiquity due to pockets of classism and the unspoken caste system that was being collateral created throughout the land. There was clear conflict between the remnants of “Roman Rule” and the assimilated people they encountered and dominated.

AFTER ROME CAME
They did not forget to worship, they forgot who, OR WHAT, to give their gratitude too. They forgot how to be in communion wholly. They shunned an entire piece of the spiritual equation, the Goddess, or Mother Earth, or Luna, or choose what name to give the other half of the whole. They were also encouraged to NOT “think of Self” as well. These are ALL signs of what we now fight against today, a “cult”.

Many humans will spend the next few thousand years “seeking” out that which they threw away and ignored. Thus began the feelings of being ‘alone’ and ‘incomplete’ as spiritual Beings.

Did you ever think about that? We are all WHOLE BEINGS.

For the record, the origins of monasticism lay in the ascetic practices of Egyptian and Syrian monks, which were transplanted to western Europe through texts such as the 4th-century Latin translation of the Life of Saint Antony (by Patriarch Athanasius of Alexandria) and through widely traveled observers such as the theologian and monk John Cassian (360–435).

These Mediterranean-wide influences were among the last examples of the communications network of the older, ecumenical Mediterranean world. Monasticism developed and sustained a powerful ascetic dimension in both Greek and Latin Christianity that increased in importance as monasticism itself came to define the ideal of clerical life in the West.

WONDERING HOLY MAN
Raised by pagans, or those who protected the Old Religion, the case of Martin was one of the first well documented ‘saints’ of the colonizing ‘religious tide’ by Sulpicius. Martin (316–397),later “St Martin of Tours”, a former Roman soldier turned wandering holy man, who practiced monastic asceticism took that and combined it with the office episcopal. In a short time Martin became bishop of Tours in Gaulle.

This was easily done with the respect gained as a Roman soldier. The Senate, now ruling in the Church, held this in high regard. Martin began to emphasize the conversion of rural pagans by questionable means, as well as ministering to the urban and rural elites. Fear-mongering was a well established practice that he drove even harder. His military prowess was pivotal in this subjugation of the conquered. The conversion of Europe had begun with force.

As stated, Martin would go on to become the Patron Saint of France and the Third Republic of Rome.

CHRISTENDOM ESTABLISHED OVER PAGAN BELIEFS
Once Christianity was established throughout the Empire, other local movements were also condemned. For example, Donatism, the belief among many North African Christians that Christian leaders could bow to pagan deities, as they were taught “God accepts all”, was not conducive to their control. Imperial persecution began and those leaders had lost their priestly status and needed to be reordained in the new Christian faith.

It was the first major heterodox (non-conforming) practice to be considered—and condemned—at an imperial church council (411). Many were taught, or told, that the “Christian God” accepted all, but were quickly shut down as they could not be controlled by the Senate. Other movements similar to this were Arianism, which challenged the divinity of Jesus, and Pelagianism, which denied original sin and emphasized pagan beliefs, such as the purely human abilities to achieve salvation on their own merit.

The Senate driven Church wanted total domination.

Other beliefs, usually those that contradicted increasingly normative doctrines of Trinitarianism (NOT to be confused with the “Triple Goddess”), the belief that the Godhead includes three coequal, coeternal, and consubstantial persons or Christology (the interpretation of the nature of Christ), were also condemned as heresy. The Church was doing everything it could to cleanse and purify the world of its practices of natural belief.

Control had to be maintained. The Roman Senate knew this. They began to exert pressure on their consorts as Normative Christianity, which was expressed in imperial legislation, church councils, and the works of influential Christian writers.

Christianity gradually became the faith of Europe’s new regional rulers. Within that broad, bastardized universal ideology, however, many of the new kings and peoples based their claims to legitimacy and a common identity on their own versions of Latin Christianity, as expressed in local law, ritual, saints’ cults, sacred spaces and shrines, and saints’ relics. Many of which were still pagan. The greatest illusion of all time was being pulled off en mass, and by force. The assimilated cults of saints and their relics, like those in the Americas and Tagalog’s island nation, served to territorialize devotion, and control over them was a distinctive sign of legitimate power in the eyes of the Church.

Although the older empire and the new, non imperial lands in Europe into which a new culture expanded… came to call themselves Christianitas (“Christendom”). They were in overseen practice divided into many self-contained entities that have been called “micro-Christendoms,” each based on the devotional identity of king, clerics, and people, controlled by the Senate-Church despite some secretly holding onto to their natural, pagan, beliefs.

A new Path was paved over the many that had been paved before it. Or, was it?

World Studies 101
Teutonic Tribes & Roman Soldiers

The Roman Empire of late antiquity was no longer the original empire of its founder, Augustus. Nor was it the empire of emperor Marcus Aurelius years later.

By the 3rd century, after the death of Commodus in the late previous century the Roman Empire was plunged into a volatile and cruel civil war. When the dust settled, Septimius Severus emerged as the new emperor, establishing the Severan dynasty. Unlike previous emperors, he openly used the army to back his authority, and paid them well to do so.

This emperor, who was first called princeps (“first citizen”) and then dominus (“lord”), became divus (“divine”). Oh my. This is how organized crime syndicates operate today. The powerful religious connotations of the imperial office were even being adopted by usurpers of the imperial throne, backed by their armies, who then ruled autocratically at the head of a vast bureaucratic and military organization.

Internal and external crises during the 3rd and 4th centuries resulted in the division of the empire into an eastern and a western area after 285. After this uncivil split, the east now possessed the great and flourishing capital built by the emperor Constantine—Constantinople (now Istanbul)—and had far more economic, political, and military resources than the western half.

The administration of the entire empire was restructured to finance immense military expenditures, giving the western European provinces and frontier areas greater importance but fewer resources. In essence, the military saw the power the “church” wielded and exploited it. Gone were the Old Gods of ancient Greece and Rome. It was time for a change.

Most of the population of the empire, including soldiers, were frozen hereditarily in their occupations. (Much as we have discussed a “caste system” that has been in place throughout time with the Romani. Many suffered this way of thinking.)

The Western Empire, whose capital moved north from Rome in the 4th century to a number of provincial cities—Trier, Arles, Milan, and ultimately Ravenna—became less urbanized, more ruralized, and gradually dominated by an aristocracy of landowners and military officials, who had removed Indigenous and took lands, forcing all personal practices that were not recognized by the new empire to be erased.

The provincial economy had become increasingly rural and localized and was dominated by the needs of the vast military bases near the frontiers. Rome knew just what to do.


FREE LABOR
The great and small estates were worked by slaves, freedmen, and coloni (“farmers”), who had once been independent but had involuntarily (rarely voluntarily) subordinated themselves to the great landowners as their only protection against imperial tax collectors or military conscription.  Sound familiar?


OPPRESSION
Fear mongering was rampant across the land. The landowners dispensed local justice and assembled private armies, which were powerful enough to negotiate on their subordinates’ behalf with imperial officials. Mediterranean trade diminished, and the production of more and more goods was undertaken locally, as was the organization of social, devotional, and political life. Just as what happened with the Sami, “tribute” had to be paid to the Empire.

NATIVE LAND DWELLERS
Non-Roman peoples from beyond the frontiers—barbari (“barbarians”) or externae gentes (“foreign peoples”), as the Romans called them—had long been allowed to enter the empire individually or in families as provincial farmers and soldiers. But after 375 a number of composite Germanic peoples, many of them only recently assembled and ruled by their own new political and military elites, entered the empire as intact groups, originally by treaty with Rome and later independently.

(There was a treaty because the Teutonic were not going to be taken and had in fact poisoned the Roman drinking water at one time. The Roman fought hard and brutal with the Teutonic, who may have seen an opportunity occuring.)

The Teutonic established themselves as rulers of a number of western provinces, particularly parts of Italy, Iberia, Gaul, and Britain, often in the name of the Roman emperor and with the cooperation of many Roman provincials.


GENETIC FALLACY
Roman ethnography classified external peoples as distinct and ethnically different homogeneous groups with unchanging identities. Since the advent of DNA, this has been shown to be untrue, “remaining unchanged” was not what Nature intended.


TRUTH LIGHT SHINES
Late 20th-century research in ethnogenesis thoroughly demonstrates the unreliability of Roman ethnography. Although modern concepts of ethnicity continue to exploit it for political purposes. What has essentially come to light is the old adage often incorrectly attributed to Churchill, “victors write the history”.

While we know that this was not his coining, it is true that the victors force their narrative onto those who survive whatever atrocities are forced upon them. Often erasing thousands of years of oral traditions and practices when this occurs.

ALREADY ESTABLISHED
What we are finding also are stories where the Teutonic Tribes would visit the Indigenous of North America and trade with them, not conquer them. They were simply acting as the sea-faring humans they were. Vikings were fishermen, or sea-farers. There are records of them even establishing a city within a different region —but we have yet to discover the truth as to “why” that occurred. We do not know if plague, commerce, or even the Earth moved them to do so. Much new light is shining onto those who seemingly espoused “Vikings”.

FINAL PUSH
None the less, the ending throngs of the Roman Empire assimilated all they could in its seeming death throws. The cultures associated with the new kings and peoples spread throughout western Europe from the 5th to the 8th centuries. They influenced changes in areas that the empire had never ruled—initially such as Ireland, then northern Britain, the lower Rhineland, and trans-Rhenish Europe (the lands east of the Rhine River).

The bishop and the monk were two of the most remarkable and longest enduring religious and social inventions of late antiquity; the “barbarian” kingdoms were a third. Although many of the latter did not survive, their experiments in Christian kingship, as represented in texts, ritual, pictures, and objects, began a long tradition in European political life and thought.
Lesson learned.

Genetic Difference

Most Teutonic people were farmers, fishermen, craftsmen and traders. From cold lands, they mastered them as they could. According to recent DNA analysis as well as forensic study of isotopes, we are now able to tell that those described as “Viking” may not have merely been doing a “job”, but a distinguished job.

We have learned they varied genetically, some even were “dark haired” people, versus the ill-perceived “blonde hair - blue eyed” and related to one another – ALL OVER EUROPE.
All of this can now be seen with genetic evidence. We have found many races contain the DNA of many other races.

What are your thoughts on this latest find? Do you think that this will shift historical telling and perceptions to any degree? Do you feel this will shift perspective more towards the findings? Why or why not?

Tuesday W72

General - Journal - Book of Shadows

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